by David Gutman
Inspired by his desire to set a prize fight to music, Hugh the Drover was Vaughan Williams’s first opera and he thought enough of the piece to keep toying with it for decades. Thanks to a Harold Child libretto replete with folksy, Cotswold village archetypes, it is rarely staged by the big companies and the present revival, which plays up the neighbourhood element by deploying a children’s chorus drawn from local schools, is well worth catching. The score, always strongly melodic and hinting at more familiar Vaughan Williams, includes some radiant music for Hugh, a benign (and here bewigged) proto-Peter Grimes, sung by the experienced tenor Daniel Norman, and Mary, his rebellious love interest, a fine portrayal from the young Australian soprano Celeste Lazarenko. The professional, mainly Anglo-Australian cast also
boasts rising baritone Grant Doyle as both the Johnny Depp-style showman and a stentorian sergeant.
Yann Seabra’s accessible design favours simple wooden forms, while signalling the lure of a freer natural world beyond rigid communal boundaries. The key props are a gibbet and the village stocks. The central fight is choreographed with conviction and only the show’s downbeat ending runs counter to the text. On opening night with Simon Thorpe unwell, the role of John the Butcher was bravely sung in from the side of the stage by Adrian Powter - the chorus sounded nervous. There are four more performances with which to celebrate New Sussex Opera’s commitment to indigenous music theatre without public subsidy. The orchestral texture is sensitively handled by a 33-piece ensemble under Nicholas Jenkins.
