Star tenors or stratospheric sopranos usually steal the operatic show. This week two exemplary performances, by a bass-baritone and a baritone, both in their forties and at the peak of their careers, brought lustre to a pair of high-profile openings: Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer at the Royal Opera House and John Adams's Doctor Atomic at English National Opera.
Having found himself negotiating sharks when he pulled out of the Ring, Bryn Terfel stormed back victoriously to Covent Garden as the tormented Dutch sea captain, condemned to sail the high seas until saved by the proverbial love of a good woman, in his case the neurotic, half-crazed, wildly obsessive Senta, a thoroughly good match.
However perpetual the doom of the Dutchman - a Nordic version of the Wandering Jew - this was redemption indeed for Terfel, were any required. Drawing on the formidable range of vocal colours which single him out, he conjured a harrowing, subtle performance, physically conveying a forlorn bewilderment which made his character all the more poignant.
This was especially chilling when he encounters the wife he had "dreamed of through eternities of dread". The music, so turbulent for much of the time, silvers and gleams with rare stillness, horns throbbing a gentle pulse until the orchestra swells up again. It was as if Terfel's dumbstruck Dutchman had to learn to speak, so foreign was the language of love or hope.
He first sang the role with WNO in 2006, when he implied he was less than enamoured of the outer space setting. In contrast, this new staging, directed by Tim Albery and designed by Michael Levine, was becalmed on what might have been a cross-Channel ferry, complete with nylon-clad boozers and their peroxide chavettes below deck.
Wagner asks for a steep, rocky shore with sea occupying most of the stage. Sensibly, his fussy, naturalistic instructions tend to be jettisoned, yet they offer a good starting point which Levine may or may not have observed. As the tempestuous overture struck up, a silky sheet-curtain wibbled with racing shadows to suggest waves. The visual rhythms ran counter to the queasy stop-start musical interpretation - even the staunch ROH brass and woodwind sounded adrift - under the baton of Marc Albrecht making a tentative house debut.
Be poetic, be literal, be both at once, but be consistent. The set was a steep rake, or maybe rock, deck or dock, with six searchlights suspended like gleaming saucepans. Ropes pointed up, which, nautically speaking, should surely have been pulling down unless the ship was moored to a tall building offstage. In a visual coup, the girls' spinning chorus turned into a sweatshop "The Sewing Machine" song (see The Perils of Pauline, 1947). Senta nursed a toy ship which she fell upon at the end, perhaps plunging into the brine, or stranded high and dry, but leaving the rest of us at sea in a gust of metaphor.
The orchestra whipped up many thrilling moments. How could this score, Wagner's first mature opera, fail to? Anja Kampe's Senta - nervy, intense, powerful in high fortissimo passages, tenderly inflected and sinuously acted - was outstanding, an exciting prelude to her Isolde at Glyndebourne this season. But the night belonged to Terfel.
