“Explain!” says Count Almaviva to Figaro in the Barber of Seville. “Tha what?” says the count in next month’s Yorkshire version of Rossini’s comic opera.
Rosina’s wrath if crossed will be less viper and more a “whippet’s bite”… “A hundred traps ah lay / Until I get mi way / Get thissen set / Get thissen set” the soprano will intone as she sings the thrilling, showstopper aria ‘una voce poca fa’. The opera will be heard like never before thanks to a full translation into Yorkshire dialect by the poet, writer and broadcaster Ian McMillan.
Translating the opera has been a fascinating experience, McMillan told the Guardian, albeit a challenging one. “It has been fun but it’s been a kind of mathematical fun, to be honest with you. It was very interesting and exciting to try and fit the words exactly to the music.”
McMillan has written operatic librettos before and they were a much more straightforward experience.
“Usually you think I’ll just put that there and that’ll be fine, the musician will find a way round it. But the musician here is dead, I can’t meet him in a cafe to talk about it.
“Normally you sit with a composer and they go, ‘this bit’s too long’ or it needs more words here. With this I was on my own and I had to stop myself from getting carried away.”
It is a comic opera and it has to be funny, but McMillan said he was conscious not go too far. It should be nothing like, for example, Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
“That’s part of the challenge, to make it feel like ordinary speech turned up several notches and not sound too ridiculous.”
The new Barber of Seville will be the opening event of the first Bradford opera festival, which is aiming “to make opera in Bradford, for Bradford audiences in a very Bradford way”.
It will be directed by Alex Chisholm and conducted by Ben Crick, who came up with the idea of a festival in 2017 after the success of a production called Ice Cream: The Opera.
The Romeo and Juliet story featuring rival ice-cream vans was performed for free in Bradford city park. “It was a huge hit,” said Chisholm. “We did it three times in one day and people flocked to it. There was beautiful music and a really lovely story.”
People who had never experienced opera and assumed they never wanted to loved it, she said.
The reception got them plotting a festival, one which has taken six years to come to fruition, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We both really love opera but we also both believe that opera should be here for people in Bradford in a way which is relevant and meaningful to people in Bradford.”
One aim of the festival is to find and train the opera talent of the future and there will be workshops for families and children.
“If we are not getting young people from all sorts of backgrounds excited by and involved in opera and starting to learn from a younger age, then 20 or 30 years down the line we are going to have an even bigger problem than we already have,” said Chisholm.
“I want to see opera which is new work reflecting Bradford and Britain and the world we live in today. You can’t do that without the artists, the composers, writers and performers so we need to be doing this now … we need to engage the artists and audiences of the future.”
The festival, being run on a shoestring in its inaugural year, will also feature two 15-minute pop-up operas including one telling the story of a sensual, romantic encounter between a cosmetic salesperson and a customer. Perfume will be seen in a Keighley shopping centre as well as other settings across Bradford.
The main event on 23 November will be the Barber of Seville featuring Oscar Castellino as Figaro; mezzo-soprano Felicity Buckland as Rosina; and Shipley tenor Joseph Doody as Count Almaviva.
Rehearsals are soon to start and the libretto is written but there may well have to be tweaks, said McMillan, known to many as the “Bard of Barnsley”.
“I have realised I’ve translated it into South Yorkshire and Bradford is West Yorkshire,” he said. “In Bradford for ‘right’ they say ‘reet’ whereas I say ‘reyt’.”
Does that mean performers will be singing reet?
“Not if I’ve got owt to do with it,” said McMillan.
