March 10, 2006

Gratuitous Musickal Posting (TM)

Persee.jpg

Persée by Jean-Baptiste Lully. First performed in 1682 for Louis XIV, this is an opera in five acts telling the story of Perseus and Andromeda, including his combat with the Medusa, his rescue of Andromeda from the sea monster and the war that erupts as a result of the jealousy of Perseus' rival Phineus.

I admit to being largely at sea in terms of having anything intelligent to say about 17th Century French opera. Fortunately, Brian Robins of Fanfare went in ahead of me. Instead of rambling on my own, I'm just going to piggy back on his comments about this production, filmed in Toronto in 2004:


“A spectacle of gods and monsters, with dancing, fight scenes and special effects.” Whether or not Lully would have recognized the blurb on the box front of this DVD as a description of his 1682 tragédie lyrique Persée is open to debate. But then he did not have the doubtful advantage of modern marketing. Persée, the ninth Lully tragédie lyrique composed in collaboration with the librettist Philippe Quinault, has already received an outstanding audio recording at the hands of Christophe Rousset, a set that I described in Fanfare 26:2 as “probably the finest recording of a Lully opera I’ve yet heard.” It duly appeared in my Want List in the same issue. Like Rousset’s performance, this new DVD issue (which has been around as a CD set with limited availability) stems from live performances, in this case given in Toronto’s Elgin Theater.

The review of that previous audio recording is here and goes much more into the story and characters. Reading it makes me want to dash out and buy the CD.

Aside from the obvious difference that we are here comparing an audio with a visual presentation, there are two important distinctions between the performances of Rousset and Hervé Niquet. The first is that Niquet has cut the Prologue that precedes the usual five acts. Since this consists of the usual panegyric to Louis XIV (who apparently suggested the topic of Perseus to Lully), some may feel that this is not a serious loss, but it does mean that we lose the connection made between the hero and the king, an important one since the absolutist monarchs of France considered themselves to be, like Perseus, demigods. In any event, viewers should at least have been told that the opera has a Prologue that is not given here. The other major difference is that Rousset cut repeats of most of the dances, many of which are observed in Niquet’s performance. In honesty, I have to say that Rousset’s cuts did not bother me too much, but at least one dance expert of the period has since castigated him for destroying the careful balance between vocal music and dance that is such a feature of French 17th- and 18th-century opera. That, I think, is probably fair comment.

It really is too bad about the cutting of the Prologue, both from an artistic and a historical perspective. As to the dances, I'm glad that the repeats were left in this recording. While I don't pretend to know the first thing about dance, I did not have any sense that they caused the performance to drag in any way.

I gave a full introduction to the opera in the earlier review, so space constraints dictate that here I must provide only a reminder that Persée is concerned with the conflation of two well-known stories from Ovid’s Metamorphisis: the slaying by Perseus of the Gorgon Medusa, and his rescuing of Andromeda from the sea monster. Romantic complications are provided by the rivalry between Phineus and Perseus for the hand of Andromeda, and by the fact that Perseus is loved by her aunt Merope. Quinault’s libretto is one of his finest, while Lully’s richly imaginative score is important for being the first of his operas to make extensive use of orchestral accompaniment for the airs.

While visually often very handsome, I’m afraid on musical grounds the performance falls far short of Rousset’s. Let’s first look at the positives. The costumes designed by Dora Rust-D’Eye, mostly period for the women’s dresses, and convincingly Greek looking for the men, are sumptuous. The predominant use of rich reds, golds, purples, and umbers gives an appropriately regal feel to the production, and it’s rather a pity to find Empire-line dresses suddenly introduced into the wedding scene in act V. The stage designs, too, are excellent in the palace scenes, if occasionally a little too darkly lit, but less convincing in the big set pieces, the killing of Medusa, and the rescue of Andromeda. Neither of these difficult scenes is successfully staged. Jeannette Zingg’s choreography, danced by a good and personable young group, frequently impresses with its attempts to create period style, but then lets itself down by introducing a much later type of choreography that in the context appears as a solecism. This uneasy mix of an honorable attempt at appropriate period style mixed with jarring modernisms is also a characteristic of the production, particularly as to gesture.

I'd agree heartily that visually this was a terrific production. Both the costumes and the stage design were extremely handsome. Fortunately, I don't know enough about choreography to have noticed overly-much the mish-mash of dance styles, although I expect that what Robins is talking about is the rather excessive amount of hand-flapping that went on sometimes.

With the exception of the strongly sung Phinée of Alain Coulombe, the singing is disappointing, both as to quality and real understanding of the expressive nuances of Lully’s récitative. This is particularly true of the women, all of whose voices (at least as engineered) sound hard-edged; they also employ far too much vibrato. The men are better, with Cyril Auvity (who took several small parts in the Rousset recording) a more than acceptable Persée, if one lacking the finish and authority of Paul Agnew for Rousset. But what really undermines this DVD is the quite dreadful engineering and balance of the orchestral sound. The heavy emphasis on the bass (and a fidgety, overactive continuo group) means that there are times when it is virtually impossible to hear the upper strings, so swamped are they by doubling oboes. Praise for clear, generally well-translated subtitles. But ultimately, the answer is obvious. If you haven’t already done so, get your hands on the Rousset CD set, and use your imagination rather than look at this often pretty, but deeply flawed DVD.

While I agree in general about the voice quality of the singers (particularly the over-use of vibrato), I would also point out that I thought their physical acting was uniformly quite good, from their gestures and movements to their facial expressions. I, too, noticed the hyper-active continuo group, although the orchestra as a whole did not sound quite so bottom-heavy to me. And the tempi and phrasing were all that I could wish. I have to say that I have always enjoyed Tafaelmusik's sound and that to the extent this recording is flawed, it is certainly an engineering issue, not the fault of the musicians themselves.

All in all then, I really rather enjoyed this performance and would recommend it if you're interested in this sort of thing. To be fair, in pointing out some of its flaws in comparison to the Rousett CD's, it seems to me that Robins is setting an awfully high standard. Nonetheless, I think I'll take Robins' advice and also go listen to the CD's.

Posted by Robert at March 10, 2006 11:48 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Stick to the outdoor division... You might actually get someone to read it!

Posted by: Babs at March 10, 2006 12:07 PM