LOVE and protests: ‘Manon Lescaut’ returns to the Liceu between euphoria and discord | Culture

When in 1889 the editor Giulio Ricordi tried to dissuade the young man Puccini to set to music the same argument that had just elevated Massenetthe composer responded with famous impudence: “A woman like Manon can have more than one lover.” And he was right. Manon Lescaut (1893), his first great operatic machinery, is also the most daringly Wagnerian: where Massenet had kept the story of the Abbé Prévost within the limits of the lyric operaPuccini pushes it towards an absolute drama, of Tristanesque descent, which leads to the strange nudity of the final act. There, by suddenly stripping the spectator of the theatrical devices that protected him in the preceding acts, turns it into voyeur of a devastated intimacy.

That last act—a static duet of love and death unprecedented in Italian opera—places the audience as a direct witness of an agony suspended in the nothingness of an American desert. The impression it made can be traced in the reviews published after the Turin premiere on February 1, 1893. “It left the public stunned and overwhelmed by emotion,” he wrote. The Gazzetta del Popoloas if the spectators “needed to convince themselves that what they had witnessed was not reality, but a staged fiction.”

The twenty minutes of that final act once again became a high intensity experience on March 17 at the Liceu in Barcelona. The brave and controversial production of Alex Ollépremiered at the Frankfurt Opera in 2019, which transfers the action to the contemporary drama of irregular immigration in an abstract space dominated by the giant letters of the English word LOVE. But it was, above all, the memorable incarnation of the protagonist by the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian which unleashed the final euphoria, punctuated by some protests directed at the stage management.

Manon’s lament, Alone, lost, abandoned —which gave Puccini so many problems until its final reinstatement in 1923—was the true climax of the evening. In the midst of the tense opening ostinato, Grigorian found the exact dose of power, seduction and charisma to convey the desperation of a young woman who dies clinging to love and life. It was the culmination of an exemplary evolution of the character by the versatile soprano from Vilnius, who transitioned naturally from the melancholic and capricious teenager to the heroine tragically aware of her destiny, passing through the sensual courtesan of the second act.

They are partner It was the tenor Ivan Gyngazov, substitute in Joshua Guerrero’s first performances. He pushed Russian exhibited metal and dramatic power as Des Grieux, one of Puccini’s most extensive and demanding roles. He especially stood out in the last two acts—in particular, in his heartbreaking Look, I’m crazy, look of the third—although his singing was more monotonous in the first two, where he did not find the sweetness, morbidity and elasticity that his famous aria requires. I never saw a woman.

The Ukrainian baritone Iurii Samoilov He shone more on the acting level than on the vocal level as Lescaut, Manon’s wayward brother, in a similar vein to that of his recent Onegin at the Teatro Real. Something comparable happened with the Italian bass Donato Di Stefano, an experienced funny bel canto player who offered a radical incarnation of a Geronte turned gangster, repulsive, bald and wearing sunglasses. Among the supporting roles, the young Croatian tenor Filip Filipović provided freshness as Edmondo, along with the Italian Andrea Antognetti in the short lamplighter’s song in the third act. The Cor del Gran Teatre del Liceu also stood out, especially as the crowd gathered in the port during the third act.

The musical direction of Joseph Pons She once again appeared competent, but not very idiomatic in Puccini. The still owner of the Liceu began the opera with vivacity, although without the necessary effusion, theatrical pulse or lyrical abandon. The volume also posed specific balance problems with the singers in the densest passages with a Wagnerian imprint. After the break, however, he extracted greater dramatic intensity in the last two acts, especially in the fourth, the best of the night. The famous Interludeone of the most inspired moments of the Gran Teatre del Liceu Symphony Orchestra.

In the scenic section, Alex Ollé takes on the thorny task of updating Puccini. The idea of ​​turning the protagonist into an immigrant who enters Europe irregularly works in dramatic terms, but it lacks true theatrical brilliance and is weighed down by an overload of unnecessary elements. This is the case of the black and white film of Emmanuel Carlier prior to the musical start, which recounts Manon’s adventures until her arrival at that kind of station with a fast food establishment where the opera begins.

The scenery of Alfons Flores sets the second act in a club stripteasean option that clashes with the neo-rococo refinement of the music. The detention cages in the third act add tension, but make the action difficult to see. The greatest success of the production are the monumental letters LOVE that run through the scenery and preside over the fourth act, where that idea of ​​love is transfigured into tragedy. The precise and poetic lighting by Joachim Klein and Jann Hartmann contributes to this, along with an artificial and banal costume by Lluc Castells that involves eccentricities, such as the conversion of the lamplighter into a transvestite.