A stark, compelling and excellently acted take on Mozart
This bizarre production got off to a bad start with one of Glyndebourne’s rare technical glitches – film footage during the overture flashed on and off with retina-punishing flickers.
What ensued was scarcely steadying: Claus Guth, the director, had translated imperial Rome to a reedy bog, above which loomed a featureless modern office suite. Everyone is dressed in black. The chorus gesticulates in block formation suggestive of a totalitarian parade. Of the glory of Rome or Tito’s largesse there is no sign: he could be a corrupt CEO or even a mafia capo for all the clemency he radiates. The film had shown Sesto and Tito playing together as coeval children, but, muddlingly, the former is later presented on stage as a slip of a teenager, while the latter has declined into middle age. At the latter’s renunciation of revenge, his lackey Publio assumes power.
Guth is evidently the sort of director who makes an opera mean what he wants it to mean: he refuses to be led by music’s mood or fooled by the moral certainties of the libretto. The result is stark, compelling and very well acted, but too perversely cool and hard in relation to the score’s nobility and elegance to be convincing. It’s an interpretation that doesn’t grow organically out of Mozart – merely one that speaks to contemporary neuroses.
Robin Ticciati conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment crisply and robustly, favouring light clean textures in the arias. I don’t know who sanctioned the protracted pauses between every exchange of the unaccompanied recitatives, but their effect was absolutely maddening.
Veteran Richard Croft (a late substitute for Steve Davislim, who resigned after disagreements with Guth) sang with exemplary poise and tonal sweetness, perhaps making Tito more sympathetic than the staging intended. As Vitellia, Alice Coote was characteristically idiosyncratic – she certainly had her thrilling moments, and some dodgy ones. Michèle Losier, Joélle Harvey and Clive Bayley provided first-rate contributions as Annio, Servilia and Publio. Jeremy Bines’s chorus were on top form.
But the undoubted star was Anna Stéphany as Sesto, dispatching both arias with terrific élan and technical control. When she sang, an otherwise bleak show came brilliantly alight.