Summer opera festivals reviewed, including Grange Park’s sharply satirical The Excursions of Mr Brouček

It is peak summer opera season in the UK. All the big country house summer festivals are up and running and, whatever the ups and downs on the way, each of the latest three productions has some strengths on its side.

For ambition, none can top Grange Park Opera. Based at West Horsley just outside the M25, and boasting a recently built jewel box of an opera house modelled on La Scala, it is offering operas on the grand scale and with a line-up of stars (Joseph Calleja, Bryn Terfel, Simon Keenlyside) the envy of companies twice its size.

For this year’s opening production Grange Park chose the Janáček rarity, The Excursions of Mr Brouček. This light-hearted satire takes a stolid landlord, fond of beer, sausage and busty women, on two imaginary journeys — first to the Moon, then back in time to the 15th century — where he encounters world views decidedly different from his own.

In tune with expectations today, director David Pountney has sharpened the satire. Like a terrier that cannot resist biting any passing ankle, his brilliant new English translation sinks its teeth into targets as diverse as wealthy sponsors, contemporary art and music critics, gender politics, vegans, lockdown parties and the latest Boris Johnson balls-up (not all of them, admittedly, in Janáček’s mind at the time).

To go with this, the episode on the Moon is staged as a nonstop, surrealist cavalcade of madcap energy. The result is relentlessly in-your-face and it is a relief when the onslaught calms down for the excursion to 15th-century Prague. Pountney’s time-travelling images of Nazis and the fall of the Berlin wall are neatly dovetailed here and the intellectually challenged Mr Brouček — the always excellent Peter Hoare — at last wins some sympathy.

Grange Park has done well with its tenors, especially Mark Le Brocq in four ridiculously high roles, and there is exemplary support from Andrew Shore and Clive Bayley in an able cast. Janáček’s score is a fount of witty, touching detail, nicely realised by conductor George Jackson, though the BBC Concert Orchestra does not find its task easy.

★★★☆☆

To July 7, grangeparkopera.co.uk

A more sedate evening is to be had at The Grange Festival in Hampshire. Under new management since 2016, the festival aims to include one Baroque opera each season, an apt complement in style to the grand, Greek revivalist country house where it is based.

This year’s choice was Handel’s Tamerlano, which dates from the height of the composer’s career in Italian opera. The final act focuses with mounting intensity on the plight of Bajazet, the defeated Ottoman emperor now in chains at the court of the victorious Tamerlano, but it feels a long slog to get to that point.

It would be unfair to fault the Grange’s cast. Hearing a symphony orchestra in Baroque opera these days is unexpected, but the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Robert Howarth gave a good account of itself, digging into the rhythms with a decisiveness that gave the drama some fire, even if it lacked the light touch. Bajazet is one of the first great roles for a tenor and Paul Nilon attacked it with unbuttoned commitment at the price of some less than beautiful singing. Countertenor Raffaele Pe, a playboy Tamerlano, delivered the goods in style in his showpiece aria and Sophie Bevan sang a full-voiced, open-hearted Asteria. Angharad Lyddon’s stylish Irene benefits from firm mezzo tone and Patrick Terry sang and played a restrained Andronico.

Daniel Slater’s production, set in the gloomy confines of a prison, is true to the opera’s serious intentions, but struggles to generate much dramatic momentum from Handel’s long series of solo arias in the first two acts. How much more gripping was Vivaldi’s treatment of the same story in his opera Bajazet, as performed by Irish National Opera at the Royal Opera House earlier this year.

The Grange Festival season also includes Verdi’s Macbeth and a lesser-performed G&S, The Yeomen of the Guard.

★★★☆☆

To July 3, thegrangefestival.co.uk

Having opened its season with the first professional production in the UK of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, Glyndebourne can be forgiven for making a popular choice in Puccini’s La bohème for its second new production. In any case this is not La bohème as we know it.

It is easy to understand why one might want to cleanse Puccini’s opera of its traditional sentiment, but it is less easy to do it successfully. Director Floris Visser has boldly cut out colour, light, or any suggestion of hope. He proposes a grey, cobbled Parisian street swathed in gloom circa 1930, which persists on stage from curtain-up to curtain-down. All roads lead to death here. Indeed, Death puts in a personal appearance as a constant, chilling presence, haunting poor, vulnerable Mimì.

A stripped-down, strong and striking message about the inevitability of death is drawn from the opera, but much else is lost. Most important, the emotional journey that Puccini charts from carefree bonhomie to loss and grief gets ironed out if the world is all sunlight-free, colour-bleached hopelessness from the off.

On to this street of melancholia steps a mostly appreciable cast. For the first two performances, Rodolfo is being sung by Sehoon Moon, whose appealingly bright, youthful tenor is probably better suited to less heavy roles for the moment, but the elegance of his artistry gives great pleasure (Long Long, the scheduled tenor, takes over on June 18). Yaritza Véliz sings generously, with a quality soprano voice, as Mimì, though a certain fragility is missing. Vuvu Mpofu sparkles delightfully as Musetta. There is a rather gruff Marcello from Daniel Scofield, a classily sung Schaunard from Luthando Qave, and an effective Colline with a recognisably Slavic tone from Ivo Stanchev. Other cast changes follow later during the run.

Best of all, Jordan de Souza conducts an all-encompassing bohème with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, fleet and sparkling, and with the lyrical music shaped as freshly as if it was composed yesterday. At least all the light and shade of Puccini’s opera can be found down in the pit.

★★★☆☆

To August 14, glyndebourne.com