I missed going to Bath Opera last year, but this year they won out over the concurrent Bach festival and I caught their production of Gounod’s Faust. This once-popular opera is now a relative rarity. It’s a long work, even without the ballet interlude. It was performed in English but with the originally spoken lines set to music.
I shouldn’t really find fault with Gounod because he didn’t do as good a job as Berlioz with this story. (Bath Opera did in fact tackle Berlioz three years ago.) Bath Opera showed their usual skill with low-budget special effects, and this time the projects on the backdrop worked smoothly. The chorus had much to do and handled their various roles and dispositions around the stage (and auditorium!) with aplomb.
In my copy of Kobbé there are two photographs of great singers playing Mephistopheles. To judge by them, you wouldn’t trust Chaliapin to tell you the time of day, while Pol Plançon looks like a much more seductive Prince of Darkness. John DesLauriers leaned towards the latter approach. (As perhaps did the singer my late father-in-law encountered in the interval of a performance many years ago in New York; Mephistopheles came front-of-house and asked him for a light, evidently not having enough of the fires of hell at his command.) Robert Felstead took the title role for Bath Opera and among the other soloists I would single out Hannah Drury as Marguerite.
The raffle at Bath Opera performances is generously stocked; no alcohol winnings this time but I didn’t leave empty-handed.