British Youth Opera’s pared-back autumn season comprises just one work, in the shape of Jonathan Dove’s L’Augellino Belverde, which was premiered at Tuscany’s Batignano festival back in 1994 and is here performed in Adam Pollock’s English translation. Its source is Carlo Gozzi’s 1765 play of the same name – itself a sequel to his earlier The Love for Three Oranges, which was turned into a highly successful opera by Prokofiev.
Dove has set himself the more difficult task, because Gozzi’s second fairytale is a good deal more convoluted than the first; the result is dramatically diffuse and overlong, with a plot far harder to articulate in stage terms than its predecessor’s.
As in all his scores, though, Dove’s technical skills remain impressive, bar a tendency to repeat verbal and musical material too often; but his musical language is so heavily indebted to John Adams and Stephen Sondheim that it is rarely possible to discern any distinctive voice of his own.
What the piece does offer a company dedicated to the development of young artists is a wealth of roles in which a large cast can show their strengths. Here, among the 11 named roles, plus a group of three singing apples – one of many elements, incidentally, cleverly visualised in Simon Bejer’s designs, which provide the evening’s outstanding feature – there’s a wealth of talent on display. Adam Temple-Smith’s Renzo, Filipa Van Eck’s Barbarina, Emma Kerr’s Ninetta and Rozanna Madylus’s Smeraldina, in particular, make their marks vocally and dramatically, as does Tom Verney in the title role of the magical bird, which he also presents as a handheld puppet in another winning feature of Stuart Barker’s production. Lionel Friend conducts a well-prepared musical performance, with the Southbank Sinfonia supplying the secure orchestral underpinning.
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