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This is a gripping and imaginative restaging that updates a 1658 work to the oilfields of the modern Middle East
Francesco Cavalli’s 1658 opera hasn’t been staged in Britain before now. Yet any fanciful notion that an eternal maverick such as Graham Vick might concoct some dutiful historical reconstruction was dispelled even before the curtain rose on Glyndebourne’s new season.
For a start the tiny orchestra — just ten artfully improvising players from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, including William Christie directing from the harpsichord — has been kitted out in Arab robes. With reason. As Vick’s production progresses the instrumentalists increasingly enter the action, most powerfully in the devastating opening to Act III where they must clamber over war rubble, playing as they go.
Just as striking is the frontcloth, depicting a Middle Eastern mass wedding. And when it rises we see the real thing: 50 brides and 50 grooms parading past the ruling sheik. As someone later quipped in the gents’ loos: “Will the real Pippa Middleton please wave?”
This much of Vick’s stunning staging, at least, is true to Cavalli’s original plot, in which the paranoid king of Argos instructs his 50 daughters to marry the 50 sons of his brother Egitto and then murder them on their wedding night. However, only 49 obey. The rebel is Hipermestra, who has actually fallen in love with her groom — but her act of mercy triggers a war of revenge.
Aided by Stuart Nunn’s Hollywood-epic sets, Vick updates all that to the oilfields and killing-fields of the modern Middle East. And pretty brutal it is, with implied (but not explicitly staged) video beheadings, rapes, stonings and, in the last act, a real burning lorry and the impression of a civilisation in ruins.
Yet Vick is canny enough to leaven attrition with humour, as Cavalli’s generation of opera composers also did. The mandatory crossdressing old nurse, flamboyantly played here by Mark Wilde, is licensed to flirt with Christie and the audience, and a row of washing-machines joins a Coke dispenser and a rather swish Mercedes among the more incongruous stage items.
The singing is mostly plangent and serviceable rather than seductive, but Emoke Barath is superb in the title role, and Raffaele Pe, Benjamin Hulett, Ana Quintans and Renato Dolcini seize their moments to rant or lament. Cavalli’s score has no standout hits, but his flexible mesh of recitative and aria is brilliantly aligned to the dramatic ebb and flow. You will be gripped, though with a 130-minute first half you might wish Glyndebourne had added a small extra interval.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/oper ... -lt8960qp9