FOUR STARS

 

Just an hour’s drive south of Oxford, principally on the A34, Grange Park has long been a summer destination of choice for our county’s opera fans seeking the beauties of architecture, landscape and music.

I encountered a number at the first night of Bellini’s I Puritani, some as puzzled as I was by the dislocations of time in director Stephen Langridge’s production.

Loosely based on Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (though not so you’d notice) Count Carlo Pepoli’s libretto presents a story of the English Civil War.

Yet designer Conor Murphy’s abstract set, with its geometric pattern of garishly coloured panels, suggests seventies’ discotheque rather more than 17th-century castle.

Most of the characters and the members of the chorus are garbed in fashions of the 1830s, roughly contemporary with the opera’s composition.

One exception is the Royalist sympathiser, Lord Arturo Talbot who, played by the Mexican lyric tenor Jesús León (above), struts out in Prince Rupert style, his ensemble topped off with a shocking red wig.

It is Talbot who is responsible for the main element of the drama. This is the long bout of madness suffered by heroine Elvira (the excellent Claire Rutter) — and enjoyed by all of us witnessing her coloratura ravings).

Discovering that his fiancée’s father, the Puritan Lord Walton (Matthew Stiff) has custody of King Charles’s widow Queen Henrietta Maria (Olivia Ray, right), Arturo conducts her out of the castle, veiled as if she were his bride. Believing herself deserted by him, poor Elvira loses her reason. This produces the happy result for us during her Act II mad scene of the exquisite melody of ‘Qui la voce sua soave’. Ms Rutter’s performance demonstrates why this is widely considered the high point of Bellini’s art. As conducted by Gianluca Marciano, this production is packed with musical delight.

Stand-out features include the stirring delivery by Elvira’s dad and her uncle Sir Giorgio Walton (Christophorus Stamboglis) of the famous duet ‘Suoni la tromba’ in which they announce their readiness to avenge her in a battle with Arturo.

There is fine work, too, from Damiano Salerno as Elvira’s rejected suitor, Sir Riccardo Forth.

 

Grange Park
Until June 29
Box office:
01962 737366 grangeparkopera.co.uk