Confronting the new: Old School B&B is a hit, Fidelio misses

REVIEW: The Old School B&B, Fidelio at Longborough Festival Opera

It was all change to start of our seventh season at the Longborough Festival Opera. A new (to us) opera, and a new B&B, pushed us out of our comfort zone.

From our discovery of this magical operatic venue, we'd stayed on a neighbouring estate called Windy Ridge. It played an important role in our courtship, we briefly considered holding our wedding reception there, and our regular visits were the first tradition we established in our married life. I spent a poignant, and very special, Thanksgiving weekend at Windy Ridge with my mother just three months before she died. We were the only guests and the owner gave us the run of the place, treating us as ladies of the manor. Five years later, we hired the whole house out to stage a 1920s-themed murder mystery party for my husband's birthday; one of the best events we've ever hosted. We called it "the summer house". Windy Ridge was a special part of our lives.

But things change. The owner decided to retire from the hard work of hospitality, and we had to find a new home for our annual country house opera weekends. The Old School shows strong potential to step into the beloved spot that our departed summer house has left vacant.

This understated yet luxurious B&B is on the A44 just east of Moreton-in-Marsh. The building started life as a Victorian schoolhouse; the original, cathedral-like school room is now divided into two stories, both lounges for guests' use. The upper one, with its exposed beams, church-style window and overstuffed sofas is particularly lavish, and relatively private considering that there are only four bedrooms for guests. Bookshelves are stocked with plenty of tomes you're tempted to dip in to, glossy magazines grace table tops and board games are stacked beside the sofas. The bedrooms have a House and Gardens Magazine feel about them, all oatmeal and cream neutrals enhanced by gentle watercolours, crisp white linens and luxurious fabrics. Our bathroom had a big tub (with shower) and multiple windows letting light flood in. There's a lovely traditional garden out back with places to eat outside or snooze amongst the flowers.

It's the kind of place you could easily settle into for long hours and forget the temptations of sightseeing.

Hostess Wendy Veale takes care with the little touches, from dressing gowns and bottled water in a bedroom fridge to reaching out a fortnight in advance of your stay to offer local knowledge, restaurant reservations, etc.  She was mindful of our anxiety over moving to a new place and was tremendously helpful with refrigeration for our opera picnics, sorting taxis, booking overflow guests and generally giving us the lay of the land.

Come mornings, Wendy pushes well beyond the traditional B&B breakfast, though if you opt for that you will be both delighted by the quality (the eggs all come from an enormous chicken enclosure at the bottom of the garden) and embarrassed by the quantity. Even hearty appetites are likely to be defeated by the mountain of sausage, bacon, black pudding and fried bread that accompany the less sinful eggs and veg. The next morning I downshifted to smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, but could have selected from a broad menu including omelettes, porridge, "eggs royale", eggy bread (aka French Toast) or pretty much anything I could dream up. A groaning sideboard held the usual array of fruit, cereal, yogurts and juices, if you could make a dent in them. (Or cared to go continental.)

So we successfully faced the anxiety of change. We are looking forward to a return visit to our new Cotswolds home next month and hope to become regulars at The Old School in future seasons.

We were less enthusiastic about the new opera.

Fidelio was my least favourite of any production we've seen in seven seasons at Longborough. Given that I've raved with appreciation over almost every past visit, they had set high standards for themselves. The fault was partially with the opera itself, a bit with the performance and a great deal with the director's choice of staging.

While the singers were excellent (particularly Elizabeth Atherton's Leonora/Fidelio and John Paul
Huckle's Rocco) but the orchestra started out surprisingly timid. A shame, since the overture is the only memorable bit of this opera that most people will know. It sounded like a handful of key players were trapped in traffic and didn't make it for the start time. It could simply have been opening night nerves and a young guest conductor, Gad Kadosh, but it wasn't until the second act that the orchestra pit was delivering its usual rich sound.

None of our party of six had seen Beethoven's opera before, and we were all looking forward to it. We all left feeling a bit underwhelmed. While the plot is a good one ... plucky, faithful wife goes under cover as a man to find and spring her missing husband from political prison ... there isn't a lot of action to stage. It is mostly small groups of people singing at each other in a couple of rooms within a prison. A greater surprise from such a famous composer: the music is pleasant rather than memorable. Beyond the overture, there's simply not an aria that you'd walk out humming, much less demand an encore of. In fact, some of it seemed remarkably derivative. One of the most beautiful bits, where a duo becomes a trio and then a quartet, seems like a blatant rip-off of a similar scene in The Marriage of Figaro.

Perhaps we would have appreciated the music more if we hadn't been so distracted by the staging. Without reading the programme or the reviews, my interpretation was a bit off piste. The stage is set with what's obviously a drug production factory. We open with a line of women packing drugs. They leave and Leonora's husband, Florestan, investigates the scene. The bad guy, Pizzaro, catches him. A fight ensues. Pizzaro gets shot and ends up in a wheelchair, Florestan gets thrown into a lower cell. Shift to Act 1, it's two years later and Leonora ... now disguised as Fidelio ... is working in the prison while the male prisoners (but not Florestan) stand around the back hooked to glowing lines that fed into a big, central machine.

My interpretation: Pizzaro was supposed to be managing a prison, but was making a mint by also running it as a meth lab staffed by the free labour of his prisoners. I thought the glowing lines showed the unfair robbery of labour from the prisoners for his nefarious ends. With this interpretation, the plot zipped along as an entertaining episode of Breaking Bad or Hawaii 5-O with a Beethoven soundtrack. Complete with shoot-out ending and a near death before the bad guys get their just deserts and the good ones live happily ever after. It was an enjoyable romp at the time, but all seemed quite lightweight. Leonora's great paeans to fidelity, which are supposed to be the emotional hook of the piece, got lost in a straightforward, fast-paced episode of a crime drama.

Afterwards, we learned that the glowing lines were supposed to be pumping the drugs IN to the prisoners, and it was all a big commentary on the unfairness of incarceration and the prevalence of drugs in the prison system. I think I'm glad I didn't know that in advance.

We also had issues with the lighting. The programme notes say they were going for oppressive gloom. Anyone who's seen a Caravaggio knows that you can do gloom, anxiety and drama while still bathing your main characters in light. The design here washed everything in a dim half-light so murky that one of our party with vision problems could see nothing at all of the second act, and little of the first. (I'm quite sure they jacked up the light for the press photo I've used here.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, our partially-sighted friend appreciated the music more than the rest of us.

I didn't hate Fidelio.

At the time, I was highly entertained. But I wasn't moved. My emotions remained untouched, both by the music and by the plot. I suspect that's not what Beethoven was going for. I'll give Longborough's Fidelio this: it's the first opera here from which I've emerged keen to take in another production, to see if I'd like someone else's interpretation more.

I am now a tiny bit nervous about next month's Magic Flute. Brace yourselves.

For a connoisseur's cut of Canaletto, it's the Queen's Gallery

It's good to be king.

Particularly if it's the 18th century, you're young, rich, and your nation is becoming the most impressive global power since Ancient Rome. That was George III's situation when he decided to beef up the Hanover family art collection. His ancestors hadn't been keen on the stuff ... music was their thing ... but No. III was different. And by a magnificent piece of art historical serendipity, one of the age's great patrons was liquidating his mighty collection just as George started shopping.

The collector, Joseph Smith, had been British Consul in Venice for decades. A visit to his palazzo on the Grand Canal was a "must do" on every aristocrat's Grand Tour, and Smith made a tidy sideline of selling art to them while they were there. He hung his walls with local artists, particularly an exciting discovery of his by the name of Canaletto. The English milordi would order their own versions of what they liked at Smith's. Canaletto made a tidy sum. Smith took a commission. And, naturally, he kept all the best stuff for himself.

Which is why, despite fact that the National Gallery's 2010/11 Canaletto exhibition has barely faded from memory (review here), it's worth making an effort to see Canaletto & the Art of Venice at the Queen's Gallery in London. There is a lot of Canaletto strewn through the country houses and museums of the UK, but in purchasing Smith's originals, the royal family ended up with the best of the lot.

You'll also benefit from an atmosphere a lot less crowded than the National's blockbuster. Though it's been 15 years since the Queen's Gallery re-opened (after a major renovation that tripled its size and made it one of my favourite exhibition spaces in London) it still feels like one of the capital's great, undiscovered secrets. You'll be able to ramble around in here with plenty of open floor space to appreciate the art in quiet contemplation.

And these are works that deserve the time and attention. Canaletto was a master of detail. There's no better place to appreciate this than the early galleries of the show, which are primarily pen and ink drawings. Here, you can see the grid lines Canaletto used to build his perspective, and the obsessive way he'd study particular elements of a building ... down to noting specific colours he'd use later. Here's where we also first encounter some of the pastiches of ruins and buildings, both real and imagined, he'd sketch to stretch his imagination. This style of painting, known as a capriccio, has always been one of my favourites. It was a real delight to discover Canaletto's photographic style grafted onto these fantasy worlds.

You're really here, though, for just one room. The largest space at the back of the galleries is a riotous jewel box of Canaletto's best. On the left wall, the twelve scenes of the Grand Canal, covering sections from one and to another, that Smith hung in his house as the ultimate sales samples. I have seen many versions of these scenes, but never a complete set, hung together, in geographic order. On the opposite wall hang five spectacularly oversized canvasses of Roman ruins. I wasn't aware he'd ever tackled the subject. Forget Venice. I would have been ordering one of these! The other two walls offer more spectacular scenery, mostly Venetian, including a fascinating view of an alternative design for the Rialto bridge that lost out to the one we know today.

Other rooms show off the work of Canaletto's contemporaries. Smith's eye didn't falter. There's more luscious stuff here, from historical paintings and romantic landscapes to more architectural scenes and some exquisitely lifelike character heads done in chalk. You've probably never heard of Zuccarelli, Ricci, Carriera and the rest. If it weren't for Canaletto's enormous reputation, you probably would have. These works are worth your attention, too.

One of the glories of the Queen's Gallery is that a full-price admission is good for a year. Meaning you can pop back whenever you like to have another look. I'll certainly be doing so.

Canaletto & the Art of Venice runs until 12 November 2017.

Exquisite Hokusai show redeems the horror of British Museum's American Pop Art

About half way through the American Pop art exhibit at the British Museum, with angst and disgust rising in equal levels, I was seriously considering cutting off our museum membership.

The show had started promisingly, with disturbing but relevant links to current events. "Repetition adds up to reputation" read the Warhol quote beneath his Marilyn Monroe silk screens. Prescient insight into much that is wrong with our present world. The art movement explored here, bridging the 1950s to the present day, reflects pop culture and consumerism back to us as a dark warning about our world. There are a few things here that are both meaningful and beautiful to look at: Ruscha's petrol station, Oldenburg's oddly compelling giant electrical plug, Haring's AIDS awareness cartoons. But most of the rest is menacing, angry, and .. in its lack of obvious artistic skills  ... begs the question: How is this art? And, more important to me as a British Museum member: Why is this here?

Hosted south of the river in Tate Modern, and positioned as a show about modern art as political protest, it might have worked better. But in this sacred ark of world culture, running under the title of American Dream: Pop to the Present, it was a dark embarrassment to both the British Museum and the United States. No wonder, when we moved on to American politics at dinner with friends later that night, I unexpectedly broke into gasping sobs. This stuff casts a long shadow of gloom and dread. If the point of art is to provoke emotion, then I suppose it's successful in its way.

My eyes, however, would like to find some beauty in art.

Thank heavens for Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave in the smaller exhibit space upstairs. This show
is as lustrous and life-affirming as Pop Art was grim and soul-sucking. And it's not just pretty. In Hokusai's long life (1760-1849) he introduced many modern innovations to Japanese art, while his influence flowed westward to be seen in everything from Beardsley prints to post-war decorative fabrics. He even predicted the musician Prince's "symbol as name" phase, changing his name ... and thus the cartouche with which he signed his work ... multiple times throughout his career to encapsulate what he was trying to accomplish in each phase of his life.

Hokusai was a Japanese painter and print maker, most famous for his Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji. We all know The Wave. (Officially, The great wave off Kanagawa.) Few realise there are 35 more scenes, rich with variety. There are landscapes from every angle, some with the mountain dominant and others where you really have to search for it. In some scenes, people go about their everyday lives so accustomed to the beauty they hardly notice. In others, they're on the mountain itself, climbing to find spiritual enlightenment. Hokusai uses simple, elegant lines and wry observation to bring people into glorious life. Flora and fauna are acutely observed. Colours are exquisite. In the example above, check out the fishermen fighting the sea in the blue twilight, with Fuji looming in the distance. If all this show did was to broaden our awareness of The Wave into its larger series, it would be a wild success.

But there's so much more.

From his earliest days, we see exquisitely beautiful and highly traditional images of deities, dragons and legends. Even here he's breaking away from the pack: a series on the adventures of the warrior hero Tametomo is filled with humour and has a clarity of line so modern it seems to be laying the foundations for manga. Another series of genre scenes originally commissioned by the Dutch East India Company shows him learning from European styles, playing with perspective and introducing the new colour of Prussian Blue into Japan (a shade that would transform his work). These also show his amazing ability to capture slices of real life. In one scene, a samurai stops to advise a boy and his father getting ready to fly their kite. In the foreground, two dogs are sniffing each other's butts. That sweet, achingly real touch of reality makes it feel like you could step through the frame and join the scene.

This is, indeed, a show worth having reading glasses to view. You will want to linger over prints to see what his tiny people and animals are doing. The drama and humour captured in deft brushstrokes is extraordinary.

Later, we come to a series of flower and bird prints suffused with a sense of profound peace. I could happily hang Weeping cherry and bullfinch above my bed and contemplate it nightly. Just when you think Hokusai may be getting staid in this category of stately flowers and perching birds, he surprises you with Carp in waterfall, a scene of remarkable action as the fish bob and weave through the pounding torrent. There are ghost stories and illustrated poems, portraits and temple decorations. Hokusai's gentle humour keeps rearing its head throughout.

We also get to see Hokusai the commercial designer, a reminder that he was extremely famous in his own time. There are designs for exquisite hair combs, fans and netsuke, some with the finished products beside them. It's no surprise that the Hokusai-inspired jewellery in the gift shop is some of the most beautiful I can remember associated with any British Museum show. Rather than splurging on that, however, I bought the show catalogue so I could pour over all the detail I'd missed.

Which leads me to the only drawback of this show: its thick crowds. You will spend far more time queuing to pay close attention to these modestly-sized masterpieces than you will actually get in their contemplation. Downstairs, my footsteps echoed through cavernous, mostly empty display spaces for the Pop Art show. I wonder if the visitor numbers are making management regret their decisions? Upstairs, you're packed body-to-body trying to take in hundreds of detail-rich objects in a small space.

Even without the crowds, there'd probably be too much here to digest in a single viewing. So yes, I will be keeping my British Museum membership. Because shows like Hokusai are more typical of the Museum's track record than the American angst. And because membership means I'm going to be able to pop in several more times before Hokusai closes 13 August. Like that other Japanese favourite, sushi, this art deserves to be savoured in many small bites.