Laurent Pelly as soon as once more creates a really perfect universe for ‘The Sold Bride’ on the Teatro Real | Culture | EUROtoday

Laurent Pelly not often settles for naturalism. In every operatic manufacturing, the French stage director builds an unmistakable visible universe, the place costumes and meticulous dramatic work on the characters merge by means of a deliberate cultural filter. He already demonstrated it three years in the past along with his Turkish in Italy Rossiniano, conceived from the Italian romantic fotonovelas of the fifties, and in 2024 with some Mastersingers Wagnerians whose cardboard Nuremberg functioned as a metaphor for cultural destroy. This season, your Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky in Les Arts he opted for excessive purification, whereas within the Maestranza in Seville he remodeled the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dreamby Britten, in a dreamlike and disturbing house.

His new manufacturing of The offered brideby Bedřich Smetana, premiered with monumental success on the Teatro Real on April 14, in co-production with the Lyon and Cologne Operas and La Monnaie of Brussels, confirms that very same inventive logic: discovering a exact cultural reference that illuminates the work from inside. The result’s a whole success, able to naturally balancing the poetic and the absurd on this founding title of the Czech nationwide opera, premiered in 1866 and reworked till 1870. As he acknowledged to this newspaper, his start line has been the Czech college of animation of the fifties and sixties, and extra particularly the naïve, satirical and surreal world of the puppets of Jiří Trnka – the Walt Disney of Europe of the East—, whose Splinter (1947) portrayed bohemian rural life in a fable tone, with its festivals, its dances and its circus.

Faithful to his technique, Pelly as soon as once more makes use of costumes to sculpt the persona of every character on this Czech reinvention of the comedy of artworkthe place love, intelligence, cash and happiness find yourself prevailing. The major couple is drawn with finesse: Mařenka, the delicate, willful and temperamental bride; Jeník, her lover and false traitor, who negotiates the switch of his beloved from himself to himself and likewise expenses for the transaction. But the French director shines much more within the drawing of the comedian characters. Kecal, the fats and talkative matchmaker, ridiculed by Jeník’s trick, right here adopts the air of a down-on-his-luck lawyer; Vašek, the village fool and stuttering simpleton, is portrayed along with his infantilized haircut and the good discovery of the bicycle. Around them, the mother and father of each protagonists—the distrustful Ludmila, the biting Háta—occupy the identical morally reprehensible airplane, whereas the circus characters of the third act match seamlessly into the naïve and satirical tone inherited from Trnka.

The set design by Caroline Ginet, already Pelly’s confederate in Mastersingersas soon as once more combines simplicity and influence. A cloud of furnishings floats over the stage as a transcript of the fabric items that fly over the plot; The second act is resolved with the easy sketch of an uneven tavern; and the third, with a circus tent that’s arrange in plain sight. Everything is wrapped within the fabulous tone offered by Urs Schönebaum’s exact lighting.

The vocal forged supplied a few lovers of excellent degree, though with nuances. The soprano Svetlana Aksenova appeared extra comfy within the tragic profile of Mařenka: she phrased her third act aria with pleasure, Oh, what sorrow… That dream of affectionthe place the protagonist regrets her lover’s betrayal. However, within the duet with Jeník that follows, the Russian singer failed to rework herself into the offended and cussed teenager, revealing a strained, pale treble. Tenor Pavel Černoch is an skilled Jeník, however his vocal evolution towards extra dramatic roles—particularly Janáček—has taken away among the appeal and lightness that the function calls for. However, she shone within the second act together with her aria When you see… How are you able to considerwhich he sang with fluidity and confidence.

The two winners of the opening night time had been, nonetheless, Günther Groissböck and Mikeldi Atxalandabaso. The Austrian bass supplied an excellent incarnation of the matchmaker Kecal, a personality that he had already sung efficiently in German and that he dealt with with full solvency in Czech, savoring the phrases of Karel Sabina’s wonderful libretto that Smetana seasoned with shades of Rossinian buffo. Groissböck confirmed off a splendid center and excessive register, and was in a position to intelligently compensate for a much less strong bass space. For his half, the tenor from Bilbao composed an impressive Vašek, which he gave with the suitable dose of comedy, with wonderful vocal means in each his aria within the second act and within the third.

Among the supporting forged, three Spanish singers stood out, ideally characterised as mother and father of the lovers: the baritone Manel Esteve (Krušina), the soprano María Rey-Joly (Ludmila) and the bass-baritone Toni Marsol (Mícha), who had been joined as a luxurious by the skilled mezzo-soprano Monica Bacelli as Háta. The 4 of them particularly shone within the lovely sextet within the third act with Mařenka and Kecal. Of the remainder of the forged, soprano Rocío Pérez was a really perfect showgirl as Esmeralda alongside bass-baritone Ihor Voievodin as Indio, and tenor Jaroslav Březina was a superb Principal Comedian, along with having supervised the ensemble’s Czech pronunciation.

The Main Choir of the Teatro Real confronted with admirable high quality, each musical and prosodic, the varied choral numbers of the opera, through which Pelly additionally requires them to maneuver and dance. They shone with a polka rhythm, though their finest second got here with the male part within the drinkers’ refrain that opens the second act. The Main Orchestra, for its half, was as soon as once more at a excessive degree, with a pointy string part together with lovely solos and woodwind ensembles.

In truth, the principle director of the Teatro Real, Gustavo Gimeno, was one other of the winners of the night time. After directing intense productions by Prokófiev and Bartók, this comedian opera by Smetana represented a substantial stylistic leap. We are speaking a couple of composer who on the age of eighteen left a revealing aesthetic confession in his diary: “By the grace of God and with his help, one day I will be a Liszt technically and a Mozart in the field of composition.” The Valencian appeared to take sides with the Lisztian stress within the well-known overture, which he scored by taking dangers with depth and precision. That identical power was maintained in the remainder of the primary act, though at the price of such a convincing symphonic high quality within the pit that at instances prevented the theater from flowing onto the stage.

Everything improved from the second act, the place Smetana’s most Mozartian aspect breathed one other life into the stage motion. The manufacturing, trustworthy to the definitive model of 1870, nonetheless selected to play the raging with the curtain lowered as an intermission, as was executed within the 1869 model – the primary divided into three acts, nonetheless with recitatives recited in response to the custom of the Singspiel—. The better of the night time got here after the break: within the third act, a higher luminosity within the wooden allowed Mendelssohnian overtones to emerge, and a extra ethereal course allowed for a virtuosic brilliance near Berlioz. However, extra spark and humor was lacking from the pit in lots of moments, corresponding to within the well-known jumpy of the third act, transformed by Pelly with nice intelligence right into a quantity starring 4 actor-clowns who arrange the circus tent in full view of the general public.