2023/2024 FR/EU reviews:
Falstaff at the Opéra Bastille (September 10, 2024)
Il barbiere di Siviglia in Pesaro (August 19, 2024)
Bianca e Falliero in Pesaro (August 18, 2024)
Ermione in Pesaro (August 17, 2024)
L'equivoco stravagante in Pesaro (August 16, 2024)
The Gambler in Salzburg (August 13, 2024)
The Idiot in Salzburg (August 12, 2024, 2024)
Tristan und Isolde in Bayreuth (August 9, 2024, 2024)
Der Fliegende Holländer in Bayreuth (August 8, 2024)
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Aix (August 19, 2024)
Kafka-Fragmente in Aix (July 12, 2024)
Eight Songs for a Mad King in Aix (July 12, 2024)
Samson in Aix (July 15, 2024)
Madama Butterfly in Aix (July 10, 2024)
Iphigénie en Tauride in Aix (July 8, 2024, 2024)
Iphigénie en Aulide in Aix (July 8, 2024, 2024)
L'Orfeo in Cremona (June 21, 2024)
La Vestale in Paris (June 19, 2024)
The Extirminating Angel in Paris (March 17, 2024)
Simon Boccanegrar in Paris (March 19, 2024)
Pique Damein Lyon (March 16, 2024)
La fanciulla del Westin Lyon (March 15, 2024)
La traviata in Marseille (February 15, 2024)
Adriana Lecouvreur at the Opéra Bastille (February 7, 2024)
Giulio Cesare at the Palais Garnier (February 8, 2024)
Beatrice di Tenda at Opéra Bastille (February 9, 2024)
Die Frau ohne Schatten in Toulouse (January 31, 2024)
Falstaff at the Opéra Bastille
It was magic from the start, Verdi’s in medias res chords exploded and tumbled, Danish conductor Michael Schønwandt established the solid, brisk beat, brilliantly illuminating Verdi’s vast musical complexities to their final cadence.
Verdi’s unparalleled masterpiece shone in its comic majesty, integrated into French stage director Dominique Pitoiset’s once progressive, now venerable 1999 production. Pitoiset had staged a series of Shakespeare plays for progressive theaters in Milan and Torino that caught the eye of Hugues Gall, the then (1995-2004) general director of the Opéra de Paris. Paris Opera had already celebrated the famed Italian theater director Giorgio Strehler, thus it was an evident choice to tap a director imbued in pristine progressive Italian theater to stage this prestigious Italian Shakespeare knock-off.
Pitoiset set the opera in front of a giant, late Victorian, industrial façade fronting the Quickley Steam Laundry, together with the ubiquitous British pub, an entry point for visits to Windsor Park and its famed tree, and an automobile repair garage which contained a classic British roadster. To change the scenes the huge façade magically traversed the stage — a vista! — moving on and off the stage to reveal its various components in different configurations. Wittily, the huge wall arrived finally at the black oak, its final destination, and stopped, at which point the car, evidently finally repaired, then drove off the stage.
All this was possible because the then new Opéra Bastille boasted massive wing space.
Andrii Kymach as Ford, Ambrogio Maestri as Falstaff
The massive wall made a parallel, always lively, always witty world to what Verdi’s famed librettist, Arrigo Boito made of Shakespeare’s tale. Director Pitoiset respected the Italian makeover to the letter. The play itself was downstage, its characters in high relief, its towering Falstaff was portly indeed. Falstaff’s tormentors, Bardolfo and Pistola effected slick Goldoni physical theater à la Strehler, complementing the commedia dell'arte, clownlike wigs of Falstaff and Pistola. The plotting women were carefully grouped together to deliver their tricky music in highly theatrical poise. Nanetta and Fenton flitted airily across the stage. And finally Ford was left quite alone on the darkened stage to vent his cuckolded rage.
The action moved always in slickly theatrical terms, all ten principals in swift, highly directed, chaotic motion that was the second act finale, arriving finally in a line across the front of the stage to summon the final musical confusion, at which point Falstaff was dumped into the steaming river.
The Opéra de Paris enlisted a splendid cast. That they were of big, beautiful voice was a bonus, given the amplitude of the Opéra Bastille, its mighty orchestra revved up to deliver the Verdi masterpiece with maximum energy. Italian baritone Ambrogio Maestri as the Falstaff. It is his signature role, first performed at La Scala in 2001, performed as well in the 2013 incarnation of the Pitoiset Falstaff at the Bastille. Mr. Maestri earned an impromptu ovation for his roar of indignation at the very idea of “honor,” but later found a great beauty of tone and phrasing in his humiliated “Mondo ladro, mondo rubaldo, reo mondo,” achieving finally an actual nobility of tone for a capitulatory “Tutto nel mondo è burla.”
Ford was sung by Ukrainian baritone Andrii Kymach. Of sharply focused, golden hued voice Mr. Kymach has an intense, dark-eyed presence. He tore up the stage with his “È sogno o realta … due rami enormi,” easily slipping into Ford’s blinding rage, then succumbing into a pure opera buffa victim of his own cunning as the pater familias.
Peruvian tenor Iván Ayón Rivas lent very beautiful, ample lyric tenor voice to Fenton, easily finding the exquisite beauty Verdi imbued into his Act III “Dal labbro il canto estasiato vola.” Nannetta was sung by Italian soprano Federica Guida in ample, Italianate lyric tone that added considerable musical and dramatic heft to her fairy queen masquerade “Sul fil d’un soffio etesio ”
The heavier voices of Mr. Rivas and Mme. Guida as they played out their love story in this performance added enormous emotional warmth and dramaturgical reward, equalling in impact the comic comeuppances of Falstaff and Ford, and the warmth of Falstaff’s acceptance of the absurdity of his existence.
Conductor Schønwandt underscored the absolute absurdity of the opera by giving us at last a carefully paced fugue, each of its voices entering in absolute clarity, emerging finally, somehow, in Verdi’s maelstrom of magnificent musical turmoil.
Olivia Boen as Alice Ford, Federica Guida as Nannetta, Marie-Nicole Lemieux as Mistress Quickly, Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieu as Meg Page
Alice Ford was sung by American soprano Olivia Boen with great warmth of voice, and sense of comic timing. Mistress Quickly was sung by Canadian contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux in a performance that was fully, and beautifully sung with but little trace of the caricature that is usual for this sometimes character role. Mrs. Meg Page was sung by French mezzo-soprano Marie-Andrée Bouchard-Lesieur, Meg’s usual aplomb pointedly exaggerated.
Bardolfo was sung by agile Australian character tenor Nicholas Jones who tumbled gracefully in a nod to Goldoni, Pistola, the driver of the classic roadster, was sung by Italian bass Alessio Cacciamani in booming voice (lead photo with Falstaff). Dr. Cajus was rendered by Italian character tenor Gregory Bonfatti as total caricature, betraying the purer dramaturgy of the production.
Scenery was designed by Alexandre Beliaev, costumes by Elena Rivkina. The original lighting was designed by Philippe Albaric, adapted by Christophe Pitoiset both in 2017 and just now. The chorus and orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris, Opéra Bastille, Paris, France, September 10, 2024.
All photos copyright Vincent Pontet, courtesy of the Opéra de Paris
Il barbiere di Siviglia in Pesaro
The city of Pesaro is the 2024 Capitale Italiana della Cultura, adding luster to its 2017 Unesco designation as a Città Creativa. All this calls for celebration, and that was the addition of a fourth production to the festival’s usual three — and no opera is more celebratory than Il barbiere!
It was the reprise of Pier Luigi Pizzi’s splendid 2018 production, a mise en scène that celebrated Rossini’s most famous opera with great elegance and sophistication. His singers dwelt on Rossini’s finely wrought vocal lines, gracefully accomplishing their musical elaboration. The comic situations were subtly conceived and carefully executed. It was an exquisite production.
Pier Luigi Pizzi, now age 94, originally studied architecture. He began his theatrical life as a set and costume designer, working with the storied Italian theater directors Giorgio Strehler and Luca Ronconi, the first directors to impose a strong, purely theatrical perspective onto their stagings of both theater and opera. Both directors worked in a highly distilled style, the theatrical structure of the drama emerging in absolute clarity, first and foremost.
Pizzi was imbued with this esthetic. Later, at age 47, he took on the staging of operas as well designing. In such esthetic was this 2018 production. [See my review in Archives.]
No longer a tightly controlled, directorial statement, this 2024 reprise became a romp for the singers, and a vanity piece for conductor Lorenzo Passerini who stood cockily before the Orchestra Sinfonica Gioachino Rossini, applauding the singers’ showpieces (lightly tapping his baton onto his opened hand), when not dancing grandly in front of the orchestra, urging it to ever greater fortes.
The singers gave their all, and then more. Fiorello, sung by Italian baritone William Corrò, sang so softly in his “Piano, pianissimo” entrance with Lindoro’s accompanists that he was inaudible, though later we learn he has a big, booming voice. Figaro, sung by Polish baritone Andrzfej Filonczyk (lead photo, right), strutted his beefcake catwalk tour so cockily that one almost overlooked that he was bellowing. Lindoro, sung by American tenor Jack Swanson (lead photo, left), knew he had big competition for being the fastest and loudest, thus his fioratura in the Figaro/Lindoro “All’idea di qual metal” was compromised, though he accomplished his final “Cessa di piu resistere” with requisite virtuosity.
Left to right, Michele Pertusi as Bartolo, Carlo Lepore as Bartolo, Andrzfej Filonczyk as Figaro, Jack Swanson as Lindoro, Maria Kataeva as Rosina, Patrizia Biccirè as Berta
Rossina, sung by Russian mezzo-soprano Maria Kataeva, was a very presentational creature, making one think of Carmen. A fine moment in the Pizzi mise en scène is the storm scene, imagined by Pizzi to be Rosina imagining that Lindoro has betrayed her trust. Such vulnerability proved well beyond Mlle. Kataeva’s emotional range.
Bartolo was sung by Italian buffo Carlo Lepore, veteran of many Pesaro productions, here up against the greatly overblown Basilio of Italian buffo Michele Pertusi.
All the artists of the production have established careers on major stages. I am bewildered by these performances, evidently sanctioned by Pizzi who oversaw the production with his longtime associate Massimo Gasparon.
Please see my review of yet another Pesaro Barbiere, this one from 2014. Though far from finding the theatrical perfection of Pizzi’s 2018 Barber, it was of great interest, and wonderful fun, famed Figaro Florian Sempey in his role debut!
Vitrifrigo Arena, Pesaro, Italy, August 19, 2024. All photos copyright Amati Bacciardi, courtesy of the Rossini Opera Festival.
Bianca e Falliero in Pesaro
Expectations were high in Pesaro just now, not for the new production of Bianca e Falliero by French stage director Jean-Louis Grinda (expectations were low), but of the Rossini Opera Festival’s return to the Parafestival, a sort of community space that closed for an upgrade in 2006. Finally re-opened 18 years later, the theater (serving as well as a basketball court) is now named the Auditorium Scavolini.
While the stage seems kind to singers, the pit offers an unflattering orchestral sound, huge fortes with chorus overburden the hall’s acoustic. The seating is on closely spaced, tiny chairs on dangerous gradations, many seats placed behind glass walls! Public amenities (restrooms) are not even minimal. It is a sad example of adaptive reuse architecture, its only advantage is its proximity to Pesaro’s hotels.
While the 1819 premiere of Rossini’s Bianca e Falliero occurred during the raging Milanese conflict of Romanticism with Classicism, we, as Rossinian classicists, are in Pesaro to celebrate florid singing and old fashioned dramaturgy — love vs. duty! The Rossini Festival’s artistic director Juan Diego Flóres awarded us a splendid cast, but a production that ignored the challenges of translating classical tensions into a current theatrical language.
Bianca e Falliero is a quartet of principal singers — Bianca a soprano (lead photo), Falliero a travesty mezzo soprano (lead photo), Bianca’s father a tenor, her arranged fiancé a bass — who all come together in the grand quartet that precedes Bianca’s triumphant, brilliant final aria “Teco io resto: in te rispetto,” reconciling, finally, her father with her lover.
La Scala librettist Felice Romani concocted a melodrama that laboriously charts the betrothal of Bianca to Capellio, a marriage that will financially save Bianca’s father Contareno, though Bianca’s triumphant warrior lover Falliero had just returned to Venice. Handily Venice had just passed a law condemning to death anyone who consorts with the enemy. Unfortunately the only escape possible from Falliero’s secret meeting with Bianca was through the Spanish ambassador’s house (the Spanish Hapsburgs controlled much of northern Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries).
Bianca was sung by Australian soprano Jessica Pratt, a singer of beautiful voice and impeccable technique, in perfectly matched, pure vocal colors to the Falliero, sung by Japanese mezzo soprano Aya Wakizono who showed magnificently in her Act II showpiece “Tu non sai qual colpo atroce” (Falliero believes that Bianca has actually married Capellio). This care in casting paid off handsomely in the three duets Rossini gifted these matched female voices, the Act I “Sappi che un Dio crudele” melding the voices in exquisite pianos.
Giorgi Manoshvili as Capellio, Aya Wakizono as Falliero
The situation resolved itself when Capellio, the arranged fiancé, was moved by Bianca’s testimony to the Venetian senate. He suddenly withdrew all his claims on Bianca and manipulated circumstances to save Falliero’s life. The role was sung by young Georgian bass Georgi Manoshvili in very beautiful, sympathetic, pure bass tones, succumbing from time to time to Capellio’s compulsion to indulge in well executed fioratura.
Bianca’s father Contareno was sung by Russian tenor Dmitry Korchak who raged floridly throughout the opera at his daughter reluctance to heed her filial duty and Falliero’s audacity to love Bianca, upsetting Contareno’s plans. Roles facilitating the action, usually in dry (fortepiano only) recitative, were Priuli sung by Nicolò Donini, Costanza sung by Carmen Buendía, Usciere sung by Claudio Zazzaro and the Cancelliere sung by D’Angelo Díaz.
Stage director Jean-Louis Grinda attempted to involve us in his production by showing us actual, tearjerking footage of Italian suffering during WWII during the opening chorus urging Venice to remain strong in the face of the Spanish threat.
The setting, designed by Rudy Sabounghi, was a wooden box in rich browns often bathed in golden light. The box broke into units that were configured in ever changing ways, pushed by stagehands in formal attire, sometimes revealing a backdrop of a realistic looking lagoon lighted by the moon. Director Grinda effected perfunctory stage movement, often clumsy, for both chorus and principals, the Act ! Finale a primer in how not to stage a large Rossini ensemble.
Costumes, also designed by Mr. Sabounghi, related to WWII evidently, though the Venetian senators were cloaked in rich robes. Particularly annoying was the 30 or so female chorus all dressed as housekeeper maids who joined Bianca in throwing plastic flowers around the stage — clicking as they hit the floor.
Plastic flowers, female chorus as maids, Jessica Pratt as Bianca
It was a retro evening with much fine singing, Roberto Abbado conducting the formidable Orchestra Sinfonia Nazionale della RAI in highly informed Rossinian fashion.
Palofestival, Pesaro, Italy, August 18, 2024. All photos copyright Amati Bacciardi, courtesy of the Rossini Opera Festival.
Ermione in Pesaro
Ermione (Hermione in the Greek myth, though Rossini’s opera has nothing to do with the myth or Euripides tragedy) was anticipated with great expectations both because Michele Mariotti, Pesaro’s conducting star, was its maestro, and because the 2008 Pesaro Ermione conducted by Roberto Abbado is remembered as a very successful Pesaro production — not to forget the 1987 performances with Montserrat Caballé, Marilyn Horne, Rockwell Blake and Chris Merritt.
A Greek king, Pyrrhus is engaged to Hermione, though he has fallen in love with the Trojan princess Andromache, politically unadvisable. The Mycenaean king Orestes however loves Hermione, politically inadvisable. Hermione loves Pirro, Andromache’s son (son of Hector, seen but not heard) is a political football. Pirro will marry Andromache, Hermione vows vengeance thus Oreste kills Pirro, then escapes her wrath.
Forget love versus duty, Ermione is about rage, evidently foreign to the Neapolitan public’s expectation of opera, as the opera was pulled after only a few performances.
Ermione, cupid (silent role), Pirro
Conductor Mariotti from the first notes of the overture placed his orchestra in an extraterrestrial space, Rossini’s play of woodwinds dancing excitedly, his crescendos piling one upon another in always new instrumental colors, a chorus intruding from time to time lamenting the lost glory of Troy. The overture to Ermione announces Rossini and the Italian operatic tradition to be in avant-garde stance.
Indeed it was Rossini venturing into new territory, building complex dramatic scenes instead of opera seria’s musical numbers. This was Rossini entering into the larger French operatic world, Rossini exploring the techniques of the Gluck reforms, and Spontini’s emotional expansions. Most importantly the Rossini opera seria recitatives that had only to advance the story in other Rossini tragedies have become full blown dramatic actions filled with vocal inflections and orchestral colors.
Yet it is Rossini, the voices of the protagonists traversing finely wrought musical lines, adding the musical excitement of masterful elaboration.
The staging was entrusted to German director Johannes Erath, in a third collaboration with Michele Mariotti. Erath created a production of enormous technical complexity, in a vast expanse that spread onto a gangway both at the sides and in front of the orchestra pit [the orchestra at the venerable Vitrifrigo Arena sits floor level, old style, together with the audience].
Director Erath and his set designer Heiki Scheele actually enclosed the orchestra within the stage picture using the gangway platforms and side wall projections to break out of the proscenium arch, thereby thrusting his actors into our space.
Cupid (silent role) on gangway, white lines
Onto this vast stage panoply he then placed the actions of the story on the Trojan shores, in various grand palaces, among celestial bodes and in real places that we know well — the Teatro Rossini and the Pesaro beach. Though the intimate encounter of the jealous Hermione berating the very self possessed Pyrrhus for loving Andromache took place she on a platform at the orchestra left, he 70 feet (20 meters) away on the orchestra right, shouting at one another across the RAI Symphony.
We were there, but we didn’t know where. We did know that it was high theater, reminded by the three huge rectangles of thin white light that enclosed, singly or superimposed, stage pictures from time to time.
Ermione was sung by Italian soprano Anastasia Bartoli (no relation), a silvery voiced singer of obviously very formidable technique. She is of imposing, indeed threatening presence, and has the incredible stamina required to rage brilliantly for several hours. Dressed in a highly concocted gown of sorts (a black leotard with red side bustle skirts) she let loose at Pirro for loving Andromache, then at Oreste for not knowing that he should not have avenged her by killing Pirro.
Pirro was sung by Italian tenor (really a baritenore) Enea Scala, a singer of dashing presence, and beautiful, powerful lyric voice that infused Rossini’s expressive fioratura with confident, unflappable elan. Unfortunately the Tottola libretto kills him off early in the second act, depriving us of the potential vocal glories of many alternative outcomes, not just the Act II finale where he might have had a few things to say.
Juan Diego Flórez as Oreste, Anastasia Bartoli as Ermione
Oreste was sung by Peruvian tenor Jean Diego Flórez, skillfully, very skillfully in his famed voice declaring his love for Hermione, demanding as well that Pirro execute Andromache’s son thus avoiding that the son avenge the death of his father, the Trojan Hector. Dressed in his signature white suit the 51 year old Mr. Flórez is singing in a voice of some added warmth, making this Oreste a sympathetic, somewhat pathetic, brilliantly sung soul.
Andromache was sung by Russian mezzo Victoria Yarovaya. In the Erath staging she became an even more minor character than she had become in the Tottola libretto (loosely based on Racine’s Andromaque), and, what’s more, the original Ermione was to be sung by the great Rossini tragedian Isabella Colbran (later Rossini's wife), leaving little extra-dramaturgical excuse for additional ravings. In a white wig and rather plain gown she was more a part of the scenery in spite of her two brief, beautifully sung arias.
Of note was the non-singing presence of Andromache’s son Astianax, played by an adolescent looking young man who remained completely limp as he was dragged up and down steep steps, pulled on and off the stage — a directorially witty piece of meat whose threat to Greek security precipitated the downfall of two Greek kings, leaving on stage only the enraged daughter of the King of Sparta.
Facilitating roles were placed by Michael Mofidian as Fenicio, Martiniana Antonie as Cleone, Paola Leguizamón as Celia and Tianxuefei Sun as Attalo. The chorus of Teatro Ventidio Basso, the theater of nearby Ascoli Piceno, were the Trojans or Greeks as needed. This chorus is a formidable ensemble well able to fulfill the demands of a major production.
For the duration of the opera, conductor Mariotti held the orchestra and the stage aloft in the Rossini universe that so thrills the pilgrims to Rossini’s birthplace each year.
Vitrifrigo Arena, Pesaro, Italy, August 17, 2024. All photos copyright Amati Bacciardi, courtesy of the Rossini Opera Festival.
L’equivoco stravagante in Pesaro
L’equivoco stravagante (1811) had only three performances before it was pulled by the censors. This is the same year its 19 year old composer was hauled off to prison for his threats to whip a couple of choristers.
In Rossini’s operatic oeuvre L’equivoco is only preceded by La cambiale di matrimonio. Rossini chose a libretto stuffed with zany word play, vulgarities and "equivocal," I.e. sexual, meanings. Tasteless indeed, it was well deserving of the censor’s disgust. Meanwhile it made Rossini famous.
A silly, pretentious, nouveau riche farmer’s daughter is slanderously said to be a castrato, thus scaring off an unwanted suitor. In the spirit of the times the masterminds were sly servants who sought to make true love triumph over vanity, exploiting the laughable attempts of the farmer and his daughter to appear highly educated, as presumed, they assumed, by their wealth.
Penniless Herman loves Ernestine from afar, the servants Frontino and Rosalia determine that Herman pretend to be a professor of philosophy. Meanwhile Ernestine’s father Gamberotto plots to marry Ernestine off to the cocky (double entendre) Buralicchio for financial advantage. Ernestine just wants to go to bed with someone.
Pietro Adaini as Ermanno, Maria Barakova as Ernestina, Nicola Alaimo as Gamberotto, Carles Pachon as Buralicchio
All this played out in the 19 musical numbers created by the young composer reared in the traditions of opera buffa — cavatinas, arias, duets, plentiful trios and quartets, plus he added a unique patter quintet as well as grand finales with male chorus. The incipient brilliance of Rossini is all there, if not the polish of a finished technique and the dramatic sophistication of many of his later works.
The original, 2019 Moishe Leiser and Patrice Caurier production was mounted in the Vitrifrigo (a maker of boat refrigerators) Arena (15,000 seats) transformed into a 1100 seat, fully equipped, modern proscenium theater, a space that usually hosts the famed comedies and the grand tragedies of Pesaro’s prodigal son. The venerable 700 seat, Italian style Teatro Rossini, usually the home of minor Rossini, was closed for repairs.
Re-opened just now after a major restoration the Teatro Rossini hosted a much reduced L’equivoco, scaled to fit an early nineteenth century (1813) stage (the theater took on the Rossini name only in 1854). Now housed in an appropriate theater the Leiser/Caurier production found the vitality of the excited young composer allowing L’equivoco to become the cocky piece Rossini intended.
The intimacy of the theater thrust our attention onto the performers, as does the minimalism of the Leiser/Caurier production — a room and its ceiling within a gold proscenium picture frame, the walls covered with a repeating, large stenciled silver motif. A smaller gold frame enclosed a painting on the back wall, a cow staring us in the face (lead photo, with Ernestina). The all male chorus wore identical costumes and mustaches, and everyone in the cast wore exaggerated prosthetic noses, creating a clownish ambience where this farmer’s daughter joke could easily happen.
First it was the grandiose language that amused us, filled with ribald, double meanings, many caught by the English language subtitles, many lost. Then we were smitten by Buralicchio’s cock like costume –– a pushed out chest and a protruding butt — that crowned his lusty entrances. And finally, cherry on the cake, it was the silly, upside-down idea of a castrato pretending to be a woman that made us groan (castration was a disappearing operatic phenomenon in Rossini’s new century, mezzo sopranos taking the high voiced male roles).
The farmer Gamberotto was played by famed Rossini buffo bass Nicola Alaimo (Pesaro’s Guillaume Tell). Mr. Alaimo boasts everything you wish for a buffo — an imposing figure, a voice that can boom as well as negotiate the lightening speed of the patter when things get confusing (and there is so much to say and so little time to say it).
The farmer’s daughter Ernestina was played by Russian mezzo soprano Maria Barakova, a natural comedienne who rendered the farmer’s daughter’s lust quite urgent. This fine young singer was a participant in the Accademia Rossiniana in 2018 (the Rossini Festival’s training program) and has since developed an impressive career in major Western theaters.
The cocky Buralicchio was played by Spanish baritone Carles Pachon. This young artist exuded the cocky confidence of his costume, finding all the considerable courage needed to confront an artist of Mr. Alaimo’s stature. A recent participant in the Berlin Staatsoper he is now a member of that company.
Ermanno, the penniless suitor, was sung by Italian tenor Pietro Adaini, also a recent participant in the Accademia Rossiniana. He was confused as needed, then able to pull himself together to impersonate a philosophy professor, and finally to rescue the imprisoned Ernestina and pile into bed with her.
The farce’s instigators, Gamberotto’s sly servants, were played by Patricia Calvache as Rosalia and Matteo Macchioni as Frontino.
Nicola Alaimo as Gamberotto, men of the chorus of the Teatro Della Fortuna as housekeepers
Italian conductor Michele Spotti conducted Pesaro’s Filarmonica Gioachino Rossini, offering from time to time the very great satisfaction of a fine Rossini delirium. The men of the chorus of the Teatro Della Fortuna of Fano, a nearby town, gamely scratched at their flea bites, a comic conceit inflicted by the directors, while singing with Rossinian pizazz.
Teatro Rossini, Pesaro, Italy, August 16, 2024. All photos copyright Amati Bacciardi, courtesy of the Rossini Opera Festivald.
The Idiot at the Salzburg Festival
The Salzburg Festival’s Felsenreitschule is home to most of its productions of twentieth century opera, just now two Russian operas based on novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Idiot (1987, though premiered in Mannheim in 2013), and Sergei Prokofiev’s The Gambler (1917, though revised for its 1929 premiere at Brussel’s Monnaie).
Both Dostoevsky novels, The Gambler (1866) and The Idiot (1868/69), are at least somewhat autobiographical, the events and personages of his life are amplified in the urgencies developed in both novels. Dostoevsky had indeed lived for a time in Switzerland, he suffered from epilepsy, had a gambling addiction, begged money from his family, fell in love with a woman named Polina, etc.
Given operatic advance planning it is likely that this 2024 double Rock Riding School programing was conceived before Russia’s February 24, 2022 bet that it could take Ukraine in a day or so. That bet lost, things Russian have lost their luster for westerners, Dostoevsky’s exposition of the Russian psyche adding no polish whatsoever to the tarnished Russian image.
When becoming operas both The Idiot and The Gambler lose much of their nineteenth century ambience, the reduced plots and personages sacrifice much Dostoevsky tonality. Both operas are more like short stories than they are like novels, short stories thrusting a formed character into a situation then finding a resolution. Both Prokofiev and Weinberg then color their stories with the modernist compositional tendencies of their time — think Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri Shostakovich.
As do directors when they stage their operas.
The Salzburg Festival entrusted the staging of The Idiot to Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, his designer wife Maľgorzata Szczęśniak and their team, video designer Kamil Polak and lighting designer Felice Ross. The Rock Riding School is a vast expanse of stage in front of a cliff. Ignoring the cliff Warlikowski erected a long (very long), low, polished wood cross-stage wall, embedded within it was a large screen for projections, plus there was the usual Warlikowski box that rolled out for intimate, domestic scenes — the murder of Natascha as example.
The libretto, construed by the composer, closely follows the novel, losing only a few extraneous characters. The idiot, a prince who is a perfect Christian, meets a man of affairs on a train who is smitten by a femme fatale. Their lives become entwined as they both follow Natascha (the femme fatale) through her brief, twisted life and inevitable death.
Video by Kamil Polak Video, lower image Bogdan Volkov as the Idiot
Composer Weinberg escaped Poland during the WWII German invasion, fleeing to Russia where he lived a rich, musical life as a Soviet composer. Of his seven operas he considered The Passenger (1968) to be his best, in fact to be the most important of all his works, though the opera had its premiere finally in Germany in 2006. Weinberg’s works have been rediscovered only in recent years,
Stylistically Weinberg is similar to Shostakovich, though without the sarcasm. More sumptuous than Shostakovich he mixes free tonalities, atonalities and polytonalities in often hugely complex rhythms. His vocal lines are melodic, if not flowing, requiring singers of considerable technique with precise ears. Weinberg’s orchestra for The Idiot was huge, unleashed under tight control by Lithuanian wunderkind conductor Mirga Graźinytè-Tyla — she is the current music director of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
Bogdan Volkov as the Idiot
Composer Weinberg takes nearly four hours to tell his tale. Of great orchestral moment was the Idiot’s epileptic seizure, requiring all possible virtuosity from the Vienna Philharmonic to support the massive seizure grandly, indeed grotesquely enacted by Ukrainian lyric tenor Bogdan Volkov, a singer of beautiful voice, great presence and phenomenal stamina. Mr. Bogdan’s subtle acting skills were well matched by Lithuanian soprano Austrine Stundyte (Warlikowski’s 2023 Salzburg Elektra) as Natascha, who, staring directly into a video camera, created shockingly direct femme fatale portraits (lead photo) that were projected onto the huge wall screen. The sheer intensity of these images equaled in effect Mr. Bogdan’s epileptic fit that came much later.
Mme. Stundyte, an extraordinary artist of magnetic presence, then disappeared under unfortunate wigs that greatly diminished her persona. Her murderer Rogoschin was played by Belarusian baritone Vladislav Sumlinsky, capturing the intensity of his obsession with an overtone of perverted Russian humanity.
Rogoschin’s rival to buy Natascha was the desperate Ganja, played in heroic voice by Slovakian tenor Pavol Breslik. Aglaja, Nataschia’s rival for the attention of the Idiot was well sung by Australian mezzo soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas. Dostoevsky’s busybody, civil servant Lebedjew, who knew everyone and everything in Warlikowski’s generically stylized, modern Russian-esque world, was made into a fantastic joker/magician, the role gamely played by Ukrainian tenor Iuril Samoilov. Among other gold-plated casting was British bass Clive Bailey as Aglaja’s father.
The Gambler at the Salzburg Festival
Sean Panikkar as Alexej, Asmik Gregorian as Polina
The Salzburg Festival entrusted the staging of Prokofiev’s The Gambler to American wunderkind (now age 66) director Peter Sellars and his usual Salzburg associates, set designer/architect George Tsypin, lighting designer James F. ingalls, and costume designer Camille Assad. [See also my introduction to The Idiot]
Prokofiev greatly simplified and streamlined the plot of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. The composer reduced its actors to the ten needed to achieve an operatic action. Director Sellars then turned the Dostoevsky nightmare into a quite breezy account of some nasty doings by some not very appealing characters. The opera was a few minutes more than two hours in length. Mercifully.
Of course Peter Sellars updated and politicized the happenings — cell phones and emails abounded, pro-environment protests, and surely even more moralizing beyond the opera’s hero (so-to-speak) Alexej’s condemnation of capitalism, and the world’s devotion to money. All this mattered very little as we were busy trying to keep up with the banter that moved the story along, getting us finally to the climax the evening — the absolutely spectacular roulette scene where Prokofiev added 15 additional solo voices to celebrate Alexei breaking the bank at the roulette tables.
Sean Panikkar at the roulette table (center), croupier and onlookers
[Polina, whom Alexei loves, then refused the 50,000 rubles offered by Alexei, the amount she had wanted to throw in the face of the Marquis, one of her debtor benefactors].
The roulette scene is a compositional tour de force by the young composer, building the excitement of spinning roulette wheels while interweaving the voices of the excited players, croupiers, onlookers, losers, etc., resulting in a musical orgy that finds the climatic colors and rhythmic excitement of the Stravinsky ballets for famed impresario Sergei Diaghilev that took stage in France during Prokofiev’s formative years.
[Diaghilev in fact met Prokofiev in London in 1915, commissioning the young composer to create a ballet, advising him to stick to Russian themes. The ballet Chout (The Buffoon) appeared in 1921].
Young (30 years) Russian conductor Timur Zangiev urged the Vienna Philharmonic and an ensemble of exceedingly well-rehearsed singers to a frenzy of musical excitement that equaled the light show unleashed on the stage by Sellars’ lighting designer James F. Ingalls, as the many, outsized spinning tops (roulette wheels) that were the riches everyone lacked, went airborne, whirling like flying saucers. Fog machines released clouds of vapor that shown dramatically in the lightning quick changes of full stage color.
Sellars’ set designer George Tsypin, besides creating the huge tops, opened up the galleries carved into the massive cliff behind the Rock Riding School stage, filling them with digital screens where we watched the audience (capitalists all) enter the theater, though he hung a heavy green covering over a few of the lower galleries so that there could be a space for scenes outside the casino. Intimate scenes were simply acted out down stage center in focused lighting.
[Though he may have lost Polina Alexej marveled mightily at the run of luck he had].
I’m not sure who the title gambler really was, maybe it was the debt ridden faux general, broadly acted and sung by Chinese bass Peixin Chen, whose rich grandmother was supposed to die but instead lost most of her fortune at the roulette wheel — played by Lithuanian mezzo soprano Violetta Urmana. Probably the gambler was the university student Alexej who had all attendant progressive attitudes, though he learned finally that money could not buy love, though it was thrilling to be a winner. American tenor Sean Panikkar made this foolish, love sick student quite real.
Polina, the General’s ward, had many transactional relationships — among them the faux Marquis and his accomplice Blanche, played respectively by French character tenor Juan Francisco Gatell and Ukrainian mezzo soprano Nicole Chirka, and the rich Brit Mr. Ashley played by Madagascar baritone Michael Arivony.
She, Alexej’s femme fatale, was played by brilliant Lithuanian soprano Asmik Gregorian (Castellucci’s Salzburg Salome, and Warlikowski’s Salzburg Chrysothemis). Possessed of magnetic personal presence, and of powerful, dramatic voice this unique artist was superfluous to this character, and to this production — she was not the promiscuous, teasing student, ensemble singer that director Sellars envisioned. Mme. Gregorian is a diva.
Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth
It is a Tristan well worthy of the Wagner shrine (not all Bayreuth productions are). Icelandic theater director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson imposed a truly hermetic discussion of love onto the Wagner masterpiece in the rarefied theatrical terms of Berlin’s hyper avant-garde Volksbuhne (of which he was a recent artistic director).
Richard Wagner’s unique Bayreuth Festspielhaus hides the orchestra under the stage, voice and orchestral sound flow into the hall as one. The Bayreuth cast was peerless, the orchestra shone in the theater’s acoustical magnificence. Czech conductor Semyon Bychkov accommodated the highly inflected text with an equally highly inflected orchestral score — voice and sound symbiotic, in complex textures that magically challenged the ear.
The stage itself challenged the mind — Isolde in white wings on a huge white cloth (clouds or the boiling sea) on a blank stage in the first act, in the second Isolde and Tristan were lost in the ruined hull of a ship, a cluttered attic of earthly items. The third act emptied much of the attic, leaving only some sculptural bones of its hull that basked in the transcendent light of a golden Liebestod.
Act I
There was no synopsis in the program booklet, only an explanation of how Tristan and Isolde found themselves together on a ship to Cornwall, and an essay by Nike Wagner (Wieland’s daughter) who notes that “if Thomas Mann thought that Tristan, not unlike the Ring, conceals a ‘cosmogonic myth’ he must be corrected insofar as this cosmogonic myth, in the end, is concealed through compositional measures that guarantee regression.”
Be that as it may, the Arnarsson production played heavily on the complexities of love — its deceits and deceptions that are the sum of the first act, the paradox of the second act when the union of love is the death of the lovers, and the third act when Isolde has in fact has failed to lead Tristan to the death she had promised him when their gazes first met — all this before this Wagnerian treatise began.
The above Tristan primer is the manifest of this Arnarsson staging, enacted in small, subtle, symbolic gestures and images that were felt rather than defined — Isolde entrapped within her cloud in the first act Tristan tearing papers apart in the second act, the white dressed steersman with wings appearing and disappearing in the third act — to mention the more obvious of the plethora of images of separation and death.
There were blatant departures from Wagner’s stage directions, departures that illuminate the critical discussions that this Wagnerian opera has engendered over the past 168 years — we are well aware that this opera is not the same opera it was in 1857. In the first act Isolde tore the flask of poison/love potion from Tristan and threw it across the stage — the original gaze was in fact the Tristan death poison (in the opera’s pre-history Isolde was about to kill Tristan when their eyes met in the gaze of immortal love). The second act ends not with Melot wounding Tristan but with Tristan drinking the potion Isolde had given him to heal his wound in the pre-opera history, thus again saving him only to endure her promised love death.
The intended force of these images and their shattering effects determined that much of the stage action was static, the singers left alone to intone the text, to inflect the text with subtleties of intention that was subservient to the philosophic imagery perceived by Aransson and contemporary Wagnerian criticism.
Much the same process occurred in conductor Bychkov’s reading of the score. If the perception was that the progression of text (stage action) was slow, nearly static (and indeed it was), so were the maestro’s tempi. But the slowness brought forth the revelation of colors from within the depths of Wagner’s orchestration, often forcing apart the orchestral sounds from the voice sounds in the shattering chromatic dissonances of separation. This the antithesis of the conjunction of love that was once thought to be the proclamation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
Freed to declaim Wagner’s text the singers inflected the text, often sacrificing an expected musical flow. The moments of illumination they felt flew easily, the deceits were spat, the joy was shouted, the negotiations were brutal. Of great moment was the Tristan of Austrian tenor Andreas Schrager (lead photo with Kurwenal) who drew upon his myriad voices to create a Tristan of monumental dimension, from an intoned speaking voice to full throttled shouts of joyous illumination in his third act recalls of the conjunction he might have had with Isolde. In the second act his emphatic accents as the excitement of love-death approached were truly momentous.
Act III
Isolde was enacted by Norwegian soprano Camilla Nylund, who crawled across the stage to sing her "Liebestod" propped up against a broken ship beam, the stage of broken ship beams bathed in golden light, the stage platform itself floating on golden light. Mme. Nylund possesses a quite beautiful voice of silvery color. With soaring high notes she found as well the vehemence needed for her Act I condemnation of Tristan.
Marke was sung by Austrian bass Günther Groissböch who delivered his famed Act II soliloquy with lieder delicacy, inflected with such grace as to render it timeless. Icelandic baritone Ólafur Sigurdarson was the beautifully voiced Kurwenal, lending authority to Tristan’s plight as Wagner required. Brangäne was sung by Austrian mezzo-soprano Crista Mayer in great warmth and power of tone. Bass baritone Birger Radde, in black pants and a fancy black shirt, flashed impressively on-stage as Melot in the finales of Acts II and III.
The sets were designed by frequent Arnarsson collaborator Vytautas Narbutas. Lighting designer Sascha Zauner was the Arnarsson collaborator for the recent Parsifal in Hannover. Costumes were created by Arnarsson collaborator Sibylle Wallum.
Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, Germany, August 9, 2024.
Der Fliegende Holländer at Bayreuth
Like all productions by Russian revisionist stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, the Bayreuth 2021 Dutchman production is fraught with meaning, delving deeply into the contemporary resonances he discovers in nineteenth century opera.
This current revival of his Bayreuth Holländer production is enriched by the musical presence of Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv. Mme. Lyniv has much experience with this early Wagner masterpiece, first in Barcelona in 2017, and now, in the Tcherniakov production, every year at Bayreuth since 2021. Thus her very colorful, very direct connection to the opera’s heroine Senta can come as no surprise, though it remains always shocking in effect.
Tcherniakov staged the Dutchman overture as a dream in which the Holländer, as a young boy, watches his mother solicit then have sex with Senta’s father Daland. He watches as the mother, prostituting love, is ostracized by the villagers. In sudden, brutal reaction the mother hangs herself. Discovered by the boy Holländer, he toys with her dangling feet, a Wozzeck-like “hop! Hop!” quote.
Did I get this right? At Bayreuth there are no concessions to an international audience. Bayreuthian hermeticism insisted that the German words projected on a scrim defining the overture’s dream remain untranslated.
Thus the dream informs us that the opera itself will be the Holländer’s revenge on love — not the celebrated Wagnerian ideal of pure love (endlessly discussed in the current Bayreuth Tristan), but love in its most basic bestial and transactional forms. In true Tcherniakov form the Wagnerian tale then became the most tense, cruel moments in the lives of a small Bavarian family in a small Bavarian village. Or somewhere.
At the August 8 performance I attended the Dutchman was portrayed by Polish/Austrian bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny instead of the announced German bass-baritone Michael Volle, a cast change that greatly enriched and perhaps confused the tonality of the Tcherniakov concept.
Tomasz Konieczny (no photos available) possesses a voice of great presence, of piercing color, a voice that is sexual and predatory. He has a handsome, commanding and authoritarian bearing, becoming a dangerous, fantasy figure. It is as such that he arrived at the village bar/pub where he aggressively expounded his male solitude, attracting the attention of Senta’s father Daland, portrayed by warm, paternally voiced German baritone Georg Zeppenfeld, who has a daughter of marital age.
But Tcherniakov’s Dutchman as portrayed by Mr. Konieczny became less about the Holländer’s revenge, and more about the values of village life, and the force of human instinct that conflicts with such values. Senta possesses such wild, youthful instincts. Her father and mother — in Wagner’s libretto this is Senta’s nurse, Marta — are the family, with its attendant need of wealth and continuity. Marta, as Senta’s mother, was sung by appropriately figured and voiced German (Indiana University trained) mezzo soprano Nadine Weismann.
The spinning chorus in Tcherniakov’s world became a chorus of village women, conducted by Marta, extolling the domesticity of simple life. The rehearsal was brutally interrupted by the fiery Senta, sung by Norwegian soprano Elizabeth Teige with impressive, impatient attitude. Mme. Teige posses a quite beautiful voice that she used with consummate, aggressive skill expounding her quite spectacular ballad telling of the Holländer’s quest for eternal love. She too, in her troubled sexual fantasies seeks love, adding considerable interest to Tcherniakov’s domestic tragedy, echoing the early twentieth century Janacek tragedies.
Senta’s father and mother invited the Holländer to dinner to introduce him to their daughter, a fruitful marriage in their minds. Falling under the Holländer’s spell, Senta needed no such encouragement, though the mother, silent in this scene, became visibly troubled.
Senta however had already pledged her undying love for the villager Eric (lead photo), sung by American Heldon tenor Eric Cutler, who cut loose in fine, heroic voice with his impassioned expectations of Senta. She summarily repulsed him — physical brutality is a Tcherniakov forte. More brutality ensued. The villagers, led by the town drunkard (Wagner’s Steersman, sung by American Helden tenor Matthew Newlin), confronted the band of unknown forces that accompanied the Holländer’s arrival in the village with much bloodshed. This excitement was greatly heightened by the chorus keeping up with the maestra’s breakneck speed for this splendid scene (they did).
At last the Holländer is forced to confront Eric, two powerful male voices, the denouement to unfold, though in the Tcherniakov production there is no ship on which the condemned Dutchman can escape. Marta the mother suddenly appears with a rifle and shoots dead the Holländer, Eric and Senta are left standing on the stage, the myth forgotten as the village is being consumed in flames, Gotterdammerung-like, all this to Wagner’s grandiose music for Senta’s suicide, a death meant to free the Holländer from his cruel fate.
This Tcherniakov denouement, of the many that occur at European opera festivals, is among the richer, laden as it is with Wagnerian humor.
Tcherniakov himself created the setting — a group of village-like bare structures, that, like the villagers dancing in Act III, danced around the stage in varying configurations for the varying plot complexities. These stifling variations were joyously supported by the maestra’s surprising discovery of many bright dance rhythms in the Wagner score. The complex, spectacular lighting was by Tcherniakov collaborator Glen Filshtinsky, the costumes were designed by long-time Tcherniakov collaborator Elena Zaytseva.
Michael Milenski
Wagner Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, Germany, August 8, 2024. All photos copyright Enrico Nawroth, courtesy of the Bayreuth Festival.
Il ritorno d'Ulisse at the Aix Festival
Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix Festival, completed the Aix Festival’s Monteverdi cycle just now by staging, himself, this Il ritorno d’Ulisse (1640). L’Orfeo (1607) was staged by American choreographer Trish Brown in 2007, L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) was staged by American stage director Ted Huffman in 2022 — thus the three extant (of seven) operas by Monteverdi, the founder of modern, intoned tragedy.
Though born into the Mediterranean world, in Lebanon, Pierre Audi came to Paris as a teenager, then completed his education at Britain’s Oxford in 1977. Eleven years later (1988) he was named head of Dutch National opera and in 2005 the Holland Festival as well. In 2018 he returned to the Mediterranean world as the artistic director of the Aix Festival, a position he now holds in tandem with the same position at New York City’s gigantic performance space, the Park Avenue Armory.
Audi staged Il ritorno d’Ulisse at the Dutch National Opera some 30 years ago, and the entire trilogy as well. He now brings Il ritorno to the Aix Festival’s tiny, 500 seat, 1787 Théâtre du Jeu de Paume for only five performances. Working with famed lighting designer/scenographer Urs Schönebaum he accordingly reduced the scale of production to the bare minimum — three neutral brown walls that assume varying positions, though there was maximal use of light — insisting that the opera is simply the return of Ulysses, first into the arms of his son Telemaco, and finally into the arms of his wife Penelope. Nothing more.
Like all Monteverdi operas Il ritorno is intoned speech. The heightened speech is often highly embellished, and sometimes it is formalized into larger musical structures. Argentine/Swiss conductor Leonardo Garcia Alarcón assembled a massive continuo to support and color Monteverdi’s emotional speech — two huge Italian harpsichords, two organs, harp, two gambas, two huge lutes, adding viols, reeds, percussion, and most importantly three trombones to build the grand orchestral colors that substitute for scenery in this minimal take on the Monteverdi masterpiece. The Cappella Mediterranea was here composed of 18 players [the same ensemble had 11 players for the 2022 Poppea].
Stage director Audi confronted the formidable, assumed problem that no one in the audience understood Italian, and that only one of the eleven member cast was actually Italian, by staging the opera in the broadest possible terms. Richly dressed Penelope bathed always in a golden light, alone in her morbid suffering, Ulysses in heroic undress, his powerful physic apparent, he too alone on the stage (lead photo). Ulysses’ son Telemaco (lead photo) and his faithful friend Eumete spoke (sang) their lines in simple dress, appropriate to their roles.
The richly dressed gods too were alone on the stage, though always with a soaring, symbolic line of white light.
The disruptive forces to Ulysses family life, symbolically his homeland, were all in neutral black dress (save the glutton Iro who was all white). These dark forces were the quarreling young lovers Melanto and Euromaco, and Penelope’s oily suitors.
Marcel Beekman as Iro (on floor, extreme left); moving left to right Joel Williams as Eurimaco (back of); Alex Rosen as Antinoo (a suitor); Giuseppina Bridelli as Melanto; Paul-Antoine Benos-Djian as Anfinomo (a suitor); Deepa Johnny as Penelope; Petr Nekoranec as Pisandro (a suitor); John Brancy as Ulysses (foreground)
Only the symbolic creatures of Monteverdi’s prologue — Love, Time, Fortune and Fragility — vying for attention, touched one another. At the first notes of the prologue they hit the walls and fell to the floor, making violent, tender, and questioning physical contact, two males and two females crawling and climbing over one another while reciting their lines. This orgy was the only touching until Telemaco fell into his father’s arms at the end the first part, and Ulysses and Penelope embraced, but only at the opera’s very final note, Ulysses return.
You may not understand Italian, and yet you did, the singers delivering their lines with unrelenting intensity, their voices quite independent of the continuo below, confidently alighting on elongated tones that were emphatically dissonant to the sound beneath them. The musical content was so complete that text and subtext became one, the story stripped of any distraction from its focus on the return of Ulysses into arms of Penelope.
American baritone John Brancy sang a truly heroic Ulysses, in a strongly present, brightly focused masculine tone, Omani mezzo soprano Deepa Johnny sang Penelope in the confident voice of a beautiful, mature woman who greatly relishes her sorrow, Southern California tenor Anthony León sang Telemaco in the clear, innocent tones of youth.
Merging the divine world with the human world American bass Alex Rosen sang Neptune raging against Ulysses in sharp tones, finding a much warmer voice for Antinoo, the most pressing of the Penelope suitors. British tenor Mark Milhofer was the placating voice of Giove, and, with a maturity of voice and artistry, he beautifully intoned Ulysses’ faithful friend, the shepherd Eumete. Argentine soprano Mariana Flores sang Minerva, the Olympian protectress of Ulysses.
Italian mezzo soprano sang Melanto, enumerating the pleasures of love to Penelope’s deaf ears, arousing the jealousy of her lover Eurimaco, sung by British tenor Joel Williams. Czech tenor Petr Nekoranek brought fine strength of tone to the suitor Pisandro, French counter tenor Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian gave strong alto tone to the suitor Anfinomo, adding a bit of urgent desperation to the voice of Human Fragility in the Prologue.
Adding to Monteverdi’s fresco of court characters was the glutton Iro who gained the stage finally to bemoan his plight. The role was obligingly humanized by Dutch character singer Marcel Beckmann.
The cast was cannily matched, their distilled emotions clearly, directly articulated from the stage of this tiny theater, their world created and hugely enriched by the players of conductor Alarcón’s Capella Mediterranea, the creators of this musical edition.
It was an extraordinary event, greatly complementing the intelligence of this year’s festival. In his directorial notes in the program booklet Pierre Audi suggests that the Mediterranean world will forever be disturbed, its clash of civilizations created by its shared shores. Its displaced populations will always seek their homeland.
Monteverd’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse tells us only that this Mediterranean hero returned somewhere, not that he found his homeland.
Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, Aix-en-Provence, France, July 23, 2024. All photos copyright Ruth Walz, courtesy of the Aix Festival.
Eight Songs for a Mad King at the Aix Festival
That’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) by Peter Maxwell Davies and Kafka-Fragmente (1987) by György Kurtág, an inspired pairing by Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix Festival who directed György Kurtág’s only opera Fin de Partie (Beckett’s Endgame) for La Scala and Dutch National Opera in 2018.
A violin unites the two pieces. The seventh song of Davies’ monodrama instructs the singer to smash a violin. The Kafka-Fragmente — 40 brief statements from Franz Kafka’s diaries — is a duet for soprano and violin. Though in Aix, in the seventh song the mad king seemed to shove the violin up his ass, awaiting the end of the cycle to smash it to bits. Late in the Kafka cycle the soprano appropriated the instrument of the violinist, awakening our fear as to what might be its destiny. The gesture was, however, merely rhetorical.
It was a star-studded evening in Aix’s tiny Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, presided upon by famed German director Barrie Kosky and famed German lighting designer Urs Schönebaum. In the pit for the Eight Songs were five members of Paris’ Ensemble Intercontemporain, with conductor Pierre Bleuse. The mad king (George III) was sung by German baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle, Glynddebourne’s upcoming Amfortas (Parsifal). The Kafka soprano was Austrian-British soprano Anna Prohaska, Munich’s Anne Trulove (The Rake’s Progress). Moldovian-Austrian violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, impressively connected to current avant-gardism, completed the cast.
Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) was a 1960's English enfant terrible of a newly energized avant-garde fueled by the protests taking place in Europe and the United States. Not that the Davis Songs are protesting much of anything other than offering a moment of what was perceived back then to be artistic outrage. A further connection between the Songs and Fragments is mental illness — the librettist of the Davis Songs, Randolph Stow had been suffering from depression, as, famously, Kafka suffered from depression, not to mention the mid 1950's depression of Hungarian composer György Kurtág that rendered him a minimalist.
Kurtág, now 98 years old, is the last living composer connected to the post-war avant-gardism of the last century, and that of Peter Maxwell Davies. Not that this staging of the Songs and the Fragments sought to evoke the 1950’s when everyone was indeed depressed. Instead messieurs Kosky and Schönebaum made these songs and fragments into an artistic upper, stripping both pieces of any dark colors, leaving only the excitement of artistic discovery — Davies finding solace in outrage and Kurtág indulging himself in minimalism.
Baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle
For this Mr. Schönebaum created a black void, Mr. Kosky stripped the mad king to his white briefs and banished the six instrumentalists to the pit. They imagined stage movement for the Kurtág concert piece in the same void, its performers in identical, simple grey dresses, the only prop was a violin.
A shattering explosion introduced Davies’ Songs, then a single spotlight illuminated the face of the mad king as baritone Kränzle began to sing, his voice traversing a range of four or five octaves in screeches, wails, whimpers and howls, with the conviction of a mad king willing to bare it all — including his the nearly naked body. It was a total performance by Mr. Kränzle that charmingly embraced state director Kosky’s penchant for the obscene as well — placing Mr. Kränzle's hand inside his underpants, a finger emulating an erected penis, then humping the proscenium arch.
For the half hour duration of the songs Mr. Schönebaum’s only illumination of the artist was his face and his body. It was a monumental feat of lighting, and an amazing display of the prowess of the technician who followed the mad king throughout the void. And a monumental achievement of mind and voice by baritone Kränzle.
The Kafka diaries, the source of Kurtág’s texts, are often amusing, seeming to be stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, character sketches, etc. Kurtág divided his duet into four sections that were demarcated by changes in way Mr. Schönebaum lighted the artists and Mr. Kosky moved the soprano, always keeping the violinist placed a bit lower on the right. The soprano moved all over the stage in various poses, sitting sometimes on its edge, leaning agains the proscenium, embracing the violinist.
Upper right corner Lodovic Tézier as Boccanegra, his video image in center. Below left to right Charles Castronovo as Adorno, Alejandro Baliñas Vieites as Pietro, Mika Cares as Fiesco, Étienne Dupuis as Paolo Soprano Anna Prohaska and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja
The final section of the Fragments grew to impressive dimension with the addition of slender columns of light deployed on the stage, and finally a magical white light spread across the floor — lighting effects that evoked quite effective visual excitement.
The 40 Kurtág fragments vary in duration between a few seconds and a few, very few minutes, a total duration of about one hour. Mesdames Prohaska and Kopatchinskaja flashed in and out of the light that marked each of the fragments, Mme. Prohaska somehow finding a new position in the blackout from where to sing the following fragment. Both performers, lovely women, exuded great charm, often communicating by sight, Mr. Kosky’s device for rendering his staging into an organic duet, the violinist even sometimes mouthing the words of a song. It must be said that Mme. Prohaska’s performance was a monumental accomplishment of mind and voice.
It was a splendid evening, of great nostalgia for the lost world of twentieth century avant-gardism. The Kosky/Schönebaum production discovered a new perspective on the troubles of the last century, finding its artistic excitement, not its traumas.
Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, Aix-en-Provence, France, July 12, 2024. All photos copyright Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of the Aix Festival.
Samson at the Aix Festival
Rameau’s Samson, with the libretto by François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire, or rather a sort of Rameau/Voltaire Samson imagined by French early music conductor Raphaél Pichon and German stage director Otto Guth, a dream team imagined by Aix Festival artistic director Pierre Audi.
Pichon and Guth landed on Rameau’s Samson, an opera that had never been performed though it had been rehearsed, and for which a score no longer exists. Voltaire’s libretto does however exist, but only in a version he created late in life when he no longer wished to be polemical.
While the Samson tale is biblically based, Voltaire had introduced a few tawdry love affairs, and turned Samson’s famed destruction of the Philistine temple into an act of angry desperation, hardly one of religious fervor. The censors found the libretto to be sacrilegious.
As any sensible composer would, Rameau simply re-purposed many pieces from Samson into future operas.
Conductor Pichon with stage director Guth imagined a theatrical action that unfolds quite independently of the published Voltaire libretto, though they maintain that their Samson is well within the spirit of a plausible Voltaire/Rameau Samson, if not the letter. Pichon took on the musical archeology needed to construct a Samson-sounding score, using appropriate bits and pieces of 17 (or so) other operas and ballets by Rameau. These lifted bits cannily approximate the words that might have been uttered by the 1735 Samson singers, the stage actions imposed by the Guth/Pichon production were now those of the Samson story.
The program booklet informs us that messieurs Pichon and Guth felt compelled to include a French Baroque haute-contre voice, given that the original Samson creators took the audacious step of making the opera’s hero a baritone, not the usual tenor. Thus they created the haute-contre role of Elon, Samson’s best friend, who, shocked and horrified at Samson’s impulsive, destructive nature turned Philistine.
While the genesis of this in-the-spirit-of Rameau opera may be fascinating, we are confronted with the actual experience of its performance. Stage director Guth, as he had with his 2022 Aix Festival Dante, il viaggio, felt the need to add a cornice to the opera. For Dante, il viaggio it was a shockingly intrusive, terrifying automobile accident, for Samson it was the addition of a speaking role for Samson’s old mother who spoke the story, with visions of the once young mother, babe-in-arms, and the boy Samson at various ages.
Jarrett Ott as Samson, Lea Desandre as Timna (the first of two love affairs)
Guth placed the action in a heavily distressed building of neoclassical design, and employed three current architect types to appear from time to time to plot its reconstruction. Thus motivated were the blue laser lights to measure distances that played on the structure from time to time, the vertical red line that swept across the stage from time to time, and the descending bar of intense white light that marked scene closures (falling on Samson in lead photo). To this superimposed light show, Guth added huge electronic sound effects (amplified percussion) when he wished to sonically convey massive, destructive force.
To complete this hyper present, pseudo contemporary stage picture, Guth meticulously costumed his principals in abstracted biblical garb, but reduced his chorus and dancers to abstracted all black dress when they were Philistines and all white dress when they were Israelites. The chorus participated in the action either from the stage in costume or were hidden in the back of the pit, camouflaged in concert blacks.
Such theatrical tricks, among many more as well, beguiled us through this stunning exposition of Rameau’s music for the theater, when the Guth tricks did not irritate us.
Raphaël Pichon is the conductor and artistic force behind the chorus and orchestra ensemble named Pygmalion, based at the Opéra de Bordeaux. For this Baroque opera its choral voices were termed the dessus (soprano), haute-contre (alto tenors), tailles (baritone) and basses, its orchestral players performed on instruments of the French Baroque (though other times its instruments may be of the Classical or Romantic periods). It is an ensemble of exceptional polish and impeccable technique.
Rameau is famed as a symphonist. The Pygmalion orchestra, here comprised of 33 strings, quadruple winds, some brass, continuo and percussion, was capable of both massive force, raging sound and passionate feelings in a huge spectrum of colors. Rameau is equally famed as a composer for harpsichord (a chamber music instrument), explaining the beautifully ornamented intimacy of his arioso recitatives enriched by a rich continuo, these occurring particularly in the first part of the evening.
The compendium of Rameau pieces flowed as a seamless whole, though the first act did not find a dramatic or musical unity. The second part of the evening, with the introduction of Dalila took on an unrelenting brutality interspersed with balletic orchestral movements that took sublime flight as pure music, proving Rameau to be among the pantheon of great French composers.
Dalila cutting Samson's hair. Jarrett Ott as Samson, Jacquelyn Stucker as Dalila, Nahuel Di Pierro as Achisch (in shadow)
The Festival d’Aix assembled a superlative cast for this unusual operatic event, singers well able to take and hold the stage, with voices accustomed to the Mozart and Rossini roles on important stages. The Americans Jarrett Ott as Samson and Jacquelyn Stucker as Dalila are refugees from the recent The Exterminating Angel at the Paris Opera, both exhibiting in these Rameau pieces an extraordinary musical intelligence that magnified their presences. Samson’s first act love affair was with the Philistine Timna, sung by French-Italian soprano Lea Desandre. She is of pure voice that beautifully melted into the Rameau ariosos. Argentine bass Nahuel di Pierro sang Achisch, the chief of the Philistines. Of fine voice he is a flashy performer who well embodied the brutal confidence of the Philistines.
Completing the cast were Julie Roset as the one winged Angel who sang the Prologue and British tenor Laurence Kilsby who sang the interpolated role of the turncoat Elon. Aixoise film and TV actress Andréa Ferréol spoke the weirdly amplified role of the mother.
Ursula Kudrna designed the costumes, lighting and video was accomplished by Bertrand Cordero. The choreography for the production's 12 dancer/acrobats was by Sommer Ulrickson.
Théâtre de L'Archevéché, Aix-en-Provence, France. July 15, 2024. All photos copyright Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of the Festival d'Aix.
Madama Butterfly at the Aix Festival
Well, why not? Why not place this iconic statement of Italian verismo in the hands of a hyper-teutonic, avant-garde (ish) stage director, adding in a new-age Italian conductor for good measure.
Not to mention a 50 year-old high-artifice diva, a heavy dose of anti-Americanism with a squawking tenor and a cold, sharp voiced baritone. The ancillary personages included an all-knowing Asian mezzo soprano, a motionless Asian bass, and two blatantly non-Asian tenors — an Italian and a Swede.
But there were six, distinctly Asian black clad supernumerary dancer types, one or some of whom stood motionless, Butoh-like, in stage pictures, when not parading with puppet cranes (the Japanese symbol of happiness, we learned from our phones at the intermission).
How did all of this work out? Well, it sort of worked out, given that Puccini’s masterwork may be indestructible.
The key to figuring it out was in the program booklet, where the stage director, Andrea Breth, herself surprised to be offered such an assignment, admits basing the production’s iconography on the arty photographs of two Austrians who had traveled to Japan in the late nineteenth century. Thus the abstracted black and white structure that served as Pinkerton’s Nagasaki minka [house], with its four downstage poles that always prevented some portion of the audience from seeing the face of whoever was singing.
Though stage director Breth insists that she avoids realism, Pinkerton was found reading a newspaper awaiting his bride, Jeffrey Epstein-like. He then took off a shoe, insisting that Suzuki wash his feet, he offered cigarettes and whiskey to Sharpless, and sang “Dovunque al mondo,” his face hidden behind a pole from my seat.
There was a platform that silently floated in from the left, crossing the stage and ending just there, forcing all entrances from the left. Butterfly slowly emerged on the moving platform, in an almost motionless tableau (she was singing), dressed in bridal white. The chorus remained hidden backstage, though a tableau of Butterfly’s relatives peeked out, the Asian supernumerary dancers in Noh theater masks.
Thus stage director Berth established Butterfly’s exotic, magical, poetic world in contrast to the crass, whiskey scented world of the Americans. Pinkerton entered into Butterfly’s world for Puccini’s magical duet “Bimba dagli occhi pieni di malia.” The new lovers remained stationary, hidden downstage in the dark while an upstage panel slowly opened, its white light intensifying as an Asian actor slowly moved the wings of a tsuru [crane] puppet, other actors following into the light, a moving tableau of flying birds.
Pole, Ermonela Jahe as Cio Cio San, Adam Smith as Pinkerton, actor with tsuru puppet, Act I
Mme. Breth’s first act was a heavy handed compendium of images, some tasteless, images she had made little effort to understand and feel, much less integrate such imagery into the verismo of Puccini’s deeply felt score. The following acts were equally troubled, if salvaged by Puccini himself and the committed performances of Butterfly and Suzuki.
It was a great pleasure to know, finally, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho’s Butterfly (lead photo), one of her signature roles with which she has gained worldwide fame. Mme. Jaho’s voice no longer has the youthful bloom that Butterfly demands, though she sings beautifully when she allows herself the use of her mature voice. She can embody a believable Butterfly in stature and movement, her expressive face (when not hidden by a pole) easily read from the furthest reaches of a theater. Vocally she is well able to find the support needed to sing softly for extended periods, and finds Butterfly’s interpolated high C# (or maybe it’s a D) with ease. But her voice now has a dryness that rendered her second act rather colorless, though she shone in the last act’s “Tu, tu, piccolo iddio” by unleashing her mature voice.
As well, it was a great pleasure to know, finally, the mezzo-soprano Mihoko Fujimura. That she may be Japanese is irrelevant to her beautifully sung and acted performance as Suzuki. She provided a moral center for the opera for us, and offered us the emotional strength needed to accept the shattering emotions of the opera’s resolution. Mme. Fujimura is 58 years old, of a warmth of voice that exudes maturity and its attendant understanding imbued with an intensity of feeling.
British/Irish tenor Adam Smith as Pinkerton and Belgian baritone Lionel Lhote as Sharpless are excellent singers and able performers. Neither artist has the Italianate sound or beauty of voice that we associate with these roles, and that flow easily with Puccini’s score. In keeping with the casting prerogatives of the Aix Festival — sensitive, indeed subservient to the requirements of a stage director — voices and bearing were found that could bespeak the crassness of Andrea Breth’s Pinkerton and the bureaucratic coldness of her American consul. Both men obliged, fulfilling the needs of the production, exhibiting voices more suited to the central and eastern European repertory. Mr. Smith did have a couple of unfortunate squawks, from which he recovered, giving a remarkably graceful, under the circumstances, performance.
Mihoko Fujimura as Suzuki, Ermonela Jaho as Cio Cio San, Carlo Bosi as Goro, Act II
The marriage broker Gore was sung by Italian tenor Carlo Bosi. Normally the role Goro is taken by a character tenor, and given that Goro is Japanese normally he is of a slight build. Mr. Bosi is a large man with a full voice. There was no attempt to make us believe he was other than a business-like, effective marriage broker, a functionary of the crass American world. Prince Yamadori was sung by Swedish tenor Kristofer Lundin. Again no attempt was made to hide the fact that he was a tall European singer, though he at least had an abstracted headdress, indicating that he was supposed to embody a Japanese aristocrat.
Lo Zio Bonzo was ably sung by Korean bass Inho Jeong, who delivered his excommunication of Butterfly in business-like tone, standing motionless. He again appeared at the conclusion of the opera, handing Butterfly the sacrificial knife with which she slit her throat.
Conductor Daniele Rustioni is the music director of the Opéra de Lyon (a co-producer of this Butterfly), the excellent orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon was in the Aix Festival’s Archvêché theater pit. Over the years in Lyon Mo. Rustioni has shown himself receptive to understanding and supporting progressive staging concepts, as he did for this Andrea Breth production. With this orchestra that knows him well, and understands his musical being he was able to create an immediacy of sonic-scapes that gave us unusual pleasure, though perhaps confusing the back stage conductors — there were significant ensemble issues in Act I. The maestro had obvious musical sympathy with the diva, resulting in a splendid Act III.
Théâtre de l’Archvêché, Aix-en-Provence, France, July 10, 2024. All photographs copyright Ruth Walz, courtesy of the Aix Festival.
The Iphigénies at the Aix Festival
Both of them — her death in Aulide and her resurrection in Tauride, back to back, in a surreal world created by Russian stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, rendered in overdrive within Gluck’s reformed operatic world by conductor Emanuelle Hahn and Le Concert d’Astrée.
In Aix just now the diptych was twice as long but no less shattering than the Richard Strauss Elektra — though Gluck’s voiceless Elektra had been abandoned back in Aulide.
In Tcherniakov’s Tauride a brutal Oreste, haunted by having killed his mother, was given ample rein to re-enact, repeatedly, the murder of Clytemnestra in a grandiose scene — in Tcherniakov’s surreal dream world the unities of Aristotelian tragedies do not apply. Oreste was sung by famed French Figaro, Florian Sempey, here tensely wound and in sharp voice, exploding brutally to the affections of his friend Pylade, sung with great strength and masculine warmth by French tenor Stanislaw de Barbeyrac, reacting to Oreste’s unleashed fury with equal, brutal blows.
It was very much a Straussian world. We sat at the edge of impending doom for the duration of both Iphigénies, these mythical voices crying out their torments, conductor Hahn extravagantly pulling every possible motif from the Gluck scores, the double winds and brass finding myriad colors and affections amidst the powerful swell of strings. The storm that begins Tauride was sonically absolutely terrifying, echoing to the rafters of Aix’s Grand Théâtre de Provence, the goose stepping march of the Greeks at the end of Aulide was a celebratory, musical apotheosis of war.
Stage director Tcherniakov began his tale of the two Iphigénies by staging Aulide’s famed overture. Agamemnon was in a dream in which he witnessed the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigénie to the goddess Diane (to secure the goddess’ support of the his war with Troy). The set, like in a dream, was not real or solid, rather there was only a linear structure outlining rooms that became different spaces depending on who was in them, and why. It was a brilliant, surreal space envisioned and realized by Mr. Tcherniakov himself, lighted with astonishing virtuosity by Gleb Filshtinsky, Tcherniakov’s long time collaborator.
Corinne Winters (right side) as Iphigénie en Tauride
As in the Strauss Elektra, and in these Gluck tragedies as told by Tcherniakov, Clytemnestra became the most terrifying of all the characters, because she is the most complex, made so by her vanities mixed with her contorted maternal instincts. A voiced participant in the action of Aulide she became Oreste’s voiceless nightmare in Tauride, towering over everyone in her magnificent coiffure and flowing green gown. Portrayed in Aix by esteemed French mezzo soprano Véronique Gens, Clytemnestra cut a magnificent figure in a voice well known on the world’s major stages.
Iphigénie was sung by American soprano Corinne Winters (lead photo) in a tour de force performance. In Aix, Aulide and Tauride were the continuous tale of one life in two terrifying moments. As Iphigénie is about to be married to the hero Achilles, she must, and willingly does reconcile herself to the sacrifice she must make for the greater good (winning the war with Troy), bowing to the will of her father. Unlike Gluck’s happy ending, in Aix she was not rescued by a deus ex macchina. Instead she was indeed sacrificed, and by the hand of her father — an electrifying moment.
Tcherniakov’s first (of many) coup de théâtre was that the goddess Diane herself did appear at that very moment, lost on the forestage as a bedraggled Iphigénie, Iphigénie herself lying dead on a sleek metal table that served as an altar. The goddess in fact sings Iphigénie’s celebratory words at her salvation, only to find herself, Diane, becoming the Iphigénie of Tauride — an hour and a half intermission occurred between the two operas.
Both Iphigénie en Aulide (1774) and Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) are huge tragedies rendered by Gluck in his reformed opera serial style. This style emulates much of pre-revolutionary French opera — greater use of orchestral colors, orchestrated recitatives, important choruses, and dance integrated into the action. Neither Iphigénies are simple or charming, as is his first reformed opera, the pastoral Orphée et Eurydice (1774 in Paris, though 1762 in Vienna [in Italian]). Both tragedies are of great dramaturgical challenge, made far greater by combining the two into one statement.
In Aix Emmanuelle Hahn took Gluck’s orchestra to and surely beyond its expressive extremes, the orchestral players of Il Concert d’Astrée played with enthused virtuosity, particularly noteworthy was the truly extravagant percussion. The 29 member chorus (including six haute-contras) of Il Concert d’Astrée was magnificent indeed. The chorus had massive responsibilities, from being the Greek people to becoming soldiers, priestesses, etc, moving from costumed participants on stage to black clad choral accompaniments into the pit. Lille’s Il Concert d’Astrée is one of France’s great treasures.
There was however no ballet. The intended music for dance was filled with stage movement by the chorus and the principals — usually some impressively choreographed fighting in addition to considerable goose stepping, not to mention the uncontrollable PTSD seizures (the Greek war with Troy, begun in Aulide, had been going on for 20 years when Tauride began), Plus, and particularly, the hyper realistic staging of the lethal fights between Oreste and Pylade. No choreographer or fight director is credited in the program, though the Tcherniakov production was but the history of a war, the terrifying family calamities only incidental to the war.
Alasdair Kent as Achille (Iphigénie en Aulide) dancing, the Greeks dancing, Iphigénie in wedding dress extreme right
As is usual at the Aix Festival, the casting was of superb singing actors. Of great effect was American formed Australian tenor Alasdair Kent as Achilles in Aulide. He found impressive high D’s of a French haute contre as well as finding a braggartly swagger for Tcherniakov’s comic take on this character. No less impressive was the Aulide Agamemnon of Canadian bass Russel Braun who, in his purple suit, found both the vocal warmth of a father and the terrifying responsibility of a sovereign.
Of great effect as well were the high priests (here soldiers), French bass Nicolas Cavallier as Calchas in Aulide, and French baritone Alexandre Duhamel as Thoas in Tauride, both men finding the rough voices and the physical brutality of hardened warriors. The calming voice of Arcas in Aulide was beautifully sung by Polish baritone Tomas Kumięga. Greek-Canadian soprano Soula Parassidis sang the goddess Diane.
The sweep of Tcherniakov’s war, his exaggerated familial tensions together with the Straussification of the Gluck score created an unrelenting, intense continuity that precluded parsing the two operas into their myriad parts — no arias were applauded. It can be noted that the indefatigable Iphigénie, Corinne Winters, did show some fatigue towards the end of Tauride, flatting a couple of notes in her “Je t’implore et je tremble, ô Déesse.”
Grand Théâtre de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, July 8, 2024. All photos copyright Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of the Aix Festival.
L'Orfeo in Cremona
The stage director informed us that this Orfeo was effected through the lens of quantum physics and the Schrödinger paradox. Be that as it may, it was a splendid L’Orfeo boasting a powerful Orpheus and a hyper dynamic orchestra — Zurich’s Il Pomo d’Oro.
Italian baritone Marco Saccardin embodied both the Orpheus of the Renaissance and a current, millennial generation Orpheus. Mr. Saccharin is actually steeped in the arcane world of Early Music. He is a concert lutenist and, in baritone voice he sang Plutone in the Salzburg Festival’s 2023 L’Orfeo. Just now, at Cremona’s Monteverdi Festival he sang a splendid Orfeo, with an impressive reserve of power and volume, executing the role’s magical ornamentation with energetic finesse, finding the dissonances in Monteverdi’s words and lines with infectious, expressive relish.
The 24 players of Il Pomo d’Oro made a mighty sound in Cremona’s Teatro Ponchielli, embellishing Monteverdi’s famed recitative with rhythms and colors that added even greater magic to Mr. Saccarin’s performance. A published edition of the opera was not indicated in the program, thus the assumption is that Francesco Corti, Il Pomo d’Oro’s “maestro al cembalo,” was the musical mastermind of the evening. Of particular note were the five trombones that created Monteverdi’s magnificent inferno, and the two trumpets that wrought heraldic magnificence when needed. The continuo included a lirone (a bowed lyre), adding period color to the continuo, the theorbo adding striking punctuation at crucial moments.
Mr. Saccardin was an elegant Orfeo. He was the Renaissance artist who accepted the challenge to balance, somehow, emotion and art, recognizing its impossibility, but exploring its possibilities. This Orfeo was also a young man full of life, a young man who had to face life’s challenges, a young man who suffered a crisis of confidence in both himself and in the gods (the world’s institutions).
We — everyone in the theater — were entranced by life and art.
Giacomo Nanni as Apollo (left) and Marco Saccardin as Orfeo
Eurydice forever lost, Apollo descended from the heavens to comfort Orfeo, inviting him to Platonically contemplate Eurydice who resides finally among the stars. This was Monteverdi’s librettist Alessandro Striggio’s expeditious resolution of the conflict of art and life. Apollo, sung by fine baritone Giacomo Nanni, and Mr. Saccandin’s Orfeo reveled in a final, highly ornamented duet that achieved a maximal quantum of male energy and artistic enthusiasm.
During the final, celebratory madrigal Orfeo, however, fell prostrate, hanging over the edge of the stage. He was handed a lute from the pit, on which he joined the orchestra for its final flourishes. He was Orfeo the artist, and Orpheus the young man. The climax of the performance was, however, yet to come — the final orchestral chord cut off, Orfeo then plucked two more, lone notes on his lute.
We knew then, as Orpheus had learned, that life and art will never reconcile.
French stage director Olivier Fredj had many more fine staging ideas. At the beginning Orfeo and Eurydice, sung by Jin Jiayu, appeared before the curtain in formal dress, where Eurydice became the personification of music, extolling its powers, and the musical prowess of Orfeo. Orfeo and Eurydice again appeared, parading down the mail aisle of the auditorium at the end of the intermission, glass in hand, and toasted the maestro as he entered the pit. Mr. Fredj made sure that we knew we too were a part of the Orpheus dilemma.
There were many more excellent performances. Contralto Margherita Sala sang the Messaggera who in the urgent tones of Monteverdi’s passionate speech recitative recounts the death of Eurydice. Caronte was enacted by bass Alessandro Ravasio with subtlety and a plentitude of beautiful bass tone. Both young artists have made Early Music their performance field.
There were 13 additional singers who embodied Monteverdi’s many smaller roles, including Paola Valentina Molinari who sang Proserpina to Rocco Lia’s Plutone. The Inferno’s Speranza was sung by Laura Orueta, these artists were winners and finalists in the 2023 Cavalli Monteverdi Competition as were many others in the cast.
The Shepherds (Pastori), Spirits and Nymphs were joined by the Coro Cremona Antiqua to deliver, majestically, the madrigals that realize the monumental plasticity of Renaissance art in the opera’s many moments of emotional closure.
The production itself became a bit troubled with too many projections that were difficult to interpret and too many changes of background that were superfluous at best. The costuming as well was for more complex than necessary to realize stage director Olivier Fredj’s concept.
These reservations aside, it was Monteverdi’s triumph, and that of Mr. Saccardin as well.
Teatro Ponchielli, Cremona, Italy, June 21, 2024. All photos copyright PhStudio B12, courtesy of the Teatro Ponchielli - Monteverdi Festival.
La Vestale at the Bastille
Though composed in 1805 Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale reached the Paris Opera stage finally in 1807, and then only because Empress Josephine intervened. The empress would not have been amused just now in Paris.
Nor were we, and not at all because American stage director Lydia Steiner condemned Emperor Napoleon I in her revisionist staging. But because she did it so poorly.
After all, most of us do indeed find tyranny abhorrent, and we have seen time and again that fanaticism is destructive. So Mme. Steier was preaching to the choir — boring the choir — the entirety of the 3 1/2 hour evening. Not that Spontini’s score invites such expressionistic display of ugly brutality given its limited harmonic and rhythmic resources.
Undeterred by Spontini Steier staged moments of the opera’s overture with a graffiti “Talis est ordo decorum” (rough translation “such is the way of the gods”) splayed over scenes of brutality witnessed by the drunken Roman general Licinius. The director ended the opera with the same phrase splayed on curtains that covered a sort of proscenium opening, evidently illustrating Shakespeare’s As You Like it dictum “all the world’s a stage.”
Act 1, chorus and principals (Le Souverain Pontife, La Grande Vestale, Julia [in gold] among the Vestal virgins)
Meanwhile Spontini’s opera Licinius had gained, at last, the hand of the vestal virgin, Julia, who had been buried alive (the floor opened in the Steier staging, Julia fell through), making a happy ending. Though in Mme. Steier’s revisionist staging Licinius was betrayed by his good friend Cinna, who had initially sobered him up in the overture, and then set him on the path to rescue Julia in the first act. This interpolated ugly betrayal resulted in the unhappy murders of Licinius and Julia so that Mme. Steier could motivate her staging for Spontini’s ballet music [a ballet followed the opera before grand opera formalized its intra-act placement].
But, alas, no dancers, just Cinna ordering the execution (effected by de rigueur Uzis) of the tyrannical Grand Vestale, and then crowning himself Emperor — as had Napoleon.
If I got all this correctly, or sort of.
Spontini’s opera has earned a certain validation through Wagner’s approval of it, admiring its seriousness of subject (as opposed to the frivolity of his idea of Rossini), though Wagner surely appreciated its mixture of myth and the transcendence of love, and ignored the political implications of its origins. The opera gained even more validation when legendary soprano Maria Callas discovered its dramatic potential for La Scala audiences in 1954. It has since become a diva showpiece.
Voilà! — a showpiece for South African/French soprano Elza van den Heever, who then canceled her participation in its first two performances. French soprano Elodie Hache, scheduled for the last two of ten performances, appeared in her stead. Mme. Hache is of clarion dramatic soprano voice which she used with a fine musical intelligence. Of diminutive stature she succeeded in creating a necessarily huge presence for her role. The staging was obviously conceived for Mme. van den Heever, placing Mme. Hache at a huge disadvantage, which she largely overcame in her fine performance.
Act II, La Grande Vestale hovering over Julia, the etrnal fire of the Vestal Virgin temple>
The sets for the Steier production, designed by Etienne Pluss, were smartly deployed on the Opéra Bastille stage, evoking the old fashioned era of painted sets, and too surely in the grand style of our expectations of the Opéra Bastille. The distorted staging, the dark and dismal setting, and the pedestrian costuming, affected by Katarina Schlipf, dampened the performances of a competent cast.
American tenor Michael Spires sang Licinius. With his tenor voice of beautiful baritonal colors he ably acted the drunkenness, confusion, ardor, honesty, bravery, etc., of Spontini’s Roman general with solid professionalism. His friend Cinna was sung by French tenor Julien Behr. Perhaps cast because his bright tenor leggiero voice is in vivid contrast to the darker tone of Mr. Spires’ voice, such voice does not convey the authority of Licinius’ (and Spontini’s) good friend, and certainly not the sinister tone of Mme. Steiers villain. [see lead photo, Mr. Behr in blond wig, Mr. Sprires on right].
French mezzo soprano Ève-Maud Hubeaux relished in grand voice the tyrannical cruelty of the Grand Vestale —more of a Mother Superior in this Steier version. In the ballet she humbly submitted to the authority of the newly crowned Emperor before being taken to her martyrdom. French bass Jean Teitgen was unremarkable as the High Preist (Le Souverain Pontife).
In the last mille seconds of the ballet stage director Steier once again announced that “Fanaticism is a monster [and some more words]” splayed across the stage.
Bertrand de Billy is a master conductor, well known across the repertory in the world’s major theaters. Deprived of the allure of a great diva he gracefully held Spontini’s score in account with the opera’s showpieces, ably proving that Spontini succeeded in finding a certain standing in the early 19th century Parisian opera world, and the occasional nod now in this 21st century.
Opéra Bastille, Paris, France, June 19, 2024. All photos copyright Guergana Damianova / OnP, courtesy of the Opera de Paris.
The Exterminating Angel at the Bastille
Staged by the famed (for many) or infamous (for others) Spanish stage director Calixto Bieito.
Both this Adès Exterminating Angel and Simon Boccanegra bore this stage director’s signature touches — a complex, abstract design metaphor to anchor the action, and lavish use of scatalogical and other visceral imagery that shocks your mind and offends your sensibilities. Actors are placed in high relief, with the daunting challenge of creating this stage director’s vibrant characters.
Great theater and pointed, powerful opera result.
Thomas Adès’ 2016 opera The Exterminating Angel is based on the 1962 film of the same name by famed filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The opera was commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, thus the film’s absurdist parody of the haute bourgeoisie attending a dinner after an opera took on even greater absurdity, given the haute bourgeoisie status of the Salzburg Festival.
Just now, a few years later, the opera finds itself in Paris — the city of existentialist Jean Paul Sartre. It is a new production by one of the world’s edgiest stage directors. Though composer Adès conducted the first few performances, the performance I attended was subject to the high strung temperament of English/Danish conductor Robert Houssart. It was electric indeed.
The design metaphor for The Exterminating Angel was a huge, empty, white, round room of solid walls, no windows. There was a huge double door at the rear that never opened. Within the room there were a few chairs, a table, and a black grand piano. The room was soon peopled by 14 well-dressed people coming from an opera performance. Only at the very end of the opera did we learn that this interior room revolved, we saw its finished exterior walls sweep past us to reveal finally the huge double doors from the outside. They opened.
Holding firm to the existential tenet that existence is not essence (i.e. being) the twelve guests of the dinner’s hosts, Lucia and Edmundo de Nobile, discover that there is nowhere to hang their coats, that the maid, before fleeing, has dumped the dinner on the floor. Taking matters into their own hands they create a world, their world, which becomes, little by little, increasingly, bizarrely, destructively absurd.
Thus the guests find themselves unable to leave the de Nobile residence.
Unique to Bieito’s Paris production was a sense of the sharpness of intelligence of the cast, the sharpness and focus of the voices, and the confidence and quite abstract purposes of their movement. There was absolutely no doubt as to the urgent need of these brilliant singers to create a vibrant artistic existence.
There was the overwhelming sense of virtuosity of the composer, demanding the extraordinary virtuosity and musicianship of the singers, plus an immense directorial intelligence behind these two packed hours of this existential discovery.
The young lovers: Filipe Manu and Amina Edris. Left is Frédéric Antoun as Comte Yemenis, Edmundo de Nobile holds a towel over his head.
Bieito signed the production with at least two proudly visceral moments. The first: the guest named Silvia wiped the sh*t off the exposed butt of her brother Francesco. The second, grandly grotesque (though undoubtedly there were more that I missed), was the slaughtering of a sheep to provide food for the self-imprisoned guests — conveniently the two affianced lovers, Beatrix and Eduardo had achieved a love-death, thus they became the meat of the feast.
Bieito encapsulated his telling of the Adès setting of Buñuel’s tale with a child holding a bouquet of sheep shaped balloons, the child bleating, upon occasion, the futility of mere existence.
Edmundo Nobile was sung by Scottish tenor, Nicky Spence, Lucia de Nobile was sung by American soprano Jacquelyn Stucker. The opera diva Leticia Mayer was sung by French/Romanian soprano Gloria Trowel, the conductor Alberto Roc was sung by French bass baritone Paul Gay, his pianist wife Blanca Delgado was sung by British mezzo soprano Christina Rice, the young lovers Beatrix and Eduardo were sung by Egyptian soprano Amina Edris and New Zealand tenor Filipe Manu. Francisco de Avila was sung by American counter-tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, his sister Silvia de Avila was sung by Irish soprano Claudia Boyle. The Comte Raul Yemenis, an explorer was sung by Canadian tenor Frédéric Antoun, Colonel Alvaro Gomez was sung by American baritone Jarrett Ott, Señor Russel was sung by Canadian bass baritone Philippe Sly, Dr. Carlos Conde was sung by British bass Clive Bayley. The de Nobile butler Julio was sung by British bass Thomas Faulkner.
The costume designer for both Simon Boccanegra and The Exterminating Angel was frequent Bieito collaborator Ingo Krügler. Set design for The Exterminating Angel was by Anna-Sofia Kirsch, set design for Simon Boccanegra was by Susanne Gschwender. Also among the Bieito’s German collaborators were lighting designer Michael Bauer for Simon Boccanegra and Reinhard Traub for The Exterminating Angel. Swiss videographer Sarah Derendinger created the extensive Boccanegra videos.
Photos copyright Agathe Poupeney / OnP, courtesy of the Opéra national de Paris.
Opéra Bastille, Paris, France. March 17, 2024
Simon Boccanegra at the Bastille
Staged by the famed (for many) or infamous (for others) Spanish stage director Calixto Bieito.
Both this Boccanegra and the Adès Exterminating Angel bore this stage director’s signature touches — a complex, abstract design metaphor to anchor the action, and lavish use of scatalogical and other visceral imagery that shocks your mind and offends your sensibilities. Actors are placed in high relief, with the daunting challenge of creating this stage director’s vibrant characters.
Great theater and pointed, powerful opera result.
The design metaphor for Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra was a ship, one that had the exposed wooden ribs of old ships as well as elements of an ugly, modern aquatic war machine. As the story unfolded these armored plates were stripped away to create the skeleton of a huge fish-like structure. It was placed off-center on a constantly revolving stage, revealing ever new, surprising perspectives through the use of video. (Lead photo is Nicole Car as Amelia and Lodovic Tézier as Boccanegra in video image. All Simon Boccanegra photos copyright Vincent Pontet / OnP, courtesy of the Opéra national de Paris).
The structure was huge, built so that as it turned an armored tower penetrated the massive. proscenium opening of the Opéra Bastille, swinging out over the pit, aggressively entering our space — 14th century Genoa was at constant war with Venice for the domination of Mediterranean trade routes.
For Simon Boccanegra Bieito obsessed on the Genoese corsair’s seduction of the Genoese patrician Jacopo Fiesco’s daughter Maria. Maria, then sequestered by her father within his palace, died of grief. A child had resulted from the liaison, though the child had been kidnapped. Fiesco, sung by fine Finnish bass Mika Karas, dragged his supplicating — though dead — daughter onto the stage where she remained, in ghostly, mute, guises though the action of the opera, though it was now 25 years later.
Upper right corner Lodovic Tézier as Boccanegra, his video image in center. Below left to right Charles Castronovo as Adorno, Alejandro Baliñas Vieites as Pietro, Mika Cares as Fiesco, Étienne Dupuis as Paolo
At the moment of his death, Boccanegra — sung by French Verdi baritone Ludovic Tézier in a consummate performance — heart wrenchingly reached out to Maria. Though now, at his end, she was no longer there.
To regain/restore his daughter Maria, Fiesco sought his daughter’s lost daughter — sung by Australian Mozartian soprano Nicole Car in newly found Verdian tones — now known by her adoptive name Amelia Grimaldi. In the end the two fathers, Fiesco and Boccanegra, reconcile, a deeply touching scene as rendered by Bieito, Fiesco embracing the dying Boccanegra, holding him upright.
The dramatic center of Bieito’s production was his imposition of a rape of Amelia by Boccanegra’s enemies. Now came classic Bieito images — blood running down Ameiia’s leg as she emerged from a vagina image within the ship’s guts. As well Amelia’s mother Maria appeared, battered and torn, bloody and ravaged. We then understood, and felt, Fiesco’s need for revenge.
Bieito established the sexual tensions he invented for Verdi’s opera as his central focus, not the political resolutions.
Adorno, Amelia’s intended, sung by American tenor Charles Castronovo and the spurned Paolo, sung by French baritone Étienne Dupuis, were very much on Bieito’s secondary plain, as were the revolutionary Genovese forces sung by the magnificent multitudes of the Opéra national de Paris chorus backing up Boccanegra’s (Tézier’s) truly magnificent cries for peace between Genoa and Venice.
Of great interest was the musical realization of the Verdi score by German early music conductor Thomas Hengelbrock. Mo. Hengelbrock is a famed researcher of historical performance practice, thus we may assume that his slower and more relaxed tempos led to a heightened sense of lyricism — specifically with regard to the Mozartian voice of Mlle. Car. Mo. Hengelbrock did not pursue dramatic punctuation, allowing dramatic effect to slowly grow through crescendo reaching shattering volume — this specifically noted in the monumental finale that concludes Act II.
Opéra Bastille, Paris, France. March 19, 2024
La fanciulla del West in Lyon
Forget the West of San Francisco born David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (the source of Puccini’s opera), not to be confused with Peter Sellers’ The Girls of the Golden West. Think Westphalia maybe, or more philosophically, West Berlin.
The first offering of the Opera de Lyon’s prestigious Winter Festival. This year the festival is entitled “Rebattre les Cartes” — the heroines of the Festival’s three operas all reshuffle the cards, here it is Minnie who bets the life of her lover in a poker game.
German stage director Tatjana Gürbaca is a disciple of legendary stage director Ruth Berghaus and a Wagner specialist to boot. Thus Puccini’s 49ers became her Nibelungen, her sheriff Jack Rance took on an uncanny resemblance to Walkűre’s Hunding (see lead photo). Minnie and her rather simple boyfriend Mike Johnson escaped a California Valhalla that we might have relished watching it go up in flames, save for the lusty miners whom we came to know and love as refugees straight from Bertold Brecht’s Mahagony.
Suffice to say that the artistically mature Puccini of 1911 was a man of the European world, well aware of theatrical currents emanating from beyond the Alps, rather more than he was the raconteur of stories from the Sierras of American Old West. The Grübaca Europeanization of this American story fit far more comfortably within Puccini’s newly sophisticated, mid-career operatic endeavor than would a staging that attempted to evoke quaint American atmospheres.
La fanciulla del West was not a success at its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera because it was neither vintage Puccini nor was it American.
In Lyon just now the conductor was Daniele Rustioni who stepped onto the podium and immediately established his intention to tell an urgent story, not to linger on the emotive moments of its protagonists, or only very briefly. The pit was Straussian — quadruple woodwinds, two harps, expanded percussion joined the strings to create a maelstrom of sounds that melded Italian lyricism with constant, pithy stage action.
The maestro drove it unfalteringly to its shattering ending. Minnie and Dick had destroyed sheriff Jack and may have escaped California, but the miners were left trapped in their lust for gold and their nostalgia for everything they had left behind.
The end of the opera. Minnie and Dick walking out of California, Jack Rance with a gun to his head, Billy (in blue), the American Indian, the miners left behind
The set was a few Tristan-worthy geometrical shapes, bathed in a sort of dusty gold light, sheriff Jack Rance was enveloped in huge animal hide coat, the chaotic law and lust of a mythic California world. Saloon tycoon Minnie appeared in a shining gold robe, then removed her too tight, golden slippers, a clean cut Dick Johnson strode in, though his alter-persona, whom we never met, was the terrifying Mexican bandit Ramirez.
Dick and Minnie (Minnie, pointedly, now in comfortable shoes and pajamas) consummated their love during the second act snowstorm. A few snowflakes did actually fall from time to time within the brightly lighted geometry, in tribute to David Belasco’s naturalism, though the act’s primary image were the many nooses that descended across the stage, a couple of ropes used to hoist Mike (Minnie snapped the security buckle) into the fly space that served as the Belasco attic.
Act II, Chiara Isotton as Minnie, Riccardo Massi as Dick Johnson
From the beginning the miners, the Wells Fargo agent Ashby, Sonora, Sid, Happy, Bello etc., melded together as acolytes to the golden priestess Minnie, save the two native Americans (called Indians), Billy and Wowkle who knew only that life leads to death. In the end the miners were shown abjectly huddled together, Billy had been destroyed by the disheveled and distraught sheriff Jack Rance, who put a revolver to his own head in the final black out.
Epic theater indeed.
Minnie was sung by Italian soprano Chiara Isotton who belted out the high notes with the ease of a fine Elektra. Signorina Isotton does have a great Italian warmth in her midrange voice that served her well in Puccini’s frustratingly few moments of emotive expansion. She does not have the ease and confidence of diva movement (though clearly she is an arrived diva), an attribute that could possibly contribute to a cowgirl Minnie, but here did not find a sufficient Wagnerian philosophical dignity.
Dick Johnson was sung by Italian tenor Riccardo Massi who in addition to possessing a fine voice and ample technique, evidences excellent musicianship. With all the Italianate tenor resources in place he still found the qualities to convey the vocal innocence of a jugendlicher heldentenor, complementary to the epic theater intentions of the director.
Hunding aka Jack Rance was sung by Italian baritone Claudio Sgura. Sig. Sgura is of imposing figure, and of black voice, attributes that served him well to create a Wild West sheriff who was possessed of the honestly raw appetites of love and justice that prevail in the wilds of humanity. Mr. Sgura enacts Scarpia and Iago, as well as Jack Rance on the world’s major stages. There are no Wagnerian credits.
The world of the gold-possessed forty-niners were a lively bunch of polished performers that included the beautifully voiced male contingent of the Opera National de Lyon chorus.
Opéra Nouvel, Lyon, France. March 15, 2024
Pique Dame in Lyon
The Russian Avant-garde has attacked Lyon, Pique Dame is left in ruin!
Enfant terrible (now forty years old) Russian avant-gardiste stage director Timofeï Kouliabine fled Russia in protest of its invasion of Ukraine. He had been director of Novossibersk’s progressive Theater of the Red Flame, and surely he escaped with much of its fervent avant-gardism. Mr. Kouliabine took his opening night bow “en culottes” (the pants of the 18th century French aristocracy), though with bare, hairy calves showing — surely a protest of something, perhaps the civility of a French theatre.
His production team is firmly ensconced in current Russian theater. Dramaturg Ilia Kukharenko, a former editor of Vogue Russie and Madame Figaro Russie, is now a commissioner of the Golden Mask theater awards of Moscow’s Pushkin Fine Arts Museum. Set designer Oleg Golovko, a frequent collaborator of Mr. Kouliabine, is the recipient of many awards within the Saint Petersburg theater community. Costume designer Vlada Pomirkovanaya, a frequent Kouliabine collaborator as well, has a plenitude of design credits in Moscow and Perm. Lighting designer Oskars Paulinš works at Moscow’s Pushkin and Gogol theaters.
Never mind Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame (1890), or Pushkin’s novella Pique Dame (1834) on which the opera is loosely based. Just now in 2024 Lyon Kouliabine and his collaborators had other fish to fry. Though I am not sure what all those other fish were.
They recast this nineteenth century document of Russian aristocratic depressive boredom onto a stage that sat on Lyon’s opera house stage (story within a story) where present day nasty things happen, though Tchaikovsky’s grandiose second act Polonaise was portrayed as a costume ball, rudely interrupted by an electricity outage. It was complicated.
Act I
The first scene of the first act, Tchaikovsky’s Moscow park, was set in a tiny vestibule of this stage set theater. Its expansive stage however held act after act of Russian militarism — a war widows’ dirge, Swan Lake ballerinas with Kalashnikovs, crippled veterans, etc. All this outrage grandly suffocated our getting acquainted with Hermann and his gambling obsession, off to the side.
At the end of the opera we returned to this obscure theatrical metaphor, though now the stage (on the stage) is in grandly distressed ruin (we sat in long silences for the intra act scene changes). We were anticipating the famed suspense of the card scene. The dissolute inhabitants were however in no condition to attempt any organized activity, much less able to find the mental acuity to gamble. Instead Hermann’s rival in love, the Prince Eletsky, presented himself, he then dressed himself as the Countess. Hermann shot him as the Pique Dame dead, escaping his own Pushkin/Tchaikovsky suicide.
Final scene, card game (Act III), Dmitry Golovnin as Hermann
Go figure.
Lisa’s magnificently bleak Tchaikovsky suicide was subverted as well. She sat in a gloomy train station together with various contemporary, societal victims. At the scene’s climax, rather than throwing herself in front of a train or bus, she gathered a mother and child and fled, presumably to a waiting train.
It is possible that this willful destruction of an operatic masterpiece was a selfish celebration of Mr. Koullabine’s escape from Russia, or maybe it was the deliberate destruction of an operatic masterpiece mimicking Russia’s willful destruction of Ukraine. Whatever, it seemed and was very Russian.
The Hermann was Russian tenor Dmitry Golovnin. He is a character singer, missing the voice and presence of a leading tenor. Mr. Goloynin is a fine singer indeed, holding forth forcefully and magnificently (he is a former trumpeter) through each of the opera’s seven scenes, though not in a voice that can be termed as beautiful. Perhaps his role was intended to be understood as Everyman, not merely that of a besotted opera singer who could summon our participation (cartharsis) through the vocal magnificence of his situation. (See lead photo from Act III, train station.)
Lisa was sung by Russian soprano Elena Guseva. Mme. Guseva is very able performer, singing Russian heroines on many of Europe’s important stages — as well she was a recent Lyon Tosca. Just now in the Kouliabine Pique Dame she was required to go histrionically well outside the vocal formalities of the role, robbing her of any empathy we might feel for the young heroine she was asked to portray. Vocally it was a fine performance, though we did not feel her participation in Mr. Koullabine’s storytelling, whatever it was. (See lead photo, Act III, train station.)
The Countess, Lisa’s grandmother, the “Pique Dame” was sung by Russian mezzo soprano Elena Zaremba. The role was enacted to perfection. Russian baritone Pavel Yankovsky sang the Count Tomski. Former member of the young artist program at the Bolshoi Opera Konstantin Shushakov was the beautifully voiced Prince Eletski. Ukrainian mezzo soprano Olga Syniakova was the beautifully voiced Pauline.
The final prayer as sung by the male voices of the Opéra national de Lyon was of exceptional beauty.
Conductor Daniele Rustioni seemed to embrace Mr. Koullabine’s production, but never found a musical center for it.
Opéra Nouvel, Lyon, France. March 16, 2024
La traviata in Marseille
Three fine singers saved Marseille Opéra’s recent 5 performance run of La traviata. Marred by a bizarre pit and weird staging conceits, Verdi’s middle period masterwork emerged, in spite of it all, in its indestructible, awesome, bel canto glory.
Spanish soprano Ruth Iniesta brought a bright, silvery sound to Violetta, finding surprising musical and vocal detail in exposing the heroine’s complex emotions. This formidable artist is in mid career — Verdi’s Violetta is one of her signature roles, others are Puccini’s Liu and Bizet’s Micaela. Hers is a Violetta who projects youthful innocence, not the weariness of a worldly courtesan. “Sempre libera” offered Mme. Iniesta the opportunity to find joyous pleasure in her roulades, and to indulge in an immature boast with the famed high E-flat interpolation squarely, forcefully hit, then held a trifle too long (see lead photo). Her mid and lower voice have great warmth, endowing her Violetta to capitulate to Germont and finally to die with frank, girlish innocence.
French tenor Julien Dran brought well-studied stylistic pizazz to his performance as Alfredo. He read as a boyish, immature Alfredo just finding his way into the Parisian beau monde, rather than as a jaded ladies’ man finding his way out of it. Mr. Dran has a quite beautiful, lyric voice, often assigned secondary roles on many European stages while continuing to shine in principal roles in Marseille.
Germont was sung by French baritone Jérôme Boutillier. Mr. Boutillier boasts a fine and powerful voice of golden color. It is well focused and very present giving his Germont a youthful sound that belies the mature gravity that is normally associated with the role. Thus he rendered his scenes with Violetta and Alfredo as a singer making beautiful sounds rather than as a concerned father. While this certainly distracted from Verdi’s storytelling, it did meld musically with the innocence of the voices of Violetta and Alfredo, creating Verdi’s bel canto world, if not his theatrical world.
Act II. Ruth Iniesta as Violetta, Jérôme Boutillier as Germont
For the 2014 premiere of this mise en scène by Renée Auphan, Opéra de Marseille’s general director Maurice Xiberras engaged a young female conductor, Eun Sun Kim. This Korean maestra has since become the music director of San Francisco Opera. Please see my review of this splendid Marseille opera performance: https://www.michaelmilenski.com/review-archives.html#Traviata_Marseille
Just now Mr. Xiberras entrusted the assistant conductor of the Opéra de Marseille’s orchestra, Naples born maestra Clelia Cafiero to preside musically over the production. This young maestra imposed erratic, changing tempos that prevented Verdi’s longer periods from finding shape. She imposed disturbing and silly rhetorical interruptions to mark brief musical moments she chose to elaborate, naively ignoring the larger dramatic impetus of a scene. As well she confused leading her singers with following her singers, and then in softened accompaniment. The maestra’s conducting thus eviscerated the powerful dramatic thrust that marks Verdi’s middle period operas.
Ruth Iniesta as Violetta, Lawrence Janot as Alfredo
This 2014 Opéra de Marseille production was re-staged just now by Yves Coudray, straying from Renée Auphan;s original intensions that were based on a close reading of the Alexander Dumas fils novel La Dame aux camélias. Mr. Coudray’s staging was instead very straight forward, eliminating Mme. Auphan’s Annina elaboration as a lesbian companion to Violetta, and portraying Flora as an older, former prostitute, the two primary examples. The notable clumsiness of stage movement was perhaps exacerbated by the lack of musical thrust from the pit.
There were two strange episodes of pit silence when voices on-stage were left unaccompanied while off-stage revelry was accompanied by a backstage orchestra. The sound seemed to be, however, a strangely muffled recording rather than real instruments.
Mr. Coudray’s third act Flora recreated an amusing take-off of La Bohème’s second act Musetta shoe episode. There was suggestive interplay between Flora and the Marchese d’Obigny, sung by Frédéric Cornille. If was apparent that the production’s Flora, performed by Laurence Janot, was cast as a shapely dancer rather than as a singer. Alfredo’s friend Gastone was sung by Carl Ghazarossian, a man of many greater years than Alfredo. Alfredo’s rival, the Baron Douphol was sung by a rough voiced Jean-Marie Delpas.
The settings for this 2014 mise en scène were designed by Christine Marist. It is a unit set of three walls, a back wall with three large openings that were plugged differently for each act while the stage right wall had a monumental fireplace that remained in place for all four acts. With the studied lighting of the 2014 staging the set well served the richness of Mme. Auphan’s staging. Lacking that richness these four set elements were a cumbersome reminder that economies may become noticeably heavy-handed. The perfunctory period costumes were designed by Katia Duflot.
Opéra de Marseille, Marseille, France, February 15, 2024. All photos copyright Christian Dresse, courtesy of the Opéra de Marseille.
Adriana Lecouvreur at the Opéra Bastille
The one by Francesco Cilea. There are several others by forgotten composers. This one sits uneasily in the verismo category given its hyper contrived plot and its historical setting.
Leading ladies have long been a theatrical topos. Victorien Sardou’s play Tosca premiered in 1887 with famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt as Tosca. The great Italian actress Eleanora Duse ended her romantic relationship with Italian poet and tragedian Gabriele D’Annunzio in 1898 when he gave the leading role in his La Città Morta to Sarah Bernhardt (la “Duse,” as Eleanora was called, had had a relationship with Arrigo Boito [Verdi’s librettist] as well — FYI).
Famed French dramatist Eugène Scribe indulged himself in the diva topos with his 1849 play Adrienne Lecouvreur, the source of Cilea’s opera. Both Scribe and Sardou were proponents of “well-made” plays, these had simple, compelling narratives with quick resolution. Voilà! Such is, in principle, Cilea’s 1902 Adriana Lecouvreur, though its operatic narrative became hopelessly complicated.
Adriana, having recited (spoken) a scene from Racine's Phaedre, accuses the Princess of Bouillon of adultery.
There was once a real Adrienne Lecouvreur, an actress of great fame in the Comédie-Francaise troupe. She died in 1730, rumored to have been poisoned, victim of a nasty amorous intrigue, by the Countess of Bouillon. Scribe’s play and Cilea’s opera imagine this intrigue replete with a dose of backstage lore and hints of obscure, early 18th century politics.
Tragedian D’Annunzio loved Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, and wanted Cilea to make an opera of his 1901 tragedy Francesca da Rimini [Francesca was murdered by her husband]. The original champion of operatic verismo, publisher Edoardo Sonzogno however owned the rights to D’Annunzio’s play, and insisted that Riccardo Zandonai render it operatically. Bereft of this drama, perfectly matched to his style, Cilea has but two operas in the repertory, L’arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur.
Divas, seemingly, are considered essential to Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. London’s Royal Opera engaged Romanian diva Angela Gheorghiu for its 2010 production, directed by David McVicar, designed by Charles Edwards. The production then came to the Opéra Bastille in 2015, again with Mme. Gheorghiu. The production moved to Vienna in 2017 and then on to New York’s Met in 2018, both with Russian diva Anna Netrebko. Just now it was mounted once again in Paris for seven performances, again with Mme. Netrebko, though she sang but the first four. Her real-life husband, Azerbaïdjanian tenor Yusuf Eyvazov was Adriana’s erstwhile lover Maurizio (illegitimate son of the king of Poland).
The final three performances were sung by Italian soprano Anna Pirozzi, long on the world’s major stages, and splendid Italian tenor Giorgio Berrugi. I attended the final performance. (See lead photo).
Sopranos with mature careers like Cilea’s Adriana role because it does not lie too high, and offers myriad opportunity to be a diva, vocally and histrionically. Its three arias are blockbusters, there are three intense duets, plus two nasty show-downs. The death scene is drawn out, with grandly ironic, quite histrionic pathos. Tenors like Maurizio because he offers them great opportunity to show off their spinto voices in its three blockbuster, though mercifully brief arias. Maurizio too has three intense duets.
Clémentine Margaine as the Princess of Bouillon, with members of the Opéra national de Paris chorus
Not to mention the Princess of Bouillon, Adriana’s rival for the affections of Maurizio, who has the spectacular second act aria “Acerba voluttà…O vagabonda stella” plus two dramatic shouting matches with Adriana.
Well-made plays made into well-made opera librettos have the advantage of finding immediate placement for emotive elaboration. Such is Adriana Lecouvreur’s libretto. The opera is essentially a numbers opera, i.e. a succession of set pieces — the emotive elaborations are far more important than a coherent story-line. That of Adriana Lecouvreur is famously obtuse, allowing its multitude of showcase pieces.
The David McVicar production is conceived for the world’s biggest opera houses. Charles Edwards, a frequent McVicar collaborator, obliges with a massive set that is essentially the recreation of an elaborate 18th century, Rococo theater stage and backstage. McVicar, well known for his stagings of operas with heavily political overtones, wishes to evoke the political and social failures of the epoch in this Adriana, failures that he believes emerge succinctly through, and because of the lavish elegance of the period set and costumes of this production.
Be that as it may.
Perhaps someday there will emerge a production of Adriana Lecouvreur that reveals its roots in the basic, simple tenets of the verismo that flourished in Italy in the waning years of the 19th century. A production that, refreshingly, does not succumb to the opera’s diva worship status, with the complementary grand opera trappings that divas are perceived to require. A production that reveals the emotionally frank, naturalistic world that this unfortunate-in-love, 18th century revolutionary actress deserves.
Adriana Lecouvreur: Anna Pirozzi; Maurizio: Giorgio Berrugi; Princess of Bouillon: Clémentine Margaine; Michonnet: Ambrogio Maestri; Prince of Bouillon: Sava Vemić; L’abate di Chazeuil: Leonardo Cortellazzi. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra national de Paris. Conductor: Jader Bignamini; Mise en scène: David McVicar; Stage Director: Justin Way; Set Design: Charle Edwards; Costumes: Brigitte Reiffenstuel; Lighting: Adam Silverman. Opéra Bastille, Paris France, February 7, 2024. All photos copyright Sébastien Mathé / Opéra national de Paris.
Giulio Cesare at the Palais Garnier
This Laurent Pelly production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare is wily indeed, enriching Handel’s estimation of antiquity’s most famous female with supreme wit. Were it pure Baroque opera seria these current Parisian audiences would surely have turned to stone.
The Pelly production was first seen in 2011 with Nathalie Dessay as its Cleopatra. Just now it was Lisette Oropesa’s Cleopatra who dazzled mezzo-soprano Gaelle Arquez’s eager Caesar. (See lead photo).
In 2011 it was the Lille based Concert d’Astrée performing on Baroque period instruments, now in 2024 it was the Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris playing modern instruments. Thus the horns that crown the final scenes did not crack and break Handel’s gorgeous lines as did these grand, old instruments of Les Musicians du Prince in Monaco’s recent Giulio Cesare. Instead Paris’ modern horns produced the smooth musical lines that are the glory of Handel’s famed score.
British harpsichordist and conductor Harry Bicket of London’s The English Concert [music director of The Santa Fe Opera as well] pulled every subtle sigh, smile, wile, frown, groan, sob, etc., from his singers, while encouraging the same from the pairs of flutes, oboes and bassoons that joined strings (8/8/5/4/2). All together they created the seduction, desperation and triumphs of love, sorrow, despair, hate, deception and revenge that the 44 numbers of Handel’s most performed Italian opera could conjure up. There are 31 arias, 2 duets, 2 small choruses [only to begin and end the opera] plus myriad recitatives and ariosos to introduce the arias. The program booklet credits the Bärenreiter HHA edition, my count is surely close.
It is usual in performances of Handel operas that there are quite a few empty seats by the third act. Those who braved the first act and returned for the second were treated to an amazing coup de théâtre. Eight beautiful maidens in matching white, high Baroque gowns come onto the stage with instruments (including a harp) to accompany (without score) Cleopatra’s scorchingly sensual (though she is impersonating Virtue) “V’adoro pupille.” Pelly’s Parnussus scene takes place within a huge, empty painting frame surrounded by these lovely, musical muses. The frame becomes an actual Fragonard painting as it moves upstage.
Rémy Bres as Cleopatra's confidant Nireno, with four decorative supernumeraries (these in addition to the eight muses, not pictured).
The second act is Laurent Pelly’s eighteenth century act. During the act a series of paintings (of not easily perceived reference) were ferried across the stage by the warehouse hands of a major museum’s storage facility, one assumes the Louvre with its massive collections of paintings and Egyptian sculptures.
Pelly’s first act obviously takes place in the museum’s antiquities storage area. A phalanx of Roman busts mouthed the words of the opening chorus [!], eliciting the animation of the Handel’s spirits of antiquity. Cleopatra arrived atop a massive representation of an unidentifiable Egyptian deity, pulled onto the stage by warehouse hands. She was lightly draped in a white, filmy gown, covering everything, more or less, except one bare breast. The warehouse hands could not be caught looking, we were less discreet.
The third act takes place in the museum’s antique Persian rug storage area. Pelly deployed several middle-Eastern men sitting crosslegged, restoring old, worn rugs, while across the stage warehouse hands were spreading out and rolling up rugs. In this final act Cleopatra is held captive in the confines of her brother’s harem, Caesar is off in battle, the warehouse hands became the soldiers.
The Pelly sight gags are heavy handed indeed, but fly lightly because they are so very witty. This surely served to excite our sensibilities, helping us feel the powerful, dramatic crescendo of the succession of arias. Those of us who remained for the third act were tightly in the grip of a number of personal dramas — Sesto’s desire to avenge the death of his father Ptolemy; his mother Cornelia’s need to rebuff the advances of Tolomeo and Achilla; Cleopatra’s war with her brother, and her love of Caesar who she now believes to be dead.
Caesar’s ship (literally) came in. Back in the warehouse a huge statue of a Roman hero was rolled on. Caesar and Cleopatra were at last reunited and finally alone on the stage. A custodian illuminated a “ghost lamp,” the single lightbulb that darkly illuminates the ghosts of a theater’s stage.
Handel’s world was vibrantly alive with excellent performances by Lisette Oropesa’s Cleopatra and Gaële Arquez’s Giulio Cesare. Louisiana (USA) born Mlle. Oropesa is quite shapely, easily embodying the arrogant and calculating sirene of myth. As Handel’s heroine she is also a sincere lover, ready to die as her brother’s prisoner. As defeated as she was in her heartbreaking “Piangero la sorte mia,” we were smitten by its sincerity. An estimable technician of beautiful voice she wove the florid lines of her multiple arias into a convincing whole.
Though Handel created the role of Julius Caesar for the famed castrato Senesino, in this third edition of the Pelly production it was sung by French mezzo-soprano Gaële Arquez. A formidable technician of beautiful voice as well, she embodied the love-stricken Caesar with great conviction. The timbre of the female mezzo soprano voice, arriving finally at her tender “Aure, deh, per pieta spirate nel petto mio,” melded perfectly into the intense lyricism instilled by maestro Bicket.
Emily D'Angelo as Sesto, Wiebke Lehmkuhl as Cornelia
Complementary to this lyricism were the voices and characters of German contralto Wiebke Lehmkuhl as Cornelia, wife of Pompey, and their son Sesto, sung by Canadian mezzo soprano Emily D’Angelo. Their duet, “Son nata a lagrimar” that closes Act I, was of sublime beauty.
Of note was the casting of Italian bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni as Achilla. This formidable performer well outshone his boss, Cleopatra’s brother Tolomeo (Ptolemy) performed by British counter-tenor Iestyn Davies. Nireno, Cleopatra’s trusted confidant, was sung by French counter-tenor Rémy Bres in the spirit of legendary French counter-tenor Dominique Visse, its original 2011 player.
The Pelly production (sets and costumes) was designed by Chantal Thomas and lighted by Joël Adam, both long-time Pelly collaborators. This revival was staged by Laurie Feldman.
Palais Garnier, Paris, France, February 8, 2024. All photos copyright Vincent Pontet / OnP, courtesy of the Opéra national de Paris.
Beatrice di Tenda at the Opéra Bastille
Bellini’s second to last opera, Beatrice di Tenda, was not a success at its 1833 Venice premiere, though subsequent performances are said to have overcome the opera’s macabre horrors through the brilliant performances of Giuditta Pasta, the bel canto diva-of-the-day, as Beatrice.
Much the same can be said of the Peter Sellars / George Tsypin production of Beatrice di Tenda that opened last night at the Opéra Bastille. The horrors of the opera were made very present — the villain was truly vile, the love intrigue was equally vile. The production’s redemption was the performance of the American diva Tamara Wilson as Beatrice. (see lead photo)
As the voice of Giuditta Pasta was described by famed early nineteenth century opera aficionado novelist Stendhal, la Wilson too is a perfect soprano sfogato (aka soprano assoluto), in other words a heroic soprano with extended upper and lower ranges, able to negotiate complex fioratura with grace and ease. Mme. Wilson sings both Turandot and Isolde, and now Beatrice. Unlike la Pasta, la Wilson does not strain to nail and extend a high D, nor does her voice assume different timbres in different ranges. It remains full and warm throughout, with a plenitude of colors, and an unerring sense of pitch in the dramatic leaps Beatrice executes in her most extreme moments. In equally intense, reflective moments she smoothly negotiates Bellini’s soaring lines, embellished with clearly executed, perfect trills. Bel canto indeed.
Beatrice, just now in director Sellars' Paris, unfortunately champions progressive political causes. It worked out well with her first husband, but he died young. She had the power to elevate a rising young politician to a position of great power, and he became her husband, later becoming corrupt. She then championed a young, progressive reformer who unfortunately fell in love with her. Unfortunately Agnese, a beautiful young woman, is in love with Orombello, the progressive reformer, though Filippo, Beatrice’s corrupt husband is madly in love with Agnese. German mezzo-soprano Theresa Kronthaler sang the role. She too qualifies as a soprano sfogato, plus she boasts a voice of truly magical beauty, well able to bewitch Filippo, if not Oronbello. Mlle. Kronthaler’s roles include Sieglinde.
Theresa Kronthaler as Agnese, Quinn Kelsey as Filippo Visconti
San Francisco finished, New Zealand Māori tenor Pene Pati sang Orombello. Mr. Pati excels brilliantly in the bel canto repertory, though he sings the Duke of Mantua and Rodolfo as well. His bows are indeed florid. Famed American baritone Quinn Kelsey sang the villain Filippo with much the same élan that he brings to his signature role, Rigoletto.
Peter Sellars’ production politicizes Bellini’s setting of a moment of early fifteenth century history (history according to opera — not exactly fact), bringing it into our contemporary experience. Sellars emphasized the brutality of Filippo, his corrupt nature and the self indulgences of a dictator encouraged by his attendant sycophants (the 40 or so male voices of the chorus). At other times these male chorus voices are joined by the 45 or so female voices to become the populous abused by Filippo, the corrupt dictator. The populace makes a mighty noise, a real threat to the dictator’s power. The finale choruses are sung from the theater’s upper reaches, thereby including us seated in the theater among their commenting force.
Mr. Sellars adds yet more from his arsenal of theatrical devices. Filippo has a few henchmen armed with Uzi guns or maybe ak47’s, a universal symbol of the brutality of the state. There are two performers of exotic provenance (diversity) — Mäori tenor Pene Pati is joined by his brother, San Francisco finished tenor Amitai Pati as Anichino, here rendered as a brother (not the Bellini friend) to Pene Pati’s Orombello. Amitai Pati is a fine tenor — Toulouse’s Alfredo, ENO’s Ferrando. Certainly the outsized chorus was complimentary to Mr. Sellars concept as well.
Pene Pati as Orombello
In the end Sellars displayed Beatrice and Orombello’s dying prayers with blood and guts spilled on the stage, Orombello and Beatrice in hideous, physical states, bel canto be damned. Filippo effected his revenge, Mr. Kelsey oscillating between remorse and ferocity, breaking free of the beauty of bel canto to crush those who challenged and betrayed him. The execution by six Uzi bearing thugs was aimed directly at the audience, Beatrice, having forgiven Agnese, begs us not to pray for her, Beatrice, but to pray for Filippo. We, mankind, felt redeemed. All of us.
Peter Sellars again evidenced himself as a potent theatrical mind.
All this bloodshed took place within a huge, complex piece of sculpture that transformed from transparent bright green to transparent bright red, fading to a gray. The huge structure was a mesh back wall with evolving textures. Side walls were reflective to destroy all boundaries. The floor was a manicured French topiary garden, a maze that told us we were in a highly regulated if arcanely governed world. Gardeners toiled to keep it so, and then these gardeners polished the reflective walls as Filippo briefly thought he might have a bit of compassion. Kazakhstan born, American finished designer George Tsypin created this massive piece of art that did not overwhelm Bellini’s small scale opera, though its sickly, luminous, quite important world was well beyond this incidental moment of opera history.
Quinn Kelsey as Filippo Visconti, with a small portion of the set visible.
The pit of the Opéra Bastille is a lively place, Bellini’s orchestral sounds pealing forth in political exuberance. British conductor Mark Wigglesworth participated whole heartedly in the Sellars concept. Much of the evening was not devoted to Bellini’s bel canto as much as it was devoted to a rhetorical delivery of text. The recitative moments were deliberately paced, indeed becoming oppressive as the evening progressed — we were being told and told some more. Much use was made of silences to emphasize the political points director Sellars wished to make, interrupting the inbred flow that is the glory of bel canto. Mr. Wigglesworth did provide very effective, informed musical support for the arias, and certainly for the massive choruses, and especially for the final prayers.
It was, of course, a splendid evening, albeit trivial in effect, if not for the spectacular singing of la Wilson.
The costumes were designed by Camille Assad, lighting design was by James F Ingalls, both longtime collaborators of Mr. Sellars. Rizzardo del Maino (Filippo’s confidant) was sung by Taesung Lee.
Opéra Bastille, Paris, France. February 9, 2024. All photos copyright Franck Ferville_OnP, courtesy of the Opéra national de ParisDie Frau ohne Schatten in Toulouse
The fifth opera in the Richard Strauss canon — the one that is truly gigantic — staged just now at Toulouse’s acoustically famed 1150 seat Theatre du Capitole in the splendid 2006 production by the late Nicholas Joel and his designer, the late Ezio Frigerio.
Very much alive in Toulouse was the electric presence of German conductor Frank Beermann and the Orchestre national du Capitole, replete with all players needed to realize Strauss’ massive score, effecting the astonishing fortes of the earthquake and, in the end, the magnificent, sonic triumph of humanity. The flutes and oboes instilled the disturbing dissonances of the falcon’s wailing call, a bassoon lamented the intimacies of sorrow, and a cello quartet warmed the hut's heart, all this against the Elektra-like maelstrom that tormented the souls of the opera’s protagonists.
It is indeed Strauss’ richest score, Hofmannsthal’s sprawling, symbolist libretto awarding the composer myriad opportunity to musically explore the lowly human condition as it extends into its most basic spiritual extensions. The story is essentially the same as The Magic Flute, with the inscrutable symbolist mysteries of Pelleas et Melisande thrown in. Wagnerian philosophical myth is never far away, and the scent of the nascent National Socialism is maybe just a bit perceptible.
Sophie Koch as the Nurse, Issachah Savage as the Emperor
The design metaphor was minimalist geometry — the lighted planes and grids of the suspended spirit world, the dark circles and holes of the human world. Myriad stairs connect these two worlds within a huge, complex stage apparatus that glided effortlessly and magically from one world to the other, exactly timed to the orchestral intrusions that bind the scenes. The stage apron itself was the visual key — its reflective surface a constant reminder that we were in a surreal, symbolic world.
The Dyer's hut (note the reflections on the stage apron)
Equally minimalist in its storytelling was the Nicholas Joel staging, realized by stage director Stephen Taylor. The nurse remained always the pivotal force, a very magical presence that clearly provoked all action, motivated by her distaste of the lower, human world. The dyer’s wife was forever petulant and flighty, the dyer himself was warm and accepting of anything, almost. The emperor was lost in the woods somewhere, searching for his falcon, not sure how he found himself in an opera. The empress, possessed by love, was the passive observer of her nurse’s machinations until she was made to feel the warmth of real, honest human emotion. She then banished her nurse and proclaimed — spoken, not sung — “ich bin nicht” in a shattering, very un-Straussian, highly theatrical orchestral silence.
Minimalist imagery defined the two worlds of the opera. The warmth of dyer’s world was present in the three fires that inhabited his hut, enabling his toil, indeed his life. The intimacy of opera’s extended monologues were directly expressed to us by the upper-world protagonists standing on the reflective stage apron. The magic of the fish children being fried, the earthquake and the fountain of life were assigned not to scenic effects but left to the magic of the Strauss score in abstract sonic metaphors.
The greatest glory of the production was, then, the Strauss score that illuminated Hofmannsthal’s strange, retro exploration of 18th and 19th century European social thinking. Conductor Beermann left no musical stone unturned. It was a brash, immediate rendering of the musical tenets of post Romanticism, with grandiose overtones of expressionism forcefully implied. The orchestra of the Théâtre du Capitole is a virtuoso ensemble that rose to magnificent volumes when not whispering under the quite beautiful moments of solo violin and solo cello.
Die Frau ohne Schatten is infamous for its requirement of five heroic singers. The Théâtre du Capitole assembled a cast of great interest. Of foremost effect was the Nurse, sung by French mezzo-soprano Sophie Koch (also Toulouse’s Isolde, Sieglinde and Kundry). With minimal body language she created an other-worldly presence that never faltered as she ruthlessly manipulated the Empress, the Dyer and the dyer’s wife. Mme. Koch was in fine voice, well able to ascend to the upper reaches of the role in beautiful tone, and finally to accept her banishment in heart-rending motions of defeat.
American baritone Brian Mulligan made a huge impression as Barak, the dyer. Mr. Mulligan possesses a voice of warmth and beauty that brought extraordinary prominence to this role, allowing his character to soar musically, investing this Strauss role with a seldom discovered lyricism. The Barak persona is complex, Mr. Mulligan embraced his character's opposing forces — a supposed brutish personality that embodies enormous sympathy. See lead photo.
Barak’s wife was sung by German soprano Ricarda Merbeth. The Dyer’s Wife is known as a treacherous role, requiring considerable force and size to rise over the Straussian maelstrom that defines her tormented character. She is obviously highly neurotic, making her a heroine nearly equivalent to Elektra. Mme. Merbeth found a brutish petulance for the role that never faltered, vocally strident as needed, coyly contrite when she needed to be, with conflicting emotions always superimposed. Mme. Merbeth well met the role’s formidable challenges. See lead photo.
Elisabeth Teige as the Empress, Sophie Koch as the Nurse. Costumes designed by Franca Squarciapino.
The Empress was sung by Norwegian soprano Elisabeth Teige, the Emperor was sung by American tenor Issachah Savage. Both artists are of golden colored, forcefully heroic voices that served to place their characters apart from, and above the characters of the lower world. The Empress managed her Act I coloratura with apparent ease, and had the stratospheric reserve needed to surmount her huge, Act III confrontation with her unseen (or heard) father. Mr. Savage had all needed forces to surmount the extreme tessitura of his magnificent Act II monologue.
Of particular note was the role of the king (Kiekobad) of the spirits’ messenger beautifully sung by French bass-baritone Thomas Dolié, as were Barak’s brash and lively brothers, sung by Aleksei Isaev, Dominic Barberi and Damien Bigourdan.
Nicholas Joel was the artistic director of the Théâtre du Capitole from 1991 through 2008. Aside from the administration of the theater he bequeathed Toulouse a sizable legacy of productions that continue to be staged (in recent years I have seen his Die Walküre and Tristan und Isolde). Among his contributions to the Théâtre du Capitole was the refitting of its stage housing in 2004, making it possible to mount productions as complex as this 2006 La Femme sans Ombre.
Ezio Frigerio designed the sets for Giorgio Strehler’s famed production of Le nozze di Figaro that held the stages of Versailles, the Garnier and finally the Bastille from 1973 until 2011. Frigerio’s wife, Franca Squarciapino designed the costumes for the Strehler Nozze, as well as all the later Frigerio productions.
Théâtre du Capitole, Toulouse, France, January 31, 2024. All photos copyright Mirco Magliocca, courtesy of the Théâtre du Capitole.