DORSET Opera Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and the company, led by artistic director Roderick Kennedy, decided not only to commission an opera to celebrate the golden jubilee, but for this new work to be a truly Dorset production. So composer Paul Carr was asked to create an opera based on Thomas Hardy’s first full-length – and sunniest – novel, Under The Greenwood Tree.

With its story based in the fictional village of Mellstock, where a new vicar plans to replace the old West Gallery quire of singers and musicians with a new harmonium, it even has an appropriately musical theme. And with the tangled love quadrangle of pretty new school-teacher Fancy Day, villager Dick Dewy, the Rev Maybold and the wealthy Farmer Shiner, it has all the ingredients you could want for a delightful entertainment.

And it is charming – telling the story of the clash of tradition with new ideas, beautifully sung, with wonderful sets (the most ambitious Dorset Opera has ever had, with a complete Dorset village built on and around a revolve, used to great effect) and a terrific cast who all act as well as they sing.

The libretto by Euan Tait is described as “After Thomas Hardy” and it does take a few liberties with the original novel but the overall shape of the story is there – with Fancy finally acknowledging her true love of Dick, and her other suitors more or less gracefully accepting the situation.

Paul Carr, who also directs the production, captures the special atmosphere of this rustic romance, with the humorous thread of the Mellstock Quire and their staunch defence of their traditional singing and music. The villagers – sung by the never-better Dorset Opera chorus – are kindly observers of the tangled love affairs and of the ultimately doomed efforts to save the Quire, but all ends happily with dancing, cider and Dick and Fancy married.

There must surely have been a temptation for the composer to draw on the West Gallery tradition – which is so well maintained by Dorset folk musician, historian and singer Tim Laycock, with Phil Humphries of The Mellstock Band and the Ridgeway Singers and Band. But Paul Carr has, probably rightly, avoided this and has instead created an opera with melodious music, tuneful arias and songs, and excellent choruses (the Summer Storm is particularly strong).

There is an outstanding second-act trio in which Dick Dewy (Felix Kemp), Rev Maybold (Thomas Humphreys) and Farmer Shiner (Ossian Huskinson) – three baritones (Humphreys is a bass-baritone) – explore their different feelings about Fancy and their situation, weaving their contrasting characters with musical lines in a pattern that is sinuously passionate.

Jamie Groote brilliantly captures the slightly elusive character of Fancy Day – she is at times skittish, almost flirtatious, occasionally decisive, then shy, frightened of the passions she has unleashed and unsure how the attentions of these men will be seen by the villagers who have so warmly welcomed her as the new school-teacher. She is undeniably drawn to Dick, but flattered by Shiner and then shocked by Maybold.

Many people think that Thomas Hardy’s novels are unrelieved gloom – and certainly Jude the Obscure is a grim story – but Dorset’s greatest writer knew the people he grew up with, he knew and loved the West Gallery quires, he saw the impact of the church organs that made the old bands redundant, and he understood the pressure on a pretty girl to marry as well as she could and the struggles of poor farm workers who had no support beyond their physical skill and strength.

This is a joyful retelling of a much-loved story and a fine way for Dorset Opera to celebrate both its golden anniversary and its roots.

FC

Photographs by Julian Guidera