AN INTIMATE AND SPONTANEOUS LA VOIX HUMAINE FOR VANCOUVER OPERA’S DIGITAL DEBUT
Francis Poulenc, LA VOIX HUMAINE: Mireille Lebel (Elle), Kinza Tyrrell (piano), Rachel Peake (director), Amir Ofek (set & costume designer), Jeremy Baxter (lighting designer), Chan Centre, October 24, 2020.
It was a sensible idea for Vancouver Opera to begin their 2020-2021 digital season with Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine, a 40-minute monodrama in one act requiring only a single female singer and one set. Given the current constraints of the performing arts world, this work has the inestimable advantage that, in the right artistic hands, it can deliver a maximal emotional payoff with a minimum of resources and personal risk. Indeed, when Poulenc’s full orchestra is replaced with a piano – as in the present performance – La voix humaine can achieve the intimacy and immediacy of a miniature chamber opera. All this worked very successfully here: Canadian-born mezzo-soprano Mireille Lebel was fully equal to the demands of her role, finding subtlety, range and emotional gravity, while pianist Kinza Tyrell accompanied her with the greatest sensitivity.
Based on the play of the same name by Poulenc’s friend, Jean Cocteau, La voix humaine centers on an unnamed woman’s telephone conversation with her former lover (the latter unseen and unheard by the audience) who has abandoned her because he loves someone else. As the exchange unfolds, a central dramatic moment occurs when the woman reveals that she has attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Such a narrative requires a singer with a sufficiently galvanizing stage presence to both hold the viewer’s attention and elicit their sympathy, and Mireille Lebel turned out to be the perfect fit. The singer had thrilled Vancouver audiences with her physicality and knack for comedic timing in the role of Cherubino in the 2017 production of Le nozze di Figaro. Her turn as Siebel in the 2019 production of Faust showcased her impeccable French enunciation and evenness of tone, both of which proved to be valuable assets here. Nonetheless, while the singer’s natural theatrical gifts might have been constrained in the latter, in La voix humaine she was completely spontaneous, fully inhabiting her character’s range of emotions – frustration, jealousy, despair, tenderness, resignation – without ever overstepping the bounds of naturalness. Her performance was marked by dignified restraint, economy of gesture and expression, and intense focus. The avoidance of superfluous movements and histrionics made the two climactic moments – the confession of suicide near the centre of the opera, and the confession of love just before the end – even more shattering.
Kinza Tyrrell’s piano playing displayed clarity of texture and a strong feeling for musical architecture and dramatic pacing. Her grasp of the work’s motivic coherence made it possible for the listener to connect disparate events and emotional states. Above all, her responsiveness to the subtlest nuances of Lebel’s delivery resulted in an integration of vocal, instrumental, melodic and harmonic elements that is rarely achieved in operatic performances. The piano was effectively the singers ‘second skin,’ or more appropriately perhaps, the projection of her subconscious. Although Poulenc’s dictum that the opera should ‘bathe in the greatest orchestral sensuality’ was not realized in the literal sense, Tyrrell managed to evoke an astonishing range of colors, from the dry xylophone hammering representing the ringing of the telephone to the lush string chords accompanying the woman’s pleading and cajoling.
The set and costume design, while simple, was effective in evoking the spirit of Paris in the late 1950s (the period of the opera’s premiere) and in drawing the viewer into the character’s emotional world. The stage of the Chan Centre was fitted out as a one-room flat with a sofa in the centre, a refrigerator and bathtub at stage left, a large bed at stage right, and a few lamps and small tables near the back. The walls and floors were pitch black, lending the scene a surreal, disembodied quality and suggesting the woman’s dark night of the soul. In the closing minutes of the opera the lights were gradually dimmed so that only the bed – and with it, the woman and her telephone – were illuminated: a haunting image of her separation from her lover and the world around her.
The audio and video quality left nothing to be desired; the voice and piano were both clearly audible and ideally balanced, and every important detail of the staging was perfectly visible. The camera angles were agreeably varied without ever becoming fussy and distracting. The video direction mostly opted for medium close ups and medium long shots that tracked the singer’s movement on stage, with a few overhead shots and high angle wide shots to give the viewer an overall perspective. The director wisely refrained from the sort of annoying close ups that have marred so many Metropolitan Opera Live in HD presentations. Perhaps viewers might have been spared the extreme wide shots in which the piano, located downstage left, was looming in the corner of the screen, but this was a relatively minor concern.
The overall impression conveyed in this production of La voix humaine was one of intimacy and intense emotional engagement which, while lacking the ambiance of a live performance, was thoroughly satisfying on its own terms. The effort bodes well for the remainder of Vancouver Opera’s digital season.
© Nicolas Krusek 2020