Poliuto, Glyndebourne, review: 'A five-star musical performance, let down by a two-star staging'

Director Mariame Clément is out of her depth - unable to make the Ancient World convincing, her solution is predictable if not plain corny, says Rupert Christiansen

Michael Fabiano in Donizetti's Poliuto
Michael Fabiano in Donizetti's Poliuto Credit: Photo: ©Tristram Kenton

In a blaze of early summer sunshine, Glyndebourne inaugurated its new season with the novel departure of a rarely heard tragedy by Donizetti – popular throughout the 19th century and famously revived in 1960 at La Scala with Maria Callas and Franco Corelli in the leads, but seldom performed since.

Gloomy in tone, monumental and heroic in character, it doesn’t offer an obvious fit with Glyndebourne’s pastoral ambience. Dominated by music of a stirringly martial nature and some tautly enthralling duets of high-pitched emotional confrontation - thought to have left a mark on Verdi’s Aida - it adapts Corneille’s frigid neo-classical drama Polyeucte and its story of a nobleman in third-century Armenia whose unwelcome conversion to Christianity causes him to be thrown to the lions.His fate is shared by his virtuous wife Paolina, who has been struggling to resist the amorous advances of the Roman proconsul Severo.

The production is directed by Mariame Clément, responsible in 2011 for a piquant and original staging of a very different sort of Donizetti opera, the farcical Don Pasquale. Here, alas, she is quite out of her depth, unable to establish a visual or dramatic idiom in which to make the Ancient World vivid or convincing.

Her solution is predictable if not plain corny - Julia Hansen’s designs transport us to that old chestnut of an operatic setting, Mussolini’s Italy or thereabouts. Bleak rectangular panels of grey concrete slide pointlessly to and fro, decorated only with grainy projections; the action looks under-rehearsed and unmotivated, leaving the cast to stand and deliver a lot of very coarse acting. This is not a presentation up to Glyndebourne’s best standards.

But the evening is more than redeemed by a superb musical performance, conducted with crisp precision by Enrique Mazzola and played with galvanised conviction by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Poliuto, played by Michael Fabiano, and Severo, played by Igor Golovatenko (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

The hugely demanding title role is confidently taken by the febrile American tenor Michael Fabiano. He seemed uneasy about his characterisation, but sang with unfailing intensity and bravado, projecting a chesty forcefulness redolent of legendary Italians of yore.

As his wife Paolina, Ana Maria Martinez spun some exquisitely floated tone and deliquescent phrasing, in powerful contrast to the virile ardour of Igor Golovatenko, a rock-steady young baritone from the Bolshoi, as her pursuer Severo. Smaller roles were authoritatively taken by Gyula Rab and Matthew Rose, and the chorus sounded magnificently vibrant as both vengeful Armenians and religiose Christians.

A five-star musical performance, in sum, let down by a two-star staging.

Box office, www.glyndebourne.org, 01273 815000

Until 15 July