OPERA REVIEW: IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS
23 SEPT/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
R: 5/5

TORONTO - In a remarkable production of Orfeo ed Euridice last season for the Canadian Opera Company, director/lighting designer Robert Carsen proved he knows how to find the heart of operatic tragedy — and break it. Now, as if to underscore to hometown audiences what he has proven conclusively to the opera world at large — mainly, that his genius seems to know no bounds — he returns with a production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s IPHIGENIA IN TAURUS that, if possible, takes an audience even further into the dark heart of classic tragedy.

In a production created for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden that opened at the Four Seasons Centre Thursday, Carsen and an impressive cast take an audience so deeply into the dark nightmare of Euripides’ final chapter of the saga of the family Atreus that you might actually feel you’ve enjoyed two and a half hours of REM sleep by the time it ends.

For those a little misty on the details of Greek tragedies, this is the final installment of the story of the tragic daughter of King Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, whose supposed sacrifice at her father’s hands has already led her mother to murder her father, and her brother, the beloved Orestes, to then murder his mother.

Meanwhile, Iphigenia, — sung here with brilliant clarity, depth and passion by soprano Susan Graham — has not in fact been sacrificed to the goddess after all, but rather been whisked to Tauris, where, under the iron hand of Scythian King Thoas (bass-baritone Mark S. Doss in full menace mode), she serves as Priestess to Diana, sacrificing, at the King’s command, every stranger that happens into his kingdom.

And this being Greek tragedy, it’s almost inevitable that the shipwrecked Orestes (baritone Russell Braun in magnificent voice) wash up on Tauris’ shores with his best friend Pylades (tenor Joseph Kaiser in a beautifully modulated performance). Both men are sentenced by the king’s command to sacrificial death at Iphigenia’s hands, but, moved by his obvious suffering, Iphigenia decides to save Orestes despite the fact that neither of them realize the blood bond. Burdened as he is, however, with the guilt of having murdered his mother, Orestes wants to die, creating one of those theatrical Gordian knots that can only be unravelled by divine intervention.

Building on Gluck’s enduring music, served up by the COC Orchestra under the baton of an impressive Pablo Heras-Casado as much as on the strength of this impressive cast, Carsen uses a largely monochromatic palette enhanced by the rich shadows created by his evocative lighting to constantly underscore the stark horror of the story.

With the COC Chorus performing off stage, he arranges his supporting cast and a corps of highly disciplined and beautifully matched dancers in a series of ever-shifting tableaux that reflect both the physical and emotional turmoil that is unfolding on stage — Braun’s Orestes, at one point tormented beyond endurance by his conscience, actually seems to be climbing walls.

As anyone who caught Carsen’s production of Orfeo can attest, this is not a director nor a design team — Tobias Hoheisel (set and costumes), Peter Van Praet (lighting) and Philippe Giraudeau (choreography) — that deals in the extravagance of conventional operatic spectacle. So if you’re looking for pretty, give this one a pass. But if you’re hungering to experience magnificent opera on a level almost completely visceral ...