PARIS — Paris is full of music, and surprises. The Opéra National de Paris has two highly contrasted major stages: the classic, Phantom-haunted Palais Garnier (1875; 2,000 seats) and 1989’s brutalist but technically adept Opéra Bastille (2750 seats). A passing personnel strike — part of French cultural life — darkened both houses June 9, causing me to reschedule hearing Antonia Bembo’s rediscovered 1707 Ercole amante (Hercules in Love) until three nights later and thus skip Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla leading Britten’s A War Requiem at the Philharmonie de Paris.
Advice to visitors: Scour the websites of the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, the Philharmonie, the art deco gem Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, and Salle Gaveau, and always have a second possibility at the ready!
Both Opéra shows I saw — the Garnier was hosting La cenerentola — proved excellent: musically, vocally, and scenically. The biography of Bembo (c. 1640-c. 1720), an abused Italian mother (evidently a persuasive, accomplished professional singer, like quite a few composers born in the 17th century) escaped to France as a protegée of Louis XIV, who identified with Hercules, is compellingly miniseries-worthy. At age 67, she completed her sole opera, utilizing the Sophocles- and Ovid-derived libretto by Francesco Buti that Francesco Cavalli had set in 1662. Bembo combined elements of the already divergent French and Italian operatic traditions in intriguing ways.
The orchestration is varied, complicated, and effective, and the characters sang in individual musical idiolects — to me, the true sign of a born opera composer, a quality that eluded such brilliant minds as Vivaldi, Haydn, and Schubert in their stage works. Sadly, Bembo almost certainly never witnessed Ercole amante onstage. Its premiere, in a concert version, occurred only in 2023 in Stuttgart; in 2025, San Francisco’s Ars Minerva presented a much-reduced chamber version. So the production at the Bastille marked the full work’s actual and well-merited stage premiere.
It will be hard to improve upon the vividly exciting version conductor Leonardo García-Alarcón, who unearthed the score 12 years ago, and director Netia Jones produced here. The Argentine conductor can be inventive and daring-in-the-moment with rhythm and accentuation almost to a fault. But for the Bastille’s vast spaces, his orchestra, larger than expected, proved invigorating and convincing, although the lighter-voiced Baroque specialists sometimes worked hard to project over conductorial enthusiasm. (Tessitura was not a problem with pitch set at 415.)
Jones furnished direction, set, and costume design: a fantastic vision combining up-to the-minute fashion choices — especially delectable and flattering for the rival goddesses Giunone and Venere — and references (Andreas Wolf’s bloated, artificially blond self-deluded tyrant of an Ercole gobbled burgers, fries, and a Coke) with classical elements (the liveried servants who brought the meal in silver salvers wore powdered wigs). In contradistinction to the havoc over-emotive, omnipresent choreography wrought on the Metropolitan Opera’s recent Tristan und Isolde and El ultimo sueño stagings, here Maud Le Pladec achieved wonders of enjoyable, evocative movement with a dozen skilled contemporary dancers.
As Valentina Carrasco’s brilliant 2024 Nixon in China — revived this season, well worthy of importation by the Met — revolved around literal and metaphoric ping pong, Jones’ Ercole amante highlighted badminton and also fencing. The frenemy soprano goddesses, played by two generations of French Baroque royalty, Julie Fuchs and Sandrine Piau, also gamed for influence over the mortals. Fuchs, projecting a 1960s Gallic screen goddess, started somewhat cold-voiced but soon sang herself in, and Piau, whom I first heard in 1996, sounded as fluid and verbally pointed as ever.
For two decades now, designers have inundated audiences with video images of churning ocean waves. Here, Jones deployed Lightmap Studios’ videos with spectacular aptness in the poignant marine scenes of the banished, suicidally anguished Hillo, whose fiancée Iole must in his absence fight off the advances of Hillo’s father, Ercole. Boyish Australian high tenor Alasdair Kent, trained at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, found one of his best roles yet opposite Ana Vieira Leite’s touching, dulcet, and musical Iole. The sea scenes also summoned up American bass Alex Rosen, offering a typically refulgent, flexible Nettuno. He later doubled imposingly as the curiously reanimated and spectral figure of Iole’s vengeance-seeking father Eutiro (Hercules’ victim).
Veteran Baroque baritone Wolf largely sang well, despite the strongman’s horridness projecting some dignity in his death scene. Once expired, Ercole weds an automaton-like beauty queen, Bellezza, for whom the seemingly tireless Piau also furnished the voice. Canadian-Omani mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny sang gorgeously and with feeling as Dejanira, Ercole’s resolute wife. (She’s a less complex but more sympathetic figure in Bembo’s opera than in Handel’s Hercules.) Johnny makes her New York recital debut at the Park Avenue Armory in November: a must-hear event. Other strikingly fine performances came in episodic roles. Georgian soprano Teona Todua made a sonorous, impactful Pasithea (a minor goddess). Male soprano Théo Imart showed appreciable vocal quality and dramatic talent as the court’s hard-worked Page. An opera and a production I hope to see again.
Some of my worst experiences with operatic comedy have involved Rossini’s 1817 “Cinderella opera,” La cenerentola. Though it’s very strong musically, and though I have heard many great singers shine in the leading roles, it often gets poorly staged, with overloads of shtick. On June 11, director Guillaume Gallienne and his designers — Éric Ruf (set), Olivier Bériot (costumes), Bertrand Couderc (lighting) — took the emotional stakes of the protagonist’s incessant mistreatment by her family seriously. Physical and verbal violence can always erupt. Drawing on incendiary themes and metaphors in the text and the fact that the opera was premiered in Naples, the design concept explores the central character’s nickname’s relation to ashes, utilizing a volcanic landscape with a concomitantly dark red hue and uneven, dried lava surfaces.
La cenerentola has only a male chorus, with important contributions throughout; Ching-Lien Wu’s forces sang very well. Gallienne deployed a roughly equal number of female figurantes (extras) onstage, of all ages and physical types. Their presence — potential friends, rivals, princesses — complemented the experiences of Angelina, who, with her stepsisters Clorinda and Tisbe, are the only female voices onstage. Often the stepsisters are repellently styled harridans “acting funny,” vitiating the drama. If they’re manifestly unworthy of being plausible candidates to be Prince Ramiro’s consort, why would he, his stand-in Dandini, and tutor Alidoro devote so much time evaluating their moral character? Happily, Gallienne and the vocally gifted interpreters, American soprano Ilanah Lobel-Torres (Clorinda) and Dutch mezzo-soprano Maria Warenberg (Tisbe), made them a visually attractive pair whose true nature emerges only in the shallowness and capriciousness of their behavior.
When Lawrence Brownlee entered in a leg brace, I feared the still sovereign-voiced Ramiro had injured himself salsa dancing; I was relieved at intermission to see 2018 program photos of both him and a previous Ramiro (Dmitry Korchak) in the same brace. Gallienne felt the Prince — who can emerge rather callow and arrogant in the wrong hands — needed some physical challenge to further inspire mutual empathy with Angelina. Brownlee remains absolutely masterful and committed in this part, which provided his Philadelphia (2006) and Houston (2007) debuts. The Russian mezzo-soprano (and sometimes soprano; she has a wide ranging repertoire) Vasilisa Berzhanskaya made her Opéra debut as a very gentle Angelina. While this suited her handsome voice better than the oddly un-Gallic Nicklausse she brought to the Met in 2024, and her experience in Rossini was evident, she tended to prefer slow tempos for everything, with not much forward motion or coloratura sparkle on offer. I’d like to hear her as Bellini’s Adalgisa, a signature role.
Stagewise baritone Huw Montague Rendall — the world’s current leading Pelléas and a sophisticated recitalist — made a fine role debut as Dandini, fluent and funny as he (the royal valet/barber) impersonated the Prince with Travolta-like flair and dance moves. Occasional and welcome Met visitor Nicola Alaimo breathed Rossini style as Don Magnifico, here a thoroughly corrupt, nasty “Papa” who doesn’t hide his binges and whoring from his daughters. Imposing yet agile bass Adolfo Corrado, in another Opéra debut, made a highly impressive Alidoro. Making his own accomplished Opéra debut in this run, conductor Enrique Mazzola — music director at Lyric Opera of Chicago — justifiably omitted two unnecessary arias Rossini had farmed out to composer Luca Agolini, Alidoro’s “Vasto teatro è il mondo” and Clorinda’s “Sventurata!”
The historic and stunning Théâtre des Champs-Elysées — the site, on May 29, 1913, of the eruptive Ballets Russes world premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring — offers rich and highly varied vocal programming, some handled by the star-favoring producing group Les Grandes Voix. (The personnel for the 2026-27 season includes Benjamin Bernheim, Anna Netrebko, Marina Rebeka, and Elina Garanča.) They failed to provide any printed or projected texts for June 16’s otherwise very pleasing concert featuring not only the well-known Pergolesi Stabat mater (1736) — one of history’s most influential vocal works — but also a rare, worthwhile cantata, Il pianto di Maria by Giovanni Battista Ferrandini (1710-91).
The splendid American mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke brought plaintive eloquence, clear diction, and even, legato-based singing to both works. She was joined in the Pergolesi’s highly varied challenges by fresh-flowing Egyptian soprano Fatma Saïd, a rising Baroque star. Technically proficient and timbrally well-matched, they joined the style-imbued ensemble Les Ambassadeurs~La Grande Écurie under harpsichordist Andrea Buccarella for a rousing, loudly cheered Stabat mater. After multiple curtain calls, the musicians encored the fast-paced “Fac ut ardeat” movement.
