July 28, 2025 | By Clive Paget, Musical America
LONDON—Pegasus Opera Company has championed artists of global majority heritage for over 30 years now, overcoming funding hurdles with a by-hook-or-by-crook determination. The death of tireless crusader and founder Lloyd Newton left them in a financial bind, but thanks to Artistic Director Alison Buchanan’s encounter with a “handsome” (her words) New York City dentist, a raft of productions, including this double bill of operatic rarities—seen July 25 at the Britten Theatre in London’s Royal College of Music—was able to go ahead.
The dentist was Murray Rosenthal, one half of Hagemann Rosenthal Associates, a U.S.-based production company, which has won multiple Tony Awards (Red, Pippin, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime) and an Olivier for Sweeney Todd. The Hagemann of the title is veteran American composer Philip Hagemann, now 92, whose has 10 one-act operas, two full-length operas and over 75 choral pieces to his name. Bankrolling Pegasus Opera has enabled several of his works to see the light of day in the U.K., including this staging of The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, seen here alongside Ethel Smyth’s one-act “dance dream” Fête Galante.
Written in 2007, Hagemann’s opera is based on a play by George Bernard Shaw. It’s set on a midsummer night sometime in the late 16th century. A mysterious man has a planned assignation with his lover on the terrace of Whitehall Palace. Instead, he encounters a cloaked lady whose poetic turns of phrase he cannot resist scribbling down in a notebook. When his paramour eventually appears, she strikes the cloaked lady in a fit of jealousy. Horror: the woman turns out to be Queen Elizabeth I. The man is revealed to be William Shakespeare. Unceremoniously dumping his dark lady—who incidentally hates his sonnets—Will and Lizzie decide to collaborate on Twelfth Night, an idea the queen wants published under Shakespeare’s name alone.
Hagemann has done a fine fileting of Shaw’s wordy text, producing a fast-moving and witty musical drama with some nice nods to the playwright’s imaginary future and his hobbyhorse of a National Theatre (the play was written in 1910, 53 years before the Olivier-helmed state- funded company would open at London’s Old Vic). His music is fundamentally tonal, with a certain spiky, crunchiness about it at times. It’s tuneful and eminently singable, with vocal lines generally doubled within a versatile chamber orchestra of 13.
Charne Rochford as Shakespeare and Alison Buchanan as his sonnet-loathing Dark Lady
Femi Elufowoju Jr staged it in front of a gigantic translucent image of Elizabeth herself (designers were Rae Smith and William Fricker with David Howe as lighting designer). It looked good and worked well, though a little more on the costume budget might have resulted in more authentic looking period fabrics).
Like Hagemann’s opera, Smyth’s revolves around nocturnal liaisons and mistaken identities. It was the fifth of her six operas (also the only one to be commissioned), and it premiered in Birmingham under Thomas Beecham in 1923. Set in a Watteau-esque garden, a king and his queen flirt furtively with members of a commedia dell’arte troupe. The action echoes Lully and Rameau’s baroque divertissements but ends darkly when Pierrot hangs himself rather than betray the queen with whom he is secretly in love. Smyth’s music is charming and, like most of her work, immaculately crafted. It isn’t her most advanced score—the opening and closing chorus has more than a whiff of a Victorian part- song about it—but nothing outstays its welcome, which is more than can be said for much of the music being written at the time. Where it falls down, perhaps, is the slightly lumpy dramaturgy (Smyth never had the luxury of multiple productions to refine her process, but then she was never the easiest person to give advice to either).
Again, the set was simple but effective: a second backcloth, suspended lanterns, and a pair of thrones. Elufowoju moved her pieces deftly with some nifty choreography for the “puppets,” the commedia chorus who moved almost as well as they sang.
In the pit, Odaline de la Martinez, perhaps the world’s leading authority on Smyth, worked wonders with both scores. Tempi were well-judged, the orchestral blend was excellent, and singers were never overpowered. The dance music in the Smyth was especially zesty.
Ethel Smyth’s “dance dream” Fêtes Galante
It was a fine cast, notable for exemplary diction across the board (the surtitles were rendered pretty much unnecessary). Jamaican-born bass Robert Winslade Anderson was a rock-solid and resonant yeoman warder in the Hagemann, creating a genial, three-dimensional character. He was equally powerful as Smyth’s conflicted king. With her warm soprano, Buchanan made a sympathetic queen in the Smyth. Her Dark Lady was feisty, though harder to pin down as Shaw and Hagemann never really fill out her background. Charne Rochford, displaying a tenor of considerable amplitude and penetration, was dramatically engaging as the devil-may-care Shakespeare, capturing the character’s wit, wiles, and boundless ambition. Canadian mezzo-soprano Sarah Champion was the evening’s standout as Queen Elizabeth, her voice secure and wide-ranging and matched by dramatic chops that captured the Tudor monarch’s power, vulnerability, and talent for caprice.
As Pierrot in Fêtes Galante, Italian baritone Massimo Modoni’s warm, rounded voice impressed, though the character was perhaps too sketchily drawn for him to make sufficient dramatic mark. With his bright voice firing on all cylinders, South African tenor Monwabisi Lindi did what he could with Smyth’s mystery lover (the role is fleeting). Ditto French-Kabylian soprano Marie Cayeaux as a sweet-toned yet steely Columbine and beefy baritone Tom Randle as a lively Harlequin.
All photos © Sharon Wallace.
Top photo: Charne Rochford as Shakespeare and Sarah Champion as Elizabeth I
