Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 5 July 2026

Images: Stephan Rabold

Bassa Selim – Bülent Ceylan
Konstanze – Adela Zaharia
Blonde – Serafina Starke
Belmonte – Siyabonga Maqungo
Pedrillo – Michael Laurenz
Osmin – David Steffens

New version and presentation – Bülent Ceylan, Andrea Moses, Michael Höppner
Director – Andrea Moses
Set designs – Raimund Bauer
Costumes – Anja Rabes
Lighting – Irene Selka
Video – Andrea Gabriel
Dramaturgy – Michael Höppner, Detlef Giese

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Gerhard Polifka)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Thomas Guggeis (conductor)

No one is perfect, although Mozart’s music often is. One of many differences between the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s previous and current musical directors is the latter’s apparent lack of interest in the operas of Mozart. Christian Thielemann’s ongoing rejuvenation of the house’s record in Strauss’s dramatic works has already offered some compensation. Both he and Daniel Barenboim have of course long since proved themselves distinguished, if strikingly different, Wagnerians. It was, in his context, a heartening development to see the house offer a new production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail—not, I think, a work Barenboim ever conducted in full, although he was known to offer its overture in Busoni’s conclusion. (Barenboim’s advocacy of his fellow adoptive Berliner Busoni’s music is another aspect of the old regime yet to be reprised, but there is time.) That, however, was before reckoning with the new ‘version’ served up by director Andrea Moses, dramaturge Michael Höppner, and comedian Bülent Ceylan. In what proved to be an increasingly depressing evening, there were important redeeming features: the singers and, still more, the players of the Staatskapelle Berlin. The abiding memory, alas, will be of one of the most important musical works in German theatrical history having been treated with undisguised contempt by a director and dramaturge who seemed not even to have bothered to engage with it in the first place. 

Billing this as an encounter between comedy and opera immediately posed the question (or rather, sadly did not) of what the relationship between the two might hitherto have been. Have there not been a few such ‘encounters’, or rather more than that, before? It is always worth, though, trying to approach something on its own terms: not that those terms cannot be criticised, but one will better criticise if one has discovered what they might have been. In that, I am afraid I can at best prove only partially successful. Ceylan essentially set the parameters for the evening by introducing it as a comedy show, ‘Entführung Live’. The idea of him as host drifting in and out of the character of the Bassa Selim is not an uninteresting one. Something improvised might, moreover, have sat in fruitful conflict with the work and the more general aesthetic of Vienna’s Nationalsingspiel. If anything, though, the tyranny of a new script proved more of a problem, Ceylan initially speaking as if this were the premiere, only later referring to that in the past tense. Whilst, to an extent, the lack of projection may have been part of the joke, incomprehensibility (to some) of Turkish German and Mannheim dialect the point, I am not sure it can be let off quite so easily. Moreover, for an event that prided itself on speaking to an international audience, the lack of titles, if not for the comedy then at least for the ‘new’ dialogue, was odd. If non-German-speakers, or indeed those of us with some German who nonetheless may have struggled at times, would have known anything, it would surely be the musical texts—the only part of the ‘action’ with titles in English or German. Ceylan was at least respectful to the musical artists, at least until the third act, in which his activity involved a good deal of speaking over them. Melodrama, I suppose, one might call it, but the game show element of highlighting apparen members of the audience – presumably in reference, in one case, to that recent Coldplay concert – had nothing to do with Die Entführung, even in its newly ‘presented’ state.

That said, he did what he was engaged for, and largely did it well. Ire should be reserved for Moses and her dramaturge. For what the production itself was ultimately concerned with remained to me elusive: very little, so far as I could tell, beyond this ‘encounter’. ‘Love’, perhaps, yet without any real questioning of what that might be—or have been. Characterisation went out of the window; there was some very odd direction of Konstanze in ‘Martern aller Arten’, in which she suddenly seemed turned on by the whole farrago, only immediately to forget that. Also absent was much sense of place, beyond a slightly baffling setting of much of it on a ship. Worst of all, the set design at one point revealed an offensive caricature of a woman’s eyes peering out from behind a burqa, hardly ever seen in Turkey, then or now: Orientalism and, let us be honest, Islamophobia far worse than anything in the work, by twenty-first- let alone eighteenth-century standards. (In her incoherent Staatsoper Meistersinger, she arbitrarily incorporated ‘sinister’ Arab figures towards the close, so there seems to be something of a pattern, both undiscriminating and, well, something worse.) The final moral, according to T-shirts thrust upon actors and chorus, appeared to be that everyone loved Bassa Selim. Hmmm, maybe. And even if true: is that it? 

There were occasional suggestions that the perennial question ‘was its deutsch? / ‘what is German?’ – we have all been there – might be a theme, but it was so poorly sustained and, worse, haplessly addressed, that it would have been better left alone. If you start from the smug liberal standpoint that your values, more or less anti-historical, stand at such a level of perfection that they are all anyone has needed, currently needs, or will need, you are unlikely to advance politically and certain not to advance dramatically. To quote the unlamented Kamala Harris, ‘I’m speaking.’ Harris’s notorious refusal to acknowledge the right of protestors to be heard, let alone the justice of their cause, indeed points to the ‘elephant in the room’ chez Moses et al. in a city and country that proudly flies Israeli flags (antisemitically described by the present Federal Chancellor as ‘Judenfahne’) from public buildings. If you want a contemporary Orientalist theme, it is staring you in the face, but that would require a little courage. What we heard instead were less calls to Lessing’s gospel of tolerance, let alone modern diversity, than of self-congratulation that Berlin first and Germany second had advanced to their current stage of enlightenment. In reality, Moses offered no real concept beyond self-congratulation and enabling sections of the audience to congratulate themselves too, and strikingly little interest in, or even awareness of, the work. The craft of actual stage direction seemed more notable for absence than presence (unless, clutching at straws, the impression of non-direction were itself a misguided aesthetic choice). 

Enough—though enough did not come soon enough. There were, as I said, aspects of the evening’s ‘entertainment’ truly to praise. One would not hear superior Mozart orchestral playing anywhere in the world; one would almost certainly hear significantly worse. Woodwind solo playing, duetting, and more was exquisite beyond words. (Much here, for better or worse, was beyond words.) The Staatskapelle strings, though, were every bit as fine, eschewing any hint of what passes today, quite erroneously, for ‘period style’, whilst as alive and alert in the present as one could hope for: unquestionably far more so than anything in the production and its ‘presentation’. What cavils I had lay with sometimes fussy direction by Thomas Guggeis. Whilst there was much to admire in his contribution – if not his unwillingness or perhaps inability to put his foot down in cases of the most egregious directorial intervention – then he could sometimes hold the orchestra down a little too ‘prettily’. Moreover, his participation in the contemporary fad of fortepiano ‘commentary’ was, alas, all too predictable in nature. When it was anything more than tracing an orchestral line on the keyboard in front of him, it came to still less, one particularly embarrassing moment excerpts from Mozart elsewhere, albeit with ‘jazzy’ (certainly not jazz-like) syncopation. Still, when he conducted, he mostly conducted very well and, crucially, let the orchestra mostly speak for itself. 

The orchestra’s twin partner in virtue, the opera chorus, acquitted itself well too, whatever the trials presented to it onstage. So too did the cast, headed by a sweet-toned, tender Belmont in Siyabonga Maqungo and the almost instrumentally conceived Konstanze of Adela Zaharia (once past a few balance problems early on). Both made their coloratura dramatically expressive, insofar as Moses permitted, as well as musically glittering. So too did the outstanding Blonde of Serafina Starke, a member of the Staatsoper’s International Opera Studio, and her well-matched Pedrillo, Michael Laurenz, as alert to the many demands placed on him onstage as by the score. David Steffens’s Osmin was also first-class: surprisingly subtle, again insofar as permitted. 

There's the rub, alas. I suppose one might try to mount a defence rooted in the genre banished by Joseph II’s theatrical reforms, founded in the ideas of Mozart’s friend Joseph von Sonnenfels. Might we see this as a return to the world of Hanswurst and, especially, his improvisational theatre? Sonnenfels’s – by extension, Joseph’s – objections had related to impurity of language, that is it was not (literary) German enough; dramatic triviality; and extensive extemporisation, that is in terms we might now employ, that it did not present a dramatic ‘work’. Its improvisatory nature, shows often only attaining literary form in their musical items, also rendered it extremely difficult to censor. But no, my heart is not in it. Ultimately, in any particular instance, there are no rules. Do whatever you want; a canonical, if slightly precarious, work will survive. But make sure you know what it is you are dealing with and do it well; otherwise, still more than mocking the work, it will mock you. If only this Entführung were anything like as ‘live’ as it thought it was.

Don Giovanni, Paris Opéra, 11 March 2022

Opéra Bastille

Don Giovanni – Christian van Horn
Commendatore – Alexander Tsymbalyuk
Donna Anna – Adela Zaharia
Don Ottavio – Pavel Petrov
Donna Elvira – Nicole Car
Leporello – Krzysztof Bączyk
Masetto- Mikhail Timoskenko
Zerlina – Anna El-Khashem

Ivo van Hove (director)
Jan Versweyveld (set designs, lighting)
An D’Huys (costumes)
Isabelle Horovitz (choreography)
Christopher Ash (video)
Jan Vandenhouwe (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris, (chorus master: Ching-Lien Wiu)
Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Bertrand de Billy (conductor)

The problem with Don Giovanni, or rather with all too many contemporary approaches to it, whether by directors or audiences (perhaps less musicians), is secular liberals’ inability or refusal to acknowledge its nature as a deeply religious, indeed theological work. It does not tie one down to a single possibility, far from it, but simply to ignore that aspect, likewise its delicate, related balance on the cusp of mythology, serves at best to impoverish and delimit its horizons, and more often to render it and them downright incomprehensible. It is all there in the score, of course, at least as much as in the libretto, still more in the transcendent potentiality of bringing the work to our consciousness, into our bloodstream, in performance; yet liberals, as is their wont, think they know better, all too often lapsing into a skin-deep psychological realism with little to say beyond ‘we neither like nor understand this work, yet consider that to be its fault, not ours’.    

There were signs, I think, that Ivo van Hove and his production team had considered this problem, or at least some issues related to it, although at least during this first revival, they were intermittent and somewhat tentative. (It is always difficult to know what might have been there to start with, not only in staging, but in performance too, though by the same taken, I have seen revivals that have marked a distinct improvement on their first incarnations.) There is little sign of sympathy or admiration with Mozart and Da Ponte’s hero/antihero, which is fine; the work, in many respects disarmingly open, is far from demanding it. Likewise, for very obvious reasons, it is more difficult than once it may have been to accept a more Faustian, some might say nineteenth-century, reading. Was there nonetheless a sense of sin, even mortal sin, remaining? I think there was, perhaps most evidently in Christopher Ash’s arresting video projections onto Jan Versweyveld’s set (stylishly taking in a Classical inheritance with modern response). A vision of souls writhing in something akin to Hell did not seem out of place, but grew out of what had been there all along, neither necessitating nor ruling out divine intervention. Distance between Don Giovanni’s actions and the divine, even if it were only what he himself saw as an ideal version of himself, was clear throughout. He could not live up to his promise, instead tending towards sociopathy (although this could have been made clearer). 

Incipient deconstruction of libertinage—is it more of the ancien régime than of any revolutionary challenge to it?—was somewhat obscured, however, by a disinclination to use social (and political) distinction to bring it out. One need not return to an eighteenth-century society of orders, though one might, to do so, but to level most or all distinctions tends, if one is not careful, to present further difficulties of incomprehension, even incomprehensibility. If Giovanni is neither the ultimate product of a diseased system of privileged liberties, nor a Sadeian-Nietzschean herald of liberty who might lead revaluation of our values, then what is he? How does he manage to get away with it? With Leporello appearing more or less indistinguishable from his master—it can work, as for instance with Peter Sellars’s pair of Harlem twins—the assumption seems to be that the not-very-servant like accomplice stays because ultimately he wants to be like him. Fair enough, but why, given that he is little more than a dislikeable and, more to the point, unsuccessful operator? Moreover, Leporello seemed too close to Giovanni in the first place, not only in often identical costume, but also in his behaviour. I had the impression that the Stone Guest scene was intended to address this, but Leporello’s unwillingness to serve, instead throwing food around and acting more like his master might than his master did, failed ultimately (at least for me) to make much sense. It clashed with words and music, without offering anything in the way of meaningful dramatic counterpoint. Perhaps the arbitrariness was the point; if so, it seemed neither a strong nor coherent enough point to have been worth making. 

This is, of course, a musical drama, and it is perfectly reasonable to say that some at least of such matters might be dealt with by musical means. Alas, Bertrand de Billy is not a conductor likely to make any such, or even other, dramatic points. There were times when, to his credit, he acted as a facilitator for outstanding playing from the Paris Opéra orchestra. Its sweetness of tone in every section was greatly appreciated; likewise sterner passages with considerable backbone. The conductor’s direction, however, proved somewhat listless, individual numbers and even phrases often floating in the moment, then stopping rather than closing, leading nowhere in particular. 

The version of the score—whose decision this was, I do not know—was regrettable too. For once, we did not have an unholy mixture of Prague and Vienna (understandable from the standpoint of singers, yet from no one else’s) but rather what was more or less Vienna. Elvira thus had ‘Mi tradì’; ‘Il mio tesoro’ was replaced with the markedly inferior Leporello-Zerlina duet (its staging, which might have been the making of it, sadly half-hearted); worst, we had cuts in the finale, papered over by that jarring new setting of ‘Resti dunque quel birbon fra Proserpina e Pluton!’ You cannot have it both ways, it might be responded; if you dislike composite versions so much, then you cannot disallow Vienna. Perhaps, but my dislike of ‘traditional’ composite versions rests on their dramatic failure (the finest performance can suspend one’s disbelief, but it must be the finest) and not on their lack of ‘authenticity’. The solution is easy: Prague. Yet no one seems willing to take it. 

Christian van Horn gave an attractive performance of the title role, fully at home in its slippery shifts of style and character, though perhaps ultimately a little lacking in its darkness of soul. Was it a little too genial, especially given the production? There was nonetheless much musically to admire, as there was with Krzysztof Bączyk’s Leporello, though having a darker-toned Leporello compared with his master also posed dramatic problems that seemed to fuse with those of the production. Adela Zaharia and Pavel Petrov made for an outstanding seria pair, clean yet purposeful of line, with coloratura that unquestionably meant something, musically and dramatically. (I actually found myself regretting the loss of Don Ottavio’s second aria.) Much the same might be said of Nicole Car, her interpretation of the mezzo carettere role of Donna Elvira affording considerable erotic as well as more dignified pleasures. Mikhail Timoskenko and Anna El-Khashem were fully at home in the less ambiguously earthy pleasures of Masetto and Zerlina (also a strength of the production, if not fully mirrored in the higher social orders). They exuded immediate attraction—and attractiveness—and were all the better for it, as were we. The Ukrainian bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk received great cheers and applause when taking his curtain call with ‘NO WAR’ emblazoned on his shirt. Rightly so, but it was equally right for his excellent performance as the Commendatore, which offered a rich, dark nobility whose political and religious implications might fruitfully have been engaged with elsewhere.

Don Giovanni, Royal Opera, 5 July 2021

Royal Opera House

Images: (C) ROH 2021, by Bill Cooper

Don Giovanni (Erwin Schrott),
Donna Anna (Adela Zaharia)

Don Giovanni – Erwin Schrott
Leporello – Gerald Finley
Donna Anna – Adela Zaharia
Don Ottavio – Frédéric Antoun
Donna Elvira – Nicole Chevalier
Zerlina – Zuzana Marková
Masetto – Michael Mofidian
Commendatore – Adam Palka
Donna Elvira’s maid – Josephine Arden

Kasper Holten (director)
Jack Furness (revival director)
Es Devlin (set design)
Luke Halls (video design)
Anja Vang Kragh (costumes)
Bruno Poet (lighting)
Signe Fabricius, Anna-Marie Sullivan (choreography)
Kate Waters, Simon Johns (fight direction)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Constantin Trinks (conductor)


This was the real thing, a return to Covent Garden that reminded one what opera can, should, even must be. We had made allowances for La clemenza di Tito, with which the ‘first reopening’ took place; there were admirable things, not least the return of some sort of hope for the art form in a hostile country, but we were making allowances—and rightly so. This Don Giovanni, however, was the real thing.

 

Masetto (Michael Mofidian), Zerlina (Zuzana Marková)

Such was clear from the opening bars. What a relief it was not to have them fashionably rushed. Indeed, Constantin Trinks led the finest Mozart I have heard at Covent Garden since we lost Colin Davis. It is a truism, but a truism worth repeating, that performing Mozart is the most difficult task in the musical world. Such complexity, especially in his later music, lies beneath the surface, yet it must sound the easiest, simplest of things. There is nowhere to hide. Like, say, Daniel Barenboim, but unlike most contemporary conductors, Trinks understands that Mozart’s music is ultimately founded on harmony—and knows how to communicate that. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House sounded rejuvenated, responding in style and with seeming relish to a vision of the work both attentive to detail and cognisant of tonal-dramatic architecture. Tempi were well chosen, not in isolation—‘Mme X will sing it like this’—but as part of what seemed to be a genuine company sense of a shared whole. For once, I could forget my objections to the all-too-familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions, enjoying a feast of music for what it was, if not the mutilation of the scena ultima (alas, the production’s doing, about which the conductor will have had no say). Trinks’s handling of recitative, both secco (from the fortepiano) and accompagnato, proved crucial both to musical and dramatic success, welding them together with that necessarily lightest of touches. If a conductor of the past occasionally came to mind, it was not so much Furtwängler (as it might have been with Barenboim) as a Carlo Maria Giulini of earlier vintage: less overtly ‘Romantic’, for want of a better word, though quietly, comprehendingly aristocratic. For this alone, it would have been Mozart worth making every effort to hear.

 

Don Giovanni

It was not, of course, alone, conductor and orchestra joined by a fine cast of singers. At its head was the ever-astonishing Don Giovanni of Erwin Schrott. Here was a role inhabited rather than portrayed, primarily animateur yet also, in chameleon-like reaction—how he slithers between, adapts, insinuates himself into all social-musical settings— animé. In keeping with and, in new circumstances, extending Kasper Holten’s production, here ably revived and similarly extended by Jack Furness, this Giovanni was dangerously seductive, disconcertingly (yet, in both musical and dramatic terms, brilliantly) spontaneous, and, at the last, or rather just before the last, thrillingly heroic. Holten’s undercutting of that heroism, having the final scene, albeit shorn (why?) of its opening, play out as the mental collapse of the hero signals, as so often, an unwillingness to take this most deeply Catholic of operas ultimately on its own terms, though less so than many others, which refuse or simply do not understand its premise in the first place.


Gerald Finley’s Leporello was just as excellent. One sensed a servant’s desire to become his master—as Schrott is a noted Leporello, so too is Finley a noted Giovanni—in musicotheatrical and metatheatrical terms. The particular mix of, and on occasion tension between, Mozart and Da Ponte that make the work what it is, galvanised by conscientious and charismatic performance was seen and heard not only in Finley and Schrott, but throughout the cast: Adela Zaharia and Frédéric Antoun a noble seria pair, their fundamental dignity both corroded and, especially in Donna Anna’s case, transformed by Giovanni’s combination of Casanova and Faust. Their arias, beautifully prepared and contextualised by recitative that told us just as much, proved moments of beauty yet, insofar as possible—that Prague-Vienna conflation really does not help—crucial dramatic reflections too. Zaharia’s coloratura was properly expressive, no mere decoration, as was that of Nicole Chevalier’s yearning Donna Elvira. Zuzana Marková and Michael Mofidian offered sweetly expressive and disarmingly bluff personifications of Zerlina and Masetto, studies in ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ that always offered more than the stock buffo characters they can sometimes seem. Adam Palka’s dark, direct Commendatore rightly put the fear of God—or Something Else—into the hearts of all but our atheist hero.

 

Zerlina, Donna Anna, Don Giovanni

In Holten’s staging, dramatic tension is generated by, on the one hand, through projected writing and rewriting of names upon the set, a sense of écriture poised somewhere between Barthes and Derrida; and on the other, that set’s labyrinthine video-propelled reinvention as it revolves, by dint of projected colour, new walls and passageways, phantom characters from past, present, and perhaps future. Such productive tension felt all the stronger in Furness’s revival, which seemed to mirror Trinks’s careful balance between detail and the whole. There is a strong sense of something Venetian, as so often in a work haunted by Da Ponte’s friend Casanova, in the masquerades, intrigues, and ultimately human passions that propel the drama. There is no question here that Donna Anna is attracted to Don Giovanni, doubtless a (post-)Romantic view, yet frankly far more faithful to the score and its spirit than the puritanical ‘reservations’ levelled by some at production and work alike. (There are many reasons unimaginative twenty-first century spectators might recoil at this drama. If they dislike it so much, why not do something else instead? No one is obliged to attend.) That does not, though, preclude her, nor indeed any female character, of agency. They know what they are doing and must also face the consequences of their actions; they are not dolls, but living, breathing women—and all the more involving for it. The male gaze, here at least, can be reversed if one wishes. Each character here has his or her own texts to write, to bring into dramatic reality; so should we all. Dramma giocoso indeed.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Orlando Paladino, 29 July 2018

Prinzregententheater

Angelica – Adela Zaharia

Rodomonte – Edwin Crossley-Mercer

Orlando – Mathias Vidal

Medoro – Dovlet Nurgeldiyev

Licone – Guy de Mey

Eurilla – Elena Sancho Pereg

Pasquale – David Portillo

Alcina – Tara Erraught

Caronte – François Lis

Gabi and Heiko Herz – Heiko Pinkowski, Gabi Herz

Axel Ranisch (director)

Falko Herold (designs)
Magdalena Padros Celada (choreography)

Michael Bauer (lighting)

Rainer Karlitschek (dramaturgy)

Munich Chamber Orchestra

Statisterie and Opera Ballet of the Bavarian State Opera

Ivor Bolton (conductor)

Gabi and Heiko Herz (Heiko Pinkowski, Gabi Herz), Angelica (Adela Zaharia)
Images: © Wilfried Hösl

Should you not like eighteenth-century opera very much, if at all, and should you have no or little interest in Haydn either, this may have been the production for you. The fundamental premise of Axel Ranisch’s staging of Orlando Paladino seems to have been that this was a work of little fundamental merit, or at least a work in a genre of little such merit, and that it needed the help of a modern medium – perhaps, it might even be claimed, an equivalent medium – to speak to a contemporary audience. Speak to the audience in Munich’s Prinzregententheater it certainly seemed to – rightly or wrongly. I could only wish that both the work and those of us in the audience who thought otherwise had not been treated with such condescension. That may sound reactionary. Perhaps indeed it is; perhaps all that matters is that those many people who enjoyed such an ‘entertainment’, to use a properly eighteenth-century word, did indeed enjoy it. Perhaps. Let me, however, try to explain why I found this, much fine singing notwithstanding, a somewhat dispiriting experience.

Alcina (Tara Erraught) and Pasquale (David Portillo)

No one, I think, would claim Nunziata Porta to be one of opera’s greatest librettists; this is not a Da Ponte, a Wagner, or a Hofmannsthal. Nor indeed a Metastasio. However, his libretto here is, by the same token, likely to be underestimated, precisely because of where his talents lay. His principal occupation at Esterháza was to adapt texts, including provision of insertion arias. (If you do not know any of Haydn’s, for obvious reasons far less widely known than Mozart’s, then they are well worth discovering.) And that is what he did here, on a larger scale, with Orlando Paladino, helping Haydn create a rather extraordinary work, a dramma eroicomico after Ariosto. Its skill lies not just in parodying Ariosto, indeed not primarily in that at all, but in permitting Haydn to do so and indeed to parody much else besides: often wryly, subtly, sometimes more overtly – here, at least in one particular instance, in Pasquale’s ‘Ecco spanio’, Ranisch worked highly successfully with libretto and music. Otherwise, I am afraid, far too little of that came through – which was surely something a skilled production might have seen as its purpose or at least a good part of it.

Alcina and Angelica

Yes, one might respond, but what if an audience does not understand the conventions of late-ish eighteenth-century opera seria? Do we not need to find a way of leading many listeners in? We probably do, or at least in certain circumstances it might be a good idea. (Heaven forfend we might actually expect some work from an audience; nevertheless, if I do not read Russian, I do not claim the problem to lie in Pushkin.) A similar problem, after all, seems often to be experienced with Così fan tutte, which very few seem to understand – or, more to the point, take the trouble to try to understand. (Sometimes it is not ‘all about you’.) By all means, though, lead us in, show us what the opera is or might be about. Ranisch, however, seemed to have no interest whatsoever in doing so. Not unlike Christof Loy in his unforgivable Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten, albeit less aggressively, the message seemed to be: ‘forget about this; I do not like this story very much, so here is another one’.

Alas, Ranisch’s new story seems to me only slightly less banal than Loy’s. For all the filmic creativity – undeniable in its way, if hardly groundbreaking – what we have ultimately is a new, less than captivating, tale of a married couple who own a cinema. One of them is at least partly gay and fantasises about the handsome Rodomonte (or perhaps the actor/singer who plays him). When technical problems cause an explosion in the cinema, he takes the opportunity to wander into the scenes on screen to learn a bit more about himself. A huge amount of silly running around, pulling faces, and so on, detracts entirely from the opera and at best has one wonder what on earth is going on. Now there may well have been a way, even within this particular metatheatrical framework, to engage with the work, to do more of what I have suggested it might. It really does not seem, though, to happen here. A pair of actors, ‘Gabi and Heiko Herz’, seem the most honoured here. Ironically, however, the banality of their story, the striking Cinema Paradiso homage in Falko Herold’s designs notwithstanding, throws one’s attention back towards the singing, if only out of desperation. We end up with another tired old cliché, that eighteenth-century opera other than Mozart’s is ‘really’ only about singing. Orlando Paladino and Haydn thus found themselves doubly damned.

Medoro (Dovlet Nurgeldiyev) and Angelica

Such might have been less the case, had it not been for Ivor Bolton’s rigid, often hard-driven conducting, which paid little attention, if any, to Haydn’s harmonic rhythm, living if indeed it lived at all only in the moment – perhaps not so ill-suited a complement to the production. The playing of the Munich Chamber Orchestra was in itself excellent, however. One longed for it to be let off its leash, though, not least for the strings to be permitted greater vibrato. There seemed little doubt that they longed for that too. Nevertheless theirs was fine playing, woodwind solos especially joyous. For the real thing, though, turn on record to Antal Doráti – or even, should this be your real thing and you can somehow stand the weird perversities, to Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Those perversities may eclipse formal understanding, or at least the communication thereof, but at least they seem less generated on auto-pilot.

Rodomonte (Edwin Crossley-Mercer)
and Heiko Herz

It was, then, to recapitulate – more of such formal understanding from the conductor, please! – from the singers that considerable pleasure and insight was to be gleaned. Mathias Vidal as Orlando trod a fine line, sensitively and stylishly, between bravado and acknowledged weakness. So indeed did all the male singers; such, not without a pinch of what we might anachronistically think feminism, is indeed the point. Edwin Crossley-Mercer’s diction was not always clear as it might have been, especially in so small a theatre; however, his dark tone proved full of allure – increasingly compromised allure. Dovlet Nurgeldiyev, for me one of the true discoveries of the evening, offered almost heartbreaking tonal beauty, whilst also making as much of the words as the production permitted. Likewise his intended, Adela Zaharia. David Portillo, a supremely versatile singer, finely attuned both to line and style, impressed greatly as Pasquale; his aforementioned aria was probably the highpoint of the entire evening. Elena Sancho Pereg, as Eurilla, proved very much his equal: a fine foil, but also a spirited character in her own right. Tara Erraught’s rich mezzo Alcina left one longing for more. It was she, above all, who brought moments of true drama to proceedings. Perhaps she, instead, should have been directing and/or conducting.

Die Zauberflöte, Komische Oper, Berlin, 13 April 2014

Komische Oper, Berlin

Pamina – Adela Zaharia

Tamino – Adrian Strooper

Queen of the Night – Olga Pudova

Sarastro, Speaker – Alexey Antonov

Papageno – Tom Erik Lie

Papagena – Julia Giebel

Monostatos – Peter Renz

Three Ladies – Mirka Wagner, Theresa Kronthaler, Caren von Oijen

Two Armoured Men – Christoph Späth, Bogdan Talos

Three Boys – Jakob Göpfert, Laurenz Ströbl, Samuel Baur

Suzanne Andrade and Barrie Kosky (directors)

Paul Barritt (animation)

Esther Bialas (designs)

Diego Leetz (lighting)

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: David Cavelius)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Kristiina Poska (conductor)

It seems more difficult to produce a satisfying Magic Flute than one might expect, if not nearly so difficult as the case of Don Giovanni. Barrie Kosky and ‘1927’ (Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt) come closer than many with this intriguing ‘silent film’ treatment. Doubtless predictably, I think it sells short the seriousness at the heart of this extraordinary work, but crucially, unlike many stagings falling into that category, it retains a space for one to think, to imagine and indeed to think of more serious things oneself. It was a pity that a sizeable section of the audience, seemingly intent on taking every opportunity to applaud through the music, did not avail itself of that space, but anyway… In Kosky’s words, ‘This concentration on images makes it possible for each spectator of the show to experience very much his own way,’ and to a large extent, that worked in practice.

In a reworking both radical and not, the dialogue – at least as dialogue – is dispensed with. Certain passages, old and new, conversational and explicatory, appear as part of 1927’s film. Whilst there are losses, and one clearly would not want to experience the work like this all the time, it is striking how much remains. And whilst Schikaneder deserves more credit than is often his due – how often one hears his magical, enabling text belittled! – it is of course for Mozart that we come to this work. What we see centres upon the 1920s, but is not confined to that era: associations, some freer than others, are made through what Andrade in a programme interview describes as ‘a journey through the most diverse fantasy worlds’. Meanwhile, what do we hear? Music from Mozart’s Fantasias for solo piano – to add to the post-modernism, on fortepiano. And yet, this somehow emerges as postmodernism that works. It might sound absurd to have Papageno dream (instead of his wine) of a pink cocktail, and through his experience to see pink elephants, but the free association benefits from the conviction of the ‘original’. It is certainly refreshing to experience the fruits of imagination as opposed to the mere silliness we often endure.

Musically, the situation was more mixed. Bonnie Wagner’s fortepiano playing – not in general, my usual readers will know, a favourite instrument of mine – was excellent: strong yet yielding, hinting at a larger whole yet imparting particular character to each ‘excerpt’. Kristiina Poska’s conducting was more problematical, despite generally fine playing from the orchestra. Most of the first act, from the Overture onwards, was rushed. Various tempi can work, of course, but the very difficult trick is to make them work; here, too often, one felt Mozart’s score harried. Matters settled down in much of the second act, however, and it was a relief to hear a performance of Pamina’s aria that, whilst certainly not of the Colin Davis variety, allowed Mozart’s pathos to shine through. Indeed, Adela Zaharia, a member of the Komische Oper’s Opera Studio, was definitely one of the stars of the show: hers was a genuinely touching performance. Her Tamino, Adrian Strooper, had his moments, offering a generally winning earnestness, but sometimes forced his voice. Tom Erik Lie was a characterful Papageno, hints of sadness informing even his most ebullient moments. Olga Pudova’s Queen of the Night did pretty much everything asked of her – often with considerable sparkle. The Sarastro of Alexey Antonov and Monostatos of Peter Renz were disappointing, however: the latter often shouting rather than singing, the former woolly of tone and too often insecure of pitch. The Three Ladies – Mirka Wagner, Theresa Kronthaler, and Caren van Oijen – were an excellent bunch, however, both individually and as a group. So were the Three Boys from Tölz: Jakob Göpfert, Laurenz Ströbl, and Samuel Baur. I am not sure I have heard better. Above all what impressed here was not only a strong sense of company but also of commitment to the staging, to the drama as a whole. That is worth a good deal – and the Komische Oper is strongly to be commended for it.