LA PETITE DANSEUSE DE DEGAS

4/07/10, Opera Garnier, Paris

Paris Opera Ballet based on Degas' paintings of dancers. A promising young dancer with a pushy mother turns up at the ballet school where she strives to attract the attention of the ballet master but is upstaged by the prima ballerina. She does however attract the attention of one of the "abonnes" (which we think means subscribers or season ticket-holders). At a party she dances with him, but on a subsequent visit to a nightclub grows jealous when she sees him with some prostitutes and steals his wallet. She's discovered, imprisoned and ends up as an uncharacteristically willowy washerwoman. There are hints (the narrative not being entirely clear) that mother in an earlier life may have been a disreputable can-can dancer and wants better things for her daughter.

The rather anaemic original score made more use of tubular bells than Mike Oldfield. John thought the score very bitty, with lots of musical ideas none of which were properly developed. The jazzy ensemble bits were better than the quieter, more reflective music or the big solos. Really it called for a full-blooded pastiche of Tchaikovsky. Apparently there was a bit of T in there, in the star dancer's solo: I of course failed to recognise it but D did.

There was plenty of dance and plenty of real ballet steps (which meant relatively little mime) which was a plus, even if it meant the storyline wasn't always clear.

The lighting designer had fun, with expressionistic touches like our heroine behind bars in prison, backlit, and a dream sequence during the ball scene in which a dramatic diagonal of light slashed across the stage along which our petite danseuse danced backwards elegantly on pointe, and then the abonne lurched towards her on his toes as if being dragged. There were footlights, too: you don't see them often nowadays. That was for a scene in which four of the dancers came out in front of the curtain, striking poses: pure Degas.

Degas himself apparently made brief appearances as a "man in black" and artist. He had relatively little to do. There was no hint of the real Degas' clearly obsessive interest in young dancers. And no tin bath.

The Garnier (an unbelievably large and pompous building with a Chagall ceiling dating from 1964 in the auditorium which I had forgotten and John greatly liked) was full of little balletomanes and their pushy mothers, lots of people photographing one another on the grand staircase (so evidently, like us, not regulars). I wanted to ask some of the pushy mothers and offspring what they thought of this rather bleak view of the ballet: the ballet master and star dancer dismissive of our heroine; the abonne clearly interested only in a bit of skirt; the mother channelling her own failures and frustrations into her daughter's putative career; disaster waiting just around the corner. But I didn't think my French would be up to it.

FROM EL GRECO TO DALI

4/07/10, Musee Jacquemart-Andre, Paris

A misleading title for a nonetheless satisfying exhibition of works by Spanish masters from a collection (Perez-Simon) in Mexico, never before exhibited in France, in a museum housed in one of Paris's most spectacular mansions.

The El Greco was a huge disappointment: a head and shoulders portrait of Christ, little bigger than a postage stamp. There was lots of Dali. Some Picasso. Some Joan Miro. Some (enormously kitsch) Murillos. Several powerful pictures of agonised saints by Jose de Ribera, full of chiaroscuro effects.

But the highlight for me was Joaquin Sorolla, the man who seems to have brought impressionism to Spain with his brightly-lit and brightly-coloured canvases and bold brushstrokes. The earliest Sorolla was painted in the 1870s, a terrace near Naples overlooking the sea reminiscent of a David Roberts watercolour in the handling of Mediterranean light filtered through the vine leaves on the pergola. There were oil sketches of naked boys in the sea and of a gnarled fisherman's face. A specatcular large picture of the fish being brought ashore and sorted in baskets on the beach. A great swirly image of cattle being driven into the surf. A nude woman emerging from bathing in the sea. A portrait of a fellow artist in severe black.



Searching for a Sorolla picture to illustrate this post I find lots, but few from the Perez-Simon collection (an indication perhaps of how unfamiliar many of the paintings in the collection must be compared to those in major galleries), and also a website that offers to sell you hand-painted copies of some of them (allow 14-21 days for delivery) which implies that I am not alone in my liking for them!



The museum itself started life as the home of a married couple, she (Nelie Jacquemart) an artist, he (Edouard Andre) filthy rich. There's a permanent collection of old masters, several rooms full of Italian Renaissance sculpture, woodcarving and the like (much of it built into the fabric), and a spectacular rococo staircase with a 15th century fresco by Tiepolo "rescued" from a Venetian villa and reassembled in Paris, though much of the colour has alas faded.

You enter via a grand gateway and tunnel from the Boulevard Hausmann and emerge into a large open space in which a double drive sweeps up from the tunnel (and a second tunnel at the far end of the property), curving back round and up to the front door, which thus faces away from the street; at the back of the house a there's a first-floor terrace above the street frontage. We arrived just as the Paris Harley-Davidson club was assembling for a (very noisy) meeting, grizzled men in leathers (and equally grizzled womenfolk) parking up four abreast along the boulevard before processing around the city. We saw them later jumping red lights and stopping the traffic near the Opera Garnier.

THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN

3/07/10, Opera de la Bastille, Paris

2 hrs. La Petite Renarde Rusee, in French. We'd never seen it before, in English, French or Czech, and I'm in two minds about it. Like Janacek's other operas, and unlike the classics of the 19th century repertoire, the words seem to take precedence: set with great care, the music supporting but not often overwhelming them. Fine if you speak Czech; less happy if you're relying on surtitles; less happy still if those surtitles are in exceedingly idiomatic French.

Structurally there's a problem too. The work started life (literally) as a comic strip, a narrative by a local newspaper journalist alongside some fetching drawings. So you have a number of (very) short scenes involving a multitude of characters, animal and human. The result is infuriatingly episodic, full of action which seems arbitrary (because not properly prepared dramatically), with little opportunity for character development. Even La Petite Renarde herself, who is on stage more or less throughout, is no more than sketched in as a naughty little thing.

The first two acts are all derived from the comic strip and culminate in our heroine's wedding to a handsome young fox. The best bit was the love duet for the fox and vixen in act two. The third act was apparently written by Janacek himself. In it the vixen has a brood of little ones, but has not lost her teasing habits. She teases the poultry man... and he shoots her, bang! Suddenly she's dead. This is striking and plausible. It was also curiously moving, not so much because of the death but because of the scene that follows in which the animals (children dressed in silly costumes as birds, insects and a hopping green frog) return to mourn. In scene one the frog leapt onto the gamekeeper as he slept and woke him, leading to his capture of the vixen; in the final scene the gamekeeper returns and spots the frog and says he knows him... only to be told by the frog that that was his grandfather. For some reason it made us both cry.

The vixen was sung by Adriana Kucerova, who looks the part and is Czech (I think). But I had serious reservations about the production and in particular the design: a field of enormous comic book sunflowers, out of which the animals emerged in the first scene; a gigantic modern farm in which the vixen is imprisoned among people dressed as comic book cows and chickens; worst of all a railway line running left to right across the stage, in every scene (though exact positioning varied from scene to scene). It made walking across the stage a trial; the point I suppose was to highlight the presence of man and the things of man everywhere, but it just got in the way.

Lots of kids in the audience. Dunno what they made of it. They might have found the gaily coloured set and costumes and the rather arbitrary plotting appealing; they may have found it baffling or frustrating (as I did).

We had to change seats. We'd been booked in the front row of the vertiginous second balcony of the Bastille; I felt deeply uncomfortable. Luckily it wasn't full and a couple just away to our left, three or four rows back, agreed to swap for our better seats.

BRUNO SERRALONGUE

3/07/10, Jeu de Paume, Paris

Serralongue takes photographs, then blows them up big, of pre-planned news events like conferences and demonstrations. They're shot wide or from unexpected angles, revealing not only the event but also its context, the artifice involved (set dressing, posters, artful repetition of poses etc etc). We saw indigenous people demonstrating in South America (their brightly-painted wooden folding chairs sinking into the mud under a sky of bright blue and fluffy white clouds); we saw the same group of black protesters trekking round a city to display a banner in different locations; we saw press conferences in the cavernous halls in which international conferences are staged... or alternatively in the tiny lecture theatres which are all that's needed to hold the handful of international news agencies that turn up. And there was a sequence of pictures taken on a hazardous environments course in the UK. I recognise this world, and I find his sideways look at it produces intriguing insights, but D I think just found it rather boring. The pictures' impact is reduced by displaying them in sequences, many of which seem repetitive.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

3/7/10, Jeu de Paume, Paris

A South African artist and videomaker, Kentridge creates multi-screen installations, often "political", involving animation, projection, vivid use of sound, mechanical creatures etc etc. The most striking in this exhibition included an installation based on Mozart's Magic Flute involving two large toy theatres, onto one of which black and white images were projhected to tunes (especially the Queen of the Night's aria) from the opera, while on the other as well as the projections a succession of mechancial figures and devices (like a megaphone on a stand) performed. There was a distorted projection (of images of the veldt and of war, planes, birds, bombs, telegraph poles, clouds) onto a spinning disc mirror which reflected an unindistorted images onto a cylindircal mirror in the centre. There was the room full of videoscreens mainly featuring Kentridge himself, drawing a self portrait which then turned into the artist, who walked away; the blank sheet of paper on which lines and images appeared and disappeared as Kentirdge;'s hands "drew them"; the cup and saucer with a mind of their own; the ladder with which he clkimbed a wall covered with his own images. There's lots of use of stop-frame and reverse-frame animation. In one room was a sculpture of a procession of people bearing burdens, who then turned up stylised in an animation. According to the exhibition programme all this had something to say about apartheid and post-colonialism generally, but I couldn't really see it. The work was mesmerising and bore watching for long periods, much helped by Kentridge's use of audio and music, but his own charcoal drawings lacked something.

SEMELE

2/7/10, Theatre de Champs Elysees, Paris

It was, admittedly, absurdly extravagant to go all the way to Paris to see Semele after going all the way to Brussels to see it last year. And it becomes even more absurdly extravagant when (to make the trip worthwhile) you go to another opera, the ballet and three or four exhibitions as well. Not to mention deciding to book tickets for a concert performance of Semele in London six days later without realising it was the same cast and production...

But it's such a wonderful piece and (happily) grows on one with every hearing.

This was a revival of a David McVicar production from a few years ago, with Danielle de Niese newly-cast as Semele. She looks the part, playing her as a sort of coquettish 16-year old taken up by a much older, much more sophisticated man. There was a nice moment in the first act when the rivalrous sisters had a spat from which their father had to separate them, de Niese pointing "It was her" as he did so. And they giggled together convincingly when Ino was catapulted into heaven at Jove's command. She was sly, mischievous, self-mocking. In other words she can act as well as sing.

As to her voice... She pulled out all the stops for Myself I Shall Adore (pretending to hide the mirror, smirking as she gazed at herself) and for No, No I'll Take No Less especially. There are plenty of vocal pyrotechnics. But while the English tradition is to enunicate each syllable in the showpiece arias with crystal clarity ("Gay-hazing, gay-ayzing, gay-hay-hay-ay-ay-hay-hay-hayzing") Ms de Niese seems to give each note a different vowel sound. The purist in me suspects this may be cheating, but it's undeniably thrilling. On the other hand it makes it hard to hear the words -- something you could level at most of her performance.

That couldn't be said of the bass Peter Rose, who sang Cadmus the father and Somnus: you could hear every word and as Somnus he even managed to get the solemn Parisians to laugh.
There was a disappointing counter-tenor as the rejected bridegroom Athamas. Richard Croft as Jupiter didn't quite have the necessary heft for some of the role but sang Wheree'er You Walk with beauty and grace and got a deserved ovation.

Ino and Juno were sung by the mezzo Vivica Genaux. I'd assumed from her name that she was a local lass, but it turns out she's American too, born in Alaska. She was suitably villainous.

Endless Pleasure was sung by another soprano, Claire Debono, as Cupid. I had forgotten/failed to realise that the song was originally written for someone other than Semele (scarcely surprising really: it refers to her in the third person). After that ravishing aria at the end of Act One she doesn't have much to do, a problem resolved by McVicar who dressed her in sequin-covered scarlet and a pair of dark glasses plus long stick and had her mime the role of blind Cupid in subsequent scenes as Jupiter's hanger-on, alternating between Ariel-like manipulator and hapless victim (he was left fumbling after Semele knocked aways his stick during No No I'll Take No Less, a sign presumably that love was on the wane).

Having Cupid in the cast reminds you what an ensemble piece this is. And what a lot of great songs, too! Including Jupiter's I Must with Speed Amuse Her and Juno's Iris, Hence Away and a first act aria for Semele which I don't recall from earlier productions and which she sang solo in front of a drop curtain while the scene was changed behind it. It was a device McVicar used several times, and it worked perfectly in the highly artificial and stylised context of an 18th century work, though in the case of one of Juno's arias the curtains were closed not for a scene change but to draw a discreet veil over Jove and Semele's love-making. When they reopened he was smoking a post-coital cigar.

The principals were in immensely elaborate 18th century costume (or plain brown broadcloth for Cadmus and Athamas and for Ino); the chorus (men and women alike) in white tie and tails. The set, by Tanya McCallin, was a semi-circular back wall with three doorways; a central disc rose at an angle for the scenes set in heaven, an enormous bed covered in cushions at its centre on which Jove and Semele made love and Somnus slept. Towards the opera's end the bed had disappeared, and Semele made her final exit as she burns in Jupiter's fire through a circular trap while Jove held her cloak. A puff of smoke emerged.

It was a wittily-characterised production with sensible business, quite unlike the weird production at the Monnaie last year, presumably a reflection of the fact that McVicar has complete faith in the quality and dramatic carrying-power of his material.

The music came from Christophe Rousset and Les Talents Lyriques, however: who were also the band in Brussels. Not quite as nuanced a performance as John Eliot Gardner's, which we have on disc.

Jupiter was portrayed as a rich man who might just be starting to tire of this pretty little plaything he's acquired: so much so that at one point he takes off his black necktie and apparently contemplates using it as a garrotte, before employing it as a blindfold instead... and singing Where'er You Walk. That was the only point where the interpretation jarred (as in Idomeneo the other night): such a beautiful love song comes oddly from a character you've just seen exasperated.

It was a very hot night but the Parisians were dressed largely for comfort not speed, cool rather than elegant. Which was reassuring because the walk to the theatre (which is not, as billed, in the Champs Elysees but several blocks away) takes you past the likes of Dior and Chanel in the Av Montaigne and some seriously rich people.

It's also a beautiful theatre, and an historic one, with a spectacular art deco exterior, with massive square recessed panels and windows and three huge bas reliefs at the top, and an elegant curved moderne corner, but an art noueveau interior, with banisters and motifs on the doors of the boxes which could have come from Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I thought it was designed in the 1920s or even the 1930s. It turns out to have been built in 1913, and it's where Stravinsky's Rite of Spring had its notorious premiere.

Inside there's a dome filled with pastoral scenes of dancing and singing, packed with frankly sexy nudes and a series of inscriptions about music, opera etc which I couldn't entirely follow running round the bottom. There are four roundels dedicated to the orchestra, the choir, the sonata and the organ (the theatre has one, its pipes visible above and beside the proscenium).

Front of house space is generous though the bars undermanned and over-priced. The acoustic is lively (as evidence when someone dropped something during a quiet moment in Act 1). There is no opera pit as such, merely a simple step down from the front of the stalls.

The Arts Desk review of the show (with which I largely agree, including the slightly catty remarks about de Niese) is here:

http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1762:semele-th%C3%A9%C3%A2tre-de-champs-%C3%A9lys%C3%A9es-opera-review&Itemid=14

DEBORAH COLKER

30/6/10, Barbican

Brazilian dance. Missed it: had to work. D said it was a cracker: the best and most exciting modern dance she'd seen for a long time, with accessible music (Barber, Handel, modern techno), sensible costumes, never fewer than three dancers on time at any one time, very fast-paced, clever use of props (especially a long trestle table). It was called Cruel and there was a threesome with knives which had enormous impact.