The recent Reveries and Passions festival at Chicago’s Symphony Center, organised by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, presented a three week overview of French music at the beginning of the twentieth century, focussed especially on the works of Debussy and Ravel. But rather than arranging the most familiar and best-loved works of that period (La Mer, the second Daphnis et Chloé suite) into a series of ‘greatest hits’ programmes, the festival offered a selection of more ambitious and less-frequently performed works by each composer.
At the centre of the festival was a concert performance of Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s lone operatic masterpiece, which featured a handful of memorable performances – most notably Sir Willard White’s anguished Golaud and the rapturous Pelléas of Stéphane Degout – supported by inspired direction from Mr Salonen and luminous playing from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
If the elliptical sentiments of Maeterlinck’s play were a perfect match for Debussy’s evocative harmonic language, the descriptive nature of the dialogue makes Pelléas especially well suited to unstaged performances. On this evening, the forests and castles of the setting were suggested using minimal back-projections, while the acts were linked by means of narration written especially for this staging by Gerard McBurney and performed with suitable introspection by the actress Dianne Wiest. While Ms Wiest was credited in the programme notes as ‘narrator’, it was implied that her character was in fact the daughter of Mélisande and Golaud, recounting the story of her doomed parents.
With the exception of this framing device, and a handful of emotional expressions from the singers, the evening remained very much a concert performance; and the orchestra, rather than remaining subordinate to the singers, emerged as the evening’s greatest asset. The strings, especially, were a marvel throughout; they managed to be substantial without sounding heavy, and hazy without losing their essential clarity. In the strings one could hear enough of the damp stones and moonlit water that no stage sets were required.
Mr Salonen possessed a strong feeling for the colours and moods that Debussy was trying to achieve – many of the orchestral interludes were quite stunning – but he also never lost sight of the drama. For much of the opera he kept the orchestra moving at a pace that was quick, although never intrusively so, and he managed to generate considerable excitement in those passages – notably in the third and fourth acts – where the passions of the characters begin to get the better of restraint. Although one could imagine a more languid reading of Pelléas, Mr Salonen’s dynamism was never less than compelling.
The Mélisande of Jenny Carlstedt – who appeared as a late replacement for Christine Rice – sounded less innocent and forlorn than one might expect; yet if her despair and resignation in the opening scene was not wholly convincing, she was credibly animated in the scene by the well and in her third-act meeting with Pelléas by the castle window. Elodie Méchain, on the other hand, possessed an ideal voice for the role of Geneviève; if she was occasionally overwhelmed by the force of the full orchestra, she nonetheless brought a warm tone of maternal wisdom to her brief appearances. At the other end of the spectrum, Chloé Briot was an effectively youthful Yniold, genuinely terrified at the anger of Golaud.
The role of Golaud was originally scheduled to be performed by Eric Owens. However when Mr Owens withdrew due to illness, the role went to Sir Willard White, who had originally been cast as Arkel; Arkel, in turn, went to David Govertsen who was originally to appear as the Shepherd and the Doctor (which were given sound performances by Bradley Smoak). Although Mr Govertsen appeared to be a fine singer, he sounded far too young for the character of a wise old king; while there was a pleasingly gentle quality to his conversation with Geneviève in the first act, he did not quite have the authority in the fourth act to bring Golaud to a halt with a single word.
As Golaud, however, Sir Willard White was magnificent, a commanding presence whose tender pleas to Mélisande in the first act were every bit as convincing as his subsequent jealousy and rage. In addition to being responsible for the evening’s most dramatically intense moments – his scenes with Mélisande in the second and fourth act, and with Yniold in the third – he served as the emotional core of the performance, perhaps the most recognisably human figure within the dreamlike setting of the opera. While he would have undoubtedly made an excellent Arkel, his Golaud ended up being perhaps the evening’s finest performance.
However it was the Pelléas of Stéphane Degout who, perhaps more than any of the other singers, was most successfully able to convey a sense of guarded emotions overwhelmed by an uncontrollable passion. If Golaud was characterised by abrupt outbursts of anger and bitterness, Mr Degout’s Pelléas offered a gradual transformation from reluctance to ecstatic ardour. Although he never sounded especially young or naïve, his performance, understated at first, seemed to gather steadily, culminating in his breathless fourth-act confession to Mélisande.
Debussy, of course, was not the only composer to fall under the spell of Maeterlinck’s play; but while Pelléas et Mélisande would also inspire Schönberg and Sibelius, it is arguably Debussy whose music gives us the greatest sense of the vague, unformed emotions beneath the surface of the drama. The evening’s performance may not have been staged, but with solid vocal performances, wonderful playing from the orchestra and Mr Salonen’s charged direction, there were no shortage of moments able to transport one out of the concert hall and into the world of the opera.
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