Tag: Opera Reviews

The Cunning Little Vixen (ENO) tells the tale of a sweet-natured, pointy-eared vixen entrapped by a forester for use as a children’s pet and who is later tied up in the back yard. On escaping, she reverts to her true nature by killing the cock, ravishing the hens and escaping back to the woodland to start a family. She is then killed by an oafish poacher from a neighbouring village.

On the surface, The Cunning Little Vixen (1924) by Leoš Janácek is a charming tale accompanied by the distinctive rhythm of Moravian folk songs but hidden within the plot are deeper allegorical significances.

We are confronted with the beauty of unbridled nature pitted against the moribund and decaying human world – a “four legs good, two legs bad” Orwellian allegory. Contrast the exuberance and free spiritedness of the woodland animals and the dull, dreary lives of the forester, priest and school master.

Sally Matthews sings the key soprano role of Sharp Eyes the Vixen. She successfully conveys the character’s sweet nature – coy, demure but her modest downward gazes mean that her voice is sometimes directed into the orchestra pit. Pumeza Matshikiza provides the perfect counterfoil as her paramour, the Fox. Pumeza’s voice is clear and colourful…any right-minded vixen would find her hard to resist.

Lester Lynch as the Forester, prowls and growls his way around the stage striking terror in his wake. He has a commanding vocal presence which fills the London Coliseum auditorium.

The best comic moments in the Cunning Little Vixen (ENO) stem from the opera’s anthropomorphism. Sharp Eyes describes her background and education as if on a first date and has the audience guffawing at mention of the mating activities of other creatures and when the forester sets a trap, Bright Eyes exclaims “Does he think we are fools?”.

Tom Scutt adopts a television studio set with props and storyline painted onto huge scrolls of paper to give vertical interest. The blackened stage provides a foil for the colourful animal, insect and fauna costumes. There are iridescent insects, metallic red-spotted toadstools and bridal chickens with perfect yellow patent shoes. Some costumes were less successful, a giant ball of fluff turned out to be a family dog and scurrying black-hatted creatures reminiscent of Victorian bobbies could be beetles.

Martyn Brabbins made light work of the conducting which was challenging as the music called for frequent loud and staccato percussion pieces that needed to be perfectly timed not to drown out the vocals. With this in mind it may have befitted the priest (Clive Bayley) and the School Master (Alan Oke) to project their voices more in Act Two to counterbalance the musical score.

And it’s a wrap…the poacher kills the vixen, the forester exits out of the studio back door…we run out of projector tape – it’s the end.

Jamie Manton, pulls the rabbit out of the hat, his direction of The Cunning Little Vixen  (ENO) makes for an exuberant production that relays a charming comic tale and gives something to chew over for those looking for deeper allegorical significance.

Maxine Morse  wrote this review of the Cunning Little Vixen as part of her opera critics training at the English National Opera. To see other reviews from her mentoring see The Valkyrie, HMS Pinafore, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cosi Fan Tutte, Satyagraha and La Boheme.

You would need to be quite disturbed to categorise Poul Ruders’ opera of The Handmaid’s Tale as entertainment but this performance nonetheless keeps the viewer transfixed throughout.

The Handmaid’s Tale ENO The Handmaid’s Tale, 22, Pumeza Matshikiza, Rhian Lois, Kate Lindsey © Catherine Ashmore

Based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, the opera depicts a future police state where women who have been living in sin, or who are in second marriages, are forced to act as surrogates for the childless leaders of the State of Gilead. Women are defined by their fertility and child bearing capabilities. Their emotions and actions are governed by a rule-bound theocracy.

The opera opens with Professor Pieixoto (Camille Cottin) explaining how the USA has been taken over by right-wing fundamentalists who have rolled back the progress and freedoms of women in early 21st century America. The discovery of a handmaid’s diary allows Offred’s (Kate Lindsey) story to be told. Camille Cotton seems lost – a slight, white-suited figure stranded on a podium…really, we want less chat so our dystopian nightmare can begin.

There is no sisterhood, no female fraternity, in Gilead. Aunt Lydia (Emma Bell) leads an indoctrination centre where the handmaids are stripped of everything that makes them human. We witness mental breakdowns, flashbacks and thoughts of escaping until the women enter a docile state and graduate.

The role of the handmaid is to act as a surrogate. Offred’s vocals convey the alarm, sadness and distress of her plight. She is held down by the wife (Avery Amereau) while her husband, The Commander (Robert Hayward) attempts to impregnate her. All erotic touching is strictly forbidden. Any transgressions are punished by the women being sent to work in a brothel, or to hard labour in the Colonies.

Annemarie Woods has designed a barren set encased by NHS hospital grade, green-grey curtains onto which grainy, celluloid films are shown of Offred’s previously happy life with her husband and child. The props of clinical apparatus and educational flip-charts evoke the birth control clinics of the 1960s. The red costumes of the handmaids represent nuns’ habits. Their uniformity makes it hard to distinguish between the opera cast. These are in direct contrast to the blue 1950’s frock of Serena Joy which is straight out of a 1950’s fashion magazine.

The music is scratchy and screechy with discordant percussion pieces punctuated by a few bars of Bach and Amazing Grace. The orchestra, conducted by Joana Carneiro, intentionally creates a background track to the action, rather than obviously supporting the voices. Ruders writes intentionally for the edge of what the performers’ voices can manage…their voices strain at the high notes which serves to underline that the inhabitants of the state of Gilead under continual strain.

Atwood is famed for having said that her novel contains nothing that hasn’t already happened in the world, or isn’t currently happening. Expect to be assaulted by historical and political allusions…the storming of the White House by Trump supporters, the rollback of women’s rights in Afghanistan, the separation of families by gun-toting soldiers which evoke the distressing, present day reality of the Ukrainian conflict.

Annilese Miskimmon (ENO Artistic Director) makes her debut as an opera director for the ENO with this performance. She should be commended for taking on such a challenging and feminist piece of work, although for some of us it left a bitter taste.

Performing The Handmaid’s Tale echoes the reasons why Holocaust education is considered important; to never forget, so we never repeat the mistakes of history. Human love, emotion and the things that make us human need to resist regulation by politics, education and organised religion.

Maxine Morse  wrote this review of The Handmaid’s Tale as part of her opera critics training at the English National Opera. To see other reviews from her training see The Valkyrie, HMS Pinafore, Satyagraha, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Cunning Little Vixen and La Boheme.

Così Fan Tutte ENO feels brilliantly contemporary for an opera that roughly translates into “all women are like that” with its sexual stereotyping and theme of infidelity.  Its success lies in its translation by Jeremy Sams of the Italian libretto into humorous, vernacular English, Tom Pye’s lavish Coney Island fairground sets and the casting of Soraya Mafi as Despina, the motel maid with the common touch.

As the strong man, oriental woman, performing dwarfs and other circus ensemble emerge from a wooden casket, we are pitched into PT Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth. The direction of this revival by Phelim McDermott is slick, well-paced and polished – everything shines from the opera performances to the comic timing, even the kick in the balls from an angry fiancée looks painful.

Two sisters are victims of a cynical wager in which a philosopher and impresario, Don Alfonso (Neal Davies) bets two lovers Guglielmo (Benson Wilson) and Ferrando (Amitai Pati) that their girlfriends won’t stay faithful to them in their absence. A plot is hatched in which the men pretend to go off to fight for their country leaving their girlfriends behind. The men reappear in disguise and successfully woo each other’s partners.

To pull off this trick, Don Alfonso ropes in a motel maid Despina, who is furtively sipping hot chocolate destined for the guests (“they get the chocolate, I get the smell”). In the best British sit com tradition, she stuffs the bribe down her bra and then moves heaven and earth to get the two sisters to break their vows. This involves Despina in adopting different guises including posing as Doctor Magnetico with his vibration machine and arranging a Las Vegas style wedding dressed as a cow girl in a Stetson. Through it all, her singing is as clear as a bell with an East End cockney twang.

The chemistry between Fiordiligi (Nardus Williams) and her sister Dorabella (Hanna Hipp) is obvious. We could be in any young girls’ bedroom. They muse about missing their men and talk of looking for someone young, handsome and rich. Their duets were both conversational and glorious.

Kerem Hasan conducts the music with perfect timing and volume to support the voices and create a seamless and sensational aural performance.

In Act Two, I noticed some interesting changes in the audience…kids in a balcony box waved at the circus performers, press hacks stopped scribbling and the surtitles were ignored as all eyes were on the stage.

Così Fan Tutte  (ENO) places the audience into a Tilt-a-Whirl, gives their cars a good spin and lurches them round bunny clubs, sugared-almond fairgrounds, retro circuses with authentically painted circus hoardings, courtesy of Joby Carter, and then abruptly plunges them into depression era movie motels before taking them up to sublime arias from hot air balloons. We are wildly spinning in countless different directions but instead of becoming green about the gills and throwing up our dinner, we don’t want to get off.

Maxine Morse  wrote this review of Così Fan Tutte as part of her opera critics training at the English National Opera. To see other reviews from her training see The Valkyrie, HMS Pinafore, The Handmaid’s Tale, Satyagraha, The Cunning Little Vixen and La Boheme.

The opening scene depicts scrounging, work shy flat sharers who are late with their rent and have no money for fuel or food. This society is clearly going to the dogs.

Variations of the La Bohème theme are on the inside pages of every popular, contemporary newspaper. Perhaps this explains the enduring appeal of this 1896 Puccini opera. It speaks to the human condition. There are no convoluted highly romanticised plots and subplots or Biblical epics with severed heads on gilded platters here.

Jonathan Miller’s production is a cross between the grey scenes of Lowry’s industrial northern poverty and Renoir’s detailed cameos of Parisienne life. Hats off to Crispin Lord, the revival director for his inclusive casting…Rodolfo (David Junghoon Kim) is a sensitive lover not a Brad Pitt lookalike, Mimi (Sinèad Campbell-Wallace) exudes seamstress-like common sense and is not the poverty-stricken waif so often depicted and Musetta is more sex bomb than harlot.

Isabella Bywater’s staging is magnificent. A gargantuan, murky edifice rotates fairground style from the freezing, spartan Crittall windowed garret to a sumptuous, joyful, bustling Christmas Eve street scene. Children chase the toy seller (Adam Sullivan) and a brass band booms. In the crowded Café Momus, amidst a confusion of toasts, camaraderie and flirtation, our impoverished bohèmians manage to palm Alcindoro (Simon Butteriss) Musetta’s elderly suitor off with their bill.

David Junghoon Kim’s vocal performance hits the highs but his lower range is sometimes drowned out by an over enthusiastic orchestra. Sinèad Campbell-Wallace singing is light, clear and crisp like the winter air. Charles Rice (Marcello), William Thomas (Colline) and Benson Wilson (Schaunard) bring some laddish musical weight to the attic scenes. Louise Alder’s performance of Musetta was fruity and rich, a joy to listen to.

Simon Butteriss who is cast as both Benoît the landlord and Alcindoro the hapless, geriatric suitor, lends a light hearted Fawlty Towers element to the production with his masterly comic timing.

The only jarring note is the dance routine in the attic in Act IV. Surely, we need a spontaneous combustion of raucous abandonment rather than a careful choreographed audience facing jig. Why else would anyone dance in their flat?

I had the pleasure of sitting behind the conductor, Ben Glassberg. He was a joy watch. He felt the music with every hand movement and was visibly transported by it and he did a masterly job in conducting for both the joys and the sadness in the plot.

The audience were visibly transported by this performance as evidenced by the rapturous final applause. We were almost tasting the wine and praying for Spring.

This year I had the pleasure of reviewing another  fine production of La Boheme at Opera Holland Park.

Maxine Morse  wrote this review of La Boheme as part of her opera critics training at the English National Opera. To see other reviews from her training see The Valkyrie, HMS Pinafore, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Cunning Little Vixen, Satyagraha and La Boheme.