REVIEW: Opera Magazine – July 2025 issue

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The second-to-last thing we might expect of a commuter-belt opera group is that they’d opt to stage, of all works, Francis Poulenc’s dark magnum opus. The last thing? That it would be this good. Aylesbury Opera has a long record of pushing the repertoire envelope (the company has mounted The Rake’s Progress and Jenůfa in the 2020s alone) and its policy of casting young professionals alongside an amateur chorus and semi-pro orchestra clearly works.

It helps that the musical director is Sam Laughton, who also conducts London’s enterprising Elysian Singers. He knows his way around a thorny score, the trickier the better, and he shaped a disparate bunch of freelancers, instrumental teachers and talented youngsters into an assured pit band. That use of ‘pit’ is a little generous. The 26 players were, rather, arrayed at floor level in front of a low but wide proscenium arch, which meant they got first dibs at the spectators’ eardrums. Balance issues, probably unavoidable, led to inaudibility from a few of the more tentative soloists, notably in the opera’s opening scene. The highest praise for these musicians is that the audience took the orchestra’s panache for granted.

The director, still in her early 20s, is a local prodigy. Emma Large’s CV is a work in progress but she handled La Bohèmefor the company last spring and on this year’s showing she is a thoughtful creative leader. Dialogues of the Carmelites is the very devil of an opera to make kinetically engaging (the title says it all: it’s mainly a succession of talking, or singing, heads) yet the young theatre-maker found an effective visual language using little more than two different designs of wooden chair. Poulenc’s final Salve Regina was devastating in its stylized simplicity, perhaps the best solution I’ve seen to staging this mass execution.

The soprano Robyn Pullen’s intelligent portrayal of Blanche de la Force progressed impressively from pallid idealist to committed heroine, and she delivered the exemplary 1959 English translation by Joseph Machlis with a bright clear tone, and a graceful musicality. To present Blanche at first as a blank canvas made sense as it set her character off on a well-defined journey of self-discovery. Other striking performances came from Jacqueline Varsey as the new Prioress, Isobel Hughes as Mother Marie and, most impressively, Camilla Foster Mitchell, who was a ball of youthful energy as Blanche’s friend Sister Constance.

Aylesbury Opera’s singers might have benefitted from a more focused approach to Personenregie. There was too much physical aimlessness among the less experienced stage performers so opportunities to develop detailed character relationships, the most vital task for any director, went begging. Blocking, too, was sometimes rudimentary, especially in the tense second-act encounter between Blanche and her brother. Only when the charismatic mezzo-soprano Salome Siu as the dying Madame de Croissy grabbed the show and shook it to life did a spontaneous stage energy take wing. Casting directors please note.

Mark Valencia