The Queen of Spades and Babur in London, Grange Park Opera, review

Rupert Christiansen finds the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's version of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades needs its edges sharpened, while Edward Rushton’s new opera Babur in London is a depressing experience.

The Queen of Spades performed at Grange Park Opera Credit: Photo: Alastair Muir

The Queen of Spades * * *

Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades poses enormous challenges to the conductor: the score is stealthily paced, but the slower episodes can easily sag, and the final scenes should explode with the shocking momentum of a thunderstorm.

At Grange Park, Stephen Barlow and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra haven’t quite got its measure yet: the thrilling overture was lumpily shaped and, despite the excision of the tinkling pastoral divertissement in the ballroom scene, one didn’t feel inexorably mounting tension in the first half, or hurtling violence in the second. There’s plenty of volume and bluster, but that’s not the point – the screw needs tightening, the edge needs sharpening.

Antony McDonald’s production doesn’t provide much in the way of taut, crisp drama either. Updated to no great effect to just before the 1917 revolution, it offers an attractive panorama of upper-class St Petersburg, but fails to dig into the story’s dark heart and hallucinatory spookiness.

Crucially, there’s no forceful indication of Herman’s descent into madness – Carl Tanner, the American tenor who sings the role with admirably clean attack and tonal security, has a prosaic stage presence and looks only mildly embarrassed when he should be blazingly psychotic.

The pity of it is that Grange Park has otherwise assembled a first-­rate cast, all of whom could easily have taken more imaginative direction on board: Anne Sophie Duprels (Lisa), Anne-Marie Owens (Countess), Quirijn de Lang (Yeletsky), Roman Ialcic (Tomsky) and those playing the smaller roles present vivid characterisations which would make even greater impact in less bland surroundings.

Babur in London * *

I found the Opera Group’s carefully prepared, competently staged, nicely sung performance of Edward Rushton’s new opera Babur in London a depressing experience: what a waste of talent on material that seemed so limp and weedy.

The not-unpromising premise of Jeet Thayil’s libretto is that the ghost of the sybaritic Mughal emperor Babur encounters a cell of narrow-minded, uptight modern-day terrorists and broadens the moral horizons of one of their number. But Rushton’s music is far too neat, genteel and small-scale for the subject matter and nothing hits you in the gut or makes your heart beat faster.

Black thoughts assailed me on the way home. Is such a marginal enterprise really worth subsidy from the hard-pressed taxpayer, and what was the point of presenting it to a virtually empty theatre in Basingstoke on a wet Tuesday night?

'The Queen of Spades’ runs until June 30. Tickets: 01962 737366