The Stage

Betrothal in a Monastery

Published Thursday 27 July 2006 at 11:10 by Edward Bhesania

Prokofiev’s opera has had to wait 60 years to get its first professional performance in the UK and Glyndebourne has done it justice but it’s not a work without its flaws. Based on Sheridan’s libretto The Duenna (1775), it’s a classic buffo scenario centring on Don Jerome, whose daughter Louisa he has promised - against her will, naturally - to the wealthy fish merchant Mendoza. After an intricate series of deceptions and disguises involving three couples, everyone ends up happy, apart from Mendoza, who finds out he’s married the duenna (governess).

There’s little in the way of character development and the only real emotional outpouring is when Clara, who has joined the convent, sings of what she believes to be her abandonment - a role lyrically sung by Nino Surgulazde - and there’s so much text to get through that there’s little sense of pacing in the music.

But the production, co-directed and co-designed by Daniel Slater and Robert Innes, is rendered in bright, Sevillian colour, not least in Jerome’s fairytale dream where he imagines his daughter wedding a fish-headed Mendoza and also producing fish-headed triplets. Viacheslav Voynarovskiy’s rotund, high-voiced Jerome and Alexandra Dursaneva’s matronly yet coquettish Duenna are the larger than life character highlights. Alan Opie’s Don Carlos amusingly attempts to instil good form and culture into his friend Mendoza and Lyubov Petrova sings with the proper resolve of a headstrong Louisa.

Vladmir Jurowski, conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, has the measure of Prokofiev’s brilliantly detailed score and delivers it with punchy efficiency.