Bampton Classical Opera / Κριτικές

“We used to call ourselves Bampton Summer Opera… But then we thought we might be had up under the Trade Descriptions Act,” joked Jeremy Gray, welcoming the large audience gathered in St Mary’s Church. Bampton’s opera performances are ordinarily given in the natural open air stage of their beautiful Deanery Garden next door, but when English summer weather drives us under cover, it’s a relief to find the back-up venue warm, comfortable and generally dry (even though the bar corner needed emergency indoor tenting, thieves having recently stripped the lead from the church roof).

Salieri La scuola de' gelosi; Matthew Sprange, Kate Howden, Samuel Pantcheff, Nathalie Chalkley Rhiannon Llewellyn, Alessandro Fisher, Thomas Herford, dir: Jeremy Gray, cond: Anthony Kraus; Bampton Classical Opera at St John's Smith Square Reviewed by Robert Hugill on Sep 12 2017 Star rating: 3.5 Popular in its day, Salieri's comedy might stretch the charm somewhat but it provides important background for Mozart's mature comedies

If the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project sought to return to first principles and restructure society according to the precepts of reason, then its exponents in the arts sought to achieve something similar but often with more of a sense of irony and wit harnessed to their creative ingenuity, than the earnest rational approach of philosophers and theorists. Haydn’s opera from 1777, using a libretto based upon an earlier work by Carlo Goldoni, takes up contemporary scientific researches and enquiries by imagining what life might be like on the moon, shorn of the conceits, hierarchies and assumptions of societies on earth. At the same time it casts a satirical eye upon those scientific methods in the person of the charlatan astronomer Ecclitico, who uses the discipline to dupe the miserly Bonafede, the father of the woman, Clarice, whom he loves. Jeremy Gray’s production deftly preserves both serious and comic elements. On the one hand, costumes hint at the early-twentieth-century, as does the Picasso-like, Cubist portrait of a woman’s head which Ernesto is seen creating at one point during the narrative, indicating a time of radically changing cultural perspectives upon the world, as well as being roughly contemporary with discoveries in the fields of astronomy and physics by the likes of Einstein and Hubble. On the other, just as the work presages Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte in lovingly sending up the intellectual discourses of the Enlightenment as well as the format of opera, the science of astronomy here is not all it seems: Ecclitico first purports to show Bonafede the world of the moon through his ‘ecliptic’ machine, projecting images to him which exploit his own somewhat lascivious and misogynist outlook; Ecclitico’s hobby is tellingly referred to in a few instances as ‘astrology’ rather than ‘astronomy’ in Gilly French’s often wry and deliberately glib rendering of the text; the ‘moon nymphs’ first appear as mice munching sage Derby, as the metaphor for the old fable of the moon being made of green cheese (and the ecliptic becomes a huge grater); and in a clear nod to Cosí, Bonafede is brought round from his drug-induced sleep by means of a magnet. With the recent, vainglorious attempts by some billionaires to hurtle themselves into space, the opera reminds us that the cosmos remains a place for the projection – both literally and conceptually – of all sorts of fantasies, for good and bad.

If the tarot pack turns up both the Moon and the Lovers, a problematic fantasy is on the cards. In Il mondo della luna, composed for 1777 summer season at Eszterháza, Joseph Haydn and the librettist Carlo Goldoni lampoon both romantic and scientific pretensions and so expose the vacuous absurdity of human morals and mores. It’s fitting, then, that in Bampton Deanery Gardens, Bampton Classical Opera should conjure a moon that is not ‘full’ but ‘fool’, Gilly French’s characteristically pithy new translation of Haydn’s ‘lunatic’ dramma giocoso complementing director-designer Jeremy Gray’s deft production – the farce fanciful rather than frantic, the absurdities exploited but not inflated. Goldoni’s action presents an elaborate and ridiculous plot to deceive the misogynistic old lecher Buonafede into persuading him to approve and finance the marriages of his daughters Flaminia and Clarice to their respective beloveds, Ernesto, here a painter, and the quack astronomer Ecclitico. A magic potion tricks Buonafede into believing that he’s been transported to the moon. As he delights in the company of "lunar-tics", the disguised lovers contrive a lunar wedding. Set in the Edwardian era, a period of revolutionary scientific change, the two acts of full moon shift from bourgeois domesticity to cosmological barminess. The outsize telescope-cum-magic-lantern through which Buonafede gleefully espies lunar happenings becomes a giant cheese-grater around which moon-mice feast on the planet’s natural resources. Zany dancers in silver excess and a gold-draped Emperor with a starry entourage charms the foolish Buonafede, whose delight knows no bounds. In a show-stealing performance, baritone Jonathan Eyers conveys the curmudgeon’s pompousness and gullibility with equal aplomb, commanding the stage with his imposing, fine singing and astute instinct for physical comedy. Nathan Vale’s Ecclitico is a sympathetic rogue, his smooth tenor and elegant phrasing aptly beguiling – after all, he’s the source of deceit and the bringer of harmony. As Cecco, the quack’s assistant, tenor Sam Harris swaps his overalls for the Emperor’s robes and rises to the challenges of his imperious patter aria. Catherine Backhouse captures Ernesto’s romantic dreaminess, while Siân Dicker and Iúnó Connolly skilfully distinguish Flaminia and Clarice’s high-flown and pragmatic natures. The latter’s closing love duet with Ecclitico is a sumptuous highlight. Margo Arsane’s Lisetta is a Despina-like maid – feisty and vivacious. As servants and moon-nymphs, Harriet Cameron and Tilly Goodwin contribute much to the slickness of the ensemble finales. Conductor Thomas Blunt balances pace and elegance, drawing colourful playing from the BCO Orchestra. All may end well when the scales fall from Buonafede’s eyes, and he learns some important lessons, but Haydn’s moon is no utopia, and Bampton Classical Opera leaves no artifice unmasked or un-mocked.