The ultimate challenge

Tristan und Isolde is one of the greatest challenges that an opera house can take on, in some ways the greatest of all. So it is wonderful to be able to report that at Grange Park it has been mounted with a large degree of success, and that most of the things that are wrong with it could easily be righted, though they won’t be. The most remarkable thing about it is the level of singing, almost uniformly high, and certainly with no weak link. Isolde is Alwyn Mellor, Longborough’s Brünnhilde, and also scheduled to sing that role for Opera North and for Seattle. Besides her impressive voice, she has plenty of temperament, and encompasses the whole of Isolde’s emotional range, from the fury and frustration and resulting irony of Act I, to the excited and expectant woman in love of Act II, to the at first distraught and finally transfigured heroine of Act III.