FringeReview UK 2024

BBC Prom 68 Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream Garsington Opera

Garsington Opera

Genre: Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Musical Theatre

Venue: BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, Kensington

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

It’s not just Bottom who’s translated. Curiously, in spite of its high jinks, this is the first time Britten’s 1960 opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been aired at the Proms, translated from Garsington Opera’s scintillating 2024 production directed by Rebecca Meltzer,  with conductor and artistic director Douglas Boyd.

But of course the translation is in what Britten and his partner Peter Pears did with the libretto, mildly outraging some, though not as much as the choice of a countertenor as Oberon (more in a moment).

This production wraps a forest round itself, just as the single band of greenery wraps round the balcony behind the orchestra, and a few shrubs and one chaise-long (a bit like a psychiatrist’s couch for recumbent dreamers) leave more sylvan imagination to performers, and the orchestra itself. In contemporary svelte attire, the court contrasts with the Mechanicals who seem on holiday from a northern town in boaters c. 1920.

Boyd, an oboist, conjures particularly fine woodwind sounds (and for grand moments, the strings blaze) sighs and micro-tonal slides from the brief orchestral interludes like Ravel’s L’Enfant et Les Sortileges.

Necessarily shearing an already very short play of much of its opening and concentrating on the magical woods, removing for instance Hermia’s father Egeus and flunkey Philostrate with whom he’s often doubled, Britten also ensures Theseus and Hippolyta only come on in the third act, essentially the old Act Five. He does transpose Theseus’ and Hippolyta’s first exchanges there. They seem a lot happier in this opera than in many recent theatre productions of the Dream. But Garsington doesn’t let off Oberon’s trickery so lightly.

This does give this evening’s soloist (as it gave originator Jennifer Vyvan) soprano Lucy Crowe an out-soaring advantage. Originator and counter-tenor pioneer Alfred Deller couldn’t project on stage what he later did when recording. Iestyn Davies like counter-tenors before him makes light of stage projection and can match Crowe, normally.

But then Britten plays a trick. All those enchanted in the woods – both male lovers or instance, as well as Tytania herself (as spelled here) find in themselves an extra octave in enchantment. It’s soaringly realised here by all especially Crowe in Queen of the Night mode, and makes us question the resolution. Sure, the lovers are all paired off rightly at the end, but the ecstasy of their derangement has gone.

Crowe is magnificent, and Davies a piercingly lyrical, reflective presence, occasionally threatening but mostly here benign. The Indian boy dispute emerges clearly but little more is made of that here.

Daniel Vening replacing an indisposed Richard Burkhard as Bottom is magnificent. He reaches figuratively to the bottom of his baritonal range in a swaggering and deeply sympathetic as well as funny weaver: but with nobility too. His “O Wall…. O Sweet and lovely Wall” is lyrically as rapt as it is rib-tickling.

Jerone Marsh-Red’s northern Puck in lime-green is the delight of the show, somersaulting, throwing shapes and spells with promiscuous delight, and proving fairies as well as mortals fools.

Stephanie Wake-Edwards mezzo Hermia isa delight in her ardent passion, her despair and especially fury. Wake-Edwards takes full possession of Hermia’s anxiety, delight, betrayal, anger and dazed revelation and every note is resolute and clear. As is Camilla Harris’s Helena: appealing forlorn and abject, with her over-arching helplessness given rein by Britten, often left, as Hermia is, to reflect on abandonment.

Capsar Singh’s Lysander is the ardent tenor lead who finds in himself an inspired wrong-note one might also say attraction to poor Helena. His Lysander is more petulant than dangerous, and far more lyrical in one sense with Hermia, when they duet. Baritone James Newby’s dark, darting Demetrius is an altogether more tenebrous hero, as befits his treatment of Helena from the start and “I’d rather feed his carcass to my hounds”, more hunter than lover. Again he finds an octave pursuing Helena, but they both revert when out of the woods. Both her and in other spats, Schoenberg’s shade it tickled.

But their awakening is one of the great magical scenes, the strings fully deployed and a blaze of romanticism as Britten rarely allowed himself after the 1940s.

This leads into the introduction of two ‘new’ characters whose pomp is led into by the strings. Nicholas Crawley impresses as a clean incisive and lyrical Theseus in Act Three, as does Christine Rice’s Hippolyta with her soprano responses: they have little to do theatrically but wax on nuptials (that arrive very fast) and wax and wane about the performance.

James way’s Flute is the other Mechanical star, the part written for Pears, himself taking a smaller role here. Way navigate the absurdity (he’s a fine comic actor, as are several in “I have a beard coming on”)l) but also just snatches the palm in actually being affecting, as all the best Flutes are. His Donizetti and that Burkhard, are sublime.

The Mechanicals northern troupe (echoing Puck, in a curious way) led by John Savournin’s Quince singing precisely and wit delicious anxiety, Adam Sullivan’s Snout even more so, soon walled up as it were; Snug with Frazer Scott’s slow-of-study as Lion and Geoffrey Dolton’s Starveling playing a huffy Moonshine. The Garsington Youth Opera Company delight in playing shy fairies delicately disdaining to scratch Bottom and scampering with aplomb, black-clad and swarming with intent.

It’s a slippery score. The most memorable music comes with the end, and, it has to be admitted, the Donizetti pastiches of the Mechanicals. There’s a few parallels with Britten’s only other comic opera, Albert Herring from 1947. But his dream reaches deeper. It’s still an elusive sore though, dependant on ensemble and clear: as if Britten himself were deferring to Shakespeare, rough-hewing him as he did.

The full Garsington production looks in the photographs to have been a delight. Much of that translates here, with the Philharmonia doing wonders to breathe the edgy life into this score: which centres all the nocturnal music Britten wrote around it from the 1958 Nocturne, through to the Piano Nocturnal. A triumphant revival, it’s still the most elusive of Britten’s major operas, easy to enjoy, still hard to fathom the melodic root of.

Published September 11, 2024September 13, 2024 by Simon Jenner