UK Edition
Review
Glyndebourne's Béatrice et Bénédict was elegant but needs more emotion
Tastefully monochrome in pastel grey, Laurent Pelly’s new production of Berlioz’s adaptation of Much Ado about Nothing is elegant but bloodless, its soul devoid of the intoxicated romance that could bring this disjointed and slow-burning opera to life.
The composer is partly to blame. Exhausted by his labours on the epic Les Troyens, Berlioz wrote Béatrice et Bénédict as a pleasurable self-indulgence. The result lacks form, contour and proportion, playing fast and loose with the Shakespearean source by eliminating the darker Don John sub-plot and replacing Dogberry with a pedantic choir-master Somarone.
It doesn’t cohere or develop narrative impetus – like La Damnation de Faust , it’s more a series of tableaux than a drama, musing on love’s ironies rather than enacting them and hobbled by long passages of spoken dialogue. Much of the music may be gloriously beautiful and madly original, but alas that does not a good opera make.
I didn’t feel Pelly really believes the piece, and his highly stylised staging is less satisfying than Elijah Moshinsky’s much more realistic version for Welsh National Opera, first performed in 1994 and set firmly in a small 19th-century Italian town.
Here, nothing is solidly specified. Against a backdrop of cloudy sky, the stage is dominated by revolving towers of large cardboard boxes out of which pop members of the populace and other minor surprises. Post-war French austerity is vaguely evoked in the costuming, contrasted with the glamour of Dior’s “new look”, as embodied in Hero’s dazzling wedding dress. But despite neat characterisations and a few chic little jokes, it’s neither frothy enough to serve as a delightful divertissement nor sufficiently emotional to tug at the heart-strings.
Substituting for an injured Robin Ticciati, Antonello Manacorda conducts a leaden account of the long overture (mercifully spared the usual dumb show). Subsequently he finds a stronger pulse, inspired by the warmly graceful playing of the London Philharmonic.
Paul Appleby sings attractively in the pallid role of Bénédict; Lionel Lhote provides comic relief of a sort as Somarone and Glyndebourne’s chorus is, as ever, one hundred per cent committed.
But this is an opera with women at its heart, and here the performance is distinguished. As Ursule and Hero, Katarina Bradic and Sophie Karthäuser blend beautifully in the gorgeous Nocturne, and Stéphanie d’Oustrac - last year’s Carmen here – makes a marvellously wiry and fiery Béatrice, singing with charm and acting with gusto. When she’s on stage, the barometer rises.
Until August 27. Tickets: 01273 815000; glyndebourne.com