Pelléas et Mélisande

“Simon Keenlyside stands out with perhaps the best Pelléas ever”

Composer : Claude Debussy
Librettist : A slight alteration of Maeterlinck’s tragedy
Venue and Dates : Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York
October 20th 2003
Concert Performance
Conductor : Bernard Haitink
Performers:

Mélisande : Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
Geneviève : Nathalie Stutzmann
Pelléas : Simon Keenlyside
Golaud : Gerald Finley
Arkel : John Tomlinson
Yniold : James Danner
Tanglewood Festival Chorus
Boston Symphony Orchestra

Notes:

Soundbites

Anthony Tommasini for the New York Times, October 22, 2003

Singing the Unspoken: A Tale of Forbidden Love

“The role of Pelléas falls awkwardly on the divide between the tenor and baritone ranges. This performance offered the appealing British baritone Simon Keenlyside as Pelléas, and in certain high-lying passages his voice seemed hard-pressed. But his warm and plaintive sound affectingly suited the role. In the scene in which Pelléas smothers his face in Mélisande’s long tresses, which she lets fall from the window of her tower bedroom, Mr. Keenlyside’s quivering intensity, Ms. Hunt Lieberson’s veiled longing and the suppressed stirrings of the orchestra under Mr. Haitink made this music seem more dangerous than ever.”

F Paul Driscoll, January 2004 , vol 68 , no.7

Pelléas et Melisande, an opera whose fragile beauties elude most opera house revivals, arrived in luminous bloom at Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium on October 20, when Bernard Haitink led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a sold-out concert performance of Debussy’s masterwork. Unencumbered by the usual fey stage realizations of the opera’s Impressionist landscape, Haitink and his superb cast gave the most urgent, dramatic reading of the score within recent memory in New York; this was, for once, truly a story rich in passion, played for life-or-death stakes. Orchestral contours were bold and sinewy, but never at the expense of color or point; the music had the aura of legend and myth, rather than a fluffed-up Disneyesque fairy-tale.

Simon Keenlyside’s ardent, somewhat keyed-up Pelléas was an ideal foil for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s glorious Mélisande, a figure of almost disturbing poise. Surpassingly lovely in a chaste white gown, Lieberson was poignant in the unhappy girl’s elliptical, evasive, turns of phrase, and equally persuasive in declarations of fear and love. Gerald Finley was an unconventionally handsome and energetic – but wholly convincing – Golaud, Nathalie Stutzmann an aristocratic, compassionate Geneviève. The worn colors of John Tomlinson’s bass gave suitable voice to the kingly concerns of Arkel.

David Patrick Stearns for Andante.

At New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Delivers a Potent Pelléas et Mélisande.

“Amidst a formidable cast including Gerald Finley and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Simon Keenlyside stands out with perhaps the best Pelléas ever.”

“….it was excellent on several fronts and had in Keenlyside perhaps the best Pelléas ever.”

“And Keenlyside? What made his Pelléas great — and I don’t use this word lightly — were all the usual elements of good performance and then some. His use of the French language wasn’t merely clear and alert to word-painting; his pronunciation suggested he was interpreting the language for the sheer beauty of its sound, just as Impressionist painters used color for its own sake. Dramatically, his performance was emotionally alive, but with an extra sense of purpose that comes with the understanding that the world Pelléas inhabits is essentially arid and loveless with an undercurrent of cruelty, and that his feelings for Mélisande are his only way out of this genteel hell.”