Deutsche Oper Berlin: Le prophète

26 November 2017

After David Alden took an abstract, stylised approach to his production of Les Huguenots at the Deutsche Oper last season, the French director Oliver Py’s take on Meyebeer’s next grand opéra, Le prophète, feels relatively straightforward. Admittedly he takes the action from 16th-century Germany – the prompt box was done up as a memorial stone to the historical figure the work was based on – and plonks it somewhere in the late 20th century.

[Read the full review at Bachtrack]

Staatsoper Hannover: Salome

18 November 2017

When Richard Strauss was hesitating about composing Elektra so soon after Salome, Hugo von Hofmannsthal tried to set his mind at rest. The two plays—the former by Hofmannsthal himself, of course, the latter by Oscar Wilde—were completely different, he assured the composer in one of the earliest letters of their correspondence. 

Annemarie Kramer as Salome in Hanover (Photo © Thomas M. Jauk)

‘The blend of colour in the two subjects strikes me as quite different in all essentials,’ Hofmannsthal wrote: ‘in Salome much is so to speak purple and violet, the atmosphere is torrid; in Elektra, on the other hand, it is a mixture of night and light, or black and bright.’

Admittedly, Hofmannsthal’s descriptions were not entirely disinterested: he was determined that Strauss should move forward with his Elektra. However, I was reminded of his characterization of the composer’s 1905 shocker when watching Ingo Kerkhof’s production—distilled, abstract, cool.  

Annemarie Kramer (Salome) and Brian Davis (Jochanaan) (l.), with Simon Bode (Narraboth) (Photo © Thomas M. Jauk)

Inge Medert’s costumes put the cast in regulation dishevelled smart-contemporary, our Salome in a simple linen dress. In the first scene, everyone apart from her sings from the front seats of the Erster Rang, and characters keep popping up through other doors in the auditorium. Salome, appearing through a broad, slinky, smartly-lit metallic string curtain upstage, is the main attraction, the subject of everyone’s gaze.

The other main feature of Anne Neuser’s set is a wall of dull gold that descends intermittently to focus the attention, and to provide the background for some effective shadow play (lighting by Elana Siberski). Kerkhof offers an unusual take on the dance (choreographed by Mathias Brühlmann), in which the dinner guests stay on to don frocks and dance around themselves, while a blindfolded Herod is tricked into touching them up. 

Robert Künzli (Herod), with dancers (Photo © Thomas M. Jauk)

There’s some gore when Narraboth slashes his forearms to bloody effect, and kudos to the prop department for an impressive severed head, delivered wrapped in a cloth. That’s about it, though. Jochanaan (the impressively resonant and imposing Brian Davis) has no cistern to sing from, his voice emanating from somewhere on high. There’s no sense of time or place. 

Annemarie Kramer (Salome)
(photo © Thomas M. Jauk)

There’s little to be actively offended about in the production, but nor does it add anything. 

Or, in fact, it's worse than that, for the lack of any context precludes any sense of that torrid atmosphere Hofmannsthal described, or much sense of who the characters are. 

Strauss’s score calls out to be amplified by something more, in terms of staging, than we had here. I found myself neither moved or shocked by Salome’s final scene—and ideally one should, I think, be both.  

Matters perhaps weren’t helped by the fact that Ivan Repušić’s conducting, though certainly not without its powerful eruptions, charted a sensible, level-headed course. Highly musical and distinguished by impressive clarity of texture (and on the whole very well played by the Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester Hannover), it didn't offer anything extra to make up for the lack of anything on stage.

That's hardly the conductor's fault, though, and one can’t really fault the cast, either. Annemarie Kremer’s Salome, though occasionally failing to project sufficiently in her lower range, stayed the course admirably and acted with intensity: her scenes with Davis’s unusually suggestible Jochanaan, alternating disgust with a kind of desperate, intertwining intimacy, were a highlight. 

There was much to enjoy in Robert Künzli’s jittery Herod and Kathuna Mikaberidze's imperious, youthful Herodias. Among the smaller roles the young bass Daniel Eggert stood out as the First Nazerene. Simon Bode might have made more of Narraboth.

Ultimately, though, this Salome's lack of potency was down to the director. No one in the cast or in the pit could do much to bring colour and atmosphere to his underwhelming staging.

Semperoper Dresden: Die Entführung aus dem Serail

2 November 2017

We got a little more than we bargained for with this Die Entführung aus dem Serail, as became clear with a pre-performance announcement. The billed Konstanze, Hulkar Sabirova, had been taken ill, and was being replaced Gloria Rehm, who’d just about had time to be run through the production.

Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Semperoper (Photo © Jochen Quast)

Rather more last–minute was the cancellation of the Osmin, Michael Eder. A replacement had been found in the shape of Mischa Schelomianski, but he’d barely had time to be fitted into his costume. He ended up having to go through the show with the help of a newly rustled-up sidekick, played by an assistant director, who steered him around, occasionally handing him a script, often, given some witty improvisation in character, to unexpectedly amusing effect. 

Inevitably this made for some difficulty in judging the general direction of the characters in Michiel Dijkema’s new-ish production (one of last seasons premieres). But it did nothing to hide the fact that this is an appealing, imaginative and witty show, designed (by Dijkema) with tongue firmly in cheek and on a grandly pantomimic scale.

Much of it felt as much like Die Zauberflöte as Entführung, highlighting some interesting parallels between the rulers that feature in each. Here we had a mysterious eastern landscape of moveable mini-islands covered in reeds and rather triste-looking trees; a wrought gate and a chunk of fortress (also moveable); threatening clouds glowering behind; dialogue distantly accompanied by an ominous background hum and rumble.

Costumes were bright and exaggerated, as were the props: a vast birdcage on wheels to house Pasha Selim’s harem; an array of large instruments of torture—‘Martern aller Arten’ indeed—rising from some fiery upstage depths to the sound of threatening chants. Fans of the Castorf Ring will be pleased to know that the production even includes a crocodile.

It’s bright, engaging and entertaining, then, and while it might not constitute a profound meditation on the issues raised by Mozart’s work—more pertinent today than ever, surely—it certainly doesn’t trivialise them either. And, above all, Dijkema shows himself to be musically sensitive, leaving the musical numbers to speak for themselves, as they did with real eloquence here.

Forming the foundation of the basis performance was beautifully urbane playing from the Staatskapelle: stylish, beautifully shaped and with an easy grace that was helped by Christopher Moulds’s easy–going, non–interventionist approach on the podium. The results were a joy.

Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Semperoper (Photo © Jochen Quast)

There was some fine singing from the cast too, with Norman Rheinhardt bringing plenty of grace and clean tone to Belmonte, even if the voice did occasionally cloud over a little. I wasn’t that keen on the artful pianissimo he employed on a couple of occasions, either, but this was nevertheless a satisfying, aristocratic and stylish performance.

Rehm’s soprano is a wonderfully bright, luminous one and she sang Konstanze with great allure, and even managed in the rushed circumstances to create a good rapport with Jaron Löwenberg’s charistmatic Pasha Selim. Aaron Pegram and Sibylla Duffe made a lively, engaging pair as Pedrillo and Blonde. And was it me or did Duffe—during her first scene, played out on some sort of giant turnip plantation— interpolate a ‘Brexit’ under her breath between ‘Ich bin eine Engländerin’ and ‘zur Freiheit geboren’?  

Semperoper Dresden: Götterdämmerung

1 November 2017

Christian Thielemann conducts two complete Ring cycles in Dresden early next year, but I’ve been experiencing the tetralogy at a slow pace as he’s been building it up over the past 21 months or so: he began with Walküre early last year and followed it up with Rheingold a year ago and Siegfried in January.

Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde), Andreas Schager (Siegfried) (Photo © Klaus Gigga)

(click to enlarge)

Such an arrangement doesn’t help for overall appreciation of Willy Decker’s production (first seen here in the early 2000s), but it struck me as being at its very best in this final instalment: uncluttered, understated and often deeply moving. 

Indeed, dramatically speaking, I think this was the most moving performance of this grandest of grand finales that I’ve seen, to a large extent because of the detailed characterisation as revived here—no revival director was credited as such, but Alexander Brendel and Bernd Gierke were on the bill for Abendspielleitung and Regieassistenz respectively—matched by terrific acting from about as good a cast as one could expect to see in the piece these days.

Nina Stemme’s now familiar Brünnhilde retained a powerful sense of nobility throughout, and she still sings with astonishing power and commitment, even if the voice seemed to take a little while to crank up to full power.

Iain Paterson’s Gunther was outstanding, impeccably sung and charting a detailed trajectory louche lack of concern to a painful realisation of what he was becoming part of. 

(click to enlarge)

Falk Struckmann remains a bass-baritone rather than a true bass, but his complex timbre—an oily maelstrom of blacks and greys—made for a properly threatening and commanding Hagen. Edith Haller’s vulnerable, desperate Gutrune added to a fully convincing picture, as did Christa Mayer’s moving, impassioned Waltraute.

Andreas Schager had some moments of strain as Siegfried—only the truly superhuman don't—but rang out heroically, creating a believable figure quick to be seduced, desperate to join in with Hagen and Gunther as if starved of some good old laddish high jinks. 

Helped by the clear-minded economy of the production—the stage emptied as a weary, heartbroken Wotan slowly walked on to observe—Schager delivered a death scene shocking power, underlined by conducting of almost suffocating dramatic weight from Thielemann.

Iain Paterson (Gunther), Andreas Schager (Siegfried), Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde) (Photo © Klaus Gigga)

The conductor’s approach to this score, as before, is grandly expansive, always rooted deep in some primeval harmonic soil, often daringly drawn out and often also, it has to be said, rather pear-shaped: the lower brass are allowed to create a bulbousness in the overall sound that, as in the final minutes of the Immolation Scene, engulfs all else. Elsewhere, particularly in Act 2, the singers struggled to be heard against an orchestral backdrop that the conductor seemed unwilling to pare down.

Sabrina Kögel (Wellgunde) (Photo © Klaus Gigga)

But it’s a small price to pay for a musical vision that is so coherent and imposing, which attempts, it seems, at every turn to convey the sheer vastness of Wagner’s own conception. And the playing of Staatskapelle was, on the whole, magnificent, offering a sound of rounded refinement and silky virtuosity.

A final word for Decker’s production and Wolfgang Dussmann’s designs. In the previous instalments we’d had the idea of the tetralogy being staged by Wotan himself, variously performed and observed by the cycle’s characters. 

It had occasionally felt a little fussy. Here, though, it came together as vision of remarkably refreshing clarity and poetic beauty: an object lesson in economy and musical sensitivity that reached a highpoint at the very end. Wellgunde slowly rolled on a new virgin sphere—a sphericus rasus?—as the cast-audience of the previous drama sank down behind a white frame. 

She stood there still, turning towards us only as, after a daringly drawn-out pause, Thielemann let the final redemptive bars sing out. It was a stunning moment.