CityLife

Classical highlights: Mahler's 10th symphony, Opera North's La Boheme

June 4, 2010

The Manchester Mahler cycle comes to completion tomorrow night (June 5), as Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic tackle the Tenth Symphony. It’s the one Mahler left unfinished, but the completion by Deryck Cooke has won its place as the performing version.

Alongside comes the last of the world premieres commissioned by the BBC and Hallé for their coalition enterprise. It’s by Anthony Payne (probably best known today as the man who completed Elgar’s third symphony) and called The Period Of Cosmographie.

“The title is from a madrigal by Weelkes, written in around 1608, which is about the place they then called Thule – the edge of the known universe,” he says.

“I’d recently been on a cruise to Iceland, the Faroes and Norway, and the incredible scenery there set me in the mood. For me this is very much a northern piece, to do with the edge of the tundra or the Arctic ice. But there’s no connection with Mahler’s tenth.”

He says he isn’t using all the instruments the Mahler work requires – he has triple woodwind, for instance, rather than quadruple – but: “The Arctic landscape has influenced the orchestral colouring.

“I want the audience to share in this cold, gloomy, northern world … I suppose deep down I’m a Romantic, but a modernist as well.”

*****

Opera North are back at Salford Quays from Wednesday June 16, with their popular 1950s-style La Bohème – Sarah Fox and Aldo Di Toro are the new Mimi and Rodolfo – and a revival of Dvorák’s Rusalka, sung in English in the production by Olivia Fuchs which was last seen here in late 2003. The third opera is a new production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda – more of that next week.

Rusalka is best known for the water nymph heroine’s Song To The Moon, and its story has some parallels with the ballet, Swan Lake. The opening and close take place around a lake, the central tragedy is about the love of a prince for the mythical creature, and there’s a central ball scene where he gets infatuated by someone else. But it’s Rusalka’s tragedy as well as his.

This time Giselle Allen returns to the title role, and Richard Angas (Spirit of the Lake) and Susannah Glanville (Foreign Princess) are back in their previous incarnations. Richard Berkeley-Steele and Anne-Marie Owens are the Prince and the witch, Ježibaba.

The three other wood nymphs are Natasha Jouhl, Kim-Marie Woodhouse and Alexandra Sherman, all reprising their roles.

Natasha describes them as “quite naughty little creatures – half human and half of the water world”. There is some real water on stage, though they don’t have to get literally wet – though she says they sometimes do by accident.

Natasha is a petite person and says: “I’ve always liked really small things” – which accounts for the fact her hobby is dolls’ houses. She has a 10-room Georgian one with original-design furniture, real quarry floors, oak panelling and electric wiring.

“My mother had a fascination with teddy bears,” she says, “and started collecting miniature ones. She suggested I collected dolls’ houses – and now I want to keep them to pass on myself.”

She was born in London but speaks with a pronounced American twang having been  brought up in New York from the age of five to 13.

“I always sang as a girl,” she says, “in school musicals and at the local YMCA. And by the age of 12 I knew opera singing was what I wanted to do.”