<< Previous performance << >> Next performance >>
Pelléas et Mélisande
|
Composer |
Claude Debussy |
|
Librettist |
A slight alteration of Maeterlinck’s tragedy |
|
Venue and Dates |
Berlin Philharmonie 21 and 23 April 2006 Semi-stage concert performance |
|
Conductor |
Sir Simon Rattle |
|
Performers |
Mélisande : Angelika Kirchschlager Geneviève : Anna Larsson Pelléas : Simon Keenlyside Golaud : Laurent Naori (Gerald Finley was originally cast.) Arkel : Robert Lloyd Un Médecin: Guillaume Antoine Yniold : Frederic Jost (Tölzer Knabenchor) Un Berger : Michael Timm Berliner Philharmoniker |
|
Coproduction with the Salzburg Festival and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London
A recording is available from House of Opera
|
Audience member, Gwyneth Davies, has kindly written the following review for us: Pelleas et Melisande, Berlin 2006
What the critics say
Rbb Kulturradio, 22. 4. 2006 (Kai Luehrs-Kaiser; broadcast in Kulturradio am Morgen)
Philharmonie Berlin: "Pelléas et Mélisande"
Drame lyrique by Claude Debussy in a concert performance
There is nowhere better than a concert performance at the Philharmonie to x-ray an almost invertebrate piece like P&M. The symbolistic tragedy of jealousy is glassy in sound, it is a matter of transparency and thorough rehearsing – both redeemed perfectly in this production coming from Salzburg.
Simon Rattle wants everything from the piece, the “Karfreitagszauber” [from Parsifal] of Debussy’s Wagner-homage as well as fervent drama. In the beginning the sound of the woods, purring naturalistically. Here the dew on the moss is steaming and the surfaces of the waters are glittering. For the murder of Pelléas the strings’ floods are lashing gigantically. At the end the performance exhales its life in extreme pianissimi.
Sure enough, Rattle’s view of the fairy-tale as melodrama and as pure emotional music comes across as curiously uncovered here. Partly it seems to take more tension than it gives. If you look at the masters of the past retrospectively, at the opulent magician of sound Karajan for example (whose recording strangely enough is denied in the programme) or Abbado in Vienna, you will notice: With this piece they remain demonstratively faint and transparently retained. They knew that with Pelléas you have to restrain yourself, to leave the lid on the pot so as not to lose the pressure and the tension. Rattle breaks with this – and produces tedious passages.
The magnificent Angelika Kirchschlager changes the usually asexual Mélisande into a Kundry awakened back to eroticism. This makes sense and shows the singer more intensive than I ever had experienced her before. Laurent Naouri’s Golaud is darkly metallic, Robert Lloyd is singing Arkel with a turned-up nose. The sensation of the evening is: Simon Keenlyside. He endues Pelléas with a straightforwardness that comes across almost as a 6th form boy’s and then again has a Don Juan’s twinkle at his finger tips. The best Pelléas since Gerard Souzay and Jacques Jansen. Surely he alone is worth the trip to the Philharmonie. That Simon Rattle is clearing the stage for singers that are able to develop magnificently with him speaks in his favour.
Mega-events like this always entice one to generealize – and to expound the problems. The fact is: The longer I listen to Simon Rattle the more perplexed I get. It is evident that you have to distinguish between excessive expectations and that curious disorientation with which Sir Simon navigates through the scores at times. A superb craftsman, of course. Thus he could make the best of his talents in Birmingham. But it’s exactly these interpretations that come across as curiously lacking personality, volitional, artificial.
Thus it may well have been no accident that the audience coughed into the first night so vehemently that Rattle turned round after the first act and asked that if they really had to cough they could at least do it into a handkerchief. At the heights of magnificence there remained a vestige of unease. A vestige of doubt.
Rating: [=felicitous]
