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Nicholls, in particular, was magnetic. Her Isolde is a flame-haired spitfire: glowering wide-eyed from the shadows, bouncing up and down with girlish excitement as she awaits her lover, and not afraid to subordinate vocal opulence to dramatic truth – though when she did open out in full ecstasy the sound was practically incandescent. More importantly, Nicholls is a terrific actor and I’ve never seen her give a dull or self-conscious performance. Her last-minute appearance in Longborough’s Die tote Stadt last year supercharged the whole show and now, at West Horsley, she’s throwing off sparks like a roman candle. You’d die for this Isolde; but then, she wouldn’t give you much choice.
Gwyn Hughes Jones’s Tristan, by contrast, is the rock against which Isolde crashes; initially impassive before breaking and falling. His agony in Act Three had a more than usually savage edge – as well it might, confronted with the vocal majesty of Rose’s King Marke. Rose filled his few lines with such sonorous dignity and such aching, wounded despair that you truly felt (and this isn’t always the case in Tristan & Isolde) the devastation that had been wrought on the world of day by the lovers’ dreams of eternal night. Again: carnage. It was conducted by Stephen Barlow, who drew shining sounds from the resident Gascoigne Orchestra without digging particularly deep. Since Wagner once half-joked that a perfect performance of Tristan would drive audiences mad, that was probably just as well.
Sullivan’s writing shimmered and blushed with all the feather-light delicacy of French ballet music
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment ended its season with two concert performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida, conducted by the finest living conductor of this repertoire, John Wilson. G&S on period instruments? It’s still relatively unusual, though in France – where they take their patrimoine culturel seriously – Sullivan’s rival and hero Offenbach is regularly presented in this way, with scholars preparing Urtext editions of his operettas and top-class recordings being funded by major cultural charities.
I don’t think this performance was recorded, which – with singers as good as Sophie Bevan (Ida) and Robert Hayward (a titanic King Hildebrand) – felt like a missed opportunity. The chorus was crisp and bright, the audience was full and Simon Butteriss was terrifically tart whether as narrator (a Harry’n’Meghan gag got a minor ovation) or pattering his way through the role of the noxious King Gama. Wilson, meanwhile, handled the score like Escoffier rustling up a soufflé. How much of the snobbery about G&S is down to flaccid orchestral playing? On period instruments Sullivan’s writing shimmered and blushed with all the glinting, feather-light delicacy of French ballet music. Wagner haunts your dreams; this stuff just melts on your tongue. Can’t we have both?
Because you read about gilbert & sullivan
Also by Richard Bratby
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