The Pearl Fishers, Coliseum - opera review

If Georges Bizet hadn’t written Carmen, we would probably never hear his earlier opera, The Pearl Fishers. Carmen has a powerful plot, one of the great female roles and a torrent of great tunes; The Pearl Fishers is feeble in every department. Even its one hit — a duet for tenor and baritone — can’t hold a candle to Carmen.

In a note accompanying her 2010 English National Opera production (here receiving its first revival), director Penny Woolcock acknowledges the work’s inadequacies but she has staged it anyway. Her view of the piece sits uncomfortably between Bizet’s fantasy vision of Ceylon and the Sri Lanka we know today.

Despite her best intentions, she offers little to counter the opera’s sentimental perspective on love, religion and poverty, and she can’t do anything to make the music better than it is, although conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud, making his ENO debut, does what he can to stir things up.

The four principals are young and willing but, receiving scant dramatic support from Woolcock, they do little more than emote stiffly at one another. It didn’t help that, on this opening night, soprano Sophie Bevan was under the weather, although her voice seemed barely affected. Unfortunately the men in her life come across as cold fish. No pearls here.