“I came down here in the 1960s from Lancashire, where the houses were black, the mills were still going and one of the brooks was turquoise from the chemical factory,” says Wagnerian bass John Tomlinson, sitting in the gardens at Glyndebourne during a break from rehearsals. “When I arrived here, I thought, ‘This is heaven!’”. He waves his hands towards the Sussex Downs in the distance. “Just look at it. It’s like the Elysian fields!”
There is something special about Glyndebourne out of season, when the lawn is not filled with audiences in evening dress, quaffing champagne with their picnics. A bucolic sense of peace prevails — the distant sound of lambs bleating, a stray gardener at work, and four members of the chorus playing rugby down by the lake.
Rehearsals have begun for Wagner’s Parsifal, getting its first ever production at Glyndebourne. This was the work that John Christie, Glyndebourne’s founder, wanted to stage in the original opera house. But for his debut festival in 1934, he opted for Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, smaller in scale and a more practical choice. By coincidence, a new production of that opera, the 10th in Glyndebourne’s history, is also scheduled this summer. New repertoire and tradition go hand and hand.
It is a week or two until the cast for Le nozze di Figaro is needed on site, but young baritone Huw Montague Rendall, who will sing the Count, is also here. He drove down from near London just to catch up with friends, bringing with him his fiancée and Maurice “le chien saucisse”, their sausage dog.
“I grew up here at Glyndebourne,” he explains. Both his mother, Diana Montague, and his father, David Rendall, were international singers who performed often at the opera house. “I remember playing cricket on that lawn with my grandmother, and there used to be a large plinth with a horse’s head by the box office [it is still there] where my sister and I used to climb. It feels like coming home. Nowhere else is quite the same.”
There is a human element to an opera singer’s life of which audiences are largely unaware. This is a career that can be relentlessly international, four or six weeks in one city, then on to the next, and so on. That is fine if the team on a production is welcoming. But often friends and family are left back at home, and loneliness and isolation set in.
Relationships at Glyndebourne are built over the long term. Just as the festival has stability in its family ownership, passing from founder John Christie to his son George and now his grandson Gus, so some performers keep up a working connection over their entire careers. The Glyndebourne chorus is like a crèche for outstanding young voices and the roll-call of those who have come out of it runs from Janet Baker to Gerald Finley.
Tomlinson, now 78, joined the chorus in 1970 and was soon offered small parts, starting at the festival with “A Murderer” in Verdi’s Macbeth. This summer he sings the role of the retired king Titurel in Parsifal: an ideal, short role for a senior bass. Montague Rendall, still only 30, was also in the chorus and won the John Christie Award, an annual recognition of young talent, in 2016.
Opposite him in Le nozze di Figaro, singing her first Countess, will be Louise Alder, another John Christie Award winner. She credits Glyndebourne for the opportunity to step in as Sophie in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in 2014, during the festival’s traditional visit to the Proms. “That night I made five debuts — the BBC Proms, Glyndebourne, the role, the orchestra and Radio 3,” she says. “It launched me into the public eye and is a night I will never forget.”
As Glyndebourne moves towards its centenary, it falls to artistic director Stephen Langridge to build on its reputation of nurturing the stars of the future. “I see the choristers who are just starting in the room with Sir John [Tomlinson] and I see them projecting hopes of being here in their late seventies after having an enormous international career, as he has,” he says.
“My dad started in the chorus here, too. There he is!” He points to a photo on the wall of his father Philip Langridge, a renowned tenor who enjoyed a near 40-year career at Glyndebourne.
In its tenth decade, Glyndebourne looks to be in rude health. Coming out of the pandemic, many opera companies in the UK, both those with state subsidy and private, had a problem filling seats, but not here. Last year the festival had to add extra performances to meet demand.
But there have been challenges. A cut of 50 per cent in Arts Council funding in 2023 resulted in the cancellation of the annual Glyndebourne Tour, which took productions from the summer festival to provincial towns and cities. This was a big blow, not least when the Arts Council’s stated purpose in making the cuts was to increase provision of the arts to the regions.
Langridge says it should not be assumed that the difficult period is over. The high inflation of the past couple of years and the increase in employers’ National Insurance mean the operating costs still look challenging.
“This year we are running 10 productions over the course of the year. We started with Jonathan Dove’s Uprising, a big community opera, in February. Then come 78 performances in the main summer festival, followed by 26 more of operas and concerts in the autumn. The question we are asking ourselves is not how to celebrate the centenary, but what is the meaning of this decade to give us momentum into the future.”
To this end the autumn season is seen as an investment. “It’s where people earn their spurs,” says Langridge. “A couple of our young artists will be in The Railway Children [the new opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage] this autumn, for example. We want the autumn to be accessible, for the development of the audience too, so 50 per cent of the seats were under £50 last year and 25 per cent of the audience were new to opera.”
At the summer festival, with Alder, Montague Rendall and Tomlinson in leading roles, Glyndebourne is looking equally to the past and the future. Montague Rendall acknowledges that the reputation of his parents looms large here, but says for him that is “only in a wonderful way. Dad sang Otello here, mum sang Orfeo. We have done more than 500 performances between the three of us. That does push you to be better.”
Tomlinson says that coming back after so many years on the opera circuit has been heartwarming. “What I found at Glyndebourne in the 1970s was a devotion to the work, which gave great joy. That may sound pious, but it isn’t in such generous supply elsewhere these days. I sing every day and am always working towards something, because the joy I discovered here has remained with me to this day. Glyndebourne has this annoying habit of doing everything so well.”
Glyndebourne Festival begins May 16, glyndebourne.com
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