Sullivan: Ivanhoe

Sullivan’s great romantic opera Ivanhoe is generally thought of as a failure, and yet it ran for 155 consecutive performances when it opened in 1891, launching D’Oyly Carte’s first Royal English Opera season. The demise of Carte’s ambitious venture in only its second season seems to have irrevocably tainted Ivanhoe, to the extent that this release marks its first recording by top-notch, fully professional forces.

Sir Walter Scott’s tale is a good story, and Julian Sturgis’s libretto makes the most of it, employing nine scenes across three acts and numerous characters, all of whom are key to the story. Although Ivanhoe is without doubt the central character (sung here by tenor Toby Spence, an ideal protagonist), it is really an ensemble piece. The whole experience is very far from the world of Gilbert & Sullivan; there’s no sign of Gilbert’s strong versification and rhythms in Sturgis’s much freer vocal lines, and I would defy any listener to find more than a few minutes of music that bore much resemblance to Sullivan’s operetta style.

Sullivan had a clear vision of an English operatic language as being a compromise between the French, Italian and German schools, emphasising commonsense virtues and genuine, unforced emotion. He sets the libretto in a very naturalistic way, his music possessing a sweeping warmth and sincerity, always colourful, by turn dramatic, tender, majestic and sweetly moving.

Janice Watson’s assured Rowena (Ivanhoe’s true love) is possibly outshone by Bernadette Greevy’s Rebecca, one of the opera’s most interesting roles, while Catherine Wyn-Rogers sings Ulrica’s music with a sinister intensity. The numerous male parts are equally well cast, Neal Davies’s suavely humane King Richard providing a good foil for Matthew Brook’s robust Friar Tuck, while James Rutherford portrays the power-hungry and lustful Commander of the Knights Templar as a believable albeit flawed character. The voices are fairly easy to distinguish from each other, so that the various sub-plots within the opera are straightforward to follow.

The result is three hours of highly enjoyable music-making, conductor David Lloyd-Jones steering his forces with sympathy and enthusiasm. The late Richard Hickox instigated this Chandos project, and he would surely have been delighted to know that it has come to such a happy fruition.