Looking good

Rameau’s Les Paladins, which arrived briefly at the Barbican Theatre, was spectacular, amazing. Or rather this production was. It was one of those occasions when so much happens on stage that you can begin to wonder whether there’s something — or nothing — to hide. I had listened to it on Radio Three a few days earlier, and been puzzled by the excitement it seemed to be generating, since most of the music struck me as being well below the best of Rameau. It turned out, at the Barbican, that we were to be happily subjected to a multimedia display, in which the visuals easily dominated. Three-D persons stepped out of two-D metro coaches, people turned into animals and vice versa, a huge array of rabbits nibbled all over the backcloth, singers danced with plausible results, there were plenty of dancers doing acrobatics, and there was singing, too, and a lively musical accompaniment. William Christie was in charge of the music, which on the whole is pretty thin stuff, though there are touching scenes. It would be absurd, though, to compare it with Les Boréades.

Most of the credit for a fun evening goes to José Montalvo, the director and choreographer. He is staggeringly inventive, so much so that the limits within which he works can easily be overlooked. Opera audiences suffer so much from feeble stagings and productions that we tend to be pitifully grateful for efficiently managed and stylishly executed gambollings. The inventors of Tom and Jerry cartoons wouldn’t have been grieving with envy, but they would have admired fellow-professionals. Admirers of Rameau’s particular musico-dramatic gifts will want, now, to get back to the works that exhibit them in profusion.

Ever open-minded, I decided finally that I would revisit ENO’s Don Giovanni, Calixto Bieito’s production which premiered to widespread dismay in 2001.