Hurrah.  There have been rumours in the pipeline for at least a couple of years that the Philharmonia were planning to put on The Pilgrim's Progress at Sadler's Wells.  Got the Spring/Summer '08 brochure through the post yesterday and it is finally happening - and just look at the cast!

The Pilgrim's Progress (Vaughan Williams) - semi-staged
Fri 20th June 2008 at 7:30pm/Sun 22nd June at 4:00pm
Sadler's Wells Theatre

Philharmonia Orchestra cond. Richard Hickox
Cast to include: Roderick Williams, Neal Davies, Matthew Rose, Richard Coxon, Matthew Brook, Timothy Robinson, Sarah Fox, Sarah Tynan, Pamela Helen Stephen, James Gilchrist, Robert Hayward and Graeme Danby.

ALSO NOT TO BE MISSED: Opera North's wonderful production of Peter Grimes is also returning to SW, on February 26th and 28th.  Booking for the above productions is open NOW - www.sadlerswells.com

Ruth - that's wonderful about Pilgrim's Progress.  Thank you for letting me know.

I suppose there is a discussion in should it be staged or semi-staged or performed-with-sets-and-costumes, but I am just grateful for it coming along again.  Roddy Williams advanced from Watchful (for Hickcox) to Pilgrim?

I said recently that you normally expect the baddies to have more exciting music that the goodies, but in Pilgrim's Progress, the music for the Delectable Shepherds and the House Beautiful are far more gripping than that for Vanity Fair and Apollyon.

The most glorious and life enhancing work I know to have been inspired (indirectly) by Calvinism.

If they're keeping it British, then how about Lennox Berkeley's Castaway, based on the section of the Odyssey where the hero meets Nausicaä? Another one-act opera with a maritime theme.

The programme for the RSNO concert tonight - review later - confirms that Roderick Williams is singing Pilgrim, and also mentions plans for a Billy Budd with Daniel Harding and the LSO: probably old news, but just in case....

Gosh, tinners! He (Roderick Williams) is down to sing Novice's Friend and Arthur Jones in that Daniel Harding Billy Budd, Ron. Nathan Gunn as Budd and Ian Bostridge as Vere. There's also an up and coming tenor (or maybe he's up and come for those that know about these things) in the line up: Benjamin Hulett as Maintop, whom I have been very impressed with on the couple of occasions I have heard him.

While on the 'interesting' casting front: Ian Bostridge as Macheath in a forthcoming Threepenny Opera to be conducted by H K Gruber.

[Oops sorry; this is the Pilgrim's Progress thread, isn't it? Thanks for the heads up on that, Ruth. Straight into the diary.]

 

Williams was wonderful in the Rückert Lieder last night: an elegant, sinuous line. It's not a very big voice, though, and Hickox did him no favours by allowing the brass to swamp him in places. Although it was a good logistical idea to have him as the soloist in Belshazzar's Feast as well, he didn't really work for me: I need a bigger, beefier voice with more sense of drama: there was very little deliniation in the 'shopping list'; he threw the significance of the last line ("And the souls of men") right away. Like most male soloists I've heard in this work, he seemed to get a wee bit lost around some of the notes, too, some of those really nasty intervals seem to have been altered, though he ended up where he should have.

Orchestra and chorus acquited themselves brilliantly - the sopranos particularly bright and lithe sounding with great tuning: even the long sustained "gold" stayed dead in pitch. It was an exciting reading, but there were still those awkward Hickox moments where he seems to be unable to carry the momentum from one paragraph to the next, and sections which seem unified in other hands sounded clunky.

The programme was very ambiguously worded so that I assumed that he'd actually be singing Billy, Ruth: he'd be excellent vocal casting for the role. The finest I've ever heard was an American called Robert Kerns - he died very young, but can be heard as Donner on the Karajan Rheingold: interestingly, it was a rather different voice to what we usually hear as Billy, a very big vibrant sound, particularly strong and rich, with a good deal of 'welly'. Probably necessary as the performance was conducted by Solti, so there was plenty of orchestra. (Nevertheless, I'd count his conducting of both Britten operas I've heard him do, MND as well as Budd as the finest I"ve ever heard: he was able to exploit the huge variety of orchestral sonorities in each to perfection, revelling in the glitter as well as the gloom, and his sense of pace over whole acts never faltered.)

Roderick Williams is gorgeous, both to listen to and to drooool over !! What a dish xx