✭✭✭✭✩ / ✭✭✭✭✩

by Francis Poulenc / Jules Massenet, directed by Diana Leblanc

Opera Ontario,

Centre in the Square, Kitchener, January 24, 2004;

Hamilton Place, Hamilton, February 5-7, 2004

Opera Ontario, Canada’s fourth largest opera company, has linked two seldom performed French one-act operas to create an unusually satisfying double bill.  As far as anyone with the company has determined, this is the first time Massenet’s Le Portrait de Manon and Poulenc’s La Voix humaine have ever been presented together.

The two works are linked in theme.  Seeing them together enriches both.  Both works focus on a lover (male in Massenet, female in Poulenc) still in love with an absent beloved and connected to that person by an on-stage object (the portrait in Massenet, the telephone in Poulenc).  That Portrait ends in comedy and Voix in tragedy gives us complex view of loss and its effects.

Director Diana Leblanc and designer Michael Gianfrancesco have heightened the works’ relationship by placing their respective settings closer in time.  Portrait has been shifted forward to 1912 and Voix moved back to 1935 nearer the date of the original Cocteau play. In addition, Gianfrancesco has set Portrait outdoors to contrast with the stark interior of Voix.  The passage to modernity becomes a move toward isolation.

In Portrait, Theodore Baerg’s warm, rich baritone perfectly captured the middle-aged Chevalier des Grieux’s continuing grief over the loss of Manon and the folly of his counsel to his ward Jean against romantic love while allowing us to glimpse in the older man his former ardor.  Louise Guyot, sang with a bright, clear mezzo ideal for the trousers role of the 18-year-old Jean.  Soprano Laura Whalen easily tossed off the coloratura of Aurore, Jean’s beloved.  Only the unsteady tenor of Steeve Michaud as Tiberge, Aurore’s tutor, seemed out of place.  All four expertly negotiated Massenet’s frequent shifts between arioso and speech.  Under Leblanc Portrait became an almost Chekhovian study of a man so consumed with nostalgia (patent in the echoes of Manon) that he no longer sees the present clearly.

In Voix, Leblanc emphasized how the tragedy emerges from a seemingly ordinary situation.  Accordingly, Lyne Fortin’s gripping performance was marked not by histrionics but the inwardness of a closely observed naturalism.  Her lush voice and her pinpoint accuracy in tone and pitch masterfully limned the increasing tension in Elle’s discourse between her attempts at unconcern and her growing despair.       

Tyrone Paterson, conducting the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, brought a languorous glow to the Massenet but could have generated a greater sense of urgency in the Poulenc.  This imaginative double bill could well inspire emulation elsewhere.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera News 2005.

Photo: Laura Whalen in Le Portrait de Manon. ©2004 Opera Ontario.