Mitridate review: High-spirited Mozart production is primarily for opera specialists

The voices are particularly strong in Tim Albery’s austere staging

Iestyn Davies as Farnace and Soraya Mafi as Ismene in Mitridate (Julian Guidera)

This is the time of year when the country-house opera companies spark into life. Two nights ago, it was Opera Holland Park; now it’s Garsington Opera. And what an unexpected success story the latter has been.

It came into existence quite accidentally in 1989, when two benefit performances were staged at Garsington Manor – once the haunt of the Bloomsbury group – to raise money for the cash-strapped Oxford Playhouse. Figaro was the work, and with a manor house stage-left and a formal garden stage-right, not much was needed in the way of scenery; the weather smiled on the enterprise. The following year, two more operas were put on, and a Glyndebourne-style ritual established, with the gardens opening at 4pm, and an 85-minute interval for dinner. Dress was not as formal as Glyndebourne, but still pretty smart.

Its founder Leonard Ingrams’s policy was to stage operatic rarities, and his eye for performing talent led to the establishment of an artistic policy that has held to this day. The list of now-famous stars who started off at Garsington is long and distinguished.

But then he died, and his family quite reasonably wanted their house back. The Garsington season took place during the loveliest time of year, and almost every bedroom had to be commandeered for backstage purposes, with the public – albeit a civilised one – tramping through their grounds.

After a long search for a new home, Ingrams’s successors hit on Wormsley, home of the Getty family. Its cricket pitch had hosted matches for visiting foreign teams, and it was now going to balance sport with opera.

That was in 2011: the new Garsington is now gracefully established, its glass-box auditorium widely admired. Its architect, Robin Snell, had drawn inspiration from Japan.

He’d followed the idea embodied by many Japanese palaces, using sliding screens and verandas to link it to the surrounding landscape, and he’d borrowed the Kabuki theatre notion of the hanamichi, or flower path, along which its characters make their entry and exit. At Wormsley, he succeeded in making his theatre – made of timber, steel, and sail fabric - seem to float in the gardens surrounding it, and the acoustic is excellent.

Mozart’s Mitridate is a quintessential Garsington project. It was composed in Milan when Mozart was just 14, and its gestation was problematic thanks to the inflated egos involved, because castrati were the pop stars of their day and this work required three of them. The opening aria for the singer in the title role had to be rewritten five times within two days - a demand that the young composer uncomplainingly put up with, so keen was he to make a splash with his first big work.

Soraya Mafi playing Ismene in Mitridate (Julian Guidera)

The audience, too, was demanding – for its creature comforts. The theatre’s boxes were not just that; each had its own retiring room with its own fireplace, plus refreshments and playing cards, and often a bed (for seduction purposes) as well.

Mitridate is a high-spirited work that makes exceptional vocal demands on its singers, and its plot is an emotional tangle. While King Mitridate is away in the wars, his son Farnace makes a play both for his crown and his betrothed Aspasia, who seeks protection from his other son Sifare, but Sifare is Mitridate’s real rival. Shock, horror! The vengeful king, who at first condemns both sons to death, softens in the light of their heroic defence of their country, and is himself mortally wounded in battle, so everyone else lives happily ever after as 18th-century theatrical decorum required.

It would be putting it mildly to call Tim Albery’s Garsington production austere. Hannah Clark’s unchanging set resembles a family home that has recently been vacated, leaving a few incongruous things behind: a cabinet of hunting rifles, a half-drunk bottle of whiskey, a box of Dinky toys, a stuffed zebra.

Counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, as Farnace, comes on in his dressing gown, every inch a slouching, rebellious teenager, takes a swig from the bottle, flicks a toy across the room, and hurls himself angrily onto a sofa. It’s not clear how all these details add up. On, then, comes Louise Kemeny’s Sifare, and there’s strife between the boys: they both want Aspasia, but she’s been promised to their father, yet she is secretly in love with Sifare. Rumours of Mitridate’s death, followed by his vengeful reappearance, set the action in motion.

Robert Murray, centre, as Mitridate, and Louise Kemény, right, as Sifare (Craig Fuller)

Farnace wants power and will do anything to get it. Sifare is torn between love and filial duty. Unhappy Aspasia just wants to die. The action is all emotion, and the libretto is all about emotion. Until a suicide is narrowly averted and blood is spilled in the last 20 minutes, the action is all in the music, and high-powered voices were what the Milan audience flocked to hear.

Luckily, Albery has assembled five voices that are exceptionally strong and vividly differentiated. Each works heroically to invest their character with colour - Davies and Robert Murray’s Mitridate most particularly – but the main thing is their sound.

Soprano Soraya Mafi’s Ismene – betrothed to Farnace but spurned by him – has a gorgeously floated high register, while Elizabeth Watts’s Aspasia wrings the heart in her lamentations. Louise Kemény’s coloratura has wonderful flexibility, but we have to wait until almost the end of the work to encounter Davies’ vocal artistry at full stretch.

Though some of the arias and duos reflect Mozart’s greatness to come, this is not one of his great works, but the English Concert under Clemens Schuldt’s direction supports the singers with exemplary sensitivity. (All praise to natural horn soloist Ursula Paludan Monberg.)

So, a warning: even though cut, this is a production primarily for opera specialists. Those in search of mainstream pleasures should opt for Garsington’s stylish Il barbiere di Siviglia, which also opened this week.