Les Pêcheurs de perles
(concert performance)
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London
4 and 7 October 2010
Conductor: Antonio Pappano
Performers:
Leïla: Nicole Cabell
Nadir: John Osborn
Zurga: Gerald Finley
Nourabad: Raymond Aceto
The performance on 7 October will be broadcast at 30 Oct 2010 at 6pm on BBC Radio 3
What the critics say
Doundou Tchil, Classical Iconoclast, 5 October 2010
Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles is notoriously hard to stage. Because the plot’s so grandiose, the imagination works overtime, dwarfing the music, making it seem puny in comparison. There’s a lot to be said in favour of concert performances because they shift the balance back to Bizet.
What was striking in this performance of Les Pêcheurs de Perles (Pearl Fishers) at the Royal Opera House was how delicate much of Bizet’s writing really is. It doesn’t jump up and grab you like the tunes from Carmen. Bizet knows zilch about Indian music but in his imagination it’s delicate and refined – Le petit Trianon India, as authentic as 18th century “oriental” wallpaper. Since we think of India in an altogether grittier way, we can’t readily respond to Bizet’s watercolours.
Dispense with the “orientalism” and think of Les Pêcheurs de Perles as French countryside, and the opera falls into perspective. Kings and Priests dominate because peasants are superstitious, and think holy Virgins will protect them. When the chorus sings of Brahma they could as easily be singing of Jesus. Get away from extreme exotic images and the music makes sense on its own terms. Bizet imagines India in delicate, refined string textures, flute trills and gently beaten cymbals.
Antonio Pappano is wise to let this delicacy breathe: over-expansive gestures are best left to the histrionic narrative. The music itself is dramatic in a gentler way, crescendi building up like swells in the ocean, diminuendos evoking refinement and submission. Lovely bell-like miniatures throughout evoking an idea of the East as perfumed and flower strewn as a church in France on a holy day. There’s more drama in this music than the opera is given credit for, and Pappano elucidates what’s there, without pushing it past its limits.The delicacy of the playing let themes, such as those from the “big number”, resurface elusively throughout the opera, sometimes so subtle they can be overpowered by being made too obvious.
The Royal Opera House orchestra deserve more appreciation than they get, so it was good to see them on stage rather than hidden in the pit. Seeing the bare structure of the stage was instructive, too, a reminder of just how much art goes into making the fantasy of opera.
Leila is a part almost tailor-made for Nicola Cabell. She’s exquisite, and swathed in sapphire satin creates a character even before she sings. Pretty singing too., but the role, despite its charm doesn’t lend itself to great displays of passion. John Osborne’s Nadir was assertive and lucidly clear in the true French manner. His aria Je crois entendre encore, was beautifully shaped and balanced, the orchestra poised around it well, so it did feel caché sous les palmiers.
The duet Au fond du temple sainte was very well realized by Osborne and Gerald Finley. Finley was by far the biggest name in the ensemble, however good Osborne, Cabell and Raymond Aceto’s Nourabad could be. More darkness works well with Zurga, a very troubled man, but Finley’s singing is so well modulated that he creates authenticity effortlessly.
I loved the ENO Pearl Fishers because the staging (Penny Woolcock) really made sense of the plot and its undertones, infinitely more so than Bizet. That’s why it was an artistic triumph, despite the poverty of the singing (with the exception of excellent Quinn Kelsey). This ROH Les Pêcheurs de Perles is a triumph for the music. Surprisingly sensitive orchestral playing, good singing and enough drama in the music to compensate for the lack of visuals. A longer and better version of this will appear soon in Opera Today.
Edward Seckersen, The Independent, 5 October 2010
The mis en scène of some operas really is best left to the imagination.
Penny Woolcock had a good crack at Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers at ENO last season but notwithstanding the excellence of her Esther Williams swimming effects the opera’s cheesy melodrama hardly supported her “social realism” approach. So the Royal Opera focused on divas not diving and with only four solo roles and a meaty choral element the concert approach made for smart economics in cash-strapped times.
Antonio Pappano was on the podium and from the elegance and airiness of the phrasing in the prelude and the “reveal” of that most seductive tune he characteristically led from the front in terms of style. The emphasis on vital rhythm and roomy, lightly inflected vocals kept the melodramatics moving and the pearly arias and duets floating to the surface. So much in this opera is “described” and the literal exoticism of harp and tambourine flecked accompaniments needs very deft handling.
Likewise the principal voices. The tenor and baritone – John Osborn (Nadir) and Gerald Finley (Zurga) – were first up with that ubiquitous duet and both singers invoked the sacred bond of friendship with laudable restraint and unusual respect for its ethereal dynamics. It’s more than a stentorian stand-and-deliver showstopper, this number, and can unbalance the act if that’s how it’s delivered so near the top of the show.
John Osborn then displayed his credentials with Nadir’s lovely act one Romance, a number demanding absolute command of a beautiful and well-rounded mezza voce. Osborn certainly has the high-set tessitura and palpitating timbre for French music and his heady delivery took the sound away to intoxicating effect. Finley had his “exotic” moments above the stave, too, and managed the tricky interplay between sensitive head voice and authoritative middle range rather well.
Enter then the object of their desires and enmity, the Priestess Leila, as personified by Nicole Cabell in provocative midnight blue. Caball has most of what it takes vocally to keep the role airborne (or should that be waterborne) – not least really great trills – and she generally managed the shimmering fioritura rather well. But the final act is a bit of a stretch for her and in an opera which is so much about longing I for one wanted more spin, more length, in the phrasing.
Good, though, to have no concerns as to whether the production will sink or swim – the score was more than kept afloat.
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 5 October 2010
Conductor Antonio Pappano who lacked his usual inspirational oomph but there were several passages of considerable elegance.Just back from a successful if fraught tour of Japan, the Royal Opera’s orchestra and chorus took to the stage of Covent Garden for two concert performances of Bizet’s fragrant but fragile Les Pêcheurs de perles. They sounded tired: the chorus’s French was pure mush and the orchestra’s strings were effortful and thin-toned where they should have been velvet-smooth and honey-sweet.
Conducting them was Antonio Pappano, who lacked his usual inspirational oomph. Using a scholarly new edition of the score prepared by Brad Cohen, Pappano’s interpretation was notable for some lovely colours from the wind and brass – the instrumental writing for this opera is enchantingly delicate and atmospheric – but not for any galvanising energy or conviction. The tension often sagged: ironically, Pappano’s protégé Rory MacDonald spun far more excitement out of the feeble drama when the opera was staged at the Coliseum last summer.
Still, there were several passages of considerable elegance, and it was a particular delight to hear the great tenor-baritone duet “Au fond du temple saint” sung with musing intimacy and quiet dignity rather than the rugby-club virility made fashionable by the dear old Jussi Bjørling and Robert Merrill recording.
John Osborn and Gerald Finley were Nadir and Zurga, the chums who fall out over their love of the same woman. Osborn, a youngish American tenor who returns to sing Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia here in January, displayed a high-lying, lucid tenor with a firm top, which impresses more than it charms.
My admiration for Finley knows no bounds, but he has by all accounts had a difficult summer, and although on this occasion his French was excellent and his intonation secure, he didn’t seem altogether comfortable in a role that he clearly hadn’t fully memorised.
Nicole Cabell, a popular winner of Cardiff Singer of the World in 2005, sang with cultured ease and grace, but Leila’s music really doesn’t offer the soprano much chance to shine.
In fact, the big duet and the tenor aria aside, the opera doesn’t offer anyone anything much – its final act surely ranks as one of the dampest in the entire repertory – and if I came away feeling musically underfed and underwhelmed, I’m inclined to blame Bizet’s lack of experience rather than any incompetence in the performance.
Barry Millington, Evening Standard, 5 October 2010
Les Pêcheurs de Perles needs to catch more drama
Those of us for whom opera is as much a theatrical as a musical experience generally feel short-changed by concert performances. With its Ceylonese fisherfolk, mysterious veiled priestess and rival lovers, Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles cries out for operatic spectacle. And yet, as ENO recently reminded us, a dose of colourful orientalism is not enough.
At least this was a fitting showcase for the ROH chorus and orchestra, just back from a morale-boosting Japanese tour. Excellent they were too under Antonio Pappano’s inspiring baton.
But there was no attempt to inject dramatic verisimilitude. Nadir, approaching his lover, wandered in with his head in his score, while Zurga didn’t even pretend to snatch the necklace on which the whole shaky plot depends — having already quit the stage.
In the latter role Gerald Finley also pointed up the difficulties of pitching his line against Bizet’s outlandish Act 1 harmonies — a feature which earned the composer opprobrium in his own day. He was commanding in Act 2, however, and delivered an agonised aria of remorse in Act 3.
John Osborn’s impassioned Nadir floated effortlessly in head voice up to his highest notes. Nicole Cabell, a vision in ultramarine, masqueraded without difficulty as a Sri Lankan beauty. And her phrasing was sensuous enough to have her thrown out of the priesthood.
Mark Ronan’s Theatre Reviews, 5 October 2010
Bizet wrote this opera when he was 24, during the summer of 1863 after returning to Paris from a three year stint in Rome. It was commissioned by Carvalho for the Théâtre Lyrique using as librettists Cormon and Carré, who had recently written Les pêcheurs de Catane (Catane, or Catania, being a coastal town in Sicily) for another French composer, Aimé Maillart. It’s reported that when they heard Bizet’s music they regretted not providing him with a better libretto, and it is indeed rather weak. The problem of how to bring the opera to a close was contentious, and when it was revived in Paris after Bizet’s death, the management loved the baritone/tenor duet, Au fond du temple saint, but didn’t like the ending in which the chief fisherman Zurga burns down the village so that the lovers can escape. They commissioned a different ending, and the loss of the original score tended to discourage productions of this opera. However this performance was based on Brad Cohen’s recent reconstruction of the original.
The music is much better than the libretto, and as Halévy wrote at the time, “After listening to the work seriously three times, I persist in finding in it the rarest of virtues”. So how was this concert performance at Covent Garden? Certainly Antonio Pappano gave a fine account of the score. He started gently, producing melodious sounds from the orchestra. Unfortunately the famous baritone/tenor duet in the early part of Act I, with Gerald Finley as Zurga and American tenor John Osborn as Nadir, failed to catch fire. It’s such a familiar piece of music that one is liable to expect too much, but I think the problem was partly that the evening took a while to warm up. The singers really only got into their stride after American soprano Nicole Cabell had entered as the priestess, with whom both Zurga and Nadir are in love. Her name Leïla was the original title of the opera, which was to be set in Mexico, but later changed to the more exotic location of Sri Lanka. Ms. Cabell won the Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 2005, and she sang beautifully here — she was the star of the evening, definitely a soprano to watch out for. Finley, Osborn and Cabell were well backed up by American bass Raymond Aceto as the high priest Nourabad, singing firmly and strongly.
As the evening warmed up we were treated to a very fine duet between Osborn and Cabell in Act II, a lovely soliloquy by Finley in Act III, and some strong singing from the chorus. I imagine the second and final night of this production on Thursday will be terrific throughout.
Tim Ashley, Guardian, 6 October 2010
Les Pêcheurs de Perles is an opera you might think would benefit from being performed in concert. Theatrically, Bizet’s Ceylonese drama has a habit of misfiring. Directors, mindful of its exotic locale, have tended to load it with orientalist tropes or self-consciously meaningful symbols – forgetting, perhaps, that it is primarily an examination of muted psychological shifts that works best when the surrounding paraphernalia is minimal.
So the Royal Opera’s decision to give the work in concert promised much in terms of exploring its emotional subtleties. In fact, it proved an uneven experience, thanks to inequalities of casting, and occasional indecisions about proportion and scale. Conductor Antonio Pappano thinks of it in bigger, broader terms than we are used to, frequently – and necessarily – reminding us of the sensual colours of Bizet’s orchestration, but sometimes lingering with overt fondness over effect. The orchestral sound is consistently glorious, if more suggestive of Italianate fullness than French conciseness.
Vocally, John Osborn and Gerald Finley are a bit mismatched as Nadir and Zurga, the friends whose relationship unravels with the realisation that they love the same woman. Finley’s voice has been in better shape, though he pushes himself to his expressive limits to create an entirely credible portrait of a man at once noble and emotionally volatile. In contrast, Osborn is impressively secure in music that lies implacably high, but he is seriously limited in colour and dynamic range. Léïla’s ambiguous, hieratic glamour suits Nicole Cabell better than some of her recent roles, while Raymond Aceto is a superb Nourabad, baleful in tone and utterly terrifying in moments of moralistic fury.
Clare Colvin, The Express, 11 October 2010
BIZET’S love affair with the exotic east has led to many highly-coloured productions since the 1863 premiere of the composer ’s first opera The Pearl Fishers.
The Royal Opera’s concert performance, conducted by Antonio Pappano, enhanced the more subtle melodies that might otherwise be submerged by stage effects of tsunamis and blazing buildings, but the decision to perform it straight, with singers lined up before the on stage orchestra, inevitably detracted from the atmosphere of old Ceylon.
In semi-staged productions, at least singers can emote physically and even, as in the Royal Opera’s magnificent Simon Boccanegra, throw themselves around a bit. However, this was decidedly not required of them here, as they clutched their music stands rather than each other.
What should have been a sublimely romantic moment as Nadir is heard singing off stage was blown when tenor John Osborn strolled on, holding the score open in front of him.
Making his Royal Opera debut, the young American tenor has a pleasing lucidity of tone and high tessitura, verging at times on alto. Musically, he’s a discovery. When he returns to sing Almaviva in Covent Garden’s The Barber Of Seville next January, we shall find out whether he can act as well.
With baritone Gerald Finley as Zurga, the tenorbaritone duet of reconciliation came over with quiet elegance.
Finley pulled out all the stops in the Act 3 aria when Zurga discovers that the object of their rivalry, the priestess Leila, is in love with his friend Nadir.
As Leila, Nicole Cabell, winner of Cardiff Singer of the World in 2005, looked striking in midnight blue and her voice was in clear control of the lavish trills with which Bizet adorned the soprano’s role, but she didn’t seem at ease with the restraint on movement or the role itself, which is one-dimensional.