Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✭✩
by Claude Debussy, directed by Nicholas Muni
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
May 6-23, 2008
“Elusive” is an adjective always used about Claude Debussy’s 1902 opera Pelléas et Mélisande, but in the Canadian Opera Company’s current production a first-rate cast, intriguing design and insightful direction bring out the work’s strange beauty and make it dramatically compelling. This is the first time this critic has been so drawn into this opera’s world of mystery and half-light.
Debussy basically set Maurice Maeterlinck’s influential 1893 symbolist play of the same name, with a few excisions, to music. In both, all the characters sense, even in their happiest moments, that they are acting out a predetermined destiny. Director Nicholas Muni’s great insight is to allow the three principal characters at least the illusion they are acting of their own free will. In the fairy-tale land of Allemonde (“Everywhere”), Golaud (Pavlo Hunka) finds an abandoned maiden Mélisande (Isabel Bayrakdarian) and falls in love with her, forgetting all about a political marriage he was to make to end a centuries-long war. When Golaud takes her back to court, his half-brother Pelléas (Russell Braun) and Mélisande fall into an intense love at first sight and combat their emotions until they can no longer resist.
Hunka is superb at conveying the onset of Golaud’s jealousy, itself an emotion he tries and fails to fend off. The detail of his acting and the pain that sounds in his dark, velvety voice make him a victim as much as the title characters. Braun has Pelléas cover a dramatic arc from initial naïveté and timidity to a final defiant acknowledgement of his love in ringing heroic tones. Similarly, Bayrakdarian beautifully voices the change in Mélisande from the terrified creature Golaud first finds to a fully self-confident woman. Yet, she, unlike Pelléas lives long enough to encounter an even greater mystery where life and death are linked.
Dany Lyne’s design imagines the sumptuous Indo-Chinese garbed court of Allemonde living on a kind of pier to separate themselves from the blasted landscape of disease and poverty below them. This gives the fairy tale a political edge and ultimately highlights the futiliy of such effort. Under the baton of Jan Latham-Koenig the COC Orchestra gives a ravishing account of Debussy gorgeous score. This is not an opera for those who like set pieces and showy arias. Instead, it offers entrance to a uniquely lush soundworld that corresponds perfectly with a universe governed by powerful unknown forces that in many ways is more “real” than the prosaic, over-explained world we call “reality.”
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-05-07.
Photo: Russell Braun and Isabel Bayrakdarian. ©Michael Cooper.
2008-05-07
Pelléas et Mélisande