Seething cruelty
Michael Tanner
PeIleas et Melisande Glyndebourne Carmen Coliseum rAne of Glyndebourne's most successful 1,.../productions of recent years has been the Pelleas et Melisande which made its first appearance in 1999, directed by Graham Vick. The revival director is Annilese Miskimmon, but my memory isn't good enough to note her contribution; on the whole, the production seems very much as it was. Perhaps that's partly because the setting, designed by Paul Brown, is so overwhelming that it doesn't give the director all that much freedom of choice.
The work is set not in a forest, caves and so on, but in a very grand early 20th-century house with an immense central staircase. Golaud is discovered sitting on a sofa, and the rest of the opera is his recall of his finding Melisande lost in the woods, and up to her death. Though I can understand why people object strenuously to this interiorising of the work, in both senses, it seems to me effective and stirring. We have the surface of civilisation at its most comfortable and comforting, while just beneath it there seethes the primal creative-cum-destructive force of love and jealousy — here figured as a Perspex floor with plants beneath it. If PeIleas hadn't struck one before as a work of Dionysian energy and violence, it can't help doing so now.
Vick allows the words and action to come into open conflict with one another, and in some cases there is an evident loss of impact. Yet the setting is so beautiful, and the lighting effects of Thomas Webster so evocative and sometimes ravishing, that the occasional moments of bathos are worth suffering. The passion in the music, the ferocity of some things on stage, make this like a Merchant Ivory production in which things go hideously wrong, the calm loveliness of the sets emphasising the cruelties rather than subtracting from them.
Vick's risks need a great musical performance to be mainly successful, and fortunately they have had one in 1999, on tour, and once again now, where the only member of the cast surviving from the original is John Tomlinson, who may seem an unlikely Golaud, but is a figure of towering grandeur and menace, much more so than in any of his Wagner roles. Sometimes his anguish goes to the limit of the tolerable, especially in the last act, when he can't stop asking the dying Melisande for `la veritt while he both hates himself for asking and knows that she doesn't have the answer. What can often be an anti-climactic scene after the unbuttoned love scene which immediately precedes it here takes its place as the almost arbitrary point at which the drama ends, before the next cycle of suffering begins.
The Melisande of Marie Arnet is rapidly domesticated in the suffocating castle, but only in her dress and deportment. She remains confused, treacherous, reckless and vulnerable, just as likely to emerge singing from a large overhead lamp as to move with prim propriety in the role of pregnant wife, the first obviously pregnant Melisande I have seen, and much more moving than usual because of it. What can you do with the part of Pelleas? He is callow, boisterous and not much more. Russell Braun leaves it at that, and allows Golaud and Melisande to be the only characters we care about. Christian Treguier's Arkel is a prurient oldster, fully mobile and fancying himself as yet another family candidate for Melisande's affections, while pretending to be solely concerned for her wellbeing.
It's a superb cast, welded together by the unremitting intensity of Louis Langree's conducting. Even though PeIleas is nowadays usually given a strong performance, the time of pastel shades having welcomely passed, I have never heard so rapturous and searing an account as this.
If Pelleas leaves you wounded and wondering, Carmen is the most exhilaratingly superficial of operas, in which there are no questions to be asked. Jonathan Miller's almost undirected production at the Coliseum respects that. I went twice. The first time Sara Fulgoni, the announced Carmen, was ill, and Sally Burgess stepped in at short notice. Tremendous as ever, 50 but an advertisement for the perpetual youthfulness granted by singing the gamut of opera's mezzo sexy villainesses, she is still a tigress, the only implausible moment in the opera being her death at the hands of the Don Jose of John Hudson, who does nothing to make the character less wimpish than Bizet left him. David Atherton conducted a properly raucous and uninhibited account of the score. Sara Fulgoni was back for the next performance. She has an imposing and luscious voice, but her personality is restrained, and so was her Carmen. Where Burgess galvanised everyone on stage, Fulgoni did her best to flaunt but just can't manage it. She could have been acting Micaela. Even the temperature in the pit — always remembering Nietzsche's wise judgment that Carmen doesn't sweat — seemed lower than five evenings before. This production, more than most, depends wholly on the singer of the title role (as Welsh National Opera's great production doesn't) and there's no question who is still the reigning queen in this country.
.A concert performance of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice will take place on 30 June at 7 p.m. at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Philip Langridge, Alan Opie, Michael Chance and the City of London Sinfonia. Richard Hickox will conduct. The concert is in aid of Venice in Peril and tickets can be ordered through Nicky Baly: 020 7736 2971.
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