Berlioz - Les Troyens (Paris, 2019)

Hector Berlioz - Les Troyens

L'Opéra national de Paris, 2019

Dmitri Tcherniakov, Philippe Jordan, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Stéphanie d'Oustrac, Brandon Jovanovich, Véronique Gens, Stéphane Degout, Cyrille Dubois, Paata Burchuladze, Sophie Claisse, Michèle Losier, Christian Helmer, Christian van Horn, Aude Extrémo

ARTE Concert - 31 January 2019

Dmitri Tcherniakov may not to everyone's taste as an opera director, but he is still highly regarded in Paris, by the director of the opera house Stéphane Lissner at least if not by the vocal traditionalists in the audience. He's certainly highly enough regarded to be given a prestigious event like the full version of Berlioz's Les Troyens on the 150th anniversary of Berlioz's death, the 350th anniversary of the Opéra de Paris and the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Bastille theatre. Whatever you think about Tcherniakov, he certainly rises to the big challenge and occasion and doesn't compromise on his own vision (playing a little safe only perhaps at La Scala with La Traviata in 2013).

The director's strength is often in harnessing and clarifying the undercurrents that drive an opera and present them in a modern way, but his direction of singers to be capable actors and persuade them to come on board with his ideas is also superb. That doesn't mean overriding the intentions of the composer, and in fact Tcherniakov's approach to Les Troyens is a measure of trust in Berlioz's work itself. It can be updated, it's not just a historical work - either in mythological or musicological terms - but a work that confronts human fears about war and terrorism on the one hand and love, healing and security on the other.

Is there anything more to Les Troyens than that? Well, of course there is. As it stands, Berlioz's masterwork doesn't need to be 'filled out', 'clarified' or 'updated', but that doesn't mean that you can't read between the lines and interpret human actions and motivations. Not everyone will like the interpretation that Tcherniakov has proposed and the professional boo-ers at the Bastille certainly don't (which makes you wonder why else they continue to go, since creative modernisation has been the case at least since Gérard Mortier's period in charge of the Paris Opera), but it's valid to interpret and see the work as more than just a grand spectacle.

Part 1 of the work, La prise de Troie, does indeed present a very different spin on Virgil's epic account of the siege of Troy, Tcherniakov placing it in a Russian or Soviet setting that is much more familiar and easier to elaborate on the underlying tensions and reality of war. He marks a strong distinction straight off between King Priam and the royal family in their wood-panelled mansion and the ordinary people fighting on the streets, taking the time with large titles to ensure that the audience know who each member of the legendary Trojan family are and what the relationship is that lies between them, while a running commentary on the developments of the coming to an end of the ten-year long siege are rolled out on breaking news TV ticker-tape reports.

Cassandra addresses her premonitions then to a crew of shocked news reporters who are expecting a more positive outlook from the royal family, which is a nice touch but it's not exactly new (Krzysztof Warlikowski did something similar with his Princess Di lookalike Alceste for Madrid in 2014). Where Tcherniakov dares to go further than most however is in projecting the imagined thoughts of the royal cortege and the elements of distrust that lie between them during the solemn ceremony for the Trojan dead. Contributing to that - much more controversially - is the suggestion that Cassandra has been abused as a child by her father Priam (perhaps accounting for her being something of an outsider), and Aeneas is seen collaborating with the Greeks (which accounts perhaps for feelings of guilt and trauma later).

In terms of spectacle and the sheer horror of the war that you expect to find overwhelming in this part of Les Troyens, the Paris production is effective on every level. Philippe Jordan finds the dark undercurrents in Berlioz's music and there's a fine cast of singers to play out these deeper undercurrents that lend it additional weight. More often associated with opéra-comique and Baroque opera, you wouldn't expect Stéphanie d'Oustrac to carry that necessary dramatic weight as Cassandra, and she does sound a little light in places, but it's a strong performance of great conviction and it's supported by the likes of Stéphane Degout as Chorèbe, Brandon Jovanovich as Énée and Véronique Gens as Hécube. It makes the fate of Troy more present. Or maybe not 'more' since Berlioz's composition has been proven to work effectively as long as it has scale, grandeur and conviction, and it certainly has all those elements, Tcherniakov's direction in no way diminishing the impact.

Which, of course is only half the story, since Les Troyens à Carthage has even more of a spin placed on it. Rather than arrive in Dido's Carthage, the displaced survivors Aeneas and his crew spend the second half of Berlioz's epic end up in a PTSD centre for victims of the war. Énée is almost catatonic from the trauma and guilt for his part in the downfall of Troy, hearing voices in his head calling 'Italie!', with only occasional moments of lucidity and spurring into action coming through group therapy role play battles and relaxation yoga sessions that bring about that "nuit d'ivresse et d'extase infinie' with Dido, who has also been dealing with loss and bereavement and is also looking to find peace.

It all perhaps takes away from the romanticism of the work in favour of psychological realism, and perhaps romanticism is actually more in keeping here for Berlioz. For a modern audience too perhaps an escape from the brutal reality of the world outside wouldn't be such a bad thing. So we really need to see the contemporary world reflected and imposed upon Les Troyens? Well that would depend on what you want to get out of the work, whether you see it (and Latin epic poetry) as having contemporary relevance, or whether it's just escapist grand opera musical entertainment and spectacle.

Tcherniakov nonetheless is successful in tapping into the undercurrents (even if he has to invent some if it to fit) and in how they are relevant to today. The spectacle is there too in La prise de Troie, even if it the glamour is undercut by Les Troyens à Carthage, but I'd argue that all the romanticism and escapism is there still in the music. Philippe Jordan is mindful of Berlioz's musical sensibilities and influences and he plays to the works melodic colours and dramatic strengths. Brandon Jovanovich and Ekaterina Semenchuk also bring a new colour to the royal couple with soft lyrical sweetness that taps into their sensitivities and their past suffering, very much humanising the characters in line with Tcherniakov's direction and purpose. After an effective La prise de Troie however, Les Troyens à Carthage becomes repetitive, lacking in ideas and consistency, its purpose increasingly distant from the grander vision of Berlioz.

Links: L'Opéra national de Paris, ARTE Concert

Berlioz - Les Troyens

Hector Berlioz - Les Troyens

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden 2012

David McVicar, Antonio Pappano, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Fabio Capitanucci, Bryan Hymel, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Brindley Sherratt, Hanna Hipp, Barbara Senator, Robert Lloyd, Pamela Helen Stephen, Jihoon Kim, Ashley Holland, Ji Hyun Kim, Lukas Jakobski, Daniel Grice, Ji Min Park, Adrian Clarke, Jeremy White, Ed Lyon

Opus Arte - Blu-ray

It’s ironic that Berlioz’s epic creation based on Virgil’s 'Aeneid' was never performed in full during the composer’s lifetime, yet we’ve had enough opportunities now to view the work to realise that Les Troyens is unquestionably a masterpiece. Having had the opportunity to see several productions however, it’s also possible to see why the opera would have been such a tricky proposition to stage in the first place. It’s a vast, all-encompassing work, one that not only demonstrates the complete range of the composer, but one that also takes in the considerable musical studies, theories and passions that were as much a part of the lifework of Hector Berlioz. Written over two years (1856-58) for the Paris Opéra (the only house with the resources to possibly stage it), Les Troyens was a deeply personal undertaking that drew from the composer’s childhood imagination-inspiring readings of the ‘Aeneid‘ and his love for the Shakespearean epic drama. It proved however to be too ambitious an undertaking for the city’s major opera house and eventually only a cut-down version of the second part of the five-act opera was performed at the Théâtre Lyrique.

Now we have Blu-ray releases of no less than three complete productions of Les Troyens to be able to judge the quality of the work.  Previously we had the revelatory 2003 Châtelet production in Paris (in an impressive account conducted by John Eliot Gardiner) and the rather less successful attempt to modernise the opera by La Fura dels Baus in the 2009 Valencia production. A comparison between the two suggests that if it’s not a case of less is more (that’s something that you couldn’t say about Berlioz’s writing here), it is nonetheless a work where it’s necessary - and difficult enough - to strike a balance between the extravagance and dynamic of the distinct styles of the two parts of the work, while at the same time also living up to the epic grandeur that it represents. Trying to impose an alternative reading or concept on top of Les Troyens (much less one as misguided as La Fura del Baus’ Trojan Horse computer virus concept) is risky and likely to conflict with the intentions and tone of the work. David McVicar therefore had quite a challenge in this new major production of the work for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, and while it didn’t exactly meet with universal critical acclaim at the time, the weaknesses in the production seem rather less pronounced when viewed at home.

The fact that David McVicar and set designer Es Devlin go for their familiar industrial Steampunk style in the first act with weapons and military uniforms that are clearly not related to the ancient Greek setting proves to be neither here nor there. As ever with McVicar, the detail is less important than the overall impact, and both the Troy and Carthage scenes aim for a mood and grandeur of scale that is commensurate with the work itself. The tone of the first half is inevitably dark, the celebrations of the Trojans at the departure of the Greek army after ten years of siege short-lived, giving way to ceremonial mourning for the loss of so many great warriors, dire premonitions of doom from an increasingly hysterical Cassandra, and the mass suicide of the Trojan women as the warriors flee for Italy, the city having been breached by the Greek soldiers through the ruse of the horse. It’s the huge mechanical construction of the Trojan Horse that is the imposing image of the first half and it’s suitably impressive. If the direction is otherwise fairly static in this section, it at least allows attention to be drawn to the magnificent musical construction of the first two acts, and it gives plenty of room for Anna Caterina Antonacci to dominate as Cassandra.

As directed for the screen, the frequent use of close-ups here goes some way towards focussing on those strong points in the tone that was effectively established and in highlighting the qualities of Antonacci’s mesmerising performance, even if the actual staging and the power of the singing aren’t quite up to the demands of the music itself. Fortunately, most of The Fall of Troy section relies on choral arrangements of celebrations and lamentations and these also come across wonderfully. The strengths and weaknesses within Les Troyens and the difficulty of coping with them in a staged production are emphasised here by the treatment of the rather different second half. The warmth of tone and presentation of the Trojans in Carthage section is in marked contrast to the darkness of the first half, but Berlioz’s arrangements are no less epic in his depiction of the utopian society of Carthage under the rule of their beloved Queen Dido. Even Bryan Hymel, who doesn’t quite manage to rise above the dramatic power of the Troy section as Aeneas, seems to find the North African climate more to his liking. The challenges of the second half of Les Troyens however lie in the presentation of those sentiments, and that isn’t quite so well achieved as the first half.

Again, there is no faulting McVicar and Es Devlin’s approach to the stage design. Carthage is laid out in all the epic grandeur and warmth that is suggested in the score. While there’s much that’s beautiful about Berlioz’s scoring for these scenes, all the ballets and the celebratory love-fests can be a little bit too much - the rush into battle with Iarbas and the Numidians the only confrontational element in the first part and even that is given only a cursory treatment. The dances and celebrations can also be particularly difficult to stage in a way that retains the interest of an audience who has by that stage already had very nearly a full evening’s worth of Grand Opéra. As Dido, Eva-Maria Westbroek sings beautifully and is excellent at conveying the dilemma of the Carthaginian Queen over her feelings for Aeneas and her promise to remain faithful to the memory of her dead husband. Westbroek has a fullness of tone and sufficient power in her soprano, but not quite the necessary colour that you would normally get from a mezzo-soprano in the role. This is particularly noticeable for the lack of sufficient and complementary contrast that ought to be there in her 'Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie' duet with Hymel - a key moment in their relationship which never really comes across here as it should.

Allowing for the longeurs in Act III and the inability of the director to make them sufficiently interesting, there is however still a lot to enjoy musically and in the singing during the final three acts and it's all superbly put across by the Royal Opera House Orchestra under Antonio Pappano’s direction. In addition to the strong performances of Hymel and Westbroek, there are some beautiful sounds coming from Brindley Sherratt’s concerned Narbal and Hanna Hipp’s devoted Anna, both providing the necessary counterweight to Dido’s mental disintegration in the closing acts. Masterfully orchestrated in musical and dramatic terms by Berlioz, Hylas’s song of longing for home at the beginning of Act Five is sweetly sung by Ed Lyon, the lure of the seas and the call of Italy urged by dark forces of the ghosts of the dead Trojans, combining well with the frisson of betrayal between Dido and Aeneas that is more strongly characterised than their romance. That ensures that the conclusion at least is sufficiently tragic.

The Royal Opera House's Les Troyens is handsomely packaged for its 2-disc Blu-ray release. The two discs are contained in a digipak that is slipcased with a large booklet with several programme-length articles and a full detailed synopsis by David McVicar. The four and a half hour opera is evenly divided across the two discs, not according to the two distinct parts. Disc One has the first three Acts, which takes in Fall of Troy (Act I and II) the first act of The Trojans in Carthage (Act III). Disc Two has the final two Acts (IV and V). Antonio Pappano provides introductions at the start of the opera and during the 'interval' sections (Before Act III and before Act V). The opera can be played with these introductions included or without. There is also a featurette that looks at Es Devlin's set designs, an excerpt from Pappano's 'Insights' look at the opera and a Cast Gallery. The BD is all-region, subtitles are in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

Berlioz - Les Troyens

Hector Berlioz - Les Troyens

Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia, 2009

Valery Gergiev, Carlus Padrissa, La Fura dels Baus, Lance Ryan, Daniela Barcellona, Elisabete Matos, Gabriele Viviani, Giorgio Giuseppini, Stephen Milling, Eric Cutler, Oksana Shilova, Zlata Bulicheva

Unitel Classica - C-Major

In principle, I’m all for the approach and the use of new technology that the experimental Catalan theatre group la Fura dels Baus bring to opera productions. In practice however, I can never get past the dumb ideas that they sometimes base their concepts upon. Although I have avoided it myself, a lot of people like their Valencia Ring cycle, and I can see how their approach to total music theatre would work with Wagner (a recent production of Tristan und Isolde was handled very appropriately) – much as it suits, in principle, the dramatic theatricality of Hector Berlioz (they’ve done La Damnation de Faust in the past). In practice however, I’m afraid it just doesn’t work for me in the case of Les Troyens.

I’ve seen Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte destroyed by la Fura’s “concept” of the split in the hemispheres of the brain that could be seen as marking the divisions between enlightenment and obscurantism in that opera taken to the extreme of putting inflatable brains on the stage with the singers hanging suspended over them – a wooly concept taken over-literally that added nothing to Mozart (I won’t even get into them removing the recitative and replacing it with poems read out by French actors). The same sense of facile concept not thought-through in any meaningful way and taken over-literally applies also to the approach taken in this Fura production of Les Troyens. Thinking of the notion of a Trojan Horse in modern computer technology parlance, they apply the concept to the computer network of ancient Troy being the victim of a computer virus. Seriously.

What genius (that would be Carlus Padrissa) though it would be a great idea to take the metaphor of the Trojan Horse virus back to its source and make it literal? The phrase, “Beware of Greeks or other outside hostile agencies bearing gifts of laptops carrying viruses that may compromise the integrity of your system”, doesn’t really have all that great a ring to it. Even if you were to find this feeble concept worthy of more than a minute’s consideration, there’s little to support it in this staging, which is an impressive spectacle certainly (you are always guaranteed that at least from la Fura dels Baus), but it’s also a complete hotchpotch of ideas and concepts that look a complete mess and don’t come across particularly well on video. There’s little sense of and physical location of Troy in the first part of the opera (presented here in its entirety as originally intended as a 5-act opera, rather than two operas), but I suppose in this version it is supposed to be a virtual world. Quite why the cast are dressed in sports padding, hockey helmets, Tae kwon-do outfits and what looks like Stormtroopers costumes from Star Wars is however anyone’s guess.

There are nonetheless impressively staged scenes mixing projections and live action – and inevitably, much wire work, hanging singers and acrobats from cables – which enhances the nightmarish visions of Cassandra and representing the death of Laco’on well in the first half. The idea of designing Carthage as a particle accelerator to represent the idea of a modern technical paradise in the second half of the opera (Acts III to IV) at least carries the concept through, the Trojans spreading their virus before leaving for an ideal (in Mars!) and it looks impressive – but really, does this bring anything meaningful out of the work, or is it just half-baked concepts and Cirque du Soleil spectacle? More often however, the spectacle doesn’t really come to life, failing to find anything meaningful to do in the ballet sequences – a boxing match? a fashion parade of warrior fetish costumes? – and it is actually quite static, particularly when compared to the active, inventive and always impressive production at the Châtelet.

Conducted by Valery Gergiev, the Valencia production at least remains hugely entertaining from a musical viewpoint, although I wouldn’t put it above the John Eliot Gardner version. The singing is mostly of a good standard, particularly the two female leads Elisabete Matos (Cassandra) and Daniela Barcellona (Dido), but again, personally, I prefer the performances of Anna Caterina Antonacci and Susan Graham in the Châtelet production. Gregory Kunde is however certainly a better Aeneas than Lance Ryan here, who I thought delivered everything in a dreary declamatory fashion and in a tone that becomes unpleasantly nasal on the high notes. His poor diction moreover painfully murders the French libretto.

The quality of the Blu-ray itself – the entire opera on a single BD50 disc – is reasonably good, the image as clear as it can be on a dark stage that uses a lot of back and front-screen projections. The audio tracks – PCM stereo and DTS 5.1 HD master audio – are both fine, if there is little to choose between them. Overall, if you don’t think too much about the terrible concept and are able to simply just enjoy the spectacle of the staging, this isn’t a bad version of Les Troyens, and it’s certainly well performed – but there is a much better version out there already on Blu-ray in terms of production values, spectacle and overall quality of the performance.

Berlioz - Les Troyens

Hector Berlioz - Les Troyens

Théâtre du Châtelet Paris, 2003

John Eliot Gardiner, Yannis Kokkos, Peter Maniura, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Susan Graham, Ludovic Tézier, Laurent Naouri

Opus Arte

Presented across two dual-layer BD50 Blu-ray discs, Berlioz’s adaptation of Virgil’s The Aeneid is truly an epic undertaking, both in terms of the production and the opera itself. His penultimate opera, Les Troyens is considered to be the composer’s masterpiece, and indeed it brings together all the elements and the variety that is characteristic of Berlioz’s range, from darkness to light, from blood and thunder to tender lyricism, with rousing choruses, dramatic singing performances, musical interludes and dance sequences.

Despite that, the opera was never performed in full during the lifetime of the composer, the first two acts dealing with the fall of Troy to the Greeks despite Cassandra’s highly emotive premonitions of doom, excised in favour of the Trojans in Carthage section of Acts 3 to 5. There is certainly a strong division between the two parts, with many of the principal’s inevitably dying at the sacking of Troy at the end of Act 2, including Cassandra and her lover Choreobus (Hector already dead before the start of the opera nevertheless makes a highly effective appearance at the start of the Second Act in the form of a projected apparition), but it’s hard to imagine the opera feeling complete without the darkness and the powerful impact of the first half. Anna Caterina Antonacci, in particular, showing what the role of Cassandra has to offer the opera as a whole, a striking contrast to Susan Graham’s Dido, who dominates the second half, though no less effectively.

As the surviving Trojans flee, they receive temporary shelter in the North African city of Carthage established recently by exiles from Tyre, under the rule of Queen Dido. Both exiles, the respective leaders of the two tribes, Aeneas and Dido, find comfort for their loss in love for each other, but only until the gods remind Aeneas of his duty to lead his people to Italy. In contrast to the opening acts, the second half of Les Troyens consequently covers a wider range of emotions and the musical accompaniment is likewise as broad and as colourful as the set designs for Carthage, the tone darkening again at the end in a manner that echoes the restored opening of the opera.

The 2003 production at the Châtelet in Paris is accordingly spectacular, the stage filled with movement and action, but never cluttered, the score dominated often by the power of the choral writing, but individual roles are strong and the performances are exceptional, Gregory Kunde a fine Aeneas to stand alongside Antonacci and Graham. Everything about the production, the orchestra under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, is of the highest order, every single scene offering something of fascination and wonder, whether it is in the music, the singing or the staging. But, particularly in this full version of Les Troyens, there is an overall impression of completeness here. Total opera.

Les Troyens is perfectly presented on Blu-ray, the division between the two parts of the opera much better than on the 3-disc DVD edition. Act 1 and 2 are on the first disc along with the extra features, the other three acts on the second disc. Image and sound can hardly be faulted, the audio presented in PCM 2.0 and DTS HD Master Audio 5.1. The tone on the surround track is soft and warm rather than clean and precise, but the dynamic range is nonetheless excellent, handling the extremes well, and it is well suited to the arrangement. The hour-long documentary features contributions from the main performers and makes some interesting observations, but is over-long, being mostly made up of a complete walk-through of the synopsis by John Eliot Gardiner, illustrated with extended sequences from the opera.