Here is my Monday February 22 Chicago Sun-TImes and suntimes.com review of the Saturday February 20, 2010, opening night performance of Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of The Damnation of Faust, the company's first work by Berlioz.
John Relyea (Mephistophélès) and Paul Groves (Faust) get acquainted in Part Two of The Damnation of Faust.
Photo: Lyric Opera of Chicago/Robert Kusel.
Like Berlioz, Lyric thinks big for 'Faust'
Director unleashes imagination, and singers deliver
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Six more performances through March 17.
2 hours and 40 minutes including one 30-minute intermission.
"Theatre of the mind?" "A conception ahead of its time?" "An opera or a concert hall piece?"
After more than 160 years, these remain the most frequent questions posed about Berlioz's 1846 "dramatic legend," The Damnation of Faust. And as Lyric Opera of Chicago demonstrates with its all-new, fully staged production of the work, the answer to all of them, including the either/or, is "Yes!"
For debating the "right" way to present a piece that defies categorization is to forget that one of the great things about a written musical score is that no performance is definitive and none alters the notes on the page for future interpreters. Berlioz (1803-1869) thought big and he thought strange, and it's hardly surprising that in times that confront and produce big and strange every day, several major opera companies around the world have sought to bring the French composer's take on the Faust legend to the stage in recent seasons.
For Lyric, the jump is even bigger, as it's never touched Berlioz's clearly operatic works, Les Troyens ("The Trojans") -- too big -- and Beatrice and Benedict -- too small, Chicago Opera Theater got to do it. It canceled an announced Benvenuto Cellini -- too expensive -- seven years ago. Now the 56-year-old company has chosen, courageously, to give its first Berlioz with multiple bangs in design, style, imagination, and spirit.
Rather than being set up in the conventional two or three acts, Berlioz's spread his action out over 19 discrete scenes that follow no clear pattern and range in time and space from Hungarian battlefields to a German student pub to a night flight through the sky to hell and heaven themselves. Why not, in a cinematic, even post-cinematic age, take the composer's fluidity on its own terms and let the work's monologues, arias, ballads, serenades, hymns, and choruses be acted out and made visual?
That's certainly Stephen Langridge's view. In his North American debut, the rising British director and his design team -- Greek George Souglides on sets and costumes, German Wolfgang Goebell on lights -- goes for a set of tableaux that animate and extend Faust's experiences as he moves from solitary scholar to would-be wooer to a maker of the ultimate existential choice of life or death. (The soul-selling comes quite late in Berlioz's telling.)
Starting with John Boesche's projections, which give us a sense of Faust's abstract world of numbers and "reason," Langridge takes us to the first of the crowd scenes where he lets busyness get the best of him. Must every chorus member and supernumerary be doing something in every scene? So Faust is alienated from he world around him. We get it. And why the random yet generic concepts for the Devil's entourage?
As things calm down, at least in terms of location, after the single intermission, the design follows the style of photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose full-color re-creations of lonely rooms fit with the sense of the young and lovely Marguerite dreaming of love while being the dutiful daughter as well.
Chorus members are transformed into sets of astonishing look-alikes of "ordinariness." Some of the area's best free-lance dancers form both a corps and a set of doubles for Marguerite and Faust. One imagines that they had more to do with their movements and characterizations than did the patchy French choreographer Philippe Girardeau.
The results will surely divide audiences, but opening night on Saturday at the Civic Opera House saw no walk-outs, only the tiniest smattering of booing for the production team amid hearty cheers and a by-no-means-customary standing ovation for the singers, choruses, and orchestra under the music direction of Sir Andrew Davis.
That Lyric has snared the top cast imaginable for this three-character, over-the-top drama does not hurt matters. Susan Graham has for some time been the gold standard in this repertoire, and the mezzo again shows us why, with a heart-rending "Ballad of the King of Thule" and intense and wholly believable acting as Marguerite, the woman caught in Faust's dreams and Mephistophélès' manipulations. Tenor Paul Groves is one of the few who can navigate the treacherously high and lengthy part of the scientist-scholar dreaming of glory and happiness. And bass-baritone John Relyea, in his Lyric debut, reveled in his devil's role both vocally and physically. All Americans, the three sang and projected their French with clarity and beauty. Ryan Center alum bass-baritone Christian Van Horn, despite being dressed and styled as Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show for no apparent reason, did the same in Brander's beer cellar "Song of the Rat."
Donald Nally's chorus, supplemented by the Anima-Young Singers of Greater Chicago, has heavy lifting galore here with moods that must move from heavenly to satirical to characteristic of the denizens of the underworld. They met their challenges superbly. The score is the story here, whether in concert, the opera house, or on a recording or broadcast, and Davis kept up both pace and constant stylistic shifts in a genuinely exciting performance. Berlioz was the great master of orchestration and players were engaged in his many instrumental subplots and commentaries.
(One hopes that it was a problem unique to opening night, but a lengthy set change after the second half's first scene brought the story and music to an unfortunate and lengthy halt, undercutting the very continuity the production worked so hard otherwise to create and maintain.)
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