Reid exudes warmth, she’s one of us. And even as the running order got the better of her from time to time I felt like I wanted to jump up and sort it out for her (“Why didn’t you?” I can hear her say). That radiant smile is SO inviting and reassuring. As for the comic timing, well, flustered or not, that never deserts her. The story of the 200-pound German bomb that failed to explode on impact with her home revealed something of the northern stock from whence she came while her mother’s irritation that they should evacuate at three in the morning could leave no one in any doubt as to why we won the war.

Reid’s stories are, of course, priceless: her memorable seven-and-a-half day flight back to India, aged 12, with a couple of joy-riding airmen where, having never flown before, she imagined that their series of victory rolls was something that routinely happened on BOAC. Is it any wonder that Victoria Wood put her on “Dinnerladies” duty?

But the real cleverness of Reid’s set lay with the shrewd choice of songs. Pianist Stuart Hutchinson plainly played a part in that fielding some lesser known Sondheim charmers (perhaps Reid’s idol Barbara Cook offered a few pointers) alongside the likes of Hamlisch, Legrand, Arlen, and even Billy Joel. Jerry Herman’s “Ribbons Down My Back” (from Dolly) was perfect (a one-time Patricia Routledge favourite) and most touching of all was an affecting little gem from Amanda McBroom called “Errol Flynn” which threw a whole new light on the legacy of a broken home. Reid inhabited that like the consummate actress she is. Indeed, her best moments in song were those in which the weight of nostalgia bore down on her… “The Road You Didn’t Take”, “Cock-Eyed Optimist”. You don’t need to be a singer to make songs land – and perhaps Reid is wrong when she says she wishes she’d done this 30 years ago; just think of all that life experience she now has to draw upon.

Thursday 30 May 7.30 2013

It’s unlike me to be so literal, even pedantic, about this free and fanciful world of opera but when a director imposes such a specific layer of subtext onto what is essentially a delicious confection about two theatrical worlds colliding, and how the one informs and enriches the other, then such anomalies can rankle and irritate. But then again Julia Müer’s rather unprepossessing set hardly suggests realism and once the Vaudevillians (the commedia dell’arte element) arrive, led with showbizzy vivacity by Laura Claycomb’s Zerbinetta, all bets are off as to where we might be headed. There is a key moment in this Prologue where Strauss and Hofmannsthal absolutely nail the essence of their conceit – and to her credit Thoma does, too. This is the interlude where Zerbinetta and the Composer (the wiry and intense and thoroughly excellent Kate Lindsey) are alone and he begins to see the real woman behind the hoofer/comedienne facade while she in turn glimpses that elusive Mr. Right. Her unexpected kiss, full on the lips, is a huge moment and one that Thoma intriguingly carries forward into the Opera proper.

So gone – wiped out in the pre-dinner raid – is the makeshift set and drooping palm of Ariadne’s desert island (the palm, acting as a kind of barometer of the Composer’s wilting prowess, is but one instance of Thoma’s decidedly German humour). In the wake of catastrophe in this little corner of England the stately home is now a hospital where Ariadne (Soile Isokoski) pines away for her one true love in the valley of the shadow of death dutifully attended by her trio of nymphs turned nurses (Ana Maria Labin, Adriana Di Paola, and Gabriela Istoc) while the composer, shell-shocked, traumatised, ponders the outcome of his score. The mournful nature of the unfolding opera sits well with the pall of the sick room and once we identify the Vaudevillians as members of ENSA there is point and purpose in their wholehearted attempts to raise everyone’s spirits.

The problem, I think, is that Thoma simply overworks her premise so that when Zerbinetta attempts to relate to Ariadne woman to woman in the ear-popping coloratura of her lecture on the joys of sexual promiscuity, for instance, the rudeness of Laura Claycomb’s teasingly voiced multiple orgasms is so explicitly physical that Thoma seems to think it necessary not just to sedate but to straightjacket her, too. That’s a bit of business too far and for all that it is intricately tailored to the music there is overkill in her point-making – a young director flexing her creative muscle. I miss, too, the mythical element so that Ariadne’s transfiguration in the arms of her one true love is almost mundane in its understatement.

Vladimir Jurowski and his trimmed down London Philharmonic Orchestra work wonders with Strauss‘ luminescent scoring always maintaining that very telling balance between intimacy and grandiosity, the world of musical theatre versus opera, the pit band that would be symphonic. Experience pays, too, in the casting of Thomas Allen as the Music Master and, most notably, his leading lady – the Prima Donna/Ariadne of Soile Isokoski. She may not now epitomise the glamour and vocal bloom we have come to expect of the role but in a house this size her wholeheartedness and musicality shine through.

And who’d have imagined that her Bacchus (the brave but challenged Sergey Skorokhodov) would turn out to be the First of the Few? Not Strauss, not Hofmannsthal. But that’s why we love Opera, isn’t it?

photo: Alistair Muir

“Liza is a whole lot more than giggles, gays, and Garland”, ventures Ashley early in the show – and yet the reality is that those three Gs pretty much define her. Not for nothing does he include the first of Mama Rose’s “turns” from Gypsy – “Some People”. Minnelli has never truly escaped her mother’s shadow and when Ashley substitutes Mama for Elsie in the inevitable rendition of “Cabaret” he fairly spits out the punchline “And when I go I’m NOT going like Mama!” More than a little home truth in that bitterness. Liza the survivor.

From a performance point of view Ashley pretty much has Liza – the insane giggle, the manic hyperactivity, the breathiness, the popping, spluttering, microphone noises – and whilst he actually has a whole lot more voice than Liza has had for years now you could still drive a hearse through that vibrato. There’s a lovely moment when Ashley/Liza coaches her fresh-faced, fresh-voiced “guest” Christopher Mitchell and suggests he try his Peter Allen number without vibrato. Yea, right. Self-delusion is everywhere. And there are the moves, too, the exocet arms and frozen poses all of it disintegrating into a kind of feverish inebriation between numbers. A running gag  has us wondering what’s in the glass and the kicker comes when she’s handed a bottle of water and deals with it like it’s radioactive, almost gagging at the prospect of a sip.

But the cleverness of the show (written by Ashley and Dean Bryant) is the way in which the classic “straight” numbers are juxtaposed with the parodies. There’s a very funny David Guest number masquerading as “Mein Herr” replete, of course, with chair contortions. And there’s a big surprise towards the end of the show, a serious moment of distillation, where Ashley manages to silence a delirious audience (with more than its fair share of trans-gender Lizas) with an ineffably touching tribute to Garland and Liza, mother and daughter both seeking that elusive thing called love but always alone in the spotlight. That moment really took us unawares and connected effortlessly to a poignant mash-up of “Losing My Mind” and “Maybe This Time”, the piano intro for the latter wrong-footing us into the former. George Dyer, Ashley’s MD, did a beautiful job and the band were cracking.

But then the laugh that sticks in your throat – how they’re all gone, Mama, Papa, Lorna… “Well actually she’s still here but who cares…” And the inevitable, obligatory “New York, New York” with its now legendary wind-up, arm revving like a propellor, tempo stretching, voice roaring. But let’s be clear, Trevor Ashley is no generic drag-queen act but something a whole lot more sophisticated. He has what Liza has – star quality – and that’s why the show lands in the way that it does. My only caveat is that he should have attempted what Liza never could or would (because, as she always said, “it’s been sung”) and given us “Over the Rainbow” just as Judy used to give it sitting on the edge of the stage. He can’t do Judy – no one can. She was simply better; she was inimitable. And I guess the sad thing is that Liza has always known that.

This is recession Britain – another twist – and Tom Scutt’s towering tenement-like cross-section of squalid rooms is an ugly reminder of that irrefutable fact. At the bottom of the tower block, the pub; at the top, closest to heaven, the latrines. And as the coffins come home traditionally draped in the Union flag young women like Wozzeck’s mistress, the mother of his son, Marie (Sara Jakubiak) pay their lustful respects to the living, not the quick and the dead. Soldiers are sexy while they’re still breathing. In the back room of the pub, the Doctor uses the coffin of one departed hero to apportion the cocaine that will screw with the heads of those who do make it back. To add terrible irony to injury the drugs are hidden in kids toys – little green dinosaurs like the one Wozzeck’s son plays with.

The veteran Wagnerian, James Morris, plays the Doctor with thunderous vocal and physical authority – and what an inspiration, albeit a logical one, that he should be “the chemist” who dispenses the character-adjusting medications whilst using the real problem cases, like Wozzeck, to experiment with the untried and untested. His buddy, the Captain – another scarily committed and full-on performance from Tom Randle – is a showcase for his drug-induced character-rebuilding, his body a war zone of angry tattoos, his crazed mind characterised in manic vocal-chord-stretching falsettos.

Wozzeck himself is well on the way to the point of no return and his best mate Andres (Adrian Dwyer), an amputee playing video war games in his fortified cell, shares his night terrors 24/7 as we see what only they see – the innocent victims of war, the Afghan and Iraqi children. Even Wozzeck’s own son is given to hide under the table from his own father, frightened of what he might see.

Of course, the real hallucinations in this amazing piece are conjured in Berg’s orchestra and Edward Gardner and the ENO Orchestra on stunning form lay them bare with paradoxical lucidity. Such weird and wonderful and wholly unlikely instrumental combinations convey the strange and skewed logic of damaged minds. And just as Cracknell’s unflinching reality chimes so starkly with things like the ferocious crescendos on unison B which mark the murder of Marie so too the great and cathartic D minor interlude just before the close seems to carry the grief of a nation.

It’s hard watching Leigh Melrose as Wozzeck, a broken man shuffling from one abuse to another, fixated only on providing for Marie and his son in troubled times. That’s the other thing this opera is about – poverty and what it does to people. And the way Melrose conveys the hopelessness of uncontrollable torment through the huge dynamic range of his vocal performance is both thrilling and deeply upsetting. It may be the performance of his life.

And for once we understand Marie for whom adultery is refuge, a pair of earrings, and new red shoes. The Drum Major (Bryan Register) gives those out like sweets. Sara Jakubiak is fearless in the role, searing in her repentance. And with Berg’s reverse conceit that when the emotional stakes are too high singing turns to plain speaking she and everyone else nails Richard Stokes’ excellent translation. For once Wozzeck belongs in English.

So there will be blood – rivers of it – and the slaughter at home will become inseparable in Wozzeck’s mind from the slaughter abroad. Musically this is ENO’s finest hour; dramatically it will break your heart. Is there more?

But Alison Jiear has one of those voices that sits somewhere between a white and a black sensibility and timbre. She’s a natural jazzer, bending and embellishing the line with a naturalness that is second nature – and she doesn’t over-embellish preferring instead an unfussy and more truthful approach where the line itself does the singing. It’s like she just “lifts” phrases where the essence of the songs lie. But don’t ever be fooled by the art concealing art. There’s an awful lot of technique going on here and what she does with that “mix”, playing so skilfully with chest and head voices, is masterful.

Of course, we all love the firepower of the Jiear belt and Aretha Franklin’s “Natural Woman” was always going to exercise the ear drums. Boy, did that sound black and then some. And if you are going to boldly go with “Streisand Got There First” you have to deliver the visceral thrills along with the laughs – including one of those “eternal” Streisand pay-off notes. That got us going. Jiear might make you think that she is coasting some of these songs but she really knows how they go and she sings what really means something to her. David Friedman’s “In Your Eyes” is the title track of her new album and Friedman’s association with the late lamented Nancy LaMott invests it with an overwhelming intensity of association. Jiear really tapped into that.

So we howl at the Tampax song commercial and the unceremonious “Country” take on (or decimation of) “I Dreamed a Dream” replete with pink guitar and more than a few vocal twangs – but Jiear simple and unadulterated is also where it’s at and more often than not simple is what really unlocks the emotion of a song. The highlights of the evening for me were those moments she shared with the ace guitarist of her excellent quartet, Adam Goldsmith. What an artist he is and what an alchemy they achieved together in “I Believe I Can Fly” and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”. How movingly understated that was. I should mention the other guys, too – Dave Arch, her MD/Pianist, Steve Pearce (Bass), and Mark Fletcher (Drums).

So Jiear sometimes confounds expectations and unlike those who barely give you a power ballad off for good behaviour she knows how to go quietly. Well, relatively quietly.

http://www.lucyschaufer.com

It’s funny how some productions only come into their own on the second or even third revival – and there is no question that – collectively speaking – this cast more than trumps the original and raises the poignancy stakes to an altogether different level. How easy it is in this piece to turn the camaraderie of our young creatives into an all-knowing, all-mugging, cheesiness. But the sentiments here were genuine and the laughs for real and we didn’t think for a moment that these were friendships forged only nightly on stage. Richard Burkhard (Marcello), amply, mellifluously, voiced, Gwyn Hughes Jones (Rudolfo), who makes it all seem so effortless, Andrew Craig Brown (Colline), dusky and unforced, and Duncan Rock (Schaunard), whose enormous charisma – vocal and physical – was here put to such finely detailed purpose; a gentle giant, to be sure.

Into their midst came Kate Valentine’s Mimi, big, open, and honest of voice and quite without that simpering sentimentality. She was marvelous in act three where she and her world are falling apart. And what a great foil to her and Rudolfo’s fond farewells than the almighty row brewing between Marcello and his good-time cabaret girl Musetta.

Angel Blue (now there’s a cabaret name to conjurer with) is making her ENO debut in the role and she was quite simply a knock-out – a great match for Valentine’s Mimi in terms of vocal size and flare and really accomplished in the always treacherous Waltz Song.

Miller is so often underestimated in the way he makes pieces speak on stage and his revival director, Natascha Metherell, has remained true to the show’s unhackneyed unfolding. Dr. Miller plays the death scene to perfection: no melodramatic slump from Mimi but a drifting off into eternal sleep that only the orchestra notices. And how telling not to have Rudolfo fling himself over Mimi’s prone body but rather sit with her in a kind of numbed disbelief as if she might just wake up at any moment.

Oleg Caetani’s conducting was thoroughly in keeping with the evening’s honesty.

Photo:ENO’s La Boheme with Melody Moore credit Tristram Kenton

In Webern’s penultimate work the reduction of his compositional sauce was as intense as it would get. The beauty of this highly enigmatic, even cryptic, piece is in its forensic clarity and the precision of what the London Philharmonic Orchestra achieved here under Jurowski’s analytical eyes and ears was startling. As abstract as this piece sounds on the surface, Jurowski achieved the near-impossible of infusing phrases of maybe one or two notes with feelings so transitory and yet so strong that collectively they added up to a whole emotional landscape. A solo violin here, a horn there, a thought, a question, an exclamation – a world of music in seven minutes.

From there we worked backwards through the dark times of the Second World War and the disturbing events preceding it. The Symphonic Pieces from Alban Berg’s unfinished operatic masterpiece Lulu are fashioned like a maxi-trailer for the finished article – snapshots of an unlikely heroine’s life and death. This was the big central piece of the evening and Berg’s voluptuous orchestra was wielded with astonishing richness of tone and colour. Through the opening Rondo (Andante and Hymn) Lulu’s world of men opens up to us, the cool seductive etchings of vibraphone and saxophone lending decadence to the harmonic yearning. And then Lulu herself entered, short skirt, fur collar, lethally high stilettos, loitering without intent against the wall of the platform as if living the Ostinato interlude (the accompaniment to a silent film showing her trial and imprisonment for the murder of her husband) in her mind’s eye.

Barbara Hannigan, the pre-eminent Lulu of our day, then slinked centre-stage to deliver her “Song”, her short but heartfelt confessional of who she is and how independently she stands from what men choose to make of her. It is directed at the one man she truly loves – Dr. Schön – and it is his theme which deep in the chest register of the violins pours out in the final scene of the opera, Jurowski here pointing up the inescapable proximity of Mahler.

The brilliance and ingenuity of the programme was then consolidated in two great works for antiphonal string orchestras and percussion, the one inspired by the other. And it was here that I questioned if Jurowski’s decision to use the largest conceivable body of strings for Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste did not compromised the tightness of the interplay in the up-tempo movements. It felt more Mondrian-like than it can – very linear, very abstract, and less subjugated to the mood music associations of a Stanley Kubrick thriller or indeed a Hermann/Hitchcock shower scene.

But how much more engaged and emotive was the performance of Martinu’s Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano and timpani modeled as it is on the Bartok and rightly following it. The outer movements of this piece are all about driving resistance and the LPO strings gave us just that. The sonorous Chaconne at its heart is as impassioned a statement of that as could be imagined with Catherine Edwards‘ accomplished solo piano invoking a terrible feeling of isolation as Martinu’s Czech homeland is signed over to the Nazis. Small wonder the full-blown return of the Chaconne at the close is so defiant. Jurowski made that moment tell, and how.

What an extraordinary concert.

It was exquisitely played by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko – all super-hushed dynamics and quivering string tremolandi – but apart from the fact that Liadov was Prokofiev’s teacher, a subliminal connection to the latter’s Fifth Symphony at the climax of the evening, it might have been better to launch the concert from the ubiquitous but still arresting horn call and hectoring declamation of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

Except that this is not how Nikolai Lugansky and Petrenko chose to pitch its arrival. Overheated bombast had no place in their framing of those familiar opening measures. Instead a certain nobility prevailed with Lugansky pulling back on the gestural chordal accompaniment while Petrenko lent the big tune (the one that vanishes without trace once its preludial purpose is fulfilled) a distinctly classical decorum. There is this tension in Tchaikovsky between the classical and the romantic and both musicians here were more than a little mindful of it. The classicism was brilliantly served in Lugansky’s super-clean articulation, the romantic in his poetic realisation of the clarinet-led second group and his limpid account of the slow movement, not least that wonderfully mercurial middle section. I loved his unhackneyed phrasings and the wholesale tussle between repose and upheaval in the first movement cadenza. And despite those moments of tasteful withholding there were thrills and spills aplenty in the fusillades of double-octaves and other such showy pyrotechnics. A little Medtner encore nicely offset the ubiquity of the concerto.

Petrenko’s reading of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony then hit the spot in ways that only a truly instinctive conductor can. Petrenko has a sixth sense for the right tempo and managed to hold fast to the epic tread of the first movement whilst accommodating all those tricky quickenings of pulse within it. There was a tremendous sense of great spaces being crossed and an unsettling majesty. Trumpet-crested tuttis carried us all the way to the ice-breaking climax where the unequivocal dissonance spelled out that the triumph of the human spirit comes at a price.

Even the Romeo-and-Juliet-infused slow movement – wonderfully played by by shot-silk Philharmonia strings – has a blade of dissonance through its heart. Petrenko really nailed the scarifying brass chord at the point of penetration but then consoled us with those ravishing traceries of sound in the closing bars.

Then there was the biting irony of scherzo and finale, the Cadillac-trio of the former deliciously relaxed and insouciant and in vivid contrast to the trenchant motor rhythms either side of it. Again exciting work from the strings and a sardonic edge to the winds. They are likable hooligans in the finale led off by the Jack-the-lad clarinet but it’s here that Prokofiev’s “infernal machine” really goes into overdrive. The amazing coda – like a dog chasing its own tail – was thrillingly engaged here with that bizarre drop-out in demented solo strings really tickling the ear. Terrific stuff.