Last summer, with the building dust barely settled in its theatre, Grange Park Opera moved into its new Surrey home with a season ambitious enough to bring an episode of Wagner’s Ring cycle to the country house opera either side of a picnic crowd. This year, with the theatre improved with swish new facilities – because nobody loves a Portaloo – the festival is getting bedded in. The best news is that the house orchestra and chorus are now those of English National Opera; ENO’s reduced summer programme means London’s loss is Surrey’s gain.
Not everything is new. Those with memories unclouded by interval champagne will recognise that Stephen Medcalf’s production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera has a set (by Jamie Vartan) thriftily recycled from last year’s Die Walküre. A state room with a balcony around the top, it works well for the palace scenes, less so for the others; the shack where fortune-teller Ulrica plies her voodoo trade is wheeled into the middle of the stage; by the time the full chorus has turned up, things feel cramped and clunky.
A sea of stars and stripes at curtain-up tell us this is the censor-mollifying Americanisation Verdi had to make of his original Swedish-set piece, dramatising the true-ish story of the assassination of King Gustav III. The victim in this version is Riccardo, Boston’s governor. Vincenzo Costanzo, caped and masked for the titular ball like a costume-shop Dick Turpin, brings genuine Italianate oomph to the role, but wields his voice like a blunt instrument, with little subtlety or sweetness – qualities found more abundantly in the orchestral playing, conducted with an ear for interior detail by Gianluca Marcianò.
Claire Rutter wrings all the pathos out of Amelia’s music, Roland Wood is commanding and stylish as her vengeful husband, and Elisabetta Fiorillo sings Ulrica with a meaty contralto that pins you to your seat. Tereza Gevorgyan’s light soprano makes for an appealing Oscar, but this “page boy” – here a strutting, gun-twirling wannabe cowboy – seems to have wandered in from another opera set a few hundred miles west: another clunky detail in a decent but uneven production.
- Un Ballo in Maschera is at Grange Park Opera, Horsley, until 5 July. Box office: 01962 737373.
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