Staging baroque opera: two contrasting examples (sample while you can)

This year, Glyndebourne festival staged its first production of an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, first staged in Paris in 1733. By coincidence, this comes just one year after the revival of Ivan Alexandre’s production of the same work at the Paris Opéra, having been staged originally in 2009 in Toulouse. While Alexandre’s…