Brett Dean’s new opera for Glyndebourne is a big-hearted romantic comedy, sunny and life-affirming. Only joking — this is contemporary opera, after all. It’s about the usual stuff: neurosis, violence and toxic sexuality. Those seem to be the emotions most naturally suited to the language of mainstream contemporary classical music, and Dean speaks that language as brilliantly as Richard Strauss handled the idiom of an earlier generation. Whatever else this operatic adaptation of Hamlet might be, it’s a polished piece of work.
That takes some doing: Shakespeare isn’t naturally suited to the opera house. It was Verdi’s librettist Boito who first realised that the best way to retain the essence of Shakespeare while still leaving room for a composer is to dismantle the play and rebuild it on operatic terms. Dean’s librettist Matthew Jocelyn has done precisely that, trimming and reassembling Shakespeare’s text to zip efficiently through all the bits you can remember of Hamlet’s multiple plotlines, and playing some ingenious little games along the way.
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