Brawn triumphs over poetry or social status in Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, in which three lovers court the sexy wife of a clockmaker while he is out each week winding up the town clocks. She opts for a muleteer, short on conversation but big on muscle, who only drops by to get his watch mended. In farcical misadventure, her other two admirers hide inside clocks.
This delicious comedy, with a score as rhapsodic – harp glissandi at every opportunity – as it is meticulous in its horological tickings and whirrings, formed the second half of a triple bill, directed by Ella Marchment and staged by the Royal College of Music opera studio at its home base, the Britten theatre. A well-drilled orchestra, conducted by RCM director of opera, Michael Rosewell, gave deft and idiomatic performances of the Ravel, along with two song cycles, Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations and Kurt Weill’s Chansons des Quais: widely contrasting works, each to a French text and each with a powerful female protagonist.
Every aspect of the evening was carefully thought through: the male quartet in the Weill, interchangeable in burlesque-style little black dresses and cabaret hats, came into their own in the Ravel. Tenors Francis Melville and Peng Tian played the unobservant husband, Torquemada, and the self-obsessed, yearning poet, Gonzalve. Baritones Ross Fettes, as the pompous Don Iñigo Gomez, and Daniel Barrett as the muleteer Ramiro, pink-cheeked after his afternoon exertions with the starlet-like Concepción (mezzo-soprano Anastasia Koorn), completed an impressive cast. Comic timing was excellent, in a production that used simple means – several retro-style analogue alarm clocks in every size – to stylish effect.
Soprano Georgia Melville in the Britten, as a dying woman recalling her youthful loves and losses, and fellow soprano Charlotte Jane Kennedy in the Weill held the stage with beguiling magnetism. Marchment, with designer Cordelia Chisholm and lighting designer Kevin Treacy, drew these pieces together with a loose narrative based on the French actor and singer known as Mistinguett (1873-1956), who appeared at the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère. The men’s voices, bursting with promise and character, are perhaps still finding their potential, but the three lead women are already poised for the careers they all deserve.
It being that time of year, Royal Academy Opera had its own end-of-term production. I caught the second performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, conducted by Johann Stuckenbruck and directed by Jack Furness. Again, the women in the cast shone especially, with fine lead performances by Clover Kayne (Hänsel) and Erin O’Rourke (Gretel). Furness chose to eschew gingerbread house fun and expose the tale’s traumatic dark side: children maltreated by adults; hints of a rape; indefinable sexual shadows falling on the siblings lost in the wood. Designs, by Alex Berry, were minimal and striking, indicating a puritanical sect in which obedience and abuse, individuality and conformity, clash to destructive ends.
The orchestra was a little too small to capture Humperdinck’s rich, Wagner-inspired sound, but the playing was spirited, chorus work strong. Hänsel und Gretel is sometimes described as being too sweet, not least because the witch (a vampish Zahid Siddiqui) is never scary and speedily ends up in the oven. No danger of that here. I came away stricken. But I was also impressed that British operatic life, at student level, is firing on all cylinders, with bags of talent and a brilliant future.
These rising star singers may set their sights on a career such as that of the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel – a one-off, but they can dream. He got to know Puccini’s Tosca from an old VHS tape in the library of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama when he was a first-year student. He is now, and has been for many years, the Scarpia of our time: villainous, smooth, twitchy, lascivious, every Italian syllable clear enough to take down in dictation, voice granite-strong but nuanced and expressive. Performing the role when Jonathan Kent’s production for the Royal Opera was new in 2006, he was back last week, opposite compatriot (and Guildhall graduate), the soprano Natalya Romaniw, superb in the title role, with the South Korean tenor SeokJong Baek as an extraordinarily reverberant Cavaradossi, top notes pinging effortlessly, heroically, loudly. To think he only retrained as a tenor (from baritone) during lockdown. Baek’s story is remarkable.
The choral Te Deum that closes the first act worked its usual spell, handsome in Paul Brown’s majestic Sant’Andrea della Valle designs. The Act 2 murder scene, in which Terfel and Romaniw drew on immense musical resources, was as chilling as any thriller. Romaniw’s Vissi d’arte, from hushed start to mighty swell, was the still point of the evening; unshowy, intense. Scarpia’s vocal line here, lying higher than in the first act, is now a challenge for Terfel, but this great singer still owns the stage. Every raised eyebrow, every icy stare, is poured back into the drama.
The performance was conducted by Eun Sun Kim, music director of San Francisco Opera, in her impressive, probing house debut. The Royal Opera low woodwind soloists, and low strings, playing with deep, murky clarity, every bar a reminder of Puccini’s genius. With top quality cameos from Ossian Huskinson (Angelotti) and Maurizio Muraro (Sacristan), this Tosca – in its umpteenth revival, by director Simon Iorio – is better than ever. In the week marking the centenary of Puccini’s death, that’s an achievement.
Star ratings (out of five)
Britten, Weill and Ravel ★★★★
Hänsel und Gretel ★★★★
Tosca ★★★★
