ENO's Pearl Fishers is a welcome revival of a grand, gorgeous production - review

More sceptical and urbane tastes might have reservations about the work’s fundamental quality. The Pearl Fishers gets off to a cracking start, but the big duet comes only 20 minutes in, after which Bizet’s youthful inexperience at the time of composition shows through and the thing runs out of steam – the novelettish plot (two best friends, pearl divers in Ceylon, falling out over the same girl) is the cue for some novelettish music, dainty in manner and shapely in phrase but short of the primary colours and visceral punch that make Carmen such a smash. 

First seen here in 2010, Woolcock’s staging has since travelled to New York, where it went down a storm. Now it returns looking even better: the “underwater” tableau that accompanies the overture is dazzlingly beautiful, and the designer Dickie Bird’s evocation of a teeming ghat on the Indian Ocean is brilliantly executed, with some awesome video of the tsunami’s devastation during the (protracted) scene changes. Nobody and nothing could make the melodramatic dilemmas of these cardboard characters real or involving, but Woolcock commendably takes their posturings at face value and doesn’t pretend that the opera is something that it isn’t.

Roland Boer is comparably sensitive in his conducting of the score, respecting its perfumed fragilities and drawing refined playing from ENO’s first-rate orchestra. His cast was new and well matched. Claudia Boyle deftly deployed her slightly acidic soprano on Leila’s pretty arias and James Creswell did sterling work in the ungrateful role of the High Priest Nourabad.

Jacques Imbrailo was forthright and sympathetic as the put-upon Zurga, who loses out to his chum Nadir, sung by Robert Macpherson in a robust and penetrating but not altogether pleasant tenor. The chorus was very stirring, but given ENO’s straitened finances, was it vital to swell its resident ranks with 15 extra freelancers?

Until December 2. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org