Inadequate leadership and schoolboy errors
Agloriously warm summer’s evening in an open-sided pavilion is scarcely the ideal environment for an opera as focused on the damp, the dark and the deathly as Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, but designer Tom Piper attempted to send us into the right mood by framing Michael Boyd’s new production with the setting of a mouldering Gothic hall.
With its tarnished gilding, rickety staircases and fetid pond, its effect could be rather magnificent, but it needs to be dramatically animated in order to make an impact. Alas, Boyd shows a weird lack of interest in the characters, and the performance is in consequence under-powered and under-motivated.
I have never felt less repelled by Golaud’s violent cruelty to Mélisande than I was here, or less spooked by his descent into the castle vaults with Pelléas. The staging of the climactic love scene and murder was positively amateurish, and the idea that Allemonde is some sort of AustroHungarian duchy on its last legs is so superficially presented as to be negligible.
The temperature was further depressed by Jac van Steen’s unimaginative conducting. With the metronome seeming to tick steadily, the dynamics rarely fell below a stolid mezzo forte and often drowned the singers. Garsington’s newly acquired orchestra, the Philharmonia, played sumptuously for him, but van Steen never found the music’s inner heartbeat or its mercurial volatility – the shimmering restless ambiguity and fluidity that is so fundamental to Debussy’s music.
Caught between Boyd’s and van Steen’s inadequate leadership, the singers weren’t well served. Hovering in the background, poor little Yniold, sweetly piped by the gallant William Davies, was often inaudible. Brian Bannatyne-Scott made a dour rather than wise Arkël, and Susan Bickley radiated only a generalised regality as Geneviève.
The central emotional triangle generated no electric charge. Paul Gay offered virile clarity as Golaud, but one never felt for a second the man’s tortured repression or his pathetic clodhopping passion for his evasive wife. Jonathan McGovern made a personable Pelléas with the right tenorial edge to his baritone – one nasty crack aside, he sang with warm sensibility. I only wish his French enunciation had been more idiomatic – in particular, he seemed to have schoolboy trouble with the é acute.
What held one’s attention most was the Mélisande of a beautiful young American soprano Andrea Carroll, currently on the roster of the Vienna Staatsoper.
Making her British debut, she married crystalline tone and subtle verbal intonation to a keen sense of the girl’s farouche nature, both timid and vicious, both naive and calculating. Her first entrance as a fairy-tale princess, rapt in her mystique, was the most beautiful and truthful moment of an otherwise disappointing occasion.