Così fan tutte, Royal Opera, 22 September 2016

Royal Opera House

Dorabella (Angela Brower) and Fiordiligi (Corinne Winters)
Images: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey

Ferrando – Daniel Behle

Guglielmo – Alessio Arduini
Don Alfonso – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Fiordiligi – Corinne Winters
Dorabella – Angela Brower
Despina – Sabina Puértolas
 

Jan Philipp Gloger (director)

Ben Baur (set designs)
Karin Jud (costumes)
Bernd Purkrabek (lighting)
Katharina John (dramaturgy)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Semyon Bychkov (conductor)

Dorabella, Ferrando (Daniel Behle), Guglielmo (Alessio Arduini), and Fiordiligi

At last: something at the Royal Opera to replace Jonathan Miller’s slapstick onslaught on Così fan tutte, not only the most sophisticated, most profound of Mozart’s operas, but the most sophisticated, most profound opera of all. (At least, that is how I feel at the moment.) It broke my heart to hear Colin Davis, conducting the greatest musical performances of the work (2007 and 2012) I have ever heard and am ever likely to hear, undermined at every juncture by Miller’s antics. Alas, the good news is not unmixed. It rarely is, of course; however, once again, we see and hear a split between music and production: not, I think, a productive mutual questioning, but just a dissociation. The fault, I am sorry to say, lay squarely with the production, although it was compounded by different – both valid, but undeniably different – conceptions of the work from conductor and singers. I suspect that some issues will be resolved as the run proceeds, but it is difficult to imagine that they all will be, especially when it comes to Jan Philipp Gloger’s production – although, paradoxically, I suspect that the lively young cast might even salvage something from that once the director is out of the way.

 

My sole previous encounter with Gloger’s work had been at Bayreuth. A weak irrelevant Flying Dutchman did not augur well, but everyone deserves a second chance. Even in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, I found ‘too many instances where the action, especially for a relatively small theatre, was on too small a scale properly to understand, or was simply, at least to me, obscure. I had the sense that there was a better production waiting to break out.’ Much the same might be said about this Così fan tutte, save that, in a larger theatre, especially from the Amphitheatre, some of the problems of scale are amplified. In both productions, one has a sense of a good idea or two, anything but original, indeed seen in many other stagings of the work in question, obscured by both a director who thinks his production is far cleverer than it actually is, and by a certain lack of basic theatrical craft, the designs, impressive though they may be, being made in the absence of anything else, to do, or to try to do, far too much of the work for themselves.

 

The production begins, reasonably enough, if in wearisomely clichéd fashion, with an attempt to set up its metatheatrical stance. During the Overture, a cast in ‘period’ dress – presumably a ‘traditional’ production in our here and now – takes its bows in affected style. There is an element of welcome surprise when our real cast, apparently members of the audience, rushes into the Stalls in fashionable, contemporary – to us – dress, and replaces that on stage. From the audience reaction, anyone would have thought such an idea had never been attempted before, whether in Così or anything else. Members of the audience – one of the worst-behaved, alas, I can recall – seemed to find that all utterly hilarious, in well-nigh uncontrollable laughter because some people walked through the stalls of a theatre whilst others were bowing on stage. They need, I think, to get out a little more; perhaps, dare I suggest it, they might acquaint themselves with some less derivative ‘modern’ theatre, in and out of the opera house, if they think there is anything daring in what they saw here.

Guglielmo

 

Anyway, in another ‘borrowing’ from other recent-ish productions, Don Alfonso, who has been on stage all along, and who, for reasons unclear to me, remains in ‘period’ dress, is revealed as director of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ productions. The play’s the thing. It is one way, not a new way, as many seemed to think, to address the perceived ‘problem’ with the work. Our Ferrarese ladies and their nobles play roles in the theatre, in a number of different settings – the public area of an (our) opera house, a Brief Encounter railway station, a somewhat dated cocktail bar, the Garden of Eden, the costume department of the house, etc. – and thus suspend the alleged need for ‘suspension of disbelief’, perhaps the most tiresome operatic cliché of all.

 

I am far from convinced that the intricacy and overt artificiality of Da Ponte’s and still more Mozart’s work, that very artificiality permitting the most profoundly human predicament to come, unflinchingly to the theatrical fore, need such ‘help’, but that need not have mattered. The problem, to reiterate, is that, especially during the first act, the designs are more or less made to do a good deal of the work that stage direction should be doing. When we come to a potentially fruitful inversion of roles, as in the Garden of Eden, it comes across as hapless, not as transgressive or alienating. It is one thing, often a good thing, to have the audience do some thinking for itself – not much chance here, given the loud applause from far too many in the middle of Despina’s ‘Una donna a quindici anni’: can they not hear the music has not returned to the tonic? – but not at the expense of doing one’s job as director. Otherwise, we should all simply sit at home with a score and/or recording, and imagine the work for ourselves. (We often do, of course, but that is not really what a visit to the opera house is for.) The final emendation, spelled out in glitzy letters above the stage, to Così fan tutti does no harm, is perhaps welcome, but again would gain in strength with something more than a scenic flourish.

 

Semyon Bychkov’s reading of this most wondrous of Mozart’s scores grew in stature as the evening progressed. No, it was not Colin Davis, but we have to accept, alas, that he is no longer with us. Bychkov’s conducting offered, at its best, an intriguing alternative, although, in the first half hour or so, some of the tempo variations sounded a little arbitrary and the sensuous quality of the music was occasionally undersold. There were no ‘period’ affectations, though, and as Bychkov hit his stride, the laudable flexibility he had always shown felt more ‘natural’ – however artificial a construct that, like the onstage drama, might be. I heard some people complain of ‘slowness’ and can only presume them to have been ignorant of the varied performance history of the work. Very little was ‘slow’, in any meaningful sense, but it was varied, and deeply considered. The lamentable alternative is to make Mozart sound like Rossini; that is a straitjacket we can all do without.  
 

Despina (Sabina Puértolas)

More of a problem was that the singers did not always, again especially in the first act, sound attuned to Bychkov’s understanding. They sounded as though they would have been happier in the swifter, less contemplative performance, impressive on its own, very different terms, which I had heard last month in Salzburg, conducted by Ottavio Dantone. Indeed, the Guglielmo, Alessio Arduini, offered the common link between the casts. I wrote then of an assumption that was ‘proud, assertive, flawed: just as he should be, whether vocally or in stage manner,’ and much the same might be said here; Arduini is a fine performer, not just a fine singer. Daniel Behle proved an estimable successor to Salzburg’s Mauro Peter, similarly honeyed of tone, ‘Un‘aura amorosa’ as so often a highlight. Corinne Winters mostly impressed as Fioridilgi, the coloratura well despatched, although her lower register was occasionally found wanting. The clarity of Angela Brower’s Dorabella was often married to a subtle richness of tone that was most welcome. Johannes Martin Kränzle took to his role as master of ceremonies with commendable enthusiasm and equally commendable musico-theatrical results. The fussiness of the half-baked concept was not his fault. Sabina Puértolas proved a spirited Despina, attentive to vocal as well as theatrical concerns (which is not always the case). Alas, there remains some way to go before different strands of production and performance come together.

Salzburg Festival (2) - Così fan tutte, 6 August 2016

Felsenreitschule

 

Images Ruth Walz/Salzburger Festspiele
Alessio Arduini (Guglielmo), Julia Kleiter (Fiordiligi), Michael Volle (Don Alfonso),
Dorabella (Angela Brower), Ferrando (Mauro Peter)

Fiordiligi – Julia Kleiter

Dorabella – Angela Brower
Despina – Martina Janková
Ferrando – Mauro Peter
Guglielmo – Alessio Arduini
Don Alfonso – Michael Volle

Sven-Eric Bechtolf (director, set designs)

Mark Bouman (costumes)
Friedrich Rom (lighting)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra
Ottavio Dantone (conductor)

 

I saw Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s production of Così fan tutte three years ago in the Haus für Mozart. It seemed initially to have been heavily revised for its new venue in the Felsenreitschule, until I realised that it was indeed a new production. Quite why, I am not sure, for his first Così seems to have been the most successful part of his Da Ponte trilogy for Salzburg. (The Don Giovanni was, in a fiercely contested field, one of the worst I have ever seen. I could not face seeing the Figaro after that, but nothing I have heard about it has had me regret that decision.)

Bechtolf here retains the eighteenth-century setting: ‘beautiful’ frocks and all, for those who care about such things. There are hints at good ideas, but rarely, if ever, are they seriously followed through. For instance, we see something we might associate with the subtitle’s school for lovers (‘La scuola degli amanti’) at the opening, although it seems to have more of a medical bent than one might expect. No harm done: there is, after all, a strong current of Mesmerism and other strange ‘natural philosophy’ to the plot. However, apart from occasionally seeing frock-coated members of that school hanging around the stage, that is more or less it. Likewise, the nod to the work’s artificiality in having painted backdrops, such as a ‘beautiful’ Bay of Naples, mounted and dismantled during the action; again, however, we really need more than that. Making use of the extraordinary Felsenreitschule setting is of course a good thing, but it needs to be more than simply having characters run around above the stage for the sake of it. Otherwise, we have a thoroughly ‘traditional’, even regressive, staging, interrupted in utterly philistine fashion by deeds of slapstick, which have no place whatsoever in Mozart – however much they might delight certain cretinous members of the audience. (They laughed, moreover, at the most peculiar times. Do they not realise this is the most agonising, heart-rending of all Mozart’s operas? Do they react similarly to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony or the St Matthew Passion? One can only assume they do not listen to the music at all.) I could go on at greater length about the production but see little point: half-baked to a – well, to whatever soggy point things that are half-baked are half-baked to…

 

Musically, things were much better. I had worried that Ottavio Dantone might bring a self-consciously ‘authenticist’ reading to the work, but there was little of that. His tempi were varied, judicious, and flexible: always sounding as if they were reached in cooperation with the singers. And the Mozarteum Orchestra was able to sound like itself, warm of string tone, with woodwind both fruity and aristocratic, with no absurd prohibitions on vibrato or other such mannerisms. The sweet sado-masochism of Mozart’s score was able to tell in all its cruel glory.

 

Guglielmo, Don Alfonso, Dorabella, Fiordiligi, Despina (Martina Janková), Ferrando

It was an excellent cast too. Despite a few intonational issues in ‘Come scoglio’ notwithstanding, Julia Kleiter gave a commanding performance as Fiordiligi. She was certainly alert to the cruel parody in Mozart’s mock-seria writing; if only her director had been. Angela Brower made for an excellent Dorabella, very much her own, freer character: silkier, perhaps, when compared with Kleiter’s fine Egyptian cotton. If I have heard a sweeter-, more seductively-toned Ferrando than Mauro Peter I have forgotten – which seems unlikely. Alessio Arduini’s Guglielmo was proud, assertive, flawed: just as he should be, whether vocally or in stage manner (Bechtolf’s absurd interpolated dances notwithstanding). Martina Janková, the sole survivor, from 2013, again impressed as Despina, hers a thoroughly musical rendition, rendering no quarter for caricature. Michael Volle’s Don Alfonso was simply outstanding: what presence vocally he has, and how it is matched with command of the stage! There was much, then, musically to delight, enabling this truly extraordinary opera’s message of existential despair to register as it should.

Le nozze di Figaro, Vienna State Opera, 27 November 2015

 

Images: Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Pöhn
Count Almaviva (Adam Plachetka)

 

Vienna State Opera

Count Almaviva – Adam Plachetka

Countess Almaviva – Véronique Gens
Susanna – Aida Garifullina
Figaro – Alessio Arduini
Cherubino – Elena Maximova
Marcellina – Ulrike Helzel
Don Basilio – Thomas Ebenstein
Don Curzio – Peter Jelosits
Don Bartolo – Dan Paul Dumitrescu
Antonio – Manuel Walser
Barbarina – Maria Nazarova

Jean-Louis Martinoty (director)

Hans Schavernoch (designs)
Sylvie de Segonzac (costumes)
Fabrice Kebour (lighting)

Chorus of the Vienna State Opera (chorus master: Thomas Lang)

Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera
James Gaffigan (conductor)

 

Four weeks precisely before seeing this Marriage of Figaro in Vienna, I had seen the Royal Academy of Music production at the Hackney Empire. It might sound as if I am exaggerating for effect, but I can assure you that I am not; in almost every respect, the RAM performance was superior. We should not become hung up on matters of cultural ‘ownership’ – Mozart was not really ‘Austrian’ at all, whatever the tourist board might tell you – but that nevertheless gives one pause for thought. Although I said ‘in almost every respect’, other shortcomings were dwarfed by Jean-Louis Martinoty’s catastrophe of a production: at least as bad as, if not worse than, Barrie Kosky’s effort for the Komische Oper in Berlin, albeit in different ways. I had been going to ask why Figaro, so long a relatively ‘safe bet’ with respect to staging – relative, at least, to Don Giovanni – was having such a bad time of it now. (Janet Suzman’s work for that wonderful RAM staging was a noteworthy exception.) Then I learned that Martinoty’s production had actually been imported from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Why? As French friends have since told me, it was bad enough then, in the 1990s. Is it not a little odd that the Vienna State Opera could not create its own new production, even if the import were of better stuff than this?

 

It is difficult to know where to start with Martinoty’s incoherent, joyless mess. I am not sure whether the director is attempting to be ‘traditional’ or something else. The costumes are ‘period’ of a sort, I suppose, but more akin to a Carry On film idea of the eighteenth century than something into which any thought has gone. I have no objection to a properly thought-out ‘period’ production; indeed, there will often be problems, not insurmountable but problems nevertheless, when a society of orders is jettisoned for something else. This just seemed, however, an excuse for opportunities for the mildest, least risqué of molestations. The politics of Mozart’s opera – even Da Ponte’s libretto, shorn of the music – are not those of Beaumarchais, but they are far from non-existent. Here, it seems, we have something that wants to be a bit of a farce, but cannot quite bring itself to do what is necessary.

 

Countess Almaviva (Véronique Gens)

 

 

The direction, moreover, veers between excessive activity – not quite hyperactivity: that might be too much hard work – and people haplessly standing around. A servant extra might walk in but to no apparent end and then – well, just walk out again. Meanwhile, someone else will be in entirely the wrong place, making a nonsense – and certainly not in a questioning, let alone deconstructionist way – of libretto, score, logic, anything really. Something appears, for instance a kneeler for the Countess in front of one of the many pictures (more on which soon, this from the Crucifixion), has one think it might actually have something to say, then no sooner has she knelt down, she gets back up and nothing more is said or done with it. The prospect of the Countess seeking her salvation in the Church is an intriguing one, but it is certainly not explored here.

 

Perhaps the worst of Martinoty’s many lapses – he manages somehow to combine the reactionary qualities and general intellectual vacuity of Franco Zeffirelli with the downright incompetence in stagecraft of Katharina Wagner – lies with his ‘treatment’ of Cherubino and the chair during the first act. He is not there. The Count reveals all, or rather does not, because he cannot. A little while later, once music and words have moved on, someone else – Don Basilio, I think – finds him in what I think might have been a linen chest. We see nothing for a while, owing to its placing on stage, and then eventually Cherubino steps out, long after we, or even the characters onstage, have ceased to care. If this were an attempt to play with, even to confound, expectation, it fell flatter than a pancake.

 

Then there are the weird stage designs. Well, the paintings: there is little else on which to comment. Lots of them, randomly assembled, often but not always still lives, come and go. At random points, they come down from the ceiling; at random points, they go back up. They either bear no discernible relation to the action, or add nothing to it. Why on earth, for instance, is a selection of cheeses suddenly brought before us at the beginning of the fourth act, and why does it equally suddenly disappear? Answers on a Pythonesque postcard, please.

 

Enough! I do not intend to dwell on the musical performances, since they were not given a chance. However, I must say something. It is difficult to know what to say about James Gaffigan; maybe he was hamstrung by the staging. There was nothing especially wrong with his direction of the orchestra, which at its best could sound gorgeous, but had a surprising tendency towards thinness at times. I could not see the pit, but suspect that, in a house of this size, a few more strings would not have gone amiss. There was a tendency towards (over-)swift tempi, but less than we have had to endure from much of the ‘authenticke’ brigade. He made the same gross miscalculation I recall Sir Charles Mackerras – a bewilderingly overrated Mozart conductor – making when Susanna emerged from the cupboard, needless to say a bit late, in the second act. No wonder here: instead an absurdly fast tempo, doubtless born of ‘performance practice’ dogma, which made it sound as if a horse were released to canter around the paddock.

Susanna (Aida Garifullina) and Figaro
(Alessio Arduini)

 

 

The finest vocal performance came from Adam Plachetka as the Count: all heading, it seemed, towards the emotional turmoil and fury of his third-act aria, and all flowing from that thereafter. As alert as the production would permit to his character and its development, this was something one could, in the circumstances, still just about savour. Véronique Gens sang beautifully as the Countess but her voice sometimes seemed a little small for the house. I did not especially care for the ornamentation of her third-act aria, but tastes differ in that respect; if it is to be done, then I doubt it could have been done better than here. Aida Garifullina and Alessio Arduini were an attractive servant pair: visually and often vocally, but they struggled, again perhaps in part from relative smallness of voice, but above all on account of the production, to burn their characters into our affection. Arduini's easy way with the text, though, was indicative of something more, which would doubtless have been more fully realised in another situation. We know Figaro and Susanna, and all the rest so well: none of them fully came into being on this occasion. Elena Maximova and Ulrike Helzel both seemed at times ill at ease with the vocal demands placed upon them; Dan Paul Dumitrescu was an excessively bluff Don Bartolo. However, with a staging such as this, the singers should not necessarily be held responsible.

 

Salzburg Festival (5) - Don Giovanni, 15 August 2014

Images: © Salzburger Festspiele / Michael Pöhn

 

 

Haus für Mozart

Donna Anna – Lenneke Ruiten

Donna Elvira – Anett Fritsch
Zerlina – Valentina Nafornita
Don Giovanni – Ildebrando d’Arcangelo
Leporello – Luca Pisaroni
Commendatore – Tomasz Konieczny
Don Ottavio – Andrew Staples
Masetto – Alessio Arduini

Sven-Eric Bechtolf (director)

Rolf Glittenberg (set designs)
Marianne Glittenberg (costumes)
Friedrich Rorn (lighting)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Philharmonia Chorus Vienna (chorus master: Walter Zeh)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Christoph Eschenbach (conductor)

Why, o why, is it apparently so difficult for directors to come up with a vaguely coherent staging of Don Giovanni? Why, moreover, do so many of them seem so uninterested in, even contemptuous of, the work? It is an opera of such overflowing richness that one would have expected directors to be spoilt for choice when it came to options for staging. Instead, we find ourselves almost always faced with an incoherent mess.

Such is certainly what was served up by Sven-Erich Bechtolf. Bechtholf’s production is probably not quite so bad as London’s twin nadirs of Francesca Zambello and Rufus Norris, but it is difficult to say anything much more positive than that. This year’s Salzburg Festival’s Great War theme – are we not all fed up with such commemorations already? – seems to receive a nod in the updating, but to what end beyond that I cannot say. Similarly the bizarre hotel setting, which makes a nonsense of so much in the work. The closest attention to Da Ponte, let alone to Mozart, seems to be in retaining some vestige of class distinction in presenting Zerlina and Masetto as hotel staff. Beyond that, the opera seems of little interest to Bechtolf. Of religion, let alone of sin, there is nothing – unless one counts the occasional and, in context, quite nonsensical reapparances of the Commendatore as a porcine devil. People dart in and out of hotel rooms and occasionally strip to their underwear in the reception area. Whether comedy be intended is unclear; it certainly is not achieved. Still less is anything approaching tragedy. As for the ending, in which Don Giovanni is still there, chasing after another maid, what is supposed to have happened? Nothing, apparently – which actually is not so very far off the mark. An existentialist conception of Don Giovanni, if that be what this is, is fine in principle, if somewhat partial; but, like any other conception, it needs pursuing coherently. It really is not worth saying any more. Bechtolf’s Così fan tutte, whilst far from perfect, was much better than this; we await next year’s Figaro with trepidation.  

 

Musically, matters were much better. If Christoph Eschenbach did not rise to the heights of Daniel Barenboim in Berlin – by far the best conducted performance of this work I have ever heard – then he nevertheless rose above the rank incompetence and/or sheer perversity we are generally fated to hear. (I really cannot be bothered to compile a list; it would rival Leporello’s in length, if not in excitement.) There was not a single instance in which tempi were objectionable. They were generally well related to one another. And crucially, Eschenbach knew how to draw a fine sound from the Mozart orchestra non pareil, the Vienna Philharmonic, which in turn deigned to play as it can and should. There was not the Furtwänglerian intensity that Barenboim brought to the drama, but there was plenty of light and shade and, that rare thing, an impression that it was being permitted to speak more or less for itself.  Interventionist continuo playing may not be to everyone’s taste, but it did little harm, and indeed livened up a good number of the more hapless moments of stage direction.

 

Don Giovanni (Ildebrando d'Arcangelo)

 

Ildebrando d’Arcangelo made for a brilliant Don Giovanni, insofar as he was permitted to do so. (Why, at one point, did he suddenly have to dress up in the guise of a 1970s gameshow host? At any rate, the Jimmy Savile hint, doubtless coincidental, was not pursued.) Characteristically dark and flexible of tone, d’Arcangelo’s was a smouldering portrayal, which captured to an unusual degree his character’s quicksilver changes of mood and circumstance. Luca Pisaroni’s Leporello was an excellent sidekick, possessing agency in his own right, yet subordinate (again, insofar as Bechtolf’s direction permitted, etc., etc.). Both showed great facility with words, music, and their alchemy. Lenneke Ruiten and Anett Fritsch had their moments as Donna Anna and Donna Elvira, though intonational difficulties were not entirely absent. Andrew Staples sounded a little out of sorts as Don Ottavio; perhaps it was simply an off-night. In any case, despite some less than mellifluous sounds, his dramatic intelligence shone through. Valentina Nafornita and Alessio Arduini made for a characterful, indeed sexy, couple as Zerlina and Masetto. Only Tomasz Konieczny’s surprising unsteady Commendatore really disappointed. The cast, then, mostly did what it could, as did Eschenbach and the orchestra; the fault lay squarely with Bechtolf.