Opera North: season highlights

The eminent writer and critic, George Bernard Shaw, described Cosi fan tutte, as “immoral, frivolous and utterly unworthy of Mozart’s genius. Good plays have often been better improvised in ten minutes in a drawing room of charades”. A century later it had become one of the composer’s most popular stage works, and this year forms the central part of Opera North’s Spring Season.

Tim Albery returns to revive his much 2004 production for the company, that has since been acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. His mix of period style costumes and abstract backdrops strips the characters bare of all trust as deception triumphs.

Yet few scores contain so many beautiful arias, and the company has brought together an exciting young cast including Nicholas Watts and Gavan Ring who both scored a notable success in their leading roles for Rossini’s comedy, The Barber of Seville, seen last year in the company’s autumn season.

The roles of their flirtatious young girlfriends are taken by Marie Flavin and Helen Sherman, with William Dazeley’s Alfonso manipulating all of those around him with a high degree of cynicism. Jac van Steen conducts, with the opening night on February 3.

That theme of 18th century female fecklessness spills over into Donizetti’s comedy, L’elisir d’amore, Daniel Slater’s sun-drenched and updated 1950’s setting taking the opera into the era of scooters and cappuccinos in a fashionable Mediterranean holiday resort. For the stammering and shy young local boy, Nemorino, the girl of his dreams, Adina, has now been quite taken by the recently arrived handsome young Belcore, and spurns his clumsy advances. Help is about to come when a hot-air balloon delivers the quack Doctor Dulcamara, selling his love potion on which Nemorino spends all of his money. What he does not know is that the girls who then flock to him, including Adina, have heard of his uncle’s will that has left him a small fortune. Gabriela Istoc, who played Mimi in Opera North’s La Boheme, and South Korean singer Jung Soo Yun, take the leading roles, with Richard Burkhard as Dulcamara.

Was it pure coincidence, or the manipulative librettist, Luigi Illica, that found Puccini writing Tosca at much the same time as Umberto Giordano was composing Andrea Chenier. Strip down the two stories and they are identical, with the wealthy young woman falling in love with an ‘artist’, only to find that there is another man in their love triangle who holds the power of life and death over them. This new production from Annabel Arden marks the first time the company has ever staged this highly popular work, and it may just be coincidence that Opera North have cast Rafael Rojas and Robert Hayward, who have already squared up to each other in Opera North’s Tosca, in the parts of the poet, Chenier, and his adversary, Gerard. Caught between them, Annemarie Kremer sings Maddalena de Coigny. Oliver von Dohnanyi makes a welcome return as conductor.

Opera North’s Spring Season, Leeds Grand Theatre, January 19-February 27. Then touring to Nottingham, Newcastle and Salford www.operanorth.co.uk