Review: Vancouver Opera closes out season with ‘verve and vigour’ with The Flying Dutchman

Over many decades, the works of Richard Wagner have held little interest for Vancouver Opera.

A spiffy production of The Flying Dutchman, which opened a three-performance run on Saturday night, might well be a harbinger of change. Certainly it closed out a season of particularly interesting repertoire with verve and vigour.

Compared to his Ring cycle and later music dramas, Dutchman is Wagner-lite. It’s very much an early indication of radical things to come, from a composer not yet willing or able to go beyond many of the operatic conventions he would soon discard.

Given Dutchman’s relatively modest scale, it’s certainly a good choice for a company with a sketchy Wagner tradition to cut its teeth on. And the VO got almost everything right.

An enlarged house orchestra, directed by Leslie Dala, grappled bravely with the intense, highly chromatic score. The men of the chorus were in fine fettle.