A coherent evening of real opera: GSMD’s Triple Bill reviewed

Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from which many institutions and artists won’t recover, it has also been a great equaliser. Suddenly there’s space to be heard, silence to be filled. In a digital world no one cares about the size of your stage. All you need is a laptop and a good idea and you’re competing alongside the Met or the Royal Opera.

In the case of the Virtual Opera Project it was a shed and a homemade green-screen. Oh, and a cast, chorus and creative team of well over 100. And did I mention the London Philharmonic Orchestra?

A brainchild of the first lockdown back in March, VOpera’s new film of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges is the best kind of small project. Big energy and, one assumes, even bigger chutzpah somehow turned director Rachael Hewer’s kitchen-table scheme into a major undertaking with the kind of starry participants who’d normally be spending their summers at Glyndebourne or Glimmerglass.

If watching opera has become difficult during lockdown, then making it is all but impossible.