Leeds Grand Theatre
26 September 2025
What more refreshing a way for a opera company to launch its new season than with a British work involving the next generation of singers, musicians, creative technicians and administrators as well as new audiences for opera.
Dame Judith Weir’s Secret of the Black Spider began life over 40 years ago when Kent Opera director Norman Platt commissioned a young people’s opera with Arts Council funding. Appropriately enough, it was first performed in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. Since then it has gone through many adaptations culminating in a revised and expanded version for the 2009 Staatsoper Hamburg season which was the starting point for this Leeds performance.
And yet this is no ‘children’s musical’. This was not a black box workshop performance either, it was on the main stage at the Leeds opulent Grand theatre and with all the resources available in this spectacularly restored venue.
This is a captivating and bizarre work with two plots intertwining and merging from different time zones and locations: A Polish legend from the Middle Ages, adapted in the gothic 1842 novella Die Schwarze Spinne by Swiss writer Jeremias Gotthelf, and a contemporary newspaper article about archeologists opening a tomb in Kraków’s Wawel Cathedral. When developing this plot involving a plague of infectious spiders even Weir had second thoughts telling us that she feared that ‘this story is too crazy, even for an opera’.
Yet this is the real deal when it comes to opera combining mystery, history, science, horror and comedy. In fact, in a discussion with the Opera North’s music director, Garry Walker before the show, Weir described the opera’s tone as ‘somewhere between a video nasty and an Ealing Comedy’.
The 48-strong Opera North Youth Company performed with tremendous conviction alongside professional Opera North singers: New Zealand born soprano Pasquale Orchard as villager Christina, who makes a pact with a mysterious Green Man, and Ross Ramgobin as the dastardly Count Heinrich. And underlining everything the Opera North Youth Orchestra drove Weir’s brilliant musical narrative forward effortlessly under their conductor Nicholas Shaw. Visually the atmospheric set with its vast and menacing grey mountain peaks of cobwebs by Zara Mansouri was magnificent, and the imaginative and animated direction of Rosie Kat drove the narrative forward with bold energy and captivating imagery.
This production marks the start of the first season programmed by the company’s General Director Laura Canning with their mission statement of ‘Making Opera Vital’. Together with many new faces on the senior team, Opera North seem to be making a big impact across the region with some powerful new collaborations and productions alongside works from the standard repertoire.
I particularly look forward to their production of Britten’s Peter Grimes touring to five venues across the region in February and March 2026.
Review by Nicholas Keyworth