Salzburg Festival (4) - VPO/Thielemann: Capriccio (concert performance), 26 July 2024

Grosses Festspielhaus

Flamand – Sebastian Kohlhepp
Olivier – Konstantin Krimmel
La Roche – Mika Kares
Countess Madeleine – Elsa Dreisig
Count – Bo Skovhus
Clairon – Ève-Maud Hubeaux
Major-Domo – Torben Jürgens
Italian Soprano – Tuuli Takala
Italian Tenor – Josh Lovell
Servants – Kieran Carrel, Jonas Jud, Fabio Dorizzi, Ian Rucker, Christian Tschelebiew, Jan Petryka, Lucas van Lierop, Philipp Schöllhorn
Monsieur Taupe – Jörg Schneider

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

There is a certain irony to the popularity of Capriccio in concert performance. The last time the Royal Opera presented Strauss’s valedictory opera – assuming we do not count Des Edels Schattens – it was also without staging. Now, for reasons unclear, it has appeared in the Salzburg Festival’s festival-within-a-festival of sacred music, ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’, treated as the first ‘full-scale’ opera of the festival, works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Luigi Dallapiccola notwithstanding, attracting the traditional complement of dignitaries for its premiere. Irony and Strauss are not so much excellent bedfellows as two sides of the same musical coin, so there is no problem there. If the world of La Roche found itself somewhat obscured on that occasion, the impresario inspired by Max Reinhardt remained present not only onstage, nodding off during the opening sextet, but also in honoured bust-form at the entrance to the Haus für Mozart next door. Strauss himself, naturally, remains on the first floor of the Grosse(s) Festspielhaus itself. And if a concert performance, perhaps especially without interval, may not have been entirely what some of those invited were expecting, they, like the rest of us, will surely have enjoyed finding themselves lightly satirised, elevated, and perhaps even inspired by what unfolded. 

Interestingly, although no ‘concert director’ or similar was credited, a degree of accomplished acting was involved, as were telling transformations in lighting (not least for the closing moonlight). Truth be told, or at least one truth among many, little seemed to be lost. When the cast engaged so animatedly with one another, onstage when necessary and offstage when not, the impression was not so very different from a ‘traditional’ production in which they would do the very same, only seated in an eighteenth-century salon. And Strauss’s question, Countess Madeleine’s too, is ultimately ‘Wort oder Ton?’ not ‘words, music, or gesture,’ however strangely that sits both with the conversations and the composer’s veneration for Wagner’s Opera and Drama (‘the book of books about music’). If we all ultimately know which will win in our hearts and minds, if not necessarily in the Countess’s, then the contest was established with commendable even-handedness by those performing, balances of all kind upheld and dramatically generative, even without a mise-en-scène or directorial Konzept. 

Moreover, if one might expect the conductor, possibly the orchestra too, to be favoured in such a scenario, such was not the case. Christian Thielemann has often proved to be at his best in Strauss. He led an extraordinary performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten in this same hall thirteen years ago, blighted yet far from obliterated by Christof Loy’s arrogant dismissal of the work as director; the composer has long proved central to his operatic work in Dresden, Vienna, and elsewhere. If his Dresden FroSch earlier this year was impressive yet, to my mind, a little on the precious side, this Capriccio unfolded with a warmth, affection, and ease that spoke of a fine balance – that word again – between preparation and familiarity. Restraint is not quite the word, but there was no grandstanding, nothing forced. One was led to listen, perhaps via music, yet to words as much as their confrere-competitors. Quotations were assumed into the orchestral fabric, never underlined. That might be the vulgar way of some, but hardly Strauss’s. There were passages of rapt orchestral magic; if the close of the string sextet has sounded more hushed, I have not heard it so. The Vienna Philharmonic clearly loves playing for Thielemann; it is just as clear that the affection is mutual. And although that sextet was certainly conducted, it never sounded like it. 

Sebastian Kohlhepp and Konstantin Krimmel made for a pair of finely cast, nicely contrasted suitors as Flamand and Olivier respectively. If Flamand ultimately stole the heart, that is really Strauss’s doing. Mika Kares lived up to La Roche’s outsize promises in a performance that relished not only his boastfulness but also his status as dramatic lynchpin, leaving implicit sadness – or am I being sentimental? – to another day. Ève-Maud Hubeaux was a splendid Clairon; before I knew who she was, I truly sensed the ‘act’ of a French tragedienne. Such is not reserved to a French singer, of course, but there was a tang of almost Voltairean authenticity here, without sacrifice to crystal-clear German. Bo Skovhus marshalled his resources wisely as the Count. Torben Jürgens’s Major-Domo made a fine impression, as did an array of individual servants, perhaps the best I have heard. They might have had a spin-off show of their own; perhaps one day they will. 

One person is missing in that, of course, and it was there that I found myself, seemingly unlike the audience, somewhat in two minds. Elsa Dreisig’s Countess was well sung, well acted, in general had much to commend it, yet somehow did not feel quite ‘right’ to me. Was that a matter of having too much a certain interpretation or mode of interpretation in my head, to which others must conform? Quite possibly, but what I heard came across in tone and character as more girlish, even Sophie-like, than a successor to the Marschallin, the true director of metatheatrical proceedings. I shall dwell on this no more; we all have our preconceptions and prejudices, and this may well have been mine. As we all know, no operatic performance is or can be perfect, let alone correct. Music, words, and theatre (visible or invisible) are too human for that.

Salzburg Festival (3) – ORF Vienna RSO/Pascal: Nono and Dallapiccola, 25 July 2024

Felsenreitschule

Nono: Il canto sospeso
Dallapiccola: Il prigioniero (concert performance)


Caroline Wettergreen (soprano)
Freya Apffelstaedt (contralto)
Robin Tritschler (tenor)
Tobias Moretti (reciter)

Mother – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Prisoner – Georg Nigl
Jailer, Grand Inquisitor – John Daszak
First Priest – Andrew Lepri Meyer
Second Priest – Timo Janzen

Bavarian Radio Chorus (chorus director: Peter Dijkstra)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Maxime Pascal (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

If the ‘mainstream’ operatic fare of this year’s Salzburg Festival looks a little thin on paper – certainly for those of us resistant to the alleged charms of Tsar Currentzis’s new clothes – this concert of two masterpieces of mid-twentieth-century music proved a more or less unqualified success. It clearly made a deep impression on the Felsenreitschule audience, bearing witness in ways faithful to, yet extending, the intentions of the works’ creators: Luigi Nono, this year celebrating his centenary, and Luigi Dallapiccola, twenty years his senior.

Performances of Nono’s music have proved a welcome, sustained focus of the Festival during Markus Hinterhäuser’s intendancy. Il canto sospeso, once past a (very) brief early passage of uncharacteristically tentative playing from the ORF Symphony Orchestra under Maxime Pascal, received a performance of deep comprehension and commitment, framed by readings by Tobias Moretti of the texts set by Nono in what he considered, as in the music of Gesualdo, to be a ‘pluridimensional whole’, a counterpoint of sounds in musical declamation. Even in that first, orchestral movement, the burning humanity of Nono’s vision seemed to possess all who listened (and played). Taking its leave from Webern, Schoenberg, and Mahler too, the music’s fragility, darkness, and perhaps hope were rendered immanent. The second movement’s a cappella writing from the excellent Bavarian Radio Chorus offered a contrast remarkable for its different yet complementary conception of beauty and what – terrible and wonderful things alike – that might mean, or at least be. Solo vocal lyricism, Freya Apffelstaedt’s deep mezzo and Robin Tritschler’s passionate elegance included, cast its own spell as modernist fragments both retained their integrity and constructed something beyond themselves. The expressive quality of listening as well as writing and performing music can rarely have felt more apparent.

The Dies irae-like sixth movement could hardly have reflected Esther Srul’s 1942 witness more powerfully in the most ‘direct setting’; indeed, it would surely have done less so.

The gates are opening. Our murderers are here. Dressed in black. They’re wearing white gloves on their dirty hands. They drive us out of the synagogue in pairs. Dear sisters and brothers, how hard it is to say goodbye to this beautiful life. You who are left alive, never forget our innocent little Jewish street. Sisters and brothers, avenge us on our murderers.

Sweet musical agony at its close spoke of overwhelming pain within, turned inward and outward, as did a spellbinding, harrowing account of the next movement, for alto, chorus, and orchestra, in which every note as well as every interval seemed to take upon itself the weight of the world. Following Moretti’s last readings, the final two movements sounded as if more tender, readily communicative progenitors of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, profound differences in aesthetic and technique notwithstanding. Closing silence, magical yet fragile, may not have ‘transcended’ – can or should anything, following the horrors of which this music was born? – but it moved nonetheless, not unlike Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, which Nono greatly admired. 

Dallapiccola came from the generation in between Schoenberg and his posthumous son-in-law Nono, a living link to complement Nuria Schoenberg-Nono. In Con Luigi Dallapiccola for six percussionists and live electronics (1979), Nono honoured the memory of his predecessor, whom he had first met in 1947, the year in which Dallapiccola completed his one-act opera. Il prigioniero, here unstaged and seemingly in no need of staging, so powerful was the performance (as it usually is) from its twelve-note Puccini opening to the final question, ‘La libertà?’ and similar, unbroken silence to that which had followed Nono’s cantata.

There lies a world in between, though: one that belies the work’s brevity—again, as in Nono and indeed Wozzeck, whose example looms large. The passionate precision of that opening was matched and heightened by similar passion and precision from Tanja Ariana Baumgartner as the prisoner’s Mother, so vivid one could ‘see’ the scene she painted before us, dream of Philip II and all. The chorus’s interventions overtly reinstated a liturgical quality already implicit in Nono. All the while, the workings of the ‘system’ seemed not only to mirror but also to create an antinomy between freedom and determinism Dallapiccola may have inherited from Schoenberg, but which he made indelibly his own. Mahlerian marching, Tosca-like torture, and the twin contrast and complementary between the Prisoner’s anger and his Gaoler’s wheedling insinuation sent us hurtling toward the tragic denouement, hope unmasked in devastating inversion of Fidelio as the greatest torture of all. John Daszak and Georg Nigl gave defiantly un-score-bound performances, to which one might possibly have harboured purist objections on paper, but any such objections evaporated into thin air in the heat of such committed performance. Deafening bells and sonically disappointing organ likewise mattered not a jot in practice. This was a confession to which all, listeners and performers alike, must contribute and did.

Salzburg Festival (2) - Motus Percussion/Sietzen: Grisey 24 July 2024

Kollegienkirche

Le Noir de l’Étoile

Christoph Sietzen, Leonhard Schmidinger, Nico Gerstmayer, Akisato Takeo, Miguel Llorente Gil, Lorenzo Manquillet (percussion)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Having emerged from Georg Friedrich Haas’s Koma at the Mozarteum, the chance for a breath of fresh air and a quick beer in the shadow of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Kollegienkirche was a happy one, prior to entering the church for further musical liminality, in the form of Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile from Motus Percussion, led by Christoph Sietzen. Although the two performances were not formally connected, save as part of the Festival’s Ouverture Spirituelle, it is difficult to believe there was not some intent in the scheduling; at any rate, it made for an illuminating journey to travel from the absolute darkness of Haas’s coma opera to the starry sky of Grisey’s work for six percussionists, tape, and electronics.

The skies have of course fascinating and inspired composers and other artists from the dawn of time, but there is something very much of its time to Grisey’s idea and realisation, resting as it does on the 1967 discovery of signals emitted by pulsars, a class of neutron star, residue of supernova explosions, whose spin is with regular rapidity picked up with every rotation. (For this, I am indebted to helpful programme notes by Jean-Pierre Liminet, whose introductory text is sometimes read out prior to performance, and Tim Rutherford-Johnson.) The science is fascinating, insofar as I understand it, and played a crucial, indeed determining role in the conception, born of Grisey’s friendship whilst teaching at Berkeley with the astrophysicist Joseph Silk. But ultimately, it is the musical work and its performance that we experience, albeit with the intervention of a pulsar recording that seems both to confirm and to correct the dizzying array of untuned percussion we have previously heard. 

Tempi and time interacted on an extraordinary musical journey – Stockhausen, who inevitably comes to mind, eat our heart out – they formed and were framed by, from now to the Vela pulsar (12,000 years old) to that of 0329 + 54 in the constellation Camelopardalis (5 million). The relationship between something so much larger than humanity and the human virtuosity that realises and discovers lay at the heart of an experience that was nonetheless experienced as mesmerising, all-encompassing ritual. Pulse and pulsars came and went. Sounds shifted as if in a reinvention of old Klangfarbenmelodie. Time, as in, say, Wagner or Messiaen, seemed to be felt, even to move differently: ironically, perhaps, for something founded conceptually and as work and performance upon precise measurement. The coup de théâtre, visual as well as musical, of the striking and spinning of the central musical disc, the work’s only note with pitch, seemed in itself both a visualisation and auralisation in microcosm of idea and instantiation.

Motus proved estimable successors to Les Percussions de Strasbourg, who gave the first performance in 1991 directed by the composer (as in their recording). Then, as now – as per Grisey’s instructions – the six percussionists were placed around the audience, as if in orbit around us, or at least their sounds were. The intensity of musical understanding and listening between them was just as impressive as the overt virtuosity heard aplenty This was the first concert for which I have been handed earplugs on arrival at the venue, but they were quite unnecessary for me, anyway, though perhaps matters were slightly different for those seated closer to one of the performers. I did not notice anyone using them, but then nor was I looking. For this music of the spheres, both nothing and everything was new under the sun(s).

Salzburg Festival (1) - GF Haas: Koma, 24 July 2024

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Michaela – Sarah Aristidou
Jasmin – Pia Davila
Alexander, Mother – Daniel Gloger
Michael – Peter Schöne
Dr Auer – Susanne Gritschneder
Dr Schönbühl – Henriette Gödde
Nurse Jonas – Karl Huml
Nurse Nikos – Benjamin Chamandy
Nurse Zdravko – Raphael Sigling

Klangforum Wien
Bas Wiegers (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

One of Alexander Pereira’s most successful innovations at the Salzburg Festival was the introduction of an ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’ at its beginning. Pereira’s practice, long since discarded, was to open that opening, as it were, with a performance of Haydn’s Creation; if memory serves me correctly, I recall him saying that he was a descendant of an original subscriber. (I attended ten years ago, fortunate to hear Bernard Haitink as the conductor.) On first glance, the idea of a smaller, related festival of sacred music, utilising Salzburg’s array of churches, might by now seem to have been stretched to or beyond breaking point into a vague selection of ‘spiritually’ inclined works. What music, the sceptic might ask, is not in some sense ‘spiritual’? There is, I think, some force to that objection. However, if one looks to the more specific theme or motto this year adopted by Markus Hinterhäuser, ‘Et exspecto’, there is perhaps a similar drawing of order, if not out of chaos, then out of its perceived danger.

It certainly helps us to understand the inclusion of a concert performance of Georg Friedrich Haas’s one-act, two-hour-long opera, Koma, concerned, as its name suggests, with the liminal experience of a patient, possibly following a suicide attempt, in a coma, gaining and losing consciousness. The opera is told and, I think, experienced from the standpoint of Michaela, the outstanding Sarah Aristidou, placed quite separately from the rest of the cast: tellingly, unseen to us (at least to me and I assume to everyone else), somehow both inverting and yet strengthening the idea of an out-of-body experience. But the most striking element, at least initially so, both of work and performance, is that much of it – about half – takes place in the dark. Music in ‘complete’ darkness has long been a Haas preoccupation. Twenty minutes of in vain, one of the last great musical works of the twentieth century take place in darkness; so does the entirety of the composer’s Third String Quartet. 

In our world, darkness is rarely if ever ‘complete’. Here, in the Mozarteum’s Grosser Saal, there were a few signs of light, once one’s eyes adjusted, and not only from glimpses of fluorescent watches that must now be in vogue. (Recurrent sight of one would prove aggravating in another festival performance, in which lights were only dimmed. Are these the new mobile telephones?) One’s sight, like other senses, can play tricks too, which I think comes closer to the point or to one of them. The principal point, however, remains darkness: what and how one experiences things in it, and its transition to other states, be they light, something more crepuscular, or death. 

This, the second in a series of three chamber operas Haas wrote with Händl Klaus for Schwetzingen – to his delight, he found the old theatre highly appropriate for darkness – naturally also explores, and raises questions, concerning how music might be made in such conditions, and others. Haas acknowledges it must be a ‘nightmare’ for the conductor, having to wait for the light once again to come to do his thing, having to pick up from where the musicians have brought him. Yet, as with many aspects of this work, one might say that such helplessness is simply a heightened experience of what is already the case. After all, the conductor almost never makes music directly at all; he is both all powerful and entirely in the musicians’ power. I use ‘he’ here, simply because it is the appropriate pronoun for Bas Wiegers, whose accomplishment in leading the musicians of Klangforum Wien was every bit as remarkable, in a good way, as theirs—and the singers’. Doctors, nurses, members of Michaela’s family, with memories they wished and most certainly did not wish, to dredge up or have dredged up, came and went, transformed: fascinatingly, in the case of her brother-in-law Alexander metamorphosing into a countertenor Mother, given an often visceral performance from Daniel Gloger. 

That seemed to be almost a visual counterpart or instantiation (Wagner’s ‘deeds of music made visible’ even) of Haas’s musical language and method. Clearly, one cannot write music for the darkness just as one might for the light, but that is probably not as such the point, or at least my point. The post-spectralist spaces opened up, inhabited, and extended by what we may think of as microtonality but Haas, not unreasonably, prefers to consider as music beyond the twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounded as a necessary realm for this drama of states, transitions, memories, and more. I was put in mind also of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, in which a moment in perception is stretched out to thirty minutes and experienced as such. There is no suggestion that this is taking place here in any literal sense, but such heightened states perhaps hold something in common. Ultimately, though, this was a singular, yet very human experience, whose lack of staging for Haas proved an advantage rather than a compromise. We may or may not agree; in all such cases, there is gain and loss. But then such is life. Such also are death and, doubtless, a host of states in between.

Munich Opera Festival (3) - Pelléas et Mélisande, 22 July 2024

Prinzregententheater

Images: © Wilfried Hösl

Pelléas – Ben Bliss
Mélisande – Sabine Devieilhe
Golaud – Christian Gerhaher
Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig
Geneviève – Sophie Koch
Yniold – Felix Hofbauer
Doctor – Martin Snell
Shepherd – Pawel Horodyski

Director – Jetske Mijnssen
Set design – Ben Baur
Lighting – Bernd Purkrabek
Choreography – Dustin Klein
Dramaturgy – Ariane Bliss

Projektchor der Bayerischen Staatsoper (director: Franz Obermair)
Bayerisches Staatsorchester
Hannu Lintu (conductor)

Nine years ago, in this same theatre at this same festival, I saw Munich’s previous Pelléas et Mélisande: a staging by Christiane Pohle which I greatly admired, but  everyone else seemed to loathe. I am tempted to say ‘failed to understand’, but let us move on—to its successor, directed by Jetske Mijnssen. Perhaps it was not the best time to see this, only a fortnight after encountering Katie Mitchell’s feminist rethinking of the work in Aix, in its first revival. For me, there is nothing especially wrong with Mijnssen’s staging. It does pretty much what one would expect of a Pelléas, save perhaps for presenting a greater realism in place of its Symbolism.

In that lay my doubts. Not that there is anything wrong with that in principle; far from it. Yet without a change of perspective, or some other such idea, the point remained elusive: not in the sense that Pelléas can, must remain elusive, but rather suggesting an extended bourgeois parody of Tristan und Isolde, with which it of course has much in common. That would be a point of view, though not necessarily one I should be inclined to pursue (imagining nonetheless with a wry smile what Nietzsche, in Case of Wagner mode, would have made of Pelléas). What I think Mijnssen is getting at, suggested by her final act – in which the castle, whose rooms whether in the forest, by the stagnant pool, or elsewhere have provided the setting for all that has gone before, is stripped to its foundations – is a psychological claim that we are all ultimately like Mélisande, not least in our inability to know one another. Presumably the wooden boards relate also to the forest we never really see.

Following a realistic if sparing portrayal of early-twentieth-century costumes, furniture, and so on, Arkel’s words ‘C’est un pauvre petit être mystérieux comme tout le monde’ offer the backdrop for the entirety of this act. Having moved from a (beautifully danced) ball for the first scene, to this hospital bed for the close, often viewing Pelléas’s sick father in his bed, the tragedy encompasses all of us in a metaphysical sense far from untrue to the work. The observation – and execution – of Golaud’s chess game with his son Yniold, and Yniold’s resort to playing with his toys, perhaps as a way of trying to understanding what is happening, including a similar sweeping of the board and pieces, are suggestive and accomplished. Golaud’s striking of Yniold likewise offers a powerful moment.

Much else, especially with water – seen as rainfall as we enter the theatre, yet otherwise relegated until the close to a long, thin ‘pool’ at the front of the stage – seems to sit a little awkwardly between two stools. That the pools are more evident in the final scene, presumably closing in on the very foundations – in more than one sense – of castle and family is another good idea. But Pelléas’s reappearance – a ghost, a dream, or an actual reappearance? – to show Mélisande her child seems to come less from an alternative dimension than from an alternative production or concept. Perhaps I am missing something, given what seems in many ways an intelligent attempt to construct a whole from what is viewed, curtain falling after every scene, as a quasi-filmic succession of dramatic fragments.

An effort to construct a greater whole in theatrical time from quasi-modernist fragments, as opposed to starting with a whole and carving detail from it, seemed also to characterise Hannu Lintu’s way with Debussy’s score. At its best, Lintu’s direction conjured a wonderful translucency from the Munich orchestra; it did not want for dark malevolence when called for, either. My principal reservation related to what seemed – I am unsure whether it actually was – for scenes, perhaps acts too, to slow during their course. No one wants to rush through Pelléas, of course, quite the contrary; yet there were occasions when I felt momentum was in danger of being lost. This may, however, have been as much a matter of pauses between scenes on account of scene rearrangement, especially before the fifth and final act. By the same token, losing oneself in the forest is surely part of the musical experience, perhaps all the more so when we never really see it.

There are doubtless many ways to sing Mélisande, yet during her performance, Sabine Devieilhe had me convinced hers was, if not quite the only one, then the best. Her ease of communication, not only in the French language but in Debussy’s musical style, was effortlessly communicated for all to hear; it was simply as if she were speaking, and as clear as if that were the case too. Moreover, Devieilhe’s delivery of the text seemed indivisible from dramatic situation and imperative. French is a notoriously difficult language to sing; it would be difficult, unsurprisingly, to claim that all in the cast managed with such ease. Sophie Koch’s excellent Geneviève was of course an exception, leaving us to long for more.

That said, no one made a bad job of it either, and an age of ‘international casts’ brings advantages and disadvantages. Christian Gerhaher’s Golaud was unquestionably a fine, brutal character study. Some will doubtless have taken more to his hectoring way (at times), but it was rooted in his conception of Golaud’s sadism. Gerhaher showed the courage not to try to endear his character to anyone, without in any sense rendering him one-dimensional. To that, Ben Bliss’s boyish, mellifluous Pelléas proved an excellent foil, vocal and scenic communication offering ample justification for Mélisande’s preference. The dark ambiguity of Franz-Josef Selig’s Arkel cast due shadow over all. Last but far from least, Felix Hofbauer gave an outstanding performance as Yniold: not ‘for a boy’, but for anyone. As impressively acted as it was sung, this treble’s performance offered yet another feather in the cap for the ever-lauded Tölz Boys’ Choir. So in many respects, the fragments did add up to more.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (5) - Samson, 12 July 2024

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Monika Rittershaus

Samson – Jarrett Ott
Dalila – Jacquelyn Stucker
Timna – Lea Desandre
Achisch – Nahuel Di Pierro
Elon – Laurence Kilsby
Angel – Julie Roset
First Judge, Guest – Antonin Rondepierre
Samson’s mother – Andréa Ferréol
Young Samson – Gabriel Coullaud-Rosseel
Homeless person – Pascal Lifschutz
Dancers – Gal Fefferman, Theo Emil Krausz, Victoria McConnell, Manuel Meza, Rouven Pabst, Francesco Pacelli, Dan Palleg, Marion Plantey, Evie Poaros, Robin Rohrmann, Victor Villarreal, Marko Weigert
Actors – Alexandre Charlet, Arnaud Fiore, Jacky Kumanovic

Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Étienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Lighting and video – Bertrand Couderc
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson
Sound design – Mathis Nitschke
Editorial associate – Eddy Garaudel

Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer  

Pygmalion

Raphaël Pichon (conductor)

A Rameau premiere? Yes and no. In some ways, what we saw and heard was more extraordinary than that: the resurrection of Rameau’s lost Voltaire opera, Samson of 1733. Envisaged by Voltaire as the work to reform tragédie lyrique, to restore its French classical virtues, it fell prey to censorship on grounds of blasphemy and was never performed. Both music and original libretto were lost, although a revised, almost certainly toned-down version of the latter survives from a collection Voltaire published later in life. Adopting an approach both speculative and scholarly, in the best sense creative, Raphaël Pichon and Claus Guth have reinvented the work, delving deeper into the Book of Judges for context, yet setting the work in a present framed by Samson’s mother (movingly acted, not sung, by Andréa Ferréol, an ambiguous homeless man (Pascal Lifschutz) and other actors and singers (including an enchanting Angel from Julie Roser). Knowing that Rameau reused music from the opera, initial attempts were made to fit Voltaire to numbers from other works. 

For instance, Pichon recounts: ‘you may be familiar with the entrée “Les Incas du Pérou” in Les Indes galantes. It contains a very impressive scene sung by the character of Huascar, who is also a basse-taille, and who also commits suicide – by hurling himself into a volcano. The music in this scene is truly breathtaking, and it gradually became clear to me that it had been used for the final scene of the destruction of the temple in Samson. So for that scene, I began to assemble a first mosaic. And so it went on.’ But it soon proved impossible to match music to the only version of the libretto to survive, so instead they adopted a freer approach, inventing that scenario and, in a way, letting both music and the Bible dictate, or perhaps even become, the drama. ‘And so,’ according to Pichon, ‘began a long and painstaking treasure hunt … and its moments of doubt when we deleted everything and started all over again. First we had to think about the number of acts, the nature of the prologue, the trajectory of a character within an act, and then the sequence of scenes, the structuring of each scene, trying to find the best way to get from one to the next, not to mention the range of tonalities and their sequences…’. Eddy Garaudel as writer and Yvonne Gebauer as dramaturge were deeply involved in the process too. A diary, if such a thing exists, or itself could be ‘reconstructed’ or ‘reimagined’, would doubtless be enlightened. 

Voltaire’s determination to restrict recitative to the minimum makes for a fascinating ‘reform’, now incorporating speech and even sound design, that in some ways looks back to early Venetian opera – Pichon mentions Cavalli, who of course worked in France too – and forward through Gluck almost to wherever one will. It is a one-off, and its creators appear to have been liberated by that prospect. Dance becomes all the more dramatically focused, and if invoking the spirit of Wagner might be misleading, it is perhaps not entirely so. Others will have different standpoints, of course, and in many ways the work came across as a staged oratorio, a French counterpart to Handel’s work of the same name, Rameau, Voltaire, and their modern collaborators perhaps penetrating even deeper. 

There would be much more to be written about the idea and realisation of the enterprise; it would be a fine thing if its creators were to do so, perhaps in tandem with some of the scholars Pichon cites. But what of the dramatic reality, as the sun set on Aix’s ever-magical Théâtre de l’Archevêché? The use of spoken texts from Judges, not quite in lieu of recitative but rather supplementing and framing, offered power and concision: worlds away from what any eighteenth-century (or later) censor would have approved. Étienne Pluss’s set design seemed to mediate between the colours and materials of vernacular architecture and a non-specific Canaan/Israel/Palestine that for obvious reasons presented problems of its own. There are clearly limits to how one might defuse, almost literally, those issues, given the subject matter. I felt uneasy at the literally monochrome portrayal of Philistines in black and Israelites in white, but perhaps black-and-whiteness was the point. In general, a temptation to make political points was, probably wisely, avoided. Samson’s own depiction, aided by sound design that gave voice to his internal agonies, was more a psychological study—and a powerful one at that. 

Jarrett Ott’s work in bringing that study to life was outstanding, as well acted as it was sung, in (to my ears) excellent French too, which far from always goes without saying. The hero’s charisma and physicality – partly, it seemed, compensation for personal and social trauma – shone through, as did Ott’s chemistry with his fellow artists. Timna, a composite of various women with whom Samson was involved prior to Dalila, and then in the second part Dalila herself were brought to life vividly and in perfect style by the nicely complementary Lea Desandre and Jacquelyn Stucker. Nahuel Di Pierro’s dark, malovelent Achisch and the strikingly melliflous tenor of Laurence Kilsby as the ultimately doomed traitor Elon offered equally fine character studies in voice and gesture. Dancers and chorus contributed likewise, as impressive collectively as individually. 

Both inspiring and supporting this was the outstanding work of Pichon and his Pygmalion choir and orchestra. The ensemble’s dark hue, inflected by moments of typically French éclat, underpinned one of the finest period-instrument performances I have heard, far superior to the previous evening’s Gluck. It was unabashedly bigboned, refuting the silly conflation common to many of ‘old’ and ‘small’, relishing rather a confrontation between old and new that played out on stage, in the pit, and in our minds. An unmistakeably Gallic bassoon enabled one, perhaps fancifully, to trace lineage up to Stravinsky’s Rite and indeed beyond, to early recordings of French orchestras, whose particularity has largely been lost in postwar homogenisation of orchestral sound. Pichon’s direction seemed unerringly to alight on the right balance, dynamic contrast, tempo, and more: a fine illustration of how scholarship and musicianship can and should inform one another in the heat of the dramatic moment. Perhaps another time it would have been different; it gave the impression of marrying due preparation with spontaneity on the evening, as did the performances of those on stage. 

And so, when the temple came crashing down in the wounded, tortured Samson’s final act of revenge and personhood, Samson became the lion he once had rent asunder. Voltaire’s determination to avoid the lieto fine, fully supported then and now by Rameau, imparted an ending of veritable and venerable tragedy, Attic and Hebrew. The world stopped, scenically and musically, in a fashion both faithful and unfaithful to Samson and his original creators—and thus, one could fancy, to expectations ancient and modern. This was evidently a labour not only of love but also of conviction for all involved. In that sense and not only that, the figure of Samson and Voltaire’s bold, vanquished plans for operatic reform found themselves embodied in Rameau, Pichon, and Guth’s new Samson.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (4) - Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride, 11 July 2024

Grand Théâtre de Provence

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Iphigénie – Corinne Winters
Agamemnon – Russell Braun
Clytemnestre – Véronique Gens
Achille – Alasdair Kent
Calchas – Nicolas Cavallier
Diane – Soula Parassidis
Patrocle – Lukáš Zeman
Arcas, Minister, Scythian – Tomasz Kumięga
Oreste – Florian Sempey
Pylade – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Thoas – Alexandre Duhamel
Priestess – Laura Jarrell

Director, set designs – Dmitri Tcherniakov
Costumes – Elena Zaytseva
Lighting – Gleb Filtschinsky

Dramaturgy – Tatiana Werestchagina   

Le Choeur d’Astrée (chorus director: Richard Wilberforce)
Le Concert d’Astrée

Emmanuelle Haïm (conductor)

 

It is not every day one has opportunity to see Iphigénie en Aulide, let alone in tandem with Iphigénie en Tauride. Even I, fervent Gluckian that I be, had never seen the former staged. This is, of course, just what a major festival should be doing: something that cannot readily be replicated in a house season. Enlisting Dmitri Tcherniakov, one of today’s most sought-after opera directors, underlined the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence’s intent. It was, by any standards, a memorable occasion, even if Tcherniakov’s production proved a little more straightforward, even conventional – I cannot imagine why some booed the first opera – than one might have hoped for, and the period instruments of Emmanuelle Haïm’s Concert d’Astrée often lacked the dramatic commitment either of the more colourful period ensembles (such as Raphaël Pichon’s Pygmalion the following evening) or of modern orchestras. 

Tcherniakov’s Paris Troyens was a landmark staging, its twin presentation of war and therapeutic aftermath in the two parts of Berlioz’s opera cast a powerful, provocative spell that has yet to recede. Here, in a dramatic œuvre of great importance to Berlioz and Wagner, the uncharitable might say there was a little too much retreading of ground, if in near-reverse, war naturally coming second and announced as such at the close of Iphigénie en Aulide, the curtain starkly announcing ‘GUERRE’. To be fair, though, the Tcherniakov therapeutic turn, which after his fitful Ring seemed to many of us to have run its course, is only hinted at in the group of refugees among whom Iphigénie (en Tauride) stays behind. Trauma itself stands rightly, strongly in the foreground, from the second drama’s announcement of casualties over a generation of war (‘une vingtaine d’années plus tard’, we are informed as we re-enter the theatre after the sole, dinner interval). Oreste’s shellshock is horrifying throughout, rendering his emergent friendship – perhaps in this condition, it can be no more than that – with Pylade a necessary, if highly limited, solace. 

Tcherniakov, as usual, provides his own set design, a building outline that can serve, both intact and not, for a range of dramatic purposes—and to my mind did so very well. (It doubtless depended where one was in the theatre, but I heard complaints contrary to my experience, but undoubtedly genuine, from both visual and acoustic standpoints.) At any rate, the contrast on one level between the two dramas registers strongly, the ambiguities of sacrifice readily apparent at the close of Aulide. Iphigénie has been rescued for now, but at what cost, both personal (marriage) and societal (impending war)? A good few of those who had been initially happy, or at least compliant, to cooperate in her sacrifice must surely wish they had gone through with it. The struggle of Achille and his men to overcome Agamemnon and his path is well handled: one of the most convincing fight scenes I have seen on the operatic stage. Few are the opera productions today, or so it feels, that escape silly dancing, neither related to the music nor intelligent set in (non-musical) counterpoint to it. This, alas, proved no exception, but most of us are wearily accustomed to the practice by now; at least it is at a wedding, which one might say is a natural home to silly dancing. It remains a pity, though, that the expressive, dramatic role played by dance in so much eighteenth-century opera, especially that we may broadly consider to be French, once again goes ignored.   

The question of the deus ex machina, familiar to Wagner, who wrote a revised ending of his own (surprisingly adopted by Riccardo Muti at La Scala), is muddied, but that is probably the point. Having Diane speak through the sacrificed Iphigénie – seen at the beginning, in Agamemnon’s imagination – allows Iphigénie herself, in double, to witness that horror, as well as compound fear instilled amidst the similarly consecrated nuptials concerning Agamenon’s voyage. The scene is recalled at the end of Tauride, a nicely ambiguous close into which we can probably read what we will, though it would be difficult to feel wildly optimistic, given what we have seen. There are times when subverting or, more often, simply disregarding the lieto fine irritates, at best, but this is better thought through and without narrowing insistence. 

Haïm’s direction had its moments. The vigour of the Scythian choruses in particular evoked a properly barbaric, brutally war-torn atmosphere from percussion and the excellent chorus alike. In general, though, even for those who find it easier to take such ‘whiteness’ of strings than I do, the emotional range was limited, belying Gluck’s status as a master musical dramatist. Purely orchestral movements often seemed merely pretty or, worse, fey, rather than acting as bearers and drivers of the drama. Dance music thereby doubly suffered, given Tcherniakov’s parallel lack of interest. Intonation, moreover, was variable, even given regular retuning. The audience, however, greeted Haïm with rapturous applause. 

Corinne Winters’s performance would have greatly impressed, had it only been in one of the operas. Hers was a musicodramatic achievement of high order, no mere ‘feat’. As well acted as it was sung, one could read almost as much into her varied facial expressions as her vocal palette. Here was a survivor in every sense. From a strong cast, Véronique Gens as a glamorous yet intensely human (and humane) Clytemnestre, Alasdair Kent’s Achille, cocky vanity matching yet not exceeding his valour, Florian Sempey’s resolute yet highly traumatised Oreste, and Stanislas de Barbeyrac’s heart-rendingly beautiful performance of Pylade stood out for me. This, though, was an Iphigénie cast in depth; I recall no weak links. Whatever my reservations, its memory will also doubtless endure.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (3) – ‘Songs and Fragments’: Eight Songs for a Mad King and Kafka-Fragmente, 10 July 2024

Théâtre du Jeu de Paume

Man – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Woman – Anna Prohaska
Violinist – Patricia Kopatchinskaja

Director – Barrie Kosky

Design and lighting – Urs Schönebaum  

Ensemble Intercontemporain

Pierre Bleuse (conductor)

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Monika Rittershaus

Virtuosity of the highest degree, entirely at the service of musical drama, characterised this Aix production under Barrie Kosky’s direction. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente formed a staged double bill, given without a break, at that eighteenth-century jewel among theatres, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume. The ghost of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire haunted proceedings, audibly in the Davies’s music theatre monodrama, written for the composer’s own, Schoenberg-inspired Fires of London (here, Schoenberg’s ensemble plus percussion), and more scenically in the Kurtág fragments, not of course intended to be staged, but here given an intriguing new slant through the mediation of expressionist cabaret.   

Johannes Martin Kränzle’s assumption of the mad king – referred to in the cast list simply as ‘Un homme’, though it is of course George III – was something never to be forgotten. Quite how much was his, how much was Kosky’s, we shall never know—and why should we particular care? Theatre is collaborative, even in what might seem to be a one-man-show. With a single spotlight, a single unsparing spotlight, this poor (rich) man, clad only in sagging underpants, bared his soul to the birds, the audience, and indeed the musicians of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, incisively conducted by Pierre Bleuse, who in turn offered us their own, related musical tour of whimsy, parody, and brutal violence. From an early promenade, through the haunting of an imaginary yet ever-so-real queen ‘Esther’, via the king’s beloved Handel – with biting irony, ‘Comfort ye…’, to the final, shocking smashing of the violin, this was a psychological study, which in a sense revealed nothing other than itself, and thus in another sense proved all the more revealing. Through the countless ways he marshalled his voice and his entire body, Kränzle touched, amused, and horrified us. It was gripping, concentrated theatre, which one might well have wished to experience again, but knew one could not, even if the attempt had immediately been made. 

Anna Prohaska and Patricia Kopatchinskaja, minus the EIC, were our guides for Kurtág’s extraordinary set of miniatures. The violin provided, as it were the bridge: destroyed and now resurrected as a one-woman orchestra who was also a protagonist—and by her double-companion. Equality here, between two more consummate musicians and communicators seemed, by virtue of staging and performance, the former still astutely straightforward yet minutely observed, to be both immediately, immanently manifest and yet also maintained through ever-shifting dramatic power relationships: one conducting the other, one pulling the other’s strings, one inciting and consoling, and so on. Where Davies’s expressionist nightmare had stunned us into submission, here a different ghost of Pierrot – perhaps surprisingly given the more ‘abstract’ nature of the work – proved more founded in re-gendered harlequin character. We turned inwards, Kurtág’s Webern-like miniatures commanding and receiving absolute concentration, in more than one sense. Prohaska’s spellbinding performance – imagine having to sing that by heart, and engage in minutely planned physical performance too – was impossible to dissociate from Kopatchinskaja’s. The two musicians seemed almost to emerge as two emanations of the same soul. A response to their male counterpart in the first half, or something subtly yet, in that subtlety, defiantly different? Why choose? Again, there was so much one could not possibly have taken in, which cried out for another chance to do so, yet which was tantalisingly lost in the passage of concentrated time. Above all, though, and this may be the ultimate ‘lesson’, we learned a little better to listen to one another.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2) – Pelléas et Mélisande, 9 July 2024

Grand Théâtre de Provence

Images: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Jean-Louis Fernandez

  

Pelléas – Huw Montague Rendall
Mélisande – Chiara Skerath
Golaud – Laurent Naouri
Arkel – Vincent Le Texier
Geneviève – Lucille Richardot
Yniold – Emma Fekete
Doctor, Shepherd – Thomas Dear
Actors – Sarah Northgraves, Kamila Kamińska, Olivia N'Ganga

Chorus of the Lyon Opera (chorus master: Benedict Kearns)

Orchestra of the Lyon Opera

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

  

Opera, or the Undoing of Women is a celebrated treatment of the genre by the French philosopher Cathérine Clément. Clément’s book has rightly come in for a good deal of criticism, not least since it signally fails to treat opera as a musical genre, looking solely at plots and ignoring the liberation the female voice in particular can embody. I heartily recommend Carolyn Abbate’s review, entitled ‘Opera, or the Envoicing of Women’ (not, as my autocorrection has just insisted, ‘the Invoicing’, though some might nod wearily at that too). That said, no one could seriously deny the treatment of female characters in most repertoire works is to our mind problematical. Katie Mitchell certainly would not; that indeed, is the starting point for her landmark production of Pelléas et Mélisande, first seen here in Aix in 2016, and on which I am now catching up.

What Mitchell does might well, in 2024, seem an obvious and necessary thing to do, yet it is difficult to think of a previous case (just as with, say, Joachim Herz in the Ring or Wieland Wagner in Parsifal).That it seems obvious must in large part to be ascribed to her work and that of other feminist directors. Ultimately, the idea is to present the work from Mélisande’s standpoint, rather than have her – as one might argue the work does – as a blank canvas on which men and, more broadly, patriarchy paint their fantasies. The means of doing so is to present the drama as Mélisande’s dream. An opening dumb show has her, on her wedding day, take a pregnancy test – some people, for reasons unclear, found this amusing – which, one presumes, gives from a concurrent relationship a positive result. Quite a predicament, and thus the dream-drama is set in motion, Pelléas representing the father, Golaud the husband. The castle extends from the bedroom in which the action has begun, and to which it often returns. Sometimes there is one Mélisande; sometimes, seeing herself in the way one sometimes can in dreams, there are two. 

Golaud is a serial abuser; not only does Mélisande sees herself raped, but the girl (in this production) Yniold too. Pelléas is a nervous wreck and mummy’s boy yet retains his allure, ultimately satisfying Mélisande in a way Golaud never could, in highly erotic scenes that ensure one level of musical meaning hits home as rarely before, whilst a charismatic, creepy Arkel ultimately rules the roost. There is even a prize won for non-irritating, non-gratuitous use of mobile telephones, Golaud sending Yniold to Mélisande’s room to report on the lovers and continuing to bark commands via that medium. The castle’s claustrophobia is highly realistic, as is the rest of the drama, but visual Symbolism will live to fight another day and Debussy’s score remains.

Susanna Mälkki and the accomplished Lyon orchestra generally had it unfold at what gives the excellent impression of being its ‘own’ pace, however chimerical that ideal may be in practice. (It takes a good deal of work to sound ‘natural’.) Inspiration from Wagner, Tristan and Parsifal in particular, was strong, dramatically pointed without overwhelming. There was, though, plenty of room for other stars in this musical constellation, French forebears not the least of them. Whether this were conscious or otherwise, letting the score do ‘its’ work, does not really matter. Debussy remained questioning, ambiguous, yet never merely vague; this was drama, not mere ‘atmosphere’, especially in combination with Mitchell’s staging.   

Chiara Skerath rose to Mitchell’s challenges and more, offering a multi-faceted Mélisande as finely sung as it was acted. She and her alter ego were not on stage the whole time, but one could have been forgiven for thinking, still more feeling, that they were. Huw Montague Rendall’s damaged yet alluring Pelléas was, in some ways, the most striking of all, beautifully, elegantly sung, yet with a halting scenic awkwardness that only at the height of passion could be put to one side. Laurent Naouri’s brutal Golaud and Vincent Le Texier subtler, yet in some ways darker still, Arkel, cunningly calculating far ahead of the rest, were similarly memorable in and faithful to their roles. Ironically, even here, one could not but hear Mélisande’s standpoint via their voices. That is not intrinsically a bad thing, of course, since opera performance is an ensemble effort. All involved played their part, not least the stage hands at work revealing and concealing different parts of the world Mélisande’s unconscious had created. We now (usually) have intimacy coordinators, but that development is very recent; here, Ita O’Brien was credited. Given the level of intimacy, her contribution will have been greatly valued by all. 

For what we saw and heard made us think and rethink on the spot. Even seeing the word ‘comédiennes’ in the programme gave pause for thought. In English, we have at last begun to move on from ‘actors’ and ‘actresses’ save in historical usage, but that development is also recent and I recall thinking it read oddly on my first encounter; French is meanwhile, given its lack of a neutral gender, beginning to pursue a project of ‘feminisation’, encouraging parity in the use of female forms. Who is ‘further on’? Are there important questions when horrifying abuse rages unacknowledged? Answers may or may not be clear, but Pelléas will never quite be the same again.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (1) - Madama Butterfly, 8 July 2024

Théâtre de l’Archeveché

Cio-Cio San – Ermonela Jaho
B.F. Pinkerton – Adam Smith
Suzuki – Mihoko Fujimura
Sharpless – Lionel Lhote
Goro – Carlo Bosi
The Bonze – Inho Jeong
Prince Yamadori – Kristofer Lundin
Kate Pinkerton – Albane Carrère
Imperial Commissioner – Kristján Jóhannnesson

Director – Andrea Breth
Set designs – Raimund Orfeo Voigt
Costumes – Ursula Renzenbrink
Lighting – Alexander Koppelmaan

Dramaturgy – Klaus Bertisch  

Lyon Opera Chorus (chorus master: Benedict Kearns)

Lyon Opera Orchestra

Daniele Rustioni (conductor)

Images: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2024 © Ruth Walz

Madama Butterfly has become a difficult opera to stage, largely on account of its deeply problematical subject matter, but also its dramatic straightforwardness. Does one just ignore the former insofar as possible, perhaps toning down what might have been acceptable to some a couple of decades ago yet would no longer be considered to be; or does one address some of its issues head on and, at least for some, risk it buckling under the weight of a critical apparatus it will struggle to support onstage? Its orientalism (or worse) will not go away, so one is going to have to take a view whether one likes it or not; likewise the cruelty inextricably linked with the sympathy it voices and evokes. And assuming one is not going to take the line that there is nothing wrong with Pinkerton’s actions or indeed American imperialism, is there really much to interpret, as opposed to draw out? 

Andrea Breth appears to think not—or at least declines to do so. She does not attempt any grand re-evaluation of the opera, but she does heighten its nastiness and, ultimately, the power of its tragedy. Breth does not impose a concept, good, bad, or indifferent, upon the work, but has clearly thought both about its problems and the drama that lies in its detail, and presents them with clarity and integrity. Where the opening scene can often seem a mere prelude, albeit a necessary one, here we are confronted with the horror of what is there from the start: the racism, imperialism, and misogyny of Pinkerton abundantly clear in his dismissive treatment of Suzuki. She barely registers as a human being as he takes off his shoes. Save for her, it is also, prior to Cio-Cio San arrival, an entirely (heterosexual) male environment—and it feels like it. Whatever it is – ‘love’ hardly seems the word – that Pinkerton feels for his bride, its roots are in this context. Suzuki, moreover, knows precisely what is going on and tells us so, long before she says a word; Breth’s direction and Mihoko Fujimura’s acting are as one. 

Moreover, Breth does not attempt to ‘understand’ Japanese culture. In the programme, she freely admits that she does not and cannot, in contrast with Puccini’s then typical yet, for us, deeply problematical acts of appropriation. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, even to talk about this without orientalising, but perception, both its truths and its lies, stands at the heart of a tale concerned with mutual incomprehension as well as deeply stacked scales. Faded designs suggest something retrospective, a refusal to resort to ‘colourful’ caricature, or both; so does lighting that appears more dialectical than crudely binary in its portrayal of lightness and darkness. Masked actors play Butterfly’s family, whilst their voices come from singers, almost unseen, in the dark surrounding the stage. Moreover, the pace of their ‘action’, if one can call that it at all, is quite different from Puccini’s. To our eyes – and ears – they slow it down, but perhaps therein lies some sort of resistance as well as difference. And of course, in most respects, they are right. Breth makes much, though anything but crudely, of Kate Pinkerton’s arrival and act of child-possession, sealing the cruel tragedy, whilst Butterfly’s suicide is horrible, as it must be, though in no sense gratuitously so. Actors and singers, after all, play characters; they do not (straightforwardly) become them, at least from a Brechtian standpoint. Indeed, the relationship between realism and other possibilities might be said to lie at the heart of the production, as perhaps of the work and how we might now approach it. 

Daniele Rustioni’s conducting of a fine cast and Lyon Opera forces combined interestingly with Breth’s staging. I am sure it would be distorting to say that one determined the other, but one certainly had the impression of interplay. Rustoni’s similar attention to detail contributed to, rather than detracting from, a greater sense of the whole. His tempi, especially in the first act, I was less sure about; that act in particular came to seem increasingly drawn out. Yet, considered as a whole, that seemed very much in keeping with the (masked) disinclination to rush, and paid off handsomely in the second and third acts, where ghosts of Tristan und Isolde in particular enlightened and discomfited. The erotics of this performance could be experienced both immediately and at a sophisticated level of mediation, as with its other qualities. 

That certainly included singing. In the beginning, I felt slightly troubled by an apparent lack of dramatic verisimilitude concerning the two central characters, struggling to achieve necessary suspension of belief given a work aesthetic that seems, though perhaps only seems, to insist on realism. There were times, moreover, when the tessitura of Butterfly’s role seemed to strain Ermonela Jaho. As the opera progressed, and as Jaho’s dramatic commitment, bordering on possession, took over, she moved in a special way that heightened a sense of both problems and opportunities in the work ‘itself’, her final scene as true and necessary a climax as one could hope for. Smith’s thankless role was more ‘straightforwardly’ convincing, as doubtless it should be. He did not flinch from having us loathe him, balancing the tricky imperatives of shallowness in character and thoughtfulness of portrayal. Fujimura’s self-revelation was deeply impressive throughout, whilst Lionel Lhote (doubtless with Breth’s help) presented a compassionate, understanding, subtly memorable Sharpless. With smaller roles all well taken, there was a strong sense of unity in greater dramatic service. Almost in spite of itself, yet also on its own account, this Aix production quietly, powerfully rethought and reimagined Puccini’s opera.