Annabel Arden’s bright, Italianate staging of Donizetti’s lyric comedy L’elisir d’amore started life on Glyndebourne’s 2007 tour. It has also proved one of the happiest additions to the festival repertoire, and its return to the tour proves a delicious winter warmer, thanks to Paul Higgins’s fresh revival, a hugely likeable young cast and brilliant conducting by Pablo Gonzalez, whose work in the pit with the Glyndebourne Tour Orchestra gives the evening its comic zing and heart.


Lez Brotherston’s rural Italian piazza, set amid olive groves, locates the action in the rustic setting imagined by Donizetti and his crack librettist, Felice Romani, but his 1950s costumes bring the characters closer to us in time without introducing a note of postwar cynicism to this charming tale of the lovelorn farmworker (here the local electrician) whose suit of the flighty landowner Adina is initially spurned. Donizetti and Romani may have called their hero “Little Nobody” (Nemorino), but his heart is big and his essential goodness wins the day — even though, by the end of the opera, he has become a millionaire as heir to his recently deceased uncle. (The lottery society Donizetti wrote for was not so different from our own, it seems.)



As the eventual lovers, the young Americans Christopher Tiesi and Joélle Harvey make a winning pair. He is short, athletic and agile, with Mediterranean good looks and a seemingly limitless repertoire of hangdog, lovesick facial expressions and rapturous smiles. Even if he didn’t sing, he could win all hearts; in fact, he has an attractively plangent, dark-toned but lightweight Italianate tenor. He is not yet in full technical command of his voice, but stops the show with his hit aria Una furtiva lagrima (One furtive tear), a party piece for modern tenors from Caruso to Pavarotti. Tiesi strikes me as a pocket-sized Rolando Villazon: still a diamond in the rough, but a diamond nevertheless.


Harvey’s Adina is technically immaculate, and her bright yet never tinny soprano lends sympathy to this sometimes brittle coquette of a character. You are never in doubt that she will fall for the good guy in the end. Genuine Italian buffo manners come in the strutting forms of Alessandro Luongo’s cleanly sung Belcore and Riccardo Novaro’s boastful but never grotesque Dr Dulcamara, who lets his mute clown assistant (James Bellorini) do most of the mugging — too much, but it’s the only, minor blot on an otherwise impeccable staging. Unmissable.