Mail Online

CLASSICAL

DAVID MELLOR

Poulenc Double Bill Glyndebourne Festival Opera, East Sussex Until August 28 ☆☆☆☆☆

Afine season at Glyndebourne ends with a real triumph: a Poulenc double bill with the tragic La Voix Humaine (1958) coupled with the opéra bouffe (comic opera) Les Mamelles De

Tirésias (1947). The director, Laurent Pelly, an experienced farceur, has emphasised how committed he and music director Robin Ticciati have been to this project. To that end, they have assembled a francophone cast, happily leaving Glyndebourne’s Eastern Europeans on the sidelines.

A rare treat. I have never before been given the opportunity to see Tirésias live, though La Voix Humaine has become popular recently. Poulenc was too versatile for his own good. An accomplished partygoer in the 1920s, he could produce songs for all occasions, most of them with dazzling original melodies. He could also write glittering orchestral music.

But for many, this gay son of privilege, whose family founded the huge French chemical company Rhône-Poulenc, was easily dismissed as a gifted amateur.

‘Half monk, half naughty boy’ was Rostand’s description. And that lasted even into Poulenc’s later life, where personal tragedy, and the collapse of France, meant Poulenc turned increasingly to religious music to fully expose his sorrows.

In La Voix Humaine, a distressed mistress lies on her bed battling with an indifferent lover, who has moved on, and the vagaries of the French telephone system. Ultimately she can take no more and commits suicide.

The distinguished French mezzo Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Poulenc’s great-niece, offers a totally convincing depiction of a woman at the end of her tether.

Perhaps here Pelly and his team interfere too much, but I’m not in a mood to carp, when the companion piece, Les Mamelles De Tirésias, is so strong.

Thérèse (Elsa Benoit), a feminist, wants to be done with her womanhood. So she throws away her breasts and tells her husband (Régis Mengus, left, with Gyula Orendt) she will no longer be his wife. It’s up to him, she says, to decide about children. Which he does. More than 40,000 kids appear, offering Pelly’s design team a wonderful opportunity for some great comic moments.

Poulenc is one of the great composers of the 20th Century. A shame most people at Glyndebourne were obviously hearing these mini-masterpieces for the first time. We should respect him more.

Tv & Puzzles

en-gb

2022-08-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/282832194894969

dmg media (UK)