English National Opera’s first season with one foot in London and one in Manchester begins in earnest with Rossini’s Cinderella at the end of the month. In the meantime, feeling like a kind of warmup, came this one-off concert. It was filmed for Sky Arts, the cameras so unobtrusive as to be almost unnoticeable, but was still an odd hybrid of an evening, with a talking-heads-and-bleeding-chunks format that seemed geared more to TV than to a theatre audience.
We had excerpts from nine of Mozart’s operas, with the ENO orchestra and conductor Clelia Cafiero on stage behind, and with a cutely cliched, periwigged child Mozart occasionally popping up as a kind of silent host. If you wanted to learn much about the women in Mozart’s life you would probably have been disappointed, although several were at least mentioned in the informal scripted links from the presenter Lauren Laverne, who slipped into friendly interviewer mode to ask the singers for more personal contributions. It was a big ask of the singers, who were required to appear at ease as themselves on stage, offer seemingly unscripted insights into the microphone, and then switch seamlessly into character – often to portray that character at a moment of peak emotional stress.
