Flashes of genius in Opera de Paris’s Nozze di Figaro and Khovantchina

The Paris Opera is beginning to look like an episode of Squid Game. As participants are taken out by Covid, and with threats of national strikes looming, the house often cannot announce until the afternoon of a planned performance whether it is to go ahead or not. (Which is not to say that other houses are faring any better.)

Netia Jones’s new production of Le nozze di Figaro (Palais Garnier) tries to walk the fine line between theatre and reality, in a self-reflecting mise en abyme that often loses its way. We are never really sure if the characters are figures in a drama or are themselves playing others. Do we believe in them or not? Jones has taken care of everything — sets, costumes, video and stage direction — so you might expect a little more coherence of vision.

There are flashes of genius, such as the Countess singing her first aria while the Count — presumably an opera intendant as well as a nobleman — auditions her successor in the next room. Or take the video projection of Marcellina’s rant against men — present in Beaumarchais’s original play but not in the Mozart — and her observation of Barbarina’s lost pin aria: the old generation watches the young repeat its own mistakes, helplessly trapped in a man’s world. When the Count brings a cordless screwdriver to open the Countess’s closet, there is a rare moment of hilarity. But overall, humour and insight are too thin on the ground to carry this long evening.

With half the cast masked, and some not using their full voice, it was hard to judge how the ensemble might have sounded in less pestilential times. Certainly Ying Fang is a show-stopping Susanna, bright, agile, a sweet, glass-clear voice and a vast expressive range. Luca Pisaroni is a good match for her as Figaro, athletic, nimble, with a rich and virile voice. Christopher Maltman, replacing Peter Mattei, makes a solid, nuanced Count.

Lea Desandre sang the part of Cherubino in Aix-en-Provence last summer; it is as if she has cut and pasted her character from that production into this one. It is wonderful, but overdone, as if she thinks she can gesticulate the production into intelligibility. (Maria Bengtsson sang the Countess on the night I attended but was unwell.)

On the podium, Gustavo Dudamel keeps a cool head and holds his forces together well. When things threaten to fall apart — which happens often — he brings them back together without breaking a sweat.

Dudamel conducted this work at Daniel Barenboim’s Staatsoper Berlin, and the older man’s influence is audible in every note. Downbeats are heavy, phrases are driven and notes are directly attacked. A lighter touch, more contour in the phrasing and more attention to instrumental articulation would bring the music an organic momentum. Still, Dudamel’s Mozart is cogent and capable. He has room to grow.

★★★☆☆

Hartmut Haenchen at Sunday’s La Khovantchina (Opéra Bastille) has done all his growing. Haenchen, one of the most consistently convincing conductors of his generation, brings scores to life with such absolute mastery that after four hours of bloodlust and intrigue, you wish you could start again from the beginning.

Sunday’s performance was the 19th of Andrei Serban’s unremarkable production, a dusting-off of something that looks as if it has been in the archives for at least half a century. If you think opera should just be a series of elaborate tableaux with fabulous costumes, you will love this staging. No matter; even the most intelligent updating of Mussorgsky’s blockbuster runs aground with its incendiary ending. How can you stage a mob of religious fanatics burning themselves to death? Serban doesn’t even try, making do with a couple of puffs of pyrotechnics and a haphazard exodus from the stage.

Haenchen has chosen Shostakovich’s completion of the score, and the orchestra plays it for him as if they had frozen and bled for Mother Russia. The chorus, under Ching-Lien Wu, is magnificent, and the mostly Russian cast is uniformly excellent. From Sergei Skorokhodov’s impetuous Prince Andrei and John Daszak’s bullish Prince Golitsine to Anush Hovhannisyan’s beleaguered Emma and Anita Rachvelishvili’s treacle-dark Marfa, every role is well cast and superbly sung. And we believe every note, not least because Haenchen shapes the details and carries the whole with a savvy sense of architecture.

Dramaturgically, La Khovantchina is a mess. Why are the pious Old Believers hanging out with the coarse Streltsy? Who are all these princes? Why does the story shift abruptly after Prince Ivan’s murder? And why, exactly, do all these people want to die? Never mind! The music is one giant roller-coaster thriller, and you will soon be so involved that you stop worrying about the why. At last we are in a world where pestilence seems like a minor blip in the order of the day.

★★★★☆

Both productions to February 18, operadeparis.fr