Rameau - Les Boréades
Opéra de Dijon - L’Auditorium, Dijon, Sunday March 24 2019
Conductor: Emmanuelle Haïm. Production: Barrie Kosky. Sets and costumes: Katrin Lea Tag. Lighting: Franck Evin. Choreographie: Otto Pichler. Alphise: Hélène Guilmette. Sémire, Polymnie, Cupidon, Nymphe: Emmanuelle De Negri. Abaris: Mathias Vidal. Borée: Christopher Purves. Borilée: Yoann Dubruque. Adamas, Apollon: Edwin Crossley-Mercer. Calisis: Sébastien Droy. Dancers: Yacnoy Abreu Alfonso, Julie Dariosecq, Benjamin Dur, Anaëlle Echalier, Lazare Huet, Anna Konopska. Orchestra and chorus: Le Concert d’Astrée.
Rameau hasn’t been getting his due lately in Paris (or else I’ve been missing things, as I do). The last time I saw any staged was well over four years ago. So although this is a very busy period at work, when I saw Dijon, his home town, was putting on Les Boréades with what looked like a strong cast, I booked for the Sunday matinée. I’m glad I did, as this was one of the best Rameau productions I’ve seen.
I suppose I should have written “seen and heard”. But instead of being staged in Dijon’s 800-seat Grand Théâtre, built in 1828, this production was given at the city’s Auditorium (1998, 1,600 seats). As the pre-performance announcement telling people, in three languages, to switch off their phones, was barely comprehensible, like a bad public address system announcing a change of platforms in a railway station, I joked to my neighbour (thinking that the sound system was defective) that I hoped it wasn’t a foretaste of the hall’s acoustics. But it was. The only worse acoustics I can remember experiencing are at the Madeleine in Paris. The sound, as the overture struck up, was muffled and reverberant and what’s more the orchestra got off to a disconcertingly scrappy start. Fortunately, as things warmed up, the orchestra got better and my ears adjusted to the puddingy sound. Which was just as well as this was, once the orchestra found its feet, musically a very satisfactory performance of the octogenarian Rameau’s magnificent late score.
A l'impossible nul n'est tenu, say the French: nobody is held to the impossible, and it’s a brave singer who takes on some of Rameau’s more spectacular arias. Un horizon serein, one of my favourites, not just in Rameau but in the whole operatic repertoire, is a prime example (though called an ariette, perversely, you might think) and I was so disappointed by Barbara Bonney’s unconvincing performance in Robert Carsen’s tight-arsed production that I left at the interval. Hélène Guilmette was fuller and fruitier-voiced and better-acquainted with the French style, and Kosky’s less anal production let her throw herself more obviously into the part. Thanks to prudent tempi and breathing, she navigated the aria (and the rest) better than anyone else I’ve heard. Not that I’ve had many opportunities.
Abaris is similarly taxed, not to say teased, but Mathias Vidal showed why and how he’s made such a name for himself in these high tenor parts - high but still warm and grainy, even in timbre throughout, not counter-tenor squawky. He just about nailed it, though I'd say he was at his limit. Even Calisis, a supporting role, gets the terrifically tricky Jouissons, jouissons, jouissons, in which he is supposed to resound over the chorus; Sébastien Droy was up to it, if not quite clarion-like enough - but perhaps that was the fault of the cotton-wool acoustics.
Emmanuelle De Negri very nearly stole the show (as far as some reviewers are concerned, she did) with a winning combination of cheeky acting (and dancing) and first-class singing. Edwin Crossley-Mercer was his customary noble, bass self. And Christopher Purves hammed it up nicely, with a ripe, edgy timbre (and audibly accented French), as the villainous Borée.
The chorus also joined in the acting and dancing with an impressive degree of zest, and after what was, as I just wrote, a disconcertingly scrappy start along with some worryingly tame tempi from the ever-energetic Ms Haïm, her band eventually settled down to give a thoroughly enjoyable reading of this marvellous, magical, often surprising, score. Why Rameau claimed he’d gained in taste but run out of genius as he aged is a mystery.
I also enjoyed Barrie Kosky’s production. It seemed to me to do a very intelligent job of winking at the conventions of tragédie en musique without sinking into making fun of it, which would - as has often been a failing of many tongue-in-cheek Händel productions - have undermined the emotions in the serious numbers. The staging centred on what a first looked like a screen, as if we were going to have videos, but turned out to be a white box, the size of a house, split horizontally around hip height so that the much larger upper part could be raised to reveal a platform beneath to which, at first, Alphise was confined, pacing around, agitated.
The roles of Sémire, Polymnie, Cupidon and the Nymphe were played as one, as were those of Adamas and Apollon, serving the parti pris that the gods were firmly in charge. To bookend the production, it opened with Emmanuelle De Negri in a black hooded cape, laboriously dragging on-stage a colourful sack of arrows that, at the end, after they had featured copiously throughout the show, she would gather up and stuff back into the sack before dragging it off again, hooded once more. In between she was, as I said, a cheeky, perky cupid, in a dog-tooth dress and black stockings in the first half, and a black flower-printed dress and jet-black wig in the second. She woke Alphise by blowing: blowing, by the Boréade clan or the dancers, would feature throughout, sometimes to comic effect (e.g. by having none: Borée had to blow three times into the pit to persuade Emmaneulle Haïm to strike up the overture). Alphise also had coloured dresses, including one, semi-18th-century in form, in floral embroidered silk reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette’s summer hangings at Versailles. Otherwise, most were in dark suits with open-collared shirts and black dresses but, to mark him out from the nobs, Abaris’s suit and shoes were light grey.
The ballets, by dancers also mostly in black suits but with bare feet and nothing underneath, were often joined enthusiastically, as I mentioned, in their quirky, good-humoured, angular dances, by De Negri and the chorus (and punctuated with hoots and squeals): this was quite an athletic production for all and, though largely cool black-and-white and shades of grey, at times reminiscent of José Montalvo’s vividly colourful Les Paladins at the Châtelet 15 years ago. It also conjured up some very striking images, most notably in the second half, where, after the wind-storm, one of Rameau's most furious, Abaris appeared among heaps of smoking ash, bristling with fallen arrows and strewn with charred (or oil-slicked?) birds and where, for the majestic appearance of Apollo, costumed in black feathers as some sort of bird-man with birds trembling on wires springing up from him arms (I didn’t get that but it was an impressive sight) dark glitter showered massively down on the platform. It was also during the second half of the show that some of the action quit the stage, the chorus filing off to sing from the rear and Adamas reappearing among the audience. The giant red, orange and pink flowers hanging from the upper part of the box in the first half had perhaps been less successful.
It was, overall, a simple, intelligent, respectful but wholly contemporary production, one of the best Rameau stagings I’ve seen. I hope we’ll be able, eventually, to enjoy it again on video, whether from Dijon or (so long as the cast is as good) Berlin.
Conductor: Emmanuelle Haïm. Production: Barrie Kosky. Sets and costumes: Katrin Lea Tag. Lighting: Franck Evin. Choreographie: Otto Pichler. Alphise: Hélène Guilmette. Sémire, Polymnie, Cupidon, Nymphe: Emmanuelle De Negri. Abaris: Mathias Vidal. Borée: Christopher Purves. Borilée: Yoann Dubruque. Adamas, Apollon: Edwin Crossley-Mercer. Calisis: Sébastien Droy. Dancers: Yacnoy Abreu Alfonso, Julie Dariosecq, Benjamin Dur, Anaëlle Echalier, Lazare Huet, Anna Konopska. Orchestra and chorus: Le Concert d’Astrée.
I suppose I should have written “seen and heard”. But instead of being staged in Dijon’s 800-seat Grand Théâtre, built in 1828, this production was given at the city’s Auditorium (1998, 1,600 seats). As the pre-performance announcement telling people, in three languages, to switch off their phones, was barely comprehensible, like a bad public address system announcing a change of platforms in a railway station, I joked to my neighbour (thinking that the sound system was defective) that I hoped it wasn’t a foretaste of the hall’s acoustics. But it was. The only worse acoustics I can remember experiencing are at the Madeleine in Paris. The sound, as the overture struck up, was muffled and reverberant and what’s more the orchestra got off to a disconcertingly scrappy start. Fortunately, as things warmed up, the orchestra got better and my ears adjusted to the puddingy sound. Which was just as well as this was, once the orchestra found its feet, musically a very satisfactory performance of the octogenarian Rameau’s magnificent late score.
A l'impossible nul n'est tenu, say the French: nobody is held to the impossible, and it’s a brave singer who takes on some of Rameau’s more spectacular arias. Un horizon serein, one of my favourites, not just in Rameau but in the whole operatic repertoire, is a prime example (though called an ariette, perversely, you might think) and I was so disappointed by Barbara Bonney’s unconvincing performance in Robert Carsen’s tight-arsed production that I left at the interval. Hélène Guilmette was fuller and fruitier-voiced and better-acquainted with the French style, and Kosky’s less anal production let her throw herself more obviously into the part. Thanks to prudent tempi and breathing, she navigated the aria (and the rest) better than anyone else I’ve heard. Not that I’ve had many opportunities.
Abaris is similarly taxed, not to say teased, but Mathias Vidal showed why and how he’s made such a name for himself in these high tenor parts - high but still warm and grainy, even in timbre throughout, not counter-tenor squawky. He just about nailed it, though I'd say he was at his limit. Even Calisis, a supporting role, gets the terrifically tricky Jouissons, jouissons, jouissons, in which he is supposed to resound over the chorus; Sébastien Droy was up to it, if not quite clarion-like enough - but perhaps that was the fault of the cotton-wool acoustics.
Emmanuelle De Negri very nearly stole the show (as far as some reviewers are concerned, she did) with a winning combination of cheeky acting (and dancing) and first-class singing. Edwin Crossley-Mercer was his customary noble, bass self. And Christopher Purves hammed it up nicely, with a ripe, edgy timbre (and audibly accented French), as the villainous Borée.
The chorus also joined in the acting and dancing with an impressive degree of zest, and after what was, as I just wrote, a disconcertingly scrappy start along with some worryingly tame tempi from the ever-energetic Ms Haïm, her band eventually settled down to give a thoroughly enjoyable reading of this marvellous, magical, often surprising, score. Why Rameau claimed he’d gained in taste but run out of genius as he aged is a mystery.
I also enjoyed Barrie Kosky’s production. It seemed to me to do a very intelligent job of winking at the conventions of tragédie en musique without sinking into making fun of it, which would - as has often been a failing of many tongue-in-cheek Händel productions - have undermined the emotions in the serious numbers. The staging centred on what a first looked like a screen, as if we were going to have videos, but turned out to be a white box, the size of a house, split horizontally around hip height so that the much larger upper part could be raised to reveal a platform beneath to which, at first, Alphise was confined, pacing around, agitated.
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| Rameau |
The ballets, by dancers also mostly in black suits but with bare feet and nothing underneath, were often joined enthusiastically, as I mentioned, in their quirky, good-humoured, angular dances, by De Negri and the chorus (and punctuated with hoots and squeals): this was quite an athletic production for all and, though largely cool black-and-white and shades of grey, at times reminiscent of José Montalvo’s vividly colourful Les Paladins at the Châtelet 15 years ago. It also conjured up some very striking images, most notably in the second half, where, after the wind-storm, one of Rameau's most furious, Abaris appeared among heaps of smoking ash, bristling with fallen arrows and strewn with charred (or oil-slicked?) birds and where, for the majestic appearance of Apollo, costumed in black feathers as some sort of bird-man with birds trembling on wires springing up from him arms (I didn’t get that but it was an impressive sight) dark glitter showered massively down on the platform. It was also during the second half of the show that some of the action quit the stage, the chorus filing off to sing from the rear and Adamas reappearing among the audience. The giant red, orange and pink flowers hanging from the upper part of the box in the first half had perhaps been less successful.
It was, overall, a simple, intelligent, respectful but wholly contemporary production, one of the best Rameau stagings I’ve seen. I hope we’ll be able, eventually, to enjoy it again on video, whether from Dijon or (so long as the cast is as good) Berlin.
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