It’s widely agreed that the most difficult form of opera to bring off is operetta, whether of the Austro-German or the French tradition — interesting that the Italians wisely eschew the genre (so far as I know), while the British stay with G&S and their inviolable traditions, including the audience’s laughing in all the right places. In the past four days I have been to two performances of French operetta, neither of them much of a success, for quite different reasons.
Opera Danube is a young company devoted to nurturing singers who recently graduated from one or another of the many music schools. It works with the Orpheus Sinfonia, a small orchestra of players at the same stage of their careers. Its artistic director Andrew Dickinson reminds us in the programme that times are hard, even harder than usual, for young musicians. When I think of the innumerable fine singers I have seen in productions at the RCM, RAM and the Guildhall School, and how many of them have never been heard again, I can only feel amazement that anyone even tries. However, Opera Danube does itself no favours by regarding St John’s Smith Square as its spiritual home (Dickinson’s words). It is a deep and lofty building, in which speech turns into mere incomprehensible echo, so that the narration and dialogue in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld got lost. The production was semi-staged, with, so far as I could tell, decent singers who in a different, more intimate acoustic might have made more of an impression. They might usefully be taught the first rule of operetta, indeed of all comedy: PLAY IT STRAIGHT. The narrator, who doubled as Jupiter, and trebled as the director, was Simon Butteriss, an immensely experienced singer, writer and actor in opera, musicals and recitals.
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