OPERA in Essex? Do me a favour. As it happens the denizens of Stanley Hall eschew the delights of Lycra, sweatpants and large hooped earrings and yield nothing to any other country-house set in agreeable poshness and picnic knowhow: this is classic Home Counties opera, if not yet on the scale of Grange Park or Garsington.
Since 2001 Christopher Stewart-Smith has been staging one midsummer opera each year in a tent at his moated Elizabethan mansion on the Essex-Suffolk border, the music organised by Orlando Jopling, late of Tête-à-Tête. This year Jopling rounded up an orchestra of 15 and a promising young cast (headed by old troupers John Rawnsley and Nuala Willis) for Verdi’s last opera.
Now this work of entirely startling genius is one you really don’t want to hear done by amateurs. The score is an exhausting riot of light-fingered invention, the title role demands someone of vocal and theatrical heft, and the minor characters have to combine delicacy, agility, and — in the case of the lovers Nannetta and Fenton — a soaring romantic ardour. What a pleasure, then, not just to hear a non-cringeworthy performance but one that actually opens your ears to the music.
Jonathan Dove’s reduction of the score is beyond exemplary — how a string quintet, the band’s engine-room, can produce these sounds is beyond me, and the brass and woodwind never overwhelm the texture. Verdi’s mercurial charm is preserved, and the solo instruments shoot it through with delicate transparency. Nothing in Verdi’s previous operas prepares you for this: it is genuine musical humour, not the lumpy stuff of his character roles, and even potentially fraught moments, as when Ford finds out about Falstaff’s designs on his wife and has a jealous tantrum, are done with a brilliantly judged mixture of seriousness and play.
The tone onstage can be as hard to capture, but for the first two acts Rawnsley is an ideal Fat Jack: charming, entirely free of malice, his boastful ardour undercut by a sort of wistful self-knowledge. You are on his side, which is as it should be. There’s not much voice left — his set pieces are musically undercooked — but bags of stagecraft, and Michael McCaffery’s witty production is strong on character.
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The space doesn’t help the integration of the ensembles, momentum leaches away in a difficult last act which is less than fairy-like, but every- one works hard to produce a wholly likeable evening. A place to watch.