Debussy : Pelléas et Mélisande
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Although director Katie Mitchell has been a regular contributor to the Aix Festival over the last five or six years, the last thing I had heard about her work was the Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden earlier this year, the production the house felt obliged to issue an "R" notice for (to all intents and purposes) in advance of the opening night. What I had read of that, and references to her other productions, did not strike me as particularly encouraging when it came to staging something as fragile as Debussy's only completed opera. What emerged had its pros and cons, but in the end was not as terrible as I had been imagining.
The one thing that rapidly became apparent was that Mitchell, like quite a few other theatre directors turning their hands to opera, concentrated solely on the text and how to interpret it, and more or less ignored the music. She admitted herself in a programme note that she's no musician, and it shows, because the thing about opera is, of course the text's important, but the composer has done a good deal of the interpreting of it in advance of anyone else, and that really shouldn't be overlooked. So Mitchell has re-set the piece in a prosperous bourgeois household, but apart from elements of the colour scheme, the sense of water that pervades Debussy's score is completely absent from the staging, and even the fountain required for two scenes is shown as a dilapidated and empty swimming pool, with just a little stagnant water accumulated right at the bottom. If the updating hardly raises an eyebrow these days, the 'dryness' of the production is a little more disconcerting.
On the other hand, there are some interesting ideas here. Where it's more common to view Mélisande as every man's phantasm, here it is Mélisande who is dreaming, and 'trying out', so to speak, the different men. The one who escapes is young Yniold, because Mitchell has dodged that bullet by turning him into a tomboy girl, whose relationship with Mélisande is as perturbed as it is with the rest of the household, but certainly not sexual. The piece as a whole is proposed as Mélisande's dream, though at the end neither she, nor we, seem clear about what has been (or might have been) learned from the experience. What was striking, however, was the staging, with the stage divided into framed scenes, the rest occluded by a black screen that could slide back and forward, or up and down, to reveal as much or as little as required. The effect was intensely cinematographic, one scene melting into another while behind the black screen the technical crew (justly applauded at the end) was busy silently swapping one module for another.
Despite the easy visual flow of the scenes, however, Mitchell's dream world was very static, and it imposed a very slow pace on the piece musically. Although both vocal plateau and orchestra were excellent, and in particular there were moments of extremely beautiful playing from Salonen and the Philharmonia, yet overall the piece lacked dramatic tension. They managed to pull it together for the end of Act 3, the explosive dialogue between Golaud and Yniold, with Laurent Naouri finally getting a chance to show just why he has been one of, if not the leading interpreter of Golaud world-wide for years now, and ably partnered by Chloé Briot's troubled Yniold, and the rest of the opera picked up from then on. Stéphane Degout negotiated Pelléas's high-lying lines (for a baritone) with ease and vibrancy, while the slow pace eventually found its proper frame in the stillness of the last act. Barbara Hannigan, however, though vocally satisfying, was obliged by the concept to project a Mélisande of such detachment and unconcern that the character's usual mystery was no longer of any great interest. If Mélisande has so little care for the world around her, how can we be expected to care for her and what becomes of her?
Visually, therefore, an extremely striking production, but Mitchell's unconcern for the music did neither her, her singers, nor the audience, any favours, though the singers and Salonen did their best.
[Next : 17th July]
No comments:
Post a Comment