Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore must be the only opera from whose central lesson one can actually learn something. Its message - drink, chill out, back off and the girl will be yours - is as good a moral guide to life as any. But it was still surprising to leave Glyndebourne last night satisfied.
Two 1950s Mozarts in one weekend might seem like pressing the contemporaneity of great art unnecessarily far. But Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, revived on Sunday, is a much less crude update than the WNO Così.
So the world didn't end yesterday as predicted, and Wagner's divine comedy about the meaning of art has weathered the ironic apocalypse following Hitler’s misappropriation. Bayreuth reels, but we Brits are lucky to have two stagings in under a year which take the humanism at face value. Scaling it down for Glyndebourne's intimate summer paradise, given director David McVicar’s knack of finding a plausible historical setting, should have offered a viable alternative to Richard Jones's hallucinogenically wonderful Welsh National Opera production. Often it did. The problem was that several singers were a size or two too small, one way or another, for the shoes cobbled by master craftsman Wagner.
Deep in rural Cheshire farmland, music is in the air. It’s not the music of the spheres from the Jodrell Bank radio telescope nearby, nor even the sound of the birds and the bleating of the lambs nearby. It is the music of human voices at work on scales and operatic arias. The 250-acre farm is Clonter, where for years people used to come to be entertained in the barn while picnicking amid bales of straw. Now the barn’s converted into an opera theatre - "the Glyndebourne of the North".
From the cuckoo hidden somewhere in the Albert Hall thicket to the Wagnerian bacchanalia of a rollicking Witch's Ride, Glyndebourne adapted its queasy little fairy tale to the widescreen of the Proms with its usual style. There was a twist or two to the consumerist heaven and hell of Laurent Pelly's never too heavy-handed production as semi-staged by assistant director Stéphane Marlot. And centre-platform rather than down in the pit, the phenomenally gifted Robin Ticciati played Peter Pan to the best possible pair of "children", helping them to soar in Albertspace with effortless charm.
From the cuckoo hidden somewhere in the Albert Hall thicket to the Wagnerian bacchanalia of a rollicking Witch's Ride, Glyndebourne adapted its queasy little fairy tale to the widescreen of the Proms with its usual style. There was a twist or two to the consumerist heaven and hell of Laurent Pelly's never too heavy-handed production as semi-staged by assistant director Stéphane Marlot. And centre-platform rather than down in the pit, the phenomenally gifted Robin Ticciati played Peter Pan to the best possible pair of "children", helping them to soar in Albertspace with effortless charm.
Thirty-five years on and this is still as much David Hockney’s Rake as it is Stravinsky’s or W H Auden’s. How rarely it is that what we see chimes so completely and utterly with what we hear. The limited palette of colours, the precisely etched cross-hatching, the directness and the cunningly conceived elements of parody – am I talking about Hockney or Stravinsky? Two great individualists in complete harmony. So why the disconnection?
Glyndebourne’s Hänsel und Gretel comes in a large cardboard box, with plain brown wrapper, duct-tape and a barcode. There’s a public health warning, too: sugar and spice and all things nice come at a price. The evil witch Rosina Sweet-Tooth is nothing more, nothing less than rabid consumerism masquerading as a smart lady in a pink two-piece suit. Yes, Laurent Pelly’s 2008 staging was/ is the first environmentally aware Humperdinck. It had to come. For revival read recycle.
It seems somehow wrong to come away from a Don Giovanni feeling a bit noncommittal about the whole thing. It’s the sort of opera that should raise you from your seat – that should fire and inspire – but this performance, directed by Jonathan Kent, never truly got off the ground. The set – a sort of Rubik's Cube of a building designed by Paul Brown that opened in ever more ingenious ways, and morphed from chapel to party house to graveyard – was clever and satisfying and mirrored the steady disintegration of the characters as we progressed.