Opera review: The Barbican’s Albert Herring was a perfect evening

Of this year’s three musical birthday boys, Wagner has fared, in England, surprisingly well, Verdi inexplicably badly, and Britten, as was to be expected, has received the royal treatment. No one could have predicted, though, that the culmination of the celebrations would be as glorious as it was: a single semi-staged performance at the Barbican of what, in my minority opinion, is his operatic masterpiece, Albert Herring. Surely after attending it, or hearing it on Radio 3, that might become a majority opinion. For what this performance revealed was a work that is inspired throughout, has no longueurs, which are to be found in almost all Britten’s other operas, even Peter Grimes, is cornucopian in its musical inventiveness, and, like all the very few truly great comedies, is unostentatiously serious, generous in its humanity, and leaves the responsive spectator glowing.

Several of Britten’s other operas are preferred to Herring mainly, I think, because they create a sense of unease, which is taken to be deeper than pleasure: Screw, Rape, Budd, Wingrave, Death in Venice, even Midsummer Night’s Dream, create feelings of perplexity, often and obviously connected with underlying and suppressed sexual pre-occupations. None of his other works contains anything like the cheerful eroticism of Herring, in the uncomplicated figures of Sid and Nancy, taken here by Marcus Farnsworth and Kitty Whately. They are the Frau Minne to Albert’s Tristan: Sid brews the potion which, just like the one in Tristan, does nothing more than release what Albert is already feeling, or would be if he weren’t crushed by Mum, marvellously incarnated by Catherine Wyn-Rogers at her finest. The director, Kenneth Richardson, seems to have told all his singing actors not to overdo it, and this Mum is clearly the latest in generations who have been brought up to make sure they don’t enjoy themselves.