Concert: Friends of T.

Trinity College, Cambridge, Saturday February 18 2012

Haydn
String quartet in E flat Op 71 N°3. Endellion String Quartet.

Sophie Hannah
The Shadow Tree; The Storming; Crowd Pleaser. Read by Sophie Hannah.

Beethoven
String quartet in C Op 59 N°3. Endellion String Quartet.

Mendelssohn
Symphony N°3 in A minor, “Scottish”, Op 56. Conductor: Harry Ogg, Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra.

Sophie Hannah
The Cancellation; Moderation; The Dalai Lama on Twitter. Read by Sophie Hannah.

Rodgers
Overtures to Flower Drum Song and South Pacific. Conductor: Chris Keen, Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra.

[Note: this is not one of my usual write-ups; it will probably only be of interest to those who knew T.]

An odd sort of programme; but this was not a public, commercial event but a private, “bespoke” one in memory of a very close friend for over 35 years, who died in December. The quirky programme, in which he had, at least in part, a hand, was therefore designed to remind us of T. and his life, acquaintances and tastes. The programme booklet itself had covers in his favourite colour, orange, and illustrations from works in his rooms, including, on the cover, a cat got up to look like Henry VIII over high table in Hall. In the circumstances, I’ve no intention of writing a “review”. Suffice it to say that the Endellion Quartet is considered to be one of the UK’s finest, that the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra (usually just known as “kew-ko”) is made up of the university’s best players, and that Sophie Hannah is a very funny poet.

I will, however, slip in a few comments on the mysteries of acoustics that ran through my mind at this memorable event. It’s often said (with or without a mention of the Musikverein) that “shoeboxes” have the best sound. It had never occurred to me before, but Trinity’s chapel is a shoebox of sorts. It’s a Tudor building, the same shape as the understandably more famous King’s College Chapel, i.e. a single long room with flat ends, flat walls and no transepts: “One long sausage” as I once heard an opinionated undergraduate describe King’s Chapel at a performance there of Britten’s War Requiem. But whereas King’s is all stone and (richly and famously) fan-vaulted, Trinity’s – more modest, as is Trinity’s way - has a flat, wood-panelled roof and, all around, so much strictly 18th-century panelling, with Corinthian pilasters, as to look like an Enlightenment Temple of Reason or Masonic hall.

As a student, I played there many times; indeed it was probably during rehearsals for Haydn’s Nelson Mass, on the chequered marble in front of the altar, that I first spoke to T., he at the rear of the second violins, his usual choice of place, I on the double bass. But I was too inexperienced in those days to have any opinion on the sound, or if I had, I’ve forgotten since. What struck me on Saturday evening was the way acoustics suit some things and not others. The chapel was perfect for the quartets, magnifying the sound marvellously and plunging us into the heart of it: that was the phenomenon that brought Vienna to my mind. For the Mendelssohn, however, the magnifying effect turned to booming: however quietly the players played, it was too loud – a racket, not that I was minded to complain. So you might have thought, with the arrival of extra brass (and the members of the Endellion Quartet, who slipped in modestly, each at the rear of his section just like T., for the musical overtures) it would be way over the top. But no, for Rodgers (it always seems odd not to mention Hammerstein, but there were no words) it was perfect: loud and lush. And I imagine we all know how marvellous these scores are played by a proper, decent-sized orchestra rather than a reduced pit band. I wondered if the works had ever been played in the chapel before. Probably not, but at Trinity, no longer a very pious place, if ever it was (T. had once suggested turning the chapel into a coffee bar, replacing the organ with a synthesizer, and the first piece I ever rehearsed there was Satie's La Belle Excentrique)  you never know. So much, then, for my digression on acoustics

To return to T.'s (musical) tastes... He had firm likes and dislikes and expressed them fearlessly: "Bloody Wagner! Fucking populist!" I once heard him shout after stumbling upon Wagner on the radio. Verdi "couldn't write a decent string quartet". And he liked to quote an old (and in fact quite famous) friend of his as saying "Tchaikovsky: keeps wanking and wanking but never comes.". But those he revealed to you were no guide to the others he didn't: you couldn't extrapolate. It turned out, for example, that he loved Kurt Weill - and played in the pit for musicals. It will be of little interest to general readers, but if anyone who knew T. turns up here, they might like to read some of the last lines on music I had from him, in a long letter from October 2010:

“I have subscribed to the year’s programme by the Endellion String Quartet, which is marvellous; I have two tickets and take either a musical undergraduate, if I can find one, or [X], provided that there is no “pill” on the programme such as a work by Shostakovich or Benjamin Britten.

“I used to go to the Wigmore Hall for their Sunday morning chamber music recitals, but I’ve not done that recently. I did, exceptionally, go to the Festival Hall for an orchestral concert, all the more exceptionally since the programme included works by Wagner and Liszt, not my usual fare. But the Faust Overture and the Faust Symphony very rarely appear on programmes, and they were excitingly played. The other work was Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody, which I adore […]"

I sent him Ann Hallenberg's wonderful new recording of that, too late, in the event, for him to get it. It will, I suppose, end up in the college library, along with the Shahnameh he never got either - the last time I visited Cambridge, and last time I saw him, was for an exhibition of Shahnameh illuminations at the Fitzwilliam Museum in January last year and the book appeared in November.

“And of course there is canned music galore […]." T. had all his CDs on a "juke box" he kept mostly on random and subscribed to Spotify, and of course there was the radio...

"I do turn off quite a lot of what is offered – organ music, opera*, choral music of a liturgical nature, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Shostakovich all get turned off, and, for other reasons, French Impressionist music. The great classics and romantics stay on, Haydn through Brahms (including his songs) and Fauré (except his songs) giving me great pleasure, perhaps mainly because of their skill. My response is perhaps more admiration than emotional sympathy."

Saturday’s concert, for about 300, was followed by supper in Hall. The next day, for close friends, there was lunch (also conceived to remind us of T - it included haggis and a pudding made of prunes in lime jelly with liquorice ice cream, a typical T. thing; he introduced me to haggis and neeps, and "fly cemeteries" and "pear Lachaise" to college menus)  in the Master’s lodge, and after coffee, under the stiff stare of Queen Elizabeth I in white, a piano recital (Schubert - a very tender moment - Brahms, Debussy – a tease, I suspect, as T. couldn’t abide Debussy…) and some songs; but as I had a train to catch to London and another to Paris, I couldn’t stay longer.

Even for someone as stony-hearted as me, taking leave can be an emotional thing, and there were a lot of farewells to deal with over the two days. To T., first and most of all, of course: this was after all, in effect, the wake for the funeral he expressly refused to have and signalled the end of over 35 years of easy, intimate friendship, learning, travel and fun (a word he wasn't so keen on). But I no longer have any reason to return to Cambridge and suspect, therefore, I may never will. So on Saturday morning I went to bid farewell to the works in the Fitzwillam Museum - only to discover one I'd never seen, a relatively recent acquisition: The Twins, Kate and Grace Hoare by Millais, which I stared at long and lovingly before doing a last round of the Italian room, buying a book on Iznik, and setting off in the rain for the concert.

On Sunday morning, thinking it was probably my last chance, I waited for morning service to, as I thought, end so I could get a look at the Arts & Crafts interior of Bodley's All Saints Church, never open when I was an undergaduate. But it turned out to be a happy clappy sort of place, full of young couples and children in pushchairs who were clearly settling in for a smelly buffet lunch, so I scuttled out, disappointed in any case at the poor state of the decoration - and surprised to find so many people in England still went to church.

I wandered across to the river in the sun and looked back at the Wren Library - thinking back to hot summer days on the lawns with friends - and roughly the spot where T.'s rooms (with the famous orange carpet), now empty, always were. I spent some more time in the sunshine sinking in the Palladian façade of the Old Schools and the more classical Senate House while Great St Mary's rang the changes impressively with its peal of 12 bells, to the indifference of passing tourists. And later, after the long lunch (there were cheese and then a savoury after the quaint pudding) as the recital continued without me and I left for the train, I took a final look back across Great Court in the typically pale Cambridge sunset, with the faint sound of the piano from the Lodge and the faint sound of Evensong from the chapel; and flinty-hearted though I am I felt a twinge. I felt another at the sight of the same pale sunset over the house and fields I link with my first love (dead too) at only 19 or 20. Farewell to the friendship of T., farewell to Cambridge, farewell - so it seemed, fancifully no doubt: I should rightly have bid it long ago... to my now very distant youth.

*He made an exception for Carmen.

Cavalli - Egisto

Opéra Comique, Paris, Thursday February 9 2012

Conductor: Vincent Dumestre. Production: Benjamin Lazar. Sets: Adeline Caron. Costumes: Alain Blanchot. Lighting: Christophe Naillet. Makeup and wigs: Mathilde Benmoussa. Egisto: Marc Mauillon. Lidio: Anders Dahlin. Clori: Claire Lefilliâtre. Climene: Isabelle Druet. Hipparco. Cyril Auvity. Aurora, Amore: Ana Quintans. Didone, Voluptia: Luciana Mancini. La Notte, Dema: Serge Goubioud. Apollo: David Tricou. Le Poème Harmonique.

“Je me fais chier” (French for “this is boring the crap out of me”). So said a friend two seats away as the curtain fell for the interval. Minutes later, on our way through the freezing night to our earlier-than-expected dinner at a Turkish restaurant, he insisted that he had nothing against Cavalli: he’d been enchanted by La Calisto in Brussels. But this production had, he said, none of the requisite magic, and the women’s voices were plain “ugly.”

My inexpert understanding – misunderstanding, most likely - is that Venetian opera in the 17th century owed at least some of its popular success to the deployment of magical effects and elaborate machinery. I also, equally inexpertly, and probably wrongly, expect Cavalli to be a bit sardonic, a bit wicked, a bit “naughty,” you might say. It seemed somehow puzzling that a production that went so far as to eschew electric lighting, (glimpsed as it were “through a glass darkly” – very darkly in this case), thus surely implying “authentic” intentions, should turn out to be in all respects so strait-laced, not to say straitjacketed.

The set took up nearly all the space on the pitch-black stage: a ruined, two-storey rotunda of concentric, once-stuccoed, red-brick arcades, with niches for candles, a curving staircase, and, I’m sorry to say, a fair amount of that stiff, trembling fake greenery that deprives any scenery of its dignity. Anything approaching scene changes was effected simply by slowly rotating the rotunda; though in the prevailing gloom it was hard to see much difference as a result. Trussed up, made up and bewigged in elaborate mythological costumes, hidebound by half-hearted baroque gestures, the singers picked their way in deliberate slow motion through the narrow spaces left to them by the set – so slow that you could vaguely see their shadowy forms creeping through the dark before the previous aria was over – to take up their places behind the flickering footlights and sing to the audience before retreating into the darkness. The result being more or less a concert performance, an oratorio by candlelight, rather than a Venetian spectacle, or at any rate my corrupt idea of one; and after 90 minutes of monotony, sore bums all round.

So much for the lack of magic. Why the remark about “ugly” singing? Well, it’s certainly true that the ladies sacrificed vibrato and, to some extent, intonation to expressiveness. As the professionals seem to agree, the men were very fine and the clarion Marc Mauillon was really outstanding. But concert.classic.com, for example, then wonders “why were they lumbered with two such frightful prime donne – vocally at any rate? Claire Lefilliâtre’s meagre organ comes across as a bad caricature of the late, lamented Montserrat Figueras; and what is Isabelle Druet doing here, adrift and vinegary, massacring her sublime lament by stripping herself of timbre for baroque effect?”

That seems harsh to me. Though it was obvious the staging wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t change after the interval, I’d have gone back to hear Mauillon’s mad scene, which I’m sure must have been very impressive. And the little string orchestra with two recorders and lots of lutes and the like was lovely (at the very middle of the front row of the second balcony, acoustically speaking we had the best seats in the whole house). But my friends were more inclined towards meze and kebabs, so off we went to the Derya.

Philippe Fénelon - La Cerisaie

ONP Garnier, Tuesday February 7 2012

Conductor : Tito Ceccherini. Production and lighting : Georges Lavaudant. Sets and costumer: Jean-Pierre Vergier. Liouba : Elena Kelessidi. Lionia: Marat Gali. Gricha: Alexandra Kadurina. Ania: Ulyana Aleksyuk. Varia: Anna Krainikova. Lopakhine: Igor Golovatenko. Charlotta: Mischa Schelomianski. Douniacha: Svetlana Lifar. Iacha: Alexey Tatarintsev. Firs: Ksenia Vyaznikova. Orchestra  and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Verdicts on Philippe Fénelon’s new work La Cerisaie (The Cherry Orchard) run from one end of the spectrum to the other. The friend who asked me, in an e-mail, “Are you by any chance going to see this rubbish?” would presumably agree with the Financial Times, whose critic started his review: “What were they thinking of? There is so much that is bafflingly wrong with Philippe Fénelon’s new opera – score, libretto and staging – that it is hard to know where to begin.” Yet for ConcertoNet the performance – score, libretto and staging – is a “masterly achievement.”

I think one thing that got some people’s goat was that the opera isn’t just a straightforward setting of the play, even abridged. The librettist states baldly on the Paris Opera’s website that he isn’t keen on narrative. His Cherry Orchard is centred on act 3 and opens with the announcement that the orchard is sold; from then on, it’s a fairly free-ranging series of studies in nostalgia, weaving in reminiscences and quotations from the librettist and/or other authors, by one or several characters at a time, interspersed with flashes of dance or traditional song. For an opera, the text is wordy, and the first half (with, for some reason, an on-stage band on a podium at the rear, as on a 1900 bandstand and dressed for it) has rather a lot of uneventful recitative, so I can understand what prompted the FT’s complaint that it seemed interminable. But even that was larded with recognisable “set pieces” – arias, duets, trios, ensembles and choruses, weaving in reminiscences and quotations from other composers, that staved off serious boredom. Even if, admittedly, it was all, in narrative terms, bewildering: i.e. we had little idea what was going on. And the second half was both livelier in parts, and at times, to me at any rate, downright moving.

It would have been much tougher going, however, without the excellent Bolshoi cast, many of whom (in fact, the 6 women, a very fine palette of Russian vocal types from alto to coloratura soprano, who quite overshadowed the men) I’d be very glad to hear again in something else, preferably Russian: a new production of Betrothal in a Monastery would suit them perfectly.

There was no sign of a magical cherry orchard in the staging. The glacially frosted-looking set was of oppressive, thick-trunked, closely crowded, gnarled oaks with their heavy branches intertwining at the rear to form a flat arch under which, in the first part, we found the bandstand. The costuming was a kind of sepia-tinted, also frosted, nostalgic take on 1900: mother and daughter in cobwebby black lace dresses, wild hair and a vague Tim Burton look to their makeup; Varia in a strict, high-necked “governess” dress and Gricha in a ghostly, frosted sailor suit; some of the men in loud check “bicycling” suits, and a cohort of soldiers and servants, the former with outsized “Napoleon” hats or hussars’ helmets, the latter with equally outsize chauffeurs’caps, all in faded, frosted old gold.

There was also a chorus of women in white, Russian folklore costumes, each with a long braid of blond hair and a pointed Russian tiara, sometimes on stage and sometimes in the pit. Reviewers who wondered who they were can’t have read the opera’s special Cherry Orchard website, where we are told they represent remembrance of things and music past.

The characters sometimes waltzed or merely flitted across the stage with abandon (“I flit, I float, I flee, I fly”); but, when singing, mainly sat on a variety of white, neoclassical chairs, facing the audience. Whenever dance was evoked, a single ballerina, in a tutu, glided across on points, sometimes also helping with the props. As there was no narrative as such in the text, there was none in the staging, just a series of scenes and a lot of text.

We sat through it neither wowed by a masterwork nor feeling it was an endless fiasco. “It let itself be listened to,” as the French put it. I wouldn’t mind seeing the second half again, so long as we had the same cast; and I’d be delighted to find those six women together once more for a real, more familiar Russian work.

Strauss - Salome

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday February 5 2012.

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi. Production: Guy Joosten. Sets: Martin Zehetgruber. Costumes: Heide Kastler. Lighting: Manfred Voss. Video: Claudio Pazienza. Herodes: Chris Merritt. Herodias: Doris Soffel. Salome: Nicola Beller Carbone. Jochanaan: Scott Hendricks. Narraboth: Gordon Gietz. Ein Page der Herodias: Susanne Kreusch. Juden: Alasdair Elliott, Yves Saelens, Johannes Preissinger, Alexandre Kravets, Guillaume Antoine. Nazarener: Frode Olsen, Donal J. Byrne. Soldaten: Tijl Faveyts, Patrick Schramm. Ein Kappadozier: Julian Hubbard. Ein Sklave: Marc Coulon. La Monnaie orchestra.

Anyone who’s as fond of Strauss as I am will understand if I say that a disappointing Salome is a particular disappointment. I’ve been scratching my head a bit since yesterday’s performance in Brussels, unable quite to pin down the problem. In the end, I think it was the production. Joosten set it in a monstrously vulgar TV/cinema-inspired world of parvenus, celebrating Herod’s birthday (or whatever) in the bullet-holed shell of a palace, with furniture piled up to one side, plaster missing from the ceiling and floorboards missing from the floor, allowing light to shine through when John was singing from below. The palace guards were our by now old friends, not soldiers in fatigues or neo-Nazis in long coats (who seem to have gone out of fashion), but the others: men in black suits and white shirts with narrow black ties and sunglasses, running round to little effect with pistols and automatic rifles in their hands and aiming frenetically at Jochanaan every time he appeared, nonchalant and unperturbed.

Unusually, there was a curtain between the opening scenes, in which we could just see the dining room in the background, and the feast proper, taking place in a makeshift space with plywood floors and polythene walls – but also one gigantic chandelier. Herod, in open-necked dinner wear, and Herodias, in a spangled red evening dress slit up to the thigh and Ivana Trump hair, entertained their multi-denominational but not very ecumenical guests (there was a Catholic priest and a protestant vicar as well as the five Jews) at a long table arranged without a doubt to recall the Last Supper.

Herod paid no attention whatsoever to the squabbling Jews; he was busy filming Salome while rubbing his crutch. This prepared us for the central, potentially horrific idea: instead of dancing for him, Salome, having crawled under the table to goose a few guests, emerged with a video cassette. Guards held up a screen and we saw a film of the young Salome, apparently made by home-movie enthusiast Herod himself (we saw his heavily-beringed hand) and ending, we supposed (by this time, the projector had been turned on the audience) in incestuous paedophilia, much to the glee of the Catholic priest, and to the fidgety and at least feigned indifference of Herod himself. All, as I say, potentially horrific. But the (meticulously directed) acting was grand guignol, with Herod as Punch and Herodias as Judy, verging on slapstick: one of the Jews actually even took to throwing pies. This undermined the work, depriving it of any of the considerable emotional effect, whether dramatic or musical, it should have: shock, horror, awe or just plain Schmaltz

Nicola Beller Carbone is a very remarkable soprano. She has film-star looks, a fashion-model figure and endless legs; but she also has a powerful voice with effortless top notes and an interesting timbre, edgy – almost shrill - but with darkish undertones. It seemed to me, nitpicking as usual, that she was possibly one size too small for Salome (or Marietta, another of her roles). But surely we could still have been wowed if only she’d been either wicked or vulnerable or a bit of each. Here she looked, as La Libre Belgique very neatly put it, like a slightly squiffy high-society girl looking for cheap thrills. So much, in the circs, for her final scene.

Even on her back with her legs in the air, displaying her black tights up to the crutch, Doris Soffel was an impressive Herodias, at one point letting off a most amazingly long, loud note, as if to outdo Caballé at the end of Don Carlos. Chris Merritt was in good voice, any defects (and there were far fewer than he is at times capable of) corresponding perfectly with his vile (fictional) character. Scott Hendricks, already impressive in Macbeth in the same house, made an unusually bright, clear Jochanaan. In his case, the character was undermined by his apparent reasonableness in such a household, like George Clooney walking into a Nespresso shop taken over by Catwoman and The Joker.

Even if the Brussels players were on pretty pedestrian form under Rizzi, they weren’t as bad as at least one reviewer claimed, and this was a very good cast; but the lukewarm applause – which Merritt appeared, having cupped a hand to his ear, to comment on to Soffel – showed that I wasn’t alone in wishing we’d had, despite the all-out, strobe-lit massacre that accompanied Jochanaan’s beheading, a more harrowingly dramatic show.

Tchaikovsky – Pikovaya Dama

ONP Bastille, Tuesday January 31 2012

Conductor: Dimitri Jurowski. Production: Lev Dodin. Sets: David Borovsky. Costumes: Chloe Obolensky. Lighting: Jean Kalman. Hermann: Vladimir Galuzin. Tomsky: Evgeny Nikitin. Prince Yeletsky: Ludovic Tézier. Chekalinsky: Martin Mühle. Surin: Balint Szabo. Countess: Larissa Diadkova. Lisa: Olga Guryakova. Polina: Varduhi Abrahamyan. Masha: Nona Javakhidze. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Children’s choirs of the Hauts-de-Seine and the Opéra National de Paris.

The ever-excellent Opera Cake blog is not alone in noting that at the Paris Opera these days, only reruns of old productions are any good (though not all of those). This is the fourth outing of Lev Dodin’s staging of La Dame de Pique in Paris, and a good one it is (better, thank goodness, than his Salome, which has already been ditched), so it’s surprising it still manages to get booed on opening night, when the man himself is there too boo at. It comes as welcome change, both dramatically and vocally, from the recent serial duds.

It’s easy enough to describe. In the original story, Hermann goes mad at the end and is committed to an asylum. That is Dodin’s cue to set the opera in a madhouse from start to finish, with Hermann either thinking back, or just imagining things. With good actors painstakingly directed (including every member of the chorus with his or her own, individual twitches, grimaces and tics, scratching or clawing, slumping or crawling or dangling of limbs…) it works right through.Of course, with less expert directing, in only one or, at a pinch, two sets, it could have been monumentally boring.

The basic set is, then, the madhouse itself: brick walls painted green to shoulder height and white above, with some high, deep cornices and occasional relief, and one plain hospital bed that stays more or less in the same spot all evening, doubling as Lisa’s bed or the countess’s as Hermann’s imaginings require. The white part of the wall glides back to create a broad ledge for some of the action: the opening scenes in the park, for example; but characters also descend to Hermann’s level. Only at the very end of the second act does the rear wall part to reveal a couple of tall, white, fluted Ionic columns supporting a beam, some white classical statues (including the nude Venus of Moscow) and a white marble staircase to the right, these new spaces serving as the Countess’s rooms (in which she dances a ghostly minuet with Hermann) and her funeral chapel.

The costumes are a superb parade of beautifully-made period clothes (early 19th C) in shades, largely, of white, cream and buff with occasional touches of green, brown and charcoal. The lighting is classic, creamy white from the sides. There are some cuts that upset some people, and there’s some pulling about of the story but not enough to bother me. In the first act, for example, when Tomsky tells the Countess’s tale, she’s on stage to sing her own “quotes”. The pastoral “tableau” in the second act is acted out (as is quiet often the case in modern productions, I think) by Lisa, Hermann and the Countess. Things like that. But with the acting quality we get in this production, it all works very well.

Vocally there were some thrills of a kind that have been rare in my opera-going experience of late. Galuzin, who was in this production form the start at the end of the 90s, now “owns” the part, as (I’m afraid) people say, flawless (as people also say quite a bit) throughout. Guryakova’s voice is harder and less agile than it used to be, understandably, but still what an instrument and what a gorgeous actress. Diadkova is a younger Countess than we sometimes get (not that we get this work often enough) and in full, sumptuous voice, not just chest notes and wobble like some - fun though that can be. Nikitin seemed off peak last night (and looked unhappy at the end) but still put out some great notes. And Tézier, who may not be so well known abroad as his colleagues, was simply marvellous, as those who do know him would expect, as Yeletsky.

I wasn’t as impressed as some of the critics by the orchestra under Dimitri Jurowski - and by the way, this time, just a few seats along in the stalls from where I was last, I could hear it perfectly clearly, such are the quirks of the Bastille acoustics. As usual – maybe more than usual, as this was Tchaikovsky - I’d have liked more energy, more drive; and to my taste he was too cautious with the balance between pit and stage: the orchestra could have played louder and everyone would have made more noise. Here it was quite Scuthbert-like.

But who’s complaining - except about the dreadful audience? It was one of those corporate nights with bankers, their spouses and guests everywhere, slouching, coughing, fidgeting, leaning and whispering, as if at home in front of the TV, and chauffeurs lounging on limousine bonnets outside. But apart from that, I’m very glad I went, for both the work and the performance

Massenet - Manon

ONP Bastille, Tuesday January 10 2012

Conductor: Evelino Pido. Production: Coline Serreau. Sets: Jean-Marc Stehlé and Antoine Fontaine. Costumes: Elsa Pavanel. Manon: Natalie Dessay. Le Chevalier des Grieux: Giuseppe Filianoti. Lescaut: Franck Ferrari. Le Comte des Grieux: Paul Gay. Guillot de Morfontaine: Luca Lombardo. De Brétigny: André Heyboer. Poussette: Olivia Doray. Javotte: Carol Garcia. Rosette: Alisa Kolosova. L’Hôtelier: Christian Tréguier. Deux Gardes: Alexandre Duhamel, Ugo Rabec.

“Manon massacred at Bastille.” “Unfortunately, this new Paris production is no break with (Joël’s) form: under the directorship of Nicolas Joel the house on the Seine seems more and more to be  bidding farewell to living, advanced music theatre.” “The year has got off to a bad start at the Paris Opera: this Manon (…) is indeed a total failure and was greeted with copious booing.” “This Manon, the worst production we have seen in a long time, is a disgrace to the Paris Opera.” “A hotchpotch of ideas that freely mixes eras and costumes, an incoherent bid for the universal message of Manon’s story that looks like intellectual laziness.” “Yet another turkey.” “Another shipwreck at the Paris Opera. Following a calamitous Faust, a Forza del destino simply too… feeble, there’s no risk that this Manon will set back on course a season that has gone adrift. The fault, above all, of Coline Serreau, creator of a spectacle of gobsmacking incoherence and vacuity.”

If anyone reads my write-ups, they may recall that after Forza I wrote: “I realised last night that I’d miscounted: the singing in Werther so eclipsed the production that I forgot how dire it was. In other words, Faust made four stinkers, not three; and Forza makes five." So Manon makes six: Joël continues to churn out duds like apparitions in Macbeth. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much dud in him? Surely after the booing, then these unusually unanimous reviews, he’s starting to get the message?

I quite enjoyed, though the Austrian ambassador didn't, Coline Serreau's Fledermaus production with prison uniforms from the concentration camps and ballets forming swastikas. I liked her Barbiere less, though it's been quite a popular hit. In both, ideas were raised but not worked through in any satisfactory way. Manon had me wondering, right from the opening scenes, what she was getting at; or more precisely, wondering if she was getting at anything at all, or simply had nothing much to say.

Hers will be remembered (until it’s forgotten) as the “punk” Manon. The ONP’s workshops pulled out the stops to produce, for Lescaut and his friends (the chorus), a wholly authentic-looking Berlin punk-Goth extravaganza of wildly spiked black-and-red wigs, leather jackets and trousers, torn jeans, chains, platform-soled, steel-reinforced biker boots, nose rings, armbands: you name it, they thought of it. That’s what will be remembered best. But in fact set and costume periods were mixed up madly.

In act one, in Grand Central Station – you couldn’t mistake the giant, round-headed windows or those shallow arches under the chunky balustrade – the revellers were kind-of-Paul-Poiret and, after dinner was thrown up to them from a supermaket trolley, Manon alighted from a 50s bus in a simple 18th century dress. She and Des Grieux left for Paris on Lescaux’ motor bike. I quite generously supposed that this anachronistic jumble couldn’t be so corny as to symbolise the eternal timelessness of Manon’s plight, but the professional critics seem to think that’s all there was to it. For the rest, it simply seemed as if Serreau was chucking random silly gags at the work to poke fun at it. There was no hint of an overarching vision.

In act two, the little house was lowered down and unfolded to show a grubby little room with a bed and (la petite) table, to which two pizzas were delivered in boxes. When Manon sang “Reine… par la beauté” a “Miss Arras” sash and large tiara made a brief appearance. And as the FT put it, to the point as usual under the header “Let’s Make Fun Of Massenet”: “The award for crass sabotage goes to the drop-down panel featuring a 1950s US housewife waving to friends in a car which triggers audience laughs just as Des Grieux tiptoes to the end of ‘En fermant les yeux’."

Act three got weirder. We were in a “Grand Palais” sort of greenhouse with monstrous columns of tropical plants. Manon was now dressed as Madonna; Lescaut serenaded three muscular, bearded men in topless, leather-corseted crinolines; during her big number, our heroine was helped into Vogue-ing poses by more muscular men, this time in leather-corseted bondage with their mouths taped over. The “élégantes” were a crazed, jerky fashion parade in black and white on platform shoes; the girls also had their mouths taped up. I think there was a message of some kind, in these scenes, about male and female sex objects but again, if so, it was corny. Then, unexpectedly, the tropical plants swivelled into church piers and the Grand Central windows were recycled into Saint Sulpice. Des Grieux wore an oddly low-cut cassock and a see-through tee-shirt. His father was costumed as Germont père. Why his groupies were Belle Époque beauties on roller skates is beyond me, but they raised a few laughs.

For the Hôtel Transylvanie scene, the station had been “baroquified” in a heavy, Brooklyn Academy of Music sort of way, the ruined staircase was made partly of scaffolding, the floor was littered with paper, the punks and Goths were joined by gangsters in pale suits, black shirts, white ties, trilbies and sunglasses, and Manon and Des Grieux were arrested by modern French riot police. The litter stayed in place, for the final scenes, in an otherwise barren landscape crossed by battle-scarred “guards” of all eras, from Roman centurion to mediaeval knight to GI. Manon died under a shower of snow.

The production seems to have been taken, by the critics, as mitigating circumstances for the singers. It has been rumoured that some, having signed up when the show was supposed to be by Laurent Pelly and, during rehearsals, seen the iceberg approaching, tried to wriggle out before the ship went down but were threatened by the ONP with legal action. Natalie Dessay was very uncharacteristically subdued during curtain calls, taking only one bow, stepping back and looking glum, a sign she wasn’t pleased with herself. She was on fragile form – “walking on eggs,” as a friend put it at the second interval. She managed a fine “Obéissons” and was as good as you might expect in “N’est-ce plus ma main?” but her voice “caught” frequently and she was, by the end in particular, often inaudible in the middle and lower range.

Filianoti was, on the contrary, very audible throughout, a valiant though Italianate and somewhat unsubtle Des Grieux. He was so generous most of the way through that it would be unfair to complain if he flagged toward the end; no doubt, if he doesn’t find some way to drop out of this disaster, he will learn to pace himself better as the run progresses. Ferrari hammed his way merrily through the part in his comic-strip punk gear and red-tipped porcupine hair. Gay was elegant but stretched at the top.

Pido seemed to be chivvying the orchestra along in a way I’d normally like (though the local critics didn’t), but on row 11 of the stalls, we were in one of the Bastille’s unpredictable blind (or deaf?) spots, so the sound was muffled. The score, by the way, was fairly drastically cut, so, what with all the gags on stage, the evening didn’t drag on too long and, after pretty vicious booing of the production team, we were out in time for a restorative steak and chips.

Parterre is discussing this show.

Johann Christian Bach - Amadis de Gaule

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday January 4 2012

Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production: Marcel Bozonnet. Choreography: Natalie van Parys. Sets: Antoine Fontaine. Costumes: Renato Bianchi. Amadis: Philippe Do. Oriane: Hélène Guilmette. Arcabonne: Allyson McHardy. Arcalaüs: Franco Pomponi. Urgande, 1er Coryphée: Julie Fuchs. La Discorde, 2ème Coryphée: Alix Le Saux. La Haine, L’Ombre d’Ardan Canil: Peter Martinčič*. Soprano solo: Ana Dežman*. Tenor solo: Martin Sušnik*. 

* Soloists from the chorus of SNG Opera in balet, Ljubljana

“Period instruments, painted canvases, historically informed acting and choreography will all contribute to this major discovery of our repertoire,” says the Opéra Comique’s website in my translation, more accurate than their own. It would be odious indeed to make comparisons with Atys, revived in the same house last year. You might wonder, as the man on my left did, aloud, whether the Royal Opera in Versailles, then the Salle Favart in Paris, are the right places for productions that might most kindly be called “gentillet” (rather than Limoges, as he suggested). But I wouldn’t go so far as the FT’s ever-acerbic critic in calling it “a feast of leftovers.” Once you settled into the idea that this was an honest attempt to bring us baroque spectacle on a budget (and not another of Nicolas Joël’s tiresome attempts to turn the clock back and the Paris Opera into the Met), you were inclined to be indulgent and give it the benefit of the doubt.

So, no, the painted flats: fluted Doric columns, a fortified bridge, barred prison windows, “sublime” outcrops of rock, Rome, and, especially, a Caracalla-type brick ruin framing a circle of Veronese sky… were effective enough - not to mention Urgande descending at the end in a beautifully Kitsch, flaming orange mandorla. I didn’t find them as “worn and recycled” as the FT. The costumes were sometimes pretty, particularly during a Fragonard-like, pastoral ballet episode, though it’s true that at the end the chorus looked rather bedraggled in (puzzlingly but temping fate in reminding us directly of Atys) Louis XIV court dress. The FT critic thought the demons looked “like The Muppet Show while Arcabonne is dressed like a demented red parakeet,” but to me they looked more like science-fiction monsters from those old, cult, “Creature from the Lagoon” films, more amusing than frightening; my neighbours agreed that Amadis himself (cloaked in white, with lion's-head kneecaps) looked like Princess Leila. The FT was right in suggesting that the producer was “unsure over Baroque gesture. We start with much hands-to head from Arcabonne – as in ‘I need an aspirin, quick' – and dramatic upper-torso posturing from brother Arcalaüs, whose feet seemed to be trapped in a patch of glue…” yes, we found that annoying too; “but efforts from the rest of the cast are half-hearted.” The ballets could have been a lot worse (they usually are), and a couple of quirky hornpipes by two skinny but enthusiastic men were warmly applauded.

With raggedy attacks, dodgy ensemble playing and dodgy tuning, the Cercle de l’Harmonie is not yet up to Arts Florissants standards, but Rohrer nevertheless had them playing with energy and oomph. And finally, while, with the exception (see later) of Franco Pomponi, it was, you sat there thinking, too early for the leads to be singing such taxing arias in such a prominent house, your inclination was to admire the pluck of student singers making the most of their first big break.

Trouble is, that wasn’t exactly the case. Hélène Guilmette was last season’s underpowered, sometimes inaudible Thérese in Les Mamelles and Philippe Do (FT: “threadbare tenor”), to my amazement, sings Werther, Don José and (crikey) Verdi’s Requiem. Allyson McHardy has a very good middle range of the “North-of-England-mezzo” kind, but turned shrill and tremulous at the top of her soprano (so I believe) role.

Re Franco Pomponi, I see I’d noticed him before, in Henze’s The Bassarids in 2005: “Who," I asked, "is this Franco Pomponi? Visibly young and obviously, with his looks and figure, a candidate for Billy Budd, his is a bright, clear but forceful baritone and he threw himself into the part so generously I feared, I admit, for the length of his career.” To me, on Wednesday night, he was the only singer who really should have been up there singing that score. And the score was, to me, the evening’s winner: well made, lively, punchy, full of incident, plenty of anger and remorse, plenty of good arias and ensembles, reasonably short… Anyone who feels, for example, that Gluck didn’t compose enough operas would do well to look into Amadis de Gaule.