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Life-Enhancing
Jonathan Dove's 'Mansfield Park'
reviewed by RODERIC DUNNETT
Heritage Opera is one of the most versatile and adventurous of all Britain's smaller-scale opera companies. In the past five years it has grown to stage four productions annually, effortlessly ranging from the cheekily comic to the grimly sobering and tragic. Its key figures -- several of the company's singers have been Heritage regulars since its inception -- are capable of handling the sternest of challenges, from Tosca to Madam Butterfly and the Queen of the Night, Figaro to Sharpless, Germont and Scarpia, or Mozart's Dorabella and Rossini's Rosina to the deeply affecting Halka in Moniuszko's Polish opera of that name which in 2009 saw the company's London debut.
Heritage's notable contribution to the opera scene has been its touring of well-conceived, finely conducted productions to country houses and more intimate settings in parts of northern Britain that would otherwise be starved of opera stagings on their doorstep...
Copyright © 18 September 2011
Roderic Dunnett,
Coventry UK
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