Glyndebourne
alexandra.coghlan
It may have taken Sarah Connolly a decade or two, a detour to choral singing and a serious flirtation with jazz, but the British mezzo-soprano has most definitely arrived at full-blown National Treasure status. Perhaps it was her career-changing Xerxes in Nicholas Hytner’s 1998 Xerxes for English National Opera that marked the start of her reign, perhaps her 2005 Giulio Cesare for Glyndebourne. But either way a starring appearance at the Last Night of the Proms in 2009, a CBE the following year and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award just last month, all proclaim her the undisputed queen of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Marriage of Figaro is so much a part of Glyndebourne’s history that it’s sometimes hard to recall the details of this or that production. Michael Grandage’s current staging, though, will be easily remembered for its strong characteristics, both good and bad: for Christopher Oram’s marvellous Alhambra sets, for the brilliance and occasional vulgarity of Grandage’s direction, for its perfection of movement and timing and its almost total obliteration of the social distinctions on which the plot hinges. Saturday’s revival was a fine example of how a spectacular misconception can be validated Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
In this revival of Richard Jones's 2009 production, the action has been very effectively shifted to post-war Windsor with Sir John Falstaff (Laurent Naouri) as down-at-heel gentry maintaining delusions of superiority, rubbing up against an ascendant middle class. Nannetta and Fenton are presumably about to play their part in the baby boom. Period features abound, from chintz and mock Tudor to soda siphons, troupes of Brownies and a Victrola cabinet.There are witty little touches, which add to the visual appeal of the production, such as the presence of a (not terribly realistic) cat in every Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell - actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history (as a refuge for evacuees) would seem to have chimed with the darker implications of the opera within - namely, the Composer’s opera seria of the title. So here we are, in these darkest of days, occupying the house of a wealthy nobleman for sure but not in Vienna or even Germany but in deepest Sussex. So why, one wonders, is everyone speaking German Read more ...
David Nice
What’s the perfect Glyndebourne opera? Mozart, of course, must have first and second places with Le nozze di Figaro – Michael Grandage’s lively production of country-house mayhem is revived again this season – and Così fan tutte. Then comes Amadeus’s greatest admirer, Richard Strauss, and Ariadne auf Naxos - his most experimental collaboration with his then-established house poet for Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, Hugo von Hofmannsthal.The life-meets-art drama of a mythic opera seria to be staged in the palatial home of "the richest man in Vienna", whose whims mean that a commedia dell’arte Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Billy Budd John Mark Ainsley, Jacques Imbraillo, Matthew Rose, Philip Ens, Glyndebourne Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Glyndebourne)I missed this staging of Britten’s Billy Budd, first performed in May 2010. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the best of Britten’s operas, taut, well plotted and musically flawless. The brass-heavy score is a marvel, its battleship grey orchestral palette accompanying an all-male cast. It contains one of the greatest, yet simplest of Britten’s inspirations in the form of the stark sequence of orchestral chords heard in Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Imago, Glyndebourne’s latest Community Opera exercise, putting the cap on 25 years of pioneering educational outreach, is one of those operas where you need to read the programme synopsis first. Or maybe not. Its complications are outweighed by the fabulous impact it makes. The triple-level-set (shades of Birtwistle’s The Last Supper and other bumper enterprises at Glyndebourne) is arresting, and brilliantly capitalised on; the projection visuals - cyberspace gone crazy - are stunning; the choreography is refined, and astonishing for a community effort. You may come out with your Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ravel composed only two operas, both one-acters, widely separated in time, superficially very different, but both in a way about the same thing: naughtiness. In L’Heure espagnole (1911), the clockmaker’s wife, Conceptión, entertains a succession of would-be lovers in her husband’s absence. In L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1924), the little boy who won’t do his homework, who smashes the teapot, pulls the cat’s tail and rips the wallpaper, suddenly finds his victims coming to life and scaring him to death.Naughtiness, rather than wickedness: Torquemada, the clockmaker, turns a blind eye on his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Purcell certainly doesn’t make it easy for the champions of English opera. His beloved Dido and Aeneas is barely half an evening’s entertainment, so condensed is its tragedy, and the dense political satire of Dryden’s King Arthur text all but requires translation if it is to make sense to a contemporary audience. And then there’s The Fairy Queen – the gauzy, gorgeous semi-opera whose music is the side-dish to a bastardised 17th-century take on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.With Purcell’s music for the latter valued above its rhyming-couplet dialogue, it’s rare to see the work today Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's amazing how long it takes to realise that we're in the 1970s in Michael Grandage's new Glyndebourne production of Le nozze di Figaro. The mansion house suggests that we're in the 18th century. The light and latticework says we're in Mozart's original Seville. The poor villagers that scurry about during the overture preparing the stage for visitors could be from pretty much anywhere Mediterranean and from any century. It's only when the Count rolls up in a 70s sports car, wearing a concorde collar and flares, that it really dawns on us that we are in the decade of free love. Read more ...
David Benedict
It has romantic sweep but is held firm by zealous attention to detail and while it’s hugely expansive of gesture, it’s never generalised. I’m talking about Kirill Karabits’ conducting of La bohème at Glyndebourne. I wish I could say the same for the production.If David McVicar’s vision of love among the artists had punch on its first outing in 2000, something has been lost in the translation. Lest we forget that Rodolfo and his chums are unsuccessful, the contemporary setting is self-consciously drab – presumably to support Puccini’s exploration of verismo and off-set the passion of his Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Rossini's La Cenerentola is not an opera that I'd normally recommend to anyone with even half a brain. It takes the simple if mildly nauseating little tale of Cinderella, pads it out with parental abuse and drawn out cliffhangers, and ends in a pass-the-sick-bag denouement of "Goodness Triumphant". Yet, in an act worthy of the fairy godmother herself, Glyndebourne has transformed the piece into something unmissable. As ever with this classy East Sussex institution, the thing that raises proceedings above the level of panto is the extraordinary casting. The first delights that we're Read more ...