It's a cliche, but this year's double bill of Rachmaninov and Puccini at Glyndebourne is truly bitter-sweet. The opera house has put together two meditations on greed, death and money, with The Miserly Knight from the Russian and Gianni Schicchi from the Italian. And it could so easily have been a fully stereotyped night, with the Rachmaninov all doom and gloom and the Puccini all sunny uplands, were it not for the direction by Annabel Arden, who inserted acrobatics and astounding stage effects into the first and virtuoso family nastiness into the second.
Both composers were inspired by their national poet. Rachmaninov took his plot straight from a short story by Pushkin about a hideous, Gollum-like miser who would rather fight his son to the death than bequeath him his riches. Meanwhile, Puccini's librettist Forzano was inspired by a two-line throwaway reference in Dante's Divine Comedy where the poet comes across Gianni Schicchi, a local trickster condemned to hell for fraudulent impersonation. From this fragment blossomed a short opera, in which the eponymous hero impersonates a wealthy dead man with the encouragement of the deceased's greedy relatives, only to rewrite the will in favour of his own daughter.
At Glyndebourne - probably the only artistic venue in Britain where black tie and long dresses are still worn without any sense of irony, and where no one fusses about the eye-watering ticket prices - the issues surrounding private money, inheritance and the niceties thereof were perhaps more easily filtered from stage to auditorium than they would have been at, say, Opera Holland Park. At the start of the long interval, when everyone trooped off to their picnics after the grim Rachmaninov, there were some sober faces doing the wicker-basket-and-Thermos-flask two-step towards the tables in the garden.
And so, after supper, when the joyously lit Puccini bounded forth with its humorous costumes, there was an almost audible sigh of relaxation from the stalls, which can't just have been the Pimm's taking effect. There was nothing like a familiar blast of Puccini to make everyone feel that the Rachmaninov had been put in its place, and that the bother of getting down to the south coast and bedding coronation chicken in matching Tupperware was worth taking an afternoon away from the office for. Indeed, when Sally Matthews as Lauretta sang the iconic aria "O mio babbino caro" (I'm surprised it hasn't yet been reincarnated as a mobile ringtone), with utterly angelic timing, there was a satisfied gasp of pleasure and then gales of blustering applause - in the middle of an act, too, which is almost unheard of at Glyndebourne.
Everyone left smiling, which is really what you need at the Christie family's private gaff. I mean, when the curtain comes down, you face having to hoof through a muddy field in yer chiffon'n'tux, only to wait 40 minutes to get out of the car park. Followed by the hideously dull straights of the M23. In the dark. I suspect that is why, say, Wagner has never been attempted.
It has nothing to do with the intimacy of the (now greatly enlarged) auditorium, and everything to do with the need to ensure that the gowned and sequinned audience exits with its perfectly shod, collective foot tapping merrily.
