New York is again lucky to host William Christie and Les Arts Florissants at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Their visits are always special, and it’s not just because the unique nature of their repertory – Baroque opera, usually French, which is neglected by most of New York’s major companies – nor the virtuosic ease with which they embody this otherwise-foreign idiom. Their productions have a passionate unity of purpose and a loving, handcrafted quality that somehow seems antithetical to many of our more slick and snarky local efforts. Their present offering, a touching production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, has little in common with 2011’s Atys, but fortunately these virtues are again in full force.
While many French Baroque operas are splendid affairs that glorify the court and its monarch, David et Jonathas is a somber tragedy. Based on the Old Testament story of King Saul, the hero David, and his friendship with Saul’s son Jonathan, it was first performed at the Jesuit institution the Collège Louis-la-Grand in 1688 (where it was initially interspersed with the acts of a five-act spoken play in Latin on the same subject). The opera alone has little action but considerable psychological subtlety, with long arias for the major characters and minimal expeditionary recitative.
The setting of Andreas Homoki’s spare production is vaguely Balkan, early 20th century, where two ethnic groups (the opera’s Israelites and Philistines, here suggested to be Christian and Muslim) coexist in an uneasy alliance. It strikes an excellent balance between the specific and the universal. David is seemingly the only link between the two, friends with Jonathas since childhood – as we see in brief but clear flashbacks – and now in love. But Saul distrusts David, and Philistine Joabel exploits this to tragic results. David and Jonathas’ relationship is treated with disarming directness, and in this production Joabel’s hatred is due to a spurned attraction.
Paul Zoller’s set consists of chairs, tables, and simple wood walls that open and close to form rooms of different sizes, the crossfading sometimes moving so quickly that the curtain descended before the cadence. The costumes are brown and gray, and overall the look is rather drab, but appropriately so. The brightest color is the yellow of the dress of Saul’s dead wife, seen in flashback. Here, she also appears as La Pythonisse, the witch who summons the ghost of Samuel, Saul’s predecessor – here the entire scene is implied to be a delusion. (This scene was originally the opera’s prologue but was here moved to the middle of the opera, where it seemed to be a natural fit for the work’s emotional crescendo.)