The telegraph
L’Heure Espagnole, Grange Park Opera, criticism: an extremely fun approach to a desperately dated work
If there is any opera more hopelessly dated than L’Heure Espagnole de Ravel (“The Spanish hour”), I haven’t found it yet. He is only 110 years old, a mere teenager compared to Handel’s gods and emperors, but in fact it seems more remote. In his day, the story of a watchmaker’s wife who entertains a poet and a banker while her husband is away, placing them inside clocks to hide them from each other and from the husband with the help of a passing muleteer, have looked frighteningly bold. Now it looks just like a bow. But can it really be enjoyed? Well, there’s Ravel’s brilliant music, made as intricately as clockwork, and spiced with cliché Spaniards only when Ravel wants to make fun of the poet Gonsalve, who prays endlessly in clichés. The problem is that, to taste it, you really need Ravel’s sumptuous orchestration, and in this pint-pot production of Grange Park Opera the track is reduced to a piano, with a few strokes of brass and glockenspiel shamelessly added. It also helps to make the stupid story believable if the scenario is exaggerated and surreal, so we hope crazy things happen. Here, director Stephen Medcalf takes the opposite path, defining the action within the narrow confines of a real antique watch emporium (Howard Walwyn’s in Kensington Church Street). It is a good joke to have this absurd story told in the mundane location of a busy London street. The muscular and infinitely helpful hawker Ramiro becomes a UPS delivery man, and buses and taxis can be seen passing by quickly. But it is difficult to sustain, because the daylight makes everything seem prosaically flat. It would have been better to film the production at night, so that the various lovers and watches could have mysteriously hidden in the shadows. Despite this, the five performers succeeded. Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts is kindly friendly and stupid as the watchmaker Torquemada, and Catherine Backhouse as his wife, Concepción, is just as sassy and vocal as she is about putting her two lovers on watches. “Be careful,” she says as Ramiro carries one down the stairs. “The mechanism is very fragile. Especially the pendulum. ”Ross Ramgobin plays Ramiro with such amiable innocence that when Concepción invites him up (in fact, down in this production), he almost wants to applaud. Elgan Llŷr Thomas is as irritating as the self-centered poet Gonsalve as he needs to be. However, the outstanding performance is Ashley Riches as Don Iñigo Gomez. In addition to providing the best joke of the night – a man named Riches playing a banker – he brings a momentary touch of vocally coagulated and long-legged menace to the scene. But it is clear that he is no match for Concepción. At the end Torquemada returns, is satisfied to find his store full of customers (his obscurity has no end), and joins everyone to sing “in search of love the moment comes when the turnkey arrives”. It’s a fun ending to a fun production that skillfully negotiates the pitfalls in this brilliant but problematic piece. Available now at grangeparkopera.co.uk