Glyndebourne Opera Festival 2014, Highlights

Tickets for this summer’s Glyndebourne Festival go on sale next month, with a mouth-watering (and we don’t just mean the picnic and Champagne) programme of ravishing new productions and established repertoire. 

The new productions are awaited with even warmer anticipation than usual because this year sees 30-year-old Robin Ticciati’s debut as music director. Ticciati was the youngest conductor ever to perform at La Scala, Milan, and has worked with top orchestras globally, including the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has already begun to accumulate gongs for his mantlepiece, including Germany’s prestigious ECHO award for a recent recording of Brahms. His conducting reputation has been founded on his work with the core of the nineteenth-century classical repertoire, which comes to a heady climax with the music of Richard Strauss. 

So it's fitting that Ticciati’s first performance will be the company’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss’ most sumptuous and seductive romantic opera, which hasn’t been seen at Glyndebourne for over thirty years. This romantic comedy concerns a love triangle between the youthful Octavian, the Marschallin, his older aristocratic lover, and new young love Sophie, but the ecstasy of Octavian and Sophie’s love is tempered (for the older Marschallin in particular) by an awareness of the withering of age and fickleness of male love. Strauss loved the female voice and gave the part of the adolescent Octavian to a mezzo-soprano – giving the lovers’ ménage a trois a distinctly Sapphic charge. The opera world will be watching Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught (Octavian) with particular interest. She had a series of high-profile debuts in Munich and Vienna last year and appears to be on a heady ascent to stardom. 

Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera, written when the composer was only 19, has only recently been accepted into the repertoire, though that’s because of problems establishing an authentic score and the opera’s complicated plot, rather than any lack of musical quality. At its heart a thrilling romantic comedy about a scorned woman who returns to her cruel lover disguised as a gardener, the piece is an exciting discovery, and promises to become as much of a firm favourite as the rest of Mozart’s work. 

Verdi’s much-loved tragic opera La Traviata, about the passionate but doomed love between reformed courtesan Violetta and nobleman Alfredo, is also treated to a new production. The role of Violetta was revolutionary at the time of first performance in 1853, offering greater moral and theatrical range than any previous female role in opera, and to this day it remains one of the most demanding in the repertoire. 

Russian soprano Venera Gimadieva performs the role in this production, and acclaimed American tenor Michael Fabiano makes his Glyndebourne debut as Alfredo, in a performance many critics are awaiting with anticipation. Last year the Washington Post compared his appearance and onstage charisma to Marlon Brando, and announced a new star in the sky of Italian opera: ‘It’s not just the looks; his sound is also a throwback to an earlier age of Italian singing — big and warm and full. Already, that sound has brought him, mainly in Italian roles, to major houses around the world: the Met, the San Francisco Opera, Milan’s La Scala.’ Conducted by Sir Mark Elder, one of the most distinguished Verdi specialists, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, this promises to be a musical and treat. 

Three of Glyndebourne’s best-loved existing productions also return this year. First on stage is Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s lyrical and sensuous adaptation of Pushkin’s verse novel about Onegin’s thoughtless rejection of Tatyana’s love, and his subsequent regret. The production, by star director Graham Vick, is a classic. Then Don Giovanni, Mozart’s much-loved, though darkly ambiguous comedy about the lecherous Don, who begins the opera mid-seduction, and ends it being sent to hell; and to conclude the season, Handel’s Rinaldo, a tumultuous love story set originally during the First Crusade, but re-located here to an English boarding school. Despite having an Italian libretto and being written by a German-born composer, the opera was commissioned for the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket, in 1711, and most critics judge it to be mainly an English work. 

Booking for the 2014 Glyndebourne Festival will open on Monday 10 March 2014

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