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Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande
Marc Mauillon (Pelléas), Jenny Daviet (Mélisande), Laurent Alvaro (Golaud), Stephen Bronk (Arkel), Emma Lyren (Genevieve), Julie Mathevet (Yniold), Stefano Olcese (Médecin, Berger)
Malmö Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Maxime Pascal
One thinks ‘Aha, a stage director who understands the music!’. Plaudits to Benjamin Lazar. As often, Golaud lies at the centre of events. Mélisande is a flaky young thing to whom Jenny Daviet...
Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande
Marc Mauillon (Pelléas), Jenny Daviet (Mélisande), Laurent Alvaro (Golaud), Stephen Bronk (Arkel), Emma Lyren (Genevieve), Julie Mathevet (Yniold), Stefano Olcese (Médecin, Berger)
Malmö Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Maxime Pascal
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One thinks ‘Aha, a stage director who understands the music!’. Plaudits to Benjamin Lazar. As often, Golaud lies at the centre of events. Mélisande is a flaky young thing to whom Jenny Daviet...
About
Stage direction : Benjamin Lazar
Sets : Adeline Caron
Costumes : Alain Blanchot
Lighting design : Mael Iger
Assistant director : Elizabeth Calleo
HD recording at the Malmö Opera in May 2016 Directed for TV by Corentin Leconte
Produced by François Duplat / BelAir Media
When Debussy completes the score, based on the eponymous symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, the world of opera still abides by Richard Wagner and the upheaval he caused with Tristan und Isolde. But Debussy decides to stand on the exact opposite side, and uses his new opus to preach a new aesthetic creed. In depicting the forbidden love story between the timid Pelléas and the beautiful Mélisande, kept apart by an unfortunate marriage, the French composer brings us back to the immortal legend of Tristan and Isolde, but this time showing the world that the future of music could very well lie far away from Wagner’s overwhelming lyricism and outsized rhetoric. This new production, created by one of the rising stars of French stage direction Benjamin Lazar for the Malmö Opera (headed by Ingmar Bergman from 1952 to 1958), encapsulates all the different aspects of this mysterious work, from the oniric poetry invented by Maeterlinck and Debussy to the realism, poignant because openly simple and even mundane, of these profoundly human beings lost in a forest full of sound and symbols that will never let them escape.
The young French conductor Maxime Pascal, the Orchestra of the Malmö Opera, and an almost all-French cast (among which the excellent Marc Mauillon and Jenny Daviet), bring forth with intelligence all the refinement and all the vitality this unique and fascinating score has to offer.
Running time : 170 min.
Booklet : FR / ENG / GER
Original language : FR
Subtitles : FR / ENG / GER / SPA / KOR / JAP
Video : Color, 16/9, NTSC
Audio : PCM 2.0, Dolby Digital 5.1
Contents and tracklist
- Marc Mauillon (Pelléas), Jenny Daviet (Mélisande), Laurent Alvaro (Golaud), Stephen Bronk (Arkel), Emma Lyren (Genevieve), Julie Mathevet (Yniold), Stefano Olcese (Médecin, Berger)
- Malmö Opera
- Maxime Pascal
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Awards and reviews
February 2018
One thinks ‘Aha, a stage director who understands the music!’. Plaudits to Benjamin Lazar. As often, Golaud lies at the centre of events. Mélisande is a flaky young thing to whom Jenny Daviet contributes a convincing wealth of confused gestures; Marc Mauillon gives us Pélleas as a mummy’s boy…Alvaro’s Golaud is strong and impressive, sung with wonderfully dark, incisive tone and acted with at times horrific realism.
February 2018
It’s a potentially liberating alternative to the heavy Romantic look often given to the piece in performance…The Malmö orchestra play most alertly for conductor Pascal. In keeping with the new directions sought by the stage director he secures a harder, less Romantic Debussy sound which is more resonant of slightly later contemporaries such as Bartók than the proto-Wagnerian splendours of Inghelbrecht or the proto-modernity of Boulez.
10th February 2018
60 minutes of quiet enchantment. Nicely packaged too, and beautifully recorded in a former synagogue. And, if you're smitten with Mirkovič’s voice, track down her recording of Schubert's Winterreise, where she's accompanied by a hurdy gurdy.
