Glyndebourne announces its 2015 season

You know summer’s over when Doctor Who‘s back on telly, you’ve dug out your first pullover and Glyndebourne puts up the shutters at the end of its annual festival.

No sooner had the 2014 season rounded off with the last hurrah of Handel’s Rinaldo than general director David Pickard stepped forward to announce next year’s programme. It promises to be a cracker.

Of the three new productions, the headline offering is Donizetti’s Poliuto, a work that has never previously been mounted professionally in the UK. Michael Fabiano, the young American tenor who has just scored a personal triumph in the company’s La traviata, will sing the title role.

The unorthodox Australian director Barrie Kosky will direct a production of Handel’s Saul with a powerful cast headed by Christopher Purves, Iestyn Davies and Lucy Crowe. Ivor Bolton will conduct the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Completing the trio of novelties is Mozart’s tricky-to-stage comic opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which hasn’t been seen at the Sussex house for over a quarter of a century. David McVicar will be at the helm, with a cast including Sally Matthews and Edgaras Montvidas under Glyndebourne’s music director, Robin Ticciati.

Ticciati will also take charge of the most eye-catching of the year’s revivals, Laurent Pelly‘s double bill of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges and L’Heure espagnole, both of which will feature Glyndebourne’s first lady Danielle de Niese (she is married to company chief Gus Christie) at the head of an otherwise all-francophone company.

McVicar’s 2002 staging of Carmen is another returning production along, most excitingly, with the first appearance at the festival proper of Fiona Shaw‘s WhatsOnStage Opera Poll-winning interpretation of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. Original cast-members Allan Clayton and Duncan Rock will return to the fray, joined for the revival by Christine Rice as Lucretia, Matthew Rose as Collatinus and Kate Royal as the Female Chorus.

The Glyndebourne Festival runs from 21 May to 30 August 2015.