Smyth’s Der Wald and Respighi’s Lucrezia review – Wagner’s spirit presides over double bill

As the near-capacity audience settled and orchestra members warmed up ahead of Guildhall School’s latest double bill of operatic rarities, a familiar tune emerged from the pit: a tuba parping its way through Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Talk about setting the tone. Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald (premiered in Berlin in 1902) and Ottorino Respighi’s Lucrezia – first performed in 1937 although this, remarkably, was its UK premiere – will have been new to most in the Silk Street theatre. Yet both scores could have “RW woz ’ere” graffitied on them, such is Wagner’s impact on their musical language. Der Wald veers into total fandom. Here’s a dark, Romantic forest inhabited by innocent lovers. There’s a dramatic soprano wreaking social havoc. “Tod und Liebe” – death and love – sings the female innocent at the end in her own miniature Liebestod. In Stephen Barlow’s production, the lighting is set at “gloomy” and the action is in 1950s North America, the woodlanders clad in denim and plaid while Iolanthe the pseudo-Valkyrie arrives on a motorbike. The cast was palpably having fun. The chorus and smaller roles were an energetic, vibrant presence, Sonny Fielding’s turn as the peddler and Redmond Sanders’ as local landowner Rudolf (here an all-mouth-and-trousers cowboy) especially persuasive. Avery Lafrentz manoeuvred her huge, hard-edged soprano effectively as Iolanthe, Harry Jacques was a warm, sympathetic Heinrich and Seohyun Go was excellent as his fiancee Röschen, her tone both generous and carefully controlled. If the impassioned climax of the opera’s love duet felt underheated as Röschen took off her cardigan, it was partly down to the orchestra, conducted by Dominic Wheeler. The lush string tone of the opening never quite returned and, despite some shapely woodwind solos, the playing lacked the polish and amplitude needed to make this opera truly compelling. The orchestra fared better in Respighi’s Lucrezia, where Wagner lurks behind the twin filters of Puccini and Strauss in a score that embraces extremes of harshness and beauty. There were moments of tactile earthiness from the cellos and basses, terrifying, febrile activity in the woodwind and hefty slabs of brass, while the strings eked out slow, traumatised drags as the heroine (better known to operagoers via Britten and to classicists via Livy and Ovid) narrates how she had been raped. Barlow’s staging places the ever-shocking plot in a modern US courtroom, the men in suits and sandals, the women in toga-like dresses. Gabriella Giulietta Noble demonstrated a gift for storytelling as La Voce (here a black-suited legal professional providing periodic commentary), while Manon Ogwen Parry’s Venilia and Hannah McKay’s Lucrezia stood out from the impressive cast in their assured dramatic and vocal intensity. It was a powerful argument for a work we should clearly know better. • Further performances on 5, 7 and 10 November, Silk Street theatre, Barbican, London