Giuseppe Verdi wrote a lot of music and much of it can be heard in La Monnaie de Munt's marathon double bill Revolution (running time nearly four hours) and its companion piece Nostalgia (a mere two, without an interval). Quite what is accomplished musically by the Spotify shuffle approach beyond a game of high-end bingo is certainly not made clear by the presentation it accompanies. I say “accompanies” as this is not a through-composed piece of coherent musical drama, but a collage of events on stage that enjoy a loose association with what’s being played and sung.
We begin with Revolution. The story, as it goes, is fairly generic: hot-headed student revolutionaries fall out over politics and sex and bad stuff happens. The time is the 1960s. The future is accelerating towards the students protesting a collection of wars and injustices. Is peaceful resistance the best option, or should we throw bricks at the police? Cristina, the voice of peaceful resistance is that of Polish soprano Gabriela Legun, achingly beautiful in her one or two arias and criminally under-used in this work. Laura, her counterpart, decides after all that bricks are the thing and perishes (I think) in an explosion caused by putting dynamite in her violin case. It’s difficult to tell why, exactly. In any case, Nino Machaidze brings all the fervour of revolt and the thrill of leading the charge but press night saw her a little high on her own supply and though laser-like accuracy made bursts of coloratura exciting, lower down she betrayed a volatility that’s exciting at the barricades but faintly alarming in the auditorium.
Everything revolves around those barricades (and anyone who’s spent time in Brussels will be familiar with the aesthetic) leaving little dramatic space for the characters to develop or interact. The personal may be political but it’s personalities that create the friction in any revolutionary moment; just ask Marx, Lenin, de Beauvoir, or any of the other papier-mâché carnival figures in Laura’s extended and bizarre dream sequence.
One brilliant Brussels addition is the street dancers who bring a muscular arrhythmia to Verdi’s soaring tunes and, in their best moments, seem to capture the passion that pulses through the music. Sometimes this works very well, as when bass Justin Hopkins as the ardent but friend-zoned Lorenzo sings about anger and suddenly there are two black men on stage raging eloquently at injustice to a 99% white, bourgeois audience snug in La Monnaie’s crimson plush.
The hottest head of them all is Italian tenor Enea Scala as Carlo, and that’s not only because he’s wrestling with Emanuel Macron for the title of Biceps of the Week: he has to just keep on singing. There are too many arias in this show, and too many of them belong to a voice that needs a bit of a breather.
In Nostalgia, the characters, niftily speed-aged by video, meet in the early 2000s at an art gallery and think about their past. There’s a question about the paternity of Virginia – played by Gabriela Legun, which promises a Mamma Mia-style intrigue amongst the old guard but this soon fizzles out. The old guard are anguished – we can tell because they pace up and down and rub their heads: about what is not clear. I find it hard to believe I’m typing this, but for almost two hours absolutely nothing happens on stage, even though the entire cast, minus the chorus (inexplicably off-stage), is required to wander around a veiled barricade-type artwork for nearly two hours without let-up. Even after the first ten minutes it starts to feel Beckettian, and not in a good way. Given that it’s supposed to be a party at a private view, we may literally be watching paint dry.
Two good things: Gabriela Legun kicks off with a simply exquisite Egli non riede ancora and then has nothing else to do but give it a bit of Florence Pugh. Attention all units: please, somebody, give this singer an emotionally and technically challenging lead role – her sound is so full and resonant she’s not just the heroine of the revolution, she is the Panthéon.
The other highlight is Australian soprano Helena Dix, who takes matters into her own extremely capable hands, attempting to make something of an insupportably restricting role. Vocally, she wipes the floor with the men to whom she must pretend to serve drinks all night while they – actually, mostly the incessant Scott Hendricks as late-career Carlo – go on and on about their past. When Dix unleashes, (somewhat incongruously but it’s not her fault) an aria from Macbeth, it’s a clear signal that there’s a great deal more to this powerful singer than the camp-it-up coping strategy she has to deploy here.
The most unsettling decision of all was to revive the character of Lorenzo in the person of actor Dennis Rudge and then not only give him nothing to do, but nothing to sing either. If the only black person on stage has no voice, then what started as a revolution now looks like window dressing.
All the men had their shirts off by the end and seemed to have backache, perhaps to show they were all getting on a bit. The characters set about half-heartedly bashing at the set before settling on giving the bust of Verdi a cuddle: poor guy has to come back all next week.
Verdi’s music is always going to be lovely – a factor surely in this bizarre commission – and the indefatigable Orchestre Symphonique de La Monnaie under the baton of Carlo Goldstein certainly delivered. While the house acoustic lends the brass a kind of clothy charm it also drops pizzicato gently into your lap, which made “Egli non riede ancora” a startlingly intimate experience, despite the vague and tin-eared grandstanding of the rest of the nearly six hours of music.
La Monnaie/de Munt’s activism season begun uncertainly with former artistic director Bernard Foucroulle’s dramatically confused Cassandra back in September, and here we are again with former artistic director Krystian Lada as librettist, dramaturg, designer, video artist and – despite scant evidence – director. If La Monnaie really wants to join the revolution it’s going to have to start looking beyond its own barricades.
