A Night of Celebrations
Orlando Jopling, the Musical Director, orchestrated the whole operatic evening for the accompaniment of a first-class quintet. Since the music they performed ranged through thirteen composers, seven nationalities and four centuries, this was no mean feat. Basically, Jopling told the audience, featuring his favourite opera moments, he held them together by following the sketch of an operatic plot about ‘the dance of love’, and, appropriately, welcomed the audience to the feast with a dance, an exuberant performance of a Tchaikovsky Polonaise.
Then the excellent tenor, Richard Dowling, introduced himself and some enchanting Purcell, by entering, singing, from the mid-theatre door before he strolled to the stage. Followed by Mozart’s wonderful aria Dove Sono from The Marriage of Figaro, quite gloriously sung by the Soprano, Jenny Stafford, and the audience had become, and remained, emotionally engrossed. Four Italian pieces followed, and we revelled in the mastery of the beautifully balanced performances of the tenor and soprano in two duets. The second, Donizetti, duet, was joined by the baritone, Alistair Ollerenshaw, whose moving performance of Britten’s ‘Look’ from Billy Budd and Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘If I loved you’ in the second half was another triumph.
By then we had reached composers with either one or both feet in the twentieth century and opened with Cole Porter’s famed ‘I hate Men’ which gave full scope to the acting skills of mezzo soprano, Martha Jones. She followed with the angry ‘Anita’ in Bernstein’s ‘A boy like that’, from Westside Story but, after the soaring purity of the soprano ‘Maria’s’ song, lost her anger and became part of the transcendental finale.
Philippa Harrison