Grange Park Opera have turned to film during lockdown, first of all with an angry, chilling version of Britten’s Owen Wingrave, and now with L’Heure Espagnole, Ravel’s ribald 1911 comedy about a bored Spanish clockmaker’s wife manoeuvring three lovers, no less, out of each other’s way during the course of an afternoon when her husband is out on business. The director is Stephen Medcalf, who has relocated the opera from 18th-century Toledo to the posh environs of London’s Kensington Church Street, filming it on location at Howard Walwyn Fine Antique Clocks, the streets outside, and a local patisserie.
It’s a difficult opera to get right. Overplay the bawdry and you risk coarseness. Understate it, and things become anodyne. Medcalf, however, gets the balance between smut and sophistication more or less spot on, as Catherine Backhouse’s Concepción delivers double entendres aplenty direct to camera, while Ross Ramgobin’s strapping Ramiro hauls around the clocks in which Elgan Llŷr Thomas’s callow Gonzalve and Ashley Riches’s supercilious Iñigo are hidden. Toledo is represented by a print of El Greco’s view of the city hung on the shop walls. Medcalf makes it very clear by the end that cuckolded Torquemada (Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts) will be more than able to profit financially from his wife’s indiscretions.
Musically it’s extremely fine, though in place of Ravel’s ravishing orchestration, we have an expertly played transcription for piano (Chris Hopkins, the film’s music director), brass (Ognune Lively) and percussion (Tom Marshall), though, inevitably perhaps, we lose some of the music’s sensuality. Backhouse, her voice bright and gleaming, has a nice line in throwaway suggestiveness, particularly when eyeing up Ramgobin’s gauchely handsome Ramiro. Llŷr Thomas makes a fine Gonzalve, darker and weightier in tone than most. Riches is ideally dour and hypocritical as Iñigo, while Lloyd-Roberts, a superb singing actor, is funny yet surprisingly touching as put upon Torquemada. It’s all very entertaining, and really well worth watching.
