ROMANTIC TRAGEDY WILL FLOAT YOUR BOAT

The Wreckers (Glyndebourne Festival)

Verdict: Blazing rendering of an Edwardian classic ★★★★★

PERHAPS the eccentric Dame Ethel Smyth, suffragette and campaigner for women’s rights, will be taken more seriously as a composer after this production.

My own admiration for her has steadily increased over the decades but The Wreckers, her tragic Romantic operatic masterpiece, has remained problematic up to now. As so often, Glyndebourne’s solution is radical.

They go back to Henry Brewster’s French libretto and restore half an hour of music, which in places has had to be orchestrated by Tom Poster. You quickly adjust to Cornish shipwreckers singing in French.

Most vital is the contribution of conductor Robin Ticciati, who clearly believes in every note of the piece, whipping

up the superb chorus and the London Philharmonic into an absolute fervour of excitement at times. I predict a triumph when a semistaged version comes to the Proms on July 24.

You can hear Smyth’s influences but she makes them very much her own. The adulterous love duet between Marc and Thurza, wife of hellfire preacher Pasko, is a highlight, as the great conductor Bruno Walter recognised.

To this basic triangle, strongly sung and characterised by Rodrigo Porras Garulo, Karis Tucker and Philip Horst, is added the complication of lighthouse keeper’s daughter Avis, also in love with Marc.

Well sung by Lauren Fagan, she is absurdly got up in pink tights (I almost hear Stanley Holloway intoning ‘Pink tights! I ask yer, pink tights!’), with a 21st-century coiffure.

The chorus sport a dreadful assortment of old tat, and not even period tat — it is the one false note in Melly Still’s production, while Ana Ines Jabares-Pita’s sets are atmospheric.