REVIEW: The Marriage of Figaro, Opera North, Theatre Royal
A sparkling new production
Many in Thursday’s audience will have bought tickets the second they went on sale, so will have had a long wait for this latest airing of a Mozart favourite.
They can’t have been disappointed, applauding every well-loved aria – even though it’s something of a convention – and clapping furiously at the end.
And if that’s also pretty standard these days, there was a sense that the performers had enjoyed themselves as much as us. Pleasure seemed to radiate from them.
Why wouldn’t it?
There’s always that wonderful music, no doubt rattled off by its precocious composer in a spare moment between lunch and tea, and it’s delivered in this instance on eye-catching sets in keeping with Louisa Muller’s locating of the tale in a Jeeves and Woosterish English country house.
Wellington boots, wax jackets and sporty paraphernalia adorn the opening scene as we become acquainted on the morning of their wedding with young couple Figaro and Susanna, settling into the room allocated to them by their employer, Count Almaviva.
Generous of him, you might think, but the man has an ulterior motive, power and patronage bolstering his view that Susanna is his for the taking.
Which doesn’t mean he isn’t also insanely jealous, suspecting every approach made to his unhappy wife, the Countess, of mimicking his own lascivious intentions.
The fact that in respect of her godson, the hormonally rampant Cherubino, he isn’t wholly wide of the mark doesn’t make him less of a monster. We’ve seen his type throughout history and they’re still with us. Aren’t they just!
What make this production really wonderful is the quality of the singing, from soloists and Chorus, and the fabulously on-the-button playing from the orchestra pit, under conductor Oliver Rundell.
South Korean soprano Hera Hyesang Park, whose slight frame gives the lie to operatic stereotyping, has a crystalline voice matched only by her superbly expressive acting and comic timing.
As Susanna, she delivered on Thursday a performance of all-round brilliance with some truly spine-tingling moments.
As Figaro, Welsh baritone Emyr Wyn Jones, whom you’d never call slight, is also blessed with a wonderful voice and patent likeability.
This, then, is a young couple well-matched – and all around them shone, too.
Excellent casting (although it tends to vary from venue to venue) gives us James Newby’s stern and humourless Count, Gabriella Reyes’ gloriously subversive Countess and Hongni Wu’s twinkle-eyed Cherubino, forever escaping by the skin of his teeth (although this is a ‘breeches role’, traditionally performed by a woman, so ‘her’ works just as well).
The farcical plot wriggles to its satisfying climactic comeuppance, and it does so over quite a stretch, made longer by those punctuating ovations and the now traditional Opera North welcome speech from the stage.
It was cellist Lydia Dobson this time, getting an ovation for every uplifting statistic – number of performances, number of newcomers to opera (surely there were some in an audience leaning towards, ahem, maturity) and so on.
We were all clapped out at the end. But if anyone could sparkle in slow motion, it was Mozart, and that was certainly demonstrated by this thoroughly enjoyable tour de force.
There’s one more performance, on Saturday, March 21. Tonight (Friday, March 20) it’s Peter Grimes - a very different kettle of fish. Details of all from the Theatre Royal website.