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The Express, June 22, 2014 |
By: Clare Colvin |
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Puccini: Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera House London, June 17, 2014 |
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Puccini's Manon Lescaut
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Giacomo Puccini’s early masterpiece Manon Lescaut is rarely staged, partly
due to its vocal demands, and because it is far darker in tone than
Massenet’s prettily romantic Manon -also based on the 1731 novel by the Abbe
Prevost about a beautiful woman who rejects true love for a life of luxury.
Puccini omits the scenes of young love in a Paris garret,
concentrating on Manon as gold digger when she leaves her student lover Des
Grieux for the rich and considerably older Geronte.
The composer
dwells lingeringly, too, on Manon’s agonising death in the Louisiana desert
after being deported there on a prostitution charge.
Director
Jonathan Kent sets the story in a contemporary hedonistic world. Teenagers
in dayglo colours celebrate their youth in the casino of a roadside hotel.
Manon and her brother Lescaut arrive in a people-carrier along with
banker Geronte de Revoir. Geronte vies for Manon’s favours, but she has
spotted Des Grieux among the students and elopes with him to Paris.
Designer Paul Brown goes overboard in Act 2 where Kristine Opolais’ Manon is
installed in a glass rococo boudoir with shocking pink bed.
She
wears pink disco skirt, bleached blonde wig and kneesocks, reminiscent of
Turnage’s Anna Nicole (to be revived this autumn).
Geronte (Maurizio
Muraro) is a godfather figure who invites his elderly cronies to watch Manon
perform a soft-porn show with one of the musicians (Nadezhda Karyazina).
Voyeurism is a running theme, as in the third act Manon and other
prostitutes are filmed by a TV crew being loaded abroad a convict ship. Even
more incongruous is the fourth act where Manon, reunited with Jonas
Kaufmann’s Des Grieux, is dying of thirst high above the stage on a ruined
flyover.
Despite these directorial excesses, the evening is
musically a triumph. Kaufmann, undoubtedly a successor to Placido Domingo
for virtuoso singing and dramatic ability, is in warm burnished voice.
He complements Kristine Opolais’ crystalline purity of tone, and the two
make an eye-catching pair. No size-ist issues here.
Baritone
Christopher Maltman is a sleazy Lescaut, ready to sell his sister to the
highest bidder, and Maurizio Muraro a malign Geronte.
The Royal
Opera orchestra under Music Director Antonio Pappano gives a magnificent
account of Puccini’s score. Manon Lescaut will be relayed as part of Covent
Garden’s Live Cinema Season on Tuesday 24 June and broadcast live on BBC
Radio 3 on July 1 at 6.45pm
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