Francesco Filidei - L'Inondation
L’Opéra Comique, Paris - 2019
Emilio Pomárico, Joël Pommerat, Chloé Briot, Boris Grappe, Norma Nahoun, Cypriane Gardin, Enguerrand de Hys, Yael Raanan-Vandor, Guilhem Terrail, Vincent Le Texier
ARTE Concert - September 2019
The musical sound world might be unconventional and difficult to decipher, but at its best contemporary opera like traditional opera forges a close bond between music, subject and character, bringing out something that music or drama on its own can't achieve, making it relevant and meaningful for a modern audience. Francesco Filidei managed that with his first opera in 2016, Giordano Bruno - for me one of the best new opera works of recent years - but French playwright Joël Pommerat has also found opera to be an effective way to draw something more from his dramas.
For his first original libretto for a new commission at L’Opéra Comique in Paris, Pommerat has therefore been matched with a composer very capable of exploring the writer's familiar but complex themes relating to family seen in his previous opera adaptations (Thanks to My Eyes, Au Monde, Pinocchio). L'Inondation (The Flood) is an original adaptation of a 1929 story by Yvegeny Zamayatin, a Russian author best known for 'We' a dystopian novel that directly influenced Orwell's writing of 1984.
L'Inondation is nonetheless a contemporary work that explores contemporary issues, or at least issues that have always been relevant and which seem no easier to deal with today. It's about the strain that has developed between a husband and wife who have been married almost 15 years but who have never had a child. They hear the sounds of children in neighbouring apartments and it causes a conflict of emotions, making their life together feel perfunctory and mechanical but with simmering emotions ready to boil over as each try to find ways to deal with the growing distance between them.
Or perhaps the metaphor is not so much that of something boiling over as much as a river filling up and overflowing its banks, which is the one that is evidently used to describe the situation in L'Inondation. When one of the neighbours in their apartment block dies, his young daughter is sent temporarily to stay with the man and the woman. The girl is 14, a significant age since their own child would have been that age if one had quickly followed their marriage. The arrival of a young girl certainly brings something new to their marriage, but as has already been indicated with an early scene showing a murder, it's not going to lead to a happy outcome.
While the nature of what happens is shocking, what leads up to it won't come as a surprise to anyone, but rather like the now well-used metaphors of stormy weather conditions and rising tides leading up to an emotional breaking point, the real challenge in a modern adaptation of the Zamayatin's work is getting underneath the human and social behaviours that lead up to it. Without having read Zamayatin, one suspects that his interest is similar to exploring the social conditions that trigger an extreme female response found also in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, as well as the corruption of the family/social unit that you see hinted at in Gorky's 'Vassa'.
The conditions that lead up to the overflow in L'Inondation are evidently less concerned with a historical examination of Russian society at the beginning of the 20th century than in how this would be seen nowadays in the context of mental illness, how it can develop and the devastating impact it can have. It also of course explores the more universally recognisable conditions of relations between men and women, how society views the roles each has to play, and examines the nature of the family unit.
To do that L'Inondation takes a wider view of life in the St. Petersburg tenement block than just that between the man and the woman and it's here that the opera is able to work on multiple levels, so to speak. Most evidently that's visible in Eric Soyer's three-level set design, with the man and woman on the ground floor, a young married couple with young children and a baby on the way on the second floor, and with the upper floor adding an almost narrative level and backgrounding, with a narrator/policeman making remarks about the case in an attic room with another room showing the young girl hanging out with friends from outside the tenement block.
What is clever about this is that it is not only able to switch from one scene to another fluidly, but it is able to show simultaneous events, leaving it up to the viewer to determine how much of what goes on elsewhere has an impact on what develops on the ground floor, which evidently takes the brunt of the overflow of the river. Certainly there is much hinted in the music and this is where the skills of a composer like Francesco Filidei are evident, the score providing a complex sound world that interlinks and connects sounds, emotions and inner lives between each of the characters, even as far as expressing the reliving of emotions and mental disturbance through the doubling of the young girl.
An additional element of self-identification would probably determine whether you actually gain any greater insight into the development of mental illness and the outcome of murder, with the associations of release, guilt, shame, and therapy that take place post-facto (or whether it's the post-facto is actually the real important aspect of the situation), but what is clear is that all the other elements are well catered for in Joël Pommerat's direction of the work for the Opéra Comique. Much like George Benjamin's work with Martin Crimp, you get a sense of true collaboration between the creators here. Other than the obvious metaphor of the storm nothing is over-explained, the opera is not wordy or expositional, it allows the music and silences to express just as much as the dramatic action.
As far as the music is concerned that appears to be in very safe hands with Emilio Pomárico teasing out all the little details, the conflicts and interconnectivity, the highs, lows and surges of Filidei's score. There is also room left for the performances to bring real human depth to the situations. Chloé Briot has challenges aplenty in balancing the woman's containment of her feelings with her overflow at the conclusion. The singing range is accordingly difficult, but she gives a great performance. There are intense performances also from Boris Grappe as the man and Yael Raanan-Vandor as the female neighbour, but even the acting performances from the children are superb and contribute to the dramatic and emotional situations.
Links: L’Opéra Comique, ARTE Concert
Philippe Boesmans - Pinocchio
Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2017
Emilio Pomarico, Joël Pommerat, Stéphane Degout, Vincent Le Texier, Chloé Briot, Yann Beuron, Julie Boulianne, Marie-Eve Munger
ARTE Concert - 9th July 2017
I don't think that there's too much question that Pinocchio is a children's fairy tale and it's one that has a very effective and unforgettable way of impressing valuable life lessons on the consequences of lying. It's an unusual subject however for composer Philippe Boesmans and dramatist Joël Pommerat (who together previously created Au Monde for La Monnaie in 2014) to base an opera upon, so perhaps there are other aspects and contemporary relevance that can be brought out of the darker side of the story.
The Pinocchio tale is one familiar to many from the Walt Disney film, without the Disney addition of Jiminy Cricket. All the memorable scenes are there; from Pinocchio's conception as a puppet from a piece of magic wood, his impoverished childhood, he desire to go to school and be like other children, his being swindled by a couple of crooks, turning into a donkey, his ending up in the belly of a whale and his eventual transformation into a real boy. The cautionary tale moral of the story, about lying, about pride denying one's origins and the question of growing or changing into a better person are very much all brought across.
Even if it is just a fairy tale for children there's potential for a piece like Pinocchio with all those memorable scenes to have another life on the opera stage. Joël Pommerat, directing the production himself for its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence festival, characteristically takes a darker direct approach to the story's themes, and perhaps even incorporates a few more contemporary questions into the matter of becoming a real human by embracing cultural diversity in a wider and more multicultural society, but the work still adheres largely to its traditional themes and its childhood focus.
If it doesn't quite establish a character of its own that merits its translation to the opera stage, Boesmans' Pinocchio is certainly richly composed and fully attuned to the drama. There are inevitably reminders of the delicate emotional surrealism of Maeterlinck and Debussy in fairy tale mood and in spoken language rhythms, but they tend to take on more of a Ravel character in the context of the story. The scene where the fairy chides the naughty Pinocchio, making his nose grow for telling lies and promising to make him a real boy, is very like similar scenes in L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, with even the vocal writing heading into high-end coloratura.
Marie-Eve Munger impresses with her ability in this role of the fairy, and Chloé Briot is an engaging presence throughout as the puppet, but the singing elsewhere in this world premiere production also matches the fine writing for the voice here. Aside from Pinocchio and the fairy, who have very specific demands, the other roles are small parts for singers in multiple roles, but they are written in such a way as to make an impression. Stéphane Degout, for example, is the circus director, one of the crooks and a murderer, but his main role is that of the narrator. As mainly a spoken role, it seems a waste of such a singing voice, but Degout's narration is critical to the flow and he still manages to make it musical in the delivery.
Boesmans' music also has its own dramatic flow and colourful expression, drawing on Arabic influences for the prison scene and when the outsider Pinocchio is trying to fit in with the other cool boys, using on-stage musicians improvising in a scene that is similar to Boesmans' use of a bohemian backstreet band in Wintermärchen, his version of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Boesmans however is happy to draw on whatever sounds best fit the dramatic requirements, using accordions elsewhere to provide other 'local' colour and siren like sounds to accompany the growth of Pinocchio's nose. With Klangforum Wien in the pit conducted by Emilio Pomarico, the reduced orchestration creates a wonderful, magical sound of exquisite detail.
The benefits of working with a small orchestra also apply to Pommerat's idea of keeping the cast reduced to a small theatrical troupe playing the multiple roles. And it's very much a core troupe of performers from La Monnaie, including Stéphane Degout, Vincent Le Texier, Chloé Briot and Yann Beuron, some of whom Boesmans and Pommerat have worked with in the past. It does very much give the impression of a little troupe all working together to create a close-knit unit. Pommerat's usual distancing direction would seem to work against that, the set a familiar dark, monochrome minimalist affair, but as with the flashes of brilliance in the music and the singing, the use of special effects and projections have a striking impact when used.
Whether Boesmans' opera version of Pinocchio will have a life as a fairy-tale favourite beyond its performances at Aix-en-Provence remains to be seen. It's a fairly faithful presentation of the main themes and scenes of the children's story, and it doesn't particularly have anything new to add to it in the way of contemporary relevance, although I daresay that a different director than Joël Pommerat could bring much more out of the potential shown here. As it stands however, Pinocchio the opera is an entertaining piece with much to admire in the scoring and the skillfully played performances.
Links: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, ARTE Concert
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
