The Roman Empire becomes a soulless modern bureaucracy in Claus Guth’s new production of La Clemenza di Tito, the first time Mozart’s last opera has been seen at Glyndebourne since 1999. It is a curiously divided piece of music-theatre, insightful and intransigent, maddening and admirable in equal measure.
Guth begins with a film, faultily projected on opening night but clear enough to enable us to see Tito and Sesto playing together as boys in an Edenic natural landscape. Their friendship and this earthly paradise, however, are already under threat from Sesto’s unthinking propensity to violence and Tito’s innate disgust at it. When we encounter the pair as adults, we find their relationship further corrupted by the demands of sex and politics. Their Eden has become a decaying wilderness, dominated by a hideous office block, where Richard Croft’s Tito fends off the endless demands of sycophantic civil servants. Down below, meanwhile, Anna Stéphany’s Sesto, in thrall to Alice Coote’s neurotic, chain-smoking Vitellia, unwillingly plots revolution.
The evening’s strengths lie in Guth’s depiction of the development of this embattled friendship, in which he is helped immeasurably by exceptional performances from Croft and Stéphany. Both achieve rounded characterisations through the seamless integration of recitative and aria, and use Mozart’s verbal and melodic repetitions to suggest shifts in psychological perception and meaning. Croft beautifully conveys the lonely isolation attendant on absolute authority and the anger that both informs and threatens Tito’s idealism. Stéphany trawls Sesto’s emotional and moral anguish with tragic intensity. Her technique is also formidable: Parto, Parto is simply breathtaking.
In reimagining the Roman populace as civil servants on the make, however, Guth loses sight of the wider political implications, giving us little sense that lives are at stake beyond the corridors of power in which the drama plays itself out. Vitellia’s music, meanwhile, lies fractionally high for Coote, and despite her palpable dramatic commitment, we are at times conscious of strain. Michèle Losier and Joélle Harvey make an attractive pair as the young lovers Annio and Servilia, and Clive Bayley is the cunning, insidious Publio. Conductor Robin Ticciati combined elegance with urgency, though the big ceremonial scenes could do with more grandeur and weight. Placing the chorus in the auditorium for the first act finale creates problems with balance, and was perhaps a mistake.
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