Albert Herring, Grange Festival, Hampshire, review: 'The opera’s innocent pleasures get an expansive airing'

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It’s a funny, hybrid work, part affectionate portrait of English village life, and part parable of (gay?) liberation – a chamber comedy composed after Peter Grimes. Britten was in his thirties when he wrote Albert Herring, the tale of an overly obedient son who, in the dearth of any adequately spotless female candidate for May Queen, gets crowned May King instead, and after being tricked into drinking rum-laced lemonade (to the Tristan chord, naturally) disappears for a night of high jinks.

In the hands of two experienced Britten practitioners: veteran director John Copley (who incidentally played Grimes’s apprentice as a teenager), and conductor Steuart Bedford (who premiered Death in Venice), the opera’s innocent pleasures get an expansive airing, with Bedford relishing each humorous nuance to be had.

The selection committee – Superintendent Butt, the Mayor, the teacher and vicar – terrorised by the autocratic local grandee Lady Billows (Orla Boylan, channelling her inner Patricia Routledge), might have swum into beautifully characterised voice straight out of PG Wodehouse. Courting couple Nancy and butcher’s boy Sid (Kitty Whately and Timothy Nelson) provide Albert with a tantalising vision of possibilities.

But in the great nine-voice Threnody near the end when everyone briefly believes Albert dead, what Peter Hall called “one of the most shatteringly emotional bits of music in all opera”, you suddenly remember this was composed in the shadow of war and hear anew the urgency in the opera’s injunction to “gather ye rosebuds”.