Sparky and often hilarious: Garsington’s Un giorno di regno reviewed

Hang out with both trainspotters and opera buffs and you’ll soon notice that opera buffs are by far the more trainspotterish. It’s the pedantry, the one-upmanship (‘Really? You should have heard it with Goodall in 1976’). Above all, it’s the impulse to collect. You can’t actually buy little pocket books with lists of obscure operas to be underlined in biro once you’ve seen them (blue for a full staging, red for a concert performance) but there are certainly opera-goers who compile their own lists of personal stats – and they let you know it. The completist urge is powerful. Hardcore opera-spotters will cheerfully cross continents to cop a rare performance of Schreker’s Der Schatzgräber or César Franck’s Hulda.

Anyway: good news, opera nerds, because this year’s summer season offers two highly collectable bits of rep. First up is Garsington, where the surprise hit of the season is Verdi’s early flop Un giorno di regno, in a sparky and often hilarious new staging by Christopher Alden.