Bringing opera out of the shadows
Encounters with Debussy’s lone completed opera, the murmuring symbolist epic “Pelléas and Mélisande,” often take place in a shadowy realm of vagueness and insinuation. Motives are never explicitly spelled out, there are mysterious political and economic rustlings around the edges of the plot, and Debussy’s watery harmonies flow in and out without ever quite tipping their hand.
The strong-limbed production under way at the West Edge Opera takes place on another plane entirely.
In this version, which had its second of three performances on Sunday, Aug. 12, at the Craneway Conference Center in Richmond, the drama — a deadly love triangle within the royal family of a mythic kingdom — unfolds as resolutely as in something by Puccini or Leoncavallo. Feelings run high, the violence is real, and there’s a sense of danger — of something truly at stake — that can get lost in a rendition along more traditionally wispy lines.
And all of this was achieved without betraying or even weakening the central premises of either Debussy’s creation or the Maurice Maeterlinck play on which it is faithfully based. Music Director Jonathan Khuner led a performance marked by
rhythmic urgency and lean, sinewy textures (it helped that he was conducting his own orchestral reduction of the score, one that eliminated even the possibility of pulling listeners too far into a world of upholstered lushness).
Director Keturah Stickann kept the proceedings in a tight close-up, bringing the audience right into the lives of these potentially arcane figures. The beggars and the dispossessed migrants who usually flit like specters across the periphery, hinting at a larger societal breakdown, were nowhere to be seen; what mattered were the emotional travails of the central characters.
The potent cast proved more than capable of sustaining that dramatic weight. As the wide-eyed Mélisande, mezzo-soprano Kendra Broom gave a performance of vocal splendor and dramatic cunning, using her luxuriant vocal tone to convey the character’s irresistible allure while hinting at something wayward beneath the placid surface.
Tenor David Blalock, fresh-voiced and fervent as Pelléas, avoided the cliches of the role by dancing nimbly across the boundaries of willful pursuit and passivity. The adulterous love between these two expressively evasive naifs registered simultaneously as a children’s pastime (as one of the characters describes it) and a perfectly serious amour.
At the fulcrum was baritone Efraín Solís’ incendiary performance as Golaud — brother to Pelléas, husband to Mélisande and somehow both the protagonist and a sidelight in someone else’s tale. In singing of muscular vividness, Solís brought the audience into the reality of his plight without ever making excuses for Golaud’s abusive behavior.
In addition, the production boasted a characteristically robust performance by bass Philip Skinner as the increasingly frail but still commanding Arkel, and a handsome, though brief, contribution by Malin Fritz as the matriarch Geneviève. Sophia Stolte, as Golaud’s young son Yniold, seemed to have the role well in hand but struggled to be heard in the cavernous performing space.
To outline the undeniable virtues of the West Edge production is not to imply that this is an interpretation suited to convert a “Pelléas” skeptic to the true faith. Lovers of this ingenious but maddening score find in it a kind of enchantment that eludes the rest of us, with our literal-minded insistence on “But why .... ” and “But who...”
Still, it’s a rare pleasure to hear “Pelléas” pulled out of its usual world of fantasy and indirection, and populated by flesh-and-blood creatures with music to define them. It’s certainly a step in the right direction.
The beggars and the dispossessed migrants who usually flit like specters across the periphery, hinting at a larger societal breakdown, were nowhere to be seen; what mattered were the emotional travails of the central characters.