Monteverdi - L'Incoronazione di Poppea (Salzburg, 2018)

Claudio Monteverdi - L'Incoronazione di Poppea

Salzburg Festival, 2018

William Christie, Les Arts Florissants, Jan Lauwers, Sonya Yoncheva, Kate Lindsey, Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Carlo Vistoli, Renato Dolcini, Ana Quintans, Marcel Beekman, Dominique Visse, Lea Desandre, Tamara Banjesevic, Claire Debono, Alessandro Fishe, Davic Webb, Padraic Rowan, Virgile Ancely

Medici.TV - 18 August 2018

The importance of Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea in the world of opera lies in its innovation, in extending the boundaries of opera beyond classical myths and bringing real historical figures to the stage. The strength of the work and the reason why it still holds such power almost 400 years later however lies in Monteverdi and librettist Busanello's fearless examination of human nature caught up in a powerplay and tyranny of love. And it's not just the interplay of the central figures competing, gossiping and plotting but the impact that this has on peripheral characters and society as a whole is very much a part of the wider remit of the opera.

Or at least it ought to be. Such is the strength of characterisation and the accumulation of events, plots, murders, suicides and, yes some of the most passionate expressions of love committed to music, that there can be a tendency for the drama to revolve around and turn inwards on the relationship between Nero and Poppea and forget about the devastating impact that their scheming and actions would have on the rest of the world. Directing for the 2018 Salzburg Festival production Jan Lauwers wants to keep that wider context present in the mind and visible, but essentially do it without detracting from the intensity of the musical content of the work.

That would be hard to do and not a wise move to make when you have William Christie conducting Les Arts Florissants, and when you have a cast like the one assembled here, one that combines experienced practitioners of Monteverdi and the Baroque (Stéphanie d’Oustrac, Ana Quintans, Dominique Visse) with a few major stars in the making not often heard in this repertoire (Sonya Yoncheva, Kate Lindsey). It's a tall order for any singer; there are few heroes or noble actions in L'Incoronazione di Poppea, all of them display at the very least meanness, arrogance and self-importance - arguably even Seneca, and certainly the gods of the Prologue.

As such, it's easy to get lost in these characters, and the superb cast make the most of them. Stéphanie d’Oustrac plays a particularly embittered Ottavia and takes it with relish, holding back on grand gestures but putting it all into the voice. Sonya Yoncheva puts everything into her singing and performance, an alluring presence that convincing turns Nero's head, but you don't get the same sense of engagement with her Poppea and I'm not certain she connects with the audience either, which has always been my experience with her at least. Full credit to her however for this ambitious venture out of standard repertoire that she takes well.

Kate Lindsey is a marvellous Nero. It's a stylised performance rather than a naturalistic one, but Nero is and should be seen as a larger than life character, albeit one with deep human feelings and failings. Lindsey navigates between anger and tenderness in a flash as Nero is driven by lust and power. "The heart is a poor counsellor. It hates laws and scorns reason", Seneca tells Nero, who retorts that "Laws are for those who serve". "Those who don't know how to rule gradually lose their power" warns Seneca, incautiously as it turns out, and therein lies the brilliance of what Monteverdi and Busanello observe and achieve in L'Incoronazione di Poppea, daring to put on stage sentiments that had never quite been expressed like this on an early opera stage before.

The challenge is to make the impact of all this visible on the stage and it's too easy to get overpowered by the scandal of powerful people behaving abominably to realise that it has consequences for everyone else. Monteverdi's opera however has many other parallel situations and characters that show that such behaviour is common across all social classes and sexes. Jan Lauwers however not only takes on the challenge of expressing the wild and contradictory facets of larger than life character like Nero or the ambition and ruthless single-mindedness of Poppea, but he extends it out and makes it vivid and real for each of the secondary characters and applicable to the wider world as well.

The quality of the performers in the  supporting roles accounts for the success of this endeavour to some extent - Carlo Vistoli's Ottone, Ana Quintans' Drusilla, Lea Desandre's Amore/Valletto and Marcel Beekman's Nurse all impressive - as does the presence of dancers of BODHI PROJECT and SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, who are given more to do than just the typical interpretative double mirroring of characters. A constant presence in the background, spinning and whirling, they occasionally move forward and interact with the characters, deepening relationships, expressing and visualising those contradictory elements as well as helping force the sense of real relationships between characters who could typically and easily be left to express solitary sentiments in individual arias.

That's extended to keeping other main characters on-stage, such as Poppea wandering past when Ottone is expressing his secret feelings for her, and it also extends to some limited interaction with the musicians who are all there in a shallow pit on the stage. There should be a very definite interaction between the music and the performance, more so in the semi-improvised measures and accompaniment of music that is not fully scored. Interpretation is very much a feature of Monteverdi's operas and there's no right or wrong way, but there certainly ways that bring the music to life better so that they connect with the tone of the drama and communicate it to the audience. There's no doubting the ability of William Christie and Les Arts Florissants to do that exceptionally well here.

It's Jan Lauwers however who manages to most successfully focus all those elements of music, dance, characterisation and expression and push them out beyond the stage. The stage itself is covered with images of classical paintings, a mass of bodies that remind you that this is not just a heated drama of consequence only to a little group of self-interested and self-serving people, but that their actions have consequences out in the wider world. That's a lot to take on, and much more than would normally be considered necessary when you have Monteverdi's music to express and enchant, Jan Lauwers' production for Salzburg, with its fine cast, make this ancient work feel as fresh and modern and relevant as many contemporary works, and perhaps even more so.

Links: Salzburger Festspiele

Purcell - Dido and Aeneas (Rouen 2014 - Webcast)

Henry Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie, 2014

Vincent Dumestre, Cécile Roussat, Julien Lubek, Vivica Genaux, Henk Neven, Ana Quintans, Marc Mauillon, Jenny Daviet, Caroline Meng, Lucile Richardot, Nicholas Tamagna

Culturebox - 13 May 2014

There's a certain amount of leeway built into Purcell's compositions which, like most early opera work, accounts for a variety of interpretation in response to the music and in how to make the work meaningful and accessible to a modern audience. Such is the degree of openness and richness in Purcell's operas, masques and semi-operas and the amount of improvisation required that it is even unlikely to sound exactly the same from one night to the next, never mind from one production to the another.

Musically that keeps things very fresh and immediate for the musicians and the singers - I'm sure there's never anything routine about performing such a work as Dido and Aeneas - but the same goes for the approach to staging. As I noted in a recent review of King Arthur, a considerable amount of thought needs to be given over to making those very old stories and their method of presentation accessible to a modern audience. The approach of Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie to Dido and Aeneas is very different from Sestina's for King Arthur, but the result is equally as effective.

While most Purcell operas require a certain amount of reduction and cutting back - as mainly masques or semi-operas they would originally have constituted a full evening's entertainment of songs, dance, music, drama and spectacle - Dido and Aeneas is a shorter work that was reportedly composed to be performed by a girl's school in Chelsea. The Rouen production however is one of the longest versions I've heard of the work, running to around 80 minutes rather than the usual hour or so. Whether extra music has been included or improvised and extended for the missing dance numbers, I'm not sure, but it at least gives the audience value for their money without having to pair it with another short work.

While there would be no question of this production providing a full evening's entertainment just from the spectacle of the stage production, Rouen's production shows that Dido and Aeneas is also a strong enough drama to sustain a longer performance. In fact, the epic nature of the mythological origins of the story almost calls out for a grander interpretation (if not quite of Berlioz Les Troyens dimensions) as long as it doesn't come at the expense of losing the necessary intimacy of the tragedy of the love of Dido and Aeneas. This is achieved in Rouen through a balance of the spectacle and the performance of the orchestra on period instruments.

The concept for the stage production seems to be based on the idea of the evocation of Dido's Carthage being a magic kingdom of ancient times, or one that has even more so become a place of wonder with the arrival of Aeneas, coming to these shores fleeing from the destroyed Troy, and falling in love with their Queen Dido. This is achieved without clever technical effects, using traditional methods of stagecraft with pulley operations, the colourful theatrical backdrops and lighting creating not a royal court but a blue bay flanked by rocky outcrops with nymphs dancing on billowing silk waves.

There are however stormy skies on the horizon which indicates that all this is about to change as the Sorceress appears and demands that Aeneas continue his journey to Italy. The set switches over to this change of mood cleverly, retaining a sense of 'merveilleux' as the rocky shoreline transforms into an undersea grotto where dark creatures scuttle acrobatically on the ocean floor, mermaids float and the Sorceress takes the form of a huge grotesque octopus. The tone is held marvellously by the design, and there are a few other clever touches in Act III, such as Dido's dress unravelling to become a sea that swallows her during her final lament.

If the stage setting provides the scale for the epic mythology, the music and the singing provide the necessary intimacy for the love story at the heart of the work. The musical arrangement for this interpretation follows the indications on the Chelsea score and is principally string based with some harpsichord continuo. Stings are plucked, lutes provide a solid rhythm along with a guitar, which is strummed at times to give an almost Spanish-guitar sound, but there's still a folk-music element there. Vivica Genaux sings well but doesn't have the richness, fullness or perhaps that certain English plumminess that the role of Dido requires. Henk Neven provides a good strong Aeneas, and Ana Quintans is a very fine Belinda.

Links: Culturebox

Charpentier - David et Jonathas

Marc-Antoine Charpentier - David et Jonathas

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, 2012

William Christie, Les Arts Florissantes, Andreas Homoki, Pascal Charbonneau, Ana Quintans, Neal Davies, Frédéric Caton, Krešimir Špicer, Dominique Visse, Pierre Bessière

Aix-en-Provence - 11 July 2012

Marc-Antoine Charpentier worked for many years in the shadow of the officially appointed court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully and it seems he has remained in his shadow ever since, largely overlooked even as French Baroque music is being rediscovered in modern times, favouring Lully and his successor Rameau over Charpentier and Campra. There may be genuine musicological reasons for this choice, but judging by this rare performance of Charpentier’s David et Jonathas for the 2012 Aix-en-Provence Festival - the first staged performance of the work in over 300 years - the problem seems to lie with the difficulty of adapting this kind of work for a modern stage, since musically it is rather something of a delight.

First performed in 1688, a year after the death of Lully, David et Jonathas, a “Biblical tragedy in five acts with a prologue” is based on the friendship between David - slayer of Goliath - and Jonathas, the son of King Saul. The difficulty with adapting this work to a stage production is similar to the nature of attempting to stage Handel’s religious oratorios, the libretto by Père François de Paule Bretonneau in this case making it somewhat difficult to grasp a clear dramatic or narrative thread. Essentially however, the main thrust of the work is relatively straightforward, dealing with Saul’s growing mistrust of the shepherd boy David, who he has initially welcomed into his company. David is shown to be a popular hero, the people celebrating his successes in battle, but Saul suspects that he may be using his popularity and his friendship with his son Jonathas as a means to overthrow his rule and replace him as king of Israel.

Another reason why the work may be difficult to follow was that it was originally written to be performed as musical interludes inserted into a performance of the theatrical drama Saul. The Aix production does its best to create some dramatic situations out of this Biblical story, adding flashback scenes during what would have been musical ballet sequences that fill out the background of the historical conflicts, building up the childhoods of David and Jonathas and including other significant incidents such as the death of Saul’s wife, all of which seems to have an impact on destabilising the king’s mind, leading to more wars and a tragic outcome. The Aix production also notionally sets this staging of the opera during the Palestinian Civil War and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, which may or may not be necessary as a meaningful parallel for the audience - but other than perhaps influencing the costume design, in reality there’s little direct reference made to the origins of the modern political conflict in the region.

The stage design rather places the action within a box of bare wood panelling, sparsely decorated with nothing more than wooden chairs and a long table, giving the impression more of a Quaker community room, or even occasionally looking like something out of a Western. Cleverly designed (I still can’t work out quite how they manage it), the walls and ceilings move to compress the space, open it out or split it into several rooms, blocking and boxing in to create a dramatic focus and tension to the singing. It’s hardly necessary, since the singing itself is more than capable of finding the right dramatic tone, and if anything the staging tends to over-emphasise it and place it at odds with the often delicate elegance of Charpentier’s beautiful musical arrangements and joyous choruses.

More often it’s simply trying to make the opera visually more interesting and dramatic than it might otherwise be. The production sparks into life during those magnificent choral arrangements, celebrating David’s successes in battle, and there are many of those. It’s less successful in providing psychological justification - and even suggestion of sexual attraction in the closeness of the relationship between the two men (notwithstanding the role of Jonathas being performed by a female singer). If the libretto and the flashback scenes don’t really bring this out sufficiently, it is however made impressively real and on occasion genuinely touching through Charpentier’s beautiful use of melody and his use of woodwind instruments - evocatively brought out by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants (who incidentally, take their name from a Charpentier opera) - and through the fine singing performances.

As David, Pascal Charbonneau has a powerful presence and voice, wonderfully expressive in a way that gives genuine character to the role, but it does tend to sound slightly constricted and nasal on those more stretched emotional sections - and this is a tragedy where the despairing cry of ‘Hélas!’ features heavily. I don’t think the actual acoustic of the boxed stage helps though. Elsewhere the singing and dramatic performances were excellent, even if the true quality of Ana Quintans singing only really came through in the very moving final act death scene of Jonathas. Neal Davies sang Saul with force and passion, but the stage direction and imagery used to convey his descent into paranoia suspicion and grief wasn’t always convincing. Still, this is clearly an extremely difficult work to adapt dramatically to the modern stage, but more than worthwhile for the opportunity of seeing this rarity from a neglected composer given full dramatic consideration and performed so well.

This performance of David et Jonathas was recorded at the Aix-en-Provence Festival on 11th July 2012 and viewed via internet streaming. It is currently still available to view on the ARTE WebLive web site or via the ArtsFlo Media site. Some region restrictions might apply.