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Britten, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Le Songe d'une Nuit d'Eté):  Soloists, chorus and orchestra of the Opéra Toulon Provence Méditerranée, co-production with the Opéra de Nancy; Toulon, France.  9.12.2008 (MM)

Though overflowing with very beautiful music,  Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream is not often included in the international Britten repertory.   Now, it has suddenly appeared on the programs of both the Opera Provence Mediterranée of Toulon and the Metropolitan Opera of New York!

Shakespeare's famous play does not exploit his usual forceful characters to drive the action. Rather, it  is an essay on the psychologies of love that reside in the pastoral poems and plays of the Renaissance.  These old pastorals explore the realms of love veiled in now unfamiliar metaphors and vocabulary, and though they are finally unsubtle in meaning they are indeed remote from contemporary sensibility.

Britten's musical setting of Shakespeare's bizarre pastoral play A Midsummer Night's Dream unfolds almost word for word (only the first act is missing), but Britten adds his usual sexual complexities.  He frames the love stories with the sexually innocent voices of young boys, a Britten obsession, and uses the solo sounds of rare percussion instruments, the solo voices of wind instruments, and the unusual sliding sounds of bowed stringed instruments to create the compulsions and contradictions of an indefinable world of sexual attractions.

Britten's more well known operas, Peter Grimes (1945) and Death in Venice (1973) mark the first and last of his sixteen operas, of which only another four are tip-of-the-tongue titles.  Composed exactly at midpoint of Britten's career A Midsummer Night's Dream (1959) is unlikely to join this primary group of operas because it presents significant challenges. As hinted at already,  foremost perhaps is the difficulty of the pastoral genre for contemporary audiences.  This problem raises a complementary issue -- why pay the price of producing an opera that will puzzle (or more likely may induce dreamless sleep, even an early departure from the theater) far more than it will please a modern audience.

The production challenges of A Midsummer Night's Dream are formidable too and consequently quite expensive.  It is for fourteen essentially principal artists (thirteen singers, one actor) who perform a myriad of ensemble scenes for which  music and staging require extended rehearsal.  This challenge was well met by the Toulon Opera (12.9.2008) as the triumph of this production was its well-prepared cast.

This was an ensemble of excellent singers with suitably beautiful voices, ll of whom were believable actors as well.  Oberon, composed for counter-tenor Alfred Deller (he famously lacked a good high register), was taken by Rachid Ben Abdeslam, a Moroccan. who boasts a beautiful lower register (and, well, rather like Deller, seems to lack a higher one).  Chinese soprano Maïra Kerey brought a sense of the exotic to the fiendish role of Tytania though she did not find the  humanity  in the role.  Trouble-maker Puck, the third principal fairy, was gracefully executed by American actor Scott Emerson.

The sextet of lovers was led by the fine Canadian bass Randall Jakobsch as Theseus, and by the rich voiced French contralto Elodie Méchain as the Amazon Hippolyta, his bride.  The Hermia of French mezzo-soprano Delphine Galou did indeed finally bag her Lysander, American tenor Jonathan Boyd.  The Helena of French soprano Marjorie Muray  also bagged her Demetrius, French baritone Jean-Sébastien Bou.  Both women proved themselves the best badminton players during the lovers' initial match. (See below.)

Three of five lively Athenian workers were Frenchmen; the Quince of bass Jean Teitgen, the Snout of tenor Christophe Berry and the particularly effective Starveling of baritone Thomas Dolié.  Snug was the fine Israeli bass Yuri Kissin, and Flute, the Peter Pears role in the original production, was sung by Swiss tenor François Piolino.

Bottom, finally, was roundly brought to real life by an authentic speaker of Her Majesty's English, Scottish bass-baritone Iain Paterson.  This fact  made a difference as his lines sailed clearly and comprehensibly across the footlights (when not muffled by the poorly designed ass's head).  While the English pronunciation of the other artists was well realized,  the inclusion of this native speaker made it apparent that, like Pelléas et Melisande, A Midsummer Night's Dream remains a play, for which the addition of music, any music, is an intrusion.  One yearned for Shakespeare.

In 1959 Benjamin Britten could not have envisioned the elaborate scenic and costume standards which have slowly and surely taken over opera houses during the past fifty years.  For Britten, the staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been minimal, the ambience created by the extensive tone painting and quotes of natural sounds emanating from his highly articulate orchestra.  In fact in photographs of the original production the stage was bare, and the costumes minimal -- perhaps ideal for a musical setting of a play that is an exposition of ideas.

Toulon mounted a well-conceived and realized production (a co-production with the Opéra de Nancy where it was first performed last June) that thoroughly illustrated the three worlds of Shakespeare's play.  It was ably directed by Jean-Louis Martinoty, a former assistant to the legendary opera director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who has had a decades long career staging rare repertory operas, often in important theaters.  However it is unclear if the Toulon/Nancy production conception was Mr. Martinoty’s own as he was an eleventh hour replacement for the original director, Omar Porras.

The scenery was designed by Bernard Arnould in bold strokes that accommodated the limitations of provincial opera to the contemporary expectation of elaborate illustration.  He used only a badminton court and a two-sided tree trunk, amended on one side by a giant high-heeled shoe.  The costumes were quite effective too, the lovers in white suits which became soiled and torn as their adventures evolved.  The fairies' costumes were insect inspired, made fantastical by hundreds of little lights, and the Athenians plebs were rendered as generic rustics, Bottom stumbling onto another  high-heeled woman's shoe that induced his dream.  Lighting, the work of Fabrice Kebour, surely established the fantastic nature of the sets and costumes.

The conductor was Britten specialist Steuart Bedford who ably kept musical control of the complex ensembles perhaps at the expense of more sweeping musical values, though certainly Britten's eerie fairy music, his rich love music and his rough character music were competently projected.  Toulon's pit was stuffed with Britten's percussion instruments, leaving room only for the minimum required strings -- twelve players (the Met will undoubtedly enrich the sound with many more).  It is understandable, if unfortunate, that Toulon replaced Britten's boys chorus with women, though gratefully four mute young boy fairies did in fact appear at the appropriate moments to establish an ironic background of sexual innocence.

This excellent production qualifies as one of Toulon Opera's finest moments.

Michael Milenski 

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