Intermezzo, Garsington Opera, Wormsley, Bucks: Serenely accomplished

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice

Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo may be at one level about a marital tiff, while at another – with words and music written by one of the partners – being a queasy exercise in narcissism. But it’s also a probingly intimate portrait of a marriage, and this is the spirit in which director Bruno Ravella and his cast have approached it.

A wife discovers a passionate love-letter sent by mistake to her husband, and their happy marriage is suddenly under threat: this is what happened to Strauss and his wife Pauline, and the libretto consists of what they actually said to each other as they painfully fought their way back to mutual trust.

Everything about this serenely accomplished production is spot-on, from Giles Cadle’s deft designs (morphing between chalet, ski-slope, and Wirtshaus), to Andrew Porter’s nicely-sprung translation, to Jac van Steen’s conducting of the quicksilver score, with its conversational intricacy and rapt symphonic interludes.

There’s no weak link in the cast which is led by two outstanding singers: baritone Mark Stone as the composer Storch, and soprano Mary Dunleavy as his wife Christine. Stone’s performance crackles with peppery authority, while Dunleavy dominates the stage every moment of the evening, drawing us all into her moods of exasperation, fury, nostalgia, and tenderness, and enchanting us with the beauty of her sound.