Review: Welsh National Opera, Hippodrome

Piggy-wiggy angels bearing silver salvers to a fish maître d’ who ladles the soup: director Richard Jones’ imagining of the dream sequence at the end of Act 2 of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel has to be one of the most seductive bits of fantasy ever realised on an operatic stage.

With the emotive swell of Humperdinck’s musical interlude, it’s almost impossibly affecting, an oasis in a landscape of fairytale meets ‘50s austerity that paves the way to the ‘ginger and spice’ of Adrian Thompson’s feisty Witch (the latter with a fearsome array of food processors and a perm as tight as a Tory benefits cut).

Jones’ staging was unforgettable at its 1998 premiere but, with a sovereign cast that’s pitch-perfect, and Lothar Koenigs’ impeccable conducting, it’s more than a match to rival WNO’s other stand-out production of recent years, Wagner’s Meistersinger (also from the Jones stable, incidentally).

The front curtain depicts an empty plate flanked by knife and fork – ultimately superseded by a giant gaping mouth – and when it returns ahead of Act 2, the plate sports a generous smear of blood (a change from chef-y balsamic!). ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice’ is not the Richard Jones way, and Scene 1’s Kitchen couldn’t be more starkly drab all in grey (not even fifty shades…).

Hansel and Gretel are similarly kitted out in battleship grey, but nothing can dampen the exuberant goody-goody, bossy sister of Ailish Tynan’s Gretel or the gangling legginess of Jurgita Adamonyté’s DDR Communist youth poster boy Hansel (a role she was surely born to play).

Miriam Murphy’s valium-popping ‘Pat Butcher with attitude’ Mother is a force to be reckoned with, and for all that the downtrodden Father is regularly several sheets to the wind, Ashley Holland endows him with a refulgent vocal heft.

Subtle details are predictably scattered throughout with the contentment-inducing balm of the Sandman’s ‘sleepy dust’ – and by a neat twist, the Sandman (here a puppet manipulated by singer Meriel Andrew) is reinvented as the Dew Fairy at the beginning of Act 3, where she washes up the remnants of the fantasy feast wearing – what else? – grey marigolds.

The icing on the gingerbread, however, is Lothar Koenigs’ breathtakingly sure-footed musical direction. The pacing is flawless, the orchestra glows – burnished fervour matched by unassailable depth. Not since Meistersinger has the band sounded so sumptuously world class.

But then, like a previous WNO Music Director, Charles Mackerras, Koenigs is something of an alchemist, able to switch styles with equally persuasive results.

He also conducts the other full-length opera in the run, Mozart’s Magic Flute (pictured above). Here the playing is light on its feet, with a transparency that suggests period instruments, and an urgency that keeps Mozart’s allegorical pantomime-cum-celebration of Enlightenment values at a buoyant rolling boil. 

Sophie Bevan’s radiant Pamina has the edge over Allan Clayton’s big-boned Tamino, Samantha Hay negotiates the ricocheting stratospheric fireworks of the Queen of the Night with commendable accuracy if disappointing caution: and, if the idea of an Afrikaans Papageno takes a bit of getting used to, when Dominic Cooke’s production is visually rooted in the surrealistic world of Magritte – complete with monster lobster and three boys pedalling a fish-cycle – why, pretty much anything goes!

Welsh National Opera were at Bristol Hippodrome on April 9-10 (The Magic Flute) and April 11 (Hansel and Gretel). They return to the Hippodrome in October. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.atgtickets.com/venues/bristol-hippodrome

Pics: Brian Tarr (top) / Robert Workman (middle) / Johann Persson (bottom)