Deborah Warner's production of Fidelio caused some controversy when it opened this year's Glyndebourne festival. One criticism was that - taking her cue from Florestan's cry of "God! What darkness here!" - she had plunged the dungeon scene into such obscurity that it was almost impossible to see what was going on. Reviving her staging for Glyndebourne Touring Opera, she has decided to throw more light on the proceedings - perhaps unwisely, because we can now see that Florestan's lethal isolation cell is in fact constructed of crinkly backcloths. This is just one unconvincing aspect of an evening that is not as impressive as one might have hoped.
The problem seems to be that Warner cannot, or will not, take the work at face value. Like other directors, she has fashionably called into question the validity of Fidelio's ideology. Progressive political optimism is replaced by rancid contemporary despair, as the opera is turned into a study of moral responsibility in a world in which violence is continuous and self-perpetuating. We are in a war zone - the Balkans, perhaps - where Pizarro exercises his reign of terror from a shrapnel-scarred school, converted into a barracks-cum-prison. When the chips go down, he is lynched by his own soldiers, who are anxious to create an impression for the nerdy- looking bureaucrat who is about to replace him.
Leonore's determination to rescue her husband from wrongful imprisonment is, for Warner, rendered suspect by the fact that the relationship between Marzelline and Jaquino is destroyed in the process. Neither libretto nor score even hint that Marzelline's attraction to the disguised Leonore is encouraged by the latter, but Warner has Gunilla Stephen-Kallin's gum-chewing Leonore going through the motions of ogling Sarah Fox's dreamy Marzelline. I was not sure whether Fox's superbly mimed hysteria during the final scene indicated catastrophic disappointment or presaged the start of a traumatic emergence from the closet. Neither is true to Beethoven, who toned down the element of sexual ambiguity that characterises other operatic treatments of the same subject.
Musically, however, much of the evening is exemplary, though Stephen-Kallin's glinting soprano occasionally strays off-pitch, and Swedish tenor Nils Olsson's Florestan belts a bit. Mark Holland's gritty-voiced Pizarro is a terrifying creature who really does seem to have strayed from hell, while Clive Bayley's cowardly Rocco and Mark Wilde's touching, bookish Jaquino rank among the finest I have heard. Glyndebourne Touring Opera's music director Louis Langrée is, as always, superlative, turning in a performance of nerve-ridden tension that grips from start to finish.
· Until October 27, then tours to Woking, Norwich, Milton Keynes, Plymouth, Oxford and Stoke-on-Trent. Box office: 01273 813813.
