Wednesday night’s performance of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride was one of stunning simplicity. But in that simplicity came a complexity of emotion and thought that made the performance one well worth seeing again.
Susan Graham in the lead role sang with her strong, fluid voice, which conveyed the sense of longing and dread and foreboding necessary for the part. Her performance left me feeling stunned and awed. Paul Groves as Pylades was very strong and effective in the first half of the work, but audibly weakened in the second half, although his performance was still very moving. Bo Skovhus, while possessing a beautiful instrument, was often not loud enough to be heard clearly over the orchestra, and his portrayal as Oreste suffered.
The minimalist set added to the effect. The set is basically a giant dark gray box, with one section of the floor that rose up to become the altar of Diana. The harsh, angular lighting cast long shadows upon the walls of the box which further augmented the emotional landscape of the music. The all black costumes – full length skirts for the women and long floor-length coats for the men, with the exception of Oreste and Pylade, who were in black shirts and trousers, drew attention to the faces and hands of the performers.
The staging was a dance staging, with the opening scene a repeated re-enactment of the crimes of Clytemnestra murdering Agammemnon and Oreste murdering Clytemnestra, his mother. One important moment comes at the beginning when the dancers scrawl the names Iphigenie, Agammemnon, and Clytemestre on the walls of the stage while the murders are taking place, symbolizing the visions that Iphigenie has of their deaths. Later, when the story of their deaths comes out, their names are erased from the walls, and when she finds out that they are dead, she herself erases her own name from the wall in an incredibly powerful moment of theater. It was chilling, especially combined with her intense singing and movement.
The rest of the piece has similar moments of incredible drama and tension, as Gluck’s music and Jean Michel Criqui’s direction work brilliantly together. Gluck rejected the excessive vocal ornamentation of the preceding era and focused on making words and music have the dramatic energy. This work is the culmination of his thoughts, and his final major work, and is truly a masterpiece. This production is Criqui’s SF Opera debut, and hopefully will not be his last.
There are three performances left of Iphigénie en Tauride, on June 23, 26, and 29, so if you get the chance to see it – tickets are fairly inexpensive, I urge you to go see it.
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