INDEPENDENT OPERA at Sadler's Wells

Pelléas et Mélisande

Reviews

Times2

Pelléas et Mélisande at Sadler’s Wells

By Hilary Finch

‘…To cut through the dark forest of symbolism and find the compassion at the heart of Debussy’s opera you have to come in close. And that is exactly what Independent Opera has done…’

‘…The orchestral undergrowth has been cleared by Stephen McNeff, in his translucent, yet entirely Debussyian, new orchestration for just 35 instruments. And, in the tiny space of the Lilian Baylis Theatre, Alessandro Talevi has devised a production that pares down the psychological implications of Maeterlinck’s words and Debussy’s score to almost Strindbergian bare bones…’

‘…In Madeleine Boyd’s design… the characters emerge from a fractured Art Nouveau demi-world into the great gaping nowhere of the kingdom of Allemonde. The Middle Ages give way to an uneasy Victorian milieu, suffocating and alienating the human spirit.’

‘… Responses seem to drift up from the score itself, passionately conducted by Dominic Wheeler, and from the minutely observed body language of Talevi’s stagecraft… the three levels are used eloquently to express loss, tenderness and brutality, fear and domination. Hand-operated pulleys, as in a period theatre, enable Julie Pasturaud’s Geneviève and the wheelchair-bound Arkel, sung in dark and beautifully sustained French by Frédéric Bourreau, to glide in from the shadows...’

‘…Ingrid Perruche is an intensely yet simply sung pre-Raphaelite beauty of a Mélisande, lost in an isolation intruded upon by both the sweetness and strength of Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy’s superbly sung Pelléas, and by the locked-in fear of Andrew Foster- Williams’s Golaud…’