Sweet birds of youth give a tangy twist to Glyndebourne’s tasty tour
Hansel Und Gretel ★★★★✩ L’elisir d’amore (both Glyndebourne) Verdict: Two intoxicating tonics ★★★★✩
THE Glyndebourne Tour — the egalitarian offspring of the summer festival — is renowned for catching bright young talent while it’s fresh. This year it opened with two terrific nights for talent-spotters.
Humperdinck’s opera Hansel Und Gretel gets a wacky makeover in director Laurent Pelly’s satire for our junk-food times.
Here the babes in the wood live in a giant cardboard box, the witch’s gingerbread house is a supermarket stacked with sweets, biscuits and fizzy drinks, and the ‘guardian angels’ are hamburger-munching kids.
The witch is a grotesque panto dame in drag (Colin Judson) and the children finally saved from her clutches are little porkers every one — a shockingly bloated indictment of the burgers-and-chips generation.
Getting adult singers to convincingly portray children is always a tough task, but Russian mezzo Victoria Yarovaya is a scampish, Just William-style Hansel, while Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman makes a beguiling British debut as a gorgeously impish Gretel.
Twenty-year-old Venezuelan conductor Ilyich Rivas ensures a glorious and moving account of this richly Wagnerian score.
THE undoubted star of the revival of Annabel Arden’s delightful production of Donizetti’s bucolic frolic L’elisir d’amore is the American soprano Joelle Harvey as the capricious heart-breaker Adina.
There’s a polished British debut, too, from American tenor Christopher Tiesi as the lovesick Nemorino, who believes that the ‘elixir of love’ of the title will win him haughty Adina. (It’s actually a bottle of Bordeaux but it gets the required results!)
Spanish conductor Pablo Gonzalez makes a light and elegant Glyndebourne debut.
The tour is at its Sussex base until October 26 (Fiona Shaw’s new production of Britten’s The Rape Of Lucretia joins it on October 19) before moving to Woking, Norwich, Canterbury, Milton Keynes, Plymouth and Stoke-onTrent ( glyndebourne.com).