Films and Harvest Festival

Today the deconstruction of the theatre begins. In six months we will be putting it back up. Oh well...

The weekend was taken up by Nomad Cinema and three films. They seemed to do very well and a whole new crowd were wowed by the spectacular "cinema" with the huge screen stood in the orchestra pit. But what a messy crowd! The wandering in and out of the auditorium took some getting used to as well. Give me an opera crowd any day of the week. Still, it was a great success - and is there a better place to watch "Cinema Paradiso"? (Not the director's cut, which upset me a bit). They had a band of Macedonian musicians playing chirpy folk music from the
Balkans which is of course the wrong side of the Adriatic for this particular film but it had moderately local flavour. Well done to the Nomad and maybe we will see them back again sometime.

After a short break, the office will be back into full flow in September with much to be settled before Christmas and the intensity of the New Year. It is a short window of opportunity to confirm the details of the next build, set budgets in stone and strike deals with sponsors and supporters. And of course there are the productions to bring to life. The next year is going to be intense with not only the 2012 season to get ready but also the future structure of the company to establish, ready for the 2013 season - the contents of which will be hopefully agreed in short order.

In the immediate future, Fantastic Mr Fox goes to Alex James's Harvest Festival in Oxfordshire. I will be sunning myself atop a Greek mountain at the time but my thoughts will be with them all!

That's all folks....

So the season drew to a triumphant close with the final performance of the brilliant production of Rigoletto and I feel that all future productions, anywhere, must be forced to do the ending in the way that Lindsay Posner staged it. No arguments. Verdi got it wrong. Not that everybody agrees of course. I had a long letter yesterday from a patron who was outraged that we had "updated" (his quote marks) the opera and had subverted the composer's original intentions. I am not sure that there is a record of Verdi demanding a particular kind of production but I pointed out that the opera was written 160 years ago and the play on which it is based twenty years earlier. The correspondent did, however, think the musical standards to be very good indeed. I consider it my duty to convert patrons from having this one dimensional view of how we should produce opera. I find it hard to imagine that they would want to see essentially the same production of Rigoletto every time but it would appear so.

It has been another amazing season; one that took all the twists and turns that we have come to expect and in the early part of the summer, one that was very much a struggle. As ever, the company pulled through. An average of 98% houses is testament to the magnificent support we get from patrons and now it is on to the next two...news on 2013 soon we hope.

There is a small film festival taking place this weekend and features "Some like it hot", "Cinema Paradiso" and a new film being given a special gala screening' "First Night" which tells the story of a group of amateurs creating a production of Cosi. You can get details on our website.

Open Day

Shirt post just to say that the Open Day yesterday was a brilliant success, even with intermittent monsoon rain. Loads of people gave up their Sunday to help. Highlights; minute maestro and the chance fir lots of people to realise their dream of conducting an orchestra. The CLS nightmare of me conducting them was realised too. They have never sounded so good though... ;-)
And the scratch chorus who sang Va Pensiero was absolutely magnificent.

Spoilers...shut up!

And so the great mystery is solved; how would we do the avalanche? Rarely has an element of an opera so pre-occupied a nation! It is worth pointing out that the story is, in fact, that Wally sees the avalanche and throws herself to her death. Does the opera even call for an avalanche?

It has been a bit disappointing to see the closing element of the show revealed in some reviews because its effect at the dress, when nobody knew what would happen was dramatic on those who saw it. But that is a common theme these days; in Rigoletto, the reimagined ending has been given away several times. On that I am stridently with the director, Lindsay Posner, to such a degree that I think Verdi made a ricket of it. A genuine, if rare, case of the stage director knowing better than the composer (ooh, controversial).

As for La Wally, I think there is immense beauty at times in the production and it draws one in- spellbindingly at times.

One almost universal aspect has been approval for the opera's gorgeous score. Perhaps a reappraisal of it as a one aria opera is about to occur? Richard Morrison said in The Times that the Act four prelude is "as haunting as Mahler's First Symphony" which is praise indeed. Of course, we have been saying this sort of thing about these operas for years and it is good to see credible voices raised in acceptance of this fact. For too long, it has been as if people cannot really bring themselves to accept that there is a whole school of neglected operas that actually do feature some quite breathtaking music. If it is neglected, then there must be a good reason for it, right? Well no actually. It is usually because opera house managements all around the world are simply not inventive, knowledgeable or imaginative enough. One thing is for absolutely sure, there is an enormous appetite for it, as has been proven by our selling out La Wally and pretty much every other opera in this vein over the years. Still, why mine the repertoire of the past 100 years when you can spunk a few hundred grand on another new opera by a pop star? There was a piece in the Guardian today (a decent one, too) by a composer who wonders whether opera singers can sing pop? Why? Because he wants to write an opera and is not sure that opera singers can sing his kind of music. Write a bloody musical then and get Alfie Boe to sing it!

Still, you can always rely on us at OHP....

Holiday to Kefalonia booked. I am already worried I might hate it.