Prom 5, Pelléas et Mélisande, Glyndebourne review - for the ears, not the eyes

What a fabulous score Pelléas et Mélisande is, and what a joy to be able to hear it in a concert performance without the distraction of some over-sophisticated director’s self-communings. Well, if only.

This was emphatically a performance for the radio. I was in the Albert Hall, but I suspect the orchestral playing will have sounded about as technically and musically refined over the air as one could possibly wish, and even in the hall – if you could shut your eyes (and occasionally ears) to the downstage nonsense – the orchestral sound, under Robin Ticciati, was as nearly perfect as anything I’ve heard in these profound spaces for a very long time. The curious thing about this is that Debussy only orchestrated the opera – or at least only wrote the orchestration down – some years after the music itself was completed. Yet the whole score – voices and orchestra – sounds like a single, completely integrated concept, imagined all of a piece, and of an expressive subtlety and precision that perhaps only Mozart at his best ever surpassed.

The director needs to clarify these things, not obscure themDavid Nice has already done the necessary Beckmesser job on Herheim’s dark fantasies, whose essence seems to survive in O’Neill’s actually somewhat more than semi staging. If these ideas – the incessant comings and goings of assorted servants, the seemingly irrelevant paintings and empty easels, Yniold’s sudden transgendering in his/her scene with Golaud, Golaud’s physical presence, acknowledged by Mélisande, throughout the final love scene, Pelléas’s reappearance as a walking corpse and Mélisande’s love-death in the final scene: if these ideas were baffling to a Glyndebourne audience who at least had the full context, imagine what any Prommer not acquainted with this marvellous and essentially lucid work might make of them. 

One even asked me in the interval what Yniold’s sex change with skirt and long hair meant. I struggled: well, hair is something of a motif (isn’t it?); Yniold is a boy played by a girl (isn’t he – well actually not originally, but let that pass). The worst of all this is that it blocks out the real significance of the scene, Golaud punishing his first wife (Yniold’s dead mother) for his failure with his second. Among other things Pelléas (like its near contemporary, Janacek’s Jenufa) is about disrupted family lines. The director needs to clarify these things, not obscure them.Vocally, though, the cast did well. I liked the Pelléas, John Chest, somewhat more than David Nice did, Christina Gansch’s Mélisande perhaps a fraction less. Chest may have profited from the acoustic space, but I thought his voice good for the part: a baritone slightly biased towards the top (this is said to have been Debussy’s own range, though heaven knows what his singing was like). Gansch also suits this music very nicely, but overacted, turning Mélisande into a nonstop Rossetti mobile, with waving body, flailing arms, and not much mystery.

Christopher Purves will have sounded a strong Golaud on the airwaves, but was damaged onstage by his crusty, too-elderly image and too coarse persona. Golaud is a plain man but not a bad one, mystified by Mélisande but violent towards her only when her uncommunicativeness finally unhinges him.

The Arkel, Brindley Sherratt, and the Geneviève, Karen Cargill (pictured above with John Chest), were strong by any standards, and Chloé Briot was a sound Yniold, though a boy is really needed, however hard to find. But the real heroes of the evening were unquestionably Ticciati and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Whenever I found my irritation with the stage boiling over, I took refuge in the orchestra and the conducting and they never let me down.

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