The Prisoner ★★★★
Fidelio Act II ★★★★
Brundibar ★★★★★
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff

THE COMBINATION of two operas set in prison by Luigi Dallapiccola and Beethoven marked another remarkable staging post in Welsh National Opera’s Rhyddid (Freedom) season, which culminated in a hugely powerful production of Brundibar, set in a concentration camp.

Dallapiccola’s The Prisoner is a moving portrayal of the mind games endured by a terrified and traumatised inmate at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, with Lester Lynch as the unnamed prisoner believing that Peter Hoare’s gaoler will let him go after addressing him as “brother” and leaving his cell door open.

Lynch sings movingly of his hope for release as he traverses the jail to freedom. But, in an awful moment when he believes he has reached freedom, Hoare reappears — this time in his true guise as the Grand Inquisitor. It’s the ultimate torture in quashing the hope building in the prisoner.

The musical genius of Beethoven rings out after the interval in the staging of Act II of Fidelio.

Lynch again stars but this time, in a role reversal, he appears as the evil prison governor Don Pizarro, who’s illegally imprisoned his political enemy Don Florestan, sung beautifully by Gwyn Hughes Jones.

Emma Bell is fantastically intense as Florestan’s wife Leonore, who has disguised herself as a man to work in the prison to save her husband from death.

It’s a stunning double bill and a thoughtful counterpart to Dead Man Walking, another prison opera earlier in the Rhyddid season.

It’s given a fitting and emotional end with Brundibar, a children’s opera composed by Hans Krasa, which was famously performed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp for the Red Cross towards the end of WWII.

In director David Pountney’s moving production, the children — played by members of the WNO Youth Opera —are herded into the auditorium by a whistle-blowing guard after the audience are handed yellow sashes to wear and the tension and horror are palpable.

Alfie Jones as Pepicek and Manon Thomas as Aninku are wonderful as the brother and sister trying to raise money to buy milk for their ill mother, with their attempts to sing in the public square thwarted by the wicked organ-grinder Brundibar (Steffan Lloyd Owen). The cast, largely children, sing and act beautifully as they combine together against him.

The staging is modelled on the concentration camp production and places the musicians at the heart of the action. The opera was filmed for nazi propaganda and the participants in the Theresienstadt production were herded into cattle trucks and sent to Auschwitz as soon as filming was finished.

Most were gassed immediately upon arrival, including the children, the composer, director Kurt Gerron and the musicians.

In two moving and harrowing speeches following the performance we learned that WNO composer Tomas Hanus’s mother performed in the opera’s chorus and survived because of an administrative error.

That banal escape saved her from the trip to Auschwitz and meant that Hanus was given life and his own children filed onto the stage to help sing a reprise of the opera’s final chorus.

In a final poignant moment, 90-year-old Ellen Davis spoke of being saved from the Holocaust in 1939 when she was sent to Britain as a 10-year-old as part of the Kindertransport.

Visibly emotional, she spoke of the death of her six siblings and mother who were left behind and, speaking about how such horrors are being repeated, she broke down as she exhorted the audience not to allow such things to happen again.