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Iphigénie en Aulide, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Glyndebourne; <br></br>Britten's Canticles/Streetwise Opera and Tête à Tête, Westminster Abbey, London

Happy endings? Not for everyone...

Anna Picard
Sunday 26 May 2002 00:00 BST
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If we were to discuss sacrifice right now, what would it mean to you? Giving up chocolate for Lent? Forgoing your turkey to work four shifts for Crisis at Christmas? Or killing your child?

In the modern western world, sacrifice – as a deliberate act rather than the sudden valour of those who rush to their deaths to save others – has become unbloodied and uncomplicated, luxurious even. Yet its rougher antecedent is all around us; in the Bible, the Koran and Classical mythology, in the stories of Jephthah, Abraham and Agamemnon, and in the newspapers. Look to Israel, where the murder and martyrdom of children is commonplace. Look to Texas, where Andrea Yates, an educated white-collar home-maker, drowned her five children in a bath-tub to save them – as she believed – from Satan. We shudder at these deaths, we translate them as casualties of deprivation or depression, as evidence of fatal innocence, fanaticism or – at our most bewildered – cold-blooded evil. What we cannot do is relate to the beliefs that inspired them. So how can a modern western director engage a modern western audience in a story of such brutal sacrifice?

For Christof Loy, director of Glyndebourne's first production of Gluck's first great French opera, Iphigénie en Aulide, the solution is a lengthy seduction that first dislocates, then beguiles, then repels his audience with flat brutality. Through an awkward marriage of stark symbolism and hyper-realism, Loy plays with historical perceptions of Agamemnon's slaughter of his daughter Iphigénie, on the story's evolution from myth to play to opera, and – perhaps unwisely – on the mounting political discontent at the period of its creation.

Gluck's opera – drawn from Racine's tragedy of the century before – was written in 1774 with the encouragement of Marie-Antoinette and revised in 1775 to include a supernatural reprieve for Iphigénie. Here we have a little of both – or all – versions: a hint of Greek drama in the violent chorus tableaux, a touch of 17th-century glamour in the dea ex machina, a soupçon of Versailles in the panniered costumes of Agamemnon's courtiers, a splash of expressionism in the blunt hirospex of Jochen Heckmann's over-explanatory choreography, and a mass of modernism in the Muji-clad commoners, the hot white walls of Herbert Murauer's set, and the vicious betrayal that Loy makes an inevitability. Everything, in fact, including the kitchen-sink sincerity of our eponymous heroine's acting. And that's just the production. In Gluck's score there are pure emotions (rage, misery, devotion, desire), mixed ones (doubt, self-deception, confusion), and one signal chorus that – for all my doubts about Loy's unconvincing parallel between pre-Revolutionary France and the Trojan Wars – bears out his choice of ending. It's impactful, well-timed, a sockeroo of a production – though this would be hard to avoid with Gerald Finley, Veronica Cangemi, and Katarina Karneus in the three main roles – and a genuinely upsetting opera; not least because until the final number's horrific reversal of fortune, a happy ending seems possible.

Much of this false hope is a result of Finley's sympathetic characterisation of Agamemnon. Where Cangemi portrays Iphigénie's goodness with utter simplicity and sweetness, and Karneus spits, dazzles and shocks as a curdled, vampish Clitemnestre, Finley wavers between anger, tenderness, and calculating coldness. By comparison, Jonas Degerfeldt, as Achille, seems two-dimensional, but I don't think Gluck invested much emotion in his arias. For the others – each a fine singer, an effective actor and an imaginative musician – the task at hand is clear, if demanding: a proper exposition of what is in the score. In this they are supported by conductor Ivor Bolton and the Orchestra of the Age on Enlightenment, who, through this production, should do for Gluck what Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra have done for Berlioz. Bolton's interpretation draws heavily on both the influence of the tragédie lyrique and Gluck's nascent classicism; underscoring the echoes of Montéclair's Jephté and the Rameau-esque wind/string doubling, propelling the development, teasing the colours and balancing the numbers in an elegant, persuasive framework. Stylish, passionate, detailed and directional, this is the sort of concentrated conducting that embraces period style without losing dramatic impetus.

For Abraham and Isaac – iconic to Muslim and Christian alike – reprieve meant reprieve. But the message of their near-sacrifice is clear: this is what you have to be prepared to do in the name of faith. In direct contrast to Loy's dislocated, morally ambiguous Iphigénie, Tête à Tête and Streetwise Opera – a company formed from London's homeless – put their Westminster Abbey staging of Britten's Abraham and Isaac at the heart of modern conflict; with father and son in combat gear (Dan Norman and Simon Baker), a news crew on hand (clients of The London Connection), and the Voice of God (James Bowman and Ian Partridge) appearing as British and American premiers at a press-call. Subtle, no. But apposite.

Linked only by tenor Dan Norman, whose clarity and expressiveness grew steadily, each Canticle was developed by director Bill Bankes-Jones with a different hostel, leading to some startling stylistic differences: Godard in the north transept (The Death of Saint Narcissus), Jarman by the Lady Chapel (My beloved is mine), CNN in the choir-stalls (as above), and Charles Sturridge everywhere else. (Who'd have thought Brideshead would have such lasting resonance?) Every performer and director – for there were many – should be proud: a witty, brave, imaginative evening.

'Iphigénie en Aulide', Glyndebourne, (01273 813813) to 5 July

a.picard@independent.co.uk

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