David Sawer’s third full-length opera, The Skating Rink, had its world premiere at Garsington Opera, for which it was written, and it afforded the curious pleasure of seeing completely convincing impersonations of figure skating on a platform utterly un-iced at the height of a hot summer. The glass-walled opera house, in the midst of the almost ludicrously perfect English idyll that is the Wormsley Estate, in the Chilterns, was pierced by sun as the character in question spun round and round as if by magic — or, at any rate, with no sign of wheels on her feet.
It raised a cheer, which wasn’t really apposite, for we surely hadn’t come here to witness a spectacle, but to be moved by a musical experience. And,