Bernstein (arr. Sunderland) - A Quiet Place

ONP Garnier, Wednesday March 16 2002

Conductor: Kent Nagano. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes: Małgorzata Szczęśniak. Lighting: Felice Ross. Video: Kamil Polak. Dede: Claudia Boyle. François: Frédéric Antoun. Junior: Gordon Bintner. Sam: Russell Braun. Funeral director: Colin Judson. Bill: Régis Mengus. Susie: Hélène Schneiderman. Analyst: Loïc Félix. Doc: Jean-Luc Ballestra. Mrs Doc: Emanuela Pascu. Mourners: Marianne Croux, Ramya Roy, Kiup Lee, Niall Anderson. Dinah: Johanna Wokalek. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Bernd Uhlig, ONP

Apparently Alexander Neef, director of the ONP, has decided to schedule more American operas, which is fine by me, and the first result is this crystalline production of A Quiet Place. Bernstein's 1983 sequel to Trouble in Tahiti seems, like many works in opera history, to have been dogged unfairly by its reputation of being a flop (it wasn't well received, initially), and as a result, tinkered with a fair bit to little avail, and ultimately still performed less often than it actually deserves. Kent Nagano recorded it a few years ago to a chamber scoring. At times, the single act has been split in two, and the shorter Trouble in Tahiti inserted as a central, act-two flashback. But Like Nagano's recording, Paris is staging a single act, only with a new orchestration for a larger orchestra, albeit less large than Bernstein's original. Why they have gone in for this extra bit of tinkering, I haven't seen explained.

Whatever. Having Nagano, a disciple of Bernstein's who often discussed the work and its fate with him, and Warlikowski together for this revival is something of a luxury. Though he has championed the work quite vigorously, this was the first time Nagano conducted a fully-staged version of it, and the result is a kind of gem: small, deep under a sleek, gleaming surface, and perfectly cut.

 

 

Warlikowski has perhaps sometimes been guilty of what one august opera expert I occasionally cross paths with online calls 'Schnörkelling', which I take to mean over-complicating his productions and adding things to the action that weren't originally in them. But over the years, his work has become simpler, more direct. I kind-of miss the complexity, but many people evidently welcome this streamlining.

If 'updating' the action is one of the things people don't like, in this case, of course, Warlikowski didn't need to do it. And Wadsworth's thorny 'family conversation' - his characters could be descendants of one of Ivy Compton-Burnett's late-Victorian households, perpetrating exactly the same kind of 'deeds' Ivy was sure they all kept covered up - suits him to a tee. As the New York Times put it, much better than I ever could*, 'in the director Krzysztof Warlikowski, it has one of the European stage’s smartest interpreters of family dysfunction and sexual complexity, the opera’s central themes.'

 

After a film of the accident, projected on a scrim, the whole opera takes place, without a break, in the crematorium, a vast, impersonal space furnished with ordinary stackable chairs of the kind found in hotel conference halls. During the cremation, a studio portrait of Dinah, 'hand-coloured' against a background of flowers, Pierre-et-Gilles style and inscribed with her dates of birth and death, fills the rear. Over the ensuing orchestral interlude, a video plunges us deep into the flames of the furnace. A spartan bedroom glides in from the left, a living and dining room from the right. The garden scene is set a against a magnificent, twinkling backdrop, a sweeping night vista of the lights and traffic of, I guess, Los Angeles, filmed from the hills above. So far so simple and efficient.

In terms of Schnörkel, Warlikowski has the 'ghost' of Dinah, played by an actress, drunk at the funeral and present in the house afterwards, occasionally joining in mute flashbacks with a child in a cowboy outfit, Junior when young: this explains the initially weird 'outsider' cowboy get-up, pink and purple, with fringed chaps, white boots and a stetson, Junior wears to the funeral. Also, in the kind of Warlikowski tic that drives some people crazy but is nevertheless extremely effective and moving, at one point he stops the opera altogether to show the child junior watching Bernstein on TV, talking about Tchaikovsky's 4th:
 

'We're going to listen to music that describes emotions, feelings - like pain, happiness, loneliness, anger, love. I guess most music is like that; and the better it is, the more it will make you feel those emotions that the composer felt when he was writing. Tchaikovsky was a composer who always tried to do this - who always tried to have his music mean something easily recognized as emotional. Take this part of his Fourth Symphony: I guess the best way to describe that would be by saying that it has the feeling of wanting something very badly that you can't have. Did you ever feel that you wanted something more than anything else in the world; and you said so, and they said "no, you can't have it," and you said again - "I want it!" And again they said no, and again you said, louder and more excited, "I want it!" and louder "I want it!" until it seemed that something would break inside you and there's nothing left to do but cry? Well, that's like this music.'

 

The costumes were, as usual, beautifully neat and right, the lighting just so, and the acting was managed down to the smallest detail, faithfully recreating people's day-to-day (mis)behaviour on stage.

 

Nagano knows and loves the score, you could tell: his conducting was richly detailed and tenderly loving and there were some very touching moments. The singers with presumably the most experience of the work under Nagano, Claudia Boyle and Gordon Bintner, who recorded it with him, came over best, and the mourners at the cremation sang as sweetly as a barber-shop quartet. But Garnier is not small, and much of the time the voices failed to project properly into the house, so to follow the complex text, made up of of overlapping snatches of tense conversation, several singing at once, the supertitles were essential, and musically the evening was dominated by the orchestra.

 

Though I have Trouble in Tahiti on DVD, A Quiet Place was new to me. It was stupid of me not to get to know the text and score before coming to Garnier on Wednesday night - I'd have got so much more out of the performance had I done so. Perhaps it will appear on video, online at least; it's sure to be photogenic, and the problem of audibility over the orchestra would in that case be solved. In any case, I hope it will come back in a couple of seasons, and in the meantime, I've started listening again already.

 

*I found the NYT's review exemplary. Here's a link to it.