UK Edition
Review
Hipermestra at Glyndebourne, review: a fabulous performance of a colossally dull opera
Everything possible has been done to revive Hipermestra, an opera by Francesco Cavalli virtually forgotten since its mid 17th-century Italian premiere. Money, talent, intelligence, great singing, dazzling spectacle and meticulous musicological scholarship have been lavished on the corpse. But was it worth the effort?
Hipermestra tells the mythical tale of a woman who defies her paranoid father’s insistence that his 50 daughters must marry his brother’s 50 sons and then kill them on their wedding night – this in order to circumvent an oracle foretelling that he will die by a nephew’s hand. Hipermestra alone defies the decree and is imprisoned. Her husband Linceo escapes and leads an army to revenge his brothers’ massacre. A godly intervention ex machina saves the day.
Graham Vick’s staging is brilliantly slick. Using the “immersive” techniques he has honed with his work for Birmingham Opera Company, he opportunistically updates the scenario to a modern-day Gulf State where the mass wedding is set to be a big fat eat-your-heart-out affair – brides and grooms wander around the gardens before the show and a massive iced cake dominates the stage.
But there’s barbed wire and security surveillance too, as the servant class (including the costumed string ensemble of eight in the pit, led by William Christie at the harpsichord) are treated like dirt. Linceo’s revenge comes in a Humvee and evokes the conflict with Isil. To claim that the tale yields any meaningful resonance to the current situation in the Arab world would be pushing it, but Vick’s wittily inventive stagecraft is matchless and Stuart Nunn’s scenery magnificent.
Unimpeachable performances come from the exquisitely crystalline Emőke Baráth in the title-role and the counter-tenor Raffaele Pé, who pulls off an alarming striptease as well as singing with robust expressivity as Linceo. Benjamin Hulett, Renato Dolcini and Anthony Gregory make the attendant tyrants and courtiers vivid, and it’s no fault of the excellent Mark Wilde that the Peggy Mount old baggage he plays in drag isn’t very funny.
If only the opera wasn’t such a colossal bore, offering barely five minutes of truly melodic arioso (most of it for Hipermestra herself) in its punishing 130-minute first half and only an exquisite quartet to lighten up the second. The remainder merely grinds through the stock formulas and cadences of Venetian baroque without any variation of pace or mood: for all the cosmetic surgery, the corpse remains inanimate.
Until July 8. Tickets: 01273 815000; glyndebourne.com