Controversial Russian soprano Anna Netrebko returns to the stage with ‘white-hot passion’ in new Puccini staging

Opera lovers arriving at Covent Garden this week for the start of the new season were greeted by Ukrainian flags and scores of picketing protesters. “While she sings, Ukraine bleeds,” read the placards, while megaphoned messages were yet angrier. “There’s blood all over the floor of the Royal Opera House tonight,” said one.

No, the controversial casting of the great Russian soprano Anna Netrebko – who was previously banned by houses across Europe owing to her historical support for Vladimir Putin’s regime – in the Royal Opera’s new production of “Tosca” did not pass without a fuss, said Richard Morrison in The Times.

Netrebko has publicly denounced her country’s invasion of Ukraine, but her critics want her to speak out against Putin too. The Metropolitan Opera in New York continues to ban her (she is suing them), but she will be singing in several European capitals this winter – and more protests are likely. None of this appears to faze her, however. “At 53, she still portrays Tosca, the volatile opera singer who gets tangled up in the politics of a repressive regime, with white-hot passion and a matchless range of vocal and visual nuance.”

I detected nerves to start, said Barry Millington in London’s The Standard; but these had settled by the time Netrebko had to deliver her big Act II aria, “Vissi d’arte” – “exploiting her rich, darkly expressive lower range and her glorious top alike, holding the beautifully floated final notes for an eternity”. And the audience was thunderous in its approval.

Set in a “chilling” dictatorship, Oliver Mears’ terrific staging is also blessed with a “mettlesome Cavaradossi of baritonal heft” in Freddie De Tommaso, said Richard Fairman in the Financial Times. Gerald Finley brilliantly conveys Scarpia’s “slimy depravity”. And holding it all together from the pit, with tremendous confidence, is Covent Garden’s new music director Jakub Hruša, said Flora Willson in The Guardian. He makes space for “moments of beauty”, but mines from the “darkest, grittiest passages of Puccini’s score a performance of tremendous emotional force”.

Royal Opera House, London WC2. Until 7 October, rbo.org.uk

by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan may be 77, said John Self in The Times, but he doesn’t seem to be “slowing down”. His hugely ambitious latest novel, a “richly imagined” work of “curious charm”, brings together “poetry, dementia, social and personal memory, the progress of human development, murder and more”.

The year is 2119, and England is “now an archipelago, with low land under water”, having been ravaged by “catastrophic flooding” – partly produced by climate change, but also by a Russian nuclear attack in 2042. Tom Metcalfe, the narrator, teaches English at the University of the South Downs, specialising in the literature of the early 21st century – a period now called “the Derangement”. In particular, he is fascinated by a poet named Francis Blundy, whose most notorious work was a sonnet sequence written for his wife Vivien, which he recited at a dinner party in 2014. Those present attested to its genius – but afterwards the only copy disappeared. Metcalfe’s research into the events of that night – which mainly takes place in a Bodleian Library, now located in Snowdonia – leads him to believe he can recover the lost manuscript.

McEwan has fun with the details of his futuristic Britain, which “as post-apocalyptic dystopias go”, doesn’t seem too terrible, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph. “Give or take the odd gang of bandits roaming the islands of the former Lake District, British society has readjusted rather than collapsed.” Elsewhere, things are more chaotic: Germany has been incorporated into Greater Russia; America is “a battleground for competing warlords”; and Nigeria is the “dominant power”. McEwan’s sentences remain “elegant and unhurried”, and it’s stirring to see him “pushing himself harder than ever”. Yet the novel ultimately suffers from information overload: it’s too “overstuffed – or if you prefer, a bit bonkers” – to be “wholly successful”. 

“What We Can Know” indeed seems to “have everything”, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. It starts out blending “doomy futurism” with “spiky campus satire”, before “finally taking shape as a gripping page-turner about marital duty and guilt”. Yet remarkably, it hangs together. “The movement between the domestic and the geopolitical hasn’t always been smoothly managed in McEwan’s work, but it’s carried off here with winning audacity.” It reads in some ways like a “McEwan’s greatest hits album”, said Jon Day in the Financial Times. And that’s no bad thing. “Aware of its limitations and comfortable in its skin”, this is McEwan’s “most entertaining and enjoyable novel for years”.

Modest royal who taught music at a school in Hull

The first non-titled woman to marry into the royal family for more than a century, Katharine, Duchess of Kent, had a natural elegance and charm that made her one of the most popular members of “The Firm” in the 1960s and 1970s, said The Daily Telegraph. She served as the patron of numerous charities and undertook several overseas tours with her husband, Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin. However, she was probably best known for her regular appearances at Wimbledon, watching from the Royal Box, presenting the winning finalists with their trophies and consoling the losers. Famously, she wrapped a sobbing Jana Novotná in a hug following her defeat in 1993. This compassionate gesture was typical of the Duchess, said The Times – who “pioneered the art of royal empathy” long before Princess Diana (of whom she was very fond) arrived. 

If the Duchess, who has died aged 92, was not well known to a younger generation, that was by design. Modest and unassuming, she had never enjoyed the limelight (she preferred working behind the scenes, she said), and in the 1990s she’d asked the Queen for permission to scale back her duties so that she could devote more time to her private passions, which included music. In 2002, she retired completely, relinquishing her Her Royal Highness title. It later emerged that, since the mid-1990s, she had been making a weekly trip to her native Yorkshire to teach music at Wansbeck Primary School, in east Hull. Only the school’s head teacher knew her real identity. To the children, and their parents, she was just Mrs Kent. 

Katharine Lucy Mary Worsley was born in 1933, the youngest of the four children of Sir William Worsley, a Yorkshire landowner, and his wife Joyce (née Brunner). She grew up at Hovingham Hall, and was later sent to board at Runton Hill School, in Norfolk. She was a gifted singer and pianist, but she failed to win a place at the Royal Academy of Music. “I passionately wanted to have a career in music, but I wasn’t good enough,” she said. Aged 19, she started volunteering in a children’s home in York; she also taught at Lady Eden’s, a private girls’ school in London. She met Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, in 1956, when he was stationed at Catterick, not far from her home. 

His mother, Princess Marina, was appalled when they became engaged, and ordered them to spend time apart. But they eventually married at York Minster in 1961. The service was broadcast on TV; and thousands of people lined the streets. In later life, she’d credit her “wonderful” mother-in-law for helping her to find her feet in the royal family. She and the Duke had three living children; a fourth was stillborn. “It had the most devastating effect on me,” she said 20 years later. “I had no idea how devastating such a thing could be to any woman.” She suffered from a severe depression, and was hospitalised. She was later diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus, the symptoms of which include chronic fatigue, and with coeliac disease. 

Her illnesses were debilitating, but she was frustrated, she told The Telegraph, when she was portrayed as the royal family’s “bird with a broken wing”. She travelled widely on behalf of various causes, served as chancellor of Leeds University, co-founded a charity to support musicians from low-income families, and gave piano lessons at a rented basement flat. In 1994, she became the first royal to convert to Catholicism since 1685. Her attraction to the faith, she said, was more emotional than intellectual. Cardinal Basil Hume acted as her spiritual guide, and she later volunteered at The Passage, the homeless charity he’d helped establish. She and the Duke spent such long periods apart, it was rumoured that they’d separated; she dismissed this as nonsense, saying they had simply been pursuing their different interests. She spent the last few years of her life with him, in a cottage at Kensington Palace.