Death in Venice, Garsington Opera, review: Musical splendour of a duff production

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Based on Thomas Mann’s novella about the impossible love which springs in the breast of a blocked middle-aged writer as he watches a beautiful boy cavorting on the beach, Britten’s final opera is burdened with prissily over-literary monologues.

Director Paul Curran has decided to take his cue from the fact that Britten had cast the mysterious boy and his family as dancers: in this production dance is the keynote.

This is fine for the allegorical, choral, and instrumental episodes, but dramatically it’s problematic, because this Tadzio (Celestin Boutin) is a fully-fledged classical danseur noble who leads his corps like a stockily muscular Nureyev: it’s impossible to square him with the fragile youth who inflames Paul Nilon’s eloquent Aschenbach. Where there should be a passionately beating heart, this drama has a gaping hole.

And while Bruno Poet’s lighting is gracefully suggestive, Kevin Knight’s staging is desperately impoverished, relying on some endlessly rearranged white gauze curtains to conjure up hotel, canals, and beach. This is really just a concert performance.

But what a performance. With Steuart Bedford, who conducted the work’s premiere in 1973, in the pit, the richness of the score is brought out in all its glory – most notably the gamelan-influenced accompaniments to the beach games – as is the expressiveness of the singing. William Dazeley’s multiple incarnations of the Fop, the Manager, the Gondolier, and Dionysus are incomparable.