Semperoper Dresden: Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra

[From OPERA, March 2015, pp. 328-9]

The Semperoper’s Strauss-anniversary celebrations came full circle at the end of 2014 with the return, with a new cast, of Barbara Frey’s Elektra, with which it had all started in January. The main attraction, however, was a reprise of Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s 2000 production of Der Rosenkavalier, with Anja Harteros as the Marschallin and Christian Thielemann at the helm (seen on December 14). The production itself holds up well, placing the action in a contemporary setting but doing so with a light touch: paparazzi plague the ‘celebrities’ that the principal characters have now become; the Marschallin’s palace apparently has to be propped up financially by guided tours; Faninal’s residence becomes the penthouse of Trump Tower. There are a few unsuccessful touches, not least the staging of the Prelude (Strauss’s music here is not, it’s fair to say, depicting the act of frantic undressing), or having Mohammed indulgently pampered by the Marschallin. One thing’s for sure, though: it’s a much finer effort than Frey’s Elektra.

Musically, too, this Rosenkavalier showed the Semperoper at its very best, with the playing of the Staatskapelle reaching the highest levels of exquisitely relaxed virtuosity—a sort of supreme flexibility, of both tempo and texture, that reminded me of the playing of another Staatskapelle, Barenboim’s Berliners, at the 2013 Proms Ring. Thielemann’s tempo fluctuations could be, by any normal criteria, outrageous at times: the nearly ten seconds of silence before the Trio or the impetuous surging towards its climax, for example, or the way he lingeringly eased the orchestra back into its waltz at Baron Ochs’s ‘Ich wart’ auf Antwort’. But with the orchestra on such form, these moments were totally convincing, and with such a fine cast playing along, the overall effect was both beguiling and moving.

Harteros, in particular, benefited from the flexibility, and her Act 1 monologue was superb, all the more memorable for the way in which the production allowed her space to stalk the stage and command it fully. As already noted in these pages, the voice is not quite the silky, creamy stuff of Straussian dreams, but it has enough of those qualities as well as its own special beauty—a slight gauziness encasing a firm, powerful core—and is always employed with the greatest elegance and musicality. Similarly, her characterization is impeccably aristocratic, even a touch austere—dressed in black and white, she seemed to resemble a stern Spanish Habsburg, rather than a high-ranking subject of their Viennese cousins. 

Her Octavian was Sophie Koch, very much a staple in this role, but one whose commitment and vocal richness shouldn’t be taken for granted, even if her mezzo has lost some of its vibrant sheen and security. Christiane Karg’s Sophie was wonderful, a perky, sparky characterization matched by singing that spoke of very human vulnerability and sensuality rather than doll-like purity. I’m not sure I’ve heard a finer Trio: with help from the Semperoper’s glorious acoustic, all three voices managed to remain distinct while blending beautifully. Peter Rose was in fine voice as Ochs, and Adrian Eröd’s emphatic Faninal and Yosep Kang’s excellent Italian Tenor led a fine extended cast.

The fact that the evening belonged to Thielemann and his orchestra, though, was largely emphasized, I’m afraid to say, the following evening, when Peter Schneider took to the podium for Elektra, in the production that Thielemann had conducted with such fleet-footed ferocity at the beginning of the year. Schneider’s account was solid and unremarkable, and his cast seemed not to have had a great deal of rehearsal. Nonetheless, the performance was worth hearing, primarily for Elena Pankratova as Elektra. The Russian soprano had tackled the role in Bari earlier in the year and here showed that her voice, a remarkably powerful and beautiful instrument, smoothly produced across its range right up to a thrilling top, is up to the challenges of the role, even if the middle register felt occasionally under-projected. Dramatically her performance was routine, admittedly, but this would no doubt improve were she given more direction in a more interesting production; vocally, though, she is a
welcome addition to the relatively large number of fine Elektras on today’s scene.

Manuela Uhl sang a powerful, often exciting, sometimes sharp Chrysothemis. Jane Henschel showed that she’s still a formidable Klytemnestra, offering the polar opposite of Waltraud Meier’s understated and under-sung characterization in January. Markus Marquardt was a solid Orest, singing in a pleasingly grainy and powerful baritone.

Dresden Festival: Feuersnot; Semperoper: Simon Boccanegra

[From OPERA, September 2014, pp. 1110-12]

Within a matter of weeks, the Saxon capital witnessed a new production of Simon Boccanegra and a rare outing for Strauss’s Feuersnot. It seemed strange, however, that the latter, in a performance given under the auspices of the Dresden Festival but billed as a co-production with the Semperoper, employed few of Dresden’s prime Straussian assets—neither the Semperoper (where the piece was premiered in 1901), the Staatskapelle, nor even Christian Thielemann, one of today’s great Strauss conductors. The different sources of funding for the festival and the opera house—the Stadt funds the former, the Staat the latter—is apparently to blame for a relationship between the two entities that is somewhat short on useful symbiosis.

Verdi, however, certainly benefited from the full Semperoper treatment, and at the third performance of Jan Philip Gloger’s new production (June 3) the musical values were extraordinarily high. Thielemann translated the virtues that distinguish his conducting of the German repertoire—weight allied to transparency, a pervading sense of expansiveness that doesn’t preclude, when necessary, the whipping up of stormy drama—into the different musical language of Verdi’s brooding score with remarkable success.

He was aided by playing from his orchestra of the most exquisite refinement and patrician virtuosity, which suggests that their performances of Cav and Pag (very different works, admittedly) at Salzburg next Easter will be something to look forward to. There, however, they won’t have the advantage of the Semperoper’s astonishing acoustic, in which voices are able to project cleanly and clearly over an orchestral sound that is warm, and entirely unrestricted in bloom, clarity and detail.

There were some fine singers to take advantage of this, with a cast headed by the ardent, passionately sung Amelia of Maria Agresta. Here is a voice of uninhibited lyrical beauty, used with generosity and dramatic conviction. As her Adorno, Ramón Vargas initially sounded stretched and a little uncomfortable, but as the performance progressed—and especially in the second act—the voice gained an impressive ringing authority. More problematic was Željko Lučić’s Boccanegra, sung with smooth tone but undermined by wayward intonation that often meant he was distressingly flat. One of the performance’s distinguishing features was the fact that Thielemann encouraged introspection from both Lučić and Kwangchul Youn (as an imposing, if not ideally legato Fiesco), the only times when his interpretation risked feeling too slow.

Gloger’s production was something of a disappointment: a generic, well-executed selection of stock Regie devices without any compelling idea to hold them together. Christof Hetzer’s impressive, rotating unit set consisted of several angular spaces on different levels; it was home to a cast—including a threatening-mob chorus—in modern dress, plus multiple doubles of different ages for the principals, whose wanderings on and off were triggered (to increasingly predictable effect) by key words in the libretto. There were striking images, with Bernd Purkabek’s lighting creating some welcome effects to cut through the pervading gloom, but the pleasures here were primarily musical.

The performance of Feuersnot took place a stone’s throw from the city’s famous opera house, in the courtyard of the residenz, only recently opened up as a usable public space. There was a large stage to house both (on the left-hand side) the Dresden Festival Orchestra—a recently-founded period band whose remit seems to cover several centuries—and (on the right) a large playing area; the Semperoper chorus was arrayed behind. That the first night (June 7) took place in the middle of a heatwave was not only a relief for the (uncovered) audience, but also appropriate for an opera—a satirical pendant, in some ways, to Wagner’s Meistersinger—that’s all about the intoxication of midsummer. It’s also a richly melodic and brilliantly orchestrated work, behind whose satirical intent lies a trenchant critique of bourgeois morality and its hypocritical tendencies.

Philosophically, then, the work paves the way for the masterpieces that would follow; but it does so musically, too, with several hints of Salome, as well as some gloriously boisterous waltzes à la Rosenkavalier. Under Stefan Klingele’s galvanizing musical leadership, it came across thrillingly as well; there might have been a hint of incongruous abstemiousness in the light vibrato of the orchestra’s not terribly numerous strings, but there was no sense of any of the players holding back otherwise.

As Kunrad, the first of Strauss’s thinly-veiled autobiographical baritone roles, Tómas Tómasson had a robustness that served him well, but which was allied to stiffness—in both voice and manner—that made the character rather more ernst than I’m sure Strauss or his librettist, Ernst von Wolzogen, required. By contrast, Rachel Willis-Sørensen’s shiningly lyrical soprano was matched by a persuasive sense of mischief in her characterization of Diemut. Her trio of friends—with hints of both Wagner’s Rhinemaidens and Strauss’s own subsequent Ariadne nymphs—were sung with relish by Angela Liebold (Elsbeth), Simone Schröder (Wigelis) and Carolina Ullrich (Margret). The rest of the large cast was excellent.

One reason for Feuersnot’s rarity is the particularly difficult children’s choruses, all to be delivered—like much of the score—in pun-laden Munich dialect. Here the Kinderchor der Singakademie Dresden was strategically peppered with some of the more youthful-looking members of the excellent Semperoper chorus to provide a perfect balance of security and youthful exuberance.

The modest semi-staging itself (realized by Angela Brandt) made clever use of the space at hand and was largely simple and effective, even if the use of younger doubles of Kunrad and Diemut brought more confusion than clarity. Nothing could detract, though, from a wonderfully invigorating and enjoyable event.