Of all the movers and shakers in British musical life there’s none so dynamic as the boss of Grange Park Opera, Wasfi Kani, whose new country-house venue at West Horsley near Guildford has just opened with (inter alia) a punch-packing production of Janáček’s Jenůfa.
In barely a year Kani has built, from scratch, a 750-seat opera theatre that resembles a miniature La Scala, and filled it with a summer season.
That the theatre isn’t wholly finished hardly matters: it’s a fabulous achievement, and it worked for Jenůfa, which was superbly cast, with singers such as Nicky Spence (a force of nature on stage despite a Donald Trump wig) as Steva, and Susan Bullock as the Kostelnička.
The Kostelnička, a church official who turns murderess out of misguided love, is the key role in this opera, commonly portrayed with cartoon-like severity. But Bullock turns it into a sort of Julie Walters role: tough but human, and profoundly so.
I missed the throbbing textural richness that the score asks of the orchestra, and fear the pit may be too deep for good projection. But the next phase of the building programme can address that. Generally this theatre is a thing to welcome and celebrate, in a setting that’s already magical. A must-see.
Palazzetto Bru Zane is a music foundation dedicated to the idea that vast tracts of forgotten French repertoire can be essential experiences if delivered with love, care and style; and it’s been running Festival Palazzetto Bru Zane à Paris, a festival of that kidney in the city of love. It’s based around composers whose names wouldn’t get the average Brit out of bed for an early Eurostar – but are nonetheless of substance.
One was Fromental Halévy, whose mid-19th-century opera La reine de Chypre turned out to be an entertaining mix of high drama and striking effects alongside tub-thumping conventionality. It played in the art deco Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (famous for the raucous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring), and was a vehicle for the classy French soprano Véronique Gens in the title role.
Another was Phèdre by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, a French contemporary of Mozart whose operatic adaptation of Racine’s great tragedy played in the atmospheric gloom of the distressed-chic Bouffes du Nord, near the Gare du Nord – still as impressively decrepit as it was when Peter Brook was running things there. Hijacked by a towering role for Theseus (here Thomas Dolié) who arrives late in the narrative to steal the show, Lemoyne’s long score was filleted for this production to a modest scale. And just as well. The bench-seats at the Bouffes are crippling.
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