Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✭✭✩
by Christoph Willibald Gluck, directed by Marshall Pynkoski
Opera Atelier, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
October 24-November 2, 2003
Opera Atelier has added to its growing list of triumphs with the first fully staged presentation of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride in Canada. The company's goal has always been to take period performance practices as a starting point for the creation of new productions. In Iphigénie (seen October 24) OA deliberately pushed the boundaries of its own self-imposed style to reflect the revolutionary nature of Gluck's reforms.
Accordingly, OA's veteran design team eschewed the extravagant sumptuousness of the baroque for the clean lines of neoclassicism. Like Jean Georges Noverre, the work's original choreographer, director Marshall Pynkoski and choreographer Jeannette Zingg fully integrated ballet into the action by creating an onstage dancing chorus to express the sentiments of an offstage singing chorus (here placed in the front loges). Zingg explored the tensions in Gluck's music by contrasting the graceful dances of the priestesses, like Wedgwood designs come to life, with the 19th-century leaps of the Scythians, clad like Inquisition-era Spaniards, and the distinctly modern floor-oriented dances of the bare-chested, blood-stained male Furies.
OA's productions have always featured a stylized gestural language derived from period handbooks and iconography. In Iphigénie Pynkoski encouraged a far more naturalistic representation of emotions so that the singers seemed to break the bonds of the codified gestures for anger, despair, surprise, even as they employed them. Through Oreste's and Pylade's frequent embraces, emotional yet chaste, Pynkoski emphasized the ardor of friendship, making this relationship as crucial as that of Iphigénie and Oreste to underscore more clearly the opera's pre-Revolutionary theme of the triumph of fraternal love over barbarism.
The lithe, young cast was nearly ideal and sang with impeccable French diction. Employing a rich, burnished tone, mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó gave a radiant and moving performance in the title role, the plangeant ring of her upper range perfectly suited to the high tessitura of the role. She projected both "O toi qui prolongeas mes jours" and "Je t'implore et je tremble" as intense meditations of grave beauty. As Oreste, baritone Daniel Belcher created a powerful portrait, physically and vocally, of a man perpetually on the brink of madness. Belcher allowed himself rather wide leeway in dramatic expressiveness, even speaking or gasping some words for effect. Playing Pylade with great compassion tenor Colin Ainsworth sang with an exquisitely clear, pure tone. Olivier Laquerre used his deep, velvety bass to create a troubled but not particularly villainous Thoas. Jackalyn Short lacked sufficient vocal weight as the goddess Diana.
Andrew Parrott and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra gave a thrilling account of the score. Parrott generated an unstoppable forward momentum that swept one into the action from the tempestuous overture onwards. With a keen focus on the work's total structure, he paused for applause only at the end of each act. Despite the exhilarating pace Parrott always allowed the music to breathe and its sinewy beauty to shine. His emphasis on the music's spareness, its unusual harmonies and its pre-echoes of Mozart and Berlioz reinforced the creative team's approach of uncovering in Gluck the roots of the modern.
Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2003.
Photo: Krisztina Szabó (centre) and Artists of the Atelier Ballet. ©2003 Bruce Zinger.
2003-10-25
Iphigénie en Tauride