This concert realisation of Peer Gynt offered a powerful riposte to Debussy’s famously waspish comment on Grieg’s music: that it had the strange charm of a pink bonbon stuffed with snow. The Norwegian composer’s score for Ibsen’s play formed the infrastructure of a gripping evening in Strasbourg’s 1200-seat opera house, which reopened after the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War in 1873 – three years before Peer Gynt’s premiere in Christiania (now Oslo).
In the auditorium’s tight acoustic the colours of the Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg, playing under its music director Aziz Shokhakimov, were strikingly immediate and vivid. Joining the conductor and instrumentalists on stage were five actors (all but one from the École supérieure d’art dramatique du Théâtre National de Strasbourg), six singers (all members of the Opéra national du Rhin’s studio programme), and the chorus of the Opéra national du Rhin, offering especially memorable contributions in the aggressive trollish chanting of ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ and, as the ageing Peer Gynt finally headed back home, the voices of various might-have-beens in his feckless life. While the actors delivered their lines in French (and, except for the velvet-toned narrator, Emma Da Cunha, without microphones), the sung text remained in the original Norwegian.
The concert presentation, running to some two hours of words and music, was originally conceived and assembled in 2000 by Alain Perroux, currently in charge of the Opéra national du Rhin and from autumn next year intendant of the Grand Théâtre de Genève. There were revisions to the score after 1876, but Strasbourg offered the full 26 numbers composed for the play’s premiere. Some are familiar from the two much-loved orchestral suites, but it made all the difference to hear Grieg’s often ambitious work in situ, complemented by speech (sometimes in the form of melodrama, fusing with the orchestra) and by song. Far more than simply ‘incidental music’, it became a kind of epic tone poem for orchestra and voices.
Beyond Grieg’s characteristic lyricism, folksiness and tangy harmonies, there are echoes of Wagner in the score’s weightier reaches and certain moments seem to presage Sibelius. The tone of Ibsen’s text is frequently ironic – even satirical in the Trolls’ convoluted social codes – but there is pathos and sentiment too: the faithful Solveig’s lovely, wistful song takes on a different aspect when you discover that she sings it not as an ingénue but as a middle-aged woman, still waiting for her beloved Peer to return from his picaresque travels around the world.
That being said, there was no lack of vernal freshness in Solveig’s soprano voice, supplied by Alysia Hanshaw, an alumna of both the Royal College of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music, or of girlish passion in her speeches, interpreted by Louise Coq. Solveig is the largest of the singing roles, though the Mexican baritone Carlos Reynoso gave a dashing account of Peer’s vigorous serenade and the Belgian mezzo Camille Bauer made a spirited, teasing Anitra. Reynoso’s actor counterpart was Sørn Mermillod Petry, a charismatic Peer with elastic body language and a quizzical twinkle in his eye. Yacine Bathily embodied his mother, Åse, with moving intensity, and the established actor Dominique Grylla (standing in for the ailing Victor Coupey) brought a powerful whiff of greasepaint to his character roles – not least the tenebrous, monstrous Curve (Bøygen).
Very much at the centre of things was the Aziz Shokhakimov, now in his fourth season as music director in Strasbourg. He drew an abundance of nuance, dancing rhythms and subtle rubato from the orchestra. The sense of unity in the string sections’ tone, attack and phrasing was astonishing. If some of the pitching of sustained wind chords was less than ideal, the solo playing – not least in the gentle surges of ‘Morning Mood’ – brimmed with poetry.
The only slight disappointment was that, at a performance in an opera house, the cyclorama at the back of the stage remained blank. Perhaps, though, still or animated projections would have been surplus to requirements when the music and words were so richly evocative.
Yehuda Shapiro
Ibsen/Grieg – Peer Gynt
Sørn Mermillod Petry, Yacine Bathily, Louise Coq, Emma Da Cunha, Dominique Grylla (actors)
Alysia Hanshaw (soprano), Carlos Reynoso (baritone), Camille Bauer (mezzo-soprano), Ana Escudero (soprano), Bernadette Johns (mezzo-soprano), Pierre Gennaï (baritone)
Chœur de l’Opéra national du Rhin, Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg
Aziz Shokhakimov (conductor)
Opéra national du Rhin, Strasbourg, 15 February 2025
Photo: © Klara Beck