Review

Turandot: Love bug

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So, you have an opera with a frankly barbaric score and libretto. Say, Turandot. What is a violent, dangerous setting for this that doesn’t imply that Chinese society is prone to these kinds of things? I know, insects! They’re vicious, right?

This is the most spectacular production I’ve seen at the Volksoper, and orchestrally one of the best as well. And the basic idea of setting Turandot with bugs is kind of nifty. Unfortunately, it’s the only idea director Renaud Doucet and designer André Barbe (the team responsible for last fall’s Rusalka) seem to have had. Sure looks cool, though!

Puccini, Turandot. Volksoper Wien, 3/28/2011. Production (revival) directed by Renaud Doucet, sets by André Barbe. Conducted by Enrico Dovico with Anda-Louise Bogza (Turandot), Mario Zhang (Caláf), Melba Ramos (Liú).

Turandot

The production starts off rather well. We’re in some community consisting entirely of insects of various types and statuses. Some are workers, some guards, some officials, and some leaders. The costumes are colorful and spectacular, and the dark backdrop and dim lighting gives it a scary air. A tall black figure with enormous talons appears early in Act 1 and it seems implied that she is Turandot, but it turns out that Turandot is actually a much less interesting fuzzy white figure. The talon lady is Death or something (having some role in Prince of Persia’s execution, and later Liù’s method of suicide), but like most things in this production she exists more as a visual gesture than a dramatic one.

It’s all quite intimidating and inhuman and ceremonial, and while it feels perfect for the music’s violence, the inhumanity also proves to be the production’s biggest stumbling block. Despite the visual impact of the big moments, the staging doesn’t do a very good job of telling the story and exploring the characters. I don’t think this was inevitable consequence of the buggy-ness of it all, but it’s how it turned out. The overwhelming visuals, monumental costumes, and static blocking don’t enable the singers to emerge from the atmosphere as personalities, and the concept is too static to pick up the slack. Barbe’s choreography (I assume, there is no other choreographer credited) was a weak point, as in Rusalka, and even when performed by bugs resembles Jazzercise. So despite a promising start, the production proved disappointing as it failed to develop over the course of the subsequent acts. There are many nice visual touches, though.

Liù and Calaf

The Volksoper orchestra, conducted by Enrico Dovico, tackled the score with enthusiasm and significant decibel count, sounding bigger and more polished than they usually do. None of the singers had the power to compete. Anda-Louise Bogza has a large though not enormous Italianate soprano with a broad vibrato and warm if sometimes spread tone. She had some exciting moments and to her credit mostly sang and did not scream, but lacks the cutting high C’s to be a truly memorable Turandot. Mario Zhang’s dark and muscular sound and stiff phrasing did little to bring life to Calaf, who I’m pretty sure now is the actual villain of the piece. Melba Ramos had a shaky start as Liu but mustered the best overall singing of the cast with a slightly covered, smoky lyric soprano and good dynamic control. Supporting roles were adequately sung, though the Emperor headed south over the course of each phrase, ending each painfully flat.

With some more focused Personenregie (to be fair, it is a revival) and more Konzept for Acts 2 and 3 (sorry, there are some things you really need German for), this could have been a lot better. Pittsburgh residents should note that Barbe and Doucet are currently in your town with a second, much more traditional Turandot. They recently compared the two productions in an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The US gets a more traditional version, because opera with bugs apparently falls under the category of Shit We Americans Really Can’t Handle. (The Neuenfels Nabucco with bees would probably go over badly as well. And isn’t there a Claus Guth Barbiere with bugs in Leipzig?)

At the Volksoper, two performances remain, on April 7 and 10. You can also see a short video on their website.

Photos copyright Volksoper Wien.

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Review

Dominique Meyer talks

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Tomorrow night Wiener Staatsoper chief Dominique Meyer will be speaking at the Rathaus. His topic is “Die Einzigartigkeit der Wiener Staatsoper in der gegenwärtigen Opernwelt,”or, “The Singularity of the Wiener Staatsoper in Today’s Operatic World.”* 7:00 in the Festsaal, free. I’ll be there and will report if anything particularly interesting or outrageous is related. The description makes it sound insufferably smug already, so I may grab a seat near the door.

One question: when is the next season going to be announced? I heard a report that it wasn’t going to be until around April 20, which is quite late, but that may be wrong. (Update: Twitterer @Goldie_Vienna tells me it is going to be April 12.) Expect a new production of La Traviata with Natalie Dessay, directed by Jean-François Sivadier (co-production with Aix, premiering there this summer), Anna Netrebko as Tatiana and the Figaro Countess (both revivals), a new Don Carlo with Krassimira Stoyanova and Piotr Beczala, probably a new From the House of the Dead directed by Peter Konwitschny (co-production with Zürich, premiering there in June) and a revival of Der Rosenkavalier with Anja Harteros. The David McVicar Adriana Lecouvreur, already seen in London, is coming, but that could be further off in the future. That’s all I got, though I can guess that our friends Barbiere, Elisir, Zauberflöte and so on aren’t going to be going away.

*Nowhere else do so many wonderful artists come together and produce so many wildly unpredictable and often mediocre performances! Well, that might not be quite what he will say.

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Review

Regietheater for social justice?

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What are we saying when we say that the integrity of works of art transcends humanitarian concerns?… Are we not saying that artists and art lovers are entitled to moral indifference–and worse, that the greater the artist the greater the entitlement?… Are we not debased and degraded, both as artists and as human beings, by such a commitment to “abstract musical worth”? And for a final thought, has that commitment nothing to do with the tremendous decline that the prestige of classical music–and of high art in general–has suffered in our time?
-Richard Taruskin, “Stalin Lives on in the Concert Hall, But Why?” collected in On Russian Music, page 280.

Taruskin’s immediate topic is music written for Stalin. But the point could apply to anything. Music is not inherently good, or always morally neutral. It cannot be completely divorced from the circumstances that produced it and the causes it has served and promoted. And to grant it absolution based on its greatness is to ignore its rhetorical power. Opera, laden with librettos, is filled with these issues right on the surface–issues of gender, of race, of power, of imperialism. They aren’t always as cataclysmic as Stalinism, but they often cut closer to our daily life. Yet opera doesn’t come to life until you put it on stage, and so it also has a unique tool at its disposal.

Any work of art is a product of its time, for better or worse. Opera in particular, due to the expense involved in its production, is often beholden to popular or powerful taste. And many operas have baggage, whatever its source. Read Susan McClary’s classic Carmen analysis from her book Feminine Endings and Taruskin’s essay on Prince Igor for an idea of the issues here.

But does every telling of Carmen, Madama Butterfly, or Prince Igor reinforce these narratives? I would argue that they can. Even if you’re a savvy modern person who thinks you know better, what you see onstage still can shape your view of the world, particularly when delivered in the seductive guise of great music. (And if you don’t think that a more than negligible percentage of operas have problems, some small, others big blackface-type problems, but problems, you may not be paying enough attention to what you are absorbing.) Music has power, and how long until excusal becomes agreement?

Taruskin is so damn quotable. He says in the Igor piece, linked to above, “[The implication is] that great music sanitizes everything it touches, including us. Is that so? Is music sanitary? Or is music persuasive, an engulfing force that lessens resistance to whatever words or images it carries to our minds and hearts?” He obviously thinks the latter, and I agree. I’m not saying that we should stop performing or seeing these works, but to be decent citizens we need to do so in a clear-headed way and talk about this stuff once in a while. And if opera wants to be anything more than a problematic curio cabinet, it has to be willing to confront the implications of its own texts.

That’s why I love it when an enterprising director decides to stage an opera in a way that takes the problem bits head-on and challenges them. This kind of revisionist Regietheater is loathed by traditionalists. “But we must respect the work! This dishonors the composer! It’s ugly!” But why we should respect something’s sexist or racist elements, and why does a 150-year old text that was never intended for such a long life deserve such sacred status at all? Revisionist productions are difficult to pull off and many misfire. But even the failures make you think about what you are seeing in a way a conventional production usually doesn’t. The next time you see a traditional production of that opera–and you probably will, they’re still the vast majority–you will be more aware.

Here is a mild example: Madama Butterfly. Puccini made a respectable-for-his-time attempt to learn about Japanese culture, but the opera is still filled with exoticized characters, cliché exotic music (just about everybody east of Bulgaria has an inordinate fondness for pentatonic scales, according to Opera), and a problematic woman victim figure. In his ENO/Met production, Anthony Minghella tried to present not another Westerner’s Orientalist image of Japan but, since we enjoy much closer connections with Japan than Puccini did, include more authentic Japanese design and steer away from some of the more cliched traditional images associated with this opera. Most importantly, actual Japanese performing arts were incorporated with a Bunraku puppet as Trouble. No one on the production team was Japanese, so issues of appropriation could still be fairly raised, but I think we can consider it an improvement in some areas at least.

I don’t think anyone seriously objected to this production. It was beautiful and left the story as we are used to seeing it. More radical rethinkings are harder to pull off and more likely to anger people. La Cieca at Parterre recently wrote a wonderful piece analyzing Calixto Bieito’s complex production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, which sparked just such a discussion; it’s well worth reading.

Another ambitious example is Martin Kušej’s production of Rusalka (pictured at the top of this post). The story is familiar: a beautiful, fragile, innocent spirit has to gives up her voice (!), family, and entire world to get a man. The Prince is only a little bothered by her muteness, but her place is still stolen by the conniving, worldly Foreign Princess (virgin/whore dichotomy, anyone?). She returns a disgraced outcast. You see the problems? (Danish feminists even decapitated a Little Mermaid statue once.)

Kušej reinvented all of this. In a take on the Natascha Kampusch case, Rusalka and her sisters were imprisoned in her father’s (the Water Goblin’s) basement, but once Rusalka escaped–at great cost–she was too damaged to survive the outside world. Instead of a beautiful, otherworldly, sacrificing nymph, we had a real woman who had been beaten into that fragile condition. Her otherwordliness was no longer romantic, her treatment by her oppressor, by the Prince, and even by Jezibaba incredibly cruel. There is an implicit critique of a society that finds such stories so beautiful without wondering why.

Not everything has to be a guilt trip, but just because the music is great doesn’t mean we can pledge blind allegiance–in fact, we should be particularly careful around the greatest music. Revisionist productions often seem depressing, but I think they can actually be the most inspiring of all, because they give voice to people who had been silenced.

Rusalka photo copyright Bayerische Staatsoper
Butterfly photo copyright Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

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Review

Elektra: Turban outfitters

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Despite having a cool-looking production for once, the Wiener Staatsoper’s photos have failed me again, hence the above. Everyone wears turbans, obviously, which is only fitting for an opera full of screaming divas. This iteration of Harry Kupfer’s production, with Janice Baird and Agnes Baltsa conducted by Peter Schneider is surprisingly not bad, which is not the same as saying that all of it is good, but you could do a lot worse.

Strauss, Elektra. Wiener Staatsoper, 3/24/2011. Production by Harry Kupfer (revival), conducted by Peter Schneider with Janice Baird (Elektra), Agnes Baltsa (Klytämnestra), Silvana Dussmann (Chrysothemis), Ain Anger (Orest), Michael Roider (Aegisth).

The Staatsoper actually does provide a washed-out photo of this production, but it doesn’t do the unit set justice:

It looks pretty good! A giant statue, presumably of Agamemnon, is seen from the knees down, its toppled head hanging out off to the side. (I think the Met Elektra also involves a toppled statue?) It is stark, the lighting is starker. We open with some slaughtering and business with meat-hooks, but for the most part the production as seen now is totally conventional. Only the absence of an ax in the finale is unusual. The costumes mix a variety of periods: generic Middle Eastern, futuristic sci-fi, and a little fin-de-siècle with some epaulets and a sequined gown for Klytämnestra. The raked stage and darkness reminds me of the Staatsoper’s recent new Mozart productions... oh, the sets and lights for both were designed by Hans Schavernoch. Figures.

I was surprised how much this look helped things feel fresh, because interpretively there isn’t much going on and the Personenregie was not any better than your typical revival of a 1965 Boleslaw Barlog production. Kupfer is a good director of singers and I think it’s fair to guess that this production originally succeeded on this count. But any trace of that has disappeared in this 55th performance of the production. The blocking was a typically bad case of unmotivated milling around, with a few stretches that were horribly static. There’s a lot of pushing and knocking people to the floor. That fits this opera, but when done unconvincingly it just looks dumb.

But there were musical rewards. Peter Schneider can usually be counted on for a better-than-average workmanlike performance, but he was having a good night, and got the orchestra to turn in an exciting, churning, tense evening that occasionally made it to (sorry) Elektra-fying. It was all very loud and often drowned out the singers, who were constantly struggling to be heard, but come on, it’s Elektra. If there’s ever an opera where the orchestra deserves to be too loud, it’s this one. Shame that the Staatsoper seems to have cast a bevy of Mozart singers as the serving maids–they were overpowered almost completely. We can only hope these ladies aren’t also all going to be valkyries in a few weeks.

Janice Baird’s angular profile looks perfect as Elektra, but her performance had a lot of ups and downs. She took almost the entire opening monologue to warm up, sounding cloudy and underpowered (OK, against the Orchestra of Doom), but over the course of the opera her voice became more steely and cutting. A good effort, overall. Theatrically, a few well-observed acting details stuck out, but for the most part she was too static, particularly in the opening monologue where she was confined to a foot of the giant statue, gripping some hanging ropes. She and Orest cannot free themselves from these ropes attached to Agamemnon’s statue! The symbolism, it overwhelms.

Silvana Dussmann was new to me and a pleasant surprise as Chrysothemis, singing with a passionate outpouring of sound in a very nice full jugendlich-dramatische soprano. Her middle voice is her strongest feature, and sometimes her top notes would turn shrill and thin.

Agnes Baltsa is older than dirt (though she isn’t admitting it in her headshot in the program), and was never really a Klytämnestra voice if you ask me. There are some holes in her range and the tone is threadbare and has an unpleasant nasal edge. But what she lacks in voice she achieves in vicious dramatic histrionics, and she can sing the part, just not terribly well. I preferred Felicity Palmer at the Met last year in this role, while I would choose both Baird and Dussmann over their New York counterparts Bullock and Voigt.

Ain Anger was an exceptionally good Orest, singing with warm tone and excellent attention to the text. I am now looking forward to hearing him as Hunding in Walküre. Michael Roider was a sufficiently abrasive Aegisth, but sounded rather better than most do in this role. The supporting folks struggled against the orchestra with varying degrees of success–as all the leads did throughout the evening.

After that mediocre Salome I had low expectations for this one, but it is in fact totally worth seeing.

(Also, let’s have a moment for the patron opera of standees everywhere: “Ich kann nicht sitzen.”)

All my bows photos were blurry this time but I did get this shot of the surtitles’ odd closing. After Elektra? Really?

Production photo copyright Wiener Staatsoper.

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Review

Rodelinda: Another jailbreak

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Nikolaus Harnoncourt brought in a crew he presumably could trust for his new Theater an der Wien Rodelinda. That would be his son Philipp, who did the directional honors with a slightly amateurish but mostly compelling modernized production of this dark opera. Harnoncourt the elder and his orchestra supplied most of the glamor of the evening, though with resident Baroque sex symbols Malena Ernman and Danielle De Niese in the cast there was plenty of undressing onstage as well, this being modern and all. It all turns out somewhat better than it may deserve to.

Handel, Rodelinda. Theater an der Wien, 3/22/2011. New production by Philipp Harnoncourt, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt with the Concentus Musicus Wien and Danielle De Niese (Rodelinda), Bejun Mehta (Bertarido), Kurt Streit (Grimoaldo), Konstantin Wolff (Garibaldo), Malena Ernman (Eduige), Matthias Rexroth (Unulfo).

This post marks a new way of writing for me, which I hope y’all will like. For this performance I’ve gone official! If you go here, you can read my more-concise-than-usual review on the excellent classical music website Bachtrack. It says this, among other things:

Philipp Harnoncourt eschews the jokey post-modern antics of many Handel productions in favor of a realistic, deadly serious approach. The entire production takes place around a grim cement apartment block whose exact geographic location is never clear. The multi-level set revolves to reveal different locations and personalities, from the thugs’ hangout to teenagers and children, showing more than one group at once… But Harnoncourt’s creativity can get the best of him, and sometimes the multiple mini-dramas unfolding at once obscure the narrative thrust and emotional arc of the plot…Yet in a broad sense the production is successful, and the drama gripping.

Go read the rest! (And look around this interesting website!) But here I shall elaborate on a few points. I think this format may free me from my unfortunate compulsion to be comprehensive.

This production gave off a slightly unfinished air at times, in need of a good editor who would cut the extraneous bits. There’s so much going on that has only tangential relation to the plot. You suspect the director fears a vacuum and doesn’t trust himself or the material. And some of the staging itself wasn’t convincingly done, occasionally slipping into unintentional comedy, most notably when Grimoaldo ambushes Rodelinda and Bertarido by popping out of a wardrobe. You maybe could play Rodelinda as a black comedy, but that’s not what this production did. In fact, its unending bleakness was rather exhausting, visually monotonous and just kind of drab, though ultimately fitting for the opera. It’s a gloomy piece.

This was maybe the inverse of the Staatsoper’s Alcina from last November. There, I thought the big picture was severely lacking but the aria-level Personenregie was pretty good. Here, the big picture was right, but on the detailed level things were amiss. Some arias were good: I particularly liked the staging of Rodelinda’s “Se’l mio duol non è si forte,” in which she torturously walks up and down a staircase. The last act was definitely the strongest. This is the point when many productions go downhill, so that suggests that the basic concept is good. Both productions were, on the whole, more or less successful, but neither quite ideal.

I have to say I don’t quite get the immense buzz around Malena Ernman. I know it probably has to do with looks and her spectacularly Europop Eurovision song (DeNiese definitely has her looks to thank as well), but while she’s perfectly fine I just don’t hear her as anything particularly special. She can sing low notes, but the tone is dull and lacks resonance. De Niese, for her part, is really compelling in person and knows how to give a smart performance, but her coloratura was surprisingly sloppy and I found her pop-influenced phrasing just infuriating. The cut of most of one of her arias (“Morra, si”) was musically awkward, and while I don’t know why it was cut I have to wonder if her singing had something to do with it–it’s not an easy aria, with a lot of long exposed runs. And in “Spietati, io vi giurai,” she copied Dorothea Röschmann’s ornamentations–only an octave lower!

But the orchestra is really great and you should go see it for them. And Bejun Mehta, who is spectacular (as I say in the full review above).

I’ll still be blogging here in the regular manner as well, but am going to be working with this two-part format more as well, we’ll see how it all works out.

Photos copyright Werner Kmetitisch

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Review

Putting it together: The art of revival

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An opera “production” can be many things. It can mean big realistic sets and costumes, it can mean a meticulously directed masterpiece of acting, it can mean a conceptual extravaganza later summarized as “the [opera title] with the [weird thing].”

But if it was created it for a repertory theater–an opera house that alternates different operas on different nights–it’s most likely going to be revived. (If it isn’t, it was probably really, really bad.) After that nice four- to six- week period of rehearsals and first run of performances, the costumes go in the closet, the sets in the warehouse, and the big binders of blocking on the shelf. They will emerge later and be used to reproduce the production, usually with much less rehearsal time, different cast members, and sometimes without the presence of the original director. Pro singers are good at getting everything together in a hurry, but it’s understandable that a cast with longer bonding time is generally more polished.

In a big repertory house like the Met or the Wiener Staatsoper, the majority of performances are such revivals. Vienna in particular is notorious for rehearsing its revivals for only a few days, often not onstage at all, before pushing everyone in front of an audience. (There is even a German expression for this: the Viennese Schlamperei.) So I thought it would be interesting to look at how this process effects different sorts of productions.

The repertory of the Wiener Staatsoper contains many ancient productions of little ambition, with realistic sets and schematic blocking for everyone. There is a lot of parking and barking, and points when someone purposefully walks from one side of the stage to the other. An example of this is the Lucia di Lammermoor that I saw in January. Theoretically, these productions offer minimal interference for singers who brought a complete interpretation in their suitcase. While individual performances can be striking, collaboration between the various cast members is often not a factor, nor is any overall vision of the opera’s meaning. And these productions often end up with no one really doing much in the way of theatrical interpretation at all, though they can be eminently worth hearing.

But Regietheater doesn’t always revive well either. Take Peter Konwitschny’s Traviata, which I recently saw in Graz. The set consists of some curtains and a chair, the costumes modern street clothes. The center of the production was the Personenregie–the acting, particularly the interactions between the characters. That’s not easy to recreate with new singers in a week or two, especially if the new Violetta isn’t ready and inclined to play the character in the same way that Marlis Petersen did. Because Petersen’s interpretation of Violetta was an important and integral part of the production, unlike any of the performances in Lucia, and a major reason for its success. You can’t necessarily copy and paste this performance onto a new soprano, who won’t have the time to immerse herself in the production and will understandably want to create the role for herself rather than just imitate another performer step by step. The results are almost always a good notch below the original run.

Of course it’s not that black and white. Sometimes a boring production’s cast can unexpectedly come together and sometimes replacements in Regietheater can work out well too, even improving on the original cast if they fit the director’s concept better than that hopeless baritone from the prima. And Lucia and Traviata are extreme examples; most productions fall somewhere in between. But Regietheater is still best seen in revival in opera houses where rehearsal is not a foreign word and/or some of the original cast members are present. Absent those things, productions can become incoherent in a hurry (the fate of Christine Mielitz’s Holländer in Vienna). Maybe for this reason, many of the theaters who perform the most and best Regie are those with strong regular ensembles of singers who are present from season to season, such as Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and the Komische Oper in Berlin.

1930’s, but basic Carmen drag.

The Met’s attempts to appear modern without offending anyone has led to a series of updated but fundamentally conservative productions such as Carmen, Hoffmann, Tosca, and the new Ring. They do not depend on detailed Personenregie like Konwitschny does, but their visuals do more to interpret the story than a plain traditional Lucia does. Of course there are still problems, like in the Carmen, all the Don Josés after Alagna attempting to find a rationale for pulling out a cross in the final scene like the production makes them do (though that move was only somewhat more convincing when Alagna did it). But these productions have been underthought, their transposed settings chosen at random (why is Carmen taking place in the 1930’s?). They seem to be created consciously for repertory and changing casts, and their hesitation to put any individual stamp on the characters makes them decorative and boring. Even with a good cast, they rarely have the overall impact of a successful production that takes more interpretive risks. This is why I prefer a hot Regie mess over something as middlebrow as what the Met often puts out. Even if it didn’t work, I saw something new.

The moral of the story is, if you are choosing between two operas, one a new production and one a revival, pick the new one. And some opera houses that may be located on the Ringstrasse in Vienna should be more responsible about rehearsing revivals and maybe not schedule quite so damn many of them. The Met has been improving on this front, bringing the original director back to rehearse revival casts, but the best Vienna has done is to exhume Otto Schenk to retouch something after 40 years. (Met performances are more dependably professional than Staatsoper ones, though many of the same people are involved.) Perhaps the real solution to this problem is the stagione system, in which only one opera is performed at a time, such as at the Theater an der Wien. Almost all the productions are new.

On vaguely the same topic, if you have seen the current Aida at the Staatsoper, please leave a report below. I am suspecting it will be a revival of the worst sort and am not planning on going.  Given good reviews I may change my mind, but so far I have not seen a single report.

Also related, I will be in Munich later this weekend and will be seeing the brilliantly programmed double bill of L’Enfant et les sortilèges and Der Zwerg at the Bayerische Staatsoper, a new production.  The Bayerische Staatsoper is currently my favorite opera house (despite not being immune to sloppy revivals themselves), and I’m looking forward to it!

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Review

Peter Konwitschny’s lean and mean Traviata in Graz

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Peter Konwitschny’s new Traviata at the Oper Graz looks like simplicity itself. The set consists solely of some curtains and a single (1) chair. Most university productions are more elaborate. But this performance, led by Marlis Petersen’s devastating Violetta, needed no help to cut right to the heart, and the story unfolds with a brutal directness. The score is trimmed in ways you might expect and some you wouldn’t (no intermission), and the musical performance is so closely tied to the drama that discussing it separately seems silly.

It is, in short, this is Musiktheater with a capital M (because it’s a German noun, duh).

Verdi, La Traviata. Oper Graz, 3.6.2011. Production by Peter Konwitschny, sets and costumes by Johannes Leiacker, lights by Joachim Klein. Conducted by Tecwyn Evans with Marlis Petersen (Violetta), Giuseppe Varano (Alfredo), James Rutherford (Germont)

The spare means of the production belie its conceptual sophistication. The rows of curtains are printed with trompe de l’oeil folds, and their red ripples are echoed in Violetta’s Act 1 dress. (Yes! we have another objectified lady in a short red dress o’ oppression.) They represent the layers of Violetta’s life: the shallowest stage (the most downstage curtains drawn) is her life as a courtesan, her love for Alfredo lets her painfully begin to open the layers to her deeper self. Finally, in the denouement at Flora’s in Act 2, it all collapses, the curtains pulled down, leaving the empty space of Violetta’s destroyed world.

She is already deathly ill in Act 1; the black-clad guests at her party are voyeurs, watching her every gasp. The group is less a dazzling society than a drunken, sadistic mess. Eager for more entertainment, the crowd throws nerdy, out-of-place Alfredo at Violetta, laughing at his attempt at a toast. She rebuffs him, but he tellingly makes his appearance in “Sempre libera” from the audience: the world of Alfredo and his father is the bourgeois one of the opera’s audience.

In Act 2, Violetta has desexualized herself, losing her bob wig and dress in favor of a lumberjack shirt, cargo pants, and combat boots, but this domestic and pastoral life is also an uneasy illusion of happiness (behind the curtains drawn at the end of Act 1 is another curtain). Alfredo’s father is a violent brute, actually bringing along his very young daughter to the meeting and not treating her so well. (Konwitschny is a good Brechtian, and the bourgeois morality on display is sufficiently hypocritical.) This life, it seems, isn’t all that fulfilling either, and Violetta even seems willing to shoot herself.

The pacing of the scene at Flora’s party is very strange, because the ballet is cut, as well as the references to the duel. Alfredo shows the moralizing tendencies of his father in the previous scene, leading to the climactic breaking point found in most Konwitschny productions, or, as Konwitschy puts it in his program note, “the surface cracks for a moment, and through his music Verdi gives us an insight into the genuinely apocalyptic forces in so-called civilized society… the whore, the only genuine human being in this opera, expresses, more or less as the lead voice, the great longing for a truly fulfilled existence.”

The final scene offers Violetta little consolation. The doctor is still wearing his party hat from the night out, and even though Alfredo returns too late, and as Violetta dies the other characters move further and further away from her, not so much a physical distance as an existential one. Eventually the all appear in the audience while she, heartbreakingly, dies alone.

What keeps the production going is the detail and commitment of the performances, from the leads to the chorus. The bare setting feels exactly right for a production this emotionally intimate and vivid. Never is there a hint of sentimentality. The cuts and lack of intermission place the focus squarely on Violetta’s quickly-unfolding fate as she attempts to find a livable place in an inhuman world.

Marlis Petersen’s utterly tragic Violetta is at the very center, with honesty, intensity, commitment, and considerable acting talent. She is a coloratura soprano, and while her high notes are dazzling the middle of her voice is less than refulgent. But she is so absorbing that complaining seems ridiculous. Giuseppe Varano as Alfredo’s acting was less accomplished than Petersen’s. The basic idea was there, but some of the more frantic moments did not quite work, though he was clearly trying. He is a solid, traditional Italian lyric tenor, but his singing in the passaggio and above sometimes sounded constrained, though he managed a decent high C at the end of the cabaletta. (We got one verse of his cabaletta while Germont’s cabaletta was cut, as were the second verses of Ah, forse’è lui and the letter aria.)

James Rutherford was a deep Wagnerian Germont, an odd bit of casting. He did his best to sing with flexibility, but sometimes sounded ill at ease in the more lyrical sections such as “Pura siccomme un angelo.” The aria was better. And he was an excellent actor in this exceptionally unsympathetic conception of the role. Smaller roles were adequately sung.

Tecwyn Evans conducted a fast account of the score that fit the production’s intermission-less rush, and everything held together well. The orchestra sounded quite good, but to be honest I did not notice them a whole lot.

This is not a Traviata for everyone–I know people who would be hollering about the cut of the ballet, and other people who would disparage the lack of pretty costumes–but as a night out at the theater it is a powerful experience. Not to be missed.

Note that this production is a joint effort with the English National Opera. Watch the trailer below and then see some photos I took of the beautiful Graz opera house. Further performances 11.3, 26.3 and 5.5, 18.5, 27.5 (in May with a slightly different cast).

Trailer:

Local sights:

 
This model is for people with visual disabilities, but somehow it reminded me of Act 1 of Stefan Herheim’s Rosenkavalier.
 
Those go straight to Maestro Evans’s dressing room, thx.

Production photos copyright Werner Kmetitisch/Oper Graz

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Review

Ariadne auf Naxos: I’m voting you off the island

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Around a year ago, I saw Ariadne auf Naxos at the Met, a performance that, while not bad, was mostly worth seeing for Nina Stemme’s powerful Ariadne. The city might have changed in the meantime, but the Ariadne has not. One Nina Stemme as Ariadne in the midst of much mediocrity, coming right up… this time courtesy of the Wiener Staatsoper.

Strauss-Hofmannsthal, Ariadne auf Naxos. Wiener Staatsoper, 3/7/2011. Production by Filippo Sanjust, conducted by Michel Güttler with Nina Stemme (Ariadne), Julia Novikova (Zerbinetta), Stepanie Houtzeel (Der Komponist), Burkhard Fritz (Bacchus), Wolfgang Bankl (Ein Musiklehrer), Alexander Pereira (Der Haushofmeister), Daniel Schmutzhard (Harlekin)

Perhaps the large number of debuts kept everyone on their toes, but this was tidy and engaged, as Staatsoper rep shows go. But other than La Stemme, there’s nothing I will remember about it.

You may have seen Filippo Sanjust’s production on this 1978 DVD. As it is today, it’s fine if dull, attractive but neither witty nor transcendent. The Prologue set is the hideous desert island set seen from the back, and it’s on the cavernous side for such intimate music. The blocking was not bad, but compared to Harry Kupfer’s weird Theater an der Wien production of last October it lacked humor and detail. The lighting is crepuscular, and disconcertingly dark. The mood seems to call for something brighter. The Opera takes place on an elegant Greek amphitheater-style desert island. If we want to be literal, I can point out that the libretto makes it clear that the Richest Man in Vienna does not have a private theater like the one shown here. Just saying that these productions that are seen as ultra-traditional take liberties with the letter of the libretto too.

Conductor Michel Güttler, a late substitute for ailing Jeffrey Tate, was not debuting. But there were issues of coordination, balance, a lack of differentiation, and the whole thing was flat.

Nina Stemme sang Ariadne with powerful, beautiful tone (a little heavy on the vibrato), including wonderful low notes. And she is a fantastic actress, strangely making Ariadne into the only character I cared about in the entire performance (as you can guess, I usually find her a bore). But this time around I doubted the suitability of this role to her at present; sometimes more flexibility would have been nice. I did get the feeling she could have eaten the orchestra for breakfast, though.

Julia Novikova was a poor Zerbinetta (in fact my third disappointing Zerbinetta in a row–and I am raising my opinion of the first, Kathleen Kim, with each successive effort). Her voice is simply far too small for this role in the Staatsoper, and lacks an incisive cutting quality. The higher notes projected more clearly, but were shrill and thin. Her stage business consisted of the matronly coquetry that was created for and should be the sole property of Edita Gruberova, this production’s Zerbinetta of record. With tiny, youthful, enthusiastic Novikova, the miniature straw hat, twirling of a ruffly umbrella, and literal hand gestures (waves, balancing scales) were like a 14-year old dressed up as her dowdy grandmother, and the effect was cloying.

Elsewhere, Stephanie Houtzeel seems to have Straussian style. But her voice, despite considerable volume, lacks substance and depth, all vibrato and no core. I’ve pretty much given up on hearing decent Bacchuses–Botha excepted–and Burkhard Fritz proved no exception, which muffled, underpowered tone. Some smaller roles were better, notably veteran Wolfgang Bankl’s clearly enunciated Musiklehrer and Staatsoper debutant Daniel Schmutzhard’s solid Harlekin. The Nymphs were a bit unblended. They and the Commedia folks hit their blocking marks well enough, but the stretch between Zerbinetta’s aria and Bacchus’s appearance felt interminable.

The presence of incoming Salzburger Festspiele intendant Alexander Pereira in the spoken role of the Haushofmeister was pure stunt casting. He’s no actor, but I actually enjoyed this part played without the usual insufferable archness. His delivery of the dictum that the comedy and tragedy would be combined was rather funny, clearly coming from a dumbass who has convinced himself that this is the best idea in the world.

Maybe I have overly high standards for this opera but I’m pretty sure that this one was not, for the most part, any good. Oh well, kam die neue Ariadne gegangen, hingegeben war ich nie stumm.

Several performances remain: 7, 9, 12 March.

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Review

The ENO’s Parsifal: Knights of the living dead

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Regietheater is by definition non-canonical but Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s well-travelled 1999 staging of Parsifal is one of the few productions that can be said to have achieved iconic status. Last Sunday I caught its current revival at the English National Opera. It’s still worth seeing. The cast is almost universally fantastic, and the orchestra and conducting are good too. There was only one hitch, and that was that it is in English. (Maybe this wouldn’t be a big deal for you, but it turns out that I hate Wagner in English, or at least I can’t stand this translation.)

Wagner, Parsifal, English National Opera, 2/27/2011. Production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth with Stuart Skelton (Parsifal), John Tomlinson (Gurnemanz), Jane Dutton (Kundry), Iain Patterson (Amfortas), Tom Fox (Klingsor). English translation by Richard Stokes.

As well as in London, this production has been seen in Baden-Baden, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Chicago, supposedly making it the most-seen Parsifal production ever. This is supposedly its last appearance in London. It is also on DVD (from Baden-Baden). This was my first time seeing it and I can understand its popularity. While it looks a little dated today, it mixes a clear basic idea with a collection of more elusive (and allusive) images that illuminate this challenging work without oversimplifying it. It’s good, and I can handle some ambiguity in Parsifal, but yeah, it beats me as to what Lehnhoff is saying some of the time.

The setting is your basic post-apocalyptic wasteland, of the indoors sort. The knights of the Grail are already encased in their own cement tomb, a decaying order (whose first appearance alludes to the terracotta army of ancient China. The Grail is a beam of blinding light, an empty signifier of a religious cult of devotion without purpose. Parsifal enters through a meteor hole in the fortress; he and Kundry, the only outsiders in the first act, are both wild creatures dressed in reddish brown, contrasting with the grayish white robes of the knights. Amfortas is almost a mummy already, and we actually see Titurel this time around, looking like a zombie.

Act 2 is basically the same set, which is a problem. Klingsor, looking like a Japanese warrior, hovers in the sensitive area of a giant pelvic x-ray (castration, we get it, OK). Kundry gets a succession of ruffly and colorful costumes whose shedding may suggest a butterfly, but whose first shell was obviously a giant vagina (perhaps this interpretation is a sign of Anna Nicole’s lingering influence on my mind). The staging of the seduction is a little on the routine side, and the buttoned-up flower maidens are more like nuns behaving badly than seductresses (albeit with, um, balls on their heads).

Act 3 is the most enigmatic. The knights have disintegrated into a disorderly mess, all now dressed in rags, and the curved train tracks and mass grave suggest a famous image of Auschwitz. But I’m not sure exactly what Lehnhoff is getting at here. The lack of a scenic transformation with the Karfreitagszauber and Parsifal’s departure from the group at the very end of the opera don’t quite add up. Amfortas dies, Kundry leaves with Parsifal and a few of the knights, and the rest seem to hail Gurnemanz as their leader and start worshipping the spear instead. This group doesn’t seem to be saved at all, but Parsifal’s retreat confuses me.

This is an addition to my growing collection of Christian God-free Wagner productions (see also this one and this one), but a non-Christian Parsifal is rather a larger challenge than a Tannhäuser or Lohengrin. As someone with limited interest in religion in general I thought it worked surprisingly well. However, this does add complexity to the reading of the libretto, and I’m afraid that this was already dealt a severe blow by the English singing text. The dense network of allusions and rhythms of Parsifal are impossible to translate. Beyond this, this translation simply suffers from many problems of tone, sounding too often like low doggerel (and I believe it contains many more rhymes than the German). For example, and I may be paraphrasing in word order:

Du siehst, mein Sohn,
zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.

You see here, my son
Time and space are one

It’s close to literal, but still presents problems of meaning–the Verwandlung from time to space is made into an equivalence–as well as adding a rhyme where one is really not called for. I can’t say I find “A single weapon serves” a satisfactory translation of “Nur eine Waffe taugt,” either. The emphasis is right, but “taugen” is so much more noble than the utilitarian “serve.” (It also creates a connection with Kundry’s “Dienen, dienen,” translated here as “to serve, to serve,” which is something different.) The obvious solution is to forget about it and do it in German, if you ask me. The enunciation of words was done with a conscious correctness that was not always musical, but I could always understand it. Unfortunately.

I’m sorry that the translation interfered with my enjoyment of the music so much, and hope this isn’t true for everyone else. Because the musical performance was really good! The orchestra sounded thoroughly excellent and well-rehearsed if a smidgen less than world-class in sound. Mark Wigglesworth proved an able conductor with beautiful balance and coloring, though I sometimes missed the larger sweep of the score. It didn’t do anything so crass as drag or rush but it didn’t quite hover in timelessness either.

Stuart Skelton is a fantastic Parsifal, with a large, forceful, yet still beautiful and clear Heldentenor. I missed a certain fragility at first, but it is lovely to hear a role like this sung with such security and passion the whole way through, and acted with both naïveté and dignity. John Tomlinson’s august Gurnemanz got the largest share of the applause, and his wisdom and authority pays great dividends despite some severe wobbles in Act 3. Iain Paterson threw himself into Amfortas’s tortures with mostly touching and occasionally awkward results, and sang with nobility and Textdeutlichkeit. (OK, screw it, I’m going to throw in as much German here as possible to make up for the lack of it onstage.) Jane Dutton was the biggest disappointment as Kundry, with blowsy, scharf tone. Tom Fox sounded at times recht ausgesungen. Chorus and small roles all solid.

More than worth seeing. Especially if you have a greater tolerance for Wagner auf Englisch than I.

Photos copyright Richard Hubert Smith.

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Review

Anna Nicole: All power to boobs

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That’s a quote from the libretto. There’s an aria about them. Boobs, I mean. Big fake ones.

As you may be aware, there’s an opera about the late not-so-merry (or was she?) widow Anna Nicole Smith playing at the Royal Opera House in London at present. I went and saw it, and found it fascinating, brilliant, and infuriating. Herein I will attempt to write about it. Not about how it relates to operatic history or what its media attention means for the world of opera. Because while we might have a publicity circus around this opera, what we’ve got onstage is a circus already.

Mark-Anthony Turnage–Richard Thomas. Anna Nicole. World premiere production, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 26 February 2011 (fourth performance). Production by Richard Jones with sets by Miriam Buether, costumes by Nicky Gillibrand, lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin and D.M. Wood, and choreogrpahy by Aletta Collins. Conducted by Antonio Pappano with Eva-Maria Westbroek (Anna Nicole), Susan Bickley (Virgie), Gerald Finley (The Lawyer Stern), Alan Oke (J. Howard Marshall II), Peter Hoare (Larry King).


This opera has been all over the news and blogosphere, so describing it feels a little superfluous, but here are the basics.

Anna Nicole in her young, semi-innocent days.

Possibly due to rumored legal threats, the opera presents Anna Nicole Smith’s life in documentary fashion. In Act 1, we see her early life through the reportage of a chorus of TV journalists. As events unfold, Anna Nicole’s family and friends comment on the action. In Act 2, things turn more personal as the reporters morph into sinister silent black figures with cameras for heads, the only allusion to Anna Nicole’s reality TV show. They observe her at every second, eager to know everything for reasons that are never clear. The sole voice of conscience is Anna Nicole’s mother, who occasionally interrupts to protest that “it so didn’t happen like that” and condemn the world to which her daughter has submitted–or that she is squeezing dry. Or both.

The plot, roughly speaking, moves from Anna Nicole’s miserable childhood in rural Texas, early marriage and motherhood, divorce, career change to stripper, career ascent as stripper via fake tits, marriage to an oil billionaire, his death, her decline into helpless drug addiction, dependence on a sleazy lawyer, her son’s death, and finally her own death at 39. We see her at her stripping job, we see her get her new boobs, and meet her decrepit consort, but increasingly, in Act 2, she disappears into her own isolated world.

Virgie, Anna Nicole’s mother

This is, more or less, a number opera, though the music flows continuously. The libretto is, like Anna Nicole herself, determinedly obscene. Thomas’s ear for American speech is good enough that the few mistakes stand out (we don’t say “car park”). It also is of a flashiness that, for the first act at least, largely eclipses the sparky, energetic music. It’s not that Turnage lacks a voice, and the jazzy, slightly dissonant, angular sounds are fun. But much of the time the score just doesn’t assert itself. In Act 2 things get more interesting, including a wonderful intermezzo just as the proceedings become more serious and eventually tragic (as Anna Nicole’s son dies, there is, I think, a Kindertotenlieder reference–oh no you didn’t). Anna Nicole delivers something like a lament at the end, before tiredly climbing into her own body bag.

He’s rich.

But the very obscenity is part of the reason why this work, for all its brilliance, is somehow unfulfilling. Simply put, there’s a shortage of dramatic conflict. The excesses of American culture are skewered at every opportunity. I’m OK with this, I realize we’re a big fat target. (Sometimes I wondered if the British audience realized how much of the “satire” was simply truth–y’all know that Wal-Mart really does have an obsession with smiley faces? They didn’t make all that shit up.) The problem is that Anna Nicole the character is set up as too much a product of her culture and not enough in opposition to it. The chorus pronounces her fabulous, but she seems like a passive object of the plot, with few moments of genuine autonomy. This makes her, as a heroine or as an anti-heroine, lacking.

The text’s perspective is relentlessly male, right down to the descriptions of domestic violence and rape. Anna Nicole, proclaimed for all her obvious dumbness to be somehow street smart, never has a real moment of self-insight, something equivalent to Carmen’s fortune-telling, Violetta’s “È strano!” or even Lulu’s instinctual self-perception, and we never get a good look inside her head, empty though it may be. In her brief final monologue, she condemns America as a “dirty whore,” but it’s too little, too late, and too male again. The libretto suggests a few times that she was both victim and master of American culture, manipulator and manipulated. But it’s only an occasional theme, mostly voiced by the poignant but unintegrated character of Anna Nicole’s mother. It seems like this is where the real substance and center of the story should lie.

Cameras are intruding

The libretto’s naughtiness aspires to subversive glee. But is that possible for a production as elaborate and accomplished with as many patriarchal roots as this one? It might have worked in a gay community center’s basement during some Fringe Festival, but on the stage of the Royal Opera House, written and directed by famous and sophisticated men, there’s an uncomfortable undercurrent of exploitation. Is this another group of the privileged taking advantage of Anna Nicole Smith yet again? The (as yet empty) threat of a lawsuit from self-avowed Anna Nicole babydaddy Larry Birkhead against the Royal Opera House is fitting, and suggests the opera has now become not just a telling of her sad life but itself another strange coda to it.

**
I suppose that sounds like a severe condemnation, but despite its disappointments I actually enjoyed it a lot. The stagecraft on display is dazzling and full of wit, even if making fun of Texas hicks is something like shooting fish in a barrel. (I’ve never been to Texas, by the way, though I’m from a rural area not too far from Appalachia, so I have the general idea. We make meth jokes too.) It’s not always too original. The opening scene, in which a row of reporters tells us they are going to present the story of Anna Nicole, repeatedly declaiming her name at top volume, is a blatant rip-off of the opening of Sweeney Todd, right down to the staging. Also, those uniform-ish reporters plus a little house on stage, well, Jones’s Bayerische Staatsoper Lohengrin, anybody?

The Lawyer Stern thinks he’s the dad

But as a show a lot of it is brilliant, action-packed, funny (sometimes awkward funny), full of panache, and every bit as tacky as the libretto. The orchestra under Pappano sounded, as far as I could tell, great, and the cast is all top-notch and can’t be faulted for their commitment (or for their English diction). The production is a fast-changing of colorful but minimal settings with garish detail, from a strip club (with acrobatic actual pole dancers) to a Wal-Mart to Anna Nicole’s tacky final living room, and the transitions are seamless and perfectly timed.

Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Texan accent swam in and out, but as Anna Nicole she gave a star performance, and she was never less than fabulously present–or appropriately out to lunch on Anna Nicole’s distant planet–and she gave the character more heart than the libretto ever did. Vocally, she doesn’t get too many chances to use the full force of her large voice, and I can image more lyric sopranos also succeeding in the role (especially considering the light amplification). But she sounded great; her sound is truly luminous. Gerald Finley’s lawyer–a role rumored to have been rewritten when his guilty verdict in Anna Nicole’s wrongful death giving Anna Nicole drugs was overturned last month (corrected–I was not a devoted follower of Anna Nicole Smith news, sorry)–is unfortunately something of a nothing role and a waste of his talents. Alan Oke as Anna Nicole’s aged second husband got better material, sung with verve. Susan Bickley as Virgie, the mother, was almost too poignant in an opera of caricatures.

Something of a disappointment compared to what it might have been, but an interesting one. I hope it gets picked up by another house, with revisions, because it has the polish of something big with the seeds of something far more poignant. Right now, despite the awkward bits, it’s still rampantly entertaining.

There are a few more performances, but it’s quite sold out. Queue early in the morning for day seats.

Video from CBS News–not an option you get with most operas, though it’s not embedding correctly:

Photos copyright by Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House.

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