Hipermestra/ La Traviata

Composer: Francesco Cavalli/giuseppe Verdi Director: Graham Vick/ Tom Cairns Conductor: William Christie/richard Farnes (May-june) and Andrés Orozco-estrada (August) Glyndebourne, Lewes, East Sussex (01273-815000) Until 8 July/27 August Running time: 4h

Glyndebourne’s summer has kicked off with an oddity, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian – the British premiere of an almost unknown opera first performed in Florence in 1658 that later lay neglected for more than three centuries. Its Venetian composer, Francesco Cavalli, a protégé of Monteverdi, is known to have composed 32 operas in all, a dozen of which remain lost – so there are surely more treasures of his to be unearthed. This one is based on a Greek myth in which the 50 daughters of Danao, king of Argos – whom an oracle has foretold will be killed by a nephew – are married off to the 50 sons of his brother Egitto, with orders to kill their husbands on their wedding nights. The only daughter to refuse, Hipermestra, is “the epitome of a tragic, traduced, operatic heroine”. But the work itself turns out to be dramatically and musically “uneven”. You are unlikely to see this rarity better staged than in this classy production by Graham Vick. “Whether you need to see it at all is another matter.”

You most certainly don’t – it’s a “colossal bore”, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph. The punishing 130-minute first half offers barely five minutes of “truly melodic arioso”. And just one “exquisite quartet lightens up the second”. On the contrary, said Fiona Maddocks in The Observer, once your ear adapts to the fact that most of the vocal line is recitative (sung speech), and that the “glories of the music” lie in the richly coloured continuo, this opera becomes “miraculous and addictive”.

Be that as it may, said Anna Picard in The Times, the Sussex opera house is undoubtedly on surer ground with its first festival revival of Tom Cairns’ “chic, bleak” 2014 production of La Traviata. This brilliant offering, as subtle and satisfying as ever, is especially notable for the magnificently sung Violetta of Russian soprano Kristina Mkhitaryan, in a memorable Glyndebourne debut, said Mark Valencia on Whatsonstage. com. “The closing moments are beautifully conceived and extraordinarily moving.”