When Grange Park Opera parted ways with the original Hampshire home that gave the company its name, it gained much more than it lost. The Grange was striking, but there’s something about its home since 2017, the gardens of West Horsley Place, with their conspiratorial corners, their overgrown croquet lawns and wild grasses, that just feels right. As a frame for Verdi’s Falstaff – that most English of Italian operas – they couldn’t be bettered.
And the charm doesn’t stop at the theatre’s edge. Already seen in Parma and Muscat but new to the UK, Stephen Medcalf’s season-opening production is a handsome one. Jamie Vartan’s simple designs – tongue-in-cheek Tudor – provide a playpen for a superb cast to romp in, albeit with enforced social distancing.
Lovers tryst among loaded washing lines; Herne’s Oak looms vast and craggy and the knight’s unexpected dip in the Thames is aided by an unusually high casement window and a really spectacular plunge. You can feel Medcalf and his musicians leaning into the warmth of Verdi’s late, great comedy, though as yet the humour feels a little too diligent, too striven-for.
You sense there might be an extra star for this production once singers relax into their return to the stage- in many cases after a long absence. There is already much to enjoy. Natalya Romaniw’s Alice Ford (a role debut) allows the Welsh soprano to trade tragedy for comedy. The result is piquant and vivacious, but loses some vocal beauty in its quest for character.
Romaniw is the leader of a Windsor ladies’ clique you long to join: Janis Kelly’s scene-stealing Meg Page, Sara Fulgoni’s Mistress Quickly – all luscious voice and twinkling eyes – and Chloe Morgan’s girlish Nanetta, wooed by Luis Gomes’s Fenton who gamely delivers “Dal labbro” some 20 feet up in a tree.
But it’s Bryn Terfel’s Falstaff that is the big draw. More than 20 years after Terfel first sang the role, it’s a character that is worn-in, pliable at the edges. Noticeably less broad here than in 2018’s Royal Opera staging, there’s nothing remotely camp about either Terfel’s knight or his blunt seductions. Terfel revels in the details – a walk, a glance, a wriggle – but keeps a through-line of melancholy from his Act III monologue right through to the final scene’s humiliation.
There were some dodgy moments of ensemble on the opening night between the stage and the BBC Concert Orchestra in Gianluca Marciano’s pit, and some equally unhelpful timing from surtitles apparently determined to kill punchlines. But this is a big-hearted return from a company whose determined achievements over the past year have put bigger and richer rivals to shame.