Two inventive new productions showcase the best of Glyndebourne
Hänsel und Gretel Love and Other Demons Glyndebourne
Hunger and potential starvation have been perennial threats in Europe for so long and until so recently that it is no surprise that a subgenre of folk tales deals with famine and feast. Engelbert Humperdinck's 1893 opera Hänsel und Gretel dramatises the Grimm brothers' locus classicus of food-based fairy tales. Glyndebourne's new production by the French director Laurent Pelly puts a contemporary spin on it by taking it out of the traditional pantomime setting, and placing it in our consumerist world.
The children and their parents make their home in a colossal discarded cardboard box. It's not quite Asbo-land, but Dad comes home from a day's scrounging pretty pissed, and harassed Mum takes out her economic frustrations on her hyperactive kids by sending them to pick berries in the forest, blighted by acid rain and liberally littered with plastic bags. After losing their way and spending a night under the stars, the children discover the witch's cottage. This isn't constructed from folklorique gingerbread, but is a huge supermarket aisle loaded with packets of biscuits and pallets of plastic-wrapped cola bottles. Hänsel and Gretel, now on a sugar rush, briskly dispose of the witch, after which her previous child victims return to life as obese little butterballs, from their fattening up by the witch prior to cooking.
Though the plot may be simple, the music is rich, tuneful and complex. Humperdinck had worked with Wagner on Parsifal, and this opera - the best thing he ever wrote - has been referred to as the comic opera that Wagner never got round to composing. The orchestration has a Wagnerian lushness, and was beautifully performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Kazushi Ono.
The production is well-served by its singers, notably the young Slovak Adriana Kucerova as Gretel, with her delightfully bright lyric soprano. The German tenor Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke does a brilliant comic turn as the witch, Teutonically perverse in shocking pink twin-set and pearls.
Hänsel und Gretel is a traditional introduction to opera for children, though some recent interpretations have been too dark to be entirely suitable. This one can be thoroughly recommended for all ages, either on its tour of English theatres or in its inexpensive cinema broadcasts this autumn.
On 10 August, Glyndebourne premiered Love and Other Demons, its new commission, with the BBC, from the Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös. It dramatises Gabriel García Márquez's 1994 short novel of clashing black and white cultures in 18th-century Colombia. Sierva Maria, the 12-year-old daughter of a widowed aristocrat, has been brought up by native servants since her mother's death. One of them, Martina, is a priestess of the shamanist religion candomblé, and has made her familiar with its spirits and rituals. One day, during a solar eclipse, Sierva is bitten by a dog in the market. The next day, during her birthday celebrations, she collapses. In the course of reviving her, her father tries to remove her African necklaces, which causes her distress, and the dog bite is discovered.
The doctor suspects rabies; but the local bishop fears demonic possession by the spirits of candomblé. Sierva is removed into the care of the abbess of the local convent, where the bishop instructs a young priest to perform an exorcism. In the course of doing this, he finds he has fallen in love with the girl; he himself has become possessed by the demon of love. His obsession is discovered and he is driven away. The bishop himself then performs the exorcism, after which Sierva dies.
It is an intense and dark story and Eötvös has created an equally intense and dark soundworld, suspenseful and expressive in a cinematic way, with much percussion and tintinnabulation.
In a fine and obviously committed cast, the magnificent Felicity Palmer as the abbess stands out, as does the Australian soprano Allison Bell as Sierva.
For booking details, log on to: www.glyndebourne.com or call the box office on: 01273 815000
Pick of the week
Prom 47
20 August, Royal Albert Hall
Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and a concert performance of Janácek's rarely heard opera, Osud.
Out of the Blocks: Olympic Games handover celebrations
24 August, St Paul's Cathedral
Free concert by LSO Brass to mark the start of the build up to 2012.
Bach Day (Prom 50)
24 August, Royal Albert Hall
The St John Passion in the evening.
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