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Then there’s Mr Broucek himself – the opera’s mainspring, and its biggest problem. Apparently he was conceived as a caricature of small-time bourgeois philistinism, until Janacek ended up disliking his antagonists even more (Pountney’s English translation renames one of them ‘Arty’ and another ‘Farty’ – the comedy, in general, is not subtle). As portrayed by Peter Hoare, he emerges as a man who’s endearingly out of time, whatever the century. As he blusters about in his pocket square and bow tie, struggling to hold on to his dignity, he’s far too relatable to be truly risible.
So with the satire effectively declawed, it all adds up to a grand old heap of nothing much, and watching it is like eavesdropping on a private joke that you probably won’t get unless you’re Czech. There’s plenty of harmless pleasure along the way, though, not least in the playing of the BBC Concert Orchestra under George Jackson, who sound exactly as you’d hope any red-blooded bunch of orchestral musicians would sound when presented with two solid hours of (effectively) undiscovered Janacek. Anyone who takes 20th-century opera at all seriously will want to tick Broucek off their bucket list, and Pountney and co. make it a lot of fun.
In 2018, Nevill Holt Opera opened a purpose-built, 400-seat theatre in the courtyard of a former stable block, and a visit felt overdue. The whole set-up is creamily seductive: a hilltop manor house overlooking prime Leicestershire hunting country, a vista of Deep England to make Tuscany look frumpy (when the sun shines, at any rate). Apart from Longborough, no summer opera festival feels more like being welcomed to a really enjoyable private party, and (again, apart from Longborough) none has a theatre that combines such intimacy with so vivid and transparent an acoustic.
It opened this year with La bohème, in an updated staging by Mathilda du Tillieul McNicol that utilised a single set – a glass-sided Portakabin – and occasionally pulled Mimi (Francesca Chiejina) and Musetta (Alexandra Oomens – a live wire with a voice of spun sugar) out of the action to confide directly in the audience. Chiejina’s Mimi very much set the terms of her relationship with Rodolfo (Peter Scott Drackley), while Schaunard (Dominic Sedgwick) and Colline (Dingle Yandell) were more alive than I think I’ve ever seen them. Christopher Nairne, as Marcello, poured his fresh baritone out over an orchestra (the Manchester Camerata under Nicholas Chalmers) that sounded as vibrant as a Raoul Dufy watercolour in that lovely little theatre. Nothing very special, you might think, about a midsummer country house Bohème. Done as well as this, though, it was certainly worth a detour.
Because you read about grange park opera
Also by Richard Bratby
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