Past Production Reviews
8That said the set is the star. The dilapidated conservatory in amongst the reeds and marshes feel like they have been part of the landscape for years, and sets just the right eerie tone. You are transported wholly into the house and its machinations, and Designer Soutra Gilmour must be praised for such an achievement.
The same could be said of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, his invincible 1954 chamber opera based on Henry James’s novella. Psychic forces grip the Governess in charge of two children, who may or may not be in thrall to two ghosts. In this first Regent’s Park Open Air theatre/ENO venture, young singers from ENO’s Harewood Artists programme – Rhian Lois, William Morgan, Elgan Llyr Thomas – led a double cast (I heard the second), conducted with superb authority by ENO Mackerras fellow Toby Purser. The 13-strong chamber ensemble was impeccable. As the children Miles and Flora, Sholto McMillan and Ellie Bradbury were chillingly convincing. Sholto’s brilliant miming on a dummy keyboard (played for real by on-stage piano) was a tour de force, never mind the insolent purity of his treble voice.
This is a reworking of Purcell’s late seventeenth-century opera Dido and Aeneas, based on Virgil’s Aeneid and originally written for a London girls' school. It uses the original words and music, apart from a few cuts, but transposes it to the now of contemporary Southwark and makes the sorceress and her witches who plot Dido’s ruin into voices within her own head. Rachael Lloyd therefore sings both Dido and the Sorceress.
Seven fine musicians from ENO’s own orchestra, bolstered by the eloquent theorbo of David Miller, played Purcell’s score with idiomatic fluency under Valentina Peleggi’s firm direction, while a dozen sensitive choristers supplied the opera’s chorus, semi-chorus and small solo parts. Together they created an aural vista of the highest class. The three principals did well too, although Rachael Lloyd, admirable as ever, has a mezzo timbre that’s a few watts too bright for her mournful Dido. Her lament “When I am laid in earth” should ideally be more heartrending than it was here. Njabulo Madlala, who sang Jim in ENO’s recent Porgy and Bess, gave a strong account of the underwritten Aeneas, while 18-year-old Eyra Norman, an undergraduate at the RCM, more than held her own as Belinda with a youthful soprano that was wholly attuned to the director’s concept.
The tenor Peter Hoare was very impressive in the hugely demanding part of Orpheus the man (as opposed to Orpheus the myth and Orpheus the hero, also played well by Daniel Norman and Matthew Smith respectively) but the whole cast coped magnificently with the outlandish score.
This is the last of the four operas based on the Orpheus myth which the ENO had the wonderfully crazy idea of bringing together for the last few months of this year and on the whole the quartet has been a success. It began with Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice which is full of great music and tells effectively the basic story of Orpheus travelling to Hades to try to bring back his beloved Eurydice after her untimely death.
International opera houses such as Covent Garden need fail-safe productions of works that feature in most seasons, in which multiple casts can be accommodated as unfussily as possible. Now eight years old, and in its fourth reincarnation, Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser's staging of Madama Butterfly has, surprisingly perhaps, evolved into one of those dependables. Over the years, much of the kitsch that characterised it when new seems to have been quietly abandoned, although traces remain: the landscape, covered with what looks like pink bubble bath, that replaces the backdrop of Nagasaki when Butterfly makes her first appearance; and the tacky flapping gestures she makes as she dies. But generally the production's straightforwardness and refusal to labour political subtexts has become its strength, and its ability to retain its crispness is shown by this excellent revival, which Caurier and Leiser themselves returned to supervise.
