Pelléas et Mélisande from the Met

So, I was able to catch part of what is likely my final Met opera broadcast in Washington this afternoon. (That is, if the Board of Trustees carries through on its plan to switch local radio station WETA from classical music to an all-news format. If you haven't yet, write them with some advice about how to remove their heads from their asses. Use the form on the right, "Feedback on radio.") Sorry if you missed it because I didn't warn you about it here, but I had forgotten until I turned the radio on that this week it was Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, which dating from 1902 just makes it in under the wire as a 20th-century opera. It's a strange, beautiful, and (for me, anyway) sinister work. Arkel and his whole family creep me out. Something twisted is deep in the roots of those people.

As the happily revived Sieglinde's Diaries noted, this is the 107th performance of the opera at the Met, which seems a surprisingly high number. (Is it possible that it was really Sieglinde's first time experiencing the opera?) What a cast! Jose van Dam, fresh off the exhausting autocrucifixion that is Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise in Paris this fall, came to New York with his renowned rendition of Golaud, joining Anne Sofie von Otter (Mélisande), Felicity Palmer (Geneviève), and William Burden (Pelléas). For me, though, it was the chance to hear van Dam's Golaud live, even if not in person, that was the thrill. He sounded great, if not perhaps as powerful as when he was younger. He snarled with rage as he terrified his son, Yniold (a very good boy soprano), and even worse as he continued to abuse Mélisande on her death bed, not to mention the horrible hair-pulling scene ("A droite, puis à gauche!"). The minor role of the Doctor was sung by Patrick Carfizzi, whom I knew in passing back when he was an undergraduate at Catholic University here in Washington. He went on to Yale and the Met and seems to be doing quite well.

For more information, you can read these reviews of the production:

• Anthony Tommasini, Savoring Debussy's 'Pelléas' (International Herald Tribune, January 19, originally in the New York Times)
  
• Ronald Blum, Staging Hampers Met's 'Pelleas' (Associated Press, January 30)
  
• Anne Midgette, The Dreams of Debussy With an Italian Inflection (New York Times, January 31)

As I said in my opera season preview, everyone and his brother is doing Pelléas this year (Paris, Berlin, Munich, Milan). A production I missed was also in New York recently, L'Opéra Français de New York's performance of a piano-only version of the opera (reviewed by Patrick Giles, 'Pelléas' Like Never Before, New York Sun, January 18). I think that this is the same piano version performed last summer in Paris, in the auditorium of the Musée d'Orsay, which I posted about on May 29, 2004.

Luc Besson Strikes out on His Own

Nicole Vulser's article (La Cité du cinéma de Luc Besson prend forme, January 30) in Le Monde describes French director Luc Besson's plan to convert an old electric plant in Saint-Denis (built by EDF in 1933), the sometimes rough suburban town to the north of Paris, into a campus of sound stages and studios. Besson thinks that such a "little Hollywood" could host a number of specialized companies, in order to draw American and other foreign filmmakers to Paris. The construction of the so-called Cité du cinéma was approved last December. Planned building includes nine sound stages (600 to 2,100 square meters, or 6,500 to 13,000 square feet), workshops for sets and costumes, editing studios, offices, and restaurants.

"In France, what is available is spread all over. There are lots of places to shoot that are not really suited to what big productions need," says Geneviève Salinier [who heads the project for Besson's company, Europacorp]. The new tax credit benefits awarded to French companies should, she says, put an end to the exportation of many French films.

Europacorp hopes to open the site in early 2007. Unusually for this kind of corporate project, it will be supported financially by the French government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to bring some development to troubled Saint-Denis and "to whip French cinema into shape." Europacorp insists that it is still a private enterprise and not a national cinema company, although the article foresees that other studios will likely complain to the European Union that Besson's project violates antinationalization laws.

A companion article (Une centrale électrique reconvertie en bord de Seine, January 30) by Emmanuel de Roux for Le Monde states that the architectural work will likely be awarded to Philippe Robert and Bernard Reichen, specialists at the conversion of industrial architecture, who converted a Menier chocolate factory in Noisiel into an office space for Nestlé France (my translation):

Saint-Denis 2 is arranged around a spectacular nave 220 meters [721.8 feet] long, luminous, airy, completely tiled, with a metallic roof and pink ocher façades in concrete masonry, pierced by high windows. Here is where the five generators were located, of which three remain. This immense hall, the spine of the future Cité du cinéma, is supposed to become a sort of interior street meant to join together the group of buildings, while preserving certain elements of its industrial past (turbines, stairways, conveyor belts).

This page from the city of Saint-Denis has an aerial shot of the proposed location, in Pleyel, and Plaine Commune has some great, if small, images of the buildings themselves, including that long nave mentioned in the article.

Poppea in Paris, Again

This has been quite a season for Claudio Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have staged the opera at the Opéra de Lyon (see my post from January 28, 2005), only a few months after René Jacobs and the Concerto Vocale did it in Paris (see my post from October 24, 2004). Well, right now, the opera is back for an Opéra de Paris production directed by David Alden at the Palais Garnier, which opened on January 26 and continues through February 22. The first review I read (Un Monteverdi shakespearien, January 28) was from Le Figaro (my translation):

The premieres are piling up and are quite different from one another at the Opéra de Paris. The day after an annoying Magic Flute, Gérard Mortier invited us to a truly fascinating theatrical moment with Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea, in a staging by David Alden that had already triumphed in Munich. In Paul Steinberg's fascinating sets (this checkerwork of vanishing perspectives!), Alden creates a profoundly musical staging where each gesture is timed with Monteverdi's dramatic rhythm. In a sort of stylized luxury palace, the characters, costumed like 20th-century jet-setters, exist with an irresistable force of attraction and revulsion. Staring with opera singers, they have made great actors, able to play comedy and tragedy, burlesque and violence: a physical and sensual portrayal, at the very least for the most erotic of operas in the repertory.

This haggard Nerone, unable to control his impulses, this femme fatale Poppea who holds him in her sexual power and leads the others around by th enose, these women on the verge of a nervous breakdown who break their heels, we will never forget them. Alden makes them into Shakespearean characters, not hesitating to overplay that mixture of genres that makes Monteverdi so audacious. But Alden takes care to balance grotesquerie with gravity, and oneirism with realism. The character of Seneca thus finds just the right mixture of true compassion and the ranting of an alcoholic and sententious philosopher, whose servile disciples note down everything he says with ridiculous fury. Many images will remain with us, not only for their artistic beauty but for their expressivity: when the set vanishes to leave Poppea to fall asleep on a green background (Pat Collins's magnificent lighting), when Octavia says farewell barefooted in a black gown, when Chronos's clock comes down to watch over the reunited lovers, time's advance is suspended.

Anna Caterina Antonacci, who was Nerone in the fall production in Paris (at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées), returns to the role of Poppea at the Garnier ("she is the incarnation of feminine seduction, a true Hollywood vamp"). Another review (Avec audace et fantaisie, David Alden couronne "Poppée" à Garnier, January 30), by Pierre Gervasoni Le Monde, has similar praise for Antonacci. Although I love the long arm of the theorbo projecting into the image of the production shown here, Gervasoni notes the mixed bag of Ivor Bolton and his orchestra: "the pit is full of good musicological intentions, with a mixture of modern and ancient instruments" (my translation):

We might reproach David Alden for making light of the work's dramatic canvas. If we did, we would focus on some effects, sometimes daring, without considering the total coherence of the whole project. Why deplore that Poppea's Nurse is a Red Cross nurse and that Seneca's friends have Tintin's bunched hairstyle? These eccentricities are part of the general fantasy that never seems to be at odds with the text. Notably when the chorus sings love's praises, at the end of the third act, with Pinocchio noses. In giving the impression of taking his subject on a detour through rollicking fantasy, David Alden is proceeding exactly as would Monteverdi, who departed from the semantic axis by using multiple vocalises. Scenic or vocal, ornamentation authorizes all sorts of excess. Especially in the case of a permanently gray aesthetic like the flat Italian opera of the early 17th century. The American director is thus authentically Baroque.

In her review (Le Couronnement de Poppée: Monteverdi chez les Marx Brothers, February 3) for Webthea: Le Journal des Spectacles, Caroline Alexander notes that this production is not really new, since it dates back to 1997. She makes an interesting observation about the set design:

You really shouldn't trust the closing image published just about everywhere in the press and on the Web [including here], that giant mosaic checkerboard in undulating perspective, which is, it's true, very beautiful. It comes down to clothe the magnificent love duet of Nerone and Poppea, finally crowned, as if to make us forget the ugliness of the sets, costumes, and props of the preceding scenes: the bright red sofa-bed softened to receive the princes of Rome, the gods of Olympos, and their love games; the highway lamp projecting from a square-tiled Métro station; the dilapidated office furniture of a company going out of business; the revolving glass doors of an old-style luxury hotel above which the allegory of Love reigns while Fortune slowdances with shaved head, and Virtue, pregnant like a balloon, hobbles on two crutches. Octavia wears heels that even the Queen of England wouldn't dare to be seen in, Seneca is an old drunkard flanked by disciples in shorts and blond hairswoops à la Tintin, and Poppea's lady-in-waiting Arnalta parades around like a drag queen.

Although she disparages the modernist tendencies of the production ("Monteverdi dragged down to the gutter by the Marx Brothers"), the cast is "practically faultless" and the music is top-notch. According to her, English conductor Ivor Bolton is leading an orchestra composed of players from the Freiburger Barockorchester and the Monteverdi-Continuo-Ensemble. However, not all of the reviewers were thrilled. In his review («Poppée»: le flop à Paris, la grâce à Lyon, January 29) for Libération, Eric Dahan thought that the Paris production fared quite poorly by comparison to the Christie production in Lyon:

Justifiably booed, the Garnier's Poppea seals a "neon week" at the Opéra de Paris, beginning Monday with the Magic Flute at the Bastille. Corresponding to Ivor Bolton's stiff and angular conductor is a shop window aesthetic. The director David Alden, obviously still not recovered from his DVD with the Pet Shop Boys, prefers to parasitize Monteverdi's music with visually striking and agressive scenes, matching apple green with fuchsia, checkerboard with neon. The sort of absurd things that perhaps used to provoke a few nice old ladies in Salzburg fifteen years ago today seem in pitifully intello-bourgeois bad taste. In spite of Anna Caterina Antonacci's vocally searing Poppea, Monteverdi is missing along with the absent subscribers.

The criticism of the press is mentioned by Philippe Herlin, in his review (Superbe Couronnement !, January 26) for ConcertoNet.com ("Based on a quick glance at the reviews, we went with some trepidation to this second production of L'Incoronazione di Poppea, denounced as a simplistic shocker"), but he decides to put what he saw into the appropriate context:

Sexual ambiguity is at the heart of Baroque opera and of L'Incoronazione: old women are played by men (Dominique Visse as Arnalta and Ottavia's nurse), young men by women, without that being a strict rule. Nerone is played by a countertenor, Jacek Laszczkowski, while recently at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées Anna Caterina Antonacci had that role and this time she performs Poppea! Cherubino in Figaro and Octavian in Rosenkavalier are only late memories of this tradition. The "Baroquies," by returning to the text, have rediscovered the genre's indecision, this "artistic flux," this vocality full of surprises. By using a few heels, a few spangles, and a few "transgenre" attitudes to adapt a modern term, director David Alden does nothing but add a level to that ambiguity, always appropriately and with humor.

Herlin's theory is that the press wanted to see a more gratuitous provocation. He notes that the Parisian critical world, for both this opera and Magic Flute, seems to have spread the word to knock the production ("sometimes the same phrases pass from one paper to the next"). This is "a crowd mentality hardly suited to the critical spirit," he says, and the public's welcoming of this production in spite of it, is justifiably noteworthy.

UPDATE:
In English, see Francis Carlin, L'incoronazione di Poppea Paris Opera (Garnier) (London Financial Times, January 28):

Parisians do not like camp. David McVicar's production of Monteverdi's last opera was jeered in October at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées and now David Alden has met the same fate. This is unfair because his use of radical kitsch is altogether more sophisticated and his manipulation of the singers faultlessly choreographed. In any case, this classic staging dates from 1997, when it was first seen in Cardiff and Munich. McVicar's approach now looks like a pale copy of an industry template.

This opera will always test a director's skill at dosing tragedy and comedy. Alden overstates the comic, with the help of Buki Shiff's sensationally dizzy costumes, but he knows when to turn the tap off, as with Seneca's monologue (Robert Lloyd, out of this world) and Octavia's proud farewell to Rome. That said, Alden's recipe is the top rung on the send-it-up ladder. Innovative stagings from now on will have to reverse gears and get more serious, while avoiding the trap Bernard Sobel has fallen into in Lyons (FT review, January 25). Sobriety can easily translate into dullness.

Some people are so hard to please.

Modernism Is Dead Again?

The latest bundle of nonsense about the irrelevance of musical modernism, an article (Classical music could even become the new rock'n'roll, February 1) by Martin Kettle for The Guardian, was brought to my attention first by Arts & Letters Daily. The image of an ostrich with its head stuck beneath the sand comes to mind here. At the same time as musical conservatives are proclaiming the death of modernism, Kyle Gann and Alex Ross are having an extended discussion with composers (Steve Hicken and the Sequenza 21 Composers Forum) about the return to complexity and atonality in recent composition. (Alex has now written a brief response to Kettle's article, too.)

Few people think that serialism or any other modernist style is the new law anymore, which the Darmstadt people really did think for decades. However, to think that modernist styles are irrelevant is absurd. Philip Glass and John Corigliano write film scores, which is a sure sign of how accustomed our ears have become to these kinds of sounds. As I've written before, people rioted at The Rite of Spring in 1913, and by 1940 the same music was in a Walt Disney film. Face it: it's not going to go away.

Discovery in Greenland

I remember seeing this article (Groenland: découverte archéologique, August 26, 2004) by Laurent Ribadeau-Dumas for France 2 Cultural News last summer but did not mention it here. So, this is a bit late but my interest was piqued when I came across it again (my translation):

Inuit burial sites clearly dating back to the 13th century have been discovered in northern Greenland. A team of seven Greenlander, Danish, and Canadian archeologists have also uncovered stone markers, tent rings, and the remains of winter houses. Some of these ruins may date back to the first centuries of the Christian era. The expedition of archeologists, which lasted six weeks, was intended to trace the principal period of Inuit history: the Dorset culture (about 900 BC to 1350 AD) and the Thule culture (900 to 1650 AD) in the region. It was financed by American funds as part of a project commemorating the American explorer Robert Peary. He was the first man to reach the North Pole, on April 6, 1909, and for whom the northern territory of Greenland is named: Peary Land.

I believe this is the work of the Inglefield Land Archaeology Project, which is planning more trips to Greenland. Genevieve LeMoine, curator of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College, was one of the leaders of the project this summer. There is some more information (and, God be praised, some pictures) of their work in an article (Bowdoin Arctic Survey Reveals Early Settlements, October 3, 2004) published on the college's Web site:

It's the start of what she expects will be nearly a decade of fieldwork surveying and excavating extensive settlements of prehistoric and protohistoric Inughuit dwellers -- sometimes called Polar Eskimoes -- in an area previously thought to be sparsely settled. "You could hardly walk ten steps without finding evidence that people were there," marvels LeMoine. "That might surprise people. We found heavily built stone houses, tent rings, and stone walls in rows three to four stones high. Some of the stones we figure would have taken four men to move."

Someone should get this woman a blog.

Cunning Little Vixen in Berlin: Follow-Up

Available from Amazon: Leoš Janáček, The Cunning Little Vixen, Théâtre du Châtelet, directed by Nicholas Hytner and conducted by Charles Mackerras

Ah, the power of the Internet. On January 28, I wrote a mini-post about the Deutsche Oper production of Leoš Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody Lišky Bystroušky). Composer Martin Suckling was in Berlin and briefly mentioned seeing this opera on his blog Musica Transatlantica. In response to my request that he share his impressions of it, he has left a gracious comment, to the effect that he has returned from a brief blogging break with some extended comments on the opera:

Part of the success of the Cunning Little Vixen depends on the audience being drawn into a convincing and enchanting animal world, with the contrasting human world visible at the fringes. Ezio Toffolutti's beautiful stage design and costumes were highly effective in realising this goal, and the inclusion of the young vixen playing with a large acorn in front of the stage was a nice touch, drawing us in before the performance began. The cock's costume was so designed that, when the vixen attacks him, he could literally run around like a headless chicken. Fun games were also played with scale and perspective; when the forester entered an enormous leg (a la Monty Python, but booted) appeared at the side of the stage. When he captured the vixen a giant hand descended, grasping an over-sized tail.

Read the whole thing. Thanks, Martin! I think this opera works best the closer the production is in style to the comic strips that inspired it, which Janáček saw in the Lidove noviny newspaper. The DVD that I had from Netflix last summer (see Amazon link above) records the garishly bright and cartoonish Théâtre du Châtelet production, with the Orchestre de Paris and with Eva Jenis as Sharp-Ears, Hana Mutillo as her mate, and Thomas Allen as the Forester. (Unlike the production that Martin saw in Berlin, the opera was sung in Czech.) My two-year-old watched this production several times with me (none of them from beginning to end) and was fascinated by the music and especially the colorful ballet of animals and insects. To this day, he has asked to see the "opera with a fox" so many times that we are going to break down and buy the DVD ourselves. However, now I can't decide if I should instead buy the new film of the opera, from BBC Television, that is actually a cartoon. (Although you can buy it from Amazon, the opera is abridged and sung in English.)

Janáček completed the opera when he was 70 years old (see my post about another opera created late in a composer's life, Monteverdi's Poppea), after seeing the cartoons and spending time in the more rural setting of his home village, Hukvaldy (see my post from August 2, 2004), to watch the foxes at play. When he died, according to Janáček's written wishes, the final scene of this opera, when the old forester sees the offspring of the vixen running through the forest, was performed at his funeral.

Présences Festival Opens

The 15th annual Présences Festival, honoring Pierre Boulez's former student Marc-André Dalbavie (b. 1961; see my post from December 24, 2004), is under way. Philippe Herlin was at the opening concert, featuring the Orchestre National de Montpellier (conducted by Juraj Valcuha) and guests, and wrote a review (Techno parade, January 29) for ConcertoNet.com. Here's a partial translation of what he had to say:

A superb opening concert of the 2005 Présences Festival, in the form of a gigantic crescendo: Marc-André Dalbavie inaugurated two weeks of concerts (free, let's remember) with The Rocks under the Water (2002), a static piece evoking The Unanswered Question with its fabric of strings and percussion chords (in the place of the trumpet in Ives's piece). Tension then mounted with the world premiere of Les mécanismes multiples de l'ivresse et de la nostalgie [The multiple mechanisms of drunkenness and nostalgia], by Québec composer Jean Lesage, film music—not meant to be pejorative—opulent, chatoyant, alluring but full of breaks. Finally there was the flood of sound, the orchestral hysteria, the savage rhythm of René Koering's Hier, aujourd'hui, demain [Yesterday, today, tomorrow], the world premiere of a new version, a piece for orchestra, two DJs (Manu le Malin and Torgul!), and a screaming voice (Gilles Yanetti). The orchestre, at triple forte almost the entire time, confronts and accepts the challenge of techno music, with the latter's "primary" and objective side influencing the symphonic mass.

Herlin compares the final piece to Varèse's Amérique and Rihm's Tutuguri. Another review (Le festival Présences se saborde, February 1) by Pierre Gervasoni for Le Monde adds a few details about the Dalbavie piece:

The Rocks Under the Water was conceived in 2002 for the opening of the Peter B. Lewis Building in Cleveland. This ecstatic piece is based on effects of spatialization impossible to recreate outside of the architectural context (designed by Frank O. Gehry) that inspired it. So the composer has revised his score so that it can be performed in any concert hall.

Gehry's Lewis Building is the home of the Weatherhead School of Management, on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Here are some pictures of its interior, where the Dalbavie piece was premiered. You can also watch this 18-minute video on the building.

The San Diego Symphony apparently performed Rocks under the Water on a program called French Masters (November 5 to 7, 2004). That concert will be broadcast on March 13 on the NPR program SymphonyCast (to see if you can hear this show in your area, check here). We in Washington will be able to hear it only if local station WETA does not convert to an all-news format. New York's Ensemble Sospeso will perform a new Dalbavie piece during their Boulez tribute concert (Zankel Hall, May 10).

UPDATE:
New Paris music blogger Never Been Home (thanks to Alex Ross for the link) went to one of these concerts.

Charles IX's Wall Under the Orangerie

At various periods in its long history, the city of Paris was surrounded by a series of fortified walls. Parts of the wall built by Philippe-Auguste, which originally joined with the fortifications of the old Louvre, are still visible at a few places. A recent article (Le mur de Charles IX a rétréci, January 28) by Anne-Marie Romero for Le Figaro describes the discovery of another of Paris's walls and what happened to it.

It is no longer 41 meters [134.5 feet] of the long wall of Charles IX, discovered under the Musée de l'Orangerie, in Paris, that will be preserved, as promised by Jean-Jacques Aillagon exactly one year ago, but only 19 meters [62.3 feet]. Without a permit for modifying construction, simply by agreement between the leadership of Architecture and the Patrimony and that of the Musées de France. Behind the scenes. Just like the wall of Charles V under the Louvre was mutilated. All that can be said is that archeology truly appears to be an unneeded hassle for the Ministry of Culture. The modification of the project was denounced by Le Canard Enchaîné, in its January 26 edition, which even specifies that only "70 blocks of stone will be put back up" from this magnificent embankment wall of 55 meters, which had been ordered from her son by Catherine de Medici to protect her Château des Tuileries.

The wall was "discovered" last year, when the basement of the Orangerie was being enlarged, although specialists had known of its existence since the 19th century. It was begun by Charles IX and continued by Louis XIII. There were calls to make a special archeological crypt beneath the museum and thus to preserve the wall. The Commission du Vieux Paris recommended that "the greatest care be given to the preservation and treatment of this wall." The national government team says that the Minister's original statement was made without having had all of the information at hand, that the project evolved according to purely technical considerations, obviating the need for a new type of building permit when the plans changed.

However, the article L-421-6 does require a modified permit when the work overlaps with a historical monument, which is the case. Who is wrong? Who is right? Whatever the decision, the wall will cross through one of the basement rooms and will be cut through by a passage 1.4 meters [4.6 feet] wide. One meter [3.3 feet] high for most of its length, it will grow progressively to three meters [9.8 feet] high as it nears the Seine. That at least was not some architect's choice, but quite simply the state in which the wall was uncovered. We will have to be content with that.

The Orangerie is still closed while the renovation is completed.

UPDATE:
I should have known that David Nishimura at Cronaca would already have a handle on this news, but I somehow missed his post from September 2003. Thanks for the link, David!