Henrietta Bredin

Saturday

21 May 2011
Henrietta Bredin

Wit of a hunter-gatherer

Over the years Chris Beetles must have made the pencil-wielding fingers of Quentin Blake and Ronald Searle itch with a desire to draw him. He presents a vigorously compact figure, possesses a pair of appropriately beetling brows sheltering an extremely shrewd gaze and sports an unabashedly splendid set of bugger’s grips. Standing in the doorway of his gallery on Ryder Street in the heart of art-dealing London, both he and his collection are a world away from the smooth-talking, sharp-suited power-broking of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the plush hush of Colnaghi.The walls of the gallery bristle with pictures, hung to fill every possible available space from floor to ceiling. Rowlandson rubs along happily with Brabazon, Edward Lear with Mervyn Peake, Quentin Blake with Ronald Searle.

Wit of a hunter-gatherer

Saturday

12 Mar 2011
Henrietta Bredin

A passion for music

Henrietta Bredin talks to the Earl of Harewood about a life in opera In his memoir, The Tongs and the Bones, the Earl of Harewood ruefully quotes his uncle, the Duke of Windsor, remarking, ‘It’s very odd about George and music. You know, his parents were quite normal — liked horses and dogs and the country.’ As it happens, George Harewood also likes horses and dogs and the country — and football and cricket and fishing — but in addition he has had, from an early age, an abiding passion for music. At the start of the second world war, while he was still at school, he notched up as many performances by Sadler’s Wells Opera as he could and tuned into static-ridden radio broadcasts of operas from Italy, Germany and Hungary.

A passion for music

Saturday

27 Nov 2010
Henrietta Bredin

Anthony Whitworth-Jones: Garsington on the move

When is a country-house opera not a country-house opera? When it no longer has a country house attached. This is what is about to happen to Garsington Opera, which is moving, lock, stock, barrel and picnic basket, from the exquisitely planned and intimate gardens of the Bloomsbury-redolent Garsington Manor near Oxford to the wide-open rolling hills of the Wormsley Estate in nearby Buckinghamshire. The move is a change and a challenge that the company’s general director, Anthony Whitworth-Jones, seems thoroughly to relish. ‘It’s enormously exciting,’ he says. ‘Once we knew we were going to have to move from Garsington the hunt was on for a suitable place, and we had to decide whether we should be looking for somewhere with a similar appeal or something completely different.

Saturday

3 Jul 2010
Henrietta Bredin

Guiding principles

What are the ingredients of a good audio guide? Henrietta Bredin investigates These days you’re more than likely, at any museum, gallery, exhibition or public building of interest, to be offered an audio (or even a multimedia) guide with which to ‘enhance your visitor experience’. There will probably be a small cost involved and you will then find yourself with a pair of headphones and an attached box to sling around your neck — or something known in the trade as a wand, which looks like a large telephone with a selection of buttons to choose from. Many people find these guides extremely useful but there will always be some (and I have frequently been among their number) who would rather find their own way around without being prompted by a small voice in their ear.

Guiding principles

Saturday

19 Jun 2010
Henrietta Bredin

Molière with a US accent

Matthew Warchus tells Henrietta Bredin why he is directing an American play inspired by MolièreRehearsing is an extraordinarily intensive, exploratory, deeply engaging business and director Matthew Warchus, emerging from a long day’s work on his new production of La Bête, by David Hirson, takes a while to change gear, blinking slightly dazedly as we walk towards the Old Vic in search of somewhere quiet to talk. ‘It’s a slippery play, this one,’ he says. ‘The text is so dense and highly wrought and it’s changing shape as we go along. The acting of it creates dimensions that just aren’t apparent on the page.’ He’s a man who knows a great deal about the process of transmuting words into vital theatrical life, and, with recent rollicking successes under his belt, ranging from Boeing-Boeing to The God of Carnage and The Norman Conquests, he is in a position to feel confident about taking on a play that had a very bumpy ride indeed on its first appearance in New York back in 1991.

Molière with a US accent

Saturday

1 May 2010
Henrietta Bredin

The great communicator

Conductor Marin Alsop talks to Henrietta Bredin about sharing a concert platform with Bernstein Last September there was a Mass Rally at the Southbank Centre in London. For an entire day the concert halls and foyers overflowed with shoals of people — children lugging instruments, parents rushing after them, singers clutching scores — all gathered to help launch the Bernstein Project, a year-long celebration of the extraordinary genius of Leonard Bernstein. Beginning with fanfares from Bernstein’s Mass, it will culminate in July with a complete performance of that work, involving community choirs, a marching band and a rock group, alongside dancers and professional soloists. This joyful eruption of an event is the brainchild of the conductor Marin Alsop, who studied with Bernstein and who has found his music and his essential spirit a continuing source of inspiration.

Saturday

17 Apr 2010
Henrietta Bredin

In the firing line

Henrietta Bredin goes backstage at the Royal Opera House and finds a stash of weaponry I am standing outside a heavily reinforced metal door somewhere in the furthest flung recesses of the labyrinthine corridor-tangle backstage at the Royal Opera House. A painted shield has the word Armoury picked out on it in gold lettering and next to a no smoking warning is a sign saying ‘No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again’. The door swings ponderously open to reveal the possessor of this somewhat macabre sense of humour, chief armourer Rob Barham. He is not a small man and his lair seems to fit around him like a tortoise shell, leaving him the minimum of space in which to manoeuvre. Built-in shelves bristle with tiny models of Napoleonic cavalry, replica pistols and revolvers hang from the walls, a slithering bundle of spears is propped up in a corner, row upon row of books and specialist magazines carry titles ranging from Women Warlords and Prussian Line Infantry 1792–1815 to Mastering the Samurai Sword and Arms and Armour of the English Civil Wars.

In the firing line

Saturday

6 Mar 2010
Henrietta Bredin

A view from the pit

Henrietta Bredin talks to the leader of ENO’s orchestra about working ‘in the trenches’ ‘Working in the trenches’ is how some people describe their lives in the orchestra pit, playing for opera performances. The traditional opera house has a horseshoe-shaped auditorium and the musicians are accommodated below stage level so that, ideally, the sound they make floats up and out into the theatre without overwhelming the singers. At Bayreuth, in the Festspielhaus that Wagner had built specifically for the performance of his own operas, the musicians are completely invisible, in a pit that is not just recessed well beneath the stage but is also covered by a hood. Janice Graham is the leader of English National Opera’s orchestra and, coming from a background of playing in symphony orchestras, was surprised to discover how much she enjoys playing in the pit.

A view from the pit

Saturday

19 Dec 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Opera

Henrietta Bredin on boats, trains, planes that transport singers around the stage Opera, so they say, has the power to transport the listener on wings of sound to places beyond the imagination — on a good night, at any rate. But just to keep singers, and directors, on their toes, a number of composers have, over the years, been tickled by the notion of writing specific modes of transport into the opera’s storyline. Puccini was car-mad, so you’d think he might have put one of his favourites into an opera. His first purchase was a De Dion-Bouton 5 CV in 1901, and some years later he commissioned a special off-road number from Lancia, for hunting trips. But the students in La Bohème are too poor to own a car, so the transport featured in his work is confined to the barge in Il tabarro, setting for torrid adultery and violent revenge among the stevedores of Paris.

Saturday

12 Dec 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Communicating through music

Henrietta Bredin on how Music for Life can help overcome the isolation of dementia sufferers I am looking at an elderly woman, tiny in a huge armchair. She has not spoken for months, she has not maintained eye contact with anyone for even longer and she has developed a nervous compulsion to keep one hand always up to her chin, covering her mouth. A woman in a pink overall is sitting next to her, gently stroking her hand, and a young man with a violin is kneeling at her feet. With infinite patience, the violinist starts to play a simple tune, making it even quieter, more exploratory, when she appears to flinch at the sound of the first notes. Very, very slowly, almost indiscernibly, the woman’s tight, clenched muscles relax slightly.

Saturday

14 Nov 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Dallas bucks the trend

Henrietta Bredin talks to Spencer de Grey, architect of the new opera house in Texas There can’t be a gesture much more brave and defiant than building a new opera house in the current doom-laden financial climate. Deep in the heart of Texas, in the centre of its freshly revamped arts district, Dallas has done exactly that. The project was awarded to Foster and Partners and has been the brainchild and chief responsibility of Spencer de Grey, whose previous work includes the Great Court at the British Museum and the Sage music centre in Gateshead. It is of course possible for an architect to design a law faculty (as de Grey did in Cambridge) without being deeply conversant with the law but, as it happens, he is passionate about music, opera in particular, a regular attendee and extremely knowledgeable.

Saturday

17 Oct 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Ready for anything

Henrietta Bredin talks to Simon McBurney about his latest challenge: doing Beckett for the first time I am standing in Simon McBurney’s kitchen, discussing pigs (he’s not only kept them but also slaughtered them, butchered them and made over 20 different sorts of salami), memory and language (both capacious and exact in his case), watching him brew coffee (freshly ground, delectably strong), grill toast and spread marmalade (home-made, dark and delicious) and realising that his insatiably curious intellect, his grace and economy of movement are as compelling in a domestic setting as they are on stage. With Complicité, the company he founded in the early 1980s, he has devised, directed and performed in works that have exploded people’s preconceived ideas of what theatre should be, expanding imagination and perception with performances that have been visually startling, mentally stimulating and, frequently, wildly, deliriously funny.

Wednesday

14 Oct 2009

Wednesday

9 Sep 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Behind the scenes at the Coliseum

I do wish English National Opera would remember what it’s called and, mindful of its status as the only English-language opera company we have, translate opera titles into English as well as singing them in that language. There was no reason for Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin not to be given as Love from afar, nor for Donizetti’s Lucia to be ‘of’ rather than ‘di’ Lammermoor. Ligeti’s Le grand macabre is, admittedly, harder to render and may perhaps be allowed as an honourable exception, along with the untranslatable Così fan tutte. Rehearsals for the Ligeti opera, which opens the new season at ENO on 17 September, are currently being conducted in a mixture of Catalan and English, under the auspices of the Fura dels Baus company, known for its wild and wonderful theatrical events, often on a massive scale.

Saturday

22 Aug 2009
Henrietta Bredin

An ‘intelligent spectacle’

Henrietta Bredin talks to David Pountney about running the Bregenz Festival Back in the days when David Pountney was director of productions at English National Opera, his so-called office was a tiny broom cupboard of a space carved out of a backstage cranny of the London Coliseum, with a single grubby window overlooking a narrow passageway known as Piss Alley for obvious and strongly smelling reasons. He now, as artistic director of the Bregenz Festival in Austria, occupies a lavishly appointed sort of control tower, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across Lake Constance and giving a direct hawk’s-eye view of the stage built out into the lake, which is the festival’s major attraction. He has a remote-control device on his desk with which he can stop the boat heading towards Lindau on the opposite shore and send it on to Wasserburg instead, change the points on the railway track running along the lake shore and manoeuvre the two giant cranes lifting parts of the set into place.

Saturday

8 Aug 2009
Henrietta Bredin

A close engagement with music

Sean Rafferty tells Henrietta Bredin how an abbot persuaded him to make his first recording Six minutes to go before the daily live broadcast of BBC Radio Three’s In Tune goes on air and the atmosphere is full of a sort of supercharged alertness, of tension expertly controlled by a small team of people who all know exactly what they are doing. The producer asks about a recording of a Handel aria she wants to play later in the programme — it’s not here yet, and may only be available on DVD, but it’s being looked for, and if it fails to materialise, she’s got an alternative as back-up. Two minutes to go and presenter Sean Rafferty ambles into the studio, having been talking to the programme’s first two guests in the Green Room next door.

Saturday

11 Jul 2009
Henrietta Bredin

‘A sticky, sweaty play’

Henrietta Bredin talks to Ruth Wilson about her role as Stella in the Donmar’s Streetcar If Ruth Wilson doesn’t very soon become a major force to be reckoned with, as an actress, director, producer, screenwriter (probably all four), I’ll eat my entire, quite extensive collection of hats. She is bursting with talent and possesses a gleefully voracious appetite for a challenge. This is probably just as well as she is about to take on the role of Stella at the Donmar Warehouse in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. ‘I love Stella,’ she says, leaning back in her chair and gulping a mug of tea. ‘I think she’s quite an opportunist, very modern and forward-thinking. She’s left the life of the Deep South and the old family home behind her and she’s moving on, getting herself a new life.

Saturday

27 Jun 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Dangerous territory

Henrietta Bredin talks to Janis Kelly about her role in Rufus Wainwright’s first opera, Prima Donna Anyone less like the clichéd idea of a prima donna than Janis Kelly would be hard to find. She is known and loved as a singer and consummate actress with a conspicuous lack of airs and graces who will throw herself into anything, the more challenging and off the wall the better, imbuing performances with her own particular brand of intense musicality and grace. Lucky Rufus Wainwright, then, who has cast her to perform the title role in his first foray into writing opera, Prima Donna, which will be given its world première at the Manchester International Festival on 10 July. I ask her, tentatively, what it’s like to be playing a woman of approximately her own age when she can, and almost invariably does, play much younger women.

Wednesday

27 May 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Grecian jewel

I am sitting in the town square of Hermoupolis, capital of the Greek island of Syros, when I am approached with great courtesy by a gentleman carrying a bundle of papers, on the top of which I can make out the words Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach.I am sitting in the town square of Hermoupolis, capital of the Greek island of Syros, when I am approached with great courtesy by a gentleman carrying a bundle of papers, on the top of which I can make out the words Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. It is the island’s Head of Cultural Affairs, Nikos Almpanopoulos, due for his weekly piano lesson after the drink we have arranged to have together. I had heard, before visiting Syros, that it has the unusual distinction of possessing an opera house, a perfect miniature of La Scala in Milan.

Tuesday

26 May 2009

Friday

22 May 2009

Tuesday

12 May 2009
Henrietta Bredin

A show that will be missed 

The South Bank Show has been going for a very long time - since January 1978 - and now, after being pushed further and further into the dimmest reaches of the late-night schedules, it's being axed altogether. This might not be such a cause for dismay if one could feel convinced that anything even approaching its calibre will replace it. Over the years, Melvyn Bragg has fronted a pretty breathtaking array of thoughtful, revealing, in-depth interviews with subjects ranging from Dennis Potter and Tom Stoppard; Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon to Pete Townshend and George Michael, Ken Russell and Spike Lee. There were dancers and actors, choreographers and film and theatre directors, actors and painters, writers and singers, pianists, violinists, architects and comedians.

A show that will be missed 

Saturday

9 May 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Alone in the wilderness

Henrietta Bredin finds out what it is that draws actors to the gruelling one-man show Judi Dench says she’d never do it, Roy Dotrice didn’t do it for 40 years but started again in 2008, Joanna Lumley says that managing to do it while looking at her own reflection in a mirror made her feel afterwards as if she could handle pretty much anything. Let’s do it, it’s the one-man, or one-woman, show. Stepping on to a stage or in front of the camera to perform requires a particular brand of courage but how much more focused and intense is that experience if you undergo it entirely on your own? As Michael Pennington says, ‘Let’s not forget it’s one of the most lonely things you can do in our game’ but it is nonetheless something that many actors — given the vicissitudes of their chosen career — find it useful to ‘have in their back pockets’.

Saturday

11 Apr 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Dido’s life on camera

Katie Mitchell explains to Henrietta Bredin how she is creating a parallel film world with Purcell’s opera It is 350 years since Henry Purcell was born and his music is, gloriously, being played and sung all around the country. And there are a lot of different Didos about: Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage at the National Theatre; Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas pretty much all day on BBC Radio Three a couple of weekends ago; at the Royal Opera House in a joint venture by the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet directed and choreographed by Wayne McGregor (see review page 38); and, in another joint venture, by English National Opera and the Young Vic, as After Dido, directed by Katie Mitchell. Gerard Manley Hopkins rhymes Purcell with rehearsal but I don’t think he could have imagined the space in which I meet Katie Mitchell during a break in the sixth week of a seven-week preparation period.

Friday

27 Mar 2009

Saturday

21 Mar 2009
Henrietta Bredin

‘I have no idea what’s going on’

Henrietta Bredin talks to Jonathan Pryce about the difficulties he found with Athol Fugard’s Dimetos It is the end of a long day of rehearsal and Jonathan Pryce is sitting patiently at a scrubbed wooden table strewn with water glasses and roughly carved dishes, behind him a tangle of ropes and pulleys slung from an overhead beam. He’s two-and-a-half weeks into the business of putting together a performance of Dimetos, an infrequently performed play by Athol Fugard, written in 1975. ‘It’s almost like doing a new play really. Sometimes when a play hasn’t had any major revivals you think, well, there must be a reason for that. But I think the only reason for this not being done more often is its apparent difficulty.

‘I have no idea what’s going on’

Thursday

5 Mar 2009

Saturday

21 Feb 2009
Henrietta Bredin

Revealing the physicist’s soul

Henrietta Bredin talks to the baritone Gerald Finley about how he portrays ‘the destroyer of worlds’ At precisely 5.30 a.m. on Monday 16 July 1945 the world entered the nuclear age. The first atomic bomb exploded in a searing flash of light and a vast mushroom cloud unfurled in the skies above New Mexico. ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,’ thought Robert J. Oppenheimer, the physicist who had masterminded its development. It was typical of the man and the deep contradictions within his nature that these lines from the Bhagavad Gita should have come to mind, and that he should have named the project the Trinity Test in response to poetry by John Donne. Sixty years later, composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars created an opera around this subject, Doctor Atomic.

Saturday

31 Jan 2009
Henrietta Bredin

‘It’s less risky to take risks’

A new arts centre with no public subsidy? Henrietta Bredin talks to its founder Peter Millican Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately — King’s (with an apostrophe) Cross in London is the location for the new and very splendid mixed-use office building and performance space, Kings Place, which has no business letting a misguided graphic designer decide to drop the apostrophe. It should be King’s Place, please. Now, onwards. This project is the brainchild of Peter Millican, a Northumbrian developer whose work has been, until now, mostly in and around Newcastle. He has wanted for some years to combine business and the arts in a single building, with beneficial effects for both, and particularly wanted to find a site close to an international travel hub.

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