Poulenc’s La voix humaine is a brief, powerful piece, and it’s a matter for gratitude that Opera North has staged a new production of it. It’s a matter for ingratitude, though, that it’s been put on by itself: not just because at 45 minutes it makes for a short evening, but because it would have been so satisfying to couple it with Poulenc’s first opera, Les mamelles de Tirésias, which is only slightly longer, and which is even less well known. It’s not as if La voix humaine is so shattering that one wouldn’t have any resources for anything else, though the other thing would clearly have to precede it. In fact one of the things that makes Voix a striking work is that it’s only moderately upsetting. Those critics who have called it silly, camp, OTT and really a work to be performed by a drag queen have failed to realise that Poulenc keeps us at some distance from the desperate woman making her endlessly interrupted call to the lover who has deserted her. It’s not as if it’s her last throw — Cocteau specified that she is a young woman, so there’s no reason to think that things are worse for her than for anyone else of a tender age who has been abandoned by the person they feel is the only one in the world for them.
Poulenc’s idiom, here as in all his best works, is one which alternates between severity or anyway neo-classicism and voluptuousness, so we spend some of the time feeling with this woman, but more of it observing her. The flexibility of idiom is extraordinary, as if in the middle of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms one suddenly had a brief passage from Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. The results would be wildly incongruous if it weren’t for the varying perspectives Poulenc gives us, and his fidelity to Cocteau’s text, in which passages of comparative calm and reflectiveness give way to renewed onsets of anguish.
Deborah Warner’s production is straightforward, if mildly anachronistic. Joan Rodgers gives an intelligent account of the woman, without bringing quite what is needed to the role. She stays within slightly narrower limits than is required to earn both our sympathy and our tendency to tell her to pull herself together. I’m a sucker for women in this plight, but there was no moment at which I felt I needed to leap on to the stage and grab the receiver to tell her ex-lover where to get off, and there should have been a few. The orchestral accompaniment under Paul Watkins was ideally lucid and where necessary lusciously abandoned.
Opera Rara’s contribution this year was a concert performance at the Coliseum of Giovanni Pacini’s Alessandro nell’Indie, which turned out to be of pulverising inanity, all the more obvious for being so well performed. Pacini, an almost exact contemporary of Rossini, took over many elements of his style, and was considerably more prolific, his operas numbering, at the most conservative estimate, 70. Alessandro was composed for Naples in 1824, to a libretto by Metastasio, he of the Clemenza of this, that and the other monarch — this opera could aptly be called La clemenza d’Alessandro.
Having conquered some of India, Alexander the Great falls in love with Cleofide, who is also loved by the defeated king Poro. After a series of psychologically nonsensical twists of plot, Alessandro leaves them to it, and is duly hymned. As Alessandro, Bruce Ford is still, at 50, in fine vocal fettle, throwing off reams of coloratura with as much aplomb as in the countless other roles he has taken over the years. Laura Claycomb, with a profile and hairdo made for operatic quarrelling, was his match, in a succession of huge arias; she commanded the stage single-handed for the first 20 minutes, once the perfunctory orchestral introduction was out of the way. And Jennifer Larmore as Poro, though her voice is less sumptuous than it was a decade ago, held her own. There are a couple of confidants, but the opera is at least mercifully free of subplots and secondary intrigues.
It was clear, with the London Philharmonic under David Parry, that Pacini is an efficient orchestrator and provider of not quite memorable melodies, but there could be no hint of genuine drama between non-characters, and there is no indication that that was even what he was striving for. With several of Bellini’s operas not performed in England for many years, if at all, and none of them for some time — a wonderful and truly dramatic master — surely it would be a much better use of Opera Rara’s resources to give us La Straniera or Zaira than this formulaic drivel. There will be a recording in due course, with the same forces, for those who wish to discover for themselves how vacuous this stuff is.
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