One afternoon in 1944, the composer Michael Tippett climbed a dark spiral staircase in Canterbury Cathedral to hear the pure, ethereal voice of one of the choir’s altos, Alfred Deller. As he wrote later: “In those moments the centuries rolled back. For I recognised absolutely that this was the voice for which Purcell had written.”
Tippett launched Deller’s career and with it a revival of the English baroque and the countertenor voice, lost from the operatic stage for more than 200 years. He also, perhaps unwittingly, set in train the genesis of another composer’s opera. Benjamin Britten was also an admirer of Henry Purcell and when, in 1960, he came to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream it seemed natural to follow Purcell’s example in The Fairy Queen and cast a countertenor as Oberon. Deller was the obvious choice to create a role that all leading countertenors have savoured ever since.
Glyndebourne had a difficult relationship with Britten and it wasn’t until 1981 (five years after his death) that the Dream was first staged there. Those of us lucky enough to have seen Sir Peter Hall’s production that year have never forgotten its impact. With designer John Bury, Hall took Britten’s extraordinarily evocative score and created a masterpiece that still retains its power to enchant 35 years on.
It’s looking its age a little – no director today would play it straight with Elizabethan costumes and a realistic forest – but its capacity to completely beguile the eye and the ear is undiminished. Bury’s insistence that Oberon and Tytania’s moonlit woodland had to be black and silver, not prosaic green and brown, is a device made more brilliant still by the “living” trees and bushes that sway and shiver within it. It also serves to underline that this is no leafy idyll but a place of mystery, cruelty, magic and make-believe.
Countertenor Tim Mead is following in the footsteps of James Bowman and Michael Chance as Oberon. It’s a rich, mellifluous sound, more in the rounder, warmer realm of Andreas Scholl than his predecessors. His aria I Know a Bank Where the Wild Thyme Blows, a signature moment in the opera, is a spellbinding achievement, sensuously phrased and beautifully judged. He looks magnificent in Elizabeth Bury’s costume design, a great soaring wig adding to his height so that he towers over his naughty, never-sit-still minion Puck. David Evans is a pure delight, whether turning cartwheels or flying through the air like a tiny Peter Pan, declaiming his verse like a veteran. He is joined in his impish schemes by the excellent Trinity Boys Choir, who make up Tytania’s fearless fairy band, all pointy ears and gossamer wings.
Kathleen Kim’s Tytania is steely bright and Benjamin Hulett, Elizabeth DeShong, Duncan Rock and Kate Royal are the spirited lovers, the aristocratic foil to the lumpen Mechanicals, led by the hilarious Matthew Rose as hapless, deluded Bottom. Conductor Jakub Hrůša casts a spell over the London Philharmonic in this ninth revival, directed by Lynne Hockney. Surely it can’t be its last.
• This article was amended on 15 August 2016 to correct the year in its opening line. Tippett heard Deller at Canterbury Cathedral in 1944, not 1943.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream is at Glyndebourne, East Sussex until 28 August
