There aren’t, as far as I’m aware, many operas with links to Linz. Indeed, the Upper Austrian city is probably best known in musical circles for having been home to that most unoperatic of composers, Anton Bruckner. Nevertheless, the Landestheater Linz has made the most of the fact that the Imperial mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler was resident there from the second decade of the 17th century. They commissioned Philip Glass’s Kepler for the city’s stint as European Capital of Culture and premiered it in 2009...
Five years after first being seen at La Scala and three years after hitting the Covent Garden stage – where it remains one of the most successful imports of the Holten era – Claus Guth’s Die Frau ohne Schatten has made it to the Staatsoper in Berlin as the new production for this year's Festtage. The cast is new (with one exception); so too is the conductor.
Semyon Bychkov was prevented at the last minute from presiding over the La Scala opening, but achieved wonders with the Royal Opera House Orchestra in London. It was his absence that was perhaps most keenly felt at this performance (particularly by anyone who saw the production in London)...
Making its third consecutive appearance as part of the Staatsoper’s Festtage, Dmitri Tcherniakov’s remarkable Parsifal looks ever more destined to become a staple of the Berlin Easter calendar. Its return next year to Unter den Linden, with slightly modified cast from this year’s, has just been announced. This means, too, that this was the chance to have the rare luxury of hearing the piece, with that world-beating Wagnerian team of Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle in the pit, in the relatively intimate space of the 1,060-seat Schillertheater...
Mozart, Symphony No. 35 in D, 'Haffner', K385
Schoenberg, Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major, Op. 9
Mozart, Symphony No. 41 in C, 'Jupiter', K551
Philharmonie, 7 April 2017
The Staatsoper Berlin’s 2017 Festtage got underway with a visit of the Vienna Philharmonic and a characteristic Daniel Barenboim programme. The two Viennese schools – First and Second – were juxtaposed, unapologetically big-boned Mozart symphonies either side Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony no. 1.
Mozart is too rarely the focus of a modern-instrument symphony orchestra concert in a hall the size of the Philharmonie, and Barenboim showed persuasively that this music can, and arguably more often should, benefit from such an approach. At least, this was certainly the case in a terrific account of the "Haffner" Symphony…
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Hans Neuenfels’s
Berliner Staatsoper staging of Ariadne
auf Naxos is its apparent pervading sense of gentleness,
if that’s the word, even at times a sort of neutrality.
Katrin Lea Tag’s set is essentially a white half-box, with
moveable walls and backdrops (one in the Prologue features a cash dispenser).
The main feeling is one of pared-down abstraction: there’s no sense of being backstage
in the Prologue, not much feeling of being on
stage in the Opera, where Ariadne weeps on a chaise longue surrounded by the
antique rubble that tumbles down from the back at the end of the Prologue.
Around her, Harlekin and his troupe try to rebuild something
from this. Ariadne’s mistaking Bacchus for Hermes is spelled out when the latter arrives in the form of a
golden statuette as part of a strange, macabre procession. Bacchus himself
stage-manages his appearance, with Najade, Dryade and Echo becoming his
assistants.
The three attendants begin the act like the Norns at the start of Götterdämmerung, the Composer—who
reappears at various points—having furnished them with a ball of three threads,
which they then use to lift Ariadne, puppet-like, from her torpor. During her
main arias, meanwhile, an actual puppet artist, dressed in black with ‘Das
Schicksal’ on his back, weaves around her with a bare head on each hand—Ariadne
and Theseus, one might assume.
Ariadne has one of
those Strauss-Hofmannsthal happy endings that is only half-convincing:
Hofmannsthal talks of transformation, but Strauss doesn’t allow his music in
this work, or even less in Die Frau ohne
Schatten (which follows both in their collaboration and in the Staatsoper’s 16/17 Spielplan), to jettison the pain of what’s come before. Happiness, the
implication seems to be, is contingent on living with and gradually processing that memory.
Here, though, Neuenfels denies us that: Bacchus does
his best to persuade Ariadne, his performance, it struck me, slightly reminiscent of the
unsuccessful mating dance of some rainforest bird. And he’s about as troubled by
his failure, too: he has given up by the close of the duet, which he sings with generalised anguish from
the orchestral pit. Ariadne, in the end, prefers to die. As the synopsis in the
programme puts it: ‘She thus fulfils the words of the Composer: “She wants to
die! No, she really does die.”’
Out goes the lesson that, according to Hofmannsthal, Ariadne
should learn from from Zerbinetta, which maybe explains why their opposing
attitudes are presented in bald opposition during the latter’s aria, where each
inscribes the essence of their Liebesphilosophie
in chalk on one side of the stage.
It's a bold ending, and one that's perhaps also surprising given that Zerbinetta is presented
with rare sympathy, smartly-dressed, grown-up and unusually sensible, and sung
with real spark here, if not quite an ideal level of pinpoint coloratura, by
Elena Sanch-Pereg.
You’d maybe expect the production to undercut her message,
but she’s allowed to get it across clearly; and rarely have I seen the
burgeoning feelings between her and the Composer—the ardent, youthful and
soprano-ish Katharina Kammerloher—in the Prologue presented more touchingly,
without any hint of caricature.
There was something especially touching, too,
about Kammerloher’s interactions with the excellent Music Master of Arttu
Kataja, whose own youth suggested perhaps more sympathy than usual with his
charge’s dilemma.
In fact, the comedy was underplayed throughout, not least by
the strange Haushofmeister(in) of Elisabeth Trissenaar, about as Viennese as
the staging, and hardly less abstract in her deliberately pulled-about delivery—as a character, she seemed situated somewhere
between circus ringmaster and cabaret MC. The excellent quartet around Gyula
Orendt’s touching Harlekin kept clowning refreshingly to a minimum, a strap-on
dildo each at the end of the Prologue notwithstanding.
The streamlined staging felt matched to an extent by the
conducting of Eun Sun Kim, which was a little business-like on occasion,
despite a great deal of flexibility in the Prologue. She didn’t dig deep as
some in the Opera itself, either, and perhaps the tragedy of Neuenfels’s
vision might have gained greater depth if she had done so.
Such an effect, though, was undoubtedly hampered by Anna
Samuil’s bold-as-brass Ariadne. Unstinting on the vibrato and the convoluted
German, she sang the notes but offered little sense of trying to explore this
most complex of roles, ploughing through her arias and failing to offer
something to match the delicately prepared cushion of sound Kim proffered her her ‘Gibt es kein hinüber’ (below, by way of totally unfair comparison, is
Gundula Janowitz showing how this can be done, in the live recording I picked
as top choice when I did a GramophoneCollection on the opera a couple of years ago)
The production rather underlines the bluster to which any
Bacchus is prone, but Roberto Saccà nonetheless sang with admirable security
and emotional grandeur—or was it here, in Neuenfels's eyes, mere grandstanding?
Finally, a mention of the playing of the Staatskapelle, a
marvel of eloquence and delicacy. And what a pleasure to here this score in a
theatre the size of the Schillertheater, a couple of hundred seats smaller than
the Stuttgart Staatstheater for which the work was originally conceived—in its first 1912 version at least.
Only a couple of days after this performance, the new season
at the Semperoper was announced, in which Christian Thielemann is to conduct
not a single of the new productions. He’s busy with plenty of Wagner (there are
a couple of Rings), as well as a starrily cast Tosca,
but it might seem surprising, after this Otello
and a Simon Boccanegra a few seasons
back, that he wouldn’t have bagsied next season’s new Forza del Destino for himself (that goes to Mark Wigglesworth).
That said, this performance suggested that Forza might not be
quite up his Straße these days. While
he brought an appropriate dark grandeur to Boccanegra
and certain moments in Otello, the
more visceral nature of the latter’s drama seemed on occasion to elude him.
The playing of the Staatskapelle gloried in the band’s characteristic
cushioned sheen, and Thielemann can elicit some thrilling edge and bite from
them too—and certain key orchestral outbursts were stunning in their power. But
it seemed like the conductor also felt the need to place several episodes of
moment by moment drama within longer quasi-symphonic arcs: the results were
always interesting, but not always compelling.
Perhaps things would have worked more powerfully had the
production, making its Dresden debut after being unveiled at last year’s
Salzburg Easter Festival, been more interested in offering us red-blooded drama
too.
Instead, as tends to be the case in my experience of their work, the team
of Vincent Boussard (director), Vincent Lemaire (sets) and Christian Lacroix
(costumes) offered something stylish but slightly anonymous:
period-with-a-modern-twist costumes, shiny dark floor, minimal boxy sets and a
recurring motif of wafting material (a reference both to the sail mentioned in
the opening chorus and Desdemona’s handkerchief) both on stage and in the
atmospheric if slightly screensaverish video projections.
We also had the dubious bonus of an ‘angel’ (played by the
actress Sofia Pintzou), who stalked the stage throughout much of the evening,
and whose black wings started to billow smoke and flame up at the big orchestral outburst ahead of ‘Dio! mi potevi’.
This allowed for some impressive images, but also seemed symptomatic of a
staging that felt weirdly reluctant to get its hands dirty with this most
powerful and direct of dramas, in which we had little sense of where we were, who the main
characters were, why they were acting in the way they did and, ultimately, why
we should really care about them.
This effect was somewhat exacerbated by a cast that never
really coalesced. The casting of Stephen Gould as Otello seemed to take us back
to an earlier age where Tristans and Siegfrieds were regulars in this role, but
also demonstrated that its challenges are very different from those of Wagner.
Gould was stretched at the extremes and his tone was exposed as short on sap
and the necessary trumpety squillo. He
has the stamina, though, and saved the best till last in a moving death
scene.
Andrzej Dobber was a perfectly decent Iago, but the
combination of his reluctance to really use the words and a smooth, rather
benign timbre held the characterization back.
Dorothea Röschmann was an
unusually forthright, strong-willed Desdemona right from the start, and certainly no mere
shining paragon of female virtue and purity (somewhat in contravention of
Verdi’s own conception of the role). There a couple of rough-edged moments, but
her Willow Song and Ave Maria were a highlight—it’s just a shame that the
characterization was left isolated within the production as a whole.
The singers making up the rest of the cast,
including Antonio Poli’s mellifluous and pleasingly bright-toned Cassio, Georg
Zeppenfeld’s authoritative Lodovico and Christa Mayer’s moving Emilia, were
excellent. There was an awful lot of quality on show, then, but this was an Otello that never really caught fire.
I’d gone to Hamburg’s new Lulu vaguely forewarned: this new production from Christoph
Marthaler was going to offer a novel solution to the problem of the opera’s
unfinished status (if there is indeed still a problem, over 35 years since
Friedrich Cerha’s completion was first performed).
I’d steered clear of reviews, but had heard the evening was
to conclude with the Violin Concerto. When the programme made no obvious
mention of the fact, though, I wondered if that was indeed going to be the
case: I embarked upon the evening in a state of mild confusion.
(Click to enlarge)
What an essay in the programme did explain was that, in this
edition (credited to Marthaler, Kent Nagano, assistant conductor Johannes Harniet
and dramaturg Malte Ubenauf), the music for Act 3 would be presented to reflect
the state of Berg’s unfinished particell score, performed by two pianos (one on
stage, the other in the pit) and violin (on stage). The music Berg did actually
orchestrate was not included.
It all served to make an already elusive work even more
elusive. It also seemed to be of a piece with Marthaler’s staging, in which all
characters themselves seemed to be presented in incomplete form, sketched out
in somewhat abstracted terms, delivering lines with studied lack of emotion,
moving with stilted, stylised awkwardness.
In a sequence right at the very start, the Theatre
Director’s assistant, Auguste, brings each character on, placing them in
position. A microphone on a boom is present throughout, while Acts 1 and 3 seem
to take place backstage. The natural state of the production, to which it felt
as though it was continually trying to return, seemed to be precisely the
provisional incompleteness that was communicated in that final act, both
musically and in terms of the staging and drama.
The whole show has a undeniable seriousness—which by no
means excludes some surreal humorous touches—and an austere, cool beauty to it.
Marthaler is unstinting in creating his own theatrical universe of post-war
beiges, painstakingly and stylishly realised through Anna Viebrock’s designs
and Martin Gebrecht’s precise lighting, which an excellent cast inhabit with total
commitment.
There’s a sense with Barbara Hannigan’s Lulu that
much of what she does here—some repeated backward flips off a table, long stretches
of jerky gesturing—she’s been asked to do largely just because she can; and the
voice remains more adept at ethereal flights into the stratosphere than
projecting mid-range intensity.
She’s still a compelling stage presence, though, and an
actress of fearless commitment: her physical submission to Ivan Ludlow’s hunky
Athlete, allowing herself to serve as some sort of numb ersatz dumbbell, was
both unsettling and strangely impressive. Her totemic, symbolic status in the
production was further underlined by the presence of four further female
figures, named in the cast list as characters from Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box.
Anne Sofie von Otter was a buttoned-up, glamorous and moving Countess
Geschwitz, singing with considerable heft as well as the trademark class. Jochen
Schmeckenbecker was a gruff, forceful Alwa, and Matthias Klink
made a strong impression as Alwa. In the other roles, Sergei Leiferkus’s
coal-toned, darkly comic Schigolch deserves special mention.
Nagano conducted with a clear-sighted sense of purpose.
He’s not one to imbue a score such as this with much warmth, however, and his
interpretation, like Marthalar’s staging, stayed relatively cool. The conductor
seemed most fired up when inspired by Veronika Eberle’s terrific playing—as soloist
in the concerto, and the vaguely-defined ‘Eine Violinistin’ in the disintegrating
drama—in the final 25 minutes.
And the edition? It seemed like an interesting experiment,
but one that stretches a long evening out to a length, with two intervals, of over
four hours. To have the drama unravel just at the stage when one’s used to have
it tighten and intensify, to leave just a resurrected Lulu and her four companions,
gesturing forlornly as the Violin Concerto came to its rapt conclusion, was
memorable. It was intriguing, too, to have a thematic link drawn between that work, written in memory of the
‘angel’ Manon Gropius, and the protagonist of the opera whose composition was broken off for Berg to complete his commission.
I wouldn't say it was a satisfying solution to the problem that Nagano and Marthaler had created for themselves. But I doubt, to be honest, that that was what they were setting out to achieve.
