Les Pêcheurs de Perles review – inconsistently ravishing

Metropolitan Opera, New York
With some superlative singing and an intelligent production, this Bizet opera should fly – but unfortunately the flaws in the work itself drag it back to earth

It’s hard to fault anyone for wanting to usher another opera by Bizet into the mainstream repertoire. Though the composer died at an early age – not long after completing the eventual warhorse Carmen – his lyric gifts and flair for orchestration are also present in his obscure stage works. The very existence of that wider oeuvre can give rise to a tantalising hope: that the right director, working with the right cast, might provide a certain substance that was lacking in one of the lesser scenarios, thereby making it worthwhile to mount more of Bizet’s output.

The Met has thrown everything they have at Les Pêcheurs de Perles (the consensus runner-up to Carmen, in Bizet’s canon). The current new production, shared with English National Opera, serves in New York as a vehicle for star soprano Diana Damrau. The intelligent staging comes from director Penny Woolcock. And filling out the scenario’s love-triangle concept are a pair of top-tier voices belonging to legitimate actors: baritone Mariusz Kwiecien and tenor Matthew Polenzani. The singers all have urgent-feeling moments in the show, but even with this notable creative team, the opera makes for an inconsistently ravishing night.

One enduring problem is that the libretto’s richest dramatic characterisations tend to come in solo moments, while the ensemble scenes feel cut-and-pasted from better narratives. When Nadir, a prodigal-son member of an ancient Ceylon pearl-fisher community, comes back to town and recommits to an oath with his old friend, the local politician Zurga, things only begin to get interesting when Nadir admits to the audience that he has in fact been keeping tabs on Leïla, the woman both men swore not to pursue.

Polenzani was never more affecting, on Monday night, than when he delivered act one’s Je crois entendre encore with a hushed vulnerability that didn’t stint on any of the piercing clarity needed during its suspended, high-flying finale. This familiar excerpt is sometimes interpreted purely for its gorgeousness – without any suggestion of the singer being troubled. Polenzani’s torment was palpable, and of a piece with other stray lines in the opera that sculpt Nadir’s more socially defiant side. The tenor received a grand ovation when it was over – and it even began with the ultimate audience compliment (that being a house that stayed fully silent for a second or two, instead of rushing into perfunctory applause).

When Nadir clashed with Zurga, later on, both Polenzani and Kwiecien showed off their rich, house-filling voices, but the drama felt comparatively rote: two men struggling over a woman, end of story. Damrau’s gleaming voice likewise fared best during Leïla’s act two aria Comme autrefois. Elsewhere, her committed physical back-and-forth with a jealous Kwiecien, in the final act, was well executed – but once again, not particularly distinct as drama. The best aspect of the big group scenes turned out to have nothing to do with the narrative, as conductor Gianandrea Noseda (just this week tapped to lead Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra) savoured every colouristic turn of the nuanced score wedded to this underperforming story.

The most intellectually intriguing aspect of the production is the subtle way Woolcock has modernised the setting. It’s not merely that she’s included televisions in the background and outboard motors on the riverboats. (This is expected in contemporary stagings, even ones that aren’t aggressively avant garde.) While the Met’s program notes for this 19th-century opera rightly begin with a quote from Edward Said’s Orientalism (as if to say, we now perceive better the limitations of this historical approach to characterisation), Woolcock offers a more substantive corrective right after the overture.

As members of the Met’s powerful chorus are introducing the audience to Bizet’s self-consciously exotic narrative set-up – in which an eastern pearl fisher community is in need of a mystic singer to ward away mythic dangers – we see that the landscape of this working-class community is dominated by a modern-feeling billboard that exploits the same ideal of elite feminine glamour that can now be found everywhere in the world, thanks to commodity culture and globalisation. This choice helps de-emphasise the limp and lazy exoticism of Bizet’s librettists, and brings the world of the story closer to our own perceptions. Similarly, when the character of Zurga first strides on stage to scare up some votes from the villagers, Woolcock has members of the chorus distributing cheap, flimsy masks bearing Kwiecien’s own face – a neat effect that looks like the cheap politicking that it is.

It can start to feel like Woolcock is on the the verge of making Les Pêcheurs de Perles feel contemporary, and profound. But in the end, she doesn’t have a trick up her sleeve that can fix the jagged, plot-twisty ending (long judged implausible, even by operatic standards). Eventually, the twists just come to seem psychologically arbitrary – stranding even these capable actors and this smart director. The great moments of singing in this production are worth hearing, but once it’s over, the dream of a classic-feeling Bizet rarity remains stubbornly unrealised. It just may be the case that posterity sometimes gets the critical rankings correct.

Contributor

Seth Colter Walls

The GuardianTramp

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