BEMF In Review

2001 FESTIVAL REVIEWS

A stunning revival of “Thesee”
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
Wednesday, June 13, 2001

“Thesee” was Jean-Baptise [sic] Lully’s greatest hit, and it remained in the active repertory in Parish for more than a century after its premiere in 1675. Since then, until very recently, it has been unheard. The Boston Early Music Festival’s spectacular production suggests that the opera is strong enough to enter the repertory again…

Wagner is usually credited with the idea of “Gesamtkunstwerk,” opera as the collaboration and summation of all the arts, but Lully was obviously there before him. He wrote on a Wagnerian spaciousness of scale (there are three full hours of music in the BEMF edition). To emphasize the point, costumer Anna Watkins arranges for the dea ex machine, Minerva, to arrive in a breastplate and shield, like Bruennhilde.

The costumes are colorful and sumptuous…Robin Linklater’s designs are picturesque and flamboyant—Versailles appears in the background, like the pyramids in “Aida,” and there are some wonderful drops; demons emerge from a gaping tiger’s mouth.

Gilbert Blin’s direction offers something very rare: convincing Baroque-period staging, highly stylized yet also recognizably human…The dances of Lucy Graham are full of charm and impudence—there’s a stirring dance with flags whipping the air and flying like rockets; as “peasants” dance an enchanting pastoral, members of the chorus distribute fresh blooms to members of the audience); a character dance for lascivious old men summons even more laughter than the surtitles.

In most respects “Thesee” unfolds on a comparably superior musical level. The “summit meeting” orchestra of experts plays wonderfully for both coartistic directors, Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette, who trade off conducting duties. Members of the Handel & Haydn Society sing with disciplined involvement and act with civilized abandon…There are some excellent voices—soprano Kendra Colton (Minerva and the Priestess of Minerva), Olivier Laquerre (Arcas), Bernard Deletree [sic] (Aegee), and Howard Crook (Thesee)…Laura Pudwell brings down the house as Medee—she matches her big voice with a big personality…BEMF succeeds to an astonishing extent in making “Thesee” look good.

Theseus meets the 21st century
Andrew L. Pincus, The Berkshire Eagle
Monday, June 25, 2001

Welcome to17th-century opera in the 21st century…The production [of Lully’s Thésée], the third the biennial festival has brought to Tanglewood, has the ring of authenticity…the artistic team—music directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, stage director Gilbert Blin, choreographer Lucy Graham and designer Robin Linklater—was right to go for a period approach rather than some Peter Sellars-style updating in the interest of capturing an audience. All elegance, “Thesee” was like a journey back to Versailles.

Musically, the performance also stood on firm ground. The orchestra, conducted alternately by O’Dette and Stubbs, played with accuracy and spirit. The dancing was rich in courtly graces…Laura Pudwell [portrayed] Medee, who became the kind of villain you love to hate. Ellen Hargis sang with strong musical values as Aegle…Ann Monoyios was sweet-voiced in the dual roles of Venus and Dorine, the confidante of Medee. Bernard Deletre provided commanding sounds as the king. Howard Crook, as a gold-clad, creamy-voiced Thesee, looked more like a noble warrior.

Lightheared “Thesee” dazzles
Peter Haley, The Albany Times Union
Sunday, June 24, 2001

The 61st season at Tanglewood opened Friday with the annual visit of the Boston Early Music Festival production of Jean Baptiste Lully’s “Thesee.”
Boston Early Music folk threw their hearts and souls into the production, creating a grand spectacle, dazzling eye and ear. The five-act narrative, punctuated with delightfully entertaining dances and divertissements, registered vibrantly, especially throughout the battles of Act I, and the final tableau, a “fete galante.”

Choreographer Lucy Graham maximized opportunities provided by Lully’s fine score while stage director Gilbert Blin kept the company flowing throughout the stage space, as though in another “world.” The large cast literally gleamed in spectacular costumes by Anna Watkins, under the sensitive lighting of Steve Rosen. Set designer Robin Linklater surrounded the players in a fairy-tale environment, which was both functional and visually appealing.

The singing was even throughout, with emphasis on ensemble. One can’t help but mention the acting and singing of Laura Pudwell as Medea. The singing actress commanded the stage at every appearance. The period orchestra nearly stole the show with its display of exotic instruments, all played expertly under the direction of Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, musical directors.

Great gambas!
Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix
Friday, June 29, 2001

The Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) is now in its 11th season. Every two years, for more than two decades, scholars, instrument makers, performers, and devotees of pre-classical music have come to Boston from all over the world to meet one another, attend the concerts, and look at the displays. The centerpiece is usually the fully staged production of a neglected 17th-century opera, and this audience of specialists usually eats it up. Lately, there have been American premieres, in new performing editions by the festival’s music directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs. Now, after several seasons of Italian operas (Rossi, Cavalli), they’ve crossed into France for a rare go at a tragédie en musique by the Italian-born favorite of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was a dancer as well as a musician. His fourth opera, Thésée, with a libretto by Philippe Quinault, turns the story of Theseus and Medea into a glorification of the Sun King and the building of Versailles. It held the stage in France from its 1675 premiere right up to the French Revolution…

In Lucy Graham BEMF has found a choreographer who fills the stage with graceful dances in a convincing style, and we got a company of dancers light on their feet and demonstrating, when called for, a shrewd sense of character (as in the delightfully sour comic dance for two horny old men). The chorus was once again superb…As usual, the real star was the BEMF Orchestra, under the alternating direction of Stubbs and O’Dette, with exciting work from Baroque-trumpet players John Thiessen and Alex Bonus and French percussionist Marie-Ange Petit goosing the lively military music and lutenists O’Dette and Stubbs and harpsichordist Peter Sykes providing a rippling undercurrent of rhythmic life…
[The following night saw] the Boston debut of the extraordinary Italian gambist Paolo Pandolfo. In just the first 20 minutes of his recital with young Norwegian theorbo/Baroque-guitar player Thomas Boysen and American harpsichordist Mitzi Meyerson, there was music more beautiful, more moving, and funnier than anything in Thésée.

These sublime and characterful works were by Marin Marais…Pandolfo is committed to the idea that this music is specific and descriptive. His program notes provided his own little poetic précis for each selection (as the great French pianist Alfred Cortot used to write, perhaps with less authority, for each Chopin Prélude). Then he introduced each group of pieces to the audience…I would have “heard” Marais’s imitations of a musette and a guitar and “seen” the parade of the Persian ambassador’s guards marching closer and closer even without Pandolfo’s descriptions, or “seen” the badminton shuttlecock sailing back and forth in the air even without his shifty eyes following it, so vivid was his playing. Perhaps most remarkable was Le tableau de l’opération de la taille, Marais’s depiction of a bladderstone operation, which Pandolfo turned into a “melodrama” by declaiming the details of the surgery as he played.

And what heavenly playing! His bowing is light and elegant, but it boasts an astonishing range of colors and dynamics, with pinpoint intonation. You think he couldn’t play any softer—or faster, or slower—and then he does. In La musette, the bagpipe seemed to materialize out of thin air, then disappear into it. Nothing could be more plaintive than the sighing phrases Pandolfo brought to Plainte, or more poignant than his depiction of Marais’s son dying after a battle (Tombeau pur Marais le cadet), or more exquisite than the labyrinth of musical apparitions in Chaconne en rondeau (beginning with Meyerson’s plucked harpsichord string)—the one encore. No doubt about it, Pandolfo is a genius—the Yo-Yo Ma of the viola da gamba. I can’t wait to hear him again.

Early music festival has a French Accent
Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
Tuesday, June 19, 2001

The Boston Early Music Festival’s focus on French music brought concerts by four leading French early music groups. The last of these, Le Concert Spirituel, performed a program of major works by Marc-Antoine Charpentier Saturday night. Under the direction of Hervé Niquet, Le Concert Spirituel has built a significant discography, and their Jordan Hall concert met the high expectations their recordings have formed…The program was devoted to music composed to celebrate the military victories of Louis XIV—some trumpet-and-drums marches, two motets, “Dixit Dominus” and “In honorem Sancti Ludovici Regis Galliae,” and an extended “Te Deum” setting. The music has a quality of invention, a vigor and a splendor comparable to the more familiar works in this genre of Handel and Haydn.
Both orchestra and chorus were excellent, and so were the soloists…The program was greeted with cheers, and following the standard bows, the entire ensemble was recalled to the stage after they had all left it.

The evening ended with a program by Tragicomedia, whose closing-night 11 p.m. concerts have become a traditional favorite…Long before the concert began there was an ovation for festival codirector Paul O’Dette…The program featured solo harpsichord music by Couperin, some guitar duets by Francesco Corbetta, Marin Marais’s piece about the gallstone operation, and several excerpts from the famous collaborations between Lully, the festival’s figurehead, and the great playwright Moliere.
Several prominent participants in the festival joined the Tragicomedia core group, including Gilbert Blin, whose brilliant staging contributed much to the production of Lully’s opera “Thesee.”…The absolute mastery of Lully shone through everything. This composer was revered in his own lifetime, and ever since then he has always been listed among the great, although opportunities to hear the reasons for his fame adequately set forth have not been frequent. To do so was a major achievement of the Boston Early Music Festival.

BEMF executive stage director Kathleen Fay, her board, donors, staff, and the artists have a lot to be proud of. Overall, this 11th festival was the best to date, and it is good to know that Fay and her colleagues have always used each accomplishment as a steppingstone to something even better. The city and the world of music owe these people a debt of gratitude.

A Flashback, Very Orderly, To the France Of Louis XIV
Bernard Holland, The New York Times
Tuesday, June 19, 2001

“Thésée”—as put on by the Boston Early Music Festival at the Copley Theater this afternoon…[puts] opera in terms of the Parc Monceau, emotions manicured like a row of hedges.

This Boston production has gone to exquisite pains to recall Louix XIV’s France. The hand gestures are certainly the result of scholarly research. The costumes have been taken from contemporary illustrations. The dances—and these are perhaps the most deeply satisfying moments of this event—have been deciphered from surviving choreographic notation. It goes without saying that the good-size pit orchestra led by Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs uses period instruments…

This “Thésée” has had decisions to make, for carrying its elements in toto from 1675 to 2001 creates a heavy load. Lully’s music, filled with rhythmic surprise and winning melody, reaches us easily and directly, as does Lucy Graham’s choreography…Bernard Deletré [wears] the trappings of the king of Athens as naturally as an Armani suit…Gilbert Blin’s stage direction is conscientious and well prepared…the Boston players do what they do well.