Death becomes her

Opera is littered with the bodies of abandoned women. Step over Dido and Gilda, and you’ll still stumble into Donna Elvira, Euridice, Elisabeth, Ariadne, Alcina. The list goes on. Pop music might have ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’, but opera has 500. Call it chauvinism or voyeurism if you like, but opera’s women are at their most powerful in despair, even death. Their anguish might be aestheticised, but it shouts louder and more truthfully than the corpses of the endless female victims of television’s police procedurals, as two arresting performances attested this week.

It’s her feet you notice first. Flexing and arching convulsively, rubbing up against one another as though to scrape flesh from bone. Soprano Anne Sophie Duprels is a consummate singing-actress, and as Elle — the abandoned lover of Poulenc’s one-act monodrama La voix humaine — her sense of entrapment, of finding herself in not just a body but also a situation not her own, was palpable in every gesture. In an opera house it would have been painful; in the close quarters of the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room it was all but unbearable.

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Poulenc’s opera has the unblinking quality of an Ian McEwan novel. It’s a piece of emotional reportage that looks coolly on as a woman is stripped, first of control and social convention, then of her self-preserving lies, her dignity, and finally — perhaps — her life. Adapted from Jean Cocteau’s play, it places the unnamed woman alone on the stage, intermittently connected (according to the vagaries of the 1950s French telephone network) to her former lover. His voice is heard only in the musical accompaniment, leaving us to supply, all too easily, the other side of this inevitable conversation.

Set against Duprels’s jagged emotions, punching through the confines of Poulenc’s often contorted phrases, the patrician ease of Pascal Rogé’s accompaniment grated deliciously.