L’elisir d’amore / Hansel und Gretel, Glyndebourne, review

As a remedy for autumn blues, nothing beats L’elisir d’amore, while two outstanding performances lift Hansel und Gretel, part of the strongest Glyndebourne tour for years

Hansel and Gretel performed by Glyndebourne opera, with Andriana Chuchman as Gretel, Victoria Yarovaya as Hansel, and Colin Judson as the witch
Hansel and Gretel performed by Glyndebourne opera, with Andriana Chuchman as Gretel, Victoria Yarovaya as Hansel, and Colin Judson as the witch Credit: Photo: Alastair Muir

One of the strongest Glyndebourne Tours in recent years, this autumn’s trilogy mixes two of the house’s most revivable productions – Donizetti’s

L’elisir d’amore

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) and Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel – with an important new staging of Britten’s

. All deserve to be seen, but as a remedy for autumn blues, nothing beats L’elisir, one of the greatest and most heart-warming of operatic comedies.

As revived by Paul Higgins, Annabel Arden’s production is played here with just the right blend of laughter and pathos. Though Lez Brotherston’s crumbling, Italianate piazza provides a sunny backdrop, it showcases performances of emotional depth. There are chuckles in the orchestra, of course, yet the excellent, taut conducting of Pablo González ensures that Donizetti’s evergreen score has plenty of soul.

Donizetti connoisseurs will want to hear Joélle Harvey’s Adina, the minx whose heart eventually melts. Singing with superb technical security, she supplies a stream of bright tone without a hint of edginess. Her Nemorino, Christopher Tiesi, is not as vocally polished, but he still displays a likeable, soft-grained tenor. Long before he wins all hearts with his “Una furtiva lagrima”, his dopey character in denim dungarees – an electrician in this staging rather than the farmhand of the libretto – gets the audience on his side.

Another technically impressive singer, the bass Riccardo Novaro is musically strong enough as the quack Dr Dulcamara not to be upstaged by his amusing commedia dell’arte sidekick. It says something for the strutting Belcore of the baritone Alessandro Luongo that he manages to hold his own in this company.

In this less innocent, post-Grimm age, a Germanic tale about children being threatened with the oven hardly counts as light entertainment, so it is no mean achievement when

Hänsel und Gretel

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)

remains so enjoyable. But such is the power of Humperdinck’s glowing, Wagner-lite score, which here inspires a number of fine performances.

And as if that wasn’t enough baggage to attach to what the composer called a “fairy-tale opera”, the original director Laurent Pelly and his designer Barbara de Limburg give us a forest stricken by ecological disaster and add a lecture on the all-too-obvious dangers of consumerism and junk food abuse. Somehow, though, the groaning supermarket shelves that replace the traditional gingerbread house still seem a clever idea – and in James Bonas’s hands, the revival comes up freshly again.

There are two outstanding performances in the title roles, delivered with a vigorous physicality that never gets in the way of the singing. Victoria Yarovaya’s warmly sung Hänsel and Andriana Chuchman’s glinting Gretel – a notable British debut for the Canadian soprano – make a lively duo but find all the stillness for a touching Evening Prayer.

Nearly as good are the end-of-tether Mother and Father of Anne Mason and Stephen Gadd, and Colin Judson’s tenor witch is appropriately grotesque – though his eventual dispatch behind a pile of cereal boxes is anticlimactic.

The evening is also notable for the work of the 20-year-old Venezuelan conductor Ilyich Rivas, who draws playing of mellowness and sweep. Looking uncannily like a cross between Vladimir Jurowski and Gustavo Dudamel, Rivas happily seems to lean towards the former when it comes to musical depth.

L’elisir d’amore, Glyndebourne Tour, to Dec 14; Hansel und Gretel, Glyndebourne Tour, to Dec 3; glyndebourne.com