Cherubini – Médée

Médée – Maria Agresta
Jason – Enea Scala
Créon – Park Jongmin
Dircé – Sara Blanch
Neris – Nancy Fabiola Herrera
Confidantes de Dircé – Mercedes Gancedo, Alexandra Urquiola

Coro Titular del Teatro Real, Orquesta Titular del Teatro Real / Ivor Bolton.
Stage director – Paco Azorín.

Teatro Real, Madrid, Spain.  Friday, September 22nd, 2023.

This new production of Médée, which opened the season of the Teatro Real earlier this week, is actually the first ever in this house.  As a role that was so closely associated with Maria Callas, the Real is dedicating the performances to mark the centennial of the legendary Hellenic-American diva’s birth.  For this production of Cherubini’s opéra comique, the house used the critical edition by Heiko Cullmann, with recitatives by Alan Curtis replacing the spoken dialogue, and the evening sung in French.  The cast, composed of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and Argentine singers, were placed under the direction of house music director, Ivor Bolton.

The strengths of Paco Azorín’s staging lie in the clarity that be brought to the narrative and in the striking stage pictures he gave us.  Even before the music started, he gave us a premonition of what was to come by showing us Médée killing her children, while the overture was accompanied by the sight of Médée and Jason getting to know each other on the golden fleece.  A special shout-out for the fetching gladiator costume Enea Scala’s Jason wore for the overture, which should come in handy for any upcoming parties.  The set, also by Azorín, consisted of a column containing an elevator, in which characters travelled to enter or exit, and images on a screen at the back of the stage, which emphasized the emotion at that point in the narrative.  A further room was hoisted up and down, which served to accommodate supplementary action – including Dircé going up in smoke after she was poisoned.  The staging undoubtedly looked very expensive, particularly as the cast and large chorus was dressed in a significant number of costumes – the sopranos and mezzos attending Dircé looked as if they were wearing pyjamas; the tenors and basses were seen in army fatigues, dressed as riot police, or as orthodox priests.  Indeed, by setting the action in a setting that seemed redolent of our times, Azorín made a point about the universality of this story that I found notable. 

Perhaps the most arresting aspect of his staging was his use of three parkour artists, Max Iniesta, Cosmin Marius, and Daniel Mellado, to incarnate three furies at the service of Médée.  They acrobatically threatened the crowd by jumping over them, or demonstrated some staggering dexterity by climbing up and down the elevator shaft with no support – it was stunning to see.  Yet, if the stage pictures were a strength of Azorín’s staging, they were also a weakness simply because the emphasis on the visual meant that far too often, the principals were left gesturing to the front.  I found his personenregie to be more hieratic, rather than living or organic.  The set also failed to give the singers acoustic support, meaning that Azorín sensibly had them sing from the front of the stage for the entire evening, to ensure that they could be heard.  Médée is a work that requires some unique voices, particularly in a house as large as this, with a need to create classical beauty of sound and line, with metal and heft in the tone.  This did mean that I found some of the principals to be pushing the voice, more on which below, and I did wonder whether in a smaller house and a more sympathetic set, the impressions might have been different.

I had a similar reaction to Bolton’s conducting and the playing of the orchestra.  My seat was at the rear of the platea, just underneath the overhang, and this may be a reason for my impression of the orchestral sound.  I found it to be recessed and lacking in bloom, and did wonder whether they should have raised the pit.  Bolton opened the evening with a muscular account of the overture, the allowed the intertwining themes to be brought to the fore.  Strings played with minimal vibrato, and natural horns added a delicious raspiness to the texture.  The string intonation was superb in its accuracy throughout the entire three-hour running time.  And yet, once we got into the opera, I found Bolton’s conducting to be extremely ponderous and low voltage.  I longed for him to bring out the drama in the running string figures, the force of the rhythm, a sense of momentum that seemed to be lacking in his focus on creating atmospheric beauty of tone.  The chorus, prepared by José Luis Basso, had been superbly trained, singing with impeccable blend and outstandingly unanimous approach of attack. 

With an international cast, it was surprising to see that the Real had chosen to perform the work in the original French.  There were frequent moments where it was possible to understand the sung text, but I was grateful for the bilingual Castilian/English surtitles.  Maria Agresta gave unflinchingly of herself in the title role, willing to frequently sacrifice the beauty of the tone to bring out Médée’s anger, and rising to a final scene of great determination.  Agresta’s soprano sounds to me like a primarily lyrical instrument pushed to be a size bigger than it naturally is.  The consequence of this was that the long, elegant lines saw the voice spread around the note and the corners turned in an ungainly way.  It also meant that the top didn’t quite spin in the way one might have expected, the higher reaches taking on a metallic force.  The text was occasionally clear.  I was grateful that Agresta had given us a performance that was so generous in its force, her final scene was absolutely fearless, but her singing did lack impact due to the fogginess of her diction and I do wonder how sustainable it will be for her to sing with such uncompromising determination. 

Scala brought his familiar focused, bronzed tenor to Jason’s music.  It took him a little while to find his best form, in the first act I found his emission to be uncharacteristically bumpy.  By the time we got to Act 2, the Scala we know was more than present, the top ringing out with ease, with a genuine attempt to sing off the text, and absolutely game stage presence that saw the priests remove his shirt.  The elegance of Scala’s line and classical beauty of his singing gave much pleasure.  Nancy Fabiola Herrera sang Néris in a warm, orange-toned mezzo with impeccable legato and clarity of text.  The pulchritude of her singing made me wish Cherubini had given her much more to do.  She was matched in her aria with bassoon playing, from Salvador Aragó, of stylish musicality. 

As Dircé, Sara Blanch brought a deliciously crystalline soprano to her music, impeccably dispatching some immaculate staccati and easy acuti.  That said, here I wish I had been hearing Blanch in a smaller house or with a more acoustically supportive set, as it did sound that the voice lacked a metal in the core in order to project more easily into the space.  Nevertheless, Blanch did generally avoid the urge to push.  Park Jongmin brought a warm bass of complex depth of tone to Créon, sung in good French, and descending with ease to the sepulchral depths.  Mercedes Gancedo and Alexandra Urquiola were positive vocal presences in their brief contributions.

There was a lot to enjoy in tonight’s Médée, even if it also left me with a number of reservations.  Azorín’s staging looks great – and the contributions of the parkour artists were absolutely staggering.  At the same time, the focus on creating those imaginative stage pictures seemed to come at the expense of personenregie that created flesh and blood characters that clearly related to each other and were based in the text.  Diction was also not quite as optimal as it could have been, which robbed Agresta in particular of the additional impact her performance could have had.  Bolton also seemed to be conducting with the parking brake on.  And yet, I was left with enormous admiration by Agresta’s determination, Scala’s ringing top, Herrara’s beautiful mezzo, and Blanch’s impressive staccati – not to mention the excellent chorus and orchestra.  The audience responded at the end with warm applause.