Dorset’s winning formula

Dorset Opera seems to receive far less coverage than the rest of the country-house summer shows, although it is in most respects well up to the standard of any of them except Glyndebourne, which is in a category, social and artistic, of its own. The Dorset productions take place in the Coade Theatre of Bryanston School, and are the result of a brief but what must be an incredibly intense period of preparation, with some big names in the major roles, and the smaller parts and chorus taken by a large collection of young singers who are strenuously trained for the week-long rehearsals. I like going on the last day, when one opera is performed at 2 p.m. and another at 7 p.m.

The first opera this year was Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, sung in a new English translation, though for much of the time it might have been in Kazakh for all that one could understand. Enunciation is something that Dorset, like every other operatic enterprise, needs to work on.

Eugene Onegin ought really to be called Tatyana, the heroine being the only character that Tchaikovsky could identify with and bring to vivid life. The remainder are on a fairly steep slope of inertia, with the eponymous anti-hero well towards the bottom. He was taken by Mark Stone, who made Onegin, to begin with, even more glacial than usual and certainly than he need be, but became more animated later. Stone flirted convincingly in the fatal country-ball scene, and gave his impressive all to the final scene, in which the by now supremely self-possessed Tatyana refuses to give way to his implorings, leaving him to bewail his ‘fate’, which is what the composer and his creations are almost all reduced to.