Glyndebourne
Miranda Heggie
After two years of Covid-affected performances – even though there was a full season last year – Glyndebourne's annual festival is finally back in full glory. Following the big blaze of Saturday's The Wreckers, Sunday welcomed back Michael Grandage's durable production of a signature treasure, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.With a remarkable cast, phenomenal sounds from the pit and a sumptuous set, this was a very classy performance indeed. Set in 1960s Seville, the set – clearly inspired by the city’s Moorish architecture – was awash with muted colours and golden hues, and was a beautiful Read more ...
David Nice
Interesting for the history of music, but not for music? Passing acquaintance with Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, a grand opera by a woman at a time (the early 1900s) when circumstances made such a thing near-impossible, had suggested so. Then along come Glyndebourne’s music director, Robin Ticciati, and a team dedicated to two years’ research in putting the full original together, including an extra half-hour of music not heard before, and it turns out to be more than that.It's big-hearted, energetic and massively flawed. The libretto, by a one-time lover of the composer, Henry Brewster, an Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If it ain’t broke… on tour and in the Glyndebourne summer festival, Mariame Clément's production of Don Pasquale has gratified audiences for a decade now. It surely will again in Paul Higgins's spirited revival. The show returns to the Sussex house at the start of this year’s tour with the leaves about to turn but the gardens still ablaze with late-season colour.If Julia Hansen’s painterly 18th century designs offer an eye-delighting spread of pastoral prettiness, Donizetti’s piece itself ripostes with its tough-minded warning not to take appearances on trust, and to avoid confusions between Read more ...
Frederic Wake-Walker
2016Dear Diary, I’ve just had a meeting with Glyndebourne about directing a new production of Fidelio. I realise it’s one of the hardest operas in the repertoire to direct but I’m so swept up in Beethoven’s vision, the power of the music and the character of Leonore that I said yes…(Beethoven himself said: “Was schwer ist, ist auch schön” [“What is difficult is also beautiful”])2017Dear Diary, I’ve decided to cut all the spoken dialogue for Fidelio. It’s so clunky and there are so many holes in the backstory. But I don’t know yet what to replace it with!The only prison I’ve been to is the one Read more ...
David Nice
“Now I’ve conducted Tristan for the first time,” the 27-year-old Richard Strauss wrote from Weimar to Wagner’s widow Cosima in 1892, “and it was the most wonderful day of my life”. Robin Ticciati, over a decade older but still young in terms of his profession, has just crowned his first run of Glyndebourne Tristans with this Proms performance, and I don’t know whether he felt the same on opening night; but it’s clear that with the house’s latest music director a new golden age of Wagner conducting has begun.You could sense it in the London Philharmonic Orchestra cellos’ opening tone-swell, Read more ...
David Nice
“Time-travelling” is how Enrique Mazzola, the superb first conductor of Glyndebourne’s last new production of the main season, described the slow-burn trajectory of Verdi’s semi-masterpiece Luisa Miller in his First Person here on theartsdesk. Possibly it’s more a case of conservative opera-by-numbers evolving into something truly deep and personal – ultimately two duets and a final scene among the very best in Verdi’s substantial output. In most of the first two acts, you simply need five of the best voices to pull focus and a production that doesn’t get in the way too much.That happened Read more ...
Enrique Mazzola
It is difficult to know why some operas succeed while others remain unknown. The reasons can be emotional or historical, or it might be as simple as a poor cast who couldn’t quite launch the opera into the stars. In the case of Luisa Miller, we have the perfect example of a masterpiece which has been a little bit neglected. As an Italian and a bel canto lover, I have no answer for why it is not more widely known and loved.Just two or three years after writing Luisa Miller, Giuseppe Verdi went from being a very important Italian composer to the most important Italian composer of all. This was Read more ...
David Nice
Why travel to Glyndebourne for a concert? Well, for a start, none of us has heard a Mahler symphony live in full orchestral garb for at least 15 months, and though the Fourth is smaller-scale than some, its innocent beginnings belie the cosmic adventures ahead. Only a handful of us got to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall during the semi-lockdown period; its departing music director Vladimir Jurowski had to make do with overwrought film presentation only when he bowed out with Tchaikovsky’s complete Swan Lake ballet score. And any programme which segues from Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The new Glyndebourne production of Rossini's Il turco in Italia has a truly winning smile on its face and a spring and a dance in its musical step. It is brimful of fun and good ideas, conveying the sense that a lot of joy has been had in its making. As one cast member tweeted during rehearsals a couple of weeks ago: "I have not stopped laughing and living my best life all day."That sense of joy definitely isn’t confined to the cast; the audience were clearly loving every moment of it at last night’s premiere, and with good reason. Once this production has had its 13 performances this season Read more ...
David Nice
Angels and birds throng the inner life of tragic heroine Katya Kabanova, very much centre-stage in Nikolay Ostrovsky’s The Storm and achingly so in Janáček’s musical portrait. Director Damiano Michieletto takes the feathers, adds cages and claustrophobic white walls, and makes the symbolism the thing. Trouble is, both play and opera insist on some equivalence of the milieu – stifling life in a conventional merchant’s house ruled with melodramatic harshness by a dragon mother-in-law versus the open air, be it summer in a garden at night or the call of the Volga. The human drama is insisted Read more ...
David Nice
How does Mozart do it? His music can provoke deep emotions even in the unlikeliest operatic situations, if well done, and present circumstances stirred them up all the more on Sunday afternoon. Those flirtatious ladies flouncing around the prone prince in the first musical number of The Magic Flute – no overture here – only had to sing “although it breaks my heart in two/I have to bid farewell to you/until we meet again" for another tearful turn of the screw. There was more dramatically justified cause for the floodgates to open as heroine Pamina arrives to lead her Tamino through the Read more ...
David Nice
We're learning fast what works and what doesn't with online arts offerings in a time of coronavirus. A distinguished young pianist I know rightly pointed out to me yesterday that however good the artists sharing their talents with us from their living/music rooms, and however reassuring it is to be able to join them at a set time, bad sound cancels out most of the pleasure (though he didn’t rule out making an appearance himself). That's mostly not a problem with the opera companies around the world putting up their back catalogue of productions on film for free.The big guns are turning on Read more ...