Classical Music

This week’s BBC Prom (Wed 19) for HM’s eightieth birthday, which features a new work from Peter Maxwell Davies (Master of the Queen’s Music) and Andrew Motion (Poet Laureate), will doubtless be a livelier occasion than the infamous premiere of another official royal offering. Britten’s 1953 Coronation opera, ‘Gloriana’, went down like a lead balloon with the VIP Covent Garden audience who probably would have preferred ‘Merrie England’. The portrait of the ageing and lonely Elizabeth I, lovesick for the toyboy (Essex) whom she eventually sends to his death, wasn’t what the post-austerity doctor ordered for the New Elizabethan age with its beautiful young monarch. Feature continues

In retrospect, the brooding queen’s final solitary reflections on her life belongs to the Britten tradition of outsiders as much as tormented fisherman Peter Grimes or saintly seaman Billy Budd, though unlike them, Gloriana’s set apart from society by privilege and power. After a successful Sadler’s Wells revival in the ’60s, the work emerged as a strong piece with a plum part for a great soprano. Phyllida Lloyd’s production for Opera North, filmed for BBC2 and now issued as an Opus Arte DVD, is a cracking reminder of how well Britten works in the theatre – not just as a vehicle for courtly spectacle and Britten’s mock-Tudor dances, but for brilliant characterisation and the ability to crystallise a tense situation into superb music.

The ensemble ‘Good Frances, do not weep’, where Lady Essex is comforted after her humiliation by the jealous Elizabeth, recalls the trio of masks from ‘Don Giovanni’ in its blend of sensuous vocal beauty and tuggingly urgent dramatic undertow. The cast is headed by Josephine Barstow, a great singing actress, as the lonely woman accepting her destiny, and Thomas Randle, another theatre animal to his fingertips, as the impulsive Essex. Lloyd’s production emerges brilliantly, spectacular without resorting to ye olde pastiche – like Britten’s score itself.

Angelika Kirchschlager in 'Guilio Cesare'

Another smash from Opus Arte: last year’s Glyndebourne production of ‘Giulio Cesare’, Handel’s 1724 gloss on Julius Caesar and the serpent of Old Nile is a knock-out. Covent Garden may have turned David McVicar into a purveyor of conventional productions for the gentry, but free from the deadening atmosphere of Bow Street the Glaswegian iconoclast still delivers the goods. This is an updated tangle of intrigue, erotic and political, in today’s unstable power-play between different cultures. A dazzling cast is led by Sarah Connolly as Caesar, in top vocal and dramatic form, and for once adopting a male guise that doesn’t make her look like Jeremy Paxman. Others include exotically beautiful Danielle de Niese (every inch Cleopatra), Christopher Maltman promoting Achilla from minor to major role, and above all Angelika Kirchschlage, a hot-headed adolescent as pistol-packing Sesto, whose performance prompted composer Julian Anderson to write a new piece for her in this year’s BBC Proms (watch this space).

William Christie conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in a sumptuous offering that sets the standard for Handel opera for the foreseeable future. Also from last year’s Glyndebourne, Peter Hall’s production of Rossini’s ‘Cenerentola’ is also available on Opus Arte. The sparkling variation on Cinderella’s story (though Italian cynicism and earthiness militate against soppy magic) is a joy, infinitely richer musically than the overrated ‘Italian Girl in Algiers’, for instance. Ruxandra Donose’s heroine may emphasise the melancholy too much for some, but Jurowski’s conducting whips the high spirits to a sometimes manic level. Martin Hoyle