Opera Review: Béatrice et Bénédict - Glyndebourne Festival
WHEN Berlioz decided to turn Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing into an opera, he made one big mistake: he wrote the libretto himself.
His decision to ditch half of the play's plot was not necessarily a bad idea, but his libretto does not really do justice to the comic potential of what remains.
The story is a nice twist on the usual boy-meets-girl, they-fall-in-love, and then either girl-dies (grand opera) or they-overcome-all-problems-and-marry (comic opera). Instead, Béatrice et Bénédict is boy-meets-girl, they-despise-each-other, they-get-married-anyway.
Related articles
In the hands of a master playwright, the potential bonding nature caused by mutual hatred could, I feel sure, be really funny, but the laughs in the Berlioz opera are sparse.
Apart from that, however, the opera is splendid. The music is glorious, containing some duets and trios that are totally sublime, particularly one trio for three female voices in the second act which rivals anything similar in the entire opera repertoire.
Hearing such music in an opera I had scarcely heard of, let alone never seen before was a real treat. With the two lovers (or haters?) superbly played by Stéphanie d'Oustrac and Paul Appleby, and the rest of the cast including the chorus on great form as well, the singing was faultless, as was the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Antonello Manacorda, who perfectly brought out the sheer deliciousness of Berlioz's music.
The director Laurent Pelly has done some wonderful things for Glyndebourne in the past (his Ravel double bill a couple of years ago was particularly amazing) and he has stamped his creative mark on this production too, but whether a set consisting in the main of oversized boxes is really enough to carry the whole thing is somewhat doubtful.
The idea, I suppose, is that both Béatrice and Bénédict have vowed never to be shoved into the boxes that other people would want to consign them to, but once that idea is established, it needs a little more. Even if the boxes do dance around the stage, with members of the cast and chorus popping out of them.
This all makes it a difficult production to give an overall rating: the singing and acting deserve five stars and so does the orchestra; the music is five-star, but the production is four-star and the story-line is only two-star.
Well, that averages out at four stars, but my judgment may be influenced by the glorious sunshine we were treated to at Glyndebourne on the opening day of the production. For their trademark picnic on the lawns during the 80-minute interval, it was simply glorious.
