Pelléas et Mélisande, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff, review: 'reminiscent of Game of Thrones'

The bar is set high: the previous Welsh National Opera production of Debussy’s enigmatic masterpiece, directed by Peter Stein and conducted by Pierre Boulez in 1992, ranks as the most beautiful and compelling performance of this work that many of us oldies have ever witnessed.

In musical respects at least, its successor has nothing to fear from the comparison. Lothar Koenigs conducted a magnificently full-blooded account of this inexhaustible score, its rippling tides and undercurrents brought to a great swell of Wagnerian intensity in the fourth act. The orchestra played it all sumptuously.

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Jacques Imbrailo and Jurgita Adamonyté were vocally ideal in the title roles, a high-lying baritone and mezzo-soprano who portrayed the lovers with all the fresh warmth and pliancy that Debussy intended. Both seized their big moments with confidence - Adamonyté rapturous as she lets her hair cascade from the tower, Imbrailo ardent and vulnerable in his shy nocturnal confession.

^{Jurgita Adamonyte as Melisande and Christopher Purves as Golaud (Photo: Clive Barda)}

Christopher Purves’s Golaud sounded in contrast crisp and forthright: a bull in a china shop, rather like Debussy himself. Leah-Marian Jones (a watchful Geneviève), Scott Wilde (a robust Arkel) and Rebecca Bottone (a winsome Yniold) completed a very fine cast. None of them were native Francophones, however, and their diction needed more coaching (too many rolled rs, for instance).

Yet memories of Stein’s miraculously fluent and nuanced staging remain indelible. Here the director David Pountney’s customary style of bravura theatricality seems bizarrely mismatched to an opera that - as Caroline Potter’s essay in the admirable programme book reminds us - explores subtleties, implications and hesitations in an atmosphere of mist and shadow. This is an opera about holding back, but Pountney can only let rip, leaving nothing to the imagination.

A vast memento mori skull dominates the setting, contained within the skeletal semi-circular pavilion familiar from WNO’s production of Lulu. Costumes are largely black and silver, pseudo-medieval in appearance. Symoblism is overt: Mélisande emerges from a chrysalis that ends up as her body bag, and anonymous figures prowl banefully in the background like grim reapers.

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The complex motivations and personalities of the central characters are reduced to cartoon outlines: Pelléas is gawky and geeky, Mélisande coldly flirtatious, and they are all over each other virtually from the moment they meet. Golaud is just rough, tough and snarling; Arkel a pantomime old fool with a long beard.

The overall effect is irresistibly reminiscent of Game of Thrones. Yes, it’s riveting to watch - whatever their faults, Pountney’s productions are never boring - but despite the glorious sounds emerging from the orchestra and the finely judged singing on stage, the opera’s essential mystery is lost and a deeper tragedy of thwarted love and human misunderstanding never communicated.

Tickets 029 2063 6464, www.wmc.org.uk
Until 6 June; then Hippodrome, Birmingham (0844 338 5000), 13 June