Music festival's operatic delight

The fun and the mischief as well as the drama and passion of the music have been graphically illustrated for followers of Bexhill Festival of Music.

The Garden Party - four talented and highly experienced members of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, promised devotees A Night At The Opera at the De La Warr Pavilion last night.

And they delivered - richly.

Glenys Groves (soprano), Scilla Stewart (mezzo soprano), Roy Gregory (baritone) and Luke Price (tenor) delighted a knowledgeable and deeply appreciative audience with a varied and well-chosen programme performed with panache.

There was novelty from the outset. The concert opened with Gypsies Love To Sing from Bizet's Carmen. But where were the voices coming from?

Scilla and Glenys walked through the audience from the rear of the auditorium...

The fun element was clearly underlined with a witty definition by Glenys.

"What is opera? We maintain it is a play where the hero when he gets stabbed instead of bleeding he sings...!"

The undoubted highlight of the first half for many present was the much-loved sequence from Puccini's La Bohme - Che gelida manina, mi chiamano Mimi and O soave faciulla - when Mimi goes to Rudolfo's attic flat in search of a light for her candle and the pair fall in love.

Opera's magic blend of music and drama were touchingly illustrated by Scilla and Roy.

Those present will doubtless continue to number the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales Of Hoffman among their operatic treasures. But they will never be able to hear it without recalling the priceless Covent Garden anecdote shared with them.

Space in the Garden's wings was so tight before the re-build that the gondola had to be stored in three sections and hastily assembled as stage-hands began to pull it across the stage.

As the sopranos prepared for their duet they had to compose themselves having witnessed the hapless gondolier clinging to the truncated bow section as it whizzed across the stage....

Needless to say, Scilla and Glenys rendered the Barbacarolle to perfection last Friday.

The first half ended with And This Is My Beloved, from Kismet.

That splendidly dotty fly duet (from Offenbach's Orpheus In The Underworld) opened the second half - a bar stool substituting for the bath.

The Garden Party have a wonderful knack of bringing not only beautiful, trained and highly-experienced singing voices to their audiences but that impish fun. So it was that the passion and drama of Bizet's Carmen was illustrated to a nicety through the Carmen/Don Jos duet and the Flower Song before the sopranos sang the Flower duet from Delibes' Lakm - complete with cabin crew pre-flight safety gestures as a tribute to the work's use in a certain airline television commercial.

The humour was not lost on an increasingly-receptive audience.

A programme of delight included the Papageno/Papagena duet from Mozart's The Magic Flute and delightful dips into Samson And Delila, The Pearl Fishers and Cosi fan Tutte before an uninhibited audience's "la-la" contribution to Roy's thrilling Nessun Dorma from Puccini's Turandot.

The encore to an unforgettable operatic contribution to an unforgettable and richly-diverse Bexhill Music Festival saw The Garden Party as Toreadors.