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Reviews  -  Hilary Finch, The Times The NPO performed at the 2003 Battersea Opera Festival and sold out their entire run of performances. They received this 3-star review in The Times 'For a view of the future landscape of opera music theatre, the Battersea Arts Centre's May and September seasons can hardly be bettered. it's where you find the New Professionals - and specifically, this week, the New Professionals Opera, with their premiere production: Pride and Fall, a double-bill of Milhaud's The Poor Sailor and Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. This enterprising ensemble of young musicians has joined forces this time with the young director Wally Sutcliffe and taken on quite some challenge. Milhaud's miniature is really no more than a tripartite instrumental suite with voices meandering over the surface of the score. the feisty Canadian soprano Susan Gilmour Bailey, baritone Ben Davies and tenor Nicholas Mulroy nearly bus a gut trying to bring drama and character to a scenario seriously lacking in both. And, while Meridth Oakes's fine translation of Cocteau's libretto drove the story, Sutcliffe's direction did all it could to humanize and to dredge any vestige of subtextual meaning from the piece. The theme of desire and its distortions - and the fine playing of The New Professionals under the lucid and stylish baton of Rebecca Miller - unified the evening. The Milhaud, though was massively upstaged by the Stravinsky and here the burgeoning flair of Sutcliffe as director really became apparent. His direction matched the taut elastic of the libretto's rhyming couplets with a telling tension of pacing and body language. Mirand Cook was a hypnotic narrator, held in a potent line of tension with Alex Bartram's Soldier by the fractured violin of a set. And Adam Meggido's many faces of the Devil set a shillingly sub-Faustian seal on a compelling show. Hilary Finch, The Times

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