Review: Iphigénie en Tauride – ENO

Few opera companies carry their language policy in their name, so English National Opera singing Gluck in French for four nights amounts to a small confession. The official line is that the original has been kept “to preserve the close relationship between Gluck’s music and text”. That is perfectly true. It is also true that the sums make the case on their own. So writes Franco Milazzo for theQR.co.uk…

It has happened before. Satyagraha has long been sung in Sanskrit here, and Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs was given in Polish in 2023. It is still rare enough to need defending, and the defence comes on two fronts. Gluck shaped his vocal lines around the cadences and long vowels of classical French declamation, and Guillard’s libretto fits them like a glove. Forcing English onto those phrases sands down exactly the edges that make this opera what it is.

Then there is the balance sheet, which matters all the more for a company now awkwardly split between two cities by Arts Council edict. A singable new translation means a translator’s fee, a copyist underlaying every word in the score and parts, and principals unlearning a text they already know by heart, all for a run that is over inside nine days. If someone falls ill on night two, plenty of singers worldwide can step off a plane knowing Iphigénie in French. The number who know a bespoke English version is exactly zero. No spreadsheet required.

“Gluck shaped his vocal lines around the cadences and long vowels of classical French declamation, and Guillard’s libretto fits them like a glove. Forcing English onto those phrases sands down exactly the edges that make this opera what it is.“

The story is Euripides via the House of Atreus, the bloodiest family in Greek myth. The goddess Diana snatched Iphigénie from her father’s knife at Aulis, and she is now a priestess on Tauris, obliged by the local tyrant to sacrifice any stranger who washes up. The next two are her brother Oreste and his friend Pylade (ouch), and she spends the best part of three acts failing to recognise him (double ouch).

Production and Staging

Lyndsey Turner directs. She has an Olivier for Chimerica and the Barbican’s box-office-busting Cumberbatch Hamlet on her CV, and she last worked for ENO on Noye’s Fludde. Christine Rice and Jacques Imbrailo both arrive fresh from last year’s Olivier-winning Dead Man Walking, though Imbrailo has been promoted from grieving father to definitely-not-gay comrade.

Somehow Turner makes the Coliseum stage feel both claustrophobic and too large. The chorus scurry in as if they are watching every step for a hidden mark. Soutra Gilmour has designed a restrained, letterbox-shaped rectangle that fills barely half the height of the proscenium. Aesthetes will fall over themselves applauding the minimalism, but without Tim Mitchell’s lighting (candles and pools of side-light) it would have all the warmth and cosiness of a nuclear fallout shelter.

Then the duets begin, and the space suddenly yawns. Static positioning leaves the libretto to do all the talking, especially whenever the focus drifts away from Oreste and Pylade. When things do move, the choreography can lurch. A dance battle near the end is more Thriller than thriller.

Vocal and Orchestral Performances

The singers do very well with what they are given, and the French gives them licence to go big in a story with no official romance and only a wobbly through line. Rice throws herself in from head to toe, and her emotional commitment in “Quel moment!” is a delight. Pairing Imbrailo’s baritone with Nick Pritchard’s tenor is inspired. The two men push the opera’s central dilemma (which of them dies so the other can live) to almost unbearable tension, and they mine their characters’ torments and homoerotic devotion for everything they are worth.

“Then the duets begin, and the space suddenly yawns. Static positioning leaves the libretto to do all the talking, especially whenever the focus drifts away from Oreste and Pylade.“

The chorus of priestesses adds physical and musical volume, plus a pleasing undertow of bloodlust. When the divine intervention finally comes, Diane arrives in the form of child soprano Zoe Houghton, who sings the part beautifully.

Gluck takes his time. He helped kill off the da capo aria, the habit of circling back to an aria’s opening section after its middle. That habit is the wallpaper of Handel’s Alcina, which was back at the Royal Opera House only last month, conducted, as it happens, by David Bates. But neither is there any Mozartian zing to hurry things along. Patience is required, and it is mostly repaid in the pit. Bates, who has conducted this opera before in Lisbon, gets precision, warmth and real delicacy out of the ENO orchestra, and he gives the storm that opens the evening a proper bite.

This is not one for novices or the fidgety, and a bolder, more mobile staging would have made the long stretches between the big scenes easier going. The big scenes themselves, though, are what you buy the ticket for, and they deliver. ENO has misplaced the first word of its name for a week, but with Rice, Imbrailo and Bates in this form the score needs no translating at all.

Featured Image: Iphigénie en Tauride – Lead Web Image