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Esa-Pekka Salonen
Extraordinary and spellbinding … Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the Philharmonia. Photograph: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
Extraordinary and spellbinding … Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the Philharmonia. Photograph: Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images

Pelléas et Mélisande review – one of Salonen’s finest achievements

This article is more than 9 years old

Royal Festival Hall, London
An unparalleled cast and exquisite soundscapes made this production spellbinding

The Philharmonia’s schedule is dominated until spring by City of Light, a big retrospective examining the artistic world of Paris in the first half of the 20th century. It is by no means a survey of solely French music: Stravinsky’s ballets, for instance, are prominent in future concerts. It opened, however, with a semi-staging by David Edwards of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande that ranked among the finest achievements of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s principal conductorship.

Much of its impact derived from Salonen’s understanding of the ambiguities at the work’s centre. Maurice Maeterlinck, on whose play the opera is based, claimed that “art always works by detour and never acts directly.” But the underlying sense of the elusive, even unknowable, nature of the characters’ psyches is offset by passages of extraordinary emotional directness. In an opera variously interpreted as a thing of muted half-tones or absurdist psychodrama, Salonen steered a course between the two, beginning with extraordinary restraint, but then allowing the music to seep into our systems, even as Golaud’s jealousy slowly poisons the exquisite soundscapes with which the work opens.

The cast, meanwhile, was one of greatest ever assembled for the piece. Stéphane Degout’s handsome, ardent Pelléas was paired with Sandrine Piau’s ravishingly sung, vulnerable Mélisande. Laurent Naouri charted Golaud’s descent into violence with disquieting vividness, while Jérôme Varnier was the noble, wonderfully sonorous Arkel. Edwards’ encouragement of slow, hieratic gestures combined with a murky, subtly shifting lighting plot by Colin Grenfell, admirably suggested the emotional stagnation of Allemonde.

To prevent applause between the acts, Salonen decided to link them with a narration drawn from Maeterlinck’s writings spoken by Sara Kestelman. Controversial, perhaps, though in the context it proved as spellbinding as the rest of it.

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