Alexandra Coghlan

A coherent evening of real opera: GSMD’s Triple Bill reviewed

In a digital world all you need is a laptop and you’re competing alongside the Met or Royal Opera – as the Virtual Opera Project showed with its new online L’enfant

Ella de Jongh and Tom Mole in Mascagni's oozing verismo treat Zanetto. Image: Mihaela Bodlovic

Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from which many institutions and artists won’t recover, it has also been a great equaliser. Suddenly there’s space to be heard, silence to be filled. In a digital world no one cares about the size of your stage. All you need is a laptop and a good idea and you’re competing alongside the Met or the Royal Opera.

In the case of the Virtual Opera Project it was a shed and a homemade green-screen. Oh, and a cast, chorus and creative team of well over 100. And did I mention the London Philharmonic Orchestra?

A brainchild of the first lockdown back in March, VOpera’s new film of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges is the best kind of small project. Big energy and, one assumes, even bigger chutzpah somehow turned director Rachael Hewer’s kitchen-table scheme into a major undertaking with the kind of starry participants who’d normally be spending their summers at Glyndebourne or Glimmerglass.

In a digital world all you need is a laptop and you’re competing alongside the Met or Royal Opera

If watching opera has become difficult during lockdown, then making it is all but impossible. Zoom auditions and rehearsals; singers asked to film and record themselves in their homes; a director forced to build her own special effects studio at the bottom of the garden; engineers painstakingly mixing orchestral tracks with umpteen solo vocal lines: Ravel’s opera may be short, but the process behind this production is immense.

The results are enchanting — or they would be if there were the least bit of sentimentality or kitsch to them. Ravel’s opera may be a child’s fantasy of talking squirrels and bats, armchairs and grandfather clocks come to life, but the emotions — all-consuming, vindictive rage, loneliness, remorse — are absolutely real.

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