Glad Rag Time Music
An eminent crossword compiler was once asked for his favourite clue. “Cinderella’s midnight music,” he replied. Seven letters. That’s, right : RAGTIME.
Well, it was glad rag time at Glyndebourne yesterday when I did what I never thought I’d do all summer: sit on the lawn with friends and enjoy a picnic.
It was sheer delight, made sheerer by the show: Peter Hall’s exquisite, acidic production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Cinderella’s late-afternoon music was a feast of elegance, melody and vitality.
I love Glyndebourne. And I love the new house as much as I loved the old house, where I saw Hall’s magical production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream many years ago. At that time, Hall seeemd to be in a lull of inspiration at the National; his soul was hovering over the Sussex Downs.
His Cinderella (first seen two years ago) belies any suggestion that the old maestro may be slowing down. Reports of his Pygmalion at Bath corroborate this impression.
One mark of the Cinderella — brilliantly designed with great moveable scenic blocks and tattered costumes by Hildegard Bechtler — is the progress of the principals right to the front of the stage in the beautiful sequence of quartets, quintets and sextets.
This movement raises the emotional temperature and places the singers in a nimbus of comic delusion and confiding with the audience.
Where had I see this effect before? Forty years ago, in Hall’s RSC version of The Government Inspector when Paul Scofield moved slowly down stage in his great fantastical aria at the end of the first act, the company of provincial officials and yes-men hanging on every word until the whole lot of them were just about to topple into the stalls when the curtain scythed down and saved them like a friendly guillotine.
Absolutely brilliant. But no music to speak of.
