David Alden’s blood-spattered production of Mazeppa made headlines for English National Opera back in 1984 with its graphic depiction of execution by chainsaw. And, as David Pountney’s striking production for Grange Park Opera proves, Tchaikovsky’s rarely staged melodic sleeping beauty has lost none of its power to unsettle the stomach while titillating the ear.
The work is timely. The Pushkin poem at the opera’s heart concerns an 18th-century Ukrainian war hero whose grab for independence wouldn’t be realised until 1991. That the grizzled Hetman (a term for an administrative ruler) is also a relentless torturer who murders his latest girlfriend’s father is, to a curious extent, neither here nor there. Throughout the opera, we are rooting for him, if not all, then certainly most of the way.
