After Toulon and Liège recently, Bellini’s opera “The Capulets and the Montagues” is on display at the Opéra national de Lorraine. In Nancy, they come to close the 2023/2024 opera season under the baton of Ramón Tebar and in a new production by Pınar Karabulut.
With this production, Pınar Karabulut makes her debut as an opera director in France, knowing that this work will later be presented on the stages of the Magdeburg Theater in Germany, of Saint-Gall in Switzerland, as well as at the Opera Ballet of Flanders, co-producing companies of the show. Very present in the theater on the stages of Germany, Pınar Karabulut approached the staging of opera at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin with the first work of the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage in 2021 entitled Greekthen with The Triptych by Puccini last year, a show much discussed for its radicalism and its explosion of colors.
Pınar Karabulut, deliberately moving away from the Italian and Shakespearean roots of the work, wanted to transfer the action to the plains of the American Far West among the cowboys. This society constitutes for her the very essence of the patriarchal system within which the woman’s voice represents little!
The unusual and close-knit couple formed by Romeo and Juliet therefore comes up against the system in place and fails to assert itself except in death. To formulate her point, the director places her show in a very particular setting with particularly bright colors (notably the lighting distilling a very 1960s/70s orange atmosphere) and an overall minimalist scenography.
Juliette (Yaritza Véliz) does not seem reassured to have to sing her love for Romeo from a high platform that is still orange (a very unflattering color in the same way as the performer’s curiously cut and variegated dress) and what’s more later will turn into a tomb.
Capellio looks like the local sheriff in the midst of stuffed horses that raise their heads or emit smoke from their nostrils at the most intensely dramatic moments. The very treatment of the performers remains somewhat conventional and non-transgressive, without the emotion expected in this dramatic work located at the sources of Italian belcanto being really intended. It will be necessary to wait for the big, well-regulated final scene and the joint death of the two young people for the listener to finally seem upset.
It must be admitted that the talent of the two performers brought together here contributes greatly to this. Announced as unwell at the start of the performance by Matthieu Dussouillez, general director of the Opéra national de Lorraine, the young Chilean soprano Yaritza Véliz, very noted in Donna Elvira of Don Giovanni by Mozart at the Rouen Normandy Opera last April, displays vibrant and passionate singing in Juliette. The tone is luminous and fluid, the treble imposes itself with its ease and its singing line offers an ornamentation that is always accurate.
Julie Boulianne, magnificent Iphigénie en Tauride on this same stage in Nancy last year, portrays a Romeo ready to move mountains, fiery and very truthful in his gestures. Pınar Karabulut did not want to make up the character who remains a woman in a man’s clothing with her hair flowing. Julie Boulianne invests every moment of her interpretation, firstly through the intensity of her mezzo-soprano vocal means, the dark and assertive colors she uses, the imposing projection which governs her entire performance up to the high notes. the most extreme. The two voices complement each other wonderfully and give this evening its full height.
The tenor David Astorga has assertive and broad means, but also a real high fifth which he still shakes up a little with a small mishap in the second act. He also constantly sings forte to the detriment of the flexibility or nuance which nevertheless imposes itself on the role of Tebaldo.
Baritone Donnie Ray Albert portrays a Capellio who is above all solid and proud, straight in his boots, his convictions and his hatred of the other camp. For his part, Manuel Fuentes gives free rein to his percussive voice in the role of Lorenzo, very singular in tone and singing a little too vocally. Here too, the vocal line would benefit from more inventiveness.
Placed at the head of the Orchestra and Choir of the National Opera of Lorraine, the latter certainly very involved but whose Italian could be better mastered, the Spanish conductor Ramón Tebar does not particularly seek to lighten his musical direction at the first act, a little too strong, if not accentuated to the detriment of the spirit of Bellini’s enchanting music. In the second act, the overall tone appears much more harmonious, more luminous, and its very careful accompaniment of the final duet reserves treasures of tenderness for its two performers. Here he does more than support them in this perilous scene.
The Nancy audience, very attentive throughout the performance, gave an enthusiastic welcome to all the performers, welcoming the staging team without really showing any rejection or approval for that matter.
