Ravel double bill, Glyndebourne, review

Rupert Christiansen finds Ravel's style is is too soft-centred for the hard wit of farce in L’Heure espagnole at Glyndebourne.

Ravel: too soft-centred for farce at Glyndebourne 2012. Credit: Photo: REX

Ravel is a composer I adore and one who, for my money, wrote (or at least published) less dull or trite music than even Mozart or Beethoven. But I have never been able to warm to his one-act opera L’Heure espagnole, a farce of adultery and lust set inside a clockmaker’s shop.

The trouble with it for me is that Ravel’s genius lies in the dreamily and meditatively sensual: he conjures moods, he evokes landscapes. But his style is too soft-centred for the dry, hard, cool wit of farce, and the intrigue surrounding a wife cramming encounters with her several lovers into a brief respite offered by her husband’s absence never gathers explosive momentum.

Laurent Pelly’s production creates the timepiece-crammed shop interior with flair, but the cast, led by Stéphanie d’Oustrac as the sex-hungry wife Concepcion, overeggs it all wildly – look how funny we are! – with diminishing returns. The result is a bore.

L’Enfant et les sortilèges is another matter. Colette’s whimsical tale of the querulous little boy taught a lesson by animated, articulate household objects and garden beasties is illuminated by Ravel with a score which always reminds me of a Persian cat – deep-furred and seductively silky, but clever and clawed, too.

Kazushi Ono conducts it lovingly and the London Philharmonic Orchestra revels in the gorgeously coloured and glowing instrumentation with barbed, feline sweetness. A largely Francophone cast of soloists sings prettily and accurately, with Khatouna Gadelia as the Boy and Kathleen Kim as the fairy-tale Princess, but it’s the chorus of shepherds and shepherdesses, who jump off the toile de Jouy wallpaper, who provide the evening’s vocal highlight.

Pelly’s staging is disappointing: it reworks a production originally created for the Paris Opéra, but I couldn’t see what made it special and worth importing. The animal costumes designed by Pelly and Jean-Jacques Delmotte are conventional and, apart from some Alice in Wonderland games with contrasts of largeness and smallness in the opening minutes, Barbara de Limburg’s scenic effects lack magical fluency. Perhaps I’ve been spoilt by the wonders of Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony, but I never felt the childish sense of wonder that is at the piece’s heart.

An audience full of well‑heeled Europeans and foreign visitors applauded enthusiastically, but they hadn’t been presented with Glyndebourne’s best vintage.

Until Aug 25. Tickets: 01273 815000