Regular patrons are in for a shock if they venture down to Glyndebourne out of season. Never mind that the champagne bar is closed and the climate in the gardens in mid-March is still positively Arctic. What would they say about DJ BabyBlu getting the rafters to rattle and the ear drums to jangle in the foyer?
School 4 Lovers – a reworking of Mozart’s Così fan tutte – is the latest initiative from Glyndebourne Education. No, don’t groan yet: just because last autumn’s sex-and-drugs opera Tangier Tattoo failed to create a buzz does not mean they cannot turn up the volume for some hip-hop Mozart.
Glyndebourne is cautious (or sensible) enough not to shoulder the risks alone. School 4 Lovers is a co-production with Finnish National Opera; part of the European Network of Opera House Education Department’s anniversary Mozart project; and funded by the Culture 2000 framework of the European Commission among a host of others. Worthy or what? Staggering under the weight of all this institutional pressure to be inclusive, School 4 Lovers could easily have sunk to its knees before it ever reached the stage.
Fortunately, Mozart’s opera is timeless and can take any amount of rough treatment. Here, that includes having its musical numbers truncated and played out against hip-hop rhythms, not to mention interruptions for local youth break dancing – not the highlight of the evening. What made it was the sharp contemporary wit of Stephen Plaice’s inner-city English text. Would Mozart’s four young lovers have talked in a stream of four-letter words if they were alive today – possibly. I’ll never hear the duet for Dorabella and Guglielmo the same again now I know how well it fits the words, “Let’s have rumpy-pumpy- pumpy now”.
After three Glyndebourne performances the lively cast – Jessica Walker and Ville Salonen (the operatic pair), Christine Gelder and Marvin Springer (the personality pair), Natasha Seale’s Despina and Paradise as the rapping Donnie/Don Alfonso – head off to repeat the show in Helsinki and Tallinn. Heaven knows what audiences there will make of it, but they will certainly broaden their English vocabulary. ★★★★☆
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