A classic in the making: Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double bill reviewed

One morning in the 20th century, Thérèse wakes up next to her husband and announces that she’s a feminist. Hubby, who’s been in either of two world wars, just wants his bacon for breakfast. Too bad: declaring herself male, Thérèse has already detached her breasts and hurled them spinning into the middle-distance. But they keep hanging around, great pink wobbly orbs floating just above her head. She takes out a gun and blasts them to shreds. Renaming herself Tirésias, and with her husband trussed into a moob-enhancing corset, she sets out to run the world, leaving the men to work out how to make babies alone. Babies (we’ve been told by an evening-suited Prologue) being an urgent national requirement.

More fizz, anyone? Les Mamelles de Tirésias comes after the interval in Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double bill, and it probably works best on an audience that’s been suitably lubricated, though Poulenc’s score (he adapted the libretto from a surrealist farce by Apollinaire) is a natural stimulant in its own right. Imagine music that’s equal parts innocence and experience: pastel-coloured waltzes, sudden, glinting shafts of satire and flushes of utterly unsentimental tenderness. It’s sexy, naughty and sweet; the orchestra leans in for a caress, then pinches you on the arse. And obviously, in the year 2022 there are a million and one ways in which a director with an agenda could take this whole pro-natal sex-change soufflé and turn it into concentrated culture-war poison.

Laurent Pelly does nothing of the sort, appreciating – correctly – that the only real butt of Poulenc’s humour is anyone literal enough to take it seriously. This is virtuoso nonsense delivered with a sensibility that’s as French as Jacques Demy or rioting farmers. Caroline Ginet’s designs present the whole thing as a three-dimensional bande dessinée. Characters colour-pop against a white scrolling backdrop: lime green and chrome yellow for a pair of duellists, blue-grey for police, inky black (with constructivist hairstyles) for the crowds. At the end of each scene they simply slide offstage, making room for the next absurdity – a cartoonishly huge megaphone, or a Heath Robinson baby-making contraption.

So the Husband’s solo efforts produce 40,049 infants in a single day (‘With willpower, anything is possible’), and suddenly there they all are – goggling and gawping in a scene that’s pure nightmare-fuel and which got a round of applause on sight. For the visuals and the sheer zest alone, Pelly’s production deserves to become a Glyndebourne classic, like the Hockney/Cox Rake’s Progress. But this initial run has the additional benefit of Robin Ticciati’s brisk, objective conducting, and a central couple whose willingness knows no limits and whose voices fit Poulenc’s gamine sound-world like bespoke couture. Régis Mengus, as the Husband, has a savoury, smoky baritone to match his drooping moustache, while Elsa Benoit, as Thérèse, injects her bright, bubbling soprano with a dash of citron pressé acid – just enough to temper the sweetness.

In short, I can’t imagine Les Mamelles de Tirésias being done better. It’s basically a zinger, all the more piquant coming after La Voix humaine, performed here with infinite shades of hope and pain by Stéphanie d’Oustrac. Again, the lustre and trim of the LPO under Ticciati is a thrill in itself, supporting but never overwhelming d’Oustrac’s phrasing as her voice blazes its way out of Ginet’s darkened, abstract sets, or tails off into a wounded silence. A single thread of light crosses the stage behind d’Oustrac, cooling to blue, or blazing red-raw as the tragedy unfolds. It’s visually arresting and often (as with any great performance of this extraordinary work) intensely painful. If I don’t say more, it’s because any performance of La Voix humaine presupposes the availability of a dramatic soprano of unusual courage and charisma. D’Oustrac is exactly that; and the result is all that you could hope. And when you return, after a suitably muted picnic, Tirésias sends your spirits bouncing up and away like an untethered helium balloon into the Sussex night sky. A pink one, obviously.

At the Proms, Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performed The Site of an Investigation by the Irish composer Jennifer Walshe. Walshe, suitably amplified, sang and narrated a collage of found texts about the interconnected awfulness of modernity – scraps of poetry, online conspiracy theories, publications by Nasa – to a colourful soundtrack for a large orchestra. Think late-night experimental radio documentary, or H.K. Gruber’s Frankenstein!! remixed by Adam Curtis. Walshe was playful and assured, while the percussion section had fun wrapping a toy giraffe in brown paper. Later, they built and demolished a pyramid of Tupperware. You’d have missed that on the radio. The orchestral writing was brilliant without much in the way of thematic ideas, but that could be said of a great deal of contemporary orchestral music.