Glyndebourne Ravel - Laurent Pelly speaks

Fascinating Ravel Double Bill starts at Glyndebourne this weekend. L'heure espagnole and L'enfant et les sortilèges, two surrealist fantasies, so sharp they're hard to stage well. But if anyone can do them with style and depth, it's Laurent Pelly, who gave us the Glyndebourne Hansel und Gretel, and the ROH Manon and Cendrillon. With Pelly, you can count on intelligence and depth.  Go to the Glyndebourne website HERE and see a link to an interview with Pelly in Opera Today HERE. There's also a podcast.

“L’enfant et les sortilèges is a work that makes us understand what it’s like to be a child, maybe 8 or 10 years old. I was 14 years old when I first got to know it, and I was very moved. It lasts about 45 minutes, but it has the depth of an opera of three or four hours. There are so many images, so many personalities, and so many ideas! When I think about the music and its freedom and inventiveness, and the poetry in the text by Colette, I’m so happy that I’m doing it at Glyndebourne.“.......“L’enfant is about a nightmare, but the nightmare is the child’s vision of the world of adults. For me, the teapot, the teacup and the shepherdesses represent adults”. The child doesn’t understand the adult world, so he sees familiar objects come to life and threaten him. It’s fantasy but at the same time understandable “You see the world through the eyes of a child”, says Pelly."
photo courtesy ICA Management