Announcement, Ethel Smyth's The Wreckers - Introducing Glyndebourne Encore

Launched at the end of last year, Glyndebourne Encore is a new subscription streaming-service from the Sussex festival, offering unlimited access to all newly filmed productions and a gradually expanding range of operas from their archives - current highlights include Barrie Kosky's breathtakingly extravagant staging of Handel's Saul, David McVicar's all-singing-all-dancing Giulio Cesare, and Michael Grandage's striking 2010 production of Billy Budd. Throughout August, a 10% discount on the subscription-fee is available to Presto customers via the link at the bottom of this page.

A major new attraction was added to the platform today in the shape of Melly Still’s production of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, which closed just six weeks ago and washed up at the BBC Proms in semi-staged form last weekend. I was lucky enough to attend one of the May performances, and on recently revisiting it via Encore was struck by just how brilliantly it transfers to the screen, the astute camera-work highlighting a wealth of nuance from individual chorus-members in particular. It’s a real asset in a work which anticipates Britten’s Peter Grimes not only in its surging seascapes but also in its depiction of a struggling community and its savage massed reaction to an outsider who rejects its values.

Premiered in Leipzig in 1906, the opera centres on a group of impoverished Cornish villagers who scrape a meagre living by extinguishing their lighthouse and luring ships to a rocky doom – an operation that’s covertly counteracted by the fisherman Marc, who secretly lights beacons on the beach and is later aided and abetted by his lover Thurza, the young immigrant wife of local fire-and-brimstone preacher Pasko. When Thurza is identified as the culprit by a thwarted love-rival, the couple are condemned to execution by drowning, framing their fate as an ecstatic love-death which tips its hat to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Smyth fought long and hard to see the work mounted in its uncut glory (and in the original French), but to no avail: the premiere performance in Leipzig was given in a German translation and with unsanctioned cuts which provoked the composer to physically remove score and parts from the orchestra-pit, and a later UK run under Sir Thomas Beecham was scarcely less fraught due to scant rehearsal-time. The Glyndebourne production restores both the original libretto and the excised passages, and makes one wonder why the piece has never gained the foothold in the repertoire which it deserves.

The score’s awash with memorable melodic material, from the swashbuckling opening theme which recurs throughout the opera to the lilting barcarolle first heard in the mouth of the rebel fisherman Marc, and although Smyth casts her musical net far and wide (listen out for faint echoes of Tosca as well as Tristan, Elgar and the French Impressionists) the score rarely lapses into mere pastiche or patchwork.

The cast is uniformly terrific, the four main principals tackling Smyth’s often uncompromising vocal writing with fierce commitment and rock-solid technical security. A regular in smaller roles at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the young American mezzo Karis Tucker is an impressive Thurza, capturing the character’s strength and vulnerability to perfection: her youthful appearance (which registers all the more touchingly on camera) bears out Pasko’s eleventh-hour realisation that his wife is ‘just a child’, but belies a voice of thrilling incisiveness that’s fully up to the demands of the final-act denunciation of a community whose values are antithetical to her own.

Handsome of voice and physique (the Cornish setting may spark mental parallels with Aiden Turner’s Poldark), Mexican tenor Rodrigo Porras Garulo is no less arresting as Marc, beguiling in his sparsely-accompanied opening barcarolle and fielding full-throttle verismo firepower in that final scene as he unmasks himself as the ‘traitor’. (Puccini’s Cavaradossi figures prominently in his repertoire, and there’s more than a whiff of the painter-rebel’s defiant ‘Vittoria!’ here…).

Another fearless performance comes courtesy of Australian soprano Lauren Fagan as the lighthouse-keeper’s brash but emotionally fragile daughter Avis, whose unrequited love for Marc spurs her to denounce Thurza to the community. Whether stomping an unsuspecting rat to death in a parody of bel canto mad-scenes or channelling Carmen and Peer Gynt’s Anitra in a fruitless bid to seduce Marc, Fagan’s a compelling stage-animal who’s capable of eliciting our sympathy even when her character’s ostensibly at her least sympathetic – and her laser-beam top notes are a force of nature. American bass-baritone Philip Horst also does a masterly job of humanising the intransigent preacher Pasko, who could easily become a cipher in lesser hands.

The other major character is the chorus, and the Glyndebourne forces relish every opportunity that Smyth throws their way, from the Meistersinger-ish chorale which opens proceedings to the vicious mob-scene in the final act and its foreshadowing of both the man-hunt in Peter Grimes and the bloodthirsty glee of Turandot (still two decades away at this point).

Robin Ticciati presides over everything with the immaculate pacing and sense of light and shade which characterised his recent recording of Strauss’s Don Juan: here again he demonstrates an extraordinary capacity for finding breathing-space in a score where the musical ideas come thick and fast, and the long Act II love-duet in particular (as in his Glyndebourne Tristan last year) benefits from his willingness to step off the gas rather than driving the music too hard.

As new Glyndebourne productions will no longer be issued on DVD or Blu-ray, Encore represents your only opportunity to experience this extraordinary production at home; Alexandra Coghlan's insightful short documentary on the work is a lovely bonus, and opera-lovers will doubtless find much to explore in the archives to boot.