Philippe Boesmans - Pinocchio
Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2017
Emilio Pomarico, Joël Pommerat, Stéphane Degout, Vincent Le Texier, Chloé Briot, Yann Beuron, Julie Boulianne, Marie-Eve Munger
ARTE Concert - 9th July 2017
I don't think that there's too much question that Pinocchio is a children's fairy tale and it's one that has a very effective and unforgettable way of impressing valuable life lessons on the consequences of lying. It's an unusual subject however for composer Philippe Boesmans and dramatist Joël Pommerat (who together previously created Au Monde for La Monnaie in 2014) to base an opera upon, so perhaps there are other aspects and contemporary relevance that can be brought out of the darker side of the story.
The Pinocchio tale is one familiar to many from the Walt Disney film, without the Disney addition of Jiminy Cricket. All the memorable scenes are there; from Pinocchio's conception as a puppet from a piece of magic wood, his impoverished childhood, he desire to go to school and be like other children, his being swindled by a couple of crooks, turning into a donkey, his ending up in the belly of a whale and his eventual transformation into a real boy. The cautionary tale moral of the story, about lying, about pride denying one's origins and the question of growing or changing into a better person are very much all brought across.
Even if it is just a fairy tale for children there's potential for a piece like Pinocchio with all those memorable scenes to have another life on the opera stage. Joël Pommerat, directing the production himself for its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence festival, characteristically takes a darker direct approach to the story's themes, and perhaps even incorporates a few more contemporary questions into the matter of becoming a real human by embracing cultural diversity in a wider and more multicultural society, but the work still adheres largely to its traditional themes and its childhood focus.
If it doesn't quite establish a character of its own that merits its translation to the opera stage, Boesmans' Pinocchio is certainly richly composed and fully attuned to the drama. There are inevitably reminders of the delicate emotional surrealism of Maeterlinck and Debussy in fairy tale mood and in spoken language rhythms, but they tend to take on more of a Ravel character in the context of the story. The scene where the fairy chides the naughty Pinocchio, making his nose grow for telling lies and promising to make him a real boy, is very like similar scenes in L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, with even the vocal writing heading into high-end coloratura.
Marie-Eve Munger impresses with her ability in this role of the fairy, and Chloé Briot is an engaging presence throughout as the puppet, but the singing elsewhere in this world premiere production also matches the fine writing for the voice here. Aside from Pinocchio and the fairy, who have very specific demands, the other roles are small parts for singers in multiple roles, but they are written in such a way as to make an impression. Stéphane Degout, for example, is the circus director, one of the crooks and a murderer, but his main role is that of the narrator. As mainly a spoken role, it seems a waste of such a singing voice, but Degout's narration is critical to the flow and he still manages to make it musical in the delivery.
Boesmans' music also has its own dramatic flow and colourful expression, drawing on Arabic influences for the prison scene and when the outsider Pinocchio is trying to fit in with the other cool boys, using on-stage musicians improvising in a scene that is similar to Boesmans' use of a bohemian backstreet band in Wintermärchen, his version of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Boesmans however is happy to draw on whatever sounds best fit the dramatic requirements, using accordions elsewhere to provide other 'local' colour and siren like sounds to accompany the growth of Pinocchio's nose. With Klangforum Wien in the pit conducted by Emilio Pomarico, the reduced orchestration creates a wonderful, magical sound of exquisite detail.
The benefits of working with a small orchestra also apply to Pommerat's idea of keeping the cast reduced to a small theatrical troupe playing the multiple roles. And it's very much a core troupe of performers from La Monnaie, including Stéphane Degout, Vincent Le Texier, Chloé Briot and Yann Beuron, some of whom Boesmans and Pommerat have worked with in the past. It does very much give the impression of a little troupe all working together to create a close-knit unit. Pommerat's usual distancing direction would seem to work against that, the set a familiar dark, monochrome minimalist affair, but as with the flashes of brilliance in the music and the singing, the use of special effects and projections have a striking impact when used.
Whether Boesmans' opera version of Pinocchio will have a life as a fairy-tale favourite beyond its performances at Aix-en-Provence remains to be seen. It's a fairly faithful presentation of the main themes and scenes of the children's story, and it doesn't particularly have anything new to add to it in the way of contemporary relevance, although I daresay that a different director than Joël Pommerat could bring much more out of the potential shown here. As it stands however, Pinocchio the opera is an entertaining piece with much to admire in the scoring and the skillfully played performances.
Links: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, ARTE Concert
Philippe Boesmans - Wintermärchen
La Monnaie-De Munt, 1999
Antonio Pappano, Luc Bondy, Dale Duesing, Susan Chilcott, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Franz-Josef Selig, Cornelia Kallisch, Juha Kotilainen, Kris Dane, Johanne Saunier, Heinz Zednik
ARTE Concert
As one of Shakespeare's late romances and believed to have been only partly written by him, The Winter's Tale - like Cymbeline, The Tempest and Pericles - seems to be designed to draw together a number of familiar dramatic situations and incidents purely for the sake of dramatic entertainment. To broadly and somewhat crudely lump them together, each of them offer variations on banishment, wild storms at sea, lost siblings cast adrift on the tides of fortune, where they meet adventure in foreign lands, only recognising their true inheritance at the end as they are belatedly reconciled into the noble families whose fortunes have since taken dramatic turns.
A Winter's Tale in particular, although it's by no means alone in this, additionally makes use of several heightened otherworldly set-pieces (or miracles, if you like) that would seem to make it a natural for the lyric stage. With a central theme of a jealous father whose foolhardy actions lead to him become estranged from his daughter, it would seem moreover a natural work for Verdi to tackle as an opera (reminiscent as it is of Rigoletto and particularly Simon Boccanegra), but although a great admirer of the playwright and one of the greatest opera composers of Shakespeare (Otello, Macbeth and Falstaff all being truly great works), I'm not aware of Verdi ever expressing an interest in The Winter's Tale or even being familiar with this particular work.
It's a work nonetheless that would certainly have presented some challenges, even to the great composer that late Verdi was, if we are to judge from the imperfections of Simon Boccanegra. Dutch composer Philippe Boesmans, working with director Luc Bondy, finds a way to draw together some of the more incongruous dramatic elements of The Winter's Tale in their 1999 collaboration on its operatic adaptation, Wintermärchen. Despite the high melodrama, or more likely in some ways due to it, The Winter's Tale carries a strong emotional and psychological undercurrent to it, one that is so expertly and movingly handled at the conclusion that it invites one to overlook the dramatic contrivance elsewhere.
Like almost all adaptations of Shakespeare to the opera, cuts are inevitable and much of the poetry is lost from the original work, but Luc Bondy and Marie-Louise Bischofberger's libretto condenses the drama fairly well for Boesman's four-act opera. If the moral question explored in the work on the subject of jealousy is pushed somewhat to extremes - both in the original drama and the opera - the impact of such behaviour on others is just as important, and similarly pushed to extremes. Luc Bondy's staging of the work for La Monnaie consequently attempts to play the drama as naturalistically as is possible (barring the obvious otherworldly interventions), allowing the staging to take on some of the more melodramatic aspects.
Although the first two acts of the drama take place in Sicily then, the kingdom of King Leontes is depicted as a dark and snowy landscape for the winter's tale that is to take place. A huge wall of ice symbolises the sudden insane jealousy that drives Leontes to attempt to have his friend Polixenes poisoned in the belief that he has had an affair with the Queen and is somehow responsible for her pregnancy. As Leontes watches them from behind the wall, the block of ice becomes an enormous barrier that chills his heart, and separates him from the truth that everyone else around him can see. The close of this first half of the drama even successfully stages the trial of Hermione and brings in the judgement from Delphi as a direct message from Apollo, Boesman's post-Wagnerian orchestration capturing all the impact of the consequences that follow.
By way of contrast, both Bondy and Boesmans take a very different spin on the second half of the work that mainly takes place sixteen years later in Bohemia. Leontes' abandoned daughter has been raised by a shepherd and grown up with the name Perdita unaware of her heritage. Engaged to Prince of Bohemia, against the wishes of his father Polixenes, the mute Perdita and Florizel's romance takes place in what looks like a fenced-in basketball court in a New York backstreet alley, populated by 'bohemian" musicians, pickpockets and street dancers. Boesmans score changes considerably, with most of Act III performed in an avant-jazz style by the group Aka Moon. Florizel is not an opera singer either, but sings more like a pop musician. The language changes too, with English spoken in 'Bohemia' in contrast to the 'court language' German of the first two Acts in Sicily.
The drama and the overall tone however still adheres closely to Shakespeare's play, and in any case it's not really any less naturalistic or realistic than Shakespeare's controversial depiction of the exiles being washed up by a storm on the landlocked shores of Bohemia. The inconsistencies and the otherworldly interventions that overturn the tragic developments of The Winter's Tale for the warmer, happy ending of Leontes being reunited not only with Perdita but also with the dead Queen Hermione are likewise less important than the overall necessity of providing a satisfying conclusion that will warm the hearts of the audience. Boesmans and Bondy carry that off well, particularly in the handling of Hermione's statue coming to life. Holding to the consistency of Wintermärchen's characterisation, the Queen, frozen in time in the wall of ice, breaks through it, restored to life at the return of her daughter.
If there's room to bring a measure of realism to the experiences of the characters in The Winter's Tale through the performances of a good cast, the scoring for the voices for Wintermärchen and the quality of the singing performances can likewise bring out the very real sentiments that lies behind all the drama. This recording of the 1999 performance of the work at La Monnaie, conducted by Antonio Pappano - revived on-line by ARTE in tribute to the recent death of Luc Bondy - benefits from exceptional singing and dramatic performances, particularly from Dale Duesing as Leontes and Susan Chilcott as Hermione. Hermoine's despair at the charges brought against her in Act II are particularly heartfelt in how the scene is scored and in how well it is performed, but Leontes likewise is a challenging role with a wide emotional range to get across. A young Franz-Josef Selig also makes a strong impression here as Camillo, with a particulrly lovely lament for his home at the opening of Act III.
Links: ARTE Concert, La Monnaie
Philippe Boesmans - Au Monde
La Monnaie - De Munt, Brussels 2014
Joël Pommerat, Patrick Davin, Frode Olsen, Werner Van Mechelen, Stéphane Degout, Charlotte Hellekant, Patricia Petibon, Fflur Wyn, Yann Beuron, Ruth Olaizola
La Monnaie, ARTE Concert - Internet Streaming, April 2014
La Monnaie's bringing together of composer Philippe Boesmans and playwright Joël Pommerat for a newly commissioned opera is an intriguing one and in many ways, for better or worse, Au Monde lives up to whatever expectations one might have of both of the Belgian creators. That's not to say that the result is entirely predictable. There's no doubt that there is a true collaboration here that manages to draw something new and unexpected out of both contributors.
Musically, Au Monde is quite different from the serialism of Reigen, my only previous encounter with Boesmans, but the Belgian composer has clearly worked in a variety of styles in opera with adaptations of Shakespeare (Wintermärchen) and Strindberg (Julie), as well as reinterpreting Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea (La Passion de Gilles). For his part Joël Pommerat previously collaborated with Oscar Bianchi on an adaptation of his play 'Grace a mes yeux' (Thanks to My Eyes), a work that shared characteristics with Maeterlinck and Debussy. There's a lot of room here then for both creators to find and share common ground in Au Monde.
It's clear that Au Monde comes from the same source as Thanks to my Eyes, the work not so much a straightforward drama or character piece as an exploration of archetypal family figures in conflict with themselves and in a state of suspended tension with one another. If Boesmans' music is more melodic and lyrical here, it's more closely related to the particular colours, sonorities of the characters and the rhythms of the dialogues and relationships between them in a way that - particularly in the intonations of the French language - can't help but remind one of Pelléas et Mélisande.
Much as it should, the music and singing voices undoubtedly contribute to filling out the characters and the relationships between them. Or, if the figures and their personalities remain rather difficult to determine, the music at least adds another dimension in place of any recognisable narrative. It's certainly easy to see however that there are tensions between them and where those tensions are coming from. Much of it centres on Ori, the son, and the only one with an actual name in Au Monde.
Ori has just quit a successful career in the military and none of the family know why. He says he needs a period of reflection and has even written a book, but no-one seems particularly interested in reading it. His father is stepping down as the head of the family's successful steel industry business and, with the agreement of the elder son, has Ori in mind to take over the running of affairs. Ori is hesitant about the matter, but there is perhaps something else on his mind...
...like murder? That's where it all gets a little stranger in Au Monde and difficult to define. Three women have recently been murdered in the town. There haven't been any such murders in a while now, but the new murders coincide with Ori's return. It might not be that simple though. Each of the three sisters of the family also have issues. The elder sister is seems to have a never-ending pregnancy and her husband has brought in a foreign woman to care for her needs; the second sister is an actress who can't bear to watch herself on the TV; the youngest sister, who is celebrating her birthday, is actually a lookalike replacement for a daughter who disappeared (called Phèdre), and she inevitably has some identity problems.
Pommerat cites Chekhov's 'Three Sisters' as a reference and notes that the name Ori comes from Orestes, but clearly the family references are a little more complex than that with Racine's 'Phaedra' mentioned and there's perhaps something of 'King Lear' in there as well. Comparisons to Debussy's and Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande are unavoidable, and a few other more modern surrealist references suggest David Lynch territory. Much of the strangeness, in this respect, seems to derive from the actress second sister, such as the foreign woman singing 'My Way' in a man's voice at certain points (these are noted in the libretto as being "perhaps a dream of the second daughter"). Whether Ori is involved in the murder is very much left open, like much else in this strange mix of genre and artiness.
The transition from theatre to opera undoubtedly involved some cutting back of Pommerat's original work, but this open air of vagueness and mystery is very much a part of the work. It's certainly heightened by Boesmans' score and by the breaking up of the work into 20 short elliptical scenes that seem to hold the characters in a permanent state of suspension or tension with one another. None of this ever seems to amount to anything meaningful than the characters walking around making ominous statements about their position, despite the attempt to insert some murder-mystery into the proceedings and despite the undoubted beauty of Boesmans' musical score.
The writing for the voice too is wonderful and there's an exceptionally strong cast here at La Monnaie to interpret it. Working from an existing play, there is a certain amount of recitative in the dialogue, but Boesmans has managed to fit the voice types well, and not just according to the traditional types for family roles. If the elder sister is an aloof and distant contralto (Charlotte Hellekant - very fine), the drama queen middle sister (Patricia Petibon) is a diva coloratura and the younger sister a high-end soprano (Fflur Wyn). The Second Sister and her character directs most of the drama and mystery, and Petibon is superb in her tecnhique, control and interpretation. Ori is also an mportant figure, albeit with less to sing, but it still needs a French baritone of personality and ability and Stéphane Degout has that.
It's probably not much of a surprise that Pommerat's stage direction tends to be rather straightforwardly theatrical. There's not a great deal of consideration given to the sets, but the long beam of light in the darkness of the rooms and the huis clos atmosphere does suggest an open door to an outside world (au monde) that the characters are fearful or unwilling to move towards. The cold, detached elegance of the characters is perfectly captured however in the lighting and the costumes. Much like Thanks to my Eyes, this all casts an appropriate atmosphere, and it's one into which Patrick Davin weaves the haunting Wagnerian emotional sweep and the intricate Debussian touches of Boesmans' score most effectively.
Links: La Monnaie, ARTE Concert