Swanhunter, Opera North

The violin figure which opens Jonathan Dove’s delightful Swanhunter evokes Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. The allusion is surely deliberate. Like L’Histoire, and in contrast to Pinocchio, Dove’s large-scale Opera North commission of two years ago, Swanhunter is a 70-minute, chamber-sized work designed for performance in small venues.

Like Pinocchio, Swanhunter is designed as an opera for children. Opera North has an excellent education department performing outreach work across the region, and they have been supporting activities and workshops in the towns where the production will tour to. Places like Bridlington and Hexham won’t have seen many live professional opera productions in recent years. At the early evening performance I attended at the Howard Assembly Rooms in the Leeds Grand Theatre, the younger audience members seemed wildly enthusiastic.

Alasdair Middleton’s libretto is inspired by a story from the Finnish Kalevala previously set to music by Sibelius in his early Lemminkäinen Legends. Exemplary in its clarity, the story is presented with directness and wit. Lemminkäinen, a veteran of many adventures, seeks a wife and travels north to find one, leaving behind his adoring mother. He wishes to marry one of Louhi’s daughters, but she will agree only on condition that he can prove his suitability by fulfilling a series of near-impossible tasks- catching the Devil’s Elk, riding the Devil’s Horse and shooting the Swan that lives on Death’s river.

Dody Nash’s set and costume designs are stark and simple, and combined with Clare Whistler’s fluid, physical stage direction the various perils are suggested in highly imaginative ways. The Devil’s Elk, for example, is entertainingly conjured up with garden secateurs and a pair of shovels.

Dove neatly scores the opera for a cast of six singers and six instrumentalists. The musical language is imaginative and direct, and you never feel that Dove is writing down or condescending to his intended audience. Stuart Stratford directs a mini-orchestra producing instrumental sounds both piquant (aided by superb accordion writing) or bewitching (particularly in the harp part). The prominent solo horn-writing is virtuosic but always idiomatic, and having the orchestra so physically close to the stage means that singers and players are incredibly well coordinated.

As for the singing, Elizabeth Cragg’s wordless aria as the doomed Swan is delivered with absolute assurance even as she reaches stratospheric heights. Andrew Rees’s Lemminkäinen is an exuberant and boyish presence – which makes the moment of his “death” all the more heartstopping. Yvonne Howard as his mother is just as moving when in the final scene she sings her son back to life. Here, the ensemble neatly transform stage props into dismembered body parts, and cheekily Dove stops the work at the exact moment where Lemminkäinen is triumphantly resurrected.

Swanhunter tours to Hexham, Ollerton, Bridlington, Berwick and Salford. Book here.