Conductor, Daniele Rustioni; Production , Christophe Honoré; Set Design, Katrin Lea Tag; Costume Design , Olivier Bériot; Lighting, Dominique Bruguière. Cassandre, Jennifer Holloway; Hecuba, Emily Sierra; Ascagne, Eve-Maud Hubeaux; Didon, Ekaterina Semenchuk; Anna, Lindsay Ammann; Priam , Martin Snell; Enée, Gregory Kunde; Panthée, Sam Carl
The first of my five musical events in Munich, having travelled all day by train the day before (London – Brussels – Frankfurt – Munich) – the only stressful part of my journey being from the Hbf in Munich to the hotel, where I confused north and south and went round in circles for half an hour……..Back to hard copy maps, I think……Google Maps doesn’t challenge your assumptions.
I have never seen Les Troyens before and it has always been on my list of top operatic things to see (as well as seeing Pfitzner’s ‘Palestrina’, and another chance to see ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’ before I die). In fact, I have actually sung in an extract from this work conducted by Colin Davis (ahem) – the Proms’ Last Night in 1970 featured the chorus of welcome to Dido as a concert item and the Prommers were invited to sing along, with a rehearsal. I had heard dire things about this Munich production, including a corruscating review in the Financial Times which gave it one star, so I approached this performance with a fair degree of trepidation, though the cast is a good one and the reviews were generally positive about was going on musically.
Les Troyens is undoubtedly a flawed work – as is usually the case when something never really becomes part of the central repertory. There are too many static scenes, and it requires a huge cast and a big orchestra – it’s not an easy work to stage at all. But there is wonderful music in it, particularly the choral material, some of the big arias and the orchestral set-pieces, and it’s well worth an occasional hearing, although a concert performance might be equally effective – however, as it’s taken me 50 years to get to see this piece, and the chances are I don’t have another 50 years at my disposal, this is probably my only shot at it and I was very happy to see a staged version.
The Troy part I thought was well done – the basic set looking like a war scene with a picture of the sea suspended at the back. There is a sense of a doomed society about to expire – men in evening dress in the chorus, a vanishing civilisation totally unable to cope with the threatening Greeks. Everything is in a cold black white or brown. The horse never appears as such in Berlioz’s libretto , but the director decided to bring on a huge neon light saying ‘Das Pferd’ [the horse] which took a bit of getting used to but is probably preferable to having a massive wooden horse on stage. Gregory Kunde has a relatively brief appearance as Aeneas in Part 1 and sounded very impressive – not a big voice but able to project with lots of ‘ping’ and great top notes, plus immaculate French. Jennifer Holloway’s voice I didn’t find particularly agreeable to listen to but arguably Cassandra is a bit unrelenting anyway. The ghost of Hector made a brief but memorable appearance. Throughout, Honore in the first part did as much as could reasonably be expected to create interesting stage pictures – particularly the scene with flowers where the women entreat Cybele, and the final scene, with menacing Greeks breaking through the women about to die with Cassandra. The prophecy of the wonderful founding of Rome made a great impact at the end dramatically as well as musically.
So I moved on to Carthage not really understanding what the fuss had all been about, but the director’s view of Part 2a of the work, in Carthage, was – ummmm – more of a challenge. The set was clear – a walled enclosure but again with an image of the sea in the background. At one end of the spectrum of experience in this part 2a, there was some of the finest singing in duet I have heard for a very long time in “nuits d’ivresse’ from Aeneas and Dido, and also some stunning playing from the orchestra in the Royal Hunt and Storm. While it is certainly true that there is a LOT of music without singing you have to do something with as a director in this work – the ballets, as well as the hunt – nonetheless a clear sense of what the director wanted to get across in these scenes failed to come through. Part 2a started with a bunch of naked – fully so, as far as I could see – men lounging on the beach. OK, that might set up a narrative about Carthaginians being lotus-eaters, which is certainly there in the text – Trojan sailors complain about leaving Carthage saying they are having a very nice time, thank you, and the girls are great – but why was the director just focusing on young men? We hardly saw the Trojans at all en masse (they were off stage singing their chorus in praise of Dido, which seemed odd)– and when they did appear occasionally, they also were in evening dress – so my theory about Part 1 doesn’t hold! The Royal Hunt and Storm and the ballets were, except the last of the ballets, accompanied by videos of variants of what looked like – I have to say it – soft gay porn. Again, if we have to have soft porn, OK, but why not a bit of diversity,? Anything we see on stage must have some dramatic relevance whatever orientation it is…..This really didn’t seem to have much connection with the text, unless the suggestion is that Carthaginians were particularly into being gay, and therefore particularly reprehensible lotus eaters, but that is obviously objectionable. Maybe the point of the videos were that the Carthaginians were totally inward-looking – and the very last of the videos was actually a video of a singer on stage being filmed by a guy with a camera – but, again, where were the women (to be fair there did seem to be one woman who was an onlooker in what looked like something of a male orgy – but why?)? Clothing in Part 2 was all over the place – the Trojans seemed to be in vaguely peasant attire (Aeneas in a peculiarly unbecoming set of baggy shorts) while the Carthaginians were in modern – mainly beach-type – dress. Both Dido and Anna had short skirts and long legs – was there something going on about sexuality – but if so what was supposed to be being said and why? A howl of boos accompanied the closing of the curtains for Part 2a from some members of the audience.
Part 2b seemed to suggest the director had just given up – most was ‘stand-and-deliver’ staging for Dido, Anna and Aeneas, and they just seemed to be doing standard operatic semaphore (while singing sensationally). There was little sense that the director had worked intensively with the singers on their reactions to each other. When the chorus did come on stage they just stood in blocks and delivered – there seemed to be no direction of them.
OK, epater les bourgeois and all that, but it did seem as though the director had made a bit of a mess of the Carthage scenes – I simply couldn’t make out how what was being seen on stage fitted together. There are so many interesting slants you could take on this work – imperialism, the standard neo-classical love-and-duty angle, the differences between the Trojan and Carthaginian cultures, nationalism and populism, militarism, even refugees – that it was disappointing the production was so incoherent. But, as I say, the singing was sensational – Ekaterina Semenchuk quite dazzling with her beauty of sound, and flexibility of voice and tone. Gregory Kunde went from strength to strength. The other huge positive was the orchestra and chorus – stunning playing, and very good singing from what, by ROHCG standards, seemed a slightly under-sized chorus – and I thought Daniele Rustioni’s conducting was excellent – alive to all the nuances of the music, constantly alert….. He is apparently a Pappano protege and one of the front-runners for the ROHCG musical director role once Pappano leaves. The only singer I wasn’t taken with was Anna (Lindsay Ammann) whose voice seemed rough and not well-controlled
So, I saw what the Financial Times meant, but all in all I was very, very happy to have finally heard this piece live on stage, despite some of the occasional daftness of regie-theater on show, and a lot of the singing was wonderful.
John's musical journey 