Offenbach - Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Brussels, 2019)

 

Jacques Offenbach - Les Contes d'Hoffmann

La Monnaie-De Munt, 2019

Alain Altinoglu, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Eric Cutler, Patricia Petibon, Michèle Losier, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Gábor Bretz, François Piolino, Willard White, Loïc Félix, Yoann Dubruque, Alejandro Fonte, Byoung-Jin Lee

ARTE Concert streaming - December 2019
It's not hard to recognise that there's a darker side to the stories and the fate of the character Hoffman in The Tales of Hoffmann, but it's by no means certain in my experience that Jacques Offenbach actually manages to draw them out in his opera. The composer's only true opera aside from his delightful comic operetta entertainments, The Tales of Hoffmann is often treated the same way as his opéra-comique works and it's rare that a director will address the underlying issues of alcoholism and mental illness in any serious way. You might expect Krzysztof Warlikowski to try to do a little more with this at La Monnaie, and he does even if it feels he's trying a little too hard.

Always keen to give a classic work a contemporary treatment that addresses the issues in a way that we are more familiar with, often using references to whatever is currently hot in the movie world, Warlikowsi goes the whole hog this time and updates the drunken fantasist of ETA Hoffman's tales into a Hollywood screenwriter-director going through a personal crisis. Obsessed with his leading actress Stella, who whatever way you look at this opera is very much the muse for his creativity, he strives to find a way to overcome his own demons through the roles he develops for her.

When it comes to movie references it's well known that Warlikowsi often relies on the films of David Lynch for inspiration, and since Lynch has tackled similar subjects of Hollywood chewing up its stars in his films Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, it makes sense (some kind of sense) to employ the same sinister qualities and techniques that Lynch evokes in those movies. Warlikowski doesn't stop there however, borrowing the three pink showgirls from the casino from Twin Peaks: The Return, sets the Olympia segment in Twin Peaks's The Black Lodge, has a microphone stand from similar sequences in Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive and even has Nicklausse and Giulietta swap identities wearing black and blonde wigs in a nod to Lynch's surreal noir Lost Highway. I'm sure Wild at Heart must be in there somewhere too.

The other current hot movie reference is where the villain(s) of the piece, Lindorf/Coppélius/Doctor Miracle/Dapertutto and his crew all adopt the make-up and look of the Joker. As far as getting underneath the surface these references are definitely in the right zone for using farce and fantasy to suggest a sinister undercurrent where drawing on personal resources and responses for the sake of entertainment can take its toll on creative artists. It's most evident in the Olympia story where the automaton becomes a kind of manufactured starlette groomed for stardom, Hoffmann's "beer goggles" blinding him to the superficiality and fakeness that his assistant Nicklausse is able to see. Olympia indeed becomes a Mulholland Drive-like victim of the Hollywood system.

As far as that goes Warlikowski gets the point across effectively in Act I, but even though the concept permits Hoffmann as director to pour his auteur obsessions out on the screen in the other sections of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, it does - as I often find with this work - tend to drag and get somewhat unwieldy. Warlikowski's references, interventions, interpolations, twisting of the narrative and adding layers doesn't really add much more to this, but tends rather to make it all even harder to follow than usual. In the Antonia section for example, Patricia Petibon breaks out of character (see Laura Dern in Inland Empire) and into another character as an actress who uses her own trauma of the death of her son to feed into her performance of Antonia, and show how it takes a lot out of her emotionally.

Essentially Krzysztof Warlikowski just wants to bring an edge of realism/surrealism to the work, showing that behind Hoffmann's fantasies are real people with real personal lives and drama that Hollywood exploits for the sake of entertainment. If you want to you can extend that another level in that this also makes you aware that the performers of the opera also have their own lives and baggage that it can be difficult to reconcile with an artistic lifestyle. Certainly the fake Oscar ceremony that Warlikowski inserts before the conclusion hits those points about home in a hugely effective and even slightly discomforting way.

Unfortunately it's just all too much, Warlikowski as he is wont to do throwing everything at the opera, much more than I feel Offenbach's writing can sustain, and as a result it feels like a bit of a mess. Which, to be frank, and accepting that Offenbach left the work unfinished at the time of his death, would be how I regard The Tales of Hoffmann as an opera anyway. Less is often more with this work in my experience, and it's telling that the only wholly successful stage productions I have seen are those that scale the whole thing down. The 2015 ETO production (which also used Hoffmann as a movie director much more effectively than Warlikowski) and the Irish National Opera's 2018 version demonstrate that despite my misgivings the work can indeed aspire to something greater.

Whatever its structural or narrative weaknesses, the one redeeming quality of The Tales of Hoffmann as far as I'm concerned is in its melodies and songs that run through the work, in the repetitive catchiness of the "Chanson de Kleinzach" and in the charm of "Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour" and it's there that the real strength of the La Monnaie production conducted by Alain Altinoglu can be found. The latter sung by Patricia Petibon and Michèle Losier is certainly worth waiting for - well, almost worth waiting for as I found my patience running out as usual with this work. Losier is superb, genuinely making something greater out of the Nicklausse role, Petibon not always able to meet the challenges of the demanding soprano roles in the opera. Eric Cutler's Hoffman is sympathetically engaging and Gábor Bretz cuts a suitably sinister figure as The Joker basically, in a production of Hoffmann that is certainly no laughing matter.

Links: La Monnaie-De Munt, ARTE Concert

Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande (Aix-en-Provence, 2016)

Claude Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2016

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Katie Mitchell, Stéphane Degout, Barbara Hannigan, Laurent Naouri, Franz Josef Selig, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Chloé Briot, Thomas Dear

Opera Platform - 7th July 2016

It should come as no surprise that Katie Mitchell and Martin Crimp's vision for Pelléas et Mélisande is far removed from any setting in antiquity, but it is also substantially different from the rather more common abstract dream-world setting of most contemporary productions. The cross-over between dreams and reality nevertheless plays an important part in this production for the 2016 Aix-en-Provence festival.

There are no towers then, no fountain, no sea, no caverns or large rocks, few of the symbolist features that might appear to be critical to Maurice Maeterlinck's original drama. Adherence to these ethereal and symbolic elements does however tend to leave interpretation open-ended, and that is something that director Katie Mitchell and dramatist Martin Crimp seem to want to avoid. They have a very specific reading of Pelléas et Mélisande and, knowing Katie Mitchell's work, that is unsurprisingly a feminist reading, but it's also a convincing one that accounts for the nature and the quality of the piece: Mélisande is a woman in an unhappy marriage.

The opening scene seems to be critical to the establishment of this reading and the world it is going to take place in. Mélisande wanders into an empty bedroom in her wedding dress looking confused. In a scene that seems to encapsulate the past, the present and the future, Mélisande is lost and is "rescued" by Golaud (even though he is lost himself). Her first fearful words to him, when he appears, are pertinent - "Ne me touchez pas, ne me touchez pas!". Thereafter she becomes a victim of forces beyond her ability to control, her sense of identity lost in an unhappy marriage where she becomes nothing more than a pawn, a plaything with no choice or volition of her own.

This description of Mélisande's nature can be heard in the floating impressionistic music that Debussy fits so remarkably to Maeterlinck's play and it's emphasised here in the dreamlike quality of the first scene. The bedroom also doubles as a forest, the undergrowth creeping up the walls as past, present and future all come together, creating a mental prison where Mélisande is psychologically abused and broken down. The impression of being treated like a doll is emphasised during the musical interludes, where Mélisande is attended on by maids in an adjoining room who drop and lift her stiff lifeless body, dressing and undressing her for the next scene.

Lizzie Clachan's sets for Katie Mitchell's usual multi-level, multi-room stage designs are exquisite and well-suited to a work that floats imperceptibly and often without logic between scenes and locations. The mechanics of the scene changes are impressively realised, the box rooms magically slipping into place in an ever changing configuration that matches the mood of the setting even if it never conforms to the work's regular established locations of caverns and towers. The "Blind Man's Well", for example, where Mélisande drops her ring into the pool, is a disused room with a drained swimming pool where branches of trees have broken through its windows.

Such scenes - Mélisande blindly following Pélleas into the room - capture everything about the closed-off, decaying world of Allemonde as an expression of Mélisande's marriage and mental state. Symbolism is everything in Maeterlinck, and the symbolism adopted by Mitchell does everything it ought to do, and that is mainly to unsettle, or at least show an unsettled view of the world from Mélisande's perspective. This goes as far as Mélisande looking on at a double of herself with a distorted or psycho-realistic view of how Golaud treats her. "Je suis malade ici" doesn't just mean that she is wistfully melancholic, here her true state of mind is made apparent.

Which also means that the familiar connecting narrative thread of Pelléas et Mélisande becomes increasingly difficult to follow as the opera progresses. Like many of Mitchell's productions with multi-level parallel scenes (Written on Skin, Alcina, Lucia di Lammermoor), there is often more going on and made explicit than needs to be. This results in a lot of comings and goings, scene changes, action taking place in multiple windows at the same time and often with doubles in different timelines.

Martin Crimp's dramatic argument also becomes harder to fathom the longer it goes on, taking increasingly strange dreamlike twists further away from the familiar narrative. Not content with Mélisande being a helpless figure torn between the projected desires and fears of Pelléas and Golaud, Arkel too gets in on the action here in one disturbing scene, and even Yniold is ambiguously sexualised and abused. The stone that is too heavy for him/her to lift has a very definite meaning here beyond the more abstract symbolism it usually carries. It's all a bit Pinteresque.

Despite it all - and notwithstanding the suggestion of a cop-out implication that "it was all a dream" - Mélisande still remains enigmatic, her true desires unknown or ambiguous, which is really how it should be. It makes characterisation difficult, but Barbara Hannigan's fine singing and expression (or lack of expression where appropriate) makes that very interesting to consider. The singing elsewhere in this luxuriously cast production also accounts for it being haunting and full of hidden menace. Stéphane Degout is an experienced Pelléas (reportedly his last time singing the role) and Laurent Naouri a fine Golaud, but viewed from Mélisande's perspective it's hard to really grasp their true nature here. Esa-Pekka Salonen gives us a gorgeous reading of Debussy's wondrous score.

Links: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, Opera Platform

Dukas - Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Strasbourg, 2015 - Webcast)

Paul Dukas - Ariane et Barbe-bleue

L’Opéra National du Rhin, Strasbourg - 2015

Daniele Callegari, Olivier Py, Lori Phillips, Marc Barrard, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Aline Martin, Rocío Pérez, Gaëlle Ali, Lamia Beuque, Jaroslaw Kitala, Peter Kirk

Culturebox - 6 May 2015

There's no doubt that fairy tales have a certain power to unsettle and create a sense of unease, and it's usually in respect of a moral or a cautionary message. Clinically exploring the psychological underpinnings of those works in some modern productions, particularly the legend of Bluebeard in the operas by Dukas and Bartok, can however tend to take away somewhat from the dark mystery of the myth behind them. Olivier Py's production of Ariane et Barbe-bleue for L’Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg exposes some of the work's subtext without losing its edge of dark, mysterious suggestion, but there would appear to be other elements that Py wants to take from this distinctive working of the Charles Perrault fairy tale.

In as far as most modern revisions of Ariane et Barbe-bleue go, and indeed of Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, the emphasis is often on the psychoanalytical aspect of female psychology and sexuality. Ariane's flirtation with the notorious Bluebeard is often less that of an innocent being delivered into the hands of a notorious suspected murderer of his previous wives, less a cautionary tale on the nature of searching for forbidden knowledge, and more as the freedom of a woman to probe, question and explore her own sexuality rather than submitting to a man's needs. In the age of '50 Shades of Grey', this question can be taken even further into sexual exploration and the dangers that lie within such experimentation.

It's hard therefore to go back and simply see the Bluebeard legend as nothing more than a fairy tale, but there ought to be another way to explore the themes of the work, and Maeterlinck's libretto, departing considerably from Perrault's version, offers opportunities to do that. The search for forbidden knowledge, as related in Ariane's determination to unlock the door to the Seventh Room despite the express instructions of her new husband, is only the starting point as far as Dukas's opera goes. In fact, Ariane is scarcely bothered to even look at the treasures contained in the other rooms, despite the Nurse being satisfied with the contents of these alone. Py likewise is hardly interested in this aspect in his production, the treasure that they contain being invisible as far as the audience are concerned.

All the audience can see are two women in a dark underground dungeon, walking though a single door into an equally dark, squalid bare room, with a little bit of falling glitter briefly illuminating the dual-level set. While the nurse has no capacity to imagine anything more precious than glittering stones, Ariane is far from impressed. The treasures she seeks are not precious jewels or even material objects, but something deeper - "Ce que j'aime est plus beau que les plus belles pierres", she tells the nurse at one stage, and shortly after this as they approach the 7th door - perhaps more significantly as far as the director's interpretation goes here - "Le bonheur que je veux ne peut vivre dans l'ombre". ("The happiness I am looking for cannot live in the shadows").

There is unquestionably more than a suggestion of sexual undercurrent to the meaning of these words, and that is certainly not underplayed in Py's direction. There is considerable full nudity on the stage, with each of Bluebeard's previous wives represented by naked dancers in the extended musical interlude sections of the work, as well as at other points throughout. Not murdered by Bluebeard in this version of the fairy tale, the women are nonetheless captives, enslaved, abused, raped, serving the master (Bluebeard also represented by a naked male dancer wearing a devil mask with horns) and his accomplices. All this takes place in eerie red light, in the darkness of the upper room, and in the woods surrounding Bluebeard's castle.

What is significant about the Maeterlick and Dukas version of the story, apart from the fact that the wives are not dead here (and that the wives are all named after heroines in other Maeterlinck plays, including a Mélisande), is that Ariane attempts to help them escape from the dungeon and allow them to see the light. When the nervous villagers see the women however, they finally rally to storm the castle and beat Bluebeard almost to death. Feeling sympathy for their captor, or perhaps just no longer capable of conceiving of any other life outside of that which they have experienced at the hands of their abuser, the women however each refuse to follow Ariane now that she has opened the path to their freedom.

For Py, an actor and theatre director who is well known for his political stance as well as his Catholicism, there are familiar themes in his treatment of this turn of events in Ariane et Barbe-bleue. According to the director himself - and without neglecting the sexual content of the work - the political questions that this gives rise to is his primary concern in the direction. When people are oppressed, they don't know how to respond to someone who wants to deliver them from their captivity - "Personne ne veut être délivré. Il vaut mieux se libérer soi-même". The need to throw off the chains needs to come from within. The dark rituals showing women liberating themselves from a Devil and looking toward the light however has more of a suggestion of Py's Christian outlook than any political message. The messages might be mixed - Py is happy to let much remain in the shadows - but the director's treatment is nonetheless typically strong, distinctive and supportive of the material.

Lori Phillips took on the role of Ariane for this production, replacing Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, who I've heard singing it before. It's a challenging role, demanding Wagnerian stamina and force at a very high pitch, and if the voice tires of such sustained singing it can waver and lose its dramatic force. For Phillips that comes around the scene of leading the captive women towards the light, but she never loses control and rallies through in the second part of the work. Elsewhere, the singing among the nearly entirely female cast is good, the variety of voices giving individual character to Bluebeard's wives. Daniele Callegari weaves a steady line between Wagner and Debussy in his conducting of the orchestra of the Opéra National du Rhin.

Links: Culturebox, L'Opéra National du Rhin

Hurel - Les Pigeons d'Argile (Toulouse 2014 - Webcast)

Philippe Hurel - Les Pigeons d'Argile

Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, 2014

Tito Ceccherini, Mariame Clément, Gaëlle Arquez, Aimery Lefèvre, Vincent Le Texier, Vannina Santoni, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Gilles Ragon

Culturebox - 20 April 2014

Tanguy Viel, a French crime writer known for cinematic references in his books - Hitchcock notably being a key figure of influence - employs very clear cinematic techniques as the librettist for Philippe Harel's first opera work, Les Pigeons d'Argile (Clay Pigeons). Making its 2014 premiere at the Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, the subject of the opera - a reworking of the Patty Hearst case - and the genre almost demands a cinematic treatment, which inevitably gives rise to the question of whether Les Pigeons d'Argile wouldn't have been better suited to the screen than the stage.

The relationship between opera and cinema, of music and drama working closely together, was recognised right from the earliest days of the new medium. Prokofiev, Strauss and Korngold were among the earliest adopters of the new artform, not just composing film soundtracks, but also incorporating cinematic effects and montage techniques into their works (Strauss's Intermezzo for example being made up of cuts of short scenes rather than traditional longer acts). By and large however, cinema and opera have tended to follow their own separate paths over the course of the 20th century, with only the occasional experimental collaboration made in the use of film and video in stagings and even more rarely seeing any adventurous compositional influence on the musical language employed.

It's only relatively recently that we've seem modern opera look at cinema as something to be embraced wholeheartedly into opera. Beyond the composition of traditional soundtracks and the translation of films into opera (most notably Brokeback Mountain), Philip Glass has for example also collaborated in the creative process of filmmaking through the fusion of music and image in films like Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. Glass has however also taken cinema into the opera world in bold works like La Belle et La Bête, scoring an opera to the rhythm and montage of Cocteau's classic film with opera singing placed on top of the existing dialogue. More recently Michel van der Aa and David Mitchell's Sunken Garden incorporated live singing performances that interacted with actors in filmed sections.

The importance of cinema on Les Pigeons d'Argile is evident right from the prologue. Opening with a shoot-out in a hangar, pre-recorded filmed footage is projected to show a more realistic cinematic version of what is being acted live out on stage.  What is significant about the opening scene however is not that it's just a way to make a shoot-out and car-chase action sequence more realistic than could ever be achieved on a theatre stage, but that it's a set up for that very cinematic narrative device of the flashback. Act I and II then go back to look at the sequence of events that lead up to this scene, with Act III considering the aftermath.

This is not particularly revolutionary in terms of how it affects the composition of an opera piece, since the tone of the music and even overtures have long - since Wagner at least - been used to foreshadow dramatic developments. In terms of strict plot development, there's not much here either that wouldn't be better suited to a film screen. Based on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, it's a story of love and revolution, a textbook case of Stockholm Syndrome. In Les Pigeons d'Argile, Patricia 'Patty' Baer is the daughter of a millionaire industrialist kidnapped by left-wing revolutionaries who comes to sympathise with their aims and joins them in extremist activities like robbing banks.

The laying out of the plot is fairly conventional, as it the manner in which the characters are drawn. There's not a great deal of depth or subtlety in how the two sides of the "class struggle" are viewed here. The use of guns has already been established by the prologue, and it's while viewing a media arranged shooting of clay pigeons on Bernard Baer's estate that the two young Marxist revolutionaries Toni and Charlie hatch their plan to kidnap the daughter of the millionaire and aspiring politician.

The prologue, where Toni's father is shot by the police while helping his son escape, also highlights the fact that the opera is concerned not so much with the political ramifications of the class struggle as with the psychological questions surrounding Patty's Stockholm Syndrome behaviour and Toni's rebellion. That's seen as having a lot to do with fathers. Toni's father Pietro is an "old socialist", a small time village activist who has never really had any thought of changing the world. Fond of his wine, the old man is an embarrassment to his son, but wants to find a way to redeem himself. In the past he and Bernard Baer were friends, but each went separate ways. Baer too however - although less strongly characterised - also wants to win the approval of his daughter, and believes it can be done though his wealth and success.

On the side of the younger generation, there's not a lot of insight or originality of observation here either. The children want to break away from the ideals of their parents and a corrupt system that defines their roles, hoping to set up a "new constitution". Their desire to keep personal feelings separate from their ideals is however shown to be unrealistic. Charlie is unable to keep "love and revolution" separate (we are told frequently in a repeated motif), and jealousy creeps in when the childhood friendship between Toni and Patty is rekindled, leading her to sell-out the revolutionaries to the chief of police. I'm not sure why Charlie's position between love and revolution dominates over the family, class and generational differences, but that seems to be the intention of the creators, perhaps as a way of reflecting the unpredictable element of human feelings.

This however comes at the cost of failing to adequately explore the other characters, with Bernard Baer in particular being neglected. As an opera, Les Pigeons d'Argile ought to be able to bring a greater depth to the characterisation than is evident from the superficial cinematic nature of the expositional dialogue and compressed shortcuts of the storyline. Viel's dialogue for the libretto is sung mainly as parlando recitative, and the singing voices at least bringing full intensity to the emotions and the situations. Harel's score accompanies and underlines the sentiments, emphasising declarations with short phrases and exclamatory flurries, but it doesn't succeed in establishing an overall distinct musical tone for the piece or give the subject any wider dimension.

As a theatrical performance however and purely as a drama, there's much to enjoy in Toulouse's world premiere presentation of the work directed by Mariame Clément. The singing from all the principal singers is exceptionally good, Gaëlle Arquez in particular standing out as Charlie, who tends to take the centre stage in the work. Aside from the magic-camera on-stage projected footage (projections of hand-held cameras show the characters in real-world setting rather than on the stage) and even simulated freeze-frames of action, the filming and editing of the performance also adopts a cinematic approach, using split-screen techniques to capture simultaneous action. Little of this however is as innovative as the combination of film and opera could and ought to be.

Links: Culturebox, Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse

Thomas - Hamlet

Ambroise Thomas - Hamlet

La Monnaie - De Munt, Brussels 2013

Marc Minkowski, Olivier Py, Vincent Le Texier, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Stéphane Degout, Till Fechner, Lenneke Ruiten, Rémy Mathieu, Henk Neven, Gijs Van der Linden, Jérôme Varnier

France TV Culturebox, La Monnaie - Internet Streaming

It's fairly evident that Ambroise Thomas's opera version of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' is far from faithful to the original. As I've noted myself elsewhere, while it starts out with good intentions it quite literally loses the plot half-way through and becomes more a case of 'Scenes inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet'. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed if there were any way of conveying the essence of 'Hamlet' as music theatre, it's probably best achieved in the style of a 5-Act Grand Opera. Much depends however on the stage direction being strong enough to make up for the liberties Barbier and Carré take with the plot and characterisation. Directed by Oliver Py, La Monnaie's production takes a few liberties itself but manages nonetheless to make a strong case for the work.

Shakespeare purists might balk at the idea, but for Hamlet to fit into a grand opera template, it requires considerable pruning and some reordering of events. There's no ghostly apparition on the battlement of Elsinor castle at the opening here, for example. That regular feature of the grand opera tradition is saved to be employed for effect later when Hamlet himself witnesses it in the second scene of Act I. Before that we have a huge joyous celebration with chorus for the wedding of Claudius to Gertrude, a scene that is in marked contrast with Hamlet's gloomy disposition and his speech about the inconstancy of women. We also have a love scene between Hamlet and Ophelia, and a display of friendship between Hamlet and Laertes. Then we finally get the big scene where Hamlet learns from the ghost of his dead father of the deed most foul committed by his brother.

That's a great way to compositionally reorder the scenes for an opera, introducing all the characters, displaying a wide variety of emotions with arias and duets in a standard series of numbers and set-pieces, achieving the necessary impact without straying too far away from the intentions of the drama (even if the 19th century French language isn't quite as rich as Shakespeare's Elizabethan verse). It's particularly effective in Oliver Py's staging of the work (the 2013 revival of the production directed here by Andreas Zimmermann). Py's regular collaborator, set and costume designer Pierre-André Weitz, provides an ingenious subterranean labyrinthine construction of revolving and shifting staircases that resembles something out of an MC Escher puzzle, an impossible architecture of dark recesses that reflect the mindset of the characters.

All the characters are a mass of neuroses here, not just Hamlet - although is always remains possible that everything we see and how it plays out is just a reflection of Hamlet's disturbed mind. When we first encounter him in this production it's descending a staircase while cutting lacerations into his own chest and arms. Deeply affected by the death of his father, he's prepared to see conspiracy everywhere in the world, in the murder of his father. Even Ophelia and his mother's attempts to lighten his disposition are met with suspicion and mistrust. Hamlet however, particularly in this production, seems to be marked by a sense of futility to change events. His direction of the drama of the travelling players can be seen in this light, either an attempt to make the world and events conform to his dark personal view or as an indirect and impotent revolt against it.

Perhaps reflecting the state of Hamlet's troubled mind, Claudius and Gertrude are first seen stumbling down the same staircase as Hamlet, unsure of their footing. During the apparition of the ghost of his father, Claudius stumbles onto the stage in a drunken stupor, Gertrude laughs wantonly and Ophelia appears surrounded by shirtless men wearing masks who also torment her (or seduce her) during her death scene. There's plenty of room for such ambiguities in Hamlet, and Py makes the most of them without going too far overboard. Well, not often anyway. There are certainly some Freudian issues that can be played upon in the play, but some might find an entirely naked Hamlet being bathed by his mother before wrestling her to the ground and then dunking her under the water a little bit pointless.

As conventional as the arrangements often are (barring the unusual employment of a saxophone solo in the travelling players scene), the subject is nonetheless well handled by Ambroise Thomas, who matches the music and the numbers with the tone of the drama. As if the saxophone is some kind of indication however, things start to go a little wayward following the reenactment of Claudius' crime in 'The Murder of Gonzago'. It's as if after everything has been brought out into the open and laid bare the characters have nothing more to do but recoil at the horror of it all. Any further progression of the plot kind of grinds to a halt while the subsequent numbers are played out in the final acts. There's a disproportionate amount of time given over for example to Ophelia's mad scene, evidently to fill-out the soprano role, but also to satisfy the French mania of the period for this character.

Stéphane Degout has some uncommon challenges when singing the role of Hamlet, including singing a major aria entirely naked, but he copes admirably. Degout is making Hamlet very much his own much the same way that he is with Pelléas, singing these key French baritone roles with the required delicate lyric romanticism underpinned with a commanding strength of purpose. The same could be said about Vincent Le Texier's command of key bass roles in the French repertoire, bringing depth and character to Claudius here in the same way that he tackles Golaud in Pelléas et Mélisande. Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo is not so strong, a little wobbly in places, but she has a good voice and likewise copes well with some of the challenges of the staging, like having her head shoved into bathwater.

Key to the success of the production as a whole however, considering the emphasis that her character has in this version of Shakespeare's work, is the wonderful performance from Dutch soprano Lenneke Ruiten as Ophelia. Her French enunciation is excellent, her delivery flowing, her high notes expressive and well pitched. Equally important is the conducting of Marc Minkowski which brings a dramatic consistency to the work. This is perhaps achieved with some judicious cuts to the ballets and other excesses (I'm not familiar with the uncut version of the work), but it helps that there are no obvious divisions between the acts, the drama allowed to flow from scene to scene through the fine set designs, with the instrumental interludes used to connect and retain the mood.

Recorded at La Monnaie-De Munt on the 13th and 17th December 2013, Hamlet can be viewed for a limited time via on-line streaming from France Television's Culturebox site or through the La Monnaie streaming service. There are no English subtitles available on any of these platforms, but there are also no location restrictions on viewing.

Verdi - Il Trovatore

Giuseppe Verdi - Il Trovatore

La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels, 2012

Marc Minkowski, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Scott Hendricks, Misha Didyk, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Marina Poplavskaya, Giovanni Furlanetto

La Monnaie Internet Streaming - 15 June 2012

There’s a case to be made for putting a little distance between the drama and the telling of it in Verdi’s potboiler, Il Trovatore. The plot is a difficult one to carry-off convincingly - a gypsy curse, a witch burned at the stake, a child kidnapped in revenge and thrown into the burning embers by the daughter of the gypsy, the whole affair creating hidden secrets and unrevealed identities. As it happens, all of these melodramatic events are kept at a certain distance already, the dark history related at the start of the opera by the Captain of the Guard at the start of Act I, and with a different spin put on it by the gypsy Azucena in Act II. Storytelling is moreover part and parcel of the whole work, Leonora relating her encounter and love for a handsome dark stranger, the opera itself getting its title from a troubadour, a wandering lyrical storyteller.

It’s undoubtedly with this in mind that Dmitri Tcherniakov stages Verdi’s 1853 opera Il Trovatore at La Monnaie in Brussels with the framing device of it being related, relived and re-enacted at some date in the future by the main protagonists. Considering the bloody fates of many of those characters, it is however a bit of a stretch to imagine them meeting up some years later on the instigation of Azucena. Like some Agatha Christie mystery where the main suspects have been assembled, the five main characters in Verdi’s drama turn up in the silent prologue - Leonora in a dark wig and wearing sunglasses, Manrico in a snakeskin jacket - greet each other after years of separation or warily edge around each other as Azucena locks the door to the room, keeping them captive there to work through the events that have occurred in order to “shed light on the tragic past that has united their destinies”.

In this way the director also removes many of the old traditional stage conventions and tired mannerisms that have become associated with this old standard, which itself has become a story that is just related, its heavy delivery and declamation detaching the work any sense of real meaning that might once have lain behind it (although one doubts that there are any serious intentions behind this Verdi opera). In Tcherniakov’s production this is no 15th century Spain in the Aragon region, there are no Biscay mountains here, no convent or nuns and there’s no traditional Anvil Chorus. The chorus is there, but they remain off-stage at all times, the work - one of Verdi’s most bombastic - reduced in the process to a chamber piece. Most significantly, the cast are thus reduced entirely down to five people, Inez and Ruiz among those roles which are not actually suppressed but sung through the doubling up of roles in the small cast - an idea that fits in fine with the role-playing concept. The whole opera is there, it’s just reduced to taking place within the confines of a single room.

If the intention is to similarly downplay the singing, then that’s achieved with the performances here, although some might think that the singing lacks the necessary dynamic, power and expansiveness. It’s an interesting cast then, but not one that particularly impresses. Scott Hendricks comes across the best here as the Conte di Luna, letting himself go with the flow of the concept, although he does also have perhaps the most expressive role in the opera. Misha Didyk is not my kind of Verdi singer, although with his choked back anguished delivery lacking any variety in vocal expression and showing no real acting ability, I’m not fond of his style of singing in Russian opera either. Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo is a smaller-scale Azucena than is usually required, but she suits the tone here, as does Marina Poplavskaya as Leonora. Her technique isn’t always the smoothest when making the transition to the higher notes, but she has exactly that kind of expressive voice that is needed to bring depth to characterisation. She looks a little uncomfortable here however, a little restricted perhaps by the concept, and was surprisingly absent from the curtain call (”unwell” according to conductor Marc Minkowski when he took to the stage). Giovanni Furlanetto sang well as Ferrando (and Ruiz).

Overall however, Tcherniakov’s direction felt a bit weak, cutting away much of the baggage of the work certainly, but also restricting the drama with a concept that didn’t really stand up to close scrutiny. One might be happy to make some allowances in credibility to see something fresh and new brought out that would shed new light on Il Trovatore, but other than one or two scenes - the closing bloodbath ending certainly registered the requisite shocks - this was rarely achieved in dramatic terms. Musically however, Marc Minkowski’s conducting of the La Monnaie orchestra - his first time conducting Verdi - was much more interesting, his treatment suiting Tcherniakov’s idea of a chamber production, while at the same time indeed finding the strengths in Verdi’s score and successfully getting its underlying power across without unnecessary overemphasis. Otherwise the overall impression was that there was quite a bit of heat generated here, but not enough fire.