SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

When I have complained about one or another flaw in a performance, a friend of mine, himself a conductor of no mean gifts, has sometimes replied, “Oh, well, I go to hear the music, not the performance.” That sounds like a splendid principle, a noble one even. But it underestimates the effect performance can have on the impact a given work, especially an unfamiliar one, makes on the listener.

Hearing, let us say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or any other piece that I have heard dozens or even hundreds of times, I can certainly make allowance for shortcomings in the work of conductor or orchestra, and not lose my perception of the music’s stature. Where Iphigénie en Tauride is concerned, however, my acquaintance before this season was only through recordings. On that basis, I had formed the view that it was a somewhat one-dimensional work. I could not understand why many critics regard it as Gluck’s greatest masterpiece. To my ears, it ranked nowhere near the earlier-composed Orfeo ed Euridice. Fancifully perhaps, comparing the Gluck of Iphigénie with the achievement of Handel in many of his operas, I thought of a relation much like that of Dickens and Trollope among 19th-century English novelists–the first figure in each pair brilliant at evoking dramatic tension and local color, but lacking, in music or in prose, Handel’s and Trollope’s ability to create genuinely rounded and believable human beings.

It is thus greatly to the credit of conductor Gary Thor Wedow, director Stephen Wadsworth, and their colleagues that this presentation of Iphigénie for the Seattle Opera, a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, revealed it as a far stronger work than I had suspected. Drawn largely from the ranks of the Seattle Symphony, the orchestra played with irresistible élan, and Wedow succeeded in eliciting, from their modern instruments, sonorities very much like the best to be heard from period instruments, without any concomitant damage to intonation. The chorus was by turns thrillingly spirited and emotionally touching. And the solo cast was already, on opening night, deeply impressive both in dramatic conviction and in vocal strength.

Nuccia Focile Picture © Bill Mohn
 

I am coming to regard Nuccia Focile, a superb Mimi in last season’s La Bohème (and to be heard again in next January’s Pagliacci), as one of the most accomplished as well as versatile sopranos now before the opera public. Her Iphigenia was a portrayal at once majestic and searingly vulnerable, and–except for one palpably flat note in the opening phrase of “Ô malheureuse Iphigénie,” the most beautiful aria in the entire work–she sang with a wonderful blend of subtlety and intensity, and with a power of tone all the more remarkable for emerging from so petite and attractive a figure. The two principal male characters in the drama, Orestes and Pylades, brought comparably splendid assumptions from Brett Polegato and William Burden. Polegato’s gleaming baritone voice, which I had already admired in the Telarc recording of Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony conducted by Robert Spano, rang out with compelling vividness and passion, and in the interests of the story tenor Burden, equally impressive in tone and line, managed a remarkable visual transformation from the glamorous hunk I saw in a Philadelphia production of Bizet’s Pearl Fishers a few years ago. The other roles are less demanding; they were well taken by Philip Joll as a neurotically blustery Thoas, Ani Maldjian and Leena Chopra as priestesses, David Adam Moore as a Scythian minister, and Michèle Losier as Diana, emerging as dea ex machina to bring the plot to its unexpectedly happy conclusion.

The production team marshaled the stage and the forces on it with much imagination. The interactions of the various characters were vividly delineated in demeanor and gesture, and literalism was notably avoided. One especially telling sortie into the theater of the mind was the re-enactment of the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, which brought it as sharply into focus for the audience as it must have been in Orestes’s tormented mind.

Thomas Lynch’s sets, re-creating the temple of Diana, was gorgeous to look at. It also featured, however, elements that were among the less satisfactory aspects of the production. The main hall of that temple occupied only about two-thirds of stage left. To house left were first an ante-room–sensibly enough, and usefully for the purposes of the action–and then a sort of outdoor alley that was the reverse of useful. Wandering about in this space at the start of the opera, several persons (two of them, I presume, Orestes and Pylades) and some changes of lighting served only as a distraction from Iphigenia and her fellow priestesses in the temple itself. Augmenting the distraction was the injection of an ungainly stylized pas de quatre in front of the altar. Ballet certainly has a vital place in French opera, but it should not be allowed to dilute the force of the sung action.

My remaining unfulfilled desire was for rather more variety in the dynamic level of the music. Almost the whole score was rendered at a minimum of mezzo-forte, though it’s true that the few quiet moments, when they came, as with one or two magical pianissimos from Ms. Focile and with some of the more reflective choruses, were all the more effective for the contrast.

I still think Gluck’s Orfeo is a much greater work. Commentators tell us how  vividly Iphigénie en Tauride portrays the varied aspects of the characters it presents. But it seems to me that, paradoxically, Gluck’s attempt to intensify the drama by dispensing with secco recitative results not so much in unity as in a certain uniformity of sound that is the enemy of individual characterization. And in this work at least–where, despite the beauty of “Ô malheureuse Iphigénie,” there is nothing to rival the sheer heart-stopping sadness and the sheer ineradicable personal-ness of Orfeo’s “Che farò”–the relative lack of truly individual tunes of the kind that Handel put forth seemingly inexhaustibly militates against our involvement with the inner lives of the sorely tried and tortured persons of the story. In a word, it is plot that drives both Gluck and Dickens, just as it is character that drives Handel and Trollope. At the end of the evening, nevertheless, I came away with a much healthier regard for this opera than I had before, and I congratulate Speight Jenkins and his admirable company on that result.