Giles Havergal’s 2013 production of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera, directed by Elaine Tyler-Hall and conducted by Garry Walker, is very well cast and very enjoyable. The performance takes place in the intimacy of the Howard Assembly Room, seating 300, and is staged in the horseshoe round.
The opera is perhaps more autobiographical and serious than the naïve and sentimental comic surface admits.
In the fictional small market town of Loxford in Suffolk, a committee meets to discuss the arrangements for the annual May Day celebration and the coronation of a May Queen.
The meeting is chaired by Lady Billows and includes her housekeeper, the mayor, a vicar, a teacher and a policeman, all neatly characterised. Britten’s attractive and amusing score, bustling and scurrying, captures the committee’s chatter perfectly and gently mocks England’s Puritanical “no sex please we’re British” attitude.
Unable to find any virgins amongst the promiscuous girls, the committee chooses the shy and timid grocer, Albert Herring, to be their May King and awards him £25.
Albert, still tied to his mother’s apron strings, is hugely embarrassed and feels humiliated. He wants to escape his chaste life and, aided and abetted by a spiked drink, he gets drunk, has a night on the tiles and sows his wild oats.
Albert’s journey to manhood is excellently acted and sung by Dafydd Jones. Judith Howarth resists over-caricature as Lady Billows. Dominic Sedgwick and Katie Bray are an engaging young couple.
I have not seen Britten’s opera in 50 years and had forgotten just how serious and bleak he gets when Albert goes missing. The threnody lamentation is a great ensemble number and beautifully sung. The grief-stricken mother thinks her son might be dead, and the anguish is all the more palpable with the knowledge there is a manhunt going on right now in Tenerife for a missing 19-year-old boy.
Opera North’s Albert Herring can be viewed free online on the OperaVision channel.