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Long before the EU was a gleam in its founders’ eyes, European integration was already becoming a reality. For an example from the 18th century, look no further than Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro — a French play of revolutionary fervour, an Italian libretto of sharp-eyed wit, and music that blends Germanic complexity with Italianate songfulness.
It is just over 90 years since Glyndebourne presented Le nozze di Figaro to open its first ever festival and it has rarely left the repertoire since. This 10th new production, by director Mariame Clément, is distinctly on the light side, so it is the Italian opera buffa that gets the upper hand.
The curtain goes up on delicately painted interiors, all pastel colours and rococo frescoes. The inspiration is the French artist Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, whose work includes a celebrated watercolour of the composer and his family, painted from life.
There is also a stage revolve, which quickly goes into overdrive, whisking the characters on a whistle-stop tour through a vast mansion, as halls, boudoirs, a library, even a bathroom whizz past with dizzying rapidity. Maybe it exhausted itself, as it conked out in the last act, necessitating a break in the performance.
In Clément’s hands the opera is a blend of Enlightenment comedy of manners and a more rambunctious farce. The “mad day” (“folle journée”) of Pierre Beaumarchais’s original play rarely pauses for breath, as people are constantly popping in and out of multiple doors, spying on each other or just bursting in, even when other characters are musing about them and should be left alone.
It all threatens to become too fussy. Do we need to have singers frozen in time as they deliver their arias? Or an ensemble repeatedly stopped and started for comic effect? By the end it feels as if too much time has been spent on amusing little asides and not enough on probing the big issues — though on that score one singer does exert a real grip.
From the moment Huw Montague Rendall’s Count enters, he is a firebrand of lust, fury and jealousy, epitomising the abuse of aristocratic privilege that will ignite the class revolution. This is very different from the Count that he played at the Royal Opera last year, where he was a slinky predator, slightly under-sung. Everything here is strong, outgoing and spontaneous, the Count as the driver of the opera.
Like others before her, Louise Alder has graduated from Susanna to the Countess and makes the transition confidently, with new authority to her singing. Johanna Wallroth is an appealing Susanna, who rises to a lovely, final-act aria, while remaining a mild player in the proceedings. Michael Nagl, not the usual incisive, Italianate comic bass-baritone, brings to Figaro a highly impressive voice of expansive lyricism, which holds promise for the future. This is a young cast and there is scope to delve deeper into their characters.
Of the others, Adèle Charvet presents a languorous Cherubino, more soprano than mezzo with an effortless high B flat in one of her added cadenzas. (There is ample decoration to the vocal parts throughout, very nicely done.) Madeleine Shaw sings well as Marcellina, searching for the contract in her voluminous skirts; Alessandro Corbelli is the expert Bartolo and Ru Charlesworth a heavily caricatured Basilio.
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment has rarely sounded better at Glyndebourne, fleet, light, with superbly differentiated woodwind colours. The conductor Riccardo Minasi must take credit for that, as well as the micromanaged detail that he brings to every phrase, but the price is paid in some irritatingly overworked, stop-go musical direction that robs the opera of its dramatic thrust. The singers do well to stay with him sometimes.
★★★★☆
To August 21, glyndebourne.com
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