DVD + Blu-Ray:
DEBUSSY : PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE

Marc Mauillon and Jenny Daviet are Pelléas and Mélisande in Benjamin Lazar's poetic staging conducted by Maxime Pascal for the Malmö Opera.

When Debussy completes the score, based on the eponymous symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck, of Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, the world of opera still abides by Richard Wagner and the upheaval he caused with Tristan und Isolde. But Debussy decides to stand on the exact opposite side, and uses his new opus to preach a new aesthetic creed. In depicting the forbidden love story between the timid Pelléas and the beautiful Mélisande, kept apart by an unfortunate marriage, the French composer brings us back to the immortal legend of Tristan and Isolde, but this time showing the world that the future of music could very well lie far away from Wagner’s overwhelming lyricism and outsized rhetoric.

This new production, created by one of the rising stars of French stage direction Benjamin Lazar for the Malmö Opera (headed by Ingmar Bergman from 1952 to 1958), encapsulates all the different aspects of this mysterious work, from the oniric poetry invented by Maeterlinck and Debussy to the realism, poignant because openly simple and even mundane, of these profoundly human beings lost in a forest full of sound and symbols that will never let them escape.

The young French conductor Maxime Pascal, the Orchestra of the Malmö Opera, and an almost all-French cast (among which the excellent Marc Mauillon and Jenny Daviet), bring forth with intelligence all the refinement and all the vitality this unique and fascinating score has to offer.

Genre Opera
Recording location Malmö Opera
Production year 2016
Duration 170 min.
Director Corentin Leconte
Distribution DVD Naxos Distribution
Composer Claude Debussy
Orchestra / Band Malmö Opera Orchestra
Conductor Maxime Pascal
Stage Director Benjamin Lazar
Soloist Marc Mauillon
Soloist Jenny Daviet
Soloist Laurent Alvaro
Soloist Emma Lyren
Soloist Julie Mathevet
Soloist Stephen Bronk