Béatrice et Bénédict review – too much outside-the-box thinking

“A caprice written with the point of a needle,” was how Berlioz described Béatrice et Bénédict, his last opera, and his final expression of his lifelong love of Shakespeare. Written in 1862, when he was already very ill and increasingly at odds with the European musical establishment, it’s a beautiful, ambivalent work that takes Much Ado About Nothing as the starting point for a meditation on youthful idealism and musical uncertainty. Writing the libretto himself, he jettisoned Don John and his intrigues, and fashioned a subplot of his own involving a composer-conductor called Somarone and his attempts to provide suitable music for the wedding of Claudio and Héro, here reimagined as high Romantic lovers, their rapture contrasting with the emotional sparring of the titular pair.

The rather static dramaturgy can make it tricky in performance, and Glyndebourne’s new production is hampered by an often overly busy staging by Laurent Pelly that doesn’t quite get the measure of the piece. Pelly’s imagination inclines to the surreal. Béatrice and Bénédict, he argues, are “two people who refuse to fit into a mould and live in a box” – and boxes of every size, shape and description consequently form the basis of Barbara de Limburg’s set.

In Act I, they’re constantly and distractingly on the move, forming themselves into semi-abstract shapes, or swinging open to reveal domestic interiors from which Paul Appleby’s Bénédict initially recoils; or Héro’s wedding dress garishly lit in a bridal shop – a moment that nearly wrecks the mood of the extraordinary Nocturne in which Héro (Sophie Karthäuser) and her maid Ursule (Katarina Bradić) ecstatically contemplate not the marriage ceremony but Héro’s wedding night. It’s only when we get past the interval that Pelly seemingly recognises the virtues of theatrical stillness, as Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s Béatrice grapples with her feelings for Bénédict in sudden isolation, before their final spat takes place on a nearly bare stage. The scenes with Somarone (Lionel Lhote) are relentlessly caricatured.

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The New Look costumes and the grey-on-grey colour scheme, meanwhile, suggest black and white wedding photos from the 1940s.

It doesn’t add up to a successful theatrical whole, which is a shame because so much of it sounds so good. D’Oustrac and Appleby generate a considerable sexual charge together and are gorgeous in their arias: D’Oustrac’s Il M’en Souvient, its long lines immaculately sustained, is deeply affecting. Karthäuser made heavy weather of Je Vais le Voir on opening night, though she and Bradić sounded so exquisite together in the Nocturne that you almost forgot Pelly’s faffing. Philippe Sly is the fine Claudio, handsome, gawky and endearingly dim; Frédéric Caton the twinkly-eyed, elegant Don Pedro. The choral singing thrills, and, in the pit, Antonello Manacorda (replacing Robin Ticciati, who is recovering from back surgery) proves to be an excellent Berliozian, getting classy playing from the London Philharmonic, on wonderful form. It’s beautiful to listen to, though you may not always like what you see.