| Idomeneo delights Mozart opera particularly apt A son conducting his father in an opera where a patriarch is forced to punish his child. A plot featuring a curse from the sea god Neptune. On a night when tidal rivers in the county were about to burst their banks, the plot of Mozart’s Idomeneo could hardly have been more apt last week. New Sussex Opera’s performance of the piece at Lewes Town Hall reminded me of the story about the little girl who was asked if she preferred radio or television. She said: ‘Radio - because the pictures are more real.’ An enthralled capacity audience would have agreed with the child in the anecdote, because this was a concert version with none of the action being played out before us. We were required to imagine it and in this way the fearful plot became horribly vivid. Obscure tradition demands that the part of Idomeneo’s son, Idamante, be taken by a woman. Normally we are helped to swallow this ruse by the character cutting an androgynous figure so it came as a shock to see that Flora McIntosh was six months pregnant. But an operatically-literate audience seemed to take this in their stride though a few might have struggled without the company’s excellent programme notes. As conductor, Nicholas Jenkins has an engaging, undemonstrative style that allowed him to coax a performance out of the Kent Sinfonia that was full but never lush. Despite the lack of a pit, the orchestra was not overpowering and the hall’s acoustic- often a little fuzzy when audience numbers are low - proved surprisingly clean. Of the principals, Neil Jenkins in the title role and Rachel Nicholls as Elettra were immense. Jenkins drew on reserves of stagecraft to almost inhabit the role rather than simply portraying it. His manic grief as be learnt of ldamante’s fate proved excruciating. Nicholls was similarly impressive; she grew in authority bringing light and shade to a part that can often be one-dimensional. It was disappointing to see that there were perhaps half a dozen people in the whole audience under the age of 40. The town’s younger opera buffs missed a sustained delight. |
| Jeremy Malies in the Sussex Express |
| Launched in Lewes with a production of Fidelio in 1979, New Sussex Opera has since risked staging such comparative rarities as Benvenuto Cellini, Andrea Chénier and Euryanthe, given the first UK performances of Weill’s Lost in the Stars, Tchaikovsky’s Enchantress, Von Einem’s Danton’s Death and Shostakovich’s orchestration of Boris Godunov, and offered operatic breaks to such directors as Nicholas Hytner (with Peter Grimes in 1981) and Keith Warner (a 1990 Tannhäuser). NSO chose to mark its 30th season with another novelty-its first ever opera by Mozart, a composer it has hitherto avoided, presumably because of his ‘resident’ status at Lewes’s local opera house. With conductor Nicholas Jenkins (a regular assistant to Marc Minkowski) tirelessly sustaining both dramatic momentum and rhythmic buoyancy, the magnificent instrumental richness of Mozart’s first mature opera was clear. Similarly, the 40-strong NSO chorus rose to its big moments as impressively in the hopeful serenity of ‘Placido è il mar’ as in the awestruck terror of ‘O voto tremendo’. As Idamante, Flora McIntosh was a Mozartian model of expressive and musical integrity, subtly inflecting her warm and affectingly vibrant mezzo to mirror every turn in the music and in the prince’s bewilderingly changeable fortunes. Amos Christie and Robert Presley, as the High Priest and Oracle, revealed an equally open and refreshingly honest approach. As for Idomeneo himself, Neil Jenkins never had a big voice but it was always an extremely well-produced one, and here he commanded the stage as much thanks to his exemplary diction and pointing of text as through his regal mien and leonine white mane. Now 62, and thus still five years short of Anton Raaff’s age when he created the role in Munich in 1781, Jenkins last year celebrated four decades as a professional musician, and yet, as The Times wrote of his 1967 Purcell Room debut, here too ‘there was hardly a bad note or an ill-formed phrase all evening’. The highlight was perhaps the king’s third-act prayer, with its wonderful accompaniment of string pizzicatos and unison responses from the male chorus. And, though sadly denied ‘Torna la pace’, Jenkins floated his final ‘Oh me felice!’ with such radiant contentment that, even when his voice cracked at the last, it served only to endorse the sincerity of his entire performance. |
| Mark Pappenheim in Opera |
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