Gluck - Iphigénie en Aulide/Iphigénie en Tauride (Aix-en-Provence, 2024)

Christoph Willibald Gluck - Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2024

Emmanuelle Haïm, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Corinne Winters, Russell Braun, Véronique Gens, Alasdair Kent, Florian Sempey, Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Alexandre Duhamel, Nicolas Cavallier, Soula Parassidis, Lukáš Zeman, Tomasz Kumięga, Timothé Rieu, Daphné Guivarch

ARTE Concert - 11th July 2024

The important and influential reforms that Christoph Willibald Gluck brought to opera seria are still impressive and remain an evident feature in his versions of two connected Greek dramas for the French stage, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). If you are used to viewing opera seria - and there have been many opportunities to revisit some of these great works in an authentic form over recent years - Gluck’s concise, minimal compositional form and the dramatic drive of through-composition feels thoroughly modern compared to the old traditional recitative and da capo aria form. And since the Greek dramas still have meaning that tells us about something about human experience in the modern world, so too do they benefit from this being highlighted in a modern production. All the more so when the two works are staged side by side as a single unit by Dmitri Tcherniakov for the 2024 Aix-en-Provence Festival 

Even the manner in which each of the works are presented on the stage allows for a continuous flow of drama that allows those themes to be better connected and explored. The overture for Iphigénie en Aulide shows Agamemnon's nightmare of carrying through his intention to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, demanded by the gods to ensure the safe passage of the Greek forces to Troy. Despite his pleas to Calchas, the Gods and even trying to ensure that Iphigenia doesn't arrive in Aulis, his efforts are in vain. The nightmare has a force of its own that will see it carried though by the time we get to the conclusion. The danger of what lies ahead remains as a driving force all the way through the opera, even if it doesn't come to pass that way in the opera, except for this one where it kind of does...

You can feel it even when, led to believe that Achilles who Iphigenia is to be married to has been unfaithful, Clytemnestra immediately pleads with her daughter to leave, but Iphigenia wants to find out the truth. There is an urgency here in the drama, in the music, which you can imagine intensifies as the drama progresses. There is no time for self-indulgent arias that stop the flow so that the tenor, soprano or mezzo-soprano can reflect on their misfortune. The dilemma can be felt, discussions and exchanges must be made (and perhaps there is still some aspects remaining for the seria form) but every scene feels like it is moving the drama forward, that events are happening quickly and there is an immediate need to act. The production bears that out while all the time maintaining an unreal air of regal sang froid, propriety and elegance, again all of which can be heard in the music. And in the voice, with Corrine Winters impressive in the title role.

Gluck's sense of pure musical drama is perhaps still not fully formed in Iphigénie en Aulide, and it is considered the lesser of the two works performed here. It's certainly less frequently staged than Iphigénie en Tauride. I personally don't buy into the idea of lesser Gluck. Lesser is just never a word I would use to describe any Gluck opera. Even his pre-reform works (all too rarely revived, alas) are superb and have their own qualities. It's not even a question of refinement, just that the later works benefit from a greater unity of form and content. It's hard however to see any weakness in Iphigénie en Aulide, particularly when it is well directed, as it is here. The music is beautiful and the sentiments are sincerely expressed without over-emphasis. It's a serious matter, a horrific one, a father about to sacrifice his daughter. You would actually expect there to be more outrage at the situation, but there is that element of knowing their duty, following the will of the gods and Iphigenia's love for her father, so instead it is profound grief that is evident here and expressed beautifully in the music and the singing.

To possibly overstate the relationship between the music and the direction, you could see the same intentions reflected in Elena Zaytseva set showing the house of Agamemnon as a house with transparent walls. It's elegant and stately, but there is nothing that can be kept hidden behind its doors. Tcherniakov takes that consistent worldview approach in most of his productions now, and it's evident here in the gloomy sepia tones, in the corruption of the royal family. The lengths to which they are prepared to go to cannot be overstated, so Tcherniakov puts it up there. The dream played out in the overture is a terrible presentiment and with the uniformity of the stage setting you can feel that tension reach a peak as Iphigenia dresses for wedding and brings herself closer to the terrible fate that awaits her after the celebrations. You see the nightmare unfold and repeat before your eyes.

We are dealing with mythology here so there is or should be no need to align this with any modern reality, although Krzysztof Warlikowski certainly managed to use contemporary themes successfully in his production of Gluck's Alceste. To say it's just mythology however doesn't take away from the human experience that Gluck presents in his version of Racine's tragedy, and it is enough for Tcherniakov to get that across. As well as highlighting the horror faced by Iphigenia, he doesn't neglect the fact that it is also a difficult duty for Agamemnon as a father, taking into account the contradiction between the public and private aspects of a king who needs to appear firm, commanding, brooking no doubt, no argument. Gluck's score bears all the complexity of these competing demands, Russell Braun's Agamemnon bringing this out in a fury out of remorse.

Considering the dramatic drive, there is nonetheless a variety of sentiments expressed. The wonderful dance music for the celebrations for Achilles and Iphigenia's marriage are retained and fit in well, and Achilles has a considerable part to play in the variations of tone and character as a figure caught in the middle of this absurd affair. Achilles is sung brilliantly by Alasdair Kent in the high tenor range, abruptly interrupting the course of events (and even the course of the music), and Véronique Gens is superb as Clytemnestra, inhabiting the role, responding with the dramatic expression of an expectantly grieving mother. That said, the sentiments expressed are limited by the singular drive of the situation towards a horrific notion of sacrifice, which might account for why the work is not more often revived.

As such it's a good idea then to expand the production to pair Iphigénie en Aulide with Iphigénie en Tauride, making this Aix-en-Provence production more of a fuller experience. It's been done before, relatively successfully at the Dutch National Opera. Tcherniakov however has a habit of overturning expectations and killing off figures who don't usually expire at the end of the opera and keeps alive those who traditionally die at the conclusion. At least here you would expect him to keep he needs to keep Iphigenia alive for "Part 2", but, well, that wouldn't be like Tcherniakov to make things easy now, would it? The impact of the family joining in a celebratory dance of death at the conclusion is certainly effective in its own way.

Iphigénie en Tauride is indeed then like a mirror image of Iphigénie en Aulide, Part 2: The Nightmare Continues. And indeed it opens with another nightmare, that of Clytemnestra murdering her husband Agamemnon. It takes place in the same outline of the house, only this time only a framework remains, sometimes neon lit (like Tcherniakov's Lulu), which when dulled down takes the appearance of a cage, a prison. Again, it's the overall tone that is important to the director, to establish the character of the work and make it effective rather than trying to find a way to make the archaic mythology work as a drama. Tcherniakov appropriately then plays Iphigénie en Tauride like it was Strauss’s Elektra, the tone one of the weight of crimes bringing increasing derangement and madness. Which is to be expected also on an island that executes any visitors, including a couple of shipwrecked Greek sailors who arrive there. Orestes too is damaged, deranged, tormented and full of aggression from his experiences.

Another characteristic found in Dmitri Tcherniakov productions is his intention to humanise works, bringing elevated mythological themes down to a level where everyone can relate to what is going on. There are no mystical priestesses in robes here, no high priest, as for example with the Met production. The inhabitants of Tauris look like refugees, like Tcherniakov's Knights of the Holy Grail in his Parsifal, wrapped up in heavy clothing to protect against the elements. The framework of a set becomes more a place of the mind here, an echo or a shadow of Aulis, where Orestes murders his mother in a ghostly recurrent nightmare. With its use of lighting illuminating scenes from the waking nightmare, it strikes a contrast that explores the work from the human experience as well as the deeper level of the psychological impact. As such, it reflects of course Gluck's musical exploration of the tone, mood and intent of the work.

Considering how he left things at the conclusion of Aulide, you can be sure that the director will - and consequently needs to - reinvent what takes place at the conclusion of this work, but it also has an impact elsewhere. Tcherniakov very much underplays the traditional key scene of the revelation of brother and sister. There is a gap of shocked silence, but Iphigenia seems to already know it's Orestes and is just waiting on her brother to finally acknowledge the reality of the tragic family misfortune. And again, it would be wrong to think that it's just Orestes who has suffered. As in Aulide, the goddess Diana (Soula Parassidis) appears at the conclusion as a double of Iphigenia. Quite what you are to make of that and how much psychoanalytical examination you want to subject the work to is up to you, but it's consistent in its reference back to what takes place in Aulis. What is perhaps more worthy of consideration is how this applies to the state of the world today, to current wars where victims become executioners. The horror of that doesn't need to be spelled out.

Whether you like Tcherniakov's work on the operas or not, the intentions are sincere and thought-provoking. What is not questionable however is the quality of these works themselves and the impact they have in this production by the joining the two operas together. The singing in Iphigénie en Tauride relies as much in the impact of the choral work, which was excellent throughout, as it does on Orestes and Iphigenia. Both Florian Sempey and Corrine Winters were fine, but it was certainly more of a challenge for Winters, singing two operas back-to-back and the latter in a lower tessitura than she would normally sing. It felt a little less dynamic as a result, but the direction also called for a muted performance here. The real winner here was Gluck, the music side-by-side, back-to-back and end-to-end doubly glorious under the baton of conductor Emmanuelle Haïm.

External links: ARTE Concert, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, Aix Festival Digital Stage

Gluck - Iphigénie en Aulide/Iphigénie en Tauride

Christoph Willibald Gluck - Iphigénie en Aulide/Iphigénie en Tauride


De Nederlandse Opera, Amsterdam, 2011

Marc Minkowski, Pierre Audi, Véronique Gens, Salomé Haller, Nicolas Testé, Anne Sofie von Otter, Frédéric Antouin, Martijn Cornet, Christian Helmer, Laurent Alvaro

Mireille Delunsch, Laurent Alvaro, Jean-François Lapointe, Yann Beuron, Simone Riksman, Rosanne von Sandwijk, Peter Arink, Harry Teenwen

Opus Arte

You don't see productions of Iphigénie en Aulide coming along very often, or indeed much of C.W. Gluck's works these days which, considering the importance of the composer to the world of opera, is something of a mystery. Even more rarely do you see it paired the way it is here at the De Nederlandse Opera with its sister work Iphigénie en Tauride, but the two works are perfectly complementary. Composed at different times with a different approach to Gluck's reformist agenda, they were perhaps never intended to be performed together, but the pairing of the two works side-by-side like this at least allows those differences in approach - so important to the progress and development of the traditional form of the modern opera - to be better appreciated. And at a time when you can see numerous complete productions of Berlioz's epic Les Troyens, there's no reason why Gluck's smaller scale and more intimate take on a related Greek mythological story shouldn't also be seen in this kind of staging.

As it happens, the intimacy and relative simplicity of the work make Gluck's two Iphigénie operas rather more difficult to stage by a company with the resources to take it on in a relatively large modern theatre. Those challenges are taken on by Pierre Audi, the artistic director of De Nederlandse in the setting of the Amsterdam Music Theatre, while the musical challenges of presenting the works is placed in the experienced hands of Marc Minkowski and his remarkable period-instrument ensemble, Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble. The difficulties in presenting the two works aren't entirely overcome by the innovative approach employed here - playing largely in the round, compressing the drama into a small area at the front of the stage and putting the orchestra at the back, with the chorus section arranged oratorio behind them - but it's a staging that works well in as far as it draws the full dramatic power out of the works. Which is what Gluck is all about really.

The subjects may be classical ones from Euripides, but by getting right back to basics of dramatic situation and expression, Gluck was able to find deeply human characteristics - love, anger, betrayal, vengeance - in mythological situations that elevated those feelings and emotions by placing them in the grander picture of questions of war, honour, duty, fate, destiny if you like, or the will of the Gods. There's consequently an intimacy as well as an epic quality that gives Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride immense power. They are stories of great simplicity and utmost gravity, and they require little more - as Pierre Audi recognises here - than a few strong images and symbols to help define their essential characteristics and at the same time serve to link them together. In Iphigénie en Aulide, the image and the notion of a blade (an axe here) pressed to a daughter's breast by her father in an act of sacrifice to the goddess Diana, is one that resonates throughout the whole work, influencing and directing the complex emotions and family issues that arise out of this terrible and tragic situation. In Iphigénie en Tauride, the image of sacrifice and family tragedy is also central to the work, Iphigenia now a priestess of Diana and about to unwittingly execute her brother Orestes, who (as any good opera goer knows from Strauss's Elektra) has been involved in a situation that has seen him take bloody justice upon their mother Clytemnestra for the death of their father Agamemnon.

Pierre Audi does reasonably well to give dramatic action to the poetry of the libretti in both works, retaining the intimacy of the emotional focus, while at the same time finding a way to project that out to an audience at the Amsterdam Music Theatre. He does that by reducing the size of the stage, focussing in on a central area flanked by scaffolding staircases that is emphasised here on the filmed recording by some overhead views of a circle that from one scene to the next can represent a sacrificial altar or a pit. It's not much to look at, and the costumes are far from classical, the colours, materials and camouflage patterns emphasising the military aspect of the Greek-Trojan war background in Iphigénie en Aulide, although Iphigénie en Tauride is a little more traditional in the gowns of the priestesses- but it's sufficient to hint at the greater sequence of events that set these dramas into motion without over-dramatising or over-emphasising actions over the expression though the words, the singing and the music.

And that perfect balance is precisely what Gluck's reformist agenda set out to achieve. It's hard then to fault the presentation and the careful equilibrium that is maintained by Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble in conjunction with the stage direction and the singing. I'm not as familiar with Iphigénie en Aulide as I am with Iphigénie en Tauride, but it's clear by the spirited orchestral performance of the latter, wonderfully expressive, delivered with controlled ferocity in places even, that the music director has taken into consideration the relative merits of the two different approaches that the individual works represent and dealt with them accordingly, using each to highlight, contrast with and complement the other. In the case of Iphigénie en Tauride, I've heard it performed with more beauty and lyricism by William Christie and Les Arts Florissantes (in a Claus Guth production on DVD), but never quite so forcefully in a way that integrates it so well with the musical drama. Both works are performed moreover on period instruments tuned to the original pitch.

The singing is also strong in the performances of both works, with only Salomé Haller's Diana common to both. Iphigenia in Iphigénie en Aulide is sung and performed marvellously by Veronique Gens with her customary attention to detail and the requirements of Baroque opera singing. There are no mannerisms and no exaggeration by any of the performers, who treat the work with the necessary dramatic gravity and sincerity. Surprisingly, as she is such a wonderful singer of Gluck, and has even recorded the role of Clytemnestra in this opera before, only Anne Sofie von Otter seemed underpowered and unable to match the intensity of the performances.

In Iphigénie en Tauride, Iphegenia is sung by Mireille Delunsch, a soprano in a role that is more often sung by a mezzo-soprano. More than just capably sung, Delunsch has a nice tone and timbre that suits arrangement here and proves to be strong enough to make the necessary impression. The casting for this work however favours and puts more emphasis on the fate and the friendship of Orestes and Plyade. Orestes is sung wonderfully by Jean-François Lapointe, who not only bears a certain similarity in appearance to Bryn Terfel but also has a comparable voice. Strong, with clear diction and good expression (if a little stiff in acting), he certainly makes more of an impression as a true baritone than Plácido Domingo did at the Metropolitan Opera a few seasons ago. He also works wonderfully off Yann Beuron's excellent Pylade, the two combined bringing another dimension to the work.

The presentation on Blu-ray is strong with a clear, bright and detailed image. The audio mixes, on account of the acoustics, are a little bright and echoing, losing focus in the surround DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 mix. The PCM track through headphones however reveals the qualities of the sound and the performances very well. As well as two full-length operas on this release, there are also two 20-minute Behind the Scenes Introductions on the BD, one for each opera, and Cast Galleries. The booklet contains an essay and two full synopses. The BD is All-region compatible, with subtitles in English, French, German, Dutch and Korean.