It is a beloved subject on the somewhat mature drink: “Ah, do you like opera?” “I no longer now that directing are often so modern.” Or: “I prefer to see Opera in the cinema, what you see there [producties van de New Yorkse Metropolitan Opera] is often so nice and beautiful and old -fashioned. ”
A Rosenkavalier with rustling skirts or Don Carlos in velvet: the craving for performances that visually connect with the action or anticipation time is easily tangible. But also, often, unnecessarily nostalgic: if a director understands and depicts the essence of an opera, it does not matter whether the decoration of oak and velvet is, or of denim and ikear-chipboard. Then Opera does its job as a total theater, and drags the mix of game, orchestra and sing in turn.
Director Peter Sellars (67) caused a furore in the 1980s with his radical theater, followed by opera productions that are stimulated and discussion bearded. Think: Mozarts Figaro In the Trump Tower, a Don Giovanni Those fries ate, a Händel in which the coloratures of Cleopatra coincided unforgettable with the water droplets raised by her toe from the swimming pool. Peter Sellars was – somewhat irreverently summarized in one sentence – the cherished enfant terrible of deeply committed, for a better, more inclusive and just world -aging Control theater.
Twin
And now there is Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ‘Tweelingen-Opera’ Castor et Pollux (1737) in Paris, a production with a high ‘a detour’ factor. Reason: Sellars is linked to the fact that the other committed enfant terrible of the opera world, the Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, known for the uncompromising perfection in which he-not for nothing called ‘utopia’.
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On paper it is a heavenly match: an opera about brothers and love and war, performed by the utopian twins Currentzis sellars. The practice is more unruly. The production has heavenly moments, but only musical. The management concept is too lean to hold the tension for an evening.
The plot of Castor et PolluxRameau’s the third opera, is simple: supreme god Jupiter has made his son Pollux immortal, while Castor dies in battle. Both love the same woman, Télaïe, who marries Pollux but keeps to Castor. Happy End: Jupiter lets both live on as the constellation twins in the night sky.
Videos (from Alex Macinnis) on a large screen make that nightly sky visible. As in a planetarium you see poetic star bodies, the earth, cities at night, clouds and fog – and sporadically some dystopic high -rise buildings or a busy highway.
Sellars’ approach on the stage before is intimate. The gods experience their oh so human intrigues in a cycle tone: sofa, blanket box (also access to hell), shower, kitchen, seating area. What the plot has to sail in this is the interaction with the Urban Dance group of choreographer Cal Hunt flown from New York. But no matter how imposing agile, their ‘flexing’ (think: snake -like hip -hop dance) is mainly free and spontaneous – and appears to be unsuitable to give the story an extra layer. After an hour the surprise effect was worn into a ‘there they are again’ – and then you have to go for two and a half hours.
The match that appears to be heavenly is that between Currentzis, his choir and orchestra and Rameau. Rameau’s extreme harmonic originality, the mix of subdued mourning sangs and euphoric choirs: they are pumps to Currentzis’ extremely detailed conducting hands, each of which of the 28 finger legs seems to suffer their own life. He sculpts great moments with it: the saturated beauty with which blazers and strings flow with soprano Jeanine de Bique (Télaire) in the Aria ‘Tristes Apprêts, Pâles flambeaux’, for example, is really breathtaking. Unforgettable: that pagots can play so whisper quietly. And insane: how the choir can swell and extinguish together in one phrase.
In the cast, Laurence Kilsby is remarkably vulnerable and beautiful as (including) Amor. In the perfectly sung brother roles, Reinoud van Mechelen (Castor) is the human, vulnerable, and Marc Maillon (Pollux) the more unapproachable. But it is Currentzis that occasionally gives you a real euphoor feeling. Musicians who together make perfection sounding, that is right utopian.