SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK OPERA REVIEW
 

Opera Holland Park (1) - Debussy, Pelléas et Mélisande: Soloists and chorus of Opera Holland Park, City of London Sinfonia. Conductor, Brad Cohen. Holland Park, London, 1.6. 2010. (JPr)

 

Anne Sophie Duprels (Mélisande) and Palle Knudsen (Pelléas)
Picture - Courtesy of Opera Holland Park

What a damp squib in more ways than one! One of London’s rainiest days in recent memory, was also the opening night of the summer season of opera in Holland Park. Perhaps the location is always blessed with dry weather because it does not seem to be able to cope with the horrendous conditions encountered that evening by the patrons going there. Any solid path was, naturally, awash and crossing grass meant that pathways became a muddied mess. It was also freezing cold and there were no signs of any heaters or blankets anywhere apart from those some audience members had brought to picnic on. The awning covering the audience is flimsy and when rained on it also vibrated to amplify the noise that it made.

All this was before facing up to the effects of the natural world on outdoor summer opera with its screeching peacocks, chattering roosting birds, screaming children and noisy airplanes. You might imagine that this was not the greatest musical event of my life – and you would be right! Even getting home was difficult, because at the end of the performance too, a further struggle was needed to reach Holland Park tube station: an essential pathway was blocked by a utility company’s activities. I will therefore assume that ‘things can only get better’ and give the whole enterprise the benefit of the doubt by limiting my critical response over this dispiriting experience.

Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande has eluded any great popular acceptance. The work is more strongly influenced by Wagner's epic music dramas than some commentators would care to admit and Debussy was a passionate Wagnerian who – like many of us – made repeated ‘pilgrimages’ to Bayreuth, whilst remaining – also like many of us – anything but uncritical. While seeking to emulate the German master, although in a French manner, Debussy was was clearly under the spell of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal when he wrote his 1902 masterpiece. The libretto for his only completed opera was a five-act prose drama by Maurice Maeterlinck, a work inherently rife with symbolism, even if it is not entirely clear exactly what the symbols represent here and there. Thoughts on this are best left to another occasion, but what is without doubt is that Debussy unravels his simple, sombre and downbeat plot much too slowly; occasionally testing the listener’s patience.

The widower Golaud, father of the young Yniold and son of old King Arkel d’Allemonde is lost in the woods (Holland Park itself?) He stumbles across a girl sobbing by a pond in which she has lost her golden crown, but Golaud does not find out much more about her except that she was, apparently, severely abused in the past. Golaud is soon married to her but she seems far happier with her husband's younger half-brother, Pelléas. The relationship between stepbrother and his new wife seems entirely chaste but it eventually drives Golaud to fratricide. We see only one physical manifestation of Pelléas and Mélisande feelings for each other in the opera’s most memorable scene, in which she tosses her long golden tresses from a tower for Pelléas to caress erotically. When Mélisande dies after giving birth to a daughter, the tortured Golaud is left literally holding the baby … but whose child is it?

The success of the evening was the valiant City of London Sinfonia under Brad Cohen with a dramatic coherent account with the music’s seemingly natural ebb and flow. This was, I suspect, exactly what Debussy was intending to achieve with writing which is necessarily dependent on the natural speech rhythms of the French language. It was admirable in the prevailing conditions that Cohen could be so sensitive to his cast and that almost every syllable of Maeterlinck’s text could be understood. Sadly all this was undermined by Olivia Fuchs’s bland, monochrome, repetitive staging on a treacherous geometrically-inspired abstract set by Yannis Thavoris.

The Tudor relic of Holland House should have been a help in this opera, yet in fact it was obscured by a curtain of silvery hanging decorations, of the sort to be found further along the road in Harrods’ windows at Christmas. It also seems to be de rigeur these days to suggest that Mélisande has been in Arkel’s palace before: here she was just a touch too knowing for the mysterious girl, found weeping beside a forest well. Anne Sophie Duprels’ portrayal was lacking in winsomeness, and naivety and instead her Mélisande became a manipulative, independent spirit, well aware of her disruptive effect on the decaying dynasty into which she marries. Ms Duprels, who was born in Paris and studied there, should have been perfect for this role and she did in fact produce some fine singing an one truly unforgettable moment when she whispered her sigh of love for Pelléas. The intimate auditorium and her supportive conductor ensured that her modestly-sized soprano voice provided a nuanced portrait of the charmless Mélisande Olivia Fuchs asked from her.

There seemed little chemistry between Ms Duprels and Palle Knudsen’s sappily romantic, slightly effete, Pelléas who was dresses up like Oscar Wilde. However ardent he tried to be, the Danish baritone seemed a little out-of-sorts vocally on this first night and, indeed, having this role sung by a tenor, as is often the case, would have allowed for a better ensemble among the singers. Palle Knudsen’s voice was too close in timbre to the veteran Alan Opie who was the undoubted star of the evening as Golaud. Although obviously a bit of a bully, he reacted in a typically human way to the distraught figure who had lost her ring and was slow to anger even when catching the youngsters in a compromising situation. When he finally erupted and threw Mélisande around by her fateful blonde locks, the episode became all the more frightening because of this Golaud’s earlier restraint. Throughout Mr Opie used his lyrical baritone with rare beauty and majesty.

The minor roles were admirably taken by Brian Bannatyne-Scott as a decrepit and stooping Arkel, by Anne Mason as Geneviève and, especially by the assured - if a little too mature looking – treble, Eoghan McNelis, as Golaud’s traumatised son.

Ignoring Colin Grenfell’s peculiar lighting, I leave my final comment on Miss Fuchs’s staging to her use of seven wan-looking female figures, initially dressed in white, who I can only dub as the ‘Brides of Dracula’. They came on to posture, gesticulate or whirl during Debussy’s interludes between his acts; they strewed flowers on stage and then threw feathers about from the pillows they always seemed to be carrying or plumping for some reason – or which they cuddled lying down at the front of the stage to represent sheep! The ‘Brides’ were put to good use on occasions, to move what set there was, but otherwise, they were a constantly annoying distraction to Debussy’s remarkable and atmospheric score.

 

Jim Pritchard

 

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