Undermining Gluck

I am usually not happy with an opera review whose primary advice is "just close your eyes and listen to the music;" but I have to confess that that is how I felt about the San Francisco Opera production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride. All the musical values were of the highest order. With the possible exception of a slightly ragged start, Patrick Summers had excellent senses of both pace and balance, both within the pit and in the relationship between the orchestra and the voices on stage. The principal voices, Mark Doss, Bo Skovhus, Paul Groves, and particularly Susan Graham, who has precious little time off stage to recharge her batteries, were all solidly on top of the music. All this made for the sort of performance that left one wondering why one does not hear more of Gluck. After all, this opera had its first performance in May of 1779, a little less than two years before the first performance of Idomeneo; and, while Gluck and Mozart have significantly different approaches to their grammar and rhetoric (not to mention a debt to Johann Sebastian Bach, which, in Gluck's case was almost blatant), each composer came up with a striking dramatic approach to a post-Trojan-War subject.

Unfortunately, the combination of the staging conceived by Robert Carsen and the choreography prepared by Phillipe Giraudeau threatened to drown the sublime of Gluck in a flood of the ridiculous. Giraudeau probably deserves the lion's share of the blame. His biography did not indicate any connection with Pina Bausch; but, like his colleague, he has the problem of never being content with doing anything once (or twice, for that matter). Everything is repeated to excess, as if this will somehow add to the gravitas of a story told in the context of a series of intra-familial murders. Combined with Carsen's black-on-black vision, there is also a strong scent of the over-stylized movements for which The Living Theatre was notorious. This all went to demonstrate why less is sometimes more. Last month I wrote about a concert performance of Berlioz' Damnation of Faust, where the only "staging" was a matter of deportment and a minimal allotment of gestures. Gluck's music is far more austere than Berlioz' (although sometime just as fiery); and, given the general austerity of approaches to production in Ancient Greece, a bit of respect for minimality would probably have been in order. Nevertheless, however shopworn the observation may be, it was definitely a treat to be able to hear this music!