One of the odd gifts of reviewing opera regularly is that you are sometimes exposed to violently clashing influences within the space of a few days. On Friday, I was enveloped in the passionate intensity of Fulham Opera’s bleak, immersive Der fliegende Holländer; on Tuesday, I found myself at New Sussex Opera’s community production of Ambroise Thomas’s unrepentantly twee romance Mignon. It was rather like tucking into the finest Chateaubriand steak, before turning to a shelf-stale vanilla cupcake laced with inch-thick pink icing. Usually, I relish this: it’s good mental discipline to engage with such different things in close succession. But, with Mignon, the contrast was so profound as to actually make enjoying the work difficult.
This is not to say we didn’t get some good singing. We were treated to two exceptional voices in Victoria Simmonds (Mignon) and Ruth Jenkins-Róbertsson (Philine), with a warm tenor Laertes from Christopher Diffey, and a generally capable Lothario from baritone Adrian Powter, a little underpowered at the end of his phrases but blessed with lovely tone. We also had an enthusiastic orchestra in the St Paul’s Sinfonia, conducted with great energy by Nicholas Jenkins through the wafting sweeps of Thomas’ score, which sounds exactly as you would expect. The exception is Philine’s extraordinary, dazzling Titania aria, which blazes like a Roman candle of originality in the otherwise beige fog of multipurpose music-that-sounds -Romantic-and-French. Fun scenery from designer Eleanor Wdowski consisted mainly of a series of differently sized trunks, some large enough to act as doors and others small enough to be tables, with judicious use of tablecloths and dust sheets to disguise them into other things when required. It was all nicely done; I felt just inexpressibly bored, as cardboard scene morphed into cardboard scene, the paper-thin plot wilting away in front of me as the hours stretched ahead.
New Sussex Opera’s Oberon last year was a triumph, incorporating a keen amateur chorus with professional singers to heartwarming effect. This year, enthusiasm still reigns on stage, but the gap between chorus and principals has grown larger. Timing in the choruses, particularly, went wildly astray, the NSO Chorus often pulling away from Nicholas Jenkins’ proffered rhythm like startled animals, an operation of sheer musical survival rather than style. Acting, generally, didn’t match last year’s standard either; the Chorus looked the part in their sumptuous period 1920s costumes, but didn’t seem relaxed on stage, while the principals either tended to over-act (Jenkins-Róbertsson in unrepentant diva mode) or under-act: Ted Schmitz’s wimpy Wilhelm was so vague a stage presence, it was a wonder any women were interested in him at all. Victoria Simmonds alone acted Mignon with recognisable intensity and restraint, but Mignon herself is a hard character to make really loveable or interesting: there’s just not enough there in the libretto, even for Simmonds.