The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 21

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH MS TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 1997 21 Can Opera North's innovative music director work the same magic at the troubled ENO? John Whitley reports Daniel heads for the lion's den ARTS VER since that moment in last year's television documentary The House Bernard Haitink, music director Opera, was confronted with the set designs for Richard Jones's infantile production of The Ring, everyone knows about the ordeals of today's opera conductors. His eyes bulged, his mouth worked, not so much in rage as disbelief anyone could so desecrate Wagner's masterpiece. So was Paul Daniel, who this autumn moves from Opera North to become Haitink's neighbour as music director at the rival English National Opera, similarly baffled? 'Well," he says diplomatically, "I didn't actually see that programme. work on and with Richard Jones and it was the best theatrical work I've done for a very, very long time," Daniel, tall, greying and enthusiastic, is, in fact, the antithesis of the Dutch conductor an uncompromising promoter of new ideas, new music and, above all, novel and often equally outrageous interpretations of the work of the past. Although his lips are contractually sealed about his specific plans for ENO, it is clear that audiences at the 'Coliseum can expect the same rollercoaster of provocative but musically impeccable productions that they experienced from the Eighties triumvirate of David Pountney, Mark Elder and Peter Jonas.

Characteristically, Daniel has chosen to make his farewell to Leeds on Saturday with a problematic Wagner opera, in a production by one of the most influential of the ENO iconoclasts, David Fielding. "It's the first complete Wagner opera I've conducted," he explains, "and it is probably the piece that gets most often cancelled, because it's very difficult to put Daniel is happy to upset the Perfect Wagnerites. "'The number of times I've been thrilled out of my mind by Wagner performances is probably about equal to the number of times I've been bored. I want to give people something new something that brings the piece to life." WHAT Sod's law hangs over the charity gala concert? Why does dazzling promise so materialise as damp squib? Because programmes are invariably too long and miscellaneous, with too much talk and not enough stagemanagement? Or because, when it comes do most of the stars who do show up can't really be bothered? EMI's effort to celebrate its centenary, in aid of the Music Sound Foundation, was shorter and sweeter than most. The aim was also to showcase the impressive list of opera stars contracted to the label, in a theatre from which it has made many memorable recordings (this, too, was being recorded).

I only wish that the feeble speeches had made more reference to EMI's great past some mention of such produc- Picture: JOHN Paul Daniel: 'I know that I could never fit into the dictator mould as a conductor. That age has gone. I have to motivate the orchestra I work with' Daniel is even suspicious of the legacy of ENO's glory days, when he worked there as a fledgling conductor under Mark "One of the great dangers of looking back over the work of a pany is that you tend to use what happened in the Eighties or the Forties as a blueprint, and that's fatal. You have to create a forced amnesia. You have to say: we're in a different economic climate, we're looking at a very different As he points out, the structure is different now, just himself and the general director, Dennis Marks, with no director of productions and a £4 million deficit.

Wake up, Alagna ers as Fred Gaisberg ter Legge would fitting. The first half of was disappointing. eran tenor Nicolai vided an arch Franz ducted the London monic Orchestra work, and Ian Amanda Roocroft Murray all delivered their personal best. bright spots were Lott, giving an demonstration of style in some froth sager, and Willard magnetic rendition Man River. Things picked up interval, however, For at 38 he remains true to the creed of David Freeman's Opera Factory, where he learnt his trade conducting, a and a fan tutte set Calisto in amid howls of protest and enthusiastic curtain-calls.

"'I started off by finding myself in situations in which there were no rules, first working on period performance with John Eliot Gardiner and then with David Freeman. "I never had to restrict myself to what had happened in the past that's the wrong aspect of tradition. We live in a society which believes that tradition is all about heritage, and that's deeply have and been Wal- Opera EMI Centenary Gala Glyndebourne Davis took over the baton. Thomas Hampson painted Ford's Jealousy monologue from Falstaff with bold intelligence, and Alison Hagley made a radiant Nannetta in another extract from the same opera. John Mark Ainsley strolled, elegantly through Where' er You Walk, proving that he has recovered from whatever ailed him vocally last year.

There was a humdinger of a French soprano called Natalie Dessay. The ladies were unanimous that hers was the evening's best frock there TELEGRAPH READER OFFER A lush, healthy lawn starts growing in days, only £11.95 Amazing Canadian Quickgrass germinates and grows extra-rapidly to give you the lawn of your dreams sooner than ever 1kg of Canadian Quickgrass covers 65sq sq ft BEFORE Patchy, brown or AFTER A lush, green lawn dying lawn with bare spots starts growing in days This incredible Canadian grass seed is a blend of three of the world's fastest growing varieties, which will give you a lawn of distinction this summer green, healthy and a pleasure to look at in the shortest possible time. In fact, it will start germinating in a matter of only 7 to 10 days, and will give you a thick blanket of grass exceptionally rapidly. What's more, the grass seed has been especially chosen to grow in all those impossible spots which are bare, shady, weedy or hilly giving you remarkable coverage all over the garden. Nothing could be easier to grow.

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451593 Reg Office 1 Canada Square, London E14 5DT carefully selected by The Telegraph, please tick here V1625 Group Reg in England enlisted to ensure this. "We have to loosen up the way the company's work is done. We are already doing a lot of contemporary opera stuff, but it is still bolted on, which hate. It should be at the dead centre of our work. "That, I sense, is the areas where I'll be able to start to rewrite the rules, to say that if you're a member of an opera company you're a member of the biggest artistic resource there is, with singers, designers.

she exploit that by ferencing those skills." This may sound threatening to those who remember the bloodletting which followed his mentor Mark Elder's arrival at the Coliseum in 1979, when many musicians were sacked. But Daniel insists that he's no ayatollah: "I know that I could never fit into the dictator mould as a conductor. That age has gone. "But the orchestra I work with must have a bottom line below which they must not drop and I have to motivate them. If people are not going to prepare a piece before the rehearsal then you don't have them in your orchestra." Daniel promises to sustain two of ENO's traditions: rebuilding a permanent ensemble and singing everything in English.

"We'd like to get the company up to 30 principals, but the reason we have only about 23 at present is not financial. It's because you have to get the right people at the right stage in their careers, and you have to give them a life when they get there, a chance." But he is adamant about sticking to English: "I can't think of one major composer wanted their opera performed in a language the audience didn't understand. Mozart certainly didn't, nor did Verdi. Daniel's restructuring will all be directed to one end the shock of the new. "I completely believe that new work is the blood transfusion that's needed at ENO, whether it's new commissions or new productions.

"You have to feed the audience fresh food; you can't give them something that's been in the freezer for three years." It's a structure that caused the abrupt exit of the previous music director, Sian Edwards, after less three years, and the Marks management style is said to have contributed to considerable unrest among the staff. One disaffected bass confides, "It's a case of Daniel in the snake pit he has to restore the morale of the whole company." Daniel himself had to be asked three times, before he accepted the job. chemistry is waiting to be sorted he says. "Not between Dennis and me, because we've talked together enough to know the measure of each other, but the balance is a much more REVIEWS REVIEWS was more competition for the worst and her scintillating difficult thing for me to fathom at the moment. It's to do with the fact that the repertoire is intimately bound up with the sheer number of performances." Daniel is itching to get his hands on these fresh problems, to break, as he says, some more rules, for there's no doubt that behind the cheerful exterior he's prepared for a clash of wills.

In this he'll be helped by his seven years as music director of Opera North. In Leeds he has boosted his orchestra's profile by increasing the number of concerts they give all over the North to 30 a year and he hopes to do the same in London: "The players love it." The key to his policy is to split up the cumbersome of the Coliseum into flexible segments, to perform in fringe productions and to tour. "'The first conversation I had with Dennis was how do we make this company national? It must possible to get out of the building. "The problem is that you cannot do productions that will tour because you're always creating for a very large space. one of the rules I hope we can break.

I want to get ENO on the streets." Community theatre directors such as Jude Kelly of West Yorkshire Playhouse may be terrible play A brother, a sister and a terrible play the concert The vetGedda procommentary, conPhilhar- like clockBostridge, and Ann below The only Felicity exemplary boulevard by MesWhite in a of Ol' after the as Andrew singing of Glitter and be Gay from Bernstein's Candide won the biggest ovation. If I ARTISTS are often lousy judges of were the Glyndebourne man- their own work. Tennessee Williams agement, I'd book her for a was convinced that Out Cry, which he new production of Massenet's worked on obsessively between 1967. Manon. and 1975, was "the big one.

close to The intended climax of the the marrow of my It was, he evening was Roberto said, his "most beautiful play since Alagna. But his coarse and flat account of Pourquoi me In fact it's terrible, though one feels from Massenet's a heel for saying since it is clearly a Werther verged on the great howl of anguish. Unfortunately, embarrassing, and, although and in marked contrast to his greatest he recovered in a duet from plays, the pain seems strident, stagy Manon, with his wife, and second-hand. There are lines and Angela Gheorghiu, his per- motifs here that tantalisingly recall, formance did him no favours. The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar and Warning bells are sound- The Rose Tattoo; but both the poetry ing over the future of this and the passion have died a cruel death.

richly endowed tenor: I hope The action is set in a theatre, where a they are heeded in the right brother and sister have come to quarters, including EMI. perform a play called Out Cry. Like Williams at the time he was writing RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN it was his "stoned age" they have Guernica's horror story AST Saturday was April April 26. in On 1937 Monday, the Spanish town of Guernica (or Gernika, in its Basque spelling) was destroyed by German planes using new obliterative bombing techniques, lent (against the counsel of his advisers) by Hitler to assist General Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War. Meridian, the BBC World Service arts magazine, broadcast a feature on Saturday (repeated yesterday), which told the story of the place, the attack and the picture painted afterwards by Pablo Picasso that was to score the event on the world's eye forever.

It was a first-rate programme, simply told by Nick Rankin but with a mass of material layered within it: first-hand testimony from survivors; the account by the newspaper correspondent GL Stern; historians' views; Rankin himself looking now at the sacred oak that still stands above the town and where, through the ages, Basques have struck bargains and signed treaties. In 1937 the planes were spotted at 4.30pm. It was a market day. By 7.45pm the planes had gone, having bombed the town to rubble, -gunned people behind fleeing for left fires which could be seen 10 miles away. Why? Guernica's bridge and factory were not touched.

Was it an awful example to other places, a warning that they should give in? Bilbao surrendered to Franco shortly afterwards. Stern's eyewitness report, written for The Times, told the world what had happened. Picasso was living in Paris, had been commissioned to do a panel for a Spanish reached rock bottom. The company has deserted them, and at the end we learn that the audience has walked out too. The pair are left trapped in the freezing theatre, with nothing but death ahead of them.

Felice and Clare represent aspects of Williams's own personality. Felice is a writer, poignantly convinced, like Williams, that he has written a masterpiece. Clare is drunk, drugged, almost out of her mind, yet still capable of a kind of bleary magnificence. The play-within-a-play that they perform is set in the Deep South, and seems like a parody of Williams's earlier works. about a brother and have any experience as jet pilots.

But one did, having managed it by insider-influsince, officially, women weren't allowed to be jet pilots in the 1960s. Nasa said they didn't have the right educational qualifications. But neither did astronaut John Glenn. Mysterious. Except not so mysterious when you consider a professional climate in which the director of the Apollo programme said at the time that he'd as soon send a chimpanzee into space as a woman.

These women, all of them pilots, had accumulated as many flying hours as the men, didn't get a salary, paid their own way, did as well as (or better than) men in all the tests. They had to undertake the same public process of excretion through a tube, have ice-water squirted in their ears to test for vertigo. Denied a g-suit, to undertake -force simulations, they improvised. When their presence on the Mercury programme was revealed, media attention was focused on hair, eyes, figure and home life. It was America that wasn't ready for astronauts, not the women themselves.

I heard about this programme through Radio 4 trailers and from a Radio 5 Live preview. It was the preview that made me listen because a personal recommendation always seems to count for more than just an advertisement. I'm very glad I listened, and was amazed to discover (because this can't have been cheap to research and make) that Sue Nelson (reporter) and Ian Willox (producer) are independents. that Radio 4's new controller keeps investing in such outside talent. Right stuff indeed.

Out Cry Lyric, Hammersmith Theatre sister, living as recluses after the father has killed their mother, then himself. The crucial failure of Williams's writing, and of Timothy Walker's production for Cheek by Jowl, is that it is never clear whether we are meant to take the play-within-a-play seriously, or dismiss it as the tosh it is. And the Pirandellian games with theatrical illusion are deadly. Sara Stewart, slurred, smashed but with a raddled glamour, brings intensity to the role of Clare, but Jason Merrells Felice never persuades you that he is anything other than a selfdramatising jerk. In this play Tennessee Williams is not waving but drowning, and Cheek by Jowl's revival has done him no favours at all.

Tickets: 0181 741 2311 CHARLES SPENCER Gillian Reynolds on Radio trade-fair pavilion. He put aside the idea on which he had been working and, in May 1937, made the first sketch for his Guernica picture. It was finished a month later, a big, stark, black-andwhite testimony to what had happened. Picasso was not a Basque, was relatively apolitical, but the passion and anger aroused by the bombing infused his masterpiece, made it an abiding symbol band war's degenerative destructive force. He would not let the work hang in Spain during Franco's lifetime; it is now in the Queen Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid.

Wars continue, around the world. The BBC World Service goes on reporting them. Alone among British broadcasters on Saturday, it also remembered Radio 4 on Thursday night told a story from the underside of history, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex, an account of how 13 women went through America's Mercury programme for training astronauts in the 1960s but were passed over by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Why? Nasa said that it was because they didn't The Peter Hall Company at The Old Vic 7 Days a Week NOW PREVIEWING The Seagull by Anton Chekhov English version by Tom Stoppard Tonight 7.30 3 May 2.30 7.30 4 May 8.00 6, 7 May 7.30 8 May 2.30 7.30 9, 10 May 7.30 11 May 3.00 and continuing in rep NEW BOOKING PERIOD Waste by Harley Granville Barker "a sulphurous and gripping production" 30 Apr 7.30 1 May 2.30 11 May 8.00 13 May 7.30 15 May 2.30 16 May 7.30 and continuing in rep LAST 8 PERFORMANCES Cloud Nine by Carl Churchill "Disgracefully funny" 11.al 1 May 7.30 4 May 3.00 10 May 2.30 17, 20, 24, 27 May 4 June 7.30 LAST PERFORMANCE 2 MAY 7.30 Hurlyburly by David Rabe "It is worth crawling over broken glass to see it" Tickets £10 £19 THE OLD VIC BOX OFFICE 0171 928 7616 FIRST CALL 0171 420 0000(24HRS) Photo Kendal Haynes.