Ponchielli - La Gioconda
La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday February 10 2019
Conductor: Paolo Carignani. Production: Olivier Py. Sets & Costumes: Pierre-André Weitz. Lighting: Bertrand Killy. La Gioconda: Hui He. Laura Adorno: Szilvia Vörös. Enzo Grimaldo: Stefano La Colla. Barnaba: Scott Hendricks. La Cieca: Ning Liang. Alvise Badoero: Jean Teitgen. Isèpo: Roberto Covatta. Zuàne /Un pilota: Bertrand Dunby. Un Barnabotto/Una voce: Bernard Giovani. Un cantore: René Laryea. Una voce: Alejandro Fonté. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. MM Academy & La Monnaie's Children's and Youth Chorus.
As the suave ‘cello solo turns into a quartet and the oboe then joins in, you think to yourself “Wow, I don't recall La Gioconda being so good.” Shortly afterwards, and for the next three hours or so, you realise why you’d forgotten. People sometimes say it’s a singers’ opera and that you need an outstanding cast to make it worthwhile. But I’m pretty certain that if you did have an outstanding cast in it, you’d be wishing you’d had them in something more rewarding.
Our conductor - who kept things as lively as he could - and cast certainly worked hard at it. I’ll deal with the men first. The most convincing of all, to me, was Jean Teitgen. His dark yet crisp-edged sound was perfectly diabolical (but a friend e-mailed me: ‘Hate his voice. All charcoal rasp.'). Stefano La Colla’s ample voice would seem to have great potential: big, bright, almost hard and metallic… He’s already been on stage for ten years and sung Calaf at La Scala, I read, but I’d say he still has work to do to sing with more subtlety and control, rather than relying on the wow factor of sheer volume and piercing timbre. I thought of a calf in a china shop. Scott Hendricks seemed in good voice to me, better than on some occasions I’ve heard him, but my neighbours, while agreeing his singing was powerful, claimed he was off-key. I must say I didn’t hear that.
As La Cieca, Ning Liang, relatively underpowered, was overshadowed by her colleagues and made little impact on me, though one of my co-subscribers liked her enough to say so. Szilvia Vörös is, I think, a promising mezzo whose sound Hungarian training (taking in a string of roles at the Hungarian State Opera) shows: her voice is firm and healthy, her phrasing is nice… The production didn’t give her much chance to project dramatic personality, but she came across as a very well-prepared young professional. One to look out for another time.
With all due respect to Hui He for her career, her experience and her obvious commitment, the contrast between Vörös’s Laura and her Gioconda, while dramatically useful, was not very flattering. Her voice now sounds (so, at any rate, it seemed to me in a hot theatre on a damp Sunday after lunch) a bit too mature and matronly for the part, and while she certainly throws herself into it and has some fine moments, her most deserving efforts ultimately come across as a laborious struggle to keep everything properly under control. Also, her top notes are dubious and have you wishing you had a score to hand to check. (I sometimes wonder if sopranos have special lessons in singing a crucial note a semitone or a tone flat without it sounding totally wrong.) The applause for Suicidio! was polite, no more - and it took it a while to get started, after a short but stressful silence.
On the production side, I had this mental image of Olivier Py rummaging through a trunk, frantically pulling things out and throwing them over his shoulders in his search for ideas that might make this lumbering museum-piece work.
His setting was dark - nothing unexpected there with Py: black, more black, some grey for a change, dabs of white - morbid and, in intention at least, sleazy. The main set was something like a very large, damp underground car park or motorway underpass with its blackened and streaked concrete piers stretching away into the far distance. It reminded my neighbour from Bordeaux of the Nazi-era submarine pens there. The floor was flooded, creating very fine ripples of reflected light on the dark sets as the cast and chorus splashed through. This deep perspective could be obscured totally or in part, as required by the plot, by a portico of square pillars and multiple rectangular openings, highlighted with neon tubes, a gangway with metal railings, a black staircase providing terracing for the chorus (in fine fettle yesterday, even when wearing clown masks), or from one to six square white rooms, two storeys of three each, connected by doors and black metal ladders.
Our old friends the Victorian bathtub, with its elaborate taps, and iron bedstead were back: I hadn’t seen them for some time. The single bare light-bulb that usually comes with them was absent: it must have slipped Py’s mind with so much else going on. There was also, sometimes, a dressing table for La Gioconda. And lots of black wooden tables and chairs were used to avoid the acqua alta - most effectively during the prelude as the dancers worked their way left to right across the stage by placing, then perching on, then removing a series of these chairs, like a human caterpillar-track.
Costumes were black: suits for the men, long dresses for the women, often with sparkles or sequins. Alvise had a few kilos of Swarovski draped round his neck, including a big, glittering cross, and at one point a black fur coat. There were no gondolas, bridges or gothic arches. But, to recall the carnival, there were clowns' heads in abundance: small, medium and large. The dancers were often half or wholly naked and there was lots of balletic simulated sex: the Dance of the Hours was in part a gang rape, though ending with more of a hornpipe (no ostriches or hippos, I'm sorry to report). A baby was stabbed and bled to death over its naked mother - a prostitute, perhaps, mused the usheress when she warned us about this grisly detail. When Enzo burned his ship, a spectacular golden shower of fireworks cascaded and crackled down before the interval curtain.
There were coffins, lots of black coffins with silver handles, used to carry off dancers who collapsed frequently into the water, but also as Laura's bed once drugged in act three. And there were, of course, young men in police coats with machine guns, lined up on the tables, facing the audience with their weapons across their chests. La Cieca was strangled with a wire in sight of us all. Illuminated scale-models (big ones) of cruise ships were wheeled through the water on trolleys, and wheeled through again in flames during Suicidio! I wondered if French-speaking Py was familiar with the expression "burning your boats".
The opera had started with a nude dancer in a big clown’s head. At the end, a giant-sized one floated in, like mad King Ludwig’s swan, and Barnaba/Hendricks climbed out of its eye socket to claim - so he thought - his reward. He ended, instead, flat out on Gioconda’s dead body.
The last time I saw this work, I concluded: “With its rather stiff, uninspiring score, I think one Gioconda every 25 years is probably about right for me.” That was less than six years ago. If the weather outside had been less frightful, I might have made my escape at half time yesterday. As it was I stayed, heaving a big, French-style ouf of relief at the end. As I don't expect to survive twenty more years, I trust this Gioconda was my last.
Here, for the fun of it, is the Fantasia version of the Dance of the Hours.
And here, a lesser-known version of Suicidio.
Conductor: Paolo Carignani. Production: Olivier Py. Sets & Costumes: Pierre-André Weitz. Lighting: Bertrand Killy. La Gioconda: Hui He. Laura Adorno: Szilvia Vörös. Enzo Grimaldo: Stefano La Colla. Barnaba: Scott Hendricks. La Cieca: Ning Liang. Alvise Badoero: Jean Teitgen. Isèpo: Roberto Covatta. Zuàne /Un pilota: Bertrand Dunby. Un Barnabotto/Una voce: Bernard Giovani. Un cantore: René Laryea. Una voce: Alejandro Fonté. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. MM Academy & La Monnaie's Children's and Youth Chorus.
Our conductor - who kept things as lively as he could - and cast certainly worked hard at it. I’ll deal with the men first. The most convincing of all, to me, was Jean Teitgen. His dark yet crisp-edged sound was perfectly diabolical (but a friend e-mailed me: ‘Hate his voice. All charcoal rasp.'). Stefano La Colla’s ample voice would seem to have great potential: big, bright, almost hard and metallic… He’s already been on stage for ten years and sung Calaf at La Scala, I read, but I’d say he still has work to do to sing with more subtlety and control, rather than relying on the wow factor of sheer volume and piercing timbre. I thought of a calf in a china shop. Scott Hendricks seemed in good voice to me, better than on some occasions I’ve heard him, but my neighbours, while agreeing his singing was powerful, claimed he was off-key. I must say I didn’t hear that.
As La Cieca, Ning Liang, relatively underpowered, was overshadowed by her colleagues and made little impact on me, though one of my co-subscribers liked her enough to say so. Szilvia Vörös is, I think, a promising mezzo whose sound Hungarian training (taking in a string of roles at the Hungarian State Opera) shows: her voice is firm and healthy, her phrasing is nice… The production didn’t give her much chance to project dramatic personality, but she came across as a very well-prepared young professional. One to look out for another time.
With all due respect to Hui He for her career, her experience and her obvious commitment, the contrast between Vörös’s Laura and her Gioconda, while dramatically useful, was not very flattering. Her voice now sounds (so, at any rate, it seemed to me in a hot theatre on a damp Sunday after lunch) a bit too mature and matronly for the part, and while she certainly throws herself into it and has some fine moments, her most deserving efforts ultimately come across as a laborious struggle to keep everything properly under control. Also, her top notes are dubious and have you wishing you had a score to hand to check. (I sometimes wonder if sopranos have special lessons in singing a crucial note a semitone or a tone flat without it sounding totally wrong.) The applause for Suicidio! was polite, no more - and it took it a while to get started, after a short but stressful silence.
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| Ponchielli |
His setting was dark - nothing unexpected there with Py: black, more black, some grey for a change, dabs of white - morbid and, in intention at least, sleazy. The main set was something like a very large, damp underground car park or motorway underpass with its blackened and streaked concrete piers stretching away into the far distance. It reminded my neighbour from Bordeaux of the Nazi-era submarine pens there. The floor was flooded, creating very fine ripples of reflected light on the dark sets as the cast and chorus splashed through. This deep perspective could be obscured totally or in part, as required by the plot, by a portico of square pillars and multiple rectangular openings, highlighted with neon tubes, a gangway with metal railings, a black staircase providing terracing for the chorus (in fine fettle yesterday, even when wearing clown masks), or from one to six square white rooms, two storeys of three each, connected by doors and black metal ladders.
Our old friends the Victorian bathtub, with its elaborate taps, and iron bedstead were back: I hadn’t seen them for some time. The single bare light-bulb that usually comes with them was absent: it must have slipped Py’s mind with so much else going on. There was also, sometimes, a dressing table for La Gioconda. And lots of black wooden tables and chairs were used to avoid the acqua alta - most effectively during the prelude as the dancers worked their way left to right across the stage by placing, then perching on, then removing a series of these chairs, like a human caterpillar-track.
There were coffins, lots of black coffins with silver handles, used to carry off dancers who collapsed frequently into the water, but also as Laura's bed once drugged in act three. And there were, of course, young men in police coats with machine guns, lined up on the tables, facing the audience with their weapons across their chests. La Cieca was strangled with a wire in sight of us all. Illuminated scale-models (big ones) of cruise ships were wheeled through the water on trolleys, and wheeled through again in flames during Suicidio! I wondered if French-speaking Py was familiar with the expression "burning your boats".
The opera had started with a nude dancer in a big clown’s head. At the end, a giant-sized one floated in, like mad King Ludwig’s swan, and Barnaba/Hendricks climbed out of its eye socket to claim - so he thought - his reward. He ended, instead, flat out on Gioconda’s dead body.
The last time I saw this work, I concluded: “With its rather stiff, uninspiring score, I think one Gioconda every 25 years is probably about right for me.” That was less than six years ago. If the weather outside had been less frightful, I might have made my escape at half time yesterday. As it was I stayed, heaving a big, French-style ouf of relief at the end. As I don't expect to survive twenty more years, I trust this Gioconda was my last.
Here, for the fun of it, is the Fantasia version of the Dance of the Hours.
And here, a lesser-known version of Suicidio.
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