YOU might think that watching opera through a curtain of clematis in the historic cloisters in this award-winning garden would be entertainment enough for one evening.
Luckily Jeff Clarke and Iford Arts believe in giving even better value for money.
The new season’s opening operatic romp through the dark world of Hoffmann’s love affairs, told through Offenbach’s music and a new English translation by Jeff himself, was the kind of top quality stuff that we have come to expect since Opera della Luna burst irreverently upon Iford’s operatic scene a few years ago.
Just as the cloisters are hugely flattering to musicians — in this case the Emerald Ensemble — so the tiny stage area seems to expand so it never seems unduly crowded no matter how many people are packed into it.
Last night Jeff and his team left the best to last with an extraordinarily voluptuous, even slightly decadent, Venetian scene in which beautiful black men, dressed as women, had wine poured down their throats as they lay recumbent on the central well.
The Tales of Hoffman is a bit of a slow burner but once it gets started you can hardly move for glorious arias.
The first of Hoffmann’s lovers is the mechanical doll Olympia. He views her through a pair of rose-tinted specs and can’t see that she is little more than a shop window dummy. Emilia O’Connor gave us a wonderful version of the famous aria last night and, even sitting just a few feet away from her, the acting was jerky-movement perfect.
In fact, one of the extra strengths of this production is the quality of the acting from most of Hoffman’s drinking pals. Without their constant facial expressions the opera might not have been quite the hit it was. Opera della Luna is one of the highlights of Bath’s cultural year and, again, the company has not disappointed us.
Christopher Hansford, Bath Chronicle

This year the inventive Opera della Luna brings the work to the cloister at Iford, starting the 2005 festival with a third Offenbach offering. Those who saw the familiar La Belle Helene in 2003, and the less frequently performed Robinson Crusoe last year, will be in for a surprise. Director Jeff Clarke has brought out the darkness in this adaptation of the opera, fraught with difficulty as no definitive version exists. The clever adaptation and translation brings Hoffman to an English country house where an opera (Don Giovanni) is about to be performed. The lovelorn poet, newly smitten with diva Stella, tells his companions the stories of the three great loves of his life. His muse must fight for his attention against these women.
In Offenbach’s version the muse takes the guise of Hoffman’s friend Nicklaus, finally revealing that all three women, Copelius’s robotic doll Olympia, the pure young singer Antonia and temptress Giulietta, are part and parcel of the same ideal.
Clarke emphasises the broad humour, helped
by the brilliantly versatile Ian Belsey, whose singing is as fine as his dramatic talents and comic timing.
The anxious muse is finely sung by Siobhain Gibson, and Andrea Crighton is a mesmerising Antonia. Emilia O’Connor has all the vocal fireworks for Olympia. Paul Featherstone in the massive central role, is the despairing poet who finds too easy refuge in alcohol, and finally realises that all his heartbreaking relationships only add to his artistic bounty.
Clarke’s “translation” brings in references to current operatic stars and a nice swipe at the deplorable state of national funding for small-scale opera in particular and the arts in general.
It’s inspired stuff, but Opera della Luna never loses sight of the fact it IS about opera, and the lush textures created by the Emerald Ensemble under the baton of Philip Sunderland and the 11-strong cast are thrilling, beautiful and deceptively spacious.
Gay Pirrie-Weir, Fosseway Magazine

The tiny Italianate cloister in the grounds of Iford Manor offers a magic setting for opera. For most companies the space would prove too limiting, but not so Jeff Clarke’s Opera della Luna. They are nothing if not enterprising, and Clarke’s affinity for Offenbach was clear in this typically lively and imaginative production.
In the programme notes, Clarke expressed his frustration that the more complete edition of Hoffinann by Michael Kaye (for Schott of Mainz) was not available to the company. This production would have been scuppered but for 11th-hour access to Fritz Oeser’s reconstruction. Gabriella Csanyi-Wills’s design concept was pragmatic rather than minimalistic, with the costumes adopting a similarly pragmatic style, for example, Siobhain Gibson as Nicklausse wore a 19th-century frockcoat with jeans, but her look was successively transformed with clever make-up effects which, in such an intimate context, rather like television with its periodic close-ups, had a considerable impact. Paul Featherstone as Hoffmann and Gibson’s Nicklausse were
the admirable mainstays of this production, but the deft juggling of parts over the sequence of prologue, four acts and epilogue might have been by the inventor Spalanzani himself, the not quite over-the-top Ian Belsey. But the two portrayals that stood out were Emilia O’Connor’s Olympia—the final frenzy of a chorus as the doll is dismembered was wonderfully exuberant—and Andrea Creighton’s Antonia. The conductor Philip Sunderland kept a tight rein on things throughout, with the Emerald Ensemble proving sympathetic accompanists. While Clarke’s directorial sleight of hand was always in evidence, it was his own new translation that was arguably the most crucial factor in this highly entertaining production. It was impish, carefully wrought so as to strike contemporary resonances without clunking, and affectionately capturing the work’s comic essence.
RIAN EVANS Opera