Hugh's letter to all subscribers

Looking forward to a summer of music and opera

Dear Friends,

I have just arrived back in London from Strasbourg, where a rare staging of French composer Albéric Magnard’s opera Guercoeur, brilliantly staged by Christof Loy, has left me in high spirits. What a discovery!

You will shortly be able to read all the details in my upcoming review on Operalogue, but I just wanted to seize the opportunity of this brief pause in my schedule to thank you once again for subscribing, and to say how much I appreciate your positive feedback.

I count it as a privilege to be in touch with you in this way, knowing that you share my love of music and opera, and want to stay informed about important events in the calendar. It gives me the greatest pleasure to write about performances you may not have been able to attend, and it is my hope that this will help to compensate for the rapidly shrinking coverage of classical music and opera in the mainstream press.

This is a good time to give you a preview of keynote performances I am hoping to write about over the summer.

In the UK, the festival season is almost upon us. I will be attending new productions at Glyndebourne and Garsington, as well as Grange Park Opera and the Grange Festival. Given the similarity of their names, it’s small wonder the latter pair generate a certain amount of confusion among opera sybarites, but they promise very different offerings and have their own distinctive artistic personality, which I will enjoy dissecting in my reviews.

I am especially looking forward to a trio of delights at Garsington — Rameau’s comic masterpiece Platée, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (with Iestyn Davies as Oberon) and Verdi’s rarely performed early comedy Un giorno di regno, which I first saw 50 years ago at the Bregenz festival.

The pick of the Grange Park Opera programme is a new David Alden staging of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova starring Natalia Romaniw and Susan Bullock, while the Grange Festival promises a Walter Sutcliffe production of Monteverdi’s valedictory L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea).

Back in the city, I will examine how Antonio Pappano is transitioning from his role as music director of the Royal Opera to chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

I will be taking a selective approach to the BBC Proms, highlighting visits by the top two German orchestras — the Bavarian Radio Symphony under Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker with Kirill Petrenko. The choral standouts include a Pappano/LSO Britten War Requiem, and Verdi’s great Mass for the Dead from Ryan Bancroft and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (wit a line-up of soloists including the thrilling US soprano Latonia Moore).

Further afield, my upcoming reports from Europe will include Britten’s The Turn of the Screw in Brussels, Puccini’s Il trittico staged by Barrie Kosky in Amsterdam, and performances in Frankfurt of Handel’s Giulio Cesare (starring Pretty Yende as Cleopatra) and Wagner’s Tannhäuser.

I intend to be in Austria in July and August to report on Brigitte Fassbaender’s semi-staging of Wagner’s Ring in Erl, as well as some of the main events at the Salzburg Festival. After an absence of more than 20 years, I will also attend the Schubertiade in Austria’s beautiful Vorarlberg region, and I have been invited to the Kissinger Sommer Festival in Germany -- a first for me.

A big thank you to all paying subscribers for renewing your subscription — and a reminder to those who receive the limited number of free Operalogue offerings that it really is worth upgrading to ‘paid’: you’ll get so much more!

Have a wonderful, music-filled summer.

Best wishes,

Hugh