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What's on Stage, 18 Jun 2014 |
By Mark Valencia |
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Puccini: Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera House London, June 17, 2014 |
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Manon Lescaut (Royal Opera House)
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Puccini's break-through opera returns to Covent Garden after a
thirty-year absence |
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If Puccini knew one thing, it's that nobody got rich by underestimating the
public appetite for sex and seediness. In order to make his mark on the
operatic world he took the bold decision to re-dramatise Manon Lescaut, Abbé
Prévost's well-trodden novel of doomed love, but to replace the elegance of
Massenet's opera (called just Manon) with a focus on the raw passion of the
infatuated Des Grieux. There's nothing dreamy about Puccini's heroine:
whatever her intentions this girl was never going to be much of a nun.
She's no Mimì either. Incapable of starving for long in their Parisian
garret (an episode that the future composer of La bohème ironically leaves
unstaged), by the start of act two she's off to glitter and be gay in the
demi-monde. Jonathan Kent's modern-day staging for the Royal Opera sees her
exploited by sugar-daddy Geronte (a splendidly seedy Maurizio Muraro) in a
perspex boudoir of bling and bust-enhancers where, dolled up as a kind of
Manon Nicole, she entertains moneyed old creeps via a live video stream.
The updating is entirely valid: it never betrays the plot and offers a
startlingly pertinent reflection of today's ‘me' culture. Tune to any number
of cable channels and they're full of documentaries about young people with
Manon's values. Ironically, the production's only dislocation is with the
pit, for the simple reason that Antonio Pappano's fabulous conducting of
Puccini's score, impassioned and Mediterranean-fresh, sometimes feels at
odds with the cynicism unfolding onstage. Kent may be in the 21st Century
but the heady orchestral sweep is firmly rooted in the 19th.
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glamorous and talented stars are the big draw to this production and they
didn't disappoint. Kristīne Opolais was in wonderful voice as Manon, even of
tone and richly coloured, while as an actress of great power she traced a
painful descent from sweet ingénue through kept woman to trafficked
prostitute before finding redemption in death, filled with regret for what
might have been – "Oblivion will wash away my faults but my love will never
die".
Jonas Kaufmann can sing anything, it seems. The great German
tenor was in magnificent voice, somehow managing to sound heroic and
vulnerable at the same time, and looked every inch the young blade whose
impulsive fling turns into something deeper. His Des Grieux broke the heart,
a man so wretchedly beset by love and so desperate to rescue his beloved
from her demons.
Christopher Maltman, singing every bit as
exquisitely as his colleagues, explained Lescaut's capricious behaviour by
fizzing with energy of a kind that superficial people tend to hide behind.
From a raft of well-taken supporting roles Benjamin Hulett was especially
convincing as Des Grieux' student friend student Edmondo and Luis Gomes a
keenly evocative Lamplighter.
It's possible to quarrel with the sheer
scale of the sets by Paul Brown that include an apartment block, a red-light
district and an elevated freeway, for Manon Lescaut is an intimate opera and
the production should draw us in, not dazzle us with architectural
massiveness. It calls for considerable star wattage to illuminate such a
space but Opolais and Kaufmann take it in their stride.
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