Heavy, pained breathing. Voices of unseen figures, whispering. The brisk clicks of a potato peeler. It has taken almost 50 years for Poulenc’s doomed Carmelite nuns to reach Glyndebourne and their first appearance there, in a new production by Australian director Barrie Kosky, is full of noises. Some are beguiling, some mundane. Many overspill the limits of Poulenc’s score, creating unexpected moments of stasis between the opera’s rapidly cross-cut scenes.
These can be uncomfortable. In the most terrifyingly effective, the snips of scissors hacking at the nuns’ hair pre-empt the guillotine strokes of the ending. In the strangest, a garden slides on to the stage, rustling in from the peeling concrete walls of Katrin Lea Tag’s single, underpass-chic set. There are, perhaps, too many sluggish fade-outs for an opera with such inexorable momentum: Poulenc’s score sounds the steady tramp of a French Revolution that cannot be stopped, retaining the swift transitions of the screenplay that inspired it.
