L'Espagnole and L'enfant et les Sortileges

Synopsis

Ravel's two one-act operas will reunite director Laurent Pelly and conductor Kazushi Ono, who made their Glyndebourne debuts in 2008 with Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel. While L'enfant et les sortilege's shares with that opera a child's-eye view of a sometimes threatening world, L'heure espagnole is a thoroughly adult confection. The play on which Ravel based his opera espagnole is a clever conceit set in the house of a clockmaker. It compares the wound-up mechanism of a clock with the erotic compulsions driving flesh-and-blood humans. Concepci?n devises a complex sequence of moves and counter-moves to conceal the presence of her various admirers. While directing these activities she becomes increasingly impressed by the physical attributes of her unwitting accomplice, Ramiro. Stephanie d'Oustrac, who last sang at Glyndebourne as Sesto in Giulio Cesare, will sing Concepci?n, while Canadian baritone Elliot Madore will make his UK and Glyndebourne debut as Ramiro. In L'enfant et les sortileges, inanimate objects come to life when a child, fed up with doing his homework, throws a temper tantrum. All the things that have been damaged by him start to voice their objections: a broken cup and teapot, a shepherd and shepherdess from the wallpaper he ripped, a battered armchair and the princess from the torn pages of a story book. When the sums from his homework and the animals and plants in the garden turn on the child as well, Ravel's music reaches a fierce climax. Only the child's kindness to an injured squirrel saves him and brings the opera to a touchingly poignant conclusion.

Our Review:

6 August 2012

Ravel’s only two operas, L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilèges, are perfect companion pieces but are all too seldom seen, either separately or together.  The Royal Opera has performed the first in recent years, but twinned with Gianni Schicchi, and it’s taken until now for Glyndebourne, who first did them in 1987, to re-establish the pairing in a new production by Laurent Pelly.

In the first opera, Stéphanie D’Oustrac, a great niece of Poulenc’s no less, is a Concepción that positively aches with sexual frustration, shedding her knickers the instant her would-be lover Gonzalve appears.  In a work that ticks and tocks from the first bar, it takes her some time to realize where she can best get her bread buttered.  Mind you, Elliot Madore’s strongly sung Ramiro, the muleteer with the muscles of Samson, is more grinning clown than beefcake, so her tardiness in ca...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

No reviews yet

Click here to add your review