Aptly it is piddling with rain in the Piddle valley, where I am staying. On Tuesday evening I was taken to Rossini’s Le comte Ory.
It is one of two operas being presented by The Dorset Opera Festival in the theatre at Bryanston School. Dorset Opera started in 1974 and models itself on Glyndebourne with picnicking and a dinner interval, coincidentally where I last saw Le comte Ory. But there are crucial differences: very few ties let alone dinner jackets and an intimate atmosphere where staff and patrons all seem to know each other. It was an engaging production with many good sight gags. I hope Dorset Opera won’t be offended if I mention that the singing was a notch below Glyndebourne but that was made up for by the enthusiasm of cast and orchestra and that matters more. My eyelids, unusually, did not droop.
The programme poses a theoretical operatic pub quiz question that had me stumped. What links L’elsir d’amore, Adriana Lecouvreur, Fra Diavolo, Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Un ballo in maschera, La Juive, I vespri siciliani, Le prophète, L’Africaine and Le comte Ory? The answer: they all have librettos written by or based on plays written by French dramatist Eugène Scribe. Go to the top of the class if you knew that.
The cast are seasoned professionals. The chorus, some sixty strong, and the stage crew arrived only two weeks ago as part of the Dorset Opera Summer School. It is remarkable that they were so quickly able to gel into a professional ensemble. They put on a terrific show that, I hope, has sown the seeds for an enduring appreciation of opera with some Dorset opera neophytes.
In case you don’t know the highly implausible plot, in this scene Juan Diego Florez, playing seducer Le Comte Ory, is dressed up as a nun and wooing innocent La Comtesse Adèle, sung by Diana Damrau. I have seen Juan Diego at the Barbican, Covent Garden and the Rossini Festival at Pesaro and his super-star status is well deserved. I only met him once briefly when I was invited to his dressing room at Covent Garden but that’s another story.