Even the keenest operatic twitchers rarely have Fauré's lyric drama on their life lists; before the Guildhall School's absorbing new production it had only been seen in London once before, at the Royal Academy of Music in 1970. Why a work that is, quite simply, a masterpiece of the first order has been ignored by professional opera companies in this country is a total mystery. This year English National Opera has squandered precious resources on Mephistopheles and The Carmelites, neither of which can be taken seriously on any level; in the same period the GSMD has come up with invaluable stagings of Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki and now Pénélope - there's a lesson here for somebody surely.
This is late Fauré, composed between 1907 and 1912, and like all his late music elusive and potently suggestive. The libretto by René Fauchois treats the story of Ulysses' return to his long suffering wife with economy and directness, and the setting is equally direct and unfussy, yet underpinned by a wealth of carefully interwoven instrumental lines of chamber-like transparency.
The influence of Pelléas et Mélisande on the delicately inflected vocal lines, which often hover ambiguously between speech and song, is obvious, and the occasional echoes of Wagner - in the sombre opening prelude, in the use of leitmotifs to represent the protagonists and important symbols like the shroud that Penelope is leaving and Ulysses' bow - seem to have been filtered through Debussy too. But Fauré's harmonic ambiguities are underpinned by classicism. The music has its own understated grandeur and compacted emotional intensity; every phrase is charged with meaning, and the final reconciliation between husband and wife is perfectly judged.
This immensely thoughtful Guildhall production by Daniel Slater (who was responsible for Opera North's much praised Bartered Bride earlier this season) updates the action to the German occupation of Greece in the second world war. Pénélope's suitors are Nazi officers; the shepherds whom Ulysses mobilises to overcome them are resistance fighters. It works su perbly with a gilded statue of the hero in Giles Cadle's set providing the link to the Homeric past, symbolising Pénélope's unflinching belief that her husband will return.
It is not an easy opera to perform - Fauré has no truck with conventional set pieces that singers can get their teeth into - yet all the allusiveness is beautifully caught in Clive Timms' conducting, and by all the principals. The mezzo Catherine Hegarty shoulders the responsibility of the title role with smoothly phrased effectiveness; Lorenzo Caróla's Ulysses captures the character's mixture of ruthlessness and lyrical ardour.
There are strongly sung performances from Stephan Loges as the shepherd Eumée (blind in this production), Christian Immler as the leader of the suitors Eurymaque, and Howard Kirk as his sidekick Antinous, while Katija Dragojevic is outstanding in the small role of the servant Cléone. The whole show is compulsory. There are further performances tomorrow and Friday; catch one if you can.
