The production’s trump cards are old-fashioned honesty and good sense. Nothing is showily updated. No directorial concept grinds away to obscure the characters’ foibles
Twenty-one years of heaven. That’s how Garsington Opera’s general director, Anthony Whitworth-Jones, phrased it on this first night of the company’s final season at the late Leonard Ingrams’ Oxford manor, where the Bloomsbury set once disported under the patronage of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Heaven certainly gave us marvellous weather. Had Le nozze di Figaro opened the previous night, Mozart’s marvel would have been snivelling in the rain. As it was, John Cox’s 2005 production basked in the evening sun.
Whatever the future pleasures of the company’s next home at Mark Getty’s Wormsley estate, designers will be hard-pressed to duplicate Garsington’s special interplay between artifice and nature. No need to imagine Cherubino jumping from the balcony into a garden near the close of Act II: the garden is there at stage left, green and trim.
It’s a production, too, that’s highly welcoming to the young talent on fizzing display. Susanna had already been in Sophie Bevan’s repertoire at the Royal College of Music; fresh as a daisy, she darts around as the Countess’s maid, all assets sparkling, vocal and physical. Note her younger sister Mary too, tenderly moving in Barbarina’s little aria. Anna Grevelius’s silver-gleam mezzo gets a good outing as Cherubino, nicely naughty. The ideal Figaro should probably have more impishness than James Oldfield, but this young professional grew more mobile with each act, and you can’t deny the promise of that robust bass-baritone voice. Up at the top of the Almaviva household, Grant Doyle shades the licentious Count with plenty of dark virility. As the long-suffering Countess, Kishani Jayasinghe wields a soprano voice with the constricted feel of a ship in a bottle; but there’s a big benefit in her dazzling smile, watchful eyes and general physical charisma.
Older hands in the ensemble easily slot into place. Stripped of her Act IV aria, Jean Rigby has relatively little to do as Marcellina, but she’s worth every look and twirl in her gaudy make-up and costume. Solid delights on offer too from Conal Coad’s Bartolo and Daniel Norman’s conniving Basilio.
