English Touring Opera has begun its autumn season and the miracle isn’t so much that they’re touring at all these days, but that they do it so well. Two generations back, this was the natural condition of opera in the UK: not Netrebko at Covent Garden, but agile, medium-scale companies playing at the Wolverhampton Grand or the Sheffield Lyceum alongside the panto and the 1950s equivalent of Friends: The Musical and An Evening with Sandi Toksvig. Don’t believe it? It’s all in Alexandra Wilson’s new book Someone Else’s Music, which is out now, and which all British opera buffs should read because it’ll make their jaws drop.
Case in point: the second stop on ETO’s current tour was the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, the venue in which Tippett’s King Priam was premièred – not just toured, mind; premièred – in 1962. The theatre still has that Festival of Britain ambience; ETO, meanwhile, was the last significant UK company to revive King Priam. A coincidence, but the point remains that ETO never restricts itself to the safe or obvious. Since Covid, they’ve performed operas by Judith Weir, Bellini, Monteverdi and Rimsky-Korsakov, with excellent (mostly British) casts and production values that put some of our national companies to shame.
The current tour takes them from Darlington to Barnstaple with new stagings of The Elixir of Love and The Rape of Lucretia as well as a children’s opera, Little Terror, and the chance to see Britten in the Belgrade seemed too good to pass up. Lucretia is directed by ETO’s artistic director Robin Norton-Hale with designs – a fortified concrete wall; a campfire amid ruins – that suggest a society traumatised by conflict. Britten’s Chorus comprises two far from reliable narrators, played here by the tenor William Morgan and soprano Jenny Stafford. They place flowers at an improvised shrine to the dead Lucretia (Clare Presland) and generally infiltrate the action, oddly distant but somehow never quite distant enough for comfort.
So while Stafford conveyed sincere distress, Morgan hinted at amusement and a troubling complicity, singing with seductive eloquence. The scene when his silhouette appeared behind the veils that shield Lucretia’s all-too-fragile privacy was chilling – one of many instances in which Norton-Hale quietly pulls the floor from under you. There’s an unsettling charisma to the music that Britten writes for the rapist Tarquinius, at least when performed with the sort of reckless charm that Timothy Nelson brought to the role. Like the rest of the cast, Nelson was wholly inside his character and perfectly comprehensible without the surtitles; an impressive foil to Presland’s nobly sung Lucretia.
Overall, it’s easily the finest cast I’ve seen in this production
Presland was the still, anguished centre of the drama, though her servants Lucia (Rosie Lomas) and Bianca (Jane Monari) were deftly drawn too, and touching in all sorts of small ways. Britten helps there, of course, and it’s hard not to marvel at the precision with which his music locks on to the core of an emotion, striking cleanly and lethally. The 13-piece orchestra is perfect for a touring company and under Gerry Cornelius every silence is a force-multiplier, with cold fear in the merest rattle of a side-drum. The audience in Coventry wasn’t large, but perhaps it was never going to be. This is strong stuff.
The cast is the big story in the Royal Opera’s revival of The Magic Flute, not that David McVicar’s production (revived here by Ruth Knight) is any less enjoyable. It’s sublime, in fact, in its play of light and shadow, and its sense of an Enlightenment world yielding to the terror and wonder of romanticism. If you want a Magic Flute that’s anything but a pantomime – one that might even make you weep – you should hurry to see this 22-year-old staging, because sooner or later it’s going to be retired and we all know what they’ll give us then. Brutalist sets, Oxfam costumes and Pamina as an ass-kicking girlboss.
The Pamina here is Lucy Crowe, by turns impulsive, radiant and tender. As Tamino, Amitai Pati has a properly heroic manner and a voice filled with Italianate sunshine; Kathryn Lewek is tragic as well as fiery as the Queen of the Night and in Soloman Howard, we get a Sarastro with low notes of textured mahogany to match the autumnal bassoons and horns that Marie Jacquot, conducting, places at the heart of Mozart’s soundworld.
Overall, it’s easily the finest cast I’ve seen in this production, but it’d all go for nothing without Huw Montague Rendall’s tousled, deeply loveable Papageno. Rendall’s star is rising so fast that it’s becoming difficult to stay abreast of his achievements; harder still to credit that the effortless musical comedian we saw at Covent Garden was such an impeccably aristocratic Count Almaviva at Glyndebourne this summer. Papageno doesn’t have much luck with his birds, but Rendall had the matinee audience eating out of his hand.
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