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Clkck - The Met in HD

Berlioz: Les Troyens, Opéra Bastille, Paris, 8,9 November 2006.

Les Troyens, in the revival of a 2000 Salzburg Festival production masterminded by the late Herbert Wernicke, is played out within an austere white-walled set with a big fissure down the centre through which the characters enter and exit, in the second part with the sea represented in the background as in baroque theatre. The enormous chorus, clad uniformly in black with Trojans and Carthaginians, distinguished by red or blue gloves, move formally, recalling Greek theatre. The performance is dominated by Deborah Polanski who takes on the double role of Cassandra in the first part La Prise de Troie Didon in Les Troyens á Carthage. Vocally and dramatically she is stupendous. Her partners in the action, Goële Le Roi as Ascagne in Troie and Jon Villars as Enée in Carthage are equal to the task of partnering her, giving sustained musical drama in the extended duets: the opening scene on a bleak corpse littered stage and the love scene during the Royal Hunt and Storm.

However, I must quarrel with two aspects. The love scene is accompanied by video images of bombed and burning buildings. My companions interpreted this as symbolising the passion and eroticism of what was going on. If so, it was a post-Freudian passion and eroticism imposed on the opera from outside, not the French romantic eroticism contained in the music. The other disappointments were the great rallying cries Italie, Italie at the end of the first act and awakening Enée from his post-coital slumber. These should dominate the opera. In Part 2, we had a man armed with a rifle waking Enée, saying ‘its time to get up now to go to Italy!

These were the only blemishes on a fine realisation of this masterpiece. There are too many scenes to record individually. Particularly poignant was the last scene with Didon, her sister Anna (Elena Zaremba) and an outstanding performance by Kwangchul Youn as Narbal. A wickedly unfair review in the French press said of Anna in the duet with Didon, she ‘semble jouer au concours de “Devine qui a le plus gros vibrato?”’ - if true, a remark worthy of Berlioz himself! Another complaint in the review is the number of non-French singers singing with imperfect accents. Perhaps this gives us a clue as to why Les Troyens does not get the recognition it deserves in France: the French have never produced singers capable of singing the leading roles. They seem to prefer Guillaume Tell, which we saw in a prestigious production at the Bastille in 2003. It has the reputation of being dramatically very weak. It is.

The Opéra Bastille is a monstrosity. The auditorium is cavernous, though the seats are comfortable and the acoustics good but the surroundings are awful, witBerlioz: Les Troyens, Opéra Bastille, Paris, 8,9 November 2006.h virtually nowhere to sit in the bar area. Furthermore it was impossible to pre-order interval drinks. I had never expected to hear in France the British Airways excuse: ‘it wouldn’t be fair on the other passengers’. Is that what they now mean by égalité?

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