Ivan the Terrible gets a modern makeover at Grange Park Opera

In taking on Rimsky-Korsakov’s first opera, little Grange Park Opera has set itself a challenge that would tax even the grandest company. This Verdian tale of a brutal and brooding Tsar who is dissuaded from exacting revenge on a rebellious city because an old affair of the heart comes back to haunt him, is huge in scale. It’s the kind of opera that absolutely cries out for a traditionally spectacular production of icons, onion-domed churches and imperial pageantry, interspersed with maidens singing Rimsky’s decorously pretty songs and listening in mock terror to a folk tale told by a babushka.

At Grange Park, we do get some (very small) icons in a procession, winsome maidens in turquoise dresses, and even a babushka, sung with wonderfully fruity Russian vowels by Liubov Sokolova. But, apart from that, this production rigorously eschews the picturesque. Francis O’Connor’s design is predominantly grey, with suggestions of Russia’s vast birch forests merging with a pitilessly austere wooden fa?ade of doors and staircases leading to balconies. This does duty for the courtyard of the noble house in Pskov, where the opera’s heroine Olga (the superb Evelina Dobracheva) overhears her father attempting to marry her off to an elderly boyar, and also confessing that Olga’s true father is unknown. Later, when this family drama is overshadowed by the threatening approach of Ivan and his army, the set is deftly transformed into a public square where the rebel leader Tucha (who’s in love with Olga, of course) delivers his stirring speech to the populace.

Director David Pountney wants to connect the ruthless Ivan with a long tradition of Russian autocrats. He achieves this in the evening’s most startling dramatic stroke, when Ivan makes his long-delayed appearance almost half-way into the opera. By now we’re used to age-old Russian cloaks and head-scarves, and it’s a shock to see him appear as a 20th-century dictator, with Olga’s disappointed elderly suitor now transformed into a sinister black-suited Soviet apparatchik.

Musically the evening is strong, with The Gascoigne Orchestra under Mikhail Tatarnikov handling Rimsky’s subtly patterned score with telling rhythmic flexibility. The terrific chorus of around 20 makes enough noise for 60. Things get off to a stirringly emotional start in the Prologue, set 20 years earlier, in which Olga’s mother (Dobracheva, again) confesses to her sister Nadezhda (Amy Sedgwick) that the Tsar is Olga’s actual father. In the scenes where Olga and Tucha declare their mutual love the temperature dips somewhat, partly because Rimsky’s folk-inflected, realist style doesn’t do mad Wagnerian passion very well, but also because Carl Tanner as Tucha isn’t so strong vocally.

In general, the women far outshine the men, with one exception: Clive Bayley as Ivan. This isn’t because Bayley charms vocally – in fact he sings notably flat at several points. But the voice is so bullying in its grainy heaviness, his cynical, watchful manner and sudden violent explosions so dominating of the kneeling, terrified crowd around him, that it hardly matters. Towards the end, when his heart is softened by Olga’s pleadings, his twitching hands tell us he won’t be softened for long. At the tragic conclusion, after Olga has been accidentally killed, you can see him deciding to forswear all human feeling – just as Stalin did, after his first wife’s death. It’s a moment of searing emotional truth, for which everything else has prepared us.

Limited tickets for Ivan the Terrible on 28 June, 4, 10, 14 July available at grangeparkopera.co.uk