Published: 22 September, 2011
by SEBASTIAN TAYLOR

TWO stunning, highly contras­ting, productions of Donizetti’s  The Elixir of Love and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger are opening the English National Opera’s new season at the Coliseum – and each is unmissable in its way.

Jonathan Miller’s production of Donizetti comic opera, relocated to a 1950s mid-west American diner, is  revived a year after its debut which received a mixed reception. Most of the production’s faults have now been rectified.

A lot of Miller’s irritating witticisms have been deleted and there’s now more room for Donizetti’s music to hold centre stage.

Sarah Tynan is back in tip-top form as Adina and Andrew Shore pulls out all the stops again as the travelling quack selling love potions.

A year ago, Shore stole the show.

Not this time.

There’s a new Nemorino, young tenor Ben Johnson successfully wooing Adina’s heart with the help of the love potions and Donizetti’s great arias.

The changes have turned Miller’s produc­tion into a great night out at the opera, particularly suitable for newcomers to opera.

Very different is The Passenger, an opera about Auschwitz by Polish/Russian composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, staged in a brilliant David Pountney production.

Liese, a former SS Guard, is travelling to Brazil on an liner 15 years after the war.

She sees former Auschwitz inmate Marta, prompting her to confront their relationship in the concentration camp.

The opera is based on a novel by Zofia Posmysz, a former Ausch­witz inmate, and each of the cast of prisoners is named after an inmate at the time she was there.

Weinberg’s music is exceptionally powerful, highly percussive, often with thin long lines rather than sombre dirges and singers are given some strong passages and melodies, notably Giselle Allen as Marta.

Although it’s an opera about Auschwitz, it pays homage to the human spirit and emerges as life-affirming amid the death camp.

It’s to be seen by anyone concerned with the Holocaust tragedy and by anyone concerned with the condition of the modern opera.

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