BBC Proms: The Marriage of Figaro, Glyndebourne Festival review - merriment and menace

One door closes, and another one opens. A lot. It’s extraordinary what value those two simple additions to the Royal Albert Hall stage lent to Glyndebourne’s performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Proms.

Combined with some niftily manoeuvred furniture, minimal suggestions of a garden for the outside scenes, and the genius touch of a bathtub for the Count in Act Three, a few strategically deployed items made sure that we enjoyed pretty much a full staging of this signature piece for the Sussex house.

The cast, in period costume, used the width of their space well and climbed, when necessary, around the steps on which the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment played. Talia Stern, director for this visit, adapted Mariame Clément’s much-acclaimed new production with economy and intelligence. No one in a full, and hugely enthusiastic, house will have felt short-changed by a mere “concert performance”.This well-conceived one-night transfer meant that the dramatic and vocal strengths of the Glyndebourne show did more than just survive the move. Singers projected effectively into the vast barn around them, and even the most intimate moments – notably, the Countess’s pair of stricken arias (pictured above: Louise Alder with Pippa Barton) – never felt like faraway events. As for the OAE, they exploited their enhanced visibility to make a thrillingly up-front and attention-grabbing sound, with woods, horns, trumpets and Adrian Bending’s hard-edged timpani major characters in their own right. Conductor Riccardo Minasi’s tempi varied between whirlwind excitement – as in a hard-driving overture – and odd patches of languor when he almost seemed to make the singers stall. Just occasionally, a generally bustling production seemed to go slow-mo.

The cast not only commanded their key arias, and smoothly meshed in the peerless ensemble scenes. They acted with a ham-free vigour and commitment that filled the huge hall. In general, and despite the billows and frills of the 1780s frocks, Clément and her singers deliver an emotionally dark Figaro. Thanks to rich characterisation and deft stagecraft, it nonetheless drew waves of laughter from around the hall at many points. That ambivalence felt true to Mozart, and to Figaro’s perpetual quicksilver coupling of surface farce with underlying pain. A tough, even menacing, Count Almaviva, Huw Montague Rendall (pictured above with Louise Alder and Joanna Wallroth) combined vocal power and nuance with a dangerous physicality. He mingled imperious desire with an edge of volatile rage. His pursuit of Susanna, and confrontations with Figaro, teetered on the brink of violence (or went right over, in one scene with the long-suffering Countess), while numbers such as “Vedro mentr’io sospiro” exhibited a scary rasp and bite.

Louise Alder’s Countess tempered her refined melancholy with spirit and even playfulness when the table-turning plot hatched with Susanna begins. Her “Porgi amor” hinted at ardent sorrow but felt slightly constrained; in contrast, “Dove sono” spanned a shadowed rainbow of emotion with exemplary feeling, tone and diction. The little child (Pippa Barton) who accompanied her – a dream daughter? – was one of a handful of directorial touches that made this otherwise fairly “classic” reading of the work not entirely mainstream. 

On the servants’ side, Tommaso Barea’s Figaro had a heft, depth and authority that made him not just a plausible antagonist for the decadent Count but – in this revolutionary age – a credible future replacement. I’ve seen and heard wittier Figaros, but Barea had presence, agility (both vocal and physical) and a sense of muscle behind his upwardly-mobile machinations. He made, for example, “Non piú andrai” not some genial send-off for the scamp Cherubino but a gloating, hands-on expulsion of a too-charming rival for backstairs supremacy. As Susanna, Johanna Wallroth always gave a wistful and lyrical undertone to her smart and pert intrigues. In “Deh, vieni, non tardar” – the smouldering serenade that gullible Figaro thinks she means for the Count – this quality bloomed into a beautifully paced and phrased sensuality. However, Adèle Charvet as Cherubino (pictured below with Johanna Wallroth) at times threatened to upstage the whole company: black-clad, unusually imposing, not just a silly charmer but addictively loveable, with a winning touch of vulnerability that his/her (finally triumphant) efforts to sing “Voi che sapete” showed. Some dainty embellishments to that number confirmed the sense that Minasi had encouraged his singers liberally to ornament their lines. That’s authentic practice, and it almost always worked. 

From the trio of old-timers – Alessandro Corbelli’s Bartolo, Robert Forrest’s Basilio, Madeleine Shaw’s Marcellina – we could appreciate sturdy character sketches, even if Corbelli's Bartolo overdid his orthopaedic challenges a bit. And Elisabeth Boudreault as Barbarina made an outsize contribution, haunting and poignant, with her astonishing minor-key lament for a lost pin. In the choral scenes (pictured above), well-judged movements made up for limited forces, while each part in the great ensembles kept clarity and definition even in this huge arena. As the genuine merriment (not polite titters) that swept the hall proved, the comedy of this satisfying Figaro survived displacement to Kensington. So too did its pathos and poignancy.  

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