Glyndebourne Festival 2010

*Some items from the pre-selected menu may incur supplement charges

Billy Budd

Benjamin Britten

Glyndebourne has never, until now, staged Billy Budd, the 1951 all-male opera, with a libretto co-written by E. M. Forster. Based on Herman Melville’s allegorical tale about the battle between pure good and blind evil, the opera takes place amidships on a British man-o’-war.

Hänsel und Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck

With its familiar fairy-tale story, feel-good ending and magical mix of simple folk tunes and rich Wagnerian textures, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel has long cast its musical spell over both adults and children alike.

Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus

Mozart The second new production at Glyndebourne this season is Mozart’s second collaboration with the mercurial librettist  Lorenzo da Ponte is among the very blackest of black comedies.

Così fan Tutte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart and da Ponte’s final collaboration is a painfully funny, sometimes wickedly cynical comedy in which two callow, and perhaps slightly callous, young lads take on a bet to seduce one another’s girlfriends. Amid the ensuing confusions and conflicts,
the often laughable attempts of both sexes to control their deepest feelings are stripped bare to some of the most enticingly seductive and heartbreakingly honest music ever written.

Macbeth

Giuseppe Verdi

‘This tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man! If we can’t do something great with it, let us at least try to do something out of the ordinary …’ So wrote Verdi to his librettist, Piave, when starting work on his adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish play’. And, while no-one now doubts that the resulting opera marked a magnificent milestone in the composer’s mastery of dramatic writing, Richard Jones’s tartanclad take on it lives up to Verdi’s words in being nothing if not wildly and wonderfully ‘out of the ordinary’.

The Rake’s Progress

Igor Stravinsky

Inspired by William Hogarth’s famous cycle of satirical prints, and blessed with one of the cleverest librettos in all opera; Stravinsky’s 1951 opera is a modern musical
morality play. The ‘hero’ Tom Rakewell, signs a Faustian pact with the devil, swaps the simple country life and a devoted sweetheart for the vain pursuit of big-city bonuses and increasingly exotic pleasures.