Obsession at The Grange: powerful singing and gothic drama in The Queen of Spades

In a glorious sun-drenched summer evening at The Grange Festival, there was one of those moments when an entrance aria blows the roof off the house and powers the audience into the drama to follow. Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is about obsession. Not the banal operatic “I must have this woman or my life is not worth living”, but a desperate, irrational, insane gambling obsession. When Andrei Kymach’s Count Tomsky strode up to narrate the tale of the old Countess and her “tri karti”, the secret sequence of three cards that will bring untold wealth, the sheer power and vitality of his baritone drew gasps from the audience. The story is frankly ludicrous, but that didn’t stop us being gripped.

Director Paul Curran’s setting is upper class England – perhaps The Grange itself – in the middle of the 20th century, long enough ago to be from a different era without turning it into a Catherine the Great costume drama. Gary McCann’s designs are pure eye candy. The Grange's elegant Ionic columns are mimicked in a series of walls which slide and rotate to provide the opera’s many settings – garden, ballroom, bedroom, barracks, canal side, gambling den. The costumes are executed exquisitely, with the opulence ratcheted up further for the Act 2 masked ball and its (decidedly 18th-century) pastoral intermezzo. The opera has several ensemble scenes whose job is to provide folkloric colour – the children in the Summer Garden and Liza and her friends at home, amongst others. These came through vividly with the help of the gorgeous settings, rumbustious chorus singing and spirited playing from Paul Daniel and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

Too spirited, perhaps. In the first half, everything was just too loud. The Grange has a fairly modest 590 seats, and both orchestra and singers were at a level that would have filled a much bigger space, which resulted in something of an assault on the senses. This damaged nuance and made it even more difficult than usual to empathise with the main characters; only Prince Yeletsky, whose love paean to Liza “Ya vas lyublyu” was beautifully sung by Ilya Kutyukhin, elicits any real empathy. You could admire the quality of the singing of Eduard Martynyuk and Anush Hovhannisyan as Herman and Liza, but it was difficult to engage with the characters of the obsession-gripped gambler or the girl who has everything and throws it all away on such a wastrel.

After the interval (set mid-way through Act 2, the point at which Herman sneaks into the Countess’s bedroom), it was as if we were listening to a different orchestra: more thoughtful, subtle, fully invested in bringing out the gothic drama in the music. And for the whole of the second half, every scene gripped us more tightly than the last. Dame Josephine Barstow sang the Countess’s reminiscences of her youth in Paris with heartbreakingly eloquent softness. The confrontations between Herman and the Countess (both living and ghostly) were chilling. In the meeting between Liza and Herman in which she finally realises that all is lost, Hovhannisyan portrayed her anguish magnificently, while Martynyuk was virtuosic in showing us Herman’s descent into insanity, each winding up the intensity of the other as the duet progresses. Martynyuk’s tenor may not have the honey or velvet of some, but he showed complete mastery of the ebb and flow of Tchaikovsky’s music and of the emotions it can portray.

This is a large scale performance for a small festival like The Grange, and one cannot help but be impressed by the all round quality. Russian diction was consistently excellent – I only speak a few words of Russian but was astonished at how much I could parse. Both the festival chorus and the Twyford Youth Chorus performed creditably. Minor roles were well taken, with Arlene Belli a sweet-voiced Polina whose duet with Hovhannisyan charmed us, and Lucy Schaufer giving a hilarious pair of cameos: one as the Governess breaking up the young people’s party, the other as Catherine the Great showing up at the ball and throwing off her wig with gusto.

For all this quality, I was less engaged than I would have liked by the first half. But the second half of the opera was riveting from start to finish, doing full justice to the gothic horror of the drama and the brilliance of Tchaikovsky’s music. A real treat – see it if you can.