When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more cultural currency. In any case, it’s back now, as part of English Touring Opera’s autumn roster, and both the staging (by ETO’s general director Robin Norton-Hale) and the performances deserve to make Weir’s haunted, oddly unsettling opera a lot better known.
If my toes had curled any harder I think I’d have dropped a shoe size
As it should be: this is a small opera that makes a bigger and darker impression each time you see it. It’s now scored for a chamber ensemble and just four singers, and it’s astonishing how much depth and meaning Weir finds in the simplest of sounds – how unerringly she seems to find the soul of each instrument, and the precise amount of space and weight to give to each word of Tieck’s gnomic text.
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