Aldeburgh opens with semi-staged Pelléas et Mélisande
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- Ryan Wigglesworth conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in a semi-staged Pelléas et Mélisande that opened the Aldeburgh Festival's summer season, with Wigglesworth a featured artist of the festival
- Rory Kinnear directed with no sets beyond industrial pendant lights and a single high stool, placing singers to perform amid the orchestra on the same platform at Snape Maltings
- Paule Constable and Imogen Clarke designed the lighting around the text's references to shadow and luminosity, including using a foyer door's light to illuminate Pelléas's entrance during Geneviève's aria about the sea's glint
- The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra sounded 'glorious' in the interludes but 'solid, even earthy' when placed alongside singers rather than separated in a pit
- Sophie Bevan sang Mélisande with a 'silvery and fluid' soprano, but the reviewer found her character 'blank rather than mysterious' in a stripped-back context that left her little to do but gaze inscrutably at the audience
- Gordon Bintner (Golaud), Jacques Imbrailo (Pelléas), Sarah Connolly (Geneviève), Nicolas Testé (Arkel), and Beth Stirling (Yniold) delivered warm, immediate performances in the Snape acoustic, with the reviewer calling the semi-staging 'gratifyingly ambitious' but concluding Debussy's opera 'remains ever elusive'
Why it matters: The reviewer's mixed verdict — that the staging was 'gratifyingly ambitious' yet left the title role underwritten — points to an ongoing tension in semi-staged festival opera: leaning on the Snape Maltings acoustic and lighting can foreground the score beautifully, but it leaves singers like Bevan with nowhere to act. For Aldeburgh as a festival, the gamble on elusion over staging clarity is a deliberate artistic identity, not a failure of resources.
