English National Opera’s first season with one foot in London and one in Manchester begins in earnest with Rossini’s Cinderella at the end of the month. In the meantime, feeling like a kind of warmup, came this one-off concert. It was filmed for Sky Arts, the cameras so unobtrusive as to be almost unnoticeable, but was still an odd hybrid of an evening, with a talking-heads-and-bleeding-chunks format that seemed geared more to TV than to a theatre audience.
We had excerpts from nine of Mozart’s operas, with the ENO orchestra and conductor Clelia Cafiero on stage behind, and with a cutely cliched, periwigged child Mozart occasionally popping up as a kind of silent host. If you wanted to learn much about the women in Mozart’s life you would probably have been disappointed, although several were at least mentioned in the informal scripted links from the presenter Lauren Laverne, who slipped into friendly interviewer mode to ask the singers for more personal contributions. It was a big ask of the singers, who were required to appear at ease as themselves on stage, offer seemingly unscripted insights into the microphone, and then switch seamlessly into character – often to portray that character at a moment of peak emotional stress.
In the circumstances it wasn’t surprising that generally the arias – some sung in English translation, some not – felt a bit constrained. The lighter numbers came off best in Annilese Miskimmon’s sometimes updated direction: Golda Schultz as the Countess and Ailish Tynan as Susanna turning the letter-writing scene from The Marriage of Figaro into a texting duet, their moment of friendship sealed as they pressed send; Tynan sparring ridiculously with Rainelle Krause as the rival divas of Der Schauspieldirektor. Shorn of context, Nardus Williams’s introspective way with Donna Anna and Fiordiligi’s arias – with Filipe Manu filling in the tenor roles sweetly – came across less vividly than her sisterly duet with Bethany Horak-Hallett’s Dorabella. At the end, Krause nailed the Queen of the Night’s second aria from The Magic Flute, every high note crystal clear. Suddenly, the musical atmosphere was electric – just in time for the concert to end.
• On Sky Arts as part of December’s Mozart Season
