Don’t look back! Like Orpheus, finicky opera fans with cherished memories have a hard time heeding that advice. In 2015, Glyndebourne premiered Mozart’s Oriental fantasy Die Entführung aus dem Serail in a David McVicar production that looked glacially formal yet blazed with banked fires. Kidnapped by pirates and trafficked to the all-powerful Pasha Selim, the glamorous Konstanze spurns the amenities of the seraglio he offers as her personal Shangri-La, endlessly moping in dialogue and in song for her betrothed Belmonte. The title of the opera lets us know which way she’ll jump when Belmonte materializes, just in the nick of time. Yet in McVicar’s production, the electricity between the captive and her smitten jailer turned the B-movie escape adventure into a profound case study of Stockholm Syndrome and Eros Denied. Given that this is an opera and that Pasha Selim has not one note to sing, such a transformation might seem impossible. Yet without a single change in the story line, the animal magnetism of the French actor Franck Saurel’s Pasha bent the arc of the drama his way; never had the “rescued” Konstanze’s departure with his blessing seemed so categorically tragic. This summer’s revival introduces the exciting Liv Redpath as Konstanze, whose wrong-headed loyalty to Belmonte expresses itself both in laments and fireworks. The likeable Anthony León is her Belmonte. The principals in a parallel love triangle playing out in the servants’ quarters are Julie Roset as Konstanze’s lady’s maid, Thomas Cilluffo as Belmonte’s valet Pedrillo, and Michael Mofidian as the blustering overseer of the harem who, unlike his master, sings up a storm, cutting no ice with the minx he loves whatsoever. Evan Rogister conducts the classy Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. And Pasha? It’s Saurel again, owning the seraglio like Yul Brynner on the throne of Siam. —Matthew Gurewitsch