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The Guardian, 9 December 2015 |
Martin Kettle |
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Berlioz: La damnation de Faust, Paris, Opera Bastille, 8. Dezember 2015 |
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La Damnation de Faust review – Hawking walks and snails mate in mawkish opera
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Alvis Hermanis’s self-absorbed production gets it all wrong, but you
can’t fault the singing in this star-studded version of Berlioz’s tricky
work
Even Berlioz didn’t know how to categorise La Damnation
de Faust. On the title page he erased his original designation, Opéra de
Concert, in favour of the more romantically inscrutable Légende, later
Légende Dramatique. To put this episodic and far from inherently theatrical
work on the stage is therefore not easy, although both Harry Kupfer and
Terry Gilliam have pulled it off in recent decades in London.
In the
Paris Opera’s new all-star production of his “dramatic legend”, director and
set designer Alvis Hermanis makes an ambitious but misjudged effort to
reimagine Faust’s intellectual daring in the age of Stephen Hawking and the
exploration of Mars. The scientist himself, played by Pina Bausch stalwart
Dominique Mercy, is a silent presence on stage throughout. The apotheosis of
Marguerite in the closing scene even becomes, in a scene of mawkish bad
taste, the apotheosis of Hawking, who stands unsupported as the curtain
falls and the booing begins. When a Mars rover crosses the stage, I half
expected Matt Damon to make a cameo appearance too.
But the
headstrong self-absorption of the production comes close to asphyxiating
Berlioz’s episodic work. When an audience collapses in hoots of derision as
mezzo-soprano Sophie Koch’s Marguerite sings the exquisite D’Amour l’Ardente
Flamme to a video backdrop of snails mating, it’s a sure sign that the
production is a turkey rather than that the bourgeoisie has been
satisfyingly outraged.
Musically, on the other hand, this is as
impressive a Faust as Jonas Kaufmann in the title role, Bryn Terfel as
Mephistopheles and Koch as Marguerite would lead one to expect. Kaufmann’s
bespectacled university lecturer Faust is a restrained but always
intelligently musical vocal presence for much of the first part of the
opera, but his invocation to nature in the second part is a consummate
moment of great singing, the sort of things one hears rarely in a lifetime,
and well worth the journey to Paris on its own (Kaufmann will be replaced by
Bryan Hymel in some later performances – a super-sub indeed).
Terfel
brings much needed vigour and energy to every diabolical contribution, and
his triumphant cry of “Je suis vainqueur” was magnificent. Koch is always a
distinguished presence, though there is little attempt at characterisation,
and Edwin Crossley-Mercer sings Brander’s song of the rat with panache. The
excellent Philippe Jordan conducts with an impeccably idiomatic feel for
Berlioz that unfortunately eludes a lot of what is happening on the stage.
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