Händel - Ariodante

ONP Garnier, Thursday May 18 2023

Conductor: Harry Bicket. Production, sets and lighting: Robert Carsen. Sets and costumes: Luis F. Carvalho. Lighting: Peter Van Praet. Choreography: Nicolas Paul. Ariodante: Emily D'Angelo. Il re di Scozia: Matthew Brook. Ginevra: Olga Kulchynska. Lurcanio: Eric Ferring. Polinesso: Christophe Dumaux. Dalinda: Tamara Banjesevic. Odoardo: Enrico Casari. The English Concert. Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Agathe Poupeney/ONP

After some delay owing to strikes over pension reform (which doesn't actually affect the ONP's special régime, so I suppose they just went out in sympathy), the Paris Opera now has a good-looking new production of Ariodante by Robert Carsen, characteristically detailed and professionally directed, more entertaining than searchingly profound or moving, with a strikingly well-balanced, equally professional cast.

It might be summed up as 'the Windsors at Balmoral.' The sets reproduce, full scale or more, Britain's solidly dull and charmless royal interiors, more middle-class than regal, in this case with green-painted panelling and blue-and-green tartan rugs on a green floor. The panels, pierced with large doorways, form the various spaces required by the plot, all of them - even act one's royal gardens, staged as a hunting scene - indoors: a bedroom with a tartan-curtained four-poster bed, a hunting lodge, with deers peering through the doors and a picnic, baronial halls with hall seats, trophies and suits of armour, the King's library with its bookcases, desk and fireplace, servants in tailed livery dashing back and forth... The cast are beautifully costumed, the men in swaggering kilts with black 'Prince Charlie' or scarlet mess jackets, dotted with silver buttons, and fly-plaids buckled over the shoulder, the women in those plain but gracious 'butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth' frocks favoured by the current Princess of Wales. Ginevra, in fact, though not as tall and slim, seems deliberately wigged and made up to look like her (and from what I see from photos on his website, tenor Eric Ferring is not normally ginger-headed, à la Prince Harry, with a beard to match...). The lighting is crisp and focused, changing and closing in to highlight the action.

Here, the letters read in the original plot are tabloid newspapers: at various stages, the press and paparazzi are invited in to hear pronouncements then shooed out again by swarms of royal lackeys when no longer needed, crawl through doorways on their bellies with long zoom lenses, or eventually force their way in uninvited, baying like hounds and recalling the hunt, to catch Ginevra at her most poignant. Polinesso, played by Dumaux more as a charming rogue than an outright villain, pinches a bottle of wine out of a passing picnic basket, tosses it in the air, uncorks it and drinks from the bottle, lights up and smokes at any spare moment, his feet on the furniture, peeks at dispatches when nobody's looking, and, when the king explodes with rage and throws down a leaking pen (as kings do these days), Polinesso niftily picks it up and slips it into his sporran. Interesting, now quite unusual detail: unlike many directors, who don't quite know what to do with dancers (often excluded) or even the chorus (relegated to the sides, the boxes or the pit), Carsen does actually keep some ballets: Scottish dances at the prenuptial evening party (in the plot, shepherds and shepherdesses in 'a delightful valley'), multiple doubles of Ariodante and Polinesso battling it out during Ginevra's 'good and bad dreams'...

At the end... well, I'll leave that to the end of this text, with a spoiler alert, in case anyone reading this - if anyone ever does - would rather enjoy the surprise.

Musically, the evening was a 'sans faute', technically beyond reproach. The cast was, as I mentioned, remarkably well-balanced and there wasn't a weak link: all the notes were there, neither missed nor fudged. What was sometimes missing was an extra spark of excitement. The two 'baddies' (or one baddie and the other led astray by him) were the notable exception, throwing themselves into their parts with obvious enthusiasm. Tamara Banjesevic's darker timbre contrasted well with Olga Kulchynska's Ginevra and she enjoyed showing of her strong, bright top. Christophe Dumaux is a singer I've always liked, even though my American neighbour, an instrumentalist whose Baroque credentials are so impeccable he was able to pick out a number of friends in the pit, claimed he sang 'like a chicken.' I didn't agree, of course. Dumaux is always at his best as a seductive rogue, and brought humour, zest and some stunning high coloratura to his part.

The rest of the cast sometimes - while, I insist, they were impeccably professional, solidly competent, to the last role - seemed vocally placid in comparison. Emily D'Angelo played Ariodante largely as a pleasant young man. Both her softish, coppery timbre and brighter high notes carried distant echoes, to my year, of Dame Janet Baker, and I was struck early on by her breath control and the stability of her vocal line. She seemed to hold back in the first act - as indeed did most, pacing themselves, perhaps, for the four-hour evening - but became more assertive in the second, and her 'Scherza Infida' was - as it should be - a real highlight of the evening. It seems to be the kind of aria that suits her best; 'Dopo Notte', which should be the other was less convincing.

I should add that, all evening, I had in mind what a friend of mine - another one with impeccable credentials - has always insisted: the Bastille is very big, but that doesn't mean the Palais Garnier is small and therefore naturally suitable for baroque opera. He even added, just the other day, that Garnier is 'a cemetery for baroque-sized voices.' There were times, especially in act one, before things warmed up, when some voices were only just audible - including Emily D'Angelo's. Fortunately, for end-of-scene arias, Carsen brought the soloists to the front of the stage so that a solid ‘curtain' of green panelling could be lowered to hide set changes. At other times, with the stage gaping behind them and even - a silly detail - singers with their backs to the audience, I found myself straining to hear.

There seems to be a French consensus against Harry Bicket, usually accused of being pedestrian. I can kind of see the point: perhaps he was partly responsible for the overall absence of dramatic fire; but I quite like his restrained, stick-to-the-score approach, not necessarily craving the dramatic gestures of a Minkowski or Jacobs, though I do love Rousset's spring. 'Scherza Infida' was beautifully supported by a softly rustling accompaniment.

Now, the SPOILER ALERT before I describe the end of the production.

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During the final duet, 'Bramo aver mille vite', in front of that curtain of panelling, the four 'youngsters', Ariodante and Ginevra, Dalinda and Lurcanio, gleefully tear off their smart 'royal family' clothes, change into jeans, teeshirts, bomber jackets and baseball caps, don sunglasses and dash off to freedom from the press and paparazzi (or to the US to write and market their memoirs). The panelling rises. The baronial hall now familiar to us has become a kind of Madame Tussaud's, where wax figures of the royal family stand cordoned off with red ropes on brass stands, and the chorus, ordinary, everyday tourists in ordinary, everyday clothes, pour in from the rear in a torrent to take selfies and conclude what was, as I said, an entertaining evening. This production will look good on video, and any audibility problems will be neatly ironed out, so it should be well worth looking out for.