Fiona Maddocks has a ball in The Observer, surveying a weekend in the country. Such a joy to read a music critic who selects adverbs with surgical precision and eschews adverbs like the proverbial pestilence:
Barking in an insistent monotone – think of a car alarm – a lone booer felt the need to make their mark amid the noisy rapture at the end of Wagner’s Parsifal: its first staging in Glyndebourne festival’s 91-year history, and an opera its founder, John Christie, always wanted to see performed in his private theatre. The reason to mention this trivial discourtesy is to try to understand the response this final “sacred drama” by Wagner provokes, and to acknowledge the visceral ownership audiences feel towards the sprawling epic of sex, death, redemption. A shoddy performance is a different matter, not relevant here. Glyndebourne’s handsome production, which together with a revival of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia launched the 2025 season, was conducted with intensity and perception by the company’s music director, Robin Ticciati. Cast, chorus and resident London Philharmonic Orchestra, glowing and nuanced, performed with engrossing authority. You could recommend it for the brilliance of the solo cor anglais playing alone….
Read on here. You won’t regret it.
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