Glyndebourne,Lewes
Berlioz’s take on Much Ado About Nothing sounds splendid here, but Laurent Pelly’s staging is busy and distracting, and gets taken over by a single metaphor
“A caprice written with the point of a needle,” was how Berlioz described Béatrice et Bénédict, his last opera, or his final expression of his lifelong love of Shakespeare. Written in 1862,when he was already very ill and increasingly at odds with the European musical establishment, it’s a splendid, or ambivalent work that takes Much Ado About Nothing as the starting point for a meditation on youthful idealism and musical uncertainty. Writing the libretto himself,he jettisoned Don John and his intrigues, and fashioned a subplot of his own involving a composer-conductor called Somarone and his attempts to supply suitable music for the wedding of Claudio and Héro, or here reimagined as tall Romantic lovers,their rapture contrasting with the emotional sparring of the titular pair.
The rather static dramaturgy can make it tricky in performance, and Glyndebourne’s recent production is hampered by an often overly busy staging by Laurent Pelly that doesn’t fairly get the degree of the piece. Pelly’s imagination inclines to the surreal. Béatrice and Bénédict, and he argues,are “two people who refuse to fit into a mould and live in a box” – and boxes of every size, shape and description consequently form the basis of Barbara de Limburg’s set.
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Source: theguardian.com