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Sally Matthews as Blanche de la Force | Photo: BBC Proms/Sisi Burn

Poulenc’s 1956 opera translates well to a concert version, but then again, it’s right there in the title. Dialogues des Carmélites’s bloody end may stun audiences into silence, but its most crucial action—and provocative questions—unfurls in conversations between the characters.

Adapting Barrie Kosky’s new Glyndebourne production, Donna Stirrup’s semi-staged version of the opera at the Proms in August wasn’t without hiccups. But it delivered on human drama, thanks to the same top-flight cast from the Glyndebourne run. That Sally Matthews was not the runaway star as Blanche speaks more to the collective excellence of her fellow Carmélites than her performance—at turns tear-logged and frantic, her soprano likewise churning like a tempest at sea.

Katarina Dalayman’s Madame de Croissy was more of a study of contrasts: her mezzo recounts the dignified Prioress she once was, all rounded corners and generous range, but the arachnoid writhings of her death betray a more brutal reality. Golda Schultz was a charismatic Madame Lidoine, with a coaxingly effulgent soprano to match. Karen Cargill is nothing short of miraculous as Mother Marie, her voice plush yet steel-framed enough to be heard under a London Philharmonic playing at full tilt. So could Florie Valiquette as Sister Constance, her soubrettey vocalism gold-laced enough to glint wherever it appeared.

Of the non-Carmélites, tenor Valentin Thill seized the ear from the evening’s very first scene as Blanche’s brother, the Chevalier de la Force, and never relinquished that grip. He has the kind of voice that seems to flow from his mind to his lips unencumbered, all balletic control, athleticism, and grace.

Golda Schutz (centre) with the chorus of nuns | Photo: BBC Proms/Sisi Burn

Robin Ticciati led the LPO with electric verve and prudent deference to the moments of onstage silence punctuating Kosky’s production. (Not all of these landed: After Blanche flees the convent, the tacet stage action which followed felt dramatically akin to a shrug.) Often, though, the overcharged LPO engulfed the singers entirely in the new setting.

In Stirrup’s reimagining, Kosky’s era-spanning concept—connecting the French Revolution to the present—creeps in almost imperceptibly at first. The nuns wear Teva sandals; Blanche smooths over linens with an electric iron. Other props are more timeless: a motley set of chairs, Madame de Croissy’s bed, the Christ Child doll, a pot for Blanche’s anxious stew-making. The only backdrop is a thin LED strip behind the Royal Albert Hall stage which displays a static concrete wall pattern, a nod to the starkness of the original Glyndebourne set.

With so few dramatic dressings, what decisions hold over from Kosky’s staging pierce with a bullet’s devastating bluntness. The loudspeaker guillotine has remained (sounding tinny, trivial, and far too loud; one wishes an acoustic solution had been brokered), as has an impressive amount of physical drama: the Marquis and Chevalier de la Force tussle, the Father Confessor (Vincent Ordenneau, his voice ropy and noble) staggers and lands on the floor with his full weight, and stew-pots and prayer books get chucked across the stage.

But the fewer the context clues, the harder this concert version must work to convince us of its time-traveling arc. It never succeeded there, dodging any satisfying answer as to who constitute the Carmélites’s modern mob, and why. In a heavy-handed holdover from Glyndebourne, the rioters (an incandescent, fervid Glyndebourne Chorus, prepared by Aidan Oliver) silently raise their fists, the gesture’s associations as various as Black Power to antifascism. Its lack of specificity vexes and perturbs, especially after the production has gone through such lengths to bring the tale into the present. Like Blanche confronting her mortality, audiences are forced, unhappily, to make peace with the production’s unknowns. There are far too many of them.