The Yellow Sofa, Glyndebourne Tour, Seven magazine review

Keen not to be outdone by the Louis XV chair and other singing chattels in Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges at Glyndebourne in August, this autumn’s Glyndebourne Tour features a fado-vocalising Yellow Sofa in nothing less than a title role.

But some drastic re-upholstery is required if Julian Philips’s chamber opera The Yellow Sofa (2009) is ever to deserve a place as part of the operatic furniture at this address.

The problem is not so much the work itself, slight though it is, as a production by Frederic Wake-Walker that misjudges the tone of the novella by Eça de Queirós on which the opera is based. This greatest of Portuguese novelists wrote with understated, graceful irony, and Wake-Walker’s response is a blunt romp full of nudges, winks and silly walks.

The talented young cast deserves better, yet somehow the central trio of performers still bring emotional insights to a story that begins to unfold when Godofredo (Michael Wallace, nicely buttoned-up) discovers his wife, Ludovina (Gabriela Istoc, her warmly glowing soprano never suggesting too many feelings of guilt), getting a little too close to his business partner Machado (Andrew Dickinson) on the eponymous couch.

Kitty Callister’s designs keep the scenery to a minimum, but the love seat is handsome enough.

It is a clever conceit to turn the Yellow Sofa into a singing role, and the dusky-toned Lauren Easton makes an effective narrator. Conducted by Gareth Hancock, the score boasts some attractive sonorities – but even in a work about the banality of ordinary life, the unmemorability of the vocal lines and the clichés of Edward Kemp’s libretto take verisimilitude too far.

Tours to Nov 30, www.glyndebourne.com

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

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