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Sondheim's Sweeney Todd has always been hard to categorise: is it a musical with ideas above its station, or an opera manqué? Here, expertly played by the London Philharmonic on a night off from Glyndebourne, and with Bryn Terfel singing the vengeful barber, the music side is well served; it is the dramatic presentation that has the identity crisis.
It is billed as a dramatised concert but, directed by David Freeman, the work is more fully staged than you'd expect. At the same time, this makes for a context in which some episodes of that staging are glaringly inadequate: Maria Friedman scrambling offstage into a red glow hardly conveys the grisliness of the end of Mrs Lovett, thrown to roast in her own oven.
Terfel, a veteran of the Chicago Lyric Opera's production, is the big draw; his Sweeney has a wandering transatlantic accent, but a consistently sinister and aptly aggressive edge, especially when smiling. He ought to sing everyone else off the stage, and just about does, despite a sound system that tends to flatten out the voices and Sondheim's crucial text in favour of Stephen Barlow's orchestra. Terfel and Friedman's cheerily amoral Mrs Lovett are well supported by Adrian Thompson, Terfel's only opera- house colleague in the cast, as the cod-Italian Pirelli, and Philip Quast's suave Judge Turpin.
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