Serves Ethel Smyth’s opera magnificently: Glyndebourne’s The Wreckers reviewed

You’ve got to hand it to Dame Ethel Smyth. Working in an era when to be a British composer implied an automatic cultural cringe towards the continent, she didn’t miss a beat when Henry Brewster, the librettist of her 1906 opera The Wreckers, chose to write in French. The incoming music director at Covent Garden was the Frenchman André Messager; perhaps, Smyth reasoned, ‘to compose this opera in French would be the best chance of a performance in England of an English opera!’ Good call: 116 years later, you get the distinct impression that the opportunity to première the unheard French version of the opera (it’s been done numerous times in English) may have tipped the balance for Glyndebourne. Picnics, after all, are more easily digested when you don’t have to worry about the words.

This new production, directed by Melly Still, serves The Wreckers magnificently. A huge scholarly effort underpins every musical detail; scores have been re-edited and orchestrations restored, and the three acts are performed completely uncut, a privilege that Glyndebourne does not extend to Tristan und Isolde. Still’s updated staging uses choral choreography, lighting (Malcolm Rippeth) and video projections (Akhila Krishnan) to gripping and often startlingly beautiful effect: a rain-streaked, wave-lashed junkyard reimagining of the Atlantic coast that mirrors and complements the elemental forces at work in Smyth’s surging orchestral and choral writing.

That’s the soul of the piece. Comparisons with Peter Grimes are not entirely invalid: both deal with outsiders threatened by the sea and a hostile community – here, a Cornish village where ship-wrecking is actively endorsed by the vicar Pasko (who emerges, in a majestic performance by Philip Horst, as the single most potent character). But how those orchestral seascapes rage, how the chorus roars and swells! Nothing I’ve heard by Smyth had prepared me for sea music of such boldness and colour.