Francis Poulenc’s psychologically arresting opera “Dialogues Des Carmelites” is well worth a hearing for its theatrically characterful score alone. As performed by the Royal Northern College of Music opera students in their own theatre in Manchester tonight, it burst onto the stage in vibrant, searing glory, in a marvellous staging that theatre director Orpha Phelan deserves a thousand gold stars for. Bringing out every cluster of tone colour from the score was conductor Andrew Greenwood. The performance was sung in French.
The story is based on the historical event of the Martyrs of Compiegne: an order of Carmelite nuns who, during the French Revolution, refused to give up their vocation and were executed by guillotine. Phelan took the production out of its eighteenth century setting and into a modern-day world. While this cut away some of the historical detail – we had no real feel for the troubled background occurring outside convent walls until some very menacing modern policemen in black riot gear burst into the building – it did mean the focus could go squarely onto the personalities and inner lives of the principal characters, many of whom needed to express their own inner spirituality in some truly lovely music of the psyche. Anna Bonomelli’s starkly monochromatic set that mostly featuring a cut-through convent building in modernist lines, with matching costumes, reinforced this emphasis onto the young singers.
Soprano Olivia Carrell starred as Blanche, a fragile young novice who transferred from hiding out as an aristocrat to retreating from the world as the newest member of the convent. She sang with a powerful yet brittle quality, and her solos were soliloquies into her angst. As Blanche’s best friend Sister Constance, soprano Julia Smith was the sparkling soubrette of the piece, bubbling her way sunnily through her music until her final moral choices had to be made.
Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Maitland shone as the elderly Prioress, Madame de Croissy. Her final scene, which she mostly sang from a wheelchair while suffering an unspecified but fatal illness, was twisted with pain but reinforced with steely fortitude. Mezzo-soprano Olivia Tringham as Mother Marie backed her in iron-edged support, and soprano Clare Hood as the new Prioress, Madame Lidoine, brought a richly spiritual voice to the convent as it entered its darkest times.
The women’s chorus of nuns were an impressive display of courage and inner strength who not only sang gorgeously together, but were a genuine inspiration as characters. The final act in the prison, illuminated with lighting designer Matt Haskins’ flushed-in reds against the Carmelites’ washed-out haggardness, led to the ending scene of the execution, and the first time the slice of the guillotine blade was sharply heard over the music, the audience visibly jumped. It was not a sound that could be got used to; and each time it was heard again, another Carmelite fell and stopped singing, until there was finally only Blanche soloing in the middle of the stage.
The male singers only had bit parts in this opera, but they still made their mark. Baritone Ross Cumming, as Blanche’s father the Marquis de la Force, set up the original image of an old man desiring to be an indulgent grandfather in a time of peace. Tenor Andrew Terrafranca, as Blanche’s brother the Chevalier, was contrastingly nervy and anxious to escape. Baritone Emyr Jones and tenor Gabriel Seawright led their police squad through the convent with relish and destruction. Philip O’Connor was a quietly practical Chaplain, and baritone William Kyle reeled off his death row list of names to a television camera as the Jailer.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 9/12/19
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