Glyndebourne 
has announced details of its 2013 Season, the 79th Festival, which marks the final year of Vladimir Jurowski’s 13 year tenure as Music Director. He will conduct a new production of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos directed by Katharina Thoma.
The year’s big anniversaries of Verdi, Wagner and Britten are all marked, with revivals of Falstaff and Billy Budd, plus a cinema screening of Tristan und Isolde. Full casting details are yet to be released, but Mark Padmore makes his role debut as Captain Vere, while Sarah Connolly is Phèdre in Hippolyte et Aricie. Danielle de Niese sings the role of Norina in a new production to the Festival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, in Mariame Clément’s production previously seen on the 2011 Tour. Ailyn Pérez is Alice Ford in a revival of Richard Jones’ production of Falstaff.
Rameau makes his operatic debut at Glyndebourne; his opera Hippolyte et Aricie appears courtesy of director Jonathan Kent and designer Paul Brown, conducted by William Christie, thus reuniting the team responsible for the successful production of Purcell’s Fairy Queen, revived this year.
Jurowski said: “I have relished my time at Glyndebourne as Music Director and am tremendously proud of the artistic work we have produced together, during which time I have realised many of my artistic dreams. I am delighted that in 2014 the enormously talented conductor Robin Ticciati will take over this role and have every confidence that he will cherish, as I have, the opportunity to create opera in the unique environment that Glyndebourne provides.”
The 2013 marks the Glyndebourne directing debut of Fiona Shaw in a new production of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, to be conducted by Nicholas Collon.
In reviewing ticket prices, Glyndebourne is proud that in 2013, 30% of all tickets will be priced at £100 or less. All of its productions will be screened in cinemas and streamed live via The Guardian’s website.
Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Head of Music, Guardian News & Music, said "The Guardian is thrilled to be working with Glyndebourne for the third year and I am proud to be continuing our partnership with them. In 2013 we will present our largest operatic programme to-date, streaming the six opera titles from the 2013 Glyndebourne Festival. Glyndebourne is recognised as an international leader in the world of opera, and I am delighted that through the Guardian's website, we are able to let our readers experience these world-class productions.”
For more information, see Glyndebourne’s website.
thing to say about this recording is that one needs to put out of one’s mind most of the famous recordings that have preceded it since what one is accustomed to hear from the Callas, Sutherland, Caballé recordings or even further back excerpts from Cigna or Ponselle is a radically different work of art. Giovanni Antonini, Riccardo Minasi and Maurizio Biondihave spent years scraping away the barnacles of dubious performance tradition and updated instrumentation and restoring hundreds of small cuts that have become part of the standard performing edition. As with a restored oil painting the removal of years of accumulation has revealed a very different work of art. Indeed I would say that it redefines the work both in terms of sound and in appropriate casting.
attended Sunday’s “Flórez and Friends” concert at the Barbican – as opposed to sitting through oceans of orchestral filler in the RFH in order to dribble over the unfeasible length of Jonas Kaufmann’s ‘Wälse’ – you may be forgiven for wondering how an audience already in a state of chronic, uncritical delight could possibly be pleasured any more. In which case, you needed to be at tonight’s solo recital, the latest tranche of Juan Diego Flórez’s Barbican residency, which comprehensively proved the time-honoured adage “it ain’t over until the sooty-lashed one sings at least four encores”. The nubile bounced around, whooping; the mature squirmed with satisfaction in their seats, emitting the odd low moan; I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the lame weren’t seen dancing in the aisles, and the dead – always a fair percentage of any opera audience – weren’t newly-risen. Indeed, anyone suffering with scrofula could well have been cured merely by touching his immaculately tailored trousers (though I’m still working out how to explain this to the police).
In a pivotal scene in Verdi’s early opera, Pope Leo squares up to the defiant Attila, causing the Hun to turn tail. Here, two leading Slavic basses – Russian Ildar Abdrazakov and Bulgarian Orlin Anastassov – go head to head in the title role, but it proves to be something of an uneven contest due both to their supporting casts and the conditions in which the two performances were captured on film. Both are fairly traditionally staged and costumed, which should satisfy those pining for the days when Huns looked like Huns, but a few minutes viewing of each disc is enough to separate the wheat from the operatic chaff. In the blue corner, Arturo Gama’s production from the Mariinsky Theatre, released on its own label; in the red corner, a rudderless affair laughably attributed to director Plamen Kartaloff, recorded in the ruins of the Bulgarian fortress of Tsaverets.
