I wonder if Cinderella realised that when she found her Prince she would also find international fame, becoming not just a Princess but also a global celebrity and icon. The glass slipper, placed loving on her shapely foot, has graced theatres, variety halls, cinema screens and opera houses - even postage stamps - and the perennial popularity of this rags-to-riches fairy-tale, in which innocence and goodness triumph over injustice and oppression, shows no signs of waning.

 

American author Gail Carson Levine’s award-winning fantasy-novel Ella Enchanted was published in 1997, and as recently as 2015  Walt Disney Pictures revisited the romantic fantasy, producing a live-action re-imagining of the original 1950 animated film. Both a Filipino pop group that rose to prominence in the 1970s, and an American glam rock band formed in Pennsylvania in 1982 and which had a series of multi-platinum albums and hit singles, chose to call themselves after the undervalued skivvy.

According to some sources, there are over 1500 adaptations of the  Cinderella story, the earliest version of which is usually considered to be the Greek philosopher Strabo’s account of a Greek slave girl who marries the Egyptian King. Made popular by Charles Perrault in  Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697 and subsequently by the Brothers Grimm in their ‘darker’ version of the folk tale (in ‘Aschenputtel’, published in the collected Fairy Tales of 1812, the step-sisters are so grotesquely greedy that they are willing to hack bits off their feet to force them into the slipper!), Cinders’ true virtue has earned its just reward in countless pantomimes and plays, ballets and films, musicals and novels.

The earliest known British pantomime based on Cinderella was first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London in 1904, and now Baron Hard-Up, the Ugly Sisters and Buttons are perennial Christmas favourites. In 1957 Rodgers and Hammerstein gave us a television musical with Julie Andrews in the eponymous role. Prokofiev put the glass slipper  en pointe, though Tchaikovsky almost got there first, writing to his brother Modest in October 1870, ‘Just imagine, that I've undertaken to write the music for a ballet Cinderella, and that this vast four-act score must be ready by the middle of December!’, though this commission for his first ballet remained unfulfilled. Ferdinand Langer (1878), Johann Strauss II (1901) and Frank Martin (1941) have all taken Cinders to a ballet-ball; and, Christopher Wheeldon, who in 2013 added puppetry (by Basil Twist) to Prokofiev’s score, will choreograph a new production of Cinderella, co-produced by English National Ballet and the Royal Albert Hall where it will be performed in the round in June next year, which is being billed as ‘the ballet spectacular of 2019’.

 

Cinemas have offered sugary sweet adaptations of the young girl’s journey from misery to matrimony, such as The Slipper and the Rose (starring Richard Chamberlain and Gemma Craven, 1976) and  Ever After (1998, featuring Drew Barrymore). And, of course, in the opera house numerous composers have literally given Cinderella a ‘voice’, from Jean-Louis Laruette and Louis Anseaume (1759) to Stefano Pavesi (1814), from Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1900) to Gustav Holst (1901), from Peter Maxwell Davies (1979) to Alma Deutscher (2016), among others.

 

Of course, the operatic versions of Goodness Triumphant by Giacomo Rossini (La Cenerentola, 1817) and Massenet (Cendrillon, 1894-6) are the best-known. But, in the early nineteenth century it was not Rossini whose Cinderella was most celebrated but that of the Franco-Maltese Nicolas - or Nicolò, as he called himself - Isouard, whose three-act comic opera,  Cendrillon, to a libretto by Charles-Guillaume Etienne after Charles Perrault, was premiered in the Salle Feydeau at the Opéra-Comique on 22^nd February 1810. And, it is this opéra-féerie by Isouard, who died two hundred years ago, that Bampton Classical Opera - celebrating their twenty-fifth year - have selected for their 2018 production and which, following performances earlier this summer at Bampton and Westonbirt, can now be enjoyed at St John’s Smith Square on 18th September.

 

So, who was Nicolò Isouard, this composer of more than 40 operas, whose bust graces the pediments of the Palais Garnier in Paris? The son of a Marseille merchant, Isouard was born in Valletta on 18^thMay 1773 (according to Grove; some sources suggest 6^th December 1775). His early education, which included mathematics, Latin and music, took place in Paris at the Pensionnat Berthaud, a preparatory school for the Engineers and Artillery, but the Revolution forced him to flee back to Malta in 1789 where his father found him a position in a merchant’s office. He continued his musical studies - composition with Michel-Ange Vella and counterpoint with Francesco Azzopardi; when his work took him to Palermo, he took harmony lessons with Giuseppe Amendola; later, in Naples, he completed composition studies with Nicola Sala and received practical advice from Guglielmi.

 

Isouard made his debut as an opera composer with  L'avviso ai maritati in June 1794, which was successfully received in Florence and later given in Lisbon, Dresden and Madrid. Back home, not all spoke favourably of Isouard, some questioning his masonic affiliations. In April 1794, the Maltese Inquisition was told that the composer was ‘a young man who leads a sinful life, frequenting loose women, and boasting about it. He ridicules and despises the sacrifice of the Mass [...] those acquainted with him consider him a libertine’, but despite such condemnation, in 1795, on the death of Vincenzo Anfossi, Isouard was appointed organist to the Order of St John of Jerusalem in Valetta, later becoming maestro di cappella there. He settled in Malta, composing serious and comic operas for the Maltese theatre.[1]

 

The French invasion of the island in June saw him become secretary to the Governor of the French garrison, Vaubois, and following the French submission to the British, Isouard, perhaps fearful of charges of collaboration, returned with the latter to Paris in 1799. His first Parisian opéra comique, Le petit page, composed in collaboration with Rodolphe Kreutzer who acted as Isouard’s manager and patron, was given in the Théâtre Feydeau in February 1800. Friendship with the librettist F.-B. Hoffman led to the sharpening of his dramatic insight, and his first major success came with Michel-Ange (1802).

 

On 5^th August 1802, Isouard co-founded - with Luigi Cherubini, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, Rodolphe Kreutzer, Adrien Boïeldieu and Pierre Rode - Le magasin de musique dirigé, a publishing venture which formally opened in December that year, in premises at 268  rue de la Loi in Paris (in 1805-6 the street number and name were altered to 76 rue de Richelieu). The company was designed to spare composers - who in the late-eighteenth century habitually self-published their works and sold them personally or through music shops - from financial risk and time-consuming business matters, and to ensure that they received increased publicity and profit. Each of the six composers was contracted to furnish at least one opera or 50 pages of music each year, and each was entitled to the proceeds from the sale of his own works and to a share in the profits of the firm’s publications of works, mainly instrumental compositions, by various non-associated contemporary composers who were popular in Paris at the time.

 

In total more than 650 editions were published, from engraved plates, including Viotti’s five violin concertos and, notably, the first edition in full score of Le nozze di Figaro (1807-08). However, of the six collaborators Isouard - who had the most extensive business experience among the group - was alone in taking his prescribed obligations seriously: the firm printed nine of his operas in full score, alongside Cherubini’sAnacréon, Méhul’s Joseph and Boïeldieu’s  Ma tante Aurore. He left the firm in July 1807 and on 12 August 1811 the partnership was dissolved, J.-J. Frey acquiring the business, manuscripts and 9679 engraved plates (of which Isouard’s contribution accounted for 3,553 engraved pages, about 37% of the total). [2]

 

In 1808, with Un jour à Paris, Isouard began his long collaboration with Etienne, who was the editor of the  Journal des deux mondes. Two years later they had an unprecedented success at the Opéra-Comique in 1810 with the fairy-tale operaCendrillon, and further triumphs followed including Jeannot et Colin (1814) and Joconde (1814), the latter establishing Isouard’s international reputation. He had little serious competition among his fellow composers in Paris at this time, but with the return of Boïedlieu, from Russia, in 1811, a friendly rivalry was initiated, one which became more acrimonious when both applied for membership of the Institut de France (1817). Boïeldieu’s success angered Isouard who broke off relations with his former friend. Indeed, it has been suggested that Isouard was driven to drink, debauchery and an early death by his jealousy of Boïeldieu! [3]

 

Isouard, Boïeldieu and Méhul are often credited with having brought French  opéra comique to its final form. The genre is a significant marker of changing taste in France in the early years of the nineteenth century. While the French did share Napoleon’s liking for Italian opera and aristocratic themes, opéra comique came to be strongly identified with the cultural appetites of the post-revolutionary bourgeoisie who, after years of Revolutionary turmoil and bloodshed, now longed for simple entertainments that would amuse and bring joy. Characters were drawn from everyday life; plots involved complicated deceptions and subterfuges; a pair of lovers was unfailingly at the centre of the drama. The story was advanced by spoken dialogue and the music was ‘uncomplicated’: melodious strophic airs and romances, pictorial orchestrations, strongly defined musical characterisation. Though the genre is occasionally dismissed as light and trivial, both Edward J. Dent and Donald Grout argue that it is in the op éra-comique of the years from 1790 to 1815 that we should look for the origins of mid-nineteenth-century Romantic grand opera. 

 

Isouard certainly achieved great popularity at home and abroad during his life-time. His operas were performed across Europe; Michel-Ange was translated into five languages and L’intrigue aux fenêtresinto seven. Born in Hanover in 1795, Sophie Augustine Leo, the writer of the anonymous Erinnerungen aus Paris (Berlin, 1851), had travelled to Paris with her elder sister Mme Valentin in 1817, and the year later married the German banker August Leo, a prominent patron of the arts among whose regular guests were many distinguished artists living in Paris at this time. Writing of the ‘masterpieces’ that were being given at the Opéra-Comique during this period, Sophie remarked Isouard’s achievements: ‘His opera Jeannot et Colin, more especially his  Rendezvous bourgeois, sparkled with life and animation; I doubt whether a more amusing subject than the latter is to be found. Though I can no longer remember enough of the detail to retell the story, I know that the merriment of the spectators was endless and that the music had caught the spirit of the text. L’intrigue aux fenêtres followed, then  Cendrillon and Joconde, and Isouard died, aged forty-one, at the height of his development and in the ever increasing favor of his public.’ [4] She also noted that, ‘In 1818, i.e., shortly after my arrival in Paris, connoisseurs were shocked by the deaths of Isouard and Méhul’.

 

Frequently composers made adaptations and transcriptions of Isouard opera airs. In 1810 Jan Ladislav Dussek published his “Variations No.4 in G major on ‘Toto Carabo’ or ‘Il étoit un petit homme’ from the opera  Cendrillon by Nicolò Isouard arranged as a Rondo with Imitations”, and one of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s seven sets of variations on opera themes took Cendrillon as its source.

 

Isoaurd’s fame and favour reached far afield. In his study of opera in Philadelphia from 1800-30, Otto Albrecht demonstrates that Isouard’s work was popular among the 258 different operas presented during in the city during these thirty-one years. In October 1827 no fewer than three operas by Isouard were performed: Cendrillon,  ou Le petit soulier verd (first performed on 20^th October 1827) was preceded by Joconde, ou Les coureurs d’aventures (1^st October) and Les rendez-vous bourgeois (17  ^th October), while a year later on 18^th October 1828 Isouard’s Lully et Quinault, ou Le déjeuner impossible was staged. [5] Further evidence of the dispersal of Isouard’s music in America can be found in Charlotte le Pelletier’s ambitious Journal of Musick, published in Baltimore in 1810. Pellier, a pianist and composer, had arrived in Baltimore from Paris in 1803. A widow with two children, she worked as a tutor and set about a project to sustain her French cultural heritage by publishing a collection of songs and piano pieces that would appeal to other French émigrés for study and performance. The collection included a large proportion of transcriptions from the latest productions at the Opéra-Comique, including arrangements for solo keyboard from the overtures and interludes of Isouard’s Les confidences (1803) and, drawing upon one of the era’s most popular vocal forms, a transcription of the ‘romance’ from Isouard’s first great success, Michel-Ange (1802). [6]

 

Isouard and his contemporaries were also all the rage on the Russian stage in the early 1800s. Among Isouard’s works that reached Moscow were  L'intrigue aux fenêtres (1807), Le médecin litre (1810), and Cendrillon (1811). And, Russian literature did not neglect him: in Alexander Pushkin’s ‘The Blizzard’ from  The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, one of the principal characters, describing his experience in the army during the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, refers to Isouard’s Joconde of 1814: “Meanwhile, the war had ended in glory. Our regiments were returning from abroad. People ran to meet them. For music they played conquered songs: Vive Henri-Quatre, Tyrolean waltzes, and arias from Joconde.” Not everyone was so enamoured of the man and his music, though. Carl Maria von Weber thought that Cendrillon’s ‘sweet airs’ possessed ‘nothing to make an effect on an audience’ and criticised ‘the routine nature of practically every piece’ in the opera and its ‘clumsy instrumentation’.[7]

 

Some have argued that the artlessness of Cinderella’s musical characterisation - the unadorned melodic line of the simple romances - reflects the influence of the rather limited vocal talents of Alexandrine Saint-Aubin, whose celebrated but brief career was given initial impetus by this role (sung in Bampton’s production by Kate Howden). But, the decorum of Cinderella’s strophic songs complements her inner grace, and Isouard reserves the virtuosity for the two stepsisters, Clorinde and Tisbe (here Aoife O’Sullivan and Jenny Stafford respectively), who, vain, spoiled and self-promoting, pull out all the coloratura stops when seeking to attract the Prince’s attention. Clearly, Isouard had an instinctive sense of how to match melody and context, and, judging by the concerto elements in the opera’s overture as well as interesting use of harp and horn throughout, a good ear for musical colour and pictorialism. There is dramatic interest and depth, too, in the expanded role for Alidoro, the Prince’s sage and tutor (played by Nicholas Merryweather in this production).

 

When Isouard died, at the age of 44, in Paris on 23^rd March 1818, his final opera Aladin, ou La lampe merveilleuse was unfinished. Completed by Benincori, the work was premièred at the Opéra on 6^thFebruary 1822, the first opera in Paris to be produced with gas lighting, and to include an ophicleide in the pit orchestra. But, on 25  ^th January 1817, an opera had been performed at the Teatro Valle in Rome which in the coming years would supplant his own Cendrillon: Rossini’s two-act  dramma giocoso, La Cenerentola - the libretto of which acknowledged a debt to Isouard, declaring itself ‘by Jacopo Ferretti after Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon and librettos by Charles-Guillaume Etienne for Nicolas Isouard’s Cendrillon (1810, Paris) and Francesco Fiorini for Stefano Pavesi’s  Agatina, o La virtù premiata (1814, Milan)’.

 

Just as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven came to dominate instrumental music, so Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini were predominant in the operatic repertory by the 1840s. But despite this, other composers continued to achieve ‘popular’ success throughout the nineteenth century, not least as providers of vocal music to alternate with instrumental works on the concert programmes of the growing number of subscription societies. Though their music is infrequently heard today, the most popular - Giovanni Pergolesi, Giovanni Paisiello, Domenico Cimarosa - remain familiar names. Yet, composers such as Louis Spohr, Giovanni Viotti, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, George Onslow and Robert Franz are now largely excised from music history, even though in their day their music - alongside that of Nicolas Isouard - was whistled on the streets.

 

Although the Opéra-Comique revived Les rendez-vous bourgeois and  Joconde after World War I, Isouard’s operas have largely languished in obscurity for more than one hundred years, though in 1999 the Australian conductor Richard Bonynge presented Cendrillon in Moscow, a performance that was recorded live. Last year, Manhattan School of Music mounted a production, and in June this year, Cendrillon premiered in Malta itself, in the Manoel Theatre in Valletta (which is the 2018 Cultural Capital of Europe).

 

Thanks to Bampton Classical Opera, we will have an opportunity to hear in London music that was recalled so fondly by an anonymous writer in the 15  ^th May 1854 issue of Revue des deux mondes:

‘I was present a few years ago when Cinderella was rehearsing at the Opéra-Comique, and I was delighted, I will admit, by the charming nature of this so naively romantic inspiration. Nicolò produced an effect on me that Rossini’s music in all its pomp had not been able to produce. I seemed to hear a real fairy tale in music, and I found in these slightly shortened phrases, an expression so simple and so touching, [an] air of childish grace and good-naturedness …’

[1] Expelled from Rhodes by the Turks in 1523, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta proved itself a notable musical patron, transforming Maltese cultural life by introducing European customs and taste. The Order’s musical establishment in its church in Valetta employed musicians of considerable talent and a number of distinguished musicians were associated with the Order. See Duane Galles, ‘Chivalric Orders as Musical Patrons’, Sacred Music, Fall 2012, Vol.139, No.3: 25-44.

[2] Bruce R. Schueneman and María De Jesús Ayala-Schueneman, ‘The Composers’ House: Le Magasin De Musique De Cherubini, Méhul, R. Kreutzer, Rode, Nicolo Isouard, Et Boïeldieu’,  Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol.51, No 1, 2004: 53-73.

[3] Geoffrey Álvarez, ‘The singing island’, Musical Times, Vol.157, Iss.1937, (Winter 2016): 114-117.

[4] In ‘Musical Life in Paris (1817-1848): A Chapter from the Memoirs of Sophie Augustine Leo-Part I’, The Musical Quarterly, Vol.17, No.2 (Apr., 1931): 259-271

[5] Otto E. Albrecht, ‘Opera in Philadelphia, 1800-1830’,  Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol.32, No.3 (Autumn, 1979): 499-515.

[6] Elise K. Kirk, ‘Charlotte Le Pelletier’s Journal of Musick (1810): A New Look at French Culture in Early America’,  American Music, Vol.29, No.2 (Summer 2011): 203-228.

[7] J. Warrack, ed.: Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music (Cambridge, 1981).

 

Read arts blogger Mary-Grace Nyugen's interview, which appeared on TrendFem

http://trendfem.com/2018/09/q-a-jeremy-gray-director-of-bampton-classical-opera/

Many Rossini fans will claim that his decision to steer clear of magical elements in La Cenerentola, as were prevalent in Charles Perrault’s fairy-tale of 1697, represented his own preference for keeping it real. The truth, however, is either more prosaic or more fascinating depending on one’s point of view. The composer and his librettist Jacopo Ferretti had only weeks to deliver their opera in 1817, and so to save time they worked closely from a model that already existed. This was Nicolò Isouard’s Cendrillon of 1810, with a libretto by Charles Guillaume Étienne, and the similarities are plain to see. The heroine may be called Angelina in Rossini’s version (she has no title other than Cendrillon in Isouard’s), but the names of Clorinda, Tisbe, Ramiro, Dandini and Alidoro all come directly from the earlier creation.

It is therefore ironic that the thing that stopped Isouard’s hitherto irresistible opera in its tracks was Rossini’s own version of the same story. Cendrillon had been immensely popular at the Palais Garnier when it premiered in 1810, and every performance there over the following three years saw a massive demand for tickets. Born in Malta, but writing the majority of his forty-five operas in Paris, Nicolò Isouard is hardly a household name today. In his time, however, he was highly acclaimed, and still enjoys a bust on the Palais Garnier, a grave in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and a music club and bus stop that bear his name in Malta.

Clearly, Isouard deserves some rehabilitation, and happily Bampton Classical Opera, which in the twenty-five years since it was founded has brought three Salieri operas to the British public’s attention, is here to provide it. Cendrillon, which features spoken dialogue rather than recitative, was written in the then popular opéra-comique style, and stands somewhere between the worlds of Mozart, which preceded it, and bel canto that was to follow. There are some amazing innovations, and the Overture is practically unique in opera in essentially sounding like a concertante for horn and harp.

Overall, however, the opera mixes styles so that the two ugly sisters (both sopranos) indulge in lavish coloratura, while Cendrillon’s Act I Romance ‘Je suis modeste et soumise’ is strophic and unassuming to emphasise her innocence and purity. This did lead Weber to deride its ‘insignificant’ melody, but it seems rather an unfair criticism since the approach was so obviously deliberate on Isouard’s part. Many listeners may, in fact, delight more in the opera’s ‘simple’ moments as the Romance, with its moving interlude between each verse, is a prime example of how music does not have to be complex to be exceedingly beautiful.

In other innovations, Clorinde sings a Spanish-style Boléro at the end of Act II, which reflects the taste developed for such music following a visit to Paris in 1809 of the Spanish singer-composer Manuel García. There is also a bitter-sweet edge to Cendrillon and Ramiro’s Act III love duet as she seems aware that the Prince’s emotions are kindled not by her in her drab state, but by his memory of her as the mysterious Princess.

Bampton Classical Opera’s production by Jeremy Gray enjoyed performances in Bampton and Westonbirt in July and August, with this presentation at St John’s, Smith Square constituting the final one in its current run. With the orchestra conducted by Harry Sever, the production was fully staged with a room set left of centre looking suitably grey when constituting the house where Cendrillon had to work all day, and bearing more life-affirming images of roses when representing the palace. The production also introduced additional colour by featuring a tree, representing the burial place of Cendrillon’s mother and providing an additional decoration at the ball, and a silent sandman to sprinkle dust and thus explain why Cendrillon goes to sleep so many times in the plot.

The performance was sung in English with Gilly French and Jeremy Gray’s translation proving skilful. All of the singers performed to a high standard with particular accolades going to Aoife O’Sullivan as Clorinde and Jenny Stafford as Tisbe who had to tackle the most bravura music while being genuinely funny, even floss dancing during the sisters’ Act I duet ‘Ah! quel plaisir’. Kate Howden in the title role revealed a rich and nuanced mezzo-soprano, Bradley Smith was possessed of an aesthetically pleasing tenor as Prince Ramir, while Nicholas Merryweather as Alidor arguably delivered the strongest performance of the evening with his powerful, but smooth and rounded, baritone.

There was a great spirit to the performance with Spanish dancing from the cast accompanying Clorinde’s Boléro. If Cendrillon has ever been described as an opéra-féeriewithout any fairies, given its lack of supernatural elements, it should be remembered that magic can come in many forms. Here, the manner in which the performances in Act II captured the heady excitement of the ball, as well as the nervousness and intrigue inherent in its more intimate moments, cast their own spell.

When Bampton Classical Opera presented Salieri’s La grotto di Trofonio in 2015, one was left wondering why the opera was not in the repertoire today alongside Le nozze di Figaro. Isouard’s Cendrillon does not elicit quite so strong a reaction, but it is thoroughly delightful and a piece that deserves to be heard more often. It did enjoy a new production at the Manoel Theatre, Valletta, last June, with 2018 marking the bicentenary of Isouard’s death, and we can only hope that there are more opportunities to hear it in Britain over the coming years.

Cinderella. We all know what happens in this fairy tale. Sitting with great anticipation at St John’s Smith Square to see Bampton Classical Opera’s production of Nicolò Isouard’s Cinderella, I was in awe of how festive and warm the stage appeared. A wooden tree with buds to pick on one side of the stage and a rocking chair next to a fireplace on the other. How charming, I thought. (Is Christmas here yet?)

Many don’t know of the composer Nicolò Isouard, yet he was once a big name in Paris’ opera scene. You can see his bust at the opera house in Paris. As Bampton Opera celebrates its 25th anniversary, continuing to present, preserve and revive rarely performed works, it so happened to coincide with the bicentenary of Isouard’s death, and the rest is history.

Bampton Opera first presented their production of Cinderella at home in Oxfordshire, which had a successful two-day run irrespective of the wet conditions for one of its nights. But there was none of that at St John’s except for an umbrella that released silver confetti in between scenes.

One could tell Bampton Opera’s artistic directors Gilly French and Jeremy Gray worked hard to reinvent Isouard’s opera in making it accessible for all audiences. By introducing an English translation with new dialogues, they managed to produce a more relatable and engaging production. After all, Isouard composed the opera almost two centuries ago.

There’s a long list of things to enjoy about Bampton Opera’s production. As it was originally composed as French opera-comique, there were quite a few giggles to experience, here, such as the flossing (dance moves), silly catfights between Cinderella’s sisters in hair rolls and dress robes, a wedding cake with Cinderella’s silver shoe served on top, and the inflatable crown worn by the prince’s squire. The unexpected bolero (mixture of flamenco, Cuban, and tango dancing) with the entire cast went down a treat, too, and it worked brilliantly with Isouard’s music.

Alistair Ollernshaw (Baron), Benjamin Durrant (Dandini), Aoife O’Sullivan (Clorinde) and Jenny Stafford (Tisbe) were stand-out performers. Their characters packed a punch and their personalities were, most, definitely funny.

As Cinderella, Kate Howden was tender-hearted and vocally radiant. Her highlights include her sorrow song to the prince ‘I’m a servant’. While Bradley Smith as the Prince impressed the audience with his soft-toned vocals, including his goofy smile for Cinderella. While Nicholas Merryweatheras Alidor, aka fairy godmother, was also strong on stage as a sturdy baritone.

Musically Isouard’s opera is enchanting and melodious. (At times I heard shades of Rossini and Mozart.) I felt deeply inspired by Isouard’s music as it expressed much of what was happening in the story. In the beginning bars of act 3, the music seems sensitive and moving, featuring sounds of darkness. This may seem too adult for a children’s story, yet for Cinderella’s journey – from being a servant under the orders of her step-father and mean sisters to a humble and modest princess – Isouard shared his enthusiasm for emotion, meaning and symbolism.

On this occasion Chroma ensemble performed superbly with conductor Harry Sever at St John’s. The harp played a significant part in some of the solos, again playing up the fantasy mood, while the singing was simply marvellous. Duets and quartets abound, the entire cast’s vocal instruments were in fine shape.

A good fairy-tale sweeps us away on a magic carpet while never letting us forget that for all the enchanting transformations, beneath the sorcery lie essential truths.

We may relish our submission to fantasy but flippancy and human foolishness are necessary ingredients too, and Bampton Classical Opera, in presenting their twenty-fifth anniversary production -  Cinderella,  by the Franco-Maltese Nicolò Isouard who died 200 years ago at the age of 41 - have found the perfect recipe for their magic spell. 

Jeremy Gray’s designs aptly juxtapose dull monochromes with dashing technicolour, mirroring the ugliness-beauty dichotomy embodied by the three young women who reside in the house of the ostentatious Baron de Montefiascone - here attired in shiny silver pyjamas (costumes by Jess Iliff) and played with haughty self-importance by bass Alistair Ollerenshaw. The sampler above the fire-place proclaims ‘Home Sweet Home’, but while the 1970s woolly wall-paper may be soft as silk, the mood in the kitchen is spiky and spiteful. As Cinderella (Kate Howden) labours with brushes and brooms, the Baron’s step-daughters, Clorinde (Aoife O’Sullivan) and Tisbe (Jenny Stafford), sabotage the sagging washing-line, only pausing from their malicious mischief-making to rejoice when the morning-post brings their invitations to Prince’s Ramir’s gala ball.

Despite Cinders’ despondency, Gray uses light and visual motifs to hint that Fate may be kinder than family and elevate the down-trodden lass to higher realms. In the corner of the yard stands a cubist tree offering golden apples, and as Cinders gently plucks the fruit, the branches are bathed in a pink glow which seems to suggest that the future will prove rosy. Indeed, in Act 2 the apples are transformed into magical lanterns which gleam warmly.

But, all good fairy-tales need a fairy-godmother - or, in this case, godfather, in the form of Prince Ramir’s tutor, Alidor (Nicholas Merryweather). Alidor stumbles on to the set cloaked in grubby grey rags and pushing a supermarket trolley filled with an eclectic assortment of oddments - a gramophone, bird-cage, flower-pots, a straw hat - but despite his beggar-disguise, there is no hiding Alidor’s wealth of wisdom and kindness. His royal tutee (Bradley Smith) may be an ingenue as far as romance and courtship are concerned, but just one glance at Cinders sees Prince Ramir smitten, and he can rely on Alidor to concoct a plan to win his bride.

Gray waves a magic wand - with a little help from a twirling ‘Mary Poppins’ whose umbrella dispenses fairy dust - to transport us to the ball, the grey fronds adorning the Baron’s walls blossoming into a forest of pink roses. Clorinde and Tisbe swap their fluffy slippers for some slinky frocks and set off in hot pursuit of their ‘Prince’, lured by the lurid gold medallion of office sported by one Dandini on his puffed-up chest, leaving Ramir free to woo Cinderella over a game of chess.

Isouard really does suggest that the devil has all the best tunes. Simple airs and romances suffice for Cinderella and her Prince, but the two sisters are blessed with characterful duets and a sparkling solo each, proving that virtue and virtuosity are certainly not bedfellows. Aoife O’Sullivan and Jenny Stafford made a wonderfully wicked pair, relishing the capricious coloratura and blending in curlicues of thirds and sixths the melodiousness of which belied the sisters’ malice. O’Sullivan demonstrated a thrilling sparkle and superb precision in Clorinde’s Act 2 show-piece which, designed to catch the Prince’s ear and eye, inspired the ball-goers to fling themselves into a bolero worthy of Torvill and Dean. Tisbe’s rueful lament in Act 3 was no less impressive and, miraculously, even managed to suggest that this harpy had a heart after all.

Nicholas Merryweather always commands a stage; thus, although we are more used to seeing and hearing the baritone in comic guise, he was a masterful mentor, using his strong baritone to convey the maturity and insight that his naïve charges lack. Merryweather also ensured that we heard every word, whether spoken or sung - even when he seemed to be singing with his mouth stuffed full with bananas. Kate Howden’s diction was less clear, but she captured Cinderella’s sweetness and warmth, singing with beautiful tone in her romances with tenor Bradley Smith’s Prince Ramir. I’d like to see both of these singers in roles which offer them greater vocal and dramatic challenges. And, the same goes for tenor Benjamin Durrant, whose Dandini would give Liberace a run for his money, and Ollerenshaw, who had little to sing but who proved a sterling foundation in the ensembles, really making his presence felt vocally. The energy and wit of Lucy Cronin and Susanne Dymott in various choral roles also made a vivid contribution to the whole.

Conductor Harry Sever made the most of Isourd’s instrumental colours and the musicians of CHROMA produced a variety of orchestral hues; I particularly enjoyed the nasally windings of the woodwind duets, and there were strong contributions from the horns (Lizzi Tocknell and Richard Bayliss) and harpist Oliver Wass. With the musicians seated behind the set and Sever visible to the cast on two side-screens, it was not surprising that the ensemble occasionally slipped. St John’s Smith Square is not a kind venue for opera, but Gray and his cast did well to overcome the challenges of space and acoustic.

Given the slightness of Isouard’s ‘drama’, we can forgive some occasional hamming in the dialogues and longer ensembles; for there was plenty of sharp wit and neat detail in Gray’s direction and Gilly French’s English translation. Unlike the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, Isouard offers us no dark terrors, political inferences or journeys into the psyche. Simply and sincerely, his music tells a familiar tale, but such is the score’s charm that we’re drawn into a story that we’ve heard so many times before. Goodness triumphs over greed, justice over jealousy. Once again, Bampton Classical Opera have shown us that dreams really can come true.

Cinderella   as   opera  in French: of late, the palm has always gone to Massenet's adorable (as in a-dor-Ah-bler) confection, and it should again soon when Glyndebourne offers a worthy home to the master's magic touch. The  Cendrillon   of Maltese-born honorary Parisian Nicolas Isouard,  aka  Nicolò, clearly had its day after the 1810 premiere, but it was eclipsed by Rossini's  La Cenerentola   coming along seven years later, and with good reason. The muse assigned to Rossini did not visit mostly pedestrian Isouard, though his approach is compact and briefly steps out of the generic with two pretty sets of minor-key couplets for its hero and heroine. Seen on a sunny summer evening in a country house, it may well have charmed throughout, but a fine company has to work extra-hard in St John's Smith Square.

Their energetic efforts do eventually pay off. Jeremy Gray's designs - knitwear, not sure why, for the home of Baron de Montefiascone, floral wallpaper for the ball at which Cinderella can disguise her identity by holding a single rose - work as well as they can in a very small space, blocking out most of the orchestra (conductor Harry Sever is seen on two large screens). Gray's direction is more village-hall antics, with too much mugging from the singers and a couple of gimmicks designed to fill out the longer numbers with business that doesn't always read. 

 

It may be easiest for the ladies playing capricious-spiteful stepsisters Clorinde and Tisbe, but these are the two finest singing actors on the stage. Since the mezzo role of Cinderella was written for a sweet but modestly voiced teenager, the vocal plums go to the sopranos. Aoife O'Sullivan's Clorinde shines in a high-lying Spanish entertainment at the palace, to a slightly gauche choreography; Jenny Stafford's Tisbe steals the show in a surprisingy big aria of regret after the ball, drawing all eyes to her focused acting and meaningful delivery of the text, such as it is, at every point: star quality.

 

There's more top-notch singing from Nicholas Merryweather as Alidor, the royal sage whose enlightened guidance would give Rossini the cue to make the story all about goodness rewarded, stripped of the magic. Which is rather indeterminate here, involving only a floaty chorus at the beginning of Act Two which is also the main subject of the harp and horn led Overture. Adolphe Adam was right when he described Isouard's work as "une f é erie sans  fé erie",   ie   a fairy-tale without enchantment; in his excellent programme note, Gray also quotes Weber's observation on "the routine nature of practically every piece". That early master of the supernatural in music was right, so frankly why disinter the work? On the clumsiness of the orchestration, though, he's proved wrong by Sever and CHROMA, drafted in for this London performance only; the scoring for woodwind in pairs - some lovely oboe writing especially - seems crisp and clear (I presume this is the original and not Adam's retouching).

 

Most disappointing is Isouard's inability to rise to moonshine for the love between Cinderella and her Prince; their duets are utterly generic, though sweetly enough done by Kate Howden and Bradley Smith. Howden has a warm lower register, though the tone thins higher up, and her words were unintelligible in the difficult St John's acoustics. The dialogue has a certain naive charm, but would have sounded better in the original French; and the rest of cast is rather too campy with it. Still, with the slipper finding its mate and the rose comes into its own again, it was hard not to feel a twinge of pleasure at the general warmth of the presentation. Pauline Viardot's  Cendrillon   next, anybody?