Pelléas et Mélisande, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, review: 'atmospheric'

The Philharmonia’s City of Light series began with a Pelléas performed with great transparency, says John Allison

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra

There was only one place where the Philharmonia’s City of Light series could have begun, and this was it – with the Golden Calf of Parisian music. As an expression of the musical world as it stood in 1902 and a tremendous influence on what followed, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande proved itself an ideal launching pad for the orchestra’s six-month-long festival exploring Paris’s musical life in the first half of the 20th century. Between now and late May, the big orchestral concerts, chamber events and talks that make up City of Light will reflect the way in which during this time Paris became the crossroads of the musical East and West, bringing together everything from the Ballets Russes to American jazz.

Standing apart from most of the repertoire – the composer Ned Rorem has written that “One can detest opera yet love Pelléas. One can love opera yet detest Pelléas” – Debussy’s seminal masterpiece of non-naturalism is essentially a play with an orchestral backdrop, and the ultimate conductors’ opera. In a series that is putting a spotlight on French orchestral sound, this gave the Philharmonia’s principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen the opportunity to sculpt a performance of great transparency and lightness, even if a little more muscular forcefulness in its few dramatic moments would not have come amiss.

Based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist allegory of the triangular relationship between Mélisande, a mysterious lost soul, and the half-brothers Goloud and Pelléas, Debussy’s work is one that even French opera companies struggle to cast with French singers, so the Philharmonia did spectacularly well. In the case of the Pelléas himself, Stéphane Degout, it’s hard to imagine the role being better sung: his high baritone shone through the orchestral textures with flexibility and fervour.

The baritone Laurent Naouri supplied contrastingly dark tone as the tragic and tormented Goloud. Sandrine Piau (standing in at short notice) delivered a wonderfully soft-grained Mélisande, even if she is now perhaps a little more mature than ideal for the role, and the black-voiced bass Jérôme Varnier was an unusually young King Arkel. With her age-defying mezzo, Felicity Palmer brought warm clarity and humanity to Geneviève, and the diminutive soprano Chloé Briot was a positive presence as the hapless boy Yniold.

The opera’s dark and depressing setting, reflecting the sadness of its characters, was atmospherically evoked here in David Edwards’s direction and Colin Grenfell’s lighting design. While successful performances in the concert hall tend to give ammunition to those on the right wing of the Opera Production Party, Debussy’s opera is so static that little was indeed really lost. It’s not a work that needs huge scenic trappings, and a few symbolic props did potent service. But the narration that punctuated each act was pointless: Debussy famously said that he wanted to eliminate beginnings and ends and create music consisting solely of middles.

City of Light runs until May 29. philharmonia.co.uk/paris