Paride ed Elena, Bampton Classical Opera, 24 September 2021

St John’s, Smith Square

Paride – Ella Taylor
Elena – Lucy Anderson
Amore/Erasto – Lauren Lodge-Campbell
Pallas Athena – Milly Forrest
Trojans – Lucy Cronin, Adam Tunnicliffe, Lucy Cronin, Alex Jones
Dancers (Spartans, athletes) – Oliver Adam-Reynolds, Oscar Fonseca

Jeremy Gray (director, designs)
Alicia Frost (choreography)
Jess Iliff (costumes)
Ian Chandler (lighting)

CHROMA

Thomas Blunt (conductor)

Least popular of Gluck’s reform operas, Paride ed Elena shows what little store we should set on popularity. (Do not Gluck’s operas more generally?) Bampton Classical Opera once again deserves our thanks in bringing a ‘neglected’—frankly, ignored—eighteenth-century opera to performance, first in Oxfordshire and now in its annual visit to St John’s, Smith Square. That it should do so at all is praiseworthy enough, that it should do so in ‘current circumstances’ all the more so. If I found some elements of staging, costumes in particular, a little makeshift, it is not worth labouring the point; circumstances were far from ideal. 

The role of Paride, written for a soprano castrato, poses a problem in that one will end up with a cast of five sopranos—or one will transpose it down for a high tenor. Allegedly, for the nature of the alleged ‘problem’ is unclear when one listens, especially to so accomplished a performance as we heard from Ella Taylor. Taylor’s Paris—we may as well use English, since the opera was sung in an English translation by Gilly French—evinced youthful strength and vulnerability through Orphic song, rising to more militaristic clamour where required. Their portrayal both contrasted with and complemented Lucy Anderson’s equally multi-faceted Helen, knowingly beguiling and resistant, ultimately moved—perhaps musically as much as verbally—to confront and acknowledge the transformation of her own feelings. As cunning agent of that transformation, Cupid posing as royal counsellor Erasto, Lauren Lodge-Campbell shone and sparkled. Milly Forrest, a late replacement as Pallas Athena, commanded attention as the deus ex machina, as did members of the small chorus, Lucy Cronin first among equals given her accomplished first-act solo. So too did dancers Oliver Adam-Reynolds Oscar Fonseca, who brought to proceedings a highly physical eroticism otherwise lacking from the staging.

Thomas Blunt led CHROMA in a well considered, flowing account of considerable cumulative drama. Here there was none of the stiffness I observed in a Bampton performance earlier this year of La corona under a different conductor. Blunt judged ebb and flow with due regard for instrumental and vocal sensibilities, but above all with an ear to the greater whole. Cuts were judicious and did little damage, which is not to say that one might not wish to hear them restored in other situations. Here, no one could have tired, in the way some people unaccountably seem to do so, of Classical drama lyricised and rendered visible. Rarely if ever did a small instrumental ensemble have one wishing for larger forces, the St John’s acoustic weaving its magic. Gluck and Calazbigi will surely have won more converts, and willingness to explore dance as musical drama augurs well for further Bampton explorations. Dare we hope, perhaps, for a little Rameau or even Traetta? To be fair, more Gluck would also be highly welcome. We shall see—and hear; at least I hope we shall.

Le nozze di Figaro, Royal College of Music, 30 November 2018

Britten Theatre

Count Almaviva – Thomas Isherwood

Countess Almaviva – Eleanor Dennis

Susanna – Catriona Hewitson

Figaro – Theodore Platt

Cherubino – Anna Cooper

Marcellina – Holly-Marie Bingham

Dr Bartolo – Timothy Edlin

Don Basilio – Glen Cunningham

Don Curzio – Samuel Jenkins

Barbarina – Milly Forrest

Antonio – Peter Edge

Two Bridesmaids – Camilla Harris, Jessica Cale

Sir Thomas Allen (director)

Lottie Higlett (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Kate Flatt (choreography)

Royal College of Music Opera Chorus (chorus master: Leanne Singh-Levett)

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

A lively, enthusiastic young cast, as skilled at acting as at singing, proved the definite highlight of the Royal College of Music’s end-of-term Marriage of Figaro. There was no weak link, each of the singers offering something particular in roles many of us perhaps know all too well. At this stage in their careers, singers will always have a good deal of vocal development to await. Nevertheless, from the stern and angry Count of Thomas Isherwood to the decidedly luxury casting of Milly Forrest’s Barbarina, there was much to enjoy here. Eleanor Dennis, an RCM alumna deputising at the last minute, offered a noble Countess: poised, dignified, pained, and compassionate, an object lesson to her younger collaborators. Theodore Platt and Catriona Hewitson sparkled as a likeable, stylish pair of servants, Figaro and Susanna, Holly-Marie Bingham’s Marcellina and Timothy Edlin’s Bartolo perhaps giving a splendidly knowing hint of where the characters, if hardly the singers, might find themselves in a few years’ time.

Michael Rosewell’s conducting was sane enough: something to be grateful for in an age of perverse, often downright ugly Mozart ‘interpretation’. It lacked charm, though, orchestral writing too often going unshaped, even barely phrased at all. A few too many disjunctures between pit and stage were skilfully retrieved, yet all in all – and this is quite a different thing from minutes on the clock – the pace somewhat dragged, a greater sense of the musical whole proving elusive.

There was not much to glean, either, from Thomas Allen’s production. It was less aggressively, even offensively ‘traditional’ than the Figaro I last saw at the RCM (Jean-Claude Auvray, 2012), yet it would be difficult to claim any great insights. (Not that an extraordinarily disruptive – drunken? – audience, laughing and applauding almost every bar, seemed to seek insight; alas, the Glyndebourne Guffaw Brigade seemed very much to be at large.) Notwithstanding a strange initial preoccupation with babies, soon dropped, as it were, the production was very much school of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, albeit on a necessarily less grand scale. What worked in the mid-Seventies – in many ways gloriously, as we may still see on film, Karl Böhm’s presence certainly not hindering – does not necessarily ring so true four decades later. Why would it? Additional elements of something bordering on silliness did not help. There was not much more to it than that. I have little doubt that the cast would have learned much from working with Allen; I have little doubt, moreover, that that showed in their own character portrayals and their interaction.

For a greater idea, be it of the eighteenth century or any other, I sought in vain: a pity, given that two other London conservatoire performances of the last few years have offered much food for thought. The Guildhall (Martin Lloyd-Evans, 2013) offered, in retrospect, chilling presentiments of #MeToo in an American electoral campaign, whilst the Royal Academy’s gentle updating to pre-revolutionary Cuba (Janet Suzman, 2015) brought forth perhaps the single finest, all in all, Figaro I have seen and heard. Claus Guth’s Strindbergian Salzburg production of the previous decade doubtless changed the work forever. It need not, indeed should not, be imitated. Some awareness and communication of the work’s savage darkness, however, is now for many of us a crucial starting point, as much as it would be for Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Mozart never suffers from sharply etched chiaroscuro. Still, there will surely be another opportunity before too long – and better this than the incoherent nonsense I endured from Johannes Erath in Dresden a couple of months ago.