Saint-Saëns - Henry VIII

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday May 21 2023

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production: Olivier Py. Sets and Costumes: Pierre-André Weitz. Lighting: Bertrand Killy. Henry VIII: Lionel Lhote. Don Gomez de Féria: Ed Lyon. Le Cardinal Campeggio: Vincent Le Texier. Le Comte de Surrey: Enguerrand de Hys. Le Duc de Norfolk: Werner Van Mechelen. Cranmer: Jérôme Varnier. Catherine d’Aragon: Marie-Adeline Henry. Anne de Boleyn: Nora Gubisch. Lady Clarence: Claire Antoine. Garter/Un officier: Alexander Marev. Un huissier de la cour: Leander Carlier. Quatre dames d’honneur: Alessia Thais Berardi, Annelies Kerstes, Lieve Jacobs, Manon Poskin. Quatre seigneurs: Alain-Pierre Wingelinckx, Luis Aguilar, Byoungjin Lee, René Laryea. La Monnaie Orchestra and Chorus.

Photos: Baus/La Monnaie

La Monnaie has a track record in doing relative rarities proud, and it looks as if the success of Olivier Py's production of Les Huguenots was behind the decision to offer him Henry VIII. It turned out to be, so I thought (unlike the press, where words like 'sumptuous' have appeared), a missed opportunity, with some notable exceptions. 

Lionel Lhote, a Brussels regular and a singer I've consistently admired, was magnificent: brutal and authoritarian in character, with a vast dynamic range used with total, subtle mastery. Orchestra and chorus were magnificent too; like Lhote, Van Mechelen is someone you know you can count on as well, and Ed Lyon did a reasonable job in a role at the limit of his powers. So in all, the men were sound, though I was quite surprised to find Jérôme Varnier a bit wobbly at the top, and Vincent le Texier now sounding quite elderly, though that suited his part as Papal legate.

Alain Altinoglu is, as I said to someone the other day, a treasure Brussels is lucky to possess, but the casting of Nora Gubisch as Anne (de) Boleyn raises, to my mind, questions about the ethics of conductors casting their wives in starring roles: how come, in these prickly days, it's allowed? Gubisch's voice is woolly, matronly and underpowered, and dressed and bewigged like a Belle-Epoque tart (her ruched red dress actually reminded me of Py himself in drag in Bru Zane revivals of Opéra Bouffe - e.g. Hervé's Mam'zelle Nitouche), she's past the age where she should be  frolicking on a camp bed with her legs (red-stockinged) in the air. Henry (Marie-Adeline, the soprano, not the king), has a powerful voice, but would do well to learn to rein it in more often, not deploy it at full blast, when it comes across as just big, loud and hard (at the interval, a Belgian friend present described it as 'an electric saw'), losing control at the top, with wince-making issues of agility and tuning.

To me, if not to the press, Olivier Py's production had an odd, 'phoned-in', generic feel, as if it was an all-purpose one, designed to be used, with the odd tweak, for any number of operas. The set, made up of smoothly mobile, treacly black towers, with windows and archers, that assembled, parted, revolved and reassembled as required, was in a style (recalling Inigo Jones) that had nothing to do with either the Tudor period or the 1880s of the work (and most of the costumes). It looked, as my neighbour said, as if it had been borrowed. The cute young dancers on stage from the outset, half or wholly naked, did various inscrutable things, the relevance of which was hard to grasp, in desultory fashion. People climbed up on the tables or rickety little bed for no convincing reason. (The single iron bedstead now has a long history as a cliché of modern opera productions; it usually comes with a single light bulb overhead, but here we had our other 'old friends', the lowered chandeliers.) Bringing Henry in, for one scene, on a real (and superb) black horse made Lhote look and sound uncomfortable. The setting of the final scenes in a railway station, with a locomotive crashing through the rear wall with a roar, was weird, and at La Monnaie, surely an odd thing to do: any long-standing subscriber there would, like me, obviously be reminded of the same house's Orphée aux Enfers, which for the gods' descent into Hades reproduced the famous Montparnasse train wreck. In that production, the loco came crashing through the ceiling. Py's young dancers doing a ballet in the station with suitcases brought in an odd, Parapluies de Cherbourg kind of touch, i.e. straight out of a musical.

Still, it was good to have the opportunity to see and hear a work we could happily see and hear more often. Contrary to what the people I was there with feared, the three-and-a-half hours seemed to go quite quickly. 'C'est beaucoup moins chiant que les Huguenots,' said one. But I can see why, in the end, having caught it on YouTube, a friend in Los Angeles and fan of the work who'd considered flying to Europe to see it, didn't mind missing it as much as he might have.

At the time of writing, the whole production can, as I mentioned above, be seen on YouTube, published by OperaVision. Here's a trailer: