Munich Opera Festival (3) - Turandot, 30 June 2026

Nationaltheater

Images: Geoffroy Schied

Turandot – Sondra Radvanovsky
Altoum – Kevin Conners
Timur – Christian Van Horn
Calaf – Yonghoon Lee
Liù – Golda Schultz
Ping – Vitor Bispo
Pang – Tansel Akzeybek
Pong, Prince of Persia – Samuel Stopford
Mandarin – Bálint Szabó

Director – Carlus Pedrussa/La Fura dels Baus
Designs – Roland Olbeter
Costumes – Chu Oruz
Video – Franc Aleu
Lighting – Urs Schönebaum
Dramaturgy – Andrea Schönhofer, Rainer Karlitschek
Revival director – Lejila Selfried

Chorus, Children’s Chorus, and Extra Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Christoph Hell)
Extras, Children Extras, and Opera-Ballet of the Bavarian State Opera
Bavarian State Orchestra
Conductor – Andrea Battistoni

 

How curious. I learned what this Turandot had been about only upon consulting the programme post-performance. To be honest, I wish I had not done so. A quotation from La Fura dels Baus’s website will do: ‘In 2046 Europe is completely under Chinese rule. More than 30 years, China had rescued Europe from a financial crisis by buying up the debt, the ownership and natural resources. China is now the new world power. Turandot, the princess of ice control, as “Big Brother” every European, in order to pay back every last penny and pay off the debt of their parents’ generation.’ There is, I suppose, nothing like a bit – a lot – of paranoid Western Sinophobia to knock the work’s tamer racism into perspective. How this was depicted onstage I am at a loss to describe, but there you have it. 

For, if that sounds like the sort of thing a US Republican might utter or like to hear, what we saw often suggested something devised to hold the attention of an octogenarian man-baby president. There was certainly something going on all the time: less an evocation of the circus, or on engagement with the idea of one, commedia dell’arte or otherwise, than a circus in itself. If not so vacuous as, say, the Cirque du soleil, Carlus Pedrussa’s production was not so far off as it appeared to think itself. Breakdancers, acrobats, rollerskaters: someone was and often many people were doing something or many things all of the time. Quite why remained obscure, at least to me. I wondered whether some comment was being made about visual overload, and perhaps it was. But its relation to Turandot I could only hazard to tell you, until the final scene when things calmed down and the characters were directed rather well. Titles instructed us when to put on our 90s-style 3-D glasses, red and blue, which promised far more than they delivered. Apart from turning much of what we saw, well, red and blue, they enabled us to see a few objects flying around between us and the stage. Spectacle has always been a dramatic – or, indeed a postdramatic – tool in opera. Here, I am afraid, things tended towards Wagner’s celebrated denunciation of Meyerbeer as effect without cause.

Pedrussa’s decision – again, I quote La Fura dels Baus’s website – to present a Turandot ‘strictly pure and original’ mighty suggest conflict, productive or otherwise, with visual hyperactivity. Did it ‘respect the composer’s music’? Arguably so, in that it presented it as one might expect, save for one exception of ultra-‘respect’, ending ‘when the choir says “Liú poesía”.’ I had not heard it done this way before, so was curious to discover how it might turn out. Not very well, alas. It can plausibly be argued that there is no entirely satisfactory solution to this particular problem, not even Berio’s—and certainly not Franco Alfano’s. But this not only sounded quite at odds with what we had seen; it also presented an oddly muted winding down to an opera for which subtlety may hardly be a priority, but tonal dramaturgic strategy certainly is. Wozzeck stops rather than closes; no one would wish it otherwise. For Turandot more or less to peter out proved an unnecessary disappointment. 

Andrea Battistoni’s conducting of the Munich orchestra offered a proverbial curate’s egg. Tremendous Stravinskian precision early on, hammering home Puccini’s inheritance from Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, met with frustrating listlessness later on. If the reading never lost sight of the gorgeousness of the orchestral tapestry, relative lack of structural command doubtless contributed to the disappointment of the close. Much was loud, very loud, although considerably more varied in tone than Yonghoon Lee’s ear-splitting Calaf. Again, this may not be the world’s most subtle opera; nor is Calaf’s the most of operatic characterisation. There is nonetheless more to it, or should be, than unrelieved shouting. Sondra Radvanovsky was cold and imperious as Turandot, and considerably subtler in, say, ‘In questa reggia’. It was difficult not to feel the loss of additional music in her case. Golda Schultz’s Liù was heart-rending: lovelorn and sincere, a star-turn without trying to be a ‘star’. Christian Can Horn’s verbally and musically attentive Timur impressed similarly for adding much that was absent elsewhere. Indeed, all the singing, bar that of Lee, was of excellent quality or better, massed choral forces included. I could only wish the singers – and we – had benefited from a production that had extended beyond School of Franco Zeffirelli, albeit more by default than design.

Salzburg Festival (7) - Les Contes d’Hoffmann, 24 August 2024

Grosses Festspielhaus

Hoffmann – Benjamin Bernheim
Stella, Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta – Kathryn Lewek
Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr Miracle, Dapertutto – Christian Van Horn
Muse, Nicklausse – Kate Lindsey
Andrés, Cochenille, Frantz, Pitichanaccio – Marc Mauillon
Mother’s Voice – Géraldine Chauvet
Spalanzani – Michael Laurenz
Crespel, Meister Luther – Jérôme Varnier
Hermann, Peter Schlémil – Philippe-Nicholas Martin
Nathanaël – Paco García
Wilhelm – Yevheniy Kapitula

Director – Mariame Clément
Designs – Julia Hansen
Lighting – Paule Constable
Video – Étienne Guiol, Wilfrid Haberey
Choreography – Gail Skrela
Dramaturgy – Christian Arseni

 Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera (chorus director: Alan Woodbridge)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Marc Minkowski (conductor)

Images: SF/Monika Rittershaus

Tales of Hoffmann, Offenbach’s unfinished, arguably unfinishable opéra fantastique, inevitably poses questions concerning performing versions and choices, in its subject matter going further in blurring boundaries between artist, character, and audience, just as many German Romantics, ETA Hoffmann himself included, had done. That is part of its enduring interest, as is Offenbach’s final, spirited approach to the ‘serious’ world of opera from his ‘home’ world of operetta. It is more complicated than that; it always is. And so on… It would be less odd than impossible not to confront such questions, whatever role(s) one might play oneself in a performance—and again, that certainly includes the audience. Here, the supporting programme materials are in many ways impressive: interviews with director Mariame Clément and, to a lesser extent, conductor Marc Minkowski make important points, as does Heather Hadlock’s essay. The problem – and here responsibility lies with the first two – is that so little of that comes across in performance. 

Perhaps I only have myself to blame; I was given a copy of the programme beforehand, but only read it afterwards. I might well have made more of Clément’s production had things been otherwise, though I cannot imagine I would have of Minkowski’s lifeless conducting. I know, moreover, that it is often too easy a retort to say ‘I should not have to read the programme to make sense of a production’. Indeed, but because I did not, it does not necessarily follow that I was not at fault in failing to pick up on what was there. Hand on heart, though, I am not sure it would have made that much difference, in what continues to strike me as a confused and confusing way of presenting ideas that are either mostly straightforward, indeed downright obvious, or not really there at all. Programme essays and interviews can be very good things; I have written a few myself, after all. They are not, however, substitutes for staging. If the director’s role involves anything at all, recognition of and response to that truism is surely part of it. 

Clément depicts Hoffmann as a film-maker: fair enough, though the constant obeisance other art forms must make to film and television has begun to wear thin by now. It is a strange teleology that has everything lead towards film, not least for a theatre director, yet to many it seems beyond question. To be fair, even Adorno fell prey to it at times. Surely the world of live performance is in many ways more interesting, more human, or at least differently so. It is not clear – like much else we see – where that leaves the work’s own, more interesting framing device of a performance of Don Giovanni. Is that also a film, or has Hoffmann moved to theatre? Does it matter? 

Hoffmann (Benjamin Bernheim), Nicklausse (Kate Lindsey), Mother (Géraldine Charvet)

Let us skip over the compendium of clichés that has led us there, including the inevitable Prologue shopping trolley. A couple of dustbins, from one of which the Muse emerges, does not alas suggest a move towards the endgame, let alone Endgame. As we move from the works canteen to the three central acts, we quickly realise that what we are seeing is what Hoffmann has bade his current cast watch on a television somewhere nearby: a conspectus of his career to date, moving from a tacky science fiction B-movie in which Olympia stands with a raygun that might have been a child’s toy – if there were such things as Z-movies, this might be one – through a more expensive, ‘period’ musical drama for Antonia, with an apt if banal nod to the ghostly; to a Giulietta act in which your guess will almost certainly be better than mine. Actors step in and out of character, inviting us to partake in the less-than-breathtaking insight that they are people too and, like Hoffmann, bring parts of themselves to their work. 

Quite why one should care about any of these people or their roles I do not know. The voice of Antonia’s mother from beyond is simply another singer standing there singing a part. Perhaps that is the point, but the lack of emotional involvement or engagement, alongside the insistence, albeit more thoroughly pursued in the programme than on stage, that the characters are mere projections of Hoffmann’s ego, has one continue to wonder whether there is any point in performing this work at all. The overriding note, ultimately, is of tedium, which again, if it is the point – I doubt it – is not enough to justify the experience. 

It might and should have been lifted by the musical performances, yet, despite good and, in some cases, outstanding singing, Minkowski’s grey, sub-Kapellmeister-ish meanderings accomplished nothing here. Basic competence in coordinating pit and stage, especially when it came to a chorus estimable in itself yet left cruelly exposed, eluded the conductor, let alone any sense of colour, irony, or drama, let alone lightness. The Vienna Philharmonic struggled through and sometimes shone; one can hardly blame the players for imparting a sense that their hearts were either not in it or at least not in alignment with what was going on elsewhere. That the Barcarolle passed for vanishingly little was a remarkable achievement, but hardly one to hymn. Minkowski received a good number of boos: an uncivilised practice in which I should never partake, yet if it were not quite deserved, it was perhaps understandable. 

If the orchestra and chorus deserved better, so did the soloists. Benjamin Bernheim, as tireless as he was stylish, made for an ideal Hoffmann. With apparent – doubtless only apparent – lack of effort, he had us believe in him despite enveloping disarray. That he was onstage even more than only added to his commitment and achievement. The same should be said of Kathryn Lewek in her multiple roles, as impressive in coloratura, of which there is much, as in more impassioned romantic feeling; that she had in addition to step in and out of ‘character’ again seemed only to inspire her. Christian Van Horn’s Lindorf cast due shadow over the action. Kate Lindsey’s Nicklausse proved as triumphant a success and as true a spur to emotional engagement, as any portrayal I have heard from this ever-impressive artist Other roles, including Geraldine Chauvet’s rich-toned Mother’s Voice (here, also actorly presence) and the several assumed with great spirit by Marc Mauillon, were all well taken. The team of Salzburg extras did what was asked of them well too. As for the rest, back to the drawing-board, I fear.

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.