Dan in his handsome new tuxedo (center).I was both excited and a little anxious when our date at Glyndebourne rolled around. Glyndebourne is an old country estate outside the town of Lewes, which is located just to the northeast of Brighton. After we took the time in our Brighton hotel room to shower and change into our evening finery, I was worried about making it to Glyndebourne in time for the curtain, so we took a cab ride from door to door instead of hoofing it back to the train station, waiting for the next train, and hoping to catch a cab from the Lewes station to the estate.
At Glyndebourne, it is traditional to dress in black tie and picnic on the grounds of the estate in the afternoon before the opera. Dan and I skipped the picnic option but dressed up and strolled around the gardens.
Dan in his handsome new tuxedo (center).
From the direction of that hill in the center, we could hear a distant cacophony that sounded like lots of people yelling. Dan figured out that it was the sound of sheep bleating.
I in my gown.
The two of us. I like this photo!
A scenic pond, with waterlilies.
There were various sculptures scattered around the gardens. I liked this one of a swimmer poised at the edge of the pond. It had a price tag on the base and was apparently available for sale; I can't remember what the asking price was, but it was a very large sum of money!
As we rounded the end of the pond, we came within view of a field of sheep. These sheep were not the source of the bleating noise, though; this field seemed quiet.
Sheeeeeep. A path had been mown through the tall grass between the pond and the sheep field, leading up to a cul-de-sac next to the fence. It was obviously intended as a sheep observation area for opera-goers in black tie, which amused me.
A better look at Dan's tux.
Another shot of my dress, taken during the "interval" (intermission). I believe that's part of the manor house in the background. I gather that the opera festival started out in the house, then moved to a small purpose-built theater, and now takes place in a larger, recently constructed auditorium.
Strolling around the grounds of Glyndebourne among the well-dressed and wealthy patrons (suffice to say, tickets are not cheap and the whole experience was a great treat for me) kept reminding me of my Oxford days. Oxford has made an effort to increase the economic diversity of its student body and my college, St Anne's, is probably one of the more diverse ones, but there's still a dominant culture of the leisure class. Growing up in semi-rural America, I had known tuxedos only as rental gear for rare occasions: high school prom, one's own wedding, and weddings in which one served as best man or groomsman. If I had thought about it, I would have concluded that the conductors of orchestras probably owned their own tuxedos. In Oxford, however, I became acquainted with a class of young people for whom formal social occasions were a regular occurrence; I met men my own age who owned black tie apparel and who didn't think it was strange to do so. In fact it made economic sense, since they probably attended three, four, five, or more formal events in a year. I was quietly amazed.
At Glyndebourne we observed a particular modulation of the formal dress code. Maybe we should call it "garden party formal." The Glyndebourne website says that "evening dress" is customary during the summer festival, so Dan wore his full tux including waistcoat and jacket, and I wore a floor-length gown. When we got there, though, we saw that the majority of men had dispensed with their jackets, and the majority of women were wearing semiformal frocks or what I might call "party dresses" with hemlines in the vicinity of the knee. Straw hats were common for both women and men, and were sold in the gift shop on site. I wasn't the only one in a full-length gown, though, and I think it was better to over-dress than under-dress.
I could go on and on about the performance, but I'm going to try to keep my remarks brief here.
Here is the trailer for the Glyndebourne production:
The production got mixed reviews, especially from members of the public leaving comments on the festival's website. The singing and musicianship were generally praised, but some people disliked the quirky production design (if you've watched the trailer above, you've seen that the general conceit for the set is a giant refrigerator) and some of the directorial choices. I was in the camp that enjoyed it a lot. I thought the design choices were imaginative, thought-provoking, and emotionally affecting. Was it the most mind-blowing, soul-shattering performance of a baroque opera I've ever attended? No, that honor goes hands down to the 2011 revival of Lully's Atys that I had the good fortune to see live in New York. But I would rate the Glyndebourne Hippolyte pretty highly.
I thought the director and designers did a good job of dealing with some of the problematic aspects of the opera. The plot and libretto are a dog's dinner, really. Just try reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, which benefits from some simplification and a lot of clarification. It's still very difficult to follow. I thought the Glyndebourne production handled it well, though. I've put my extended commentary on this point on a separate page.
The costumes were a mix of cartoon-baroque and contemporary, with the immortals generally in cartoon-baroque and the mortals generally in contemporary clothing. I thought some of the cartoon-baroque costumes were wonderfully fun:
Diana
Cupid
Pluto
(all three screen shots from the streaming video of an earlier performance of the Glyndebourne 2013 production)
I also enjoyed some of the visual wit in the production. Probably my favorite joke was this (ignore the subtitles):
Of course the son of Neptune has an aquarium in his house.
There were many impressive spectacles in the show, but probably my favorite was the dance of the flies. The sets for each scene are variations on the refrigerator theme established in the prologue (which you can see in the YouTube clip above). Hades is imagined as the dusty back side of the refrigerator, with Pluto lording over the scene from atop the compressor. For the ballet in Hades, the dancers were dressed as giant flies with frightful headpieces and costumes evocative of baroque-era court dress. I couldn't get a good screen capture from the online broadcast (the flies are in constant motion!) but there's a nice picture here.