Neither Tristan nor Isolde quite convinced: Glyndebourne’s Tristan und Isolde reviewed

Glyndebourne is nothing if not honest. ‘In response to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions our 2021 performances of Tristan und Isolde will be presented as a concert staging, after the 2003 production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff’, says the programme, and what we get is not a full production but a compromise imposed by the peculiar circumstances of August 2021. The London Philharmonic Orchestra huddles on stage. Behind them the back wall glows and fades in washes of blue and pink; in front, a stepped apron extends over the redundant orchestra pit. The singers slip on and off from the wings or, in a basic but effective trick of lighting design, appear to materialise from the embracing darkness.

It’s an approach to Wagner that can work well. Lehnhoff learned his craft under Wieland Wagner, whose postwar Bayreuth productions — dark abstract forms, ritualised action, pools of light — continue to shape modern visualisations of his grandfather’s work. Any insomniac knows how the imagination, in darkness, grows in amplitude and strangeness, and with the musical mind of a Wagner to steer that process a great Tristan inundates your waking dreams for nights afterwards. Yet many of the compromises felt frustrating. Orchestras can sound boxy from behind a proscenium, though it’s a better solution than the grotesque practice of using a pre-recorded soundtrack, as employed by some of Glyndebourne’s less credible rivals this summer.

Meanwhile, there were entrances, exits and some awkward fighting, and Simon O’Neill, as Tristan, sang much of Act III while recumbent — as the plot demands. Costumes were of the dressing-up box variety, with no designer credited: still, this was hardly the first operatic production in which a bloke in black slacks and an M&S shirt wields a shining broadsword.