A Tale of Divergent Styles at the English National Opera - NYTimes.com

Allan Clayton and Sophie Bevan in a scene from "Castor & Pollux."

By GEORGE LOOMIS

Published: November 22, 2011

LONDON — You wouldn’t know it from the scant opportunities to see his work on stage, but Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the great opera composers.

He was also a late bloomer — 50 years old when his first opera, “Hippolyte et Aricie,” triumphed at its premiere in 1733, an event that caused the composer André Campra to exclaim: “My Lord, there is enough music in this opera to make 10 of them; this man will eclipse us all!”

“Castor et Pollux” was less successful at its 1737 premiere, but made a huge impression when it returned to the Paris Opéra in revised form in 1754. By that time a controversy raged in France over the respective merits of French and Italian opera. The opera appealed to Italian tastes, especially with “ariettes” akin to Italian da capo arias. Yet Rameau’s “lyric tragedies” remained essentially faithful to the tradition established by Jean-Baptiste Lully, even as they provoked conservatives with their expressive harmonies and other complexities.

One ought to jump at the chance to see the English National Opera’s new “Castor & Pollux” (as it is billed in light of the company’s policy of performing operas in English), the company’s first ever Rameau staging.

But unfortunately, the opera, which deals with the tender love between two half-brothers, each in love with the same woman, was entrusted to the director-producer Barrie Kosky, general director-designate of Berlin’s Komische Oper, and his production seriously misfires.

I have admired some of Mr. Kosky’s prior work, but here he seems both stymied by the aesthetic of French Baroque Opera and determined to prove to the Komische Oper (of which this “Castor” is a co-production) his radical stripes as a producer. Playing in a bare-box set by Katrin Lea Tag that flouts France’s tradition of visual splendor, the staging is full of trendy clichés like having choristers mimic disco dancing while singing jaunty music or having characters experience epileptic fits at crucial dramatic moments.

Because Pollux resolves to take Castor’s place in death after the latter is slain in battle, with the aim of allowing a resurrected Castor to live happily with Télaïre, who returns his love (but not Pollux’s), the opera has important underworld scenes. They must have been the impetus for the mound of dirt on stage that characters play around in, like children in a sandbox. There are also heavy doses of nudity and gratuitous violence.

Matters are better musically, though hardly perfect. The conductor Christian Curnyn, conducting a somewhat altered version of the 1754 score, sets well-judged tempos but could have worked harder to attain from the E.N.O.’s modern-instrument orchestra a performance with the litheness and crispness of a period instrument band. A couple of the choruses also lack the proper bite, possibly because of the English translation.

Sophie Bevan sings beautifully in Télaïre’s great aria of mourning “Triestes apprêts” (to use its French title), but neither she nor the drama benefit from assigning ariettes in the divertissement scenes to the principal characters; she tired toward the end. Laura Tatulescu sings vividly as Télaïre’s conflicted sister Phébé, who also loves Castor. Allan Clayton’s sweet tenor voice serves Castor’s music well, and Roderick Williams is an articulate Pollux. Henry Waddington, who sings Jupiter with a cloth in front of his face, is not the only singer to look silly in Ms. Tag’s costumes. Yes, the dazzling sight of Jupiter is supposed to blind mere mortals, but still.

After the frustrations of “Castor & Pollux,” Deborah Warner’s engrossing new production of “Eugene Onegin” at the E.N.O. comes as a tonic.

Tchaikovsky’s opera is one of the most emotionally powerful in the repertoire, and after a series of several high-profile deconstructive interpretations, most recently Stefan Herheim’s distorted staging in Amsterdam, a production that recognizes this fundamental fact is long overdue.

A Tale of Divergent Styles at the English National Opera - NYTimes.com