Debussy - Pelleas et Melisande / Gardiner, Alliot-Lugaz, Le Roux, Opera National de Lyon

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Claude Debussy's great literary opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck's dramatic reading of the classic tale of sibling rivalry, was first performed in 1902. This 1988 production was recorded at the Opéra national de Lyon, swapping a traditional medieval forest setting for a fin de siècle Castle Allemonde in which the characters wander through vast, shadowy, and empty halls. The cast features Colette Alliot-Lugaz as a mercurial Mélisande and François Le Roux as a Byronic Pelléas, with José van Dam as his brother Golaud, the austere fly in the ointment.

Little actually happens on stage. The characters circle each other, describing events and emotions which they only half understand. Often, their recitative is introspective rather than a means of external communication. The drama is played out in the landscape of the mind, punctuated and emphasized by Debussy's remarkable, brooding, and atmospheric score. At times, it becomes the swirling stuff of nightmare, an aspect to which John Eliot Gardiner's assured conducting pays close attention. The opera might come to its inevitable end, but there is a strong sense that these ghost-like figures are doomed to repeat their tragic tale endlessly. Uncomfortably haunting stuff, with moments of breathtaking beauty. --Piers Ford

Description

Claude Debussy's only opera, which brilliantly conveys a dark, otherworldly mysteriousness through its breathtakingly beautiful music, tells the story of two young lovers who are tragically torn apart. Pelleas and Melisande fall deeply in love, but their union is doomed by the anger and vengefulness of the aging Golaud, Melisande's estranged husband. Pierre Strosser's highly original interpretation strips the masterpiece from its usual mythical setting and uses intimate camerawork to emphasize the tension and drama in this striking version of "Pelleas et Melisande." John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Orchestra of the Opera National de Lyon.

Customer Reviews:

compare Jonathan Miller.......2005-12-27

For those who found this production too static, please watch the DVD of Handel's Tamerlano directed for the Halle Festival by Jonathan Miller. In an interview that's part of the bonus material, Miller explains his philosophy of directing operas. Basically, sometimes there is no need to have people moving about the stage. The Pelleas et Melisande with Gardiner and all is so gripping that there is no need for running about the stage. This is one of the very few times I have approved of tampering with a composer's stage directions -- and this is the first time I really enjoyed a production of P&M.

Mesmerizing.......2004-12-08

This performance is consistently and repeatedly (I've been drawn back to it many times) engrossing and ...yes. .mesmerizing. The poetic essential interpretation allows the mystery and power of this most delicious score to stay at the fore -- no distractions. To address a complaint made by others, the sound on my DVD is fine -- no problems at all.

Bad bad sound!.......2002-07-15

The staging is okay, but the sound is ABSOLUTELY terrible.
Just can't understand they actually are selling this product!

Dream cast, wonderful musically, but a missed opportunity........2002-07-02

This could well have been the Pelléas & Mélisande you've been dreaming of. To begin with, the cast is all francophone, which in a so text-dependent opera as this surely must count as an important advantage; it shares with precious few other operas a libretto of such high literary quality, a significant portion of Maeterlinck's original play having found an almost verbatim placing in the opera.

Some readers may remember Alliot-Lugaz's outstanding Mélisande from her Decca 3-cd album conducted by Dutoit that came out some 10 or 12 years ago, a recording that preserved her rôle's characterisation in sound that fittingly finds a logical companion in this roughly contemporary video production. Le Roux is the true french baryton, that sort of noble high baritone (or low tenor if you prefer) that comes around seldomly and that makes some rôles in french opera so hard to bring off succesffuly, the true successor to that illustrious line of singers epitomised by Hughes Cuénod. By 1987 Van Dam was still capable of bringing off startling results even though he was past his prime, and the rest of the cast also achieve a superior level of accomplishment. In no less good form are Gardiner and his Lyons forces, to whom he was closely associated at the time, who carry this music (and the whole and very significant cultural baggage behind it) in their blood. So there you are, you're in posession of practically all of the lottery tickets, so what's keeping you from winning out right?

Let's go now into that. First of all, the production itself gets tiresome after a while. Pelléas & Mélisande is a dangerous work to produce in the theatre, there's little stage action per se along the 5 acts, events succeed one another slowly and you may end up with a sublime piece of music that bores your audience, no less. And the ideas put into practice here don't help at all: décors don't change at all, the 5 acts happen in the same drawing room of some large bourgeois house from approximately the time the work was composed, and stage action is mostly evoked rather than actually shown: no forest, no fountain, no sea cave, no tower from which Mélisande's hair hangs down, and so on. So there are many situations where concrete places and events are referred to in the text that don't find a stage correlation, as in for example the very first scene, where Golaud and Mélisande don't actually meet in the forest as is actually sung and supposed to happen on stage, but we rather watch an old and perhaps embittered Golaud who half drunkenly reminisces at those events, which may have taken place many years ago. So you end up listening to a dialogue in which only one of its participants is present and seen (?) but both are heard loud and clear. And so with the rest of the work, there's more that doesn't work in the end in the production than what does: Pelléas & Mélisande's hair hanging from the tower scene happens here in the same drawing room, Mélisane's hair hanging ... from a sofa. The main idea behind the production may seem interesting at first, but does tire after a while. And second, the sound: in my copy at least, it starts okay, begins to deteriorate once the 3rd act begins and keeps going downhill from then on. I don't know if this problem affects only Image's US release (or a portion thereof) or if this defect is also present in the European discs of the same performance published by Arthaus Musik (but they also advertise an NTSC release in their website, so I guess you may care to look it up).

Summing up, I'd state that if your copy's sound is alright throughout (assuming the problem described above affected only a batch of Image's US release from which unfortunately my copy was a part), buy it as many years may still go by before a similar cast is gathered and so successfully bring off the music. Visually, and in spite of some strikingly beautiful images, it is likely that the production will end up losing its interest, so you may end up turning off the TV and just enjoying some of the most glorious music put out during the turn of the XX century, magnificently sung and played by cast and orchestra. But for that perhaps you may have to end up digging up the NTSC Arthaus Musik issue. Image should take note of this problem.

Review originally written in 2002 / February 2005 addenda: I wrote Image several times complaining on the sound deterioration problem, which has been pointed out not only by me but also by others in their comments on this disc. When they finally replied, they did so to state that the problem was in the source material licenced them by RM Associates; to me at least, acknowledging this fact but not giving any warning in the box to prospective customers is utterly censorable. Also, as I changed by old DVD deck for a new Philips multi-colour television standard (PAL/NTSC) and multi-region one, I purchased from Amazon France Arthaus Musik's PAL-encoded release of the same performance (the NTSC TV standard version catalogue number having disappeared from their website lists since when I wrote the original review in 2002): the image quality is comparable to Image's but the sound is absolutely beautiful throughout (what happened to Image's report on the fault being on the original material?). So, if your DVD deck can play Region 2 discs and is also able to read PAL-encoded material, definitely go for the Arthaus Musik release.

The Sound is BAD.......2002-06-08

I have to agree with "A Viewer From San Francisco"'s review.
If you already have a good knowledge of this work, the unusual
staging could be described as "interesting"; if you don't,
well, Pelleas and Melisande is already baffling enough (it's
supposed to be). But the sound in the later part of the
disc (after the layer switch perhaps, is this an authoring
error?) is absolutely atrocious. Hopefully Image may be
able to correct this problem, or another video production will

surface. This beautiful music deserves much better.

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