Offenbach - Les Brigands

Opéra Comique, Paris, Monday June 27 2011

Conductor: François-Xavier Roth. Production: Macha Makeïeff and Jérôme Deschamps.Costumes: Macha Makeïeff. Lighting: Marie-Christine Soma. Falsacappa: Eric Huchet. Fragoletto: Julie Boulianne. Fiorella: Daphné Touchais. Pietro: Franck Leguérinel. Le Comte de Gloria Cassis: Philippe Talbot. Le Baron de Campo Tasso: Francis Dudziak. Le Prince (Duc de Mantoue): Martial Defontaine. Le Chef des carabiniers: Fernand Bernadi. Antonio: caissier du prince: Loïc Félix. Carmagnola: Léonard Pezzino. Domino: Thomas Morris. Barbavano: Antoine Garcin. Pipo: Jean-Marc Martinez. Adolphe de Valladolid, un page: Marc Molomot. Princesse de Grenade: Michèle Lagrange. Zerlina, La Duchesse: Christine Rigaud. Le Précepteur: Ronan Debois. Chorus of the Toulon Opera. Orchestre Les Siècles.

Passing in 24 hours from one end of the French romantic spectrum to the other, I found myself mixing them up as I prepared to write and, for a brief moment, thinking dead chickens fell from the sky in Les Huguenots. They didn’t: it was in Les Brigands the following evening. They were later plucked naked.

This was a revival of a 1993 production madly staged at the Bastille, but this time with a period-instrument orchestra and a conductor so historically-informed he stood in the middle of the pit, surrounded by the players. The Salle Favart of course made much more sense since any facial expressions are lost several hundred feet down in the Bastille, and a very amiable evening of nonsense we had of it. It’s the kind of deliberately, tongue-in-cheek traditional show, almost pantomime-like, that could be dire, with its cardboard cut-out, painted flats (a glade with receding mountain ranges; an inn at the well-known border between Spain and Italy; a gothic castle supposedly in Mantova set against a volcano – that erupted in a shower of sparks at the end) live chickens as well as dead ones, and “Disney-gothic” costumes. But in this case the hammy acting was so well-rehearsed, fluent and good-humoured (as if everyone was really having a whale of a time); the music was so carefully crafted, to Minkowski’s respectful standards (he wasn’t in the pit but in the audience, no doubt resting from Meyerbeer); and the cast was so good – some of them having been with Minko himself in the famous Pelly productions (remember Baron Puck and Prince Paul in La Grande Duchesse?) that we had a highly entertaining evening and a nice, undemanding end to the season.

Highlight: the proud, comic-book Spaniards, their extravagant gestures and stamping feet. And stuck in our heads for hours after: "Le bruit des bottes, des bottes, des bottes…"

Meyerbeer - Les Huguenots

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 26 2011.

Conductor:Marc Minkowski. Production: Olivier Py. Sets and costumes: Pierre-André Weitz. Lighting: Bertrand Killy. Marguerite de Valois: Marlis Petersen. Valentine: Mireille Delunsch. Urbain: Yulia Lezhneva. Raoul de Nangis: Eric Cutler. Comte de Saint-Bris: Philippe Rouillon. Comte de Nevers: Jean-François Lapointe. De Retz: Arnaud Rouillon. Marcel: Jérôme Varnier. Cossé: Xavier Rouillon. Tavannes: Avi Klemberg. Thoré: Marc Labonnette. Méru: Frédéric Caton. Dame d’honneur: Camille Merckx. Une coryphée: Tineke Van Ingelgem. Deux bohémiennes: Camille Merckx, Tineke Van Ingelgem. Orchestra and chorus of La Monnaie.

La Monnaie decided to end the season with a grand gesture, pulling out all the stops to stage Les Huguenots for the first time since the 1930s, with as strong cast as it could muster under a famous conductor, directed by a famous producer and so, as they say in French, “creating an event,” with people searching the web for spare tickets. It must have cost a lot of money, as people remarked during the afternoon.

The expensive-looking staging might be summed up simply as “black and gold.” The sets were a complex and ingenious 3-D puzzle of highly-mobile, interlocking renaissance façades, with pedimented doors and many-paned windows, cut out of sheets of brassy gold metal, sometimes blackened. The different, perfectly-fitted shapes slid in and out silently across the glossy black floors, joining and separating between two octagonal turrets to form internal or external spaces varying in shape and size or reveal, in the generally dim, golden lighting, flights of glossy black stairs or a glossy black bridge (for Chenonceau).

Costume periods varied. The Protestants were mostly in black: top hats and coats for the men, with black breastplates for the more warlike moments; black dresses buttoned up to the neck for the women. The Catholics were jackbooted from the start but had little white ruffs recalling the renaissance and their breastplates, for the more warlike moments, were gold; the women had the same little ruffs and long white veils. The page wore a black “Buttons” outfit. For the massacre, the Catholics above had white armbands on their coat sleeves marked with a cross, while the Protestants wore mid-20th-century street clothes. So the production, which also included the odd, anachronistic automatic rifle, dealt with religious persecution through the ages, not just in 16th century France.

It was also a show that, at first, looked like it might involve quite a lot of bare skin. It opened with an extra quite clearly chosen for his body, bare-chested and holding a cross in both hands above his head. As he advanced, he spread his arms, revealing that there were in fact two crosses not one. (Later, the same plain wooden crosses would be wielded like wooden swords; fortunately the threatened duel was staved off, avoiding actual ridicule.) The Chenonceau scene opened with a brief ballet between a male dancer, stark naked apart from antlers (and antlers hide nothing), and a female one with just a tiny crescent moon on her head, hiding no more. While the ladies-in-waiting, in long white nighties, bathed (in real water, in a black channel in the black floor under the black bridge), the Three Graces, equally naked, more or less vogued in classical poses. But there’s a progression in Les Huguenots from nearly frivolous to deadly serious: the act three ballet, very neatly done on a broad, black staircase, was only half naked aagin, and the bare skin and posing faded out as bickering escalated to massacre.

As you can see from the names, the cast was, as I said, strong. I was very glad to hear Marlis Petersen for the first time, having seen her name often; her glamorous timbre was what people often call “creamy” and her Marguerite was about as flawless, vocally and scenically (she is charismatic and totally at ease) as you are likely to get. Mireille Delunsch was on form, making the most of her current means and artfully disguising any vocal difficulty as dramatic effect, as experienced singers do, with her familiar “wounded” sound at the top, well-known presence and acting skills (the acting throughout was well directed, though perhaps unexpectedly conventional, as if the sheer length of the thing had, in the end, exhausted the producer’s imagination). Yulia Lezhneva scored a popular hit as the page, and Eric Cutler is, as I already noticed in King Roger at the Bastille, a very remarkable high tenor, slipping easily and convincingly from full voice to falsetto. Marc Minkowski, in the pit, drove the score forward in his usual forceful, sometimes brutal manner.

But Les Huguenots was composed for the likes of Marie Cornélie Falcon, Nourrit and Levasseur, and revived by Joan Sutherland and Bonynge. Can it be made to work without performers of that calibre? This was my first experience of Meyerbeer live and in the theatre. I know how risky it is to express an opinion on that brief (albeit it this case not so brief) encounter; I also know there will be Meyerbeer fans out there ready to call me stupid, bitter, small-minded and so on. But to me, though Meyerbeer undeniably occupies a special place in opera history, what I saw and heard seemed awkwardly positioned between Rossini and Verdi, with the melodic gift of neither, none of Rossini’s fascinating delicacy and inventiveness in his accompaniments (viola d'amore or solo bass clarinet notwithstanding) and, in terms of story-telling, none of Verdi’s gift for breathing life into characters and driving the plot forward with urgency. Probably because of both the duration (5 hours) and the religious theme, Don Carlo(s) came to mind: a comparison, it seemed to me, unflattering to Meyerbeer. “Sterile,” said the man behind me; “rambling,” thought I, and judging by the glassy, “gorblimey” look in the eyes of people staggering out at the intervals and the end, I wasn’t alone in finding it a trial.

But I'm no professional, and it seems to have gone down well with the press.

Mozart: Solemn Vespers for a Confessor; C Minor Mass.

Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, Friday June 24 2011.

Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Sally Matthews, soprano. Ann Hallenberg, mezzo-soprano. Rainer Trost, tenor. Nahuel di Pierro, bass. Le Cercle de l'Harmonie. Choeur Les Eléments.

I thought I’d better dash off a brief account of last night’s Mozart concert today, as tomorrow I have five hours of Meyerbeer in Brussels and may find myself with a lot more to write about. The magnificent C Minor Mass, so magnificent even I have a recording of it, was preceded by the smaller-scale and less magnificent Solemn Vespers, though they do contain one smash hit for the soprano.

I was, for once (and by accident; if I’d paid more attention I would have chosen seats elsewhere), on the front row. This naturally brings you a bit too close for comfort to the people on stage - at such close range they are all too human: you can see the un-hemmed trousers, the hairy nostrils, the state of their shoes (in baroque orchestras, usually terrible) the odd socks, etc - and ruins the balance; so the chorus, who were rather remote for me, on the other side of the orchestra, sometimes lacked a degree of the oomph they no doubt had for people in more sensible seats.

Le Cercle de l’Harmonie is visibly a youngish baroque orchestra, its members looking and dressed as if they’d been raised on locally-produced, organic (and probably vegetarian) fare. There’s safety in numbers, and whereas in smaller configuration for the Vespers they were sometimes cruelly exposed, in the Mass they made the deep, richly-coloured, crunchy sound I prefer by far in Mozart to smooth, silky modern orchestras. The wind and brass sections, the old trombones especially, had that extra fear-of-death factor that is so impressive in “historically-informed” performances of funereal works. And overall I didn't feel, as I have in the past with Rhorer, that there was any shortage of liveliness.

Côté solistes, we couldn’t have been luckier with our ladies. Not that there was anything at all wrong with the gents but they had little to do all evening except sit and look interested; indeed, bringing in Reiner Trost for so little was surely quite a luxury. The women’s voices were highly contrasting, each corresponding, curiously, with the dresses they wore. Ann Hallenberg was in a generously flowing, low-cut dress of old rose shot silk overlaid with flowery fabric, and an airy cream stole. She was radiant as usual and looked as if she was enjoying every minute. Sally Matthews was, on the other hand, narrowly buttoned-up in part medieval, part bondage black with multiple belts and just a hint of crinoline emerging from a gap, down where the buttons were left open towards the hem of her tunic. Her hair was very, very neatly bobbed (living in Paris, how I miss the precise cut of English hairdressers, but that’s off topic of course) and she looked as if she found the whole evening rather tense and trying.

So, while Ann’s singing was warm and round and easy, liquid, generous, and flowing, Ms Matthews’, though very good indeed (I see she’s now a much-admired Fiordiligi), was cooler, drier, less nuanced and, most of the time (there were occasional exceptions: there was, after all, a hint of crinoline and netting peeking out of that severe designer dress) more strait-laced. But she did, after all, once the loud applause turned rhythmic during the curtain calls (if a mass may be said to have such things), eventually break into a  smile, albeit a rather English one.