La Bohème: Your hand is cold

The Munich Opera Festival part of the Bayerische Staatsoper’s season rolled on with a shot at what is known in these parts as a Sternstunde–famous names being providing luxury singing to gratify your pleasure principle. But for this to work you need more than glamorous singing, there has to be a real connection among the cast and with the audience too. That wasn’t happening so much last night. Angela Gheorghiu and Joseph Calleja are a beautiful match in terms of pure sound, and both have the voices for these roles. But theatrically they are a disaster, encouraging each other’s worst qualities. Gheorghiu only loves Gheorghiu, and I saw few convincing signs of Calleja loving anything at all.
I remain an enormous fan of Gheorghiu’s sound, which has a uniquely beautiful silvery smokiness and sounds perfect in this music. Would that we could hear more of it. When she finally sung out in Act 3, it was glorious, but up to then she had maintained her characteristic 75%–never quite inaudible but not loud enough either. Her self-conscious diva persona would never work so well for Mimi, but she was at her most self-absorbed this evening, reacting only for her own and our benefit and never interacting with the cast around her. She apparently got some new dresses for this production, which seemed to be of the upper middle class rather than of a simple seamstress (which sticks out because the costumes of the rest of the cast are actually fairly faithful to class), but also followed her usual preference of displaying maximum cleavage during her death scene.

Joseph Calleja also has a beautiful sound, and sang the music with much more straightforward musicality than Gheorghiu, who tends to be capricious in regards to phrasing. On a CD, his “Che gelida manina” would be a real winner, with easy high notes, smooth legato, and that golden tone with its distinctive fast vibrato. But he never does anything to make it interesting. He did more to engage with his fellow Bohemians, but his acting remains a series of indications rather than a character, and in terms of chemistry he and Gheorghiu are not so happening.

The supporting cast was mostly drawn from house locals and sounded more Eastern European in style than Italian, but were great company and way more fun than our leads. I wondered if light soubrette Laura Tatulescu had been cast as Musetta as to present minimal competition to Gheorghiu (and their timbres do make a good vocal match–they’re both Romanian, if that means anything), but while her voice is small she projected consistently and effortlessly, and managed to be full of character without overacting, a rare thing in Musettas. The pick of the Bohemians was Levente Molnár’s big-voiced, lively Marcello, showing great life and warmth, but the others were fine as well. Alfred Kühn’s bio has the telling debut date of 1963, and I suspect he has been singing repertoire like Benoit the whole while. I will just say that he is a local favorite and at least he wasn’t cast as Mime.
Dan Ettinger conducted like someone who knows his way around this tricky score, managing the remarkable tasks of rarely covering up Gheorghiu and also staying with her wayward beat. The Act 2 chaos was reasonably clean and if the orchestra was, as I suspect, playing this on little to no rehearsal, I am very impressed. Ensembles were oddly balanced and scrappy but hey, this is the Festival, with Angela Gheorghiu.
Otto Schenk’s production is a traditional job with none of the opulence of the Met’s Zeffirelli extravaganza. I have to say I like it a lot more than that one. Like Ettinger, it doesn’t try anything fancy but it puts things where they need to be to give Angela Gheorghiu something to bounce her voice off. (We’ll leave the actual productions for another day.) Act 2 is busy without ever losing track of the protagonists, the garret could arguably use some sprucing up (how long has this production been going? a while, I’m guessing) but I guess looking like that is the point of a garret. The snow scene is the most artistic of the sets, but still doesn’t dwarf the main characters. The opening of Act 4 was unusually clearly directed. I do wish that opera houses would realize that their rubber fishes are all embarrassments, though.
Admittedly, this has never been one of my favorite operas (I’m not exactly sure why), but this one left me exceptionally dry-eyed. Considering the musical merits, a disappointment. In a few weeks I’ll be seeing the new Salzburg production with Netrebko and Beczala, which I hope will have more to offer.

Photos copyright Wilfred Hösl.


Puccini, La Bohème. Bayerische Staatsoper, 7.17.2012.
Musikalische Leitung Dan Ettinger

Inszenierung Otto Schenk
Bühne und Kostüme Rudolf Heinrich
Chor Stellario Fagone


Mimi Angela Gheorghiu
Musetta Laura Tatulescu
Rodolfo Joseph Calleja
Marcello Levente Molnár
Schaunard Christian Rieger
Colline Goran Jurić 
Parpignol Dean Power
Benoît Alfred Kuhn
Alcindoro Tareq Nazmi
Ein Zöllner Tim Kuypers
Sergeant der Zollwache Peter Mazalán

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Tristan! Isolde! in Munich!

This performance was a wonderful surprise. I went to see Nina Stemme’s Isolde, expecting not much more than the usual Festival mishmash out of the rest and worried about the prospects of Ben Heppner as Tristan. But we got a real, properly put together Tristan, and a damn good one at that.

Wagner, Tristan und Isolde. Bayerische Staatsoper, 7/27/2011. Production by Peter Konwitschny (revival), conducted by Kent Nagano with Nina Stemme (Isolde), Ben Heppner (Tristan), René Pape (König Marke), Ekaterina Gubanova (Brangäne), Alan Held (Kurwenal).

Peter Konwitschny’s production presents an eclectic, ambiguous aesthetic. The costumes are a mix of modern and medieval garb while Act 1 takes place on a modern (or at least twentieth-century) ship, Act 2 in front of a painted fairy-tale backdrop and on a silly yellow floral couch, and Act 3 in a stark modern space with a slideshow of photos from happier times. But the larger point is crystal clear. The upper, upstage part of the stage is the characters’ “reality” while Tristan and Isolde step forward, off this platform onto the apron of the stage to enter their own fantasy world. To illuminate their night in Act 2, visible Brechtian lights descend from above. The staging aims to be plausible and spontaneous and dramatic, downplaying the love potion and Marke’s wrath in favor of human empathy. It’s not that much to look at, but the thing is, it works, drawing you in at every moment.

This is thanks to the greatest asset of any Konwitschny production, the meticulous Personenregie he coaxes out of his premiere casts. The movement traces the motion more of the music than the text, giving his work a wonderful fluid quality. These details often can’t be quickly reconstructed for revivals, and my expectations for this festival revival were low (it premiered in 1998). But from the start I noticed that there was something happening with the direction. Bless the Bayerische Staatsoper, they actually got Konwtischny to come and rehearse a bit with this cast (he even took a bow at the end), and you could tell. From Brangäne flipping the pages of a magazine as the sailor sang his song on, it was elegant and integrated with the score. It was not as fearlessly physical as his Traviata, but this is Wagner singing.

(different cast)

The staging’s most unusual moment is during the Liebestod, where Isolde steps to the front of the stage and is joined by a revived Tristan. They both wear black. While Isolde might die in the text, in the world of the music and night she lives united with Tristan, and that’s what we see. The image had been foreshadowed with two English horn players at the beginning of the act. Wordless musicians, they also exist beyond the confines of the upstage space.

Kent Nagano conducted the excellent orchestra with restraint, clarity and controlled volume, a fine reading but a somewhat self-effacing one. The cast was about as all-star as it is possible to get. Nina Stemme is an astonishingly good Isolde. Her huge, dark voice is weighted towards the middle, but her high notes also cut through, she sings with an unwavering sense of the text and meaning of the music, and is an excellent actress. I doubt there is a better all-around Isolde today.

Ben Heppner is surely past his best days of singing, but pulled together a credible performance. I wouldn’t call it the triumph that a few Tweeters seemed to hear–at a half dozen or so spots everything threatened to fall apart in gurgly cracks, and he somehow derailed a bit of the Act 2 duet (skipping a phrase, I think?), making Stemme miss her next entrance. But he managed to recover each time and made it through to the end. That’s a higher compliment than it sounds like.

The biggest applause of the evening actually went to René Pape’s generous, honey-toned König Marke, who due to the usual Nationaltheater sightline problems I couldn’t see at all but sang with the kind of resonant authority and majesty that threatens to steal the opera. Ekaterina Gubanova as Brangäne got off to a muffled start but warmed up to be excellent if extremely Slavic in tone. Alan Held was a very good Kurwenal as well. A class act, all around.

This production is available on DVD with a different cast.

Photos copyright Bayerische Staatsoper/Wilfred Hösl (showing the cast from the DVD)

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Der Rosenkavalier in Munich: Die schöne Musi!

The Marschallin seems like a role that the elegant, meticulous soprano Anja Harteros was born to sing. She finally did it at the Bayerische Staatsoper this season, and repeated it with the fabulous Octavian of Sophie Koch at their Festspiele this Saturday (the July “Festspiele” consists of a few new productions plus a retrospective of the season with most of the same casting, fancier audience members, fewer rehearsals, and higher prices–fun but a little unpredictable). While Otto Schenk’s production would benefit from a good fumigation and energy injection, the all-star cast made this worth it.

Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier. Bayerische Staatsoper/Münchner Operfestspiele, 7/23/2011. Production by Otto Schenk, conducted by Constantin Trinks with Anja Harteros (Marschallin), Sophie Koch (Octavian), Lucy Crowe (Sophie), Peter Rose (Ochs), Piotr Beczala (Tenor).

This Rosenkavalier is an Otto Schenk extravaganza, similar but more opulent than Vienna’s Schenk. This run was originally planned as a new production this season, but intendant Nikolaus Bachler decided to keep the Schenk at the last minute, supposedly a bone thrown to staging conservatives. While the sets and costumes are in fine physical shape, age is still a problem. Most seriously, the Personenregie has gaps: there are many points where the singers simply stand still while the music cries out for stage action. As the Marschallin would point out, you can’t stop time.

Visually, the cluttered aesthetic is not to my taste–the von Faninals seem to gunning for a record for the largest china collection outside the Hofburg. But the level of detail (such as the inclusion of visible and detailed antechambers behind the main set) is impressive if you like that kind of thing. The Act 3 inn is more convincingly seedy than some other productions’, though the action in the opening was not as clearly laid out as it could have been. If you want to see this production in action back in its glory days, such as they were, you can do so on this excellent DVD conducted by Carlos Kleiber with Gwyneth Jones as the Marschallin.

I can’t really comment on many of the acting details of this performance, because, as is often the case at the Nationaltheater, my view of the stage was hopelessly bad. I could see the set and, once in a while, the singers, but as for most of what they were doing beyond the big rote blocking action you get in a standard issue Rosenkavalier (which is what this was), I’m not too sure.

Late replacement conductor Constantin Trinks (GMD in Darmstadt) seems like a good find, particularly when you allow for the limited rehearsal time of these festival productions. It wasn’t the most precise Rosenkavalier I have ever heard, and both stage-orchestra coordination and the faster orchestral business were off at times. But the light spirit, indulgently slow ending, and general sense of shape and dramatic timing worked really well, with a clear path through a score that can meander. Balance was something of an issue in Act 1, when the orchestra overpowered the singers, but improved over the course of the evening.

Anja Harteros has a wonderful way with the text, with beautiful diction and wit, and a conversational musicality that sounds both natural and graceful. Her voice is a little smoky and grainy, in a good way that makes her sound unique, and her middle voice has the strength needed for this role. Most notable is the detail and musicality she puts into every phrase, which is particularly good for Straussian style. Once or twice she sounded studious, but she is already my pick for the Marschallin of today.

Sophie Koch is an experienced Octavian. Like Harteros, she tends towards the aristocratic side of her role, welcome after too many slap-happy, excessively hormonal productions. But she is still convincingly youthful and masculine, funny in Act 3 without being over-the-top, and sings with expansive, lustrous tone, only sometimes sounding a little thin on the very top notes (Octavian did, after all, start as a soprano role).

The rest of the cast was perhaps not quite their match, though Lucy Crowe’s Sophie was very good, sung with richer, fuller sound than the thin twitterers you sometimes get, and acted with confidence but never brattiness. Unfortunately the pitch of her high notes wavered occasionally. Peter Rose’s Ochs is one of the better ones out there, more bumpkin than lecher and sung with style and fluidity, but his voice is rather hollow at both top and bottom. Supporting roles were universally solid and well-rehearsed.

In a delightful bit of luxury casting, Piotr Beczala appeared and knocked the Italian Tenor aria out of the park. Sure, it’s a kitschy bit of music, but given such a luscious rendition, it’s the best two minutes of tenorial bliss you could ask for.

Despite the boring production (which I couldn’t see too well anyway), a festival-worthy performance.

Photos copyright Bayerische Staatsoper.

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Fidelio in Munich: Led to freedom

Of all composers, it’s Beethoven who we think we understand. The greatest achievement of Calixto Bieito and Daniele Gatti’s strange Bayerische Staatsoper Fidelio is how it disrupts our expectations and banishes calcified certainty and cliché. The prison exists only in the minds of the alienated characters, and Leonore finds that freeing her husband isn’t quite as simple as finding him and dressing him in a suit. The production’s fragmented dreaminess and vaguely unfinished quality can be frustrating, but its handful of revelatory moments and wonderful performances add up to a powerful experience.

Beethoven, Fidelio. Bayerische Staatsoper, 1/5/2010. New production by Calixto Bieito, sets by Rebecca Ringst, costumes by Ingo Krügler, lights by Reinhard Traub. Conducted by Daniele Gatti with Anja Kampe (Leonore), Jonas Kaufmann (Florestan), Franz-Josef Selig (Rocco), Wolfgang Koch (Don Pizarro), Laura Tatulescu (Marzelline), Jussi Myllys (Jaquino), LazArt Quartett.


Sit back, guys, this one is going to take a good amount of space. Also, I again had a restricted-view seat, and the chance I missed something important is pretty good, alas.

This production does not take place in a literal prison. The set is a shifting maze of glass and metal, in the first act a vertical structure of floors and ladders and, in Florestan’s cell, a horizontal one of hallways. Each character is a captive of this strikingly beautiful Borgesian labyrinth, each inside their own private mental prisons, alienated by the proverbial Modern Condition. Each has an obsession that prevents them from reaching the labyrinth’s center and the freedom found there. It’s a Bildungsroman for the Cormac McCarthy set.

Before the overture, Leonore opens the opera by reciting a Jorge Luis Borges poem. Here it is in English (it’s from In Praise of Darkness).  Maybe the labyrinth doesn’t have a center at all; whether there is any escape is a key issue of the production:

Labyrinth
There’ll never be a door. You’re inside
and the keep encompasses the world
and has neither obverse nor reverse
nor circling wall nor secret center.
Hope not that the straightness of your path
that stubbornly branches off in two,
that stubbornly branches off in two,
will have an end. Your fate is ironbound,
as is your judge. Forget the onslaught
of the bull that is a man and whose
strange and plural form haunts the tangle
of unending interwoven stone.
He does not exist. In the black dusk,
hope not even for the savage beast.

The overture that follows is not the Fidelio but full-blown Leonore No. 3, here given a schizophrenically dissociated performance by Gatti, moving between Zen-like waves of crescendos and decrescendos and frantically fast sections. Onstage, Leonore takes off her shirt and binds her breasts. This is important: it is the denial of her sexuality and single-minded need to find Florestan that prevents her from escaping the labyrinth, not the lack of Florestan himself. (Giving the woman her own purpose in life, what a concept!)

Bieito has eliminated the spoken text almost entirely and inserted short quotations from Borges and McCarthy in its place. But they do not serve remotely the same function; most are some variation on “I am trapped in the labyrinth,” offering a few moments of spoken interlude between the musical numbers. The series of musical numbers does not present us with the plot but the various characters’ more or less independent psychological prisons, all products of the constraints of modern society. Rocco wants money. Marzelline wants sex, and Jaquino is, as could be expected, a rapist. Don Pizarro wants power. Leonore, determined and capable but denied a full life, struggles with literal ropes attached to the labyrinth in “Komm, Hoffnung.” In the Prisoners’ Chorus she puts pictures of Florestan’s face on the scattered prisoners, as if that would transform these momentarily free men into her husband and thus free herself. When some bits of the plot intrude into the sung texts it is as if they are fragments from some other world.

The first act exists entirely in this kind of timeless abstraction; in the second the labyrinth is lowered to a horizontal position and we disconcertingly enter the world of characters and events (we also acquire a number of hanging acrobats who descend from the flies, symbolizing floating freedom and such). What exactly is wrong with Florestan is unclear (perhaps mental illness, perhaps resigned into an exceptionally bad case of modernist alienation), but despite his vision of Leonore and attempts to climb out of the labyrinth, he is mentally elsewhere and scared of anyone who comes near him. Leonore dispatches Pizarro with both a bottle of water smashed over the head and acid thrown in his eyes.

The marital reunion begins euphorically, and Leonore ditches her man clothes for a dress and Florestan his asylum-like pajamas for a suit, but after “O namenlose Freude” they draw away from each other, Florestan unsure of leaving and Leonore not sure who this is that she has finally found. Then, where Mahler and Bernstein put Leonore No. 3, a string quartet descends from above and plays an excerpt from the slow movement of the Op. 132 string quartet, the Heiliger Dankgesang (only the molto adagio, not the “feeling new strength“ section). It’s a moment of perfect peace and stillness, and the hanging musicians seem to represent the consolatory, freeing, yet abstract power of art (cue Beethoven biography reference, and the program includes the text of the Heiligenstadt Testament). And yet it is only a momentary respite.

The finale confused me a bit. Don Fernando arrives in the personage of the Joker from The Dark Knight (some other parts of this production kind of recall Inception–I suspect that Bieito is a big Christopher Nolan fan), a deus ex machina who enters from the audience. He proceeds to shoot Florestan. While he does not remain dead onstage, I think he actually does die. Because the utopia of the finale is a freedom that can’t exist (especially when you’re in a Calixto Bieito production), and considering Florestan’s mental state, he isn’t going to be able to piece his life together again in this world, wife or no wife. The only release for him is death. The rejoicing of the reunion continues in some other space. But what does this mean for Leonore?

This is my biggest problem with the production: the characters exist in such isolation from each other. I think it may be too abstract for me; I miss having a plot and real characters instead of symbols of a vague existential struggle, and it was only during the more concrete action of the second act where I was fascinated (as evidenced by my descriptions–I really thought the treatment of the reunion was brilliant). The first half of Fidelio is inevitably a dramaturgical challenge, but this solution seems weirdly lacking in ideas, almost incomplete. And I missed the good old struggle for justice, however naive it might be. I guess I’m sentimental.

But the best thing about this production is how unnaive and unsentimental it is, how it expresses the power and desire of Beethoven’s score without lapsing into cliché. As intendant Nikolaus Bachler said at the post-show discussion, “The curtain goes up and there’s ironing! Always ironing!” But beyond avoiding ritual staging, Bieito expresses the central theme of freedom while pretty much destroying any comfortable historicist paean. He avoids the ideological truisms of black and white truth and Western idealism that are attached to Beethoven and this work in favor of something more unique and intensely personal. (My problem with most Beethoven presentations is encapsulated in the subtitle of Edmund Morgan’s Beethoven biography, The Universal Composer, a phrase that presents so many cultural problems that I don’t even know where to start.  Bieito is an antidote to this.) It might be neither fuzzily inspirational nor coherent, but it has many other virtues, and its freshness and complexity are definitely some of them.

Musically, Daniele Gatti seemed like almost the right conductor for this production. He is willfully strange, with weirdly slow tempos and unexpected shifts, sometimes overwhelming the singers and sometimes lacking in coordination and rhythmic crispness (from the stage, this could have had to do with the production). But the static quality and unexpected twists seemed to fit with a production this unconventional, and his strange waves of music certainly sounded alien. The orchestra, particularly the strings, sounded very good, though occasionally a little bewildered.

Anja Kampe made a tremendously badass Leonore. Her large, rich voice sometimes struggled through Beethoven’s murderous vocal writing and Gatti’s slow tempo in the first half of her aria. But her singing was expressive and heroic throughout, and her giant high Bs ideal for this role. She acted with remarkable sincerity through the considerable demands of the production, and her naturalness and honesty provided most of its soul. Jonas Kaufmann navigated the terrors of the aria with great dramatic eloquence, including a daring crescendo at the beginning and a trumpeting ending with strong high notes. And his vaguely autistic, tic-ridden Florestan was a formidable piece of acting. But after the aria he sounded under the weather, and sometimes was drowned out in the ensembles. (This was his return to the production after several illness-related cancelations, and he coughed several times mid-aria. Hilariously, half the audience immediately broke out in sympathy coughs.) Laura Tatulescu and Jussi Mylls were animated as Marzelline and Jaquino, both singing with clarity through their considerable acrobatics. Wolfgang Koch made an oddly soft-grained Pizarro. Franz-Josef Selig was an excellently sung Rocco with robust, round tone. As usual in a Bieito production, the acting and commitment from the cast was across-the-board great.

I found parts of this production massively frustrating, but there is more of it that will stick with me.  And, as you can see by the amount of words it took me to explain my thoughts about it, it certainly gave me something to think about.  As much as I love the triumph of justice, it’s going to be a little tricky to go innocently back to the ironing after this.

All photos copyright Bayerische Staatsoper.
Trailer (3 minutes):

Documentary (10 minutes):

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L’elisir d’amore: Punch-drunk love

If you’ve ever gazed upon a stage full of picturesque Italian peasants and thought, “This would be so much better if it looked like something out of Brazil!” then have I got an Elisir d’amore for you, directed by David Bösch at the Bayerische Staatsoper.   Life in Nemorino and Adina’s post-apocalyptic village isn’t easy, what with the bombed-out looking landscape, rapey soldiers, and shortage of furniture.  But, like the chorus with their pathetic little watering cans, they learn how to find love under difficult circumstances.  The results are fabulous.

And your blogger does her best to appreciate the musical assets of Joseph Calleja’s Nemorino under some trying conditions.

Donizetti, L’elisir d’amore.  Bayerische Staatsoper, 1/3/2011.  Production by David Bösch, conducted by Justin Brown with Joseph Calleja (Nemorino), Laura Tatelescu (Adina), Nikolay Borchev (Belcore), Alessandro Corbelli (Dulcamara), Tara Erraught (Giannetta)

Adina and Belcore.
Note that all photos show premiere cast, not the cast I saw.

The set is at first a desert adorned only with a chair and umbrella (Adina’s) and a lamppost with a phone on it.  Despite some quite spectacular effects (some using old-fashioned means like glitter and balloons), the production’s focus is on the characters.  We first meet Giannetta, whose role is greatly expanded in this production into a nerdy teenage busybody in awkward glasses and a dirty wedding dress, who constantly hangs on Nemorino (who never notices that she has a giant crush on him).  He’s a dork himself (though here neither stupid nor idiotic), and the elegant, literate Adina seems totally out of his league.  Belcore and his soldiers are senseless brutes who rape and pillage, and his relationship with Adina never seems quite consensual.  While Adina usually is played as a manipulative bitch who needs to learn to be nice, here Nemorino and Adina go through the same journey: they must learn to defy conventions, Nemorino by refusing the macho world of the army and Adina by learning to tell a man that no means no.  This change was appreciated by me!

Dulcamara arrives in a gigantic spaceship/something that glows, shoots sparks, lets off smoke, and has twirly bits sticking out all over the place (see top of post).  In the words of the program, he comes as a god to the village, one bringing the dream of consumerism (I love German programs! this one also indulges in a close reading of the gondola girl song!).  The machine’s approach was the first time I ever found the excitement of the chorus greeting Dulcamara to be merited.  The elixir itself comes in a giant tank with a hose of the sort you use to spray insecticide.  The production is full of details like this, and confetti, and the treatment of Giannetta, but it balances this silly stuff with close attention to the protagonists and the darkness of the setting itself.  The desolate atmosphere adds surprising poignancy: these people are really struggling to find happiness under difficult circumstances.  Trust the Germans to make L’elisir d’amore depressing, I know.  But I found it touching.

This production premiered around a year ago with an almost entirely different cast (original Adina Nino Machiadze sang earlier performances in this run).  The spirit was not quite aligned this time around, and sometimes it read like a very ordinary Elisir on inventive sets.  Not that there’s anything really wrong with that, but I suspect that the original cast was able to find a more distinctive tone and more comic details.  The big set pieces, including Nemorino’s now-infamous striptease with the women’s chorus, were the best moments, but the less tinkered-with scenes were not nearly as interesting (also, note to tenors: you may think black underwear looks more flattering, but it makes you look like you’re wearing a 1920’s swimsuit).

As Nemorino, Joseph Calleja (not pictured) sang with effortless sweetness and his instantly recognizable timbre, a light, bright lyric tenor with a fast and narrow vibrato.  It sounds lovely and he knows how to sing with style and feeling, but I found his Nemorino underplayed and not integrated into the production.  He was sympathetic, straightforward, and I kind of like a Nemorino who has two brain cells to rub together, but this production seems to demand someone with more personality and presence onstage.  The “Una furtive lagrima” was the most beautiful of my recent hearings, though not the most intense.  One of the most famed moments of this production in its original iteration was Nemorino singing the aria from halfway up the set’s lamppost, but Calleja did not do this at this performance.  I didn’t mind, and his release of a bunch of balloons into the flies during the final bars was a nice touch.

Laura Tatulescu (also not pictured) has a light, focused voice with plenty of carrying power, and made a sympathetic, rather passive Adina.  Unfortunately, after a solid evening she came to considerable grief in the aria at the end of the opera, running out of breath and cutting off the usual fermatas, racing through cadenzas, and singing no acuti at all.  I’m not sure what happened because the rest of her performance was good.  Alessandro Corbelli as Dulcamara was not in best voice either, sounding blustery and approximate, and did not make as much of the comedy as I think could have been done, especially considering that Dulcamara emerges from his machine wearing a spacesuit.  As Belcore, Nikolay Borchev showed barihunk qualities of swaggering acting and perfectly acceptable if not very memorable singing.

There must be something on the cover of the Elisir d’amore orchestral score that reads “This Score May Only Be Conducted Very, Very Poorly.”  This was the worst-conducted performance I have heard since Elisir in Vienna in October.  The orchestra sounded heavy and uncoordinated, and stage/pit relations were hostile.  In the arias, the conductor more or less followed the singers, but ensembles proved a trial.  Tempo changes were nail-biters.  While star conducting isn’t exactly necessary for a solid Elisir, something this bad always gets in the way.

Schenk/Anti-Schenk:  On December 21, I saw Otto Schenk’s Wiener Staatsoper production of this opera.  Both it and this were repertory performances with non-premiere casts and showed signs of limited rehearsal.  Schenk’s production emphasizes the preciousness of the story, making both protagonists childish, the peasants very tidy and cute, and the events always light.  Bösch’s production has wildly creative visuals that interpret the story with much greater complexity, and the production has a whole featured a much more interesting mix of darkness and comedy.  And the characters, even in minimally rehearsed form, seemed to grow a lot more. I found it a much more involving and emotional experience.  Given the choice I’d pick Bösch’s fun-house in a second.

Photos copyright Bayerische Staatsoper.

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Rusalka in Munich: Not part of this world

Martin Kušej’s new Bayerische Staatsoper production of Rusalka is not a happily tragic fairy tale.  Rusalka’s lake is a dark, damp cellar, where she is imprisoned with her sisters by her abusive father.  But once she finally escapes, she is thrown mute and alone into an equally brutal world where she is utterly unequipped to survive, and he increasingly looks like a protector.  It is a deeply unsettling and, for the most part, enormously effective production.

Dvořák, Rusalka, Bayerische Staatsoper, 10/26/2010.  New production by Martin Kušej, sets by Martin Zehetgruber, costumes by Heidi Hackl, lights by Reinhard Traub.  Conducted by Tomáš Hanus with Kristine Opolais (Rusalka), Klaus Florian Vogt (The Prince), Günther Groissböck (The Water Goblin), Nadia Krasteva (The Foreign Princess), Janina Baechle (The Witch).

We open to see a giant photographic cyclorama of an idealized alpine vista, flat and fake.  In front of this is are the accoutrements of a run-down living room and the house’s occupants, a man in track pants and a bath robe and an indifferently caftaned woman with long curly hair.  Wait, what?  Then this room rises to reveal a wet, dark, filthy cellar below, populated by a group of imprisoned girls of various ages.

Yes, the concept is based on the Fritzl and Kampusch cases.  The light on the water of the opening is the man above (for he is the Water Goblin, their father) shining a flashlight down through a trapdoor from the room above, before he climbs a ladder into the cellar to abuse them.  Rusalka’s moon is a bare neon globe; how she has spotted the Prince is left unsolved.  She begs her mother–Jezibaba–for freedom, but when she finally gets it she’s given a pair of Dorothy-like red heels that she can’t even walk in, deprived not only of her voice but also her grace.  Unsurprisingly, she attaches herself to the first person who happens upon her, the Prince, even if he meets her while pointing a gun at her.

The second act opens with the Gamekeeper systematically dismembering a deer with occasional breaks to grope his niece, the Kitchen, um, Girl (usually a pants role).  So, you know, not that much of an improvement for Rusalka.  She’s tottering around mute and lost and utterly helpless, confronted by wedding guests in tacky Alpine Tracht that recall nothing so much as the mural of Act 1.  Rusalka discovers the Prince enjoying a pre-marriage bump with the Foreign Princess against a wall and runs back to her abuser/guardian.

For the first two acts, it’s a brutal but rather brilliant exploration of Rusalka’s battered outsider status, and her twisted relationship with her father.  But like in many of these sorts of productions, in Act 3 things get a little too complicated.  The Gamekeeper and the Kitchen Girl corner the Water Goblin, who unexpectedly stabs the Gamekeeper to death, but it seems that this was some kind of sting operation as police officers jump out to catch the Water Goblin (their timing is a little off).  The daughters are all put into a mental institution that, while a plausible consequence, in the plot resembles a deadly serious version of the jail in Act 3 of Fledermaus: everyone keeps inexplicably showing up there.  The Prince reveals unexpected and implausible depths of guilt and kills himself, Rusalka is left broken and alone with her similarly insane sisters.

The visual vocabulary of this production could be a winner in any game of Regie bingo: the icky father figure in a bathrobe toting Aldi bags, the Prince’s wallpaper almost matching that of the opera house, the dead animals (more dead deers are wielded by a crowd of brides in a horrific wedding ballet), the deflation of Alpine kitsch.  (I know by now that as soon as anyone steps onto a German opera stage wearing lederhosen that they’re about to do something horrific.)

But for all its occasional reliance on cliche and its unrelenting darkness, I loved this reinterpretation of Rusalka’s character.  The nymph is usually a spirit of longing, not a character but a collection of romantic desires in passive feminine form.  Kušej is usually described as a total misanthrope (his productions of Don Giovanni and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk bear this out), but I thought he gave her, for once, a revelatory humanity.  This soul adrift is not pretty in her yearning, she’s a woman who has been destroyed by total alienation and abuse and has only instinct left.  You can read this (and I would like to) as an implicit critique of the tradition that has given us all these beautifully longing spirits in the first place, and as a challenge to an art form that still often stages female objectification without thinking twice.  Like many operatic characters, Rusalka cannot control her own fate or even or own body, but for once we can’t miss the inhumanity of that loss.

Kristine Opolais had a theatrical triumph in the title role, acting with raw commitment and an utter lack of diva vanity, stumbling and trembling the entire evening.  Her voice is also raw and pushed, and her senses of rhythm and pitch sometimes approximate.  But while this is not a lusciously sung Rusalka, it’s a heartbreakingly vivid one.  Less earthy was Klaus Florian Vogt’s Prince, sung with exquisitely crystalline tone that effortlessly fills the theater.  For all its beauty it can be a somewhat bloodless, unvarying sound, though he acts with a passion his voice can’t really command.  His unearthly Prince and Opolais’s tough Rusalka were a fascinating reversal of the usual sounds in these roles.

All the musical values were top-notch and Tomáš Hanus conducted a beautifully contained performance with great lyricism and transparency.  He never lapsed into sappy sentimentality, but found the kind of romantic sweep you need in the big moments.  And the orchestra was excellent.  But this was a performance more memorable for its production than its music.  The Personenregie was detailed and across-the-board convincing to a rare degree down to the small roles (particularly the haunting nymphs, who also all sang wonderfully).  Günther Groissbock sang the Water Goblin with a medium-sized, very secure bass, and gave a creepy but, even creepier, never overacted portrayal, defined by his extremely ambivalent relationship with Rusalka.  Nadia Krasteva was a glamorous Foreign Princess and sang well, though it is odd to hear a mezzo in this role.  Janina Baechel’s Jezibaba had no magic, but was another fascinatingly conflicted, ambiguous character, and sung with authority and precision.

There’s a place for fairy tales, but to see something that dismantles them so thoroughly and devastatingly is not to be missed.  Leave the kids at home, though.

N.B.: I had a restricted-view seat for the first two acts (found something slightly better for Act III) and missed some of the things happening on stage left.  This production is being filmed for DVD, there were cameras all over the place, so I’m looking forward to seeing it again with more complete visuals.

And I saw someone who looked like Katharina Wagner, but I’m not sure if it was her or not.

Next: What’s this mermaid opera I’m seeing tonight?  Oh, yeah, Rusalka again!  This time at the Volksoper.
Photos copyright Bayerische Staatsoper except the two below.
Edited because diacriticals are critical.
My most successful bows photo yet:

Nationaltheater under a very Bavarian sky:

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