Adversity could have floored English National Opera’s zippy revival of Handel’s comedy Partenope (1730). On first night, the conductor, Christian Curnyn, was taken ill after the first act, leaving assistant conductor William Cole to step in – which he did, coolly, and with style. Mid-aria a door came off its hinges, kept upright by the quick-thinking cast. It looked like an error, but this staging, set in 1920s Paris, is heavy on absurdism, so you couldn’t be too sure. Days earlier, less of a hindrance to the performers maybe but vital to ENO’s future, chief executive Jenny Mollica announced she was leaving, after barely two years, to run the Roundhouse in Camden, north London.
The timing could not be worse. ENO is struggling to redefine itself ahead of a part-time future, from 2029, in Manchester. The Coliseum management shuffle dance has grown decidedly breathless. Mollica’s predecessor, Stuart Murphy, stayed five years. John Berry, who left in 2015, was with the company for two decades, with an impressive eight seasons at the top. His tenure, bumpy though it might have been, now looks a model of innovation and experiment. During that period, ENO consolidated its ambition to become a leading house for Handel (Jephtha, Alcina, Agrippa among the stagings).
Partenope, new in 2008, directed by Christopher Alden and designed by Andrew Lieberman, was part of that drive. Alden himself directed the latest revival. A fresh young cast, led by the soprano Nardus Williams – brittle, bewitching but vulnerable – embraces its crazed energy. Together they modulate gender issues of the past, whether from Handel’s day or the distant shores of the 2000s, into a more fluid present. The score might not be Handel’s finest but it bursts with the master’s hallmarks, especially that quicksilver flickering from light to dark. The ENO orchestra and excellent continuo players grasp and shade every detail.
He nearly steals the show by singing while crawling head first down the stairs. We all would if we could
Surrealism sets the tone. The bizarre figure of Emilio, smartly delivered by tenor Ru Charlesworth, is drawn from Man Ray, with his creepy, all-seeing camera. The chief lovers, both countertenors in awful wigs, are well matched: caddish Arsace (Hugh Cutting, in a starry debut) may get the best music but shy Armindo (Jake Ingbar) gets the girl. He nearly steals the show by singing while crawling head first down the stairs. We all would if we could.
Completing the lineup, the outstanding mezzo-soprano Katie Bray is a sympathetic Rosmira; bass William Thomas makes much of the army chief Ormonte, irresistible in pink balloon frock and spiked helmet draped with bananas. Farce may not be to your taste, but Partenope is seriously done, with wit added by Amanda Holden’s demotic translation. Shoes are thrown, bottles smashed, a top hat moves of its own accord and, now de rigueur at the opera, a well-appointed lavatory takes centre stage.
That toilet trope began – at ENO, ever the pioneer – back in 2002 when the director Calixto Bieito installed 14 WCs on the Coliseum stage, on which 14 down-trousered men squatted: an eye-catching opener to Verdi’s A Masked Ball. The doyen critic of the Times, Rodney Milnes, was polite in his desperation: “Oh dear, I do wish Bieito would go away and leave opera alone.” Fortunately the Spanish bad boy did not. His new staging of Wagner’s Ring cycle for the Opéra national de Paris promises to be one of the more fascinating. Sans bathroom, it offers instead – arguably more provocative – a waddling, headless automaton dog and a Brünnhilde on a child’s hobby horse.
Die Walküre, the second of the four operas, opened in Paris this month, conducted by Pablo Heras-Casado, with not one but three British Wotans on call. An unwell Iain Paterson was first replaced by the Royal Opera’s Wotan, Christopher Maltman, then, on the night I was there, by James Rutherford, who will sing it at Grange Park Opera next June. Next year is the complete work’s 150th anniversary: take your pick of cycles in Brussels, Munich, Bayreuth, New York and doubtless more.
James Rutherford and an automaton dog are the stars of Die Walküre at Opéra Bastille in Paris. Main image: Nardus Williams is ‘brittle and bewitching’ in the title role of Partenope alongside Ru Charlesworth
Bieito’s setting, in Rebecca Ringst’s designs, is dystopian and ugly. Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil is cited as inspiration. Valhalla is a futuristic big tech control centre. AI rules but not entirely: overflowing filing cabinets and looping cables are hangovers from an old world. A tree growing in Hunding’s upstairs apartment, spindly and hopeless, is the only breath of nature. Hunding himself (Günther Groissböck) is the kind of guy who relaxes out of his double-breasted suit into an SS officer’s uniform of an evening.
Under Heras-Casado, the Paris Opera orchestra never overpowered, but nor did it always sound quite focused, perhaps a result of the Bastille’s unyielding acoustic. The enthralling singing was a different matter. Tamara Wilson’s clarion-voiced Brünnhilde, brave and touching, starts as a prim Victorian girl then unhooks her hooped gown to reveal her warrior might. Rutherford’s Wotan, sometimes too soft for this barn of a theatre, was always expressive, shattered by his loss of authority. Stanislas de Barbeyrac and Elza van den Heever as Siegmund and Sieglinde, fierce and brilliant in their incestuous love, sang with scorching intensity. The cyborg-y Valkyries were mad and terrific.
Response to Bieito’s Ring so far has been mixed. Many Wagner devotees – to generalise – equate an absence of horns and helmets with “controversial”. I don’t think, on the evidence here, and compared with some of his earlier work, Bieito’s is. The quality of the storytelling is first-rate and perceptive, however confusing the visual detail. We are only halfway through. All may, or may not, become clear. Siegfried, the next instalment, opens in January. If Wagner’s epic work intrigues you, ahead of the anniversary, stay home and try Opera North’s award-winning semi-staging online for a small donation. It’s just as compelling.
Partenope is at Coliseum, London, until 6 December
Photographs by Lloyd Winters/Nathan Laine