Brilliant in parts but a rare off-night for Bryn
Falstaff Grange Park Opera, West Horsley
★★★★★
Bryn Terfel, in the title role of this season-opening show at Grange Park Opera, is recycling a career’s worth of experience. Several productions feed into his portrait of Falstaff, the Fat Knight: he first sang the part in 1999, and has taken it around the world. Back then, he deployed a magnificent rock-solid bass-baritone in performances full of detail.
But when he repeats it today, it’s with diminishing returns. The voice is still recognisably Terfel’s, but it suffers from tonal dryness and a lack of flexibility. Terfel has become generalised, too, in his response to Arrigo Boito’s great libretto. Singing Falstaff is not only about having a powerful voice, but also producing lightness where the score demands, and little of that is in evidence here.
Would a stronger directorial hand have made any difference? It isn’t easy to be fresh in Verdi’s final and frequently performed masterpiece, yet coming from Stephen Medcalf, a director known for bringing elegant simplicity to the stage, this production is disappointing. The staging, set in the Shakespearean “period”, features drab designs by Jamie Vartan. Oldfashioned, hammy acting is the order of the night, and despite Falstaff being one of the greatest comic operas, no one laughs until after the long and boozy dinner interval.
Crackling humour is there, however, in the music. Gianluca Marcianò conducts a taut performance, managing to supply bite in the opening passages despite a reduced BBC Concert Orchestra. Unlike Falstaff himself, the orchestra is less “fat” than usual, and the sound less full-bloodedly operatic, yet Marcianò still shows how the instruments colour and illuminate the text.
Though there are few (if any) true Verdians on stage, some excellent voices stand out. Natalya Romaniw is a glowing Alice Ford, soaring confidently at the head of the quartet of Merry Wives; her soprano is vibrant and her stage presence sharp.
David Stout’s Ford, meanwhile, sings with a dark and muscular tone. Janis Kelly, always a stalwart performer, is a lively Meg Page, sounding in better vocal shape than Sara Fulgoni’s Mistress Quickly, and Mark Le Brocq brings nuance to his portrayal of Dr Caius.
Ultimately, then, despite just one big name in the cast and only a couple of singers really worth hearing, this Falstaff succeeds as an ensemble performance – and Verdi’s operatic signing-off in the final fugue, ‘Tutto nel mondo è burla’ (‘All the world’s a jest’) rollicks to a close just as it should.