The postmortems are, presumably, already in progress at English National Opera and Glyndebourne on the cadavers discovered on the stages of the Coliseum and the opera house in Sussex within days of each other last week. I refer to ENO's cheap and tacky staging of Kismet, a tawdry and cheesy piece of 1950s racist kitsch, with a score plundered from Borodin's masterpieces Prince Igor and the Second String Quartet, and to Glyndebourne's second turkey of the season: an unnecessary staging of Bach's St Matthew Passion, musically so substandard that it makes a mockery of Glyndebourne's claims to "festival" status.
On the face of it, these two fiascos could just be written off as incidental flops. Unfortunately, they seem to be part of an emerging pattern. It matters less, of course, if Glyndebourne falls into a slough of mediocrity: no taxpayers' money is at stake (except when the company tours), whereas ENO is spending millions of pounds of your and my money on a succession of disasters. Yes, there have been successes: David Alden's Olivier-winning Jenufa and Deborah Warner's recent Death in Venice were incontrovertible hits, and even Philip Glass's dreary Satyagraha began to fill houses towards the end of the run.
The problem for ENO is that these isolated hits represent a tiny proportion of the company's work.
Boe as the Caliph, poorly acted by everyone and nondirected by Gary Griffin, a Broadway specialist. Only Sarah Tynan, singing gorgeously as the romantic female lead, Marsinah - she really gets the musical style of a West End show, unusually for an opera singer - emerges from this catastrophe unscathed.
At Glyndebourne, Bach's great Passion, a sublime masterpiece of western art, sinks with almost equal ignominy, except that the musical performance is possibly worse. It is hard to know if Richard Egarr's soporific conducting and the tired playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment - was it wise to schedule their lengthy 21st-anniversary gala the day before Glyndebourne's opening night? - were responses to Katie Mitchell's tedious, nauseatingly mawkish grief-fest of a production or the way they feel about Bach's music.
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Mitchell's Big Idea is to stage the Passion as an improvised, supposedly spontaneous outpouring of anguish after a mass bereavement. The setting is a contemporary classroom somewhere in Europe - it might be Dunblane or Beslan - and mourning parents are "rehearsed" in their choral parts by a group of travelling players, obviously moonlighting as grief therapists. There is a lot of hugging, soloists waltz with selected partners during their arias (presumably because they are in 3/4 time) and, during the flagellation of Christ (Henry Waddington), the soprano plunges his head in a bowl of water and pours salt on his head. That, alas, is the big "theatrical" moment in this nonevent. Mark Padmore's superbly sung Evangelist and Sarah Connolly's luminous account of Erbarme Dich (the work's emotional core) are the only reasons to see this dreary spectacle. The chorus struggles hopelessly with Bach's complex counterpoint and Egarr's ragged beat.
Mitchell's Passion is the latest unrevivable show from David Pickard, Glyndebourne's general director, whose artistic "vision" consists of following Welsh National Opera and Opera North around with a shopping trolley, buying in directors such as Mitch-ell, Richard Jones, Daniel Slater and Annabel Arden, whose better work can be seen, at a fraction of the cost, in Cardiff or Leeds. Of the 58 performances offered between mid-April and the end of the season in a fortnight's time, only 18 have been of operas, while the other 40 have been of musicals: Bernstein's On the Town and now this ghastly Kismet.
Some kind colleagues have been inclined to blame previous administrations for ENO's continuing woes, but Death in Venice at least - you don't get Deborah Warner and Ian Bostridge at short notice - had been planned by previous management (either Sean Doran, whose pet project for ENO was a Britten series, or his predecessor, Nicholas Payne). John Berry, the current artistic director, has presided over this sequence of disasters, although, possibly, he was behind the Jenufa (another "mainstream" opera that had a very short run).
ENO is advertising Kismet, laughably, as a "lavish" staging, but Ultz's screaming, primary-coloured sets seem contrived out of crimson-painted sandpaper, ill-constructed MDF daises and a few gauzy drapes, while his hideous costumes look like the work of an amateur operatic society sorely strapped for cash. Only patrons who live in a hovel or a cave could imagine this miserable pile of tat as remotely "lavish". As for the score, well, leave out the Borodin tunes (Stranger in Paradise, Baubles, Bangles and Beads, And This Is My Beloved) and it is worthless schmaltz, moderately sung by Michael Ball as the Poet and Alfie
The postmortems are, presumably, already in progress at English National Opera and Glyndebourne on the cadavers discovered on the stages of the Coliseum and the opera house in Sussex within days of each other last week. I refer to ENO's cheap and tacky staging of Kismet, a tawdry and cheesy piece of 1950s racist kitsch, with a score plundered from Borodin's masterpieces Prince Igor and the Second String Quartet, and to Glyndebourne's second turkey of the season: an unnecessary staging of Bach's St Matthew Passion, musically so substandard that it makes a mockery of Glyndebourne's claims to "festival" status.
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On the face of it, these two fiascos could just be written off as incidental flops. Unfortunately, they seem to be part of an emerging pattern. It matters less, of course, if Glyndebourne falls into a slough of mediocrity: no taxpayers' money is at stake (except when the company tours), whereas ENO is spending millions of pounds of your and my money on a succession of disasters. Yes, there have been successes: David Alden's Olivier-winning Jenufa and Deborah Warner's recent Death in Venice were incontrovertible hits, and even Philip Glass's dreary Satyagraha began to fill houses towards the end of the run.
The problem for ENO is that these isolated hits represent a tiny proportion of the company's work.
Of the 58 performances offered between mid-April and the end of the season in a fortnight's time, only 18 have been of operas, while the other 40 have been of musicals: Bernstein's On the Town and now this ghastly Kismet.
Some kind colleagues have been inclined to blame previous administrations for ENO's continuing woes, but Death in Venice at least - you don't get Deborah Warner and Ian Bostridge at short notice - had been planned by previous management (either Sean Doran, whose pet project for ENO was a Britten series, or his predecessor, Nicholas Payne). John Berry, the current artistic director, has presided over this sequence of disasters, although, possibly, he was behind the Jenufa (another "mainstream" opera that had a very short run).
ENO is advertising Kismet, laughably, as a "lavish" staging, but Ultz's screaming, primary-coloured sets seem contrived out of crimson-painted sandpaper, ill-constructed MDF daises and a few gauzy drapes, while his hideous costumes look like the work of an amateur operatic society sorely strapped for cash. Only patrons who live in a hovel or a cave could imagine this miserable pile of tat as remotely "lavish". As for the score, well, leave out the Borodin tunes (Stranger in Paradise, Baubles, Bangles and Beads, And This Is My Beloved) and it is worthless schmaltz, moderately sung by Michael Ball as the Poet and Alfie Boe as the Caliph, poorly acted by everyone and nondirected by Gary Griffin, a Broadway specialist. Only Sarah Tynan, singing gorgeously as the romantic female lead, Marsinah - she really gets the musical style of a West End show, unusually for an opera singer - emerges from this catastrophe unscathed.
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At Glyndebourne, Bach's great Passion, a sublime masterpiece of western art, sinks with almost equal ignominy, except that the musical performance is possibly worse. It is hard to know if Richard Egarr's soporific conducting and the tired playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment - was it wise to schedule their lengthy 21st-anniversary gala the day before Glyndebourne's opening night? - were responses to Katie Mitchell's tedious, nauseatingly mawkish grief-fest of a production or the way they feel about Bach's music.
Mitchell's Big Idea is to stage the Passion as an improvised, supposedly spontaneous outpouring of anguish after a mass bereavement. The setting is a contemporary classroom somewhere in Europe - it might be Dunblane or Beslan - and mourning parents are "rehearsed" in their choral parts by a group of travelling players, obviously moonlighting as grief therapists. There is a lot of hugging, soloists waltz with selected partners during their arias (presumably because they are in 3/4 time) and, during the flagellation of Christ (Henry Waddington), the soprano plunges his head in a bowl of water and pours salt on his head. That, alas, is the big "theatrical" moment in this nonevent. Mark Padmore's superbly sung Evangelist and Sarah Connolly's luminous account of Erbarme Dich (the work's emotional core) are the only reasons to see this dreary spectacle. The chorus struggles hopelessly with Bach's complex counterpoint and Egarr's ragged beat.
Mitchell's Passion is the latest unrevivable show from David Pickard, Glyndebourne's general director, whose artistic "vision" consists of following Welsh National Opera and Opera North around with a shopping trolley, buying in directors such as Mitchell, Richard Jones, Daniel Slater and Annabel Arden, whose better work can be seen, at a fraction of the cost, in Cardiff or Leeds.