Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande (Geneva, 2021)

Claude Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande

Grand Théâtre de Genève, 2021

Jonathan Nott, Damien Jalet, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Marina Abramović, Jacques Imbrailo, Mari Eriksmoen, Leigh Melrose, Matthew Best, Yvonne Naef, Marie Lys, Justin Hopkins

GTG Digital - 18 January 2021

We have already seen how it is going to be necessary to adapt our lives post-Covid, if such a time is yet imaginable, and it looks like things might never be quite the same again. Opera however has always been adaptable and open to incorporating a variety of art forms, since music and theatre offer many means of expression, combining the abstract and the concrete. One opera that stands almost unique in its approach is Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, in the way that it sets drama to music, and not just any drama but a Symbolist drama by Maurice Maeterlinck. As such it offers many ways of interpretation of meaning and vision and you imagine that few works are as well suited to expressing social isolation and a sense of lockdown.

The Grand Théâtre de Genève have certainly put together an interesting and unconventional team for their social isolated lockdown version of the work and attempted to use it as a way of exploring another side of Debussy's enigmatic opera. The concept and performance artist Marina Abramović provides the concept for this production, and it's co-directed for the stage and choreographed with dance elements by Damien Jalet and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. With Jonathan Nott conducting the Suisse Romande orchestra in a spread-out fashion around him, you would expect the moody atmospherics to thrive in such an unconventional space, but somehow - too many cooks perhaps? - it doesn't quite live up to expectations. 

It at least approaches the idea of preserving the mystery and enigma of the opera rather than try to pin it down. I once observed in Robert Wilson's production of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Paris Opera that there was a kind of circularity to the work, Mélisande leaving one world and entering into another in much the same state of despair that she entered into it. Wilson's stylisations  - introducing social distancing on the opera stage long before it became necessary - had that haunted quality, of a never-ending story, of ghosts repeating and re-enacting a tragic tale for eternity. As an image of the abstract and enigmatic nature of Debussy's only opera, the circle is a symbol of infinity with no beginning and no end, works well, and it's used as such to similarly haunting effect in Marina Abramović's idea of expanding the work out into the infinite universe.

Space and circular imagery (planets, eyes) are evident throughout the Geneva production, and the circle can even be seen in the shape of the pool, one of infinite depths where Mélisande loses her ring (another circle). The circular image of the moon, reflected in the pool, also represents a cold enigma. In a Symbolist work like Maeterlinck's such ideas evidently work very well, particularly with the added mood that Debussy's music brings to this unique opera. Although it has a Gothic or Medieval character to it, the piece needs no concrete idea of time or place. It's as abstract and internalised a world as Tristan und Isolde, a work of forbidden love and obsession, something both works have in common if approached obviously in entirely different ways.

Approaching the work in an entirely different way is exactly what you expect from a production based on an idea by Abramović (who also recently devised an extraordinary new opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas for the Bavarian State Opera last year), and choreographed by Jalet and Cherouaki. Rather than rely too much on the usual symbols or place too much emphasis on physical locations or internal dark places, Abramović visualises the work in a much more open environment, but one equally as isolating to the individual; in space. Obelisk monolithic crystals form rocks and grottoes as well as suggest a space ship, as the universe revolves and expands around Pelléas, Mélisande and Golaud. The director(s) also use the symbol of the eye to gaze on them from the emptiness of the infinite abyss of a black hole.

The dance moves are superbly choreographed and performed, the dancers moving fluidly around to 'enhance' the drama. Using some simple Improbable-style effects with reflective tape, they can become the tangled branches of the forest where Golaud is lost at the start, or weave Pelléas into the trap of Mélisande's hair. It sounds simple, but it's incredible how well this needs to be choreographed to be this effective. They can be purely abstract shapes and movement that tap into the undercurrents of the music and the nature of the characters, representing the oppressive qualities of Allemonde in wrestling semi-naked twisting bodies. Golaud's role in particular is magnified and multiplied with a team of dancers who forcefully surround and impress upon Mélisande. Sometimes however they can be a bit of a distraction and often feel unnecessary, intruding on the minimalist beauty of the piece, as well as making additional noise that isn't needed either.

As gorgeous as the Geneva production is, it doesn't manage to penetrate or even bring anything new out of the opera's mysteries. Pelléas et Mélisande can be a cold and detached opera, but it can even thrive on that, and there are few who can do icy detached coolness as well as Robert Wilson. A little bit of humanness doesn't go amiss however and that's largely absent here. Jacques Imbrailo tries to bring some of that in as Pelléas, and it's hard to fault the performances of Mari Eriksmoen's Mélisande or Leigh Melrose's impressive Golaud, but despite everything none of them seem to make any real connection to the people, the place, the space or the music. I don't think it's the fact that the production had to be performed in an empty theatre or the arrangement of the orchestra spread are out into the parterre, but despite all the fine individual talents in place, there's a feeling that there is a connection missing to click it all into place.

Links: Grand Théâtre de Genève

Lens - Shell Shock (La Monnaie, 2014 - Webcast)

Nicholas Lens - Shell Shock

La Monnaie - De Munt, 2014

Koen Kessels, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Claron McFadden, Sara Fulgoni, Gerald Thompson, Ed Lyon, Mark S. Doss, Gabriel Kuti, Eastman, Aimilios Arapoglou, Damien Jalet, Jason Kittelberger, Kazutomi Kozuki, Elias Lazaridis, Johnny Lloyd, Nemo Oeghoede, Shintaro Oue, Guro Nagelhus Schia, Ira Mandela Siobhan, Theo Lally, Gabriel Crozier

La Monnaie Web streaming - November 2014

La Monnaie in Brussels are in my view just about the most consistently impressive opera company in Europe at the moment and at the forefront of presenting opera as a cutting edge artform. Part of the reason for their success is their willingness to involve theatre directors and artists from outside the opera world, who often bring a new and refreshing perspective on the meaning and presentation of very familiar works, but the musical interpretation and the quality of the performers engaged is of a very high standard too. Their commitment to ensuring that opera remains a vital musical and dramatic force is also evident in their commissioning of exciting new creations every season. This year Shell Shock proved to be one of the most impressive new works I've seen for a very long time.

Characteristically, the strength of the work and the key to its success is in how La Monnaie have assembled a strong and imaginative creative team from a variety of disciplines.  As some of these collaborators have little or no previous experience of opera, they often have few preconceptions about what opera ought to be. For this work, commissioned to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War, the Belgian composer Nicholas Lens (born in Ypres where the memory of the war remains fresh) was been paired with the Australian singer/songwriter and author Nick Cave, while the direction and staging of the work was placed in the hands of Belgian-Moroccan dance choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The result is Shell Shock: A Requiem of War, A Dance Oratorio in Twelve Canti.

Evidently then, Shell Shock is not an opera in the traditional sense. It's part choral oratorio, it's part requiem mass, it's a ballet, it's a song cycle, but opera is a good enough description in how it encompasses and blends together these various musical and dramatic art disciplines. Made up of twelve separate cantos that describe the experience of the war from a variety of viewpoints (Canto of the Colonial Soldier, Canto of the Nurse, Canto of the Deserters, Canto of the Orphans etc.), there is however a strong thematic and even a narrative line that runs through the work, connecting the experiences. Even though there is little narrative dialogue within the canto format, the experiences being typically that of a single person or a group of people in a choral piece, there is nonetheless a vital dialogue established with the other elements. Not only is there a strong connection between the words and the music - as you would expect at the very least - but they form an meaningful dialogue and interact very much with the performers and dancers on the set, and with the various other theatrical stage devices, including the unconventional use of props, and projections.

This is an true operatic collaboration then in every sense of the word, where equal weight is given to each of the disciplines and they are informed, heightened and enhanced by their interaction with one another. Musically, Nicholas Lens draws on a variety of styles to match the content, some of it sounding like Vaughan-Williams in less pastoral more wartime music and, inevitably, closer to Britten's War Requiem. There is also a John Adams-like modern rhythmic quality in how the music is attuned to the sung English text, but without the minimalistic repetition. If it's difficult to pin down, the music nonetheless has a consistency and dramatic quality that works perfectly with the tone established by Nick Cave's texts. Unpretentiously called lyrics, they are indeed songs, Cave working to his strengths as a storyteller, expressing all the anger, exasperation, fear and horror of the conditions experienced by the soldiers, the nurses and the families of those caught up in nightmarish situations.

The connection between the words and the music is a strong combination that makes Shell Shock viable and deeply affecting as a concert piece in its own right, but Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's choreographed dances, movements and tableaux-like settings for the scenes really take the work to another level. The dances and movements manage to be strikingly beautiful without for a second glorifying the slaughter, without fitting the horror and confusion of the circumstances into any false sense of dramatic action, and without idealising the senselessness of the sacrifice. "War is reprehensible, not the man", is a line from the lengthy Canto of the Deserters section, but the theme is expanded on elsewhere, with lyrical and musical motifs referring to an Angel of Death and Kratos the God of War drawing together common experiences into a larger narrative.

Cherkaoui's dances, with Eastman leading the troupe, are also strikingly illustrative of these themes. It's a ballet of war where soldiers twitch with shell shock or contort as their bodies are disjointed, mutilated and torn apart by bullet fire and crawl over sandbags to form their own pile of corpse sandbags. The use of common objects found on the battlefield is employed imaginatively elsewhere, guns, bayonets and even stretchers flowing with the dancers into configurations that illustrate the stories and give expression beyond the literal. Bed sheets, for example, are used to capture charging soldiers, their faces and hands pressed against the canvas screen in a silent scream at the point of death. In combination with the music and the lyrics, it manages to be visually striking, expressive and horrific scene at the same time. Eugenio Szwarcer's projections and the stage lighting also come together with all the other elements to create further tableaux vivantes, or tableaux mortes if you can put it that way.

The singers are assigned various roles according to the Colonial Soldiers, Deserters, Survivors and Fallen of the Canti, some of them recurring throughout the opera as a whole. Essentially however, they are unnamed in the respect that each of them can fulfill multiple common designations within this war, and are identified only according to their singing role. The casting of a soprano (Claron McFadden), a mezzo-soprano (Sara Fulgoni), a countertenor (Gerald Thompson), a tenor (Ed Lyon) and a bass (Mark S. Doss) is clearly meant to be representative of the whole range of experiences covered here, but the choice of singers for those roles is also just about perfect. That's no coincidence either, several of these singers having worked with Lens before (Claron McFadden notably on Love Is The Only Master I'll Serve), but it's just another example of how La Monnaie strive for perfection on every level while stretching the capabilities of everyone to their limits. The results of this approach are evident to anyone viewing this remarkable work.

Links: La Monnaie, ARTE Concert

Wagner - Das Rheingold

Richard Wagner - Das Rheingold

Teatro alla Scala, 2010

Daniel Barenboim, Guy Cassiers, René Pape, Johannes Martin Kränzle, Doris Soffel, Kwang Chulyoun, Timo Riihouen, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, Stephan Rügamer, Jan Buchwald, Marco Jentzch, Anna Samuil, Anna Larsson, Aga Mikolaj, Maria Gortsevskaya, Marina Prudenskaya

Arthaus Musik - Blu-ray

The true musical merit and the importance of Das Rheingold is often underestimated or at least overlooked on account of its designation as merely the Prologue to the three parts proper of Wagner's epic Ring saga. For the public certainly it at least sets the tone for the grandeur and the admittedly greater dramatic and musical richness that can be found in the Die Walküre that follows, but I suspect it's treated with no less musical and conceptual rigour by the conductor and the director who embark on any new Ring cycle. Perhaps even more so, since it's important to establish from the outset what distinctive approach is going to be taken, and whether it can settle on the precise balance required that will propel the audience compellingly into this unique musical journey.

The first part of the new Teatro alla Scala Ring, created in 2010, fulfils that remit well, with Daniel Barenboim managing proceedings with precision and drive from the orchestra pit and director Guy Cassiers fulfilling all the requirements to establish a suitable tone that fully supports the work. With the assistance of choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, there may even be something of a distinct vision that offers a sense of the shape the subsequent parts of the tetralogy might take. I don't know what Wagner would have made of ballet being incorporated into Das Rheingold, but the Prologue of the Ring - the ultimate expression of the Gesamtkunstwerk - can use a little bit of extra spectacle and stage innovation to draw out those deeper premonitory resonances within the work.

The combination of the music interacting with the staging is at least superb during the opening scene. In the beginning there is nothing, just darkness, then there's the sense of water and life as the Rhinemaidens drift in an out of the shadows in response to the attentions of the Alberich. The sun eventually rises to bath the stage in shimmering gold at the same time as it dawns on the Niebelung goblin that he has something greater within his grasp more covetable than the three bathing beauties. The resonances of the gold, the power that it confers on the person who wields the ring made from it (the "ring" incidentally a shimmering glove here) and the outcome that it eventually holds for the gods is all there in the music and the force of it comes through in Barenboim's meticulous account of the work and in the performance of Johannes Martin Kränzle as Alberich.

It's also there in the background projections and in the contribution of the dancers in this production. In addition to the fine performance of the work on the surface level of the stage direction and the singing, the greater significance of what is being played out here is projected in abstract shimmering colours, textures and shadows on the background and in the movements of the dancers. On a straightforward level that means that there are giant-sized shadow counterparts for the giants Fasolt and Fafner, while the dancers meld together to form the Tarnhelm and its transformations, but the use of lighting, colours and abstract shimmering projections of water, rocks and gold also manage to convey a brooding mythological quality to the locations with premonitions of the dark consequences to the epic events that are about to unfold.

In Das Rheingold the more active roles in determining the direction of the drama are in the likes of Alberich, Loge and Fasolt, and these are indeed the performances that shine here. I wasn't sure that Johannes Martin Kränzle benevolent slightly comical appearance could carry off Alberich, even with the disturbing disfigurement of a "permanent smile" scar at the edges of his mouth, but he not only sings the role well, he also manages to convey the right impression and tone for each scene, from his achieving enlightenment in his renouncing love for power, through his tyranny over Mime, his pride in his invulnerability, to the agony of his loss of the ring to Wotan and Loge. Stephan Rügamer is a sprightly Loge, clever but cautious, a spring in his step and in his voice. Even though small in stature Kwang Chul Youn is nonetheless impressively capable of sounding much larger as the giant Fasolt. The use of shadowplay helps visualise the size and actions of the giants, but it's all there already in Kwang's performance.

The capabilities of Wotan and Fricke aren't tested here to the same extent that they are in Die Walküre, so both René Pape and Doris Soffel were fine if not quite outstanding in these roles. Pape doesn't always appear to be as comfortable or authoritative in the role of Wotan as he probably ought to be, but how well he eventually manages to fulfils the role and whether that uncertainty is part of his character's make-up should become apparent in the subsequent parts of the Ring. The remaining roles were also adequately performed, Timo Riihouen's Fafner in particular working well with Kwang's Fasolt and Anna Larsson making a suitably dramatic entrance and impact as Erda.

A BD25 disc might seem a little tight to cover an opera that is close to three hours long, but I detected no issues at all with the image or the sound. The transfer is stable and clear, handling dark scenes and all the textures and colouration of the background projections without any shimmer or flickering. The audio tracks are LPCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1. There's no great benefit to the surround mix, which might even be a little bit too echoing even if it is mainly front-speaker based, but the stereo mix is strong, particularly when listened to through headphones. There are no extras on the disc, just an essay in the booklet that seems to have some rather high-flown ideas about the production. Subtitles are in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Korean.