The opening performance of English National Opera’s borrowed production (from Welsh National Opera and Opera Australia) of Billy Budd was, inevitably, overshadowed by the announcement that Sean Doran, the company’s artistic director and chief executive, would be leaving after only 30 months in the posts. The move comes as no surprise to seasoned London opera-watchers. Doran was plucked from nowhere — well, the Perth Festival, in Australia, actually — with no experience of running an opera company, by Martin Smith, ENO’s hands-on chairman of the board, when it was becoming painfully clear that nobody with a proven record in opera would take the post.
The indecent haste — flouting Arts Council guidelines — with which Loretta Tomasi and John Berry, both ENO insiders, have been co-opted into the split posts of chief executive and artistic director is presumably to save Smith from similar humiliation only 2 years on. Berry’s assumption of the second most important job in British opera will not be greeted with unanimous enthusiasm by the profession. As casting director, he was known for his casting gaffes, and he cannot disassociate himself from the feeble standard of the singing at ENO since he joined the company.
After sustained criticism, things have improved this season with the return of such ENO-nurtured stars as Felicity Palmer in The Carmelites, Dame Felicity Lott in next spring’s La Belle Hélène, and Simon Keenlyside and John Tomlinson in the current Billy Budd, but underlying problems remain. Berry’s reliance in the past on young, underprepared singers to sing leading roles in the West End’s largest theatre has damaged the reputation of the company with audiences and critics alike.
Doran’s resignation announcement is a classic piece of corporate double-speak, reading like an encomium to the point that you wonder why he has resigned at all. Smith praises Doran’s “establishment of Britten as house composer” — did they consult a medium to get his consent, I wonder? — and attempts to credit him with the company’s two big box-office hits this year, Jude Kelly’s production of Bernstein’s musical On the Town, and Anthony Minghella’s house-filling Madam Butterfly, both planned — as Smith should know — by former chief executive Nicholas Payne and former music director Paul Daniel.
The whole affair leaves Smith in an untenable position, eerily reminiscent of Lord Chadlington at the Royal Opera, when he high-handedly appointed his old Arts Council associate, Mary Allen, to run Covent Garden during the darkest hours of the ROH closure (both Chadlington and Allen resigned within six months). If Smith won’t fall on his own sword, his fellow board members should be plotting a Julius Caesar scenario for their next meeting.
There are knock-on effects of Smith’s shotgun appointment of Doran that ENO still has to live with: a music director, the Italian-domiciled Oleg Caetani, whose other main job is on the other side of the world, as music director of the Melbourne Symphony. Caetani is scheduled to conduct only one production in his inaugural season, Vaughan Williams’s rarely performed Falstaff opera, Sir John in Love, from March.
The American Andrew Litton was another name considered for ENO’s top musical post. If his thrilling conducting of Billy Budd at the Coliseum last weekend is anything to go by, ENO missed an opportunity in not appointing him. It’s a long time since I have heard the chorus, orchestra and ensemble clearly operating as a company and close to the form it regularly achieved under Mark Elder. Given the evidently poisonous atmosphere in the building, that is no mean feat on Litton’s part. All of his previous ENO appearances, in Verdi’s Falstaff (1994), Strauss’s Salome (1996) and Verdi’s A Masked Ball (2002), have suggested a conductor capable of inspiring the company. I don’t think I have heard an orchestrally finer account of Britten’s score in the theatre — the sequence of chords describing Captain Vere’s conflicting emotions as he prepares to break the death sentence to the hapless Billy was gut-wrenchingly upsetting — and the male chorus sounded in finer fettle than for many a season.
With Simon Keenlyside, still looking amazingly youthful and agile for a man in his mid-forties, and John Tomlinson, almost unrecognisable without his Wotan-Wanderer beard, as a handsome Billy and creepily toad-like Claggart, two of the leads had been assigned to singers whose part in the performance history of this great opera is significant. Keenlyside can still “do” innocence, malevolently destroyed by Tomlinson’s baleful master-at-arms.
Timothy Robinson made his role debut as Captain Vere: he has the Peter Pears-like timbre, but, as yet, lacks the stamina to ride the choral and orchestral tumult of the battle scene. This is a reading of the part that will clearly mature, however, and Robinson is an echt-Britten tenor. Among the crew of the Indomitable, it was good to see seasoned old hands such as Gwynne Howell (still eloquent as Dansker), Adrian Thompson (Red Whiskers), Pavlo Hunka (Mr Flint) and Nicholas Folwell (Bosun) working alongside promising youngsters such as James Edwards (Novice) and William Berger (his friend).
Neil Armfield’s staging remains effective and serviceable — though sometimes poorly lit — even if Brian Thomson’s revolving hydraulic platform occasionally looks lost and hyperactive on the large Coliseum stage. But, thanks to Litton, Keenlyside and Tomlinson, ENO has another box-office winner on its hands. The three performances this week really shouldn’t be missed.
As if to demonstrate that no company has a monopoly on Britten’s works for the stage, the Royal Opera chose to showcase its Young Artists, past and present, in a striking modern-dress production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Olivia Fuchs (director) and Nicky Turner (set and costume designer) in the Linbury Studio Theatre. Unfortunately, the production’s last night — of a too short run — coincided with ENO’s Billy Budd premiere, but I hope the enthusiastic audience and press response will encourage the RO to mount a revival in the near future.
Fuchs and Turner have a refreshlingly abstract and contemporary take on Britten’s Shakespeare adaptation. Initially, I was concerned that plush-red theatre seating, facing the audience, was the signal for a navel-gazing, self-referential production, but this opening gambit proved little more than a tease: Theseus, Hippolyta and the four lovers sit down to watch a show and fall asleep, perchance to dream. Then the magic starts, with an arresting simplicity and evocative use of light to suggest the dream (rather than fairy) world implicit in Shakespeare’s text.
Britten’s use of a boys’ chorus for Tytania’s train always courted accusations of tweeness, but not here, with the “fairies” depicted as deceptively cherubic choir-school ruffians in their pyjamas, evidently enjoying an after-lights-out romp. William Towers’s masculine, youthful Oberon and Gillian Keith’s sultry, sexy Tytania were among the best exponents I have seen in these roles, while Katie Van Kooten (Helena), Tove Dahlberg (Hermia), Robert Murray (Lysander) and Grant Doyle (Demetrius) looked and sounded a convincing quartet of young lovers. In Fuchs’s scheme, the horny-handed “rustics” (as Britten called the Mechanicals), led by Darren Jeffery’s cocky Bottom and Jonathan Best’s drolly bemused Peter Quince, worked perfectly and amusingly, while Richard Hickox and his City of London Sinfonia weaved enchantment in the pit. The Royal Opera should schedule more chamber-scale Britten in the Linbury, as well as reclaiming the “grand” operas Britten wrote for the company.
