OPERA
The Damnation Of Faust (Glyndebourne Festival Opera) Verdict: Vintage Berlioz ★★★★✩
EVEN Hector Berlioz, while wanting La Damnation De Faust to be staged, had doubts about whether it would work; but director Richard Jones plunges in and makes an entertaining show of it in this, the opening production of Glyndebourne’s Festival 2019.
All hinges on his Mephistopheles, Christopher Purves (pictured), amusingly got up like Paganini and carrying a violin . . . the Devil’s instrument.
Given some spoken texts from Goethe’s original, he puts them over with panache, in plausible French. Most of his singing is excellent: only the lyricism of ‘voici des Roses’ escapes him. The best vocalist is French-Canadian mezzosoprano Julie Boulianne as Marguerite, victim of the self-centred Faust.
Her aria in Part 4, supported by Sue Bohling’s supple cor anglais, is the highlight of the evening.
Allan Clayton plays Faust as a bumbling Everyman. His singing falls easily on the ear but his sins, including murder, seem at odds with his air of innocence. Some ideas misfire. The piece should close with Marguerite being taken to heaven but Jones places the Minuet of the Will- o’-the-Wisps at the end. Well danced by Underworld demons, it makes an anti-climax. Hyemi Shin’s designs and Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes are clever. Robin Ticciati conducts vitally; and the LPO and the chorus are superb.