“Don’t call it ‘semi-staged.’ Nothing about the Cleveland Orchestra’s new production of ‘Pelleas and Melisande’ is being done halfway,” writes Zachary Lewis in Thursday’s (4/27) Plain Dealer (Ohio). Music Director Franz Welser-Möst described “called it an ‘opera installation,’ a spectacle fully on par with his memorable 2014 staging of ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ … also conceived by Los Angeles-based director Yuval Sharon…. [Sharon] conceived the notion of a large glass box above the stage in which dancers, puppets, and digital imagery interact with fog, lighting, and special effects…. Dancers portraying the characters enter and leave the box mysteriously, engulfed in fogs emblematic of their own hazy psychological states.… The opera is to be viewed less as a sequence of literal events than a dream or interior drama…. Welser-Möst said he could give any number of reasons why Debussy’s opera is good for the institution and his players (for instance, it sets the stage for next year’s mounting of Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’), but the real reason he scheduled it is so he could fulfill a longtime wish…. ‘I just always wanted to hear the Cleveland Orchestra play this. I don’t think there’s any better orchestra for this music.’ ”
Posted April 28, 2017
In photo: The Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director Franz Welser-Most rehearse their new production of Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande,” directed by Yuval Sharon, coming to Severance Hall May 2-6. Photo courtesy of the Cleveland Orchestra
