Though some of us will only believe it when we finally get to see it on stage, English National Opera’s ambitious plan for a new staging of Harrison Birtwistle’s The Mask Of Orpheus, 33 years after the company gave the monumental work its premiere, is for me the headline news from the announcement of its 2019-20 programme.
The opportunity to see again what is arguably the greatest British opera of the last half century is part of an autumn season dominated by a much wider-ranging Orpheus project also taking in Gluck’s Orpheus and Euridice, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld and Philip Glass’s Orphée (one of his trilogy of music-theatre works based upon films by Jean Cocteau). All four operas will be staged in a single transforming set design by Liz Clachan, but with different directors for each work. ENO’s artistic director Daniel Kramer has reserved the Birtwistle for himself, which might be good news for those who admired his staging of the same composer’s Punch and Judy in 2008, and less welcome to those of us who didn’t.
Music director Martyn Brabbins, an ardent Birtwistle champion, conducts – without him, I’m sure, The Mask of Orpheus would never be happening. Brabbins will also be in the pit for Madam Butterfly, which is one of three revivals in a season that also boasts an impressive seven new productions. The Orpheus project aside, those new shows do for once seem to be concerned with reinvigorating the company’s repertoire, a task which has sometimes been rather neglected in recent seasons, with needless inferior replacements for some works – last year’s La Traviata was one example – and the absence of other core works.
ENO has not fared well with its versions of The Marriage of Figaro over the last 30 years, but the new one, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, does at least promise a fine cast (which includes Sophie Bevan, Louise Alder and Susan Bickley), while its only previous staging of Rusalka was one of the greatest achievements of its Powerhouse years in the 1980s, and will be a hard act to follow for the new one, which is directed by Tatjana Gürbaca. But Verdi’s Luisa Miller isn’t exactly core Verdi, and neither is it easy to cast convincingly, so that is perhaps the one uncertain quantity among the new fare.
All this, needless to say, comes packaged with the usual well-intentioned statements of intent about equality and diversity onstage and in the demography of its audience. The season’s theme is the “rise of the feminine” – though the Orpheus legend is hardly a feminist tract – and though female conductors and directors are well represented, there’s a striking absence of any women composers. An absence too, of any brand new operas, when one a season should surely be a minimum for a company such as ENO.
