Prokofiev - The Love for Three Oranges / Nagano, Opera National de Lyon

In one dimension, this work is a discussion of operatic styles and conventions, and this is the level on which the Opera de Lyon production triumphs most decisively. Its style is self-consciously brilliant, as it should be. The performers' acting style is as important as their voices, and they have refined every verbal nuance, every gesture, to perfection, including a lot of pure slapstick. This opera, in this production, will appeal particularly to two types of audience: sophisticates who will relish its subtexts, parodies, insider jokes, and chic staging, and children who will be attracted by the story of a prince (son of the King of Clubs) who angers a witch and suffers a terrible curse: he will fall hopelessly in love with three oranges. --Joe McLellan

Description
With neat, plain building-block designs by Jacques Rapp, Louis Erlo's energetically-staged production of Prokofiev's surreal fairy-tale for the Lyon Opera is full of cartoon characters and swift farce. Based on a play by Carlo Gozzi, "L'Amour des Trois Oranges" tells the story of a doleful, hypochondriac Prince, who can only be cured through laughter. When he breaks into hysterics at the expense of the evil witch Fata Morgana, she curses him. His fate is to fall in love with three oranges. Speed and good humor make the stage bristle with life and Erlo's sunny conception is typified by the Prince, less an effete neurotic as Jean-Luc Viala plays him, than a pure Danny DeVito figure, pear-shaped and peppery. One of Prokofiev's running jokes is the warring camps of opera-lovers who keep wanting to intervene from beyond the proscenium and Erlo realizes this conceit very effectively, with the Lyon chorus clambering in and out of stage boxes and eventually invading the onstage action. Even the King, the great French bass Gabriel Bacquier, makes his entrance as a bumbling latecomer amid the front stalls. 105 minutes.

Martin


subtitles missing   March 24, 2004
There is no way to turn the subtitles on and I have bought 2 DVDs at this point and neither of them have working subtitles. Outside of that is a suberb performance. No company is better than Opera Lyon's at this type of production.