Cinderella/La Cenerentola, English National Opera review - the truth behind the tinsel

When you go to the prince’s ball, would you prefer a night of sobriety or excess? Julia Burbach’s new production of Rossini’s Cinderella (La Cenerentola) for English National Opera frankly errs on the side of theatrical over-indulgence.

The stage-business treats arrive thick and fast like trays of richly seasoned canapés, from the scurrying kids in mouse costumes who act as the mastermind Alidoro’s hi-tech little helpers to the all-male chorus togged out in an assortment of scarlet-to-pink period outfits as Prince Ramiro’s ancestral ghosts. 

I never quite discovered why those hard-working children (pictured below) also act as mini-me doppelgängers for the mean sisters and their conniving dad Don Magnifico in the second act. A reminder of the child-like urges that drive these adults’ selfishness? In a bauble-rich show, we even glimpse a Christmas tree in the industrial lift that connects the ground-floor and balcony levels of Herbert Murauer’s busily ingenious set. Too much, too fussy, too tricksy, some Rossinians might say – and they did, on Saturday’s opening night at the Coliseum. But hey, guys, this is Cinderella (albeit in the fairy-free version of Jacopo Ferretti’s 1817 libretto). If an opera director can’t let her hair down a little in this show, when should we permit a touch – or ten – of not-strictly-necessary fun? 

What mattered here was that the the tender, touching mezzo of Deepa Johnny’s Angelina/Cinderella grounded the evening in plausible emotions, and that the other major roles – Aaron Godfrey-Mayes’s Don Ramiro, Charles Rice’s Dandini, Simon Bailey’s deliciously assured and amusing Magnifico (pictured below with Isabelle Peters and Grace Durham) – generally sang and acted with relish and panache. Crucially, debut conductor Yi-Chen Lin steered the ENO orchestra with a bounce and verve that felt idiomatic from first to last, the tempi brisk but not breakneck, the instrumental accents often full of cheek and charm. In her hands the complex concertati ensembles had focus, sparkle, and the right level of show-off swagger. We’re in contemporary London, where fashion-victims Tisbe and Clorinda – Grace Durham and Isabelle Peters, projecting a strong AbFab vibe with a measure of pathos as well as farcical vanity – scold their disinherited stepsister-skivvy in the aftermath of another lush soirée (pictured beow, with Deepa Johnny). Alidoro, the scheming philosopher who plays fairy-godfather in this version, turns up disguised as a parcel delivery man to announce the ball and set the plot wheels in motion.

As the benign manipulator in his purple suit, David Ireland’s bass-baritone had polish and authority, and even some neat comic moves as he dad-danced while observing Cinders and the Prince at the ball. He also had a silent female partner, omnipresent but inactive, which did seem like one of Burbach’s more perplexing wheezes. If she represented Cinderella’s late mother, her unquiet spirit should have had more to do. More troubling were the balance issues that, in the first act, sometimes led Lin’s punchy and fothright conducting to steal the thunder from singers set far back on the higher level of Murauer’s set. Gradually, voices and band found their correct level and we could properly appreciate the acrobatic wit of Christopher Cowell’s fresh translation. Yes, we tasted plenty of corn amid his rhyming wordplay (Dandini... Martini?) but Cowell at his best sometimes vied with the tongue-twisting dexterity of the peerless Jeremy Sams. Besides, folks, we’re hearing Cinderella, not Götterdämmerung.

Bailey in particular sounded, and looked, in absolute command of Rossini’s gymnastic sibillato patter, his diction immaculate as he turned Magnifico into a dressing-gowned Baron Hardup, a grandiose but cash-strapped gent whose defrauding of Angelina/Cinderella came across as more mischief than malice. Godfrey-Mayes’s Ramiro (pictured below, left, with Charles Rice) showed ardour and refinement in his solo arias, and handily nailed the high notes of “Si, retrovarla io giuro”. But his most attractive passages came in the nicely-blended duets with Dandini, as master and servant swap identities. In the Figaro-like valet role, Charles Rice didn’t at first sound secure on the perilous high wire of Rossini’s vocal line. Later, in his key contributions, his baritone bloomed in both colour and character as he mimicked the prince in the dashing but sleazy manner of some Knightsbridge playboy. And his “Come un ape ne’giorni d’aprile’ unrolled with a smoothly satisfying lyric lustre. Sussie Juhlin-Wallén’s enjoyably OTT costumes added to the visually entertaining, if sometimes distracting, clutter and glitter. Sir Grayson Perry might have coveted the sisters’ billowing gold and rose frocks. Meanwhile, the red-pink ancestral garb of the chorus (pictured below with Deepa Johnny) that advises Ramiro resembled a mass Extinction Rebellion attack on the pictures in the National Portrait Gallery.

All this palaver of spectacle and movement – with the ball itself cleverly choreographed by Cameron McMillan – would have meant little without the poised, robust centre of Deepa Johnny’s plucky floor-scrubbing heroine. The Canadian mezzo brought to the role not so much in-your-face virtuosity but rather a firm, pure tone and credible depth of expression. That gave her solo yearnings (“Una volta c’era un rè”) utter authenticity, and supercharged the romantic duets with Ramiro. In an opera, and a production, all about the search for emotional honesty amid the trendy trappings illusion and deception, it felt right that Cinderella’s final triumph came when, at the top of red-carpeted stairs, she emerged from behind the fancy crimson gown that we see being trimmed. Forsaking this fake finery, she descends clad in the simple dress of truth. Her great sign-off, “Nacquì all’affanno”, danced as it should through Rossini’s coloratura obstacle-course. Still, the number felt more like hard-won liberation than gloating triumph.

Not everything worked quite so well as the finale; this is not yet a glitch-free vehicle. But enough of this hyperactive but always-engaging Cinderella/Cenerentola struck gold to make you regret that the long-beleaguered company has programmed only six Coliseum performances. So an institutional perma-crisis – some of it self-inflicted, for sure, but much of it not – has robbed the ENO of the chance of a genuinely popular Christmas-season London hit. Moan about that, Rossini buffs.