Review of 'Crossed Wires' (South Wales Argus) - July 2008

Mozart and Menotti performed in Chepstow, Wales

Double Opera Bill, Chepstow Drill Hall

(Tuesday 22nd July 2008 By Nigel Jarrett)

Chepstow Festival’s resourcefulness was no better illustrated than by this foray into the lighter side of opera by a professional team with local connections.

The Telephone, Menotti’s witty one-act take on the blight and blessing of technology, was coupled with an original piece called Crossed Wires, which fused the stories of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni as an opportunity to present no fewer than ten famous highlights.

The Mozartiana was devised by baritone James Gilbert, who later joined soprano Lindsay Kidd Churchill in Menotti’s two-hander, which was cleverly directed by Karl Daymond and played with something approaching perfection.

Both included comic references to the locality, an indulgence carried off with bravura rather than self-consciousness and indicative of a production that believed in itself enough to have actor Jennifer Kidd almost make a threesome of the Menotti in a superbly woven cameo introduction.

As narrator of the Mozart medley, though, she had to sit through the concluding Soave sia il vento from Cosi fan tutte while the singers made a touching duet of a sublime trio.

Adaptation at its most courageous.

Ms Kidd Churchill was a winning Mozartian (Susanna, Zerlina) and did not flinch when Menotti asks for emphatic coloratura.

Her partner, too, flitting between the scheming Don, the agricultural Figaro and Menotti’s hapless suitor, made the transitions intelligently and with sustained voice.

None of it would have happened without the attention of pianist Suzy Ruffles, whose bright tempi, applied with an orchestral grasp in the Mozart and a feeling for idiom in the Menotti, kept the singers on their mettle.