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Opera

Powerful and upsetting: Pelléas et Mélisande at the Barbican reviewed

Simon Rattle’s conducting was immaculate, Peter Sellars’s directing wasn’t as irritating as feared and what a cast!

16 January 2016

9:00 AM

16 January 2016

9:00 AM

Pelléas et Mélisande

Barbican

There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and in my case Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is one of them, in fact by far the most pressing one. I never know in advance how I’m going to react to it, and to some extent the actual performance I see is not the determining factor.

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