CLASSICAL

Opera review: Silent Night, Opera North, Leeds Town Hall; Hansel and Gretel, Royal Opera, ROH

Opera North’s Silent Night is a moving missive for our troubled times

The Sunday Times
War requiem: Stuart Laing, left, and Richard Burkhard in Opera North’s Silent Night
War requiem: Stuart Laing, left, and Richard Burkhard in Opera North’s Silent Night
TRISTRAM KENTON

Opera North’s winter show this year is less a seasonal offering than a centennial in memoriam of the end of the First World War. Kevin Puts’s Silent Night, first seen in St Paul, Minnesota, in 2011 and given its European premiere at Wexford four years ago, tells the story of the 1914 Christmas truce, when guns were laid aside to celebrate a common humanity.

Its message seems more pertinent than ever at a time when divisions in Europe are recklessly exploited, although Puts’s score has passages of blandness — I thought longingly of English National Opera’s staging of Britten’s masterly War Requiem, which tells the same story, albeit more abstractly — and Mark Campbell’s libretto has its fair share of improbabilities (an opera diva