Opera reviews: The Winter’s Tale and The Tale of Januarie

4 / 5 stars
The Winter’s Tale

ENGLISH National Opera’s Composer in Residence Ryan Wigglesworth has long been obsessed with The Winter’s Tale, on which his first opera is based.

Opera scenePH

It poses one of the most inexplicable character changes in all Shakespeare’s plays: a fond husband turns into a jealous tyrant intent on murdering his new born baby and humiliating his wife.

Wigglesworth sets the court of King Leontes of Sicilia in what could be an Eastern bloc dictatorship. In a towering performance, bass-baritone Iain Paterson portrays Leontes with a bullying exterior that conceals an inner fragility – a study of paranoia caused by the corrosive effect of power. 

The huge marble statue of the King dominates Vicki Mortimer’s revolving circular set and suggests Leontes is a megalomaniac. It only needs Hermione’s warmth towards Polixenes, King of Bohemia and Leontes’s boyhood friend, to set off alarm bells in his chaotic mind. 

Polixenes (Leigh Melrose) flees Sicily, and Sophie Bevan’s defiant Hermione is pronounced dead when she collapses at her trial. Son and heir Mamillius dies of a fever and baby Perdita is abandoned on the wild shores of Bohemia. 

Act Two, 16 years later in the spring of rural Bohemia, begins the long path back to reconciliation. Perdita (Samantha Price) and Polixenes’s son Florizel (Anthony Gregory) meet and fall in love, to the fury of his father.

The final scene back in Sicily of Hermione’s statue restored to life is magical. Wigglesworth conducts his coolly beautiful score and actor Rory Kinnear makes a proficient directing debut. It is a dramatic evening, with strong performances all round, though rather lacks the play’s depths. 

Another world premiere with a wintry title opened last week in The Tale Of Januarie by composer Julian Philips and librettist Stephen Plaice. The opera is based on Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales and the words are largely in Middle English. 

The tale of an old man, Januarie, who marries the maiden May, has been a favourite with opera composers through the ages with the old man thoroughly trounced for his delusions and May ending up getting the young blade with whom she first fell in love.

Director Martin Lloyd-Evans brings out the tale’s bawdiness and romance. Dick Bird’s designs, lit by Mark Jonathan, evoke the seasons. A tree’s bare silhouette gives way to spring blossom, green leaves of summer and golden pears of autumn, by which time May is heavily pregnant, though not necessarily by her elderly husband. 

Philips creates a rich pattern of sound, imaginatively combining the rough music of Chaucer’s time, including a hurdy gurdy, with contemporary instruments. Tenor John Findon is excellent in the strenuous role of grey-beard Januarie. Joanna Marie Skillett’s May is a determined survivor who sees the advantage of a rich old husband with a virile young servant. Try to catch the final performance tomorrow.

VERDICT: 4/5

Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale English National Opera, The Coliseum, London WC2 (Tickets: 020 7845 9300/eno.org; £12-£125)

Julian Philips’s The Tale of Januarie Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London SE1, (Tickets: 020 7638 8891/barbican.org.uk; £25/£15 concessions)

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