Glyndebourne’s Dialogues des Carmélites review — shocking and musically thrilling

What drives people to commit themselves to a belief system? Few works in the performing arts are serious about religion, let alone about the psychopathology of religion. One of those few is Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. It is set during the final days of the French Revolution as anticlericalism reaches its peak and the Carmelite nuns take a vow of martyrdom. As the opera ends, they depart to the guillotine, one by one.

The first night at Glyndebourne of a new production of this singular masterpiece was followed by a full-throated and sustained ovation. Among other achievements, it is a fascinating sequel to the festival’s double bill last year of Poulenc short operas, La Voix humaine and Les Mamelles de Tirésias, both intensely secular affairs. Poulenc emerges as a startlingly diverse composer and dramatist.

The protagonist of Dialogues, the aristocratic Blanche de la Force, has been fearful all her life. She chooses to become a Carmelite nun, at least in part because the convent offers refuge from the terrors of the French Revolution, which is shattering the society she has known. She has not been there long before she encounters other terrors, not least death. By the end of the opera, Blanche, the last to go to face execution, has come through a complex journey. She has even, finally, conquered fear.

Robin Ticciati’s conducting shows how richly layered this music drama is. At all points, the London Philharmonic Orchestra beautifully reveals the momentous pace and spacious sound-world of Poulenc’s composition. Dialogues combines voices and orchestra in contrasting rhythms, now with the suspenseful plainsong-like metres of human conversation, now with the inexorable tread of larger events. When the nuns join voices in religious anthems, their singing has a melodic uplift like nothing else in this work. And the gentle, sustained chord that follows Blanche’s death — a break from all that rhythm — is sublime: serenity, freedom.

Barrie Kosky’s austere direction concentrates the drama, encouraging us to hang on words often by the use of physical stillness and attentiveness. Moments of violence are made all the more shocking. Everything occurs in the same single set by Katrin Lea Tag, a receding, funnel-like space that suggests dilapidation, bleakness, intensity. Gardens, beds and tables come and go economically. Then, towards the end, revolutionaries burst in, battering down the right wall in a visually powerful moment. An equally shocking image occurs when the nuns are lined up against the opposite wall, as if expecting to be shot. Each final, loud descent of the guillotine is accompanied by the violent hurling of the last nun’s shoes back on to the set. (The nuns die, but the Revolution can recycle their shoes.)

My only reservations concern the vocal side of two performances. Sally Matthews’s Blanche is alternately tremulous or squally, with often indistinct diction; Paul Gay as her father, the Marquis de la Force, brays tensely. The performances by Katarina Dalayman (Madame de Croissy), Fiona Kimm (Mother Jeanne), Golda Schultz (Madame Lidoine), Valentin Thill (Blanche’s brother, the Chevalier de la Force) and Florie Valiquette (Constance) are musically thrilling and dramatically individualised. We hear and see, as does Blanche, how wide a range of temperaments may be included within the Carmelite order. The inspired exaltation of Schultz’s singing, the spontaneous vulnerability of Valiquette’s, the tormented force of Dalayman’s and — above all — the startling vehemence of Kimm’s all register gloriously.

★★★★☆

To July 29, glyndebourne.com