BBCSSO: Debussy's ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’

City Halls, Glasgow, 26/3/26

BBCSSO, RCS Chamber Choir, Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor), Sophie Bevan (soprano), Huw Montague Rendall (baritone), David Stout (baritone), Karen Cargill (mezzo-soprano), Alastair Miles (bass), Beth Stirling (soprano), Richard Morrison (baritone),

The night of 26th March in Glasgow’s City Halls was not typical of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Thursday night series, not even in the context of its 90th year celebrations.  A concert performance of an opera is a relative rarity; one of Debussy’s only opera ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ doubly so.  But there was also an additional element of uniqueness: this was the UK première of the Critical Edition, compiled through a project begun in 1985 and only completed in 2020.  The orchestra, the RCS Chamber Choir and a cast of principal vocalists were conducted by the BBCSSO’s Chief Conductor, Ryan Wigglesworth.  The principals comprised soprano Sophie Bevan, baritones Huw Montague Rendall and David Stout, mezzo Karen Cargill, bass Alastair Miles, soprano Beth Stirling, and baritone Richard Morrison.  The opera was sung in French with English surtitles.  Swiss violinist and First Concertmaster at the Bern Symphony Orchestra, David Guerchovitch returned as Guest Leader for the evening; he last guested in October. Turnout was not full, but entirely satisfactory.  The performance was recorded for broadcast on Radio 3 on 4 April at 6 pm.  A second live performance is scheduled for this Sunday afternoon in Edinburgh's Usher Hall.

I first got to know the opera through the Ansermet Decca LP box set, borrowed from my university’s record library about 1981.  I copied the LPs to two cassettes and listened to them on my ‘Walkman’ a few times during my 4-mile commute by bicycle to and from the campus.  I acknowledged that the music was beautiful but I could not warm to it as an opera.  In fact, at a time when I was getting fired up by opera, I found it cold, damp, mildewy and anaemic and, for a work dramatising a crime passionel, surprisingly devoid of passion. An anti-opera, in fact.  Just now, I paused typing to check and yes, I still have the two C90 cassettes, still not properly labelled.  I have not listened to them again in over 4 decades.  I mention this as a confession that I was attending the performance not without ‘baggage’, and less than 3 weeks after Scottish Opera’s semi-staged concert performance of ‘Tristan und Isolde’, with whose art and philosophy the contrast could not be starker.  Did the performance unburden me of this ‘baggage’?  Yes and no.

First, the ‘yes’.  Debussy’s music was even more gorgeous than I remembered, as was Maeterlinck’s prose. The orchestral interludes, lengthened by Debussy to give time for scene changes, but shortened again for publication, have been fully restored in the Critical Edition, and they are exquisite, even when depicting a gloomy castle with dingy suffocating vaults.  The music is as laden with vague fluid symbolism as the words, constantly shifting between light, half-light and darkness.  The orchestration is superb and Ryan Wigglesworth drew a commensurate realisation from the orchestra. The French diction of all the principals was flawless.  In any concert performance, the burden of any characterisation falls on vocal timbre and phrasing, but even more so with Debussy where the vocal lines are less demonstrative, with much carried in the orchestral and verbal symbolism, with an overall atmosphere of vagueness and duality.  I felt that all the principals navigated this challenge excellently.  Sophie Bevan’s light soprano gave us Mélisande’s innocence (yet secretiveness), vulnerability (yet resoluteness).  A visual bonus was her petiteness and long blonde hair (probably a wig for the ‘role’; it’s not so long in her photographs).  Huw Montague Rendall’s baritone painted a picture of a Pelléas with an open appreciation of nature and beauty (yet a sensitive melancholic temperament), and a playfulness (yet a sense of honour and duty).  Fellow-baritone David Stout delivered magnificently as Pelléas’ half-brother, the widower Golaud, who encounters the fey mysterious Mélisande lost and weeping in a forest and marries her, eventually taking her to live in the gloomy castle.  Golaud acknowledges no duality: he is a man of absolutes, suspicious, jealous, controlling, threatening, and ultimately violent, murderous and guilt-ridden.  He becomes convinced that his wife and half-brother are in an affair.  Debussy entrusts the darkest and most direct music to Golaud, and David Stout repaid that trust handsomely.  Geneviève, the mother of Golaud and Pelléas, sung by mezzo Karen Cargill, is conflicted, welcoming Mélisande as an antidote to the gloom of the castle, but increasingly aware that her presence is sundering the half-brothers’ uneasy relationship.  It is a relatively small role with little warmth, but Karen’s voice is always a joy.  Geneviève’s father, King Arkel, was sung by bass Alastair Miles, who also sees Mélisande as an omen of hope for the future, yet is oddly fatalistic when that hope fades at her deathbed, shortly after she gives birth to Golaud’s daughter.  Again, not a huge role, but another fine voice adding colour and context.  Scottish soprano Beth Stirling, currently studying with Sarah Pring for Master of Performance at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, was excellent in the naïve role of Golaud’s little son Yniold, whom he forces to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande.  A pair of cameos, a shepherd who chats with Yniold in Act 4, Scene 3, and the doctor at Mélisande’s deathbed near the end of the opera, were expertly handled by baritone Richard Morrison.  My youthful impression that the opera is ‘devoid of passion’ did not survive this performance; David and Huw saw to that in Act 4, with Golaud’s jealous rage in Scene 2, and the surge of ecstatic emotion following Pelléas and Mélisande’s hushed confession of love in Act 4 Scene 4 right through to the end of the act when Golaud slays Pelléas.  Somehow, it never made an impression 45 years ago. My tastes have changed, evidently.

That said, we come to the ‘no’.  Act 4 is Act 4, but there are 5 acts.  As an opera to listen to, there are vast tracts of dreamlike stasis.  The confession of love is barely audible; contrast with the huge 40-minute duet in Act II of ‘Tristan’.  Three weeks ago, when I reviewed Scottish Opera’s ‘Tristan’, I was struck by how those 5 hours did not feel ‘long’.  I no longer think that ‘Pelléas’ is an “anti-opera”, but I do feel that, if it is an opera at all, it is a “long opera”.  It was set to finish about 10:30, but it was closer to 10:45.  Don’t get me wrong, it is undoubtedly a masterpiece of historical significance and I am very glad that scholarship has given us a Critical Edition and to have had the opportunity to experience a committed and artistically satisfying realisation of the same.  But the bottom line for me is the following.  I took those two C90 cassettes out of a rosewood carousel tower to make sure they were what I thought they were, then put them back.  I don’t expect to take them out again any time in the foreseeable future.  Not with tastier goodies beckoning, and live and staged to boot.