Midsummer Marriage at the Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for Tippett's Midsummer Marriage. Lyrically daft, musically brilliant. Not quite as bad as Robert Thicknesse, The Times, would have you believe: yes, at little short of four hours it is a "story going nowhere very, very slowly", and the chorus do indeed look like they are on a "middle-aged Hampstead Heath community picnic", but it is hard to see how it could have broken out of the straight-jacket of Tippett's libretto. All that Jung-meets-Eliot filtered through a Powell and Pressburger sensibility is tiresome and dated (as preposterous as a tweed clad Prince Charles quoting Laurens van der Post), and at times you wished they were singing in German (at least it might then have sounded profound), but surely this work is worthy of a revival in that it connects us to an age when post-war English art was manfully struggling to fuse it's English idyll romanticism to a modernist style. Tom Service veers too far in the opposite direction in The Guardian, giving little more than a summary of the opera.