FAUST

21/9/10, ENO

Notes written at the time and transcribed two months later...

The Gounod version, directed by Des McAnuff, better known apparently for his musicals. His experience with Broadway shows certainly taught him something tyro opera directors who started in the theatre often can't handle, namely the chorus and how to get them moving together and (especially) how to get them on and off.

The interpretation was questionable. Things have been updated to the mid-20th century and the Age of the Bomb. Old Faust (Toby Spence) is a jaded atomic scientist, apparently. The flashback to his youth takes us to World War One and soldiers in those funny French helmets. They returned from the war in a terrible state (as you did after WW1) but that made a bit of a nonsense of their jolly drinking song.

There were awkward moments in the staging too. He didn't seem to know what to do with Margarita after the witches' sabbath. She stood at the back while Faust and Mephistopheles (or their doubles) ran up and down the spiral staircases at either side of the set more or less endlessly.

Margarita (Melody Moore) was in a clumping blue dress and brown shoes and short hair. She was a big girl: I'd like to hear her in Wagner. She wasn't quite convincing here, for all her power and rich tone.

Mephistopheles (Iain Paterson) was supposedly suffering from the aftermath of a chest infection but it wasn't evident.

Acts 1 and 2 went swiftly. Act 3 dragged for me, though it started well with a Faust solo aria, very affecting. Margarita's music is less immediately appealing. The closing trio brings the hairs up on your head. The closing chorus is noisy.

I thought we'd seen it before with Willard White as Mephistopheles but it must have been the Berlioz version. This one concentrates on the love story: passionate stuff, except it's all a lie because he knows he's not for real.

The brother comes back, finds his sister's pregnant, fights the duel and dies cursing his sister despite the chorus urging him to repent so that he will go to heaven.

There was a spectacular neon cross at one point for Margarita's salvation. But she drowns the baby in the font.

It is long.

KATE ROYAL

24/1/09, Wigmore Hall.

1 hr 45 mins. Recital of songs and lieder, mainly duets, for soprano (Royal) and mezzo-soprano (Christine Rice).

Kate Royal looked like the school glamour-puss who'd brought her rather plain and dumpy friend along too, to show herself off to best advantage -- with the headmaster for company.

Ms Royal is certainly striking. Tall, posh face, slender, almost gawky if you're being unkind ("swanlike", according to the more charitable S) in a black sheath which left one of her wide swimmer's shoulders bare. There was loads of expression in the voice and face but she's a bit stiff, not a natural actress: the head girl descending from her eminence to grace the school play with a guest character appearance.

Christine Rice tries less hard but is more convincing as an actress, less impressive as a dresser: a claret off the shoulder gown with curious black Spanish lace (or so it looked) around the shoulders. She sure can sing, though.

Tinkling the ivories was the headmasterly Roger Vignoles: black jacket, grey shirt, black tie (conventional, not bow), grey hair, spectacles.

Had to work and got there late. Missed the first piece, Purcell's Sound the Trumpet, one of my favourites, which I've only ever heard a) on record or the radio and b) sung by counter-tenors, and was much looking forward to. D said it was very good.

Arrived during a set of songs by Mendelssohn, clearly audible through the double doors in the Wigmore foyer. Went in during the applause for a set of five by Brahms: a revelation. I've always thought lieder a rather bloodless form, but then I've never heard it in the flesh. A recalibration is required. It's surprisingly powerful stuff, even when you've no idea what they're singing about. It was clear one song was the comic number (Die Schwestern, it turned out, about two lovely and somewhat coquettish sisters whose relationship sours once it emerge that they love the same man); two (Love's Way 1 and 2, to words by Johann Gottfried Herder) came with the most lovely melodies. And the last was a splendidly melodramatic mother-daughter dialogue on Walpurgisnacht ("Dear mother, there's thunder over the Brocken." "Dear child, there are witches up there..." and Mum, it turns out, is one of them).

The second half had two songs by Gounod (associated with "sentimental religiosity" according to the programme note, but it was tuneful sentiment), two by Ernst Chausson, less obviously appealing, and four by Rossini -- two solos, two duets including another comic number called The Venetian Regatta which also provoked much mugging from the girls. Less than 24 hours on and I can remember nothing of the music, except that it was pleasing ("The English know nothing of music: they just like the noise it makes," as my father claims Beecham once said).

So we should go more to the Wigmore Hall, which is evidently an ideal size to appreciate this kind of stuff and is architecturally more exotic than I remember it from our one previous visit many years ago. The lobby has those wide, shallow arches much liked by English architects of the arts and crafts school. The performers sing on a stage in an apse at the end with an elaborate mosaic or fresco above it. S said it reminded her of an Edwardian loo: she felt the entrance and exit doors on either side should have "ladies" and "gents" above them.

It was a full house. We weren't quite the youngest there but it felt like it. They gave us two encores: a Brahms and a Schubert, both rather contemplative for encores; we could have done with something a little more upbeat.

The programme says Rice and Royal have been singing together occasionally since 2004, when they were Rhinemaidens in a concert performance of Rhinegold at the Proms, which we went to. But it wasn't until we saw Kate Royal at the Opera Garnier in Paris in a performance of Handel's L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Il Moderato that she made any impression. She was brilliant, beautiful, poised: the best thing about an otherwise ghastly, lamentable staging by a South African "choreographer" who took great delight in deconstructing the whole thing.