The Maison symphonique displayed a concert version of the opera in Montreal Alcina by Händel, an unforgettable evening and a milestone event, in several respects, in the history of Les Violons du Roy.
Very officially, the presentation ofAlcina de Händel celebrated 30 years of collaboration between Karina Gauvin and the Violons du Roy. In practice, the musical director of Les Violons du Roy is called Jonathan Cohen, and the latter conducted Alcina at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2022.
The idea of exporting his in-depth know-how for weeks to England is undoubtedly not foreign either to the Saturday evening or to the extraordinary sensitivity and refinement of his orchestral reading. The digging of the pianissimo nuances in the air Ah mio cor » ofAlcina in Act II, literally sung in a daze by Karina Gauvin, left you speechless, as did the orchestral response of Les Violons du Roy at any time of the evening.
Magical threesome
Plus, the show was vocally stellar. At first, he was saved by the tenor Benjamin Butterfield, who replaced the ailing Stuart Jackson in the role of Orontes in the afternoon. And he did things as if everything had been planned… Hats off!
Then the cast was not only flawless, but admirable. We are now beginning to know well the skills of the excellent alto Avery Amereau. We discovered its tone in the vocalizations. The voice of the mezzo Kayleigh Decker is more “ordinary”, without particular relief (act III, scene 3), but she is a solid and reliable musician.
Nathan Berg camped Melisso with more stature than finesse, but with great efficiency, the bouquet of the evening being obviously made up of the exceptional sopranos. Rowan Pierce embodied an Oberto of confounding assurance in the most perilous passages (“ Barbara! Io en lo so è quello il genitor “), while the stunning Lucy Crowe was lunar in Morgana, with spun highs, improbable attacks, playing with her voice like a tightrope walker. Karina Gauvin measured the importance of the moment. This role, her role, the magician Alcina, approached with a breadth that is given to her today and with the rage of a wounded animal, she sang it as if it were her last evening on stage.
The customer experience
Musically, there is nothing else to say than this immense admiration, but the important observations do not stop there. The evening raises questions, and first of all to see such a sparsely filled Maison symphonique for such a big project. Crudely and simply: how many spectators would there have been with the name “Bernard Labadie” on the poster? Is there a problem with the image and sex appeal of Jonathan Cohen vis-à-vis the public, which has nothing to do with the quality, excellent? Corollary: this evening with seven upscale soloists, in a more than half-empty Maison symphonique, the Violons du Roy risked it for whom and for what, and how long will they drag it around like a financial drag?
The second question relates to the experience of the evening. An opera in concert without staging, with singers reading the score, sung texts printed in the program rather than projected as surtitles, for an opera of more than 3h15, what type of “customer experience” does this give?
We have no doubt that the London basin is full of baroque opera specialists ready to drink in this kind of evening, but did we wonder if it was really exportable to Quebec and under what conditions? Because, icing on the cake, opera with Händel is based onaria da capo, that is, roughly speaking, tunes where the protagonist spends ten minutes repeating the same thing four times. In the XVIIIe century, maybe they had nothing else to do, but after his working week, after three hours (and even two hours, because people left on the break), the average Beijinger, the eye immersed in his program to read “Ah my heart” and hear “Ah my heart, Ah my heart, Ah my heart, Ah my heart”, he is a little fed up.
No doubt there would be a way to think about modernizing the experience for a less purist audience than that of Glyndebourne.