Julietta, ENO, Seven magazine review

Martinu’s operas are still on the mainstream fringe in Britain, and it’s taken 10 years for Richard Jones’s staging for Paris and Geneva of the surrealist Julietta to come to London.

Considered by many the composer’s masterpiece, the opera is a fantasy about Michel, haunted by the memory of Julietta, singing a love-song he heard when he was on holiday. He tries to recapture the memory – and the girl. It dawns on him that all the people living in the French resort have no memories; they live only in the present. When he thinks he’s found Julietta, his hold on reality is loosened, to put it mildly.

Surrealist writing thrives on whimsy, with a frequently maddening lack of focus. The great strength of Jones’s production and Antony McDonald’s brilliant designs is that their precision and physical presence paradoxically anchor Martinu’s dream world.

The set is a giant accordion – Martinu uses its sound to put the characters briefly in touch with memories. It opens on to a forest where memories are for sale; its bellows become the filing cabinet of the Ministry of Dreams that people enter to live out their illusions – the opera was first staged, in Prague, in 1938, when European totalitarianism was firmly on the march.

Jones doesn’t deny Julietta’s potential for absurdist fantasy, but he’s clearly more concerned with its dark edges, of people stuck with no room for development, leaving the audience free to draw their own psychological, symbolist and allegorical conclusions. He and McDonald have opened out the opera’s range with huge panache, and Edward Gardner does the same with the ENO orchestra.

The subtlety of the sound was a reminder that, although Martinu was Czech, he spent much of his life in France, and this defined – some might say diffused – his style, neoclassical one moment, then shades of Bartók’s Bluebeard, even a foretaste of Britten in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

There was an edge and momentum to Gardner’s conducting that enlarged its dreamlike irresolution, and the big-emotion moments (the Act 2 love scene, Michel’s closing music in which he surrenders himself to a dream life) give the opera structure and, more importantly, heart – something Martinu is often criticised for lacking.

As Michel, Peter Hoare carries the evening with his strong tenor and versatile acting. In the smaller role of Julietta, Julia Sporsén sang with attack and brilliance, and she was directed in such a way that her existence was never certain.

The huge cast of minor surreal characters are directed with uncanny flair, led by Andrew Shore and Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts.

Julietta has never had it so good.

To Oct 3; www.eno.org

This article also appears in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph.

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