“Please, can we go again?” asked my three-year-old grandson after absorbing Under the Little Red Moon, a 20-minute “opera for tinies”. That’s surely a ringing endorsement from the target audience. It’s a tough challenge to hold the attention of a roomful of restless babies and toddlers for 20 minutes, but English Touring Opera generally succeeds, barring the occasional vocal protest from these demanding critics. (“It was only a little bit boring sometimes,” confided my discerning companion afterwards.)
Composer Russell Hepplewhite and writer-director Tim Yealland have created an enchanting tale with helpful suggestions from the paediatrics department at King’s College hospital, London. Lulu and Monty, two highly engaging characters, sung by soprano Rachel Speirs and bass-baritone Ben Knight, are joined by actor Gusta Matthews in a series of tiny scenes that tell the story of the moon, who is upset to be glowing red. She looks in a mirror, and we all look in little mirrors. The mirrors make us think of water; exotic fish and jellyfish swim around us. When the moon sets, rabbits come out to play with their babies. (“That’s not a baby rabbit,” said the observant junior member of the Critics’ Circle. “It’s a flannel.”) The moon rises, happy to no longer be red, and tells us it’s time for bed. After the applause, the children rushed to handle the props and talk to the cast. My 13-month-old second grandson made a beeline for Speirs and promptly sat on her lap.
Hepplewhite never patronises the children with rumpty-tumpty Jack and Jill tunes, but instead gives them sinuous music of great sophistication, choosing instrumentation that embellishes the sense of wonder being created on stage. Percussionist Tom Hingham shapes a distinctive soundworld using vibraphone, gongs, crotales, temple blocks, bongos, a tubular bell, a singing bowl, even sandpaper. More than 70 performances of this delightful double-cast show are scheduled between now and mid-November in the Midlands and the north. Take your tinies and open their eyes and ears.
What’s in a name? Well, quite a lot if you were the Oxford lieder festival. From this year it is the Oxford international song festival, an identity that perhaps more closely reflects a broadening schedule of vocal music that now spans several languages and genres. Already this season, audiences have heard an absorbing fusion of Iranian and European classical styles and enjoyed some aromatherapy, courtesy of French song paired with a range of perfumes. Before the month is out, concertgoers can look forward to a dip into the Great American Songbook, and hear everything from Monteverdi to Billie Eilish – but art song, in all its glory, remains at the festival’s heart.
One such programme came last week from mezzo-of-the-moment Helen Charlston, with the festival’s artistic director, Sholto Kynoch, at the piano. In a triumphant recital devoted entirely to settings of Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, Charlston mesmerised with the blackcurrant quality of her voice, her even tone, liquid phrasing and her wonderfully expressive face. She lives the text of each song, whether exultant or desolate, drawing us into her story, willing us to understand her joy and her pain.
Achieving a neat gender balance, we heard songs from Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Josephine Lang and a world premiere, Knight’s Dream, from Héloïse Werner, alongside works by Carl Loewe, Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. The Werner premiere was captivating. Heine’s words tell of an old, stumbling knight who dreams of dancing every night with his beloved and of his empty despair when he wakes. Werner’s accompaniment tingled in the dark of the knight’s gloomy lodgings, Kynoch creeping through the delicate filigree of the spare accompaniment, feeling his way along the score, sometimes rapping on the piano case to conjure the knock on the door that would herald the knight’s lover. Charlston sang Werner’s haunting, lyrical vocal line exquisitely, alert to every nuance of the text, including spoken interjections in English, amusingly turning on its head the line “Yet never a word would be spoken”.
Her radiant expressiveness reached its peak in Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Op 48, Heine’s romantic journey through bliss and disillusion towards apparent resignation and resolution. With supremely sensitive playing from Kynoch, Charlston made us struggle with her over all these emotional hurdles in a superb performance, both exhausting and elating.
Oliver Mears’s lavish 2021 production of Rigoletto is revived at the Royal Opera House, with soprano Pretty Yende making her Covent Garden role debut as Gilda, the jester’s daughter so callously treated by her first love, the Duke of Mantua, whose court is a cockpit of cruelty. Mears’s #MeToo concept is still firmly in place, offering a simple message: everywhere, women are exploited.
Yende brings a naive innocence to Gilda, and sings with great tenderness, even allowing for an occasionally trying tendency to scoop up to a note. Mongolian baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat is tremendous in the title role, with outstanding singing also from Gianluca Buratto as the assassin Sparafucile and Ramona Zaharia as his wily sister Maddalena.
Tenor Stefan Pop seemed ill at ease at times as the Duke, but there was a certain slackness to the first night, suggesting a lack of rehearsal under revival director Danielle Urbas, not helped by uneven conducting from Julia Jones. No doubt this will settle. There’s a change of cast from 13 November, when Simon Keenlyside takes over the title role, for the first time in this production. Now that should be interesting.
Star ratings (out of five)
Under the Little Red Moon ★★★★
Helen Charlston & Sholto Kynoch ★★★★★
Rigoletto ★★★
