...Chelsea Opera Group has announced its Spring and Summer concerts for 2009, though intriguingly the Autumn 2008 concert is still TBA.

Spring '09 concert will be Adriana Lecouvreur, at the QEH on 15/02/2009 with Nelly Miricioiu in the title role.  I fell in love with this opera in a big way when Holland Park did it a few years ago, and am really pleased that COG will be doing it.  However I suspect that COG haven't been reading the "We hear that..." column in Opera magazine, where I learnt some months ago that the ROH has a production of AL on the cards at just around the same time, with Gheorghiu (assuming she decides to show up).  Cilea operas are like London buses.

Summer '09 concert will be Guillaume Tell, at the QEH on 07/06/2009 with Majella Cullagh as Mathilde  I'm delighted - I've never seen it, and wasn't really ever expecting to.  It's pretty long, though, isn't it... I hope they do a reasonably authentic version.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of operatic rarities... University College Opera's production in March 2009 will be Ernest Bloch's Macbeth!

Tell was presented by the London Opera Centre at the Wells at some point between 1969 and 1972 - I saw it when I was at KCL. Stuart Kale was Arnold, coping pretty well with the string of high Cs that the part contains. Without the programme - possibly in storage - to hand, I can't remember any of the rest of the cast, but there was a large chorus from somewhere that had done an amateur production previously (Newcastle, IIRC) and there were substantial cuts.

There was a Lecouvreur production at Covent Garden in the early 1980s.

The Bloch piece is very strange: the music concentrates on the mystical nature of the story rather than its violence and horror, so that rather than being school of Elektra, let alone Wozzeck, its nearest influence appears to be Pelléas....

It was.  I've only seen/heard truly awful performances from them, but in fairness that was a decade or so ago.  I am glad to hear they have improved in the interim.  The usual reason for their previous low standards was essaying works vastly beyond their abilities or resources.

Keith Warner staged Bloch's MACBETH in a professional production in Germany last year:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2006/Jul-Dec06/bloch0401.htm

In fact I believe this was a revival/reworking of a previous staging he'd done there, since Susan Bullock had sung in it originally 2-3 years previously.  He didn't get much thanks for his pains from the critics either time around, it seems.  I've heard extracts of the music in a broadcast about Swiss Music of the C20th that appeared here on Radio Orphee last year,  and in isolation these clips were rather pleasant.  I can't help wondering (pace Ron's comments on the "mystical" nature of Bloch's approach) if the problem doesn't lie in the piece itself?  Making an opera (or any other theatrical presentation) out of a linear plot which goes from A to C via B is a relatively conventional approach for both creative team and audience alike.  Making a successful opera out of contemplative and philosophical material is a much, much harder prospect for an audience used to "beginning-middle-end" pieces, and three times harder for both composer and creative team to pull off.  (viz SATYAGRAHA, lumbered with a poor libretto - no better for being in a purposely incomprehensible language, of course - in which the central character at the end is no different to where he started, and nothing has happened except that someone threw some screwed-up paper at him.  Contrast with the same composer's AKHNATEN where we see the rise-and-fall of a great leader whose unworldly aspirations came crashing around his ears - viz "a story"). 

I'm not saying that philosophical and contemplative works shouldn't have musical representation, of course - but I'd question whether the theatre is the best place for them to be seen and appreciated with most fruitful results?   This is the traditional territory of oratorio, of course.   I'd like to hope I was wrong, and that it's possible to create attention-grabbing, arresting, gripping pieces that don't depend on linear stories...   but sadly I can't think of very many examples that have stood the test of production and remained in repertoire?

The teetering scenery puts me in mind of a military production I was obliged to perform in  of scenes from My fair Lady done at infantry pace, forgive the digression guys.

Actually, my recollection was that the orchestral playing was pretty decent, if a bit brass-heavy (don't know whether it was the Bloomsbury Theatre acoustic or the more general issue of brass players needing to be told to put a sock in it from time to time).

I didn't know they'd done Benvenuto Cellini - one I'd dearly like to see some day.