Mozart - Idomeneo, re di Creta, at La Monnaie in Brussels

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday March 22 2026

Conductor: Enrico Onofri. Production: Calixto Bieito. Sets: Anna-Sofia Kirsch. Costumes: Paula Kleiné. Lighting: Reinhard Traub/Calixto Bieito. Vidéo: Adrià Reixach. Idomeneo: Joshua Stewart. Idamante: Gaëlle Arquez. Ilia: Shira Patchornik. Elettra: Kathryn Lewek. Gran Sacerdote di Nettuno: Michael J. Scott. La Voce: Frederic Jost. Cretesi e Troiani: Manon Poskin, Nadiia Lys, Taeksung Kwon, Byoungjin Lee. Orchestra and chorus of La Monnaie.

Photos: © S. Van Rompay/La Monnaie

Calixto Bieito is, so I read, well pleased with how his production of Idomeneo (a co-production with the State Opera in Prague, where it premiered last year), turned out: a dream. His intention, so I also read, was to approach the work as a psychological study of the traumatic after-effects of war on those who’ve waged it, and on their relationships with their family and entourage. The backdrop to this mental landscape, meanwhile, is a fluctuating memory of the sea, where ‘everything is lost and reappears, where acts of violence, objects and plastic waste are stored’ (Bieito in interview).

My degree was not in psychology, and I confess I’ve never read a thing by Freud, so perhaps that’s why I, personally, found it mostly impenetrable. Sunday was (for once) a sunny spring day in Brussels, so perhaps I’d rather have been out and about enjoying it. The beef carbonade and chips I'd just had for lunch was decent enough, so it wasn’t that. Perhaps it was the staging’s drab, prosaic, cooly-lit aesthetic; it did occur to me I might have enjoyed seeing the same cast in 18th-century costumes. Perhaps I should have read the (interesting) programme notes in advance. I don’t doubt that every enigmatic (or obvious) detail of the staging had been carefully thought-through and had its raison d’être within the director’s framework concept. The acting was undeniably directed in equal detail, the cast was visibly engaged, and rapid crowd movements were well managed. But still, unfortunately, it didn’t grab me.

 

There is nothing explicitly Cretan about the contemporary production design, but six or eight tall, boxy, L-shaped structures in translucent plastic, lit from within, glide around ingeniously to form aptly labyrinthine urban, clinical or carceral spaces, while acting as screens for video projections. The High-Priest-cum-Arbace (there’s no atual Arbace in this version; some of his part is transferred to the Sacerdote), his ever-present blond double, and the assistants moving the panels around, are in white, including, for some, long white aprons and white wellies… so we might be in a medical institution, but might also be in a fish factory. I.e. this is perhaps yet another ‘flashback’ production set in a psychiatric clinic, but perhaps not.

Idamante wears an untucked shirt and loose tie. Ilia has bloodstains splattered on her yellow prison overalls, and a heavy chain round her neck. Elettra is in wicked dark red and black. Idomeneo sports a suit and tie and carries a briefcase housing either a computer or a backlit mirror: whichever it is, at various times he opens it up with trembling hands to gaze in perplexity or horror at what’s inside. The chorus, busy protagonists in this production, wear industrial, bib-front dungarees, and sometimes PPE jackets with strips of hi-viz.

Some of the ideas are a bit too obviously or didactically carried through. The way the tall plastic boxes line up, for example, to form a row of colour-coded cells, underlining the characters’ discrete natures, and their mental isolation from one another. Or the projections on the panels, of the sea, of the cross-section of a brain, of Idamante’s happy childhood while the chorus brandish toys and teddy bears and the like… As I said, the choristers (in peak form, vocally, by the way) are kept busy, so they swarm in in the dark as the monster, with lights strapped to their foreheads like a thousand accusing eyes, that they then, in imitation of Elettra, hold under their chins for ghoulish effect. Directors like this torch trick, I’ve noticed, but it’s always looked childishly amateur to me, and now feels corny, as, too, does the polythene sheet stretched across the stage to represent the rippling waves, and clawed through by the chorus, exactly as, two months ago, it represented ice, hacked through by Siegfried, in Bieito’s ongoing Ring at the Bastille.

One theme in particular was inscrutable: a foot fetish, or at least a fixation on shoes. Not only do characters slip them on and off repeatedly, but Elettra quietly steals Adamante’s and, seated on the floor during ‘Idol mio, se ritroso…’ buffs them up lovingly, virtually masturbates with them, and brushes patches of shiny brown polish on to her own legs. Equally puzzling is the presence, on stage as the curtain rises on the final act, of what look at first like giant ice cubes, but are actually plastic jerrycans dropped from a dangling net. During ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri,’ Ilia thoughtfully straps round them the chorus’s abandoned headlamps, and switches them on: the jerrycans - something to do with sea pollution? - become, perhaps, buoys or beacons, and the accusing eyes of the monstrous chorus a benevolent form of protection…?

Idomeneo has, by now, lost it. He staggers in cradling a statue of Neptune, but eventually snatches the god’s trident from its setting and uses it to smash the sculpture. To wrench a decision from him, the High Priest crowns him with electrodes (recalling the projected brains): ‘Oh voto tremendo !’ The chorus, one by one, garland Idomeneo's neck with placards marked ‘Killer!’ - facile business you might sooner expect to see in student theatre, or a production by Py (though with Py, it might have been chalked everywhere on black walls). The happy end isn’t, of course, happy at all. Idomeneo is left a gibbering wreck while the chorus - one last enigma - brandish giant white bags. To stuff all the rubbish of the past into? Don’t know. 

I honestly don’t doubt for a moment - I repeat myself - that Calixto Bieito has given a great deal of thought to his production, and that every curious detail has its significance with regard to his overall vision. Perhaps If I’d read about his intentions in advance, gone to the introductory presentation, and attended the chat, after the show, with the creative team, it would all have come together beautifully into a coherent whole, just as Bieito claims it had for him: his dream production. After all, I do find that reading the handouts at gallery entrances are often a help in grasping what contemporary artists are getting at. But on a sunny spring Sunday, with tulips on the lawns and variegated Easter eggs piled up in Brussels’ chocolate shops, I wasn’t in the mood, going in cold, for teasing out all the riddles. As I said just now, for once I’d have been happier to have the same strong cast, wearing nicely-tailored period costumes, in simple, evocative sets.

The cast, however, had evidently been to the introduction and the creatives' town-hall epilogue, and adhered 100% to Bieito’s vision. One thing they had in common, drawing them together as a team, was their dramatic commitment, as they crafted, and maintained in detail, consistent, distinct personalities throughout. Vocally, you could feel they’d been carefully selected (‘curated,' you might say) to suit their individual representations.

Shira Patchornik (Ilia) is a fresh, supple, expressive lyric soprano, with a pretty sound and delicate phrasing. Though she isn’t actually fresh out of the conservatory, she’s still young, and there’s still (so it seemed to me) a faint aura of student over-carefulness in her singing, as if making a special effort to win her next prize. A little less powerful than her partners on stage, she was occasionally overpowered by Enrico Onofri’s biggish orchestra.

Kathryn Lewek’s Elettra has been highly praised by the press and was well received by the audience, including the regulars I chatted with on Sunday. So if, having heard such good things about her, I was disappointed, I guess boils down to personal taste. For expressive effect, she plays with dynamic extremes, from impressive outbursts to stretches of extreme pianissimo, with or, quite often, without vibrato, occasionally just hinting (by design, not by accident) at leaning off the note… It’s too finicky for me, there’s too much ‘mewing’, as I call it, of a kind that in the past has put me off Anne-Sophie Von Otter, and seems to tread perilously close to Maria Ewing’s terrain in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. One man’s mannerism is another’s expressiveness; I know it’s an approach many people appreciate. Look how many devoted fans Von Otter has. And as I say, I seemed to be alone among those around me in having doubts. 

As Idomeneo, Joshua Stewart’s burly, slightly baritonal tenor sound, perhaps not typical casting for the part, suited his burly physique and, while he had occasional trouble steering his ample voice round the score’s trickier corners, also suited Bieito’s disturbed and disturbing characterisation. He deserves a medal for dramatic commitment: the production’s psychological and physical demands must be very nearly as exhausting to meet as those made on the central character, in the same house, of Tcherniakov’s Czar Saltan, memorably played as an autistic youth.

 

The vocal star of this show, the most flawlessly accomplished all round, was, however, Gaëlle Arquez as Idamante. She’s surely at her peak - I mean, you don’t see how she could get much better, in her fach and repertoire, though of course she might, and stun us all. Her voice is full, warm, round and supple, and whatever she chooses to do with it is apparently done with ease. Excellent all round. 

Over the past few months I seem often to have been at odds with the majority over conductors and orchestras. ‘HIP’ specialist Enrico Onofri has had plenty of praise for his conducting, in this Idomeneo, of La Monnaie’s house orchestra, not usually particularly ‘HIP’ but here, I noticed from my perch upstairs, fielding horns with no valves. I wasn’t so sure. From his body language and the playing, the impression I got was that he was more interested in the forward pulse and overall shape and sweep of the performance than attending to detail - some rhythmically ragged ensemble, I thought - and to the singers’ needs. I found the playing, winds especially, dry and prosaic.

But thousands didn't. My late mother, bless her, told me often enough I had cloth ears.