It's typical of the enterprise of the Guildhall School's opera department that its latest production, a triple bill, should include a British premiere and a work that has rarely, if ever, been seen on stage before.
Debussy's "lyric scene" L'Enfant Prodigue - a fascinating score that reveals both where his music came from and where it was heading - wasn't intended for the opera house at all: it was the piece that won the composer the Prix de Rome in 1884, while he was studying with Massenet. Here though it is staged, with a good deal of conviction, alongside two of his teacher's one-acters.
Massenet's Le Portrait de Manon was designed in 1894 as a sequel to his most famous opera, and has never been seen in Britain before. The plot is thin and contrived: the now mature Des Grieux continues to hark back remorsefully to his affair with Manon, and the tragedy of her death, until he manages to exorcise her memory thanks to his nephew Jean and the woman he wants to marry, Aurore, who reminds Des Grieux inescapably of Manon. If it's an excuse for a trawl through some of the famous themes of the earlier opera, it does so pleasantly and undemandingly enough.
La Navarraise, though, could hardly be more different. It was Massenet's shot at doing verismo, composed in 1901 in the wake of the success of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, and he shows that he can do it just as lustily and loudly as any of his Italian contemporaries.
The story is set in a Basque village on the frontline of the Carlist war in Spain in the 1870s; there is plenty of military action, some lively local colour and a strong central love interest in the romance between Anita, the girl from Navarre of the title, and Araquil, a sergeant in the Royalist forces - hot-blooded, and surreptitiously enjoyable stuff.
Stephen Langridge's Guildhall production (in Jessica Curtis's sets and conducted by Clive Timms) sensibly treats each work on its own merits, so that the Debussy is given an almost ritualised Middle-Eastern setting, while Le Portrait de Manon is presented naturalistically and La Navarraise in a suitably noisy and robust way. There are fine performances in all three, especially from Natasha Jouhl as the mother Lia in L'Enfant Prodigue, and from the sturdy tenor Andrew Rees and the gleaming-toned soprano Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, as the central pair of lovers in La Navarraise.
Further performances tonight and Friday. Box office: 020-7628 2571.
