Review

There Will Be Wälsungs (Castorf Ring, 2)

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After an animated Das Rheingold, Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Die Walküre is a rather flat affair. There are rumblings of a larger plan, but as expected they’re more like suggestions of themes than anything systematic. For one thing, the narrative isn’t linear. We’ve gone from an indeterminate trashy American motel in Rheingold back to the 1880s. The 1880s in–you guessed it!–Baku, Azerbaijan. (Sorry if you did not, in fact, guess it. Perhaps it is helpful to remember that Castorf is from East Berlin.) There’s an oil drilling boom and once again people/gods/dwarfs/singers are destroying everything. The Wälsungs Siegmund and Sieglinde, however, don’t have any real place in this ecosystem, and this turns out to be a problem. Musically, though, this was a very strong installment, making the cleft between sound and stage ever wider.

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Review

Real Housewives of Valhalla (Castorf Ring, 1)

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Many of Bayreuth’s audience members can tell you about Ring cycles going back decades. They know the Ring very well. Not only that, but when we–and now I mean all of us–go to Bayreuth we engage with Wagner in a certain way: immersed, initiated, as part of a thread of history.  We are here to contemplate, to chew over things. We see the Ring as a work whose meaning and presentation has changed through the decades, as works with life cycles and symbolic significance. And of course the works themselves construct their own, internal networks of meaning.

The challenge of Frank Castorf’s Ring, now in its third year, is that it cannot be read in those terms. It rejects those premises. The more you ask what it “means,” the less you will see what it is.

Here are a few thoughts on Rheingold.

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Guide

The Bregenz Festival: tips and tricks

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The Seebühne

Thinking of going to the Bregenz Festival? Located in the province of Vorarlberg, at the far western tip of Austria and on the edge of Lake Constance (the Bodensee in German), it’s somewhat off the beaten path. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this festival is not very popular among the English-speaking set, so I thought I would provide some information for those who may be interested.

The Area


Lower right: Austria. Lower left: Switzerland. Top: Germany.

The Festival
There are two venues. First, the Seebühne (lake stage), the huge open-air amphitheater with the stage anchored in the lake. This stage only hosts one opera and it’s the same one for two years, given a very large number of performances from late July to the end of August. 2015 is Turandot’s first year so it will be performed in 2016 too. The productions here have a somewhat upscale popular aesthetic–pitched at roughly the same level as the Met, actually–and are performed without an intermission. Here is my review of Turandot.

Turando or Turandon’t?

Since it is outside, weather is a major variable. If it’s raining a bit, everything goes ahead. You aren’t allowed to use an umbrella but you can buy a plastic poncho from the kiosks for 1 Euro, a wise investment if there are any clouds at all. If the weather is truly bad, the performance is moved into the Festspielhaus and performed in concert. However, the Festspielhaus is much smaller and only the most expensive tickets include inside privileges.

The seats are plastic. The festival sells cushions, but I thought they were OK.

There is no consensus dress code for the Seebühne. Some people looked like they were going hiking and others looked like they were going to an opening night in Salzburg. When it started raining, I was glad I wasn’t wearing an evening gown. (There were also plenty of dirndls.)

The casts for the big production rotate and who is singing which performance isn’t announced ahead of time. (This is not a star-focused enterprise.) If you are intent on seeing any particular singer, I would advise contacting the box office or the singer in question.

such creativity with the “Chinese” imagery!

The other venue is the Festspielhaus, a modern theater seating around 1,600. This venue hosts a few short-run productions of more obscure or adventurous opera, this year including Stefan Herheim’s staging of The Tales of Hoffmann and the local premiere of Peter Eötvös’s The Golden Dragon. There are also a few orchestral concerts with the Wiener Symphoniker. The dress code for the Festspielhaus is more consistent and formal–think suits and nice dresses, including many full-length ones. Fewer dirndls at Hoffmann than Turandot. Here is my Hoffmann review.

Subtitles are in German only, and found in both spaces found at the sides of the stage rather than above it. (I found the Hoffmann ones difficult to see from my seat in the center of the theater and used my mediocre French skills instead.)

There is also a young artists production of Così fan tutte in the Vorarlberger Landestheater.

If you are staying in Lindau (see “hotels,” below), you can arrive by boat. This seemed charming but I wasn’t staying in Lindau. The festival is also a very short walk from the Bregenz train station.

Tickets for this festival go on sale very early–in autumn, well before all the casting details are announced. You simply buy them directly off the website, no complicated pre-orders like Munich or Salzburg, and they do not sell out nearly as fast as those places. You can safely wait until well into the spring to make your plans and some tickets are even available now that the festival has already begun. (Weekends and cheap seats are pretty sold out, though.) It is also a relatively affordable festival, particularly compared to its neighbors in Salzburg and Luzerne. What would have put me somewhere in the darkest back rows of Salzburg’s Großes Festspielhaus got me the second row at Hoffmann. The normal tickets for Turandot are also quite reasonably priced, though the champagne-and-boat-trip type packages are considerably more.

The festival is amply equipped with food and drink from restaurants and bars, and there are many pretty places to sit around the lake.

It’s gonna raaaaaain.

Here is the festival’s website.

The Setting
This is the festival’s Achilles heel. Bregenz is boring. The lakeside landscape is pretty and if you’re into hiking or biking or sailing there is plenty of that. If you aren’t up to sailing, you can also rent a paddleboat right near the Seebühne. But otherwise there isn’t much to do and the town itself is strangely charmless. It’s also in the part of Austria where the grocery stores close at 6:00 p.m. (This part of Austria includes most of Austria.)

There are some nice day trips to be had, however.  Lindau, just across the German border, is picturesque. St. Gallen, home of a fantastic Baroque library, is under an hour away. Konstanz is also within reach, though I didn’t make it there during this trip. You can buy a regional rail day pass which is valid on all local Austrian, Swiss, and German trains.

One other challenge is hotels. I booked relatively late but found few affordable options in Bregenz itself. If you have or rent a car you will have a much easier time. I ended up staying in nearby Dornbirn and taking the S-Bahn, which involved some waiting for trains but not too much actual transit time. There are also options in Lindau. The S-Bahn runs extra-late for the festival (an example Bayreuth could learn from!).

Seebühne from the back

While it’s in Austria, Bregenz is most easily approached from Zurich, though Munich is also reasonably close.* Salzburg is around four and a half hours away by train and at almost seven hours Vienna is way more distant than you would think possible for such a small country.

As Destination Opera, I’m not convinced that Bregenz is necessarily worth a major trip by itself, though the Hoffmann arguably is. The program is quite narrow and it thus lacks the intensity of its more famous siblings–for the most part you can’t see four different things in a long weekend. But in combination with other area festivals such as Munich, Salzburg, Bayreuth, Luzerne, or even Verbier, it’s definitely worth a look, and won’t break the bank.

*If you’re coming from Munich, the REX train route is as fast as the EC so you can use the cheap Bayern-Ticket to get almost all the way there; you will just need to switch to the S-Bahn with a local ticket in Lindau. If you’re doing this summer’s mysteriously popular Bregenz-Bayreuth Regiestrecke, be aware that this may involve more changing of trains than seems reasonable. You could also do this trip on the Bayern-Ticket, but since it isn’t valid on ICE trains it might take a lot longer depending on your particular route. This has been a note from someone who has spent too much time and money on Bavarian trains.

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Review

Ratty Lohengrin

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Hans Neuenfels’s Bayreuth Festival Lohengrin has become an improbably beloved production. Klaus Florian Vogt’s Lohengrin is justifiably the most popular performance of the festival and the score sounds amazing in the space, even though it predated the Festspielhaus. But the production: famous for its chorus of rats, it seemed like the kind of thing that would be remembered for one weird image, put into a collective Strange Opera photo album along with Neuenfels’s Nabucco with bees and that Bieito Ballo that no one can get over. Instead it became an almost instant classic. In part it is memorable for the rats’ indexicality, yet the rats are not only an image but a compelling idea. And while the rats would seem to preclude the romantic knight in shining armor aspect of this opera, that’s not really what happens.

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Review

Tales of Herheim at the Bregenz Festival

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If you’re one of those people who fill comment sections with impassioned arguments about different editions of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, has Stefan Herheim ever got something for you. (If you aren’t, you’ll find plenty to like too.) This production, which premiered on Thursday night at the Bregenz Festival, is not an attempt to create a definitive, authentic edition of one of the most convoluted operas in the repertoire. It’s about what’s at stake in such a search for authenticity–about subject and object, what it means to control and/or love someone, and whether we ever can escape our own heads.

And rarely has the search for the true self looked so much like a twisted Busby Berkeley musical!

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Favorite Posts, Review

Big Bregenz Turandot

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The Bregenz Festival’s main attraction is an opera performed on a stage anchored in Lake Constance (in it!) to a huge amphitheater. They’re probably best known for their appearance in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace. That may not sound like a setup for quality musicianship or aesthetic risk-taking, but you might be surprised–that Tosca glimpsed in the Bond movie is actually pretty interesting if you watch the whole thing and nightly something approximating the Wiener Symphoniker is in the pit. (Note: not actually a pit.) Nothing against Verona, but this ain’t Verona.

Not quite, that is. There’s plenty of fire juggling as well. Bregenz wobbles between the largest, heaviest Regietheater you will ever see and the Cirque de Soleil-type spectacle the dramatic setting and mass audience suggests. New intendant Elisabeth Sobotka seem acutely aware of the challenge; in an interview in the festival’s own publicity she calls their Andrea Chénier of a few years ago an artistic triumph but very difficult financially, while she simply calls the most recent production, of Zauberflöte, very economically successful, leaving its artistic virtues or lack thereof tactfully undescribed.

This tension is acutely visible in their new production of Turandot, which opened on Wednesday night. Director Marco Arturo Marelli tries to problematize the opera’s exotic cake and eat it too. While at times he succeeds by brute force, the result is mild indigestion.

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Review

Abandon all hope with Christian Gerhaher

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In Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, a small group of actors and musicians wander through a post-apocalyptic landscape, bringing music and theater to an, empty land. Such is also the world of David Bösch’s dark, sad production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, now in its first revival at the Bayerische Staatsoper, again with baritone Christian Gerhaher in an unusual star turn. While not explicitly post-apocalyptic, it is nonetheless a desolate, nocturnal version of our reality–one even the perky, ukulele-carrying spirit of Music fails to brighten.

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Review

Picnic in the Harem, or, Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Glyndebourne

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My trip to the UK has been a weird crash course in postcolonial studies. First I saw Lakmé, a veritable celebration of British colonialism, in posh Holland Park, at an opera house whose tickets contain a note about where to position your pre-opera picnic. Then I went to Glyndebourne, an elaborate imperial picnic venue which also happens to perform opera. And there I saw, of all things, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, an older and less Britain-centric exotic relic, but, still. (Then there was Guillaume Tell, which was less site specific.)

Rest assured that I did not plan this–but, since the other operas on at present include Falstaff and Aida, I likely would have ended up in the same place even if my choices had been somewhat different.

Anyway, I arrived in Glyndebourne with my friend and our picnic and I enjoyed the gardens and sheep and the fancy dresses of everyone else who was out in rural England for opera in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. It really is a beautiful and relaxing setting. I don’t think that Calixto Bieito’s Entführung (an example I use altogether too frequently but what else would work here?) would be at home. It’s not that provocation and leisure are incompatible, and the Glyndebourne model in fact offers ample time for reflection. But, on another level, how pleasant does your sex slavery Singspiel have to be for it to go with your picnic?

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Favorite Posts

Guillaume Tell in London

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“Staging opera means interpreting a score’s ambiguities, and each
performance must bridge the space between operatic history and the
present. Inevitably, modern anxieties and prejudices fill the gaps. And
few issues are more personal and contentious than the representation of
rape.”

I wrote about the Royal Opera’s production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell for the New York Times. You can read my piece there, or in the July 19 Arts and Leisure section.

photo copyright Clive Barda

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Review

Bells, flowers, Lakmé

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As I read the plot summary of Lakmé, waiting to get to the Bell Song and the Flower Duet, I checked off boxes: exotic setting, a rebellious daughter/temple priestess/goddess (?) with a religious fanatic father, English colonialists. Totally typical for later nineteenth-century French opera, but also total red meat Regie bait. Despite its two very popular Opera Moments, Lakmé is rarely performed in toto. Had anyone done the obvious and updated it in a rather noisy and political way? Or even staged it in a moderately contemporary fashion? So I went to see Lakmé at Opera Holland Park with great curiosity.

Is there a Regie Lakmé in here? Anyone care to report from Bydgoszcz?

But no! Aylin Bozok is a more lyrical sort of director and doesn’t go there. It’s arguably a tricky piece to pull off—the thin plot moves slowly (colonialist falls in love with mysterious priestess, father objects), the characters are flimsy, and the music, while uniformly pleasant, is fairly monotonous. It’s also Orientalism for people who think Aida isn’t obvious enough. But despite a idea portrayal of India, Bozok’s production is very tasteful. It looks Indian without hitting you over the head with clichés. That isn’t easy and it’s an admirable goal. (Bonus: no blackface.)

Unfortunately the result is terribly dull. The missing element? Romance, love, sex. Of course the erotic side of exotica leads us into difficult territory very quickly, but a story about forbidden love that leaves out the love (without anything to take its place) is a gloomy affair. All the sex is relegated to a single whirling dancer, and her choreography is less than amazing (note: there isn’t a credited choreographer, nor is the dancer’s name on the website–sorry, I didn’t buy a program book). The monotonous music, slow plot, bleak color palate (mostly blues, grays, and black), and rather static staging unite to make this a slog, particularly since the first two of three acts are performed without pause.

Much of this had to do with the casting and direction of the central couple. Fflur Wyn has an attractive, silvery soprano and sang the long title role with impressive accuracy and control. She is musically tasteful if not very French in style and her Bell Song was very impressive. (Her high E natural is not her best feature, but whose is? It was a cleaner rendition than the one which bafflingly won Cardiff Singer of the World a few weeks ago.) However, she seems like a friendly, outgoing type, a Morgana or a Despina, not the mysterious goddess figure she is made out to be.

When her tenorial love interest, Robert Murray as Gérald, entered in the company of obligatory supporting baritone Nicholas Lester as Frédéric, I almost burst out laughing. Lester is a towering barihunk with very shiny hair while Murray is, well, not tall and has been given a sorry excuse for a bouffant. I wasn’t familiar with either singer, but sometimes opera is obvious and I didn’t have to ask which was which. Like Wyn, Murray sounded quite good, with a full, plummy lyric sound. He and Wyn, however, had zero chemistry and as fatal romances go it wasn’t one to get too excited about.

As Lakmé’s father Nilakantha, bass-baritone David Soar sounded excellent but, likewise, the character remained blank. The chorus was also outstanding for a house of this modest size (though neither Delibes nor the production convinced me of the necessity of so many choruses), and the orchestra and Matthew Waldren’s conducting were fine. The supporting cast consists of Frédéric—tall baritone Lester, who has a pleasant voice—and some silly English ladies. They sing a number of ensembles, all of which sound very like the “you need women” quintet from Carmen and do virtually nothing for the plot. They would, however, had supplied color and humor were we in a production which had color and humor. Alas, we were not.

While pretty enough to listen to, this performance didn’t convince me that Lakmé is an opera worth much wider dissemination. Perhaps a riskier or more glamorous production could make a better, crazier, or more interesting case. But it’s now won a place on my list of “things I don’t need to see again.”


Delibes, Lakmé. Opera Holland Park. 7/15/15. Full information here.

photos by Robert Workman

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