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The Spectator, 28 June 2014 |
Hugo Shirley |
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Puccini: Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera House London, June, 2014 |
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Manon Lescaut: Puccini’s Anna Nicole?
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This season has already seen Manon Lescaut appear in several different
operatic guises across the UK, but it was Covent Garden’s new production of
Puccini’s version (its first staging of it in three decades) that was the
hottest ticket of all. The Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais and the
superstar tenor Jonas Kaufmann were tackling the roles of the lovers, Manon
and Des Grieux, for the first time. Antonio Pappano, in the repertoire where
he most reliably excels, was in the pit.
In an introductory talk
before the production opened, the conductor tentatively drew a comparison
between Puccini’s first major success and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna
Nicole, which opens the Royal Opera’s next season. He has a point, of
course, not least because Manon — especially in Puccini’s work — is a
heroine who can be seen, depending on one’s point of view, as either
exploiter or exploited, a victim of others or of herself. Puccini relished
these contradictions, but what his score should also do is elevate Manon,
placing her tragedy on a level where the moral balance sheet is swept away
as we’re swept along — the composer himself proclaimed that while Massenet,
whose earlier Manon he knew, ‘will feel it as a Frenchman, with powder and
minuets … I will feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion.’
Pappano certainly feels the piece as an Italian, with conducting of
marvellous lyrical flexibility and fierce conviction; the account of the
Intermezzo was magnificent. But Jonathan Kent’s new modern-dress production
(with grim designs by Paul Brown) might in part be what suggested the Anna
Nicole parallel: there’s little more than a boob job to separate the
real-life Playboy model from Opolais’s Manon here after she’s abandoned Des
Grieux and become a Barbie doll for old, rich Geronte. In puffy pink
mini-dress and knee-high stockings, she’s filmed in dirty close-up and
paraded in a sex show in front of his old friends in a ghastly, plasticky
boudoir.
Act 3 becomes a bizarre, nightmarish reality TV show,
against the backdrop of a dingy multi-roomed brothel, with the parade of
fallen women forced through a hole brutally torn in a large hoarding —
advertising a perfume called ‘Naïveté’. On the other side of it, instead of
the American desert, is a half-built road to nowhere. The imagery is not
subtle; nor is the production as a whole. It isn’t very coherent either,
especially with its occasional lapses into surrealism and meta-theatrics.
And it’s so busy wagging its finger at us all that it fails to realise that,
in parading a soprano in the way it does, it risks being complicit in the
game of exploitation it seeks to criticise.
It also serves to dampen
the passion of Puccini’s patchy but powerful early score. So did the fact
that, although Opolais and Kaufmann both look ideal and found an extra gear
for an impressive final act, they sounded tentative for much of the
first-night performance, unable to match vocally the emotions surging from
the pit — often with rather too little concern for balance. Kaufmann sang
with a great deal of elegance and refinement, and acted with detail, but the
voice — from my seat at least — sounded tired, the top notes lacking the
usual trumpeting power. Opolais sang beautifully, too, but struggled to
project in the middle of her range. Christopher Maltman’s forceful, cocky
Lescaut headed the strong secondary cast. Some elements burnt brightly, but
as a whole the evening left me cold.
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