The centrepiece of this year’s Glyndebourne tour is a new production by Fiona Shaw of Cendrillon, Massenet’s 1899 version of the Cinderella story. It’s a curious work, in some respects – astonishingly beautiful, yet hampered by uncertainties of tone and flaws of shape.
Massenet follows Perrault’s familiar tale, but his need to give Cendrillon and her Prince an extended duet results in a strange interpolated episode, in which the pair, briefly reunited by the Fairy after the ball, express their love in mystical terms reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
And the ending, in which the singers step out of character to remind us that what we have been watching is merely a tale, seems oddly abrupt after what has gone before.
Shaw’s response is to stage the opera as a surreal, modern-dress phantasmagoria, much of which takes place in the mind of Alix Le Saux’s Cendrillon as she dreams by the fire. Caroline Wettergreen’s Fairy is an idealised memory of her dead mother, returning to protect her from her self-regarding stepmother, Madame de la Haltière (Agnes Zwierko) and her two ghastly daughters (Eduarda Melo and Kezia Bienek). The magical apparatus is genuinely entrancing, but elsewhere things are over-cluttered and the symbolism heavy-handed. The ubiquitous image of a butterfly prefigures Cendrillon’s eventual release from drudgery, and the dances at the ball accompany a game of hunt the slipper. Massenet’s decision to cast a mezzo as the opera’s hero, meanwhile, allows Shaw to suggest elements of gender fluidity in the relationship between Cendrillon and Eléonore Pancrazi’s Prince, who literally wears a heart on his/her sleeve, before surrendering it in their big duet.
It’s finely sung. Le Saux and Pancrazi sound ravishing together. William Dazeley is touchingly funny as Cendrillon’s put-upon father Pandolfe, though the best performances come from Zwierko and Wettergreen. Zwierko, gloriously over-the-top, steals each scene in which she appears. Wettergreen floats the Fairy’s coloratura with exquisite ease. Conductor Duncan Ward is wonderfully alert to Massenet’s sensuously glittering textures, and the Glyndebourne Tour Orchestra play most beautifully for him.
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