![]() Kosky puts the nuns in dense groups or formal lines, but two stand out: the bright-eyed Constance (Florie Valiquette) and the intense and nervous Blanche (Sally Matthews) who has come to the convent for refuge from the terror on the streets. ![]() They cheerfully go about their daily tasks, but the fear of death is ever-present, shockingly represented by the final torments of the Prioress (a harrowing Katarina Dalayman) as she rails against her lifetime’s faith. ![]() Within the bare, pock-marked convent walls of Katrin Lea Tag’s set, down which blackness drips as danger approaches, the nuns – shorn of their traditional garb and dressed in simple black – are a close-knit, emotionally supportive community. But in this wrenchingly powerful new staging by Barrie Kosky, magnificently conducted by Robin Ticciati, the piece hits home with renewed strength. It is arguably a big ask of Glyndebourne’s pleasure-seeking crowd to be subjected to the repeated sounds of the guillotine after their evening’s picnics. Increasingly, though, the elemental power of its storytelling and its vividly traditional musical language have won favour with audiences ready to be stunned by the directness of its emotional appeal. When it first appeared in 1957, its backward-looking music, shot through with the models the composer acknowledged – from Monteverdi through Verdi to Musorgsky – may have seemed old-fashioned in the age of Boulez and Messiaen. There is nothing in opera, absolutely nothing, quite like Francis Poulenc’s extraordinary piece about the nuns of Compiègne, caught up in the terror of the French Revolution and finally meeting their deaths on the scaffold.
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