Horlick, Tchenguiz and Madoff played out in full operatic glory

Nick Goodway
11 Jun 2009

THE bel canto operas of Gaetano Donizetti are too rarely performed. So it was a great pleasure last weekend to go with my family to Opera Holland Park to see a splendid production of Roberto Devereux. (I made the picnic and Mrs G bought the tickets - it's not all corporate hospitality in my world.)

The plot involving Queen Elizabeth, the Earl of Essex and the Duke and Duchess of Nottingham is frankly idiotic. But the music is superb and the whole enterprise was entered into with a gusto that left me spellbound.

Imagine my surprise then to come in to work and find on my desk a small sheath of paper entitled: The Queen of Funds, an opera by Donizetti to be performed in Hyde Park, Summer 2009. I will reprint it in full.

Overture: Rousing music, no libretto. Queen Nicola escapes her German captors and flees to sanctuary with the French. A brief sojourn before she returns to London and takes her rightful place on the throne.

Act One: At the court, Queen Nicola (soprano) opens the act with the haunting aria "Dammi i vostri soldi" (Give me your money), which she sings to the assembled courtiers including the Duke of Hampshire (baritone) and Earl of Merseyside (tenor). They hand her bags of gold but it's not enough to fill her chest made from an oak tree from the forest of Bramdean.

The scene shifts to the palace of an Iranian prince in exile, Prince Vincente (tenor). Queen Nicola woos him with the soaring aria "Sono la donna eccellente" (I am the Superwoman). He hands over enough gold to fill her chest. This is guarded by Baron Larcombi (bass). Back in the court, the Queen is visited by a foreign snake-oil salesman, Count Madoffi (tenor). They duet with him singing "Ponzi e buono" and her declaiming "Speculero." Madoffi surreptitiously removes several bags of gold from the chest as he departs.

Prince Vincente enters declaring "Dove sono i miei soldi?" (Where has my money gone?"). Queen Nicola tries to soothe him with "Nessun dorma" (NOT that one), implying no one in her realm will sleep until she has made the money back. In fact, she is plotting to take full control of what is left in the chest herself.

Act Two: Throughout this act, a chorus of spies, agents and heralds rushes in and out. Sadly, all of them wear muzzles, which makes their singing hard to hear and almost impossible to understand. Prince Vincente enters the court in a rage and belts out "Deve andare, tutti devono andare" (She must go, they all must go).

The next scene is a haunting trio with Queen Nicola "Prendero il controllo" (I will take control), Prince Vincente "Non potete vincere" (You cannot win) and Baron Larcombi "Vada via" (Go away).

Act Three: Opens with the entire cast crammed into a small room in Prince Vincente's palace. Everyone reprises their best song from the earlier acts at the same time. The Duke of Hampshire's voice rises above the babble as he sings "Ho una soluzione" (I have a solution). But he is too late. In the dramatic finale, Prince Vincente and Baron Larcombi stab each other in a fatal embrace. The spies, agents and heralds remove their gags and sing the final chorus "Diciamo la verita" (We tell the truth). Queen Nicola tears off her wig as she finally goes mad and descends into the fires of hell.

Sadly, there is an alternative ending where a notary arrives on stage at the end of Act Two and - not even in song - announces that all the parties have reached an "amicable agreement" and will making not further comment. Donizetti, quite correctly, had scrawled his quill through this.

Christopher Clarke and the small is beautiful approach to wealth management in a crisis

I DOFF my cap to Christopher Clarke, chairman of wealth manager Rensburg Sheppards, who this week explained in detail to shareholders just how wrong he had got it a year ago when he told them he thought financial markets had stabilised. The FTSE 100 then was just above 5800, and today it is below 4500.

"There's not nearly enough humility expressed in life in general these days," Clarke told me.

I agree and I also think this is one of the reasons the small and usually older wealth managers have fared better than their brash, larger counterparts. They treat their clients well in the bad times as well as the good. Or as Clarke puts it: "We give them some TLC."

A glance at Rensburg's annual results confirms this. Funds under management were down 23% at £10 billion in the year to the end of March.

That's not bad in a period when the FTSE 100 fell 31%, and some fund managers (no names, no pack drill) saw their funds under management fall by 40%-plus.

Wealth management for the last couple of years has been about preserving an individual's capital, not making it grow fantastically or yield a huge income. "I'm not saying we didn't make a single hedge fund investment," says Clarke. "But they weren't very frequent nor particularly large."

C&G bleats: a country mile off target

I do not wish to alienate the entire population of Gloucestershire (part of my family lives there). But the reaction to the closure of Cheltenham & Gloucester's branch network in the county was frankly quite appalling.

Many seemed still to believe their savings were in a nice local building society when, in fact, it had been taken over by Lloyds in 1995 even before it bought Trustee Savings Bank.

Several expressed the opinion that Lloyds should be closing Halifax branches (670) rather than C&G ones (164). Not much commercial logic there.

But the strangest comment of the lot was the broadly accented gent who said: "It's like they were to shut down Gloucester Cathedral." What could he have meant?