The opera’s a masterpiece but the production doesn’t quite come off: ENO’s The Dead City reviewed

English National Opera has arrived at the Dead City, and who, before Christmas, would have given odds that this new production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt would ever make it this far? This is late-Romantic music-drama on an exuberant scale; it simply doesn’t lend itself to pubs and car parks (even the reduced version staged – superbly – at Longborough last summer used an orchestra of some 60 players). Korngold deals with strong emotions (grief, delusion and obsessive love) with a melodic generosity that has historically provoked the prissiest instincts of the British operatic establishment. The Royal Opera held its nose and staged a brief run in 2009, before sweeping it hastily under the carpet.

But not ENO. ‘The opera is a masterpiece,’ says ENO’s artistic director Annilese Miskimmon and for that alone I’d gladly double its subsidy. Of all the idiotic things that have been said about English National Opera since the Arts Council’s botched attempt to garrot the company last November, the most self-evidently ignorant was that it lacks a distinctive artistic profile.