The first of Pascal Dusapin’s operas to be performed in the UK, Passion was written 10 years ago to a commission from the Aix-en-Provence festival for a work that would take Monteverdi’s operas as its principal frame of reference. Dusapin’s starting point was the Orpheus legend, the subject not only of Monteverdi’s first extant opera but of major works by Gluck, Offenbach and Birtwistle. His treatment is both novel and iconoclastic.
In this collaboration between Music Theatre Wales and National Dance Company Wales, the story’s mythic narrative is dismantled. Orpheus and Eurydice are renamed simply Him and Her, and the work refashions their final colloquy on the borderline between life and death as a meditation on the idea of passion itself as an expression both of desire and suffering. The score engages in a dialogue with baroque tradition. A harpsichord underpins Dusapin’s quietly dissonant textures, while an offstage group of vocalists comments, like a madrigal consort, on the emotions at the work’s centre. As in the opéras-ballets of Campra and Rameau, dance is as integral to the piece as song. It’s mesmerising, if overlong: the closing scenes, in which Him and Her finally separate, seem protracted after what has gone before.
The staging, co-directed by Michael McCarthy and choreographer Caroline Finn, is remarkable for its seamless integration of movement and music. Emotional tension is released in slow, sometimes erotic gestures, and Him (Johnny Herford) and Her (Jennifer France) are as much members of the dance ensemble as individuals in their own right. Finn’s choreography hints at the religious connotations of passion as France is borne aloft, her body drooping Christ-like in an echo, perhaps, of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross. France and Herford sing superbly. Her voice soars rapturously upwards as she contemplates the sunlight she has left behind. Herford, sensing her slipping away from him, is all contained intensity and grief. Exaudi are the immaculate vocal consort, while the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, prise open Dusapin’s textures with fastidious care and control. It is beautiful, haunting and wonderfully well done.
Touring until 10 November.
