Jazzy and Sleazy Will Todd's 'Alice' - recommended by RODERIC DUNNETT '... this disc should be on everyone's shelves.'

As its premiere at Opera Holland Park demonstrated, Will Todd's 'family opera' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a dazzling showpiece from start to finish. Jazzy and sleazy, endlessly inventive, riddled with garish orchestration, it is like one long, brilliant spoof, which takes Maggie Gottlieb's libretto, a brilliant send-up of Lewis Carroll's story, and produces from it something as catchy, in its way, as (say) West Side Story.

It's helped along by a host of characterful singers (Keel Watson's basso Caterpillar is a classic, vivid example), every one of whom enters into the spirit and creates an outrageous character: not just the appealing Fflur Wyn as Alice, but Robert Burt (memorably doubling the father with the appalling Queen of Hearts) and Victoria Simmonds, who manages to be both mother and Mad Hatter. But what matters is that these characters — John Lofthouse's March Hare, Maud Millar's Humpty Dumpty — are all blissfully over the top...

SIGNUM CLASSICS

ROBERT BURT

VICTORIA SIMMONDS