Delibes
Lakmé (DVD)
Sabine Devieilhe, Frédéric Antoun et al; Pygmalion/Raphaël Pichon; dir. Laurent Pelly (Paris, 2022)
Naxos 2.110765 (DVD); NBD0177V (Blu-ray) 135 mins
For many listeners Lakmé is no more than the sum of two of its parts, ‘The Flower Duet’ and ‘The Bell Song’. This thoughtful production, which began across several stages at the Opéra Comique, shames any who may have wrinkled their noses.
Laurent Pelly transforms Delibes’s opera into an exploration of colonialism and cultural appropriation on a set that appears to feature artfully cut paper – origami perhaps – with stage hands in black, as in Kabuki. Hints of Butterfly here, as Pelly also references operatic Orientalism from The Pearl Fishers to Le Roi de Lahore.
The colonisers are British barging into a sacred Hindu forest space where a banished Brahman and his priestess daughter Lakmé keep faith with their religion. Pelly’s Europeans, refugees from Offenbach perhaps, are giggling girls and men with upper lips as stiff as cardboard. No wonder the young officer Gérald falls for the exquisite Lakmé, the allure of the orient made flesh.
Frédéric Antoun is a handsome Gérald, though the high tessitura of the role takes its toll in the last act. Sabine Devieilhe’s Lakmé is superb, with silvery tone and jewel-like above the stave. She is fearless in ‘The Bell Song’ which she turns into her own story with Gérald, and her final aria as she sacrifices herself for her English lover touches every emotional chord.
Raphaël Pichon, conducting Pygmalion on original instruments, relishes Delibes’s lush orchestration, and in the final act stresses the souvenirs of Parsifal which Delibes had seen at Bayreuth while finishing his own opera. Christopher Cook