Year in Review

Best of 2015

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Hoffmann in Bregenz. Time marches onward.

This entry is probably the latest best of 2015 you will find in the opera blogosphere. I haven’t been writing much recently, mostly because I haven’t seen much recently. At the end of the semester it’s pretty hard to find time to get out of town and the Met’s December schedule didn’t feature anything that convinced me that the effort would be worthwhile. I am, however, going to see The Pearl Fishers tomorrow, so let’s wrap up 2015 before we step into the wild and crazy world of 2016. (2016 is starting with lots of exoticism. Plus ça change.)

I wasn’t happy with the amount I wrote here this year–I saw a few great performances (and a few not great but interesting ones) that I never wrote up for reasons contractual, logistical, and existential. I’m less inclined to knock off a few paragraphs about parking and barking than I have been in years past. But I don’t want to sound too gloomy, because I think that what I lost in quantity I more or less made up for in quality. Blog-wise, snappy one-liners about the Met bring in the crowds–particularly compared to my specialty, 1,500 words about Regietheater from a part of Austria that few non-EU folks can find on a map*–but for me, this year offered better, more interesting material than the last few. This was in part because I was highly selective and selected things that I was pretty sure I was going to like. It worked out OK, as far as I’m concerned!

Finally, what’s coming up? In the immediate future, Pearl Fishers plus some more Boston Symphony Orchestra with Renée Fleming, then Manon Lescaut and Elektra. I’m not planning on Roberto Devereux, but I do hope to make it to some opera in Boston. In the longer term, I’m thinking of moving this operation to WordPress because Blogger is effectively no longer under development and becoming unwieldy, but I predict this will be time-consuming and I don’t know when I will do it. Also, I will be writing a bit about a new class I’m teaching at Smith this spring: a history of opera and women from Traviata to Lulu!

Anyway:

Best of 2015, Opera
Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Bregenz Festival
Lohengrin, Bayreuth
Elektra, Boston Symphony Orchestra
L’Orfeo, Bayerische Staatsoper

Best of 2015, Singers
Gerald Finley, Guillaume Tell (ROH) 
Christine Goerke, Elektra (BSO)
Barbara Hannigan, Written on Skin (Lincoln Center Festival)
Eric Owens, Don Carlo (Opera Philadelphia)
Klaus Florian Vogt, Lohengrin (Bayreuth)
Sonya Yoncheva, Otello (Met)


Best of 2015, Conductors
Antonio Pappano, Guillaume Tell (ROH)
Kirill Petrenko, Der Ring des Nibelungen (Bayreuth)
Andris Nelsons, Elektra (Boston Symphony Orchestra)
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Mass (Philadelphia Orchestra)


Names to Watch
Tobias Kehrer, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Glyndebourne)
Daniel Johansson, Les Contes d’Hoffmann (Bregenz)
Guanquan Yu, Turandot (second time in this category! why isn’t she famous yet?) (Bregenz)

Special Recognition
The Bernstein Mass in Philadelphia. It’s not a mass, it’s not an opera, who knows what the hell it is? I don’t think that most of it is very good. But I became sort of obsessed with it. (As did everyone else in my then department–almost all of us saw it and felt an unusual urge to talk it over with each other. Repeatedly. And we had to pass around the score around, because the library only has one copy.) It’s a pungent historical artifact and still powerful, relevant for many of exactly the same reasons, and kind of shocking.


Aleksandar Denic’s sets for Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth. This cycle left me with less than I had hoped (see below) but the sets were absolutely amazing in their detail, both hilarious and grotesque.

The newspapers, Lulu. I wasn’t quite as big a fan of this production as most people, but I love the way it deployed newsprint as symbol.

Things I Forgot to Say
Guillaume Tell, which became famous as shock theater, was a very powerful performance which I was fortunate to see. It wasn’t consistent or even coherent, but it was serious and took the piece very seriously. Also, Gerald Finley has never been better, and he sets a very high standard. I was proud of what I wrote about it for the New York Times, but that wasn’t the place to make a critical statement. So here it is, late.

The Ring in Bayreuth left me conflicted. I didn’t end up writing about all of it here because I did a piece on it for the New York Times (and then I moved from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts the following week!). I liked how earthy and strange and raw it was, and how genuinely funny. It had a weird emotional payoff that happened when you least expected it. But the acting was spotty, the symbols vague, and the whole thing misogynistic. And it didn’t stick with me–I took lots of notes but didn’t find myself thinking about it often compared to most of what I saw on the same trip.

Trovatore at the Met. I went to this and I wrote about half a review which I didn’t post. It was a very emotional performance, but I didn’t feel like I could write about it in the effusive way it seemed to demand. I wasn’t touch with my fan self that weekend.

Exotica. I spent a lot of time this year thinking about and writing about how opera represents its others, from blackface to Turks to Delibes’s fromage-y Lakmé to a Turandot involving the Great Wall, clay soldiers, and every single other cliché. I don’t want to be a scold and I get tired of writing these things sometimes (especially when I saw most of those in the space of two weeks) but I’m not going to give up on this. The power dynamics are real and also very complicated.

Operas About Famous Dead People. Opera Philadelphia did two big new operas! Great move. Unfortunately both featured more dull monumentalizing than story. At least the second, Yardbird, however tepid its drama, featured an original, intriguing score by Daniel Schnyder.

Not Much Met. I had a hit with my pie chart analysis of the Met’s programming. But I only saw a handful of productions at the Met in 2015. I missed a few that I would have liked to see, most grievously the Iolanta/Bluebeard double bill, but I wish there had been a few more that would have inspired me to get on the train/bus to go to New York. (Remember: it takes me four hours to get to New York these days! And that’s four hous on a Peter Pan bus.) And some of what I did see didn’t make this list. Hopefully next season will be better! I still am really looking forward to Elektra and have some hope for Manon Lescaut.

Happy 2016!

*In March I’m giving a talk on this production–which, if you didn’t follow the link, is the Herheim Hoffmann–at the American Comparative Literature Association’s conference at Harvard!

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Review

Best of 2013

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I saw some great stuff this year! Here are some of my favorites. This list was a little less exciting to put together than some of my previous year-end posts (2012, 2011), because I mostly was home in the US and for my tastes Europe is just more interesting.

But let’s look on the bright side: the Met certainly did better in 2013 than they did in 2012 or 2011. They played it safe with new productions, most of which were imported from elsewhere, but most of them proved more or less watchable and well-sung. And in Parsifal and Die Frau ohne Schatten (the former an import and the latter a revival of a Met original) they had two very special performances of challenging and unusual works. Let’s hope that this continues in the upcoming Prince Igor.

Best Performances
Parsifal (Met)
David et Jonathas (Les Arts Florissants/Brooklyn Academy of Music)
Don Carlo (Royal Opera)
Die Frau ohne Schatten (Met)

Best Individual Performances
Joyce DiDonato, La donna del lago (Royal Opera)
Antonio Pappano (conducting), Don Carlo (Royal Opera)
Peter Mattei, Parsifal (Met)

Rising Stars
Jamie Barton, Norma (second year running in this category! arguably should be promoted to the above category) (Met)
Lianna Hartounian, Don Carlo (Royal Opera)
Jacquelyn Wagner, Feuersnot (American Symphony Orchestra in concert)
Michael Spyres, La donna del lago (Royal Opera) (also has nearly outgrown this category)

Special Awards
Best Webcast: Così fan tutte, from the Teatro Real Madrid, in Michael Haneke’s superb production with a compelling cast. I also enjoyed Meistersinger from Salzburg, but was not very impressed by most of the cast or the conducting.

Most Extreme: Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Komische Oper Berlin, which was more an act of catharsis than a performance one could enjoy in any conventional sense.

Saddest: The New York City Opera had been operating on borrowed time for some time now, but its demise is the end of a great institution.

Best Reinvention: Silent film might seem an odd inspiration for opera, but the Komische Oper Berlin’s production of Die Zauberflöte (seen later in Los Angeles and coming soon to Minnesota) was brilliant.

Unfulfilled Promise: Gotham Chamber Opera. Both Eliogabalo and Baden Baden 1927 seemed like terrific ideas on paper, but less so in live performance.

Biggest Contrast: When I saw the same production of Don Carlo in New York and London a few months apart. What had been dull and lifeless in New York (most of all due to Lorin Maazel’s limp conducting) was terrifically energetic in London. Even Ferruccio Furlanetto, who was the best thing in the New York performance, was way better in London.

Most Popular Posts
1. Parsifal (Met) (this post also got a remarkable 19 comments) (as someone who has found the introduction of Parsifal to undergraduate students to be something of a challenge on the enthusiasm front, this is both encouraging and surprising)
2. Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Komische Oper Berlin) (16 comments)
3. Rigoletto (Met)
4. Eugene Onegin (Met)
5. Maria Stuarda (Met)


See you in 2014! I will be seeing Die Fledermaus eventually, but am going on a research trip before that and won’t make it until midway through January.

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Review

Best Performances of 2012

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“You aren’t about to leave Serse off your Best Performances list, are you?”

I felt like I had a disproportionate number of “almosts” this year–plenty of wonderful singing, playing, conducting, directing, etc., but almost every performance came with a serious caveat that some other element was seriously lacking (e.g., I loved Christopher Alden’s production of Così at the City Opera, and the cast was overall quite excellent, but the orchestra was oy). So it usually goes in opera. While my “best performances” list is short, tons of great stuff didn’t fit in here here–Nina Stemme’s Brünnhilde! Christian Gerhaher! The Makropulos Case! But if you want to see what I have to think about any of them, well, read the archives of this blog, because if I relived everything this would be really long. On that note, I had best proceed.

Best Performances of 2012

Serse (Komische Oper): Who knew that Regietheater wizard Stefan Herheim would turn into Mel Brooks when attempting Baroque opera? This production had a joyous and knowing attitude towards opera, and super performances from the Komische Oper ensemble. Some of it was a little recycled, but that was kind of the point, and I’ve actually found myself describing it to explain how Baroque opera works, it’s that spot-on. This production needs to be on DVD, so I can watch it whenever I’m feeling sad about life. 

Der Ring des Nibelungen (Bayerische Staatsoper): A modest Ring for unsure times, it suggested that in the end all we need is love. Fair enough, for the Ring. While sometimes too minimal for me to have strong opinions about (until a somewhat discordant, blaringly ideological Götterdämmerung), it did have a quiet poetry, and some achingly earnest performances from Anja Kampe, Nina Stemme, and Wolfgang Koch, and the entire cast did the text and drama proud. Even without directly comparing it to the Met’s DOA Lepage Ring, it had palpable life.

Lulu (Semper Oper Dresden): A scintillating performance by Gisela Stille in the title role, Cornelius Meister’s eloquent conducting, a marvelously committed cast in… another Herheim production, this one with some seriously scary clowns. I know I’m boring by just praising him all the time, but his work has a way of growing and gaining coherence in your memory as time passes, as you make sense of it for yourself.
Excellent Musical Performances: Wozzeck in concert at Avery Fisher Hall (not reviewed, sorry), La clemenza di Tito (Met), Khovanshchina (Met)
Excellent Productions (new or relatively new): Così fan tutte (Christopher Alden, City Opera), Mitridate, re di Ponto (David Bösch, Bayerische Staatsoper), Wozzeck (Andreas Kriegenburg, Bayerische Staatsoper)
Best Individual Performances
ANJAAA! (with KLAUS FLORIAAAN!)

Anja Kampe (Sieglinde, Die Walküre, Bayerische Staatsoper) Such raw, vivid expression! My offer of a year or two ago to found an Anja Kampe Fan Club still stands. 

Anna Netrebko (Mimì, La bohème, Salzburg) The perfect role for her lush voice and earnestly vivacious presence.
Elina Garanca (Sesto, La clemenza di Tito, Met). I never thought I would say that! Very elegant.
Simon Keenlyside (Wozzeck, Wozzeck, Munich and Bayerische Staatsoper) Terrifying.
 
Classing Up the Joint, AKA Fabulous Performances Under Questionable Circumstances:
Bryn Terfel (Wotan, Ring, Met) There was more to one of his monologues than to whole acts of Lepage.
Waltraud Meier (Waltraute, Götterdämmerung, Met) There was also more to hers. A cameo that nearly redeemed the whole evening.
Anna Caterina Antonacci (Cassandre, Les Troyens, ROH) Maybe the Trojans didn’t believe her Cassandra, but the audience definitely did.
Jonas Kaufmann (Bacchus, Ariadne auf Naxos, Salzburg) Great singing with shamelessly bonkers acting.
Best Conductors
Esa-Pekka Salonen (Wozzeck, not reviewed)

Names to Watch

Guanqun Yu (Leonora, Trovatore, Met)
Jennifer Rowley (Orasia, Orpheus, City Opera)
Jamie Barton (Agnese, Beatrice di Tenda, Collegiate Chorale)
Hannah Hipp (Anna, Les Troyens, ROH)
Paul Appleby (Hylas, Les Troyens, Met)
Ryan Speedo Green (The Mandarin, Turandot, Met)
Least Awful New Met Production
Un ballo in maschera. It seemed like a decent production with a few issues, unlike most of the rest, which were issues without the potential for goodness. (Runner-up: Manon.)
Most Interesting Performance That Wasn’t Actually Good 
Fidelio (Dresden). The singing ranged from bad to really bad (Evelyn Herlitzius can be epic, but on this night she wasn’t), but this production has been hanging around since 1989. That’s a momentous date, particularly when you’re talking about Fidelio.
Best Trend
Video streaming on the internet from European opera houses. Unlike the Met HD broadcasts, these free, not that high quality productions (meaning the quality of the recording, not of the performance–the picture isn’t high def, the stage lights aren’t brightened for the occasion, and the sound can be a little tinny) aren’t aiming to replace the live opera experience (which is my biggest problem with the Met program, it teaches us to be numb to the virtues of liveness), and they make great, unique stuff accessible worldwide to people who would otherwise not see them. The leaders in this category are Brussels’s La Monnaie and Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper. The TV channels Arte and Medici also produce webcasts, which tend to be very high quality but often have regional restrictions (though sometimes you can find these, ahem, elsewhere–big thanks to those kind souls who disseminate things like the Bayreuth Parsifal and La Scala Lohengrin, both of which I loved).

Worst Trend
Assuming that you audience is uninterested in complexity and depth, both intellectual and emotional. The Met’s worst efforts this year–the Ring and Enchanted Island–presumed the attention span and maturity of a 13-year old (or less). Dumbing things down left us with shows that were insipid, shallow, and actually pretty boring. While not everyone has a great knowledge of opera, operagoers are generally educated and curious people accustomed to films and books that are drastically more sophisticated that the kinds of things going on at many American opera houses. They can be spoken to like adults. (Some of them may find this surprising, OK, but they can learn.)

Let’s hope for a great 2013!

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Review

The Best of 2011

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I saw a lot of exciting stuff this year! Later I might ruminate about why most of it was during the seven months of the year I spent in Europe rather than during the five I spent in New York, but first here are some highlights.

I made lists of five this year, because ten seemed excessive when you have multiple categories. Except for the first opera list they are not in any particular order.

Opera

  • Parsifal (Bayreuth): This took “the right opera in the right place” to a whole new level. The ritualistic experience of Parsifal in the theater for which it was written becomes a self-reflexive story of its own history from seclusion to militancy to a guarded redemption. For better or worse, we control this postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk now. Truly worth the pilgrimage.
  • Fidelio (Bayerische Staatsoper): This phantasmagorical production by Calixto Bieito dispensed with most literal narrative, but its stark images of torture and struggle were somehow incredibly Beethovenian, and stuck with me for longer than almost anything else this year. Like Parsifal, it was something of a slow burn and I don’t think I had finished processing when I wrote about it. Those productions are the best. (The production dated from late 2010 but I saw it in 2011.)
  • Der Rosenkavalier (Bayerische Staatsoper): Otto Schenk’s production owes less to Strauss than it does to Masterpiece Theater, but with the magnificent Anja Harteros and Sophie Koch in the leading roles it had life in it yet (mostly musical). Lucy Crowe was great too, Piotr Beczala was the Italian Tenor you always want, and conductor Constantin Trinks made a promising Bay Staats debut.
  • Rusalka (Semperoper Dresden): A middle-aged man in crisis finds his fantasies have little relation to reality. It might not have much to do with The Little Mermaid, but this psychothriller was true to Dvorák’s beautiful, sentimental music at every moment. (My top opera of last year was also a revisionist Rusalka—Martin Kusej’s in Munich–which, in a very different way, also suggested the forest nymph is a projection of male desire.)
  • Atys (Les Arts Florissants): This arrived at the Brooklyn Academy of Music preordained as the Event of the Year, but nearly lived up to expectations, largely through the force of William Christie’s wonderful orchestra and the elegant, self-consciously formal production. Next year a different French Baroque opera, please?

Concerts

Singers

Conductors (Opera)

More Great Achievements in Operatic Direction (Met, Are You Listening?)

Special Awards:
Halls of Fame: I’m always grateful for the chance to see anything at the Bayerische Staatsoper and the Theater an der Wien, who make everything new.

Halls of Shame: The Wiener Staatsoper for their wretched, slapdash revivals and both the Metropolitan Opera and the Wiener Staatsoper for their visionless, confused new productions.

“Oper für alle” Award: The Komische Oper Berlin, for combining accessible and affordable tickets with an adventurous and ambitious program (and during the summer festival a really interesting program of lectures and, uh, free wine). All operas are performed in German, but now they have titles in multiple languages.

Least Predictable: You never know what you’re going to get with conductor Daniele Gatti. I loved his Parsifal, was oddly persuaded by his Fidelio, and his Mahler 9 with the Wiener Philharmoniker was the single worst concert I heard all year.

Most Predictable: You do know what you’re going to get with the Met’s new chief conductor, Fabio Luisi. His work is brisk, well-paced, perfectly balanced, and phrased with elegance. Grandeur and dramatic weight, though, can be scarce.

Up and Coming: They’re at various stages of their careers, but I hope to hear lots more from conductors Cornelius Meister and Tomas Netophil, sopranos Gal James, Meagan Miller and Caitlin Lynch, mezzos Anita Rachvelishvili and Elisabeth Kulman, tenor Michael Fabiano, baritone Iain Paterson, and bass Dmitry Ivanshchenko.

Let’s hope for an exciting 2012!

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Review

Best of 2010

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 It was a very good year for me and Opera. Here’s the best of it.

Putting this together was fun but confusing. I spent the first half of the year in New York and the second in Europe with a stop in California in between, so I had a fabulous variety of performances to choose from. Compared to prior years, it was an embarrassment of riches.  This is the kind of problem one wants to have.  But this list doesn’t correlate with my reviews very closely.  I write a positive review of any performance that I think is good, but the ones I have the most affection for are usually those of works that I personally enjoy (Cardillac was an excellent performance, but it is not on this list).  And sometimes the review I write a day or two after seeing something is a poor indicator of how much it will linger with me in following weeks and months.  This is what I remembered.

Honorable Mention: Semele (Theater an der Wien), Tosca (Metropolitan Opera, April), Les Troyens (Deutsche Oper Berlin).

10. Carmen, Met (d. Richard Eyre, c. Alain Altinoglu, April) Two really great principals made this memorable without help from Richard Eyre’s mediocre production.
9. The Nose, Met (d. William Kentridge, c. Valery Gergiev) A perfect marriage of Shostakovich’s wacky collage score with William Kentridge’s artwork.
8. Lulu, Met (d. John Dexter, c. Fabio Luisi) A finely balanced performance of one of the greatest of 20th-century operas.
7. The Fairy Queen, Glyndebourne Festival/Brooklyn Academy of Music (d. Jonathan Kent, c. William Christie) Pure fantasy with excellent orchestral playing and a hilariously fanciful staging. Now available on DVD.
6. Adriana Lecouvreur, ROH Covent Garden (d. David McVicar, c. Mark Elder) An extravagant and lushly sung star vehicle that never got buried in its own upholstery.
4./5. (tie) Tannhäuser, Wiener Staatsoper (d. Claus Guth, c. Franz Welser-Möst) and Tristan und Isolde, Opernhaus Zürich (d. Claus Guth, c. Bernard Haitink) A brilliant Guth double-header considering Wagner through the lens of 19th-century society, with excellent musical performances on both counts.
3. Aida, Staatstheater Basel (d. Calixto Bieito, c. Maurizio Barbacini) Brutal and sometimes gruesome, but a revelatory, amazingly relevant interpretation that turned the tables on this problematic work.
2. Der Ring des Nibelungen, Los Angeles Opera. (d. Achim Freyer, c. James Conlon) A rigorously conceived, visionary production with a highly personal style and generally strong musical values.
1. Rusalka, Bayerische Staatsoper (d. Martin Kusej, c. Tomas Hanus) An immensely moving production with incredibly committed performances, a remarkably complete re-imagining of a distant fairy tale into something horrifyingly contemporary and immediate, and yet still faithful to the sad longing of Dvorák’s music.

And…
Special Award for Ladybusiness: Aida (Basel) and Rusalka (Bayerische Staatsoper) for compelling, three-dimensional conceptions of female characters who are usually denied inner lives.
Special Award for Awesome: Their productions might not have been all that great, but Petra Lang (Les Troyens, Berlin), Anja Harteros (Alcina, Wiener Staatsoper), and Nina Stemme (Ariadne auf Naxos, Met) were.
Special Award for Prolific Overachievement: Jonas Kaufmann. “Prolific” is due to my repeated efforts to track him down, but he’s seemingly fantastic in everything, so it was worth the effort.
Special Award for Tech: Rusalka (Bayerische Staatsoper). A complicated production perfectly executed, large quantities of water, collapsing walls, and (fake) dead animals included.
Special Award for WTF? (Short Form): The last 20 minutes of Harry Kupfer’s Ariadne auf Naxos (Theater an der Wien). Zerbinetta and Bacchus… Harlekin and Ariadne… whaaaaa?
Special Award for WTF? (Long Form): Don Giovanni (Wiener Staatsoper) and Armida (Met) for showing that more-or-less traditional productions can be every bit as incoherent as more radical efforts.
Special Award for Overrated: Le grand macabre (New York Philharmonic) You’re very shiny, but you’re not as clever or as seditious as you think you are. (Also Special Award for My Least Popular Opinion.)

For the record…
Most Popular Blog Posts as measured by Google Analytics, most popular first: Carmen at the Met (April), Adriana Lecouvreur at Covent Garden, Standing Room at the Staatsoper, Alcina at the Staatsoper, Aida in Basel, Tosca at the Met (April), Armida at the Met, Rigoletto at the Staatsoper, Semele at the Theater an der Wien, Liederabend of Popular Tenor.
Blogging Lesson Learned: For the accumulation of comments, challenge the supremacy of an institution such as The New York Times, the Wiener Philharmoniker, or Juan Diego Flórez (granted, in that last one we mostly ended up talking about various other tenors hanging off lampposts).
Other Blogging Lesson Learned: However, for the accumulation of sheer numbers of visitors, see “Special Award for Prolific Overachievement” and entries 1, 2, 6, and 10 on the most popular list.

I’ve enjoyed perpetuating this blog’s second life (third, to tell the truth), and hope you have enjoyed reading. In other news, New Year’s is coming up, so I’ve got some Sekt to drink, a Fledermaus to see, and a Germany-bound train to catch for the other half of my Schenk project.  Here’s to a great (and equally transatlantically split) 2011!

Also, you want to follow me on Twitter, don’t you? 

Edited for broken links because Blogger hates me.

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