Stellar operatic performances in this ‘immersive Greek myth’

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of “The Odyssey” may promise “three hours of head-spinning storytelling”, said Neil Fisher in The Times. But “when it comes to immersive Greek myth, nothing beats Richard Strauss in full surround sound in the final 15 minutes of ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’”.

Written in 1912, the opera tells the story of the eponymous Cretan princess who is abandoned by Theseus on a desert island with only nymphs for company, before falling in love with the god Bacchus. She had mistaken him for Death, but “that’s not really important. What matters is the moment shortly before the end when you can hear Strauss push the throttle and fire up the engines, and we bathe in the power of a soaring tenor, ecstatic soprano and coruscating orchestra”. I have never heard this scene performed with such virtuosity as in Glyndebourne’s “rapturous” new production. Catch it if you can.

It’s hard to imagine where you could find “more exciting singing” than that of David Butt Philip (as Bacchus) and Rachel Willis-Sørensen (Ariadne) in the latter stages of this “delight”, said Richard Fairman in the Financial Times. The production does not see director Laurent Pelly at his most imaginative, and Massimo Troncanetti’s “spartan designs are unappealing (Ariadne’s desert island is an even more miserable lump of rock than the plot demands)”. But the singing is just superb and the music is a joy. Conductor Robin Ticciati and players from the London Philharmonic Orchestra expertly capture both the score’s Rococo wit and its rousing Wagnerian grandeur.

“Ariadne auf Naxos” is an opera of two parts, said Erica Jeal in The Guardian. Before we get to Naxos, there’s a long satirical prologue, set in Vienna, about the difficulties of putting on an opera. This first part (added four years after the opera was first performed) finds the director “at his witty best”, and features a host of nicely judged comic performances. The second half is certainly well performed but it is “less sparky and less insightful than the first”. The upshot is an evening that is “enjoyable” but ultimately “unmoving”.

Glyndebourne, Lewes. Until 29 August.

by Douglas Stuart 

Douglas Stuart’s two previous novels – the Booker Prize-winning “Shuggie Bain” (2020) and “Young Mungo” (2022) – were both set in Glasgow tenements, said Michael Arditti in The Spectator. For his third, Stuart has “moved north”, to the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.

Cal, 22, “returns to his family croft” on the island, after spending four years studying textiles in Edinburgh, in response to a call from his father, John, telling him that his grandmother is dying. Cal is gay, and comfortable with that fact; his father, a deacon of the island’s Free Presbyterian Church, which adheres to an “extreme biblical morality”, is in denial about his own homosexual leanings. The relationship between the two – by turns loving and violent – is at the heart of this “beautifully observed” novel.

“This is a magnificent book of disarming intensity,” said Maria Albano in The Telegraph. Stuart excels at “rendering the soul of a place” in all its variety: the “descriptions of pulling a lamb from the ewe in her labour are as confident as his mastery of weaving argot”. And his “character-building” is no less superb: all his portraits are “equally lifelike”.

While “John of John” is an “unashamedly emotional novel”, full of “vivid, generous” prose, it is also, at times, very funny, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. A scene in which Cal climbs through a window clutching flowers “has the farcical quality of Shakespearean comedy”. It also features “one of the funniest and most memorable depictions of masturbation in fiction”.

It’s already on the longlist for this year’s Booker Prize, and it’s “difficult to imagine” that it won’t be shortlisted.

Goodie turned naturalist who fronted Springwatch

For those who grew up in the 1970s, Bill Oddie, who has died aged 85, will always be one of “The Goodies”, said The Times. The anarchic comedy show, co-starring his Cambridge Footlights alumni Graeme Garden and the late Tim Brooke-Taylor, was about a trio of fixers who travel around on a three-seater bicycle they called a “trandem”, supposedly solving all manner of problems. Running for 76 episodes, it mixed “lavatorial” jokes and sight gags inspired by Buster Keaton and Tom and Jerry with absurdism (one episode had the group being chased by a giant kitten) and political satire (another addressed apartheid). As well as helping to write the show, Oddie composed songs for it, including “The Funky Gibbon”, which reached No. 4 in the charts in 1975 and led to him and his fellow comics appearing on “Top of the Pops”.

At its peak, “The Goodies” attracted 12 million viewers. But although it had similarities to “Monty Python”, BBC executives did not take it as seriously, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. They classified it as children’s TV, which was meant as an insult and Oddie took it as one. Later, he reinvented himself as a naturalist and won many new fans as the presenter of wildlife programmes, including “Springwatch”. Yet here, too, his success was undercut by sadness. He left “Springwatch” at the end of 2008 and later made it clear that he’d been forced out by the BBC. He said his mental health had been a factor and that he “could be very tetchy”. He had, he revealed, fallen into a depression, twice attempted suicide and been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Born in Rochdale in 1941, William Oddie was the son of Harry Oddie, an accountant, and his wife Lilian. Aged six, Bill came home from school to find the house empty and blood all over the kitchen. It turned out his mother had attacked his father. She spent years in psychiatric wards. The family subsequently moved to Birmingham. He was educated at King Edward’s School, then won a place at Cambridge, where he made a splash at Footlights alongside the likes of John Cleese. Before long he was appearing in a Footlights revue in the West End and on Broadway. He wrote scripts for “That Was the Week That Was” and episodes of the TV comedy “Doctor in the House”. He also appeared regularly on radio, including in “I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again”. “The Goodies” launched in 1970 and ran for more than a decade. Each of its creators had a distinct personality, said The Guardian: Brooke-Taylor was pompous; Garden was professorial; while Oddie was hairy and untidy. Even then, he suffered from mood swings. He found fame hard to manage and could be grouchy. When, in 2001, Michael Aspel approached him with his big red book and the words, “Bill Oddie, this is your life,” Oddie replied: “It’s not. I always said I wouldn’t do it and I won’t.” His family eventually persuaded him to go ahead with the show.

Oddie had loved birdwatching since his teens and, after a spell working in children’s TV in the 1980s, he began fronting wildlife shows such as “Birding with Bill Oddie”. In 2003, he was made an OBE for his conservation work. He attributed his mental health problems to his childhood, and the feeling that his mother had abandoned him. Later, however, he began to appreciate that she may also have had bipolar disorder. He realised, he said, that she had been “in no way negligent”, only “immensely unlucky”. He is survived by his three children, and his second wife, the writer and former actress Laura Beaumont.