The RO show has winged creatures (not 14), but it don’t look good…

I’ve only found it at Premiere, though, so the usual caveats about ordering it aged 20 and receiving it as a granddad apply.

I must confess I didn’t see the Minotaur … I once saw Birtwistle make an amazingly pompous speech at a concert and it put me off him for life! … Well, that and the fact that he doesn’t like to write tunes. The last new opera I saw at the ROH was Un re in ascolto, I think, but I rather like Berio. Still, at least the Minotaur had Amanda Echalaz and Johan Reuter in it.

I think Gianni is ripe for mugging, but it still makes me laugh out loud, which is more than I can say for any of the others usually. Jones’s Pag had me rolling about too, and what I think was his first stage hit, the play Too Clever By Half, made me fall off my seat. Ditto the Alsatian on the black and white set in A Flea In Her Ear.

I can’t think why the ROH is pushing Christine Rice so hard. She’s probably a good Flora or Ines.

I was actually just thinking that I’m not that crazy about comic opera (as opposed to operetta) in general apart from the Ariadne prologue and L’Heure. The teapot and teacup in L’Enfant et les sortileges also make me laugh. I don’t even like Falstaff, and I am a big Verdi fan. Rossini’s comic music is usually much funnier than what’s going on stage, and a apart from a couple of moments of Mariandel, most of the broad comedy in Rosenkavalier is a bit of a bore. In things like Elisir they’re all bloody psychotic.

For Gianni Schicchi, my all-time favourite comic opera newly-minted, I still prefer Annabel Arden’s Glyndebourne show. The Met staging got laughs but was coarse and undisciplined by comparison (though Corbelli with his Harpo gookies was sublime in both).

The Schicchi was better, but it was pretty damn obvious. Not a piece I’m fond of, however – apart from the bits for the lovers.

Is there something buried in your remark that I’m missing, La Cieca? How’s the hot tooth?

I’ve said this before, but being told that a Jones Wozzeck, for instance, is set in a baked bean factory, or his Pag is about British sitcom/farce in no way prepared me for the results, which not only started with a brilliant mise-en-scene but sustained it. Very few regie-istas do that; many wrap the whole work around one idea – ie Tony Palmer’s Doria Manfredised Turandot – and get stuck with that.

I love Humperdinck’s genius, dcrazmo. I might agree that musically his witch is more of a balancing act between sweetness, humour and a nasty underbelly than Jones made it. But he convinced me of the work as a whole – and, yes, there’s nearly always a scene in each of his thought-through productions which DOES strike me as genius – the macabre party in his Queen of Spades, many episodes in his Ring, I could go on…and his theatre has been just as memorable.

Regie Goodfornaught: When Keith MC writes “Jones is used to directing operas for intelligent audiences, so it’s not surprising the Met audience didn’t get it,” that’s absolutely an allusion to us “stupid Americans.”

Unlike some of German Regie colleagues he has a very macabre sense of humour illustrated in the scratch and sniff Love of 3 Oranges, Gianni Schicci, Lady Macbeth etc. He can do fun and glamour too with Trocadero chorus girls emerging from those clocks at the end of L’Heure Espagnol.

I’d be interested to hear your answer to the questions I posed to you earlier in the thread.

I was enchanted, and would welcome the opportunity to see other Jones-productions…