les troyens – Likely Impossibilities

Troy again

December 19, 2012 4 Comments

Les Troyens is a wonderful, unique, and rare opera (also REALLY BIG), but it’s not one that sells itself. Without an equally strong and unique cast and production–from each of the principals to the chorus and choreography–its five and a half hours can become a bit of a slog. While there are some considerable virtues in the Met’s current revival, it’s only an intermittently satisfying affair.

Berlioz, Les Troyens. Metropolitan Opera, 12/17/2013. Production by Francesca Zambello (revival), conducted by Fabio Luisi with Susan Graham (Didon), Deborah Voigt (Cassandre), Marcello Giordani (Énée), way too many more, see here

Francesca Zambello’s production is fairly traditional, with a few Virgilian Easter eggs and non sequitur insertions that pass for vision. Maria Bjørnson’s multi-level George Tsypin-esque set is neither particularly effective nor intrusive, though its textured strips of metal make it resemble a high-end corporate lobby. (The sight lines are bad, too. In Act 2 I couldn’t see the ghost of Hector at all.) The costumes are traditional colorful robes and armor in the Troy portion and in the Carthage half consist of lots of all-white robes and royal purple. Zambello tends towards the heavy-handed and cluttered. Some plot points are underlined and circled, such as Ascagne taking Dido’s ring and Andromache’s screaming, while other developments seem quite badly timed, such as Dido and Aeneas finding love at the beginning of the Hunt kind of robs the rest of the act of its point.

After having seen three different productions of this opera live (this one, David McVicar’s in London,* and David Pountney’s in Berlin), I have come to three conclusions (besides that Troy is far, far easier to effectively stage than Carthage):

   1.   The Carthaginians don’t have chairs. They lounge on cushions.
   2.   The Carthaginians always look like the members of a New Age cult. White robes, little in the way of gender differentiation (apparently a side effect of having a queen?).
   3.   The dancing is usually awful, and goes on for far too long.

I actually liked Doug Varone’s choreography of the Chasse royal a lot, where he has a chance to build the drama to some developmental music, and wished Dido and Aeneas hadn’t been providing visual distraction as well as premature macking. But the insertion of dance at other points, such as Iopas’s song and the jazz hand-filled Laocöon ensemble, is irritating, and the long dance sections of Acts 3 and 4 outstay their welcome. Overall, at least as revived here it’s a generic, uninspired production–in Carthage considerably less egregious than David McVicar’s recent effort but also far less visually arresting in Troy. I must say that this production’s moderately-sized, literal horse is far less impressive than both McVicar’s steampunk fire-snorter and the Pountney production’s take, where giant feet kicked at the Trojans from overhead.

The problem with a lackluster Troyens is that you become acutely aware of how uneven the piece is. It’s not that much of it’s bad (I think it’s 98% genius, and the 2% is mostly the Dance of the Nubian Slave Girls), but it doesn’t fit together without consistent energy and vision. In this performance, I was not convinced that we really needed two peripheral beatific tenor arias, plus, well, I adore the whiny soldiers in Act 5. They’re my second favorite whiny soldier duo in opera, beat only by Nero’s guard in Poppea. The glance into their lives, plus the respite of Hylas’s music, are what gives the opera its epic quality. But if they don’t have some spirit you just want to get on with it.

next up: Dance of the Campaign Pollsters

The best thing about Fabio Luisi’s conducting is that it kept everything moving. I liked his work in the quieter music best, such as the lovely Didon-Anna duets, where he found a nice gentle flow. And the processions and choruses had a good solid momentum, with only a few coordination issues early on. The chorus, by the way, might be the real star of Les Troyens, and while I found the Met chorus somewhat less impressive than the ROH’s last summer, it was still a strong showing. Where I thought Luisi was less satisfying was in the quirky stuff that makes Berlioz so special, stuff like the ostinatos, the irregular phrases, the sudden turns. Stuff like this moment. Luisi has a tendency to make it all sound like early Beethoven, and pleasantly bland early Beethoven at that. More lurching energy, more neuroticism was needed.

Besides the chorus, Susan Graham is the star of this production. Her Didon is absolutely beautifully sung and acted, with more depth and intensity than I remember in her performance on the Châtelet DVD. She expertly balances musical grace with the text, giving her Didon dignity and stature, convincingly regal but also human. Her voice is bright but also slightly grainy, a perfect size for this role and by the end she becomes a real tragedienne at the end. Her only issue is high notes: the big and prominent B flat in “Chers Tyriens” simply entirely failed to come out both times, leading to a somewhat anticlimactic end. I’m guessing there isn’t a lot of time with Octavian in her future (which is a shame, because she is otherwise outstanding there!).

I wonder if Marcello Giordani took the widespread rumors of his imminent replacement personally. (How could you not?) For the first three acts he seemed to be giving it his all, and managed a little better than I expected. His voice is aging, the high notes extraordinarily loud but not very pretty, the disconnected lower range hollow-sounding and weak. It was in Act 4 where the problems really began to show, with a can belto “Nuit d’ivresse” that completely drowned out Graham’s more appropriately nuanced efforts, and his Act 5 “Inutiles regrets” were indeed regrettable, involving something resembling a high C and some B flats but also a lot of vaguely rhythmic, somewhat pitched shouting towards the end. His acting is acceptable but not exactly dashing or charismatic. I would not at all be surprised if he were sent packing to, uh, Italie before the HD broadcast (“he’s not Italian! he’s Sicilian!” -my relatives, my family comes from southern Italy). The rumored replacement is Bryan Hymel, who, with indisputable competence if not terribly much beauty, sang the role earlier in London this year.

Deborah Voigt’s wan, poorly sung Cassandre made me long for London’s brilliant Anna Caterina Antonacci. Voigt was always a Chrysothemis, someone who plants themselves in front of the conductor and makes a glorious sound. Cassandre is a role that requires the charisma and madness of a mystic, which Voigt has never possessed. What’s more, the sound is gone, the voice small and sour, a shadow of her past. She vocalizes through the music with rather unpleasant tone and unclear French, rarely looking at her Coroebus. Very disappointing.

The army of supporting cast was strong, for the most part. Karen Cargill’s warm, rich low mezzo as Anna was a highlight, and she made an excellent contrast to Graham. Paul Appleby sang Hylas with a sweet tenor and honest, simple phrasing. In contrast Eric Cutler was a Iopas with a large but uneven voice and fussy phrasing (with a fussy staging from Zambello), somewhat miscast and unaware that less is sometimes more. Julie Boulianne sounded clear as Ascagne with some strange flirty direction. Stephen Gaertner stood in for Dwayne Croft as Chorèbe and showed a strong, full dark baritone. The two most prominent basses, Kwangchoul Youn (long time, no see!) as Narbal and Richard Bernstein as Panthée, were both excellent.

There’s great stuff in this production, but it requires patient waiting through considerable quantities of not so great stuff to get to all of it. Still, recommended under the general “come on, it’s Troyens” rule.

Les Troyens continues through December with an HD broadcast on January 5.

*Like the set of David McVicar’s London production, this Met one (which
came first) also features, in the Carthage set, a raked circular thing center stage
that has little buildings on it (these look more like building blocks
while McV’s were very clearly a city). Unfortunately I have no pictures
of the NYC incarnation; here is the London one:

Coincidence? Errrrr.

Photos copyright Met.

Review

Les Troyens, the Royal Opera House for a horse

July 3, 2012 6 Comments

At least the horse is good. But the Royal Opera House’s straightforward new production of Les Troyens isn’t nearly as exciting as it should be. The cast and their singing are the best of it, and both Anna Caterina Antonacci and Eva-Maria Westbroek are well worth seeing, but somehow it underwhelms. David McVicar’s production is, for the most part, not bad, but it’s not much more than average, and the whole affair never coheres enough to rise to the occasion–the occasion, in this case, being a vague Olympics tie-in and the eternal “we’re putting on a quasi-all-star uncut Les $#!&ing Troyens, the biggest opera around that isn’t in four parts.”

Berlioz, Les Troyens. Royal Opera House, 7/1/2012. New production directed by David McVicar, sets by Es Devlin, costumes by Moritz Junge, lights by Wolfgang Göbbel, choreography by Andrew George. Conducted by Antonio Pappano with Anna Caterina Antonacci (Cassandre), Fabio Capitanucci (Coroebus), Bryan Hymel (Aeneas), Eva-Maria Westbroek (Dido), Hanna Hipp (Anna), Jin-Min Park (Iopas), Brindley Sherratt (Narbal), Ed Lyon (Hylas).

David McVicar is a smart and slick director, but rarely a profound one and over the past few years his productions seem to be losing more and more intellectual weight. (I think his Faust is legitimately brilliant, and I love his Zauberflöte, both at the ROH, but his more recent Anna Bolena and Trovatore, both at the Met, are adequate at best.) For Troyens he pulls one of his favorite tricks, setting the opera in the time in which it was composed, here around the 1850s. But that’s about the extent of his Konzept, which never creates a compelling reason for why this siege and escape happen. Who are these Trojans, Greeks, Carthaginians, or future Romans? (This exposition is something McVicar achieves with model efficiency in his Giulio Cesare, seen nearly everywhere already and coming to the Met next year). It doesn’t have to be a historically specific definition–though since he sets the piece in a historically specific milieu that might be the most satisfying–but it has to be something dramatically convincing. Here too much is left empty, with familiar-looking nineteenth-century images that do little to define the setting or characters. Nor did the cast seem to be on the same wavelength as this setting, or for that matter with each other.

The Troy acts are far easier to stage and the production works best here. The Trojans have holed up in a vaguely steampunk setting of industrial detritus surrounding a giant metal tower. Why the industrial stuff? I thought momentarily of the broken machines in Heart of Darkness, but that’s all I got. For people suffering under a long siege the Trojans look damn good, the women in beautiful dresses and the men in elaborate uniforms. (While I’m not sure why it was there, much of the design in this half is very striking.) Swooping through all of this is Anna Caterina Antonacci’s old school Cassandra, with the dramatic postures and oversized gesture of, maybe, the 1850s, or a visitor from Planet Sarah Bernhardt. Eyes painted on her hands lets her tell people’s fortunes–based on her reactions, most of them aren’t getting happy endings. If there’s anyone who can pull this kind of thing off it’s Antonacci, and she’s great fun, but Gesamtkunstwerk it’s not.

The set piece effects in Troy work well. While the Horse might seem a challenge I’m pretty sure that as long as you produce something very big and equine it’s going to be a hit, and this one, welded of abandoned weapons and snorting fire, is no exception. It looms large and is very exciting. McVicar does a good job with the ceremonies in this act as well, coming up with something convincingly ritualistic and appropriate to the music. The dancing, however, made me decide that if I ever run an opera company I will ban the use of cartwheels, somersaults, handsprings, back handsprings, backwards somersaults, and any other gymnastics in all of my productions. (The dances in Carthage made me want to expand this ban to all dance entirely–more on that in a second.)

While the Troy acts are all dark excitement and desolation, Dido’s Carthage is a land of plenty and peace and sunniness. The dark metal tower turns into a multi-tiered sandstone city, as well as a model of a tiny city that variously sits on the stage and hovers above it to no clear purpose. Unfortunately McVicar gives into a wide variety of tired Orientalist cliches out of an unironicized Ingres painting (without the nudity, surprisingly enough). Like in many other productions of Troyens, the Carthaginians have built a glorious city but not yet discovered chairs, and prefer to languish on cushions while wearing robes and shiny jewelry. The dances are more frequent and far more annoying, with lousy slinky choreography, some horribly tacky rainbow costumes and, during a typically McVicarian naiad abduction in the Chasse royale, a tree that bursts into flames. Presumably it was struck by lightning, but the effect is that Aeneas and Dido’s love is signaled by a burning bush, Old Testament style.

There is some lazy stagecraft in the last act, with a large portion of Dido’s final scene played extreme downstage in front of a black curtain, presumably as the pyre is set up behind it. While this got Eva-Maria Westbroek right down to the apron, it’s more than a litle anticlimactic and out of character for the rest of the production. The final step, however, is a mistake not of economy but of opulence. Perhaps skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to be “spoiled” but a giant head with a pointing hand enters at the curtain, looking like a man version of the Horse, presumably pointing Italie-wards. Maybe it’s Hannibal. Whatever, it’s embarrassingly like a last-minute cameo from the Terminator (not, strangely enough, pictured in any of the official photos).

McVicar knows how to create engaging Personenregie, but the staging fails to provide a larger vision, and the weirdness in the design and especially the dance unwelcomingly recalls the commodity elements of the grand opera genre. It’s a luxury buffet of what we purportedly want to see, unfortunately all the dishes don’t work together. I must say the lighting is gorgeous, though.

The cast ranged from decent to excellent. Antonio Pappano’s conducting was straightforwardly exciting and quickly paced, but tended to shortchange Berlioz’s quirkiness. I missed the orchestral detail, unusual timbres, and rapid changes of mood of Colin Davis or John Eliot Gardiner. The orchestra sounded absolutely excellent until the end, when the brass began to tire. The chorus sounded super the whole way through, and with this opera’s number of choruses that makes a big difference. The aforementioned Antonacci was surely the highlight, out of place as she was, she can declaim with such conviction and vivid presence that you forget anyone else is onstage. It’s a shame Cassandre is only in the first few hours of this epic–and only Antonacci managed to transmit a sense of the epic.

Antonacci also held a monopoly on gravitas among the cast, the rest of whom were lacking in this department. I like soprano Didos, and Eva-Maria Westbroek’s shimmering tone suits the part. She sounded lovely despite a certain lack of French style. But I wasn’t entirely convinced on a theatrical level. In roles like Sieglinde her down to earth, big sister stage persona is a great asset, but it worked against her here. Her Dido began insecure and worried and only gradually gained in stature (as her voice tired)–but it was too late, in my opinion. This interpretation could have worked had the production fit it, but as it was the second half lacked a strong center.

As Aeneas, Bryan Hymel sang some spectacularly powerful high notes, and his super technique kept his smallish voice even and consistent through the entire long role. But despite really throwing himself into it, both he and his sound are severely lacking in glamour and charisma–the voice is basically monochromatic and plain, particularly in the lower register, and like Westbroek he seems like a guy you’d hang out with rather than an ancient hero. (I have little doubt he sang the role far better than Giordani is likely to do at the Met in December, however.)

The supporting cast was solid, highlighted by Hanna Hipp’s Anna, who was slow to warm up in the duet with Dido but whose rich tone sounded absolutely lovely in the duet with Narbal. Fabio Capitanucci was a stiff but authoritatively-voiced Coroebus, Brindley Sherrett a first-rate Narbal, and Ed Lyon one of the few cast members who sounded French-ish as Hylas.

After around four hours of opera, I peered into the pit to see a cellist flipping to the back of his part, counting the pages remaining. I hate to say it but I could kind of see his point. This was a missed opportunity.

Photos copyright Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House

Review

Les Troyens: Decline and fall

December 7, 2010 6 Comments

Any performance of Les Troyens is automatically a Big Event. Its length, its awesomeness, and its strangeness are all on a grand scale. The Deutsche Oper Berlin’s new production is successful in a number of ways, and allow you to appreciate how wonderful a piece this really is. But it’s not an unqualified success, and while it boasts good conducting by Donald Runnicles, a good orchestra, a great chorus, and a super Troy staging with a fantastic Horse, some so-so principals and a wayward Carthage made it only partly unforgettable.

Berlioz, Les Troyens. Deutsche Oper Berlin, 12/5/2010. New production premiere, directed by David Pountney with sets by Johan Engels, costumes by Marie-Jeanne Lecca, lights by Davy Cunningham, choreography by Renato Zanella. Conducted by Donald Runnicles with Béatrice Uria-Mozon (Didon), Petra Lang (Cassandre), Ian Storey (Énée), Liane Keegan (Anna), Markus Brück (Chorèbe), many more, see the full cast list here.

David Pountney’s production is about the conflict between man (Troy) and woman (Carthage). This begins well. His Troy is set in dirty brown, rusty red, and gold, a large empty stage filled with teeming crowds. The costumes are those of timeless grungy warriors with much brown leather, grommets, and random incidents of facepaint. The Trojan Horse is a wonderful effect, seen only in terrifyingly enormous, living parts: kicking feet from above, a giant nose.

It’s good design, these people look like they’ve been besieged for ten years, and the tired, fragile, gilded grandeur of Priam (in a wheelchair) is just right. Cassandre hovers around a red, glowing crack in the brown stage, opposite Hector’s grave, and frantically knits. She is making something that looks like the head of a horse. I can appreciate this on a mythological level–Cassandra’s story is rather similar to Philomela’s–but this craft project looks like something that shows up every year at the church rummage sale (and made me think of The Godfather).

In Act 2, we see a a large metal circle, ringed with bare bedframes with a vortex in the middle. The ghost of Hector rises out of this center hole, and it is where Cassandre kills herself, along with an army of white-veiled women (their veils a foreshadowing of the women’s world of Carthage, a world they can’t create in Troy). The symbolism of the empty beds eludes me, but, like many other tableaux in this act, it’s a striking image. The Personenregie is simple but good, particularly that of the chorus. They move as a convincing crowd, in Troy alternately a steadily advancing, organized mass and a frantic flowing mob. Chorèbe and Cassandre’s scene is touching.

Unfortunately, things go downhill once we get to Carthage in the second part of the opera. While Pountney’s Troy was ruled by supposedly masculine might and ferocity, Carthage is a sensual woman’s utopia, decorated in white, yellow, and green and featuring curved lines instead of angles, pillows and lounging instead of armor, and many filmy curtains. The costumes go from warrior to cult, complete with turbans.

As a concept it makes sense, but everything stays too static, and particularly Didon is not given a chance to make any journey as a character. Les Troyens has a lot of static scenes to start with, and this kind of oppositional staging, without close attention to the characters, only makes things more flat. The calls of “ITALIE! ITALIE!” feel like no more than a bothersome interruption. And Didon also never shows much in the way of grandeur or power, only the serenity of a guru. (If you’ll forgive me a Lord of the Rings metaphor, Troy in this production is Rohan while Didon is Galadriel.) At the end of the opera, Cassandre guides Didon to her suicide in the middle of the bedframes again, but other than killing themselves in the middle of the same set piece, it’s not clear what they have in common.

The score was performed without any large cuts. But while it’s wonderful to hear all the great dance music, the choreography by Renato Zanella is weak, sometimes unintentionally comic (the matelots doing the wave, for example), and generally uninteresting as dance, resembling some sort of aerobics. Narratively speaking, I think Pountney and Zanella really erred with the staging of the Chasse royale. Instead of narrating the awakening love of Didon and Enée, we get a generic ballet of seduction that does not directly relate to the plot, and then we see Didon and Énée in full-fledged embrace right afterwards. We never see them fall in love, we just see them in love, and it feels tremendously abrupt and wrong for Didon’s character. The entire fourth act is treated like an interlude–but plot-wise, without it the fifth act wouldn’t be much, so this other-worldliness feels off.

(Also, at the end of the ballet, the women become pregnant and proceed to birth enormous clear plastic spheres in something I have already heard referred to as the “placenta ballet.” These spheres make a reappearance in the following scene, and eventually Didon and Énée float above the stage in their own circles. I’m sure they symbolize something circular or insular, but, hey, Cassandre did herself in in the middle of a circle, too.)

Musically there was more to be enthusiastic about. Donald Runnicles’s conducting did not have the neurotic tension nor the sheer strangeness of Colin Davis’s, but it had a light energy and forward momentum that kept things going a lot better than the staging did, with an excellent sense for the large-scale pacing of this long score. The offstage groups and otherwise enormous forces were excellently coordinated. He did not emphasize the crashing dissonances or eerie sounds, this was Berlioz that sounded remarkably normal, yet still like Berlioz. The orchestra sounded good but not great, with some scrappy wind sections and slackening towards the end of the evening.

The Deutsche Oper Berlin’s chorus is famously good, and they were one of the best things about this performance, singing with amazing nuance, homogeneity and balance. The chorus music seemed every bit as directed and musical as any other section of the score (more than some of the principals, actually), and that’s a rare thing. They also moved very well, and from my customary back-of-the-house seat looked like a convincing crowd even while singing so well.

Petra Lang’s towering Cassandre was by far the best of the leads. Her portrayal has grown since her excellent 2001 recording of the role (get that CD, it’s awesome!), and her Cassandre has fatal, desperate gravity, sung with an imposingly large voice yet great detail and attention to the text. She knows how to hold back until the biggest moments, she can be gentle as well as ferocious, and while I was sitting too far away to be a great judge of detailed acting, she has charisma, even while wearing someone’s grandmother’s afghan and maniacally knitting part of a hobby horse.

Béatrice Uria-Mozon was a tastefully sung and gracefully acted Didon, but until her intense final scene she failed to win me over for some reason. I found her portrayal somewhat small-scaled, and both the production’s simplicity and her dark-hued and spicy but very lyric voice didn’t help her out. I think from the front of the house she probably made a much better impression, but to have a Troyens without a heartbreakingly grand Didon was a problem for me. (I would have loved to hear originally cast Kate Aldrich, who canceled a while ago due to being busy having an actual baby, rather than a big plastic globe.)

I don’t quite understand why Énée is often sung by a Heldentenor, but whatever your volume it certainly requires more finesse and sense of French style than dark-voiced, baritonal tenor Ian Storey has, and from a clumsy opening aria onwards he sounded loud but completely wrong for the part. He can certainly blast out the notes, but Berlioz requires sensitivity. As Heldentenors go he is an OK actor, but that’s not a very high standard. (This blog would like to endorse the idea of a Roberto Alagna Énée, and I realize I might live to regret that. Kaufmann would be nifty too.)

The many supporting roles were more satisfyingly filled, with Markus Brück’s thuggish-looking but sweetly lyrical-sounding Chorèbe and Liane Keegan’s big-voiced Anna particular standouts. Ex-NYCO’er Heidi Stober sounded excellent as Ascagne and Gregory Warren was a pure Iopas. Technical values were mostly good except for some mysterious offstage clunks and a few poorly blended follow spots.

Was it worth it? Of course, its Les frickin’ Troyens! In case you haven’t noticed, I love this score. But I hope I’ll run into a more rounded production soon. The reception involved lots of cheering for everyone except lots of booing for the production folks. There were also an dismaying number of unsold seats. At a premiere of a major work, Berlin? Really? Is this normal?

I’m back in Vienna and tired, but will be off to Reimann’s Medea at the Staatsoper tonight anyways! I still owe y’all words on the Royal College of Music’s excellent Orpheus aux enfers, I am working on that!

Bows:

Production photos copyright Matthias Horn/Deutsche Oper Berlin