Spellbound

English Touring Opera continues to be the most heroic of companies. This spring season it is performing at 17 locations, from Exeter to Perth, Belfast to Norwich. And in the many years that I have been going to its productions, there has been no compromise in standards and absolutely no contraction of repertoire to the familiar and the safe, if anything the reverse.

Last autumn it premièred Goehr’s tough Promised End, an immense artistic achievement. And now they are putting on Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr Fox, an operatic adaptation of Roald Dahl, with young children from each of the relevant towns playing the fox cubs — and having their names printed in the lavish accompanying booklet, with CD attached. Actually, I can’t say I was much impressed with either the narrative thread of Fox, or the run-of-the-mill music, but the piece wasn’t designed for my enjoyment, and the large audience of children in Cambridge’s Arts Theatre seemed spellbound.