Pelléas et Mélisande, opera review: Rattle draws shimmering beauty from the forest

A stylized, thought-provoking production
Sizzle and strife: Magdalena Kozena
Tristram Kenton
Barry Millington11 January 2016

An opera such as Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, so mysteriously evocative of place, is not an obvious candidate for semi-staging.

But last night’s performance, the second of two of the latest collaboration between Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars, set out to fulfil Debussy’s wish that the orchestra itself might represent the forest in which the action takes place.

Thus the various sections of the orchestra were distributed about the stage, enfolded by the strings. Singers were not confined to the small grey block (the single prop) at the centre, but flitted through the undergrowth. When Mélisande’s ring fell into the well, we heard it whistle through the air with the thrum of a harp.

Rattle drew playing of rapt, shimmering beauty and extraordinary subtlety, but tender and sensuous as his reading was, the broad, Wagner-influenced paragraphs had nobility, and passages of drama had a flesh and blood quality. Rarely has Maeterlinck’s richly symbolist text been rendered with such immediacy: “the ice has been broken with red-hot iron”, says Pelléas as Mélisande finally declares her love, and again we heard the sizzle.

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Abetted by Rattle, Magdalena Kozena (Mélisande) managed to make even “ouvrez la fenêtre” sound magical and brought a suitably wide-eyed innocence to the role. Christian Gerhaher’s sympathetic Pelléas was best when impassioned; I missed the exquisite nuances of which this consummate lieder singer is capable.Gerald Finley’s probing Golaud could not be faulted, nor could Franz-Josef Selig’s imposing Arkel. Excellent contributions, too, from Bernarda Fink, Joshua Bloom and Elias Mädler.

Sellars’s stylized, thought-provoking production excelled in its character interaction, but the attempt to add a contemporary resonance with lurid neon-lit trees — less a natural landscape than Piccadilly Circus — was misguided. The LSO Live recording, untainted by neon lighting, will be a landmark.

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