Date: 20 July 2018
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ARTS
Mythical spaces
Opera, from an organ room to an ice rink
GUY DAMMANN
Claude Debussy
PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE Glyndebourne Festival Opera, until August 9
David Sawer
THE SKATING RINK Garsington Festival Opera
The Glyndebourne Festival’s new pro- duction of Pelléas et Mélisande, con- ducted by Robin Ticciati and directed by Stefan Herheim, is the company’s fourth staging of the work, timed in celebration of the centenary of the composer’s death. The curtain opens, straight away, to reveal an oddly familiar space, in both senses of the term. A family and their servants are gathered in a great hall, overlooked by grand paintings and, more conspicuously, a large organ. They surround a kind of altar on which is laid the body of young woman, their apparent mourning led by Prince Golaud. In the minute and a half or so of music before the action formally begins, the com- pany dissolves, leaving Golaud, dressed in plus fours and a tweed hunting coat, lost in thought, to chance on the same young woman, equally lost and, with streaks of blood descending from her eyes down her cheeks, apparently blind, but now nonetheless living and breathing.
To a sceptical eye, much of this will seem ludicrously arch, particularly the set, which is a detailed replica of Glyndebourne’s organ room, an extension to the Elizabethan manor constructed by John Christie in the 1920s to accommodate the family’s increasingly ambitious musical life. The instrument, which looms almost preposterously large in the house (it is apparently the largest domes-
tic organ in Britain), has an even more power- ful presence on the stage, filling the entire width. This, and the way many details are crammed into the opera’s opening moments so we are equipped with the information we need to know, or to set aside, in order to understand what on earth has been done with the original scenario (in this case, “une forêt”), make for a somewhat worrying beginning. That said, Ticciati’s handling of the opening’s music is radiant, exquisitely shaded and calmly paced.
In the second scene, the rhythm of the stag- ing seems easier to grasp. The organ has shrunk to more homely proportions and the lighting acquired a more cheerful aspect, ren- dering visible the paintings as replicas of those hanging in the actual organ room next door. More important, however, is the way the movement of the singers becomes more immediately visible. This quality is particu- larly noticeable after Pelléas – dressed in a light, striped suit with a blue bow (possibly inspired by a photograph of Debussy picnick- ing) – has asked his grandfather’s permission to leave the castle to visit his dying friend. The answer is that he must wait at home because no one knows how Golaud’s return, with the mysterious princess, will affect the life of the family. The music at this point is full of dark shadows, but as the interview con- cludes it lightens until a beatific violin solo floats high above the swaying harmonies. At this moment on stage, Pelléas, his mother and
grandfather, who have been circling around each other, somehow coalesce, each leaning closely into the other, standing at an angle as if listening out for an image of beauty which might re-unite the family. The immense ten- derness of the moment, caught in arrested motion, seeps back into the gentle contours of
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Date: 20 July 2018
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the music, and yields a strange feeling of inti- macy with the usually mysterious and emo- tionally distant royal house of Allemonde.
The sense of watching a kind of pared-down ballet grows, as Golaud is welcomed back into the family and Mélisande introduced to them. The music is on tenterhooks at this stage, barely able to catch its breath, and the delicate state of relations between the characters, the balance of anxieties and tensions and the vari- ous requirements of affection and ritual, prece- dence and hospitality, are borne out in the way Herheim has the characters move in and out of each other’s orbit, as if the forces of attraction and kinship that operate between the members of this complex, taciturn but volatile family could be explained purely by the laws of gravi- tation. And indeed, the movement on stage matches perfectly the shifting focus of Debussy’s music and the way it settles, butter-
fly-like, on particular colours and motifs before being swept away by more powerful and fundamental forces; this illuminates how at its heart, Maurice Maeterlinck’s troubling and mysterious symbolist drama is basically about the tensions and paradoxes implicit in the laws of human attraction.
Another aspect, borne out in the distinction between Pelléas and Golaud, relates to ways of seeing. The two half-brothers live after all in the same castle with the same people, but they rarely see the same things. In the music, this is expressed through the contrast between the light and flowing lines of Pelléas and the dark and troubled contours of Golaud, and in the way Mélisande’s ambiguous harmonic world, though caught between the two, seems so ineluctably drawn to the former. Herheim enhances this by making Pelléas a painter, ill at ease with the feudal life of the castle but fluent in exploring its beauties. The third scene’s exploration of the kingdom becomes a tour of the organ room’s paintings, some of them works in progress, others new acquisitions brought home by Golaud on his recent journey with Mélisande. The contrast between Pel- léas’s concern with the look of things and Gol- aud’s desire to hunt and possess the objects of his awareness reaches its apex in their different
attitudes towards retrieving Mélisande’s lost ring, and in the ecstatic but all too fleeting music when the cave is illuminated with moonlight.
The soloists and orchestra are wonderfully responsive to Ticciati’s musical direction and seem entirely at one with Herheim’s under- standing of the drama. Christina Gansch gives a tremendously affecting performance as
Mélisande, while the distinction between Christopher Purves’s tortured and violent Golaud and John Chest’s ethereal Pelléas matches the framework perfectly. Brindley Sherratt’s Arkel is also affecting. Herheim’s pursuit of the logic of these characterizations can lead to odd conclusions, but the direction is always revelatory on some level, even though particular details take longer to digest than others. The action concludes, perhaps predictably, by returning to the opening funeral setting, showing the circularity of the family’s thirst for renewal. At the end, though, the characters melt away – an effect aided by Herheim and Tony Simpson’s extraordinarily dynamic lighting designs – and the room is suddenly filled with contem- porary opera-goers and tourists, keen to take in the organ room before progressing to the performance, accompanied by the luminous, peacefully lapping movements of the final bars. Again, it sounds arch, but the concern here seems to be not somehow to implicate the audience in the objectification of Mélisande so much as to illuminate how we all contribute to maintaining the mythical spaces that give life to the opera.
The mysterious laws of human attraction and gravitation are equally the subject of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s first novel, The Skating Rink, in which a constant shifting between three narrators, and a focus on how each sees particular details in different ways, are used to gradually frame and explore the mysterious murder of Carmen, a beggar who once sang at the opera in Naples. Her body is discovered on an ice rink, built in secret with municipal funds in the swimming pool of an abandoned mansion. All of which makes it an unusual choice for operatic treatment – and yet
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somehow, in an ambitious new commission by Garsington Opera, the composer David Sawer and librettist Rory Mullarkey, together with the director and designer Stewart Laing and the conductor Garry Walker, manage to pull it off in one of the summer season’s most surprising triumphs.
Each narrator is given a single act – the drop- out poet Gaspar (Sam Furness), his smooth friend Remo (Ben Edquist) and the corrupt but still quite lovable town official Enric (Grant Dyle). The balance between narrative and action is managed superbly well, and the music fizzes with complexity, realizing its potential in a dizzying palette of styles but uniting in carefully structured rhythmic devices which seem to drive the action forward at break-neck speed – often faster than the characters would appear to be comfortable with. For a new, ambitious production, the musical standards are very high indeed. Each of the narrator-so- loists navigates the shifting between narration and interaction brilliantly, as well as capturing their contrasts in tonal colour and movement. Fine performances are also given by Susan Bickley (as Carmen), Alan Oke (as Rookie), and Lauren Zolezzio as the skater Nuria who, like Mélisande, is the object of fascination who brings together this fleeting community of nar- rators. The most surprising detail of the eve- ning, however, is that Laing’s clever, minimalist set is constructed on a kind of plas- tic which actually functions as a skating sur- face. Zolezzio – and more importantly her character-double, the skater Alice Poggio – can thereby give us a glimpse of the grace and beauty of movement that first brought the three conflicting narrators together.
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Date: 20 July 2018
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John Chest as Pelléas and Christina Gansch as Mélisande
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