For the first time in my nearly 40 consecutive years of visits to Glyndebourne, it opened not with a new production but, disappointingly, with two revivals. Richard Jones’s wry, modernist take on Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier proved a popular hit when it was new in 2014, despite a kerfuffle about the costuming of its titular “hero”, the Irish mezzo Tara Erraught; and Annilese Miskimmon’s Madama Butterfly, updated to Nagasaki in the 1950s for the Tour in 2016, is certainly no feather in the festival’s cap, despite some good performances and a vocally formidable reading of the title role from the Moldovan soprano Olga Busuioc.
In any case, Puccini’s opera is the antithesis of a Glyndebourne Festival piece. Played almost without cease since its revised, published