Saariaho - Innocence (Aix, 2021)

Kaija Saariaho - Innocence

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2021

Susanna Mälkki, Simon Stone, Magdalena Kožená, Sandrine Piau, Tuomas Pursio, Lilian Farahani, Markus Nykänen, Jukka Rasilainen, Lucy Shelton, Vilma Jää, Beate Mordal, Julie Hega, Simon Kluth,Camilo Delgado Díaz, Marina Dumont

ARTE Concert - 10th July 2021

The loss of Kaija Saariaho in June 2023 came as a shock to those who recognised her as one of the most brilliant of contemporary composers. I saw her twice in person, once at the premiere of her opera Only the Sound Remains in Amsterdam in 2016, where she was present in the foyer posing for press photos. It was a surprise however to walk into a coffee shop in Dundalk in Ireland in June 2019 and see her sitting there with her husband Jean-Baptiste Barrière. Even though I knew she was there as a guest for a performance of her works at the Louth Contemporary Music Society's annual two-day summer festival, and Dundalk has seen many famous modern composers appear in town, it still felt strange to see the composer of such sublime music in such an everyday place. I think I made a brief nod and smile of acknowledgement, unwilling to disturb her. The performance of Terra Memoria that evening by the Meta4 string quartet was extraordinary and thrilling.

I greatly admired her music, even though like most contemporary music, you had to search it out and rarely had the opportunity to have it brought to you. For various reasons I never found the time to watch the streaming of Innocence at the Aix-en-Provence festival in 2021 even though I had read good reports about it. Sadly, now that there won't be another, this final work will remain her last contribution to the world of lyric drama and, belatedly taking the opportunity to view it now, the work is even more poignant now, deeply moving and surely a masterpiece, a fine testament to the wondrous complexity of her musical range. The beauty and power of her music is fully evident here, the restless striving to push her music into new ground through the use of unconventional instruments like the kantele and exploring the range of the voice as an instrument.

Innocence is in almost complete contrast to her previous opera Only the Sound Remains. It exudes menace and sorrow from the outset even as the drama opens on the day of a wedding that is a supposedly happy occasion for the bride, the groom and his family. But not everyone is happy, the celebrations tainted, almost overwhelmed by a greater emotion; the shock and horror of the caterer Tereza who has been asked to provide service at the last moment. To her horror, she has just come to the realisation that the eldest son of the family she is working for killed her daughter Markéta along with a number of other children in a gun rampage through a school ten years previously. As she relives the experience, the family are forced to confront the reality that this event cannot be erased or forgotten about.

Going into the opera without knowing what is to take place, there is nonetheless an evident rawness and complexity in the situation, one that is trying to bring together two contrasting events that do not sit well together. The music tries to encapsulate these conflicting sentiments, as well as find a way to suggest that something has taken place that is almost too deeply disturbing and horrific to depict or even speak out loud. It takes a while before the libretto make that realisation explicit, the present and past playing out at the same time, and when it comes it still feels painful, even if it remains too horrific to show with any kind of dramatic realism. And yet, through the music and the direction, it manages to truly get to the heart of the mixed emotions surrounding it in place and time.

Simon Stone is a good director to bring out the complexity of undercurrents and contrasting viewpoints (see his extraordinary Tristan und Isolde, also performed at Aix in 2021) and he finds a creative way of allowing it to work coherently, but it's Saariaho's music, conducted at the premiere by Susanna Mälkki, that really brings it together. The score gets to the heart of the situation and sentiments without resorting to cinematic techniques or the conventional dramatic orchestration that you might expect, but rather with a delicacy and sensitivity of touch, the music plunging deeply into the interior world rather than the external drama.

That's quite a challenge. For a start there is a large cast of individual figures in Sofi Oksanen's original libretto, each of the children international students, speaking in a mix of languages, who each tell their own story while simultaneously living and reliving their experience. Some are now dead, others express fear blended with survivor guilt, constantly questioning how they reacted at the time, how they could possibly have helped. This plays out at the same time and alongside the parents of the killer feeling concern about bringing an innocent new bride into this family, mixed with guilt about their son's actions, questioning whether they are in some way to blame, whether they failed to notice the warning signs, whether they were complicit to one extent or another in what has happened.

Then there is the challenge of exploring the act of the school shooting itself, trying to present a rounded account of the complex motivations that may have lain behind it; was it inspired by racism? was it a terrorist act? and the impossibility of even being able to fully explaining it. The stage shows commemorations taking place simultaneously with the bloodbath, the occasion contaminated by a sense of anger at the tragedy being used and exploited for political gain, with politicians making fake promises of changes to gun laws. The pain of some has value, the pain endured by others none at all, as one of the victims puts it, words and good intentions replacing any real action; nothing will be done, until the next shooting.

The singing has its own complexity, in a multiplicity of languages, English, Finnish, French, Spanish and German are spoken, and even the singing voices have an uncommon range, from background choral voices used as an instrument, to spoken recitative and folk-inspired arrangements on the part of Markéta, the dead daughter of the catering server at the wedding party. The work also captures Saariaho's fascination for time, how it can be subjective, seeming to stretch out when one is bored and in other moments it can feel like time seems to stop. This feeds into how she composes the music for each overlaid and overlayered scene. Time has stopped for some, it is repeating for others, past and present coexist. The music ambitiously attempts to bring this all together, bringing together the experiences of many into the same period of time.

The opera is superbly directed by Simon Stone for the Aix festival. It's not just the concept of the rotating box of rooms and split levels that keep the continuity flowing and scenes overlapping, but much like how the same idea was applied to his Wozzeck, the clarity with which the complexity of the story is allowed to unfold is impressive. The scene of the shooting is horrific enough without it requiring blazing guns, the testimonies from blood-splattered victims and survivors tells the story in its own horrific fashion, but the scene where Tereza confronts the family and the new bride with the deception they have been carrying out, pouring out all the pain she has had to live with is truly harrowing. Nothing however is as clear cut as we would like it to be when it comes to identifying who is a victim. The performances here from Sandrine Piau and Magdalena Kožená is this scene are extraordinary, but then they are both remarkable throughout. The filming for screen is also superb, the close-ups in this scene showing the intensity of the dramatic performances.

The singing is outstanding, Saariaho writing beautifully for the voice with singers clearly chosen as best for the roles and all of them outstanding. Markus Nykänen as Tuomas, the Finnish groom, and Lilian Farahani, his Romanian bride Stela, both give notable performances of great emotion and intensity at the situation they find themselves in. Saariaho is not afraid to use spoken recitation when it is required for its own effect, for the direct expression of the students, rising into singing under the strain of the experience. Choral arrangements of chants and humming vocalisations underline the ambiguity of the unspoken and the inexplicable. The high pitch yelps of Vilma Jää's Finnish folk singing for the dead Markéta takes getting used to but have their part to play also and work effectively for the dramatic purposes of the opera. Combined, it makes Innocence an almost overwhelming experience, for all it takes in, for all it expresses, for it being a work of unparalleled ambition and genius. 

External links: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence

Penderecki - Die Teufel von Loudun (Munich, 2022)

Krzysztof Penderecki - Die Teufel von Loudun

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2022

Vladimir Jurowski, Simon Stone, Ausrine Stundyte, Ursula Hesse von den Steinen, Nadezhda Gulitskaya, Lindsay Ammann, Danae Kontora, Nadezhda Karyazina, Jordan Shanahan, Robert Dölle, Martin Winkler, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, Andrew Harris, Ulrich Reß, Kevin Conners, Jochen Kupfer, Thiemo Strutzenberger, Barbara Horvath, Sean Michael Plumb, Martin Snell, Christian Rieger, Steffen Recks

Staatsoper.TV - 27th June 2022

The Bavarian State Opera are not afraid to take in new and challenging works, and while not exactly new - it was premiered in 1969 - Penderecki's Die Teufel von Loudun is being performed in Munich for the first time in 2022 and it is an ambitious work to open their Summer Opera Festival. It's not just that Penderecki's music is modern and uses some unconventional instruments, but the subject matter still has the potential to cause shock and outrage in some quarters. Directing the opera at Munich, Simon Stone attempts to explore the work and its subject a little more deeply than that, but it doesn't quite have the impact you might have expected.

The opera itself caused a certain amount of disapproval when it was first performed, but the controversy around the subject goes back much further than that. Based on a famous event of mass hysteria in a Ursuline monastery in the 17th century where a number of nuns claimed to be possessed by demons, the story has been written about and filmed many times, celebrated for its potential to cause outrage. The basis of most modern adaptations is Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun (1952), including the play by John Whiting, and it's the latter that provides the dramatic template that is the basis for Penderecki's opera.

More than just being about mass hysteria, the subject gives rise to a number of human and socio-political points of interest, on the abuse of power, on religion, the oppression of women, female repression and expression; all topics that, not so surprisingly, continue to be topical and can be related to many present day issues and scandals. And since it's Australian-Swiss director Simon Stone who is directing for Munich, you can imagine that it will not be set in the 17th century but will have a contemporary setting. Essentially however Stone doesn't take revisionism much further than modern dress, just to prevent the viewer from thinking that this is a historical event that has no relevance to the present. Other than that however, the work and its themes speak out powerfully on their own terms.

It's really not such an outrageous idea to imagine how a closed group of people or a closed inward-looking society, dissatisfied with their situation, repressed from having expression of normal human activities that others are able to enjoy, might find themselves subject to manipulation resulting in mass delusion. It certainly appears to be that kind of situation exploited by Cardinal Richelieu in France in the 17th century, wanting to break down the walls of Loudun as a sign of being more open to Protestantism, and he uses the breaking down of a liberal-minded man, the womanising priest Grandier who poses a threat to his sense of order. Huxley would have seen parallels to this in his time just as Penderecki would have recognised lving in Poland in the 1930s, and you don't need to be reminded where it is applicable today.

There are many other levels that can be explored, and from a modern perspective - and again an issue that remains topical and controversial - it's interesting that the battleground that this battle is fought over is that of a woman's body. The young women of Loudun are preyed on to some extend by Grandier, and they are urged to claim demonic possession by the priest's enemies. The nun Jeanne and the other nuns, victims of repressive behaviour and thus highly suggestible, who have no control over how their situation is exploited. The use of modern dress might help make such connections without having to make it explicit and without having to resort to exploitative or sensationalist imagery, but nonetheless I don't think that Stone's production is entirely successful. The again, I'm not sure it's all down to the direction.

Where Stone is usually strong is in working with his set designer, Bob Cousins, to devise a set that is adaptable and fluid, keeping the drama moving while holding the inherent intensity of a work. This set however doesn't prove to be very attractive or interesting, being just a large revolving block with a number of functional openings and staircases. I'm not convinced however that Penderecki gets to the heart of the situation either in the libretto or the score. The essential ideas and themes I mentioned earlier are evident, but the libretto is a little too wordy and explanatory, the music often reduced to cinematic cues. The lip-syned demonically possessed voices is a quite creepy effect, but you get a sense that it should be far more chilling and disturbing than this. It feels more academically laid out than dramatically engaging.

Where Stone is also traditionally good is getting into the complex underlying psychology and making it relatable. There is a lot to get into here, and we certainly get strong performances under the musical direction of Vladimir Jurowski, a champion for the work. Ausrine Stundyte in particular is excellent as Jeanne, and is typically superb in roles like this, but it still feels like there is something missing. Whether it's in the disconnect between the music, the drama, the themes, the set design or the performances, in some operas it is critical that they all come together. That's down to the director to ensure that happens, but for whatever reason, the elements just don't seem to blend in a way that really makes the necessary impact.

I don't think the replacement of an indisposed Wolfgang Koch by an actor had any real bearing on that, but it probably didn't help. Robert Dölle from the Ensemble of the Residence Theater gave a strong dramatic performance with a Sprechstimme delivery of the recitative lines, but the singing part of the role had to be taken off-stage by Jordan Shanahan. Certainly the fate of Grandier as depicted in the opera and on stage is truly horrific, and that impact was not lost. Die Teufel von Loudun is definitely an opera that is worth bringing back and looking at it again in the filmed version of the opera with Tatjana Troyanos confirms its worth, but it doesn't really make the same impression here in the 2022 Munich Festival premiere.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, Staatsoper.TV

Berg - Wozzeck (Vienna, 2022)

Alban Berg - Wozzeck

Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna - 2022

Philippe Jordan, Simon Stone, Christian Gerhaher, Sean Panikkar, Jörg Schneider, Dmitry Belosselskiy, Anja Kampe, Josh Lovell, Peter Kellner, Stefan Astakhov, Thomas Ebenstein, Christina Bock

Wierner Staatsoper Live - 31 March 2022

Whether it's the inherent power and meaning of Büchner's original unfinished drama or whether it gains something more from Alban Berg's score, Wozzeck is one of the most powerful and enigmatic statements about the human condition in either form. When it comes to staging it then it almost demands a statement from the director, and Simon Stone is a director with things to say or at least a director with a distinctive vision. His production of Wozzeck for Vienna has some impressive stagecraft and singing, but whether it makes a statement or not, or whether it even needs to, there's no question that the essential qualities of the work are there for all to see.

One thing you can expect from Stone, whether directing opera or drama, is that it's necessary to make it contemporary, something that speaks of now and not of a time in the past. You would certainly expect that when dealing with the themes of Wozzeck, and not unexpectedly, the setting of this production is contemporary (in a gym, in the Underground), minimalist and faithful to the content, letting the work and the music express everything that is essential. Nothing is the different from what you would expect and yet it is at the same time unfamiliar.

The first scene is closest to what you expect to see at the opening of Wozzeck, Franz shaving the Captain, although not as a soldier for his bullying commanding officer, but working apparently at a barbershop. We can presume it doesn't need to be in a military setting for the nature of Franz's belittlement at the hands of others to be meaningful. The scene ends with the throat of the other two customers being slit open by the barbers, creating a feeling of a general sense of the absurdity and hopelessness of life, at least as it is experienced by one man, Franz Wozzeck, but also a premonition perhaps of fate of Marie.

Stone uses a tripartite rotating stage that, for the early part at least, flows continuously in a cycle were one scene flows straight through to the next, despite this being a work made up of distinct scenes that in the unfinished original did not even have a set order. The flow of one scene into the next however captures something of the abstraction of Franz's life, the disconnect between reality and how it appears in his mind, already disturbed by the experiments of the doctor, making it seem even more unreal and disorientating.

The flowing rotation is not even a linear or cyclical approach, Stone collapsing time in the scene of Marie's infidelity with the drum major, showing three versions of the scene at different time points almost simultaneously as Wozzeck puts the pieces together in his mind. The technique was used by Stone also in his remarkable Tristan und Isolde for Aix-en-Provence last year. Here there is a sense that Franz is grasping to restore some kind of sense or order upon the randomness of his life going out of control.

If there is a larger purpose to the rotating and constantly shifting scenes, aside from an incredible sense of stagecraft of Robert Cousins to rapidly change the sets with fluid ease, it is this idea of seeking to impose structure while time and life is moving faster than Wozzek can keep up with it. All his interactions as a soldier, as a father, in a military or family unit seem to be a search for something to grasp onto, guide him and show him the way out of his setbacks and troubles. Marie likewise has the Bible and religion to turn to for order and meaning, but what she reads in it seems to offer no comfort.

Stone's approach is effective then, but it's also open enough that any criticism you might have of the stage setting and his direction within it could also be said to work in its favour. Some might see the plain white walls of basic sets as somewhat cold and sterile - in complete contrast for example to William Kentridge's more elaborate approach (Salzburg, 2017) - but the sterility and emptiness of the white rooms, contrasted with the overgrown scenes of disorder in nature - could also be seen to reflect a world that offers no comfort to Franz. As a statement of futility, the final depiction of the dead body of Franz being lifted on a crane out of a cistern is certainly suitably bleak.

The search for order and the failure to find any comfort in any kind of artificial construct is reflected too in Alban Berg's score. Meticulously and tightly constructed, with historical antecedents, it seems to offer a clearly defined structure, but the atonal, unpredictable progression and enigmatic development hints at the difficulties of comprehending the underlying complexities of a world when we are looking for simplicity. It's a source of constant wonder, but there is nothing comforting in Berg's music.

The Wiener Staatsoper production is conducted by Philippe Jordan and he has a good measure of the detail of Berg as well as the overall impact that it strives to achieve. The opera leaves you dissatisfied that it seems to offer no respite and no sense of resolution. It's an unremittingly bleak view of the human condition and yet at the same time it is beyond impressive that this is capable of being expressed in such musical terms. Simon Stone's production matches that, leaving you feeling that it needs something more, yet impressed at what it has been able to say at the same time.

That inevitably places considerable challenges on the two principal roles, but we have two fine performers here in Christian Gerhaher and Anja Kampe. This seems like an ideal role for Gerhaher and sings it well, bringing character and personality to the role, or humanity maybe, since it's essential to see Wozzeck as such, not as some pitiful figure, but one striving to find a place in a world that seems to be conspiring against him. Anja Kampe is also excellent, not just a foil for Wozzeck but a person in her own right with strength of character, just similarly lost and unfortunately not on a wavelength that can help him.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper, Wiener Staatsoper Live

Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Aix-en-Provence, 2021)

Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde

Festival Aix-en-Provence, 2021

Simon Rattle, Simon Stone, Stuart Skelton, Nina Stemme, Jamie Barton, Josef Wagner, Franz-Josef Selig, Dominic Sedgwick, Linard Vrielink, Ivan Thirion

ARTE Concert - 8th July 2021

Director Simon Stone typically approaches Tristan und Isolde in his 2021 Aix-en-Provence Festival production with the intention of updating the opera to a more meaningful contemporary age. As wrong-headed as that might seem, since the drama - such as it is - and principal motivating force in Wagner's opera and music score takes place in a realm almost entirely outside of any physical time or place, Stone nonetheless has good form with his modern updates both in the world of opera and in the theatre. There's a complete reworking of the drama and the motivating forces behind it in this production, but Wagner's sublime music proves - as always - to be supremely capable of withstanding and supporting any number of extravagant directorial ideas and concepts. 

If you want to relocate Tristan und Isolde in the present day, minus magic love potions and the forced relocation of the Queen of Ireland by sea to a forced marriage with the King of Cornwall, you do nonetheless need to replace it with something suitable and meaningful. There's a natural division in the opera between the physical reality and an idealised dream-like exploration of powerful forces that extend beyond and transcend material human boundaries. Krzysztof Warlikowski also recently exploited that division in his 2021 Munich production and for the festival at Aix, Stone proposes viewing the heightened reality as a kind of love/vengeance fantasy on the part of the disturbed mind of a wife whose husband has been unfaithful to her.

Much of this is laid out in the Vorspiel and inevitably Wagner's music has a lot of weight to carry in order to establish this as any kind of viable idea to impose upon Tristan und Isolde. Witnessing her husband (Tristan) canoodling with a work colleague or friend at a dinner party in their fancy apartment, Isolde goes to bed in Act I dreaming of stormy sea with ideas of burning revenge and probably divorce raging in her dreams. Rather than drink from some arcane flask of magic potion, here at the conclusion of Act I it's a collection of prescription drugs and a cachet of cocaine in a cardboard shoe box that acts as a drug to heighten the personal turmoil of emotions going on between them.

As ever in this particular work, you need to carry this though to its conclusion to determine whether this domestic arrangement can be sustained, but it has to be said that Stone at least does establish it in spectacular fashion in Act I. You might be less inclined to go along with this idea as it is initially laid out where it not for the power of Wagner's music to scour the depths of human emotional response. It sustains the dramatic and conflicting tensions of love, hatred and desire that exists between Tristan and Isolde through to the release from any inhibiting factors to its expression at the end of the first act. There's still quite a bit to go though, and it's not easy to piece it all together into something coherent in Stone's production.

Act II abruptly takes us to an office where Isolde appears to be the manager, where the staff - in line with present circumstances - observe social distancing and mask wearing in the workplace. The day after the night before, the consequences still reverberating in Wagner's score, Tristan is shown the door with his suitcase. His reappearance in the office however leads - slightly confusingly - to a seamless flashback of the consuming love the two of them once had. To add to the complex layering of the situation and the resonances in Wagner's music, younger Tristans and Isoldes re-enact the beginning of their affair in parallel scenes during 'O sink hernieder'. It's revealed that the affair indeed started as an office romance when Isolde was already married and had a young child, the discovery of the affair breaking up her marriage.

It's not the traditional telling of the story of Tristan und Isolde by any means and it risks undermining the context and intended meaning of the drama, but it certainly touches on the underlying sentiments, if somewhat obliquely. More than that it in fact, with a vision of an elderly Isolde and Tristan in a wheelchair, it attempts to telescope the entirety of sentiments that contribute to a fully rounded and lived relationship, and encapsulate within it the depth of feeling that two people can have for one another. It's not just two people each with the own feelings but something greater that has grown between them, a love that is called Tristan AND Isolde, something that exceeds the boundaries of flesh and blood existence and can only reach its fulfilment in death. And damned if you don't feel that when it is laid out like this.

Laying it out, as simply as possible in all its complexity, is indeed the purpose of a director and Stone achieves that to a remarkable degree. It's no mean feat to match and fuse the sentiments expressed in the music and in the abstract dramatic expression of what love means, and translate that into something relatable. For the most part, Stone makes every moment feel meaningful and prevents anything from dragging - King Marke's monologue excepted, which eludes even Stone's ability, particularly as it's difficult to figure out what this Marke's relationship is with Isolde in the layered timeline. Obviously she's his wife at this point, but after Act I it's not that clear how it has come about. On the other hand, Isolde seeing Tristan wounded by Melot at the end of Act II and attempting to take her own life seems like a thoughtful pertinent touch.

Things perhaps become clearer in Act III, showing how the latter scene was in the main a flashback interlude at a point where Isolde had left Marke for Tristan. There is a murmur in the audience as Act III opens - defying even the wildest expectations of where this might be going - on a moving train running through the Paris underground Metro line. It sure as heck wasn't going to be the usual static scene on Kareol anyway. Closer to the immediate aftermath of the Christmas party, here Tristan and Isolde are on their way to a function - or perhaps an opera  - in formal dress. Or more likely since they are heading out of the city - stopping at each of the stations on the Porte des Lilas line - just back from one. At the conclusion - major spoiler alert - Isolde catches Tristan texting his mistress and Melot defends her honour by stabbing Tristan as the passengers get off at their station.

I don't really care what justification Stone has for this, and I'm not even sure it goes against my previous belief that Tristan und Isolde is stronger when it plays out in the abstract, letting the spirit of the work and the music flow without being tied to any realistic physical realm. A subway train is both as abstract and as real as any a place for Tristan to agonise through his last moments of life, in isolation amidst the oblivious and sometimes concerned glances of the other passengers. It has a suitable air of surrealism about it, being vaguely unsettling or disorientating, as the tube of the train, authentic from the upholstery of the seats down to the graffiti tags on the wall, shuttles alone relentlessly from station to station.

Everything that Act III needs to be however is there most critically in the performances of Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme. While he cuts a less than heroic romantic figure than you would usually expect of a Tristan in Act I, and looks somewhat shamefaced like a naughty schoolboy at being caught out by Marke and Melot in Act II, the true depth of his feeling, his love psychosis, is felt in Skelton's powerful, deeply felt performance throughout. Freshly wounded again on the Paris Metro in Act III, what is essentially put across is a sense of deep loss and the pain of it.

Here Stone takes the liberty of reworking the Liebestod - a daring venture if nothing else for it being one of the most sublime moments ever written in all of opera, and one that really shouldn't be messed with. Replaying the devastating scene of Tristan being caught texting a lover, but this time without the stabbing, the consummation of their love in death might not be exactly the kind Wagner was aiming for, but it's immensely powerful nonetheless. Tristan has lost his Isolde and it feels like the end of the world. Utterly devastating, it manages to evoke the higher spiritual level of the work while simultaneously bringing it down to earth. You can't argue with the sincerity of intent nor the effectiveness with which that is achieved. Stemme and Skelton do their part to bring that about, but there are also tremendous performances from Jamie Barton as Brangäne, Josef Wagner as Kurwenal and Franz-Joseph Selig as Marke. Simon Rattle's conducting and the performance of the orchestra is also hard to fault.

Links: Festival Aix-en-Provence, ARTE Concert

Verdi - La Traviata (Paris, 2019)

Giuseppe Verdi - La Traviata

Opéra National de Paris

Michele Mariotti, Simon Stone, Pretty Yende, Benjamin Bernheim, Jean-François Lapointe, Catherine Trottmann, Marion Lebègue, Julien Dran, Christian Helmer, Marc Labonnette, Thomas Dear, Luca Sannai, Enzo Coro, Olivier Ayault

Paris Cinema Live - 21 September 2019

La Traviata is a great opera and I've heard it and seen it enough times not to need reminded of that nor ever feel the need to rush out and see it again. Yet here I am again watching another production of La Traviata. Really though it's only when a director has no fresh ideas and isn't able to do much with the work, pitching it in a stuffy Belle Époque setting, that it can be a bit of a chore - and even then Verdi's music is always the saving grace. If you get a director who can show the modern relevance of the work, its humanistic outlook, its fire and sense of outrage at social conventions and conservative attitudes, well then La Traviata can still have the power to impress and bring you back to see it again.

So with it being the Paris Opera, with theatre, film and opera director Simon Stone at the helm and the chance to see a much talked about new soprano Pretty Yende singing the role of Violetta Valéry, for the first time in a long while I was actually quite looking forward to my one millionth (approximately) La Traviata. Undeterred by a strike at the Paris Opera cancelling the live performance, the Paris Opera falling back on a pre-recording made a few days ago and fortunate to have turned up early enough to not miss too much when the cinema got its European time zones wrong, it was certainly a La Traviata worth making the effort to see.

Timing evidently is everything, and the issues I had getting to see the cinema broadcast turned out to be appropriate since although it's by no means a major theme in the work, there is a pressing sense of time running down in La Traviata (something made explicit in the Willy Decker production). It's there as a consideration that becomes important to Violetta Valery as she realises that there's more to life than parties and admirers and that she should grasp the opportunity for true love and happiness for the brief moment that it is open to her when she meets Alfredo. Time however is not on her side as we of course - very quickly - find out.

Not only that but Verdi makes the pressing of time very much present in his music and in the pacing of the drama. Really we are only introduced to Violetta and Alfredo and they to each other to enjoy a brief blossoming of love in Act 1, only for it to rapidly vanish and become a victim of social and monetary pressures in Act 2. There are certainly other complex motivations - guilt, a sense of unworthiness perhaps, a consciousness of age difference - that drive Violetta to finish with Alfredo, but principally its pressure from the social gossip and reputation, and there's a simmering anger against those conventions and the underlying hipocrisy of it all the fuels La Traviata.

Director Simon Stone is very good at getting that fluid sense of time in his rotating stage for the Paris production at the Garnier. He's also good at bringing a modem sensibility - a conflicted and contrasted one - to the romantic ideal of Paris and high society in this production. Violetta Valéry is a model here, her image emblasoned on posters and video advertising hoardings for expensive perfume 'Villain'. Her image dominates the stage while the reality is of course not quite as perfect. All the trappings of the lifestyle are there of course and they are indeed trappings that it proves impossible to escape from.

So we see two sides to the glamour. The fancy night club against the more down-to-earth reality of Alfredo declaring his love for Violetta out in the back alley by the bins. A Paris sequare has a grand statue, while a drunk at the foot of the dais, and instead of the florid declarations of love, Alfredo and Violetta communicate via banal instant messages and emoticons as Violetta has an after-party kebab from a Turkish fast food stall, 'Paristanbul'. Then of course, there's the scandal that comes along with the glamour. Again updating events, Violetta is accused of dragging down the name of a Saudi royal family (presumably instead of an old-fashioned baron), the tickertape newspaper headlines updated for a digital world and spreading like wildfire. In that respect it shows that the pressures on famous women who don't behave according to expectations are arguably even greater now than in Verdi's time.

That of course is the important theme of the work and it's one that Stone is able to emphasise and show is still relevant at the same time as he is able to show the personal cost by dispensing with the fake Belle Époque glamour and mannerisms of a traditional production. Visually, it's just spectacular, images blown up on a huge digital screen backdrop, the stage rotating fluidly and impressively to keep sets changing, adding and accumulating a picture of Violetta's lifestyle, how she interacts with those around her and where the conflicts and problems arise within it. It perhaps tries a little too hard, when everything that is really essential is there in the music and can also be found in the performances, but it's an impressive spectacle nonetheless and an intelligent response to the work.

And as magnificent as the production looked, it was the musical and singing performances that contributed to the overall success of the production. The Paris Orchestra sounded terrific under Michele Mariotti's conducting, striking that beautiful balance that the work has between Verdi's lyrical flights and the underlying fury, capturing an Italianate view of Parisian glamour. The young South African soprano Pretty Yende secures her growing reputation here with a very memorable Violetta Valéry. Her singing and interpretation were superb, placing an individual stamp on the work, and her acting performance - so critical here amid the melodrama - was impressive.

Youth belying experience was also of benefit to Benjamin Bernheim's Alfredo, generating a passion with Yende's Violetta that felt real and sincere. Giorgio Germont can be a rather stuffy role just by its nature, and there wasn't much Jean-François Lapointe could do about that, but the role was well sung. Simon Stone's production might have drained a little of the heated melodrama out of La Traviata by undercutting the glamour at key points, but it was an approach that ultimately worked in favour of the work and did indeed leave the heavy lifting principally to Yende and Mariotti who, if the impact of the conclusion is anything to go by, were more than up to the task.

Links: Opéra National de Paris