Opera review: Brett Dean’s Hamlet - Glyndebourne Festival Opera

4 / 5 stars
Hamlet at Glyndebourne Festival Opera

IT MAY seem the height of audacity to set Shakespeare’s longest and most quotable play to music but that is what Australian composer Brett Dean has dared to do in his new opera Hamlet, which was given its world premiere at Glyndebourne last week.

hamletRICHARD HUBERT SMITH

Australian composer Brett Dean has dared to do in his new opera Hamlet

Dean and his librettist Matthew Jocelyn have mashed up Shakespeare’s text into fragments. Nearly the first words we hear are “...or not to be”. 

It fits with music that is clangorous at times and others, especially when John Tomlinson’s Ghost hoves into view, eery or rumbling like an approaching tsunami. 

The London Philharmonic Orchestra under Vladimir Jurowski combines with electronic percussion to notable effect. The exemplary cast is led by Allan Clayton’s Hamlet. 

No “sweet Prince” he but a childish, scruffy youth jigging distractedly and close to insanity. 

Sarah Connolly is a regal Gertrude while Rod Gilfry as usurper Claudius suggests an uneasy conscience under the urbane exterior. 

Tomlinson is in cracking form whether Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, Gravedigger or Player King while soprano Barbara Hannigan goes gorgeously mad as Ophelia. 

Despite director Neil Armfield and set designer Ralph Myers’s virtuoso production, however, I was left feeling uninvolved. Dean’s Hamlet lacks the sympathy for the protagonists that is deep-rooted in Shakespeare’s play. 

Hamlet will be broadcast live in cinemas and online on July 6 and transfers to the autumn Glyndebourne Tour with a new cast. 

hamletRICHARD HUBERT SMITH

Dean and his librettist Matthew Jocelyn mashed up Shakespeare’s text into fragments

Puccini’s Tosca at Grange Park Opera

Grange Park Opera’s new 750-seat opera house on a woodland site in Surrey opened on Election Day with a production of Tosca, Puccini’s melodrama about politics and sex. 

The Theatre In The Woods is the happy outcome of a meeting between Wasfi Kani, dynamic founder of Grange Park Opera, and Bamber Gascoigne, who inherited the 300-acre estate and 15th century West Horsley Place from his aunt the Duchess of Roxburghe. 

The inaugural opening saw renowned Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja’s role debut as Cavaradossi. Puccini’s tragedy is set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars but director Peter Relton updates the action to Mussolini’s fascist regime, with realistic sets by Francis O’Connor. 

Puccini’s ToscaROBERT WORKMAN

Puccini’s Tosca at the Grange Park Opera

The change of era works well, though baritone Roland Wood as Rome’s Chief of Police Scarpia is distinctly uncharismatic in a Raymond Chandler-style raincoat.

Calleja’s powerful performance as freethinking artist Cavaradossi pulses with conviction. Russian soprano Ekaterina Metlova rises to the heights in Tosca’s great aria Vissi D’Arte and makes an adept job of despatching Scarpia with a knife to the jugular. 

Excellent playing from the BBC Concert Orchestra under conductor Gianluca Marciano, who also play for GPO’s staging of Leos Janacek’s Jenufa. The Grange Festival in Hampshire has reformed after the departure of Kani’s Grange Park Opera with the distinguished countertenor Michael Chance as Artistic Director. 

★★★★✩

Claudio MonteverdiGETTY

Claudio Monteverdi

Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno D’Ulisse In Patria at The Grange Festival

The 2017 season kicked off with Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno D’Ulisse In Patria, directed by Tim Supple and designed by Sumant Jayakrishnan. 

Monteverdi’s opera takes the final section of Homer’s Odyssey, where Ulysses returns to his island home after 20 years at the Trojan Wars to find his wife Penelope besieged by suitors greedy for his property. 

Soprano Anna Bonitatibus, in sublime voice, conveys the implacable nobility with which Penelope fends off the predators. 

Tenor Paul Nilon is a vigorous Ulysses and scenes of reunion, first with son Telemaco (Thomas Elwin) and then with Penelope, are profoundly moving. 

★★★★✩

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