Like watching paint dry? - with added orchestra
Our last Glyndebourne of the 2024 Festival Season is Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
Light-hearted merry romp it isn’t.
This is a revival of the 2003 production. It’s not just a marathon of an opera, at 4 and a half hours it’s time for elite athletes to run two marathons! Tristan und Isolde is the ur-German Romantic opera – where ‘Romantic’ seems closer to Dignitas – where love and death seem necessarily intertwined.
The music is lush, and wonderfully performed by a very full (for Glyndebourne) London Philharmonic – 57 players – under a superb Robin Ticciati and it is very well sung, particularly in Act III.
The set is a set of elliptical hoops running across the stage (and a nightmare to walk around or up shallow steps) – perhaps because of this the staging is almost static with singers addressing the audience and not each other.
Stuart Skelton (Tristan) has filled out, in Acts I and II he seemed to channel Hagrid, whereas in Act III he went the full Zero Mostel!
To emphasize the static nature of the staging characters on a number of occasions exited so slowly they hardly appeared to be moving at all. This was clearly thus both intentional and, frankly, quite off-putting – at times it seemed more a concert performance.
Much of the show is in gloom, so you cannot see even which character is singing.
But this all comes together and really works in Act III which is effectively almost a surreal dream – suddenly the production catches fire. Indeed, I could forgive the staging of the first two acts for the impact of the third – which is tempestuous and where Isolde’s final aria is intensely moving.
Would I go to it again? – no – but I’d certainly listen to it with great pleasure.