Iain Bell - Medusa, at La Monnaie in Brussels

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday May 17 2026

Conductor: Michiel Delanghe. Libretto and production: Lydia Steier. Sets: Flurin Borg Madsen. Costumes: Katharina Schlipf. Lighting: Elana Siberski. Medusa: Claudia Boyle. Euryale: Paula Murrihy. Stheno: Angela Denoke. Perseus: Josh Lovell. Poseidon: Konstantin Gorny. Athena: Mary Elizabeth Williams. High Priestess: Anu Komsi. Danaë: Marie-Juliette Ghazarian. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

Photos: © Simon Van Rompay

 

I’m going to waffle a bit at the start of this post. If you just want to know about the production or the singing and playing, skip or scroll down… I remember once, when I was a kid in England, there was some Beethoven on the radio; piano music, probably a concerto, and at one point, perhaps during a cadenza, Beethoven stripped the score right down to single notes played with one finger. ‘That’s not very hard,’ said my mother, drying a dish. Clearly, Beethoven needed to pull his socks up. A friend of mine, an amateur violinist, used to play with an eccentric chemistry don in Cambridge, an amateur pianist who, so the friend told me, identified chemicals by taste. This don would only consent to play difficult duets; he had no time at all for anything he considered easy. I myself, not so many years ago, went to the opening of a young artist’s first solo show in Paris. His work was very seductive. I met a gallery person in the street afterwards, and told him I had to admit I was wary (rightly or wrongly) of work so easy to like. Last year, one of the still-young artist’s paintings sold for $750,000.

I recalled all this at La Monnaie, during Iain Bell’s brand-new work, Medusa.

Bell, also still young, at least from my antique perspective, is an English composer specialising in vocal music. In 2013, Diana Damrau starred, as Moll Hackabout, in his first opera, A Harlot's Progress. Their collaboration seems to have had a decisive influence on his subsequent work: not only is Medusa, commissioned by La Monnaie, his sixth opera in just 13 years, but it also calls, in a cast of eight, for three coloratura sopranos, one of whom, at least - Medusa herself - is expected, during the course of the evening (afternoon, in the present case), to progress from lyric to dramatic coloratura while her character evolves from pretty, heedless ingénue to the monster of myth - and beyond.

 

Medusa was my first encounter with Bell’s work. A new piece by a new composer can be hard to apprehend on one listening, and hard to describe adequately in writing afterwards. Though, in my experience, often powerful and effective, new operas can (in Europe at any rate) be grim and forbidding. So however rewarding they may be experienced live and staged in the house, you may not feel like spending time curled up with them on the sofa at home. Bell’s score (for conventional orchestra with the usual, these days, beefed-up percussion but no electronics) is, as Medusa’s librettist and stage director Lydia Steier points out in the programme notes, obviously and undeniably contemporary. But while contemporary, and never actually pastiching, say, Puccini, it’s clearly rooted in classical opera traditions. Bell doesn’t, it seems, refuse repetition as some of his colleagues do; so the many and various elements of rhythm, form, melody and vocal technique stick around long enough to become recognisable. There are discernible ‘numbers’ marked by changes of tempo, there are solos, duets and ensembles, trills and tremolos, a lullaby, a hymn, and so on. And successive passages are atmospheric, tender, even palpably lyrical, evocative, menacing or - the rape especially, with its thundering timpani - violent. Also, Bell sets English well, and displays a Händelian knack for using allusive motifs to illustrate the text.

As a result, without feeling facile, or resorting, magpie-like, to eclectic borrowings (something that can make new American operas hard for me), his Medusa comes across as quite easily accessible: seductive, like that young artist’s paintings. So I was, again, and again rightly or wrongly, suspicious - which is what I was waffling about at the start of this post. Have I inherited my mother’s apparent view that if something’s easy it can’t be much good? Is Medusa too approachable, too seductive, too easy to like, to be of lasting worth? By the end, I’d decided not only that, more comfortably than, say, Pintscher’s recent Nuit sans aube, I’d be able to spend time curled up with it and a mug of cocoa at home, but that getting to know it better, growing familiar with its overall form, its themes and melodies and harmonic and rhythmic progressions, could well prove rewarding. I might become a Bell fan (would that be a Bell-boy?). The whole opera is available on YouTube, so there’d be no excuse for not watching and listening again, to find out if that seductiveness is superficial and will weather off, or deeper and more durable.

Lydia Steier’s name has come up several times in my posts in recent years, as I’ve seen her Paris Salome, which I was not so keen on, twice (2022, and 2024 for Lise Davidsen), and she also directed La Vestale here, in 2024. Her libretto for Medusa is (so I read; I can’t pretend I’d have known otherwise) mostly a combination of Hesiod and Ovid, and tells the story pretty much as those of us likely to know such things these days know it. ‘When Poseidon demands Medusa’s submission, her sisters send her to live with the priestesses at the Temple of Athena, hoping to protect her from the sea god…’ and so on, but with a moving twist at the end that recalls Elena Makropoulos/Emila Marty’s decision not to take the elixir again: sick of her monstrous fate - through no fault of her own but on the contrary, raped by Poseidon and. unjustly condemned to a friendless, loveless, childless life - she welcomes Perseus as a brotherly redeemer, and urges him to save his mother by killing her. The full synopsis can be read on La Monnaie’s website.

 

Steier’s production is, in both acts, dark, and succeeds in conjuring up a genuine sense of antique tragedy unfolding, à la Götz Friedrich in his famous Elektra, in the shadows. In the first act, mobile units - platforms backed by a wall, sometimes two - are manoeuvred round by creeping, crawling, barely visible creatures in black, to form stages, small or large, within the larger stage. Their constant rotating, joining and parting again suggest the ebb and flow of the sea. Medusa’s immortal sisters, the maternally protective Euryale and the pricklier, more cantankerous Stheno, both with stiff, peaky wigs and expressionistic,  ‘self-hybridation’ style make-up, are costumed in shiny, Victorian black; Medusa wears more Edwardian white, with freely flowing long hair - until stripped and changed into stiff gold, with a rigid head-dress of coiled plaits, to join (reluctantly and with some bewilderment) the ranks of Athena’s identically-costumed, sometimes Gorgon-masked priestesses, and their noisy, coloratura boss, before a flaming brazier.

 

White-haired Poseidon arrives in a white, three-piece suit - the universal entitled male - to ‘claim’ Medusa in a graphic rape scene (to those thundering timpani). The rear walls then part to admit Athena, a kind of golden corn-doll in bronze armour, twelve feet tall, gliding around like a monstrous Dalek on a remote-controlled dolly, to deliver a terrific dressing-down, first to Medusa, then to the high priestess and all her acolytes. She condemns Medusa. Wailing paroxysm. Curtain.

 

In the second act, the previously mobile platforms are now bogged down in a tangled mass of petrified men’s bodies, but the whole central mass rotates. Euryale, still in her glossy black crinoline, and Medusa, now wearing a reptilian body-stocking, while the snakes on her head (and their ‘hundred tongues that flit’) pulsate, like embers, with reddish light, look back on some of ‘this panoply of frozen men,' handsome or not, apprehensive or warlike, all out to spill blood and carry off their trophy. Medusa recalls how rape has destroyed her body and her life.

 

Another young man, in black fatigues, appears, sword in hand and shielding his eyes, in the shadows, to die in an explosion of sudden yellow light and stage smoke, to the sound of sirens - so we see the curse at work; but Medusa then grieves for her victims’ mothers’ misery. In an agitated, physically and vocally demanding solo - the soprano is required to be as much as dancer as a singer - she recognises the ‘next fresh fool’ by his scent, as the ‘starchild’ (i.e. Perseus, son of Danae, and a fellow plaything of the gods) of the lullaby she used to hear over the waves. The set continues to turn as, in a long, complex, emotional duet, progressing through recognition, sympathy, elation and collusion, with some ringing top Bs (I think) for both, Medusa begs Perseus for the ‘reward’ of death: ‘Starchild, you are my mercy.’ She even gives him some advice, Tosca-like, on how to go about it properly. The light changes abruptly from warm to cold, he cuts off her head, the chorus sings out, the sisters arrive too late… The end.

 

The production is phenomenally well directed and lit, with stark beams casting expressionistic shadows, and the soloists evidently bought into it in full: they sang and acted with ferocious commitment from start to finish. Only Steier’s libretto - as far as I can tell from grubbing around on the internet, this is probably her first - is less consistent in register, slipping uncomfortably from contemporary crudeness to neo-Victorian euphemism. 

 

Claudia Boyle (Medusa), whom I’d so far come across in A Quiet Place and The Exterminating Angel, was obviously the absolute star in the consistently impressive cast. The title role, as staged or even, you might say, choreographed by Steier, is, as I said above, as demanding physically as it is vocally. The singer must, though movement, gesture and facial expression, act out Medusa’s psychological and bodily evolution while singing a demanding coloratura part, more subtle and varied than those of the other, more monolithically hectoring sopranos in the cast, Athena (Mary Elizabeth Williams) and her high priestess (Anu Komsi). Both were new to me, both powerful, Komsi perhaps drier and edgier in sound than the juicier - and utterly monstrous - Williams, who has already, I see, sung Isolde.

 

Paula Murrihy (Euryale) and Angela Denoke (Stheno) were evenly matched and equal in rich intensity as the immortal sisters, each, like all Bell’s characters, with her own, distinct vocal personality. The younger Murrihy, whom I’d seen a couple of times before, as Janacek’s Fox and Britten’s Countess of Essex in Gloriana, was the more supple of the two. Denoke is, as well all know, a veteran singing actress, one I’ve seen many times over the years, the last being in 2022 as Klytemnestra in Carsen’s Elektra. Her voice came across as now more matronly, harder at the top. Young Marie-Juliette Ghazarian, the third mezzo (if we can now take Denoke to be one), sang Danae’s lullaby lyrically from the wings.

 

Russian bass Konstantin Gorny I’d only seen once before, also in Brussels, in a concert performance of Parsifal in which Elena Pankratova’s commanding Kundry rather unfairly shunted everyone else, however worthy, aside. He was a suitably gruff, rough Poseidon, perhaps a touch anonymous. Canadian Josh Lovell has so far been, I see, mostly a baroque and Mozartian tenor, but to hear him - and Bell’s writing for Perseus leads you to it - you’d imagine him soon moving into roles like Rodolfo.

 

The chorus was kept in the background, so it’s hard to find anything specific to say about their contributions. The orchestra, under Michiel Delanghe, could, I thought, have played more incisively and with greater contrast, but when a piece is brand-new, it isn’t easy to say for sure.

 

All of the singing on Sunday afternoon was strikingly powerful and forcefully present, even up on the second balcony, where I sit; so much so that two of us, independently, wondered if some form of artifical lifting was in use. But our Belgian friends dismissed the idea. Whatever. Medusa is a powerful work, a welcome addition to the repertoire, and likely, I think, to travel. We left the house impressed - even stunned.

 

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.