Review

Capriccio review, Garsington: A sweet and beautiful confection

Miah Persson as The Countess and William Dazeley as The Count in Richard Strauss's Capriccio
Miah Persson as The Countess and William Dazeley as The Count in Richard Strauss's Capriccio

The pistol has been fired and the country-house opera festivals are off. The going looks good: Glyndebourne heads the field, but coming up the rear this week are Iford, Holland Park and Garsington. Grange Park, The Grange and Longborough can’t be far behind – and don’t underestimate this year’s dark horse Nevill Holt or late entrant Dorset Opera. Phew!

Let’s focus on Garsington. Now comfortably settled into its elegant pavilion on Mark Getty’s Wormsley estate in the Chilterns, it offers both high artistic quality and an excellent “visitor experience”.  A focus of its season this summer is Richard Strauss’ operatic swansong Capriccio, a “conversation piece” that endorses the culture of a well-heeled hedonistic aristocracy and is therefore seamlessly suited to this exclusive landscape.

Behind its varnish lie horrors. Conceived during Europe’s descent into barbaric totalitarianism and first performed in Munich while El Alamein was raging, it is the work of someone whose response to unparalleled devastation and massacre was to turn his face to the wall and lose himself in nostalgia for the ancien regime.

Set in a place – Paris in the 1770s – where nobody does anything except sit about in salons talking about love and opera, it contemplates its navel through a score full of smug self-reference to Strauss’ glory days as the composer of Der Rosenkavalier. There are no rough edges, no tricky questions asked. What a sticky, sickly taste this sweet confection leaves. 

Miah Persson as The Countess
Miah Persson as The Countess

Tim Albery’s immaculate production, designed by Tobias Hoheisel, cunningly leapfrogs the opera’s origins in mid twentieth-century holocausts by presenting a pristine rococo drawing-room flanked by modern additions and inhabited by characters in modern dress. The Countess becomes a wealthy patron of the arts, troubled only by a few workmen in overalls peering sceptically through the French windows as her posh friends flirt, bicker and witter.

It could be a glossy feature in The Tatler for all its moral or emotional urgency, but on those terms, one can’t imagine it more beautifully styled than it is here. Miah Persson is the acme of sophistication as the Countess, singing with all the silvery grace that Strauss adored (she must play the Marschallin soon) as she is courted by the suave poet Oliver and geeky composer Flamand, splendidly interpreted by Gavan Ring and Sam Furness respectively. Andrew Shore blusters amusingly as the bluff producer La Roche and Hanna Hipp wittily channels Bette Davis in All about Eve as the acid-tongued actress Clairon. Smaller roles are all sharply focused, with special mention due to Graham Clark as the prompter Monsieur Taupe. 

Douglas Boyd conducts a sumptuous account of the music – some of it so lovely, so fragrant, so delicately wrought. If only I could stop imagining bombs exploding in the background.  

Until 28 June, in repertory with Die Zauberflöte and Falstaff. Tickets 01865 361636; www.garsingtonopera.org

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