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Ilona Revolskaya as the Controller and Patrick Terry as the Refugee in Jonathan Dove’s Flight at the Royal Academy of Music.
Ilona Revolskaya (top) as the Controller and Patrick Terry as the Refugee in Jonathan Dove’s Flight at the Royal Academy of Music. Photograph: Robert Workman
Ilona Revolskaya (top) as the Controller and Patrick Terry as the Refugee in Jonathan Dove’s Flight at the Royal Academy of Music. Photograph: Robert Workman

The week in classical: Flight; Rinaldo review – fasten your seatbelts

This article is more than 6 years old

Royal Academy of Music; Barbican, London
Jonathan Dove’s terrific airport opera opened an exciting new space. Plus, Iestyn Davies in extreme Handel

So awkward was the site of the Royal Academy of Music’s sparkling new theatre, unveiled last week, that demolition and construction had to be carried out entirely by carefully positioned crane – everything old swung out over the rooftops, everything new dropped into place from above. Small wonder, then, that Jonathan Dove’s 1998 opera Flight, obsessed with all things aerial, was chosen to open it.

The space, at the academy’s central London site, is gorgeous, enfolding an audience of 300 in a warm, cherrywood-lined, semicircular embrace, with excellent sightlines and up-to-the minute technical facilities backstage. The comfortable seating (with good legroom for we lanky music-lovers) is a bright, cheerful red – apparently in tribute to architect Ian Ritchie’s beloved Liverpool FC.

The Susie Sainsbury theatre is named after the deputy chair of the academy’s governing body, who, says principal Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, worked tirelessly to raise the £30m needed to replace the Sir Jack Lyons theatre. The old place had given 40 years’ good service, but with a cramped pit, no fly tower and hardly any wings it was just not equipping tomorrow’s musicians for a career in modern opera. Now they have not only a tremendous stage with enlarged orchestra pit, but 14 dressing rooms, more rehearsal facilities and a beautiful 100-seat recital room and studio, perched like a jewel box on the theatre’s roof.

The Royal Academy of Music’s beautiful new Susie Sainsbury theatre. Photograph: Adam Scott

All this means the academy can now strengthen collaboration with other world-class institutions such as the Julliard in New York, and increase its already generous public access to its music-making (though it needs to add a cloakroom and better loos). Overriding all this, though, says Freeman-Attwood, is the intention “to raise the ante for the students to perform better”. On the evidence of the first night of the double-cast Flight, the project’s principal aim is working very well indeed.

Dove’s comic opera took off like a rocket and stayed airborne throughout, with excellent ensemble work from the young cast and some truly distinctive solo performances. Dove and librettist April De Angelis use a familiar setting, an airport departure lounge, as a place where people dare to hope: that they will find new life and love by taking a flight; that someone will arrive on a plane who will transport them to new possibilities; or, in the case of a refugee without papers, that human kindness will allow him to stay.

An electric storm grounds all flights and forces the bickering, quarrelling cast to reconsider their lives and put their petty concerns into perspective, particularly when the refugee relates his tragic story of longing and loss. It’s a brilliantly conceived plot that allows Dove to explore all the conventions of opera in Mozartian detail, and offers oodles of opportunities for singers to shine in his instantly accessible, high-energy score. Notable on first night were the ethereal-toned countertenor Patrick Terry as the Refugee; Ilona Revolskaya as a stratospheric coloratura Controller who, more than a mere voice announcing flights, laments her passengers’ moral slackness; baritone Nicholas Mogg as the randy Steward, big in voice and personality; and mezzo-soprano Marvic Monreal, the Older Woman, waiting for love to arrive.

Flight at the Royal Academy of Music. Photograph: Robert Workman

The Royal Academy Sinfonia shone under the baton of Gareth Hancock, adding lustre and sheen to this bravura show, directed by Martin Duncan and designed by Francis O’Connor.

Several RAM alumni – singers and instrumentalists – were on spectacular form the following night, when Harry Bicket and the English Concert presented Rinaldo, the latest in their Handel opera series that has become a particular annual treat at the Barbican (Ariodante last year was a knockout).

Chief among those alumni was countertenor Iestyn Davies, who in the title role had a mountain to climb, taking on the eight arias and two duets Handel wrote for star castrato Nicolo Grimaldi in this, his first Italian opera for the London stage, dating from 1711. For the most part, Davies sailed through it, faltering only slightly at the last, when, in Or la Tromba in suon festante, his usually faultless sense of line slipped, but I defy anyone to sing those decorated semiquavers with aplomb, particularly after three exhausting hours on stage.

Rinaldo’s lavish plot and original staging is too ridiculous to relate here, but Handel’s sublime music makes it almost irrelevant, and the piece works just as well in a concert performance. And with singers of the calibre of Jane Archibald as the wicked sorceress Armida, Sasha Cooke as Goffredo and Luca Pisaroni as Argante generating quite enough excitement, who needs mermaids, aerial machines or fire-snorting dragons pulling chariots?

Joélle Harvey, Iestyn Davies, Sasha Cooke, Jakub Józef Orliński, Jane Archibald and Luca Pisaroni with the English Concert in Rinaldo at the Barbican. Photograph: Robert Workman

Star ratings (out of 5)
Flight ★★★★
Rinaldo ★★★★★

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