“The first opera to be written in Middle English” is a lot more fun than the description sounds. This new full-scale work by the Guildhall’s staff team of composer Julian Philips and librettist Stephen Plaice is based on Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale – one of the fruitier Canterbury Tales already, made more so by Plaice and director Martin Lloyd-Evans’s Carry-On-Up-the-Tabard approach. Dick Bird’s set, a blossoming tree in the centre of a medieval calendar, may be beautiful, but the real tone is set by the narrator, Priapus, who wears a pinkly obscene hat and carries his cock in a wheelbarrow.
It’s a story of age treading on youth’s toes, of an ageing knight cuckolded by the young wife he’s unwisely chosen. The language – there’s a verse translation on screens either side – is half familiar, half not, and so too the opera. It’s impossible to see the initially preening old knight Januarie – at least in tenor John Findon’s brilliantly larger-than-life performance – without thinking of Verdi’s Falstaff or Strauss’s Baron Ochs. Pluto and Proserpina bicker and interfere as in any good baroque gods-and-mortals opera – or, perhaps more pertinently, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The soundworld of Chaucer’s own era makes occasional appearances in the choral writing and in passages for medieval fiddle, recorders and, yes, hurdy-gurdy.
Januarie is a hefty role that taxes Findon’s vocal stamina, but he lasts the course and has real presence. Conducted by Dominic Wheeler, the rest of the cast and players do justice to a well-made work that just needs a little trim. Like a lusty yong squier in the monthe of May, expect it to come up again.
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