Elizabeth and Essex

RODERIC DUNNETT on Phyllida Lloyd's Gloriana for BBC TV

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True, you'd think some of the fanfaring (superb Opera North brass) might have given Miklos Rozsa cunning ideas for Ben Hur; and some of Britten's more grandiose moments sound strikingly close in genre to Vaughan Williams's The Pilgrim's Progress, originally started as early as 1906, which foundered - equally unfairly - at Covent Garden two years earlier.

Others strove to restore Gloriana to its glory even before this production : most notably, Sir Charles Mackerras in his ground-breaking recording on Argo, buoyed up by the outstanding Welsh National Opera Chorus, Philip Langridge as an inspired Essex and John Shirley-Quirk in full voice as the Recorder of Norwich, and Barstow once again as Elizabeth I.

Dame Josephine Barstow as Queen Elizabeth I. Photo: Stephen Vaughan

Powdered, Barstow, like Edith Evans or Eileen Atkins before her, all but becomes the Queen : she has the authority (her public persona, quite apart from her vocal cutting edge, is awesome; she commands the stage every second she shuffles, or rides shoulder high, onto it; her range of facial expression - whether ranting or cooing, beaming, frolicsome, inscrutable, grim, tight-lipped - seems limitless; her rage against Lady Essex is devastating); and all the vulnerability (the woman behind the mask - 'I'm still a woman, though I be a Queen' is profoundly tragic : a last-act Marschallin-cum-Philip II, with the cutting voice of Dyer's wife.

The private encounter and ensuing duet between Elizabeth and Essex (the superbly on-form Thomas Randle) is profoundly touching : not only because Britten summons up Elizabethan parody of an enchantment to outdo even his own mesmerising fairy music from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or the nocturne from Lucretia, but surely because Randle and Barstow have worked together more than once for Opera North (in Medea, for instance) : the intimacy is marked, partly because some of her acting gift has rubbed off on him, partly because, thanks largely to Opera North, Randle has been emerging as a significant operatic presence, as well as voice, in his own right.

Josephine Barstow as Queen Elizabeth I
and Thomas Randle as The Earl of Essex.
Photo: Stephen Vaughan

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