UK Edition
Review
Cendrillon, Glyndeborne, review: A gender-fluid Cinderella concoction of sparkle and charm
Given the health police’s warnings against sugar consumption, I shouldn’t be recommending Massenet’s Cendrillon. A thickly iced confection, heavy with the musical equivalent of empty carbs, trans fats and additives, it would be all too easy to gorge on its richness and end up doing long-term damage to one’s palate and digestion.
Happily, however, the Glyndebourne Bakery has found in Fiona Shaw a mistress of patisserie who has sprinkled some more piquant flavourings into the mix and the result is something that doesn’t end up like a brick in one’s stomach.
First performed in 1899, Cendrillon is Cinderella, but based on Charles Perrault’s 1698 austere version of the tale, free of the accretions of Victorian pantomime. Although it follows the familiar narrative outline, an addition has been made by the opera’s librettist Henri Cain in the latter half, where the heroine is so distraught after the ball that she runs away in a suicidal frenzy, falls asleep by a river and has a whimsical dream in which she is reunited with the prince under a magic bower.
This makes no material difference to the outcome – when Cinderella awakes, the real prince finds her with the missing slipper as per usual – but the episode allows Massenet to insert a dainty fairy interlude, painted in pastel shades and lit up by the tinsel glitter of the Fairy Godmother’s coloratura. Perhaps there’s a glut of such delicate rococo filigree in the score: I confess there were moments when I found myself longing for some barbarian in hobnailed boots (Prokofiev?) to thunder in with some rumbustious tunes and a belly laugh.
But if you can take the absence of primary colours and red meat, there is much to delight and seduce here: Massenet can open the tap on a free flow of gently expressive lyricism, using the timbres of women’s voices with consummate skill and weave a finely stitched tapestry out of the melodic themes. It is, at the very least, immensely artful.
This new production will be a big popular success. With evocative lighting by Anna Watson, wittily appropriate costumes by Nicky Gillibrand and a set that plays cleverly with revolving mirrored panels designed by Jon Bausor, it looks a Christmas treat. Yet it isn’t merely a spectacle: Fiona Shaw’s direction gracefully explores the story’s psychological resonances – the power of the imagination to shape our identity, the gap between childhood fantasies and adult realities, the way that our objects of desire reflect ourselves. The fluid nature of gender becomes central. You may feel you’ve heard enough about this phenomenon lately, but given Massenet’s insistence that the prince should be sung by a woman en travestie, it is surely justifiable to suggest that Cendrillon may be looking for love with someone of her own sex – a possibility that Shaw presents with refreshing ease, warmth and good humour.
In the pit, Duncan Ward conducts with admirable lightness of touch and respect for the instrumental niceties: although he attends assiduously to the needs of the singers, a touch more oomph wouldn’t go amiss. The French mezzo-soprano Alix Le Saux makes an engagingly spirited heroine – her soft-grained timbre blending beautifully with that of Eléonore Pancrazi as the prince in their palpitating love duets. Caroline Wettergreen is spot on as the sparkling Fairy Godmother, William Dazeley is sympathetic as Massenet’s version of Baron Hardup, and Agnes Zwierko enjoys herself infectiously as a tightly corseted wicked stepmother with expensive shopping habits.
The sum of it is charming: this may not be the most macho or devastating opera you’ll ever encounter, but in this performance it’s a very pleasurable one.