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Iphigenie en Aulide
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Composer |
Gluck |
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Librettist |
after Euripides via Racine |
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Venue and Dates |
Glyndebourne 19, 21, 24, 26, 28 May, 1, 8, 12, 14, 18, 22, 25, 28, June, 3, 5 July 2002 |
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Conductor |
Ivor Bolton |
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Director |
Christof Loy |
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Performers |
Agamemnon: Gerald Finley Iphigénie: Veronica Cangemi Achilles: Jonas Degerfeldt Clytemnestra: Katarina Karnéus Diane: Marie Arnet Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Glyndebourne Chorus |
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Production |
Sets: Herbert Maurauer Lighting: Reinhard Traub Costumes: Bettina Walter Choreographer: Jochen Heckman |
From the Glyndebourne website
This is the first Glyndebourne staging of Gluck’s great reform opera Iphigénie en Aulide. It marks the zenith of Gluck’s composing career, finding the perfect balance between music and drama. Gluck’s search for beauty and simplicity, expressed in this, his first French opera, will be reflected in Christof Loy’s production, which aims to be an honest and poetic reflection of the work.
Through the simplicity of Greek tragedy, Iphigénie en Aulide explores the notions of sacrifice, heroism, love and the supernatural forces of the mythological gods in a story of a daughter, Iphigénie, who is prepared to die for her father, Agamemnon, and his country.
The panorama of emotion, both domestic and epic, is reflected through Iphigénie, whose total acceptance of her fate and obedience to the command of her father and the gods with calm, steadfast exaltation, is the focus of this powerful opera.
Ivor Bolton returns to Glyndebourne to conduct the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment with Veronica Cangemi in the title role. Gerald Finley returns to Glyndebourne as Iphigénie’s father, Agamemnon.
What the critics say
Fiona Maddocks 20.05.02
Power and a picnic
Nationalism in music still has its activists but if there is such a thing as musical Euro culture, then Gluck was its first representative. No piece is more emblematic than Iphigénie en Aulide, written by this Bohemian-Austrian composer to an ancient Greek subject, with French text and Italianate mannerisms. "I have found a musical language fit for all nations," said Gluck modestly in 1773, "and hope to abolish the ridiculous distinctions between national styles of music."
The German director Christof Loy's mainly restrained new staging for Glyndebourne echoes this eclecticism with a visual style in which the men are all long-haired Billy Connolly lookalikes in corporate suits, who sometimes wear frock coats, and the women are variously turned out in little black dresses or magical behind ghostly gauzes in Act II, with wedding-cake organza gowns and powdered hair. Within Herbert Maurauer's handsomely severe white-boxes-within-boxes set (lit by Reinhard Traub, costumes by Bettina Walter), this free association all worked surprisingly effectively, though the rag-doll choreography was beyond decoding.
The libretto (after Euripides via Racine) explores notions of sacrifice, heroism and duty versus love: if the Greeks are ever to fight the Trojan war, Agamemnon (a tormented and expressive Gerald Finley) must sacrifice his daughter Iphigénie, sung by the spirited Argentinian soprano Veronica Cangemi with warm, innocent ardour. She is betrothed to Achilles (Swedish tenor Jonas Degerfeldt making a promising, if not yet relaxed, house debut). Her mother Clytemnestra - a magnificently cool, intense Katarina Karnéus, swathed in a blood-red gown and shoes that suggested a successful trip to Manolo Blahniks - is understandably and extravagantly indignant. The plot doesn't follow the exact lines of Greek myth, nor does this production follow the exact lines of the libretto, ending as it does with a tableau featuring incestuous love-death, a new and all-too-typical operatic twist.
As the first new production of this Glyndebourne season (as well as the company's first of this opera), Iphigénie en Aulide is no mere picnic, though it gives food for thought either side of the hamper on the lawn. Its frequent flashes of power, brought out with diligence and vigour by Ivor Bolton and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment supported by the fine Glyndebourne Chorus, showed how it opened a door on emotions and character engagement through which so many later composers - not least Wagner - gratefully tumbled.
The Telegraph, 21 May 2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/05/21/bmrc21.xml
Taut tragedy boxed in by design
On paper, Glyndebourne's 2002 season looks puzzling: having opened with a revival of Graham Vick's despicable staging of Don Giovanni, which I refuse to sit through again, it continues with Gluck's little-known Iphigénie en Aulide. Later comes another long-neglected work, Weber's Euryanthe, alongside unalluringly cast productions of Kat'a Kabanova and Carmen. Only a handful of performances of Britten's Albert Herring with Felicity Lott as Lady Billows promise traditional Glyndebourne pleasure - and even there, one wonders about the wisdom of shoehorning the Russian Vladimir Jurowski in to conduct.
But paper promises can translate surprisingly in the theatre and, musically, this new production of Iphigénie can be counted a terrific success. The audience was attentive and enthusiastic, and the marvellous score, much admired by Mozart, Berlioz, Wagner and Mahler, is thrillingly conducted by Ivor Bolton and boldly played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Perhaps Gluck's greatest gift, wrote the scholar Winton Dean, "is his ability to see his mature operas as wholes, and to place details in exact relationship to the total effect". Bolton duly shaped the drama with taut urgency, ignoring the conventional barriers between recitative, arioso, aria, ensemble and chorus, and keeping the dynamic level high and fast.
The only negative effect of all this visceral energy was a certain stressed-out rough edge to the singing which impaired the noble architecture of Gluck's vocal line. Gerald Finley's Agamemnon was reduced to rasping and roaring in his monologue in Act 2 and Katarina Karnéus's Clitemnestre was sometimes drowned out by the orchestral fury raging beneath her.
In other respects, Finley and Karnéus gave powerful interpretations, with Karneus's rendition of the achingly poignant Par un pere cruel providing the most beautiful episode of the evening. As her daughter Iphigenie, Veronica Cangemi was touching and winning, though she too had to fight her way through Bolton's blasts, and there were strong performances in smaller roles from Jonas Degerfeldt (Achille) and Clive Bayley (Calchas). The chorus was heroic throughout - disciplined, cohesive and firm of purpose.
But, oh dear, the production! For some years now, the Glyndebourne audience has been getting increasingly sick of the Graham Vick style, in which emotional warmth and social realities are eschewed in favour of bare walls and costumes which promiscuously mix historical epochs. Now that Vick has gone, who does the management decide to import? The German Christof Loy, who appears to favour exactly the same tricks.
Here we are, back in that old white box - in four receding white proscenium frames separated by slats and gauzes, to be precise - with costumes that vary from modern suits to baroque paniered skirts. Agamemnon the warrior favours an Ozwald Boateng single-breasted number; Clitemnestre sports a decollete evening dress. In Acts 2 and 3, other characters appear in full baroque fig.
The dreadful choreography - and there's a lot of dance to endure in the course of a Gluck opera - similarly vacillates between the stately precepts of Noverre's Lettres sur la danse and barefoot representations of the breaststroke and back crawl.
It's so jejune, and so stuffed with pretentious clichés. What does any of it actually mean, in terms of Gluck's drama? Why, for example, is Clitemnestre all dolled up? Has she just been to a cocktail party? I have another, more fundamental question for Loy: where is this opera meant to be taking place? On a bleak island on which an army is anxiously preparing for war, as Gluck believed? Or "in a theatre", which is what the Brecht-influenced Loy appears to think? And which, ultimately, is the more interesting place to be?
Paul Griffiths for NY Times, May 21, 2002
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E4D81538F932A15756C0A9649C8B63
Two Faces of a Season, One Sensibility
The Glyndebourne season has opened strongly with a vigorously revived ''Don Giovanni'' and a new production of Gluck's ''Iphigénie en Aulide'' that mounts in power, following the curve of the work. Both presentations show the company's continuing high standards of musical preparation.
Ivor Bolton conducts a keenly alive account of the Gluck score, in which firm line and powerful gesture are supported by an assured flexibility in tempo and volume. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, playing in period style, adds a raw poignancy in the oboe wails that Agamemnon identifies as the cry of nature or the knife slices in the third act in which the strings graphically imagine Iphigénie's sacrifice.
The combination of formality and savagery is equaled onstage. Christof Loy, directing, creates his own slicing of the white-box interior in which he places the action. For much of the time Herbert Murauer's set is cut into five platforms from front to back, each a personal space of one of the principals. Alleys between them allow the chorus to rush on and off; the effect is also to emphasize how the cruelties of fate and of personal history place the characters largely on their own.
The costumes (by Bettina J. Walter) are variable, sometimes contemporary, sometimes 18th-century, as if time were sweeping over these people like a tide. But the men, whether in gray suits or stage armor, keep the unkempt long hair of barbarians.
War is the prize. It is to execute a war that Iphigénie must die. The baritone Gerald Finley as Agamemnon roars out royal agony, fixed steadily to the notes. Vocally and physically he fully embodies the force of the man and the force of the bull-like charging course that has led him into an impossible position. Clive Bayley, in the lowering bass role of the high priest Calchas, goads him on unmercifully, singing out of a bleak scowl.
As Achilles, the tenor Jonas Degerfeldt shoulders the demands for imposing power and natural fluency, while gloomily suggesting an Agamemnon in the making.
The excellent Clytemnestra is Katarina Karneus, singing with biting attack and hot-tempered expression, yet always with superb sophistication. In her big scene in the third act she makes the drama for a moment her tragedy: that of seeing her worst fears (about men) come unerringly to pass. Veronica Cangemi is appealing in the title role, but wayward in intonation. Marie Arnet makes a striking appearance as Diana, entering with a group of Baroque beskirted divinities who curiously observe the strange race of earthly beings they briefly find themselves among.
In this production, though, divine intervention does not untie the knots. The action ends another way, and the coarse unison hymn at the close is the noise of war going ahead.
Anthony Holden for The Observer, Sunday May 26, 2002
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,722192,00.html
Ladies in red
Christof Loy defies the gods - and Gluck - in a vibrant, bloody Iphigénie en Aulide
With a stylish update of the long-lost past, Glyndebourne is also offering us a tantalising sneak preview of British opera's near-future. Christof Loy's bold and imaginative reading of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide marks the UK debut of the young German director who will soon be shaping Covent Garden's fortunes as surely as its new music director Antonio Pappano, his colleague and friend from Brussels's La Monnaie. With the first of several collaborations, Ariadne auf Naxos, they will together launch the Royal Opera's new season this autumn - and its interminably awaited new lease of life.
With elegant support from his set and costume designers, Herbert Murauer and Bettina J Walter, Loy has created a sleek modern world in which to revisit the ancient dilemma of the Greek leader Agamemnon, required to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia before the goddess Diana will grant him a favourable wind to Troy. But this is really Iphigenia's story, not her father's; the sang-froid with which she accepts her fate, barely ruffled even by her love for the dashing Achilles, is what interested Gluck - and rightly preoccupies Loy.
Men in suits are running the world as Gerald Finley's overly histrionic Agamemnon literally thrashes around for a way out of his problem. Enter Veronica Cangemi's serene if fragile Iphigénie, far more resolute about her patriotic duty than her formidable mother Clytemnestre (Katarina Karnéus), clad in blood-red amid the monochrome to remind cognoscenti how Euripides played out the curse on the House of Atreus.
Come the preparations for Iphigénie's wedding to a rather fey Achilles (Jonas Degerfeldt, unhappily looking the same age as his potential father-in-law), our scene shifts to Marie-Antoinette's (and Gluck's) France, complete with overlong dance sequences archly choreographed by Jochen Heckmann. It's all a sham, is the intriguing suggestion - soon confirmed by the intervention of the one remaining suit, Charbel Mattar's imposing Arcas, to reveal his general's grim pledge to Diana. Little does the audience know, as it re-scans the synopsis over its champagne picnics, where all this is leading.
For Loy has a surprise in store. After Diana's descent from picture-book Greek myth to spare all concerned, the director defies the gods, the composer and the programme notes by having father axe daughter anyway - his own dour take, it would seem, on a woebegone world still at war a few thousand years later.
For his vibrant rejuvenation of a pretty lifeless piece, Loy can be forgiven such lapses as the shaggy-dog hair-extensions which make the Greeks look like a mincing army of Billy Connollys. With Clive Bayley's blind Calchas lending a sinister presence throughout, all the central roles are powerfully, if at times less than beautifully sung, matching the relentless pace of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under the insistent baton of Ivor Bolton. Yet again, Glyndebourne has rescued an endangered species from oblivion.
Andrew Clements for The Guardian, May 21, 2002
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/review/0,,727950,00.html
Rating: Four stars out of five
A new season at Glyndebourne begins with a new administration - executive chairman, general director and music director - firmly in place, and some fresh faces in the production roster too. The first production there of Iphigénie en Aulide signals the UK debut of the German director Christof Loy. His name will become far more familiar in the next few years - he is scheduled for several new shows at Covent Garden.
If this Iphigénie is an accurate guide to Loy's approach, then we can expect more striking stage pictures, interspersed with moments of teasing bafflement. In Herbert Murauer's elegant black-and-white set, Loy presents a reading of Gluck's tragedy that is always faultlessly arrayed on the stage and seems to inhabit several epochs interchangeably.
The men's wigs, which look like a job lot acquired from the Meatloaf Appreciation Society, may be troublingly unrevealing, but the dark suits and pastel day dresses of Bettina Walter's costumes fix the first and third acts in the present day. The ballgowns and shiny armour of the second act, meanwhile, hark back to the 18th century. Yet some characters, such as Agamemnon, remain fixed in the present day, even while the back wall rises to reveal an ornate classical tableau, when the goddess Diane (Marie Arnet) arrives to spare Iphigénie from sacrifice.
In Loy's reading, even this divine intervention does not guarantee a happy ending. Agamemnon and his family are a dysfunctional bunch: he and his wife Clitemnestre hardly exchange a glance, and during the final chorus the king kills his daughter. At least his ruthlessness is clear-cut, as is the chilling determination of his high priest Calchas, (Clive Bayley), who urges Iphigénia's destruction.
Other strands are psychologically more ambiguous. Most characters act with total naturalism - the relationship between Veronica Cangemi's deceptively tough Iphigénie and Jonas Degerfeldt's Achille has perfectly conventional body language - but Gerald Finley's nobly sung Agamemnon and Katarina Karnéus's Clitemnestre are couched in stylised histrionics, as if distinct worlds of expression were mingling on stage.
There can be no ambiguity about the high musical quality of the performances, all superbly supported by Ivor Bolton's conducting, and of the playing of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
George Loomis, International Herald Tribune, 29 May 2002
'Iphigenie,' the other one
A major revival of Gluck's "Iphigenie en Aulide" was well overdue. Opportunities to hear the composer's operas have long been skewed toward "Orfeo ed Euridice" and are not all that plentiful in any event. When one of his two "Iphigenie" operas is performed, it's usually "Iphigenie en Tauride."
Glyndebourne Festival Opera's gripping new production of "Iphigenie en Aulide" offers further evidence that we need to rethink our views on Gluck from the ground up. Cecilia Bartoli's recent disk of Italian arias brought a wealth of great music, all from operas that are virtually unknown. Now Glyndebourne reveals a work of shattering emotional power. The first of Gluck's operas for Paris, "Iphigenie en Aulide" took the city by storm, especially in the slightly revised version Gluck made a year after the 1774 premiere.
In treating Agamemnon's (near) sacrifice of his daughter, Gluck took up a signal event at the Trojan War's outset and one that drove a wedge into Agamemnon's marriage to Clytemnestra, thus precipitating the whole Oresteia saga.
"Iphigenie en Aulide" has juicy roles for four top-notch singers, each reacting in his or her own way to the impending catastrophe. You never lose sight of its tragic arch, yet the opera is rich in variety, with festive scenes like those surrounding Iphigenia's interrupted wedding to Achilles supplying telling contrast.
From the initial chorus of Greeks clamoring for a victim, the director Christof Loy proved alert to the opera's stormy conflicts. Herbert Murauer's elemental, black-and-white sets were also effective, though the men, with scruffy, shoulder-length hair and clad in the gray business suits of Bettina Walter's costumes, hardly looked like Greek heroes.
Unfortunately, Loy's strong direction was undermined by minor irritants, such as turning the high priest Calchas into a blind man with cane, and one monstrous blunder. After the goddess Diana's deus-ex-machina appearance, Loy had Agamemnon (who spent much of the third act pacing zombie-like, ax in hand, at stage rear) slaughter Iphigenia anyway. People have to stop thinking that happy endings of 18th-century operas are inherently suspect and realize that the pity and terror of tragedy can be evoked even if the final step into the abyss isn't taken.
How much more effective the baritone Gerald Finley would have been in the eerie, drum-accompanied final chorus (from the opera's first version) if allowed to play the stern ruler Gluck intended instead of a demented ex-father. Here and elsewhere his singing was superb. Veronica Cangemi's fervent portrayal of the title role was also highly affecting. Clytemnestra is a role that snowballs in intensity, and Katarina Karneus charted its course surely. Jonas Degerfeldt's Achilles would have profited from a greater touch of the heroic but was pleasantly enough sung.
With Ivor Bolton leading the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in a highly charged reading, this "Iphigenie," its flaws notwithstanding, demands to be seen.
Anna Picard, The Independent, 26 May 2002
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article190201.ece
Happy endings? Not for everyone...
If we were to discuss sacrifice right now, what would it mean to you? Giving up chocolate for Lent? Forgoing your turkey to work four shifts for Crisis at Christmas? Or killing your child?
In the modern western world, sacrifice – as a deliberate act rather than the sudden valour of those who rush to their deaths to save others – has become unbloodied and uncomplicated, luxurious even. Yet its rougher antecedent is all around us; in the Bible, the Koran and Classical mythology, in the stories of Jephthah, Abraham and Agamemnon, and in the newspapers. Look to Israel, where the murder and martyrdom of children is commonplace. Look to Texas, where Andrea Yates, an educated white-collar home-maker, drowned her five children in a bath-tub to save them – as she believed – from Satan. We shudder at these deaths, we translate them as casualties of deprivation or depression, as evidence of fatal innocence, fanaticism or – at our most bewildered – cold-blooded evil. What we cannot do is relate to the beliefs that inspired them. So how can a modern western director engage a modern western audience in a story of such brutal sacrifice?
For Christof Loy, director of Glyndebourne's first production of Gluck's first great French opera, Iphigénie en Aulide, the solution is a lengthy seduction that first dislocates, then beguiles, then repels his audience with flat brutality. Through an awkward marriage of stark symbolism and hyper-realism, Loy plays with historical perceptions of Agamemnon's slaughter of his daughter Iphigénie, on the story's evolution from myth to play to opera, and – perhaps unwisely – on the mounting political discontent at the period of its creation.
Gluck's opera – drawn from Racine's tragedy of the century before – was written in 1774 with the encouragement of Marie-Antoinette and revised in 1775 to include a supernatural reprieve for Iphigénie. Here we have a little of both – or all – versions: a hint of Greek drama in the violent chorus tableaux, a touch of 17th-century glamour in the dea ex machina, a soupçon of Versailles in the panniered costumes of Agamemnon's courtiers, a splash of expressionism in the blunt hirospex of Jochen Heckmann's over-explanatory choreography, and a mass of modernism in the Muji-clad commoners, the hot white walls of Herbert Murauer's set, and the vicious betrayal that Loy makes an inevitability. Everything, in fact, including the kitchen-sink sincerity of our eponymous heroine's acting. And that's just the production. In Gluck's score there are pure emotions (rage, misery, devotion, desire), mixed ones (doubt, self-deception, confusion), and one signal chorus that – for all my doubts about Loy's unconvincing parallel between pre-Revolutionary France and the Trojan Wars – bears out his choice of ending. It's impactful, well-timed, a sockeroo of a production – though this would be hard to avoid with Gerald Finley, Veronica Cangemi, and Katarina Karneus in the three main roles – and a genuinely upsetting opera; not least because until the final number's horrific reversal of fortune, a happy ending seems possible.
Much of this false hope is a result of Finley's sympathetic characterisation of Agamemnon. Where Cangemi portrays Iphigénie's goodness with utter simplicity and sweetness, and Karneus spits, dazzles and shocks as a curdled, vampish Clitemnestre, Finley wavers between anger, tenderness, and calculating coldness. By comparison, Jonas Degerfeldt, as Achille, seems two-dimensional, but I don't think Gluck invested much emotion in his arias. For the others – each a fine singer, an effective actor and an imaginative musician – the task at hand is clear, if demanding: a proper exposition of what is in the score. In this they are supported by conductor Ivor Bolton and the Orchestra of the Age on Enlightenment, who, through this production, should do for Gluck what Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra have done for Berlioz. Bolton's interpretation draws heavily on both the influence of the tragédie lyrique and Gluck's nascent classicism; underscoring the echoes of Montéclair's Jephté and the Rameau-esque wind/string doubling, propelling the development, teasing the colours and balancing the numbers in an elegant, persuasive framework. Stylish, passionate, detailed and directional, this is the sort of concentrated conducting that embraces period style without losing dramatic impetus.
Edward Seckerson, The Independent, 22 May 2002
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article189491.ece
Stolen thunder
Wagner paid Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide the supreme compliment of extensively rewriting it. But you can hear why it caught his imagination. Gluck's reformation of opera, driven by the French appetite for singing and dancing on an extravagant scale, attempted to place the needs of the drama before those of the singers. Wagner was not yet born when Iphigénie sojourned in Aulide. He was still not around by the time Gluck transported her to Tauride in a second (and finer) opera five years later. But seeds had been sown. Gluck was dreaming Wagner's dream.
At Glyndebourne, the goddess Diana decrees that an electric storm shall pass through the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and that its bristling string semiquavers, flaring brasses and thunderous timpani shall anticipate the opening of Wagner's Die Walküre some 70 years later. The curtain rises on a series of white frames seen in recessive perspective. The chorus, dressed, it would seem, for a private view at Tate Modern, are crouched behind a lightening-streaked gauze. In the foreground, Agamemnon receives some bad news. He must sacrifice his daughter to appease Diana.
And thus the drama is well under way before even the prelude has run its course. The producer Christof Loy and his designers (Herbert Murauer, sets, Bettina J Walter, costumes) and choreographer, Jochen Heckmann, have devised a show that highlights the opera's "modernity" while almost overcompensating us for its shortcomings. Iphigénie en Aulide is fledgling music-drama in which the emotion is still worn more than deeply felt. In that sense, Loy's sleek, cool, calculated, arrestingly physical staging is no less, indeed probably a great deal more, than it deserves. The energy passing between stage and pit, where the conductor Ivor Bolton's wonderful band have been raised to give the greatest possible immediacy to Gluck's flailing orchestral gestures, is the evening's real driving force. Director and choreographer are more or less indivisible in their contributions; excellent chorus and dancers likewise. A sea of dark figures repeatedly threaten to submerge the troubled protagonists. The will of a god-fearing people is always just beyond the reach of their outstretched hands.
The problem is that Gluck's energy (and subsequently that of the production) is too generalised. Inspiration comes only intermittently – as in Agamemnon's great scena at the close of Act II, in which duty to country and devotion to daughter are wrestled to spine-tingling effect. The commanding Gerald Finley even managed to keep his moustache in place during this number. Similarly, Katarina Karneus's Clitemnestre (dressed in red so you know she's trouble), pleading with Achilles to protect her daughter, finds great dignity in a wonderful aria where the voice finds parity with Gluck's plaintive oboe, and deep sighs in the basses hint at depths hitherto unplumbed. We also hear the beginnings of the Wagnerian Heldentenor in Jonas Degerfeldt's Achilles. Veronica Cangemi's Iphigénie is bright, fresh, and as emotionally truthful as the opera allows her to be.
As a portent of things to come, Iphigénie en Aulide was still distant thunder in 1774. But something happens at the close that Christof Loy seizes upon to give this show an 11th-hour kick. Diana, stepping out finally from the kitsch mythology of our imagination, reprieves Iphigénie and urges the Greeks to "amaze the future" with their glorious deeds. But as the chorus intone their victory hymn against an ominous drumbeat, Loy has us share a vision of Agamemnon striking the death-blow anyway, leaving the prone and bloody body of Iphigénie as a symbol of the innocent blood that will be spilled in his nation's name. Real drama at last.
George Hall, Opera News, November 2002
http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/_archive/1102/InReview.1102.html
Three new productions at the 2002 Glyndebourne Festival presented one of the world's most familiar operas alongside two rarities. Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide (May 19) came first, staged by German director Christof Loy, making his British debut, and conducted by Ivor Bolton.
Other than (in one form or another) his version of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, none of Gluck's scores is regularly placed before the public. His first Parisian opera, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774), suffers from an invidious comparison with his last, Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), which is a kind of sequel to it and regarded by many Gluckians as his greatest achievement.
But in itself Iphigénie en Aulide is a masterpiece, taut in structure -- the traditional French ballets being cleverly integrated -- and, if lacking the more obvious melodic appeal of a French-influenced Mozartean opera seria such as Idomeneo, just as cogent as a music drama. Above all, the quality of Gluck's ideas is consistently high, and they draw one inexorably into a world of heightened emotion.
The situation is static, though viewed with an intense vision from different perspectives. Agamemnon's Greek fleet cannot sail for the Trojan War unless he sacrifices his daughter Iphigénie to the goddess Diane. A political pragmatist, he is willing to oblige, to the consternation of his wife, Clitemnestre, and the fury of Iphigénie's lover, Achille. Iphigénie herself is ultimately prepared to be sacrificed, and it is only the last-minute, dea-ex-machina intervention of Diane herself that saves her.
Or should do, for in a perverse final gesture Loy had Agamemnon kill his daughter anyway, to the extraordinary strains of a revolutionary-sounding war chorus Gluck wrote for his 1774 original version and later dropped. (This departure from the text presumably precludes Loy's staging Iphigénie en Tauride in sequence for Glyndebourne, unless he intends to resurrect the heroine.)
It was otherwise a visually stylish (some might say style-obsessed) staging, its overall look switching back and forth between early-twenty-first-century chic and the fancier late-eighteenth-century equivalent -- the latter employed in particular for the divertissements and the goddess's nick-of-time salvation of Iphigénie. Herbert Murauer's pristine, no frills set was lit purposefully by Reinhard Traub, while -- whatever their vintage -- Bettina J. Walter's costumes were classically elegant.
None of this might have counted, however, had the musical performance been any less committed or polished than it was. Gerald Finley portrayed the conflicted Agamemnon with a prodigious variety of tone that was equalled by the passionate, moment-by-moment engagement of Katarina Karnéus's vehement Clitemnestre. Veronica Cangemi charted the emotional contours of Iphigénie's predicament with a delicate line, and Jonas Degerfeldt brought Achille's volatility alive in every note. Above all, the vital declamation of the text as a central ingredient of Gluck's conception was managed with range, subtlety and impact. Bolton's conducting responded positively to every change in the music's mood, and he spotlit the many colors of the score, which was impeccably played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.