Salzburg Festival: Charlotte Salomon, Der Rosenkavalier, Don Giovanni

[From OPERA, October 2014, pp. 1249-52]

After György Kurtág failed to deliver his new work on time for last year’s salzburg festival, Marc-André Dalbavie’s Charlotte Salomon became the first of the four operas commissioned by Alexander Pereira for 2013-16 to materialize (seen at the Felsenreitschule on August 2). However, it sounds as though the French composer might also have given the Salzburg management a scare. There had been substantial reworking of the piece’s Epilogue by Dalbavie and his director, Luc Bondy, right up until the start of rehearsals. At a much earlier stage, a complete libretto on the subject had been produced by Richard Millet (the librettist of Dalbavie’s Gesualdo), but this was deemed too literary and replaced by a brand new text—written in German, but largely translated into French—by the artist and writer Barbara Honigmann.

It tells the story of the Berlin-born Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon and draws on
the remarkable set of nearly 800 autobiographical gouaches, entitled Leben? oder Theater? (‘Life? or Theatre?’), that she produced in the final two years of her life, having fled Germany for France. (She died in Auschwitz in 1943, aged just 26.) Salomon designated her work a ‘Singespiel’ (sic) and filled it with jottings and musical allusions.

Honigmann’s libretto reflects the unusual nature of its source, and uses the same fictional, sometimes playful names Salomon produced for herself (she becomes Charlotte Kann) and the major players in her life (her stepmother, a singer, becomes Paulinka Bimbam; her mother’s conductor friend is rechristened Professor Klingklang). Dalbavie’s score takes note of the many musical references, weaving in—and often more or less consisting of—snippets of Carmen’s Habanera, the Bridesmaids’ Chorus from Der Freischütz and more. Salomon herself (the actress Johanna Wokalek, speaking in German) is present on stage as a sort of narrator of her own story, while the characters of that story are embodied by singers (communicating in French).

Johannes Schütz’s set, spread across the width of the Felsenreitschule’s broad, shallow stage, consisted of movable partition walls, doors and a few domestic props; Bondy’s direction was impressively fluid and sure, with an extra dimension provided by projections of Salomon’s own paintings. However, any sense of the innovative or experimental in the piece—its multi-layered premise, and the complexity of how the story and music are built up—was undermined by its resolutely A-to-B narrative trajectory, which prevented Charlotte, or anyone else, from developing as a character. It might have been deliberate strategy to emphasize how Charlotte is, essentially, a young girl, prone to insecurity and romantic crushes, but the work fails to create any powerful sense of chiaroscuro between this and either the tragedy that marked successive generations of her family or the greater tragedy that eventually engulfed her—the inevitable arrival of grotesquely masked Nazis felt automatic and almost trivial. 

Dalbavie’s music is expert, and does an excellent job of digesting quotations and reproducing them in disturbingly skewed form; but otherwise it feels short on identity and imagination: too much of it follows the pattern of rumbling, nervy ostinatos building up to dissonant climaxes, and there’s no sense of cumulative drama. The vocal writing is also rather anonymous, while the Epilogue, which pushes the running time to well over two hours (without an interval), still feels like a work in progress. 

There was excellent work from the singers, with Marianne Crebassa’s rich, unfettered singing as Charlotte Kann standing out. Frédéric Antoun was lyrical and charming as Amadeus Daberlohn (the main object of Charlotte’s desire), while Anaïk Morel brought a rich mezzo to Paulinka. The rest of the cast, often taking multiple roles, all gave committed performances, and the Mozarteumorchester Salzburg demonstrated its versatility in playing the score under Dalbavie’s direction. The net effect, however, was of a piece that was far less memorable or moving than it should have been, and therefore a work that, despite the best intentions, was simply not up to honouring its subject matter.

There were disappointments of a different sort with Harry Kupfer’s new Rosenkavalier, staged for the Strauss anniversary, in which the vaguely-defined action seemed to rattle around with little sense of purpose on the vast stage of the Grosses Festspielhaus (August 1). As with this summer’s other talked-about Rosenkavalier, there was some unconventional casting: on this occasion, a tall, young and handsome Baron Ochs in the shape of Günther Groissböck. Strauss himself in later life emphasized that Ochs should never be reduced to a straightforward oaf, even if Hofmannsthal at the time of the premiere—and a century before Twitterstorms—had despaired of the casting options available to him: ‘If all bass buffos are long and lean and only the Quinquins thick and fat,’ he wrote to his composer, ‘I may as well close down!’. Such casting against convention does, of course, offer potential for reinterpretation and rethinking a familiar work, and the fact that the usual cuts to Ochs’s music in Act 1 had been opened up suggested that there was an attempt to reposition the character as central to the opera’s action (he was, of course, mooted for some time as the title role).

However, Kupfer hardly made anything of the casting, and Groissböck’s unconventional, smartly-dressed, ‘long and lean’ Ochs—sung classily but with a lighter, higher bass than we often hear in the part—seemed to have stumbled into a conventional production that made little effort to accommodate him. The main effect was that, with the loss of the inherently pantomimic and comic in Ochs’s stage persona, the bubble of pretence and artificiality on which the opera so relies was burst, the balance of the drama skewed. Sophie Koch’s familiar Octavian, as a result, felt somewhat sidelined, especially since neither of the character’s relationships—with the Marschallin or with Sophie—was clearly or convincingly defined.

As the Marschallin, Krassimira Stoyanova sang with undeniable elegance and refinement, if not the requisite cream—and I wonder if it was she who had dictated a swiftish tempo for the Trio in a performance that was otherwise not averse to a little wallowing. But she communicated little of the necessary aristocratic poise and was hindered, undoubtedly, by a bizarre green-velvet costume in Act 3.

Mojca Erdmann looked the part as a pert, perky Sophie, but her voice—wiry, pushed and thin—proved itself fundamentally inadequate for the task in hand: the Presentation of the Rose was a trial; the closing bars of the final duet, in which her intonation went awry, were something of a car crash. The secondary cast was strong—including Adrian Eröd as a convincingly desperate if initially dry-voiced Faninal, and Dirk Aleschus as a comically tall Notary—but there was no escaping the fact that this was not a cast on the sort of level that Salzburg should be offering. 

Kupfer’s production in general felt like an unhappy compromise between the traditional and the abstract. Apparently updated to the time of composition, it made a feature of vast black-and-white projections of Viennese buildings, ignoring, it seemed, the important fact that the action of Der Rosenkavalier all takes place indoors. In the first two acts, Hans Schavernoch’s set consisted of movable chunks of glossy, stylized scenery in front of these projections.

There was an entirely different aesthetic for Act 3, when we were presented with an outside tavern—presumably in the Prater—which was whisked away for the trio and final duet, during which Faninal and the Marschallin reappeared in a grand vintage car. Much of it looked nice, but it felt indecisive, and seemed to present the work as being far more complacent and confortable than it is, an impression that was in part reinforced by the broadbrushed luxuriousness—and loudness—of Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic.

The biggest dud, however, was Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s dismal new Don Giovanni, the second instalment of his Da Ponte trilogy (seen on August 3 at the Haus Für Mozart). Rolf Glittenberg’s lavish single set presented us with a grand, wood-panelled hotel lobby, with a bar stage left and a central stairway leading up to multiple rooms above. I spent much of my time wondering which other operas this set might have been better employed for; its suitability for Mozart’s work was far from apparent, and the production offered no insight into why Bechtolf might possibly have deemed it appropriate.

One advantage was that Zerlina and Masetto could be portrayed as hotel staff, reflecting for once their social standing, but otherwise there was no sense of what anyone else was doing there. There were hints of a powerful military in the Commendatore and several uniformed extras—I think we were in the early 20th century—but this, like the appearance of a horned devil to save Don Giovanni from the chaos of the Act 1 finale, was left unexplored.

The director’s imagination—and the production’s budget—seemed to have been exhausted on the set, so for the supernatural elements the brave cast were left to fend for themselves, with minimal props. Dramatically it was feeble, and intellectually it felt lazy; despite fine work from the cast and orchestra, the production rendered the performance as a whole distressingly boring.

The cast dealt with their assignment with the utmost professionalism, however, with a particularly fine double act from Ildebrando D’Arcangelo’s suave Don Giovanni and Luca Pisaroni’s edgy and sophisticated Leporello. Lenneke Ruiten at times seemed a little stretched by Donna Anna’s music, but brought fire to the characterization, while Anett Fritsch was a fearless Donna Elvira. Andrew Staples’s voice sounded slightly fuzzier than usual as Don Ottavio, but the tenor sang with impressive breath control and impeccable Mozartian elegance. Valentina Naforniţa and Alessio Arduini made a fine, handsome couple as Zerlina and Masetto. Tomasz Konieczny, as the Commendatore, did what he could to bring gravitas to a character otherwise robbed of all dramatic power by the production.

There was high-quality playing once again in the pit, where Christoph Eschenbach conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in a straightforwardly traditional account of the score, in which no tempo jolted and no texture was unduly alarming. In Act 1, in particular, though, the dynamic range tended to feel limited, rarely dropping below mezzo forte. The musical performance was admirable on its own terms, and it’s probably unfair to complain; nevertheless, given the dearth of ideas on stage, a few more ideas in the pit might have been welcome.         

Bayerische Staatsoper: Orfeo

[From OPERA, October 2014, pp. 1268-70]

For the second new production of the Munich Opera Festival, the Bayerische Staatsoper installed itself in Max Littman’s 1901 Prinzregententheater, loosely modelled (in terms of its 1,000-seat auditorium, at least) on Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus and plonked on its own Green Hill in the smart, villa-filled Bogenhausen district of the city across the Isar.

The work was Monteverdi’s Orfeo, the Orfeo Christian Gerhaher, adding another operatic role to his modest tally. David Bösch, a Lübeck-born theatre director increasingly active in opera (recent stagings include Simon Boccanegra in Lyon, as well as Munich’s L’elisir and Frankfurt’s Königskinder), was in charge of a production that showed a mixture of theatrical virtuosity, poetic feeling and the sort of light touch that made a potentially unpromising initial premise—the setting was updated to a loosely-defined hippy community in the 1970s—highly effective, and, in harmony with Monteverdi’s supremely beautiful score, extremely moving.

Much of the production’s trippy, seductive beauty came from Patrick Bannwart’s set, in which long-stemmed, oversize flowers grew swiftly up from the stage during the Prologue, wilting and losing their petals as tragedy struck. In a smart and chilling counterpoint, grotesque cloth-sack figures dangled down like elongated roots into the Underworld, their blank faces brought spookily to life by Falko Herold’s video projections. Otherwise the scenery was minimal but highly effective: the obligatory camper van, a modest chariot (pulled by masked minions) for Caronte. After Euridice’s death, there was a soil-filled rectangle in the centre, representing her grave, of course, but also imbued with much further meaning besides—nothing here felt didactic or literal. 

The straightforward joys of the opening act were conveyed charmingly by the mainly young cast, and even if Gerhaher’s older Orfeo already seemed a little worn by experience compared to his colleagues, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the revels—Elvis moves, singing into a microphone and all. As the drama progressed, though, he was simply superb, acting with moving sincerity and using his voice—so beautifully, delicately projected and impeccably produced—to heart-wrenching effect.

He was surrounded by vivid characterizations from Andrea Mastroni (Caronte), Anna Bonitatibus (Messaggiera and Proserpina), Andrew Harris (Plutone), Lucy Knight (Ninfa) and Mauro Peter’s Vietnam-veteran Apollo. Anna Virovlansky was the personification of innocence as Euridice; Mathias Vidal stood out as an especially vital and engaging Shepherd and Spirit, but his colleagues (Jeroen de Vaal, Gabriel Jublin and Thomas Faulkner) were no less fine.

Yet it was Angela Brower as La Musica and Speranza—in the same grungy, winged costume for both, but full of wide-eyed joy as the former and childlike despair as the latter—who perhaps more than anyone embodied the production’s powerful sense of tragedy impinging so brutally on happiness and innocence. Ivor Bolton, conducting members of the Bayerisches Staats-orchester and the Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble, was unafraid to explore the emotional extremes at both ends of the spectrum, and there were vivid contributions from the Zürcher Sing-Akademie, whose members played various important dramatic roles, too.

WNO: Guillaume Tell; ROH: Barbiere

[From The Spectator, September 27]

Is there a fundamental, insuperable problem with staging Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a budget, without the resources to conjure up the sense of scale that was part of grand opéra’s appeal and raison d’être? Take away the special effects, whip away the phantasmagorical curtain, and, as with any Hollywood blockbuster, you are left with a modest little plot whirring away at its centre. In Tell, this involves the love between Arnold and Mathilde across a national divide. It’s the struggle of the Swiss — in a time before neutrality and cuckoo clocks — against their Austrian oppressors that, along with the Alps, forms the backdrop.

[continue reading here]

ENO: Otello

Benjamin Britten, when seeing his Peter Grimes at La Scala, wrote with a touch of glee that performing the work in Italian made it sound like Otello. It’s interesting to wonder what Verdi would have made, then, of David Alden’s new staging of his penultimate opera at the Coliseum, performed, of course, in English. Certainly, with Alden’s Grimes—also starring Stuart Skelton—still fresh in the mind from last season, the parallels seemed unavoidable. And even Jonathan Summer’s Iago shared a leather coat, if not quite the genuine sinisterness, with Matthew Rose’s chilling Claggart in Alden’s 2012 Billy Budd .

On this occasion, though, neither the set (by Jon Morrell)—moveable blocks of imposing, run-down grandeur with hints of a rubble-strewn wasteland beyond—nor, more broadly, the setting seemed much suited to the work in hand. For a start, as I understand it, Otello is primarily about emotional battles being fought once military battles have been won: the attendant peace and lack of activity making for the idle minds that Iago’s devil can exploit; the delineation between Otello’s nobility on the battlefield and his emotional immaturity and insecurity off it is at the heart of the drama. Here he stumbled out of battle less victorious than already broken, and seemed strangely unconcerned by the chaos that—Alden's almost dystopian setting suggested—persisted around him. His essential otherness, meanwhile, seems to insist entirely of a certain awkwardness in his manner. 

Disconsolate and nervy, Skelton's Otello was an unconvincing military leader, and, as a result, his fall from grace lost much of its wider resonance. (Was that why ‘Ora e per sempre addio’ was sluggish and internalised?) Without any initial composure, this Otello had nowhere to go, resorting to strange contortions, furniture throwing and the like. Similarly, with all the loss of pomp and grandeur surrounding him, his fall lost context; and I’m not entirely sure what was being said by having the chorus in Act 3 appear as regulation uptight-community scowlers and tutters—were they to be understood as somehow complicit in Otello’s downfall? Although they play an important role (and the ENO chorus was here on terrific form), this mass is surely there more to set the scene for the drama than to participate in it. 

Stuart Skelton in ENO's new Otello (photo: Alastair Muir)

Summers's Iago was shot through with the same run-down weariness that seemed to characterise the whole thing, often, it seemed, going through the motions joylessly and without much of the sadistic glee that we often see. His voice is in good nick, but is smooth in timbre, without bite. Skelton's voice—magnificent though it is—is similarly short on required edge, making for a slight lack of definition between them. Otherwise Skelton made a very decent stab at the role, taking its challenges largely in his stride, even if his interpretation was held back, I feel, by the production. It will be fascinating to hear how he grows into the part; and I, for one, can't wait to hear him tackle it in Italian. His enunciation of Tom Phillip's workmanlike translation here, though, was impeccable. 

Funnily enough, it was Leah Crocetto's Desdemona (the character's name incidentally retaining its stress, as in Italian, on the second 'e') who brought some vocal edge to proceedings. The American soprano sang the role in a big, vibrant voice that could be exciting, even if it made for a distinctly unangelic heroine. She seemed the least comfortable with singing in English, though, and, like her husband, was robbed of nobility by the production—particularly in a final act that couldn't make up its mind between realism and stylisation. Allan Clayton was excellent as a Cassio reduced, after his initial fall, to an alcoholic. As, respectively, a half-fop, half-spiv Roderigo and a tweed-clad, bespectacled Emilia, Peter Van Hulle and Pamela Helen Stephen could easily have wandered in from the nightmarish Borough of Alden's Grimes. 

The qualities one expects from Edward Gardner were there in abundance. There was precision and conviction in his conducting, and and a very high standard of execution from an ENO orchestra that has improved immeasurably during his tenure. But, like the production, it was a reading of Verdi's score that seemed to lose the depth, delicacy and grandeur, and which was also short on nuance at times (the introduction to Act 4 struck me as rather unloving). Although this team always brings a certain high standard to what it does, on this occasion I couldn't but feel disappointed by the result—an Otello that, worryingly, failed to leave me as moved, let alone poleaxed, as it should.

[Finally, if you'll excuse me, a plug for the new ENO/Overture Guide to 'Otello', for which I wrote a performance history. It's currently available only in the Coliseum foyer before the shows, and in the Royal Opera House shop, but will be available from the usual other outlets soon.]

Royal Opera: Ariadne auf Naxos

[From OPERA, September 2014, pp. 1149-50]

Ariadne auf Naxos

Royal Opera at Covent Garden, June 25

With this revival of Christof Loy’s 2002 Ariadne auf Naxos—the third of three of the Hofmannsthal operas presented in the 2013-14 season—the Royal Opera’s modest celebration of the Strauss year came to a conclusion. The performances also marked something of a celebration for Antonio Pappano, returning to the first production he conducted as the Royal Opera’s music director, not long after having announced the extension of his contract at Covent Garden. 

It remains a smart show, and Loy himself was back to direct this fourth revival, keeping much of the comedy sharp. Yet I wonder how much of a hand he had in directing Karita Mattila, who was singing Ariadne for the first time, but in large part, one felt, simply playing herself. The result was a fascinating performance from the Finnish diva, whose haughtiness in the Prologue was deliciously funny, but who in the Opera never quite shed the Prima Donna character, creating an unusual continuity between the evening’s two parts. But while there was a compelling intensity and charisma, of course, there was little sense of vulnerability and insecurity, or, as a result, of the character’s all-important transformation. Vocally, too, there were rough edges at the top and bottom, and signs of wear and tear could occasionally be heard all through the range. Artistic generosity is what Mattila’s Ariadne offers, not cool serenity and purity of line.

She was well supported by the rest of the cast, not least by a Bacchus from Roberto Saccà whose slight dryness of tone was more than compensated for by rare elegance and stamina. Jane Archibald was impressively on top of Zerbinetta’s notes, too, rattling through ‘Grossmächtige Prinzessin’ with considerable virtuosity, even if the voice might ideally have had a little extra sparkle and ping. Ruxandra Donose was impassioned and impulsive as the composer should be, and sang with spirit and commitment, but her mezzo is maybe a touch small for the role in this house. Sofia Fomina (no mean Zerbinetta herself, by all accounts), Karen Cargill and Kiandra Howarth made an unusually fine trio as Naiad, Dryad and Echo; Ed Lyon and Thomas Allen were well contrasted as a mischievous, mincing Dancing Master and pragmatic, mellow Music Master. Markus Werba’s Harlekin lacked charm, but Christoph Quest brought an authentically Austrian superciliousness to the Major Domo. 

In the pit, Pappano coaxed extremely fine playing from the reduced Royal Opera orchestra, and conducted with pleasing flexibility, keeping the to-ing and fro-ing of the Prologue, in particular, light on its feet. On the first night, though, not all the transitions between the comic and serious were as seamlessly handled as they might have been, and I missed some of the magic in the final pages. One further gripe: the surtitles—more simplistic précis than translation—felt a touch insulting to the intelligence of both the librettist and the audience.