Massenet - Cendrillon

ONP Bastille, Thursday April 7 2022

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi. Production: Mariame Clément. Sets and Costumes: Julia Hansen. Lighting: Ulrik Gad. Video: Etienne Guiol. Cendrillon: Tara Erraught. Madame de la Haltière: Daniela Barcellona. Le prince charmant: Anna Stéphany. La fée: Kathleen Kim. Noémie: Charlotte Bonnet. Dorothée: Marion Lebègue. Pandolfe: Lionel Lhote. Le roi: Philippe Rouillon. Le Doyen de la faculté: Cyrille Lovighi. Le Surintendant des plaisirs: Olivier Ayault. Le Premier Ministre: Vadim Artamonov. Six Esprits: Corinne Talibart, So-Hee Lee, Stéphanie Loris, Anne-Sophie Ducret, Sophie Van de Woestyne, Blandine Folio Peres. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Monika Rittershaus / ONP

I know Cendrillon is quite a lot of people's favourite Massenet opera, but, despite my admiration for some of his work, I'm sorry to say I've never managed to get my head round this particular score. The vocal lines seem to meander one way while the orchestra meanders another, the text overruns the music, as if there were more words to sing than beats to the allotted bars, and while I can tell which parts are meant to be the big hits, I've never yet retained a tune: it all remains hazy and vague. I suppose by 1900, Debussy was in the air, and he's a composer I have always had a tough time with. And Cendrillon belongs to a French genre I also find tough going, the 'plein de poésie et de tendresse' kind - don't ask me what I think of Le Petit Prince.

The cast was pretty good overall, if not spectacularly so. Tara Erraught's voice has some lovely sweet spots in the upper range (and the Bastille is kinder to high notes), though not evenly distributed from top to bottom. Anna Stéphany, completely new to me, was apparently not well (they announced after the break that she was sick but would go on with the show) but you could hardly tell, unless that was why her lower range was faint - which I put down more to the Bastille's acoustics. She was quite an interesting discovery, someone to see again in a more reasonable space. Kathleen Kim brought some body and rondeur to her coloratura rôle, if not a distinct vocal personality.

To me, the best all-rounders, perhaps because they have longer experience, were Daniela Barcellona, who turned out to be quite a comic actress, and the ever-reliable Lionel Lhote, whose top notes rang out more impressively than I'd expected in Paris's barn. The chorus wasn't at its best, having a hard time, so it seemed, staying in time with the pit. Carlo Rizzi's conducting was bland and wan: I very nearly forgot he was there.

Mariame Clément set her production in the industrial era, rather than at the time of Perrault. Before each act, a screen was lowered to show magic-lantern animations, in frilly frames, of black-and-white silhouettes, sketching the coming action. The main set was a factory, with the Haltières' little drawing room to the right but above all, dominating the stage, a giant machine, to me recalling, with its silos, tanks, ladders, gangways, bellows, wheels, levers and illuminated dials, Istanbul's first power station, at Eyüp on the Golden Horn (now an arts and cultural complex called Santralistanbul). This, we learnt as the action progressed, was a dressing and coiffing machine: put a naked doll or a girl in mufti in the silo on the left (the silos had doors), and out, eventually, from the silo on the right, would pop a doll or a girl in a ruched candy-pink crinoline and blond ringlets with bows. (All the girls at the ball had the same pink dress; Cinderella too, only hers glittered.) Cinders stoked the boiler and slept in the mouth of a duct on the left. The fairy appeared in the tallest silo of all, against a background of sparkling lights. And Cinderella left for the ball in a balloon.

The king's salle des fêtes was a conservatory in the style of Paris's old Baltard market halls, with a buffet arranged round a tall, central palm. The prince, originally in red-and-white sneakers, clearly found the protocol and dressing-up irksome, and as soon as he and Cinderella had hit it off, he stripped back down to his trousers and shirt, helped her out of the pink dress - leaving her in her slip and bloomers - and offered her his comfy sneakers in place of the tight, spangled, high-heel slippers. They chatted, oblivious to the ball around them, till the clock struck.

After the return home, for the fairyland scene with its grand chêne au milieu d'une lande pleine de genêts en fleurs, Clément used the machinery to raise the whole de-la-Haltière factory up so we could discover, underneath, a dark, misty forest of silos, in one of which, eventually, appeared a large, glowing, palpitating heart (Le Prince ayant promis de suspendre son cœur au chêne enchanté) through which Cinderella and the Prince joined hands before meeting at last.

For the last act, we were back in the factory, though the machinery was now draped in tarps. At the end, as the Fée unceremoniously discarded the superfluous 'glass' slipper, the recovered prince handed Cinders a glittering pair of... sneakers.

This was Cendrillon's debut at the Paris Opera. For that, you might have imagined there'd be a spectacular production with a stellar (French?) cast. In the event, musically and dramatically, this was more a solid, good-humoured, provincial repertory show, perhaps one for the Christmas/pantomime period, with a decent cast. There were cameras galore, so I guess we'll all get a chance to see it again soon, should we so wish.