https://www.glyndebourne.com/tickets-and-whats-on/events/2018/watch-vanessa/
Watched online, excellent print.
First performed in 1958 at the Met.
Composer: Samuel Barber
Libretto: Gian Carlo Menotti
Conductor Jakub Hrůša / Leo McFall (17 and 24 August)
Director Keith Warner
Designer Ashley Martin-Davis
Lighting Designer Mark Jonathan
Projection Designer Alex Uragallo
Cast includes
Vanessa: Emma Bell
Erika: Virginie Verrez
The Old Baroness: Rosalind Plowright
Anatol: Edgaras Montvidas
The Old Doctor: Donnie Ray Albert (familiar to me as Porgy in the Houston Opera Company version of Porgy and Bess)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
The Glyndebourne Chorus
In the introduction, the host gave this analogy: Hitchcock meets Ibsen. Well, I don't know much (any?) Ibsen, so after seeing it, I can't relate. I know Hitchcock very well, and found none here. The only suspense was "what the heck is going on?" And the answer is "just what you're seeing."
The 3 women are Vanessa, her mother and her niece Erika. We open in 1950's Scandinavia in winter, during a snow storm. Vanessa is waiting for Anatol to arrive by sleigh. The Anatol who arrives is not her former lover, missing for 20 years; he's dead. This Anatol is his son. Vanessa recoils. Erika is so intrigued, she sleeps with him. He proposes marriage. She rejects him. He develops a relationship with Vanessa, and they marry. Erika is pregnant, has a child, not sure what happened to it. (Neither synopsis that I read covered it.) We end the opera with Vanessa and Anatol going off to Paris to live, and they may never come back. Erika vows to stay and take care of grandmother, and take Vanessa's place waiting for Anatol to return. ....huh?
From the Glyndebourne Opera page (link above): "An operatic thriller from the age of Hitchcock, Samuel Barber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first opera boasts one of the 20th century’s most beautiful scores. Poised constantly on the edge of song, Vanessa unfolds in generous swathes of melody, rich in filmic strings and soaring brass, with echoes of Puccini, Berg and Strauss. It climaxes in a final quintet of Mozartean poignancy – one of the great ensembles of the contemporary repertoire."
I paid fairly good attention for a while, but got none of that. No melody grabbed my attention (except a few notes that sounded like they were ripped from Puccini), and the quintet didn't grab my attention either.
Both synopsis entries that I read talked about the sets and costumes in '58 designed by Cecil Beaton, who has 12 film credits ('41-'64) for set and costume design, and won 3 Oscars for My Fair Lady ('64) and Gigi ('58). The sets/costumes of this production seem unlikely to be faithful to that original performance. The sets were creative in a minimalist way, but everything was drab and colorless. This could have passed for a b/w film, except we got some skin tones.
I don't know what it would take for me to appreciate the drama here. The libretto was in English, and we had subtitles to assist. I didn't get any psychological insights into either Vanessa nor Erika, nor Anatol for that matter. Maybe I really didn't pay good attention. Or maybe yet another emperor is naked.
Glyndebourne Opera Festival, cond. Hrusa; 6
