Shut your eyes and enjoy

Peter Grimes
English National Opera

L’elisir d’amore
Royal Opera House

Norma
English Touring Opera, in Cambridge

So what contrast is being made? Are these townsfolk not only narrow-minded and prurient but merely acting? Is Ellen, and up to a point Grimes, the only person who has decent feelings, or anyway some feelings, and isn’t ashamed of them? Even the Balstrode of Gerald Finley, wonderfully sung, as one can take for granted, makes strange hieratic gestures, and speaks his concluding lines to Grimes very badly indeed, a tricky moment handled worse than I have known.

Musically, standards are extremely high, and I very much look forward to the Radio Three broadcast (11 July). Edward Gardner gets playing of extreme polish and precision from his orchestra, and whips up thrilling climaxes in the interludes. He has a superb cast, with Stuart Skelton, both in appearance and occasionally voice, recalling Jon Vickers. Roocroft, who seems to be in the early stages of a second, really great career, has tenderness, volume, warmth to make her a great Ellen. The smaller roles are as well cast as in Opera North’s production, and the chorus is tremendous. But that doesn’t prevent almost all their efforts from going for very little, thanks to the weird things they wear and the weirder ones they are expected to do. Even the stunning climax of the manhunt, with the reiterated yellings of Grimes’s name, makes little impact dramatically, since there is no context of involvement. Go, shut your eyes and don’t allow yourself a sneak peep, and you should have a great evening.

The perennial mystery of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore is how a comedy can be so relentlessly good-natured without being annoying. The Royal Opera has revived for the first time Laurent Pelly’s 2007 production of this evergreen, harmlessly updated to the late 1940s, with the famous high-rise of hay, the Lambrettas and the rest of it, and, though it is far from the most enchanting production I have seen, it is still a winner. I am less of a fan of Diana Damrau than everyone else, finding her tone shallow and a bit hard, but she is endearingly bossy. Giuseppe Filianotti is a decent, unmemorable Nemorino, Anthony Michaels-Moore a Belcore who doesn’t even pretend to be a charmer, merely bullies and struts. The star is the Dulcamara of Simone Alaimo, with an ingenious trailer of tricks. Bruno Campanella, the conductor, is not wasted on this piece.

Though I have been a loyal and usually a favourable supporter of English Touring Opera for many years, they don’t invite me to their productions, so I went to Norma under my own steam. It was a concert performance, in Cambridge’s West Road Concert Hall. The results were deafening, Michael Rosewell giving the excellent orchestra its head from the word go. What is remarkable is that Yvonne Howard, whom I had seen as the Second Norn two evenings previously, can sing all the notes of the fiendish title role, though she too was always loud, and mainly without expression. ‘You tremble...and for whom?’ she asked the treacherous Pollione pleasantly, where Callas makes the earth open. Justin Lavender replied in kind. This marvellous opera was a noisy romp.