What better entertainment than an upbeat, bijoux production of, arguably, the most upbeat and tuneful operetta ever written, on a wet, windy cold Sunday afternoon in the stunning Opera House at Tunbridge Wells? And, as ever, I’m struck by the enlightened (in this instance) approach of JD Wetherspoon, which, once a year allows its pub to revert to its original function for two performances, with a meal package if you wish.

John Ramster’s eight hander adaptation runs with the wackiness of the piece. Hands, and other things, poke through holes on the side cloths of Bridget Kimak’s set and her costumes range from Pierrot to Alice in Wonderland with a splendid, massive, shiny yellow suit and chrysanthemum-topped headdress for a scary-looking skull-masked Mikado (Matthew Quirk).

The advantage of working on G&S with a small cast – and I’ve seen it with other companies such as Illyria Theatre and Charles Court Opera – is that you can hear every note and every word because it’s all so exposed. Music director Bradley Wood, sidestage on keyboard, has wisely run mostly at fairly moderate tempos so that the clarity is crystalline – after an oddly nervous opening number at the performance I saw.

Christopher Faulkner, as a gor-blimey, insouciant Ko-Ko, for example, delivers the all-topical little list, which he wrote himself, with impeccable timing and hilarious precision. The Mikado’s song is, unfortunately, a bit muffled by the mask but I really liked the way Gareth Edmunds, a fine tenor, and Wood managed all the tempo and mood changes in A Wandering Minstrel I. And the madrigal, Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day is, as sung here, a lovely example of a quartet really nailing it. I could almost feel Sir Arthur applauding.

Ashley Mercer as Pooh-Bah is magnificent. Tall, slender and sneering he literally wears a multiplicity of hats all piled one on top of another. He oozes stage presence and his bass voice is resonant and authoritive.

The larger-than-life Susan Moore is terrific as Katisha too. She has an old fashioned contralto voice like good claret and acts beautifully as the frumpy but oddly vulnerable and pretty vindictive woman nobody wants. She is also very funny, pulling faces and flirting with the audience.

Every director wants – needs, even – to put his or her own stamp on a piece as well known and much loved as this. If G&S is to work, it has to sparkle. It was, let it not be forgotten, lack of freshness which eventually alienated the Arts Council and killed the D’Oyly Carte company. The trouble is, though, that there is a fine line between imaginative artistic innovation and gratuitous gimmickry. And sometimes Ramster crosses that line. What on earth does it add to the piece to do Here’s a Howdy Do in Texan accents as if we were at a rodeo? Why change the word Japan to Pajan? Why have Mathew Quirk, doubling as Pish Tush speak in a distorted accent which is a cross between West Midlands and cod-Jewish?

For various reasons I saw this touring show late in its run. It includes a lot of stage business with long bendy arms with which characters touch each other, kiss and so on. This is clearly how it was rehearsed last year when on-stage social distancing was a requirement. It would then have seemed quite witty. Now it feels a bit quaint. When this production is next revived, I’m sure this aspect of it will be dropped.

Susan Elkin

An unusual five work programme, this concert began and ended with Mendelssohn via two contrasting Ravel favourites and a dip into Fauré – all of it very familiar territory.

Barry Wordsworth is a poised figure on the podium. As Conductor Laureate and Music Director and Principal Conductor here for 26 years, he knows the Brighton Philharmonic very well. With little fuss he drew out all the melodic calm and storm in Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides with some nicely pointed brass interjections and well balanced string work.

Then in completely different mood came Fauré’s Pavanne, lovingly played. The rippling pizzicato was allowed to resonate beneath the melody without rushing. The solo wind passages, especially the horn were sweet and evocative.

Of course for Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, the showiest work in this concert, you need four percussionists all now in place ready for that arresting opening whip crack. Soloist Junyan Chen with her shiny dress and scarlet striped hair looked as glitzy as she and Wordsworth made the music sound. It’s a piece which changes mood frequently and I liked the accurate but sensitive way the cross rhythms, alternating with rich lyricism was delivered. Chen has a knack of watching Wordswoth almost continuously which made for an exhilaratingly coherent performance especially in the incisive framing movements. In contrast her long solo passages in the middle adagio assai movement were gently impassioned.

It’s hard to believe that the five component movements of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite were originally written as piano pieces to be played by the Godebski children with whose family he was close friends. What talented children they must have been! Brighton Philharmonic’s rendering of the orchestral version of these colourful fairy tales in music showcased especially pleasing work from flute, xylophone harp, celeste and contrabassoon. It also made me realise – thanks BPO – how unusual it is to hear the entire suite, used as we are to exterpolated movements on, for example, radio.

And so finally to the glorious ebullience of Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony. I played in a performance of this work just a few weeks ago and know how essential if is to get the rapid string work crisp. Wordsworth did it with aplomb – as he did the eloquent rests and pauses. He also gave us plenty of minor key tip-toeing mystery in the andante and lilting warmth in the third movement nothwithstanding the occasional ragged entry. The saltarello presto finale whipped along excitingly, as it must, with some pleasing decisive playing from the strings and attractive wind sound especially from flute and bassoon.

Susan Elkin

“It is at such moments as these that one feels how necessary it is to travel with a full band.” So says the Duke of Plaza-Toro in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, but how rarely one hears “a full band” in a performance of any of the Savoy Operas nowadays. All too often even the most optimistic listener would struggle to describe the band as half-empty. It is pleasant to record therefore that Cambridge University Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s production of The Gondoliers at West Road Concert Hall last night had a band which if not quite full (the piece calls for a surprisingly large orchestra) was more than equal to the challenges of one of Sullivan’s most ebullient scores. The overture, so often an endurance test in non-professional productions, was dispatched with vim and grace, with a particularly winning oboe solo in the middle section. For the first time I actually wanted it to go on for longer, and then was delighted to find that it did – conductor Richard Decker having opted to extend it with a burst of the Cachucha at the end to give a more rousing conclusion than Sullivan’s original.

Another musical decision I found more questionable – finding a number of brass fanfares in the score Decker had put the brass in the balconies to left and right of the stage. The intention was to evoke the atmosphere of a coronation (the massed trumpeters in the galleries of Westminster Abbey) and for those passages it was effective enough. The drawback was that the fanfares represent under two minutes of music, and for the rest of the evening there was a distinct loss in terms of balance and ensemble. At the climax of the second act the brass got lost entirely, and there were several bars of cacophony before order was restored. This was a particular shame when the musical standard of the rest of the evening was so high.
The Gondoliers was the pair’s last success, and though it was for long one of the most popular of the series there are signs that Gilbert in particular was beginning to run out of ideas. Nothing much happens in the second act, the secondary characters are not terribly interesting and the dénouement, involving swapped babies, is perilously close to that of HMS Pinafore. It will always have a place in my heart though as it was the first of the operas which I performed in (Oxford Playhouse, 1988, in the role of Twelfth Gondolier, since you ask), thus inaugurating my long career of bit parts in amateur musical theatre. As such I well recognise the challenges of putting on a show of this kind when everyone involved has day jobs to do, essays to write or lectures to attend. The wayward follow spot, the principal unaccountably absent from the wings when his entrance is due, the chorus member on the wrong side of the stage for the curtain call – all these are very familiar. In a dull production you wince at such things, in a good one they just add to the fun.
Though to some extent an ensemble piece with music and dialogue shared out among an unusually large number of principal roles, any production of The Gondoliers stands or falls by its central quartet of the two gondoliers and the girls whom they marry. In this production the title roles were taken by Seb Blount as Marco and Owen Elsley as Giuseppe, with Tiffany Charnley as Gianetta and Louisa Stuart-Smith as Tessa. That they all sang superbly is almost a given – Cambridge abounds in good singers – but they also played together beautifully, and the dialogue scenes, which can drag if not carefully paced, bounced along with the perfect amount of wit and sparkle. Of the other principals, Peter Coleman as Don Alhambra stood out for clarity of diction in his two solos, but there were no weak links anywhere in the cast (and given the number of solo parts in this show these can be horribly exposed).
West Road isn’t an ideal venue for operetta but Rose Painter’s production made good use of its wide stage, with a simple but effective set aided by creative lighting. The Gondoliers is a particularly rewarding show for the chorus – in an ideal world we would have wanted more men, but those that there were sang valiantly, aided by a few women en travesti. The dancing could probably have done with more rehearsal time, but everyone was game and the stage was always full of interest and movement. There were of course new sight gags and topical references (a reference to Boris Johnson’s “work event” went over particularly well) but the director had a good sense of when such things are welcome and when they are not. I have seen productions where the clowning never stops, but the Savoy operas have a delicate balance of the silly and the serious, and such numbers as “There was a time”, “When a merry maiden marries”, “Kind sir, you cannot have the heart” and “Take a pair of sparkling eyes”, all beautifully sung, were wisely left to speak for themselves.

William Hale

There was an upbeat atmosphere of new year/new optimism for this well attended first concert of 2022 spiced with a strong sense of the worst being behind us. And the overture to Mozart’s last opera, The Magic Flute (1791) was an aptly chosen opener. The orchestra made it sound bright, chirpy and celebratory especially in the fugato quaver passages which were delightfully crisp.

And so to Beethoven – and, arguably, the loveliest violin concerto ever written, premiered only 15 years after The Magic Flute. Benjamin Baker is an unshowy soloist who breathes the music like a singer – often with an impish half smile. He and Brian Wright made sure we heard every detail of the orchestral parts as well as the solo line and I loved the way they moved, as a team into the spirited rondo.

Two things, however really distinguished this performance. First, Baker chose to play the Christian Tetslaff candenzas, adapted from the ones Beethoven wrote for the piano version of the concerto and using a timpani accompaniment in the first one. I’m familiar with recordings of this but had never heard it live. Keith Price on timps, Brian Wright on the podium and Baker out front gave us a very arresting – if quirky rendering. No wonder the audience applauded – unusually at an MSO concert – at the end of the first movement. Second, Baker’s encore, a movement from Bach’s A Minor sonata presented double stopping, so breathtakingly skilled that it sounded like two instruments.

It was, intentionally or not, a chronological concert which shifted forward a further 137 years after the interval with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s fifth symphony: a work which has four movements all of them slow, and full of key changes and different time signatures so it was real contrast to the classicism of the first half.

Wright dug out plenty of lyrical passion as he delivered that characteristically RVW “wafty” quality – always with fluidity and sometimes with an evocatively clenched left fist. There was fine work from Simon Phillips as principal horn sailing over the textrure especially in the first movement. The muted strings patterning with the wind in the second movement created the required “misterioso” and, not withstanding one or two earlier ragged entries, I liked the way Wright controlled the magical dying away ending in three movements.

Susan Elkin