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I am a director of branding and digital design consultancy Howoco in London, UK. The articles on opera, film opening titles and culture featured here have all appeared on my Daily Telegraph blog. I hope you enjoy reading them.

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Opening titles: Breakfast at Tiffany's

Here's another post about opening sequences, which are sometimes better crafted than the movies they introduce. An example is Breakfast at Tiffany's, whose prelude is more interesting than Blake Edwards's film, which I find meandering and flat.

We open with a long shot of Fifth Avenue, lined with street lamps like a string of pearls at day rise, miraculously empty. A yellow cab pulls up in front of No 727. The wistfully scored "Moon River" escorts the scene.

An elegant woman in a long black gown and beehive hair disembarks. She stands column-like in front of the building. Blake Edwards cuts to a sharply upward camera angle to reveal the location: Tiffany & Co. Instant status is bestowed upon the august jeweller’s. We see it as if through Holly Golightly’s eyes: this is a sanctuary. She will indeed ask George Peppard later in the film: "Do you see what I mean – how nothing bad could’ve happened to you in a place like this?"

The camera pans down now as she sashays up to the window. We see her in profile opening a bag. She fishes out a Danish and a coffee. We notice two things here: she’s maybe a little overdressed, and she’s wearing sunglasses when the sun is barely out. Maybe she’s a hopeless romantic? Maybe she's nursing a hangover after some serious partying? Or she’s a bit nuts? (She’s all that).

She takes her time. Eating her breakfast and admiring what Tiffany’s has to offer, she slowly saunters up to another window. Couture dresses and polystyrene cups make odd but intriguing visual juxtaposition – we’re now asking ourselves what this is all about. We still don’t know who she is or what she really looks like except in profile, and we’re halfway through the opening sequence. Blake Edwards teases us next with a hazy reflection of Holly. She’s an enigma. A character is slowly being built with a costume, a prop and a location.

Now we finally cut to a full-frontal medium-close shot of her, the only one in this sequence. Her expression is not one of wonderment, but of comfort and familiarity. She has clearly done this before. Framed, as she is, by the window, we look at Holly captivated by what’s in front of her. Visually she’s in a gilded cage. We're watching a classic technique for capturing conversations: reaction shots. The dialogue here is between her and the store, and we feel an intimacy.

Holly now walks away and begins to turn the corner. In this long shot we notice that she’s walking naturally and not doing geisha steps – and that’s because it’s dress number two. Hubert de Givenchy made Audrey Hepburn a facsimile dress with a split at the back just for this section of the titles.

The sequence concludes as she recedes into the distance, still an enigma. Mancini’s expertly composed score swells to a climax and ebbs away.

Considerable effort went into translating Truman Capote’s gritty novelette into something altogether more family-friendly for the big screen. This opening sequence sets the tone right away. Audrey Hepburn’s classic features and comportment are more high society than high-class hooker. We’re in a totally different world to the one Capote wrote about: wholesome and glamorous, cleverly side-stepping the hooker question.

If any film deserves a remake it is this one. Much as I love Hepburn, I’d be interested to see Capote’s original brought to screen without the sugar coating.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 7 Jan 2014

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Yau Leung was the Chinese Cartier-Bresson. Why isn't he better known?

Cheongsams (1961)

The pictures featured here are by a photographer called Yau Leung 邱良 (1941-1997). He’s one of Hong Kong’s most significant and accomplished documentary photographers, but scandalously little-known outside the city. Can we put that right?

His work documents a changing Hong Kong, spanning the colonial days of the 60s to post-handover 90s. The best known of his photographs is the one of the two ladies in cheongsam seen from the back. It's an image that distills the essence of change: a time when people still considered traditional Chinese garb as their daily wardrobe – but in a quickly westernising city. What most people don’t know is that the rest of the photographer’s portfolio is every bit as glorious as this picture.

Yau Leung started his professional life on film sets, working at the famous Shaw Brothers Studio. In parallel, he documented street scenes and daily lives of the people in Hong Kong. This personal project reveals the real Yau Leung: it's an astonishing archive.

These images remind me of the great master of photojouralism, Henri Cartier-Bresson: strong and challenging compositions, a balanced spectrum  of light and dark, technical mastery of selective focus. Above all, like those of Cartier-Bresson, his subjects are infused with humanity – telling a story, eliciting a smile or a question.

Where is that girl going in the half-sized moped? Why are the little boys being told off by the little girl? Yau Leung chased what Cartier-Bresson called "The Decisive Moment", capturing a scene at the crucial split-second.

Yau Leung’s career was tragically cut short by a freak accident at the age of 56: he fell while changing a lightbulb in his studio. What he left behind is a treasure trove of a gentle era, one that my parents knew – the calm before the storm of aggressive consumerism.

A selection of Yau Leung's work can be seen at Picture This.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 1 Jan 2014

Small wheels (1960s)

In trouble (1960s)

South China Stadium (1968)

Naked Humour (1970)

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On the last day of his anniversary year, a quick guide to mocking Wagner

Wagner parody is almost an industry. There’s nothing like poking fun at someone with an outsized ego and notorious political views. Jibes flooded in almost as soon as he opened for business. There was Rossini’s celebrated observation that "Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour" to Woody Allen’s "I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland" (Manhattan Murder Mystery). And the jibes continue.

In the early part of 20th Century, French music hall humorist Betove made a series of recordings ("Pastiches Musicaux") sending up the musical style of various composers. In this recording, ironically, Wagner is followed by Rossini. Tristan chords abound in the piano introduction as Betove starts singing melodramatically.

In 1943, silent screen vamp Pola Negri made a late career appearance in a talkie called Hi Diddle Diddle as a Wagnerian singer. The comedy storyline is a hotchpotch of swindlers, mistaken identities and stolen diamonds, ending with a happy sing song from Tannhäuser. There’s a sweet little cartoon of Wagner throwing a tantrum. It's delightfully surreal:

Talking of cartoons, surely the most famous of all Wagner parodies is Chuck Jones’s 1957 What’s Opera, Doc?: Bugs Bunny is disguised as Brunnhilde, dodging the hunt of Elmer "Kill the Wabbit" Fudd. Tannhäuser’s Pilgrim Chorus is again adapted with bits of Die Walkürethrown in.

Lastly, the indomitable "musical cartoonist" Anna Russell, who looked like Benny Hill in drag. Masquerading as serious lectures, Russell delivered an "analysis" of Der Ring des Nibelungen, her comic masterpiece, to concert-hall audiences. She disentangled the complicated plot, boiled it all down to a 20-odd minute routine, and at the same time slyly acknowledged the impenetrability of the 16-hour long cycle. Her  catchphrase "I’m not making this up you, know" eventually became the title of her autobiography.

Here’s Anna Russell in fine form, on Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen:

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 31 Dec 2013

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The return of the classical LP – at a price

I'm in Hong Kong, where a visit to a small record store yielded a few surprises. First of all they actually have a whole room dedicated to classical music – as opposed to a corner, like the new Oxford Street HMV flagship. Then I saw these, stashed away:

Yes, vinyl LPs – not vintage objectes but freshly pressed new releases (and re-releases). A search on Deutsche Grammophon's website reveals that they have been trickling them out since 2010. There are 10 releases in total and this year alone there are five, including a boxed set called "Wagner on Vinyl" of six LPs, consisting of highlights and recitals rather than any complete opera. Decca have four in their catalogue.

The limited editions probably explain why they're not too visible in the UK, where high street record stores have in any case all but disappeared. We increasingly rely on downloads and online streaming services. LP and CD enthusiasts alike are having to make do with second-hand exchanges (such as the world-famous Gramex) or special deliveries from online shops.

A final surprise – the price: in this Hong Kong shop, the Netrebko Verdi LP retails at £50. The UK Amazon sells it for £30 – that’s still more than double the price of a CD. Presumably the production costs of LPs are considerably higher, especially if it's high quality vinyl. Even so, would you pay £30 for an LP? And does anyone know how the sound compares to the top-class vinyl of the LP era?

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 27 Dec 2013

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Here's something different: a Christmas carol that mentions Satan and hell

I love Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. At school, one of my Grade 8 singing set pieces was a solo from these carols. They bring back lovely memories.

A Ceremony of Carols was scored for treble voices and harp. Aged 29 at the time, Britten wrote it en route from New York to Liverpool over U-boat infested waters in 1942. Seven carols were completed during this passage, and he later added the rest, adapting the set to fulfil a commission from the American harpist Edna Philips.

The text Britten used was largely based on medieval carols, lifted from a book (The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems) he picked up when his boat docked in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote a biography of Britten in 1992, puts it best: "(It’s) neither a medley of carols…. nor a ceremony." It is rather "a ceremony of innocence, a musical representation of life before the fall". The mystical aura makes it as enigmatic as a Botticelli Nativity.

"This Little Babe" is probably the most famous number of the set, and a favourite of choral groups up and down the country. Structurally clever, it begins with all voices singing in unison – fast – introducing the theme. When Britten repeats the tune, he staggers the entries so that the singers seem to be chasing each other, a musical echo chamber. Yet, skilfully, they arrive simultaneously at the end despite starting at different moments. In the final section the piece launches into an urgent three-part canon. This is difficult music and not at all easy to pull off in performance. Here's the first verse, taken from Robert Southwell's "New Heaven, New War" of 1595:

This Little Babe so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s fold; All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold do shake; For in this week unarmed wise the gates of hell he will surprise

This is not your usual sentimental fare: it depicts the baby Jesus winning a battle against evil cosmic powers. Normally the churches like to forget about those at Christmas. How many other carols mention Satan and hell in the same verse?

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 22 Dec 2013

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Why Engelbert Humperdinck is the perfect Xmas music. No, seriously

What operas can you watch at Christmas? La Bohème has a nice wintry ambience. Massenet’s Werther actually takes place with Christmas in the background – though, not very festively, the hero pulls the trigger on himself. Want a touch of Dickensian spookiness? Britten’s Turn of the Screw fits the bill, though again it's not exactly jolly.

For true seasonal spirit with a touch of pantomime you need Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. The music is an absolutely dream, a continuous flow of great melodies with the symphonic textures of Wagner (to whom he was an assistant – he helped prepare the score for Parsifal).

Humperdinck originally composed Hansel and Gretel for his sister Adelheid Wette as a family play; they thought  it was so good that they fleshed it out as a full-scale opera. It was Adelheid who made crucial changes to the original story – adding characters such as the Sandman, the Dew Fairy and the father. And it was she who decided that the witch should be turned into gingerbread, thus softening the original Grimm ending where she’s burnt to a crisp in the oven.

Yet the darkness of all Brothers Grimm tales is still there the opera. Despite the beer-hall jolliness at the beginning, at heart Hansel and Gretel is about abandoned children. Unloved and lost, they fend for themselves.

During the Act 2 Traumpantomime, angels appear in the woods to protect the children as they fall asleep and present them with gifts. You can see the sequence poignantly interpreted by the Royal Opera in 2008 below: in their sleep the children have an apparition of their parents – both warm and benevolent in their collective fantasies. They are given hugh boxes of presents. They are loved like they never have been in real life. Eagerly opening them, they discover…. well, watch:

Hansel and Gretel was an instant hit in 1893, translated into many languages and performed worldwide. It has never dropped out of mainstream repertory. However, Humperdinck was never to write another successful opera. With this work he briefly filled the void left by Wagner. Seven years later, Richard Strauss, who conducted the world premiere ofHansel and Gretel, forged a new musical language for German opera in his one-act shocker Salome.

Engelbert Humperdinck died in 1921, thankfully unaware of the musical atrocities that would be perpetrated in his name. Steel yourself:

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 16 Dec 2013

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Opening titles: How 'Jackie Brown' puts us on the side of a criminal

Suppose I were to sell you an idea for a script. The main character is a smuggler who walks off with oodles of money made from selling narcotics. We all go home happy and satisfied. Justice has been done.

Far-fetched? But Quentin Tarantino pulls off something very similar inJackie Brown. And, in the process, creates his most likable and three-dimensional character.

It starts with a blank wall, and then a statuesque middle-age black woman comes into view on a conveyor belt. She hovers at the edge of the screen. We see her in profile and the camera moves with her – for over a minute – before we cut to something else.

This tells us a few things about her: she’s an air hostess and she’s on her way to work. Life is probably as uneventful as this sequence. Dull. Literally, there are long stretches of nothingness in front of her. Maybe her career is flat-lining, but her neutral expression gives nothing away.

Interestingly, The Graduate has a very similar opening title sequence after Dustin Hoffman steps off the plane. Basically it’s saying something similar: this character has a lot of time to kill and is probably going nowhere. We don’t know, and neither do they.

However, what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing in Jackie Brown's opening titles are two different stories. Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street contains these lyrics:

Been down so long, getting up didn’t cross my mind, I knew there was a better way of life that I was just trying to find. You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under pressure, Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester.

It’s Jackie’s anthem: yes, she has a respectable job, but life hasn’t always been easy. She will do anything to survive. Instantly the music establishes her character, the steel behind that profile.

What can be her problem? The next thing Tarantino cuts to gives us a clue: airport security. There's a knowing, ironic effect, cutting from a human being on a conveyor belt to a lot of objects going the same direction. It objectifies the character: will she be X-rayed like those objects? Well – no, we find out, because she has a very cosy relationship with the security staff.

Now the camera angle changes. It points up at her. We’re admiring her stature now. It then cuts to a medium close shot framing her full-centered – she looks entitled and forthright. "You have to be strong if you want to survive," sings Womack. Tarantino is hinting at us that Jackie is engaging in some form of activity that requires courage, and we know she has it in spades.

So the pace picks up and she is now rushing for her flight. This long running sequence mirrors the opening. Notice how the camera does something unusual next. She is now in front of the camera. It sort of follows her but at the same time pans to the opposite direction to the one in which she’s heading, creating a dizzy circling effect. She goes behind the door, dumps her bag and reappears a total professional, in control of herself. "Welcome on board," she says cheerfully.

Jackie Brown is a money smuggler, using her work as cover. She's also used, unwittingly, as a mule smuggling drugs. In a key scene, she’ll be involved in a complicated operation where she will be dumping a bag inside a department store. Straight afterwards she will come out of the store and the camera will do a full-on 360 degrees spin around her. I think we’re being given a hint in the title sequence of what’s to come.

In a four-minute sequence Tarantino has put us on the side of the criminal. Already we like her and want to know how she breaks out of the ghetto. The casting of Pam Grier in the title role is masterly, because her warmth, intelligence and toughness bring this role to life. And it's all there in these opening titles. A heroine is born.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 12 Dec 2013

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Glyndebourne's set for Billy Budd

Glyndebourne's 2010 set for Britten's Billy Budd, directed by Michael Gradage with sets by Christopher Oram. (Click for larger picture)

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Opera Australia's set for Tosca

Opera Australia's incredible 2013 set for Act 1 of Puccini's Tosca, a new production by John Bell with sets by Michael Scott-Michell. (Click for larger picture)

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Wagner's Parsifal is sublime. So why do I always fall asleep in it?

I'm writing this post with Christian Thielemann’s recording of Parsifalpiping through my headphones. The music is wonderful – sublime, even.

I thought I’d just make sure, because every time I see Parsifal on stage I manage to fall asleep at some point. This time round at Covent Garden was no exception.

Parsifal is designed to be a spiritual experience from which one emerges feeling cleansed and redeemed – and not as a result of a quick nap. As in several of his operas, an outsider intrudes upon a closed community. There’s a unique creation in the form of Kundry, the passive-aggressive female character. Parsifal himself is in a line of Wagnerian archetypes: an innocent fool who is in fact the chosen one.

This is Wagner’s last opera, a culmination of a lifetime of experience and wisdom. Covent Garden’s production does the composer proud at the close of his centenary year, both musically and visually.

Yet, as usual, I zoned out, especially in the monologue sequences. This, I guess, is my problem with Parsifal – a very long work with little plot development. Leitmotifs are pared down to create an austere drama. So we experience Parsifal in slow motion.

Director Stephen Langridge cleverly uses a hide-and-reveal device to show us the back story: Amfortas’s seduction, his downfall and the loss of the holy relic. Klingor’s castration is graphically depicted. A hospital bed dominates the first and last act, a symbol of an organisation (the Knights of the Holy Grail) on its last legs.

Operas often contain incomprehensible plots and it doesn't matter, but in Wagner one can’t separate the music from the text. And his intentions with Parsifal are not clear. Is this a religious opera or an opera about religion? Who is the nameless Redeemer? What is it telling us about sex and faith, or compassion as the key to redemption? Indeed, what is this production at the Royal Opera House trying to say, offering images of the child Christ instead of the Holy Grail? Our esteemed opera critic Rupert Christiansen is similarly baffled.

Personally I think Gerald Finley, who plays Amfortas (quite magnificently), is bang on the money in the trailer, which you can see in full below. He asks what happens to organisations when their leader’s ethics and behaviour are called into question. This is played out in our world daily – think Rob Ford and Toronto, Paul Flowers and Co-op or a certain celebrity chef and her personal brand.

Still, we're talking about four hours of music excluding the intervals. I can sit through Die Meistersinger and come out feeling like I want more. WithParsifal, that's enough. Every time.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 5 Dec 2013

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Yoshikazu Mera can sing three and a half octaves. Prepare to be amazed

If you don't know it already, let me introduce you to an astonishing voice that spans three and a half octaves. Consider Maria Callas’s voice: in her prime she had less than three. That put things in perspective a bit.

This voice belongs to Yoshikazu Mera, a Japanese male alto. If you’re into Japanese anime you'll have heard him sing the theme song for Princess Mononoke (1997). He's also an extraordinary soloist in the early volumes of the just-completed Bach cantata series by Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan, arguably the finest on record.

Countertenors, or male altos, usually have to "switch" from their everyday talking register to their falsetto one. What makes Mera’s voice such a phenomenon is that he has no discernible switch at all. His singing voice can go seamlessly from a normal tenor to high alto. The effect is eerie and thrilling. It remains a debate whether he does actually goes into falsetto – he may be one of those rare people who can sing naturally all the way up and down the scales. This may be connected to the fact that, sadly, he suffers from brittle bone disease, which can compress the spine.

In the video above Mera is in top form, singing something appropriately festive: "Thou art gone up on high" from Handel’s Messiah.

What strikes me about this voice is its sweetness, purity and the ease with which the sound is produced. At 1:40 he goes down to an A below middle C without losing any power or sounding forced. His diction is clear and the text is intelligently pointed throughout. As with his Bach recordings, you’d never guess the singer is Japanese.

There’s also a very still, contemplative quality about his singing that is grounded in expression and not showing off. This restraint is particularly unusual, for at the heart of Baroque castrato singing are firework showpieces. Eighteenth-century opera composers from Handel to Porpora all produced coloratura extravaganzas to show off the singers. Countertenors of today revel in these arias (and they are very exciting to hear) but Mera mostly shuns them.

With a voice so prodigious, he naturally doesn't limit himself to Bach and Handel – indeed, he can be found doing anything from Rachmaninov to Satie (plus pop songs). Purists would say this is stretching the repertoire a bit, but I don't agree.

Here’s Mera singing a transposed version of Richard Strauss’s gorgeous song Morgen, originally written for soprano voice:

No one could sound less like Callas; but, like hers, this is a voice you will never mistake for anyone else's.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 2 Dec 2013

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At the Isabella Blow exhibition, you can still smell the scent from her clothes…

As I walked through the upper galleries of Fashion Galore!, an exhibition at Somerset House celebrating the life and collection of the late Isabella Blow, I noticed a faint but seductive scent. I asked an attendant if perfume was being piped into the room to create a sensual as well as visual experience. "No", she replied, "but it could be coming from the clothes. Isabella practically bathed herself with it from head to toe every day. It’s on all her clothes." Now that is taking things into a whole new terrain. This scent, Fracas by Robert Piguet, is Isabella in absentia. Unlike other retrospectives of famous fashion designers, this is no routine roll-call of greatest hits from the dusty archive. This scent jolted me into awareness, that I was peering into a real person’s wardrobe. It’s all the more heartbreaking experience walking through the galleries knowing that she committed suicide six years ago, and in such a shocking way. To put a job title to what Isabella Blow did is hard. You can say she was a stylist, a talent spotter, an art director, a personality. You can say she was a fashion genius: she was the first to spot the potential of Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy, Hussein Chalayan, Julien Macdonald, Sophie Dahl and Stella Tennent – to name a few. She bought McQueen’s entire collection from his St Martins graduate show. She certainly knew a good thing when she saw it.

The clothes, hats and shoes she collected were astonishing. Some of them challenge gravity itself. Others were outlandish in their audacity yet slyly witty – like the Rolls Royce hat by Treacy complete with the Silver Lady atop and a metal shield standing in as a veil. Some pieces were created by blowtorching black lace. A dress by Chalayan actually had iron filings engrained into the fabric to create a rusted patina. This is fashion as living art, sculpted assidiously so their natural forms bend to their creator's will. Feathers assume volume, metal appears soft, fur becomes geometric.

However, it is their artistic expression that leaves an imprint on your brain as you stroll through the galleries. The pieces are by turn whimsical and morbid, at time both together. You’re never two steps away from something darker, especially with the gothic brilliance of McQueen’s creations. Her collection is all so irresistible that you can't walk away without an emotional response. They provoke you.

This exhibition is a love letter to Isabella, by her great friend and fellow High Priestess of Fashion, Daphne Guinness. When Isabella died, Guinness bought her entire collection in order to preserve the integrity of her vision. And here we have it – all in one place, thanks to Guinness’s foresight.

Fashion Galore! brings Isabella Blow vividly to life, not least through films of her interviews, in which she was always wearing iconic headwear by Philip Treacy, but also through little tales of her idiosyncratic ways. When she was assistant to Anna Wintour, for example, she used to wipe her boss's desk only with Perrier water. And her love of pink – she wrote all her Rolodex cards with pink ink. I love the fact that it’s not just any old pink ink – it has to be Yard-o-Led Claret.

These galleries in Somerset House provide the perfect setting: the monastic vaulted stone ceilings meld with Isabella’s love of medieval history. Indeed many of her photo shoots were styled with that period in mind, like her photo spread for The Face, and her collaboration with David LaChapelle.

As you leave the exhibition, you’re confronted by heavy black velvet curtains, like you’re about to walk through to a 19th-century Parisian funeral parlour. In the middle of the curtains is an oval momento showing a blurred black and white picture of Isabella's back. Mysteriously you can't figure out her head there. She’s fleeing away, into the ether, as if she’s saying: stop here and peer no more, for where I’m going you cannot follow.

Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! Is at Somerset House, London until 2nd March 2014.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 26 Nov 2013 

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Gloriana set at Covent Garden

Royal Opera's postmodern take on Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, successfully combining Elizabethan costume with a 1950s post war sensibility (it was positioned as a play within a play). Richard Jones production. Sets by ULTZ. (Click for larger image)

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James Bond opening titles: Why 'From Russia with Love' is the odd one out (and the best)

Here's the second in my series of posts on classic film opening titles.

The Cold War is hot. Dominic Sandbrook is presenting a racy series on the BBC. A Storyville documentary recently profiled the "Third Man", Kim Philby. Ian McEwan’s latest book Sweet Tooth is set in the world of MI5, while Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical homes in on the Profumo affair.

The films that created the original Cold War aesthetic, of course, were the James Bond franchise movies. They are the real thing – many of which were made as the Cold War was happening. Last year the Barbican presented a comprehensive review of the art that went into making 007 who he was: from props to costumes, set designs to title sequences. This highly graphic, beautifully crafted title art graced the entrance to the exhibition on multi screens, and visitors could see at once how they compared to each other visually. Over half a century, these titles managed to look amazingly coherent, as if one single person masterminded all of them. There’s an unspoken core to their sensibility that cannot be diluted, and somehow we all know what it is instinctively.

A Bond title must have two ingredients: a damn good title song and overlapping graphic silhouettes of people – traditionally of women in motion, but lately featuring more of Daniel Craig’s Bond himself.

There are three exceptions to this rule: both Dr No (1962) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) feature John Barry’s theme music instead of a song. From Russia with Love does have a theme song sung by Matt Monro, itself a runaway hit at the time – but uncharacteristically this is placed at the end of the film.

From Russia with Love is my favourite of all the Bond title sequences, probably because it’s the odd one out. The film launches straight into an orchestral arrangement of the title song, but with an urgency and pace that's absent from Matt Monro's wistful delivery, and I love that.

The way this is carried off visually is deceptively simple: low-tech projections of type (News Gothic, if you want to know) on closely cropped body parts, in nightclub lighting against a black background. That's the measure of it. Yet it’s quite sophisticated at the same time: that flash of a startled face with 007 over it, that slow, twisting hand-dance interjected with quick shaking of the hips. The distortion of coloured typography going in and out of focus, stretched and teased out of shape, at times illegible, was new and daring at the time. What this title sequence has that somehow later Bond titles lost is warmth and sensuality. They were to become much cooler and brassier.

To understand this piece of work you need to place it in the context of what title sequences looked like in the Fifties and early Sixties. The designer Saul Bass pioneered a style which dominated cinematic titles: his classics for Vertigo, North by Northwest and The Man with the Golden Arm were universally admired and copied. It’s a style that relied heavily on animated hard-edged geometric shapes. As late as 1963 when From Russia with Love was released, titles still employed this technique, like Stanley Donen’s Charade from the same year.

But things were changing, both within the genre of Bond films and in the wider world of cinema. Films were coming out of their love affair with classic Hitchcock-style titles, in favour of a more naturalistic and punchier way to enter a movie. From Russia with Love straddles both film and graphics: it’s a unique combination that the Bond franchise was to hold on to and own, refining and polishing in years to come.

The next Bond film would set the mould in terms of what a Bond title ought to look and sound like. Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger is larger than life, fatalistic and glamorous – a tradition which Adele has successfully revived in Skyfall. That sensibility is yet to find expression in From Russia with Love. We’re right on the cusp of change.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 25 Nov 2013

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Here you go – beautiful, hummable arias from modern operas. Have a listen…

Most people's perception of 20th-century opera is that it's elitist and impenetrable. Modern operas break all the conventions of what has gone before. A lot of them are either atonal (Wozzeck, Le Grand Macabre), minimalist (Nixon in China, Satyagraha), or at the very least full of discords. Having a hummable melody was SO not going with the programme back then. Any self-regarding and progressive composer wouldn't go anywhere near them. Operas that have back-to-back tunes are called "musicals". We all know that.

But is that really true? I can think of quite a few 20th-century operas where the traditional concept of "aria" pervades. And they’re pretty tuneful arias at that too. Bernstein’s Candide, for example, has the wonderful "Glitter and Be Gay" – a coloratura roller-coaster. Here’s a performance of high camp by the Meryl Streep of the opera world, Diana Damrau:

That surely deserves a standing ovation!

In 1954 Aaron Copland wrote a sublime aria called "Laurie’s song" for his opera The Tender Land. Set in the Midwest during the Great Depression, and inspired by Walker Evans's evocative photographs, it was premiered at the New York City Opera (which was sadly declared bankrupt and closed its doors recently). Dawn Upshaw gives a wonderful performance here:

Before Kurt Weill became a Broadway sensation he wrote some wonderful opera in his native Germany – some are well known, others less so. This song, "Das Lied Des Lotterieagenten" is from his Der Silbersee (Silverlake) of 1933. It premiered just three weeks after the Nazis seized power. Der Silbersee is a story of guilt, greed, exploitation and the ultimately triumph of the good will within mankind. In the story a police officer wins the lottery. He is subsequently inspired to help a man he shot and crippled, whom he believe to be basically of good character. This is the song of the lottery agent. The seduction of money is expressed in the swaggering dance-like rhythms.

And as a final treat, here's "The Trees on the Mountain" from the operaSusannah by Carlisle Floyd. Susannah is a modern retelling of the Susannah and the Elders story (also depicted by Handel). Set in Tennessee, the story follows the heroine as she’s persecuted by her local small-minded church community, because she’s pretty.

The composer Carlisle Floyd was born in South Carolina, and this music, influenced by Appalachian folk songs, is Susannah’s lament for her innocence. You can see it as a modern update of the Willow Song fromOtello, full of sorrow and foreboding. Cheryl Studer gives a beautifully poignant performance here.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 20 Nov 2013

[operandesign]

Opening Titles: How we enter the Godless world of Se7en

As a graphic designer I've always been fascinated by the art and trickery of films' opening titles. So here's the first in a series:

This is, famously, a film about a serial killer who exploits the themes of the Seven Deadly Sins. David Fincher's film is a meditation on whether evil is born of nature (a theory espoused by the cop Brad Pitt plays) or nurture (Morgan Freeman, the more experienced cop).

In the title sequence, we're given the serial killer’s point of view, making us increasingly uneasy. The soundtrack is screechy and non-diegetic – meaning that its source is outside the story. We're on the edge of our seats immediately.

The camera is placed tight and close throughout, shrouded in shadows, creating an air of secrecy and also concentration. Specific emphasis is placed on cutting, piecing, crossing out of artefacts – all destructive activities. The crossing out of words in a medical book on pregnancy refers to the Gwyneth Paltrow character, who plays Brad Pitt’s wife, and is pregnant with their child.

We return again and again to the pages being turned. In between we’re shown gridded paper, photocopies, pages of writing: a suggestion that we’re dealing with a highly intelligent being, a genius of evil, perhaps, and he is scrupulously careful in preparation. But at the same time we wonder what is being planned here. This planning activity is important, as we will learn in the film that the villain plots his crimes more than a year ahead.

At 0:23 there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flash of a corpse. It’s deliberately done subliminally to create a feeling of nausea. Notice that the colours are desaturated, sometimes sepia, sometimes blue, but occasionally jolting us with images saturated blood-red. The naive hand-written credits and the typewriter font are done with an unsettling ghosting effect, heightening this sense of primal evil. Also worth noting is the distressed 35mm film stock effect, with scratches and flickering.

Everything here conspires to emphasise vandalisation, decay and turmoil. In the final frames the word "God" is plucked out… for we’re about to enter a Godless world.

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 13 Nov 2013

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Why does an opera by Donizetti suddenly switch into the style of Verdi?

The other day a work colleague asked me this question: "Are ‘rare’ operas worth listening to at all? Surely they have fallen into neglect for very good reasons? Aren’t we be safer sticking to the Bohèmes and the Lucias?"

Umm… here you get a cop-out answer from me. Yes and no. Yes, because sometimes the work is an unmitigated disaster, both musically and dramatically. I can think of quite a few.

But once in a while history draws a veil over a certain work because it's damned by circumstances and changing tastes. Here’s an aria, "Angelo casto e bel", from just such an opera: Donizetti’s Il duca d’Alba. But there's a catch which I'll explain later:

It’s a beautiful, soaring aria – and Rolando Villazon makes a lovely job of it. But… the music sounds almost Verdian, don't you think? Which is odd.

Il duca d’Alba is the completed version of Le duc d’Albe. Donizetti left the opera unfinished half way through, in 1839, having written Acts 1 and 2 but only sketched out melodies for the final two acts. There’s a beautiful tenor aria in there, and, not wanting to waste a good tune, he transferred it in his grand opera La favorite (1840), where it became "Ange si pur".

Fast-forward to 1881, 33 years after Donizetti's death. His pupil Matteo Salvi decided to prepare a performance score for Il duca d’Alba but found a hole where the big tenor aria should be. So what did he do? He composed one himself – some say with the help of Ponchielli. The result is "Angelo casto e bel" – written at a time when La Traviata and Aida were among the world's best-loved operas and bel canto was a distant memory.

So that explains why it sounds like Verdi. And not bad Verdi at that…

This article is from my blog on the Daily Telegraph Originally published on 12 Nov 2013