New opera at la Bastille

We're off to Paris in 48 hours, yes!

One of the treats I'm looking forward to the most is Adriana Mater, the new work commissioned by the Bastille Opera from Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, with the libretto written by Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf. The premise is quite impressive. Even though I'm a bit skittish seeing another new work after thoroughly disliking Leonid Desyatnikov's The Children of Rosenthal at the Bolshoi on 26 March, I'm committing myself to this one as a way of rinsing the unpleasant aftertaste Detya left in my mouth.

So far, reviews have not been exactly unanimous. I've seen two posted already online after the world premiere just a couple of days ago. The first one, dated 4 April 2006, is written by Francis Carlin of the The Financial Times.

Six years after the success of her first opera, L’Amour de loin, Kaija Saariaho is back with a modern fable, a striking story of lust and desire for vengeance.

Adriana is raped by Tsargo, who has been transformed by war from a drunk into a swaggering bully. He disappears. She gives birth and worries if her son Yonas will be Cain or Abel. Years later, the adolescent Yonas resolves to kill his father but falters when he sees Tsargo is now blind and a broken man.

The dream team that worked on L’Amour de loin is back. The libretto is by Amin Maalouf, the production by Peter Sellars and sets by George Tsypin. Saariaho again steers clear of the template of modern opera: the narrative is stark and linear. But you have to be a fervent supporter of the Saariaho style to overlook the flaws.

Saariaho’s decision to write for the stage was in part prompted by Messiaen’s St François d’Assise, an opera that is really a gargantuan oratorio. L’Amour de loin shared the same unconcern with dramatic pulse but worked for those who were entranced by its luxuriant orchestration. Adriana tries to tackle a more physical world and fails. Saariaho cannot juggle with theatrical pace and timing. A disembodied chorus barks out snippets of text and the amplification bombards us with crude distortion.

Adriana treats Maalouf’s wordy, banal libretto with scant regard for French meter. Vital sentences are drowned out. Worse, the first three scenes are dominated by a background blur from the orchestra.

As for the cast, Patricia Bardon is a rich-toned Adriana; Solveig Kringelborn, as her sister Refka, soars above the fray and Gordon Gietz is a lithe, energetic Yonas. Stephen Milling’s giant proportions suit Tsargo’s character but he stumbles over uninteresting music towards the end.

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts a disciplined orchestra. There are cheers for Saariaho but scant applause. The dream team has been caught resting on its laurels.

Not the most encouraging review, really, but what can you expect from the FT? This business-oriented paper would probably label as disappointing anything hinting political liberalism. When you're talking about a morality play suggestively set in the former Yugoslavia involving possibly Muslim protagonists, when the outcome doesn't really end as vengefully bloody as Shakespeare or the Bible, would you be surprised FT found it limp entertainment?

Fortunately there's a balancing review by the New York Times - a daily I normally agree with. In a feminist-sounding piece entitled An Opera in Paris Addresses Motherhood in a War Zone, Alan Riding writes:

PARIS - At its most powerful, opera takes human, religious and political dramas of the past and gives them enduring relevance. "Adriana Mater," the new opera by the heralded Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, borrows its haunting narrative from our own age and shows it to be a story for all time.

Its setting is a modern war, modern because it could be happening now, yet primitive because its weapons include rape. Thus, while the country is not named, the plot inevitably evokes the Bosnian war of the 1990s, with its grim legacy of rape and ethnic cleansing.

But here there is a twist: Adriana Mater is raped by a soldier from her own community. Ignoring the advice of her sister, Refka, Adriana refuses an abortion and rears a son, Yonas, to believe that his father died a war hero. At 17, he learns the truth. When the man, Tsargo, returns to the village, Yonas decides to kill him.

A story of such intensity demands music of equal power, and to judge by the enthusiastic response of the Opéra Bastille's packed house at Monday's world premiere, Saariaho succeeded in forging a work on an emotional scale rarely heard in contemporary opera.

The cast comprises just four characters - Adriana, Refka, Yonas and Tsargo - who are backed by an amplified offstage chorus. The opera's changing moods are defined by richly varied orchestration, explosive and reflective, as well as by the urgent parlando and lyrical arias of the vocal parts.

"Adriana Mater" is Saariaho's second opera. And as with her first, "L'Amour de Loin," presented at the Salzburg Festival in 2000 and since widely performed, she has again joined forces with the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf as librettist and with the American director Peter Sellars.

But "Adriana Mater," which was commissioned by the Paris National Opera and the Finnish National Opera, is a far darker work, one searingly painful in its depiction of humanity.

"If there is not a lot of action, there must be big feelings," Saariaho, 53, a soft-spoken woman known to be intensely private, said in an interview a few days before the premiere. "I am more for big feelings than a lot of action. I did not say I wanted something sad or violent. It just happened by itself."

Saariaho, the mother of two, said she was drawn to the subject of motherhood, still moved by the memory of another heart beating inside her. The idea of confronting motherhood and war then emerged from Maalouf's experience as a war reporter who chose fiction - and exile in Paris - when civil war erupted in his native Lebanon.

"The story is set in no fixed place at no fixed time," Maalouf, 57, said in the opera's program. "Even so, I had in mind some of the conflicts I have followed closely, notably that of former Yugoslavia. But the most important thing for me was that Adriana's aggressor was from her community, not the enemy camp."

Saariaho said she frequently discussed the story with Maalouf, but only began composing when the libretto was completed. This she did on a computer, working mainly from her imagination. As a result, she said, when she heard the score played by an orchestra for the first time, it was "very shocking."

"That moment, when I start hearing it, I stop imagining it," she said. "I begin to forget what was in my mind. I go back and look at the score and remember what I heard the orchestra play and what I first imagined. And I ask myself, 'Is this what it is supposed to be?' I have to be very critical. Did I write it as I imagined it, if this is how it is played?"

Still, Saariaho is evidently assured by working with longtime friends, not only Maalouf and Sellars, but also Esa- Pekka Salonen, a fellow Finn, who is conducting the Paris Opera orchestra for the five performances of "Adriana Mater," through April 18. "If the artists come together, the result is so much more than music," she said.

With George Tsypin's translucent décor suggesting a Balkan or Middle Eastern village, Sellars's fluent direction helps the four characters of the opera, divided into seven tableaus, to occupy the Bastille's large stage. The opera's ending tableau turns from despair to hope. Adriana's son, Yonas, cannot bring himself to kill his father, the rapist Tsargo, now old and blind. Feeling he has betrayed his mother, Yonas begs her forgiveness. But now, Adriana is sure that her blood flows through the veins of Yonas.

"This man deserved to die, my son, but you did not deserve to kill," she says. And taking her son in her arms, she concludes: "We are not avenged, Yonas, but we are saved."

Sellars, clearly moved by the opera, described it as "a classic."

"In the 21st century," he said in an interview, "we have a responsibility to do more than sit around and tell sad stories. Here we see there will be a future. And that future has been guaranteed all over the world by women, women who in impossible situations nourish and cultivate human dignity."

With the score mixed, I toss the dice. (A man with a credit card can be dangerous.) I've just booked tickets for me and my Inessa for €50 each. The minimum was just €40 around a week ago, before the premiere, but they've gone up; a good sign, if anything. Even though for the same price you could see two operas for two people here in Moscow, they've different standards for opera there. I remember in 2002, when I saw Madama Butterfly at the Teatro Real in Madrid, I had to pay €18 - an astronomical sum for a student, especially one who was looking forward to pay just €2.

I hope Riding -and not Carlin- is right.