ONP Garnier, Wednesday October 7 2009
Conductor: Marc Minkowski. Production: Nicolas Joel. Sets: Ezio Frigerio. Costumes: Franca Squarciapino. Mireille: Inva Mula. Vincent: Charles Castronovo. Ourrias: Franck Ferrari. Ramon: Alain Vernhes. Taven: Sylvie Brunet. Vincenette: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.
Nicolas Joel's production of Mireille left me with no wish ever to see or hear the work again, so what a thankless task it must be for a perfectly decent cast to slog through it ten times without any help from the producer, and with only resounding boos on the opening night and tepid applause since as their reward. By mid-series, the orchestra played and the singers sang as if they'd long since wished they'd never got involved. The work itself needed help too if it were to succeed (Mireille ends in a mawkish orgy of Catholic Kitsch; the score, meanwhile, had me wondering if I hadn't always underrated Arthur Sullivan), and didn't get it from a staging that seemed (in the context of the change of management at the ONP, from Mortier to Joel) to be almost aggressively outdated and provincial.
On the whole, the press have panned the production but praised the cast. So Inva Mula was disappointing on Wednesday night, and as she was sipping discreetly from a stage beaker at one point, she may not have been on peak form (or she may just have needed a stiff martini to face another evening's ordeal). Mireille is supposed to be hard to sing, and she made it sound so: you could hear the revving-up and the crunching of gears. The medium was very good indeed, but the top notes were either barely-audible pianissimi or, if loud, problematic. Her being done up with braided hair and in frumpish frocks didn't help: she could have been Vincent's dowdy mother. She was, however, noticeably stronger in the last part: perhaps the martinis had by then kicked in.
Charles Castronovo made a handsome, elegant Vincent, visually and vocally, though even at Garnier his voice is not loud (and come to think of it, nobody's voice really rang out in this performance; as I said, they all seemed to be fed up). In the absence of any direction, his acting was reduced to hands in pockets or clenched fists, but we know he can act if helped; we saw that in L'Elisir d'amore, where he radiated boyish charm. So it wasn't his fault.
Sylvie Brunet was far better cast here than as Carmen at the Châtelet. Hers was probably the most interesting sound of the evening, very bronzy, great diction and no hamming things up with Azucena-like chest notes. The rest of the cast would have been perfectly adequate in a production that made more of the piece, apart from the "Passeur" boatman, who was from the classic feeble-voiced, wobbly school of bit-part singers.
Minkowski pretended still to be enthusiastic, although he must have noticed how little applause he and the unruly orchestra got before the last round. The chorus, under its new chorus-master, who came from Toulouse in Joel's luggage, was unusually ragged and off-beat: an inauspicious start to a new era?
That's the fear you get from the whole unmemorable enterprise, as you can't help seeing it as a manifesto proclaiming radical change (for the worse, so you can only think at this stage) at the ONP. OK, this is only the opening show and Joel has promised not to abuse his position by staging his own productions, so things may turn out for the good; we have to wait and see. And a team like Ezio frigerio and Franca Squarciapino are really not radical change at all, more a return to the distant past: Frigerio was already the set designer for Paris's near-legendary Strehler production of Le Nozze, which must have premiered in the 70s I guess. But as I think we all know, there's no way to bring back a golden age (supposing there really was one), and "taking the same and starting again," as the French call it, is no way to see in a new one.
Frigerio's sets were simple and, I use the word again, unmemorable: a field of wheat; the same field plus a waggon decorated with flowers; a long provençal farmouse behind a hillock; a plastic river in the moonlight; a stone wall; a flight of steps up to a cross on a column. The characters were all dressed (and the set was lit) for Millet's Angelus. The choreography of the farandole was absurdly amateurish. Taven brandishing her twisted stick as the curtains closed was Met-standard corny. The boatman scene by the river (I could hardly believe my eyes when dry-ice "smoke" appeared in twin streams from the sides) ended in ridicule as the boat sank too fast into the stage. Nobody moved to help the dying Mireille as she climbed the stone steps on her knees to embrace the column.
"Limoges 1930" said my elderly neighbour, who would know. She couldn't get over the farandole, imitating it in the foyer. I don't know why my friends decided to stay to the bitter end. I'd gladly have left earlier. A very dull start to a new season under new management, but as I just said, we have to wait and see. Die tote Stadt is next, so there may be light on the horizon...
Monday, 26 October 2009
Korngold - Die tote Stadt
ONP Paris - Thursday October 22 2009
Conductor: Pinchas Steinberg. Production: Willy Decker. Sets and costumes: Wolfgang Gussmann. Lighting: Wolfgang Goebbel. Paul: Robert Dean Smith. Marietta: Ricarda Merbeth. Frank/Fritz: Stéphane Degout. Brigitta: Doris Lamprecht. Juliette: Elisa Cenni. Lucienne: Letitia Singleton. Victorin: Alain Gabriel. Graf Albert: Alexander Kravets. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine⁄children’s chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Coproduction with the Vienna Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival.
It’s a rare enough treat for those who like Die tote Stadt to have it staged at all. And it’s a wonder any leading couple can be found to sing it, let alone give us a stunning third act performance like Thursday night’s. These facts, plus near-universal praise in the press (apart from one French sourpuss dubbing it a mere “curiosity for the curious”) have made me dither over writing it up, not wanting to seem ungrateful or nit-picking by admitting I was still left wanting more: “Sur ma faim,” as they say here.
However, having discussed it with friends and heard the live broadcast, I’ve concluded that the Bastille’s peculiar acoustics are probably mostly to blame. To cut a long story short, for several years I always had the same seats, on the front row of one of the projecting side-sections of the second balcony. This year, unexplained chaos at the box office has meant that, despite being a long-standing subscriber and despite asking for the most expensive tickets for all performances, we have ended up with a mixed bag of seats in various categories, not even at the dates we wanted. As a result, on Thursday evening we were, for the first time, in the very middle of the first balcony meaning, at the Bastille, further from the stage than in the side sections, which jut forward. And in case you didn’t know, acoustics at the Bastille are patchy and can play odd tricks. (Yes, that was the short story.) So…
Robert Dean Smith is not the clarion or bull-in-a-china-shop kind of Heldentenor. His is a softer, grainier timbre, though still powerful enough (what fool dismissed him as a “tenorino” on one of the French opera fora?), more human and better-suited to Paul’s troubled persona. He navigated his way through this crippling role, not only without a wrong note but with moving, musical phrasing thrown in. Ricarda Merbeth, meanwhile, was perhaps an even more remarkable Marie, making the highest notes in the score sound (and resound) easy. Some critics mentioned a worrying wobble. It wasn’t in evidence on Thursday evening - and I might urge them, when they then say they preferred Angela Denoke, to listen to the latter’s Salzburg recording, though it’s true Denoke is a more natural actress and, especially, dancer. The last act was, as I said above, stunning. However, grateful though I am for that, they (understandably, I freely admit) held their voices back somewhat during the whole of act one and half of act two and, as a result, from these new seats sounded disappointingly distant – a fact not helped by the staging (see below). It was only when they started to let their hair down in the second half of act two that I realised the evening wouldn’t be a washout after all.
Stéphane Degout was, as you might expect, a super Frank/Fritz and the rest of the cast was just fine.
Now, the orchestra. The press have tended to praise Pinchas Steinberg for avoiding Schmaltz. To me, the performance seemed to take the score note-by-note and lack overall “sweep,” if that makes any sense. It didn’t sound joined up, and I sat there thinking “I must get to see this in Vienna one day and hear the VPO in the Staatsoper acoustics.” In other words, I could have done with at least a touch of that missing Schmaltz. I could also, as is often the case (so maybe it’s just an obsession of mine) have done with a bit more drive (something the singers might have been grateful for too: the slow tempi must have made their breathing that much harder). But on the radio the orchestra sounded wonderful, throwing up a mass of gorgeous detail in the potentially overblown score. So again, I now put it down to the new seats.
The production has been around and is in rep in Vienna, so many of you will have at least seen photos of it – and very photogenic it is. On the Bastille’s huge stage it was framed in black to make a smaller proscenium, set so far back from the pit that I assumed Marietta’s pals’ antics and the religious parade would take place in front, on the apron. They didn’t, but the effect was to distance the singers even more than usual (the Bastille auditorium is vast) from the audience.
The main set was a large, gloomy, ugly room in Paul’s house: brown parquet floor; two brown club armchairs (much climbed-upon as the action progressed, especially by Marietta, who tended to perch on the arms); white ceiling with mouldings; black walls with some scribbling near the ceiling (couldn’t see what it was about); big, double doors to the left; and one large and many small canvases of a particularly unattractive, doe-eyed Marie (though not as blatantly unattractive as the giant, porcine Madonna that used to hover over Paris’s Tosca). The atmosphere generated – authentically Belgian - brought to mind the surrealists Magritte and (worse still) Paul Delvaux, definitely one of my least favourite painters.
So I thought we were in for a visually grim evening, but once Paul started having his visions things perked up: the room fell apart to reveal various livelier novelties at the rear: a smaller version of the same room for his vision of Marie; a cluster of white-robed beguines bearing a white cross and a crucified Doris Lamprecht (that was dangerously close to laughable); dancing houses with lit windows for the scene where he’s supposed to be on the quayside (it was clever making everything come to him rather than the other way round, meaning he had his visions without ever leaving his room); Marietta’s troupe in all-white commedia dell’arte costumes; the Fellini-esque religious procession.
The acting seemed to me a touch stiff, but only a touch, and Ricarda Merbeth isn’t really built for twirling gaily round like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music: she's more like Deborah Polaski as Elektra. The production didn’t knock my socks off, but it handled the themes well and I wouldn’t mind, as I said, seeing it again in Vienna and having it on DVD. In fact, musically (I say this now having heard the radio broadcast) it might just be the best recent version available.
Conductor: Pinchas Steinberg. Production: Willy Decker. Sets and costumes: Wolfgang Gussmann. Lighting: Wolfgang Goebbel. Paul: Robert Dean Smith. Marietta: Ricarda Merbeth. Frank/Fritz: Stéphane Degout. Brigitta: Doris Lamprecht. Juliette: Elisa Cenni. Lucienne: Letitia Singleton. Victorin: Alain Gabriel. Graf Albert: Alexander Kravets. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine⁄children’s chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Coproduction with the Vienna Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival.
It’s a rare enough treat for those who like Die tote Stadt to have it staged at all. And it’s a wonder any leading couple can be found to sing it, let alone give us a stunning third act performance like Thursday night’s. These facts, plus near-universal praise in the press (apart from one French sourpuss dubbing it a mere “curiosity for the curious”) have made me dither over writing it up, not wanting to seem ungrateful or nit-picking by admitting I was still left wanting more: “Sur ma faim,” as they say here.
However, having discussed it with friends and heard the live broadcast, I’ve concluded that the Bastille’s peculiar acoustics are probably mostly to blame. To cut a long story short, for several years I always had the same seats, on the front row of one of the projecting side-sections of the second balcony. This year, unexplained chaos at the box office has meant that, despite being a long-standing subscriber and despite asking for the most expensive tickets for all performances, we have ended up with a mixed bag of seats in various categories, not even at the dates we wanted. As a result, on Thursday evening we were, for the first time, in the very middle of the first balcony meaning, at the Bastille, further from the stage than in the side sections, which jut forward. And in case you didn’t know, acoustics at the Bastille are patchy and can play odd tricks. (Yes, that was the short story.) So…
Robert Dean Smith is not the clarion or bull-in-a-china-shop kind of Heldentenor. His is a softer, grainier timbre, though still powerful enough (what fool dismissed him as a “tenorino” on one of the French opera fora?), more human and better-suited to Paul’s troubled persona. He navigated his way through this crippling role, not only without a wrong note but with moving, musical phrasing thrown in. Ricarda Merbeth, meanwhile, was perhaps an even more remarkable Marie, making the highest notes in the score sound (and resound) easy. Some critics mentioned a worrying wobble. It wasn’t in evidence on Thursday evening - and I might urge them, when they then say they preferred Angela Denoke, to listen to the latter’s Salzburg recording, though it’s true Denoke is a more natural actress and, especially, dancer. The last act was, as I said above, stunning. However, grateful though I am for that, they (understandably, I freely admit) held their voices back somewhat during the whole of act one and half of act two and, as a result, from these new seats sounded disappointingly distant – a fact not helped by the staging (see below). It was only when they started to let their hair down in the second half of act two that I realised the evening wouldn’t be a washout after all.
Stéphane Degout was, as you might expect, a super Frank/Fritz and the rest of the cast was just fine.
Now, the orchestra. The press have tended to praise Pinchas Steinberg for avoiding Schmaltz. To me, the performance seemed to take the score note-by-note and lack overall “sweep,” if that makes any sense. It didn’t sound joined up, and I sat there thinking “I must get to see this in Vienna one day and hear the VPO in the Staatsoper acoustics.” In other words, I could have done with at least a touch of that missing Schmaltz. I could also, as is often the case (so maybe it’s just an obsession of mine) have done with a bit more drive (something the singers might have been grateful for too: the slow tempi must have made their breathing that much harder). But on the radio the orchestra sounded wonderful, throwing up a mass of gorgeous detail in the potentially overblown score. So again, I now put it down to the new seats.
The production has been around and is in rep in Vienna, so many of you will have at least seen photos of it – and very photogenic it is. On the Bastille’s huge stage it was framed in black to make a smaller proscenium, set so far back from the pit that I assumed Marietta’s pals’ antics and the religious parade would take place in front, on the apron. They didn’t, but the effect was to distance the singers even more than usual (the Bastille auditorium is vast) from the audience.
The main set was a large, gloomy, ugly room in Paul’s house: brown parquet floor; two brown club armchairs (much climbed-upon as the action progressed, especially by Marietta, who tended to perch on the arms); white ceiling with mouldings; black walls with some scribbling near the ceiling (couldn’t see what it was about); big, double doors to the left; and one large and many small canvases of a particularly unattractive, doe-eyed Marie (though not as blatantly unattractive as the giant, porcine Madonna that used to hover over Paris’s Tosca). The atmosphere generated – authentically Belgian - brought to mind the surrealists Magritte and (worse still) Paul Delvaux, definitely one of my least favourite painters.
So I thought we were in for a visually grim evening, but once Paul started having his visions things perked up: the room fell apart to reveal various livelier novelties at the rear: a smaller version of the same room for his vision of Marie; a cluster of white-robed beguines bearing a white cross and a crucified Doris Lamprecht (that was dangerously close to laughable); dancing houses with lit windows for the scene where he’s supposed to be on the quayside (it was clever making everything come to him rather than the other way round, meaning he had his visions without ever leaving his room); Marietta’s troupe in all-white commedia dell’arte costumes; the Fellini-esque religious procession.
The acting seemed to me a touch stiff, but only a touch, and Ricarda Merbeth isn’t really built for twirling gaily round like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music: she's more like Deborah Polaski as Elektra. The production didn’t knock my socks off, but it handled the themes well and I wouldn’t mind, as I said, seeing it again in Vienna and having it on DVD. In fact, musically (I say this now having heard the radio broadcast) it might just be the best recent version available.
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Händel - Semele
La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday September 27 2009
Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Production and sets: Zhang Huan. Costumes: Han Feng. Lighting: Wolfgang Göbbel. Jupiter: Jeremy Ovenden. Cadmus, King of Thebes/Priest: Nathan Berg. Semele, Daughter of Cadmus: Ying Huang. Juno/Ino, Sister of Semele: Ning Liang. Athamas, a Prince of Boeotia: David Hansen. Somnus: Kurt Gysen. Iris: Sarah Tynan. Les Talens Lyriques. Chorus of La Monnaie.
Familiarity is supposed to breed contempt, but I wonder if, conversely, unfamiliarity breeds awe. Quite often when "controversial" artists from other media are brought in to direct opera while knowing nothing about it, the result is surprisingly tame. Such was the case with this Brussels production of Semele by Zhang Huan: though he’s known for nudity and bestiality and dressing up in raw meat, once you accepted that it was set in China his staging was remarkably conventional.
As usual these days, it required some reading up beforehand. Zhang bought a Ming temple from a widow whose husband was executed by firing squad after (if I understood correctly) murdering her lover. As it happens, in the temple he (Zhang) found a diary chronicling the husband’s jealousy and drunkenness. It occurred to him that this made the temple an apt setting for Semele, and that if he shipped it lock, stock and barrel (not to mention its owner, the widow, who made several appearances sweeping the stage) to Brussels, the Qi that came with it would lend a special urgency to the production.
Well, it certainly looked gorgeous in the excellent lighting, but as the Sunday Times reviewer rightly concluded (and again, as is often the case when artists are asked to direct): “The visual ideas, while beautiful to look at, [were] undermined by minimal direction and clumsy execution.“
Only occasionally were we reminded that Zhang is a contemporary artist. During the overture we watched a black and white documentary, subtitled in English, about the temple, the family that lived in it and its dismantling and reconstruction in Zhang’s studio in Shanghai. The final still shot gave way to the real thing, with its beams and rafters bare to leave sightlines clear and allow objects to be lifted in and out.
The ancient temple was, understandably, the only set. A bronze bell came down for the opening temple scene and burst into flames not quite as required by the libretto. Jupiter and Semele’s Citheron love-nest saw it overgrown with bamboo for the chorus to fornicate in when not singing. Somnus snoozed on a vast, red, flowery quilt askew on the roof, dreaming of the naked Chinese girl beside him and doubled up by a slowly unfolding inflatable giant. The mirror scene was spectacular: a wall of mirror filled the proscenium from top to bottom and side to side, reflecting La Monnaie’s gaudy, gilded auditorium back at the audience.
The costumes, a mix of Ming-period western with ballooning breeches and ruffs (as in the wonderful Japanese screens in Lisbon’s fine arts museum) and colourful Chinese silks and headdresses, were sumptuous. There were some elements of Chinese theatre: a pantomime horse in act one, a priapic pantomime donkey in the fornication scene, and a long, white dragon, inexpertly handled by European technicans and breathing incense smoke, in whose coils Semele anticlimactically expired. Sumo wrestlers made an incongruous and baffling appearance at one point. A Mongolian singer made another at another. And there was a Mongolian recital out on the square, under a three-legged, copper Buddha statue by Zhang, during the interval. The opera ended with Semele’s death and the chorus “Oh, terror,” followed by an odd humming chorus of the Internationale socialist hymn and, finally, the sound of rain as a series of Zhang’s ash portraits were washed away on video.
The story was not totally out of place in this setting, but I felt all the way through that it would have been better to find an experienced director willing to work in partnership with Zhang to make the singers act and the ideas work (“minimal direction and clumsy execution” is spot-on).
I also agree with most of the Sunday Times reviewer’s take on the performance.
“What might have been an outstanding musical performance - led by Christophe Rousset, one of the world’s outstanding Handelians, and his wonderful period band, Les Talens Lyriques - was compromised by some B-list casting. Ning Liang, one of the most experienced classical singers from China, with a career in the West of more than 25 years behind her, now struggles with the range and bravura of Juno’s fulminations…”
Yes. Hard to imagine her singing Octavian in New York.
“… and the Athamas of the young Australian countertenor David Hansen was barely audible in this medium-sized house.”
Barely audible, yes, but he would have been very good indeed in a smaller place. The old lady next to me also found him strikingly cute, though he was clearly not at ease in tights.
“As Jupiter, the British tenor Jeremy Ovenden sang a stylish, but tonally unalluring, ‘Where E’er You Walk…”
Mmm... I didn't find it all that unalluring; I was glad to hear someone singing relatively well.
“Another Brit, Sarah Tynan, scored a personal triumph with her bright-toned, sparky Iris.”
OK.
“Ying Huang, the Semele, compensated for some less than dazzling coloratura flourishes…”
Yes, every long run on the word “alarm” in “No, no, I’ll take no less” was marred by a deep breath in the middle.
“… with excellent diction - Chinese-trained, she now lives in New York - and much charm.”
Neither of those struck me I’m afraid. With all due respect, Ms Ying was not up to singing Semele on the Brussels stage. And an alto who makes a hash of “Iris, hence away” is about as unnecessary a piece of casting as an Eboli who makes one of “O Don fatale.” So this was, as the reviewer (who might also have mentioned Nathan Berg’s comfortably idiomatic contribution) also wrote, from the musical point of view, Rousset’s Semele.
Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Production and sets: Zhang Huan. Costumes: Han Feng. Lighting: Wolfgang Göbbel. Jupiter: Jeremy Ovenden. Cadmus, King of Thebes/Priest: Nathan Berg. Semele, Daughter of Cadmus: Ying Huang. Juno/Ino, Sister of Semele: Ning Liang. Athamas, a Prince of Boeotia: David Hansen. Somnus: Kurt Gysen. Iris: Sarah Tynan. Les Talens Lyriques. Chorus of La Monnaie.
Familiarity is supposed to breed contempt, but I wonder if, conversely, unfamiliarity breeds awe. Quite often when "controversial" artists from other media are brought in to direct opera while knowing nothing about it, the result is surprisingly tame. Such was the case with this Brussels production of Semele by Zhang Huan: though he’s known for nudity and bestiality and dressing up in raw meat, once you accepted that it was set in China his staging was remarkably conventional.
As usual these days, it required some reading up beforehand. Zhang bought a Ming temple from a widow whose husband was executed by firing squad after (if I understood correctly) murdering her lover. As it happens, in the temple he (Zhang) found a diary chronicling the husband’s jealousy and drunkenness. It occurred to him that this made the temple an apt setting for Semele, and that if he shipped it lock, stock and barrel (not to mention its owner, the widow, who made several appearances sweeping the stage) to Brussels, the Qi that came with it would lend a special urgency to the production.
Well, it certainly looked gorgeous in the excellent lighting, but as the Sunday Times reviewer rightly concluded (and again, as is often the case when artists are asked to direct): “The visual ideas, while beautiful to look at, [were] undermined by minimal direction and clumsy execution.“
Only occasionally were we reminded that Zhang is a contemporary artist. During the overture we watched a black and white documentary, subtitled in English, about the temple, the family that lived in it and its dismantling and reconstruction in Zhang’s studio in Shanghai. The final still shot gave way to the real thing, with its beams and rafters bare to leave sightlines clear and allow objects to be lifted in and out.
The ancient temple was, understandably, the only set. A bronze bell came down for the opening temple scene and burst into flames not quite as required by the libretto. Jupiter and Semele’s Citheron love-nest saw it overgrown with bamboo for the chorus to fornicate in when not singing. Somnus snoozed on a vast, red, flowery quilt askew on the roof, dreaming of the naked Chinese girl beside him and doubled up by a slowly unfolding inflatable giant. The mirror scene was spectacular: a wall of mirror filled the proscenium from top to bottom and side to side, reflecting La Monnaie’s gaudy, gilded auditorium back at the audience.
The costumes, a mix of Ming-period western with ballooning breeches and ruffs (as in the wonderful Japanese screens in Lisbon’s fine arts museum) and colourful Chinese silks and headdresses, were sumptuous. There were some elements of Chinese theatre: a pantomime horse in act one, a priapic pantomime donkey in the fornication scene, and a long, white dragon, inexpertly handled by European technicans and breathing incense smoke, in whose coils Semele anticlimactically expired. Sumo wrestlers made an incongruous and baffling appearance at one point. A Mongolian singer made another at another. And there was a Mongolian recital out on the square, under a three-legged, copper Buddha statue by Zhang, during the interval. The opera ended with Semele’s death and the chorus “Oh, terror,” followed by an odd humming chorus of the Internationale socialist hymn and, finally, the sound of rain as a series of Zhang’s ash portraits were washed away on video.
The story was not totally out of place in this setting, but I felt all the way through that it would have been better to find an experienced director willing to work in partnership with Zhang to make the singers act and the ideas work (“minimal direction and clumsy execution” is spot-on).
I also agree with most of the Sunday Times reviewer’s take on the performance.
“What might have been an outstanding musical performance - led by Christophe Rousset, one of the world’s outstanding Handelians, and his wonderful period band, Les Talens Lyriques - was compromised by some B-list casting. Ning Liang, one of the most experienced classical singers from China, with a career in the West of more than 25 years behind her, now struggles with the range and bravura of Juno’s fulminations…”
Yes. Hard to imagine her singing Octavian in New York.
“… and the Athamas of the young Australian countertenor David Hansen was barely audible in this medium-sized house.”
Barely audible, yes, but he would have been very good indeed in a smaller place. The old lady next to me also found him strikingly cute, though he was clearly not at ease in tights.
“As Jupiter, the British tenor Jeremy Ovenden sang a stylish, but tonally unalluring, ‘Where E’er You Walk…”
Mmm... I didn't find it all that unalluring; I was glad to hear someone singing relatively well.
“Another Brit, Sarah Tynan, scored a personal triumph with her bright-toned, sparky Iris.”
OK.
“Ying Huang, the Semele, compensated for some less than dazzling coloratura flourishes…”
Yes, every long run on the word “alarm” in “No, no, I’ll take no less” was marred by a deep breath in the middle.
“… with excellent diction - Chinese-trained, she now lives in New York - and much charm.”
Neither of those struck me I’m afraid. With all due respect, Ms Ying was not up to singing Semele on the Brussels stage. And an alto who makes a hash of “Iris, hence away” is about as unnecessary a piece of casting as an Eboli who makes one of “O Don fatale.” So this was, as the reviewer (who might also have mentioned Nathan Berg’s comfortably idiomatic contribution) also wrote, from the musical point of view, Rousset’s Semele.
Saturday, 27 June 2009
Szymanowski - King Roger
ONP Paris Bastille - Thursday June 25 2009
Conductor : Kazushi Ono. Production : Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes : Malgorzata Szczesniak. Video design : Denis Guéguin. Lighting : Felice Ross. King Roger II : Scott Hendricks. Roxana : Margarita de Arellano. Edrisi : Stefan Margita. Shepherd : Eric Cutler. Archbishop : Wojtek Smilek. Abbess : Jadwiga Rappe. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.
Some people may find Bruckner’s symphonies or Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels all much of a muchness, but if you’re hooked, you’re hooked and can never get too much of the same. A friend of mine described Warlikowski’s latest Bastille production as “very lazy recycling” and for all I know what seems clever about it may only be pseudo-intellectual. Maybe the king is in the altogether, in both senses; maybe I’m just be a sucker for superficial gloss. But to me this was another momentous evening’s theatre.
It isn’t even as if I “got” everything. I still haven’t worked out why a strikingly handsome young man in boxer shorts was injected at the start, making the king vomit, and dragged off; and why, at the end of the work, Roger took his place, in the same white shorts, to be injected in turn by Edrisi (though I have ideas). Or why there was a second Roxana floating dead in the tanks in front of the swimming pool throughout. Nor, never having taken any interest in cinema, was I able to pick up references others tell me were to Warhol/Morrissey films or Pasolini’s Theorem. But with Warlikoswki you expect layers and you expect to be puzzled, and I was satisfied enough to suppose that his staging (a) was in part – though by no means only - about a homosexual awakening and (b) took a sardonic swipe at various illusory utopias: religion, drugs, today’s obsession with physical beauty and staving off old age, Disney…
Visually it was at times magnificent. The single set was simple enough: a gymnasium-like space with wall-bars against walls that changed colour with the lighting, and dark, polished parquet. At the rear, a fairground-type archway with a neon sunburst and the word “sun” picked out in lights, waiting for the finale scene. The parquet could slide open, slowly broadening the space, and closed over a blue swimming pool. Act 1 was especially lavish, with the court men in dinner suits and the ladies marvellous, made-up harridans in various shades of gold lame and big, Mrs Thatcher wigs (my neighbour, not being British, thought of Nancy Reagan instead). They were filmed in real time by a hand-held camera: grotesque close-ups of their snarling features were projected on a giant gauze as the action took place behind and in front of it.
At the start, the King and Roxana were in their underwear, getting dressed – possibly after sex - for the ceremony. The shepherd was a sort of camp hippy with Michael Jackson hair and red-varnished fingernails (but had handsome doubles in white imitating his every move among the crowd). The bacchanalia was choreographed as an aquatic gym session for the very old. And what got some people’s goat was that, at the end, the shepherd emerged, like Michael Jackson (whose demise we were to hear of the next morning) with a gang of children in Mickey Mouse heads and little black velvet suits; he too had a mouse-head (which muffled his singing rather) and big, spangled Minnie Mouse shoes. As my annoyed friend put it this was “the extravagant tangent [Warlikowski] went off on, a sort of didactic exposure of the Shepherd’s worthless philosophy as no more than a lead-in to US commercial values.” Yes, I get the point. But it was so well acted and lit and sung… and as one critic put it, you may not understand everything, it may not all make sense, but Warlikowski has a gift, even so, for creating a complex, uneasy atmosphere that somehow works. At any rate, it works for me.
Unless I’m mistaken, I didn’t hear Krol Roger in concert at the Châtelet some years back, so this was my first encounter with the sumptuous score. I realise it’s always dangerous, when hearing pieces for the first time, to seek comparisons as later, when you know the composer better, he will sound like no-one but himself. But as the shepherd’s part calls for a high and elegiac tenor, I couldn’t help thinking of Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg, with occasional hints of Ravel, Stravinsky’s Firebird, and even (though not enough to ruin the whole evening) Vaughan-Williams.
We had a strong cast of men. Indeed, they all made themselves heard over the row from the pit, and I doubt they could have been better. Eric Cutler soared radiantly through the difficult part, with remarkable ease; Scott Hendricks was a very powerful high baritone; and Stefan Margita was Stefan Margita, which is perfectly fine by me. Unfortunately (this is understudy month in Paris) the scheduled soprano dropped out, sick; her stand-in seemed to be doing a sterling job as far as we could hear, but her efforts, however fruitful they may have been, remained mostly inaudible in the Bastille’s vast spaces. Kazushi Ono also did a great job with the ONP orchestra, who stayed in the pit for the bows at the end, a sign they got on with the conductor for once.
If this comes out on video (the TV production was, after all, by Bel Air) then we’ll get Mariusz Kwiecien and Olga Pasichnyk, so all will be well and, having had a preview on Internet, I’ll buy it, for sure. “Eurotrash”-haters, however, should steer clear.
Conductor : Kazushi Ono. Production : Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes : Malgorzata Szczesniak. Video design : Denis Guéguin. Lighting : Felice Ross. King Roger II : Scott Hendricks. Roxana : Margarita de Arellano. Edrisi : Stefan Margita. Shepherd : Eric Cutler. Archbishop : Wojtek Smilek. Abbess : Jadwiga Rappe. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.
Some people may find Bruckner’s symphonies or Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels all much of a muchness, but if you’re hooked, you’re hooked and can never get too much of the same. A friend of mine described Warlikowski’s latest Bastille production as “very lazy recycling” and for all I know what seems clever about it may only be pseudo-intellectual. Maybe the king is in the altogether, in both senses; maybe I’m just be a sucker for superficial gloss. But to me this was another momentous evening’s theatre.
It isn’t even as if I “got” everything. I still haven’t worked out why a strikingly handsome young man in boxer shorts was injected at the start, making the king vomit, and dragged off; and why, at the end of the work, Roger took his place, in the same white shorts, to be injected in turn by Edrisi (though I have ideas). Or why there was a second Roxana floating dead in the tanks in front of the swimming pool throughout. Nor, never having taken any interest in cinema, was I able to pick up references others tell me were to Warhol/Morrissey films or Pasolini’s Theorem. But with Warlikoswki you expect layers and you expect to be puzzled, and I was satisfied enough to suppose that his staging (a) was in part – though by no means only - about a homosexual awakening and (b) took a sardonic swipe at various illusory utopias: religion, drugs, today’s obsession with physical beauty and staving off old age, Disney…
Visually it was at times magnificent. The single set was simple enough: a gymnasium-like space with wall-bars against walls that changed colour with the lighting, and dark, polished parquet. At the rear, a fairground-type archway with a neon sunburst and the word “sun” picked out in lights, waiting for the finale scene. The parquet could slide open, slowly broadening the space, and closed over a blue swimming pool. Act 1 was especially lavish, with the court men in dinner suits and the ladies marvellous, made-up harridans in various shades of gold lame and big, Mrs Thatcher wigs (my neighbour, not being British, thought of Nancy Reagan instead). They were filmed in real time by a hand-held camera: grotesque close-ups of their snarling features were projected on a giant gauze as the action took place behind and in front of it.
At the start, the King and Roxana were in their underwear, getting dressed – possibly after sex - for the ceremony. The shepherd was a sort of camp hippy with Michael Jackson hair and red-varnished fingernails (but had handsome doubles in white imitating his every move among the crowd). The bacchanalia was choreographed as an aquatic gym session for the very old. And what got some people’s goat was that, at the end, the shepherd emerged, like Michael Jackson (whose demise we were to hear of the next morning) with a gang of children in Mickey Mouse heads and little black velvet suits; he too had a mouse-head (which muffled his singing rather) and big, spangled Minnie Mouse shoes. As my annoyed friend put it this was “the extravagant tangent [Warlikowski] went off on, a sort of didactic exposure of the Shepherd’s worthless philosophy as no more than a lead-in to US commercial values.” Yes, I get the point. But it was so well acted and lit and sung… and as one critic put it, you may not understand everything, it may not all make sense, but Warlikowski has a gift, even so, for creating a complex, uneasy atmosphere that somehow works. At any rate, it works for me.
Unless I’m mistaken, I didn’t hear Krol Roger in concert at the Châtelet some years back, so this was my first encounter with the sumptuous score. I realise it’s always dangerous, when hearing pieces for the first time, to seek comparisons as later, when you know the composer better, he will sound like no-one but himself. But as the shepherd’s part calls for a high and elegiac tenor, I couldn’t help thinking of Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg, with occasional hints of Ravel, Stravinsky’s Firebird, and even (though not enough to ruin the whole evening) Vaughan-Williams.
We had a strong cast of men. Indeed, they all made themselves heard over the row from the pit, and I doubt they could have been better. Eric Cutler soared radiantly through the difficult part, with remarkable ease; Scott Hendricks was a very powerful high baritone; and Stefan Margita was Stefan Margita, which is perfectly fine by me. Unfortunately (this is understudy month in Paris) the scheduled soprano dropped out, sick; her stand-in seemed to be doing a sterling job as far as we could hear, but her efforts, however fruitful they may have been, remained mostly inaudible in the Bastille’s vast spaces. Kazushi Ono also did a great job with the ONP orchestra, who stayed in the pit for the bows at the end, a sign they got on with the conductor for once.
If this comes out on video (the TV production was, after all, by Bel Air) then we’ll get Mariusz Kwiecien and Olga Pasichnyk, so all will be well and, having had a preview on Internet, I’ll buy it, for sure. “Eurotrash”-haters, however, should steer clear.
Sunday, 21 June 2009
Bizet - Carmen
Opéra Comique, Paris, Saturday June 20 2009
Conductor: Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Production: Adrian Noble. Sets & Costumes: Mark Thompson. Lighting: Jean Kalman. Carmen: Anna Caterina Antonacci. Don José: ???????*. Micaëla: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Escamillo: Nicolas Cavallier. Le Dancaïre: Françis Dudziak. Le Remendado: Vincent Ordonneau. Zuniga: Matthew Brook. Moralès: Riccardo Novaro. Frasquita: Virginie Pochon. Mercédès: Annie Gill / Louise Innes. Lillas Pastia: Simon Davies. Un guide: Lawrence Wallington. The Monteverdi Choir. Hauts-de-Seine children's choir. Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.
For Le Monde, “Obviously Anna Caterina Antonacci steals the show, embodying a Carmen of icy fire, with impeccable diction and sovereign musicality, ardent but never carried away by her passions. Her vocal projection enables her to murmur what so many of her fellow-singers hammer out.” According to Webthea, “She combines her beauty, sensuality and acting strengths with impeccable diction and the charm of a slight Italian accent, flowing projection and low notes that pierce hearts.” For ConcertClassic.com, “Daughter of the people, sensual and provocative as Sofia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, with her generous décolleté, wasp waist and flowing hair, Anna Caterina Antonacci is the most sumptuous of Carmens.” For the FT, “She is quite simply extraordinary in her handling of text and song, pulling off subtle inflexions that would be lost in a larger house, but she is also a sexy stage animal with the physical magnetism to explain her appeal.” And as a friend of mine put it in a nutshell: “She just waltzed through the part and that was what was so enjoyable.”
Not finding words to describe Antonacci in the part, I decided, as you see, to borrow other people’s. She was astonishingly at ease, as intelligent and nuanced as Berganza but more animal (not difficult, admittedly) and more natural by miles. Ars est celare artem, so we’re told, and here there was simply no sign of acting. Remarkable, and certainly the best Carmen I’ve ever seen and heard. But she was not the only star of the show…
Gardiner and his revolutionary orchestra did nearly as much for Bizet as for Berlioz, bringing vim and vigour, bite, balance and detail, “dusting off” the score as many reviewers put it and giving us, among other things, a rip-roaring overture and a prelude to act 4 for the annals. The Monteverdi Choir did much the same for the choral parts. As the FT critic, again, put it: “[They] may act like undergraduates on a gap year in Seville” – they were clearly enjoying the romp – “but I doubt if the chorus in Carmen has ever sounded so punchy, clean-cut and articulated.” Again, a wealth of previously unnoticed details and nuance emerged to surprise us.
Then there was the tenor. The one originally scheduled dropped out, practically at the last minute if the announcement was to be believed, and in stepped a young Brazilian. I wouldn’t say that, out of context, he was a star, but after all you always root for the stand-in, especially if he’s young and it’s his big break. He put in a more-than-creditable performance, definitely better than the José I heard in Sydney, and more than that, a genuinely touching flower aria. He had all the notes, falsetto or not, as needed, a feat not guaranteed in this tricky role, and also turned out to be quite an impassioned actor. So at the end he got nearly as warm a reception as Antonacci. Now I just have to find out who he was*.
Nicolas Cavallier was a rough-hewn sort of Escamillo, and Anne-Catherine Gillet a silvery, tremulous Micaëla with a lot more volume than from her timbre, you’d expect and a stiff, protestant sort of stage presence. The rest of the cast were as good as they ought to be – and the children’s chorus slightly better than usual.
Some reviews have said the production aimed to avoid cliché. They must have meant the single, ugly set: our, by now, old friend the bare Opéra Comique stage, and in it a sort of circular ramp on radial concrete piers, reminiscent to me of the old Fiat factory at Lingotto in Turin, in looks part broken amphitheatre, part multi-storey car park. In act one there was a kind of oval cistern in the floor from which the cigarette girls (not John the Baptist) emerged; in act two, oriental carpets and Moroccan lanterns; in act three, ladders and a faintly ridiculous giant moon; in act four, wooden fences between the piers and red and yellow banners hanging down. No horses, donkeys or chickens. But the ladies of the chorus spread their legs, lifted their skirts and fanned themselves to cool off as usual: clichés if ever I saw them; and there were some pretty corny theatrical ideas like dropping the (mainly golden, sometimes red) lights at key moments to leave only a spot on the soloist, or slow-motion crowd movements during orchestral passages. The costumes were mostly ill-fitting, though Carmen’s Act 4 Goya-like dress and bolero, in black and gold brocades, made up in the end for the others. It was, to me (and others) a disappointingly conventional show for one blessed with such a great Carmen and such sounds from orchestra and chorus.
*Got him, thanks to the friend quoted above: "The tenor Fabiano Cordeiro was born in Brazil. He first discovered an interest in music through buying a CD of Joan Sutherland and Carlo Bergonzi's La Traviata at a car boot sale."
.
Conductor: Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Production: Adrian Noble. Sets & Costumes: Mark Thompson. Lighting: Jean Kalman. Carmen: Anna Caterina Antonacci. Don José: ???????*. Micaëla: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Escamillo: Nicolas Cavallier. Le Dancaïre: Françis Dudziak. Le Remendado: Vincent Ordonneau. Zuniga: Matthew Brook. Moralès: Riccardo Novaro. Frasquita: Virginie Pochon. Mercédès: Annie Gill / Louise Innes. Lillas Pastia: Simon Davies. Un guide: Lawrence Wallington. The Monteverdi Choir. Hauts-de-Seine children's choir. Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.
For Le Monde, “Obviously Anna Caterina Antonacci steals the show, embodying a Carmen of icy fire, with impeccable diction and sovereign musicality, ardent but never carried away by her passions. Her vocal projection enables her to murmur what so many of her fellow-singers hammer out.” According to Webthea, “She combines her beauty, sensuality and acting strengths with impeccable diction and the charm of a slight Italian accent, flowing projection and low notes that pierce hearts.” For ConcertClassic.com, “Daughter of the people, sensual and provocative as Sofia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, with her generous décolleté, wasp waist and flowing hair, Anna Caterina Antonacci is the most sumptuous of Carmens.” For the FT, “She is quite simply extraordinary in her handling of text and song, pulling off subtle inflexions that would be lost in a larger house, but she is also a sexy stage animal with the physical magnetism to explain her appeal.” And as a friend of mine put it in a nutshell: “She just waltzed through the part and that was what was so enjoyable.”
Not finding words to describe Antonacci in the part, I decided, as you see, to borrow other people’s. She was astonishingly at ease, as intelligent and nuanced as Berganza but more animal (not difficult, admittedly) and more natural by miles. Ars est celare artem, so we’re told, and here there was simply no sign of acting. Remarkable, and certainly the best Carmen I’ve ever seen and heard. But she was not the only star of the show…
Gardiner and his revolutionary orchestra did nearly as much for Bizet as for Berlioz, bringing vim and vigour, bite, balance and detail, “dusting off” the score as many reviewers put it and giving us, among other things, a rip-roaring overture and a prelude to act 4 for the annals. The Monteverdi Choir did much the same for the choral parts. As the FT critic, again, put it: “[They] may act like undergraduates on a gap year in Seville” – they were clearly enjoying the romp – “but I doubt if the chorus in Carmen has ever sounded so punchy, clean-cut and articulated.” Again, a wealth of previously unnoticed details and nuance emerged to surprise us.
Then there was the tenor. The one originally scheduled dropped out, practically at the last minute if the announcement was to be believed, and in stepped a young Brazilian. I wouldn’t say that, out of context, he was a star, but after all you always root for the stand-in, especially if he’s young and it’s his big break. He put in a more-than-creditable performance, definitely better than the José I heard in Sydney, and more than that, a genuinely touching flower aria. He had all the notes, falsetto or not, as needed, a feat not guaranteed in this tricky role, and also turned out to be quite an impassioned actor. So at the end he got nearly as warm a reception as Antonacci. Now I just have to find out who he was*.
Nicolas Cavallier was a rough-hewn sort of Escamillo, and Anne-Catherine Gillet a silvery, tremulous Micaëla with a lot more volume than from her timbre, you’d expect and a stiff, protestant sort of stage presence. The rest of the cast were as good as they ought to be – and the children’s chorus slightly better than usual.
Some reviews have said the production aimed to avoid cliché. They must have meant the single, ugly set: our, by now, old friend the bare Opéra Comique stage, and in it a sort of circular ramp on radial concrete piers, reminiscent to me of the old Fiat factory at Lingotto in Turin, in looks part broken amphitheatre, part multi-storey car park. In act one there was a kind of oval cistern in the floor from which the cigarette girls (not John the Baptist) emerged; in act two, oriental carpets and Moroccan lanterns; in act three, ladders and a faintly ridiculous giant moon; in act four, wooden fences between the piers and red and yellow banners hanging down. No horses, donkeys or chickens. But the ladies of the chorus spread their legs, lifted their skirts and fanned themselves to cool off as usual: clichés if ever I saw them; and there were some pretty corny theatrical ideas like dropping the (mainly golden, sometimes red) lights at key moments to leave only a spot on the soloist, or slow-motion crowd movements during orchestral passages. The costumes were mostly ill-fitting, though Carmen’s Act 4 Goya-like dress and bolero, in black and gold brocades, made up in the end for the others. It was, to me (and others) a disappointingly conventional show for one blessed with such a great Carmen and such sounds from orchestra and chorus.
*Got him, thanks to the friend quoted above: "The tenor Fabiano Cordeiro was born in Brazil. He first discovered an interest in music through buying a CD of Joan Sutherland and Carlo Bergonzi's La Traviata at a car boot sale."
.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
Mozart - Le Nozze di Figaro
La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 14 2009
Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production: Christof Loy (reprise by Dagmar Pischel). Sets and costumes: Herbert Murauer. Conte Almaviva: Stéphane Degout. Contessa: Andrea Rost. Susanna: Ingela Bohlin. Figaro: Alex Esposito. Cherubino: Sophie Marilley. Marcellina: Helen Field. Bartolo: Jan-Hendrik Rootering. Don Basilio: John Graham-Hall. Don Curzio: Enrico Casari. Antonio: Frédéric Caton. Barbarina: Fflur Wyn. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.
Too often I forget the advice of an old friend in the UK: expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed.
I’d been looking forward to this Sunday. One of our regular co-subscribers was off at a christening or some such nonsense, so it was a chance to show Brussels and La Monnaie to someone else, on what was supposed to be a warm, sunny day. On paper the cast of Le Nozze looked alright. Christoph Loy can be an interesting director. In the end, however, it was mostly what the French call “un jour sans” – an off day.
Not that we missed the train or even, despite a handful of union protesters letting off sirens at the Gare du Nord (don’t ask me why; nothing better to do on a Sunday I imagine) that it was cancelled or delayed. But roughly at the Belgian border it started to rain - something Google, at 8 a.m., hadn’t anticipated. We hadn’t brought umbrellas (wimpish things I hate anyway), in Brussels the rain was quite heavy, and seeing the excellent summer weather in Paris our guest had rashly put on white espadrilles (more wimpish things I hate, though I imagine wiry Mediterranean peasants would deny the wimpishness). So we had to skip the sights, sounds and smells (hot dogs mostly) of the bazaar-like Sunday market outside the station and take a taxi to the centre. There, after picking up some gingerbread at Dandoy's, it was too wet to linger on the famous square, so we ducked into the arcades for lunch.
I suppose if we ate too much it was our fault. Then it was hot and stuffy at the Métropole over coffee, and of course it was hot and stuffy up in the gods at La Monnaie. But a zippy Nozze (Jacobs-style) in an exciting production (the posters looked promising) might have perked us up. No way. It was soon clear that (a) Jérémie Rhorer is no René Jacobs and (b) as is often the case these days (I wonder why) the posters bore no relation to the staging, which was simply uninteresting. A dull set: broken parquet and three doors. Dull lighting and dusty-looking props. Ill-fitting, unflattering costumes (why did the countess wear red high heels with an apricot satin slip and robe? Why didn't the count's clothes fit better?). The direction (this production is over ten years old; I don’t think Loy was there in person to revive it) emptied the work of its nobility and reduced the acting to something approaching boulevard farce, which Le Nozze is not. The singers worked hard at it, but didn’t seem convinced or convincing. To be honest, more than one professional critic has proclaimed it was a theatrical triumph, but I don’t see why.
The men sang best – some of them at any rate. But even the usually excellent Stéphane Degout seemed miscast as the count: too youthful and lacking in authority, vocally and dramatically. Beside him, Andrea Rost looked almost matronly. She had a far bigger voice than the rest of the cast (“a sore thumb” were words that came to mind) with an unpleasantly tart edge to it. La Libre Belgique perhaps went too far in saying Helen Field had “no more voice at all,” but it certainly was wobbly. This may be par for the course with Marcellinas, but was disconcerting when you read in the programme notes that she’s a Salome specialist. Alex Esposito had a certain Maurizio-Benigni-like, arm-waving charm as Figaro. The rest of the cast was unexciting, apart from the real star of the show: John Graham-Hall, this season’s Aschenbach, back as Don Basilio. But of course, a luxury Don Basilio doesn’t rescue a dull Nozze.
So at the interval we trooped off to the place des Sablons for a drink on a café terrace. It rained.
Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production: Christof Loy (reprise by Dagmar Pischel). Sets and costumes: Herbert Murauer. Conte Almaviva: Stéphane Degout. Contessa: Andrea Rost. Susanna: Ingela Bohlin. Figaro: Alex Esposito. Cherubino: Sophie Marilley. Marcellina: Helen Field. Bartolo: Jan-Hendrik Rootering. Don Basilio: John Graham-Hall. Don Curzio: Enrico Casari. Antonio: Frédéric Caton. Barbarina: Fflur Wyn. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.
Too often I forget the advice of an old friend in the UK: expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed.
I’d been looking forward to this Sunday. One of our regular co-subscribers was off at a christening or some such nonsense, so it was a chance to show Brussels and La Monnaie to someone else, on what was supposed to be a warm, sunny day. On paper the cast of Le Nozze looked alright. Christoph Loy can be an interesting director. In the end, however, it was mostly what the French call “un jour sans” – an off day.
Not that we missed the train or even, despite a handful of union protesters letting off sirens at the Gare du Nord (don’t ask me why; nothing better to do on a Sunday I imagine) that it was cancelled or delayed. But roughly at the Belgian border it started to rain - something Google, at 8 a.m., hadn’t anticipated. We hadn’t brought umbrellas (wimpish things I hate anyway), in Brussels the rain was quite heavy, and seeing the excellent summer weather in Paris our guest had rashly put on white espadrilles (more wimpish things I hate, though I imagine wiry Mediterranean peasants would deny the wimpishness). So we had to skip the sights, sounds and smells (hot dogs mostly) of the bazaar-like Sunday market outside the station and take a taxi to the centre. There, after picking up some gingerbread at Dandoy's, it was too wet to linger on the famous square, so we ducked into the arcades for lunch.
I suppose if we ate too much it was our fault. Then it was hot and stuffy at the Métropole over coffee, and of course it was hot and stuffy up in the gods at La Monnaie. But a zippy Nozze (Jacobs-style) in an exciting production (the posters looked promising) might have perked us up. No way. It was soon clear that (a) Jérémie Rhorer is no René Jacobs and (b) as is often the case these days (I wonder why) the posters bore no relation to the staging, which was simply uninteresting. A dull set: broken parquet and three doors. Dull lighting and dusty-looking props. Ill-fitting, unflattering costumes (why did the countess wear red high heels with an apricot satin slip and robe? Why didn't the count's clothes fit better?). The direction (this production is over ten years old; I don’t think Loy was there in person to revive it) emptied the work of its nobility and reduced the acting to something approaching boulevard farce, which Le Nozze is not. The singers worked hard at it, but didn’t seem convinced or convincing. To be honest, more than one professional critic has proclaimed it was a theatrical triumph, but I don’t see why.
The men sang best – some of them at any rate. But even the usually excellent Stéphane Degout seemed miscast as the count: too youthful and lacking in authority, vocally and dramatically. Beside him, Andrea Rost looked almost matronly. She had a far bigger voice than the rest of the cast (“a sore thumb” were words that came to mind) with an unpleasantly tart edge to it. La Libre Belgique perhaps went too far in saying Helen Field had “no more voice at all,” but it certainly was wobbly. This may be par for the course with Marcellinas, but was disconcerting when you read in the programme notes that she’s a Salome specialist. Alex Esposito had a certain Maurizio-Benigni-like, arm-waving charm as Figaro. The rest of the cast was unexciting, apart from the real star of the show: John Graham-Hall, this season’s Aschenbach, back as Don Basilio. But of course, a luxury Don Basilio doesn’t rescue a dull Nozze.
So at the interval we trooped off to the place des Sablons for a drink on a café terrace. It rained.
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Janacek - Vec Makropoulos
ONP Bastille, Thursday May 7 2009
Conductor: Tomas Hanus. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes Malgorzata Szczesniak. Emilia Marty: Angela Denoke. Albert Gregor: Charles Workman. Jaroslav Prus: Vincent Le Texier. Vítek: David Kuebler. Krista: Karine Deshayes. Janek : Ales Briscein. Kolenaty: Wayne Tigges. Hauk-Sendorf: Ryland Davies. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.
Same excellent, powerful production as in 2007, same cast except Wayne Tigges as Kolenaty (and very good he was), and Angela Denoke the best I've ever seen and heard her. She really lives the part. The orchestra remains unruly in Janacek, David Kuebler's voice is now pretty much shot and Charles Workman can't hit the killer top notes at all any more, but Vincent Le Texier and, especially, Karine Deshayes were better than ever. Bastille about one quarter full: madness, but perhaps those who were there really wanted to be: nobody coughed. Will this, one of my favourite productions of all time, ever come out on DVD?
Conductor: Tomas Hanus. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes Malgorzata Szczesniak. Emilia Marty: Angela Denoke. Albert Gregor: Charles Workman. Jaroslav Prus: Vincent Le Texier. Vítek: David Kuebler. Krista: Karine Deshayes. Janek : Ales Briscein. Kolenaty: Wayne Tigges. Hauk-Sendorf: Ryland Davies. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.
Same excellent, powerful production as in 2007, same cast except Wayne Tigges as Kolenaty (and very good he was), and Angela Denoke the best I've ever seen and heard her. She really lives the part. The orchestra remains unruly in Janacek, David Kuebler's voice is now pretty much shot and Charles Workman can't hit the killer top notes at all any more, but Vincent Le Texier and, especially, Karine Deshayes were better than ever. Bastille about one quarter full: madness, but perhaps those who were there really wanted to be: nobody coughed. Will this, one of my favourite productions of all time, ever come out on DVD?
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