English Touring Opera continues to be the most heroic of companies. This spring season it is performing at 17 locations, from Exeter to Perth, Belfast to Norwich. And in the many years that I have been going to its productions, there has been no compromise in standards and absolutely no contraction of repertoire to the familiar and the safe, if anything the reverse.
Last autumn it premièred Goehr’s tough Promised End, an immense artistic achievement. And now they are putting on Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr Fox, an operatic adaptation of Roald Dahl, with young children from each of the relevant towns playing the fox cubs — and having their names printed in the lavish accompanying booklet, with CD attached. Actually, I can’t say I was much impressed with either the narrative thread of Fox, or the run-of-the-mill music, but the piece wasn’t designed for my enjoyment, and the large audience of children in Cambridge’s Arts Theatre seemed spellbound.
I must admit, too, that it seems to me an act of misplaced valour to tour with Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, which has re-established itself in the repertoire, but which I find, despite the obvious lovely arias, dramatically stagnant and a very long way from Mozart at his transcendent best, so I gave that a miss, shamefacedly. However, what did afford immense pleasure were the two parts of Puccini’s Il Trittico, which is the other enterprising evening in the tour.
Il Tabarro (The Cloak) has claims to be the one opera which really deserves the word verismo, so sloppily applied over a vast area of Italian operas from about 1890 to 1920. Many of those are, even by Latin standards, coarsely melodramatic, whereas Il Tabarro, though it ends in murder, is mainly a poignant rendering of the tedium and frustration of daily life on Seine barges.
As always Puccini is the most painstaking of all operatic scene-setters, and the compact music which he employs to evoke the place, the atmosphere, the passing characters, and the central three figures with their miserable relationships, is masterly, though also self-denying. For his greatness lies in the glorious expansiveness with which his characters express their ecstasies and, mainly, torments; while the wretched inhabitants of the barge suffer within a constricted range of feeling, and the music is correspondingly sombre rather than exuberantly anguished.
ETO’s staging is perfect, claustrophobic and dingy, and within it the minimal action is all too true to life; only the final murder and its revelation is less powerfully handled than it needs to be. All three of the central figures are extremely well taken, though Julie Unwin as Giorgetta, needing the love of her lost child and of a more appealing bed-mate than her husband, occasionally shrieks. Simon Thorpe, the barge owner Michele, makes an ideally pathetic yet repellent figure; while Charne Rochford as Luigi, the stevedore who has what Michele lacks, sounds as if at any moment he might turn into Rodolfo, and has a presence to match. A small masterwork? Tabarro is too conscientiously drab for that, but it sticks in the mind.
Gianni Schicchi is an undoubted masterwork on a small scale, and ETO’s production, though unnecessarily updated to Downton Abbey days, with an absurdly cluttered set, does it almost full justice. It’s a pity that most of the grasping relatives of the deceased Buoso ham so relentlessly, when the first rule of comic opera acting is: underplay it! But the young lovers fortunately don’t join in the mugging, and Paula Sides gave us an ‘O mio babbino caro’ of irresistible radiance, while Ashley Catling’s celebration of Florence was a fine tenor counterpart.
What made the show wonderful was the Schicchi of Richard Mosley-Evans, vocally magnificent and acted with a remarkable sense of telling detail. Schicchi can be a lot darker than this, but under Michael Rosewell’s ebullient baton this provided 50 minutes of bliss.
I wish I had more space to celebrate the Royal College of Music’s Rodelinda, which opened this year’s Handel Festival. It was one of the finest Handel opera performances I have ever been to (I saw the first cast), though the sets are ghastly and I’ve had it with combats for men and power dressing for women in baroque opera; and am not a fan of corrugated offices as sets.
Still, all was forgiven thanks to the superb singing of almost all the cast, but above all of Eleanor Dennis in the title role and still more of Ben Williamson as her husband Bertarido. His is the loveliest counter-tenor voice I have heard, and he acted this complex role with a subtlety and conviction which actually brought the opera to vivid dramatic life. And the conducting of Laurence Cummings was far more exciting and propulsive than usual, so that this enormous work seemed, not short, but to justify its length.
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