Spark review – Glyndebourne Youth Opera light up a terrific new show of monsters and magic

Glyndebourne, LewesLucy Armstrong’s family opera transports audiences to a secret world above the rooftops. It explores themes of grief and loss with a lightness of touch, and is directed, designed and performed with panache.

For decades now, Glyndebourne has been setting the bar for what a youth opera company can be. Its latest show is Spark, a new full-length opera directed by Fiona Dunn with music by Lucy Armstrong, exploring grownup themes of grief and loss.

Spark is a story of a parallel world accessed via something unlikely, so there are shades of Narnia or Wonderland. Our heroine is Clara (shades of The Nutcracker), who has panic attacks when she tries to go to school: “They talk like it’s simple,” she says in Olivia Bell’s succinct, fluent libretto, “but my chest is tightening and I can’t breathe.” We find out that her anxiety stems from her grief for her brother, and that she can no longer connect with her parents, who are having connection problems of their own. But she can escape up the chimney to a rooftop land populated by Spark Monsters – who will help her regain her lost spark, pun intended.

Those monsters are the youth opera members – 64 of them, aged nine to 19 – and as always at Glyndebourne, they shine in a setting of sky-high production values. Armstrong gives them lots to sing and lots to do, in a score that ranges from quiet, magic-dust passages with harp, celesta and glockenspiel to full-on, many-layered choruses, including an artfully chaotic party scene, all snappily coordinated by the music director Ashley Beauchamp. Róisin Whelan’s detailed movement direction is executed with panache, and the singing is terrific. As for Ryan Dawson Laight’s sets, if the fireplace portal didn’t already suggest Harry Potter, the chimneys on wheels recall The Cursed Child. But the costumes are where he really goes to town, with the monsters in an anarchic mass of coal-dust textures, neon coloured ruffles, orange eyes and strange fuzzy headdresses.

The Glyndebourne Sinfonia is in the pit, and the professional cast are led by Clementine Thompson as a convincingly youthful Clara and Ella Taylor as the imperious Blaze, ruler of Spark World. Holly Brown and Hugo Herman-Wilson double as parents and monsters, undergoing pitstop costume-changes. Brown also plays the delightfully overprotective Flicker, waving around a laminated card in the name of health and safety.

Spark briefly loses its lightness of touch in the second act with a long scene for Clara and Ember – the baleful leader of the fallen spark monsters, sung by Herman-Wilson – that is a perhaps too obvious allegory for depression. Here Armstrong’s usually keen ear for melodic invention hits a small speed bump too. But all ends well, in another Glyndebourne youth opera full of dynamic commitment and, yes, spark.