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T H E G R A N G E F E S T I VA L
Hugh Canning talks to John Copley Last year’s Grange Festival production of Britten’s Albert Herring marked a notable return to the operatic limelight of a veteran director, John Copley, who has never exactly disappeared, but in the last two decades, has ceded the ground to a younger, perhaps more radical and startling generation of directors, but his Albert Herring demonstrated that he has lost nothing of the vital spark that saw him rise to be one of the most successful opera directors – both at home and
When I met him recently at his London home, I suggested it was a surprise he had not reprised the stylish ENO production, also designed by Lazaridis (traditionally), and he agreed. “It is, but I was never asked to do it again. It’s a favourite piece of mine.” In the almost half century since his first production, Mozart’s Singspiel has fallen behind his serious operas, Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito in frequency of performances as contemporary directors have shunned
“His Albert Herring demonstrated that he has lost nothing of the vital spark that saw him rise to be one of the most successful opera directors” internationally – from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the 1970s Copley supplied both the Royal and English National Opera with significant “keepers”, repertoire productions, such as La traviata and Carmen at ENO, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte at Covent Garden. His staging of La bohème was a mainstay of the Royal Opera’s repertoire for 41 years, showcasing every important interpreter of the Romantic leads, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras, Roberto Alagna, Katia Ricciarelli, Mirella Freni, Ileana Cotrubas, Angela Gheorghiu, Anna Netrebko, all of whom benefited from Copley’s sense of period and style, In 1970, he directed his, to date, only production of of Mozart's German singspiel, The Abduction of the Seraglio, which he returns to for the first time this summer at The Grange.
the piece with its shifts between comedy, high romance romance and near tragedy. “Well, I’m not sure if I know how to do it,” he chuckles, “but I haven’t changed my thoughts on it since I did it all those years ago.” Is it perhaps the spoken dialogue – always a challenge for opera singers – that has made the piece somehow problematic? “Well, it’s not a problem for me because I direct theatre, whether it’s a play, an operetta, or an opera. Even if it’s Wagner’s Ring [which Copley, to his great regret, has never done] you’re still telling the audience a story – well I am, anyway, telling a story through words and music. That’s what I do, but I think everyone has seen the standard rep pieces so many times that most opera managements want to take these operas wildly off course and away from the text and the music.”