La Cenerentola, English National Opera, 27 September 2025

Coliseum

Images copyright: Mark Douet

Angelina – Deepa Johnny
Don Ramiro – Aaron Godfrey-Mays
Dandini – Charles Rice
Don Magnifico – Simon Bailey
Alidoro – David Ireland
Clorinda – Isabelle Peters
Tisbe – Grace Durham

Director – Julia Burbach
Set designs – Herbert Murauer
Costumes – Sussie Juhlin-Wallén
Lighting – Malcolm Rippeth
Video – Hayley Egan
Choreography – Cameron McMillan

Dancers

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus director: Matthew Quinn)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Yi-Chen Lin (conductor)

Cinderella (Deepa Johnny), Don Ramiro (Aaron Godfrey-Mayes)

For the more Teutonically inclined of us, Rossini is an interesting case. He would doubtless have scoffed at the very idea, itself deeply German, of offering a ‘case’ at all: surely more the province of Wagner and his endless stream of interpreters. Interpreting Rossini might even seem beside the point; as Carl Dahlhaus put it, setting up his guiding twin style and culture contrast between Beethoven and Rossini, for him ‘a far-reaching rift in the concept of music’, there was ‘nothing to “understand” about the magic that emanated from Rossini’s music’. That is far from straightforwardly a pejorative observation, though it is difficult to avoid the implication of lesser, secondary status vis-à-vis Beethoven (and his successors). It might even be made to stand with Nietzsche’s celebrated elevation of Carmen over Wagner, though that even more so is ‘really’ about Wagner, not Bizet. At some level, though, one knows what Dahlhaus means, irrespective of one’s own particular stance or preference. There is something immediate, even unreflective to much of this music; one does not engage in a search for music, or if one does, one is readily confounded, given the way the same music can be made to suffer quite different purposes, brazenly un-textbound, attesting to the truth, if not the whole truth, in Wagner’s oft-misunderstood observation of ‘absolute melody’. 

There needs, though, to be magic (as doubtless there does, in a very different way, in Wagner). It will suspend disbelief, transform the at-times disturbingly formulaic into an intriguing formalism, and among other things, simply delight. That was not absent on the first night of ENO’s new Cenerentola, but nor was it as present as it might have been. Yi-Chen Lin’s stewardship of the score proved surprisingly tentative, highlighting rather than transmuting potential longueurs, too often feeling and sometimes being oddly slow. I suspect that was partly to be attributed to the requirements of singing in English – a very wordy English at that – but it was not only that. The Overture, for instance, came across as a random assemblage of unconnected musical ideas, with little attempt to weld them into something that was more than the sum of its parts. Too often, the music, some splendid playing from the ENO Orchestra notwithstanding, lacked contrast, be it dynamic or of tempo; all was too much of a muchness. There were a few too many cases of discrepancy between pit and stage – one in particular lasting several bars – but such things tend to iron themselves out during a run. 

In that context, the singers could only be expected to shine intermittently, which they did. Deepa Johnny’s Angelina/Cinderella was in general beautifully sung, with an accurate if not necessarily expressive line in coloratura. She did much to fashion an attractive character of sincerity; if there were no hidden depths, that might be said of everyone else and is more a reflection of the work than anything else. Her accent sometimes veered awkwardly between different sides of the Atlantic: one of several reasons why Italian will generally prove the better choice for such repertoire. Aaron Godfrey-Mayers offered a Ramiro, tender and ardent by turn, who again had one long to hear what he might have done in Italian, without in this case feeling unduly shortchanged: a significant achievement. Charles Rice’s Dandini was similarly well sung and acted, alive in the moment in a properly Rossinian sense, and fearless in his trickier vocal moments. David Ireland and Simon Bailey gave the strongest sense of commitment to the translation, the former as Alidoro almost giving one the impression it might have been written that way, the latter as Don Magnifico spinning and relishing a fine, old-school ENO line in patter. As the sisters Clorinda and Tisbe, Isabelle Peters and Grace Durham steered a judicious line between opera and pantomime, though could often have projected and enunciated more strongly in the cavernous Coliseum. Chorus and dancers offered variety, scenic diversion, and a welcome degree of greater framing. 

That might have been developed further had Julia Burbach’s production not felt quite so caught between two (or more) stools. A few doses of more detailed as opposed to surface realism, be it grimy or ‘traditional’, and/or of glitter, magic, and, dare I say, of spectacle might have helped. Herbert Murauer’s set could not have been cheap, yet a central lift that did not go up or down served little purpose; if two levels were desirable, a staircase might have done a better job of linking them. Burbach’s staging also imparted a sense of having failed to establish – in reality, probably having failed to communicate – quite what its guiding principles were and how they played out in the drama, which came across as less than it does on the page, though Christoper Cowell’s relentlessly self-regarding translation – often more a paraphrase – did not help. Many in the audience, though, seemed to find the startlingly novel concept of rhyme hilarious, especially when mixed with increasingly tedious demotic anachronism. 

Cinderella, Dandini (Charles Rice)

If, despite the shortcomings, this made for an enjoyable enough evening, it could readily have offered more. The opera’s general trajectory and Rossini’s musical formalism could and surely should have been conveyed more consistently, with both greater polish and a stronger sense of what ‘it’, be it the opera ‘itself’ or its staging, was actually about. Children dressed as miniature versions of Don Magnifico (in his case, with beard) and his daughters, appeared on stage for a while, eliciting mirth and bewilderment. Alas, I cannot tell you why. A woman who often, though not always, accompanied Simon Bailey turned out, according to the programme, to be Angelina’s mother. It is a reasonable enough idea, but needed greater attention to communication and implication. Mice ran around for a while, without really doing anything beyond that. Even a promising sense of literal framing, members of the chorus stepping out of the prince’s ancestral pictures, led nowhere in particular. That seemed in retrospect, alas, a little too accurate a snapshot of the action as a whole.