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.

Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 7 June 2014

Don Giovanni (Elliot Madore) and Donna Anna (Layla Claire)
Images: Robert Workman

Glyndebourne Festival Theatre

Leporello – Edwin Crossley-Mercer

Donna Anna – Layla Claire

Don Giovanni – Elliot Madore

Commendatore – Taras Shtonda

Don Ottavio – Ben Johnson

Donna Elvira – Serena Farnocchia

Zerlina – Lenka Máčiková

Masetto – Brandon Cedel

 

Jonathan Kent (director)

Lloyd Wood (revival director)

Paul Brown (designs)

Denni Sayers (movement)

Mark Henderson (lighting)

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Andrés Orozco-Estrada

 

Having become so jaded with indifferent – or, sadly, far worse than merely indifferent – stagings of an opera I love more than words can tell, it proved a relief and indeed a joy for me to attend this first revival of Jonathan Kent’s 2010 Glyndebourne production, especially its first act. It was not perfect; perfection we leave for Mozart. But Kent’s staging, as revived by Lloyd Wood – I am afraid I am in no position to say how much is Kent and how is Wood – treats this masterpiece seriously and joins a select group of productions I should happily see again, not least because I suspect there would be intriguing points revealed to me that I had missed upon a first viewing. (Incidentally, its Glyndebourne predecessor, from Graham Vick, forms part of that small band.)

 

Kent’s staging may lack the cocaine-fuelled kinetic energy of Calixto Bieito’s unforgettable ENO production, or the (apparently) all-encompassing, Calderón-like Salzburg World Theatre of Herbert Graf’s production for Furtwängler (the most precious opera DVD this side of the Boulez-Chéreau Ring?), but even such magnificent achievements as those can only begin to hint at the possibilities Mozart and Da Ponte offer us. Most stagings come nowhere near accomplishing even that. Social tensions are either absent or underplayed – an all too common shortcoming – but a seriousness and sensibility it is perhaps not unduly exaggerated to call theological nevertheless comes to the fore. Giovanni’s unflinching, libertine atheism is of course the true heroism of the opera. The dark force of what to him may be reaction is symbolised by the darkness of Paul Brown’s excellent set designs, from out of which the action seems to emerge and into which it retreats. But some in the audience – and some of the characters too – might equally decide that it is the temporal stability of the revolving cube (the Mother Church, perhaps?) which protects and which ultimately proves the villain’s downfall.

 

 

Such openness to interpretation is quite different from a lack of direction. There is room for the burning conviction of strong directorial lines – Bieito is surely one of the greatest and unquestionably one of the most celebrate examples – and for more reticent yet nevertheless intelligent productions, permitting of various understandings. In that respect, Kent’s likening, in his brief director’s note, of Brown’s spinning cube to ‘a kind of Cabinet of Curiosities or, perhaps, a great sarcophagus,’ proves fruitful both in itself and for the further consideration it might suggest. Moreover, such properly Baroque references, in a more broadly cultural sense rather than the narrow conceptions of ‘style’ prevalent today, prove equally stimulating to the imagination – just as they do in Mozart’s score and Da Ponte’s libretto. The 1950s updating registers if one wishes: Kent suggests a ‘time of transition, in which a sexual, social and moral revolution, a dolce vita world, coexisted with the remnants of a devout society. However, at least to my eyes, it does not force itself unduly upon one’s consciousness. The staging is again, then, suggestive; it does not make the mistake of trying to shoehorn the drama into a pointlessly narrow conception, let alone somehow attempt to make Don Giovanni ‘about’ the era in question.

 

There remains, however, one significant reservation. I do not know whose decision it was to serve up what seemed pretty much to be the Vienna version of the score, but I wish he or she had thought again; it made a change, though, from the unholy conflation of Vienna and Prague generally foisted upon us. To anyone who cares to think about it, Prague wins every time, although I have yet to attend a single performance in which Mozart’s dramatic sensibility is thus honoured. At any rate, we heard both of Donna Elvira’s arias, just the one of Don Ottavio’s (‘Dalla sua pace’), and the very rare Vienna duet for Zerlina and Leporello, ‘Per queste tue manine’. It was not, of course, uninteresting to hear the latter, for once, but it is almost unworthy of late Mozart, and holds up the action just as much as if we were to hear both of Ottavio’s arias (and/or, for that matter, both of Elvira’s: just as much a problem with Vienna). There was, at least, no messing about with the scena ultima – a relief, given the recent butchery perpetrated by the Royal Opera. It was a great pity, though, about the surtitles, whose translation was unworthy of Da Ponte’s matchless marriage of wit and profundity.

 

Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s Mahler I greatly admired in Vienna a year-and-a-half ago. At first, that is, in the Overture, I found him somewhat wanting in Mozart. I have learned to live with the opening being taken at an allegedly alla breve tempo far too fast to my ears; off the top of my head, only Barenboim and Muti, amongst living conductors, come close to what I hear in my head. More concerning were a general thinness of tone and apparent lack of concern with harmonic rhythm.  If those were not actually natural trumpets – I could not see the pit – they certainly sounded like them; others, of course, respond better to that rasping sound than I do. However, once past that disappointing opening, there was much to admire, though such tendencies were far from entirely banished. There will always be tempi with which one can quibble, but this was a variegated performance which did not harry the music, and which permitted both the on-stage drama to develop and the excellent London Philharmonic Orchestra to have its say. The Stone Guest Scene, however, was strangely un-climactic: partly, I think, a matter of the failure to use the Prague score, but it was more than that, for that failing is common to many other performances. Though beautifully played by the LPO and – for the most part – well sung, the final scene therefore did not jolt quite as it should.

 



Leporello (Edwin Crossley-Mercer) and Don Giovanni

Indeed, the main factor was probably the underpowered singing of  Taras Shtonda’s Commendatore. The other disappointment amongst the cast was Layla Claire’s vibrato-laden Donna Anna, whose musical line really needed to be clearer throughout.  Otherwise, a cast almost entirely unknown to me acquitted itself well, with a fine sense of company. Ben Johnson, whom I had heard before as Ottavio, albeit in English, sang exquisitely, almost to the extent of having one regret the lack of ‘Il mio tesoro’. Serena Farnocchia was a stylish Elvira, whilst Lenka Máčiková and Brandon Cedel offered vocally lively assumptions of the roles of Zerlina and Masetto. If Elliot Madore lacked the charisma of the great Giovannis, then he nevertheless delighted in the musico-dramatic quicksilver of the role, sufficiently differentiated from the equally lively Leporello of Edwin Crossley-Mercer. There was genuine chemistry between them. Perhaps ironically, given the ‘loss’ of his aria, it was only Johnson’s Ottavio which continued to ring in my ears; but this, like the production and performance as a whole, was a cast that proved considerably greater than the sum of its parts.