Review: ‘Il Trionfo’ and ‘Pelléas’ at the Aix-en-Provence Festival
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Version 0 of 1. AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Ghosts, girls and growing up: These were the specters hanging over a weekend of opera here. Handel’s first oratorio, written when he was just 22, “Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno” was never meant to be staged. But allegories, with characters that are also concepts, can be irresistible to modern directors, and Krzysztof Warlikowski has taken the piece on in a deep, tender staging that opened on Friday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. With Emmanuelle Haïm drawing exuberant playing from her ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée, this was as good as opera gets. The plot — if you can call it that — couldn’t be simpler: Time and Disillusion try to convince Beauty to abandon Pleasure for less fleeting gratifications. (Forsake the flesh; embrace the spirit: Would you guess that a cardinal wrote the libretto?) It’s an argument prosecuted in a perfectly calibrated procession of fast and slow arias, of joy, anger and sadness. Mr. Warlikowski’s Beauty (a wide-eyed Sabine Devieilhe, her voice gracefully fragile yet, when you least expect it, boldly tough) is in mourning. A film that plays during the sprightly overture shows Beauty and her lover dancing at a club with friends, passing around drug tablets. They both collapse; the boyfriend dies. As the action begins, she has ended up in what might be a mental institution, or perhaps rehab — there are nurses and a hospital bed — but the set (by Malgorzata Szczesniak) is dominated by rows of stadium-style movie theater seats. Why the movies? It’s a canny reflection of the surroundings: The outdoor Théâtre de l’Archevêché has a super-wide shallowness that suggests a screen. And in a short interview Mr. Warlikowski projects just before intermission, Jacques Derrida says that cinema is “the art of allowing ghosts to return.” So the space feels like a kind of afterlife, not just for Beauty’s boyfriend, but also for a host of blank-faced party girls who, like him, have died too early, sacrificed on the altar of adulthood and sensible living. Beauty ends the opera not triumphantly embracing the blazing light of heaven, but quietly slitting her wrists, another youthful martyr. In this staging’s first act, Time (a trumpeting Michael Spyres) and Disillusion (the commanding, chocolaty Sara Mingardo) are treated like archetypes: detached, nearly abstract representatives of an older generation. But in the second half, it becomes painfully clear that this is a family drama. (Pleasure, the oboe-bright countertenor Franco Fagioli, is Beauty’s ne’er-do-well brother.) It speaks to the compassion of Mr. Warlikowski’s vision that he treats the two parents not as overbearing caricatures. They’re something closer to helpless onlookers, adults who may themselves once have been young and wild, but who moved on, who made it through. It’s obvious, though, on which side of the work’s argument this director’s sympathies lie: The party should go on and on. I don’t know that I’m fully persuaded by his punkish, youth-above-all worldview, but it makes for an vital, poignant show. Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” is also about a young woman who doesn’t quite fit in, who bridles against maturity and conformity as elders look on with mingled incomprehension and fear. Based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s enigmatic Symbolist drama, the work is invariably described as dreamlike: Katie Mitchell, the director of a coolly accomplished new production that opened at the Grand Théâtre de Provence on Saturday, takes that literally. The curtain opens and we see Mélisande in a wedding dress, entering a room and falling asleep; the opera proper is her dream, and presumably a refraction of her “real” life. (Was she just married? Is she about to be?) But the action — even with liberal helpings of slow motion, eerily smooth crosscuts between shifting scenes, odd juxtapositions and a Mélisande double — is not much more surreal than most other “Pelléas” productions. I wondered, then, what the usefulness of the dream frame was, except to add a note of detachment. This staging is effective because it is clinical, its motions carefully choreographed, as if not only dreamed but also preordained. Barbara Hannigan, singing her first Mélisande with precision but never coldness, more womanly than girlish, is unequaled in the opera world for her physical control, and what she does here — a mixture of stillness, deliberation and sometimes what can only be called gymnastics — is riveting. “Pelléas” is haunted by vanished wives and husbands, and permeating Ms. Mitchell’s production is Mélisande’s anxiety that she is just the latest in a parade of wives for her husband, Golaud (Laurent Naouri); that the generations will march inexorably on; that she will die. Her affair with Pelléas (Stéphane Degout), Golaud’s boyish half brother, is here a search for a security that neither man is able to provide. Starting the score with medieval solemnity and clarity, Esa-Pekka Salonen roused the Philharmonia Orchestra to a febrile performance, weaving around the singers’ tiny changes of speed and tone and matching Golaud in the ebbs and flows of his desperate monologue about innocence. There’s no one onstage to answer that outpouring. The generation ostensibly in power — the patriarch Arkel (the booming Franz-Josef Selig), and the gentle Geneviève (Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo), Pelléas and Golaud’s mother and a kind of grown-old Mélisande — are ineffectual, inaccurate. Just as in a dream, no one seems to be running the show. Lizzie Clachan’s set, a mansion with oddly empty corridors, crumbling bowels and great piles of dirt spilling from doors, keeps revealing new facets. Lit by James Farncombe to be sometimes moonlit night, sometimes golden dusk and sometimes summery morning, this world is a formidable technical achievement, continually transforming itself. The Aix festival’s first three days brought three of music’s greatest scores — “Il Trionfo,” “Pelléas” and Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” — all played and sung exquisitely and staged with stimulating seriousness. It is a festival that, under the direction of Bernard Foccroulle for two more years, leaves the very biggest shoes to fill for Pierre Audi, just announced as his successor. |