Filidei - L'Inondation (Paris, 2019)

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

Gounod - Philémon et Baucis (Tours, 2018)

Charles Gounod - Philémon et Baucis

L'Opéra de Tours, 2018

Benjamin Pionnier, Julien Ostini, Norma Nahoun, Sébastien Droy, Alexandre Duhamel, Eric Martin-Bonnet, Marion Grange

Culturebox - February 2018

Composer centenaries are always a good opportunity to revisit some rare and neglected works, and while Charles Gounod is well-represented by Faust if not much else, the 200th anniversary of his birth has at least unearthed (and seen broadcast) two practically unheard works in La nonne sanglante and Philémon et Baucis. If neither of the works proved to be lost masterpieces or give any indication that Gounod might be an underrated composer, they are certainly merit another look and prove to be charming and entertaining stage works.

First performed in 1860 (a year after Faust), Philémon et Baucis was revised in 1876 from its three-act form into a two-act opera. While neither version has been given much attention in the intervening years, the three-act Philémon et Baucis - in its production here in Tours - certainly hasn't been performed since 1860. An adaptation of Jean de la Fontaine's adaptation of the mythological take told in the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses, with a libretto by Jules Barbier et Michel Carré, Philémon et Baucis was intended to capitalise on the success of Offenbach's racy carry-on through classical mythology in his 1858 opéra-comique Orphée aux enfers ("Orpheus in the Underworld"). Gounod's take on the subject however has little in common with Offenbach.

Where Offenbach's approach was satirical and irreverent, Gounod adopts a more gentle tone that relies for humour more in the situational settings of mythological figures intervening in the lives of humans and employing common language, and instead exploits the setting and the characters for different moods and colours in concise little numbers. The opening scene in the original 1860 version, for example, opens with a pastoral scene, showing the poor couple, Philémon and Baucis in their humble little hut, singing of their love for each other, content in their old age. To relive their youth would be lovely, but looking at the wild and drunken antics of the youth of today, Philémon prays to Jupiter to deliver them from such behaviour.

The arrival of Jupiter with the god Vulcan in tow during a storm brings other colours out of the work, not least of which is the humour to be found in the lascivious behaviour of Jupiter already made great fun of in Orphée aux enfers. Gounod takes this awareness for granted then and doesn't try to compete in the sauciness stakes with Offenbach's work - although there is plenty of opportunity - but takes a more measured and dynamic approach that is rather (pre-)biblical in nature. Jupiter and Vulcan, who also has a little (pre-)Rheingold-like fiery forging while bemoaning of the cruelty of Venus towards him, are surprised at the kindness the old people show the two strangers and the fact that they are still very much in love, as this is not their experience of love.

Having gifted them with a self-replenishing jar of wine and the promise of a return to youth, Jupiter then takes vengeance on the other disrespectful Bacchantes who mock the gods and carry on their outrageous orgies, bringing a flood to the land and wiping them all out, and Gounod takes advantage of this opportunity to have a ballet Intermezzo (that is also taken full advantage of in the excellent Tours production). He doesn't wipe out everyone of course, keeping a few choice souls for his amorous purposes, but when he sees Baucis returned to her youthful beauty, he inevitably makes a play for her that doesn't make Philémon a bit happy.

There's plenty of material there for Gounod to play with and he's not so much interested in the comic potential. The arias and numbers are all rather pleasantly melodic and charming, and conducted as such by Benjamin Pionnier, but the work lacks any real edge, even in the spoken dialogue passages. A stage director could be tempted to play it up a little more in the style of Offenbach, but that would seem to be going against the true intentions of the work, and Julien Ostini focuses instead on matching the variety of tones provided by Gounod with an appropriate setting for each situation. That means keeping everything relative simple and uncluttered, but with some visual flair in Bruno de Lavenère's sets and some sympathetic lighting by Simon Trottet.

The necessary charm is there also in the singing performances of Norma Nahoun's sweet lyrical Baucis working wonderfully alongside Sébastien Droy's earnest Philémon. Alexandre Duhamel's self-confident but ultimately repentant skirt-chasing deity Jupiter is likewise well balanced with Eric Martin-Bonnet's bitter and lovelorn Vulcan, and Marion Grange whips up the Bacchantes into a frenzy, or perhaps more of a mild tizzy. Such is the nature of Gounod's Philémon et Baucis and such is the light charm of the account given it in the Tours production that this is a sympathetic and appropriate way to rediscover the true value of another neglected work by Charles Gounod, even if it's not such a masterpiece.

Links: L'Opéra de Tours, Culturebox