"This isn’t our kind of thing, you know," Glyndebourne owner John Christie said rather sniffily when Benjamin Britten’s comedy was first performed there in 1947.
It was the composer’s second full-blown opera and after Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia, so perhaps not the high-minded sort of stuff that he and his audience expected. Nor perhaps did its satire on local big-wiggery suit his patrician tastes.
It took this later, wonderful production, directed by Peter Hall in 1985 with John Gunter’s lovely, realistic designs, to establish the piece as a popular masterpiece. It’s delightful, irresistible and magnificently sung in a performance conducted by Bernard Haitink that brings out every mischievous syllable in Eric Crozier’s verse libretto, based on Maupassant’s short story Le Rosier de Madame Husson.
Albert is the meek and mild mother’s boy Albert, running the family’s greengrocery, who is chosen to be the village May King because no girl of impeccable morals can be found to be the usual May Queen. But after lad-about-town Sid and girlfriend Nancy lace his garden fete lemonade with rum, Albert seizes the chance to break mum’s apron strings, and a few other strings too.
Britten’s score is constantly witty, Rossini-like in its bubbling effervescence, and including a succession of immediately characteristic writing styles for each of the singers, clearly identifiable even in passages for up to nine voices. Patricia Johnson as the local Lady Bountiful, Derek Hammond-Stroud (vicar), Richard Van Allan (policeman), Alexander Oliver (mayor), Elizabeth Palmer (teacher), Felicity Palmer (housekeeper) and Patricia Kern (mum) all respond beautifully to this satire on the righteous we-know-bests.
Alan Opie and Jean Rigby as Sid and Nancy provide nice counterpoint in every sense to this hide-bound rectitude, but the highest accolade goes to John Graham-Hall in the title role.
The tenor seems to enjoy every moment of the part, the eyes almost as much as the voice reacting to Albert’s changing situation. While there is a comic poignancy to his entire performance, I find his song about Nancy genuinely moving, especially delivered in a charming East Anglian accent, and with subtle inflexions that bring out undertones of meaning in single words.
A classic to treasure.