![]() Still, all of these voices had good, warm timbre and blended beautifully in the ensemble numbers. But the Jack Lyons Theatre is quite a large space for a chamber work like this, and there were some problems with diction: like Austen's prose, this opera relies on the use of language, and I frequently lost the words. ![]() Royal Academy Opera produced a generally strong cast of young singers who, broadly speaking, coped with everything that was thrown at them. I doubt that anyone will accuse Dove of being kind to his singers: this seemed like challenging stuff, highly varied and requiring extremes of vocal agility from everyone. Plaudits should certainly go to pianists Chad Kelly and Emily Senturia, who played vividly and excitingly. It made me think of the comparison between listening to the orchestral and piano versions of Pictures at an Exhibition: Ravel's orchestration is a splendid piece of work but ultimately an unnecessary one, because all the colour you might want is already there in Mussorgsky's piano original. The difference is most tangible in the way Dove uses the piano to get a huge variety of effects: percussive, rolling, lyrical. ![]() I realise that although I've seen plenty of opera on small stages, this is the first time I've seen an opera actually purpose-designed for the chamber format previously, I've only seen cut down versions of full scale operas. Mansfield Park is a chamber opera scored for piano four hands and ten singers, commissioned by Heritage Opera to be performed in a Northamptonshire country house - in other words, pretty much on location. Throughout the evening, I was struck again and again by the sheer beauty of the vocal lines, the richness of musical texture and, most of all, the excitement generated by his contrapuntal writing in many of the ensemble numbers: the bulk of the opera is sung by groups of the performers from duet to octet. To my mind, Dove squares that circle: he may not be a tunesmith (you don't come out singing any of the numbers), but his music is thoroughly melodic and lovely to listen to without in any way sounding old fashioned or passé. My most common complaint about contemporary opera is that the music is harsh, discordant and wearing on the ears the response of contemporary composers would be that you can't just carry on writing as if it were still the nineteenth century. As a result of these tricks and others, we learn everything we need to know about the characters in the space of just a couple of hours, in a way that truly captures the spirit of Austen's writing. ![]() At one point in Act II, our maligned heroine Fanny sits on her park bench in the middle of the stage while action revolves around her later, when a lot of narrative needs to be covered in a short space, four singers are on stage reading and writing letters. The opera is divided into named "chapters" whose subtitle is sung to the audience with relish and humour, which serve to frame the story. So it's a brave move for Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton to have tackled Jane Austen's Mansfield Park - four hundred pages or so of comedy of manners which glories in the acute observation of its characters and the societal norms which they inhabit.īut to my mind, Dove and Middleton pull it off admirably, using some unusual devices to great effect. ![]() Turning great novels into opera isn't a new idea - consider Prokofiev's War and Peace or Massenet's Werther - but it can be a tricky business: opera thrives on pace and high drama, while the greatest novels have time and space for reflection and character development. ![]()
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