I’m going to waffle a bit firstly of this submit. When you simply need to know concerning the manufacturing or the singing and enjoying, skip or scroll down.
I keep in mind as soon as, after I was a child in England, there was some Beethoven on the radio; piano music, most likely a concerto, and at one level, maybe throughout a cadenza, Beethoven stripped the rating proper all the way down to single notes performed with one finger. “That’s not very arduous,” mentioned my mom, drying a dish. Clearly, Beethoven wanted to tug his socks up. A good friend of mine, an beginner violinist, used to play with an eccentric chemistry don in Cambridge, an beginner pianist who, so the good friend advised me, recognized chemical substances by style. This don would solely consent to play tough duets; he had no time in any respect for something he thought-about simple. I actually, not so a few years in the past, went to the opening of a younger artist’s first solo present in Paris. His work was very seductive. I met a gallery particular person on the street afterwards, and advised him I needed to admit I used to be cautious (rightly or wrongly) of labor really easy to love. Final yr, one of many still-young artist’s work offered for $750,000.
I recalled all this at La Monnaie, throughout Iain Bell’s brand-new work, Medusa.
Bell, additionally nonetheless younger (at the very least from my vintage perspective) is an English composer specializing in vocal music. In 2013, Diana Damrau starred, as Moll Hackabout, in his first opera, A Harlot’s Progress. Their collaboration appears to have had a decisive affect on his subsequent work: not solely is Medusa, commissioned by La Monnaie, his sixth opera in simply 13 years, however it additionally calls, in a forged of eight, for 3 coloratura sopranos, one among whom, at the very least — my physique is aware of unheard-of songs Medusa herself — is anticipated, in the course of the course of the night (afternoon, within the current case), to progress from lyric to dramatic coloratura whereas her character evolves from fairly, heedless ingénue to the monster of fable — and past.
Medusa was my first encounter with Bell’s work. A brand new piece by a brand new composer will be arduous to apprehend on one listening, and arduous to explain adequately in writing afterwards. Although, in my expertise, usually highly effective and efficient, new operas can (in Europe at any fee) be grim and forbidding. So nevertheless rewarding they might be skilled stay and staged in the home, chances are you’ll not really feel like spending time curled up with them on the couch at dwelling. Bell’s rating (for typical orchestra with as of late’ beefed-up percussion, however no electronics) is, as Medusa’s librettist and stage director Lydia Steier factors out in this system notes, clearly and undeniably modern. However whereas modern, and by no means really pastiching, say, Puccini, it’s clearly rooted in classical opera traditions. Bell doesn’t, it appears, refuse repetition as a few of his colleagues do; so the various and varied components of rhythm, type, melody and vocal approach stick round lengthy sufficient to turn into recognizable. There are discernible “numbers” marked by adjustments of tempo, there are solos, duets and ensembles, trills and tremolos, a lullaby, a hymn, and so forth. And successive passages are atmospheric, tender, even palpably lyrical, evocative, menacing or – the rape particularly, with its thundering timpani – violent. Additionally, Bell units English nicely, and shows a Händelian knack for utilizing allusive motifs as an instance the textual content.
Consequently, with out feeling facile, or resorting, magpie-like, to eclectic borrowings (one thing that may make new American operas arduous for me), his Medusa comes throughout as fairly simply accessible: seductive, like that younger artist’s work. So I used to be, once more, and once more rightly or wrongly, suspicious. Have I inherited my mom’s obvious view that if one thing’s simple it could’t be a lot good? Is Medusa too approachable, too seductive, too simple to love, to be of lasting price? By the tip, I’d determined not solely that, extra comfortably than, say, Pintscher’s current Nuit sans aube, I’d have the ability to spend time curled up with it and a mug of cocoa at dwelling, however that attending to understand it higher, rising aware of its total type, its themes and melodies and harmonic and rhythmic progressions, may nicely show rewarding. I would turn into a Bell fan (would that be a Bell-boy?). The entire opera is out there on YouTube, so there’d be no excuse for not watching and listening once more, to search out out if that seductiveness is superficial and can climate off, or deeper and extra sturdy.
Lydia Steier’s identify has come up a number of instances in my posts lately, as I’ve seen her Paris Salome, which I used to be not so eager on, twice (2022, and 2024 for Lise Davidsen), and she or he additionally directed La Vestale right here, in 2024. Her libretto for Medusa is (so I learn; I can’t faux I’d have identified in any other case) largely a mix of Hesiod and Ovid, and tells the story just about as these of us prone to know such issues as of late understand it. “When Poseidon calls for Medusa’s submission, her sisters ship her to stay with the priestesses on the Temple of Athena, hoping to guard her from the ocean god…” and so forth, however with a shifting twist on the finish that recollects Elena Makropoulos/Emila Marty’s determination to not take the elixir once more: Sick of her monstrous destiny — by way of no fault of her personal however as a result of she was raped by Poseidon, condemned to a friendless, loveless, and childless life — she welcomes Perseus as a brotherly redeemer, and urges him to avoid wasting his mom by killing her.
Steier’s manufacturing is, in each acts, darkish, and succeeds in conjuring up a real sense of vintage tragedy unfolding, à la Götz Friedrich’s well-known Elektra, within the shadows. Within the first act, cellular items — platforms backed by a wall, generally two — are maneuvered spherical by creeping, crawling, barely seen creatures in black, to type levels, small or giant, inside the bigger stage. Their fixed rotating, becoming a member of and parting once more recommend the ebb and move of the ocean. Medusa’s immortal sisters, the maternally protecting Euryale and the pricklier, extra cantankerous Stheno, each with stiff, peaky wigs and expressionistic, are costumed in shiny, Victorian black. Medusa wears extra Edwardian white, with freely flowing lengthy hair, till she alters into stiff gold, with a inflexible head-dress of coiled plaits, to affix (reluctantly and with some bewilderment) the ranks of Athena’s identically-costumed, generally Gorgon-masked priestesses, and their noisy, coloratura boss, earlier than a flaming brazier.
White-haired Poseidon arrives in a white, three-piece swimsuit — the common entitled male – to “declare” Medusa in a graphic rape scene (to these thundering timpani). The rear partitions then half to confess Athena, a form golden corn-doll in bronze armor, twelve toes tall, gliding round like a monstrous Dalek on a remote-controlled dolly, to ship a terrific dressing-down, first to Medusa, then to the excessive priestess and all her acolytes. She condemns Medusa. Wailing paroxysm. Curtain.
Within the second act, the beforehand cellular platforms at the moment are slowed down in a tangled mass of petrified males’s our bodies, however the entire central mass rotates. Euryale, nonetheless in her shiny black crinoline, and Medusa, now sporting a reptilian body-stocking, whereas the snakes on her head (and their “hundred tongues that flit”) pulsate, like embers, with reddish mild, look again on a few of “this panoply of frozen males,” good-looking or not, apprehensive or warlike, all out to spill blood and carry off their trophy. Medusa recollects how rape has destroyed her physique and her life.
One other younger man, in black fatigues, seems, sword in hand and shielding his eyes, within the shadows, to die in an explosion of sudden yellow mild and stage smoke, to the sound of sirens – so we see the curse at work; however Medusa then grieves for her victims’ moms’ distress. In an agitated, bodily and vocally demanding solo — the soprano is required to be as a lot as dancer as a singer — she acknowledges the “subsequent recent idiot” by his scent, because the “starchild” (i.e., Perseus, son of Danae, and a fellow plaything of the gods) of the lullaby she used to listen to over the waves. The set continues to show as, in a protracted, complicated, emotional duet, progressing by way of recognition, sympathy, elation and collusion, with some ringing prime Bs (I believe) for each, Medusa begs Perseus for the “reward” of demise: “Starchild, you’re my mercy.” She even offers him some recommendation, Tosca-like, on go about it correctly. The sunshine adjustments abruptly from heat to chilly, he cuts off her head, the refrain sings out, the sisters arrive too late… The top.
The manufacturing is outstandingly nicely directed and lit, with stark beams casting expressionistic shadows, and the soloists evidently purchased into it in full: they sang and acted with ferocious dedication from begin to end. Solely Steier’s libretto — so far as I can inform from grubbing round on the web, that is most likely her first — is much less constant in register, slipping uncomfortably from modern crudeness to neo-Victorian euphemism.
Picture: Simon Van Rompay
Claudia Boyle (Medusa), whom I’d to date come throughout in A Quiet Place and The Exterminating Angel, was clearly absolutely the star within the persistently spectacular forged. The title position, as staged and even, you may say, choreographed by Steier, is, as I mentioned above, as demanding bodily as it’s vocally. The singer should, although motion, gesture and facial features, act out Medusa’s psychological and bodily evolution whereas singing a demanding coloratura half, extra delicate and different than these of the opposite, extra monolithically hectoring sopranos within the forged, Athena (Mary Elizabeth Williams) and her excessive priestess (Anu Komsi). Each had been new to me, each highly effective, Komsi maybe drier and edgier in sound than the juicier — and totally monstrous — Williams, who has already, I see, sung Isolde.
Paula Murrihy (Euryale) and Angela Denoke (Stheno) had been evenly matched and equal in wealthy depth because the immortal sisters, every, like all Bell’s characters, together with her personal, distinct vocal persona. The youthful Murrihy, whom I’d seen a few instances earlier than, as Janacek’s Fox and Britten’s Countess of Essex in Gloriana, was the extra supple of the 2. Denoke is, as nicely all know, a veteran singing actress, one I’ve seen many instances over time, the final being in 2022 as Klytemnestra in Carsen’s Elektra. Her voice got here throughout as now extra matronly, more durable on the prime. Younger Marie-Juliette Ghazarian, the third mezzo (if we will now take Denoke to be one), sang Danae’s lullaby lyrically from the wings.
I’d solely seen Russian bass Konstantin Gorny as soon as earlier than, additionally in Brussels, in a live performance efficiency of Parsifal through which Elena Pankratova’s commanding Kundry slightly unfairly shunted everybody else, nevertheless worthy, apart. He was a suitably gruff, tough Poseidon, maybe a contact nameless. Canadian Josh Lovell has to date been, I see, largely a baroque and Mozartian tenor, however to listen to him — and Bell’s writing for Perseus leads you to it — you’d think about him quickly shifting into roles like Rodolfo.
The refrain was stored within the background, so it’s arduous to search out something particular to say about their contributions. The orchestra, below Michiel Delanghe, may, I believed, have performed extra incisively and with better distinction, however when a bit is brand-new, it isn’t simple to say for certain.
All the singing on Sunday afternoon was strikingly highly effective and forcefully current, even up on the second balcony, the place I sit; a lot in order that two of us, independently, questioned if some type of synthetic lifting was in use. However our Belgian pals dismissed the concept. No matter. Medusa is a robust work, a welcome addition to the repertoire, and certain, I believe, to journey. We left the home impressed — even shocked.
