Review of Pelléas et Mélisande – a luminous half-stage but Debussy’s elusive opera keeps its secrets | Opera

TTrying to unravel the secrets of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck’s allegorical play, is a slippery task at the best of times. Doing this in a barely there stage show, with the orchestra on stage with the singers, is much more difficult. For the opening performance of the Aldeburgh Festival this summer, this was the challenge that brought together conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, a featured artist this year, with actor and occasional opera director Rory Kinnear.

Except for some industrial-style pendant lights and one bar stool, there were no props or scenery – unless you count the orchestra, through which the characters stumbled as if the players were the forest surrounding the castle. The costumes, also credited to Vicky Mortimer, were simple: dark suits for the royal men, tattered white wedding suits for Melisande, and faded boiler suits for the silent onstage extras, who also provided the brief off-stage chorus.

What mattered, visually, was the light. Working with lighting designers Paul Constable and Imogen Clarke, Kinnear took his cues from the series of references to shadow and lighting in the text. Figures moved through points or bands of light on the stage, or walked in the gleam of music stand lights among the orchestra behind them. As Genevieve sang of the distant shimmer of the sea, the light of the parlor was shining through an open door near the back as her son Pelias entered, singing from the aisle as he approached the stage across the hall. His inevitable kiss with his sister-in-law took place in the glare of sidelights.

Conducted by Wigglesworth, a featured artist at this summer’s festival, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra often sounded impressive, especially in the interludes. Yet music that can seem ethereal when emanating, disembodied, from the orchestra pit here sounds solid, even earthy. This was no problem for the singers, whose voices came with a warm immediacy in Snape’s vocal, from Nicolas Testi’s cavernous Arkel, to Sarah Connolly’s opulent-voiced Geneviève, to Beth Stirling’s playful Yniold. There was a compelling sibling rivalry between Gordon Painter’s Golaud, a velvet-coated tough guy, and Jacques Imperillo’s generous, honest, charismatic Pelias. But where does the mysterious Melisande fit in? Sophie Bevan shone loudly in the role, the soprano silvery and fluid, but in this abstract context the character had little to do but stare vaguely at the audience, her arms at her sides, empty rather than mysterious. This clever staging was satisfyingly ambitious in what it aimed to achieve, and it almost succeeded – but Debussy’s opera remains anything but elusive.