Massenet’s Thaïs (1894/98) has none of the flagrant erotic charge and sexual violence of Strauss’ Salome (1905), but it does have exceeding grace and tenderness as it explores the attraction between sacred and profane love. This rarity was given by Opera Australia as part of its displaced winter season in the Sydney Town Hall.
It is not often that we get to hear such beautifully sung French opera. Massenet knew his orchestra and his voices, learning from watching his Verdi and Gounod from within the orchestra pit as a player. The score shimmers with the lucidity that French composers seems to inherit as a birthright.
The opera is based on Anatole France’s erotically charged novel – Thaïs (1890). The story may be a little clichéd, but it is potent. Somerset Maugham employed a similar construct in his short story, Rain (1922). Religious man seeks to convert voluptuous women, succeeds and then succumbs to the lusts that she has surrendered.
Nicole Car as Thaïs and Etienne Dupuis as Athanaël gave us thrilling assumptions of the central characters who are always close to being in love. The frisson of this slippage between close breathed lips that never kiss is palpably erotic – in a very delicate way.
Car has a rich, fulsome soprano voice with dark colours that thrill and a powerful upper register that remains clear and potent. She is a passionate communicator, as her recent Luisa Miller and Tatyana showed. She creates a believable Thaïs. The wide-ranging nature of her mirror aria – “Dis-moi que je suis belle” – requires various stages of emotional responsiveness. The breathless wonder at her vicarious lifestyle, under pinned by her deep responsive to the sensual, the vanity that tugs at her intellect, the craving for deep peaceful loving and the soaring contradictions of a young women learning the bitter taste of sensual fulfilment were all articulated with a keen sense of drama and poised vocal emission.
Dupuis is a handsome man with a handsome voice, burnished and able to summon power and delicacy in response to his character's changing moods. His ability to soften his harsh character and vocal line was touchingly managed in the desert scene of Act 3, when he flails both Thaïs and himself – lashing out his misogynistic hate only to stumble on the tenderness of seeing and feeling her pain: her beautiful white feet torn and bathed in blood. The religious imagery, the ecstatic tenderness and the flood of understanding that passes between priest and courtesan was modulated with exquisite vocal and dramatic judgment. The yin and yang of these two near lovers was a source of pleasure throughout the evening.
The Nicias was expertly sung by Simon Kim. This character seems to combine some of the headiness of Herod and the forlorn loving of Narroboth (Salome) well before these Straussian characters were imagined. His fine tenor voice gave this swirling hedonist ready humanity and a sense of the intoxicating state of being in love with love.
Richard Anderson as Palémon allowed his rich dark bass to anchor the religious feeling of the monastic scenes with both gravitas and wisdom.
Sian Pendry’s contralto etched the small role of the mother superior Albine with vivid strokes of vocal emphasis, while Anne-Louise Cole (Crobyle) and Anna Yun (Myrtale) lent a true erotic charge – like French Flower Maidens – to the robing of Athanaël, their soprano/mezzo soprano blending nicely to project pert and teasing humour.
Jonathon McCauley’s short intervention as Nicias’ servant was nicely handled, both dramatically and vocally.
Maestro Guillaume Tourniaire led the Opera Australia orchestra with passion and clarity. He obviously loves this music and the players responded with scintillating playing. The storm scene in Act 3 was a particular highlight, as was the scurrying interlude that accompanies Athanaël as he races to the convent to save the dying Thaïs. Massenet’s music is remarkably responsive to the dramatic situation. The stupefied reactions of the crowd to the dispatch of Athanaël and Thaïs, following the torching of her palace, was highly effective within close grained means, dynamic and elegant. The 19th century town hall gave a particular bloom to the orchestra,
The famous Meditation was starkly enticing (finally delivered in its original setting) with that glorious violin melody, almost endless in its own terms, in situ with the choral interjections that soft bed its conclusion. The solo violin was superbly played by Jun Yi Ma. This melody is recalled across various stretches of the opera, most craftily on flute. Like a halo, it swirls around the final poignant misunderstanding between Athanael and Thaïs – who once more operate on two separate planes, tenderly invoking their new gods, Christian now for Thaïs and Venus for the broken religious man. This was profoundly simple music making, underpinned by a pure restraint that let these mixed emotional states rise together like different, fragrant scents, stealthily entwined. Heavenly salvation and earthly hell have never been more sweetly conjoined.
The Opera Australia choir was deeply embedded in their roles as monks, nuns and voluptuaries with finely gradated singing across these various incarnations.
This concert version, directed by Hugh Halliday, was full of dramatic engagement between the singers – the physical dash to offstage by Athanaël was thrillingly choreographed with the music. Such a theatrical concert presentation seems an ideal forum for Opera Australia to present the opera’s it will never stage, given the economic logistics of the tiny Sydney Opera theatre, where monstrously-high ticket prices require the regulation rotation of the warhorses: Boheme, Butterfly, Carmen and Traviata.
A wealth of French opera exists beyond Carmen and the Pearlfishers, beyond Faust and Romeo et Juliette. How wonderful for these forces to tackle a rarity like Le roi d'Ys (1888) or the full Les Troyens (1863). It would not be beyond the probable that the fairly full house of AO subscribers for this special evening would pay for such further delights.
Tendresse is in short supply.
Opera Australia, Town Hall, Sydney – July 22, 2017
Gar Jones
It is not often that we get to hear such beautifully sung French opera. Massenet knew his orchestra and his voices, learning from watching his Verdi and Gounod from within the orchestra pit as a player. The score shimmers with the lucidity that French composers seems to inherit as a birthright.
The opera is based on Anatole France’s erotically charged novel – Thaïs (1890). The story may be a little clichéd, but it is potent. Somerset Maugham employed a similar construct in his short story, Rain (1922). Religious man seeks to convert voluptuous women, succeeds and then succumbs to the lusts that she has surrendered.
Nicole Car as Thaïs and Etienne Dupuis as Athanaël gave us thrilling assumptions of the central characters who are always close to being in love. The frisson of this slippage between close breathed lips that never kiss is palpably erotic – in a very delicate way.
Car has a rich, fulsome soprano voice with dark colours that thrill and a powerful upper register that remains clear and potent. She is a passionate communicator, as her recent Luisa Miller and Tatyana showed. She creates a believable Thaïs. The wide-ranging nature of her mirror aria – “Dis-moi que je suis belle” – requires various stages of emotional responsiveness. The breathless wonder at her vicarious lifestyle, under pinned by her deep responsive to the sensual, the vanity that tugs at her intellect, the craving for deep peaceful loving and the soaring contradictions of a young women learning the bitter taste of sensual fulfilment were all articulated with a keen sense of drama and poised vocal emission.
Dupuis is a handsome man with a handsome voice, burnished and able to summon power and delicacy in response to his character's changing moods. His ability to soften his harsh character and vocal line was touchingly managed in the desert scene of Act 3, when he flails both Thaïs and himself – lashing out his misogynistic hate only to stumble on the tenderness of seeing and feeling her pain: her beautiful white feet torn and bathed in blood. The religious imagery, the ecstatic tenderness and the flood of understanding that passes between priest and courtesan was modulated with exquisite vocal and dramatic judgment. The yin and yang of these two near lovers was a source of pleasure throughout the evening.
The Nicias was expertly sung by Simon Kim. This character seems to combine some of the headiness of Herod and the forlorn loving of Narroboth (Salome) well before these Straussian characters were imagined. His fine tenor voice gave this swirling hedonist ready humanity and a sense of the intoxicating state of being in love with love.
Richard Anderson as Palémon allowed his rich dark bass to anchor the religious feeling of the monastic scenes with both gravitas and wisdom.
Sian Pendry’s contralto etched the small role of the mother superior Albine with vivid strokes of vocal emphasis, while Anne-Louise Cole (Crobyle) and Anna Yun (Myrtale) lent a true erotic charge – like French Flower Maidens – to the robing of Athanaël, their soprano/mezzo soprano blending nicely to project pert and teasing humour.
Jonathon McCauley’s short intervention as Nicias’ servant was nicely handled, both dramatically and vocally.
Maestro Guillaume Tourniaire led the Opera Australia orchestra with passion and clarity. He obviously loves this music and the players responded with scintillating playing. The storm scene in Act 3 was a particular highlight, as was the scurrying interlude that accompanies Athanaël as he races to the convent to save the dying Thaïs. Massenet’s music is remarkably responsive to the dramatic situation. The stupefied reactions of the crowd to the dispatch of Athanaël and Thaïs, following the torching of her palace, was highly effective within close grained means, dynamic and elegant. The 19th century town hall gave a particular bloom to the orchestra,
The famous Meditation was starkly enticing (finally delivered in its original setting) with that glorious violin melody, almost endless in its own terms, in situ with the choral interjections that soft bed its conclusion. The solo violin was superbly played by Jun Yi Ma. This melody is recalled across various stretches of the opera, most craftily on flute. Like a halo, it swirls around the final poignant misunderstanding between Athanael and Thaïs – who once more operate on two separate planes, tenderly invoking their new gods, Christian now for Thaïs and Venus for the broken religious man. This was profoundly simple music making, underpinned by a pure restraint that let these mixed emotional states rise together like different, fragrant scents, stealthily entwined. Heavenly salvation and earthly hell have never been more sweetly conjoined.
The Opera Australia choir was deeply embedded in their roles as monks, nuns and voluptuaries with finely gradated singing across these various incarnations.
This concert version, directed by Hugh Halliday, was full of dramatic engagement between the singers – the physical dash to offstage by Athanaël was thrillingly choreographed with the music. Such a theatrical concert presentation seems an ideal forum for Opera Australia to present the opera’s it will never stage, given the economic logistics of the tiny Sydney Opera theatre, where monstrously-high ticket prices require the regulation rotation of the warhorses: Boheme, Butterfly, Carmen and Traviata.
A wealth of French opera exists beyond Carmen and the Pearlfishers, beyond Faust and Romeo et Juliette. How wonderful for these forces to tackle a rarity like Le roi d'Ys (1888) or the full Les Troyens (1863). It would not be beyond the probable that the fairly full house of AO subscribers for this special evening would pay for such further delights.
Tendresse is in short supply.
Opera Australia, Town Hall, Sydney – July 22, 2017
Gar Jones