Hänsel und Gretel
Royal Albert Hall
How frightening an opera is Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, or how frightening should it be? The answer to the first question, if one had only encountered Hänsel at the Prom performance which Glyndebourne brought to London last week, was ‘not at all’. It was given in a semi-staged version, but virtually nothing of Laurent Pelly’s distinctive production survived. At Glyndebourne the family live in a cardboard house; the forest the children wander into looking for berries is denuded, empty plastic shopping baskets hang from branches; and in Act III the Witch’s gingerbread house is a vast construction of gaudily packaged junk foods; while — to the alarm and distaste of many of my colleagues — the redeemed children who enter at the end are all clinically obese.
Little of this transferred to the Royal Albert Hall.
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