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Opera: Boulevard Solitude

Subtlety and soul lost on this Boulevard

Boulevard Solitude

Millennium Centre, Cardiff/Touring

2 Stars

Prostitutes dressed in stockings and suspenders and their clients resplendent in pig masks are not standard fare at the opera but then Welsh National Opera's spring season is themed around "fallen women."

Director Mariusz Trelinski's vision of Hans Werner Henze's Boulevard Solitude, based on the story about Manon Lescaut, provides a stylised though uneven vision of female sexuality.

WNO employed Trelinski and set designer Boris Kudlickato for both Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut and Henze's opera on the same subject, an interesting concept reflected in the highly stylised set used for both works.

That is about as good as it gets though as Trelinski has directed the hell out Boulevard Solitude.

Sarah Tynan, a vision as Manon, sings wonderfully well but is overwhelmed by the staging. The latter is at its most effective after the opening scene, where Manon sits holding the gun with which she has shot her former lover Lilaque, ably sung by Adrian Thompson.

This leads to the most gripping scene in the opera as police march in slow-mo to arrest Manon and take photos of the crime scene.

But Trelinski has this repeated during every orchestrated interlude, which gives the audience the opportunity to scrutinise some oddly US-style cops at work in Paris.

It's a device the director used in his risible Manon Lescaut and it adds little here.

Tynan and Jason Bridges as Armand Des Grieux, her student lover, are wholly unconvincing in a relationship thwarted by her burning desire for the material possessions which can only be provided by a succession of porcinely rich lovers.

Yet this production buries why the pair are so in love and, stripped of a convincing love story, we are left with the overt sexuality of a revealingly dressed Tynan and a drug-addled penniless student.

The orchestra, under the inspired baton of Lothar Koenigs, bring Henze's atonal score to vivid life as does the occasionally inspired singing.

But this is a production that does not equal the sum of its odd parts and it left me faintly nauseous at its bleak expression of humanity in a state of full-blown decadence.

Tours England and Wales until April 3. Details: www.wno.org.uk.

David Nicholson

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