Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is famously and beautifully a sparse opera, adapting the Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck whose drama is structured not so much as a continuous narrative as by its succession of episodes centred symbolically on certain objects, ideas or incidents. Jenny Ogilvie’s production hauntingly reduces that dramaturgical leanness further by making it essentially a play of shadow and illumination, concentrating on the libretto’s many references to light amidst the gloomy, decaying atmosphere of the kingdom of Allemonde. Light emanates from different sources in each scene – strip and stage lights, a torch, a lantern – which are often invisibly manipulated, drawn across the stage, or dangled over it so that they seem no less mysterious or sinister than the dark scene they are supposed to clarify. An abstract cubist facade stands in as the old castle, moving back and forth over a chequerboard floor, evoking the Gothic, mediaeval spirit of a fairytale, as do some of the characters’ costumes, the latter mixed up with a flavour of the 1950s.
Those elements conjure a timeless story of human relationships that are thwarted or unhappy, unable to flourish on account of a lack of communication, trust or openness. There are even three servants who occasionally appear, gazing out menacingly to the audience at the opening of two different scenes with unspoken dialogue briefly added for them in the surtitles, as though struck dumb by the castle’s inertia. Yet they appear to become the agent of death as they sweep in with black Roman-style hairpieces, as though the Fates of Classical mythology, heralding Mélisande’s demise.
A couple of brief glimpses of joy or renewal ironically underline the prevailing malaise: the developing erotic frisson between the lovers as Mélisande plays with her hair up in the tower is here rendered by having her on a swing, presumably recalling Fragonard’s famous rococo painting with its profusion of colour and joy contrasting with the tragedy of this drama. In the final scene, she lies dying on a bed of flowers – just about the only manifestation of life and colour that has appeared during the course of the drama, apart from the characters themselves – surrounded by a glass screen, like the bodies of embalmed saints that are found on the altars of Mediterranean Catholic churches; the flowers, and her newly-born baby in a niche underneath, paradoxically point towards a possible revival of life within Allemonde at the point of her death. And yet she, and what might have become her shrine, are drawn away into the darkness, leaving the sobbing Golaud alone on stage at the end, seemingly still neither redeemed nor renewed after his encounter with the mysterious young woman, ultimately centring the opera upon his tragedy rather than on that of the illicit passion between the title characters.
Brett Polegato masterfully embodies Golaud’s emotional aloofness with a tight control and staidness over the music, and tellingly only erupting into forceful expression at moments of frustrated anger. While maintaining the overall withdrawn character of the opera’s score, the lovers are comparably more lyrical, Karim Sulayman’s Pelléas with a light, slightly lilting head voice, and Kateryna Kasper cultivating an aptly nervous, brittle edge to her otherwise silvery-sounding Mélisande. Julian Close’s gravelly Arkel wonderfully encapsulates king Arkel’s well-meaning but aged effeteness, contrasting with Catherine Carby’s more determined, rounder tone as his daughter Geneviève (the mother of Golaud and Pelléas). Nia Coleman is just as effective as Yniold, the elder of Golaud’s children, with a tinge in the voice that is redolent of a young boy.
Anthony Negus shapes and colours the score magnificently with the Longborough Festival Orchestra. His extensive experience in Wagner pays off richly in directing flexibly the subtle shifts and surges in tempo across the continuous music of each scene. The half-veiled timbre of the orchestral texture exactly replicates the spectral hues of the drama on stage, occasionally flaring up for moments of heightened tension, or bringing to bear the grandeur of Parsifal’s transformation scene to the Grail temple in the somewhat similar scene of the characters’ gathering in the castle during the interlude in Act One. But even the soft instrumental shadings are often revelatory and rarely can such understatement in terms of sound and action be as hypnotically compelling as in this production.
Further performances to 10 July
The post Longborough Festival 2025 – Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande – with Karim Sulayman, Kateryna Kasper & Brett Polegato; directed by Jenny Ogilvie; conducted by Anthony Negus appeared first on The Classical Source.
