Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro has been the quintessential Glyndebourne opera ever since the Sussex Festival launched with it in 1934. This year’s new production needed to be a classic – and joy of joys, it is.
Count Almaviva, who preys on servant girls while his wife mourns her lost happiness, wants to deflower his wife’s maid, Susanna. Her fiancé, the Count’s valet Figaro, is out to stop him, while the lovesick adolescent page Cherubino is always in everybody’s way.
Mariame Clément’s staging mingles an exquisite 18th-century setting – sumptuous designs by Julia Hansen and warm, sensitive lighting by Paule Constable – with fresh humour, pertinent observation and magnificent characters. Moments of raw emotion reveal the nascent violence beneath that silken surface.
Countess Almaviva (Louise Alder) and Cherubino (Adèle Charvet) (Photo: Glyndebourne/Richard Hubert Smith)The revolving stage reveals a palace full of doors, often with snoopers behind them, the servants hurrying to giggle over their superiors’ conflicts.
Unusually, Clément makes Figaro, superbly sung by baritone Michael Nagl, into a lovable rogue who is slightly dim – and it’s convincing because his elaborate plots always go wrong and cause others enormous trouble. Johanna Wallroth is a bright-voiced, sparky Susanna and Adèle Charvet a touchingly adorable Cherubino.
At the centre, however, is the Count’s abusive relationship with the Countess – and two of British opera’s brightest young stars, Huw Montague Rendall and Louise Alder, make it all too real. Alder is heartrendingly poised and tender, and an especially poignant touch is the presence of a small daughter. Montague Rendall incarnates an entitled, dangerously sexy aristocrat.
There’s star-turn support from Alessandro Corbelli as Dr Bartolo, Madeleine Shaw as the housekeeper Marcellina and the bouncy Barbarina of Elisabeth Boudreault. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is in superb form, though it could use a couple more string players – the sound is too thin.
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Why only four stars? The conductor Riccardo Minasi, so I’m told, has meticulously researched his interpretation, in which he plays quite extremely with the tempo, speeding up and slowing down mid-number. Evidence apparently exists that Mozart used to pull the tempi around, too.
As we can’t hear what Mozart really did, the test is whether this device actually sounds good. It doesn’t. It’s distracting and gimmicky, unforgivably disrupting the musical flow of this glorious score.
Besides, it sometimes leaves vocal ensembles hanging by a thread. It’s to the cast’s great credit that nothing fell apart. A gorgeously performed, sparklingly intelligent staging – I look forward to a revival conducted by someone else.
To August 21, glyndebourne.com
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