Garsington Opera opens its summer festival with two 'very different productions'

L'elisir d'amore: a 'perfect summer evening's entertainment'

(Image credit: Julian Guidera)

Since 2011, when it left its original home following the death of its founder Leonard Ingrams, Garsington Opera has been based on the Getty estate at Wormsley in Buckinghamshire, said Richard Fairman in the Financial Times. "Nestled in the Chiltern Hills, with formal gardens and a full-scale cricket pitch, it has proved the ideal venue for an upmarket summer opera festival." And the festival now has the feeling of a serious operation, firing on all cylinders. Garsington Studios, its new cultural hub, is up and running (a winter season of concerts is soon to be announced). Productions of Handel's "Rodelinda" and Beethoven's "Fidelio" are in rehearsal. And the festival has opened with two similarly impressive but very different productions – the one brooding and darkly heightened; the other charming and sunny.

Director Jack Furness's superb production of Tchaikovsky's "The Queen of Spades", based on Pushkin's short story, affirms it as the composer's "most substantial and forward-looking operatic achievement", said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. He has retained its 18th century setting, but in every other respect this is an "unmistakably dark 21st century reading" – and an "overwhelmingly convincing staging". Irish tenor Aaron Cawley is a prodigiously intense, "Heathcliffian" Hermann, while Laura Wilde is a "haunted and haunting" Lisa. Although excellently sung, both performances would benefit from more dramatic heft, said Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph. Nevertheless, this is a "fabulous new production", elevated by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Douglas Boyd – and by Garsington's lavish and "breathtakingly vigorous" 32-strong chorus.

The other season opener is a light and fizzing production of Donizetti's fake-love-potion comedy "L'elisir d'amore", said George Hall in The Stage. Director Christopher Luscombe has set the action in a hilltop town in southern Italy in 1944, its piazza "triumphantly conjured by Simon Higlett's hyper-realistic set". Luscombe and a "uniformly excellent cast understand that while comedy provides the surface appeal of Donizetti's enduring piece, not far beneath lies an essential pathos" – and it makes for a "perfect summer evening's entertainment, with real heart amid the laughs". All four leads are terrific, but Oleksiy Palchykov, as Nemorino, is a "vocal phenomenon" who stops the show with his stunning account of the famous aria Una furtiva lagrima.