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He’s behind you… the Glyndebourne Chorus with, centre back, Henry Waddington appearing in the middle of the table as Saul. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith
He’s behind you… the Glyndebourne Chorus with, centre back, Henry Waddington appearing in the middle of the table as Saul. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith
He’s behind you… the Glyndebourne Chorus with, centre back, Henry Waddington appearing in the middle of the table as Saul. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith

Saul; Orpheus; The Lighthouse review – a top week of opera

This article is more than 8 years old

Glyndebourne, East Sussex; Sam Wanamaker Playhouse; Linbury Studio, London
Glyndebourne’s touring production of Handel’s oratorio is even better than its summer hit. Plus, Orpheus at the Globe and an Atlantic roar

In any music he turned to, Handel was never shy of musical extravagance, but his oratorios stand in a category of their own. They cascade and pulsate with aural detail precisely because they were not intended for the stage. Audiences would have followed the texts and let their imaginations do the rest. Saul (1739), about the Israelite king unhinged by hubris, reached unknown heights of excess, needing a new organ, three exotic trombones, large kettle drums borrowed from the Tower of London, and a specially made carillon – a keyboard operating little hammered bells that sounded to one of Handel’s circle like “some squirrels in a cage” – to depict Saul’s descent into insanity. Their twinkly tinkles would drive anyone mad pretty fast, but, exercising restraint, Handel transforms them with sonic genius.

Barrie Kosky’s production for Glyndebourne, the highlight of this summer’s festival, now returns with a fresh cast for the autumn tour, under the baton – a coup – of Laurence Cummings. As artistic director both of the London Handel festival and the Internationale Händel-Festspiele Göttingen, he now ranks as one of the composer’s best advocates in the world. Self-effacing on the podium, faithful above all to the score, he matches Handel’s energy and invention with unmistakable lyricism, generosity and dignity. It’s not that others don’t or can’t; rather that Cummings makes it feel the only conceivable approach, drawing the music out, not driving it along. Nipping from podium to keyboard, he also plays the solo organ. Five rigorous continuo soloists and the Glyndebourne Tour Orchestra perform as if born to the baroque style.

Revived by Donna Stirrup, Kosky’s staging has shed those aspects that irritated before. Choreography and stage movement have relaxed a little, allowing greater subtlety and intensity to emerge. The camped-up oohs and ahs of the agile, all-important chorus have been reined in. Kosky’s anti-naturalistic directorial style, and that of designer Katrin Lea Tag, is to keep the stage fairly bare. Thus after the crazed opening tableau – a gorgeous and gluttonous feast of swan and boar – colour drains away to shades of soot, all set on a bed of black earth.

Watch the trailer for Saul

Whereas Christopher Purves delivered a compelling, febrile performance in the title role in the summer, his successor Henry Waddington opts for stillness and self-absorption. It’s a powerful twist that plays to Waddington’s considerable strengths, and works brilliantly. At first, as he lumbers around in an unkempt long wig, you hardly notice him. This gives proper opportunity for the young hero David, fresh from slaying Goliath, as well as Saul’s three children, Jonathan, Merab and Michal, time to establish themselves. Christopher Ainslie’s David, silver-voiced, serene and inscrutable, and Benjamin Hulett’s Jonathan, warm, bewildered and torn, were ideally matched. Sarah Tynan and Anna Devin gave good delineation to the somewhat unfulfilling roles of Saul’s daughters. Stuart Jackson made an ebullient, vocally assured impact in multiple small roles. Catch it in Canterbury, Milton Keynes, Norwich or Plymouth.

The Royal Opera’s latest collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe is a new production of a 17th-century rarity: Orpheus by Luigi Rossi (1597-1653), the last of the ROH’s run of operas based on the Orpheus and Euridice legend. As with Cavalli’s L’Ormindo last season, Christian Curnyn directs his superb Early Opera Company orchestra from the harpsichord, up in the gallery. The expanded telling of the tale at first feels long-winded and, in Christopher Cowell’s rhyming translation, loses no opportunity for gags, leaving an uncertainty of tone.

The ‘ingenious, gripping’ Orpheus at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Photograph: Stephen Cummiskey

As the drama builds towards Euridice’s death at the end of Act 2, both music and action shift up a gear, with a seamless outpouring of solo arias, duets, ensembles and some dark, tugging instrumental writing. Elizabeth Kenny, on lute and guitar, added melancholic lustre. Keith Warner’s staging was ingenious, gripping and, for the dozen young singers who had to hurl themselves around in the tiny, candlelit Sam Wanamaker theatre, heart-in-mouth risky. Everyone in the cast pulled their weight, with standout performances from Siobhan Stagg (replacing an indisposed Mary Bevan) as Orpheus, Louise Alder as Eurydice, Caitlin Hulcup as her other suitor, Aristaeus, Keri Fuge as Cupid and Sky Ingram as Venus. Hear it on Radio 3 on 28 November. It’s over three hours long, and the best is in the second half so don’t switch off early.

Peter Maxwell Davies’s chamber opera The Lighthouse (1980) requires only three male singers and a small ensemble. They have to be good: the players virtuosic soloists, the singers versatile. The new production at the Linbury Studio, given by the Southbank Sinfonia and members of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker young artists programme (others of which took part in Orpheus), excelled in conjuring the ghostly atmosphere at the heart of this unsolved, true-life mystery. In 1900, three keepers vanished from a remote lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides. In his own libretto, Maxwell Davies begins with a prologue set in the Edinburgh courtroom where three officers describe what they found: a deserted lighthouse with everything left as if in a hurry. Part 2 flashes back to the three keepers themselves, on that final night, each telling their story in parodic song. Fog descends. Tension rises. Something terrible occurs. We never know what.

‘They have to be good’: Yuriy Yurchuk, David Shipley and Samuel Sakker in Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Director Greg Eldridge and designer Alyson Cummins, who has loosely used Escher’s Relativity as a starting point for her fixed structure of stairways and platforms surrounded by darkness, capture the tensile drama of a psycho-thriller. Not everything works. More differentiation between present and past would have helped. Use of surtitles would have aided tenor Samuel Sakker, baritone Yuriy Yurchuk and bass David Shipley, who sang well but could not always make the narrative clear. Yet still this dazzling score, conducted by Jonathan Santagada, held our attention. Luminous and salty, it conveys the desolate, sea-battered mood, the cries of seabirds, the waves’ roar, equally as tellingly as Britten in Peter Grimes, but in an entirely different musical voice: not North Sea but Atlantic edge. Maxwell Davies, 81, was there to take a bow and hug his performers. His smiles were reward enough for all.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Saul *****
Orpheus ****
The Lighthouse ****

Saul tours to Canterbury, Milton Keynes, Norwich and Plymouth until 27 November

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