The British premiere of Lalo’s Fiesque, performed by University College Opera in 2008
What is London’s hottest opera ticket this March? The obvious answer has to be Plácido Domingo in Handel’s Tamerlano at Covent Garden, the great and ever-questing tenor’s first Handel role in this country. Or perhaps, across at the Coliseum, it is the revival by English National Opera of its stunning production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, the only opera in Sanskrit that most of us are likely to see this year—and certainly the best.
If you have a ticket for either, you won’t be disappointed. Even so, the London opera performance I often look forward to most in March doesn’t take place in the grandeur of the Royal Opera House or in the vastness of the ENO’s home. Instead, you will find it up a quiet street in Bloomsbury in a 1960s theatre. The often far-from-capacity audience seems mostly to consist of the friends and relations of those taking part, along with a motley bunch of operatic trainspotters like me.
March in London means University College Opera’s annual semi-professional opera production. It is an admirable tradition but not, you may feel, one that sets UCL apart from other enterprising university opera societies. Except that UCO is actually very special. Every year it mounts four or so performances of an opera which in all likelihood you will never have heard before in your life and which you may well wait most of a lifetime before ever hearing again.
Semi-professional opera performances tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they are well-intentioned tries in which one has to make an awful lot of allowances, or one is so unexpectedly absorbed in the boldness and interest of the evening that one simply overlooks any limitations. In my intermittent visits to UCO productions, the latter has been a far more common experience than the former.
The company has been going since 1951, the brainchild of UCL’s then director of music Anthony Addison. Though its first offering was a well-known piece, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, most of those that have followed have been works whose place in the repertoire has not been secure, and in many cases has been non-existent. In nearly 60 years, UCO has given three world premieres, including one by Beethoven (Leonora), as well as 18 British premieres, including operas by Wagner (Das Liebesverbot) and Verdi (Alzira, Oberto and the first version of Macbeth). Few of the other UCO productions have been in any way mainstream, though many are by celebrated composers.
My first visit to UCO was in 1972, when it put on Marschner’s opera Hans Heiling, a milestone work in German romantic opera which greatly influenced Wagner. My memory is that it was not a total success, but never less than interesting. By the 1960s, UCO was hiring young professional singers for its productions—Felicity Lott is the most famous to have appeared there—and one of the attractions of the annual mystery tour is the possibility that one may just discover a remarkable singer.
This year, with an eye to the composer’s bicentenary, the choice falls on Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva, a work of which most audiences are only aware through occasional performances of its overture. It was written when Schumann was at the height of his powers (1847-49). Having considered and rejected writing an opera based on the Nibelungenlied or Tristan and Isolde, and having been piqued to discover that someone had beaten him to an opera based on the Lohengrin story, he settled on Genoveva, a libretto based on a play by Ludwig Tieck.
This will not be the British premiere of Genoveva. It is more than 100 years since that event took place, at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1893. That was another student performance, this time by the Royal College of Music, conducted by Charles Stanford himself. George Bernard Shaw, who was there, called it “an excellent selection for the college to make,” since “it is commercially valueless as an opera and we should never have heard it at all if it had not been taken in hand by a purely academic institution; and yet, being by Schumann, it was certain that some interesting music lay buried in it.”
There speaks the authentic voice of the musically curious listener. Do not go to the UCO production expecting to encounter a fully formed masterpiece languishing in unaccountable obscurity. Go because the work will contain interesting things you will not be able to encounter elsewhere. Go because the works of the great are always worth hearing and because these students and enthusiasts deserve your support and thanks for their unique and too often unheralded annual achievement.
Genoveva, Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 22nd-27th March. Box office Tel: 020 7388 8822; further details at www.ucopera.co.uk
If you have a ticket for either, you won’t be disappointed. Even so, the London opera performance I often look forward to most in March doesn’t take place in the grandeur of the Royal Opera House or in the vastness of the ENO’s home. Instead, you will find it up a quiet street in Bloomsbury in a 1960s theatre. The often far-from-capacity audience seems mostly to consist of the friends and relations of those taking part, along with a motley bunch of operatic trainspotters like me.
March in London means University College Opera’s annual semi-professional opera production. It is an admirable tradition but not, you may feel, one that sets UCL apart from other enterprising university opera societies. Except that UCO is actually very special. Every year it mounts four or so performances of an opera which in all likelihood you will never have heard before in your life and which you may well wait most of a lifetime before ever hearing again.
Semi-professional opera performances tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they are well-intentioned tries in which one has to make an awful lot of allowances, or one is so unexpectedly absorbed in the boldness and interest of the evening that one simply overlooks any limitations. In my intermittent visits to UCO productions, the latter has been a far more common experience than the former.
The company has been going since 1951, the brainchild of UCL’s then director of music Anthony Addison. Though its first offering was a well-known piece, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, most of those that have followed have been works whose place in the repertoire has not been secure, and in many cases has been non-existent. In nearly 60 years, UCO has given three world premieres, including one by Beethoven (Leonora), as well as 18 British premieres, including operas by Wagner (Das Liebesverbot) and Verdi (Alzira, Oberto and the first version of Macbeth). Few of the other UCO productions have been in any way mainstream, though many are by celebrated composers.
My first visit to UCO was in 1972, when it put on Marschner’s opera Hans Heiling, a milestone work in German romantic opera which greatly influenced Wagner. My memory is that it was not a total success, but never less than interesting. By the 1960s, UCO was hiring young professional singers for its productions—Felicity Lott is the most famous to have appeared there—and one of the attractions of the annual mystery tour is the possibility that one may just discover a remarkable singer.
This year, with an eye to the composer’s bicentenary, the choice falls on Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva, a work of which most audiences are only aware through occasional performances of its overture. It was written when Schumann was at the height of his powers (1847-49). Having considered and rejected writing an opera based on the Nibelungenlied or Tristan and Isolde, and having been piqued to discover that someone had beaten him to an opera based on the Lohengrin story, he settled on Genoveva, a libretto based on a play by Ludwig Tieck.
This will not be the British premiere of Genoveva. It is more than 100 years since that event took place, at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1893. That was another student performance, this time by the Royal College of Music, conducted by Charles Stanford himself. George Bernard Shaw, who was there, called it “an excellent selection for the college to make,” since “it is commercially valueless as an opera and we should never have heard it at all if it had not been taken in hand by a purely academic institution; and yet, being by Schumann, it was certain that some interesting music lay buried in it.”
There speaks the authentic voice of the musically curious listener. Do not go to the UCO production expecting to encounter a fully formed masterpiece languishing in unaccountable obscurity. Go because the work will contain interesting things you will not be able to encounter elsewhere. Go because the works of the great are always worth hearing and because these students and enthusiasts deserve your support and thanks for their unique and too often unheralded annual achievement.
Genoveva, Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 22nd-27th March. Box office Tel: 020 7388 8822; further details at www.ucopera.co.uk
