Review

Salome: Twilight of the vibratos

5 Comments

Staatsoper rep night: Salome. Ancient production? Check. Underrehearsed staging? Check. Uneven singing? Check. Welcome back to the opera house where everything can go pretty much right but Salome can still come out bland. Camilla Nylund is an alright Salome, but I’m sure she’s better in other roles. Peter Schneider isn’t the best Strauss conductor out there, but you could do far worse. Unfortunately, this is an opera that requires a frisson from some source or another.

Strauss, Salome. Wiener Staatsoper, 2/2/2011. Production by Boleslaw Barlog (revival), conducted by Peter Schneider with Camilla Nylund (Salome), Tomasz Konieczny (Jochanaan), Wolfgang Schmidt (Herod), Iris Vermillion (Herodias), Marian Talaba (Narraboth).

Boleslaw Barlog’s production takes its visual inspiration from Klimt, but on this 196th performance there wasn’t much glitter left on Jürgen Rose’s sets. Gold floors are vaguely spotted with colored tiles, and generically Middle Eastern robes with mosaic bits are the clothing of choice. The photos here make it look rather nicer than it does in person, from the Galerie standing section it was just a brownish platform with some spots. The worn quality is less one of appropriate decay than simple drabness, and often there’s not enough color contrast to see what’s going on. I’m not sure what its angle was, if it ever had one in the first place. Something about the exotic as self, I am sure, whatevs. Of the Personenregie, today it is a site of park and bark.

Mystery Salome and Herod (not my cast)

Peter Schneider conducted a spotty rendition of the score. The orchestra obviously can play this piece very well, but I’m not convinced they were playing well together, and some moments worked while others were flat and unfocused. The character was somewhat soupily Romantic with Rosenkavalier tendencies, but not differentiated enough to give a decisive impression. It wasn’t bad, in fact much of the playing was quite good, but it had little shape or edge. Like the staging, it lacked intensity.

Camilla Nylund is a lyric Salome and was pushing for volume at many points. I would classify her as a Singer with Skills, not a bad thing but not an exciting one. She can be depended on to have thought through the role, give it the best she’s got, show good musical taste, and rarely make ugly sounds, but she isn’t going to get to Demented (see also: Adrianne Pieczonka). Her silvery soprano doesn’t have a particularly memorable timbre, and can get vibrato-heavy and strident at the top. Her characterization was well-acted but longing and girlish, at times almost fairy Salome, and I missed darker undertones. She deserves credit for doing her own dance all by herself, but it seemed something of a space-filler. Her most memorable moment was a creepy Sprechstimme “den Kopf des Jochanaan.”

Tomasz Konieczny was a hale and hearty, even a clean John the Baptist. He sounded healthy as well, with a metallic, noble sound that suited the part far better than his downright reputable looks and ordinary presence. The rest of the cast failed to inspire, though Iris Vermillion’s wobbly camp goddess Herodias was entertainingly over the top (sporting a glittery dress that I think we can call a harem Dirndl). Wolfgang Schmidt, after a painfully voiceless Aegisth in Elektra at the Met last season, turned up again to do the same for Herod. I know this isn’t a role where you expect beautiful singing, but there is a limit to how much hooting Sprechstimme one can be allowed characterization’s sake. Or vocal frailty’s sake, for that matter. Marian Talaba’s gargled Narraboth likewise did the evening no favors. The Nazarenes and Jews sang just fine, though the Jews carried on like dudes at Tevye callbacks at the First Presbyterian theater club, which made me a little uncomfortable.

To make Salome so competently unmemorable requires special talent, but the Wiener Staatsoper is a special place.

Photos copyright Wiener Staatsoper.

Continue Reading

Review

Lucia di Lammermoor: Mad about you

11 Comments

So generous of the Wiener Staatsoper to throw in an opera along with that mad scene, no?  But considering the spectacle of hopeless conducting and pathetic staging that surrounded Annick Massis’s moment of Crazy–and Piotr Beczala’s decent tenor aria–I kind of wish they hadn’t.  That thing I said the other day about wanting boring productions to blog about instead of tricky stuff like Herheim?  It was only a joke, but I TAKE IT ALL BACK.

Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor.  Wiener Staatsoper, 1/14/2011.  Production by Boleslaw Barlog, conducted by Bruno Campanella with Annick Massis (Lucia), Piotr Beczala (Edgardo), Eijiro Kai (Enrico), Dan Paul Dumitrescu (Raimondo).

Bruno Campanella conducted with some nice differentiation of color but soporific tempos, which crippled the singers at many points.  They ran out of breath in the slow parts, they got ahead in the fast parts.  Sometimes he pulled dramatic accelerandos at the ends of numbers, which were exciting, but didn’t excuse the snooze that had preceded them.

Stage direction was nonexistent, with park and bark scenes and indulgence in semaphoric gestures of the worst sort (“O Ciel’!” proclaims Raimondo, raising both hands towards the sky).  Eijiro Kai has a solid, gravely, somewhat forced-sounding baritone, and was a stiff Enrico with little shading or expression.  Protagonists Annick Massis as Lucia and Piotr Beczala as Edgardo are both experienced exponents of their roles and made much more of them than the rest of the cast.  Unfortunately they had the chemistry and affection of two people who met that afternoon in the standing room line, but you can’t have everything.

Massis’s Lucia was delicate and neurotic, her incipient madness clear from her first entrance.  Her characterization was detailed and natural, but unfortunately her small, colorless voice didn’t make nearly as good an impression.  Her sound is thin and quavery, and she was often lost under the orchestra or in ensembles.  Her ornamentation and acuti were good, though Campanella’s tempo in “Quando, rapito in estasi” was tortuously slow.  But she pulled out all her stops for the mad scene, for which I suspect she had been saving her voice (and the orchestration is lighter), with more sound and creative, involving acting (including stepping off the main set to the very edge of the stage, almost literally leaving the world behind).  The coloratura was perfectly accurate and the high Es, with the exception of the final one, secure.  I’m not sure if she quite deserved the extent of the rapturous ovation she got, but in comparison to what had preceded the scene, it was understandable.

Beczala was said (unofficially) to be recovering from something or other and sounded off his best, singing with a reduced dynamic range of loud, loud, and loud, with a somewhat congested tone and strain on the high notes.  His Edgardo is filled with conventionally gallant acting details.  While this doesn’t quite create a rounded character, it beats standing still. Supporting characters were OK.  The chorus sounded really good, I can say that. 

Boleslaw Barlog’s ancient production begins with a few shabby, wrinkly drops that nonetheless necessitate 5-minute half-light scene changes every 20 minutes.  (With 18th-century stage technology, they could have switched out those suckers in 15 seconds.)  The Staatsoper understandably declines to provide photos of any of these sets on their website–the only photo they have that isn’t horribly blurry is the one above.  In the first scene, a background painting of a wild forest is augmented solely with a mysterious tree stump kindly placed on the center-left hot spot, so Normanno can be both seen and heard.  Things improve a bit when we go indoors, with some moderately impressive paneled rooms (pictured).  Oh, and Edgardo’s avi miei are buried in some sort of crypt (again, the pallbearers were considerate enough to set Lucia’s corpse down right next to the center-stage right hot spot, so Edgardo could off himself in acoustic favorability).  The costumes are also drab, and Massis was swimming around in a nightie that could have fit Joan Sutherland.  Come to think of it, it probably did.

Also, there were bows after every scene.  Not every act, every scene.  Strange reception at the end: extremely enthusiastic but very brief applause.  Vienna’s not the place of the Gesamtkunstwerk, though, and people are very willing to overlook massive deficiencies in some areas if there’s something they like elsewhere in the performance.  I’d prefer something that shows a group effort.  This wasn’t exactly my night.  Take me back to Germany, please.

Next: I got some Schenk wrapping-up to do, and am braving a return to the Philharmoniker tonight for Jansons and Shostakovich and Berlioz.

Bows:

Continue Reading

Review

Die Fledermaus: Bring your own fizz

1 Comment

Appreciation of the Wiener Staatsoper’s ritual New Year’s Fledermaus depends on your appreciation of Viennese rituals in general, of jokes about current Austrian politics in particular, of the simple joy of watching a tenor fall on his ass, and most of all on the amount of Champagne you have drunk. I missed the legendary special-guests New Year’s Eve showing (this year: Netrebko and Schrott) and went to the hangover special the next day instead. Once you get past the sociological aspects, this was a mostly first-rate cast threading their way through the greasy cogs of an ancient schticky Otto Schenk production with varying degrees of aplomb. Not bad, but magic only in a Viennese imagination.

Johann Strauss, Die Fledermaus. Wiener Staatsoper, 1/1/2011. Production by Otto Schenk, conducted by Patrick Lange with Markus Werba (Eisenstein), Camilla Nylund (Rosalinde), Angelika Kirchschlager (Prinz Orlofsky), Michael Schade (Alfred), Daniela Fally (Adele), Adrian Eröd (Falke), Helmuth Lohner (Frosch)

The sets and the tragic hair on the heads of the women suggest that this Otto Schenk production dates from the mid- to late-1970’s. It’s impressively lavish but rather cluttered and visually speaking strictly by-the-book realist (documented on this 1980 DVD with Gruberova, Popp, and Weikl). The turntable that took us to Prinz Orlowsky’s dining room got applauded, which tells you all you need to know.  The direction features quite a lot of silly choreography in the ensemble numbers. But this two-performance run did not seem to be well-rehearsed, and this kind of thing requires very good ensemble timing to pull off with flair. The dramatic beats were signposted and underlined by the cast as they all tried to get into position for the next moment, and interaction was minimal. It seemed more sketched than realized, and some moments, like the Unter Donner und Blitz ballet, were just clumsy. This is too bad, because most of the cast was excellent and I’m sure they could have had an outstanding Fledermaus in them, even in this dated production. When they were able to loosen up in their solo moments, they were universally better.

Fally, Werba, and Nylund

Unfortunately the cast had a weakness at its center, and that was Markus Werba’s Eisenstein. This seemed to be a case of a Leporello being cast as Don Giovanni: too young, not sufficiently bourgeois, and vocally not authoritative. He was completely overshadowed by Adrian Eröd’s arch and polished Dr. Falke, probably the best overall role portrait of the evening (does he sing Eisenstein? also, nice handstand). Almost as good was Daniela Fally’s Adele. Unlike her Sophie of last week, her singing was precise, light, and full of humor, and her acting again very good (spoken with what sounded to me like credible Viennese dialect). Angelika Kirchschlager’s Orlowsky was similarly accomplished, with some of the best singing of the evening and appropriately off-kilter acting in this unfortunately short role. Alfred Sramek was similarly amiable as Frank, particularly in the third act’s drunken extravaganza.

Camille Nylund has a large voice for Rosalinde, but navigated the acrobatics quite well, though the end of the Csardas was not her best moment. While a good actress, she did not have quite the touch for comedy as some of the rest of the cast, and emerged as the straight woman of the production. Michael Schade as Alfred was willingly the simple buffoon, with gleefully parodic singing, many pratfalls, and tenorial in-jokes and references (I believe these are attached to the production rather than him, but I counted La Bohème, Parsifal, Lohengrin, Die Walküre, and Fidelio, I’m probably forgetting a few).

Particularly in Vienna, Act 3 of Fledermaus is a drawn-out affair, with sparse music and plot development and lots of unrelated stand-up comedy (much of which is not explained in the English titles, by the way). Last night our Frosch was veteran actor Helmuth Lohner, and while I could understand almost all of what he was saying, my grasp of current Austrian politics was not sufficient to appreciate many of the jokes. While drunken physical comedy doesn’t depend on cultural knowledge, I still thought it was far too long, and I wanted to return to the plot.

I’m still sad they cut Murray the Comic Canadian in Act 2, though. (I realize that everyone does this, but come on, guys, he’s a comic Canadian! Michael Schade could do it, Alfred isn’t in Act 2!)

Up-and-coming stick-waver Patrick Lange boasts an impressive head of Conductor Hair but led unobtrusively, and while his account was well-judged and phrased, it lacked the headlong rush and brilliance this opera can reach. I appreciated that he was not a young conductor speed demon, but it could have been more exciting. The post-Neujahrskonzert orchestra sounded suitably sparkling in the overture and perfectly fine elsewhere (though it was more Donner and less Blitz in the ballet). Strings better than the occasionally bumpy winds, as usual.

Had things managed to gel a little better, this could have been an outstanding performance, but it was something less than the sum of its parts. Alas, such is the repertory norm.

This post concludes for now my survey of Otto Schenk at the Wiener Staatsoper; soon I will turn to productions of these same operas by some modern enfants terribles (some not so jeunes) for comparison. I am posting from Munich, where I just saw Claus Guth’s brain-teaser of a Luisa Miller at the Bayerische Staatsoper. It required more thought than all the Otto Schenk productions put together. I didn’t like everything about it but it felt like a giant relief to have something to chew on after all this literalism. Singing was also excellent. Turntable used a lot but not applauded once.  No Schenk comparison for this one but I didn’t want to skip it.  More on all of this in coming days.

Continue Reading

Review

Der Rosenkavalier: Wie du warst, wie du bist

6 Comments

While Otto Schenk’s Wiener Staatsoper Der Rosenkavalier have been spiffed up and the staging is showing alarming signs of rehearsal, a great Rosenkavalier still requires a great cast. While Adrianne Pieczonka’s Marschallin is very fine, neither she nor her less distinguished costars quite lit up the stage. With the exception of the excellent orchestra, this wouldn’t have rated above a solidly routine Rosenkavalier in most houses. In Vienna, a city that takes its Rosenkavalier almost as seriously as its Mozart, it ranks as a disappointment.

Continue Reading

Review

L’elisir d’amore: Your love is my drug

10 Comments

Sometimes the Wiener Staatsoper has a Noises Off! quality to it.  I’m not talking about onstage mishaps, though those happen also, or middlebrow artistic attitudes, though those are far too common as well.  No, I mean cast changes!  When ensemble member Benjamin Bruns fell ill and couldn’t sing Nemorino last night, Ramón Vargas, in town for Un ballo in maschera, took it on.  I’ve always thought Vargas a likeable guy and these one-off performances can be great fun, so I spent my beer Beerenpunsch money on a gallery standing room spot.

Bonus: it helps me organize my study of the art of Otto Schenk.  Because here we have ur-Schenk.  It’s CUTE!

Donizetti, L’elisir d’amore.  Wiener Staatsoper, 12/21/2010.  Production by Otto Schenk, conducted by Guilermo García Calvo with Julia Novikova (Adina), Ramón Vargas (Nemorino), Tae Joong Yang (Belcore), Alfred Sramek (Dulcamara), Elisabeta Marin (Giannetta)

I’ve never found never found Ramón Vargas’s forrays into bigger rep very convincing; he lacks a certain vocal heroism and stage authority (his earlier, more lyric efforts are excellent).  But those would be liabilities when you’re Nemorino, and last night he turned in a free-wheeling performance of joyous singing and wonderfully undignified acting.  It wasn’t very polished in an acting sense, but come on, it’s Nemorino, the primary task is to be endearing and dumb.  And Vargas has that down, much more than Flórez in October.  Vocally he sounded better than I’ve heard him in ages, with sweet tone and unbroken legato, though he sings pretty much everything forte and the one time he tried a piano (cadenza of the Lagrima), he immediately went flat.  But such are the costs of the spinto years.

Yes, that’s La Netrebka. Only photo I could find.

Julia Novikova was a more vivacious and capricious Adina than Sylvia Schwartz in October.  She has a beautiful upper range and easy coloratura, and showed sensitive phrasing in “Prendi.”  But in a lyric role her voice is perilously small for the Staatsoper, and her sound got lost in ensembles.  Tae Joong Yang’s Belcore has grown in comedy since October and is now quite funny, but he struggled with intonation in the aria and elsewhere sounded blustery.  Vienna favorite Alfred Sramek sleep-walked through Dulcamara’s aria and somewhat compensated with tired schtick elsewhere.

I didn’t notice anything distinctive coming out of the pit but Guillermo García Calvo kept things together a lot better than Yves Abel did in October.

Otto Schenk’s production makes a better visual impression from the gallery than it did from the Parterre Stehplatz, because you can appreciate the depth of the stage and don’t see the dopey and wrinkly backdrop that clearly.  But it still has the colors and details of a picture postcard and none of the texture that brings something to vivid life, or the ideas that would focus the story in any particular direction beyond a children’s book.  People really like skipping around in circles in this production.  It’s totally kitsch, and while L’elisir d’amore isn’t exactly an opera of extremes, if can be more touching and human and less old-fashioned cute if you give it a push.

Of course it probably looked better in 1973, when this production premiered.  A coat of paint would do wonders, though it wouldn’t make it be about anything.  Remember, you can see this production on DVD with Anna and Rolando.  But if you’re just looking for an Elisir, I recommend Angie and Roberto in happier days more highly.

This is the first full entry in my series Schenk/Anti-Schenk.  The Anti-Schenk counterpart will be David Bösch’s Bayerische Staatsoper production, which I’ll see in early January.  Also, I am prepared to take whatever consequences I deserve for this post title.  But if L’elisir d’amore were pop music, it wouldn’t be Radiohead in terms of intelligence, would it?

Continue Reading

Review

Don Giovanni: Love in a boring climate

5 Comments

The Wiener Staatsoper’s new production of Don Giovanni was begging to be stolen all night.  Had anyone shown a little initiative and done something exciting, they could have walked off with it in their pocket.  But no, we had a balanced ensemble, and a milquetoast evening it remained to the end.  From the scattered mess of a production to the respectable but not quite distinguished singing, it reminds you that there’s no Don worse than a boring Don.  The orchestra was the best thing about it.

This is historically possibly the single most central work in the Staatsoper’s repertoire, and the disappointment among the premiere crowd was palpable.  Watch out, Herr Meyer, the Stehplatz masses are restless.

Mozart-Da Ponte, Don Giovanni. Wiener Staatsoper, 12/11/2010.  New production premiere by Jean-Louis Martinoty, sets by Hans Schavernoch, costumes by Yan Tx, lights by Fabrice Kebour.  Conducted by Franz Welser-Möst with Ildebrando d’Arcangelo (Don Giovanni), Alex Esposito (Leporello), Sally Matthews (Donna Anna), Roxana Constantinescu (Donna Elvira), Sylvia Schwartz (Zerlina), Saimir Pirgu (Don Ottavio), Albert Dohmen (Commendatore), Adam Plachetka (Masetto)

REMINDER. Follow me on the Twitter!

An article in the Staatsoper magazine trumpets the learned director Martinoty’s consultation of many other Don Giovanni tales (and he name-drops lots of them in the program book interview).  I don’t know whether to suggest he should have spent more time with Mozart and Da Ponte’s text or just to note that he obviously hasn’t found his own version yet.  Because this is a morally confused, interpretive black hole of an opera, and Martinoty does nothing to suggest who Don Giovanni is, or any of the other characters for that matter.  He sticks in some novelties, but there’s no vision or concept to speak of in an opera that demands one.

The production is set in post-war Spain, for no perceptible reason (maybe 1950’s, but I’m not sure! sometimes it looks more recent).  The stage is steeply raked, with a twisted series of proscenium arches.  The sets by Hans Schavernoch consist of a few projected backdrops of Seville, something that looks like a wine cellar to meet Donna Elvira (?), a hotel lobby for Zerlina and Masetto’s wedding, Don Giovanni’s Baroque party room, a rather nice church in lieu of a cemetery, and Don Giovanni’s banquet hall.  In the latter, the statue–a skeleton–confusingly remains from the cemetery, visible for the entire scene, making its dramatic vocal arrival somewhat anticlimactic.  Finally, the Commendatore shows up in person, despite not having appeared except as bones in the previous scene (see the photo at the top of this post).  The curtain frequently comes down for set changes, never for too long, but the interruption in the flow is unfortunate.  So are the cast traffic jams at the too-small exits.

Fun fact: this is the second production of Don Giovanni I have seen in Vienna that is set in a hotel!  But Keith Warner’s Theater an der Wien job was a sleazy, wild masterpiece, which this one isn’t.

The costumes by Yan Tax are blandly 1950’s-ish until everyone dresses up in period finery for the Act 2 finale, some retaining it for Act 2.  The significance of this masquerade is unclear (because glittery suits are fun, and now there are men with ruffles, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, traditionalists?).  The armies of Mozart lookalikes in the stage bands are amusing, though. Of the lighting, by Fabrice Kebour, welch’ Dunkel hier!  I understand a lot of this opera is supposed to take place in the dark, but, for example, shouldn’t we be able to see Donna Anna’s face for her crucial narration of her abduction by Giovanni?  (Putting her far upstage didn’t help either.)  There are a few scenes of highly designed painterly beauty, but the rest of the opera seems to have been forgotten.  Some illumination is provided by a mysterious bare hanging fluorescent tube, which looks like it was a housewarming gift to Dominique Meyer from Achim Freyer.  But no one took any pictures of it, because it looked weird!

While some of the direction is lively and physical, it doesn’t do a very good job of developing the plot or characters or their relationships.  Sometimes logic fails.  Why doesn’t Leporello react before noting the presence of people in the introduction?  What happens in the confusing duel involving a sword umbrella and a flashlight?  Why does Donna Elvira have a voodoo doll?  Why doesn’t Zerlina look at Don Giovanni during “La cì darem la mano”?  What the hell is going on with that statue?  But in the big picture everyone seems to like Don Giovanni: he and Donna Anna apparently have a consensual S&M thing going on, Donna Elvira just wants him back (despite voodoo), and even Don Ottavio is a good buddy.  And Ildebrando D’Arcangelo’s Don seems like a good guy.  He’s friendly, maybe a little aggressive on the romantic side of things, but basically decent.  And that doesn’t make for a very interesting show.

Donna Elvira (Roxana Constantinescu)

In the arias, Martinoty frequently brings in extra characters to give the singers someone to act against–Leporello has a girlfriend in the opening, Donna Elvira gets a priest in “Mi tradi,” and a random servant girl appears repeatedly.  A commenter here already pointed out the concatenation of the Catalog Aria with Zerlina’s wedding, which is nicely done except for shorting out Donna Elvira.  There’s a monk praying through all of the final sextet, who I was expecting to be a reincarnated Don (because the Don dresses up as a monk in the church scene earlier), but nothing so interesting, he was just a monk.  Unfortunately I think this technique ended up being more a crutch than anything else.  And the ending, with its everpresent statue, has none of the crazy intensity that it needs (though Donna Elvira has apparently become a nun), and the descent to hell passes so quickly as to have very little impact. 

Sorry to say so much, but I feel like I had to to describe everything, because this production doesn’t organize itself into easily-summarized coherence.  It doesn’t ever develop any direction or guiding idea.  There’s stuff there, but what’s it all about? AAAHHHH! I DON’T KNOW!!!!

Musically, the highlight was the orchestra, which knows this score inside out and can play it without breaking a sweat.  But there were some conducting issues.  Franz Welser-Möst’s account was more shaped on the orchestral than vocal side, and had coordination issues with the stage.  The tempos tended to be odd, and the pacing lacked drama.  Unfortunately the singing was accomplished without being memorable.  Many of the arias were loud and unsubtle, the ensembles were better.  Appoggiaturas were in oddly short supply.  I prefer baritone Dons to basses, and while D’Arcangelo was perfectly fine, with a darkish lyric tone, he failed to seduce me.  Er, I mean, he’s no Erwin Schrott in the acting department, and didn’t show much in the way of seductive tendencies (and some of us may have found Leporello better-looking, sorry, I’m superficial).  I could have also used more vocal floating in the serenade.  It takes skills to sing the Champagne Aria and take your shirt off at the same time, though.

Donna Anna (Sally Matthews)

Alex Esposito was a vocally solid if not particularly outstanding Leporello, with a very good Catalog Aria and a lighter and higher-sounding tone than his master.  Their relationship didn’t go anywhere, though Esposito was a sparkier presence than D’Arcangelo.  The best of the women was Sally Matthews’s Donna Anna, whose cloudy, sometimes constrained soprano has a vaguely Gheorghiu-esque quality, though more pointed.  She took some time to warm up but gave a committed, grand performance with good coloratura and long phrases.  Roxana Constantinescu’s mezzo Donna Elvira was hindered by a wide vibrato and a lack of contrast and acting detail.  Sylvia Schwartz’s Zerlina was lyric and sweet but understated. Saimir Pirgu sang Don Ottavio with attractive tone but phrasing right out of Puccini, wringing every bit of drama and sentiment out of his two (yes we got both) arias and blasting every “-te” of “morte” in “Dalla sua pace.”   Albert Dohmen disappointed as the Commendatore, not sounding bass-like at all.  Except him, none of the principals were weak, but none really remarkable.

I think a few more tech rehearsals would have done this show good.  I wondered if someone was writing the lighting cues as they were giving them, because they were that bumpy and randomly timed.  Lights would abruptly change in the middle of scenes for no reason, making me suspect a cue was pages late or early.  The trip down to Hell went about three times too quickly and started a good two pages too late, severely screwing up the drama.  If you’re not going to get this kind of thing right at a new production prima, when are you going to?

There was rather a lot of booing at the end, particularly by generally-friendly Vienna standards, though there was also some enthusiastic cheering.  The consensus in the standing room was that it fell short of Wiener Staatsoper standards for both Mozart singing and staging.  “It would be OK for Zurich,” one Stehplatz member said.  “Or Germany.  But in Vienna?”  In my experience Zurich and Germany generally come up with something more interesting than this production-wise, but point taken.

We’re getting a full Da Ponte cycle from this production team.  The Figaro, already seen in Paris and already considered via DVD here, will premiere in February, the Così in two years’ time.

Also, typo in the cast list!  They misspelled “Masetto” as “Masseto”.

Bows–the statue is not THE statue, it is only A statue:

Production photos copyright Wiener Staatsoper, except the first one, copyright APA/Robert Jäger

Continue Reading

Review

Reimann’s Medea: Keeping it in the family

4 Comments

 Aribert Reimann is not easy listening.  His music is modernist with no trace of post-: dense, dissonant, non-tonal, and deadly serious.  But his opera Medea was a surprise hit when it premiered at the Wiener Staatsoper last February, and in its first revival at the house it was not hard to see why.  The libretto is clear as can be, the drama incredibly intense as well as emotionally accessible, and the music, despite its density, tells the story with a directness that is easy to hear even on the first time through.

Reimann, Medea. Wiener Staatsoper, 12/7/2010.  Production by Marco Arturo Marelli, conducted by Michael Boder with Claudia Barainsky (Medea), Adrian Eröd (Jason), Michael Roider (Creon), Stephanie Houtzeel (Creusa), Elisabeth Kulman (Gora), Max Emanuel Cenic (Herold)

(FIRST a quick reminder if you are on the Twitter to follow me on the Twitter so my follower count isn’t pathetic.)

Reimann’s source material is not Euripides or Ovid or Seneca (or even Corneille) but rather the third part of Franz Grillparzer’s trilogy of plays The Golden Fleece (1822).  Reimann adapted the text directly from Grillparzer without a librettist, Salome-style.  This works well.  The language and psychological world of the work feel remarkably modern, with complex characters who are all to some extent sympathetic.  We begin as Medea and Jason seek refuge with King Creon in Corinth, and even many of the thematic concerns of the plot–Medea is a racial outsider who must discard her headscarf–feel all too relevant.

The set represents a hilly, rocky landscape that could be the surface of the moon (and that is how much comfort it seems to give the characters).  An austerely bare modern room sits stage left, rising and falling, sometimes stage level and sometimes connected to the ground by stairs.  This is the home of the “civilized” world of Creon, and he and his tribe wear pure white while Medea, her nurse Gora, and her children wear colorful, vaguely Middle Eastern robes in warm red and purple.  Jason acquires white clothes once he has been brought back into his former home, and the children do as well once they are adopted by Creusa.

Reimann’s music is angular and violent, but each character does develop a distinctive voice.  Orchestrally, there is a lot going on (particularly in the percussion section), but the balance is pretty good.  Medea is one of those insane dramatic coloratura roles characteristic of post-war German opera, she is yet another suffering woman singing high Fs. (See also Die Soldaten, Simplicius Simpiccisimus, the ur-source Lulu, and almost anything else in the repertoire of Claudia Barainsky.  Sometimes I wish Strauss had never opened Pandora’s coloratura box by composing my namesake.)  Medea rages from high notes to low, skipping around everywhere in between.  To my ear her music often sounded vaguely pentatonic, but this may have been my imagination used to pentatonic exotic characters.  Jason’s music (lyric baritone) is no more stable but not as extreme in range.  Creon is a muscular tenor of no great imagination or variety, and Creusa (lyric mezzo) gets the most memorable profile of all, a flurry of silly, bouncy coloratura showing her unknowing superficiality.

It’s an exciting score, and the tension barely lifts from the ghostly start until just before Medea’s (offstage) infanticide. Her solo scene leading up to her murder of her children is a tour de force, starting in haunting quiet and building to the rage she had shown throughout the opera.  But the post-murder coda is full of astonishingly placid lyricism, a cathartic and beautiful end to a score that is otherwise very harsh.  It’s a powerful piece of work, harrowing without the over-the-top, numbingly cruel misery of some modern opera, it’s tragic in the best sense.  (Only in a period like this could a work in which a woman kills her own children be called restrained.)

The production is straightforward and effective.  Jason forcibly leaving Medea in the ascending room stage left, she clinging to his hand, is a particularly memorable image.  Medea’s magic disturbs the (volcanic-looking) rocks upstage–unfortunately as they roll down the hill their unlikely weightlessness is unmistakable.  The blocking is impressively detailed for such complicated music (not to mention for a Wiener Staatsoper revival), and kept everything psychologically clear.

Putting on Reimann in a repertory house is a major challenge, of course.  The singers in this production were the same as in the premiere, with the exception of Claudia Barainsky in the title role (premiere cast Marlis Petersen was to appear in this revival but is ill; Barainsky sang the work’s German premiere this fall) and Stephanie Houtzeel as Creusa.  Note that all these photos show the premiere cast.  But all the singers were spectacularly good with this impossibly difficult music.  Barainsky has a narrow, focussed soprano with considerable power.  She made an earthy, instinctual Medea; according to some other audience members, Petersen was more aloof.  Adrian Eröd was a smoothly sung, dramatically conflicted Jason, and Houtzeel sang Creusa with flowing tone and skipped around like she was in a Mozart opera.  There wasn’t a weak link in the whole cast, really, Elisabeth Kulman’s dramatic Gora, Michael Roider’s Herod-like Creon, and Max Emanuel Cencic’s forceful countertenor Herold were all strong.

Michael Boder did an excellent job balancing orchestra to singers.  It’s hard to tell in this kind of score if everyone is together or not, but I did get the impression the orchestra was hanging on by the skin of their collective teeth at times. There were attacks that I believe were supposed to be together that were not.  Passagework was dicey, and sections on opposite sides of the pit sounded questionably coordinated.  But I’m not sure if I can really blame them for this.

This was the last performance of this opera this season.  If you’re interested in seeing this work–and I hope you are–a DVD of the premiere is now available.  (It’s available at the Staatsoper, at least, I can’t find it on Amazon yet.)

Next: Tomorrow night is the premiere of Il Postino at the Theater an der Wien, but I think I will be going next week.  I’ll be at the premiere of the new Don Giovanni at the Staatsoper on Saturday for sure.

Bows.  The fellow in the suit on the right is Reimann himself:

Production photos copyright Wiener Staatsoper.

Continue Reading

Review

Rigoletto: Puffy shorts brigade

7 Comments

Take three first-rate voices (Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ramón Vargas, and Patrizia Ciofi), one of which might not be quite ideally cast (guess), add a psssshhhht, and you have Rigoletto. That last bit is the sweet song of separating Velcro on the Gilda-containing sack in the last scene. Just another rep night at the Staatsoper.

Verdi, Rigoletto. Wiener Staatsoper, 16/11/10. Production by Sandro Sequi, conducted by Michael Güttler with Ramón Vargas (Duca), Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Rigoletto), Patrizia Ciofi (Gilda), Kurt Rydl (Sparafucile), Nadia Krasteva (Maddalena)

Dmitri Hvorostovsky is no more a pathetic loser than Juan Diego Flórez is. Hvorostovsky’s carelessly sprightly Rigoletto wasn’t annoyingly smug like Flórez’s Nemorino, but he was even less plausible on a theatrical level. Looking only mildly bedraggled, hunching over roughly half the time, and giving one or two rakish smiles too many, he was closer to being the drunken life of the party than an outsider from it. Rigoletto flirting with the Countess Ceprano seems a little wrong somehow, or at least it does in a production as utterly conventional as this one. I’m sure Hvorostovsky has a more convincing Rigoletto in him, but he’s not the best actor and is so naturally unsuited for the part that it would require more rehearsal than a Staatsoper rep performance gets to bring it out.

Vocally there were some weird things going on. His tone sounded much darker than I remember from the last time I heard him (around a year and a half ago, Trovatore at the Met), and I wonder if he’s doing something odd to get the volume. He was perfectly audible for the Staatsoper’s size, but the tone lacked brilliance. It’s still a deluxe voice, but I liked the moments when he lightened up a bit to a rounder, more resonant sound best. It wasn’t bad at all, but based on this outing Rigoletto is not a role that plays to his strengths.

He smartly positioned himself in one of the stage’s hot spots downstage left for “Pari siamo.” It’s always interesting to see which singers manage to gravitate towards the acoustically best locations on the stage (Flórez is also adept at this). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to interest the lighting folks, and he was completely in the dark for the entire monologue. Better unseen than unheard, though, especially when suffering from an excess of hotttness.

Ramón Vargas was an undercharacterized but stylishly and assuredly sung Duke. His ease and comfort with the notes and the style were impressive, however I wish they had led him to a more dynamic portrayal. I think the years of heavier rep are beginning to take a toll on his voice, which has the traces of a beat and can be kind of spread and unfocused, but the sound is still pleasant. No high C, which I think was wise; the high Bs sounded excellent. (OOPS, I mean high D, not that either, even better that he skipped it.)  Experienced Maddalena Nadia Krasteva (last seen feeling up a different tenor as the Foreign Princess in Munich’s Rusalka) managed to light up her short scene, getting more life out of Vargas than he had shown in the rest of the opera.

Patrizia Ciofi as Gilda was the most unqualified vocal success of the evening, with a clear yet full sound that sounded bell-like in the coloratura. Her very top notes turned shrill, and she rushed through the “Caro nome” cadenza, singing the highest section legato. However, for the most part this was really lovely and vibrant singing. Gildas often sound generically angelic, but she was nicely distinctive. Acting-wise she did the best she could, somewhat more engaged than Vargas but nothing particularly innovative.

Smaller roles were fine. Kurt Rydl sounded ancient and wobbly as Sparafucile but he sure was loud. Janusz Monarcha as Monterone could graduate to Sparafucile should Rydl ever retire. Michael Güttler led a conventional but tight account of the score with good control over the tempos and only a few coordination hitches with the chorus and offstage bands. The orchestra sounded slightly below their usual standard, the brass particularly out to lunch.  Everyone sang their lungs out in a shapeless “Bella figlia dell’ amore,” leading to a most graceless effect.

I believe this production has received a sprucing-up since I last saw it in 2006. The new costumes are rather loud and fussy. Rigoletto’s jester’s suit looks like a tribute to the German flag via the Italian Renaissance, there are more men in tights than there should be when the men are not ballet dancers, and even Gilda’s man costume has puffy slashed sleeves. Their brightness clashes badly with the same old, faded set. It’s all by-the-numbers, though some things could be improved: why does Giovanna enter with the music obviously portraying Gilda? And that Velcro is just a crime. Shame on you, Staatsoper tech. I have been there–I believe it was around “Venite, inginocchiatevi”–and I have chosen not to do that.

Bows. I got one at the end of Act 2, the other is from the actual end:

 
Vargas, Ciofi, Güttler, Krasteva, Hvotostovsky, Rydl

 Scenic photos copyright Wiener Staatsoper (first one credited to Axel Zeiniger), bows photos by me.

Next: I got a ticket to hear Thielemann and the Philharmoniker’s Beethoven show on Saturday.

Continue Reading

Review

Alcina: Bewitched but unbothered

4 Comments

ANJA HARTEROS.  She’s the reason why you should see this Alcina.  The Wiener Staatsoper’s Baroque experiment is good enough, but only the resplendent Harteros and the fab Les Musiciens de Louvre in the pit elevate it above the blandly pretty.  Adrian Noble’s production is incoherent, but all told not really that bad.  The whole of this one is surprisingly better than most of its parts.  I think we can mostly credit Handel and Harteros for that.

Handel, Alcina.  Wiener Staatsoper, 14/11/10.  New production premiere directed by Adrian Noble with sets and costumes by Anthony Ward, lights by Jean Kalman, choreography by Sue Lefton.  Les Musiciens de Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski  with Anja Harteros (Alcina), Vesselina Kasarova (Ruggiero), Veronica Cangemi (Morgana), Kristina Hammarström (Bradamante), Shintaro Nakajima (Oberto), Benjamin Bruns (Oronte), Adam Plachetka (Melisso).

Based on Adrian Noble’s pre-premiere ramblings, I expected his production to be rather convoluted.  It is not.  It has a frame narrative: the drama of Alcina is being performed by 18th-century British aristocrats for their, heh, peers.   But the 18th-century characters do not have identities separate from their characters in Alcina, so it never gets very complicated.  (Or interesting.  However, considering how tricky these theater-in-theater productions are to pull off, maybe it’s best left half-baked.)  All the concept means is that we are in an 18th-century salon with some 18th-century audience members wandering in and out (you can’t see them in any of the pictures I could find, sorry).  They tend to leave for the most intimate moments, so they don’t get in the way, which doesn’t make much logical sense.  It indicates how seriously Noble takes this frame–not very.

The set is a stately, luxuriously appointed room whose back wall opens up to reveal a green field.  It’s such a direct rip-off of Robert Carsen’s Garnier/La Scala Alcina that it’s not even funny.  (I couldn’t find a good picture of the whole Staatsoper set, unfortunately, but trust me here.  Here is the Carsen.  I will add a photo comparison if I can come up with one.)  But it’s very pretty, the design is elaborate and eye-catching with many bright and shiny colors.  The breaking of Alcina’s enchantments is equated with a dark, star-filled sky, absent her male admirers.  Bradamante and Melisso cutely arrive on the island via hot air balloon.  We get touches of Eastern exoticism in Ruggiero’s silk vest and Alcina’s fringed umbrellas.  The dance interludes, diverting enough, feature Alcina’s spirits, her “ombre pallide,” generically Eastern (yet pale) men.  Oberto’s father in the form of a lion is a charmingly homespun effect.

But mostly the costumes reveal that we are in that well-known theatrical era familiar from many productions of Mozart, Molière, and Bartlett Sher’s Met Barbiere di Siviglia: the Slutty 18th Century.  This mythic era, most often explored by straight male directors, is just like the regular 18th century except with more corsets and cleavage.  Women habitually wear only their underclothes in public.  Dresses mysteriously fall off mid-aria, never to be recovered.  This afflicts soubrettes most frequently, but any woman is vulnerable.  See also Slutty Early 19th Century, AKA Anna Netrebko in the Met’s Don Pasquale.  This setting has been brought to you by the Male Gaze.

I don’t think that Noble has a single thing to say about Alcina, about the lady’s magic or her society.  His much-vaunted Duchess of Devonshire (see his notes linked above) is alluded to in (YES!) a giant hat at the very beginning of the opera, but otherwise the 18th-century elements are purely aesthetic.  The frame merely adds an alienation effect, which makes me suspect that Noble doesn’t really trust the libretto to work when taken seriously on its own terms.  I think this is a shame, and it helps make this a rather emotionally shallow production.  We end with a collective dance that is reminiscent of Twelfth Night.  (Or any chaconne ending of an earlier Baroque opera.)  Just another evening’s entertainment, it raineth every day, etc.

But while it never gets below the surface of the work, this is actually a nice evening.  It rarely drags through its four hour running time, which is no small achievement.  The Personenregie of each individual number is mostly good, the plot is dealt with clearly and straightforwardly.  The blocking is naturalistic with no coloratura choreography or other Sellers/McVicars/etc. whimsy.  There are moments of stillness when it’s needed, such as Alcina’s “Ah mio cor,” and more elaborate stagings when needed, such as Ruggiero’s “Sta nell’ircana pietrosa tana.”  It doesn’t pack much of an emotional punch and is very generic, but it works.

The inclusion of Les Musiciens de Louvre in the pit was the production’s big experiment.  Media accounts before the premiere fretted about whether a Baroque opera would work in the Staatsoper acoustic.  While it’s not ideal, it is more than satisfactory.  The orchestra here is very large for Handel, around 50 people.  I wonder if they could have gotten away with less without sounding skimpy, this group fills the theater nicely but sounds a little too big for the music.  The contrast between continuo and full orchestra ritornello was jarring.  But the orchestra sounds great, crisp and precise and nimble.  They use vibrato tastefully, particularly the soloists.  I liked the inclusion of the obligato instrumental soloists onstage, which gives the sound a wonderful intimate quality and liveness.  Marc Minkowski conducted with quick but never excessive tempos, lovely phrasing in the dance movements, and good coordination.  Vocal ornamentation was similarly middle-of-the-road, tasteful and idiomatic.  Overall, it’s a good compromise between big opera house music and period practice.

Anja Harteros is a magnificent singer, with an incredibly rich and complicated sound that she perfectly colors to each phrase.  I haven’t heard her in a few years and had forgotten how good she is.  Everything in her performances just fits together vocally and theatrically in a way few singers manage.  Her voice is large for Handel, but while I’m sure there are more virtuosic singers of “Ombra pallide,” she can, well, handle all the role’s demands in a gratifyingly large-scale way.  She is a strong presence as Alcina, both powerful and privately vulnerable.  (And her tallness helps her, made even more notable by an extremely tall wig.)  Her “Ah! mio cor” was a tour de force of both voice and acting, going from despair to violence to resignation.  I think she could be devastating given a better production, but the fineness of her singing is a considerable reward in itself.

Vesselina Kasarova confuses me, though she’s very popular here.  Her sound is certainly unique, but it’s very uneven.  She sounds like different singers in different registers, from hollow, throaty lower notes to an iffy middle register to more powerful and focused higher notes, and her phrases are inevitably broken up into segments.  Her coloratura is fast but more aspiration than note.  Her Ruggiero was suitably impetuous and heroic, and she had a few moments, notably a very expressive “Mi lusinga il dolce affetto.”

The standout in the smaller roles was Kristina Hammerstörm’s impeccably sung Bradamante, with all the vocal evenness Kasarova lacked.  Veronica Cangemi (center in picture, right) does not have the vocal freshness that would be ideal for Morgana, and got off to a rough start in “O s’apre al riso,” scooping towards the high notes and mostly missing, but her richer soprano voice was rewarding in “Ama, sospira,” and her “Tornami al vagheggiar” accomplished.  Vienna Boys’ Choir member Shintaro Nakajima was a small wonder as Oberto.  I usually can’t stand little kids singing, but this boy was amazing, singing all three (!) difficult arias with confidence, accuracy, and lovely clear tone.  Benjamin Bruns was fine as Oronte, Adam Platcheka very good as Melisso (both are ensemble members).

Intendant Dominique Meyer can continue to breathe easy, there were enthusiastic cheers at the end for the singers and orchestra, and moderate ones for the production team.  No booing.  His real test will come next month with a new Don Giovanni, a considerably riskier endeavor.

Another note: the orchestra was rehearsing in the hall up until the last second, delaying the standing room admittance considerably.  We could hear them as we waited, eventually Meyer emerged from the theater (and said hello).  We were let in shortly afterwards with only 20 minutes before the starting time.  I tied my scarf in the front of Parterre standing room and then got out of the theater, to the Würstelstand, ate a Wurst, ran back to the opera house, through the coat check, through the WC line, bought a program, and back to my scarf.  All in under 15 minutes, with five minutes to spare before the start of the opera.  I impressed myself, at least.  My stomach wasn’t so happy about it, but four hours of Handel opera while hungry would have been worse.

Next: I wandered around during intermission in the hopes of running into Dmitri Hvorostovsky.  I failed, but I’ll be seeing him in Rigoletto on Tuesday.

I’m sorry the photos I have here are so non-illustrative, I will try to find some better ones.  I was strangely lucky with the bows photos this time, here are a few:


Continue Reading

Review

Die Zauberflöte: The best spirit in the world

1 Comment

If last week’s less-than-intoxicating L’elisir d’amore exhibited the worst tendencies of the Wiener Staatsoper repertory system, last night’s Zauberflöte showed some of its better ones.  Despite a scattershot production and some workmanlike singing, the average level of artistry was pretty good.  Add the usual strengths of orchestra and chorus, stellar conducting by Ivor Bolton, and a smashing Pamina from Genia Kühmeier and you have a first-rate night out.  More or less.

Mozart, Die Zauberflöte.  Wiener Staatsoper, 3/11/2010.  Production by Marco Arturo Marelli, conducted by Ivor Bolton with Genia Kühmeier (Pamina), Jeanette Vecchione (Queen of the Night), Norbert Ernst (Tamino), Markus Werba (Papageno), Kwangchul Youn (Sarastro).

Marco Arturo Marelli’s abstract Zauberflöte production has a few things going for it: a most excellent dragon, some pretty lighting (sometimes too dark) and a refusal to overwhelm the characters with visual effects (cough Julie Taymor at the Met cough).  But that’s about it.  The set hails from the era of the big white cube, but features many skewed planes.  Its lack of right angles made me want to go hug a bookshelf.

But more seriously it lacks profundity or any clear vision of the piece, awkwardly mixing humor and seriousness.  There’s a grab bag of ideas–the three boys as mini-Mozarts, some Masonic stuff, the obligatory Big Black Box o’ Mystery, Papageno frequently hiding in a mini-version of the big set–but what it says about good and evil, enlightenment, and all that jazz beats me.  Maybe it was clearer when the production originally appeared, but last night any transcendence was going to have to happen from the music alone.

Luckily that turned out well.  Ivor Bolton coaxed a lean HIP-ish sound out of the reduced orchestra, and conducted with both an excellent sense of dramatic pacing and sensitivity for details.  Despite a shortage of glamorous voices, everything was together, of a piece, and, for a repertory evening, impressively clean and well-balanced.  Both the orchestra and chorus sounded great.

There were two vocal standouts: foremost Genia Kühmeier’s pure, expressive, and transparent Pamina.  She has a clear kind of soprano in the Janowitz model, not a large voice and sometimes squeezed at the top, but very beautiful.  Kwangchul Youn’s lyric Sarastro lacked the cavernous dark bass usual for this role, but his warm tone and musicality more than made up for this. (If you think René Pape is a fine Sarastro, you would like Youn; if you think Pape is too lightweight you probably wouldn’t.)

In other roles, Markus Werba proved a perfectly OK, rather aggressive Papageno who failed to make me laugh until well into Act 2 but didn’t irritate either.  Jeanette Vecchione has the notes for the Queen of the Night’s second aria, but lacks the dramatic timing for the recitative of the first, and sounded a bit too gentle and sweet.  Norbert Ernst was a largish-voiced Tamino and struggled with the higher parts of “Dies Bildnis,” but sounded more at ease elsewhere, if not exciting.  As usual, the smaller roles were all sung well, though the Three Ladies seemed to be competing with one another for volume as well as for Tamino.

Except for Kühmeier and Youn it was hardly a Sternstunde, and the incoherent production and long stretches of dialogue turned dull in Act 2.  But between the conducting and the usual “Mozart, duh,” a worthy night for the Staatsoper.

Next: Royal Concertgebouw on Sunday morning at the Musikverein.  Gaaaaah, early.  I love me some Tchaik 4 but believe the only appropriate way to experience it before lunch is in an orchestra rehearsal.  When you’re playing it yourself.  This will be interesting.

Photos copyright Wiener Staatsoper.

Continue Reading