ROYAL OPERA YOUNG ARTISTS

7/3/10, Channing School, Highgate

A reprise of last year's fundraiser for the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institute. Robert Lloyd, celebrating his 70th birthday (we sang Happy Brithday at the end with a lack of vigour and tunelessness which would not have disgraced a Church of England congregation), and four young singers from the Jette Parker scheme at Covent Garden, once again accompanied by Steven Moore.

They were better actors than last time. The little soprano, Eri Nakamura from Japan, who is cast as Susannah in Covent Garden's forthcoming Marriage of Figaro, had a wonderfully animated face though she hasn't yet learnt how to use it. The baritone, Dawid Kimberg from South Africa, I thought a little stolid though D was very impressed. The tenor, Robert Anthony Gardiner, English, with dark floppy hair, imperial and 'tache, certainly looked the part, but alas came adrift in his first solo aria (Almaviva's Ecco ridente from the Barber of Seville) and took a while to recover his confidence. The mezzo, Kai Ruutel from Estonia, was large and blonde and statuesque and looked initially as if she might be rather wooden but turned out to be very expressive, and very good at using her eyes (she also wore not one but two splendid strapless numbers).

But Lloyd once again acted them off the stage. There's nothing subtle about his acting, no doubt designed to impress the most distant balcony in the world's biggest opera houses, but he is brilliant at telegraphing emotion, and throws himself into the thing with wonderful abandon. Once again I was struck too by what hard work this kind of singing is, especially for a man of his age: it leaves him quite breathless.

His presentation wasn't quite as sparkling as last year, when I fear he used up all his best jokes, but he was still charming.

The programming was a bit shaky. Lots of jolly Donizetti and Rossini in the first half (no fewer than four areas and a trio from the Barber of Seville), but then in the second half of the second half Lensky's very sombre "Kuda, kuda" sung by the tenor before the duel in Eugene Onegin followed by a splendidly dramatic duet by Kimberg as the Marquis of Posa and Lloyd as the King from Don Carlos which required more concentration to appreciate than I had left after more than two hours and a good lunch (supplied beforehand by S). We agreed those two should have come at the end of the first half.

But they sang some jolly encores. The tenor's was "You are my heart's delight" in the original German, which pleased me greatly: he sang it more mellifluously than Tauber.

ROYAL OPERA YOUNG ARTISTS

8/2/09, Channing School, Highgate

A fund-raiser for the Highgate Literary & Scientific Institution, 170 years old this year. A school assembly hall, four performers from the Royal Opera Young Artists Programme (a tenor and a baritone, both from Korea; a soprano from Romania; a pianist from Queensland), the bass Robert Lloyd, now retired and a member of the Highgate Lit, and a dozen famous and familiar operatic arias.

S (also a member of the Lit) invited us to lunch beforehand with A and the Lit's president, plus the president's husband and the president's oldest friend, a nice lady who moved ten years ago from the Yorkshire Dales to the Pyrenees where she practices alternative therapies and counselling and such like. She offered me a head massage.

It was semi-staged (the singing, not the head massage); Lloyd did the introductions (with considerable wit); and they sang their socks off. The audience (average age about 80) lapped it up.

The soprano (Simona Mihai) struggled a bit with the gavotte from Act 3 of Manon, which has some very loud and very high top notes, but was generally pleasing in a long dark red evening dress. The baritone's acting wasn't up to much - his woodenness accentuated in the finale, a rousing martial duet with Lloyd from I Puritani by Bellini, in which Lloyd acted him off the stage - but he had the most wonderfully resonant voice; he was called Changham Lim. The tenor (Ji-Min Park) was a better actor and after a slightly under-powered start came into his own in Edgardo's graveyard aria from Lucia di Lammermoor, much of which is unaccompanied and which is punctuated by silences which really were silent -- he even managed to still the lady down at the front who kept taking photographs on her new camera (she had the manual open on her lap). His rendering of Your Tiny Hand Ain't 'Arf Froze from La Boheme made the hairs stand on end - but maybe that's just because it's so familiar.

In the first half Lloyd sang Osmin's aria from the Seraglio with tremendous vigour -- but was so breathless at the end he could barely speak to introduce the next piece and had to go and sit in a corner looking a smidge peaky while he recovered. It was a reminder that singing opera must be bloody hard work. The young do it with greater ease, but for the most part lack the stagecraft and experience to carry it off at the very highest level. Which is a shame: as Lloyd said, it was nice to hear the Act 4 duet for Rodolfo and Marcello from La Boheme sung by chaps of the right age for once. (Later: turns out the soprano and the baritone are both 30, so not that young; not sure how old the tenor is.)

Worrying about Lloyd's health rather distracted from the baritone aria from Puccini's Edgar (no, I hadn't heard of it either) which featured an extraordinarily long note. And there was a second very long note when Lloyd and the baritone sang the duet for Rigoletto and Sparafucile from Act 1 of Rigoletto, which ends with the bass singing a very deep "Sparafuceeeel..." as he exits. Lloyd had no problem with that. He told us afterwards that it is the custom in Italian opera houses to pay the singers before their last entrance, a legacy of the time when opera house managers were apt to do a runner with the night's takings before cast and crew could be paid, and the Met in New York does the same. After exiting in Act 1 Sparafucile makes only one other appearance in the final act, so the exiting bass walks off stage in New York to be met by the stage manager with a cheque. "It really does fell like you're being paid especially for that note," he said.

He also introduced a duet from The Merry Widow by claiming he knew little of the opera because it had no role for a bass and cited the Australian baritone John Shore, once principal baritone at Covent Garden. Lloyd encountered him once in the recording studio when he, Lloyd, was a young man. Shore asked him what he was recording and when Lloyd told him asked what the baritone part in the opera was like. "There isn't one," said Lloyd. "What kind of bloody opera is that?" said Shore.

Maybe they were funnier the way Lloyd told 'em.

They gave us fruit juice and home-made biscuits in the interval and two encores, O mio bambino and the duet from The Pearl Fishers, a pair of Classic FM crowd-pleasers. Walking back afterwards S likened the Lit's role in Highgate society to that of the church in a country village, a focus for community life kept going by volunteers and donations, meeting regularly with occasional special events, like today's.