Blond Eckbert review – Judith Weir’s bare-bones opera kicks off Aldeburgh festival

Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh
Despite excellent performances from the singers and chamber ensemble, this stripped-back version of the folkloric opera failed to convey the horror of its story

A month after her 70th birthday, Judith Weir is one of the featured composers at this year’s Aldeburgh festival, which opened with a single performance of English Touring Opera’s new staging of her third opera, Blond Eckbert. For those who remembered the premiere at English National Opera in 1994, it must have seemed a distinctly different work, for this was the “pocket version” of Blond Eckbert, first performed in 2006. The cast of four was unchanged, but the scoring has been scaled down from full orchestra to an ensemble of just 10 players, and the work itself shortened; the Snape Maltings performance lasted barely 55 minutes.

Weir’s libretto has plenty of authentically operatic ingredients – there’s murder and incest, paranoia and insanity. Based on a novella by the German romantic writer Ludwig Tieck, it’s the tale of Eckbert, whose secluded idyll with his wife, Berthe, in the Harz mountains of northern Germany ends in tragedy when his friend Walter reveals he knows much more about Berthe’s childhood than he should, and finally reveals a monstrous secret.