|
On June 17, Puccini's Manon Lescaut returned to the stage of the Royal Opera
House for the first time in more than thirty years. In the meantime, much
has happened — including a propensity for stage directors to relocate and
update the action of classic works that has become endemic and indeed
nigh-on automatic. It quickly became clear on curtain-up that Puccini's
version of the Abbé Prévost's eighteenth-century cautionary novel had been
transferred to near-contemporary times — someone suggested the 1980s —
though its location remained unsatisfyingly vague. Perhaps Act I's ordinary
block of modern flats with a casino next door could have been in Amiens, or
in a suburb of Paris, though it could have been almost anywhere. Upmarket
pimp Geronte's mansion had become the gaudy interior of a brothel, where
Manon — here clearly his star attraction, rather than his live-in lover —
was evidently bored with having to dance for her numerous elderly clients
while being filmed. The dancing master turned into the maker of a porno
movie. Why were the madrigal singers there at all?
The final acts
felt even more mystifying. Some sort of parade of sex-workers across a
platform took place, but they appeared to be being manhandled along the way
from flats notable for the kind of garishly colorful decor one might expect
to see, for instance, in Amsterdam's red-light district. (Maybe these were
the same flats visualized in the first scene, now seen from the outside?)
The women were next, for some reason, pushed through a film poster; exactly
who was roughing them up along the way it was difficult to say — perhaps
representatives of sex traffickers. (They seemed to be an unofficial
grouping.) On the other side of the poster lay a dilapidated and disused
roadside corner of a motorway, where Manon and des Grieux spent their final,
despairing scene: not much of a journey appeared to have been involved in
getting there, and certainly not a transcontinental one.
In effect,
director Jonathan Kent and his designer Paul Brown had not so much staged
Manon Lescaut as shoehorned it, often unwillingly and nonsensically, into
their new opera about the contemporary sex trade, which utilized the same
music and the same Italian text. Some of the more obvious discrepancies
thrown up by this wholesale revamp were quietly removed from the English
surtitles and the program-book synopsis, which made no reference, for
instance, to any specific location at all. Maybe director and designer care
so deeply about the iniquities of the sex trade that they have a desperate
need to write a new opera all about them. Puccini's opera, and its audience,
meanwhile, deserve to have Manon Lescaut taken seriously on its own terms.
Musically this was a strong evening. It is hard to think of a
contemporary soprano and tenor pairing better equipped, both vocally and
physically, for the demands of the two central roles than Latvian soprano
Kristine Opolais and German star tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Opolais could maybe
do with an extra ounce or two of cream on the tone at the role's extreme
climaxes, but she went for all of them with boldness and confidence, as well
as with broad success. She also shaped Puccini's lines with imagination. So
did Kaufmann, whose grainy but undeniably handsome tone may not be
inherently Italianate in the classic mold, but whose impeccable phrasing and
keen awareness of both musical and textual meaning carried him through to
triumphant acclaim at his curtain call.
The opera, of course,
depends — and to an unusual degree — on the central casting of the amorous
duo. Yet also making an appreciable mark were English baritone Christopher
Maltman, who seized every opportunity as Manon's brother Lescaut, here a
low-level pimp, and the ample bass of Italian Maurizio Muraro, whose Geronte
de Ravoir was conceived and executed on a grandly sonorous scale. Benjamin
Hulett sang Edmondo's Act I solos with some charm, despite being presented
as a baseball-hatted kid-on-the-block.
Conducting the score was the
company's music director, Antonio Pappano, whose natural musical territory
this might be expected to be — and so it proved. Offering a detailed focus
on the score and its many intricate and incidental beauties, he also brought
to it a sense of grander overview, page by page, scene by scene and act by
act, that gave it continuity and momentum on a much longer-term scale.
|
