Dove’s tale

The Adventures of Pinocchio
Grand Theatre, Leeds

It’s odd how, even if you try to ignore Christmas, it still manages to determine the shape of your end-of-year experiences. Three weeks ago, four days before Christmas Day, Opera North enterprisingly mounted the world première of Jonathan Dove’s 21st opera, Pinocchio. I haven’t seen any opera since, except on TV and DVD, yet my memories of it are alarmingly faint. I have a pretty clear impression of what much of it looked like, but very little of what it sounded like. I’m not being snide at Dove’s expense, just wondering how far what seems like the interminable sequence of fragmented days is responsible for my failure of recall. The sheer fluency of Dove’s output, which I think wouldn’t be hard to guess even if one hadn’t been told about his productivity, does invite comparisons with the churners-out of opera, whether the recycling baroque composers, or the 19th-century Italians who produced at least one new opera each season, and usually in a matter of weeks.