The Long Christmas Dinner and A Dinner Engagement, Guildhall, 4 June 2018

Silk Street Theatre

Lucia – Alexandra Lowe

Mother Bayard, Ermengarde – Carmen Artaza

Roderick, Sam – Michael Vickers

Brandon – Bertie Watson

Charles – Frederick Jones

Geneviève – Emily Kyte

Leonora – Madison Nonoa

Nurse – Meriel Cunningham

Lucia II – Lucy Anderson

Roderick II – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Earl of Dunmow – Samuel Carl

Errand Boy – Filipe Manu

Mrs Kneebone – Emily Kyte

Countess of Dunmow – Lucy Andreson

Susan – Zoe Drummond

Prince Philippe – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Grand Duchess – Lucy McAuley

Ashley Dean (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (set designs)

Kevin Treacy (lighting)

Laura Jane Stanfield (costumes)

Victoria Newlyn (movement)

Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

Stuck record time again: much of the best London opera comes from our conservatoires. That is not to belittle what I have heard at Covent Garden since returning to London; much has been of a very high standard. ENO: let us hope the benighted rule of Cressida Pollock has now been put behind it. Opera Holland Park continues to go from strength to strength, most recently with perhaps the finest all round Così fan tutte I have seen and heard for well over a decade. These things are not competitive, whatever capital might tell you. Moreover, our conservatoires tend to offer rather different, complementary fare. A particular strength of the Guildhall has been its repertoire choices – and so it continued to be here. If, in this double bill of two operas I had neither seen nor indeed heard, one proved far superior to the other, I was immensely grateful to be afforded the opportunity to acquaint myself with both, especially in such fine performances as these.

Hindemith and Thornton Wilder might not seem the most obvious of collaborators. The Long Christmas Dinner, however, works very well. Wilder, it seems, worked hard to convert his 1931 play into a libretto. (I say ‘it seems’, since I am relying on secondary literature; I shall certainly try to read the play before long.) The concision is striking, but so is its suitability for Hindemith in particular. That may, of course, also be a matter of Hindemith’s adaptability too. At any rate, what came across strongly, in work, performances, and indeed staging was the somewhat tedious repetition of Christmas in a bourgeois New England family, the Bayards, over ninety years – without in any sense proving tedious itself. The cyclical aspect may be seen in a revolving set, centred on the dinner table, to which characters in slight decline – far less dramatically so, and surely this is deliberate, than in Buddenbrooks – come and from which they go. Behaviour varies and repeats; one feels a certain sympathy, and yet a certain ennui, or rather feels their ennui. Hindemith’s forms mirror and/or incite this: softened Kammermusik, in a sense, the post-Bachian motor rhythms still present, albeit without noticeable aggression, drawing one in to action and atmosphere alike, in a harmonic language that is, doubtless unsurprisingly, closer to Die Harmonie der Welt. Time passes: their time and the world’s. Until, that is, Ermengarde, the final member of the family resident, learns that another branch – by now, with children Roderick III and Lucia III – are building another house, another story. Whilst reading the letter informing her, she dies. It is a very difficult task to bring off, to portray such people in such a situation whilst retaining one’s interest, but the company – and this seemed to me a true company achievement – did just that. For that reason, I shall single no one out in particular, other than to say Dominic Wheeler’s conducted framework proved just what the team required.

Hindemith’s opera was first performed in Mannheim, in 1961; its first performance in English came two years later, at the Juilliard, in 1963. Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement had its premiere a few years earlier, in 1954, at Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall. It seems, frankly, to be very much an opera written for the insular, xenophobic world to which those trying to force us out of the EU would have us return. Not out of intent, I am sure, whether from Berkeley or his librettist Paul Dehn. But its fluent, pleasant, vaguely Gallic boutique musical style palls after a while, not least on account of the absence of any dramatic grit. A diplomat and his wife plan to marry off their daughter to the son of the Grand Duchess of Monteblanco. (Don’t ‘foreign’ places have funny names?) That son, Prince Philippe, thinks the daughter is a maid; they get on, and they decide to marry, the lack of a handsome dowry notwithstanding. His mother does not even object. If ‘heartwarming romantic comedies’ are your thing, even you might look for a little more in the way of a plot twist. The only ‘joke’ is that the ‘foreigners’ are – well, foreign, so speak or rather sing with ‘silly’ accents. Some food burns too. Performances were again very fine, Eduard Mas Bacardit and Zoe Drummond skilfully teasing out what level of lyrical excitement the score permitted as the two lovers. Once again, moreover, there was an excellent sense of company. But there are limits to what might be achieved, even with a resourceful kitchen set design, when the material is sub-Carry On – without the jokes.

Dialogues des Carmélites, Guildhall, 5 March 2018

Silk Street Theatre

Chevalier de la Force, First Commissary – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Marquis de la Force – Jake Muffett

Blanche de la Force – Lucy Anderson

Thierry, Second Commissary, M. Javelinot, Gaoler – Bertie Watson

Prioress, Mother Jeanne – Georgia Mae Bishop

Sister Constance – Claire Lees

Mother Marie – Emily Kyte

Second Prioress – Michelle Alexander

Carmelites – Eva Gheorghiu, Myramae Meneses, Victoria Li, Alice Girle, Siân Dicker, Ana Marafona, Isabelle Peters, Catherine White, Meriel Cunningham, Natalie Davies, Anne Reilly

Sister Mathilde – Lucy McAuley

Chaplain – Daniel Mullaney

Martin Lloyd-Evans (director)

takis (designs)

Robbie Butler (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

The Guildhall’s termly opera offerings have long tended to be more adventurous than those of the Royal Academy or Royal College when it comes to repertoire. In June, we shall have the mouthwatering prospect of a double-bill of Hindemith’s last opera, The Long Christmas Dinner, and Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement. Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is probably as mainstream as I have heard here, with the exception of a fine Marriage of Figaro in 2013. I am not sure that the performance I heard marked the school’s greatest achievement, but there was nevertheless much to admire – and yes, the final scene did what it must when the nuns came before the guillotine, bringing tears to my eyes and a sense of redemption through grace.

The first act in particular seemed somewhat unsettled, the gentle – often deceptively so – flow of Poulenc’s orchestral writing often seeming to elude conductor Dominic Wheeler, and the cast seeming to have been encouraged to perform in a fashion more suited to Italian verismo. French opera more often than not presents a difficulty: not just in the language but in the style too. Perhaps the brashness of the orchestral sound and some decidedly odd balances were as much a matter of the difficult Silk Street acoustic as of anything else. Stravinsky came to mind, quite rightly, but it did not always seem quite the right Stravinsky, and he certainly would have required greater precision too. Fortunately, matters improved considerably in the second and still more the third acts: much better than the other way around! And it was good to have opportunity to see and to hear the opera in its proper three acts, rather than, as often the case, having a break part way through the second.

Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production worked well enough, although the balance or perhaps even opposition between naturalism and something more minimalistic, even symbolic, sometimes seemed arbitrary rather than productive. I have nothing against the opera being set when it ‘should’ be, but the danger then can be that it then comes to seem to be ‘about’ the French Revolution, which it really is not. There were some beautiful costumes from takis to look at. More to the point, his relatively sparse set designs achieved a good deal by suggestion – as well as possessing an aesthetic appeal of their own. A Carmelite convent is surely not in any case intended to be lavish. The true theme of the opera, Divine Grace, shone through just enough, if perhaps less consistently than it might have done.

The young cast had much to recommend it. Perhaps rather oddly, given their distinctly lesser roles, the men foten stood out as much as the women, Daniel Mullaney’s Chaplain and Eduard Mas Bacardi’s Chevalier and First Commissary both offering finely sung, dramatically considered performances. Perhaps the starring role on this occasion was that of Emily Kyte’s Mother Marie. We were reminded more than once, as much through acting as through vocal means, that not only does the opera has its roots in her telling of the story, but of her especially problematical role in the narrative. Lucy Anderson’s Blanche proved a little vocally wayward to start with, but once settled, proved well able to engage our sympathies. A nicely contrasted, yet strangely complementary, pair of prioresses, Old and New, came our way from Georgia Mae Bishop and Michelle Alexander. Choral scenes were well directed, scenically and musically, offering the necessary sense of a threatening and, yes, revolutionary backdrop.