Bernheim and Viotti shine in Loy’s understated Werther at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

The orchestral score of Massenet’s Werther can be played in very different ways. You can go Wagnerian, emphasising the times when the brass thickens the texture. You can tug at the heartstrings with Puccinian string swell. Or, as was done by Marc Leroy-Calatayud, conducting Les Siècles at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées last night, you can mine the score for detail, with millimetre calibration of instrumental balance to bring out as many nuances as you can find.

What particularly impressed was the way that Leroy-Calatayud made space for individual instruments and voices to shine. He would take down the level to allow a softer voice to be heard, allow the brass to come in with a subito fortissimo that would have satisfied Wagner, then take it straight down to make way for a woodwind solo. It’s the first time I’ve heard this conductor and I want to hear more.

It helped, of course, that Leroy-Calatayud could call on a high calibre cast of native French-speaking singers who were as focused as the orchestra on exploring nuance and detail. All the principals – Benjamin Bernheim as Werther, Marina Viotti as Charlotte, Jean-Sébastien Bou as Albert and Sandra Hamaoui as Sophie – were perfect in their diction. Bernheim showed a magical ability to place syllables to delineate subtle shifts in the tormented poet’s psyche, while able to turn on the afterburners when required, his voice blooming into warmth. His “Pourquoi me réveiller” – really the only standalone aria in the piece – left us shaking in exactly the way this show-stopper should. Playing the woman who loves him but who obeys the call of duty to marry another man, Viotti was the perfect foil, with equal attention to text and mood, a pretty timbre at the top of her range and immense reserves of strength in her lower register. Hamaoui’s light soprano glittered as Sophie; Jean-François Bou was characterful enough as Albert but could have done with more heft; Marc Scoffoni was splendidly put-upon as Le Bailli; Yuri Kissin and Rodolphe Briand provided excellent comic relief as the drunkards Johann and Schmidt. The children’s chorus of the Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine deserve special mention for the bags of character they injected into their rehearsals of “Noël! Noël! Noël!”.

This musical approach sat well with the directorial approach of Christof Loy, which took his usual modus operandi, focusing in on the state of mind of his characters at the expense of any scenic depiction of events, and extended it to the maximum. Johannes Leiacker’s set is a single doorway in the inside wall of what could be a Hausmann-era Paris apartment. All the action of our main characters takes place on the audience’s side of the wall. Our four principals observe the various festivities but we never see them properly taking part in them and we keenly feel their sense of estrangement. We hardly ever see the chorus, which is behind the wall. Loy stretches the opera’s timescale: in the original, the acts are separated by a few months, but Robby Duiveman’s costumes show the characters maturing far more quickly. In the “three months” between Acts 1 and 2, Charlotte transforms from pretty young thing to sober matron, while Werther smartens up considerably from his previously unkempt appearance; by Act 3, he has become decidedly dapper.

Loy gives us some atypical ways of looking at characters. Sophie – brilliantly characterised by Hamaoui – isn’t a mere airhead, but is beset by the weight of living permanently under the shadow of her saintly older sister. She is always watching, always trying desperately – and ineffectually – to make herself at the centre of things. Albert is perfectly kind and gentle in the early part of the opera, but by Act 3, he has turned malign and domineering. In the intermezzo between Acts 3 and 4, Charlotte has thrown Werther’s letters in his face and he has locked her into the house while he reads them. Only when we hear the gunshots of his suicide does he unlock the door for her to fly to his side.

You could sum up this production with the single word “understated”. Both Loy and Leroy-Calatayud eschew grand gestures and focus on the detail and the subtleties of this piece. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it certainly made for an interesting evening whose intensity increased steadily from start to finish.