If there was any doubt as to the loss this will have, WNO brought the big guns out to play, producing a stunning weeks’ worth of music drama that showed that when opera is really firing, there is little that matches it in the theatrical sphere. From school dinner Mozart to operas great hitters to Britten’s late masterpiece, there was something for everyone, a final bacchanalia before the famine.
Outside the Bristol Hippodrome on a sold-out Saturday night performance of Death Of Venice, its audience was asked to join the cause. To add its names to the petition asking ACE and ACW to reconsider their funding cuts for the Welsh National Opera, something that holds additional oomph in Bristol with the February 2025 tour stop (already down on their previous twice-a-year visits) canceled due to funding difficulties. This is a brutal reality, something had to give and, in this case, it was Bristol. A city that has played host to one of the UK’s great opera companies for decades has lost the opportunity to see world-class opera in the city. The petition needs signing. You can add your name here.
Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte (☆☆☆☆) is a challenging opera to get right. The beautiful 1789 melodies clash with Lorenzo da Ponte’s challenging to 21st-century ears libretto, with its assertion that women are not to be trusted with anything as important as matters of the heart. Director Max Hoehn’s decision to take its English subtitle (School for Lovers) and set it in a school much like the one in that famous sketch in Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life. It may not produce a beautiful staging in the way that the music and original settings suggest, but in designer Jemima Robinson’s playful set and the heightened characterisations from the chorus, there is fun to be had. Having Don Alfonso as a scholarly teacher and Despina as a dinner lady would provide safeguarding nightmares for current HR departments, but it makes a semblance of sense in this 60’s set public school world.
Hoehn’s production provides plenty of absurdist laughs, particularly the Sergeant Peppers’s lonely hearts club disguises of Guglielmo and Ferrando as they come back to try to seduce their ladies and prove that their old teacher’s dismissal of women’s fickle hearts is incorrect. That the women quickly bend to the thesis and agree to these new trysts suggests that they’ve been watching plenty of Couple to Throuple, even if these newfound romances do not appear to have hit the spot as the couples sing of forgiveness and understanding while their faces tell quite another story.
Ultimately with Mozart, a production lives and dies by its musical quality. Under the masterful hand of Music Director Tomàš Hanus, the orchestra brought both lightness to the comic buffa moments and heavier notes to Fiordilligi’s dilemma between fidelity and desire. The quintet of lovers sounds terrific, Egor Zhuravskii’s Ferrando and James Atkinson’s Guglielmo in fine mettle in ‘Di Scrivermi Ogni Giorno’ while Kayleigh Decker is flighty and light as a feather as Dorabella. Yet the musical honours ultimately belong to Sophie Bevan, beautifully considered in her ‘Come Scoglio’ aria, and Rebecca Evans whose dinner lady Despina consistently brings anarchic elements to her every disguise, her light soprano keeping everything on the verge of a wink. There may have been a slight jarring of the visual and aural aesthetic, but the beauty of its music could not be disputed.
Even more challenging in content, but exquisite in execution Death In Venice (☆☆☆☆☆) is Benjamin Britten’s last opera given heady, sensational life by director Olivia Fuchs. Its tale, of an older successful writer finding infatuation in the beauty of a teenage boy, is here given metamorphic pull in the wonder of circus performer Antony Cèsar, who tumbles and flies like a God himself. If you still can’t help but feel queasy in the narrative that Thomas Mann’s 1912 novel originally espouses, the higher planes that Cèsar’s Tadzio flies to keep the whole thing from earthliness and into celestial planes.
Brittten’s operatic adaptation, composed between 1971 and 1973, is both intimate in its focus on the writer Gustav von Aschenbach’s inner thoughts-it almost feels like it could be a chamber piece for long stretches of its running time- and then maximalist in its choral scenes and musical construction for orchestra. This gives it a dreamlike quality, nothing coalesces, the solitude of Aschenbach contrasted with the crowds thrumming the streets of Venice and the Olympic tournament overseen by the Gods.
Fuchs just about keeps all these different moving parts together, seamlessly blending internal moods with circus spectacle. An impending sense of doom hangs over the evening, even in the moments where great beauty takes over, as circus acrobats swing over the stage, there is a melancholy mixed in with exhilaration.
As in Cosi, music standards are high under the baton of Leo Hussain. Mark Le Brocq as Achenbach fulfills the demanding role with ease, vocally he sounds as strong at the finish line as he did at the starter gun, while Roderick Williams is equally as impressive in the singing of the seven different adversaries that cross paths with Achenbach, finding various shades and timbres with each role. Alexander Chance also shines, his countertenor gliding perfectly through his role as Apollo.
With strong support from guest artists and the Welsh National Opera chorus, even the smaller roles are sung with delicacy and poise, producing a special night that the sold-out Hippodrome crowd responded to with a standing ovation, both you feel for this magical production, and at least for now a farewell to WNO from a city with a lifelong attachment.
News
Bristol Old Vic has announced its new season with shows up to May next year. Lots of highlights including Miranda Cromwell’s long-awaited (it was postponed during Covid) festive show The Little Mermaid, a double whammy of reimagined Shakespeare’s with a rap Romeo and Juliet and a musical version of Twelfth Night Play On! with music from Duke Ellington and an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In the studio, former BOVTS student Laura Waldren’s Papatango winner Some Demon, one of my Edinburgh highlights Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz and a festive show for the little ones Little Red (& other winter tales) from writer-in-residence Florence Espeut-Nickless. In Nancy Medina’s second year, it is good to see her continue to plow her own path away from the former regime with new writing at the heart of it.
In further BOV news, complete casting was announced for A Child of Science, which includes an actual Harry Potter going up against Draco Malfoy, as Jamie Glover who played Harry on stage joins Tom Felton, alongside stage debutant Kate Bellamy, recently given much acclaim for her Kate Middleton in the Crown.
Meanwhile, over in Bath, Lindsay Posner, who seems to have his own residence in the city, directs a new version of George Orwell’s 1984, in a new version by Ryan Craig. With Robert Icke’s trans-Atlantic success still in recent memory, do we need a new version so soon? I guess we will have answers this September when the show opens in Bath before commencing a UK tour.
What’s On
This week the juggernaut of Hamilton reaches Bristol as part of its UK tour. Nothing more needs to be added to the millions of words uttered about Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Tony, Olivier, and Pulitzer winner hit, it’s a hot ticket, the tour cast has been receiving glowing reviews and Bristol will not throw away its shot. In the Weston Studio, Bristol School of Acting students present Pam Gem’s Piaf, and Theatre Royal Bath showcasing those ultimate outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. Frank Wildhorn’s musical flopped on Broadway but seems to have landed more strongly in the UK and this tour comes after a few West End runs. If it’s not too remiss of me to also mention my day job, Bath Theatre Academy students present a double bill of shows in the egg theatre this week and they’re a talented bunch, The Sad Club and A Series of Public Apologies should be well worth your time.
Kris Hallett- life as theatre 