When it comes to presenting new works, Glyndebourne is not renowned for adventurousness, so it is a amount of how Peter E�v�s's status as an opera composer has climbed that he should be the first non-British composer to have a stage process premiered by the company. Love and Other Demons is E�v�s's fifth all-out opera, and if structurally it is his to the highest degree conventional so far, it is too well made and musically rewarding.
The composer has admitted that he localize out to write a bel canto work for Glyndebourne, and that Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez's 1994 novelette of spiritual intolerance, demonic possession and illicit love seemed to contain all the operatic ingredients he needed. The English-language libretto by Kornel Hamvai fillets the already slender tarradiddle expertly enough, but leaves the slice curiously deracinated. By removing its 18th-century Latin American context almost entirely, the power of M�rquez's thaumaturgy realism is neutralised, going just an unsavoury fib not far removed from Ken Russell's The Devils, with an ending that seems incautiously inconclusive.
E�v�s's confident score, though, is full of authentically magical things. His orchestral imagination is keen and he has simplified his musical spoken communication without always making it simplistic. There are ravishing sounds here, combined with equally convincing vocal writing often spun over diaphanous textures, tied though sometimes the drama needs more of a musical push.
It helps that the Glyndebourne carrying into action is so accomplished. Conductor Vladimir Jurowski makes the music shimmer and glow, and provides the singers with upper limit support. Allison Bell takes on with gusto the demanding coloratura of the central character, Sierva Maria, the lester Willis Young girl world Health Organization is incarcerated in a convent after apparently catching rabies; Nathan Gunn is the hunky priest sent to exorcize her demons but world Health Organization falls in love with her or else. There are wonderfully ascertained character roles from Jean Rigby as Sierva Maria's fellow inmate and Felicity Palmer as the abbess, and from John Graham-Hall as a doctor (the only age of Reason figure in this god-obsessed society), Robert Brubaker as the girl's father and Mats Almgren as the local bishop.
Only Silviu Purcarete's production disappoints for its failure to evoke whatever real horse sense of place, despite the lavish use of television projections total of wiggly bodies, insects and reptiles; someone power have pointed out to him that there are no chameleons in South America.
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