Canadian theatre innovator Robert Lepage’s production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale and Other Fables is a little like being given candy before dinner: no operatic production that comes afterwards will taste quite as sweet. Like all great works of genius, the work, with its shadow puppets, fox, hen and cock acrobats, and the orchestra pit filled with water just seem right; obvious. Why didn’t anyone else think of that? But they can’t, and won’t and if they try to replicate it, it won’t work. Not quite like it does in this once-in-a-lifetime masterpiece.
Attempts at “modernising” opera, as the artform seeks to regenerate an ageing audience base, are not new. There are often invisible red lines that can’t be crossed, though: play with the costumes, the sets and setting, maybe add some modern dance; utilise all the tools of modern lighting. It must remain serious though; you must furrow your brow and refer to the program for clues. This is high art, remember.
In Robert Lepage’s co-production by Opera national de Lyron, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company and Dutch National Opera, in collaboration with Ex Machina, though, all lines are crossed, all walls are broken, and the orchestra pit is flooded with water. Act One, with its trio of clarinet solos, peasant songs, poems set to music, and chamber opera about a fox in the hen house, plays not like a recital, with solemn silences and polite applause; there’s shadow puppetry, animalistic acrobatic silhouettes, seamless transitions and, most importantly: laughter, joy and aching tenderness.
The operatic talents of the mostly international cast of performers are not diminished by all this stagecraft: they are heightened. The puppetry and acrobats are not a distraction: they are synergistic. When the outstanding soprano Yuliya Pogrebynak laments a flower being defiled by a dove, the subtext is made visible. When world class contralto Meredith Arwady delivers a triumphant four song cycle about mischievous cats, cheeky black shadow cats slither their tails on the screen. When tenors Andrew Goodwin and Owen McCausland, bass Tara Berezhansky and baritone Nabil Suliman unite on the farmyard fable, The Fox (Renard), it is just as much fun as it should be. This is classical music made immediately accessible. This is the future of the art form. Those who resist, who cannot see this, are like the priests who rebelled against the printing press: they want to look down on the congregation with the superiority of their exclusive knowledge rather than invite the masses into the temple.
It’s the nightingale’s song that is the most enchanting, though, as, in Act Two, the moat created in the orchestra pit gets fully utilised. McCausland begins, as the Fisherman, waist deep in water, singing while manoeuvring his puppet: his tenor soars as he splashes. Over the course of less than an hour, dragons dance, emperors rise and fall and rise again, mother ducks, followed by their ducklings, swim on by, grim death looms large then retreats: above it all, atop this grand spectacle, soprano Yuliia Zasimova, floats above all with her effortless trills, her lilting coloratura. Like the nightingale’s song, Zasimova’s sound is a beauty that can bring tears, humanity, to the powerful, yet should be heard by all. For almost 15 years, since its debut in 2009, Lepage’s Nightingale has shown what this grand old artistic medium can be. Hopefully Adelaide listens. It won’t forget what it saw here, that’s for sure.
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