A Village Romeo and Juliet, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Opera, review I've tried hard with Delius, I really have. I loved Ken Russell's television film about his dotage. I've sat through his operas Fennimore and Gerda and Koanga. I've listened to Sea Drift in a darkened room smoking a Balkan Sobranie. But alas, nothing floats my boat. Whenever I hear his music, up rises the ghastly memory of a slurpy farty soup that appeared at school on Tuesdays full of indeterminate grey vegetable mush and devoid of nutritional value. I tried yet again with this concert performance of A Village Romeo and Juliet, composed at the turn of the last century and famous for its orchestral interlude "The Walk to the Paradise Garden." No change to report. Based on a story by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, it tells the broadly Shakespearean story of two young lovers whose peasant families are locked in a feud over land. Hot-headed Sali lands Vreli's father a killer blow during a row, forcing them to flee and form a suicide pact. The shadowy figure of the Dark Fiddler plays a sinister choric role, urging the lovers on to pastures new. It's hokey late Romantic doom-laden stuff, but the problem isn't Delius" libretto so much as a score which seems to swirl about in a state of vague yet intense rapture, unrelated to what T.S. Eliot called an "objective correlative" - in other words, a discernible dramatic or psychological motive. Nothing has any corner or edge, and there's no trajectory: the level of emotion is the same at the end as it is at the beginning. There is some richly textured and highly chromatic orchestral writing in the last two scenes, but much else seems to me to be ground out of the claggy textures of my school gruel. I now meekly await brickbats and excoriation from Delius" many impassioned admirers. The New London Orchestra played with due fervour under Ronald Corp, but the Queen Elizabeth Hall does not have an auditorium that takes kindly to classically trained voices, and from my seat the hard-working cast led by Anna Devin and Joshua Ellicott as the young lovers, Andrew Shore and Christopher Maltman as the warring patresfamilias and David Wilson-Johnson as the Dark Fiddler was wasting its efforts, being largely drowned out by Delius's inundations. A fully staged production follows at the Wexford Festival next month. I shall not be attending.