Hansel & Gretel at the Royal Opera House --- jetzt neu mit Hexentitz !!!

Hänsel & Gretel - Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 9 December 2008 (opening night)

Most of the 'new' productions at Covent Garden this year have been borrowed from places like Munich and Salzburg. Leiser and Caurier's Hänsel und Gretel is one of the few to be produced in-house. What's more it's about to be shown nationwide in cinemas, and even on Xmas telly. So it's not just a show. It's a mission statement, temperature gauge, and table of fare. All important these days when the Royal Opera House is scrabbling for a shrinking funding pool, not to mention bums on seats.

Leiser and Caurier are a safe-(ish) pair of hands. You know you're not going to get impenetrable intellectualism, half-dressed Nazis or criminal haberdashery abuse. Their ROH Turco, Cenerentola and Barbiere, were, by general consensus, 'fun', if not downright adorable. Their Zurich Clari a few months back was brilliant. Well I thought so anyway.

The first half was packed with sweet childlike touches - a Mogwai Sandman (actually, that one freaked me out just a tiny bit), a Princess Barbie Dew Fairy, fluffy squirrel-headed angels with light-up wings hanging from the ceiling. (Probably some people will want to stick their fingers down their throat just reading that. This production is not for you, dear grouches.) So far, so cute.

The biggest surprise came in the second half. The last thing I expected to see here - or indeed anywhere - was Anja Silja, legendary Wagnerina and grandmama, entering with - gasp - !!! her bewbs out !!! At Covent Garden! A closer look revealed - heart attack over - they were merely comedy t1ts of the stag party strap-on variety (or a posh ROH makeup dept version anyway). It was naught but a flash, and it was over in moments. She swiftly rebuttoned her open cardie.

But it was just the shocking start the third act needed to jolt us from the comforting world of sweet dreams and gingerbread houses into her witch's horror chamber of dead children hung from meat hooks and baked in giant ovens.

It's still a fairytale and it's still fun and the nastiness has a comfortingly cartoonish quality. But where the first act glossed over the children's hunger and their mother's neglect (if you're in the market for psychodrama, don't shop at Leiser and Caurier) this part of the production reminded us firmly that Bad Things can happen.

So the production was uneven, but the casting was perfection and the performances superb. In the title roles, Angelika Kirchschlager and Diana Damrau channelled their respective inner children so effectively that they were still larking around like eight year olds long after the final curtain had dropped.

The ingenious first half set - a teeny wonky-walled bedroom inside a huge tree-scene box - gave them plenty of reverberent surfaces and their voices projected powerfully through the auditorium.

Diana Damrau took a while to settle vocally, but both found themselves in the best part of their ranges and played off each other instinctively, relishing the words and enunciating them with a truly childish glee (a shame though that the surtitles entertained some inappropriate modernisms in translation).

Elizabeth Connell and Thomas Allen as their parents struck just the right balance between fecklessness and heartfelt concern, and made the most of what could be a thankless first act duet with some wonderful physical comedy.

The Sandman of Pumeza Matshikiza and Dew Fairy of Anita Watson were charming, but neither could avoid the odd scratchy note. Nerves? Both are well cast and should improve as the run goes on.

But Anja Silja was the star of the show. The voice is not the most accurate or the most beautiful, though in darn good shape for someone who's been singing professionally for fifty years. Her witch has a panto look, but a disturbingly authentic menace. I know the opera, I know the story, but as with all great actors, I never quite knew what Silja was going to do next.

Or was Sir Colin Davis the star of the show? He drew a wonderful performance from the orchestra, somewhat stately in pace, but deliciously nuanced. Some people think Hänsel und Gretel is just a cute children's opera; for Sir Colin it's a gateway drug to Tristan und Isolde. The score may not have Wagnerian heft, but it has a driving narrative thrust and glimpes of real harmonic invention. Sir Colin whipped up the drama where needed - the terrifying explosion of the witch's kitchen brilliantly handled - but the gentle lyricism of the dream scene, or the bouncing mock-Viennese waltzes rang just as true. If there was magic in the air, it was all in the pit. Can Robin Ticciati and the second cast match up?