Davies I and N/Bevan/Hobbs/Dunford - Dowland, 28 March 2026

Wigmore Hall

From The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires: ‘Behold a wonder ‘; ‘I must complain’; ‘Lend your ears to my sorrow’; ‘What poor astronomers are they’; ‘When Phoebus first did Daphne love’ (?); ‘Me, me and none but me’; ‘The lowest trees have tops’; ‘By a fountain where I lay’; ‘Time stands still’; ‘Say, love, if ever thou didst find Interval’; ‘What if I never speed’; ‘It was a time when silly bees could speak’; ‘Fie on this feigning’; ‘Love stood amazed’; ‘O what hath overwrought’; ‘Farewell too fair’; ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’; ‘Come when I call’; ‘Farewell, unkind, farewell’
‘The Frog Galliard’
‘Lachrimae’

Iestyn Davies (countertenor)

Daisy Bevan (soprano)

Thomas Hobbs (tenor)

Neal Davies (bass-baritone)

Thomas Dunford (lute)

The Wigmore Hall has done John Dowland proud with a whole weekend, Friday to Sunday, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of his death. The composer’s lute songs will surely always remain at the heart of his renown, but these concerts have also explored his instrumental and sacred writing. The concert I was able to attend offered almost all of The Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires: nineteen of the twenty-one, I think, although, unless my ears deceived me, one listed on the programme, ‘When Phoebus first did Daphne love’ was not sung and thus – I assume – replaced with one of those remaining. (I may, though, have misunderstood; the programme above I have simply reproduced from that I was given.) In addition, we heard two exquisite lute solos, as well as skilful ‘preluding’ in between from Thomas Dunford. The 1597 Frog Galliard, which may ultimately refer to Elizabeth I’s pet name, ‘my little frog’, for her French suitor the Duke of Anjou, was nicely spun as a memory of court dance. The ‘Lachrimae’ pavan that would become the celebrated ‘Flow my tears’ from Dowland’s Second Book, was its second-half counterpart, on which a little more below. 

Dunford’s contributions ran throughout, of course, a masterclass in the lutenist’s art, ever tailored to song, singer, and moment. His partnership with Davies in the opening song, ‘Behold a wonder here’ announced a wonder indeed: endlessly varied music-making, not despite the strophic form but on account of the variation it suggests and received. All four singers had their moments in the sun, including a four-song sequence at the beginning in which each introduced him- or herself. Thomas Hobbs’s ‘I must complain’ presented his pleasingly lyrical tenor; Daisy Bevan’s ‘Lend your ears to my sorrow’ offered similar verbal sensitivity and a nice sense of inwardness, her style broadly ‘early’ but not aggressively so; a sprightly, witty ‘What poor astronomers are they’ from Neal Davies rounded off the quartet. 

Part songs such as ‘Me, me and none but me’ and ‘Love stood amazed’, subtly yet crucially directed by Iestyn Davies, offered textural variety, a keen, variegated sense of euphony, and a good deal of variety within. ‘By a fountain where I lay’, for instance, had solos, well taken, from soprano and tenor, whilst tenor and countertenor shared those honours in ‘Say, love, if ever thou didst find’. Collaborative singing was crucial in the brazen repetitions of ‘come’ in ‘What if I never speed?’ Likewise the duetting between Bevan and Iestyn Davies in ‘Come when I call’. Neal Davies’s expert use of the Earl of Essex’s verse in ‘It was a time when silly bees could speak’ suggested words of their own volition becoming song, art concealing art. His sign-off here was a particular moment to cherish. The closing ‘Farewell, unkind, farewell’ struck just the right note as a farewell in itself: slightly lingering, but not too much.

Other highlights were a plaintive ‘Farewell too fair’ from Hobbs, followed by a wonderfully somnolent ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ from Bevan, words and performance a powerful incentive to succumb to the ‘reconciling … rest that peace begets’, whilst at the same time reminding one why this could not be an option, given the quality of music-making on offer. Both, as well as the preceding four-voice ‘O what hath overwrought’, fell in the shadow of that ‘Lachrimae’ from Dunford. Here, one felt not only Dowland’s tears, but their salt, flavouring much of what was still to come.

My only real doubt concerned whether some aspects of the performances fell a little too strongly on the polite side: not only for itself but because it precluded the greater variety that might have come from more clearly developing the lead set by Dunford and Davies (Iestyn) in that respect. If not quite Choral Evensong, it was not entirely not of that world either. It might seem silly to criticise a performance of English music for being too English, even Anglican, and this was an intermittent matter of degree. This is a hesitant cavil, though, nothing more, and doubtless in part a matter more of taste than of judgement. There could, in truth, be no gainsaying the intelligence and musicality of these performances.

Le nozze di Figaro, English National Opera, 7 February 2025

Coliseum

Count Almaviva – Cody Quattlebaum
Countess Almaviva – Nardus Williams
Figaro – David Ireland
Susanna – Mary Bevan
Cherubino – Hanna Hipp
Marcellina – Rebecca Evans
Dr Bartolo – Neal Davies
Don Basilio, Don Curzio – Hubert Francis
Antonio – Trevor Eliot Bowes
Barbarina – Ava Dodd
Bridesmaids – Claire Mitcher, Sophie Goldrick

Director – Joe Hill-Gibbons
Set designs – Johannes Schütz
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Matthew Richardson

Associate director, movement – Jenny Ogilivie  

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

Ainārs Rubikis (conductor)

Images: copyright Zoe Martin

Joe Hill-Gibbons’s production of The Marriage of Figaro opened briefly at the Coliseum in 2020, only for Covid to put a stop to it. Five years have passed before it has had another opportunity. I wish I could say it had been worth the wait. Hill-Gibbons claims, in the programme, that his ‘primary job was to deliver Figaro in all its joy, power and complexity, rather than remake it for today’. Judged by his own criterion, I am afraid this can only be accounted a failure, though I am not sure he managed to ‘remake it for today’ either, whatever that may mean. 

Put simply, the production, as opposed to musicians’ performances, offered no sense of: who these people were; how they might relate to one another; why they might be doing what they were doing; and, quite often, even of what they were doing. In the latter case, the fourth act’s ‘complexity’ was entirely absent, yet still managed to confuse. The audience managed nonetheless to destroy any sense of, well, anything by laughing when the Count begged for forgiveness. Everything was flattened. There was no sense of social hierarchy, and certainly no sense of social or political, let alone religious, meaning. It was perhaps the most singularly boring Figaro I have seen: a singularly perverse achievement. My companion indeed described it as ‘almost unbearable’, like a sitcom, albeit without the dramatic depth or content. 

Plain to a fault, Johannes Schütz’s white set suggested a hotel room corridor slightly abstracted, with occasional views of something, though very little, downstairs. That was it, really, not only for the set design but for any sort of dramatic concept. To be fair, Astrid Klein’s costumes, well designed in themselves, seemed to represent an attempt to offer a sense of updated commedia dell’arte. All well and good, although Figaro, whether as play or opera, is not The Barber of Seville, and Hill-Gibbons is certainly not Ruth Berghaus. In both cases, there was something rather dated and somewhat ‘German provincial’ to the ‘look’, without that dated quality seeming to be the point. Memories of Michael Grandage’s Duty Free staging for Glyndebourne surfaced. Cherubino’s strange appearance made nonsense of his character. Any mezzo worth her salt would usually be able to portray him as an adolescent. Here, poor Hanna Hipp, who sang and, within the constraints imposed upon her, acted very well, was left looking no more like a page boy or an army officer than if she had worn a dress all along. 

Jeremy Sams’s English translation proved variable, presumably deliberately—and often deliberately wordy. Perhaps some, comatose since c.1955, found Dr Bartolo repeatedly singing ‘that bastard Figaro’ edgy. For me, it was simply out of place, whether with respect to the work or other parts of the translation. In some cases, it remained reasonably faithful, whilst in others, it went beyond paraphrase: all the while a little too keen to attract attention. At least, though, there was an intelligent mind behind it, which, if one must have translation at all, is something. 

Conductor Ainārs Rubikis was clearly going to have his work cut out to make anything much of the musical drama. Hamstrung as he was, that he did so intermittently was again something. I should be interested to hear what he might make of this or another Mozart opera in a different context. Rubikis and the ENO Orchestra were often at their best when bigger boned, conjuring a sense of coherent drama entirely lacking onstage. There were some fine intimate moments too. What lay in between was sometimes more of a problem, as was proportionality of tempo, the sections of, say, the second-act finale sitting oddly with another. Alas, the musicodramatic life and form of the recognition sextet, key to the entire third act (at least), also fell flat. But then so did everything else about it, some people in strange outfits simply standing nowhere in particular, singing to no one in particular about nothing in particular. There was little or nothing after all, to recognise. Secco recitatives were sometimes a little heavy, but that was more a matter of having to deal with the English translation than anything else. I think the fashionable ‘Moberly-Raeburn’ reordering of the third act may have been used; yet, truth be told, even on the morning after, I cannot quite remember, even on the morning after—which may indicate something about how inert the drama turned out to be. ‘Standard’ excisions were certainly made from the fourth act. They would doubtless have been well sung; for once, keen as I was for it all to end, I welcomed them. Music long since having been reduced to ‘incidental’ status, a finely crafted libretto likewise, there was little to stay awake for.

Fortunately, there was some good singing, though it was more difficult to tell than would usually be the case. In addition to Hipp, the female cast acquitted themselves especially well, Nardus Williams’s Countess somehow maintaining presence, dignity, and well-spun line throughout. Mary Bevan offered a lively Susanna, though the production militated against her becoming the truly animating presence she might have been. ‘Deh vieni’ gave a powerful sense of what we lost. Rebecca Evans’s Marcellina, like Neal Davies’s Bartolo, were keenly observed and equally finely sung. David Ireland’s Figaro deserved better. He made the best of a poor hand, his way with the libretto, even in translation, second to none, converting it with an art concealing art into an excellent performance. The ‘smaller’ roles were all well taken. Cody Quattlebaum’s Count, though, was a decidedly odd portrayal: doubtless in good part the production, which seemingly had no idea what to do with the character (!), but strange vowels and intermittent wooliness of tone were also a problem. Perhaps, not unreasonably, he would have been more comfortable singing it in Italian. 

Ultimately, then, this seemed designed to be a Marriage of Figaro for people who do not like or understand the opera. It is difficult to imagine such people exist, but there they were, chattering, guffawing, and, I kid you not, noisily guzzling popcorn (now on sale at the bar, so as also to provide a miserable olfactory auditorium ‘experience’). It was less Twelfth Night than Terry and June without the characterisation or the drama—although, to be fair, even the latter might have had its moments compared to this. I cannot have been unusual among opera lovers in having Figaro as one of the first operas I grew to know and love. Had this been my first encounter, I fear I might not have pursued work or genre further. 

I shall conclude with words from an interview with assistant/movement director Jennie Ogilvie, supplier of the tediously silly dancing long mandatory for any such production: ‘I find it frustrating when people need everything to make sense in an opera. … we have all been watching music videos for 30, 40 years, which really do not make sense, and yet they are the best way of expressing that bit of music. I wish that we could come to other live forms of music like opera and extend the same permissions.’ Hmmm.

King Arthur, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 8 November 2019

Images: Ruth und Martin Walz (from 2017 premiere)

Anett Fritsch, Robin Johannsen (sopranos)

Benno Schachtner (countertenor)

Reinoud Van Mechelen, Stephan Rügamer (tenors)

Neal Davies, Arttu Kataja (bass)

Arthur – Michael Rotschopf

Merlin – Jörg Gudzuhn

Oswald – Max Urlacher

Osmond – Paul Herwig

Emmeline – Meike Droste

Grimbald – Tom Radisch

Conon – Roland Renner

Aurelius – Steffen Schortie Scheumann

Mathilda – Sigrid Maria Schnückel

Little Arthur – Béla Jim Ottopal

Sven-Erich Bechtolf (director)

Julian Crouch (director, set designs)

Kevin Pollard (costumes)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Gail Skrela (choreography)

Joshua Higgason (video)

Ein Skills Ensemble

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Akademie für Alte Musk Berlin

René Jacobs (conductor)

What to do with King Arthur? Rightly or wrongly, a ‘straight’ performance seems out of the question, even in the case of this, the only case of a Purcell semi-opera conceived as such (by Dryden), as opposed to adding music to an existing play. There are several problems here. Some might say, not without reason, that there are several opportunities too, that those very problems may readily be understood to be opportunities. For our purposes, doubtless too schematically, they may be summarised as: how to conceive of this genre; how to conceive of this particular example of that genre, likely written as an allegory whose meaning we shall never recover or, at best, at which we shall only hesitantly be able to guess, closing with an uncomfortably ‘patriotic’ final act; what sort of dialogue to use, most likely to write; and, last but not least, how to accomplish any of that for a largely non-English, indeed non-Anglophone audience. I shall not attempt fully to answer those in turn, but they are worth bearing in mind in consideration of what was seen and heard in this performing version by René Jacobs, with a little – or a good deal of – help from various friends, Sven-Erich Bechtolf and Julian Crouch included, in ‘updating’ a German translation by Wolfgang Wiens and Hans Duncker.

The fundamental conceit is far from a bad one; its framing permits for various standpoints, depending on the spectator, to be taken. Set in wartime, in the 1940s – it seems, though some designs appear, confusingly, to be from earlier in the century – this is a tale of a boy, Arthur, who has lost his father in action. His mother would like to move on with her life, but Arthur is resistant to anyone taking his father’s place. Various characters and situations – his mother, his father’s father, a puppet show, his father in a dream, etc. – recount to Little Arthur a story from Britain’s ancient past, of battle between Britons and Saxons, onto which some issues of the present may be read, and vice versa. Ultimately, the war comes to an end; Arthur’s mother remarries; and, both disturbingly and unconvincingly, Arthur learns, seemingly without irony or any of the double reading in which he or we might previously have engaged, that the King Arthur of whom he has learned – in this context, a somewhat odd King Arthur, more deeply engaged with retrieving his love, the blind Emmeline, than the activities for which we know him – should be his model as an English patriot. Almost all of the spoken theatre proceeded in German; Purcell’s music was always given in English, heightening a sense of separation.

The doublings of historical standpoint, if sometimes a little confusing, at least to start with, have much to be said for them, their often bizarre accoutrements rather less. I could not help, as an Englishman at present inevitably still more disenchanted with any show of ‘patriotism’ or nationalism, but wonder at the ideas other, neighbouring, still-friendly – whatever the provocations – countries have of Purcell’s ‘fairest isle’ right now. One is clearly of ongoing obsession with the Second World War: fair enough; one can hardly argue otherwise, however much one might wish it otherwise. Another enduring conception seems to be of a Monty Python-style humour that frankly irritates many of us, but which is certainly enjoyed by a number of my German friends. That combination of something not nearly so clever as it thinks it is with mere silliness certainly haunted a good deal of what we saw.

If, for instance, you had for some reason been longing to see a black-and-white-striped, exaggeratedly priapic version of the creepy 1980s BBC children’s television ‘character’, Wizbit, brought to us once upon a time in association with Paul Daniels and ‘the lovely’ Debbie McGee, this would certainly have been your night. (I can only presume, indeed hope, that the resemblance was coincidental, but who knows?) If, moreover, you were someone who found threats of rape on the part of that strange conical figure inherently amusing – disturbingly, much of the audience seemed of that persuasion – your dramatic cup would verily have run over. Mishearing of ‘Uhren’ (clocks) for ‘Huren’ (whores), farting and other ‘smell’ jokes (yes, afraid so), and so on and so on were largely suggestive of variety show rather than Dryden. Ribaldry certainly has its place in other works by Purcell, but hardly here. This show – that seems to me the right word – certainly seemed happier with the generalised rather than the particular. Occasional flashes of something wittier, more substantive, for instance a character musing on how the drama might have developed, had postdramatic theatre been yet invented, offered tantalising possibilities. Greater focus would have been no bad thing.

There was much to admire in the singing – in particular – but also the acting, overdone though some of the latter may have been. All singers covered numerous roles to excellent effect: Anett Frisch’s stylish and intelligently dramatic soprano, Benno Schachter’s hauntingly beautiful countertenor, and Neal Davies’s performance in the celebrated ‘Frost Scene’ – how manifestly superior it is to its likely model in Lully! – were the pick of the bunch for me, but there were no weak links. The Staatsoper chorus, as ever, proved on fine form. Some, I suppose, might have preferred a smaller body of singers; for me, however, it proved rather a wonderful treat. With the best will in the world, a band such as the Akademie für Alte Musik cannot approach the warmth of, say, the English Chamber Orchestra in Antony Lewis’s recording of this music, nor its easy way with Purcell’s idioms. However, there was fine playing on its own terms, to which my ears became more accustomed as time went on.

Jacobs’s tempi and general direction were for the most part unobjectionable, although there were times, doubtless predictably, when the music might have been permitted to breathe more openly. Various other music by Purcell was added, sometimes offering an orchestral background to dialogue: not a Purcellian practice, but in its borrowing from later ‘melodrama’ unproblematic and a welcome addition of textural variety. Jacobs seems also to have felt the need beyond that to ‘improve’ on Purcell’s scoring. I have no objection in principle to rewriting, reorchestrating, reordering, to anything really, so long as it works; there was nothing here to which I especially objected, though Jacobs’s amplifying choices were highly predictable in practice. On the other hand, the relative intimacy of Purcell’s writing here – compare it with, say, The Fairy Queen – was often lost, without sign of any true rethinking in modern terms.

As ever, then, pious talk of musical ‘authenticity’ proved about as plausible as a Liberal Democrat bar chart. Thoughts inevitably returned to our – Britain’s, that is – lamentable political present. There were lessons to be learned, even if far from straightforwardly. On reflection, that is doubtless as it should have been. However uncomfortable this may have been for an Englishman in temporary exile, if ever a failed state deserved to be the butt of ‘foreign’ humour, it was surely ours.

Serse, English National Opera, 15 September 2014

Coliseum

(sung in English as Xerxes)

Serse – Alice Coote

Arsamene – Andrew Watts

Amastre – Catherine Young

Ariodate – Neal Davies

Romilda – Sarah Tynan

Atalanta – Rhian Lois

Elviro – Adrian Powter

Nicholas Hytner (director)

Michael Walling (revival director)

David Fielding (designs)

Paul Pyant, Martin Doone (lighting)

 

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Dominic Peckham)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Michael Hofstetter (conductor)

 

It was a delight to welcome Nicholas Hytner’s charming, witty staging of Serse, or Xerxes, intelligently revived by Michael Wallingm back to the Coliseum. Some of ENO’s so-called ‘classic revivals’ have stretched the term beyond breaking-point; this, however, does seem to qualify both as a revival in more than name and, in its own way, as a ‘classic’. Having won an Olivier award on its first outing in the anniversary year of 1985, Hytner’s production lightly frames an opera which, if we are honest, has nothing meaningful to do with ancient Persia, in terms of a re-imagined eighteenth century. Images from something akin to Georgian Vauxhall – topiary, newspapers, aristocratic finery – merge happily and without the slightest pedantry with hints at the Enlightenment archaeological imperialism of the British Museum, ‘anachronisms’ such as deck chairs in the park, the anonymised ritual of white-faced courtiers, the celebrated Handel statue in Westminster Abbey, and so forth, to enable our minds and memories to play upon whatever associations they will, without damage to the slight comedy that is the ‘drama’ of the piece and which is really more of an excuse for a fine succession of Handelian melodies than anything else. (That said, the sense of a different æsthetic, not just that of opera seria, but also of the often-unacknowledged experimentalism of Vauxhall, is present too, perhaps especially in the revival.)

 

Whilst, even in this, one of the strongest of Handel’s operas, it is difficult and would probably be perverse to care about the characters and their actions in the way one would in the greatest of his dramatic oratorios, let alone in an opera by Monteverdi or Mozart, the cast offered not only a generally strong set of vocal performances but, for the most part, more than plausible acting too. Alice Coote seemed to be an audience favourite but, for me, hers was a strikingly mixed performance: at its best very good, especially rich in the lower range, but too often resorting to downright shouting, and with decidedly mixed results when it came to coloratura. Andrew Watts’s coloratura was often found wanting too; I had the sense that he would have been happier in contemporary than Baroque opera. Otherwise, there was little about which to cavil at all. Sarah Tynan’s Romilda was beautifully sung throughout, with a fine sense indeed of how coloratura can, even in Handel opera, strain towards true dramatic meaning. Rhian Lois captured to a tee the character of her scheming yet ultimately insouciant sister, Atalanta, and was just as impressive in vocal terms. Catherine Young offered relative gravity and, again, equally excellent singing as the disguised heiress, Amastre (Amastris here). Neal Davies and Adrian Powter were more than serviceable in the smaller roles of Ariodate and Elviro. Direction of the chorus was finely judged too.

 

I feared the worst at the beginning of Michael Hofstetter’s account of the Overture. Vibrato-less strings and a hard-driven tempo had me thinking we should be in for something akin to typical English ‘Baroque’ – actually, nothing of the sort – puritanism.  However, within the bounds of what is (sadly) nowadays possible, Hofstetter’s conducting and the ENO Orchestra’s response showed considerably flexibility and an enlightened approach towards musical expression of which I had more or less given up hope. There was not, of course, the rich tone of the old ‘live’ recording (in German) from Rafael Kubelík, with Fritz Wunderlich no less, but the performance compared well with Charles Mackerras (this production, on DVD). Not only was there genuine ‘life’ to be heard in the pit, it sounded like an orchestra rather than a tired end-of-pier band, such as more recently suffered here from so-called ‘specialists’. This work’s particular fluidity of recitative and aria – perhaps harking back to one of Handel’s sources in Cavalli’s version? – was well served, dramatic impetus not, at least after the Overture, being mistaken for the tyranny of the bandmaster. If there were times when a little more warmth would not have gone amiss from the strings, they were fewer than one might have expected. Continuo playing was alert and, again, far from inflexible. ENO could do far worse than ask Hofstetter back in such repertoire – especially when one considers the alternatives.

 

There will be a broadcast on BBC Radio 3, on 4 October.

Britten Sinfonia/Elder: Berlioz, L'Enfance du Christ, 8 December 2011

Queen Elizabeth Hall

L’Enfance du Christ, op.25

Sarah Connolly (mezzo-soprano)
Allan Clayton (tenor)
Roderick Williams (baritone)
Neal Davies (bass)

Britten Sinfonia Voices (chorus master: Eamonn Dougan)
Britten Sinfonia
Sir Mark Elder (conductor)

I have somehow managed to miss Sir Colin Davis’s London performances of L’Enfance du Christ, making it one of the final major Berlioz works I have heard in the flesh. (I hope to rectify the understandable omission of the Messe solenelle when Riccardo Muti conducts it in Salzburg next summer, a performance of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale remaining.) There was much to enjoy in this performance from Sir Mark Elder and the Britten Sinfonia, though my impression was that much of an often badly-behaved audience enjoyed it more than I did. (The second half was considerably delayed whilst the rest of us were compelled to wait for a gang of braying corporate hospitality beneficiaries from Mills and Reeves solicitors. I should like to think that it was from that group that a friend overheard some people announcing that the work had been composed by Benjamin Britten…)

For me, the problem lay in Elder’s conducting, certainly not in the ever-immediate response of the Britten Sinfonia. On the positive side, Elder imparted drive to the narrative, almost as if this were an opera rather than a dramatic choral work. (Berlioz never termed it an oratorio, though it is commonly and harmlessly thus described today.) I especially liked the ominous orchestral tread from Herod’s Palace, forshadowing the ‘Libera me’ from Fauré’s Requiem. Berlioz’s inimitable nervous energy was present throughout, to considerable effect. And the Ishmaelite trio for two flutes and harp was an utter delight, charmant to a degree, though it seemed quite unnecessary for the conductor to traverse the stage to conduct it. The bassoon timbre, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the music for the Witch of Endor in Handel’s Saul, was spot on for the appearance of Herod’s soothsayers. But the near-absence, certain orchestral rebellions notwithstanding, of string vibrato was a serious problem. The Vibratoverbot was not universally applied, or at least not universally adhered to: I both saw and heard valiant musicians tempt the wrath of the Norringtonian gods. There are so many objections to this practice that it is difficult to know where to start. It is utterly unhistorical, despite the pseudo-historical pleas routinely made for it. At any rate, the contrast between lively, colourful, plausibly ‘French’ woodwind and frankly unpleasant string sound was jarring. Indeed, the poor violins were forced to play for the scene in the Bethlehem stable in a fashion more reminiscent of a scratchy school orchestra than the fine ensemble we all know this to be. It could have been worse for them, I suppose: they might have been members of Norrington’s demoralised Stuttgart orchestra. Afterwards, I noticed a quotation from Elder in the programme: ‘Each particular scene has its own timbre. It is not a rich, twentieth-century sound but rather more restrained with little vibrato in the voices and instruments.’ No justification is made for the claim, let alone the results, but I cannot help wondering why, if every scene has its own timbre, a more-or-less blanket prohibition on vibrato is considered appropriate.

Choral singing was first-rate throughout, the Britten Sinfonia Voices clearly well trained by Eamonn Dougan. The choir’s keenness in the fugue, ‘Que de leurs pieds meurtris on lave les blessures!’ was exemplary, likewise the fine blend of the final a cappella chorus (with narrator), a barrage of coughs notwithstanding. Offstage, the invisible angels impressed equally, though there was something distinctly odd about the sound of the organ; I assume it must have been electronic. That the Shepherds’ Farewell was a little hasty was no fault of the singers.

The vocal soloists all had their strengths too. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarah Connolly and Roderick Williams proved the strongest: what a joy it was to hear such a melting duet from them in the stable scene, their voices happily uniting deeply-felt expressiveness with Gallic elegance. The French language heard elsewhere was often more of a trial; though Allan Clayton often sang beautifully, especially at the close, the meaning of the words was not always quite so apparent. Whilst Neal Davies had his moments, the power of his projection of Herod’s turmoil – at times, this presages both musically and temperamentally close to Boris Godunov – was often compromised by a tendency to emote excessively. The dryness at the bottom of his range was cruelly exposed from time to time.

In a sense, I have saved the worst until last: a half-baked attempt – Elder’s initiative, I am told – to evoke a sense of ‘community’ prior to the performance. Even some time after the solicitors and their important clients had deigned to join proceedings, we were made to wait a good few minutes whilst Elder and various members of the orchestra walked around on stage, conversing inaudibly in a fashion that would have shamed the most homespun of amateur dramatic societies. A concert scheduled for 7.30 thus began at 7.45. Alas, the only ‘community’ evoked was that of Deborah Warner’s ludicrous ENO staging of the Messiah. There was so much that was good in this performance that it was a real pity for a few aspects to have detracted from it so significantly. Let us hope, then, that London will not have to wait too long for another performance from Sir Colin.