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‘Outstanding cast’: Allan Clayton (Hamlet) and Rod Gilfry (Claudius) in Brett Dean’s Hamlet at Glyndebourne. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
‘Outstanding cast’: Allan Clayton (Hamlet) and Rod Gilfry (Claudius) in Brett Dean’s Hamlet at Glyndebourne. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Hamlet; Tristan und Isolde; Charlie Parker’s Yardbird – review

This article is more than 6 years old
Glyndebourne; Longborough Festival Opera; Hackney Empire, London
Glyndebourne’s new, full-scale Hamlet toys with Shakespeare’s text to fine effect, while Tristan und Isolde is so hot it sizzles

Shakespeare’s powerful magnetic field makes iron filings of us all. Composers writing operas in English are particularly susceptible. These past months, you could choose from Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale premiered at ENO, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), which launched the Aldeburgh festival, André Tchaikowsky’s The Merchant of Venice (1968-1982), arriving at Covent Garden next month, and Australian composer Brett Dean’s new Hamlet at Glyndebourne last week. None, even Britten, is entirely successful. Each has its supporters.

Dean’s full-scale operatic Hamlet bursts into life with the best possible advocacy. The outstanding cast, led by the tenor Allan Clayton, a resourceful actor, shuffling, twitching, convulsive, and Sarah Connolly as a memorably sympathetic Gertrude, was matched in quality by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, incisively conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, Glyndebourne’s music director until 2013. Neil Armfield’s ultra-tasteful updating, designed by Ralph Myers (with lighting by Jon Clark and costumes by Alice Babidge), made Elsinore a place of beauty: ivory panelling and tall windows, Gustavian style.

The composer’s restless score, which also uses electronics and positions musicians around the auditorium, is alert with rattlings, tappings, swoops and extreme techniques (as when woodwind and brass blow down their instruments in ghostly exhalation). An accordionist adds expressive melancholy. Dry percussion sounds evoke the desiccation of dust and ashes. As you would expect from a former viola player in the Berlin Philharmonic, Dean’s string writing is deliciously inventive. The tremendous choral writing makes an indelible impression from the outset.

Vocal lines are fluent, supportive to the text, if not immediately memorable. John Tomlinson enjoys triple decker glory as Ghost/Gravedigger/Player 1. He heads a watertight ensemble: Jacques Imbrailo a loyal Horatio, countertenors Rupert Enticknap and Christopher Lowrey as a Gilbert and George-style Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Kim Begley the butter-smooth Polonius, Barbara Hannigan an ethereally crazed Ophelia and Rod Gilfry the morally abject and complacent Claudius.

The Canadian librettist Matthew Jocelyn has made a skilful collage from different editions, scattering soliloquies to the winds and gathering them up in fragments. The opera’s opening line is “…or not to be”. Characters self-quote (Polonius partly repeats his “tragical-historical” ramble in his death scene). There’s some well-known textural variation (“O that this too solid/ sullied flesh would melt”). Some omissions have honourable precedent. Fortinbras, cut here, is also absent from the Olivier film version of 1948. Most of the “big moment” scenes remain, if not necessarily in the usual place.

At nearly two hours, the dramatic pacing of Act 1 is uneven. The second act, with its final devilish sword fight, picks up. Yet the work as a whole, so polished and antic, spins too fast. Nobility and humanity reel away into the distance. Paradoxically, as often in long works, judicious cuts would retrieve some of the central stillness that makes this play so magical. A second encounter might prove otherwise. There’s a live cinema relay on 6 July. See it, too, on Glyndebourne tour, with the talented David Butt Philip (here a fine Laertes) taking over the title role.

‘Quietly erotic’: Lee Bisset and Peter Wedd in Tristan und Isolde at Longborough Festival Opera. Photograph: Matthew Williams-Ellis

The rest of the week must be taken at a gallop. Longborough Festival Opera in Gloucestershire, run by the intrepid Lizzie and Martin Graham, who have constructed a witty riposte to Wagner’s Bayreuth theatre in their garden, reaches ever greater heights. Carmen Jakobi’s 2015 production of Tristan und Isolde is back, streamlined and overwhelming. Redundant dancer-doubles have gone. The glisten of dawn at sea is captured by Ben Ormerod’s lighting and Kimie Nakano’s beautifully simple sets. Once again, Anthony Negus, British Wagnerian supremo, conducts. The orchestral writing is made transparent, the drama reined in and unleashed with absolute assurance.

Peter Wedd and Lee Bisset excelled in the title roles, their obsessive love so quietly erotic you felt almost voyeuristic watching them, their singing tireless, searing, intelligent. Harriet Williams’s glowing Brangäne and Stuart Pendred’s Kurwenal, touching and troubled, enriched these supporting roles, with Sam Furness making a shining company debut as Sailor/Shepherd. You may think intervals at these opera festival are all chat. It’s a first to come out of Act I, never mind the subsequent two acts, and find everyone dumbfounded. It’s hard to imagine this opera making a more shattering impact. Next year: The Flying Dutchman sails into view.

A brief hooray for the great American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, male singer of the year in the 2017 International Opera awards and graceful commentator on Cardiff Singer of the World last week on BBC4. He sang the title role of Charlie Parker in Yardbird, a collaboration between Opera Philadelphia and the Apollo Theater, Harlem, with ENO and Hackney Empire. More documentary than opera, it offered a brilliant platform for Brownlee and the wonderful international cast and ensemble. See him in Semiramide at the Royal Opera House in the autumn. A pleasure ahead.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Hamlet ★★★★
Tristan und Isolde ★★★★★
Charlie Parker’s Yardbird ★★★

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