A performance of this came in the middle of my wonderful pre-holiday music feast (I’ll try and write up the concerts & recital before the New Year).  As I wrote earlier, I’d never seen it before and, as Ron predicted, it was a bit of a treat.  Ingo Metzmacher and the Nederlands Philharmonisch certainly do the music the justice as far as I’m concerned.  The music itself came perilously close to Lehar-type syrupiness but, I think, stayed just the right side.  I was very impressed with the singing of Juanita Lascarro in the title role; I won’t comment on the acting because the plot is pretty bonkers – I was warned about this on the other thread, too.  Unfortunately one of the other leads, Scott MacAllister as Apollo, was pretty poor.  Maybe he was having an off day but it seemed to me he missed almost all the high notes; and my companion noticed it too.  The other slightly annoying thing was the ending.  The transformation of Daphne into a tree was actually handled quite well but it was mixed, for no reason I can fathom, with images from the Third Reich culminating in a photograph of the composer.  I know the opera was premiered during the Third Reich and that the Nazis had some mad mystical obsession with nature; but this ending just suggested to me that the director had run out of ideas.

The overall verdict though, is that it was well worth going.  The Nederlandse Opera, with people like Metzmacher, Haenchen and even, occasionally, Jansons in the pit is consistently good value for money.  There’s one more performance of ‘Daphne’ if anyone’s in Amsterdam on Saturday though according to operabase Ms Lascarro is not singing.