Bryn Terfel’s turn as father-of-five Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof at Grange Park Opera gives one pause to reflect on those great and not-so-great moments when the leviathans of the opera world have turned their eyes to the West End in search of anything from popular acclaim to commercial success to cross-art-form kudos. The results are sometimes ear-opening, occasionally eye-watering and often breathtaking. Here’s a few of my favourites.
Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras sing Bernstein’s West Wide Story: a classic of the genre, in which the operatic luxuriance of the two opera stars transcends, swamps, and swallows Bernstein’s score. Lenny and José both lose it a little during the recording of Maria, as the famously revealing documentary shows …
Bryn Terfel sings Sweeney Todd at the Proms in 2010, showcasing Terfel doing what he does best, and a role he reprised at the Coliseum earlier this year with Emma Thompson. For my money, Terfel’s voice, charisma and gigantic stage presence are all big wins in Sondheim’s most theatrically and murderously extreme score.
It’s the same, I reckon, here, when Plácido Domingo brought zarzuela, Spain’s popular musical entertainment, to the Salzburg festival in 2007: this is music that is in Domingo’s vocal bloodstream, to mix one’s corporeal metaphors. He grew up surrounded by it, and it shows in his performances of sensitive but high-octane vocal emotion.
What you make of Lesley Garrett, singing here with Michael Ball, in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera – well, the opening number anyway – may well be another matter.
And through no real fault of his own, Michael Ball is at the centre of one of the great critical drubbings of recent-ish operatic history: ENO’s production of Kismet in 2007. As Anthony Holden wrote, it was heroically misconceived on every level: musical, theatrical and political, an apparent object lesson in why opera companies should tread carefully when they put on musicals.
Which is what Opera North got so right, for many people, in their staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel in 2012, in which cast, creative team and opera company revealed the genuinely operatic ambitions of Carousel, from its score to its socio-political consciousness.
As did Nikolaus Harnoncourt when he achieved his lifelong ambition of conducting the show that he has known backwards since he was five years old – Mozart? Beethoven? Weber? Wagner? None of the above: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which he finally conducted, aged 79, at the Styriate festival in Austria in 2009.
More Sondheim: one of the Metropolitan Opera’s stars of the postwar period, Rosalind Elias, made her Broadway debut in 2011 in Follies, playing an elderly singer looking back painfully on her previous life. It seemed like perfect casting: her performance of One More Kiss, even in this shonky video from a live performance, shows why.
A couple of great moments to savour, of operatic tenors in more popular repertoire: here’s Mario Lanza in Jerome Kern …
And Lauritz Melchior – according only to me (well, and thousands of others) the finest Wagnerian Heldentenor in recorded history – in one of the smash hits of Neapolitan song, Torna a Surriento. Magic.
- Fiddler on the Roof is at Grange Park Opera, London, from 4 June to 3 July, and at the Proms (and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3) on 25 July.
