United Kingdom Longborough Festival Opera 2023 [2] – Donizetti, L’elisir d’amore: Soloists, Longborough Festival Chorus and Orchestra / Alice Farnham (conductor). Longborough, Gloucestershire, 20.6.2022. (CP)
Production:
Director – Max Hoehn
Designer – Jemima Robinson
Lighting designer – Mark Jonathan
Cast:
Nemorino – Thando Mjandana
Dr Dulcamara – Emyr Wyn Jones
Adina – Jennifer Witton
Belcore – Arthur Bruce
Giannetta – Haegee Lee
Originally set in a Basque village, Donizetti’s melodramma giocoso, L’elisir d’amore, his greatest popular success, was written at a time when his closest contemporaries, Bellini and Verdi, were sticking with opera seria rather than opera buffa. Director, Max Hoehn forges an inspired link with Longborough Festival Opera’s (LFO) more serious blockbuster opener, Götterdämmerung, as Donizetti’s sentimental leading soprano, Adina (Jennifer Witton), reviews the story of how a potion brought Tristan and Isolde together. Relaxing in the village square with pilot Belcore (Arthur Bruce) who has plans to woo Adina, she is joined by local postman, tenor Nemorino (Thando Mjandana) at a picnic table. Adina is consumed with the potion story as her search for a prescription gathers pace. Nemorino, realising he could die of love, sings his romanza, ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ with great confidence and super control accompanied by haunting bassoon and harp; one of the most memorable musical highlights of which there were many in this most entertaining production.
Designer, Jemima Robinson’s jigsaw framed set grabs the attention before Act I begins. Sitting within the frame is every Cotswold village’s red telephone box converted to house a defibrillator, the red post box in the stone wall and the blue bin for dog waste!! More innovations are to feature with charity book sales, Punch and Judy shows, young teenage footballers emerging from green waste bins and disco dancing in the converted telephone box. This is a very clever transfer of Donizetti’s opera buffa from a Basque farming community to a very typical Cotswold village, where green issues matter as the backdrop statement confirms – the village is ‘green, pleasant and now protected’. Evidence of director, Max Hoehn’s earlier work with Birmingham Opera Company’s Graham Vick is patently clear with well-tested use of the chorus of villagers as much more than simple villagers. As gossipmongers, as senior citizens with shopping trolleys, as local builders, policeman and depicters of troublesome low flying aircraft – remember, this is the Cotswolds – their purposeful energy never allows the pace to drop, even though on occasions that chorus lost touch with Alice Farnham’s determined conducting.
Jennifer Witton (Adina), dressed in a somewhat unflattering gilet – standard dress, perhaps, for Cotswold farmer’s wives – is part of a stellar cast. LFO fields fine singers and singers who can act, none more so than, bass-baritone Emyr Wyn Jones (Dr Dulcamara), the potion deliverer, who manages to deceive everyone with his wit and bravado, including Adina, in their beautifully delivered duet, ‘Quanto amore’. Dealing from his cart laden with potions, he declares he’s ‘making the penniless rich’. His comeuppance is complete when the villagers turn on him hoping the charlatan crashes his cart. Finally, with Adina’s love for Nemorino reciprocated, she falls into his arms – wearing the wedding gown for her proposed marriage to Belcore – across two large straw bales; well, this is the Cotswolds, she is a farmer’s daughter, what else would you use? Long before this coming together, she has dispensed with her veil in the blue dog waste bin, when she realises her recent lover, Belcore is happier with his lot as the world is full of other women.
Baritone, Arthur Bruce, makes a striking appearance as Belcore in Act I, wearing a leather aviator sheepskin jacket complete with Biggles Style flying helmet, before declaring his feelings for Adina – ‘no woman can reject a man in uniform’, whilst also enjoying the attention of the village girls. Why Bruce is dressed as an airman and not the soldier in the script, remains a mystery? He captures the spirit of Donizetti’s buffa style contributing to the buffoonery in which Wyn Jones, too, joins in with strongly. Realising he has competition for Adina’s hand from Nemorino, he urges the postman to sign up for military service, delivering the application to the red post box in the stone wall. When gossiping villager, Giannetta (Haegee Lee), spreads a fake rumour of a Nemorino windfall on the death of his uncle, Belcore realises his competitor will soon be the Croesus of the village and quite a catch as a husband.
Longborough Festival Orchestra is the glue holding this modern dress production together. Super horns provide melancholic support when postman Nemorino pleads for a delay to the impending wedding Belcore sought. Nemorino’s reluctance to be a poor suitor emboldens him to seek a more potent potion, which he does, with unfavourable results, in an attempt to see off his rival. In the end, of course, he wins Adina’s love.
From the pit, Alice Farnham receives fine support from the strings, excellent flute and clarinet playing, plus those melancholic horns and bassoons. For the most part, her leadership maintains a frantic pace with villagers fully engaged in their several and various exploits, whether pretending to read glossy magazines whilst eavesdropping on lovers at play, displaying new potion advertisements or brandishing umbrellas as rain reaches the Cotswolds. Lighting designer, Mark Jonathan finds a way to create those images of incoming rain showers, as well as managing to illuminate several different potion containers whilst maintaining a brightness on stage to clearly illustrate the complexity of the bitter-sweet comedy. Some of those fractured jigsaw pieces forming the stage frame are not a correct fit, why?; this is a Jemima Robinson challenge, yet to be solved at the end of a thoroughly enjoyable romp in the sun as Longborough’s season excels.
Clive Peacock