Michael Jarrell - Bérénice

ONP Garnier, Monday October 8 2018

Conductor: Philippe Jordan. Production: Claus Guth. Sets: Christian Schmidt. Costumes: Christian Schmidt, Linda Redlin. Lighting: Fabrice Kebour. Video: rocafilm. Titus: Bo Skovhus. Bérénice: Barbara Hannigan. Antiochus: Ivan Ludlow. Paulin: Alastair Miles. Arsace: Julien Behr. Phénice: Rina Schenfeld. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.

I’ve often joked, with friends who also sat through it dying for a chance to escape, that Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin set my personal gold standard in buttock-aching operatic boredom. You can’t really compare Saariaho’s score with Michael Jarrell’s. It would be like comparing chalk and cheese or silk brocade (Saariaho) and sackcloth: they have nothing much in common other than that they are, each in its own way, more atmospheric than action-packed. Jarrell’s is uncompromisingly bleak: long, dark chords or clusters punctuated with outbursts of brass or percussion. The singing, mainly recitative, sometimes virtuoso to suit Barbara Hannigan’s powers, sounds almost unrelated, laid on top of the gritty undercurrents. I see, reading the professional reviews, that I’m not alone in wondering whether it will get performed much, or be worth listening to at home once out on CD: it's been described as both monotonous and boring.

But Jarrell did well to choose texts (mostly) by Racine, whose alexandrines have a dramatic impetus of their own, pushing the classical tragedy forward, though having separate scenes taking place concurrently in two rooms, or soloists singing their respective lines simultaneously, meant it was often necessary to keep an eye on the supertitles. Phénice spoke her part, amplified, in Hebrew, prompting a text message from an opera critic I know: “Too much spoken dialogue, always a sign that a composer is not up to writing for the voice.”

He also benefited from a handsome, rather austere production by Claus Guth. This was set in three strictly neoclassical saloons - a large one in the middle with a door at the back, smaller ones to the sides with french windows - with simple, off-white panelling picked out, like the modest frieze of swags below the curved cornices, in gold. The floors to left and right were white; in the middle, black. The lighting in these spaces changed separately and abruptly from bright white to softer gold, according to the action; they also slid to and fro slightly, ditto. Atmospheric, slightly hazy black and white videos were sometimes projected over the set: crowds for the people of Rome, for example, ancient stone walls (Roman or a reference to Jerusalem?), Bérénice falling back into water… The costumes were modern: the usual black suits for the men and neat red, black and navy for Bérénice, with the high heels Hannigan wears so well.

Jarrell

At the beginning, Titus was nursing an urn, presumably of his father’s ashes, in the room on the right. Bérénice was not the picture of wounded but stoic nobility you might have expected to see, but a passionate oriental, leaping hungrily and athletically at Titus, clasping her legs round his waist. As the action hotted up (the unfortunate chairs, the only furniture in the rooms, got thrown around a good deal and eventually smashed up) it became apparent that the black floor in the middle was made of granules, not carpet or paint: ash, I imagined. Patches opened up revealing the white beneath, traces of the black spilled through the doors into the other rooms, and more black rain fell to the white floors as projected ash floated softly down in the videos, as if on Pompeii or Herculaneum.

The cast, too, was an asset. Barbara Hannigan was as stunning a Bérénice as you would expect, vocally as well as physically and singing as soundly clasped round Titus's waist or lying on the floor as any normal, standing soprano. Bo Skovhus, proving once more how well-suited he is to these highly dramatic, contemporary roles, was a perfect match. It was thus a challenge for Ivan Ludlow to equal their impact.

What struck me, while I was there, was how key the choice of Racine (not Amin Maalouf) and Guth (not Sellars) was in making this quite a successful, if grim, opera, though you wouldn’t have had it go on any longer than 90 minutes and might not want to sit through it at home over a gin and ginger beer. While libretto and production sustained Bérénice, what made L’Amour de Loin so painful was perhaps, after all, not so much the music, which is more obviously colourful and immediately seductive than Jarrell’s, if no livelier, but the combination of Maalouf’s cringe-makingly excruciating texts and Sellars’ catatonic production.