Eros and Thanatos, the operatic themes par excellence, join hands in this explosive Manon by Massenet that the Liceu premiered yesterday with great expectation –the general rehearsal was held behind closed doors– and with fully satisfactory results. Especially for the vocal invoice, which started from the cancellation of Javier Camarena giving the reply to the fabulous Nadine Sierra –a setback that the tenor Michael Fabiano solves with power–, and a little less because of the staging proposal signed by the actor and director Olivier Py, a great asset in stage direction who has been appointed director of the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris, after passing through the Odéon and the Avignon Festival.
The final eight minutes of applause, with the audience on their feet, crowned Nadine Sierra as queen of the Liceu and Fabiano as a worthy prince. And whether or not the public liked the show could not be appreciated either, since no representative of Py's production deigned to come out and say hello.
One would have to start from a couple of premises to understand the scope of the success of this staging – material that is already a few years old – of one of the most powerful French operas in the repertoire. Py, who describes himself as Catholic and homosexual, knows how to emphasize sordid eroticism in a social context marked by double standards.
And precisely this opera, which Jules Massenet composed in 1882, is in itself an invitation to peek into the lust that proliferated in France at the beginning of the 18th century, when Paris was experiencing the height of debauchery and houses of prostitution abounded. This is the Paris that Abbe Prevost knows closely. The author of the Manon Lescaut that gives rise to the libretto made his forays into dissolute life, nothing at odds then with the religious.
But this story of the young woman who, on her way to the convent, meets her cousin Lescaut (the baritone Alexandre Duhamel) and his depraved friends fall for her beauty and shower her with riches until she becomes the city's most prized courtesan. the actual society. A story of eighteenth-century debauchery passed through the filter of nineteenth-century morality.
Py bursts those filters and exposes the characters in their lustful side, without concealment, in a low-class red-light district –with its rooms shown as a beehive– in which Guillot de Morfontaine (Albert Casals) is a sexual predator or Monsieur de Brétigny (Tomeu Bibiloni), a rich pimp. And they, the supposed actresses, Pousette, Javotte and Rosette (Inés Ballesteros, Anna Tobella and Anaïs Masllorens), walk the streets pretending to be queens. Or was some actress freed then from being a courtesan?
Neons, opulence, parties... that's what Manon has yet to enjoy when she meets the young Des Grieux and falls in love, despite her father's reluctance, with a splendid Laurent Naouri. Arguably, Manon gets away from him to sing “Je marche sur tous les chemins”, one of the most demanding coloratura arias that she sings like a star, exposing herself as the most requested in Paris.
The sensual Nadine Sierra, truly proverbial, plunges into the role at the hands of her partner Fabiano. Sick with heartbreak, it is he, Des Grieux, who becomes a priest, stronghold of the time against lovesickness. "Oh! Fuyez, douce image ”, he sings in the third act, unable to forget her. It is the preamble to a fateful ending in which the disco ball that sparkles in the audience and the skull (which prefigures death) are opposed as in the eternal debate between pleasure and duty.
This aria gives Fabiano – better here than in Tosca – his first vocal brilliance. But it's the chemistry between these American best friends that's at stake in the later famous duet. Chemistry that is guaranteed in the second cast, with Pene Pati and his wife, the soprano Amina Edris.
Maestro Marc Minkowski makes the effort to conduct the orchestra with a broken shoulder and reduced mobility. And the chorus is the dynamism that gives the touch of grace to this production with a stage design of debatable tastes.
