Search - Tchaikovsky - Pique Dame on DVD

"And All This Is But The Vain Delirium Of My Sick Spirit?"

TODD KAY | 12/24/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The quotation that forms my review's title is from Hermann, the opera's protagonist; it could just as well be from stage director Lev Dodin, who has imposed on Tchaikovsky's opera a concept that is at first puzzling, then increasingly tedious, and finally ruinous. Hermann is floridly psychotic throughout, and the action is staged in an asylum. For the greater portion of the 180-minute running time, we stare at green walls and an institutional bed in an otherwise empty room. At first it seems that the scenes staged are Hermann's remembrances of the events that drove him mad -- the other characters are trotted out on a catwalk running the length of the rear wall, and they wear non-institutional clothing of the type we would see in a typical period production of PIKOVAYA DAMA. But at other points, characters from Hermann's past seem also to be fellow patients (two burly orderlies deliver Chekalinsky in time for him to get Act II rolling), and characters weave in and out of Hermann's asylum and non-asylum existences -- the mezzo who breaks up Lisa's party in Act I Scene 2 seems to work part time as what she was in the libretto (Lisa's governess) and part time as the head nurse of the institution.



The viewer who manages to endure all three hours of this static muddle will be left with many questions, as well as a regret that the production is not arresting enough to make him/her willing to spend more than a minute pursuing their answers. Is Lisa (who does not commit suicide here, but survives the opera) supposed to be visiting Hermann at the institution in the "present day" in some of these scenes (like the one in which the nurse/governess chats with her while taking Hermann's pulse and making notations on his bed chart), or is Hermann merely remembering his and Lisa's previous encounters and superimposing his present milieu on them, in cooperation with the bargain-basement minimalism favored by Dodin? One begins to wonder if everything in Dodin's production is the delusional imaginings of the mental patient. Probably closer to the mark is a suspicion that Dodin is using the psychosis of his Hermann as a dramatic crutch for an inchoate and dramatically unstable production; he believes it has liberated him from consistency. As is typical of directors of our era, especially those active in Europe, his disdain for the banality of a "straight" presentation of what the composer and librettist provided is such that he prefers to spend hours hammering the square pegs of an opera's dramatic situations into the round hole of a directorial conceit that should have been aborted within minutes of its conception.



It is also worth brief mention that lines of the libretto are added, subtracted, or reassigned with unusual audacity. As if we needed an additional prompt that this Hermann is insane, he has been given some minimal (but jarring) new dialogue in the first scene: he rants and shouts in an attempt to get the attention of the little boys playing soldier games, and they respond by looking contemptuous and repulsed (hallucinated children should be heard but not seen, I guess). The role of the Major Domo has been eliminated, it having no place in Dodin's reimagining. In one of the few *good* alterations (though one likely still to offend the most catholic sensibilities), Dodin has the Countess appear to speak/sing her lines in Tomsky's Act I narration. He repeats this gimmick with Lisa's lines at the beginning of Act III, which in the libretto belonged to Hermann as he read aloud from Lisa's letter. The intermezzo with the "Dance of Shepherds and Shepherdesses" is also at odds with the institutional milieu, so we instead get choristers dressed as mental patients, blindfolding each other and staggering around (confusingly, Lisa and the Countess also participate). The roles of Prilepa and Milovzor in the vocal portion of that divertissement are not assigned to singers brought in for the occasion, but are performed by the portrayers of Lisa and Hermann. One expects, then, the baritone singing Yeletsky to play the third member of the triangle, Zlatogor, with his temptations of the heroine with "mountains of gold and precious stones"; surprisingly, and of mild dramaturgical interest, this part is assumed instead by the Countess. There are some unsuccessful attempts to make the production seem more cinematic with awkward interpolations of stock gambling footage (hands holding cards, chips falling, and the like).



If it is difficult for me to imagine any devotee of this opera willingly watching the DVD more than once, it is equally difficult for me to imagine anyone only wanting to hear the performance once. Conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky leads the forces of the Paris Opera in a sympathetic and often thrilling traversal of the colorful score, and his cast is without true weak link. The tireless Vladimir Galouzine justifies his solidifying reputation as one of the greatest of Hermanns vocally, and he is an energetic actor who does what he can to realize Dodin's ideas. He often seems to be channeling Geoffrey Rush as David Helfgott, though in the scene with the spurning of Lisa, there is a brief detour into Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. Stocky and coarse-featured, he is not physically ideal for what he is asked to portray (to be really touched by this Hermann, especially in this close-up format, we would need a physical type not often found among men who can sing the role -- someone more delicate and inward). Hasmik Papian excels at looks of grave concern, and her dignified and mature Lisa is a winning assumption in spite of edginess at the top of that big voice. Irina Bogatcheva's Countess, pace descriptions of other characters, is no old crone, either physically or vocally. One senses that she could have brought more ambiguity to her earlier scenes in a better-thought-through production, but she makes the most of her almost director-proof reverie in Act II. As she wistfully recalls her youth, her slow, graceful dance in white nightgown, long hair loosened, provides the production's one indelible image. Baritones Nikolai Putilin and Ludovic Tezier, as Tomsky and Yeletsky respectively, provide capable support (the former overcomes an early tendency to begin in the vicinity of a note and slither up or down to its specification). Christianne Stotijn's Polina, warm and genial where Papian's Lisa is circumspect and wary, makes a vivid impression in her brief time on stage, and sings beautifully.



This superb audio recording of an irresistible Romantic opera, weighed down with unpleasant and futile pictorial baggage, is virtually an advertisement for DVD Audio Ripper or an equivalent program. I leave you to do what you will with that qualified recommendation, just as I leave this production's Hermann to thrash about in his sleep at the asylum, perhaps dreaming of a topsy-turvy alternate reality in which his chaotic mind and severed acquaintance with logic and reason would qualify him not for institutionalization but for a lucrative career as a stage director."