Troubled company picks young conductor” was a fairly typical headline when
English National Opera appointed Edward Gardner, then only 31, as its new
music director in March 2006. Handsome, slightly built and a natty dresser,
he certainly has the looks to front an institution in need of a face-lift,
but he has also established himself as a formidable conductor of large-scale
works: Britten’s Death in Venice, Bizet’s Carmen, Verdi’s Aida and, above
all, Richard Strauss’s sprawling and intricate Der Rosenkavalier, all of
which he tackled for the first time in his first ENO season.
His second begins on Saturday night, when ENO unveils its 2008-9 programme
with a new production of opera’s hardy double bill, Mascagni’s Cavalleria
rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci (Clowns), the
so-called “heavenly twins”, although they are among the earthiest and most
visceral of the Italian school known as verismo (realism or truthfulness).
Over lunch in a small private club adjacent to the Coliseum, Gardner enthuses
about his plans for the coming season. It’s a surprise, I say, to find a
music director of an opera house dirtying his hands with verismo. “Really?”
he asks quizzically. “I think Mark Elder [his predecessor but three at ENO]
did them here and Tony Pappano has done Pagliacci at Covent Garden. I love
both pieces, and I’m looking forward to working with Richard [Jones]. We’ve
put together a really great cast.”
Although time-honoured titles, Cav and Pag, as they are known, have become
relative rarities. Once as popular as the big Puccini four - Bohème, Tosca,
Butterfly, Turandot - they have dropped down fastidious opera directors’
list of priorities. Of the two, Pag has a Brechtian allure for cutting-edge
stage directors, but the raw red meat of Cav’s rural melodrama tends to turn
more delicate stomachs. These days, they are no longer even guaranteed
box-office hits. Even this umbilically linked double-bill - as Raymond
Gubbay learnt to his cost a few years ago at the Albert Hall - is a bit of a
risk. Gardener acknowledges this: “We are doing 10 performances of Cav and
Pag, which isn’t a sure-fire seller like the Ring, so we shall have to see
how it goes.”
For a thrusting and hungry tyro MD, Gardner strikes a strangely wary note. He
talks about the need for adventure, but enterprise is tempered with realism.
ENO gives fewer performances now than at any time since the company,
formerly Sadler’s Wells Opera, moved from its home on Rosebery Avenue, in
Islington, to the London Coliseum, at the heart of the West End’s
theatreland, 40 years ago. A playbill that once boasted more than 200
performances of more than 20 works is now reduced to about 115 of 12-13
main-stage titles. ENO was once a repertory house to rival Covent Garden in
the range and breadth of its programming. Nowadays it does a marginally
greater number of works, and only a few more performances, than “stagione”
houses such as those in Brussels or Amsterdam, which typically give 8–10
performances of eight or nine operas (albeit in much smaller auditoriums).
Gardner says he would like ENO to do more performances, but resources and
artistic priorities won’t allow a return to 200 performances of 20-plus
operas. “Well, there are lots of reasons we can’t do that,” he says. “Health
and safety, first and foremost. What we do with revivals has changed a lot
over the past few years. We ask ourselves how much another revival of
Rigoletto will sell. The figures seem to be going down and down recently.”
(This is only partially true. Last season’s revival of Nicholas Hytner’s
production of The Magic Flute, announced as its last run, is back this
season, as they say, “by popular demand”.)
Fewer revivals, he says, mean more new productions. “To do more new
productions, we need more rehearsal and more stage time. There are no fallow
periods here. During the Young Vic season, we were working on repertory
pieces for the Coliseum. We will be going back to the Young Vic this season,
but it’s not necessarily a fixture. We shall see how it works season by
season.”
ENO’s Young Vic season in the spring comprised a newish work by the Austrian
composer Olga Neuwirth, Lost Highway, based on the David Lynch film, and a
new production of Harrison Birtwistle’s 40-year-old, but still
controversial, shocker Punch and Judy. It was widely judged an artistic
success and sold out at the box office. “We could have doubled the number of
performances of Punch and Judy,” Gardner reveals, which begs the question,
why didn’t they programme more?
I point out that only three performances of Vaughan Williams’s one-acter
Riders to the Sea - a piece lasting barely more than 40 minutes - have been
programmed for November at the Coliseum. “We’re going to put another piece
with it,” Gardner counters. “The evening will last an hour and 10. It’s a
nod in the direction of Vaughan Williams, but we didn’t want to do any more
than that. I think three performances is fine. We’re only going to do four
performances of Sariaaho’s L’Amour de loin at the end of the season.”
Gardner is refreshingly upfront, but it doesn’t seem much of an artistic
manifesto or a vote of confidence in ENO audiences. The company wants to be
seen as bold and wacky, but softly, softly. “I think it’s incredibly
important to do new pieces,” he says, “and if it means we do four
performances, sell out and make it an event, rather than do eight and play
to half-full houses, I’d much prefer that.”
To be fair to Gardner, his ENO appointment came in the wake of the no-show
music directorship of Oleg Caetani, offered the job during Sean Doran’s
brief reign as “artistic director” – an offer rescinded when Doran was
replaced by John Berry. “I came in at a difficult time, because we had big
contractual changes that unsettled the orchestra,” Gardner explains. “There
was a threat of compulsory redundancies, which, thank God, we didn’t have to
do. I was identified with the management bringing in those changes.” In
fact, even though he had conducted only one opera for ENO - a revival of
Così fan tutte - before his appointment as music director, Gardner has
established a fine rapport with the orchestra, with a clear raising of
standards across the season. As well as Cav and Pag and the Saariaho opera,
he will take musical charge of new productions of Boris Godunov, with Peter
Rose singing the conscience-wracked tsar for the first time in London; Peter
Grimes, with a stellar cast headed by Stuart Skelton, Amanda Roocroft and
Gerald Finley; and, in place of a planned new production by Anthony
Minghella of Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onyegin, a revival of the late film
director’s popular production of Madam Butterfly. Further ahead, he talks
about ENO’s first production of Strauss’s Elektra and a new Wozzeck (Alban
Berg). He says he wants to conduct The Flying Dutchman and Hansel and
Gretel, but concedes that he may have to wait a while, as the Royal Opera
has new productions of both.
What is undoubtedly clear is that Gardner has the talent and drive to raise
ENO’s form. “His” Rosenkavalier was a success from every point of view:
orchestral playing, casting and a tried-and-tested staging by David McVicar.
Of his first-season offerings, he’s especially proud of it. “And last
season’s Magic Flute,” he continues. “Both had all-British casts. We can’t
have singers like Roddy Williams [last season’s Papageno in the Flute] or
Matthew Rose [the Speaker] on our books full-time, but we want to get them
here as often as possible. And being able to present a young singer such as
Sarah Tynan in Der Rosenkavalier, alongside Sarah Connolly, Janice Watson
and John Tomlinson, is what ENO is all about.”
