Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Iolanta/The Nutcracker
L'Opéra National de Paris, 2016
Alain Altinoglu, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Sonya Yoncheva, Arnold Rutkowski, Andrei Jilihovschi, Vito Priante, Roman Shulakov, Gennady Bezzubenkov, Elena Zaremba, Anna Patalong, Paola Gardina
Culturebox - March 2016
Given their shared history, it's surprising that opera and ballet tend to remain within their respective disciplines and rarely cross-over. There are of course exceptions and one of them is the pairing of Tchaikovsky's short opera Iolanta with the composer's ballet The Nutcracker at its Mariinsky premiere in 1892. It's also notable that combining opera and ballet in the same programme is traditionally something that has been done in French opera from Lully, Rameau and Gluck right through to the extravagant excesses of the Grand Opéra.
So while it is more common nowadays to see Iolanta paired with another short opera by a different composer, it's undoubtedly instructive to see the work paired in the way it was originally intended, and it's appropriate that it should be the Paris Opera who stage the two works in the same programme. Considering the separate paths that both works and disciplines have taken in the meantime however it would still take some radical reworking for it to succeed. Fortunately the Paris Opera have entered a new period of productive experimentation again and, fortunately in this case, they have engaged Dmitri Tcherniakov to come up with a daring approach to the programming that confounds any expectations.
Surprisingly however, at least initially, it looks like Tcherniakov might be going down the same relatively safe route as his La Traviata for La Scala in 2013 (although you can't be safe enough for La Scala). His Iolanta is set in the same sort of drawing room, the decor, lighting and costumes all suggesting period in a way that conforms with the attitudes expressed in the drama, with there being little evidence of his usual modern subversion of the works. The placement of a Christmas tree in the drawing room suggests that Iolanta will blend into The Nutcracker, and indeed it does, but not at all in the way you might expect, the tree even being abandoned before the ballet starts, and the Christmas drawing room scene following it soon after.
The Nutcracker proves to be not so much a continuation of the story of Iolanta as much as an extension of its themes, assuming that you see its story of a young girl who has is cured from blindness as a metaphor for a young woman coming of age. That's certainly how the Metropolitan Opera played the work when it paired Iolanta with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, a double-bill that put the emphasis on sexual awakening and liberation. Although successfully staged, it was still a fairly radical and dark exploration of the works' themes and not the most obvious direction you would see Iolanta moving towards. Seen in the context of its pairing with The Nutcracker, the Paris production is a more simple matter of coming of age and self-awareness, but there's nothing at all straightforward in the way Tcherniakov's production sets about it.
If Iolanta was played fairly straight, with perhaps only an additional emotional intensity brought out in the uniformly strong singing and acting performances - with a notably sweeping performance from Sonya Yoncheva - the already notorious opera director really lets loose in his settings for the ballet sequences of The Nutcracker. It starts out fairly sedately with the cast of Iolanta remaining on the stage, Clara here appearing to be the little sister of Iolanta rather than a straightforward double or mirror role. If the dancing is not the traditional ballet steps, it is initially at least smooth and fluid, the party games and march music involving a kind of musical chairs game and playing with a nutcracker piñata.
That's about as close as this version of the ballet gets to any of its traditional reference points. The movements, choreographed in the first part by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, become more frantic and modern with jerking semaphored movements and rhythms as Clara dances with Fritz. Without the familiar ETA Hoffmann story points, it's hard to establish exactly what is going on when a gunshot is fired (by Drosselmeyer?) and the drawing room seems to explode in a ball of fire, leaving Iolana not involved in a war between gingerbread soldiers and grey mice, but in a desolate forest of swirling ashes and snow. Whirling changes of perspective add to the sense of dislocation through projections of the dark woods that are populated by dark shadowy figures with torches.
Act II of the Nutcracker takes us further into unfamiliar territory and strange imagery, with additional dance sequences by two other choreographers, Edouard Lock and Arthur Pita. The shadow of a giant bird circles, an enormous CGI hippo wanders through the woods, but the notion of sexual awakening is suggested by several Claras all dancing with fine young men, with the principal Clara writhing suggestively on the forest floor, abandoning herself to her inner nature. One would think that the traditional sweets and gifts from around the world would suit the purposes of this enlarging of Clara's (and by extension Iolanta's) world, but instead the scene is colourfully filled by huge toys which take us through to the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. The final pas-de-deux is also extraordinary, beautifully choreographed as a succession of Claras dance with the Prince through to old age.
It might not adhere to the original Nutcracker and the connection with Iolanta is tenuous, but it's a beautiful and poignant interpretation that works fully with Tchaikovsky's musical expression. More than just a dream, Clara's experience is a life-long journey that is even more fantastical than the original conception. That's what Tcherniakov does and it doesn't always please opera fans, so I'm sure it will also no doubt horrify some ballet fans more used to the traditional 'Casse-Noisette' that is a perennial favourite at the Paris Opera. It's all the more impressive then that the overall reception to this daring extravaganza has been very positive. It's another promising sign of the new director Stéphane Lissner successfully putting a progressive stamp on the Paris Opera.
Links: Culturebox, L'Opéra National de Paris
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Iolanta
Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard's Castle
The Metropolitan Opera, 2015
Valery Gergiev, Mariusz Treliński, Anna Netrebko, Piotr Beczala, Aleksei Markov, Ilya Bannik, Elchin Azizov, Nadja Michael, Mikhail Petrenko
The Met Live in HD - 14 February 2015
Whether by accident or design, the Met's Live in HD Valentine's Day broadcast featured two one-act operas that explored two different sides of love, one where love is bathed in light, the other shrouded in darkness. I guess if the programming was by design it might not have been a little more predictable and you might have expected Gonoud's Romeo et Juliette or - at a stretch - Tristan und Isolde. The pairing of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, never before performed at the Met, with Bartók's challenging Duke Bluebeard's Castle was much more ambitious, and with a fine musical and production team in place, it was an impressive indication of what the Met can achieve when they really make the best use of the resources and talent available to them.
There are some obvious superficial connections between the two works - both are fairy-tales and both involve a female protagonist who must overcome a domineering male figure in order to achieve fulfilment in her love life. In the interal interview during the live cinema broadcast, director Mariusz Treliński proposed a further connection that helped him link the two works, seeing Judith in Duke Bluebeard's Castle as a grown-up version of Iolanta from Tchaikovsky's opera. That doesn't really come across in any obvious attempt to suggest that they are the same person, but there's no doubt that by looking at it that way, it allows some themes in the first work to be explored in greater depth in the second.
The director uses all means at his disposal to try to tease out the underlying metaphors of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta. Or at least he seems to, but it becomes clear by the time we get to the Bartók work that he has left quite a bit in reserve for the deeper exploration of the more overt psychological-probing of Duke Bluebeard's Castle. For Iolanta, the world of the blind girl is beautifully realised, her bedroom a revolving open-box set within a dark wood, with occasional projections, sometimes symbolic (a faun skipping through the woods), sometimes abstract. Significantly, when Iolanta can't tell a red rose from a white rose, those projections are entirely black and white.
This is significant in a number of respects, since much of Iolanta is about perception. Iolanta's blindness is a metaphor for not seeing the outside world as it really is, being caught up in her own inner world and an idealisation of love. Her blindness, we also discover, cannot be cured unless she wants to see for herself. Of course, in Iolanta's case, that not necessarily the young girl's fault, as she has been isolated and protected from the outside world by her father King René to the extent that she isn't even aware that she is blind. The fairy-tale is not without its dark side - what proper fairy-tale isn't? - but the resolution is pretty much black and white, the light of her love for Vaudémont allowing her to see and accept the world and the people around her for who they really are.
There are no such black and white matters in Béla Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, and no pretense of the story being anything but a metaphorical exploration of female psychology and dark sexual desires. The menacing voice-over narration at the start tells us that it is the inner world that we are delving into here. And, in a way, it is true that Judith is a more grown-up version of Iolanta. The innocence is gone, and Judith goes to live with her new husband Duke Bluebeard despite his fearsome reputation for his treatment of young women, even more drawn to the darker aspects of his masculinity than the idealistic light of love. Judith is however simultaneously attracted and appalled by the dark recesses that she discovers in Duke Bluebeard's 'castle'.
Judith, more mature than Iolanta (Perrault's fairy-tale also more open about the dark impulses that underpin such stories) believes she can handle the truth now. She wants to leave no door unopened as far as her husband is concerned, but is horrified by the visions of what is revealed as she is given the key to unlock each of the rooms. Despite the warnings of never going near that darkest, locked seventh room - the secret of Bluebeard's sex life in his relationships with his previous wives - Judith can't help but curiously probe into things she would be better off not knowing about. She discovers more than she wants to know and the knowledge cannot be unlearnt. She too is trapped in Bluebeard's castle.
In line with the more psychological probing and the darker outcome of the second tale, Bartók's 20th century musical language for Bluebeard is also far away from Tchaikovsky's fairy-tale music, far more ambiguous and unsettling. As far as director Mariusz Treliński is concerned about the relative impressions that each work evokes, it's as different as black-and-white to colour. All the richness of Tchaikovsky's music is there in the setting for Iolanta but the tones and brightness are pure, but Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle requires a much more complex range of colours and effects. This is impressively achieved for a one-act opera, Boris Kudlička's set designs sliding into place, working with the lighting and projections to evoke a distinct quality for each of Bluebeard's rooms, as well as for the symbolic nature of what they represent.
This is extraordinarily ambitious, and - particularly in the handling of Duke Bluebeard's Castle - I've never seen anything quite like it at the Met. Conceptually, as a whole, it all works remarkably well, the pairing of the two works allowing one to feed off the other. Whether one gains more than another from the contrast and juxtaposition doesn't matter - it will be different for every individual viewer how they respond to each of the works - but it undoubtedly allows the viewer to see both works in a new light. That's undoubtedly a lot to do with the direction here which really probes the situations and the characters, but there is complete interaction between all aspects of the production, between the creative team and the performers which is just as vital to its success.
Aside from the challenges of the stage design, it's Valery Gergiev who has to take the orchestra from Tchaikovsky to Bartók and find commonality between the works or at least make them complementary. Like Treliński, he finds the fairy-tale aspect of the stories as a basis to work with, contrasting the shimmering otherworldliness of Tchaikovsky's score - with which the Russian conductor clearly feels an affinity - with the harder-edged factured realities of Bartók's music. Both works also benefit from contrasting but equally committed performances from Anna Netrebko as Iolanta and Nadja Michael as Judith. Michael can be wildly variable depending on the role she is playing, but here in her Met debut role, she was highly impressive. With Mikhail Petrenko an outstanding Bluebeard, Iolanta was almost put into the shade by the duo in the second work. Ilya Bannik however give a strong performance as King René in Iolanta, but I found the reliable Piotyr Beczala a little bland here this time.
Links: The Met Live in HD
