Review

Ravel double bill, Glyndebourne, review: 'polished'

L’heure espagnole, part of the Ravel double bill at Glyndebourne Festival
L’heure espagnole, part of the Ravel double bill at Glyndebourne Festival Credit: Richard Hubert Smith

Like an authentically French soufflé to end the season, the revival of Glyndebourne's Ravel double bill supplies delicious light relief after a festival seemingly dominated by religious dogma. Whether it was the pre-eminence of Christian values over other beliefs in Donizetti's Poliuto and Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, an Old Testament epic in Handel's Saul or New Testament moralising in Britten's Rape of Lucretia, theological matters have featured heavily on the Sussex Downs.

Ravel's one-act operas sweep all that aside with a Gallic puff: L'Heure espagnole is a Feydeauesque farce about a clockmaker's nymphomaniacal wife named, aptly enough, Concepción, and L'Enfant et les sortiléges is full of whimsical enchantment, although supplying a moral when nature comes out in force to avenge the Child's destructive behaviour.

L'Heure espagnole is a Feydeauesque farce about a clockmaker's nymphomaniacal wife
L'Heure espagnole is a Feydeauesque farce about a clockmaker's nymphomaniacal wife Credit: Richard Hubert Smith

Laurent Pelly's productions are more polished than the 2012 versions, and Glyndebourne's music director Robin Ticciati draws exquisitely detailed playing from the London Philharmonic, languid in the first opera and wonderfully alert to Ravel's inventive night music at the end of the evening.

Both stagings are visually arresting. Caroline Ginet's set for L'Heure heaves with the domestic detritus of a house above the clockmaker's Toledo shop. The giant prickly pear in the alley outside the window stands guard quietly, while the mere suggestion of something saucy sends all Torquemada's clocks into a spin; and no double entendre involving a pendulum is left un-swung. Barbara de Limburg's design for L'Enfant evokes a surrealist wonderland in which outsize furnishings dwarf the Child. Where the garden comes to life, Pelly fills this with profoundly touching detail.

L'Enfant et les sortiléges evokes a surrealist wonderland
L'Enfant et les sortiléges evokes a surrealist wonderland Credit: Richard Hubert Smith

The roles of Concepción and the Child are normally associated with mezzo-sopranos, but those eyebrows raised when the soprano Danielle de Niese was announced for the roles are firmly lowered by this performance. Not only were these roles originally created by sopranos, but de Niese's voice has changed since she made her spectacular Glyndebourne debut a decade ago as Handel's Cleopatra, gaining duskier colours lower down. Although less might sometimes be more with her predictably saucy Concepción, as the Child she is totally transformed into a petulant, pudgy schoolboy. Giving a very physical performance and delivering the brief monologue to heart-stopping effect, she makes the evening her own.

Glyndebourne surrounds her with a predominantly Francophone cast. François Piolino is an amusingly ineffectual Torquemada, and Cyrille Dubois uses his light tenor to flowery effect as the poet Gonzalve, hopelessly unequal to Concepción's demands. Lionel Lhote is an oleaginous Don Inigo, her elderly suitor, and Étienne Dupuis displays a firm baritone as Ramiro, the beefcake muleteer who delivers the goods. Three of the men return among the numerous small roles in L'Enfant and Sabine Devieilhe, in particular, spins brilliant coloratura as the Fire, Princess and Nightingale.

Until Aug 30; tickets: glyndebourne.com

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