Sir John in Love is an odd choice for a youth opera company in 2022. Yes, it’s Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 150th anniversary year and yes, BYO has long made a point of staging less known repertory. But if this opera was ever hilarious rather than twee (emerging from the “cowpat school”, as Elisabeth Lutyens branded the musical pastoralism of RVW and co), its comedy has aged badly. There aren’t just endless fat jokes – it’s a Falstaff plot, after all – but French jokes, Welsh jokes, class jokes and jokes about men marrying men. More seriously for a production whose unequivocally talented personnel are all at the start of operatic careers, Sir John in Love is a piece dominated by older characters, including its title role, and with multiple generation gaps at its core. And don’t get me started on the vocal ensembles, whose auto-muddiness is beyond the reach of any surtitling.
Ethel Smyth: Der Wald; Becca Marriott, Jacob Bettinelli, Louis Hurst, Lizzie Ryder, Martins Smaukstelis, Francesca Lauri, Panaretos Kyriatzidis; The Opera Makers at Holy Sepulchre Church Friday 10 March 2023 A rare outing indeed for Smyth's second opera, 70 minutes of late-Romantic atmosphere and emotional turmoil, well caught in this small-scale performance When the guns began to roar and the armies march at the beginning of World War I, it marked a significant divide in Ethel Smyth's career. German-trained, she had remained something of a German composer, performances of her work across Europe being far more common than in England. In 1914, she had major European performances of her operas planned, the two being Der Wald and Strandrecht (the German version of The Wreckers). Never again would she write large-scale romantic drama and her final three operas are smaller scale and firmly English.
