Cunning Little Vixen, WNO, Cardiff, February 2013

This opera pits the timeless amorality of the natural world against the emotions and melancholy of human beings. The former is represented by the Vixen, her family, and other forest animals, the latter by Forester, Schoolmaster, Priest and Poacher.

Vixen and her Fox

In the original story by Rudolf Těsnohlídek, based on drawings by Stanislav Lolek, the Vixen lives on, but Janáček has the poacher kill her. This injects a tragic element into the story, yet the end result is the same: the natural world continues regardless of human intervention, and in the final scene where the Forester recalls true love from the springtime of his life, another vixen appears. As he reaches out to catch her, his hand clasps a little frog, who tells him he’s not the same one as before — that w-w-was his grandfather. The natural world is a constant, and while the Forester and other humans live with the memories of love they have lost, the animals know that the meaning of life is life itself.

In David Pountney’s 1980 production, with its designs by Maria Bjørnson, the natural world is pre-eminent, and a small space opens up for those moments when the humans control things: the yard at the Forester’s home, and the inn where the three friends drink together. Otherwise it is the outdoors, where Nick Chelton’s lighting shows the change of seasons and day alternating with night. At one point the snow disappears in a pretty stage trick that made me laugh — a light moment, and the opera is full of them. The story may be as deep as the sky, but the whole thing embraces three half-hour acts plus one interval. In the Czech Republic it is Janáček’s most popular opera.

Schoolmaster and Forester

Musically it’s a treat, and in Act II when the Vixen finds her Fox and opens up to the joy of life, Sophie Bevan and the orchestra rose to heights of lyrical perfection. Her love duet with Sarah Castle as the Fox was glorious, with the orchestra under Lothar Koenigs playing with Wagnerian intensity. Alan Oke made a wonderfully dry Schoolmaster with his steady melancholy, David Stout was very effective in his Act III appearance as the poacher, and Jonathan Summers was full of character and vocal assurance as the Forester. As the opera ended I wished for more intensity in those final musical chords, but Lothar Koenigs gave an intensely lyrical rendering of Janáček’s score.

Vixen’s new family

The production as a whole is a delight, and in Act I when the Vixen is tied up in the Forester’s yard, a dancer comes on to express her desire for freedom. Stuart Hopp’s choreography here fits the music to perfection, and Naomi Tadevossian showed true musicality in its performance. When the production was new it would have been a different dancer, as would be the children who played the small animals, but life goes on while human problems remain the same, and that is the point of this wonderful piece of Czech magical realism.

Performances continue at Cardiff, 26 Feb – 28 Feb; Birmingham Hippodrome, 7 Mar; Venue Cymru, Llandudno, 14 Mar; The Mayflower, Southampton, 21 Mar; Milton Keynes Theatre, 27 Mar; Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 4 Apr — for details click here.

Lulu, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff, February 2013

Alban Berg’s Lulu, mostly written in 1934, was only performed in a complete version for the first time in 1979. Berg died in 1935, and after his widow could not get Schoenberg, nor Webern or Zemlinsky, to write an orchestration of Act III she refused any attempt at completion, and so it remained until she died more than forty years after her husband.

Lulu and Countess Geschwitz, all images WNO/ Clive Barda

Complete productions are much to be desired because in Berg’s unique musical language the three acts hang together, and David Pountney has done us the great service of staying true to the composer’s vision, and indeed that of Frank Wedekind, who wrote the two plays on which it is based. If you saw the Covent Garden production by Christof Loy in 2009, a coldly unrealistic concert-like performance, be assured this is utterly different. Colourful, yet capable of huge coldness towards the end, courtesy of Mark Jonathan’s clever lighting, this production allows us to see Lulu’s abject amorality and the fascination she exerts on those around her.

Schön and Lulu

Johan Engels’ set recalls the circus of the prologue, perhaps even the meta-human achievements of the 2012 Olympics, and the animal heads used in Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes recall the convergence of humanity and inhumanity in The Story of O. The bowler hats represent the world outside, as do the umbrellas in the final scene, where Lulu meets her end in a dreary post-Dickensian London.

After each of her three husbands dies earlier in the opera he is hung on the set and lifted high up, remaining there until the end when each returns in a different guise. This helps exhibit the symmetry of Berg’s opera, centred as it is on the incarceration of Lulu after the death of her husband, Dr. Schön. She kills him herself and he returns as Jack the Ripper. Heady stuff, with Lulu as nemesis to the desire and fascination she evokes, the earth spirit in the first part of Wedekind’s drama.

Lulu, Act I sc.3

Marie Arnet did a superb job of bringing this Erdgeist to stage, secure in voice and sure in characterization under David Pountney’s direction. Here is something far more than a femme fatale. She is a creature of the spirit world that lurks in our unconscious, befitting the deeply intellectual milieu that produced Freud and the music of the Second Viennese School. Some excellent singing too from others in the cast, with Natascha Petrinsky particularly notable as Lulu’s lesbian lover and admirer, the Countess Geschwitz. Ashley Holland gave a sound performance as Dr. Schön, with Peter Hoare giving a brilliantly incisive portrayal as Lulu’s lover and Schön’s son Alwa. Richard Angas came over very well as the animal tamer and Schigolch, as did Mark LeBrocq as the Artist in Act I reincarnated as the Negro in Act III, Patricia Orr as the schoolboy and other roles, Julian Close as the Acrobat, and Alan Oke was superb as Prince, Manservant and Marquis in the three acts.

Conducting by Lothar Koenigs brought out the full range and value of Berg’s extraordinary score, and in Pountney’s hands this was a production to savour. When Lulu is incarcerated after the death of Schön, her Freiheit removed like Freia in Wagner’s Ring, there was a similar lassitude that could only be relieved by her escape. And talking of the Ring, the patch over Schigolch’s eye, and his appearance at the end, reminded me of Wagner’s Wanderer in Siegfried.

This was a rip-roaring success for WNO, and if you don’t know the story of the opera, read it up first and buy a programme for the excellent essays it contains.

Performances at the Wales Millennium Centre continue until February 23, after which it tours to: The Birmingham Hippodrome, 5 Mar; Venue Cymru, Llandudno, 12 Mar; The Mayflower, Southampton, 19 Mar; Milton Keynes Theatre, 26 Mar; Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 2 Apr — for details click here.

The Minotaur, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, January 2013

The opening night of this revival ended with a tribute to John Tomlinson for 35 years of wonderful service to the ROH — highly appropriate since composer Harrison Birtwistle has said Tomlinson was the key to writing this opera, which had been brewing in his mind for many years.

The Innocents arrive, all images ROH/ Bill Cooper

The first scene shows Christine Rice as Ariadne on the beach with a heaving sea projected on the backdrop, and the opera ends with Elisabeth Meister’s bloodcurdling scream as the Ker, seeing the Minotaur dead and her share of future victims vanish. In the meantime Ariadne has revealed that as the daughter of Minos and his wife Pasiphae, whom Theseus calls “whore to the bull of the sea”, she is half-sister to the Minotaur, whom Theseus has come to kill him so as to save future Athenian innocents from further death. She tricks him into letting the present twelve go first, and Act I ends with their massacre. Susana Gaspar as the first innocent was particularly good here, lying in wounded agony before the winged Keres come to pluck out her heart.

In the second act Johan Reuter as Theseus reveals that he may be the son of Poseidon, and if Poseidon was indeed the bull of the sea then he is half-brother to the Minotaur. The important dichotomy between Theseus and Ariadne however, is that while he wants to get into the labyrinth, she wants to get out of Crete. Needing to bring him back from the centre she consults the oracle at Psychro, who gives her the ball of twine despite her lying about her true intentions, and after making Theseus promise to accompany her away from the island the stage is now set for the final denouément.

The Minotaur

Birtwistle’s opera, with this clever production by Stephen Langridge, designs by Alison Chitty and lighting by Paul Pyant, works wonders with the story and with the Minotaur himself, shown to be both man and beast. Presaging his first appearance a wall of sound is followed by two tubas in unison, along with contrabass clarinet and contrabass bassoon. The music is fascinating, its permanent state of melody a metaphor for the labyrinth. And David Harsent’s libretto is a masterpiece of concision and clarity drawing us through the story.

The duality between man and beast is cleverly expressed through lines such as, “When I go to sleep does the man sleep first, when I awake does the beast wake first?” The Minotaur speaks only in his dreams, and when he dreams he sees himself, he sees Ariadne, he even sees Theseus, appearing through a mirror with him. He thinks of his life, his failings, his sorrows, in each case calling them “all too human”. When Theseus arrives he recognises him from the dream, and reflects on his predicament of being both man and beast. “The beast is vile, so the man must go unloved. The beast can’t weep, so the man must go dry-eyed. The beast is wounded, so the man must die”. We begin to understand the man-beast, hidden away in the labyrinth as a child. It’s a great opera, the only surprise being that it has yet to be produced anywhere else since first appearing at the ROH in April 2008.

Tomlinson, Johan Reuter, and Christine Rice repeated their wonderful performances from five years ago, and Elisabeth Meister sang an excellent Ker, with Andrew Watts and Alan Oke taking over the roles of snake priestess and her medium Hiereus. The priestess herself rises to a great height, looking like those famous chthonic deities from Knossos, a nice touch.

The lyrical wonder of Birtwistle’s music, combined with lines of sheer terror, was brilliantly conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth on this occasion, and if you went in 2008, go again, particularly with tickets at such low prices for this thrillingly deep opera.

Performances continue until January 28 — for details click here.

The Tempest, Metropolitan Opera live cinema relay, November 2012

This remarkable opera by Thomas Adès, to a libretto by Meredith Oakes, dares turn Shakespeare’s play into an opera, and succeeds.

All images MetOpera/ Ken Howard

First performed in 2004 at Covent Garden in an intriguing production by Tom Cairns, it was originally co-produced with the Copenhagen Opera House and the Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg. This production at the Met by Robert Lepage, co-produced with the Quebec Opera and the Vienna State Opera, shows Prospero’s body tattooed with knowledge from the vast library he owned in Milan before his exile, whereas in Cairns’ production he used a laptop. That single difference is emblematic of the distinction between these productions, the first ethereal, the second set on the stage of an early nineteenth century La Scala with costumes to match. Rather appropriate since the play shows how Prospero’s stage magic wins him back the Dukedom of Milan plus a marital alliance with the Kingdom of Naples.

Prospero and Miranda

The forging of that alliance, between his daughter Miranda and Prince Ferdinand of Naples, is rather different from Shakespeare, where one might suppose that Prospero intended it all along. Here the libretto makes clear that he greatly detests the intrusion of Ferdinand, and in this production he strings him up.

Prospero and Ariel

The Met did well to cast Simon Keenlyside as Prospero, which he sang in the original production and performed here with huge vocal strength and commanding stage presence. Isabel Leonard as his daughter Miranda was a study in perfection, and she and Alek Shrader as Ferdinand made a lovely couple. As Prospero’s monstrous servant Caliban, Alan Oke made a terrific impression from his very first entrance, and in this production he appeared almost as a dark alter-ego to his master. He, Prospero and Miranda, inhabitants of the island before the storm that brings Prospero’s enemies to judgement, carried the opera between them, but other roles were notably well performed. Toby Spence, who sang Ferdinand in London, came over very well as Antonio, the usurper who took the Dukedom of Milan from his brother, and Christopher Feigum sang strongly as brother to the King of Naples, nobly represented by William Burden.

The production starts with a gymnastic Ariel cavorting on a chandelier with shipwrecked passengers bobbing around in a stormy sea. Soon after, Audrey Luna as the singing Ariel showed she was no mean gymnast herself as she flitted about, barely ever touching the ground. Carried by invisible hands at times she seemed to float, and finally became a twelve legged insect hovering above the stage, a remarkable physical performance.

Caliban

Congratulations to the Met for putting on a modern British opera, conducted by the composer himself, who provides a beautiful musical tapestry, from the devilishly magical to a gentle love duet for Ferdinand and Miranda. Such is the stuff that dreams are made on, and at the end Caliban is alone, all others being melted into air, into thin air.

Le Nozze di Figaro, Glyndebourne, June 2012

If you demand this opera in eighteenth century costume — and I overheard some in the audience who did — then forget it. But if you are happy to see a more up to date interpretation, then this is a winner.

All images Glyndebourne Opera/ Alastair Muir

It’s the 1960s and Almaviva is one of the nouveau riche, possibly a pop star, who occupies a magnificent house with servants. He arrives home with his wife in a two-tone sports car, dressed in a loud jacket of Carnaby Street style, while Basilio wears check trousers and jacket. He lights a fag from a silver case, and offers one to Almaviva, who later in the opera smokes a joint and shares it with Susanna.

Susanna and Almaviva

Don’t be put off — Almaviva’s a prat, we all know that — and he gets his come-uppance. It all works perfectly. Sally Matthews as the countess in long flowing dresses was elegance itself, and her soliloquy Dove sono i bei momenti in Act III was a lovely moment that captured the heart of the audience.

The countess

This Michael Grandage production gave us a wonderful stage play, complete with music and singing, capturing the natural interactions between its characters during this ‘crazy day’, taken from Beaumarchais by Mozart and Da Ponte. Vito Priante as Figaro showed quick-witted intelligence as well as becoming admirably disconcerted, and Lydia Teuscher as Susanna switched effortlessly from melodious phrases to annoyance and determination. Her interplay in Act I with Ann Murray’s well-nuanced portrayal of Marcellina was great fun. Andrew Shore as Bartolo delivered a superb La vendetta in Act I, and when he and Marcellina finally realise that Figaro is their son, he showed palpable astonishment and delight as he calls out Rafaelo! … gently pummelling his long lost boy. This is acting of very high quality, preceded of course by Almaviva’s short-lived delight at hearing Don Curzio’s legal opinion of Figaro’s contract with Marcellina, robustly delivered by Colin Judson.

Susanna, Figaro, Marcellina, Bartolo

Isabel Leonard as Cherubino showed characterisations ranging from an attractively sympathetic young man in Act I to infuriatingly testosterone-fuelled impertinence in Act IV, and her Voi che sapete in Act II was a knockout. Sarah Shafer as Barbarina was delightful in her mini skirt, and the dancing at the end of Act III amplified the location of this production to the 1960s when ballroom was strictly passé. Alan Oke’s Don Basilio fitted perfectly with this new hedonism, as did Audun Iversen’s Almaviva as a youngish success story in the world of fashion or entertainment with an elegant wife who no longer fuels his fancy.

Almaviva, with his wife in disguise

Sets by Christopher Oram filled the Glyndebourne stage with the feel of a vintage country house, a rotation converting Act I to II, and a second rotation after the interval converting Act III to IV. Stage positioning and movement of the performers was beautifully judged, and lighting by Paule Constable was superb. From the orchestra pit, Robin Ticciati commanded the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with fine forward drive and sensitivity to the singers. A hugely entertaining co-production with Houston Grand Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, but see it at Glyndebourne first! Performances continue until August 22 — for details click here.

Heart of Darkness, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, November 2011

Wow! This was a remarkable achievement by 33 year old composer Tarik O’Regan, along with a libretto by artist Tom Phillips.

The crew on the boat

They have packed Joseph Conrad’s novella into 75 minutes of gripping musical narrative, starting in London with the old sea captain, Marlow — beautifully sung by Alan Oke — in a moment of recollection, “He was a remarkable man”. This is repeated in different forms, and although nothing is hurried, everything is accomplished. Marlow goes into the heart of Africa, upstream with his crew.

Edward Dick and Robert Innes Hopkins have come up with a wonderful design. The deck of the boat moves up and down on water that seeps through, and the effect is that we are there with them as they move up river. It is all helped by Rick Fisher’s lighting, which is mostly dark, but sometimes brilliantly lit with the crew is in the midday sun, and when the witch-doctor appears later we see a strangely magical projection roiling the air.

Alan Oke as Marlow

The sets and lighting help, but the atmosphere is created by the music and libretto. The tension, the frustrations, “What I really need are rivets”, and when the rivets eventually arrive the crew dance for joy. Bright interludes there may be, but the percussion, strings and woodwind create a sense of the jungle, and the crew pull out their guns, “The jungle has eyes in it”. They survive an attack, instigated by Kurtz, that mysterious man whom we eventually meet, strongly sung by young Danish bass Morten Lassenius Kramp. He looks the part in spades, lying on a table, yet supremely fit and slim when he stands up. A man of vision, or is it obsession — Kurtz and his ivory, “They will try to claim it as theirs. It’s my ivory. I want nothing more than justice”. But as Marlow later sings, “His intelligence was perfectly clear, but his soul was mad”.

Marlow and Kurtz

The opera ends as it starts, on the river Thames in London. Kurtz’s fiancée, sung by Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, reappears and we are back to Marlow’s conversation with her at the beginning. He muses about the ‘remarkable man’, impossible to know him and not admire him. She wants to know what were his last words, and Marlow is stuck. “The last word he announced was . . . your name”. It is almost the end, and as the tide of the music goes out and in, we are left to ponder on the eternal insanity of acquisitive obsession.

The music was played by CHROMA conducted by Oliver Gooch, and I would gladly hear and see it all again. This is the first time I remember seeing surtitles in the Linbury Studio, and they worked very well. Performances continue until November 5 — for details click here.

Il Trittico, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, September 2011

In performances of Puccini’s Il Trittico the first opera Il Tabarro often delivers the heaviest emotional punch, but not here. Suor Angelica knocked Tabarro right off the stage because of one person — Ermonela Jaho. She was … words fail me … sublime … ethereal. You have to beg, borrow or steal to get tickets for this show just to see her performance.

Suor Angelica with the other nuns, all photos ROH/Bill Cooper

She is so pure as she sings I desideri — desires are flowers of the living, and in death the Virgin Mother anticipates them all — yet after Anna Larsson as her aunt the princess arrives, cold and elegant in black, and carrying a lovely fox stole, Ms. Jaho starts to show real emotion, singing of her son, and asking for news of him. Her È morto? followed by her anguished cry, was as lyrical as it was powerful. In this production the abbess moves Angelica’s hand to sign the document, smiling obsequiously to the princess, contaminating the serene purity of the convent with her desire for the family’s money, and not a care in the world about Sister Angelica. When Ms Jaho has finished singing Senza mamma, with her cries of parlami, amore you know it’s the end for her. And when the end of the opera arrives what a huge triumph it is for Antonio Pappano in the orchestra pit and Ms Jaho on stage. A front drop comes down and Ms Jaho stands in a spotlight to thunderous applause.

Yet it was not just her — the rest of the cast was super, and Anna Larsson in particular was emotionally gripping as the princess. Even after an interval of 25 minutes one could not take another such drain on the emotions, and Gianni Schicchi was the perfect antidote.

Schicchi is the one in jeans and tee-shirt

This last opera of the evening was enormous fun, and the harmonically ostentatious pleading of the relatives produced delighted laughter from the audience. I loved the occasional disconnects in the music near the beginning, as if this were musical chairs, and Elena Zilio was an excellent Zita with Francesca Demuro superb as the young Rinuccio, so keen to marry the Lauretta of Ekaterina Siurina. As she sang O mio babbino caro to her father my only complaint is that this came over as a set piece aria, but Lucio Gallo as Schicchi gave a fine performance of a crafty peasant who can outwit the whole Donati family. Here was a man who could well use the mule, the mills, and give the house to his daughter as a wedding gift.

Il Tabarro — the set

Lucio Gallo was equally at home as Michele the barge owner in Il Tabarro, subdued and controlled yet still emotional. Richard Jones’s new production, with its set designs by Ultz was excellent, and I liked the way D.M. Wood’s lighting died down at the front of the stage towards the end. Alan Oke was superb as Tinca, and Anna Devin and Robert Anthony Gardiner were very good as the lovers. Aleksandrs Antonenko sang a hunky Luigi, but Eva-Maria Westbroek as Michele’s wife Giorgetta did not grip me. I’ve seen her give wonderful performances of Sieglinde, of Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, and even Minnie in Fanciulla, but after Irina Mishura’s Frugola has sung about her dream of a little house, and Giorgetta sweeps in with her own dream, È ben altro il mio sogno! Ms Westbroek lacked lyricism, and the duet with Luigi was disappointing. Pappano revved the orchestra up to glorious heights, but the singing didn’t rise to the same level.

Yet this Puccini trio of operas is a must-see for Antonio Pappano’s richly nuanced conducting, plus Richard Jones’s new production of Suor Angelica with Ermonela Jaho. I first saw her in January 2008 when she took over at short notice from Anna Netrebko in Traviata, and she was a knock-out. That’s a role she’ll repeat at Covent Garden in January 2012 — I shall be there!

Performances continue until September 27, with a starting time of 6:30 — for details click here.

Anna Nicole, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, February 2011

This is an opera for today’s celebrity culture, where parts of the media, eager for salacious details, are happy to pick on anyone available. But Anna Nicole Smith was not just anyone — she worked as a stripper and snagged an 89 year-old billionaire, J. Howard Marshall I, though it’s said they never lived together. He died in 1995, fourteen months after their wedding, and Anna Nicole herself died in 2007, aged 39. The contest over his will, however, is still alive and has now reached the US Supreme Court.

The marriage to Marshall

Act I of this new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage tells of Anna’s life up to the wedding with Howard Marshall, including her first marriage, but it starts with her as a sex symbol, singing, “I want to blow you all — blow you all —— a kiss”. And those are also her last words before she dies, riddled with drugs, following her son, who died of a drug overdose. Almost at the start the cameras appear, cleverly shown as heads of performers in opaque black body stockings. At first there are two, but by the end there is nothing but cameras, and Anna herself. Then, finally, she too is covered in black and the lights go out.

Anna Nicole, Stern and the new baby, all photos by Bill Cooper

Act I was deliberately tacky, but Eva-Maria Westbroek as Anna Nicole carried it off well, looking gorgeous. Then she had a boob job, which did not improve her appearance, and by the end of Act II she looked bloated, which was of course the intention. Alan Oke was suitably frail as old man Marshall, and Gerald Finley gave a strong performance as Anna’s lawyer and third husband, Stern. He was the one promoting her, and had the garish idea of filming the birth of her new baby — his baby he thought — so that it will be broadcast as ‘pay per view’. But as she tells him later, “The baby’s not yours!” Indeed Anna had many lovers, but that is one thing that didn’t quite come over. She must have been a very sexy lady, yet the sexuality on stage was very stylised and lacked allure. That may have been intentional, showing an entirely materialistic attitude to life, alleviated in her case only at the very end as she shows real emotion. There is, however, one thread of sensible humanity running through the opera in the form of Anna’s mother, superbly sung and portrayed by Susan Bickley. She and Eva-Maria Westbroek formed excellent focal points for Turnage’s music, which was remarkably melodious, with its jazz elements reminiscent of Kurt Weill.

The production itself, by Richard Jones, is nothing if not colourful — even the Royal Opera House curtains were replaced by pink ones with Anna Nicole motifs, and there were photographs of her around the balconies and above the stage. The theme is of course tackiness, and the libretto by Richard Thomas pulls no punches in terms of coarse language. Perhaps there is something thrilling about defiance of conventional decorum, and as old man Marshall says, “Don’t grow old with grace. Grow old with disgrace”. The audience loved it, judging by the enthusiasm of the first night. Whether this success will last when the Royal Opera House is no longer pulling out the stops to promote it, remains to be seen, but Turnage’s music has a strong rhythmic pulse, and is well-served by Antonio Pappano’s conducting.

There are six performances in total, ending on March 4 — for more details click here.

Satyagraha, English National Opera, ENO at the London Coliseum, February 2010

photo by Alistair Muir

This is an opera about Gandhi (1869–1948) and his belief in non-violent resistance. Violence is a word common to many languages, but non-violence is not described by a single word, so Gandhi invented one — satyagraha. It’s a Sanskrit word from two roots, satya meaning ‘truth’, and agraha meaning ‘holding firmly to’, giving the sense of holding firmly to truth.

The opera is in three parts, headed Tolstoy, Tagore and King. The first is named after the great Russian writer whose letters to the young Gandhi were a source of inspiration, until Tolstoy died in 1910. The second part is named after Rabindranath Tagore the great Indian writer, and first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. He and Gandhi had a great reverence for one another, and it was Tagore who used the honorific ‘Mahatma’ (meaning great soul) to refer to his friend. The third part is named after Martin Luther King, who was greatly influenced by Gandhi’s teachings, and remarked that, “Christ gave us the goals and Mahatma Gandhi the tactics”.

Despite these three parts referring to past, present and future, the libretto has no narrative in the conventional sense, and there are no surtitles, though it’s sung in Sanskrit. Words are occasionally projected, sometimes on an array of newspapers held up by the performers, and whole sentences occasionally appear on the backdrop. The libretto, like Glass’s music, is very repetitive, but I mean this in a good sense, and its insistent intensity provides a way of approaching the persistent minds of original thinkers like Gandhi, and others (Einstein, Galileo, Kepler, Akhnaten) about whom Glass has written operas.

This one about Gandhi reveals excerpts from his life, such as his early experiences as an Indian lawyer working in South Africa when he experienced racism at first hand. For example, the incident when he was attacked by a crowd of white settlers, and only rescued by the wife of the police superintendent, is vividly shown. Many years before Gandhi went to South Africa he had studied the law at University College London, where he acquired an interest in Buddhist and Hindu literature, and joined others in reading the Bhagavad Gita. Excerpts from this great poem are performed by giant puppets, battling one another in slow motion, the puppets themselves being constructed on stage from baskets and rolled up newspaper. This puppetry, and the masks that appear later, are glorious and enliven the rather static nature of the music. With excellent sets and costumes the whole opera becomes a slowly moving picture that changes, yet somehow remains the same, just like the music.

Stuart Stratford conducted it, keeping both orchestra and singers in unison, and bringing out the lyrical and rhythmic quality of Philip Glass’s music, while Gandhi was well sung and very calmly performed by Alan Oke. The absence of surtitles and clear narrative is unusual, but I found the whole work an uplifting experience. The production by Phelim McDermott, assisted by Julian Crouch who also did the marvellous set designs, along with excellent costumes by Kevin Pollard, and superbly subtle lighting by Paule Constable, has a rather ethereal quality, and as a friend of mine said, “I was left humming peaceful thoughts all the way home”.