Beatrice and Benedict review – Mid Wales Opera’s staging has style and fizz

Hector Berlioz was obsessed to the point of adulation with Shakespeare. Yet when he decided to base what would be his last opera on Much Ado about Nothing and write his own libretto, he had no compunction in making big changes, removing various characters and replacing the clowns with Somarone, a buffo invention of his own. Berlioz thought of his opera as a caprice, “written with the point of a needle”.

For their bright and shiny new SmallStages tour, Mid Wales Opera and artistic director Richard Studer take their cue from the composer and further strip the comedy to the bone for an ensemble of six singers. Music director Jonathan Lyness has filleted the score to a quartet of instruments – violin, clarinet, cello, piano, arranged stage left, Lyness himself at the keyboard – while capturing the essence of the Berlioz from the natural fizz of the opening bars of the overture to the lovely lyricism that matches the vocal lines. In this version, Leonato, governor of Messina, and Ursule, lady-in-waiting, morph into Leonata, mother of Hero and aunt of Beatrice, a mezzo role taken by Stephanie Windsor-Lewis, permitting an even balance of voices. It’s all neatly done and with the Studer/Lyness trademark of imagination and great understanding of the medium. The minimal set – three Italianate banners as backdrop and four trees – is stylish, designed by the multi-disciplined Studer, foregrounding the elegant costumes in ivory with rusty pink, with the women in Dior New Look-length dresses and all with decorative detail that mixes the centuries.

Sung in English, using Amanda Holden’s translation, and subject to some of the perpetual trickiness of opéra comique’s spoken dialogue, the company’s acting is spirited and the voices musical and polished, with the two sopranos Lorena Paz Nieto as Hero and Monica McGhee as Beatrice stealing the honours. Tenor Huw Ynyr is a dashing Benedict and he and McGhee realise well the ongoing love/hate, will they/won’t they playfulness of the couple who enticed Berlioz in the first place. John Ieuan Jones and Matthew Stiff ably complete the ensemble.

Such a slick staging, with artistic values paramount, is delightful and it could not underline more emphatically the sheer incomprehensibility of the Arts Council of Wales’s recent decision to cut this company’s funding completely.