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.
I must admit, too, that it seems to me an act of misplaced valour to tour with Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, which has re-established itself in the repertoire, but which I find, despite the obvious lovely arias, dramatically stagnant and a very long way from Mozart at his transcendent best, so I gave that a miss, shamefacedly. However, what did afford immense pleasure were the two parts of Puccini’s Il Trittico, which is the other enterprising evening in the tour.
Il Tabarro (The Cloak) has claims to be the one opera which really deserves the word verismo, so sloppily applied over a vast area of Italian operas from about 1890 to 1920. Many of those are, even by Latin standards, coarsely melodramatic, whereas Il Tabarro, though it ends in murder, is mainly a poignant rendering of the tedium and frustration of daily life on Seine barges.
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