Hänsel und Gretel, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 11 December 2017

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Gretel (Elsa Dreisig) and Hänsel (Katrin Wundsam)
Images: Monika Rittershaus

Peter – Arttu Kataja

Gertrud – Marina Prudenskaya

Hänsel – Katrin Wundsam

Gretel – Elsa Dreisig

Witch – Jürgen Sacher

Sandman – Corinna Scheurle

Dew Fairy – Sarah Aristidou

Achim Freyer (director, designs, lighting)

Geertje Boeden (assistant director)

Petra Weikert (assistant designer)

Sebastian Alphons (lighting)

Jakob Klaffs, Hugo Reis (video)

Elena Garcia Fernandez, Larissa Wieczorek (dramaturgy)

Children’s Chorus of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (chorus master: Vincenz Weissenburger)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Sebastian Weigle (conductor)

The first performance of Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera, Hänsel und Gretel, on the night before Christmas Eve, 1893, in Weimar, was conducted by Richard Strauss. The work’s second staging, in Hamburg, in September of the following year, was conducted by Gustav Mahler. It reached Berlin, this very house, then home to the Royal Court rather than the State Opera, the following month, and has belonged to the world ever since. Alas, that very popularity and a strange, seemingly related, insistence on presenting a tale of child abuse with sugar coating have tended to lead to the opera’s underestimation, or at least to insipid presentation, even non-interpretation. What, after all, is a fairy tale, if it is not an invitation to interpretation, for children, for adults, for all? For those to whom the Brothers Grim(m) were something a little more interesting than Eric and Donald Trump Jr, this would be mind-numbingly obvious; alas, audiences being what they often are…

Hänsel, The Witch (Jürgen Sacher), and Gretel

Achim Freyer does not penetrate so deep as LiamSteel in his Royal College of Music staging; when I saw that, I more or less instantly realised it was the production for which I had been waiting much of my adult life. (Yes, as I never tire of pointing out, much of the best London opera takes place in our conservatoires.) But nor does he try to; his concerns are different. He is certainly not pandering to reactionary ‘tastes’, in the manner of Adrian Noble in his Vienna Disneyfication. Where Freyer excels, as, at his best, he always does, is in the creation of a world, both childlike and perhaps not. I say ‘perhaps’, since who is to say what is ‘childlike’ and what is not, or indeed what its opposite might be. Is that, again, not part of the essence of fairy tales? Clowns are present, of course; there is that undeniable element of Freyer house style, but why not? It does not look, like sometimes his staging have, as merely more of the same, or one size fits all; nor does it feel like it. The sense of theatre is keen, not without framing, for instance when the wondrous flick of the lighting switch opens the metaphorical story book at the opening, yet without ever seeming pleased with itself, or too clever-clever. Children, of whatever age, do not like that; often they are right not to do so. We never see the ‘real’ Hänsel and Gretel, or rather the ‘real’ singers, not really, for their masks cover their faces several times over. But what is ‘real’? And what is ‘real’ here? Perhaps the plot interests Freyer less: a pity, I think, but he has other concerns. And the dream-like sense of proceedings, if only in retrospect, acquires a more darkly, yet also brightly, sense of the political and its possibilities, with a final unveiling of the sign ‘REVOLUTIO’. Unfinished business, or a joke? Dreamers or anti-dreamers, from Novalis to Brecht, may – or may not – have their say. Life with Freyer, life in many fairy tales, is a circus; yet think of what a circus, that theatre of cruelty, of the absurd, of society and anti-society, involves, suggests, incites.

If only the musical side of things had lived up to those possibilities. Sebastian Weigle’s conducting was, alas, throughout Kapellmeister-ish in the negative sense. ‘Light’, as if attempting a demonstration that Mendelssohn were not worth listening to, almost entirely without Wagnerisms, let alone the kinship with Strauss Christian Thielemann in that Vienna performance had imparted, rightly or wrongly to the score, the greater sin of Weigle’s reading was listlessness. I do not think I have ever heard the first act drag so; nor have I heard the music sound less magical. Weigle is certainly no Strauss or Mahler. It would be a hard task indeed to have the Staatskapelle Berlin sound bad in this music, and it did not; but this great orchestra was sadly undersold throughout, achieving a few moments of wonder despite, not on account of, its conductor.

It was not a vintage night for singing either, although Elsa Dreisig sparkled as Gretel. Katrin Wundsam sometimes sounded rather harsh as Hänsel. Marina Prudenskaja and Arttu Kataja sang well enough as their parents, likewise Jürgen Sacher as the Witch, but perhaps needed something more in the way of inspirational musical leadership – I shall never forget Colin Davis in 2008 – to lift their performances to something more memorable. There was hope, though, that in a subsequent revival, not only better conducted, but perhaps more engaged with the possibilities hinted at by Freyer, something more than the sum of the parts might emerge. That hope is, after all, the fuel on which opera houses, especially houses now reborn such as this, should burn.

NDR Chorus/Konzerthausorchester Berlin/Spering - Bach and Schubert, 3 April 2015

Großer Saal, Konzerthaus

Bach – Cantata: ‘Lass, Fürstin, lass noch einen Strahl’, BWV 198 (Trauerode)

Schubert – Mass in A-flat major, D 678

Marlis Petersen (soprano)

Katrin Wundsam (mezzo-soprano)

Colin Balzer (tenor)

Michael Nagy (bass)
 

NDR Chorus (chorus master: Michael Gläser)

Konzerthausorchester Berlin

Andreas Spering (conductor)

 

Mourning for the Saxon Electress, Christiane Eberhardine, ‘die Betsäule Sachsens’ (Saxony’s pillar of prayer), was deeply felt by her husband’s subjects, although neither he, nor their son, attended the funeral. Unlike Augustus the Strong, who had converted to Roman Catholicism to ascend the Polish throne, she had remained faithful to Protestantism. Protestantism thus remained faithful to her, not least in the guise of  Bach’s Trauerode, the text by Johann Christoph Gottsched, first performed in St Paul’s Church, Leipzig, in 1727. One of the touching aspects of the text is the sense of place: references to city, river, residence, and so on. Even in the Prussian capital, with a North German chorus, I could imagine myself back in Leipzig – not least since I tend always to think of that city on Good Friday, even when not attending a Passion or Parsifal.

In performance, Bach was not badly done by, although Christoph Spering might have offered greater ‘heart’ to a somewhat chilly account. The opening chorus, ‘Lass, Fürstin, lass noch einen Strahl,’ was taken very fast, bur rhythms were well pointed. Here and throughout, the clarity of the NDR Chorus was beyond reproach. ‘An dir, du Fürbild großer Frauen,’ the chorus closing the first of the two parts, proved tumultuous, redolent of one of the turba choruses in the Passions. (Flutes struggled a little there, though.) The final chorus did not entirely dispel the suspicion that Spering had a train to catch, and phrasing might have been less choppy, but again, counterpoint was communicated clearly, even as the weight of harmonic meaning was lessened.

The extraordinary orchestra Bach employs made its mark, as it always does: visually as well as aurally transitional, two gambas (to the fore in ‘Wie starb die Heldin so vergnügt!’) and lutes placed in the centre, the ‘modern’ orchestra surrounding them. (Hermann Scherchen’s recording is a typically provocative exploration.) The alto recitative, ‘Der Glocken bebenes Getön,’ sounded wonderful orchestrally, flutes against pizzicato violins and violas.  Flute and oboe obbligati sounded splendid in the tenor aria with which the second part opens. Once again, I was reminded of Bach’s almost modernistic exploration of instrumentation, a feature of his music to which Boulez has, perhaps unsurprisingly, drawn attention. Marlis Petersen offered a keenly dramatic account of her recitatives and arias, harking back to Bach’s seventeenth-century forebears. Some might have cavilled at the evident difference of approach to vibrato, she largely eschewing it, the strings warmer, but it did not especially bother me. Katrin  Wundsam’s aria (that one with the gambas) exposed the differences in tone between different registers in her voice, but again, that was not unduly distracting, and it is partly a consequence of the particularities of Bach’s vocal writing. Colin Balzer proved the weakest of the soloists, intonation variable, and coloratura less than perfect. (The writing is difficult, but even so.) Michael Nagy navigated with great success the transitions between recitative and arioso, likewise achieving an excellent balance between declamation and the longer line.

Schubert’s choral works are, by contrast, cheerfully South German: nominally Catholic, without any obvious evidence of great belief. (Nor is there any evidence of Beethovenian struggle, despite the similarities with, and perhaps influence of, the Missa solemnis.) As one might have expected, this was not the most ‘symphonic’ of readings, but so long as one could, at least for a few minutes, put Wolfgang Sawallisch from one’s mind, a good enough account was given of the work in, the Berlin Konzerthaus notwithstanding, more church-like fashion. Strangely, given Spering’s lack of what we might call ‘Romanticism’, I was nevertheless put in mind of Bruckner and indeed twentieth-century writing. Perhaps that was in part testament to the long-lasting influence of Caecilianism. Quite why a chamber organ was used I am not entirely sure, but such seems almost to be de rigueur in ‘early music’ performances, even when a perfectly decent instrument is present in the hall.

The opening ‘Kyrie’ set the tone for much of the performance, in its strong contrast between passages for solo voices (whether individually or in ensemble) and those for chorus. The dramatic quality of the imploring ‘Christe’ solos was rather winning. Spering’s way with the ‘Gloria’ I found unduly fast and brutal, rather as if Toscanini were back with us; others will doubtless have felt differently. There were times when a greater body of strings too would have been of benefit. Spering’s conducting of the concluding fugue proved wooden too, leading to loss of much of its dynamism, though matters improved as it progressed. Again, at the opening of the ‘Credo’, although the performers (chorus and orchestra) were excellent, the conducting was four-square. The strings, however, dug in nicely upon the word ‘crucifixus’, especially important on this of all days. The closing ‘Amen’ sounded glorious – from all concerned. A well-shaped ‘Sanctus’ followed: lyrical, yet with a strong sense of underlying power. Phrasing was a bit odd in the ‘Osanna’ section, for no evident reason. The ‘Benedictus’, perhaps predictably, was taken very fast. It flowed nicely enough, but I remained unmoved. The ‘Agnus Dei’, though on the swift side, was imbued with greater feeling than earlier, although the contrast between choral and solo passages was perhaps excessive. Still, there was no doubting the prowess of the excellent chorus.