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Rebecca Brite's Letters from Paris 2004 April
Paris in April saw a new production of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Théâtre du Châtelet. It was beautifully performed and minimally produced. With no bacchanal, and the song contest reduced to a 'mano a mano' between Tannhäuser and Wolfram, this was an abbreviated (just over three-hour) version of the Paris Tannhäuser that Wagner did in 1859-61, some 15 years after the work’s German premiere. The cerebral production was by Andreas Homoki, intendant of the Berlin Komische Oper, with resolutely abstract sets and vaguely modern costumes by his frequent collaborator Wolfgang Gussmann.
The Act I curtain revealed the Venusberg in the form of a red balloon barely emerging from a pit in the floor. This fleshy-looking protuberance (literally the sphere of the senses) swelled, grew and changed color as the music demanded, from blood red to at one point something looking like an advertisement for a certain international wireless operator. A grand piano and scattered music manuscript pages constituted the only other scenery and/or props. A black-clad Tannhäuser occasionally interrupted his composing to pursue or be pursued by a black-haired Venus who, the lighting permitting, matched the balloon in a scarlet evening gown and long gloves. At intervals, the artist collapsed to the floor. The Shepherd, who showed up once Tannhäuser resolved to leave the Venusberg, was revealed by his red bellboy’s uniform to be a creature of the love goddess.
That hallowed spot was revealed in Act II as a large white cube, open at front and back, into which the many white-clad, black-shod guests of the Landgrave crowded with much pushing and shoving. The piano remained on the stage as the sole other element of decor. Elisabeth, blonde in an evening gown of virginal white but showing even more cleavage than Venus, greeted the returning Tannhäuser, now in matching white, and returned his ardor with apparent enthusiasm. Indeed, Elisabeth behaved like a complete debauchee, not only defending her loved one’s artistic views but returning his repeated embraces - until the moment the pagan goddess's name was pronounced.
The German tenor Peter Seiffert provided a durable and supple voice, if rather wooden acting, in the title role. Mezzo Ildiko Komlosi of Hungary has the physique for Venus and sang with convincing passion. Austrian soprano Petra-Maria Schnitzer was vocally and dramatically touching as Elisabeth. The outstanding overall performance of the evening, in terms of both acting and singing, was that of French baritone Ludovic Tézier as Wolfram.
The other new production this April (actually, from mid-March) was the pairing by the Opéra national de Paris of Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at the Palais Garnier. This double-header of one-acters was last coupled in Paris at the Opéra-Comique in 1986: Jean-Louis Martinoty’s production with sets by the sculptor Arman, featuring the popular French baritones Jean-Philippe Lafont as Ramiro the muleteer and Gabriel Bacquier as Schicchi. © Rebecca Brite, 3 May 2004 May
Lyon has shared the spotlight with Paris in recent weeks when it comes to innovative productions. On 1 June, the Opéra national de Lyon hosted the French premiere of Tea, by Chinese-born composer Tan Dun. Tan was at the podium for the event, to which the noticeably young audience gave a rapturous reception. With fairly accessible music, plenty of potential for gorgeous settings and costumes, a classic story and fascinating use of unconventional instruments, Tea could prove a popular addition to the repertory.
The libretto, by Tan and playwright Xu Ying, is in English, though a Chinese version was given in Shanghai several months after the work’s 2002 premiere. The story is told in flashback by Seikyo, a Japanese monk. Ten years before, he had wooed and won Lan, daughter of the emperor of China. But an argument with her brother over the legendary Book of Tea led to a wager that would have dire consequences. The second act tells of Seikyo and Lan’s journey to seek the priceless book, and their exploration of their love. In the third act, jealousy and rashness lead to Lan’s death. A coda returns Seikyo to his temple in Japan, where he repeats his opening gestures: performing the tea ceremony with an empty bowl.
Unlike at the world premiere in Tokyo, where Westerners took three of the five main roles, the principle singers here were Chinese or of Chinese origin. All gave strong, accomplished performances, led by baritone Haijing Fu, who created the role of Seikyo in Tokyo. His Lan, lovely of face, form and voice, was soprano Xiuying Li, reprising in English a role she first sang in Shanghai. Tenor Warren Mok was her brother, while bass Haojiang Tian and mezzo Guang Yang sang multiple roles, notably those of the emperor and the tea master’s daughter. They were backed by an ensemble of ten baritones and basses from the Lyon Opera chorus. All were sumptuously costumed by Raoul Fernadez and effectively lighted by Stéphanie Daniel.
The words are English, but of a rather orientalized sort and often deliberately deformed in the singing, so the French supertitles were a necessity. The rationale for an English book is a little vague, but presumably it reinforces the international scope for the work. If proof were needed that Tea, like a good wine, has ‘legs’, the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, which shared the original production commissioned for Suntory Hall in Tokyo and gave Tea its European premiere in 2003, has scheduled a repeat of that production by Pierre Audi for January 2005.
Dominating much of the scene in France last month were Baroque opera in general and Jean-Philippe Rameau in particular. The main attraction was a new production of Les Paladins (1760), Rameau’s penultimate opera and the last to be staged in his lifetime. Under William Christie’s baton at the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Arts Florissants troupe joined its musical artistry to the trendy choreography of José Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu and the digital inventiveness of Montalvo and Hervieu’s video team from the Centre chorégraphique national de Créteil in Paris’s eastern suburbs. The result was one of the spring’s hottest lyric tickets.
Montalvo and Christie, clearly judging that modern Parisian audiences would be even less responsive to this silliness than their forebears were, transformed it into a sort of operatic Gap advertisement, a youth-culture Neverland where the Lost Boys and Girls were hip-hop and techno and capoeira dancers, wearing (when indeed they wore anything at all) bright-hued street and club wear designed by Hervieu. One exception was a male dancer who seemed intended as a personification of the Baroque: he executed the traditional steps and brandished gold-painted lighting bolts during the storm scene, and no matter what or how little he was wearing, his wrists always dripped with lace.
The words went pretty much by the wayside as the singers did their best to keep up with the Créteil dance troupe. Even some French members of the opening night audience admitted they were too distracted by the multiple goings-on to catch more than perhaps a third of the lyrics (the Châtelet, unusually for Paris, does not use supertitles for French-language works). Otherwise, the singing was top notch, with Finnish tenor Topi Lehtipuu (the one non-French principle) as Atis, mezzo Stéphanie d’Oustrac as Argie, soprano Sandrine Piau as Nérine, baritone Laurent Naouri as Orcan, tenor François Piolino as the Fairy Manto and bass René Schirrer as Anselme, reprising the role he sang the last time Les Paladins was performed in Paris, a 1990 concert version at the Opéra Garnier directed by Jean-Claude Malgoire. By comparison, the revival of Alcina at the Opéra Garnier, which opened the day before Les Paladins, seemed almost straitlaced, and yet at its 1999 premiere this Robert Carsen production of Handel’s third Orlando Furioso spinoff caused quite a stir with just a few discreetly shaded naked men. Slovakian soprano Luba Orgonasova sang the title role this time around, partnered by her Ruggiero from the 1999 Barcelona production, Bulgarian mezzo Vesselina Kasarova (a huge crowd pleaser despite the constant register breaks). Alaskan mezzo Vivica Genaux was a subdued Bradamante. Italian coloratura Patrizia Cioffi and British tenor Toby Spence were in fine comic and vocal form as the lovesick Morgana and Oronte. John Nelson directed the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris.
It is worth noting that the Châtelet run of Les Paladins partly overlapped with the Lyon Opera’s new production of Rameau’s very last work, Les Boréades, directed by Marc Minkowski and produced by Laurent Pelly (who, as usual, also designed the costumes). This ‘tragédie lyrique’ was never staged until the 1980s; the original production of 1763, a year before Rameau's death, was abandoned before its scheduled opening. By some accounts, Pelly was not up to his ebullient best in this effort, which featured Mireille Delunsch and Paul Agnew. Still, your correspondent was sorry that illness forced her to miss it. A co-production with Zurich, it opens there on 12 June with Annick Massis and Richard Croft taking over the roles of star-crossed lovers Alphise and Abaris. Minkowski dedicated the opening performance to his father, Alexandre, a well-known specialist in neonatal medicine, who had died at age 88 just two days earlier. © Rebecca Brite, 2 June 2004 June
Nostalgia was in the air last month in the Paris opera world, with a new production of Capriccio at the Opéra-Garnier marking the closure of the long and, by most accounts, happy regime of administrator Hugues Gall at the Opéra national de Paris. While a few grumps carped after the fact about this Robert Carsen production of Richard Strauss’ last opera, the audience reception was thunderously enthusiastic. If the singing was sometimes less than inspired and Günter Neuhold’s conducting seldom more than workmanlike (Christian Thielemann having dropped out, apparently for health reasons), the theatrical experience as a whole was exciting, verging at the end on the magical. That incongruous touch aside, Anthony Powell’s costumes, like Michael Levine’s sets, situate the action more appropriately in the timeless never-never land that is the theater - lyric theater in this case. The scene opens on what appears to be a bare stage, with doors in the back revealing a larger-than-life replica of the Palais Garnier’s backstage 'Foyer de la danse', that gilded and mirrored boudoir-away-from-home where opera-going dandies went after the show to pick up members of the corps de ballet. The male principles - Madeleine’s brother the Count, the poet Olivier, the composer Flamand, the stage director La Roche - wear casual clothes of a type that would not seem out of place today. Clairon has a flashy, androgynous trouser-and-tunic ensemble in black and red. Madeleine’s sumptuous aqua gown, with its full long skirt and low shawl collar, looks more 19th century.
Whether seen as an opera about an opera or an opera about Opera, with its playful use of the self-referential literary device that the French call 'mise en abyme', Capriccio lets Carsen indulge his taste for mirror imagery (which he has used to good effect here in the past, notably two years ago in Rusalka at the Bastille) to the hilt. We expect it in the final tableau as Madeleine sings to her mirror image. But Carsen is not content with one layer of reflection. His last scene starts with the Opéra-Garnier’s familiar curtain, a two-dimensional confection of painted velvet and brocade. As the orchestral interlude continues it slowly rises to reveal old-fashioned footlights, and then . . . the painted velvet of another curtain, virtually identical to the 'real' one. Madeleine’s gown has been transformed into a glittering costume of the same cut. The three-dimensional Foyer de la danse set has become painted flats and the mirror a scrim behind which the Countess sees not her real image but a similarly costumed super whose gestures deliberately do not quite match the singer’s, making the artifice more than clear. And in a breathtaking coup de théâtre, as the closing chords sound, the whole vision rises into the flies to reveal the actual vastness of the bare Garnier stage, the Foyer de la dance set being broken, and, in the far depths, the real Foyer de la danse in which the little ballerina of Monsieur La Roche’s show is turning pirouettes. American soprano Renée Fleming, a darling of Parisian audiences, sang Madeleine without too many of the vocal mannerisms that some feel have marred her performances of late, but with perhaps not enough real character either. Anne Sophie von Otter was a striking Clarion; the Swedish mezzo was almost unrecognizable in the role. German baritone Dietrich Henschel made a natty Count, German tenor Rainer Trost and Canadian baritone Gerald Finley were credible as la musica and le parole, respectively, and German bass Franz Hawlata as La Roche turned in a lively performance that many observers saw as a conscious tribute to Hugues Gall. (France Musiques has scheduled a broadcast of the production for 10 July at 1pm GMT.)
“I suppose,” sings one of Madeleine’s 18th-century servants near the end of Capriccio, “that soon they’ll be writing roles for domestics into their librettos.” Indeed. The day before Capriccio’s premiere, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées opened a revival of its 2001 Le nozze di Figaro, a collaboration of director Jean-Louis Martinoty and conductor René Jacobs. Mozart’s 1786 opera buffo, his first venture with da Ponte, seemed a little stale in this incarnation. The production was hailed for its freshness on its first go-round, but tempi that then seemed brisk now sounded rushed, and the then-daring ornamentation often seemed strained. An off night, perhaps.
Another 2001 production that did not seem to have aged particularly well was Robert Lepage’s multiple-video-screen version of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, revived in May and June at the Opéra-Bastille. The set was literally creaky - it sounded as though perhaps it had not been assembled correctly. Conductor Mark Elder was unable to hold Berlioz’s tricky ensembles together as well as Seiji Ozawa did in 2001, and he let the orchestra drown out the singers too often; the audience was vocal in its displeasure when he took his bows.
The Théâtre du Châtelet welcomed a 2002 production of Kodály’s Háry János and a new Antigona, by the nearly forgotten Tommaso Traetta, in its Festival des régions, which this June brought the forces of the Opéra national de Montpellier and Christophe Rousset’s Les Talens Lyriques to Paris.
As with the Strauss 'conversation piece' and Berlioz 'dramatic legend' reviewed above, it could be argued that Kodály’s 1926 'fable' is not, strictly speaking, an opera. It is a series of vignettes mixing instrumental, sung and spoken depictions of the adventures of a Hungarian Münchhausen. The appearance of French actor Gérard Depardieu in the main speaking role guaranteed the Montpellier version a certain cachet.
The prolific Traetta (1727-79) and his librettist, Marco Coltellini, based their 1772 tragedy on Sophocles but somewhat softened the fate of Oedipus’s unhappy children. Spanish soprano Maria Bayo had been scheduled to sing the title role in Paris as in Montpellier but the birth of a daughter forced her to drop out of the Châtelet production. Her replacement, Raffaella Milanesi, was well received. The Miró-esque black-and-white production by Eric Vignier, with sets by the Paris design studio M/M, met with more mixed reaction.
© Rebecca Brite, 4 July 2004 July, August, September Reports awaited. October
After the Opéra national de Paris kicked off the new season with old productions, as is customary (L’Italiana in Algeri and Pelléas et Mélisande), the real action started in October with two works that in mood, style and setting could not have been more different. First up was the Chatelet’s jolly new La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein. A day later came the solemn Saint François d’Assise at the Opéra Bastille.
Working against Saint François’s bid for hitdom were its length (nigh on six hours in this new production, counting two unnecessarily long breaks) and the acquired-taste status of much Messiaen, even in France, combined with less than buzzy advance word of mouth about Stanislas Nordey’s stationary staging and Emmanuel Clolus’s dark geometric sets. In the event, the critical reaction was mixed and the respectably full houses tended to bleed spectators at the intervals despite Van Dam’s moving performance. By turns commanding and compassionate, his reading of this role (which reportedly he had to be coaxed into undertaking for a third time) was never unsure and often purely beautiful despite its rigors.
One wonders if the difficulty and sheer length of the part were offset or exacerbated for the singer by the mostly immobile staging, which had Saint François perched on little platforms for hours on end. From the audience viewpoint a bit more activity would have been welcome. Other particularly outstanding members of a generally fine cast were German soprano Christine Schäfer as the angel and American tenors Chris Merritt and Charles Workman as, respectively, the leper and Brother Masseo.
Over at the Théâtre du Chatelet, meanwhile, Jacques Offenbach’s 1867 romp, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, reunited British soprano Felicity Lott in the title role, French tenor Yann Beuron as the object of her affections (alternating on a few nights with the Swiss Bernard Richter), Laurent Pelly on staging and costumes and Chantal Thomas on sets, along with much of the rest of the team that was responsible for the wildly popular Belle Hélène of recent seasons. Add Mark Minkowski (another of the Mortier Seven, by the way) once again at the podium directing his Musiciens du Louvre band and choir, and hitdom was virtually assured, hélas for Messaien and Mortier.
Of course, the two works defy comparison. We are not just talking apples and oranges here - more like apples and kumquats. La Grande Duchesse, like Offenbach’s Hélène before her, is as frothy and frivolous as St François is solemn and worthy. Indeed, given that the rest of the Châtelet season is devoted largely to what promise to be rather less accessible works by the likes of Eötvös and Henze, and that the Opéra lineup leans heavily to the serious side, this production seemed like an aberration.
It started off on one of its few dark notes - other than some of those sung by Lott, who has admitted the role is really too low for her, this being a restoration of the original rather than the high-soprano Viennese version. The curtain rose on a battlefield apparently strewn with corpses, but it soon became apparent that our boys were just dead drunk and that the scariest thing they’d have to face that day was an inspection by their nymphomaniac commander in chief. The duchess’ retainers carried on a massive battle painting to frame the lady’s entrance. Her ladies in waiting wore camouflage frocks onto the field. Her despised suitor, Prince Paul (French tenor Eric Huchet), wore a ridiculously minuscule crown.
And so it went, from Lott’s salacious rendering of the famous rondo ‘Ah! Que j'aime les militaires!’ (roughly: ‘Soldier boys! Oh boy oh boy!’) to ‘Le carillon de ma grand-mère’, the restored set piece that ended the second act (followed by what must surely have been among the funniest entre-acte ballets ever to grace, or rather disgrace, the French stage), before petering out a bit in the final scenes. La Grande-Duchesse returns over the holidays, and, possibly, like Hélène, for years to come. The Boxing Day matinee will be broadcast live on France Musiques radio and France 2 television.
The season’s third new production was at Paris’s third house, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. It was the first of three new French stagings scheduled for 2004-05 of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1642 masterpiece, L’incoronazione di Poppea: the others are in Lyon starting on the 21 January (William Christie conducting, Peter Stein producing) and at the Opéra Garnier premiering just five days later (Ivor Bolton, David Alden). Pure synchronicity, we must suppose, as neither 2004 nor 2005 is an anniversary year for the composer or the work. (At least the new Châtelet and Lyon productions of Henze’s Pollicino in March and April can be explained by the 25th anniversary of the fairy tale opera’s opening.)
When last Paris operagoers tuned in on the adventures of the emperor Nerone, the lady Poppea and her loving Ottone, it was on this same stage a year ago in Handel’s Agrippina - which, like this production, was conducted by René Jacobs, staged by David McVicar, choreographed by Andrew George and featured among the cast the Italian soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci (then in the title role) with American countertenor Lawrence Zazzo, French haute-contre Dominique Visse and Italian bass-baritone Antonio Abete. As the curtain fell on that huge hit, Poppea could be glimpsed turning a speculative gaze on the ambitious young Nerone.
While well-sung, and directed with Jacobs’s customary brisk efficiency, this installment of the Roman soap opera had less charm and pizzazz than the last, and accordingly met with a more mixed reception - including some booing at the sexy staging of the Act II duos between Valetto (Algerian soprano Amel Brahim-Djelloul) and Damigella (Venezuelan soprano Mariana Ortiz-Francés), and between Nerone and Lucano (Icelandic tenor Finnur Bjarnason; also deserving particular mention in this United Nations of a cast was American tenor Tom Allen as Poppea’s faithful Arnalta).
Jarringly inappropriate hip-hop-influenced choreography, yet again, was the only sour note in the ‘new’ production of Kát’a Kabanová at the Opéra Garnier (actually a Paris transfer of Christoph Marthaler’s 1998 production for Salzburg, Mortier’s old fief). Leos Janacek’s 1921 work depicts women’s lot in a small Russian town. Marthaler’s conception and Anna Viebrock’s sets and costumes perfectly captured the stifling atmosphere of a provincial housing development - the drab exteriors and drabber clothes, the noisy, nosy neighbors, the lack of intellectual or any other stimulation except sexual.
Cambreling conducted; he seems at least for the moment to be the de facto primus inter pares of the Mortier Seven (who in addition to Minkowski are Christoph von Dohnányi, Valery Gergiev, Vladimir Jurowski, Kent Nagano and Esa-Pekka Salonen). It was also Cambreling in the pit, for instance, in September when Robert Wilson’s 1997 production of Pelléas moved rather uncomfortably from the Garner to the vastnesses of the Bastille, and he returns in May for La clemenza di Tito, while the others make one appearance each all season. Kát’a Kabanová continues to November 19.
In late September the Amphithéâtre space at the Opéra Bastille hosted a cross-cutting show titled …22,13…, which its composer, Mark André, described as an alternative to opera. Involving actors, dancers and a women’s chorus, it was a co-production with Paris’s Festival d'automne and the first of the Opéra’s new Frontières series, which will also feature works by Simon McBurney and Alain Platel. André’s show, whose title refers to Revelation 22:13, baffled the critics. Not so the revival of the Andrei Serban L’Italiana in Algeri at the Garnier: seen as something of an outrage on first appearance in 1998, it has benefited from various even more outrageous stagings in the meantime and evidently has come to seem fairly tame. American mezzo Vivica Genaux as Isabella came in for particular praise.
© Rebecca Brite, 3 November 2004 November
Lo, a multitude of operatic angels have visited Paris this season. One featured prominently in Saint François d'Assise, another appeared rather more mysteriously on the poster for Kát'a Kabanová and an angel wing graces all the Opéra national de Paris program information. Now comes the world premiere of Peter Eötvös’s setting of Angels in America at the Théatre du Châtelet, and yet another member of the heavenly host made a surprise visitation elsewhere in November, as shall be revealed below!
Eötvös was nothing if not audacious, tackling such an icon of millennial American culture for the Châtelet, which commissioned the work. Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour, Pulitzer Prize-winning play was a theatrical landmark of the 1990s and equally a milestone on TV in Mike Nichols’s six-hour HBO version, which ran on French cable the week the opera opened. The librettist, Mari Mezei (Mrs Eötvös in private life), boiled down this sprawling, panoramic spectacle into a single evening of two and a half hours, including intermission. The composer, who co-wrote the libretto of Three Sisters, his first and still best-known opera, no doubt had a large hand in the process whatever the credits may say.
If arguably less rich musically than Three Sisters, Angels in America, as Eötvös and director Philippe Calvario conceived it, was much more thrilling theater. Paris audiences gave it a hugely enthusiastic welcome all four nights of its inaugural run. Inevitably, though, in shrinking Kushner’s masterpiece by some 90 percent (bear in mind that lines take longer to sing than to say), Eötvös has done violence to it. With Three Sisters, knowledge of Chekhov’s play enhanced understanding of the opera. In the present case it was probably better to approach the opera without knowing the play, as this viewer did. After a later reading of Kushner’s full text and realization of what was sacrificed, one could only regret that the ambitions of Eötvös and the Châtelet had not been more Wagnerian in dimension.
With a view to making the opera 'universal', virtually all of the overtly political commentary was pared away. The libretto focuses on two unraveling relationships: that of New Yorkers Prior Walter and Louis Ironson after Prior learns he has AIDS, and that of the Mormon couple Joe and Harper Pitt after the revelation of Joe’s homosexuality. A third 'couple' serves as counterpoint: closeted right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn, of McCarthy hearings fame, and the ghost or vision of the spy who loathed him, Ethel Rosenberg. Joe’s mother, Hannah, and Prior’s friend Belize are the other main roles - aside from that of the Continental Principality of America, aka the Angel, who would make a latter-day prophet of the unwilling Prior. More even than in Kushner this is a work about abandonment. Louis leaves Prior in his moment of greatest need, Joe leaves Harper and then vice versa, and God has abandoned all.
Calvario’s production and the sets of Richard Peduzzi manage to preserve Kushner’s conception of the action, in which two or more scenes often play concurrently. Many take place in boxy, movable modules set against a background of bleakly urban brownish brick. At the end of the second part, when the scene shifts to heaven or thereabouts, the brick wall is replaced by a blue one that is segmented into sky and staircase. The colorful costumes by Jon Morrell and skillful lighting under Bertrand Couderc add effectively to the atmosphere.
Eötvös’s music makes clear that he subscribes to the notion of America as patchwork rather than melting pot. Jazz, Tin Pan Alley, rock and other native idioms have little cameos, as does New York itself with its sirens and car crashes. The composer was in the pit leading an ensemble of sixteen instrumentalists and three vocalists. The eight singers onstage spoke or sang-spoke about half the lines - indeed, some commentators asked whether this could really be called opera. That, however, is what its creator says it is, and he noted that the spoken parts - like the electronic amplification of all the singers and instruments - were integral to his concept of the work’s sound.
Strong acting as well as singing was needed to carry off this effect. Among the mostly American cast members, baritone Daniel Belcher as Prior and soprano Julia Migenes in the dual role of Harper and Ethel especially shone in both respects. On opening night some of the voices sounded fatigued; soprano Barbara Hendricks as the Angel and countertenor Derek Lee Ragin (as Belize, a bag lady and Harper’s imaginary friend Mr Lies) seemed to suffer particularly from what one imagines must have been pretty grueling rehearsals. Soprano Roberta Alexander, as Hannah, a rabbi and a doctor, pulled off this juggling act largely with solid acting. British baritone Omar Ebrahim successfully conveyed the confusion and vulnerability of Joe. Finnish tenor Topi Lehtipuu as Louis and Australian-born baritone Donald Maxwell as Roy were to some extent victims of miscasting, for while both sang well, Lehtipuu’s Anglo-Nordic accent was unconvincing and Maxwell was physically all wrong for the part.
At the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, November brought a revival of last season’s Irina Brook staging of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, featuring two promising young singers in their Paris debuts. Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca, a finalist in the 2001 BBC Singer of the World competition and now a regular with the Vienna State Opera, sang Angelina, the title role. Her Don Ramiro was 23-year-old Russian tenor Maxim Mironov of Moscow’s Novaya Opera, who was barely out of music school when he placed second in his first competition, for the 2003 Bertelsmann prize. Brook’s modern-dress production made Don Magnifico the owner of a rundown watering hole and Don Ramiro a local rich kid. Noëlle Ginefri’s 'Bar Magnifico' set, with its football trophies, photos of faded celebrities, tacky beaded curtain and malfunctioning espresso machine and neon sign, had a feel that was at once authentic and fun. The nouveau-riche mansion of Don Ramiro, much of whose décor was furnished by a vast flat-panel 'TV', was less successful, though the glass-slipper sculpture was a nice touch.
Garanca wowed the audience with a fluid, seemingly effortless sound, a fresh but understated beauty that was perfect for the part, and a fair amount of acting ability. Her Dorabella at the Opéra Garnier next season should be worth looking forward to. Mironov was uneven vocally, often drowned out by the Orchestre National de France under Evelino Pidò (who also failed to keep many of the ensemble numbers from going all ragged), and the girlish haircut was ill-advised. As the evening wore on, though, he sang more strongly and his acting loosened up. The voice definitely had enough moments of real beauty to make this a career to keep an eye on, especially given his youth. British baritone Nicolas Rivenq as Dandini had a lot of trouble negotiating his more florid passages, especially in the first act, but pretty well made up for this lack with comic flair and general hunkiness. Italian bass Andrea Concetti was magnificently tipsy as Don Magnifico. Argentine mezzo Nidia Palacios and Italian soprano Carla di Censo, the only holdovers from last year, were wickedly funny stepsisters. In the role of Alidoro, Italian baritone Lorenzo Regazzo rivaled Garanca as the evening’s star, though his angel wings in the finale were incongruous. The small, all-male chorus playing Ramiro’s retainers were suited up by costumer Sylvie Martin-Hyszka in prints reminiscent of the 1950s’ wilder pajama styles.
Francesca Zambello’s 1999 production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites made a reappearance in a transfer from the Opéra Garnier to the Bastille. The curved, rotating sets by Hildegard Bechtler and effective lighting by Jean Kalman worked well on the vast stage. Felicity Palmer returned as Madame de Croissy (the old prioress), in splendid voice and dying most effectively. Dawn Upshaw as Blanche needs to work on her French but gave an otherwise moving performance; the skinhead-looking young man seated next to your correspondent sniffled surreptitiously throughout both acts and no we don’t think it was a cold. Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek made an outstanding debut with the Opéra national de Paris as Madame Lidoine (the new prioress); and her return as Chrysothemis at season’s end will be welcome. Two French stalwarts, tenor Yann Beuron and baritone Alain Vernhes, respectively the Chevalier and Marquis de La Force, gave still further reminders of how lucky Paris is to have them. Another regular, Michel Sénéchal, was badly cast as the Aumônier du Carmel (the convent’s chaplain) and his voice is about gone. Alas, the same must be said of Anja Silja as Mère Marie.
© Rebecca Brite, 4 December 2004 December
Like lyric music lovers elsewhere, French audiences expect light fare at holiday time and tend to come out in greater than usual numbers for such events. While the Théâtre du Châtelet was reprising the Offenbach operetta we reported on here a couple of months ago, the Opéra national de Lyon was also doing its best to oblige the holiday crowds, presenting the French premiere of Moskva, Cheryomushki, a musical comedy by … Dmitri Shostakovich. Ah, yes, Shostakovich, the Lehár of Leningrad, the Muscovite Meredith Wilson – NOT. But nor, on the other hand, are we talking Symphony No. 14 or even The Nose here. The composer of Moskva, Cheryomushki is the Shostakovich who, after all, wrote Tahiti Trot, the jazz orchestra suites and all those film scores, and who early on had a job as pianist in a silent movie palace.
He dashed off most of this very Soviet operetta (variously translated as Moscow, Cherry Tree Towers, Wild Cherry Quarter, Cherry Tree Estates, Cherry Town) in 1958 during the brief Khrushchevian cultural liberalization. It was commissioned by the Moscow Operetta Theater, whose musical director, Grigory Stolyarov, had conducted the ill-fated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk twenty years earlier. The theater had recently lost Stalin's tame tunesmith, Isaak Dunayevsky, a probable suicide at age 55. So, well, why not ask the Soviet Union's greatest composer to step in? For the book, Stolyarov engaged humorists Vladimir Mass et Mikhail Chervinsky, who concocted a tale of young love and urban planning. It premiered in January 1959. The work's widest popularity came after Shostakovich, at the urging of his friend Isaak Glikman, adapted the music for Gerbert Rappaport's 1963 film Cheryomushki.
It was a French husband-wife team of theater directors, Macha Makeieff and Jérôme Deschamps, who talked Serge Dorny, the Belgian manager of the Opéra de Lyon, into programming as his holiday season treat a virtually unknown musical by a composer who until recently was much less appreciated in France than in the UN or UK. The couple, who co-directed this charming production with Makeieff also doing the sets, costumes and dialogue adaptation, in turn claim inspiration from Jacques Tati's films, particularly Mon Oncle. The creators of the zany TV show Les Deschiens, they were also responsible for the production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail that Marc Minkowski directed last summer at Aix-en-Provence.
Aside from the opening scene amid a pitiful handful of museum displays, the Lyon production took place in a giant doll's house of a set showing six flats in the not-quite-finished housing project and the office of the building supervisor, a henchman of Drebednyov named Barabachkin. As was clear from a look at the printed libretto (provided in full, in both French and Russian, in a program only slightly less bulky than War and Peace), Makeieff's adaptation lopped away great swaths of spoken dialogue. This was greatly to the benefit not only of an audience that included many children, but also of the many Russians in the cast, who had to deliver their spoken lines in French.
The singing, however, was in Russian, and while the mostly young cast generally did a fine job, the evening's stars were Elena Bakanova as Liussia, whose fast vibrato and brightness of tone give her soprano a wide palette of shimmering color; her Sergei, Andrei Ilyushnikov, who stood out not only as the one tenor in the bunch but also as a strong musician of considerable promise; and bass Alexander Gerasimov as Barabachkin, like Ilyushnikov a soloist with the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers. Comedians Lorella Cravotta and Robert Horn, familiar to many in the audience from Les Deschiens and other Deschamps-Makeieff endeavors, made an assortment of comic non-singing appearances. Conductor Alexander Lazarev and the Lyon Opera Orchestra and Chorus gave a sprightly and humorous reading of the rather repetitive score; it had its catchy bits but on the whole seemed meatless except for occasional moments (mostly in the bad guys' music) that sounded almost, er, like Shostakovich. This production of Moskva, Cheryomushki is also scheduled for early 2007 at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège, Belgium.
The holiday fare on offer from the Opéra national de Paris was ballet, Baroque (see below) and Il barbiere di Siviglia at the Bastille. When this production by filmmaker Coline Serreau first opened in 2002, its feminist take on the Beaumarchais story was seen by some as strident, and its setting in the Spain of the Cordoba caliphate called up uncomfortable echoes of the Afghanistan invasion then still fresh in many minds. There was also a certain skepticism about moving Rossini's little gem to the enormous Bastille, but the sumptuous arabesque sets of Jean-Marc Stehlé and Antoine Fontaine put those fears to rest and the current revival (to February 6) was greeted with pretty much universal rapture.
Bayo will cede Rosina's veil in mid-January to American mezzo Joyce DiDonato, who until late December could be heard at the Opéra Garnier in the Luc Bondy - Arts Florissants production of Handel's 1745 musical drama, Hercules. Heard, that is, if one managed to get tickets to this unexpected smash hit. The buzz from Aix-en-Provence, where the production was first staged last summer (see the Archives for Pieter Bijlsma's Opera japonica review), was excited despite Richard Peduzzi's deliberately unattractive sets (the word 'bunker' appeared in review after review) and Rudy Sabounghi's nondescript modern costumes. This was partly due to the reputation of the 56-year-old Bondy - Swiss-born, French-reared, long a mainstay of German theaters and opera houses, and here tackling Handel for the first time. Moreover, the work, popularized (relatively speaking) by Marc Minkowski in concert performances and the 2002 recording with Anne Sofie von Otter, had never before been staged in France. And William Christie, enjoying a most successful 60th birthday year, is always a hot ticket in Paris.
The libretto by Handel's clergyman friend, Thomas Broughton (after Ovid and Sophocles), tells of the killing power of jealousy. Hercules, returning from the last of his labors, brings with him a beautiful prisoner, Iole. His son, Hyllus, is captivated by the captive, but the hero's wife, Dejanira, is wrongly convinced the younger woman is a rival. Hoping to regain love she has never really lost, Dejanira gives Hercules a cloak that she thinks is a love charm but that in fact has been poisoned by the hero's old enemy Nessus the centaur. Hercules dies and Dejanira goes spectacularly mad ('Chain me, ye Furies, to your iron beds/And lash my guilty ghost with whips of scorpions!').
© Rebecca Brite, 5 May 2005 Rebecca Brite moved to Paris in 1980 as a copy editor for the International Herald Tribune. A native of the American Midwest, she attended her first operas as a teenager in Omaha, Nebraska. Since 1990 she has worked as a freelance editor, writer and occasional tour guide in Paris. Her professional and personal interests include environmental and energy issues, travel and tourism, American traditional music, opera, cinema, and the history of Paris. She divides her affections between an Englishman and two Russian Blue cats. See other letters in the Archives.
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