There's hardly room to swing a metaphor...
Review of Independent Opera's Pelléas et Mélisande and Leon Fleisher at the Wigmore Hall
In his celebrated story of the cave, Plato taught us that what humans perceive as reality are 'mere imitations' of a higher reality too perfect for human understanding. But if art in its various forms has taught us anything, it is that representations may possess the greater force. This was the primary message of the Symbolist movement, of which Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck was a leading light in 1890s Paris. Pelléas et Mélisande, his best-known work, is a tale of forbidden love that takes the barest of shapes to show the tragedy and beauty of human longing. Mysterious and suggestive, peopled less by traditional characters than fleshed-out metaphors, it cries out for the musical setting given it 10 years later by another Symbolist, Claude Debussy. The result is both delightful and profound, but bewilderment is a constant risk.
Bewilderment was certainly the order of the day on finding that the enterprising Independent Opera planned to stage Debussy's opera in the minute Lilian Baylis Studio. The mystery dissolved, partially, on learning of the new orchestration by composer Stephen McNeff, which calls for a mere 35 instruments as opposed to nearly 100 in the original. Madeleine Boyd's ingeniously compact staging also responds to director Alessandro Talevi's efforts to undercut the emotional obscurity of the drama with an enhanced intimacy....
In his celebrated story of the cave, Plato taught us that what humans perceive as reality are 'mere imitations' of a higher reality too perfect for human understanding. But if art in its various forms has taught us anything, it is that representations may possess the greater force. This was the primary message of the Symbolist movement, of which Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck was a leading light in 1890s Paris. Pelléas et Mélisande, his best-known work, is a tale of forbidden love that takes the barest of shapes to show the tragedy and beauty of human longing. Mysterious and suggestive, peopled less by traditional characters than fleshed-out metaphors, it cries out for the musical setting given it 10 years later by another Symbolist, Claude Debussy. The result is both delightful and profound, but bewilderment is a constant risk.
Bewilderment was certainly the order of the day on finding that the enterprising Independent Opera planned to stage Debussy's opera in the minute Lilian Baylis Studio. The mystery dissolved, partially, on learning of the new orchestration by composer Stephen McNeff, which calls for a mere 35 instruments as opposed to nearly 100 in the original. Madeleine Boyd's ingeniously compact staging also responds to director Alessandro Talevi's efforts to undercut the emotional obscurity of the drama with an enhanced intimacy....
