An opera with the compulsive power of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) all but stumps rational response. Barrie Kosky’s new production of Carmélites for Glyndebourne – after his runaway success in 2015 with Handel’s Saul – is riven with discontinuity: extraneous shouts and sighs, slow fades to black, awkward silences between the many short scenes. At the same time the impact – with incisive conducting by Robin Ticciati, Glyndebourne’s music director, flawless playing by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and an accomplished cast – disturbs and confounds. That the two responses can coexist, vexation with eulogy, is part of the unspoken contract you enter into with this most audacious of directors.
Everything in the work is specific, even the date: 17 July 1794, when 16 Carmelite nuns from Compiègne in northern France were executed by guillotine, at the height of French revolutionary terror. The libretto is based on a later, fictionalised account. Poulenc’s music, with its Ave Maria and Salve Regina, is steeped in the Catholic liturgy he refused or infused all his life. For Kosky, a Jewish atheist (his own words), the opera’s wider relevance had to be unlocked. If you were feeling disputatious, you could say that the point of any masterpiece is its resonance beyond literal limits. But the Australian director is fertile with ideas, and he is not shy to hammer them home.
