Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful!!!, July 22, 2005
Jean-Baptiste Lully is regarded as the founder of French opera. Persée (1682) is one of Lully's greatest works for the stage. The opera concerns Perseus son of Jupiter, his love for Andromeda, and his killing of the snake-headed gorgon Medusa. The music is enchanting, with lots of celebratory choruses and orchestral divertissements.
The production on the new DVD is from a 2004 performance that was recorded live at the Elgin Theatre, Toronto. The production is sheer delight. The settings are beautiful and the costumes are sumptuous. The atmosphere of the rich artistic life at the court of Louis XV is effectively recreated using the décor, costumes and actors movements. The choreography of the dances seems to me as a very successful effort to restore dance movements of the French baroque style. To sum up, it is a feast for the eye.
The conductor is Hervé Niquet. He is doing a great job. The Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra produces precise and transparent sound on period instruments. The lutes are very prominent, and there are beautiful woodwinds solos (especially oboes). The Tafelmusik chorus is invisible but sings excellently. All the singers are great, with very beautiful voices, idiomatic baroque singing and excellent French.
The opera is called Persee, but Persee has not too much music to sing. It is a pity, because Cyril Auvity (tenor or haute contre) has one of the sweetest voices I have heard lately. One has to mention soprano Monica Whicher that is very moving as the wretched Merope (she loves Persee, but he is in love with Andromède, the excellent Marie Lenormand).
Technical quality is first class. Highly recommended.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Art at its Best, August 5, 2006
About five minutes into 'Infortunés, qu'un monstre affreux' mezzo soprano Marie Lenormand sings a line of music that's indescribably beautiful. A moment later Monica Whicher sings the second part of it. Their voices are perfect. The accompaniment is perfect. The next four minutes are rapturous musical bliss. No subtitles are needed. They're meaningless anyway. They don't matter. The sets don't matter. The story doesn't matter. Just the music ...only the ravishingly beautiful music ... this is the type of thing a person gets lost in, the type of thing only the greatest art is capable of. It's pure perfection, something that's worth any amount of searching. It's priceless. Wow!
This production didn't settle in that easily, not at first anyway. Even with some acquaintance with Lully's music the prominence of lutes over strings (violins etc.) and harpsichords made the style of his music feel unfamiliar. For one used to the more rigid forms of opera seria opera buffa the blurring of lines between recitative and full number created another hurdle. The sets, costumes and lighting all seemed to belong to one family of colours. They aren't really. But the predominant (some would say excessive) use of browns and related colours created that impression--at first glance it was like watching something filmed in sepia. Skipping through chapters in search of a highlight probably didn't help either ...
But patience is a virtue. On the second evening the film was started at the beginning and watched properly (at least until the sixteenth chapter but I'll get back to that later). It was worth the effort. After a short period of acclimatization everything meshed. The lack of distinction between song and recitative was serving the drama wonderfully. The use of both lutes and harpsichord for the continuo enriched its tonal colouring with each being used to highlight the other. The singing and acting was all of the highest order. The music was a delight. The set was still a little brown but that was a tiny detail. This production is fabulous. The section (chapter sixteen) mentioned at the beginning of this review stopped me in my tracks. It was watched about five times (give or take a few) before moving on.
There's not enough kind or complimentary words in the English language to do justice to this stellar but (largely) not well known cast. Marie Lenormand has one of the silkiest mezzo soprano voices I've heard in a while. Monica Whicher's voice is radiant and her technique is excellent. Cyril Auvity sings in a soft but powerful tenor with no hint of shrillness that powerful tenors often fall into. Oliver Laquerre and Alain Coulombe have commanding bass voices that never sounds harsh. Mezzo soprano Stephanie Novacek sings in creamy tones marginally lower than those of pure sopranos. Colin Ainsworth is one of the few countertenors (I've heard) who uses his tonal qualities without sounding as if he's singing in a falsetto voice. Vilma Vitols has a flexible mezzo voice capable of immense power and enormous subtlety. Lully's vocal writing stressed subtlety over power and all of these singers shade the nuances in his music beautifully often seeming to glide through the work as opposed to just singing it. The combination is exquisite.
Opera Atelier and Tafelmusik are both familiar names in Canada. And that's as it should be. Tafelmusik has been one of the leading period instrument ensembles for ages and their recordings (usually under the baton of Jeanne Lamon) are invariably excellent. Here they're working under the baton of Hervé Niquet and the result is great. He clearly has an affinity toward this repertoire. Opera Atelier is committed to both performance excellence and introducing young people to the medium of opera. Over the years their productions have been consistently phenomenal. Their revival of this piece (which they did for the first time in 2000) was hailed as the operatic event of the year. It was the first time Persée had been performed since the 18th century.
This is a great production. The staging is largely traditional with the exception being the costumes which (appear to) draw their influences from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries with a touch of modern ballet thrown in. The sets are ornate and reminiscent of the era the music stems from. The sets are spacious and leave plenty of room for the considerable amount of dance used to portray the action sequences. Director Marshall Pynkoski (one of the founders of Opera Atelier) did a great job of pacing the action and keeping the story moving. The orchestral playing is great. The quality of the sound is pristine. And the singing is marvellous. Browns and reds occasionally seem a bit overused but that's a minor complaint about a magnificent production.
It gets the highest rating.
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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An air from another world, August 28, 2005
This is a wonderful production from Toronto. It tries to give a taste of what the original production was like, yet it is not literal enough to alienate a modern audience. The young performers are all good. In early French opera the emphasis was on the language and drama rather than the music - just the opposite of Italian baroque. The singers use the ancient hand gestures to emphasize the drama. At first this seems from an alien world, but gradually it grows on one. Curiously Persee has the smallest part. He may even dance more than he sings. The DVD does not identify a second dancer Persee so if Auvity both sings and dances he is an outstanding artist. Apparently there are a couple cuts - one the Prologue praising the king. No real loss. French baroque can go on for Wagnerian lengths. If it is to win modern converts it needs to meet them at least half way.
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