Béatrice et Bénédict
National Concert Hall, Dublin
★★★☆☆
This is Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing reimagined as opera by Hector Berlioz. The last thing he wrote, it was first performed in 1862, in Germany, and here receives its Irish premiere in a concert performance presented by Irish National Opera. We are not alone in delaying Béatrice et Bénédict. The UK (1936) and the USA (1977) were also slow to introduce it, and it was not in fact performed in Berlioz’s native France until he had been dead 21 years.
Alarm bells? Well, it’s not without issues. The adaptive libretto, by Berlioz himself, entirely removes Shakespeare’s villain Don John and all the considerable darkness he injects into an otherwise sunny story, and reduces the lovebirds Héro and Claudio almost to a sideshow. As well, the music is more episodic than organic, a sequence of scenes.
But it’s still Berlioz, the big selling point. The conductor of this performance, Ryan McAdams, combines energetic precision and animation to draw lively, fresh playing from the INO Orchestra, whether on their own in the overture or entr’acte, or when accompanying voices. The cast, in the absence of staging and costumes, are obliged to confine acting to a minimum and engage the audience by communicating their characters’ thoughts and feelings almost entirely through singing.
Berlioz gives most of this to the women, led here by the mezzo soprano Paula Murrihy as Béatrice, bringing her particular smooth and forward-placed clarity to another INO role. The soprano Anna Devin does sweetness so well as Héro, matched for warmth by the mezzo Niamh O’Sullivan as Ursule, her attendant, notably in their act-two duet “Nuit paisible et sereine”. The tenor David Portillo sings Bénédict with youth and charm and with the required disdain for marriage in general and Béatrice in particular.
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The stretches of spoken dialogue that Berlioz originally included are often now replaced with passages read by a narrator. Here this role is filled by the actor Fiona Shaw, who, delivering her uncredited script (and so very naturally and casually – did she write it herself?), performs a crucial function, all the more important and challenging in a concert performance: inviting the audience to relax and laugh because the whole endeavour is meant to be a funny one.
Shaw is mischievous and playful, establishing the right vibe with her first words – “There is nothing sexier than two people who don’t realise that they are in love with each other” – and reinforcing it every time she speaks. She reverts to Much Ado liberally, capping this with a breathless, rapid-fire dialogue between Béatrice and Bénédict from late in the play in which she magically – and with sudden intensity – delivers both parts.
Shaw is enthusiastically supported in her subtle comic energy by the calculated unsubtlety of the bass-baritone John Molloy as Somarone, the goofy conductor invented and inserted by Berlioz. Following an attempt to usurp the podium from McAdams, Molloy draws laughs in cantankerous exchanges with the chorus. Quite the contrast with his physically and emotionally bruised role in INO’s Trade, which resumes its tour on Friday, October 11th.
