7 days ago
The Marriage of Figaro, Glyndebourne: No new insights but buckets of charm
Ninety-one years since Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), opened the old opera house at Glyndebourne (and 52 years since I first saw the opera there, but let that pass), Mozart's sublime opera buffa is still core to the festival's repertory. Its new staging, by French director Mariame Clément, will surely provide a banker for the future: it is charming, clever and extremely well-sung, while offering absolutely no new insights into this greatest and most subtle of comedies.
When Clément directed Mozart's Don Giovanni here two seasons ago, the result was an incoherent jumble of ideas. Here, she has moved in the opposite direction and produced instead a direct telling of this tale of the follies of a single day, on which the servants Susanna and Figaro aim to get married, but the wiles of Count Almaviva stand in their way. The cross-class alliance of the unhappy Countess with Susanna in order to humiliate the Count provides a rich source of disguise and deception, but social commentary is missing here.
Julia Hansen's design of interlocking curved rooms provides an elegantly post-baroque setting (though problems with the movement of the revolving stage caused a delay in act four on opening night), as we see the spaces of the chateau unfold with Paule Constable's occasionally surreal lighting. Clement gives each character a signature: Marcellina (Madeleine Shaw), who claims Figaro's hand, vulgarly munches fruit; Don Basilio (Ru Charlesworth), who gleefully observes the confusions, has the sniffles.
Some ideas are cute: an inserted game of musical chairs interrupts the wedding scene; while Cherubino (the ardent Adèle Charvet), the well-behaved child of the Countess whose writing provides the source of the letter duet, makes a nervous false start to his famous aria Voi che sapete. The spectacle of Huw Montague Rendall's Count emerging from his bath makes a vivid opening to Act III: he is lithe and forceful in his big aria – quite fanciable, even, though not as much as he imagines himself to be, which will provide the root of the opera's closing scene.
We are unlikely to hear the Countess's aria Dove sono sung better in our day than by Louise Alder, gloriously focused and resonant; Johanna Wallroth's Susanna is chirpy rather than cheeky, but her voice is nicely sharp-edged. Barbarina's one aria is perfectly done by Elisabeth Boudreault. At the centre of proceedings, Michael Nagl's good-humoured Figaro produces some lovely tone in his act four aria and finale.
Riccardo Minasi's jumpy, stop-start conducting of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment produced an uneasy first half on opening night and only settled down in the second half: Minasi attempts rhythmic flexibility, which is admirable, often slowing down arias before the end, then racing to the finish. But that should not be at the expense of continuity and flow, which was fatally missing from the tremendous Act II finale.
This is a harmless, amusing Figaro, which will delight audiences – but surely we expect more from Glyndebourne.
