Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande

One thinks ‘Aha, a stage director who understands the music!’. Plaudits to Benjamin Lazar. As often, Golaud lies at the centre of events. Mélisande is a flaky young thing to whom Jenny Daviet... — BBC Music Magazine, February 2018, 4 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 10th Nov 2017
Catalogue No: BAC144
Label: Bel Air Classiques

Marc Mauillon (Pelléas), Jenny Daviet (Mélisande), Laurent Alvaro (Golaud), Stephen Bronk (Arkel), Emma Lyren (Genevieve), Julie Mathevet (Yniold), Stefano Olcese (Médecin, Berger)
Malmö Opera
Maxime Pascal

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Stage direction : Benjamin Lazar

Sets : Adeline Caron

Costumes : Alain Blanchot

Lighting design : Mael Iger

Assistant director : Elizabeth Calleo

HD recording at the Malmö Opera in May 2016 Directed for TV by Corentin Leconte

Produced by François Duplat / BelAir Media

When Debussy completes the score, based on the eponymous symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, the world of opera still abides by Richard Wagner and the upheaval he caused with Tristan und Isolde. But Debussy decides to stand on the exact opposite side, and uses his new opus to preach a new aesthetic creed. In depicting the forbidden love story between the timid Pelléas and the beautiful Mélisande, kept apart by an unfortunate marriage, the French composer brings us back to the immortal legend of Tristan and Isolde, but this time showing the world that the future of music could very well lie far away from Wagner’s overwhelming lyricism and outsized rhetoric. This new production, created by one of the rising stars of French stage direction Benjamin Lazar for the Malmö Opera (headed by Ingmar Bergman from 1952 to 1958), encapsulates all the different aspects of this mysterious work, from the oniric poetry invented by Maeterlinck and Debussy to the realism, poignant because openly simple and even mundane, of these profoundly human beings lost in a forest full of sound and symbols that will never let them escape.

The young French conductor Maxime Pascal, the Orchestra of the Malmö Opera, and an almost all-French cast (among which the excellent Marc Mauillon and Jenny Daviet), bring forth with intelligence all the refinement and all the vitality this unique and fascinating score has to offer.

Running time : 170 min.

Booklet : FR / ENG / GER

Original language : FR

Subtitles : FR / ENG / GER / SPA / KOR / JAP

Video : Color, 16/9, NTSC

Audio : PCM 2.0, Dolby Digital 5.1

Reviews

February 2018

One thinks ‘Aha, a stage director who understands the music!’. Plaudits to Benjamin Lazar. As often, Golaud lies at the centre of events. Mélisande is a flaky young thing to whom Jenny Daviet contributes a convincing wealth of confused gestures; Marc Mauillon gives us Pélleas as a mummy’s boy…Alvaro’s Golaud is strong and impressive, sung with wonderfully dark, incisive tone and acted with at times horrific realism.

February 2018

It’s a potentially liberating alternative to the heavy Romantic look often given to the piece in performance…The Malmö orchestra play most alertly for conductor Pascal. In keeping with the new directions sought by the stage director he secures a harder, less Romantic Debussy sound which is more resonant of slightly later contemporaries such as Bartók than the proto-Wagnerian splendours of Inghelbrecht or the proto-modernity of Boulez.

10th February 2018

60 minutes of quiet enchantment. Nicely packaged too, and beautifully recorded in a former synagogue. And, if you're smitten with Mirkovič’s voice, track down her recording of Schubert's Winterreise, where she's accompanied by a hurdy gurdy.

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Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande

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Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande

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