Les Troyens - Covent Garden in the Summer

[Segilla]

Has anybody got wind of what sort of production this opera will be subjected to?
It is supported by Rolex and the image here:-

http://www.roh.org.uk/whatson/production.aspx?pid=18862

doesn't seem to be very reassuring.

[Chris Newman]

On the basis of that one image it looks very similar to the Paris production with JEG, which was actually very good.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesfred/262187813/

On a positive side the direction is David McVicar; the set designer, Es Devlin, also has the closing ceremony of the Olympics on her plate and many of the cast are excellent. Anything will be better than ENO's Rusalka.

[BBMmk2]

I agree with Chris Newman here. i find it very reassuriong good! Be worth seeing!

[David-G]

Anything will be better than ENO's Rusalka.

Did you mean anything will be better than the ROH's Rusalka? If so I would agree 100%. The ENO's Rusalka, produced by David Pountney, was superb.

[rauschwerk]

I'm very keen to see this but worried about possible cost. Can anyone give me any clues about ticket prices before booking opens tomorrow? I see that a recording will be shown in cinemas in November.

[Chris Newman]

Did you mean anything will be better than the ROH's Rusalka? If so I would agree 100%. The ENO's Rusalka, produced by David Pountney, was superb.

Yes, David, you are absolutely correct. I meant the ROH Rusalka. Great music making but 0/5 for that production.

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

I'm very keen to see this but worried about possible cost. Can anyone give me any clues about ticket prices before booking opens tomorrow? I see that a recording will be shown in cinemas in November.

Amphitheatre prices range from £10 - £104 (there are currently some Upper Slips seats for the opening night available, but I expect more seats will be offered when public booking opens).

You might want to wait and catch it (minus production) at the Proms, of course...

[bluestateprommer]

Has anybody got wind of what sort of production this opera will be subjected to?

This other forum with its own thread on the ROH Les troyens hints at an update for the McVicar production to the time of the Crimean War:

http://www.talkclassical.com/15987-les-troyens-roh-london.html

This doesn't make sense historically with respect to the Trojan Horse, unless one is willing simply to accept the idea of alternative history in the manner of Doctor Who. Musically, however, it sounds very promising. Plus, that production is supposed to materialize in concert version at The Proms this summer.

[Segilla]

This other forum with its own thread on the ROH Les troyens hints at an update for the McVicar production to the time of the Crimean War

In that case I'm glad I didn't manage to get a ROH ticket to watch such nonsense. My best option will be to listen to the radio broadcast of the Prom and re-live in my head the fine experiences of the revelatory 1956 performance there and the later more sumptuous one.
I would like to have made it a trio, but perhaps some of the wish was simply Romantic vanity.

[kernelbogey]

Shouldn't this thread be on A Night at the Opera forum?

[Chris Newman]

[

[Chris Newman]

I am sure that David McVicar the director of Les Troyens will do Berlioz proud.He is one of my favourite directors. If settings remind us that War is War and bring it nearer our age it is often the better.

Berlioz's twin themes were those of Homer's tragedy: war and the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas. Back in the 1981 I was lucky enough to attend the RSC production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, another love and war story. It was a brilliant production by Terry Hands (another good one)with a cast including David Suchet, James Hazeldine, Carol Royle, Tony Church, Oliver Ford-Davies and Joe Melia. Terry Hands reset the play in the First World War rather than straight-forwardly in Troy. The first half saw the generals faffing and fretting over maps in a chateau. The second half saw the common soldiers falling down in trenches and on barbed wire. It was painfully telling like Warhorse (currently being staged in London and shown at cinemas or even more like the film The Dirty Dozen which began funny (almost Dad's Army) and after the interval (remember those in films?) ended in the full horror of war. I grant that there is little funny stuff in [I]Les Troyens[I] apart from the dramatic irony of the Trojan soldiers' duet just before Dido's suicide.

I felt a twinge of teacherly pride when I watched a former pupil who I took to that Troilus and Cressida and whom I directed in A Man For All Seasons in 1980 play Troilus at the RSC in 1990.

I am praying that I can get tickets for Les Troyens. It is so rarely performed we must be grateful for this. Touch wood I have heard every performance at the Proms as well as the night Janet Baker saved the day at Covent Garden.

Shouldn't this thread be merged with the other one on the Opera sub-thread?

[Segilla]

I am sure that David McVicar the director of Les Troyens will do Berlioz proud.He is one of my favourite directors. If settings remind us that War is War and bring it nearer our age it is often the better.

I]

And while you're at it, why not update the music?
I wonder if a steel band and tin whistles would improve on the sounds that Berlioz imagined. Why is it only the production that can be interfered with?

If Berlioz was as entranced with the Crimean War as you seem to be, he could have embraced that.

If people like you are to have your way, how are new and future music lovers ever to experience what was intended?
I have never forgotten the insult offered by that arrogant pipsqueak Paul Daniel, when asked on Desert Island Discs how people who didn't like modern productions were to react.

"They can listen to their CDs".

Sheer selfishness.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And while you're at it, why not update the music?

Because the Music is still ahead of its time, whereas the staging conventions of mid-19th Century French opera houses were behind the times even in the mid-19th Century.

If people like you are to have your way, how are new and future music lovers ever to experience what was intended?

Nobody quite "like" our Chris! And what do you mean by "have your way"? This rather suggests that you believe that the person you attack wishes his preferences to supplant all other forms of staging. What evidence do you have for such a belief? Isn't it rather a - how shall I put it? - "pip-squeakingly arrogant" supposition?

I have never forgotten the insult offered by that arrogant pipsqueak Paul Daniel, when asked on Desert Island Discs how people who didn't like modern productions were to react.

"They can listen to their CDs".

Sheer selfishness.

Well, they can! And they do.
Meanwhile, as there are sufficient numbers of people who eagerly buy tickets for "modern productions", (and who dread the idea of a return to middle-aged men in tights standing at the front of the stage singing out to the auditorium) does it not suggest that those who would impose their own staging preferences are themselves at least equally guilty of such "sheer selfishness"?

[Chris Newman]

All I say is that I wish the music to be given full justice. Why on earth would I expect steel bands and whistles? I hope Mr Pappano includes Ophicleides in the mix though. I believe that most composers expect any production to bring out the dramatic best in their music. If, having sat on high looking down on theatrical developments since their last visits to earth, Berlioz and Handel, making brief returns to Earth, would be rather surprised to see the attendant deities in some of their opera seria to fly across the stage on cardboard cut-out clouds. I believe that they would be more impressed by the momentary appearance of, say, Mercury in a cloud of real billowing stage smoke which actually conceals a fork-lift truck. I have once seen gods on flying cut-out clouds used to great comic effect in Handel's Semele which of course is a bawdy romp.

Berlioz himself argues strongly for contemporary theatrical realism and progress in his splendid autobiography. Having read that I am convinced that this is what he would expect.

My own belief is that the less clutter there is on the stage the easier it is to concentrate on the action. It does not matter whether the Trojan Horse is wood, metal or projected on the back screen. It symbolises the gullibility of the Trojan and deviousness of the Greeks. It is only there for a short while at the end of Part One. If the stage is filled with temples, pillars and such details the drama becomes obscured. Look at those camp, over the top Zeffirelli productions like Cavaliera Rusticana: very pretty but you could hardly hear the music because the fountain was splashing so loudly and soloists disappeared into the bright colours until they start sing and you look for the singer who is moving his or her lips. Aida with live camels and horses make me think of Thomas Beecham!! We all sit waiting for it to happen. The current ROH production of Tosca based of designs from the actual sites of the action is too glittery. It need a little toning down so that you can see entrances clearly and people opening and closing peep holes. Much of the action goes for nothing in all that beauty.

On the other hand some production go too far and end up barren and empty. Balance is required and recognition that an audience is an intelligent body with a sense of imagination.