Thursday 12 March 2015

Review written for Manchester Evening News 11 March 2015


THIS new production of a Mozart masterpiece is good example of Opera North doing what it ought to do. Making opera accessible while keeping to high musical and production standards should be the company’s watchword, and this fulfils it. 

That’s not to say that everything made sense or hit perfection – but there have been very good productions in the past to compare with. In Jo Davies’ new one it’s sung in English (Jeremy Sams’ clever translation) with no surtitles to distract attention – so the comedy is visual as well as verbal and the singers have to put the lines over. 

They all manage that well, some very well. The interesting thing for me was that Quirijn de Lang, as Count Almaviva, came over so sympathetically, with his attempts to play the old-style aristocrat boss frustrated by his servants (and, of course, the women whose plotting crosses the class barriers completely). He is a superb singer, too. 

That’s not to do down Richard Burkhard’s performance as Figaro, which was well acted and finely sung, but I noticed that de Lang uses a conversational style of recitative singing (almost Sprechgesang) that sometimes sits a little loosely to the notation, whereas the other principals are all stricter. 

There’s also an element in the production which focuses on the crumbling façades of an upstairs-downstairs social setting (literally so, in the case of Leslie Travers’ set designs, and emphasized by the costuming – Gabrielle Dalton – in a Downton Abbey sort of period), so the tottering structure of feudal power becomes a powerful concept. 

Davies’ great achievement here is to get all the singers to find real human personality, not caricature, in their acting. Some of them were strikingly successful. I don’t remember a less harridan-like Marcellina before (Gaynor Keeble, looking a tiny bit like Imelda Staunton), and Henry Waddington – always a great character actor – is really believable as Dr Bartolo. 

Silvia Moi and Ana Maria Labin both look their parts, acting and singing beautifully as Susanna and the Countess respectively, and Helen Sherman tackles the difficult task of being a lovestruck teenage boy with gusto. 

It’s strongly cast all round – good to see Ellie Laugharne making her contribution as Barbarina – and conductor Alexander Shelley pilots everything with skill and sympathy from the pit. It may not plumb all the emotional depths, but this Marriage Of Figaro is quality entertainment. 

Repeated on Saturday. 

**** 

Robert Beale

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