Manon Lescaut, Opera Holland Park, 4 June 2019

Holland Park

Images: © Robert Workman

Manon Lescaut – Elizabeth Llewellyn

Lescaut – Paul Carey Jones

Des Grieux – Peter Auty

Geronte di Ravoir – Stephen Richardson

Edmondo – Stephen Aviss

Singer – Ellie Edmonds

Dancing Master – John Wood

Innkeeper, Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Alistair Sutherland

Backing Singers – Hannah Boxall, Susie Buckle, Lara Rebekah Harvey, Ayaka Tanimoto

Shadow Manons – Angelica Barroga, Isabella Martinez, Hanan Mugga

Karolina Sofulak (director)
George Johnson-Leigh (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Tim Claydon (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia

Peter Robinson (conductor)

Manon Lescaut is a curious opera. Its protracted genesis and sometimes unsatisfactory dramaturgy seem ultimately to work against it, whatever the attempted solution. A Leipzig revival of its original, 1893 version suggested that reinstatement of the original first-act finale was certainly not the answer. I am yet to be convinced that it can be made to work, though I shall happily be proved wrong. Perhaps Puccini’s greatest devotees feel the same way I should about La finta semplice, Feuersnot, or Die Feen. The operatic repertoire is full of works, after all, whose potential has been incompletely realised; we do what we can with them and should often be the poorer without them. The gap between potential and realisation can even prove part of a work’s fascination, especially in a knowing production and performance.

Elizabeth Llewellyn (Manon Lescaut) and Shadow Manons

Alas, Karolina Sofulak’s production, ambition notwithstanding, does not come across as engaging with quite enough of those apparently intractable problems – and a little too often seems unclear. The 1960s updating works well enough in theory and has its moments in practice too. A society preoccupied with style and with a strong tension between reaction and liberation has obvious parallels with the eighteenth-century world of the Abbé Prévost. Where Sofulak’s production does score is in trying to make something of the heroine. If only we had something of Manon and Des Grieux’s time in Paris, she might come across as more fleshed out. (Puccini continued to entertain such a possibility for a decade.) Instead, Sofulak offers us a nightclub singer and entertainer who attempts – I think – to take responsibility for her own career, to wrest its control from the lowlifes around her. The idea seems to me a good one; the problem lies, perhaps as with the work, in its partial, confusing realisation. There is nothing wrong with making an audience work, asking it to fill in certain aspects; not everything can be portrayed on stage or indeed in the pit. The clashes between ‘original’ and new setting, though, often seem arbitrary rather than productive. By the time one realises what is happening in the fourth act, that Manon is making her escape from this world, abandoning her lover too, one may have ceased to care. A keener sense of place, even if place explicitly not created, would have helped. One does not need to see Le Havre or the bizarre ‘desert’ outside New Orleans, but if much is to remain the same, either abstraction or knowing, purposive infidelity may need to come across more strongly. Perhaps, though, I was missing the point and might feel differently on a second viewing; it has happened before and will surely happen again.

That difficulty with caring or with otherwise feeling truly involved is part of the work’s problem, at least for many of us. Too often, I found myself wishing that this were Lulu or, somewhere in between, Boulevard Solitude. Perhaps, though, that did credit to much of the musical performance. If, in my heart of hearts, I might prefer a few more strings for Puccini, I could hardly fault the City of London Sinfonia under Peter Robinson, and do not wish to try. There were a few moments when pit and stage fell out of sync in the first act, but that can happen in the finest of houses. More to the point, Robinson and his players pointed up nicely the character of each act, permitting one’s ears to draw all manner of connections between Puccini’s roots, his future, and his influence and affinities. Wagner loomed increasingly large, but so did devices Puccini would adopt more successfully in subsequent works, as well as sounds one might have thought stolen from Debussy, Stravinsky, even Poulenc – save for the fact that, if anything, it must have been the other way around.

Lescaut (Paul Carey Jones), Manon, Geronte (Stephen Richardson)

Elizabeth Llewellyn unquestionably did what she could to have one care about Manon and her plight. If the character remains unsatisfactory, that is in no way to be attributed to Llewellyn, whose typically intelligent, sympathetic performance rose far above the vocal difficulties recent laryngitis occasionally revealed. Paul Carey Jones and Stephen Richardson brought similar depth to their roles as Lescaut and Geronte respectively, again supplying as much implied context as anyone could reasonably ask. If Peter Auty’s performance as Des Grieux proved somewhat generalised and gestural, there could be no doubting his enthusiasm. The Holland Park Chorus combined such enthusiasm with greater precision – vocal and staged; so too did other members of the cast, Stephen Aviss and Alastair Sutherland making a particular favourable impression.

Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera, 17 June 2014

Royal Opera House

Manon Lescaut – Kristïne Opolais

Lescaut – Christopher Maltman

Chevalier des Grieux – Jonas Kaufmann

Geronte de Revoir – Maurizio Muraro

Edmondo – Benjamin Hulett

Innkeeper –Nigel Cliffe

Singer – Nadezhda Karyazina

Dancing Master – Robert Burt

Lamplighter – Luis Gomes

Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Jihoon Kim

Naval Captain – Jeremy White

Jonathan Kent (director)

Paul Brown (designs)

Mark Henderson (lighting)

Denni Sayers (choreographer)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

A moronic audience and obscenely high ticket prices were not designed to have one in the best of moods. The Royal Opera House should be ashamed of itself for its cynical pricing: I had to pay £51, more than I could really afford, for the most distant reaches of the Upper Amphitheatre, from which it is impossible to see the singers’ fasces, whilst Stalls tickets far exceeded £200. So more should those who, having previously been laughing, shuffling, talking, opening sweets, coughing, sneezing, etc., booed the production team. Jonathan Kent’s staging has all sorts of problems, yes, but such boorish, threatening behaviour has nothing to do with art and suggests the perpetrators would be better off at a football match, of which there seems to be no shortage at the moment.

 

Indeed, it was tempting to conclude that such people received what they deserved. Having tittered at the surtitles – is it not side-splittingly hilarious that someone should be interested in preserving an emerald or too? – they, needless to say, failed to notice what might have been the virtue of Kent’s production, had it been coherently thought through and presented. Turning the tables on spectators of different varieties, most notably during the filmed ‘show’ of Manon’s antics in the second act, set to a backdrop of sickly pink vulgarity, might have worked in a Katie Mitchell-like manner; it might even have succeeded in indicting those who had turned up for an evening of conspicuous consumption and sentimental refusal to hear something other than ‘lovely tunes’. One might be able to set aside jarring details, such as this modern(-ish) woman having had parents decide to send her to a convent. The problem is that a not uninteresting idea – and I appreciate that this is a generous reading of what we see – utterly collapses following the interval. Suddenly, without warning, and more to the point without discernible agency, we appear to be in a different production altogether. The point – and again I am trying to be generous – may well be that now the audience, having been rendered aware (a fine chance with most of that lot!) of its complicity, should now be more or less conventionally harrowed, but that is not how it comes across. What registers instead are incoherence and ineptitude, increased by designs which seem to have been ‘borrowed’ from Kent’s less than successful Flying Dutchman.

 

By the time one reaches the fourth act, the production team seems to have given up completely. Not only is it well-nigh impossible, even for the most sympathetic viewer, to consider the cartoon-like presentation with a hint of irony; it is far from clear whether Des Grieux’s failure to bother to find some water, instead just sitting down a few yards away, is deliberate or just an unknowing commentary on what we have been watching. If Kent had had the strength of his (apparent) convictions, had continued to undermine an ‘easy’ reading, perhaps by having Manon fake her death and return to a life of luxury, this would have been worthier of respect; as it stands, one can neither sympathise with the characters nor with the botched attempt at critique of the ‘drama’, such as it is.

 

With a cast such as this, there are compensations of course, but again, bearing in mind the cynical pricing, that is hardly enough. Jonas Kaufmann sounded at times a little strained in the first act – he would surely be more home as Siegmund, the sort of role in which the ROH never permits us to hear him – but, even from the very back of the house, one could see as well as hear his dramatic presence. The Italianate sobs are not overdone, thank goodness, and one could take dictation from his words and vocal line alike, however softly sung. Much the same, bar the Siegmund observation, could be said of Kristïne Opolais, whose shaping of her lines was every bit as impressive as Kaufmann’s. The voices may not always quite have blended, but they certainly came together powerfully in the fourth act – which would have been far better off in a concert performance. Christopher Maltman’s Italian sometimes seemed a little deliberate, but his was an alert reading of the role of Lescaut, both on stage and in voice. Maurizio Muraro probably had the best of the production in terms of the presentation of Geronte; his was a powerful presence throughout. ‘Supporting’ roles were pretty much all well taken; especial mention might be made of Benjamin Hulett’s finely observed Edmondo. Choral singing was of an equally high standard.

 

As for Antonio Pappano’s conducting: well, at least it was not his Wagner. Many extol him in Puccini; he certainly seems more at home here than in a great deal of other repertoire. There remains, though, more than a little stiffness, and that same desire to ‘accompany’ rather than to lead. The Wagnerisms of Puccini’s score came through, perhaps ironically, far more strongly than when I had heard the work in Leipzig in April, but, like much of the rest, they seemed isolated rather than properly placed within a greater scheme. Delicacy was more to the fore than passion, let alone a dialectic between them. The orchestra, bar some surprisingly thin string tone at times, played very well, considered in itself, though it was too rarely given its head; I could not help but wonder what a symphonic conductor such as Daniele Gatti, Semyon Bychkov, or Riccardo Muti would have brought to the performance. That said, the most glaring shortcomings were those of the half-baked staging.  This really is not, or at least should not be, the place to present work-in-progress.
 

Manon Lescaut, Oper Leipzig, 19 April 2014

Leipzig Opera House

Manon Lescaut – Nadja Michael

Lescaut – José Fardilha

Chevalier des Grieux – Stefano La Colla

Geronte de Revoir – James Moellenhoff

Edmondo – Sebastian Fuchsberger

Innkeeper –Andreas Reinboth

Singer – Jean Broekhuizen

Dancing Master – Martin Petzhold

Lamplighter – Tae Jin Cho

Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Sejong Chang

Naval Captain – Milcho Borovinov

Giancarlo Monaco (director)

Johannes Leiacker (set designs)

Birgit Wentsch (costumes)

Wolfgang von Zoubek (lighting)

Marita Müller (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Leipzig Opera (chorus master: Alessandro Zuppardo)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Anthony Bramall (conductor)

For reasons that remain unclear, Manon Lescaut seems recently to have become ubiquitous. In the United Kingdom, both Welsh National Opera and the Royal Opera are offering new productions this season. Sir Simon Rattle has been leading the Berlin Philharmonic in this, his first Italian opera; Munich will soon be staging it; and so on, and so on. Doubtless the plans and availability of ‘star’ singers, not least Jonas Kaufmann, play a role, but that does not seem to be the whole story. A good few stagings of, for instance, La fanciulla del West, suggest that houses and audiences may be keen to hear Puccini works beyond the central triptych of Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly; maybe they are even tiring of those dangerously over-exposed works. Leipzig got in a little earlier with this 2006 production by Giancarlo Monaco, conducted at its premiere by Riccardo Chailly, and now revived under Anthony Bramall.

Dancing Master (Martin Petzhold) and Manon (Nadja Michael)

The version employed, the 1893 original version for Turin, as edited by Roger Parker for Ricordi, was Chailly’s choice. Though Puccini would continue to tinker, in particular long Manon’s fourth act aria, ‘Sola, perduta, abbandonata’, until reinstating it, slightly modified, for the thirtieth-anniversary performance at La Scala in 1923, the principal difference here concerns the first act finale. Before both the vocal score was published and the first La Scala performance (1894), Puccini followed Luigi Illica’s suggestion and wrote a different ending. Here we therefore heard what Mosco Carner, in his New Grove article on the opera, describes – justly – as a ‘conventional pezzo concertato, based on the melody of “Donna non vidi mai”’. Chailly considered this original finale ‘more serious’, drawing Wagnerian comparisons. I wish I could hear them, for frankly, to my ears, the first act as a whole is ultimately rather dull, considerably less characteristic of the composer than the second act, let alone the much stronger third and fourth – which seem to me to have more of Wagner in them too. (Puccini had visited Bayreuth n 1889 and 1890.) Still, for those with ears to hear, this is clearly an interesting opportunity to hear Puccini’s first thoughts.

The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra played splendidly, gaining depth and lustre as the score did the same. The Wagnerian harmonies – Tristan a little too obvious perhaps, though one might say the same of some early Schoenberg too – of the Intermezzo registered with a golden glow that was very much this great orchestra’s own. Bramall kept the score moving, but although a disinclination to bend the knee to sentimentality can only be applauded, there were occasions when he might have relaxed a little more, stiffness sometimes replacing a more natural ebb and flow. (A more ‘Wagnerian’ approach would certainly be welcome here.)

The principal problem, however, was Nadja Michael’s assumption of the title role. As with  other occasions I have heard her – Salome at Covent Garden, for instance – she seemed incapable of singing in tune. Vibrato of a variety that occludes distinctions between one or two degrees of the scale may or may not be overlooked. Persistently flat intonation, of a nature that had one wondering whether she was attempting ‘historically informed’ or maybe ‘deformed’ Puccini at Baroque pitch, is another matter again. Michael, as is her wont, threw herself enthusiastically into the role and exhibited undoubted stage presence, but musical considerations can hardly be cast aside here. That said, matters improved – somewhat, though far from entirely – in the third and fourth acts. Her gymnast’s bow during the curtain calls proved equally memorable. To his great credit, José Fardilha held his own with respect to intonation: no mean feat in duets. His was indeed a creditable performance throughout: typically Italianate in spirit, but fully in technical control. The other particularly impressive performance was James Moellenhoff’s Geronte, dark and deep of tone to an extent that suggested a Prince Gremin. Smaller roles were well taken, and choral singing was of a high quality throughout.

Lescaut (José Fardilha) and Manon

The chorus moved well on stage too, its blocking adding distinction to Monaco’s attractive, if ultimately somewhat conventional production. Despite the updating to the 1920s and certain cinematic references, it was difficult to glean any particular insights. The madrigalists looked a little too much like refugees from an imitation Otto Schenk Rosenkavalier to convince for Paris. Still, Johannes Leiacker’s set designs and Birgit Wensch’s costumes retained their period lustre, and the starkness of the desert for the fourth act offered welcome contrast, also permitting one to focus more or less entirely on the plight of the doomed lovers. A silent film interlude, taken from Arthur Robinson’s 1926 Manon Lescaut, opened the second act; it did not, however, fill in the gap in the action, that is, when the lovers live together, but rather foretold what was to come. Perhaps surprisingly, no such footage was used during the Intermezzo. It was a little difficult to understand why.