A winning performance of an American masterpiece
Christopher Cook delights in Glyndebourne’s 2018 production of Samuel Barber’s 1950s melodrama
Barber
Vanessa (DVD)
Emma Bell, Virginie Verrez, Edgaras Montvidas, Rosalind Plowright; Glyndebourne Chorus; London Philharmonic Orchestra/jakub Hr a; dir. Keith Warner (Glyndebourne, 2018) Opus Arte DVD: OA1289D; Blu-ray: OABD7258D 130 mins Vanessa is a great American masterpiece. Not just because of Samuel Barber’s luscious score, or the care with which he writes for the voice, but also the immaculate libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti, with its chilling sense of mystery. Here now is the production and cast that Vanessa has been waiting for.
Glyndebourne’s director Keith Warner well understands the work’s American roots, premiered at the Met in 1958 two years after Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind had shown how melodrama could cut to the heart of the American Dream. Menotti may have set his libretto in ‘a northern clime’, but an old baroness who refuses to speak to her daughter Vanessa – who has brought up her niece Erika as if her own daughter in a mansion stuffed with servants – is more haunted Hollywood than icy Northern Europe.
Warner frames his set with a pair of giant mirrors. There’s black and white video of the back story, a staircase worthy of film noir and, behind the fashionably distressed grand sofas and salon chairs, a dark brooding forest. Human hearts are gripped by ice here, until the mysterious Anatol arrives to set them all fluttering. Virginie Verrez is magnificent as Erika who loses her heart and almost her mind when she sleeps with Anatol. Rosalind Plowright is a knowing but haughty Baroness, and Edgara Montvidas oozes boyish charm as Anatol. But it’s Emma Bell’s Vanessa that holds your eyes and ears. Passionate, trusting, fearful and deluded, she never puts an elegant 1950s foot wrong from the opening wait for the man who is Anatol to their final departure for Paris. Bell and the whole cast are admirably served by Jakub Hr a conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
PICTURE & SOUND ★★★★★
Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
Emma Bell holds your eyes and ears as the titular Vanessa