When Rameau composed this score in the early 1760's, Gluck was reforming opera and Haydn had appeared on the scene. In the end, Apollo himself appears from on high to reveal that Abaris is his son, begotten of a nymph in the line of the Boréas. I'll not soon forget the scene when a line of gray-cloaked attendants to the queen's suitors appear at the temple of Apollo with brooms they ruthlessly sweep away the fallen leaves and push apart the lovers. Moments of confrontation between the forces in the story are poignantly rendered.
He has responded to the tensions that lie below the surface of Rameau's courtly, rustic and pastoral dances by devising tightly wound, hyperkinetic movements for the dancers, who spin and turn, all jittery and mechanistic, with fidgety arms and kicking legs. Lock's choreography for an agile roster of solo dancers may divide opinion. These attractive and limber choristers could easily be mistaken for dancers, as they execute the athletic steps devised by the choreographer Édouard Lock.īut Mr. Christie has long attracted young, eager singers to Les Arts Florissants who are keen about acting and movement. That's the way the disciples live as well, for when we meet them they are dressed variously in white underwear and nightshirts, and nestling in loving couples atop a stage thickly strewn with autumnal leaves. But our sympathies are meant to go to the followers of the high priest, who support the claim of Abaris and urge the queen to follow her heart. In this production the Boréad suitors are backed up by attendants similarly garbed in gray suits and overcoats and carrying, in place of swords, umbrellas. Not even Vivaldi in "The Four Seasons" did a better job at conjuring hail storms, thunder and, in contrasting moments of calm, rippling brooklets and harmonically radiant bursts of sunlight. The elements are captured with special-effects exactitude in Rameau's orchestra. Carsen fills the stage with effects that suggest thick fog, howling winds and blistering snows. When the queen decides to forsake her throne and marry the man she loves, the gods unleash torrents of horrific weather as a punishment, or so it seems at first. But Alphise loves Abaris, a man of unknown parentage who has been raised by the high priest Adamas in the temple of Apollo. Two princely suitors who meet the test, Calisis and Borilée, pressure the queen to make up her mind and provide a king to her worried people. Fate decrees that Alphise must marry a descendant of Borée, god of the north winds. "Les Boréades" poses the question of whether the winds, storms and floods represent the attempts of the gods to coerce human behavior or whether these natural elements are metaphors for human emotions that are equally awesome and unruly. The production, given its premiere at the Paris Opera in March, is only the third staging ever of Rameau's posthumous "tragédie lyrique." The additional performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House tonight, Friday night and Sunday afternoon offer rare opportunities to revel in a beguiling presentation of a staggering masterpiece that has come to light only in the last 20 years.
It was immediately clear that the director Robert Carsen, with sets and costumes by Michael Levine, had devised a playful modern-dress concept for this mythological story that also tapped its dark subtext. The curtain went up to reveal the opera's distressed heroine, Queen Alphise of Bactria, in a dowdy blackish dress and high heels walking against a surreal sky blue backdrop amid a field thick with oddly stiff-stemmed flowers of every color. With two Baroque horns playing hunting calls from a low balcony to the left of the pit and two Baroque woodwinds erupting in dizzyingly virtuosic flights from the opposite balcony, you experienced the French Baroque equivalent of Surroundsound. Under the conductor William Christie, an incomparable interpreter of this 18th-century French master, the musicians of Les Arts Florissants brought crackling rhythmic brio to the jaunty music.
#ANNA MARIA PANZARELLA FULL#
Just moments into the overture of Rameau's miraculous final opera, "Les Boréades," at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Monday night, you knew you were in for a long, full evening of utterly vibrant music making. With Anna Maria Panzarella, left, and Paul Agnew in "Les Boréades." Opéra de Paris (Palais Garnier) // Les Boréades - in tournée a Brooklin
0 kommentar(er)
