Saul, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 8 June 2025

 

© Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photography by ASH

Saul – Christopher Purves
David – Iestyn Davies
Merab – Sarah Brady
Michal – Soraya Mafi
Jonathan – Linard Vrielink
Abner, High Priest, Doeg, Amalekite – Liam Bonthrone
Witch of Endor – Ru Charlesworth
Dancers – Lucy Alderman, Robin Gladwin, Lukas Hunt, Dominic Rocca, Nathan Ryles, Daisy West

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Donna Stirrup
Designs – Katrin Lea Tag
Choreography – Otto Pichler
Revival choreography – Merry Holden
Lighting – Joachim Klein

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus director: Aidan Oliver)
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Jonathan Cohen (conductor)

Saul (Christopher Purves)

I found myself listening at home to Saul a few months ago (Charles Mackerras’s outstanding Leeds Festival recording with Donald McIntyre, James Bowman, Margaret Price, et al.). It made for often uncomfortable listening, the ever-problematical identification of Handel’s Protestant England with the ‘children of Israel’ all the more when daily we see the Philistines’ successors mercilessly slain in the name of a latter-day ‘Eretz Israel’, itself the product of the imperialism on which the new, fiscal-military state of Great Britain had been founded. Culminating in news from the Amalekite – David’s ‘Impious wretch, of race accursed!’ – that Saul has been slain and Israelite exortation to ‘Gird on thy sword, thou man of might’, it seemed both a work both for now and absolutely not. At least it was not Joshua or Judas Maccabeus, I thought; and indeed its central dramatic concerns are not necessarily those, however glaring they may stand out now. The work’s political dimension is important, but is one of several and arguably not the most important. In any case, it extends beyond war and empire to broader questions of kingship—not least given the precedent of the Whig establishment’s treasonous support for the Dutch invasion that had removed ‘the Lord’s anointed’ within living memory, and without which George II would stand nowhere near the throne. 

Barrie Kosky’s Glyndebourne production of Saul was first seen in 2015: what may now seem a very different world, prior to Britain’s fateful referendum, Trump’s election, Covid, the invasion of Ukraine, and of course genocide in Gaza. None of those things came out of nowhere, of course, but the world was different. He was – and is – perfectly entitled to explore other aspects of the drama, and it is neither his nor revival director Donna Stirrup’s fault that events have overtaken us. Kosky offers a typically pugnacious, persuasive defence of staging such works at all and of his particular aesthetic in the programme. ‘But when you put Handel’s oratorios on stage you know that there will be a flood of opera reviewers who’ll say these pieces were not written for the stage, so why are we staging them? Get real! Opera is not about rules and regulations. Handel’s oratorios are sometimes more dramatic than his operas. We know that because we can hear it. Their musical landscapes are often more radical than those of the operas.’ I agree with every word. Why, then, beyond the inevitable unease concerning aspects of the drama, did I have my doubts—as someone who has long thought it cried out for the stage? 

There are problems intrinsic to the work, of course, as there always have been, lying beyond the cul-de-sac of alleged intention. The chorus’s role is one: how to deal with it onstage? Kosky certainly makes the most (as, for instance, in his Komische Oper Hercules) of his opportunities in this respect. An opening festal tableau, gestures arrestingly frozen, draws one in, Kosky’s detailed direction of each member of a crowd that also combines with excellence en masse dovetailing with Katrin Lee Tag’s painterly vision.An eighteenth-century audience, so it seems, participates, mirroring the dual function of the chorus itself, roots in Greek tragedy apparent and brimming with dramatic potential. 

David (Iestyn Davies)

The problem for me comes with elements of the conception of the protagonists. Not all of it: much shows great insight. A brazenly opportunist David is the trump card: charisma born of body and battle, seemingly willing to do anything – or anyone – to further his clear yet unstated lust for power. Why bother to spell it out, when the crowd will for him? ‘Saul, who hast thy thousands slain, welcome to thy friends again! David his ten thousands slew, ten thousand praises are his due!’ There is, moreover, a creditable effort to make more of Saul’s daughters and their roles, though that also leads us to more difficult territory. In that programme interview, Kosky states his dislike of realism, but that seems to refer to aesthetics rather than to psychology. (I actually would not have minded more on the former side and less dance, however finely accomplished; but that is a matter of taste, no more.) It is a particular form of psychological realism that, though I can see the temptation, also leads the drama to become less interesting and arguably less coherent. If one portrays calculation in such realistic way, there is nothing ‘mad’ about Saul’s reaction. Michal and still more Jonathan must simply be in love with David, which is obviously part of what is going on but surely not the only or overriding dramaturgical concern. And the decision to present Saul for much of the time as if already in Bedlam – perhaps even as if a flashback – is ultimately reductive, again crowding out other concerns. 

Set against that, the darker turn following the interval makes an undeniably strong impression. There is a splendid star-turn (literally) from the revolving solo organist onstage. When Saul visits the Witch of Endor, Kosky offers a nice sense of Tiresias in Beckettland, to the weird, disconcerting extent that Saul feeds from one of the Witch’s breasts. The doomed monarch also voices Samuel’s words himself: possessed or merely delusional? If Kosky and Tag’s Beckettland looks surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) close to that seen for their Castor et Pollux (ENO and elsewhere) and Don Giovanni (Vienna), most production teams have recognisable correspondences over time. Richard Jones & Co. anyone? The important question is what one does with them. 

Jonathan Cohen’s conducting I found more difficult to get on with: not only aggressively ‘period’, but of a variety that too often skated over Handel’s strengths as a musical dramatist. There was little grandeur, if often much rasping noise. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment strings might surely have been permitted fuller tone at times. Excellent woodwind fared better: characterful and dramatically telling. Handel’s writing for bassoon – not only in the Witch of Endor scene – is worth an essay alone from someone. It certainly sounded so here. Greater variety of tempo was achieved as time went on, if there were still cases, especially in choral numbers, when breakneck speed disrupted ensemble. 

Merab (Sarah Brady), Michal (Soraya Malfi), and Jonathan (Linard Vrielink)

Christopher Purves’s Saul was superbly acted, if sometimes a little close to Sprechgesang (leaving aside purely spoken interjections further to enhance the impression of insanity). There was often, though, a thinness of tone to his delivery that complemented Cohen’s way with the orchestra, but which on ‘purely’ musical terms left me at least missing something more bass-like. Iestyn Davies’s David was outstanding in every respect: word, tone, and gesture a model of characterisation.  Sarah Brady and Soraya Mafi offered a haughty Merab and an attractive, calculating Michal, in fine dramatic contrast both with one another and with the honeyed, imploring sincerity of Linard Vrielink’s Jonathan. Kosky’s amalgamation of Abner, High Priest, and Doeg, into a single Fool-like character elicited sinister ambiguity from Liam Bonthrone, who also took on the ‘cursed’ role of the Amalekite, mysteriously hooded in the auditorium. Ru Charlesworth offered a darkly vivid portrayal for Kosky and Handel’s strange conception of the Witch of Endor. The Glyndebourne Chorus likewise responded to a varied set of challenges – Handel’s, Kosky’s, and Cohen’s – with fine musical and dramatic dedication. 

My reservations, then, were relatively minor. Audience enthusiasm suggested they were little shared. This was a highly enjoyable occasion, though might it have offered more dramatically? To my dismay, I could not help but wonder whether a concert performance, albeit differently conducted, might have come closer in that respect.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, English National Opera, 1 March 2018

Coliseum

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Trinity Boys Choir (c) Robert Workman

Puck – Miltos Yerolemou

Oberon – Christopher Ainslie
Tytania – Soraya Mafi
Hermia – Clare Presland
Lysander – David Webb
Demetrius – Matthew Durkan
Helena – Eleanor Dennis
Quince – Graeme Danby
Bottom – Joshua Bloom
Starveling – Simon Butteriss
Snout – Timothy Robinson
Flute – Robert Murray
Snug – Jonathan Lemalu
Theseus – Andri Björn Róbertsson
Hippolyta – Emma Carrington
Cobweb – Aman de Silva
Peaseblossom – Lucas Rebato
Mustardseed – Caspar Burman
Moth – Dionysium Sevastakis
 

Robert Carsen (director, lighting)

Emmanuelle Bastet (associate director)
Michael Levine (designs)
Peter van Praet (lighting)
Matthew Bourne, Daisy May Kemp (choreography)


Trinity Boys’ Choir (choirmaster: David Swinson)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Alexander Soddy (conductor)

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Soraya Mafi Trinity Boys Choir Joshua Bloom 3 (c) Robert Workman

 

Twenty-two years is a ripe old age for an opera production nowadays. Production styles date quickly; were the idiotic description ‘timeless’ not already shop-soiled before it tripped off the tongue, it soon would be in this world. More fundamentally, production concerns will quickly transform too. Such is the nature of our ever-changing world and thus of the theatre which, in varying degrees of the oblique, holds up a mirror to it. Robert Carsen’s 1995 ENO production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream looks fresher than I should ever have imagined. Visits to houses from France to China notwithstanding, it might have been new at the Coliseum this March. I wonder, never having seen it before, how much has been revised and restored. Much, I suspect: that, surely, is the business of keeping a production, of necessity far from ‘timeless’, in the repertory. And there is certainly a case, without that descending into mere conservatism, for ENO to ‘curate’ its repertory of productions a little more carefully than has sometimes been the case in the recent past.

 

A giant bed delimits much of the action’s limits. Such an image can hardly fail to suggest something sexual, although, by the same token, it would be disingenuous to claim too much that is overt, or even covert, in that respect. There is a sense of childlike, or at least childish (not the same, as Britten of all composers would surely have known) play to the proceedings too: such, after all, is how children, at least in their (alleged) innocence, will speak of a bed. Beyond that, the Coliseum space is used inventively, occasionally spilling out beyond the stage, yet never merely for the sake of it, and never to the extent of the wearily predictable. Lighting (Carsen himself and Peter van Praet) is sensitive, revealingly suggestive of different worlds, different times; likewise Michael Levine’s designs. There is an almost ravishing beauty to the proceedings of this Athenian forest, from which it would take a sterner soul than mine entirely to recoil.

 

I certainly saw no reason to do so, and found the first two acts fairly sped by. As for the third, perhaps the problem is mine. There are people who complain about alleged longueurs in Elektra (!) and Der Rosenkavalier, their complete absence (to me) notwithstanding, who find the play within a play riveting, even hilarious. I am afraid I find it all too straightforwardly a ‘tedious play’. Oh well: it does none of us any harm to try to understand what others see and hear in something – and, if we cannot do so, simply put up with it for a while. In any case, Alexander Soddy led a knowing, sensitive, often truly magical account of the score throughout. Its allusions to other scores, other composers were clear enough without underlining. What seems to me ultimately far more interesting in Britten – and that is doubtless as much a matter of my own preoccupations as anything else – is the way he constructs his music. That generative, impulse was equally to the fore here. Indeed, although I am far from a paid-up admirer of this opera, I found myself, until the third act at least, fascinated at the interplay between local colour and atmosphere, broadly construed, on the one hand, and that rather sinister build-up of mechanistic forces on the other. None of that, of course, could have been achieved without the excellent understanding of the ENO Orchestra.

 

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Andri Björn Róbertsson Emma Carrington Matthew Durkan Eleanor Dennis David Webb Clare Presland (c) Robert Workman

The cast proved excellent too, with no weak links: a testimony to fine casting as well as to fine performance. The quartet of lovers – Clare Presland, David Webb, Matthew Durkan, and Eleanor Dennis – was handsome in every sense, as vocally refined as impressive of stage manner. One really felt – which is surely part of the point – that one would have been happy with any conceivable outcome to the madness of the forest, and would not necessarily have minded being included oneself. Christopher Ainslie and Soraya Mafi made for an equally finely sung, nicely contrasted king and queen of the fairies, attended to by a properly rascally Puck (Miltos Yerolemou) and outstanding Trinity Boys’ Choir. The rustics and temporal monarchs all had much to offer too. Were I to name them here, I should simply be repeating the cast list above. This was the sort of company performance for which ENO used to be renowned; I hope that it will now continue to be so.

 

ENO A Midsummer Night's Dream Christopher Ainslie

Miltos Yerolemou 3 (c) Robert Workman

And yet, and yet… you may have felt a ‘but’ coming. If so, your instincts did not err. For Carsen’s production has returned at the expense of Christopher Alden’s brilliant 2011 staging, quite the best I have seen. It did what those of us less suffocated by the post-Britten English musical establishment, more open – like the young Britten, aspirant pupil of Berg – to artistic developments beyond these grey shores, would have thought obvious, yet seemingly no one had dared previously attempt. The sexual darkness not only of Britten’s past and present, but also of this work, was tackled head on, in a boys’ school setting that left one in no doubt there could be no happy endings here. By contrast, chez Carsen – and however unfair the retrospective comparison – everything is a little too well-ordered in its fantasy, a little too blithe in its heteronormativity, a little too distant from shadows of power and the abuses that accompany it.

 

There is no reason in principle, of course, why there should not be room for both approaches, and indeed for many more. Whether, however, we should be papering over awkward cracks specifically now, in the age of #metoo, the Jimmys Savile and Levine, et al. is another question. I never cease to be amazed quite how lightly Britten gets off in this respect, but that doubtless tells its own story or stories. Not that I am suggesting we need necessarily always sit in judgement: a large part, after all, of the role of drama is to explore, to tease out. A dramatic work is neither a court case nor a treatise. There is, though, surely far more to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its ideological framework than is acknowledged here. I hope the decision not to revive Alden was not taken because ‘traditionalists’ and those in positions of power – often one and the same – were ‘offended’, or running scared. Perhaps, then, next time, might we return to Alden, or see something with insights altogether new?

 

Jenůfa, English National Opera, 23 June 2016

Images: Donald Cooper
Karolka (Soraya Mafi), Mayor's Wife (Natalie Herman), Jenůfa (Laura Wilde), Laca (Peter Hoare)

 

Coliseum

Grandmother Buryja – Valerie Reid

Kostelnička Buryja – Michaela Martens
Jenůfa – Laura Wilde
Laca Klemen – Peter Hoare
Števa Buryja – Nicky Spence
Foreman, Mayor – Graeme Danby
Jano – Sarah Labiner
Barena – Claire Mitcher
Mayor’s Wife – Natalie Herman
Karolka – Soraya Mafi
Neighbour – Morag Boyle
Villager – Claire Pendleton

David Alden (director)

Charles Edwards (set designer)
Jon Morrell (costumes)
Adam Silverman (lighting)
Claire Gaskin (choreography, revived by Maxine Braham)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Stephen Harris)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)

 

 

 

Jenůfa

This now seems as though it took place in another world – because it did. I nearly did not make it, waiting more than half an hour to change trains at Tower Hill, before desperately trying to find a cab to take me to the Coliseum. Yes, that monsoon rainfall that hit London – and, well, you know the rest… In some ways, it was fitting, if heartbreaking, that this outstanding demonstration of European internationalism should have opened on the night it did: the night when the forces of bigotry, those who would have stoned Jenůfa, took us where they did. I might have preferred to hear Jenůfa in Czech, but who cares? Although the words – excellently translated, insofar as I am competent to judge, a considerable ‘insofar’, although compared to my countrymen and, to a lesser extent, countrywomen… - sometimes sound in themselves a little odd in English, they and their meaning were powerfully, indeed viscerally conveyed. (I know that ‘visceral’ is a much overused word in such contexts, but here it certainly was the mot juste, or whatever ‘decent’ English phrase that fascist Farage would have us use.) Moreover, hearing the words in English certainly had the advantage for a non-Czech speaker – my fault, I know – of underlining when words, especially but not only when repeated, took on not only vocal but orchestral life of their own as speech rhythms (even if the speech rhythms were thus a bit peculiar!) That cavil-which-is-not-a-cavil will be really my only attempt at finding one, for this was magnificent, a reproach not only to xenophobes but to all those who have wished ENO ill, and who, in certain case, continue to do so.

ENO Chorus

 

The (relatively few) reservations I had about David Alden’s production last time around in 2009 have either evaporated or, seemingly, been dealt with in revision. Perhaps it was as much a matter of the outstanding performances we saw on stage – although they were pretty good too in 2009. I am not entirely sure which, since it is always difficult, no impossible, to remember precisely what happened when, so shall not offer detailed comparisons. At any rate, the shift from Czech Hardy-land – I was put in mind of Boulez’s less-than-favourable description of earlier Janáček as ‘Dvořák in the country’, thereby exalting the late works to which he came to, well, late – to a more overtly, at least to us rootless cosmopolitans, vicious urban-ish setting, perhaps holding something in common with Christoph Marthaler’s Paris Katya Kabanova. The people are poor and they live in a small, ‘tight-knit’ community, with all the problems that brings: that is what is important, not whether we see lots of wheat sheaves or whatever. Indeed, a sense of the bucolic might be argued to distract from the tragedy at hand; that is certainly given no chance of happening here.

Grandmother Buryja (Valerie Reid), Jano (Sarah Labiner), Jenůfa

 

Charles Edwards’s brilliant designs, Jon Morrell’s costumes, Adam Silverman’s costumes, the choreography of Claire Gaskin, here revived by Maxine Braham: all these combine with Alden’s razor-sharp focus upon human tragedy to present something out of the normal (and that is before we even come to the music). Walls close in, the storm intervenes, worlds (visual) collide, often with the greatest physical menace. The Mayor’s Wife outfit and make-up are just as much part of the drama, as the terrifying rattling on the shutters of the Kostelnička’s house and the eventual smashing of the glass. Gesamtkunstwerk is a word so divested of meaning, historical or contemporary, that it is perhaps beyond salvation, but if salvation there might be – and there is precious little chance of that dramatically – this would offer unimpeachable witness. If I find some of the deviations from the naturalistic a little peculiar in themselves, they serve that greater purpose; indeed, when considering that, I recalled Alden’s brilliant ENO Peter Grimes. I was less troubled there by such matters, perhaps because I like the work ‘itself’ less; that, though, should not be the point, and the greater dramatic point of small-community, small-minded bigotry punches one in the gut just as it did in Britten’s opera. The advance of the chorus, the villagefolk gunning for their primitive, punitive, perverted ‘morality’ will long remain in the mind; so will the cowardly attempt at rescue of a broken Števa. Here, wall-hugging, often rightly derided, had justification, the desire both to escape and to self-incarcerate inescapably drawn to the fore.

Kostelnička (Michaela Martens)

I cannot recall hearing a finer performance from the ENO Orchestra. Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting – he must be brought back as Music Director, with a settlement for the company to match – was the most intense I can recall in this work, perhaps in any Janáček opera. It grabbed one by the throat, just like the work of a great conductor in Wozzeck, and never relinquished its grip. It was not all fierceness, though; the open, sympathetic, European humanity of Janáček’s score shone through all the more warmly in the context of such an agón. The pounding repeated chords at the second half registered all the more strongly for the turmoil both onstage and in the world outside; but they were the orchestra’s and Wigglesworth’s too. Biting, ferocious, generative: they were everything a musico-dramatic prelude should and must be. As the lights flickered in duet with the xylophone, a world internal and external shook. Wagner has no monopoly in operatic renewal of Attic tragedy: this was a communal and, yes, a political rite.

Jenůfa and Laca

That warm sympathy was equally apparent in Laura Wilde’s lovely account of the title role. This was no stock object of sympathy, of circumstance; we experienced her agonies, but as an agent too, albeit, like us, an agent constrained, (near-)destroyed by her ‘community’. Michaela Martens, almost the only returning member of the 2009 cast, again presented a woman of strength as well as goodness, that strength smashed to pieces – how broken she looked and behaved in the third act! – by what she had done. Vocally, she soared; dramatically, in the very best sense, she plummeted. Valerie Reid was similarly broken by that stage as Grandmother Buryja. She intrigued, as the finest performances of this curious role will: we knew that she and whatever mistakes she had made were fundamental to the tragedy unfolding, without ever quite knowing what they had been. We guessed, though, thus making us complicit with the chorus of terror. Its magnificent contribution throughout, beyond ‘visceral', if something can be so, was yet another standing rebuke to the encircling vultures: ironically so, given its members roles as just that.

Jenůfa and Števa (Nicky Spence)

Peter Hoare’s Laca took us on as moving a ‘journey’, with apologies for the cliché, as that of Jenůfa; youthful (in knowing excess?) silliness was transformed into diffident, difficult maturity. I was quite unprepared for the violence of Nicky Spence’s first-act Števa. Again, being rid of the bucolic doubtless helped, but what generally comes across as winning charm was here a brazen display of power from the start, somewhat tempered, eventually, by Jenůfa’s intervention towards the end of the act, but only somewhat. That rendered his ghost-like appearance and disappearance all the more terrifying in the final act. Sarah Labiner’s splendidly boyish Jano, Soraya Mafi’s spirited Karolka, Graeme Danby’s skilfully differentiated roles Natalie Herman’s nasty-piece-of-work Mayor’s Wife: they and all the rest contributed to a true company performance. Even in, particularly in, the direst of tragedy, we find our catharsis somehow.

 

L'Oca del Cairo, London Mozart Players, 14 April 2016

St John’s, Smith Square

Don Pippo – Quirijn de Lang

Celidora – Fflur Wyn
Lavina – Soraya Mafi
Biondello – Robert Murray
Auretta – Ellie Laugharne
Donna Pantea – Victoria Simmonds
Calandrino – Christopher Diffey
Chichibio – Alexander Robin Baker

Oriana Choir

London Mozart Players

David Parry (conductor)

 

I wanted to like this; I really did. On the face of it, it seemed to offer so much of what I liked, so much of what I approved. Stephen Oliver’s 1990 completion of Mozart’s aborted opera buffa, L’Oca del Cairo is neither an exercise in pastiche nor in pasticcio. Instead, Oliver composes his own music and reworks the plot and libretto to create something theatrically viable, or so the claim goes. Alas, there remains too much and too little of Giovanni Battista Varesco. English translation probably does not help, but nor does the reordering, which renders a silly libretto more straightforwardly confusing. I am afraid to say I gave up trying to work out what was going on, excellent diction from an impressive cast notwithstanding.

 

The real problem, I think, is Oliver’s music. Reading the programme, one learns that this was someone who clearly meant a great deal to a number of friends, Jonathan Dove (who gave a brief, spoken introduction) and Jane Glover included. That does not, alas, translate for the rest of us into being an interesting composer. There is certainly competence, never to be disdained; someone could hardly have composed forty-four (!) operas without gaining a good deal of craftsmanship. By the sound of it – the programme tributes, rather than the other forty-three operas, which I doubt I shall be listening to – such craftsmanship was indeed there all along. I had previously encountered Oliver as provider of new secco recitatives (to replace the wretched efforts of Süssmayr) for La clemenza di Tito: an important job, very well done, to be found on a Glyndebourne DVD under Andrew Davis. There he writes ‘in style’, and indeed my sole complaint would be that there is nothing evidently of the new to them; in some moods, I have longed for a Berio, now for someone else, to do something more with and indeed to the work. Here, Oliver writes in what I must presume to be his own style and language, which emerges, a few more modernist moments aside, as rather drearily sub-Britten, even Shostakovich-like. A repeated slow waltz intrigued, but it was not entirely clear to me what it was doing where it was. For the most part, it all sounds a bit 1980s Channel 4, or maybe BBC 2. There is far more Oliver than there is Mozart; with one exception, in the final scene, in which the (new) composer interpolates himself, they follow each other in orderly fashion, with contrast of a sort, but one that served only to have me long for the return of Mozart.

That return would have been more welcome, had David Parry not harried Mozart so. His was a ruthlessly hard-driven, quite charmless account of Mozart’s contributions: Mackerras, and then some; or, if you prefer, Rossini without any smiles. The London Mozart Players themselves sounded splendid. At least they were not denied vibrato, although Mozart really needs a larger band (only four first violins), even in so warm an acoustic as that of St John’s Smith Square. Parry and the ensemble sounded more at home in Oliver; it is doubtless my problem that I was not. Peter Schreier’s CPE Bach Chamber Orchestra recording is a much better bet (along with Colin Davis, no less, in Lo sposo deluso).

 

That said, there was some good singing to enjoy. The young cast acted well, insofar as what was essentially a concert performance permitted, interacting with each other impressively in vocal terms too. I was especially pleased to hear Quirijn de Lang’s agile baritone; more than once, I thought I should like to hear him as Count Almaviva. Robert Murray’s tenor was more of a known quantity to me, but no less welcome for that; his performance was just as alert and lively. Likewise that of Christopher Diffey, both vocally and dramatically (insofar as the work permitted). Alexander Robin Baker showed a similar gift for comedy and style. At times, Ellie Laugharne’s performance was a little strident for my taste, but hers was a committed performance nevertheless. All of the vocal performances had something valuable to offer, soprano Soraya Mafi another welcome discovery for me.