Pelléas et Mélisande, Longborough Festival, review: Opera at its most intoxicating

Telegraph

30-06-2025

In the wake of their recent small-scale stagings of Wagner's Ring cycle, under the outstanding musical direction of Wagner supremo Anthony Negus, it makes sense for him to tackle Debussy. After all, the French composer's 1902 operatic adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck's play was profoundly influenced by his experience of Wagner's music-drama. Now, in doing so successfully, Longborough have demonstrated a way to move forward.
Heavy with symbolism, the story of Debussy's intoxicating opera is essentially a simple love triangle in which the developing, overwhelming love of Pelléas and Mélisande threatens her enigmatic marriage to Pelléas's half-brother Golaud and leads, in the end, to the murder of Pelléas and the death of Mélisande. But around this swirls a host of allusive episodes linked by Debussy's unique through-composed score, a continuous narrative of suppressed passion and lurking danger with no conventional operatic arias or ensembles.
Picking up on the frequent references in the text to light and dark, Jenny Ogilvie's staging (designer Max Johns, lighting Peter Small) is dominated by lights with an alarming life of their own: a moving neon strip for the pool by which Golaud and Mélisande first meet, swinging spotlights across the stage, dazzling crossbeams for moonlight, an illuminated swing on which Mélisande becomes entangled with Pelléas. However, this becomes overdone towards the end, as the equipment has to be dragged on and off stage by silent servants, while the concept of Mélisande's baby portrayed as a light should be rethought.
But all this frames a perfectly intelligible telling of the story, against a threatening moving back wall of concealed steps and hiding places, where the young Yniold (the excellent Nia Coleman), Golaud's child by his first marriage, can constantly lurk unobserved, and then be used by his jealous father to spy on the lovers. As Golaud, lost at the beginning of the opera, despairing at the end, Brett Polegato captures perfectly the intensity of Debussy's writing but also its restraint. There is strong support from Julian Close's sonorous Arkel and Pauls Putnins's disturbing Doctor.
The central couple are not perfectly matched: Karim Sulayman's Pelléas is well sculpted, the words crystal clear, but there is just not enough voice to sustain the role. But Ukrainian-German soprano Kateryna Kasper as Mélisande is an outstanding discovery here, with a voice fuller and richer than we may be used to in this role, but wonderfully rounded, full of anxiety, and heart-rending at her death, prostrate in a glass box (recalling the sleeping Tilda Swinton at the Serpentine all those years ago).
Mélisande's hair is not long, there is no tall tower from which to drape it: our imaginations have to work overtime to conjure up these scenes, but Negus realises Debussy's storytelling precisely, especially in the vivid interludes. At first I feared he would be too overtly dramatic, and it is true that there is an element of translucence and stasis missing here. But the orchestral playing is very fine, and bodes well for Longborough's future expansion of the repertory.