Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s lyric tragedy Médée secured its place within the fashionable repertoire as a result of artistry and scholarship of William Christie, who championed the composer’s music throughout his early years together with his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. Christie’s groundbreaking live shows, staged performances, and studio recordings of Médée from the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties had been instrumental in unveiling Charpentier’s craftsmanship for sculpting psychologically multifaceted characters and orchestrating intensely expressive theatrical music. Regardless of its rating’s aesthetic being tied to the technological technique of the 17th century, Charpentier and Thomas Corneille had been remarkably prescient as dramatists in conceiving a piece that exuded the identical natural melodic language and verbal efficiency seen in operatic masterworks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Christie’s pair of Médée recordings represented landmark paperwork of rediscovery for Charpentier’s masterpiece. His 1984 account, which carefully adopted live performance performances starring Jill Feldman and Gilles Ragon, was a historic milestone that lifted the opera out of obscurity. A decade later, Christie’s collaboration with the director Jean-Marie Villégier of their richly detailed stage manufacturing gave the opera its definitive recording—an engrossing, note-complete affair distinguished by the good Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s charismatic portrayal of the lead position.
Almost thirty years after these seminal performances, Christie and Les Arts Florissants as soon as once more revisited Médée in its entirety throughout a season that has been transformative for Charpentier’s work. Final winter, Christopher Corwin praised Sir Simon Rattle’s riveting collaboration with Magdalena Kozená and Peter Sellars in Berlin, whereas parterre field spotlighted Hervé Niquet and Véronique Gens‘s new full studio recording on Alpha Classics when it launched in early 2024.
Earlier this spring, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants achieved the essential historic milestone of lastly presenting Médée in its long-awaited premiere on the Paris Opera. The Garnier’s Médée, beforehand staged by David McVicar for the English Nationwide Opera, was televised by ArteTV and options an idiomatic solid of French baroque specialists like Lea Desandre, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Ana Vieira Leite, and Laurent Naouri. After helming its historic Paris Opera premiere, Christie and his orchestra then transported Charpentier’s masterwork work to Madrid, the place Véronique Gens limned a most charming portrayal of the titular sorceress underneath Marie Lambert le Bihan’s semi-staged idea. The Teatro Actual’s prima on June 6 serves as the point of interest of this evaluation.
Paris and Madrid’s performances fascinate for distilling the inventive concepts that Christie accrued over 4 many years of championing his beloved masterpiece. To accommodate its runtime inside a timeframe of roughly 3 hours, each productions eschew the Louis XIV-oriented prologue. On issues of creating the rating’s dramatic structure, Christie’s studying is nearer in its psychological buildup to his second recording from 1994. Nonetheless, within the intervening thirty years, the conductor’s imaginative and prescient has developed, permitting the tragic scenes to unfold with larger depth and gravitas, whereas the orchestra reveals nonpareil refinement in its execution. The third act, arguably essentially the most theatrically awe-inspiring piece of music inside Charpentier’s oeuvre, rumbles and thunders with a full palette of dynamics and tonal shades that couldn’t be totally skilled throughout the confines of a recording.
Witnessing William Christie information his orchestra and singers was actually certainly one of this efficiency’s biggest highlights. The conductor’s swish gestures evinced love for the rating, his fingers’ supple and expressive motions resonant with the story’s development and emotional contours. Whereas his recordings of Médée supply glimpses of Charpentier’s genius, the complete ensemble’s dwell efficiency radiates with musical brilliance, delineating the rating’s fascinating harmonies and the myriad particulars behind the composer’s melodic transformations. Most memorably, Christie and Les Arts Florissants dropped at life the profound grief that suffuses Médée’s nice scene in Act III. As scenic painters, the orchestra’s gamers had been masters in imbuing Lake Avernus’s thunderous cataclysms with a visceral depth and the phantasms Médée unleashes upon Creon with an otherworldly eroticism.
Nonetheless, it was Véronique Gens’s mesmerizing incarnation of Médée that reaped the best rewards from Christie’s profound identification with the rating. Gens personified the quintessential tragedienne, wielding her inventive prowess with authority. Liberated from the strictures of live performance opera, she exhibited a sovereign command of phrasing and an incisive dramatic acumen that enthralled the viewers every time her character dominated the stage. Guided by Christie’s style and perception, Gens’s Madrid efficiency transcended the recorded interpretation she minted with Niquet and equals and even eclipses elements of Lorraine Hunt’s groundbreaking interpretation.
Gens, who was in radiant vocal type for the premiere on the Teatro Actual, deployed her impeccable diction and aristocratic poise whereas partaking Créon and Corinth’s aristocratic class. Her clever phrasing considerably enlivened her political interactions, alluding to the character’s adeptness in leveraging energy dynamics to her benefit. But it was in Médée’s soliloquy that Gens discovered the apogee of her studying, together with her profoundly tragic rendition of “Quel Prix de Mon Amour” unfolding with a extra profound sense of heartbreak in comparison with that heard beforehand. The diabolical summons that adopted revealed an unfettered enchantress able to unleashing destruction upon the world, her phrasing anguished and terrifying in its efficiency.
The Belgian haute-contre Reinoud Van Mechelen, just lately solid as Jason within the Paris manufacturing with Christie, possesses a darker, extra metallic timbre in comparison with his lyrical and mellifluous counterparts within the discography. Van Mechelen’s fashionable musicality and muscular vocalism add depth to his portrayal of Jason, a morally doubtful and opportunistic warrior whose actions catalyze the libretto’s tragic occasions. Ana Vieira Leite, one other returning performer from Paris, reprises her position as Creuse in Madrid, her jewel-toned and youthful interpretation contrasting fascinatingly with Gens’ regal and imposing presence.
Though Cyril Costanzo’s Créon and Marc Mauillon’s Oronte lack the agency vocalism or commanding presence of Laurent Naouri and Gordon Bintner within the Paris manufacturing, Costanzo’s haunting and demented portrayal of the mad scene in Act IV leaves an indelible impression. Emmanuelle de Negri, a seasoned LAF singer celebrated for her beautiful Sangaride (Atys, 2011), delivers an unusually engaged and welcoming Nérine, her scenes with Gens a spotlight that successfully drew audiences into Médée’s troubled psyche.
Marie-Lambert le Bihan’s meticulous personenregie and her refined use of minimalist props and lighting stood because the hallmarks of her manufacturing’s theatrical course. Underneath her steering, the soloists’ and chorists’ actions had been thoughtfully choreographed to focus on the wealthy subtleties of Corneille and Charpentier’s creation. This masterful character course was most evident in Le Bihan’s collaboration with Véronique Gens, whose efficiency from the third act onward constantly radiated dramatic stress.
Nonetheless, there have been moments when the absence of extra elaborate visible parts induced Charpentier’s chorus-heavy scenes to lose distinction and character, prompting one to query why a extra visually partaking manufacturing like that of the late Villegier’s couldn’t have been chosen as le Bihan’s dramaturgical backdrop for this essential Spanish premiere. Regardless of these minor misgivings, the night was finally an inventive triumph for the Teatro Actual, Charpentier, William Christie and above all, Véronique Gens and her definitive Médée.
Images: Javier Del Actual
