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                                           BLAZE OF GLORY

                                           Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff *****

 

Put quite simply, this is one of the most infectious, life-enhancing shows I have ever seen in nearly 60 years of reviewing, and I urge you not to miss it.

The context is grim. This is 1953, and a mining community is faced with the imminent closure of its pit. So what do they do to raise morale? They form a male voice choir, and go from strength to strength, the whole tale underpinned by David Hackbridge Johnson’s amazing, eclectic score with a witty, allusive, brilliantly-constructed libretto by Emma Jenkins.

This is a creation more than worthy to go alongside similar concepts: Brassed Off, Calendar Girls, The Full Monty, The Choral, and certainly deserves to be proclaimed in the cinema. Director Caroline Clegg choreographs vividly expressive movement (and this is a largely chorus-based opera) over Madeleine Boyd’s symbolic sets (static pit-wheels, genteel taprooms, Eisteddfod tea-marquees), all the while creating a setting for heartwarmingly engaged performances from the cast, many of them from the remarkable WNO Chorus but with character names too difficult to identify.

James Southall conducts the excellent WNO Orchestra and company through this exhilarating panoply of music of the period, ragtime, jazz, lindy-hop, all kinds of syncopation, and influences of Kurt Weill, Poulenc, Stravinsky and Bernstein. We have a trio replicating the Andrews Sisters, commenting in close harmony like a Greek chorus, and we have wonderful choral singing, not just from the superb WNO Chorus, but also from a more than excellent male voice choir (uncredited in the programme) who had entertained us pre-show in the foyer singing songs from the shows, and who now ranged down both aisles in the auditorium raising neck-hairs and goose-bumps in great Welsh anthems.

Some of the soloists are identifiable: Mark Llewellyn Evans vibrant and vivid as the curmudgeonly, unpredictable adjudicator Caradog Probert, Feargal Hylton engagingly embarrassed as the bearded alto Bryn Bevan who proves to be the Bethesda Gleemen’s star attraction, and Themba Mvula as Anthony, an endearing role replicating the compassionate relationship with the Welsh miners by Paul Robeson (whose voice addressing those communities we actually hear in this production).

And the two principals are outstanding: Jeffery Lloyd Roberts engaging our sympathy as the reluctant choirmaster Mr Daffyd Pugh (the honorifics were important in Welsh society in those days), growing in confidence and strength, and finally succumbing to the organising, energising strength of the formidable but available Miss Nerys Price, an absolutely triumphant assumption by the experienced Rebecca Evans, here adding another comic string to her already well -loaded bow.

Christopher Morley

*At Birmingham Hippodrome May 8

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