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Rating: GIOVANNA D'ARCO.
The performances of "Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher", music by Honneger with a dramatic text by Claudel, concluded last night. With this work, the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome has chosen to open the 2008/09 season. Pappano engages the direction of K. Warner, one of the most renowned opera directors, to stage a captivating show that is as engaging as a film but with the intensity and ability to move, which comes from the actors' performances and the music that is intricately woven, thread by thread, note by note, into the plot.
Those who know me know how suspiciously I approach things that feel very 'new' to me, wrongly, but those who know me also know of that curiosity that the new and novelty itself cannot keep me away from. There I was, among the audience, enthralled by a show hard to define and outside formal parameters, not an oratorio, not a melodrama, nor an opera, just pure emotions.
The triumph and praise of French nationalism, but also the symbol of a vocation towards something, a struggle for Truth and the affirmation of values of love, solidarity, and Unity, until the end, beyond death. Jeanne is the heroine who dedicates her life to an ideal, that of a united France under one king; she is the strong woman inspired by God but also the virgin maiden, judged by men. Catholic, deeply religious yet irreverent, Claudel portrays the judges as animals, a pig, a donkey, and sheep, a bestiary that stigmatizes arrogant human stupidity. It's thought-provoking that this 'drama' that praises Unity was composed between 1935 and 1942 and is performed again today at a time when history seems to be taking us back. Claudel's text is tight. Honneger's music at times supports it, underlines the irony, and other times diverges from it. Pluralism and co-existence of different expressive codes, a taste for the combinatory game and seemingly incompatible languages but always thought out and intentional; from the innocence of the children's voices to the pounding rhythms of Jazz, from the deep toll of bells to the sound effects given by the Ondes Martenot; games of light and dark sounds, mixes of colors and timbres that clash in an orchestra deprived of the open and clear sound of horns in favor of the soft, dense, rich, dark sound of the Sax.
The prosody of Claudel's verse is in turn insistent, musical itself; its accentuation perfectly aligned with that of the music becomes music; words and notes, in an inseparable pair, naturally pass into each other in a continuous osmosis. And the rhythm is that marked by the breath and then the sigh of one who defied foolishness, greed, and power. But now she is at the stake and in the doubling of her consciousness, now close to dying, she recalls the past. The direction is masterful: an essential scenic setup yet not devoid of effects aimed at representing the depth and diversity of temporal planes. Jeanne speaks, remembers, trembles, encourages herself, is afraid, she is there on a small chair; behind her, the same large chair on which her dying body lies. And games of light, projections of images that alternate with the characters, the choirs, render the progress of an action that is not in motion yet never static.
The intense performance by Romane Bohringer has nothing to envy from that of Bergmann directed by Rossellini; remarkable flexibility of the orchestra in becoming pure timbre, but above all, behind every movement, every word, every crescendo and decrescendo, every action, every expression, every light, great is the co-direction of Antonio Pappano, a true deus ex-machina and not only of this production.
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