As with the Queen's speech and endless repeats of the Sound of Music, Christmas would not be Christmas without Gian Carlo Menotti's one-act opera about the Three Kings' unscheduled stopover at the home of a crippled shepherd boy. Amahl and the Night Visitors was the first opera specifically composed for television, and for many people it evokes not only nostalgia for childhood Christmases, but their first ever encounter with the operatic form.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of that initial Christmas Eve broadcast and the 90th birthday of Menotti himself. There was a remarkable sense of occasion for this lavish and loving reappraisal by the composer's most passionate current advocate, conductor Richard Hickox. The concert performance by the Northern Sinfonia formed the climax of a 90th birthday tribute, given with the composer in attendance.
There are certain opera composers - Massenet, for example - whose work can glutinise into pure syrup if sloppily treated, yet prove sufficiently appetising given a conductor with a genuinely sweet tooth. Hickox's great qualification for interpreting Amahl is that he performs the work with an unaffected honesty that unleashes its simple, sentimental power. It is fashionable to dismiss Menotti as the purveyor of the emotionally manipulative and harmonically obvious. It is also deeply unfair, as a performance of this calibre makes clear. The cumulative power of the central number, Have You Seen a Child?, which builds from limpid solo to full-blown quartet, provides a magical, operatic moment. Menotti has always stipulated that the title role be taken by a boy treble, and here 12-year-old Pablo Strong proved to be a revelation. Not only is his voice flexible and focused, he has a natural acting talent to support it.
Jean Rigby was superb as Amahl's mother, the work's most vocally taxing and morally complex role. Roderick Williams and Matthew Best displayed great gravitas as the kings. Christmas being the season of sore throats, Robert Tear had to cancel - but Martyn Hill stepped in to make a magnificent last-minute substitute as Kaspar.
