L'amour du loin (Love from afar)
I recently went to see this new opera at the Colisseum (first staged production in the UK, written c seven years ago). I tend to be pretty uncritical of the operas I see because I love going so much, but in this case not only did I enjoy the production but thought it was genuinely a wonderful opera as well. I think this is the first visit I can say is a direct benefit from dutifully reading Opera magazine every month for the last few years, since I'd never have heard of it if not for a cautiously glowing overseas review I read there.
This was a much less naturalistic production than the one I read about, unsurprising since the director is best known for doing productions for Cirque du Soleil. For most operas, this amount of acrobatics and jaw dropping paraphanelia by way of sets (eg a huge sheet of swirling fabric being 'flown in' over the stalls to represent the sea) would have been horribly distracting, but this story is so simple and, well, static, that it worked. (For me at least: some people may well still have found it irritating.) In fact the minute ratio of plot per note, though not anything else about it, reminded me of something like Tristan & Isolde: much standing around and indepth exploration of the character's state of mind.
There were only three singers altogether: the trobadour (the fabulous Roderick Williams, who I'd last heard singing Bach), his 'love from afar' who he never meets until right at the end, and the Pilgrim who acts as their go-between. Filling out the stage in this case were two non-singing doubles for each singer, who acted through dance or acrobatics as 'shadows' to give more information about his/her state of mind or evoke the idea of a character in a scene when they weren't actually present. This was effective in that the main theme of the opera is the troubadour ideal of 'l'amour du loin', an idealised love for someone who is hardly if ever physically with them. (Which I know about thanks to detailed articles in the programme.) Thankfully this feast for the eyes did calm down a bit towards the end.
The music was uniformly lovely in a loose, Debussy-ish style, with the atonal elements generally submerged in the lyrical scoring: very few large jumps in the vocal lines, which I'm sure they appreciated. I remember Clemence's nostalgic lament for the France of her childhood, which has surely forgotten her by now; and most of all her spine-tingling singing of one of the songs Jaufre has written for her, with its glances at exotic 12th century flourishes, though I have no idea how authentic they were.
This was a much less naturalistic production than the one I read about, unsurprising since the director is best known for doing productions for Cirque du Soleil. For most operas, this amount of acrobatics and jaw dropping paraphanelia by way of sets (eg a huge sheet of swirling fabric being 'flown in' over the stalls to represent the sea) would have been horribly distracting, but this story is so simple and, well, static, that it worked. (For me at least: some people may well still have found it irritating.) In fact the minute ratio of plot per note, though not anything else about it, reminded me of something like Tristan & Isolde: much standing around and indepth exploration of the character's state of mind.
There were only three singers altogether: the trobadour (the fabulous Roderick Williams, who I'd last heard singing Bach), his 'love from afar' who he never meets until right at the end, and the Pilgrim who acts as their go-between. Filling out the stage in this case were two non-singing doubles for each singer, who acted through dance or acrobatics as 'shadows' to give more information about his/her state of mind or evoke the idea of a character in a scene when they weren't actually present. This was effective in that the main theme of the opera is the troubadour ideal of 'l'amour du loin', an idealised love for someone who is hardly if ever physically with them. (Which I know about thanks to detailed articles in the programme.) Thankfully this feast for the eyes did calm down a bit towards the end.
The music was uniformly lovely in a loose, Debussy-ish style, with the atonal elements generally submerged in the lyrical scoring: very few large jumps in the vocal lines, which I'm sure they appreciated. I remember Clemence's nostalgic lament for the France of her childhood, which has surely forgotten her by now; and most of all her spine-tingling singing of one of the songs Jaufre has written for her, with its glances at exotic 12th century flourishes, though I have no idea how authentic they were.