Robin Ticciati interview: ‘Glyndebourne is a festival where the established and the fresh exist together’

Glyndebourne, the great Sussex opera house, celebrates its 80th anniversary this summer. Hurrah! There is a new music director, too, 31-year-old Robin Ticciati. Hurrah! And he opens the season next week with a new production of Der Rosenkavalier directed by Richard Jones. Hurrah! Summer has begun.

There are few finer plots of land to be on a summer evening in England than Glyndebourne, one of those rare places where the frame matches the picture. In a way Glyndebourne defines England, and summer, and the way the English take their pleasures. Certainly there is no place like it anywhere else. People at other festivals may love music just as much, and swank even more, but Glyndebourne, with or without black tie, is a world apart.

And few operas will be greeted with greater rapture than Strauss’s Viennese masquerade, which is one of the three most popular works in the repertoire alongside The Marriage of Figaro and La Bohème.