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Opera Japonica/Archives/Letters from Paris 2004
19/04/08 21:42
Rebecca Brite's Letters from Paris 2004
April
Tannhäuser at
the Théâtre du
Châtelet: Peter
Seiffert as
Tannhäuser
(far left) and
Petra-Maria
Schnitzer as
Elisabeth.
Photo: M N Robert
Paris in April saw a new production of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Théâtre du Châtelet. It was
beautifully performed and minimally produced. With no bacchanal, and the song contest reduced to a
'mano a mano' between Tannhäuser and Wolfram, this was an abbreviated (just over three-hour) version
of the Paris Tannhäuser that Wagner did in 1859-61, some 15 years after the work’s German premiere.
The cerebral production was by Andreas Homoki, intendant of the Berlin Komische Oper, with resolutely
abstract sets and vaguely modern costumes by his frequent collaborator Wolfgang Gussmann.
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seated next to your correspondent sniffled surreptitiously throughout both acts and no we don’t think it was a cold. Dutch soprano
Eva-Maria Westbroek made an outstanding debut with the Opéra national de Paris as Madame Lidoine (the new prioress); and her
return as Chrysothemis at season’s end will be welcome. Two French stalwarts, tenor Yann Beuron and baritone Alain Vernhes,
respectively the Chevalier and Marquis de La Force, gave still further reminders of how lucky Paris is to have them. Another
regular, Michel Sénéchal, was badly cast as the Aumônier du Carmel (the convent’s chaplain) and his voice is about gone. Alas,
the same must be said of Anja Silja as Mère Marie.
Dialogues des
Carmélites:
Anja Silja as
Mère Marie
(kneeling at
left) and Dawn
Upshaw as
Blanche with
the newly
secularized nuns
in the former
convent chapel
Photo: Eric
Mahoudeau
© Rebecca Brite, 4 December 2004
December
Il barbiere di
Siviglia at the
Bastille: Bruce
Ford as Almaviva,
Dalibor Jenis as
Figaro, Alberto
Rinaldi as Bartolo,
Kristinn
Sigmundsson as
Basilio, Jeannette
Fischer as Berta
and Maria Bayo as
Rosina, at the end
of the first act
Photo: Eric Mahoudeau
Like lyric music lovers elsewhere, French audiences expect light fare at holiday time and tend to come
out in greater than usual numbers for such events. While the Théâtre du Châtelet was reprising the
Offenbach operetta we reported on here a couple of months ago, the Opéra national de Lyon was also
doing its best to oblige the holiday crowds, presenting the French premiere of Moskva, Cheryomushki, a
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musical comedy by … Dmitri Shostakovich.
Ah, yes, Shostakovich, the Lehár of Leningrad, the Muscovite Meredith Wilson – NOT. But nor, on the
other hand, are we talking Symphony No. 14 or even The Nose here. The composer of Moskva,
Cheryomushki is the Shostakovich who, after all, wrote Tahiti Trot, the jazz orchestra suites and all those
film scores, and who early on had a job as pianist in a silent movie palace.
Dmitri Shostakovich's
Moskva, Cheryomushki
at the Opéra de Lyon:
New residents of the
Cherry Tree Apartments
welcome Elena
Bakanova as Liussia the
construction worker
Photo: Gérard Amsellem
He dashed off most of this very Soviet operetta (variously translated as Moscow, Cherry Tree Towers,
Wild Cherry Quarter, Cherry Tree Estates, Cherry Town) in 1958 during the brief Khrushchevian cultural
liberalization. It was commissioned by the Moscow Operetta Theater, whose musical director, Grigory
Stolyarov, had conducted the ill-fated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk twenty years earlier. The theater had
recently lost Stalin's tame tunesmith, Isaak Dunayevsky, a probable suicide at age 55. So, well, why not
ask the Soviet Union's greatest composer to step in? For the book, Stolyarov engaged humorists Vladimir
Mass et Mikhail Chervinsky, who concocted a tale of young love and urban planning. It premiered in
January 1959. The work's widest popularity came after Shostakovich, at the urging of his friend Isaak
Glikman, adapted the music for Gerbert Rappaport's 1963 film Cheryomushki.
Shostakovich seems to have had mixed feelings about Moskva, Cheryomushki. During the first
rehearsals he wrote to Glikman that he was 'dying of shame', but when the film came out he pronounced
it 'not bad'. Stolyarov and the original cast recorded excerpts for Melodiya in 1959, and the film was a
holiday perennial on Soviet TV until the mid-1970s, then the work basically vanished for 20 years or so.
The English composer and Shostakovich booster Gerard McBurney resurrected it in pocket version for
Pimlico Opera in 1994, Chandos brought out the first complete recording under Gennady
Rozhdestvensky in 1997, the University of Geneva staged a French adaptation of McBurney's version in
2004 and the Vienna Chamber Opera will give the work's Austrian premiere, in a production by Nicola
Raab titled Moscow, Moscow, in May and June.
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Moskva,
Cheryomushki:
Elena Bakanova as
Liussia, Oxana
Shilova as Masha,
Bertrand Chuberre
as Sasha, Andrei
Ilyushnikov as
Sergei, Andrew
Greenan as Baburov
and Ekaterina
Sherbashenko as
Lidotchka at the
'Bench of Truth'
Photo: Gérard Amsellem
It was a French husband-wife team of theater directors, Macha Makeieff and Jérôme Deschamps, who
talked Serge Dorny, the Belgian manager of the Opéra de Lyon, into programming as his holiday season
treat a virtually unknown musical by a composer who until recently was much less appreciated in France
than in the UN or UK. The couple, who co-directed this charming production with Makeieff also doing
the sets, costumes and dialogue adaptation, in turn claim inspiration from Jacques Tati's films,
particularly Mon Oncle. The creators of the zany TV show Les Deschiens, they were also responsible for
the production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail that Marc Minkowski directed last summer at Aix-enProvence.
Moskva, Cheryomushki pokes good-natured, and not terribly daring, fun at many familiar foibles of the
Soviet system with a story of four couples whose dreams revolve around the spanking new Cherry Tree
housing complex - a real Moscow suburban neighborhood, apparently a seemingly endless series of sixfloor apartment blocks that, not surprisingly, is said to be pretty shabby nowadays. Sasha, who works at
the hilariously bleak Museum of Moscow History and Reconstruction, is married to Masha but the
housing shortage means they've never had a chance to live together till now. Sasha's bluestocking
colleague Lidochka catches the eye of lonely Boris, visiting the museum with his friend Sergei,
chauffeur to Drebednyov, a petty bureaucrat involved with the Cherry Tree project who has a new young
trophy wife, Vava. Sergei secretly loves the feisty Liussia, a construction worker on the project. When
Drebednyov tries to take over the new apartment of Lidochka and her father, Baburov, to satisfy Vava's
desire for a boudoir, Liussia rallies Sasha, Masha and the other newcomers to the neighborhood. The
final scene is a fantasy involving a bench in the courtyard that forces whoever sits on it to speak the
truth. With its help, the honest comrades vanquish the greedy apparatchiks, and Sergei and Liussia at last
confess their love, though the fate of Lidochka and Boris is left somewhat ambiguous.
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Moskva,
Cheryomushki: Elena
Bakanova as Liussia
and Andrei Ilyushnikov
as Sergei sing of their
love
Photo: Gérard Amsellem
Aside from the opening scene amid a pitiful handful of museum displays, the Lyon production took place
in a giant doll's house of a set showing six flats in the not-quite-finished housing project and the office
of the building supervisor, a henchman of Drebednyov named Barabachkin. As was clear from a look at
the printed libretto (provided in full, in both French and Russian, in a program only slightly less bulky
than War and Peace), Makeieff's adaptation lopped away great swaths of spoken dialogue. This was
greatly to the benefit not only of an audience that included many children, but also of the many Russians
in the cast, who had to deliver their spoken lines in French.
Moskva, Cheryomushki:
Elena Bakanova as
Liussia, Andrei
Ilyushnikov as Sergei,
André Morsch as Boris,
Ekaterina Sherbashenko
as Lidotchka, Oxana
Shilova as Masha and
Bertrand Chuberre as
Sasha
Photo: Gérard Amsellem
The singing, however, was in Russian, and while the mostly young cast generally did a fine job, the
evening's stars were Elena Bakanova as Liussia, whose fast vibrato and brightness of tone give her
soprano a wide palette of shimmering color; her Sergei, Andrei Ilyushnikov, who stood out not only as
the one tenor in the bunch but also as a strong musician of considerable promise; and bass Alexander
Gerasimov as Barabachkin, like Ilyushnikov a soloist with the Mariinsky Academy of Young Singers.
Comedians Lorella Cravotta and Robert Horn, familiar to many in the audience from Les Deschiens and
other Deschamps-Makeieff endeavors, made an assortment of comic non-singing appearances.
Conductor Alexander Lazarev and the Lyon Opera Orchestra and Chorus gave a sprightly and humorous
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reading of the rather repetitive score; it had its catchy bits but on the whole seemed meatless except for
occasional moments (mostly in the bad guys' music) that sounded almost, er, like Shostakovich. This
production of Moskva, Cheryomushki is also scheduled for early 2007 at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in
Liège, Belgium.
Il barbiere di
Siviglia at the
Opéra Bastille:
Bruce Ford as the
Count and Sergei
Stilmachenko as his
servant Fiorello in
the opening scene
Photo: Eric Mahoudeau
The holiday fare on offer from the Opéra national de Paris was ballet, Baroque (see below) and Il barbiere di Siviglia at the
Bastille. When this production by filmmaker Coline Serreau first opened in 2002, its feminist take on the Beaumarchais story was
seen by some as strident, and its setting in the Spain of the Cordoba caliphate called up uncomfortable echoes of the Afghanistan
invasion then still fresh in many minds. There was also a certain skepticism about moving Rossini's little gem to the enormous
Bastille, but the sumptuous arabesque sets of Jean-Marc Stehlé and Antoine Fontaine put those fears to rest and the current revival
(to February 6) was greeted with pretty much universal rapture.
Returning from the first run were guitar-strumming Slovak baritone Dalibor Jenis as Figaro, American tenor Bruce Ford as
Almaviva, Icelandic bass Kristinn Sigmundsson as a towering Don Basilio (a role being taken over in January by Vladimir
Ognovenko) and Swiss soprano Jeanette Fischer as Berta. All were in good voice and humor, as was Alberto Rinaldi as Dr
Bartolo. The soprano Rosina, Spanish diva Maria Bayo, replacing the originally scheduled French mezzo Sophie Koch, did an
outstanding job. Daniel Oren kept things moving in the pit from the first chord of the familiar overture, delivered as a stand-alone
showpiece. The men of the Paris Opera Chorus, moving as if they'd worn voluminous baggy trousers all their lives, provided
stalwart support. On January 28, French conductor Marc Piollet, musical director at Vienna's Volksoper, takes over from Oren in
an eagerly awaited first appearance with the Opéra national de Paris.
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Il barbiere di
Siviglia: Dalibor
Jenis as Figaro,
Maria Bayo as
Rosina, Bruce Ford
as Almaviva and
Alberto Rinaldi as
Bartolo give the Act
II heave-ho to
Kristinn
Sigmundsson as
Basilio
Photo: Eric Mahoudeau
Bayo will cede Rosina's veil in mid-January to American mezzo Joyce DiDonato, who until late December could be heard at the
Opéra Garnier in the Luc Bondy - Arts Florissants production of Handel's 1745 musical drama, Hercules. Heard, that is, if one
managed to get tickets to this unexpected smash hit. The buzz from Aix-en-Provence, where the production was first staged last
summer (see the Archives for Pieter Bijlsma's Opera japonica review), was excited despite Richard Peduzzi's deliberately
unattractive sets (the word 'bunker' appeared in review after review) and Rudy Sabounghi's nondescript modern costumes. This
was partly due to the reputation of the 56-year-old Bondy - Swiss-born, French-reared, long a mainstay of German theaters and
opera houses, and here tackling Handel for the first time. Moreover, the work, popularized (relatively speaking) by Marc
Minkowski in concert performances and the 2002 recording with Anne Sofie von Otter, had never before been staged in France.
And William Christie, enjoying a most successful 60th birthday year, is always a hot ticket in Paris.
Handel's Hercules
at the Opéra
Garnier: Toby
Spence as Hyllus
and Joyce
DiDonato as
Dejanira with the
chorus in one of the
opening scenes
Photo: Eric Mahoudeau
The libretto by Handel's clergyman friend, Thomas Broughton (after Ovid and Sophocles), tells of the killing power of jealousy.
Hercules, returning from the last of his labors, brings with him a beautiful prisoner, Iole. His son, Hyllus, is captivated by the
captive, but the hero's wife, Dejanira, is wrongly convinced the younger woman is a rival. Hoping to regain love she has never
really lost, Dejanira gives Hercules a cloak that she thinks is a love charm but that in fact has been poisoned by the hero's old
enemy Nessus the centaur. Hercules dies and Dejanira goes spectacularly mad ('Chain me, ye Furies, to your iron beds/And lash
my guilty ghost with whips of scorpions!').
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Everyone from the Aix cast returned except Camilla Tilling as Iole, replaced at the Garnier by Swedish soprano Ingela Bohlin.
DiDonato won raves as Dejanira while English tenor Toby Spence, an increasingly familiar and welcome presence on French
stages, was applauded as a fresh and youthful Hyllus. Hercules was sung by English baritone William Shimell and Lichas by
Swedish mezzo Malena Ernman.
Hercules: by the closing chorus, the hero is dead
but his statue lives on
Photo: Eric Mahoudeau
© Rebecca Brite, 5 May 2005
Rebecca Brite moved to Paris in 1980 as a copy editor for the International Herald Tribune. A native of the American Midwest,
she attended her first operas as a teenager in Omaha, Nebraska. Since 1990 she has worked as a freelance editor, writer and
occasional tour guide in Paris. Her professional and personal interests include environmental and energy issues, travel and
tourism, American traditional music, opera, cinema, and the history of Paris. She divides her affections between an Englishman
and two Russian Blue cats.
See other letters in the Archives.
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