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SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW
Gluck, Armide: Opera Lafayette Orchestra and Chorus, Conductor, Ryan Brown, The New York Baroque Dance Company, Rose Theater at Lincoln Center. New York City 3.2.2010 (SSM)
Semi-Staged Production
Choreographer: Catherine Turocy
Cast
Armide: Dominique Labelle
Renaud: William Burden
La Haine: Stephanie Houtzeel
Sidonie, Lucinde, Un Plasir: Judith van Wanroij
Phenice, Mélisse, Une Bergère: Nathalie Paulin
Artémidore, Le Chevalier Danois: Robert Getchell
Hidraot: William Sharp
Aronte, Ubalde: Darren Perry
It was a marketing if not a financial coup to sell tickets for the Washington and New York performances of Gluck's Armide for $15.00. All 2,000 seats for Monday's performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington and all 1,000 seats in New York for Wednesday's performance were completely sold out. Anne Midgette in the Washington Post amusingly notes that since the production company had no budget for printed advertisements, it managed to sell out the New York performance "in part by sending volunteers to New York by bus to hand out fliers to people attending the movie-theater broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's Carmen." The reason for this price break was to celebrate the Opera Lafayette's fifteenth anniversary season.
Gluck's Armide is one of some fifty operas based on a story from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. Handel's Rinaldo and versions of Armida by Haydn and Rossini are among the better known adaptations. Some of the performers in the current production were given a head start in becoming familiar with the libretto by having sung in Opera Lafayette's 2007 performance of Lully's Armide. That opera's libretto, written for Lully by Philippe Quinault, is in fact almost identical to Gluck's. Having taken the challenge of updating Lully's music a century after it was first performed, Gluck attempted to recompose an opera considered at the time an untouchable masterpiece. It would be the equivalent today of someone trying to improve upon Puccini's La Bohème. Needless to say, it was not initially received warmly, and was considered a travesty of Lully's sacrosanct musical composition. Far from being part of any opera company's standard repertory, Gluck's Armide has from the nineteenth century forward been infrequently revived. The Metropolitan Opera's last production was in 1911; the Paris Opera last performed it in 1905, and Covent Garden in 1928.
I admit I felt some trepidation as I sat down for what the playbill said would be a production lasting three hours and fifteen minutes. (It actually ran half an hour less.) I remembered some epic concert versions of Handel performed in the 1970's at Carnegie Hall in what Harold Schonberg then called "the new way of doing Handel"; I had to sit through these productions, the tickets having been paid for by my wife's boss. Unfortunately, it was several years before music of this period actually began to be performed in an historically informed manner. I also remembered walking out of a concert version of Rameau's Les Indes Galantes at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, so I wasn't overly excited on Wednesday night about sitting through what might be another static production.
The first hour of Armide was a little slow. Although Dominque Labelle sang well in the title role, she didn't exude the strength of character necessary to sustain interest. This became particularly clear when La Haine, played by Stephanie Houtzeel, burst onto the stage with several arias that made the rest of the cast seem like they had been performing in another opera (perhaps Pelléas and Mélisande)? Whether it was Ms. Houtzeel's enthusiasm or an improvement in Gluck's music, the opera from that moment on seemed to have been given a new life.
In several ways, this opera is unusually well-suited for a semi-staged production. First, there is not much in the way of physical action. More of a psychological drama, the opera revolves around Armide, a sorceress, whose emotional swings back and forth vis-a-vis her enemy/lover Renaud, a Crusader, is the opera's central dialectic. Unusual for an opera of its time, it ends neither with a main character's demise, nor with a happy but artificial resolution. Armide in an almost existential moment calls forth her Furies to destroy her castle and returns to the vengeful character that she was at the beginning of the opera. Second, the music is through-composed, performed as if it were one continuous aria. Gluck replaced what would normally be recitativi secchi
with either recitativi accompagnati or ariosos. Aside from not giving anyone in the audience, except for the man seated to my left, the chance to interrupt the performance with shouts of "bravo," it made for a more complete musical experience.
Much of the credit for the success of this performance should go to its choreographer, Catherine Turocy. Whether the dancing was in any way similar to how it was originally performed is unknown. Ms. Turocy in her notes states that no surviving period dance notation scores are extant for the dances in Armide. She based her choreography on treatises written in Gluck's time, and the dancers performed eloquent movements, hands raised delicately in the air, their expressive faces reflecting the emotions of the moment. Commendations are particularly in order for Caroline Copeland (who also soloed brilliantly in Opera Lafayette's production last year of Monsigny's Le Déserteur) whose mime-like, happy-to-sad facial alterations in the Act V Chaconne were worth the price of admission, and then some.
Tenor Robert Getchell should be singled out for his excellent singing and for his clear French diction (an asset not found in the other singers: an observation I must credit to an observant music scholar in the audience). The chorus also provided vibrant accompaniment. A few times, the singing was drowned out by the orchestra which played vigorously on period instruments. The French horn players struggled a bit now and then, most noticeably in the fanfare-like aria Plus on connaît l'amour, but some leeway is usually given to players of the valveless horn.
Considering the effort required to produce the opera for just two performances and with only two days to manage the logistics of moving the crew and cast from Washington to New York, this performance was an amazing accomplishment. Opera Lafayette's performance next year of the Baroque opera Sancho Pança (1762) by François-André Danican Philidor will, unfortunately, only be performed in Washington. Let's hope that next year the production company will be willing to make the commute back to New York!
Stan Metzger