Ian Baker
‘Why can’t you be like other men and evolve?’
Hungary, she received no support from the intelligence services when her husband was killed and her children kidnapped. Her embassy also seemed to contain no staff – all she had was Tchéky’s address and a lot of pluck. I wish she’d told him his French accent and ridiculous limp would have been exaggerated even for Inspector Clouseau. Fiona Shaw is one of my favourites – I love her Irish Ascendancy voice and poise. But she has never been in anything half-decent. The overrated Killing Eve; various Agatha Christie thrillers; Three Men and a Little Lady … can’t somebody adapt a few Elizabeth Bowen or Molly Keane novels with her in mind? For an author whose keynote was clean brevity, six episodes devoted to Hemingway were more than enough. The bullfights, guns, marlin-fishing and cheerful extermination of wolves, bears and lions; the endless self-dramatising. We were told about it all. Hemingway was always suffering from concussion
– so he’d not have had a hope with the narrative shape of Baptiste. Two facts emerged to tickle me. One, his mother dressed him up as a girl, which explains the over-compensating machismo. Secondly, an ex-wife, Martha Gellhorn, settled in Chepstow, which is where my sister Angharad owns and runs an award-winning jam factory – the Preservation Society.
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE If you haven’t yet heard of The Oldie music column’s award for Conspicuous Bravery in the Staging of Rare Repertory, it’s because I’ve only just thought of it. There were two contenders for the award: David Pountney’s Grange Park Opera production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov, also known as Ivan the Terrible, and Garsington
Opera’s revival of Handel’s musically glorious but little-known and rarely performed Amadigi. Like Rinaldo and the Water Music of 1717, Amadigi shows the 30-year-old Handel at the peak of his early powers. It’s the libretto’s less-than-skilful reshaping of this popular 16th-century Spanish romance, Don Quixote’s favourite reading, that has long seemed problematic. That and the minimalist cast: an alto castrato (Amadigi, our dauntless hero), a contralto (his ill-fated rival) and two sopranos (a flame-haired temptress and her saintly antitype). ‘But what’s not to adapt and enjoy?’ seems to have been the cry of director designer Netia Jones and conductor Christian Curnyn. The show was a triumph. As was the May 1715 première, before the initial run was cut short by the threat of a Jacobite invasion. ‘No Opera performed, the Rebellion of the Tories and Papists being the cause, the King and Court not liking to go into Crowds in these troublesome times,’ it was said. In the summer of 2021, it was not only the court that was reluctant to ‘go into Crowds’. Which is why I’m offering a further award to an event that took place against particular odds – the Hampshirebased Grange Festival’s staging of a dazzling and properly moving account of what is arguably Rossini’s greatest opera, La Cenerentola. Shortly after the season was confirmed, the festival was hit amidships by the withdrawal of its resident orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony, over concerns about crowding in the pit. The solution – to pre-record the orchestra – looked problematic. That this wasn’t the case was due to the sophistication of the sound system and the presence on the rostrum of that well-practised master of the pre-Puccini Italian repertory David Parry. (Would that Parry had been on hand for Garsington’s staging of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, about which the less said the better.) In this age of text-led ‘director’s opera’, we’ve largely lost sight of the fact that the most important person in the production of any opera is the conductor. The glory of Grange Park Opera’s revival of Ivan the Terrible was the musical direction of St Petersburgborn Mikhail Tatarnikov. It helped, too, that the company had managed to smuggle a couple of Russians past the UK Border Force. Mariinsky Theatre star Liubov Sokolova sang the old nurse, without which few Russian dramas are complete, whilst Evelina Dobracheva was the The Oldie September 2021 67
