‘There is good music, bad music, and music by Ambroise Thomas,’ said Emmanuel Chabrier, but then, Chabrier said a lot of things. I adore Chabrier – who couldn’t love the man who wrote España and turned Tristan und Isolde into a jaunty quadrille? – but it doesn’t do to take him too literally. Thomas ended his career as a notoriously crusty director of the Paris Conservatoire, and when the French musical establishment puts you on a pedestal younger composers invariably start hurling the merde. Scraps of Thomas’s music survive in all sorts of odd corners (a snippet from his opera Mignon crops up in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). I’ve always found it rather appealing.
The Buxton International Festival’s production of Thomas’s 1868 tragedy Hamlet confirms that it is, indeed, extremely listenable. The libretto is based on Alexandre Dumas’s version of Shakespeare, and it’s calculated to turn Bard-worshippers puce. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are cut and Polonius and Horatio are barely walk-on parts. Brilliantly, Thomas and his librettists Carré and Barbier also rewrite the ending so the Ghost gatecrashes Ophelia’s funeral like the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, while Hamlet survives to be acclaimed King. And if you think that’s sacrilege, you can’t have been to Stratford-upon-Avon recently.
In any case, Thomas’s score, which can feel a little polite on disc (think Gounod and soda), is actually very effective in the theatre. With Adrian Kelly conducting the orchestra of Opera North it’s trim, it’s passionate, and you still get all of old Shakey’s juiciest bits: the gravediggers, the play-within-the-play and a stonking coloratura mad scene for Ophelia – sorry, Ophélie (Yewon Han). At one point in the Buxton production Hamlet – sorry, ’Amlet (Gregory Feldmann) – even addresses himself to a skull, and the fact that the director, Jack Furness, manages this without self-consciousness speaks volumes. Furness engages with Thomas’s opera on its own terms, and plays it for what it is.
So it’s updated – suits and evening wear – but you barely notice, with the chorus gliding around like predatory caterers. Sami Fendall’s set designs are minimalist (not much more than a flight of steps) but they’re so skilfully lit (by Jake Wiltshire) that they evoke the whole noir-ish, shifting world of Elsinore: shadows, corridors and blasted wastes. The appearance of the Ghost (Per Bach Nissen), meanwhile, is a real coup de théâtre. The atmosphere is as compelling as it is oppressive, and with Hamlet as a sort of tormented hipster amid the upscale couture of the court, Furness lands hit after palpable dramatic hit.
Certainly, Feldmann and Han seemed to be giving their all, in a pair of enormously extended and taxing leading roles. Feldmann conveys Hamlet’s seesawing naivety and angst as vividly as anything you’ll see at the RSC, but he’s got vocal stamina too, sounding nearly as fresh at the start of the final scene as he had three hours previously. The same goes for Han’s touching Ophélie. Her voice had a shaded, poignant undertow that added multiple layers to her huge, virtuosic final aria – which was received in icy silence by the Buxton audience. They’re hard to please in the High Peak.
Alastair Miles was a proud, oaky-sounding Claudius and Allison Cook, as Gertrude, found powerful reserves of nuance and pathos. Like everything about this production, they delivered more than the sum of their parts.
Feldmann conveys Hamlet’s seesawing naivety and angst as vividly as anything you’ll see at the RSC
The singing and the playing are also the thing in Opera Holland Park’s new staging of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Cecilia Stinton’s meat-and-two-veg production doesn’t spring any particular surprises, but if you like BBC period dramas you’ll enjoy the tailcoats and stovepipe hats (Stinton has updated the action to the era of Walter Scott). Three graves dominate the front of the stage, to remind you that this is not – despite the evidence of the costumes – a revival of Oliver!.
OHP does have one killer card to play. This company has always excelled at casting, and pretty much everyone here is the genuine bel canto article, pouring out those long aching melodies at fever heat. In fact for large parts of the evening Morgan Pearse, as the heartless Enrico, sounds even sexier and more lustrous than Jose de Eca (as a Heathcliff-like Edgardo) – though when Eca hits his full-throated stride, it’s more than worth the wait.
The big news, though, is Jennifer France’s role debut as Lucia. It’s dangerous for a critic to have too many preconceptions, so take it as you will when I say that the hushed intensity of her singing in the quiet passages and her absolute control in the mad scene exceeded my (high) expectations. The rest of the cast (and indeed the City of London Sinfonia under Michael Papadopoulos) were audibly inspired by France’s singing, and her final scenes – bloodied, bedraggled and caked in mud – are the kind of theatre that stays with you.
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