Mon 14 May 2007

Perhaps not exactly a she-devil, but Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirschlager's Melisande, costumed in a bewitching, diamond-panelled red dress for Debussy's mystical "Pelleas et Melisande", is anything but the wan heroine of productions past.

This is a Melisande for a metro-sexual age, ordering Prince Golaud, who finds her alone in a forest, not to fish out a crown from a fountain (how'd it get there, huh?). Later, eyes flashing mischievously, she'll nonchalantly toss the wedding ring he gives her down a well. "I'm not stupid," Kirschlager, still wearing that dress, says of her character backstage after last week's London premiere of a new Salzburg-Royal Opera co-production with Simon Rattle on the podium. "I'm always watching and trying not to get into a bad situation, but I'm not passively shy," she adds. "I'm reflecting my situation." Hers - in the red dress - is decidedly better than the rest of the superb cast who are outfitted in baggy, bangled white body suits that are a cross from some campy outcast aliens in "Star Trek" and Elvis-impressionist gear. Couple this with a staging using huge monolithic boxes a la "2001 A Space Odyssey" that open to reveal, variously, 91 blood-stained pillows (marriage on the rocks, get it?), or the vixen herself in THAT dress, pinioned as if in a butterfly collection amid 38 copies of same, and you feel pinioned by director Stanislas Nordey's static movements and clobbered by designer Emmanuel Clolus's heavyhandedness.

"Pelleas et Melisande" wasn't meant to be this way, it is an opera of deep subtlety in which no one is completely right and no one is completely wrong. At least the singers get it. "I'd be disappointed if I was seen as the mean guy," said Canadian-born baritone Gerald Finley, who sings Golaud. But doesn't he kill his half brother, the poetic, childlike Pelleas (British baritone Simon Keenlyside) who has tried to run away from his infatuation with Melisande but yes, probably has had carnal knowledge of her? "Yes, but he's (Golaud) a man driven by his own passion. And I think we all have a villain inside of us. "What I'd hoped really was to portray a certain complexity of motivation if you like and that's been the essence of the production, to make them real characters that are going through thought processes that are absolutely tormenting them."

There's not much complexity to be heard, though, in Rattle's interpretation. With big belts of brass and gales of strings, we're hellbent for leather for Wagner here, with potential for tossing in whole passages of "Parsifal" almost without anyone being the wiser. It's a way to see it. That troublesome German tore a hole a mile wide through the music world of the late 19th- early 20th century, but perhaps not this wide. For a different point of view, hunt down Pierre Boulez's famous recording based on an earlier Covent Garden production from the early 1970s. Of course, you can only hear it, not see it. But then again, with the current production, there may be moments you want to avert your eyes. Except when that lady with the red dress is on.