IT IS 35 years since Sir Peter Hall’s first Glyndebourne production, 21 since he became director of productions and 15 since he stormed out. Two of his productions are playing this year, including this curtainraiser; it makes you wonder what is going on there.

Once it was about great casting, getting the right directors and conductors, doing things, in the house’s own phrase, as well as they could be done. That sounds hollow after last year’s moronic Magic Flute, now being revived alongside this Rossini, another notable misfire. The season’s hopes now rest on the wobbly sands of a new David McVicar production of Giulio Cesare and a revival of Jonathan Dove ’s brilliant Flight, a 1998 commission and a reminder of days when Glyndebourne had direction.

Sir Peter was at pains to point out that his Cinderella wouldn’t be a comedy, which is fine, but his furrowed-brow approach leaches the piece of its hard-eyed cynicism as well as its complexity, heart, Byronic generosity of spirit and humour. It is trad to the point of idiocy in its lack of enquiry and characterisation, hackneyed blocking, crude lighting cues and naively illustrative staging.

The idea, if any, is that Cinders is a manipulative little baggage with a martyr complex at the beginning, and gets worse: how novel to find yourself rooting for the bad sisters. How this fits in with Hall’s concept of the Voltairean Alidoro manipulating events towards a happy ending isn’t clear. And Hall’s desperate avoidance of buffo shtick (heaven forfend that it should be mistaken for a production by the dreaded Dr Miller!) means that his best performer — Luciano di Pasquale as Magnifico — is hamstrung, and moments of carefree Rossini fantasy quite annihilated.

Musically, it is hardly better: Vladimir Jurowski, Glyndebourne’s young music director, is a sensational conductor, but has an anti-talent for the giving bounce and twang of Rossini’s rhythmic genius. The London Philharmonic plays with clarity and bright precision, but all the notes in the right order is not nearly enough: it is mechanical, pedestrian, simultaneously rushed and interminable.

Ruxandra Donose (Angelina, the Cinders role) is a perfectly serviceable, bland mezzo, Maxim Mironov a weak, bleaty Prince, Lucia Cirillo a feisty, attractive Tisbe; but almost everyone’s coloratura is approximate.

Any fool knows that Angelina’s crowing finale betokens extreme psychological fever, but Hall pounds it home with jackhammer unsubtlety, and mistimes it, too. The fantastic, mysterious ensembles are blown by fluffed cues and fatuous, fill-in stagings. This is notional Rossini with his musical and dramatic soul excised. Forget it.

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