The Pearlfishers
Of golden voice... Henry Choo as Nadir.
Photo: Brendan Esposito
BIZET probably saw his opera The Pearl Fishers as a story in the tradition of Bellini's Norma: a love triangle about a woman, Leila, torn between sacred vows and profane love, and two men united in loyalty but divided by jealousy.
Placing it in Ceylon (originally it was Mexico) provides the usual excuse for exotic dance and colour, as is amply exploited in this revival. It is also an opportunity for the passions to run more freely than in real life.
Ann-Magret Pettersson's 2000 production transforms the work into an opera about orientalism and Western representations of the East, bringing the tacet colonial assumptions of Bizet and his librettists, Michel Cormon and Eugene Carre, to the fore.
Bizet's head fisherman and village leader, Zurga, becomes a French colonial governor and the whole story is set as a distant memory after he has returned to Paris. This gives a piquant and subtle twist to Bizet's musical representation of Leila, the famous hymn-like tune first heard in the great duet Au Fond Du Temple Saint.
With its celestial harp and flute introduction, it might have originally evoked the sanctity of an Ave Maria for Bizet's listeners; in this production it places her firmly on the Parisian side of the orientalist divide.
It also allows the design team (John Conklin, Clare Mitchell and Nigel Levings) to get away with a cardboard cutout view of Ceylon. In the post-9/11 world, orientalist analysis is under challenge, as this production might also be, although it is a thought-provoking way of setting a piece whose music still shines.
The cast of this revival oscillates between the stellar and the stalwart. Looking regally statuesque, Leanne Kenneally, as Leila, began with a veiled sound, her voice finding attractive definition in act two and powerful expressive intensity in the last act, where she was fiercely coloured with being stentorian.
Henry Choo sang Nadir with golden smoothness of voice. His dramatic persona is amiable, such that one would be inclined to put his importunate breaching of the temple in act two down to stupidity rather than passion.
Michael Lewis sang Zurga, bringing the judgment of experience to create fine balance in the great scene with Nadir of act one, as did Shane Lowrencev, the pious priest, Nourabad, who calls for blood in act two.
Bizet's opening was stilted but the Opera Australia chorus is magnificent in moments such as the closing of act one. The conductor, Emmanuel Joel-Hornak, exhorted passion from the pit, sometimes at the expense of precise co-ordination.
