The Royal College of Music gets in early with marking Ravel’s 150th-anniversary next year with this presentation of L’heure espagnole, although it completes a wider arc in that it presented his other, later one-Act opera in March 2023. It is integrated (as the only true opera here) within a French-language triptych whose theatrical frame in Ella Marchment’s production is a flashback to various episodes in the life of Mistinguett (Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois) the famous early 20th-century cabaret performer who ran the Moulin Rouge. In principle, no problem, as that draws a logical connection between the three disparate works here, as a series of reflections upon a woman’s complex and aggravated romantic entanglements with men. But that hardly registers on the stage itself, as it is only in the programme note that it’s stated we are supposed to see these three compositions through Mistinguett’s eyes.
The two sequences of songs here are presented explicitly as a cabaret performance – stylishly it’s true, though without reference to any particular place or person. Ravel’s opera is meant to be recalled as a performance from the 1920s (even though composed in 1911). Except for the fact that Mistinguett, in her guise as a cabaret performer, looks on to this staging (with its array of clocks under a proscenium arch) at the beginning and end of the representation, it’s really a standalone production that neither makes nor needs any reference beyond itself. As such, any meaningful connections between the works only really exist on paper.
We are told that the various opium-fuelled visions recounted by Rimbaud (as set in Britten’s cycle Les Illuminations) are re-interpreted as the fleeting memories of the aged Mistinguett under the influence of morphine to reduce her pain. We don’t see the elderly Mistinguett herself and, paradoxically, the cabaret act into which Britten’s settings are forged here makes these fragmented, feverish visions the most unified section of the whole triptych. The musical performance with the RCM Opera Orchestra under Michael Rosewell’s direction perhaps lacks something of the shimmering subtlety and nuance that it might receive in a concert performance, as here it is impelled with grander, theatrical gestures. A comparative lack of vibrato by the strings gives it a certain hard edge too, enabling the more luscious timbre of ‘Being beauteous’ to stand out all the more when it is applied. Soprano Georgia Melville sings robustly and defiantly (in the character of the younger Mistinguett).
Weill’s Chansons des Quais come from the incidental music he wrote for the adaptation of Jacques Deval’s play Marie Galante as a musical (it had also just been made into a film, directed by Henry King). These are songs also presented as a cabaret by Mistinguett, with the male quartet in drag. Without any surrounding dialogue or narrative imposed in this staging however, the lurid story of the play is not at all evident and so forms a rather hollow centre in this triptych. But musically it’s vivid, as Charlotte Jane Kenndy assumes the soprano role with a more pliantly effusive and ripe voice that suits the idiom of a jazz-tinted musical, and the orchestra offer an iridescent flurry of colours – a poignant saxophone solo giving way to clarinet in the Intermezzo is a particular highlight.
In Ravel’s opera – where Mistinguett can now be construed as the clock maker Torquemada’s wife, who entertains various lovers at home during his absences, she is now much more the master of her own cheerful dalliances, even if she briefly rues the men’s opportunistic use of her favours. Accordingly, Anastasia Koorn takes a more coquettish approach as Mistinguett’s alter ego. The quartet of male soloists characterise their respective roles idiomatically – Francis Melville’s direct Torquemada; Peng Tian’s fruitily mellifluous poet Gonzalve; Daniel Barrett’s easy-going Ramiro; and a bluff Don Iñigo Gomez from Ross Fettes. Rosewell and the orchestra find a more rarefied, luminous richness in this score, appropriate to Ravel’s style, than the surface spectacle of Britten or Weill’s music, though they keep up a lively pace too.
Despite the attempt to fit these three works into a coherent whole, the effect in practice is still piecemeal. If the Ravel is the starting point (as a real opera) then perhaps other song-cycles more in stylistic keeping with that would have been better – the same composer’s Shéhérazade perhaps, or Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été for example. But these are welcome musical performances.
The post Royal College of Music – Opera Triple Bill – Britten, Weill and Ravel appeared first on The Classical Source.
