Cinderella overview – fun-forward fairytale kicks off ENO makeover | Opera

A new manufacturing of an opera based mostly on a narrative everyone knows, a clutch of firm debuts – together with each conductor and director – and a crimson carpet rolled out on the tarmac outdoors. After the turbulence and uncertainty of current years, English National Opera opened its first season break up between the London Coliseum and its new house in Manchester with an brisk show of institutional confidence. Not to say a transparent dedication to all issues enjoyable.

Like different variants, Rossini’s tackle the Cinderella story – normally generally known as La Cenerentola– is a rags-to-riches story that includes a downtrodden heroine, her dreadful stepsisters and their equally terrible father Don Magnifico. Plus a prince, his valet and a fairy godmother character that Rossini and his librettist remodeled right into a male thinker, Alidoro. Julia Burbach’s vibrant, contemporary-ish staging performs wittily with the story’s familiarity. A small group of uniformed mice outfitted with clipboards, iPads and walkie talkies assist Alidoro to maintain the plot on observe. Various sneakers are handed round (though the operatic prince’s chosen type of bridal ID is a bracelet). And, as an alternative of a pumpkin carriage, the stage is dominated all through by a big metal-doored carry, which delivers the remodeled Cinders to the get together on the essential second.

Unlike most variations of Cinderella, although, Rossini’s is adorned with lashings of virtuosic ornamentation: even the vocal strains sparkle. Making her ENO debut within the title function, Deepa Johnny appeared to breathe coloratura, producing cascades of notes together with her gentle, luminous mezzo as if nothing may very well be simpler. But such music is ferociously tough. Although Isabelle Peters and Grace Durham have been a deliciously horrid double-act because the stepsisters and David Ireland was a heat, likable Alidoro, each Aaron Godfrey-Mayes and Charles Rice sounded overstretched because the prince (Don Ramiro) and his valet. The former made an impression solely in his highest register, whereas the latter struggled to maintain tempo with the orchestra in his patter songs. Simon Bailey’s Don Magnifico was all bluster, his personal approximate ornamentation dramatically becoming.

Making her ENO debut, conductor Yi-Chen Lin drove the tempo all through, the orchestra whirling alongside as a handful of dancers created near-constant motion on stage. Yet vitality alone can’t carry Rossini’s rating. More finesse and suppleness have been wanted, in addition to neater coordination with the singers, who periodically parted methods with the pit as they laboured via the word-heavy English translation.

But then there have been the lads of the ENO Chorus. Dressed because the prince’s ancestral portraits – a mixture of classic sportsmen, navy bigwigs and historic queens full with wigs and bustles – they enlivened each scene they have been in, their bodily comedy pitch-perfect, their singing world-class. As ENO continues its personal rags-to-riches bid, the refrain is undoubtedly the jewel in its crown.