Munich Opera Festival (4) - Die Walküre, 1 July 2026

Nationaltheater

Images: Monika Rittershaus

Siegmund – Joachim Bäckström
Hunding – Ain Anger
Wotan – Nicholas Brownlee
Sieglinde – Irene Roberts
Brünnhilde – Miina-Lisa Värelä
Fricka – Ekaterina Gubanova
Helmwige – Dorothea Herbert
Gerhilde – Julie Adams
Ortlinde – Elaine Gvritshvili
Waltraute – Claudia Mahnke
Siegrune – Niina Keitel
Rossweiße – Christina Rock
Grimgerde – Natalie Lewis
Schwertleite – Noa Beinart
Loge – Charith Pidikiti

Director – Tobias Kratzer
Assistant director – Matthias Piro
Designs – Rainer Sellmaier
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Video – Manuel Braun, Jonas Dahl, Janic Bebi
Dramaturgy – Bettina Bartz, Olaf Roth

Bayerische Staatsorchester
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

 

As a student in Berlin, Ludwig Feuerbach attended lectures from, among others, GWF Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher: far from an unusual combination, but prophetic for his subsequent development as the pre-eminent Young Hegelian philosopher of love-communism. Although he lectured at Erlangen, Feuerbach failed to obtain a university position, an ambition rendered impossible following revelation of his authorship of the atheistic Thoughts on Death and Immortality published anonymously in 1830, a year in which revolutions once again began to sweep Europe. His writings, including those Thoughts, The Essence of Christianity, and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, inspired many radicals in the next wave of revolutions (1848-51), although Feuerbach remaining personally aloof from revolutionary activity. One of those, of course, was Richard Wagner, who, shortly after publication of Feuerbach’s Thoughts, had gained his first experience, direct and reported, of revolution, inspired by events in Paris, Leipzig, and even the previously quiescent Dresden. The seventeen-year old Saxon would recall in his autobiography Mein Leben ‘the world of history’ having come to life: ‘Saxony was not spared: in Dresden it even came to street-fighting’. He began to attend Leipzig University lectures on philosophy and aesthetics, and henceforth considered himself a ‘fervent partisan of the revolution’. Wagner would go on read at least all three of the Feuerbach books named above and, in contrast to one of his great intellectual mentors, stood anything but aloof from revolutionary political activity—be it in practice, during the 1849 Dresden uprising, or in the fruits of his post-revolutionary exile in Zurich. Among those were The Artwork of the Future, dedicated to Feuerbach, its very title a homage, and of course Die Walküre, perhaps his single most Feuerbachian drama—in that the positive, as well as negative, side of a religion purer than yet related to Christianity, founded on love, features most strongly in the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, and Brünnhilde’s conversion to their creed, crucially at the ‘price’, in reality an elevation, of losing her own immortality. 

With this Walküre, newly premiered, Tobias Kratzer’s Munich Ring reaches its second instalment. I was unable to see Das Rheingold; but on the evidence of this, as well as much of his other work – his near-universally loved Bayreuth Tannhäuser, various Deutsche Oper productions, and more – I hope to put that right before long. Even considered on its own, Kratzer’s Walküre has numerous distinctions, but perhaps its most distinctive feature, at least until the third act, is a more overt Feuerbachian element than any other I can recall. I suspect it would seem so all the more in light of the Rheingold, but that must remain a matter of speculation by now. What it certainly does is put the gods, even here, centre-stage, not only as ‘the gods’, characters in this drama, but emphatically as gods—and emphatically not, as Ernst Bloch put it, ‘called gods without being gods’.

The curtain rises on a rural, possibly suburban chalet; by deduction, it may be somewhere outside Munich, though it need not be. This, of course, is Hunding’s house, at the end of the driveway a quasi-Marian shrine, albeit to Fricka. That is, Kratzer follows Wagner absolutely in presenting a dramatic critique of religion, mostly yet not only Christianity, albeit shrouded, as it were, in the guise of Germanic paganism. (Wagner is doing other things with reference to the Eddas and sagas too, but he is certainly doing that, in unambiguously post-Feuerbach fashion.) It is here, under Fricka as well as Hunding, also under a larger, indoor ecclesiastical shrine, not unlike a tabernacle or reliquary, perhaps denoting the rule of Valhalla/religion/Christianity more generally, that Siegmund takes refuge. Sieglinde is clearly a member of this religion too, since she genuflects before the shrine even when Hunding has gone—and, initially shamefully, later with abandon, celebrates her wholesale abandon(ment) only after covering it. When, in the second act, Wotan comes to earth, like the gods of old (though also, if we believe the New Testament, ours too), he is distressed not only by Fricka’s demolition of the new religion he has ultimately inspired, but by the destruction of the shrine within: his old religion, one might say. Just as Wagner’s god is torn, so is he, visibly as well as audibly so. 

That Hunding, whose cause Fricka takes, should be a devotee of her understanding of this religion – sect, perhaps – will surprise no one, but it is clear, not assumed. She even recognises herself in it; I am tempted to add, in Biblical style, ‘and it was good’, save that obviously it was not for humanity. We even see a ram, albeit a dead one; hers is a chariot, if only metaphorically, of death—as in Wagner. When death occurs, moreover, it is unquestionably violent; we are no more spared than its more direct victims. When Wotan, in anger, bids Hunding kneel before Fricka, Wagner’s goddess of ‘custom’ (as he explained in a letter to August Röckel), the bourgeois property- and motor-owner does just that: not something I have seen before. She and other gods – I assume, Froh, Donner, and Freia – whom we have already seen, in a drawing projected at some point during Wotan’s monologue, observe events on the battlefield. Dressed in designer Rainer Sellmaier’s mediaeval, even Burgundian-Nibelungenlied garb, they offer strong connection to the mediaevalism of work, Wagner’s selection and adoption of sources, and to the hostile, Young Hegelian critique of church and state such as had been mystically united in states such as the Prussia of Frederick William IV.

Another such example, if less fanatically so, was the Saxony in which Kapellmeister Wagner threatened to burn it all down—and took delight in seeing just that in his opera house: ‘8 May (Monday) Morning once again by roundabout route via barricades to Town Hall. At S. Anne Barricade guard shouts “Well, Mr Conductor, joy’s beautiful divine spark’s made a blaze.” (3rd perf. 9th Symphony at previous Palm Sunday concert; Opera House now burnt down. Strange feeling of comfort.)’ Another important point, I suspect, from Wotan’s monologue: in his proto-Parsifalian wandering, he passes a church. Out of it ran two hooded figures, disaffected youth, it would seem. Something within me wondered whether one might be Alberich, in the one Ring drama in which he ‘should’ not appear onstage. I think it was, for during the Ride of the Valkyries, a hooded figure with child, surely Hagen, watches. We shall see. To be reminded, at any rate, of Wagner’s contemporary and fellow Feuerbach enthusiast (for a while), Marx, and his more or less contemporaneous observation, in explicit Young Hegelian critique of Hegel, that ‘the relationship of industry [Alberich] and, in particular, the world of wealth to the political world [the gods] is one of the principal problems of modern times,’ was salutary—and I should be surprised to learn that it had merely been my interpretative fancy. 

So far, so excellent—all accomplished in fine Personenregie and response thereto. This is no mere concept; it is an absorbing drama. That of the third act is hardly less so in the latter respect, although it seems strangely distant from what has gone before. Perhaps more will be revealed in Siegfried or Götterdämmerung, but once past a video ‘Ride’ that took in much of Munich, Brünnhilde at the helm of Apocalypse Now helicopter, an original ‘Bavarian host’ of the Siegestor, thus returning to source as it were. Naturally, the local audience loved it, and why not, numerous aspects of the city eliciting gasps of recognition and, less laudably, actual applause. Surely one can appreciate a coup de théâtre or de cinéma without Pavlovian response. That nonetheless we should end up in the Nationaltheater may have particular warrant, given it was here that, against Wagner’s wishes, Ludwig II had it all begin. Perhaps Kratzer anticipated the applause or such reaction, and turned it against the audience avant la lettre. We can read it that way anyway. And perhaps subsequent events will play out more fully in that respect—and not too closely to Stefan Herheim’s metatheatrical Deutsche Oper Ring. But it seemed a slight pity. There is still much to admire in the emergency repair work – and religious rebirth? – offered by Valkyrie body-snatchers to heroes, as well as in the passionate direction and portrayal of Wotan and Brünnhilde thereafter. That the demi-god Loge appears as bidden, with flame, at the close, ties all neatly together. Yet I could not help but think – this is really my sole cavil – a more apt setting might have been found, unless the point be that the opera house is now our dubious temple. If so, I shall happily recant; again, we shall see.

In one sense, though, even that helped point, in the unlikely event anyone should have needed pointing, to the truest heroes of all: the orchestra that first performed this work. Wherever you may have heard it, in Berlin, Bayreuth, Dresden, Vienna, or elsewhere, it is unlikely to have been played better than this. Strings were dark yet incisive, ‘old German’ in a way Furtwängler might have recognised, ‘dramatic’ in a way Boulez might have done. The rest of the playing was equally outstanding, the Ride far more than showpiece, but rather quite rightly a symphonic movement taking its place in Wagner’s dramatic whole. Vladimir Jurowski’s conducting had its moments in better and worse senses. To begin with, too often one could hear as well as see him conduct. Wagner became a miniaturist in a sense too close to Nietzsche’s jibe. It was all too effortful, though to Jurowski’s credit, he never tried to get this great orchestra to sound like anything other than itself. The third act was more at ease with itself, with far fewer odd impositions upon it; it flowed in a way closer to the Rhine (or Isar) and thus the orchestra’s mysterious, Delphic oracle sounded more unbidden—save, in the eternal riddle, for who might have created its own gods.

Speaking of heroes, Joachim Bäckström made for a fine Siegmund, his chemistry with Irene Roberts’s increasingly ecstatic Sieglinde – what a foretelling of Siegfried she offered! – thrilling and, at times, disturbing to watch. For Kratzer did not follow Wagner in his understanding of incest. These twins, even the religious Sieglinde, were positively excited by the prospect of incest, as opposed to loving each other and its revelation not mattering. Again, film revealed some of the backstory, adding to rather than merely mirroring what we learned from narration—at least after the first, slightly disappointing instalment. Nicholas Brownlee’s Wotan we had thus seen and known already, his fireside sadness, seen by the siblings’ mothers, projected into a wise, multivalent portrayal of the ‘sum of present-day intelligence’ (Wagner on the character, immediately prior to starting work on the score of this opera).  

Ekaterina Gubanova’s imperious, haughty, godlike Fricka was all one might hope for, in general and in context. Ain Anger’s self-assured Hunding was no mere thug, though he was certainly given to violence; here was a man who knew his beliefs and his patriarchal rights, and was willing to fight for them. Miina-Lisa Värelä’s Brünnhilde’s journey to the brink of losing immortality absorbed us through excellent, Wagnerian command of words, music, and gesture. Other Valkyries offered singing and acting of the highest order. For not the least of the work’s and performance’s virtues was a celebration of Wagner’s Feuerbachian conception of the ‘purely human’ and its socialist expansion into a vision, political, social, religious and more, that only in cooperation might we begin to achieve our potential as a species.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Of One Blood, 28 June 2026

 

Nationaltheater

Production images: Monika Rittershaus

Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England – Johanni von Oostrum
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots – Vera-Lotte Boecker
Female Consorts I-IV – Seonwoo Lee, Mirjam Mesak, Lotte Betts-Dean, Meg Brilleslyper
Female Consort V, Jane Kennedy – Freya Apfellstaedt
Male Consort I, Lord Darnley – Michael Butler
Male Consort II – Joel Williams
Male Consort III, Rizzio – Andrew Hamilton
Male Consort IV, Scottish Lord I – Armand Rabot
Male Consort V, Scottish Lord II, Executioner – Pawel Horodyski
Solo harpsichord – Mahan Esfahani

Director – Claus Guth
Set designs – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Sound design – Bob Scott, Sven Eckhoff
Lighting – Michael Bauer
Choreography – Sommer Ulrickson

Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Lukas Leipfinger
Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus director: Christoph Hell)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

I remember, as a schoolboy, reading in a newspaper about ‘The Hecklers’, a pair of composers with highly reactionary aesthetics, who objected so strongly to Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain that they protested against its revival at Covent Garden. I would hear Gawain at a subsequent revival, as a student, and be swept off my feet. But at the time, I recall being puzzled by the idea that one would protest against something being performed simply because one did not like it, or even because one thought it not very good. I did not know much about the repertoire of opera houses at the time, but the idea that they were overloaded with new, or even modernist, work was patently absurd. I was equally puzzled, at the end of this performance of Brett Dean’s new opera Of One Blood, to hear loud booing from certain quarters of Munich’s Nationaltheater, when the composer, librettist Heather Betts, and (I think) director Claus Guth came onstage. It was not a premiere, so their appearance was slightly unexpected, if welcome. Could people who had contentedly, so it seemed, sat through two acts of a new opera have felt so strongly about its music – it could, I suppose, have been its libretto, or even its staging – that they felt they must bellow farmyard noises in an attempt to drown out applause? If they had not liked the opera, or had considerable criticisms of it, fair enough, but what was it that had led them to such a display? It was neither a mindlessly reactionary nor a vigorously avant-garde work; it was well crafted, well performed, and well directed. Would not refraining from applause – as, I am sure, many of us have done on occasion – have been enough? I am afraid reflection has left me none the wiser, but the experience was unsettling and has continued to be, not least from concern for those at the sharp end of that strange, bullying response.

 

The phrase ‘of one blood’ refers to a phrase Mary (Stuart), Queen of Scots used in a letter to her cousin and antagonist – historical and, here, dramatic – Elizabeth I, here ‘Elizabeth Tudor’: ‘We be both of one blood, of one country, and in one Island’. In their communications and other sixteenth-century sources lie the seeds of Betts’s libretto, assembled and constructed after the manner of many a dramatic confrontation between the two. Betts is a visual artist: an interesting case for a librettist in terms of scene-setting, for instance the opening and close of the work in contemporary or perhaps, in Guth’s staging, a future Westminster Abbey, in whose Henry VII/Lady Chapel the two queens lie at opposite ends, at the command of their mutual successor, James VI and I, who also commissioned their tombs. That struck her when visiting, as it might anyone, but its visual element seems to have been especially important to the librettist dramaturgically, focusing the action and the way it plays out, thereby also influencing the staging, as well as providing elements of a solution for the perennial problem of what to do in a drama concerning the entwined lives of two central figures who never met. Contriving an occasion on which they did is a common solution; it is good to welcome an alternative to the fold, in an intriguingly clinical white setting, albeit beneath a hint of English Perpendicular Gothic (which tilted at one point, perhaps as a reflection of changing fortunes and/or danger). 

And so, we see the two queens act separately in the beginning, later appearing partly at the same time in their own halves of the stage, with ‘consort’ retinues – I was puzzled before realising the word was intended musically rather than maritally – so as to react one another’s words and deeds, coming tantalisingly close, yet never quite meeting. Tellingly, their union in duet, as opposed to ‘written’ dialogue, takes place when both are offstage. There are oddities to the libretto, or at least features I did not understand: the archaic ‘-eth’ third-person singular is employed, yet we hear ‘will’ rather than ‘wilt’ with thou. It all serves its purpose well enough, though—and perhaps such inconsistencies, if inconsistencies they be, are simply reflections of a language that has always been in change. Titles were used not simply to convey but, at certain points, to add to the libretto, including indication of place, such as Richmond Palace, Holyrood, or of course Fotheringhay Castle.

Collaboration between husband and wife librettist (their daughter one of Mary’s excellent consort) seems to have been fruitfully close. What comes ‘first’, whether chronologically or aesthetically, is ever a fraught question in any such relationship, but there were no obvious signs of tension and many of complement. Likewise between them and Guth, the extraction of both tombs for cleaning and their return at the end an interesting element of the aforementioned framing rather than contrast or contradiction. A low opening pedal – electronic rather than acoustic, I think – sounds, Rheingold-like yet -unlike, the musical beginning, subsequent scraping noises, like a dental implement writ large, partaking of the drama and ushering in the Bayerische Staatsorchester, here on excellent form under Vladimir Jurowski’s wise, invigorating direction. Two worlds, then, collided and coincided in more ways than one: multidimensional yet bilateral dramatic conflict, one might say. This was further layered in the Elizabethan scenes with harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani onstage. Few if any harpsichordists have done more for new music than Esfahani; here his role once again bridged divides between old and new, his instrument inciting orchestral and electronic material, and on at least one occasion – if my ears did not deceive me – prefigured in the ‘purely’ electronic material of the very opening. The dramatic possibilities of such time travel were manifold—perhaps all the better for being left to us not necessarily to resolve but to ponder, and thus to engage as active dramatic participants.

Similarities with Berg – first a chord close to Wozzeck, then broader harmonic fields – suggested themselves to my ears at the opening of the second act, but I am not sure this was so much influence as my ears making sense of a new harmonic world with music I knew. More fundamentally, the expertise and artistry with which both acts, of roughly equal length, were planned and realised was striking, still more so in the second (perhaps a matter of my having become more at home with the work). In that, the role of the equally excellent chorus was apparent: first liturgical, in Westminster Abbey, but changing its role, like the Greek chorus so as both to comment and participate, in acclamation, rebellion, and more. 

In what was perhaps an inevitable nod to or at least coincidence with Donizetti, coloratura featured in both queens’ lines, but there was far more to them than that, especially as brought so vividly and sympathetically to life by Johanni von Oostrum and Vera-Lotte Boecker. Amongst the rest of a very fine cast, I might put in a word for Michael Butler’s feckless Darnley and Pawel Horodyski’s Executioner, but this was emphatically an ensemble performance as well as one of warring queens. Designs and choreography were stylish and suggestive throughout. Maybe our hecklers disliked the black coals of ruin that occupied much of the second-act stage, before being swept away by restoration workers in the present/future. I am grasping at straws, though. Who knows? Ultimately, who cares?

Applause from the premiere: Geoffroy Schied

 

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Borgioni/Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble/Heumann - La Morte d'Orfeo, 28 June 2026

Prinzregententheater

Excerpts from:

Stefano Landi: La Morte d’Orfeo
Monteverdi: L’Orfeo
Giovanni Maria Trabaci: Durezze et ligature
Jacopo Peri: Euridice
Luigi Rossi: Orfeo

Interspersed with:

Lorenzo Allegri: Primo Ballo della Notte d’Amore
Monteverdi: Seventh Book of Madrigals: ‘Tempro la cetra’
Biagio Marini: Per ogni sorte di strumento musicale, op.22 no.21: Sonata sopra ‘Fuggi dolente core’
Alessando Piccinini: Intavolaturo di liuto: Toccata
Sigismondo d’India: Le Musiche: ‘Cara mia cetra’
Andrea Falconiero: Il primo libro delle canzone: ‘Battaglia de Barabaso yerno de Satanas’
Giovanni Legrenzi: La Cetra: Sonata
Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea: ‘Oblivion soave’

Mauro Borgioni (baritone)
Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble
Friederike Heumann (concept, director, viola and lira de gamba)

 

Founded to enable ‘historically informed’ performances of the three surviving operas of Monteverdi, Munich’s Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble both celebrated its thirtieth anniversary and commemorated the life of one of its founding members, lutenist Fred Jacobs, in a ‘Baroque concert’ contribution to the city’s annual Opera Festival. Gambist Friederike Heumann devised a programme around the idea of the death of Orpheus, in a sense creating a small(ish) concert opera in two acts, rejecting the happy end of so many retellings and exploring not only death but above all the power of music, through assembled texts revealing four protagonists: Orpheus, his lyre (in turn variously represented by harp, lira de gamba, and chitarrone), a narrator, and the ferryman Charon. 

At the heart of ‘La morte d’Orfeo’ stood excerpts from three seventeenth-century Orphic operas, by Monteverdi, Stefano Landi, and Luigi Rossi, as well as one from the oldest surviving opera of all, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, written and first performed in 1600. It made for a fascinating evening, poised somewhere between concert and pasticcio, my only real cavil being the lack of titles to enable closer following and comprehension of the words. Yet so vividly communicative were the performances by baritone Mauro Borgioni, who has sung Monteverdi’s Orfeo (and Ulisse) in several productions, and the ensemble as a whole that the loss was mitigated: tribute, in its way, to the power not only of music, but that of its mysterious alchemy in song and in what we have come to know as opera. 

In the beginning was an overture: well, not quite, but music that served well in its new guise, Lorenzo Allegri’s Primo Ballo della Notte d’Amore, an ersatz-Sinfonia reflecting in its gathering momentum the interchange between lands north and south of the Alps that has contributed so much to the genre—and perhaps to Allegri’s life and work too, as a composer and lutenist at the Medici court in Florence sometimes referred to as ‘Lorenzino Tedesco’. Dance, we were reminded, in body as in spirit, has informed dramma per musica from the outset. The array of music, genres, and indeed styles that proceeded to feed into the whole reminded us ‘opera’ has, from the outset and arguably from before that outset, always found itself pulled between various poles: words and music, descriptive and prescriptive (even proscriptive), text and performance, and so much else. Sigismondo d’India’s ‘older’, more madrigalian harmony, for instance, registered in such richly expressive fashion that no one could seriously draw a straight line from any point a to any other point b. Indeed, if anything the later seventeenth-music could sometimes sound conventional, even restricted, in various modes of expression compared to what came earlier: Monteverdi, of course, yet far from only him. 

Peri’s Euridice stood, probably from coincidentally, at the centrepoint of the first ‘act’, voice and chitarrone (Michael Freimuth) opening a window on the world to be joined by their musical confreres. An ensuing sinfonia from Monteverdi immediately recalled to us why we consider his Orfeo to be the first operatic masterpiece – it remains hors concours even without words – but here the rewards in understanding through so many paths to and from his work and those of Landi and Rossi  were manifold. Monteverdi’s ‘Rosa del ciel’ was heart-rending, Rossi’s later lament was more ornate, in what we have come, rightly or wrongly, to consider more ‘Baroque’ style, echoed in fuller ‘orchestral’ response. Landi’s ‘It’ al sacro consiglio’ was perhaps more generic a setting, yet still interesting to hear in such context. The ‘Battaglia’ from Andrea Falconiero’s Primo libro delle canzone gently reminded us that opera is and always has been theatre too, two of the ensemble having slipped out returning with their instruments in a dialogue that here began, if only began, to approach some of our notions of music theatre. Orpheus and his instrument having travelled to Hades, other humans and their ‘musicking’ could join in musical sympathy.

For the second, shorter ‘act’, a Rossi passacaglia proved a splendidly apt and contrasting curtain-raiser: in later, more ‘orchestral’ style, yes, but also, more importantly, in dramatic mood. Landi’s narration, ‘Volge Orfeo gli occhi’, showed his artistry to more individually expressive effect, at least to my twenty-first-century ears, than the previous excerpt from his 1619 tragicommedia pastorale; here, perhaps conditioned by what had gone before, I found his simpler writing more allied to the later century and arguably in better company. Harp (lyre) music in both halves by Giovanni Maria Trabaci soothed the soul and furthered the action. For Orpheus’s farewell, Rossi and of course Borgioni rose magnificently to the occasion; no one could have entertained any doubt about what was happening and about to happen. A trio-instrumental treatment of the lullaby ‘Oblivion soave’ from L’incoronazione di Poppea, cornetist Gebhard David’s line rocking atop and against its continuo, worked its magic in winning new guise, prior to a splendidly theatrical change of mood for Charon/Caronte’s ‘Beva, beva secure l’onda’. This was Landi in festive mode, its strophic form nicely varied in Borgioni’s ornamentation and, of course, the Ensemble’ response. 

As an encore, the thwarted happy ending returned: again, emblematic of a key theme in the history of the genre. Borgioni and the players treated us to a solo rendition of the closing ‘chorus’ of L’Orfeo, ‘Vanne Orfeo felice a pieno’. Orpheus reborn once again: where should we be without him?

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Pénélope, 21 July 2025

Prinzregententheater

Images: Bernd Uhlig
Pénélope (Victoria Karkacheva)

 

Pénélope – Victoria Karkacheva
Ulysse – Brandon Jovanovich
Euryclée – Rinat Shaham
Eumée – Thomas Mole
Cléone – Valeria Eickhoff
Mélantho – Seonwoo Lee
Alkandre – Martina Myskohild
Phylo – Ena Pongrac
Lydie – Eirin Rognerud
Eurynome – Elene Gvritishvili
Antinoüs – Loïc Félix
Eurymaque – Leigh Melrose
Léodés – Joel Williams
Ctésippe – Zachary Rioux
Pisandre – Dafydd Jones
Shepherd – Nicolas Bader
Ulysse double – Stefan Lorch
Pénélope double – Teresa Sperling
Archer – Daniela Maier

Director – Andrea Breth
Designs – Raimund Orfeo Voigt
Costumes – Ursula Renzenbrink
Lighting – Alexander Koppelmann
Dramaturgy – Lukas Leipfinger, Klaus Bertisch

Vocalensemble ‘LauschWerk’ (chorus director: Sonja Lachenmayr)
Bayerisches Staatsorchester
Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

 

Pénélope, Ulysse (Brandon Jovanovich and Stefan Lorch)

Fauré’s only opera Pénélope was premiered at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in March 1913, moving to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées only two months later. It has fared incommensurably less well with posterity than the Stravinsky ballet that had its premiere there later that month. The opera is no Rite of Spring, of course, yet what is? In an excellent new production for Munich directed by Andrea Breth and conducted by Susanna Mälkki, Pénélope emerged as an opera quite undeserving of its neglect, intrinsically and by comparison with more than a few ‘repertoire works’, especially from the previous century. What we heard should also have confounded some lazy preconceptions about the composer. 

Breth’s production is a typically serious piece of theatre, which grapples with the highly untheatrical nature of the work and, to my mind, largely succeeds. A fellow musicologist friend I met at the performance pointed to its place in a specifically French conception of drama dating back at least as far as Corneille and Racine, in which little happens onstage in terms of stage action, almost all unfolding through words, I am sure he is right. The classical unities are also certainly observed. I thought also, inevitably, of Pelléas et Mélisande, though the relationship between Fauré and Debussy was not an easy one. They certainly shared contexts and influences and neither cared for operatic display, to put it mildly, but ultimately this was probably more correspondence than anything else. 

In any case, Breth’s mixture of realism and ritual, the latter founded in doubles for characters, but also ways of acting (in more than one sense), proved compelling and fitting, removing any doubts that this might be an oratorio or something else masquerading in operatic guise. Characters processed, imitated, took their time, and just occasionally acted hurriedly—in keeping with the work yet not bound by it. Opening action during the Prélude presented an elderly man guiding a woman in wheelchair to view museum exhibits, stark yet broken. This Pénélope and Ulysse framed the action and in some sense presaged it, three suitors, ready for action, later removing their shirts and adopting the poses of those statues. There was, then, a circularity that came into conflict with yet also helped form the drama literary and staged. What we saw and heard played with time and involved characters and audience in reception of myth and opera alike. 

When revenge came, economic presentation unmistakeably evoking the rural hinterland of Ithaca, before closing in once again on the palace, it lacked nothing in brutality, suitors treated as replacement pieces of meat for those they would have served at the banquet. It was clear and direct, like the work itself, meaningfully adding to rather than merely doubling or indeed contradicting it. If the conclusion struggled to convince – two people in front of me talking through the closing bars did not help – then that is more a problem with the work. A hymn to Zeus is one way of rounding things off, I suppose, but something a little more ambiguous or indeed human might have worked better. That is not what we have, of course. One might sense Breth undercutting things with the frozen, tableau dimension to what we see at the close, or one might not. Perhaps that was the point. 

Susanna Mälkki’s direction of excellent orchestra, chorus, and cast was similarly sympathetic and comprehending, with work and staging alike. One sensed, rightly or wrongly, that musical and stage interpretation had developed in tandem. Where there was a light sense of Götterdämmerung’s Gibichung decay onstage, perhaps even a stylised Gallic return for Salome/Salomé, so was there in the music, Mälkki knowing what was and was not Wagnerian in Fauré’s method and soundworld, the latter more than one might expect, though far from all. Likewise with Debussy. Orchestral lines developed differently, of course, at times not unlike Fauré’s chamber music; vocal lines emerged woven like Pénelope’s shroud, again showing consciousness that, whilst there were unsurprisingly aspects in common with the composer’s songs, this was not a song cycle writ large but an opera.    

Victoria Karkacheva and Brandon Jovanovich made for a compelling central pair, musically and dramatically conceived in utmost sympathy with work and staging. There was a deep connection between the two expressed in words, music, and gesture, that did not shy away from darker aspects of fate and revenge, without being merely consumed by them. Rinat Shaham’s nurse Euryclée offered an exquisite, chalumeau-like voice of wisdom and recognition. The similarly faithful shepherd Eumée received compelling characterisation from Thomas Mole. A duly nasty yet individual set of suitors received what it deserved yet offered much vocal pleasure in the meantime. Loïc Félix’s ringing Antinoüs, Leigh Melrose’s typically compelling Eurymaque, and Joel Williams’s subtle Léodés especially noteworthy (to me). But there was no weak link in the cast. The evening’s success relied throughout on collaboration—acted as well as sung, for which Stefan Lorch and Teresa Sperling as doubles for Pénélope and Ulysse and Daniela Maier gymnastically stringing the latter’s bow must also be credited. 

Comparisons with Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria are near inevitable for the opera-goer, yet are not especially helpful. What would not pale slightly at least in its shadow? If only we lived in a world in which comparisons with Dallapiccola’s Ulisse were meaningful. Perhaps one day. In the meantime, this excellent staging and these equally excellent performances can well stand for themselves. They may just prove a milestone in this opera’s unlucky reception history.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Die Liebe der Danae, 19 July 2025

 

Nationaltheater

Image: © Geoffroy Schied

Jupiter – Christopher Maltman
Merkur – Ya-Chung Huang
Pollux – Vincent Wolfsteiner
Danae – Malin Byström
Xanthe – Erika Baikoff
Midas – Andreas Schager
Four Kings – Martin Snell, Bálint Szabó, Paul Kaufmann, Kevin Conners
Semele – Sarah Dufresne
Europa – Evgeniya Sotnikova
Alkmene – Emily Sierra
Leda – Avery Amereau
Four Watchers – Bruno Khouri, Yosif Slavov, Daniel Noyola, Vitor Bispo
A Voice – Elene Gvitishvili

Director, choreography – Claus Guth
Set designs – Michael Levine
Costumes – Ursula Kudrna
Lighting – Alessandro Carletti
Video – rocafilm
Dramaturgy – Yvonne Gebauer, Ariane Bliss

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Christoph Heil)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Sebastian Weigle (conductor)

© Monika Rittershaus

For what continues to be considered an ill-fated rarity, Die Liebe der Danae has had several outings over the past couple of decades or so. I have seen three productions before this, two admittedly at its Salzburg Festival ‘home’ and none in Britain, though Garsington staged it a little before my time in 1999. (A recording, under the late Elgar Howarth, remains available.) Claus Guth’s Munich production, first seen earlier this season in February, is the Bavarian State Opera’s fourth. Rudolf Hartmann directed it twice; his first, 1953 version travelling on a company visit to the Royal Opera House, which has neglected to present it since. Hartmann’s 1967 production was designed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, no less, whilst 1988 saw a new version from Giancarlo del Monaco. With Rudolf Kempe, Joseph Keilberth, and Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting respectively, some of those occasions will surely have been fondly recalled by some in the Munich audience this time around. Nearly forty years on, though, it was time for something new. Perhaps ironically for an opera concerned in part with the baleful influence of gold, little expense would seem to have been spared. I wish, then, I could have felt greater enthusiasm, especially prior to the third act, for what I saw—and to some extent heard. 

Guth’s production opeened before the work with Danae posing for a photo shoot. Following a number of poses and loud clicks, the music could begin. The action played out exclusively in a penthouse with views of skyscrapers and the odd helicopter (as when Midas arrives). Pollux was dressed as a caricatured Donald Trump, silly hair, red tie, and overweight. His first appearance was enough to elicit laughter, which is fair enough: it was, for once, an amusing joke, but that was it really. Nothing was done with the identity beyond a love (common to all characters, it would seem) for the crass vulgarity of dictator-chic gold. That may have been a cause for relief given the impending shower of gold and indeed the question of Pollux’s relationship with his daughter Danae, but it ultimately seemed a bit cheap. (Perhaps that was the point.) And so, it continues, golden appearance clearly a sham, although the particularly trashy get-up of Jupiter as Midas is not without unfortunate connotations of Jimmy Savile, at least to a British viewer. 

© Geoffroy Schied

For the third act, everything changed—as, in a way, it should. The bubble had burst, though the physical devastation suggested war rather than a ‘mere’ credit crunch. (One might well argue that the two cannot be so readily separated. Indeed. But that probably needs to be shown rather than merely assumed or elided.) The drama that apparently truly interested Guth – up to a point, one cannot blame him – could commence in these new circumstances and one could actually begin to relate to the characters. In that, Guth’s conception was seemingly matched by a more committed performance from conductor Sebastian Weigle. They were doubtless following prevailing opinion; faced with the proverbial revolver to the head, who would not preserve the final act over the preceding two? But we are not—and perceived or actual imbalance is surely all the more reason to ask how we might elevate the latter. I am sure no one intended to reinforce (relative) critical opprobrium, but the first act in particular came across as often merely expository and, worse, expository of things that did not appear to have much in the way of consequence later on. If there was in Guth’s case unquestionably a guiding intelligence to the whole, contrast of ‘before’ and ‘after’ very much the thing, a little more sense of why we might care about these people and the situation they were in would have done no harm. 

Did we need, though, Juno to wander around above the stage without doing anything of obvious import? Having that higher level was not a bad way of emphasising difference between gods and humans—and of showing in which guise Jupiter should be understood at which time. Yet beyond that, I ended up regretting Strauss had not written a part for the goddess, perhaps in wry homage to Handel’s Semele, which, given his profound knowledge of all manner of musical history, he must have known. Merkur’s dancing above – that of everyone else too – is best forgotten, suffice to say that, having tried his hand at choreography, Guth would be well advised to stick to the day job. 

© Monika Rittershaus

If it was interesting and in itself moving to see at the close film of old Munich and of Strauss walking in his garden, presumably at Garmisch, they nonetheless suggested a certain abdication of responsibility. Danae was written for Salzburg, not Munich, and never received its full premiere in Strauss’s lifetime precisely because he wished it to take place across the reinstated border. Whilst we can look for traces of the composer in the work, it is also not obviously ‘about’ him, even a fictionalised him. It is not Intermezzo and it is not obviously laced with one of Strauss’s greatest musicodramatic gifts: irony. In the end, though, the story had been clearly enough told, as it has been on all occasions I have seen the work—and this was in every way preferable to the unconcealed racism of Alvis Hermanis for Salzburg in 2016. 

To my surprise, Weigle proved less flexible than he had in an excellent reading at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in 2016. If orchestral playing was more or less beyond criticism in itself – and the conductor doubtless merits some credit for that, but it was difficult to avoid the Bayerische Staatsorchester would have played with exemplary clarity, balance, and heft no matter what. The problem, rather, lay with Weigle’s reluctance or inability to let the score flow. Especially earlier on, too much emerged as unrelentingly loud. There is extraordinary variegation in the score, much of which had been more successfully presented in Berlin—and it needs a helping hand or two to draw it out. The difference may have been in part a matter of acoustics, but it is surely part of the conductor’s job to deal with that. I cannot recall feeling quite so bludgeoned in the Nationaltheater before. The third act, like Guth’s, was considerably more successful. Earlier on, lack of Straussian sweep tended to draw attention to the infelicities of Joseph Gregor’s libretto: something a fine performance can readily have one forget. 

© Monika Rittershaus

Volume issues extended to some singing too; again, this was surely at least in part Weigle’s task to moderate. As Midas, Andreas Schager was particularly in need of some restraint. Schager is, of course, an extraordinary Heldentenor. It seems churlish to cavil, given long years we endured when no one could sing Siegfried and few if any could master other Wagner roles. Here, he proved indefatigable as ever and also showed himself perfectly capable of softer, more sensitive singing in the third act. A little more shading elsewhere would nonetheless have been welcome. Another near-impossible role, arguably more so, is that of Jupiter, in which Christopher Maltman’s recent forays into heavier roles, Wotan included, fully justified themselves. Maltman despatched the lower, darker reaches of the role, movingly indeed and with echoes of the latter god’s farewell to Brünnhilde, whilst attaining rich and ringing clarity at the top, to suggest an almost Kaufmann-like tenor. In the title role, Malin Byström proved agile, fearless, and – important, this – rather likeable. Hers may not be the largest of voices, but she knew what to do with it and did it well. Smaller roles were all well taken, as were the choruses. Special mention should go to the quartet of ‘elder’ ladies, amusingly portrayed in sex-and-shopping mode and beautifully sung by Sarah Dufresne, Evgeniya Sotnikova, Emily Sierra, and Avery Amereau. 

As for my reservations, perhaps it is time to accept that this is a very difficult work to bring off. Not every attempt will be entirely successful, any more than it is with, say, Der Rosenkavalier or Salome. Passing slowly yet surely into the repertoire would not be the worst of things, far from it.

Munich Opera Festival (3) - Pelléas et Mélisande, 22 July 2024

Prinzregententheater

Images: © Wilfried Hösl

Pelléas – Ben Bliss
Mélisande – Sabine Devieilhe
Golaud – Christian Gerhaher
Arkel – Franz-Josef Selig
Geneviève – Sophie Koch
Yniold – Felix Hofbauer
Doctor – Martin Snell
Shepherd – Pawel Horodyski

Director – Jetske Mijnssen
Set design – Ben Baur
Lighting – Bernd Purkrabek
Choreography – Dustin Klein
Dramaturgy – Ariane Bliss

Projektchor der Bayerischen Staatsoper (director: Franz Obermair)
Bayerisches Staatsorchester
Hannu Lintu (conductor)

Nine years ago, in this same theatre at this same festival, I saw Munich’s previous Pelléas et Mélisande: a staging by Christiane Pohle which I greatly admired, but  everyone else seemed to loathe. I am tempted to say ‘failed to understand’, but let us move on—to its successor, directed by Jetske Mijnssen. Perhaps it was not the best time to see this, only a fortnight after encountering Katie Mitchell’s feminist rethinking of the work in Aix, in its first revival. For me, there is nothing especially wrong with Mijnssen’s staging. It does pretty much what one would expect of a Pelléas, save perhaps for presenting a greater realism in place of its Symbolism.

In that lay my doubts. Not that there is anything wrong with that in principle; far from it. Yet without a change of perspective, or some other such idea, the point remained elusive: not in the sense that Pelléas can, must remain elusive, but rather suggesting an extended bourgeois parody of Tristan und Isolde, with which it of course has much in common. That would be a point of view, though not necessarily one I should be inclined to pursue (imagining nonetheless with a wry smile what Nietzsche, in Case of Wagner mode, would have made of Pelléas). What I think Mijnssen is getting at, suggested by her final act – in which the castle, whose rooms whether in the forest, by the stagnant pool, or elsewhere have provided the setting for all that has gone before, is stripped to its foundations – is a psychological claim that we are all ultimately like Mélisande, not least in our inability to know one another. Presumably the wooden boards relate also to the forest we never really see.

Following a realistic if sparing portrayal of early-twentieth-century costumes, furniture, and so on, Arkel’s words ‘C’est un pauvre petit être mystérieux comme tout le monde’ offer the backdrop for the entirety of this act. Having moved from a (beautifully danced) ball for the first scene, to this hospital bed for the close, often viewing Pelléas’s sick father in his bed, the tragedy encompasses all of us in a metaphysical sense far from untrue to the work. The observation – and execution – of Golaud’s chess game with his son Yniold, and Yniold’s resort to playing with his toys, perhaps as a way of trying to understanding what is happening, including a similar sweeping of the board and pieces, are suggestive and accomplished. Golaud’s striking of Yniold likewise offers a powerful moment.

Much else, especially with water – seen as rainfall as we enter the theatre, yet otherwise relegated until the close to a long, thin ‘pool’ at the front of the stage – seems to sit a little awkwardly between two stools. That the pools are more evident in the final scene, presumably closing in on the very foundations – in more than one sense – of castle and family is another good idea. But Pelléas’s reappearance – a ghost, a dream, or an actual reappearance? – to show Mélisande her child seems to come less from an alternative dimension than from an alternative production or concept. Perhaps I am missing something, given what seems in many ways an intelligent attempt to construct a whole from what is viewed, curtain falling after every scene, as a quasi-filmic succession of dramatic fragments.

An effort to construct a greater whole in theatrical time from quasi-modernist fragments, as opposed to starting with a whole and carving detail from it, seemed also to characterise Hannu Lintu’s way with Debussy’s score. At its best, Lintu’s direction conjured a wonderful translucency from the Munich orchestra; it did not want for dark malevolence when called for, either. My principal reservation related to what seemed – I am unsure whether it actually was – for scenes, perhaps acts too, to slow during their course. No one wants to rush through Pelléas, of course, quite the contrary; yet there were occasions when I felt momentum was in danger of being lost. This may, however, have been as much a matter of pauses between scenes on account of scene rearrangement, especially before the fifth and final act. By the same token, losing oneself in the forest is surely part of the musical experience, perhaps all the more so when we never really see it.

There are doubtless many ways to sing Mélisande, yet during her performance, Sabine Devieilhe had me convinced hers was, if not quite the only one, then the best. Her ease of communication, not only in the French language but in Debussy’s musical style, was effortlessly communicated for all to hear; it was simply as if she were speaking, and as clear as if that were the case too. Moreover, Devieilhe’s delivery of the text seemed indivisible from dramatic situation and imperative. French is a notoriously difficult language to sing; it would be difficult, unsurprisingly, to claim that all in the cast managed with such ease. Sophie Koch’s excellent Geneviève was of course an exception, leaving us to long for more.

That said, no one made a bad job of it either, and an age of ‘international casts’ brings advantages and disadvantages. Christian Gerhaher’s Golaud was unquestionably a fine, brutal character study. Some will doubtless have taken more to his hectoring way (at times), but it was rooted in his conception of Golaud’s sadism. Gerhaher showed the courage not to try to endear his character to anyone, without in any sense rendering him one-dimensional. To that, Ben Bliss’s boyish, mellifluous Pelléas proved an excellent foil, vocal and scenic communication offering ample justification for Mélisande’s preference. The dark ambiguity of Franz-Josef Selig’s Arkel cast due shadow over all. Last but far from least, Felix Hofbauer gave an outstanding performance as Yniold: not ‘for a boy’, but for anyone. As impressively acted as it was sung, this treble’s performance offered yet another feather in the cap for the ever-lauded Tölz Boys’ Choir. So in many respects, the fragments did add up to more.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Idomeneo, 5 July 2024

Nationaltheater

Images © Wilfried Hösl

  

Idomeneo – Pavol Breslik
Idamante – Emily D’Angelo
Ilia – Olga Kulchynska
Elettra – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Arbace – Jonas Hacker
High Priest of Neptune – Liam Bonthrone
The Voice (Oracle) – Alexander Köpeczi

Antú Romero Nunes (director)
Dustin Klein (choreography)
Phyllida Barlow, Nina Schöttl (set designs)
Victoria Behr (costumes)
Michael Bauer (lighting)
Rainer Karlitschek (dramaturgy)
Catharina von Bülow (revival director)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (director: Christoph Heil)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Ivor Bolton (conductor)

Take a stroll around central Munich and you may come upon a plaque on Altenhofstrasse indicating the spot where Mozart lived in the winter of 1780-81 whilst at work on Idomeneo. The opera was written for the Residenztheater, now generally known as the Cuvilliés-Theater, although now we saw it at the Nationaltheater, home since its 1818 opening to most of the Bavarian Court – latterly the State – Opera’s activities. Both theatres were eventually rebuilt after Allied bombing, although Mozart’s apartment building was destroyed for good in 1944.  A different staging of Idomeneo would have been required to go ‘home’, for Antú Romero Nunes’s 2021 production certainly makes use of the larger stage and space, but that did not entirely negate a sense of homecoming, not least given memories of a fine concert encircling and presaging the work at last year’s Munich Opera Festival, in the ‘original’ venue. 

Why inverted commas? Perhaps they represent a fussiness too far, given how much any old building will have been rebuilt over the years, although the old theatre did have to be rebuilt from scratch, finally reopening in 1958, not with Idomeneo but with Le nozze di Figaro. Idomeneo was still then a great rarity and remains, to many of us bafflingly so, less popular than any other of Mozart’s seven ‘mature’, full-scale operas. (Many of us may be inclined to soften the distinction drawn there, but it continues to hold for opera companies and their general public.) Given the total break in its performance history – unlike that of, say, Figaro – we might say that any performance becomes more of a reconstruction too, irrespective of intention. The work is often cut and if, at least in a good performance, one feels the loss, it can also work in truncated form within reason. This version – and I think one can go so far as to use that word – had, however, some highly unusual, even unprecedented textual features, some to my mind more justifiable than others. Old and new, fidelity and reimagination, text and performance, music and drama: these do not necessarily stand opposed, but their relationships have also never been without friction. If part of the interest lies in that friction, difficulties may also lie therein. On this occasion, it would be fair to say that we experienced both. 

Action prior to the overture is now a commonly accepted, albeit perhaps now all too common, theatrical strategy. It is more unusual to open with stage music interpolated from elsewhere, a feature throughout the production. What we saw and heard, though, intrigued, largely due, I think, to Phyllida Barlow’s arresting set designs, verging on an installation in themselves. Here, at the beginning, in a dark and dangerous port, musicians and dancers set the scene in several ways, solo- and ensemble-human fragility contrasting with the elemental sea implied scenically and musically, as the Overture proper came upon us. Quite why Nunes felt the need to project ‘titles’ as it unfolded, I am not sure. I suppose it let people know who the characters were and who was singing their parts, but beyond that it achieved little. In retrospect, the lack of dramatic motivation, in spite of a lot ‘going on’, proved too prophetic. Beyond the striking, meaningful ‘look’ – one could read much into Barlow’s structures, above all the sheer mysteriousness of the realm of the gods – Nunes seemed to have little to say. The performance progressed, but that was about it, save for a strange marriage of interpolations and cuts, recitative predictably suffering most. Of politics there was little sign, but nor did the lack of drama and sense of installation seem to be an overt aesthetic, as in the case of Romeo Castellucci. 

Idomeneo (Pavol Breslik) and Arbace (Jonas Hacker)

Perhaps most indefensible – not the first time it has reared its head in a Mozart opera – was a fortepiano rendition of the D minor Fantasia, KV 397/385g, shorn of its turn to the major mode (by whomever), which provided the opportunity for further ballet music, probably suggestive of the relationship between Idamante and Ilia, though I was not always clear whether dance were intended as pantomime or in the older, ‘Italian’ tradition. ‘Perhaps’, because it was run close by the surprise arrival of the aria, ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te … Non temer, amato bene’, KV 505, for Idamante and, you guessed it, obbligato fortepiano. Emily D’Angelo sang it very well, but neither its tenuous connection with the opera nor dramatic momentum was well served. 

The worst decision, though, was to fade out ‘Torna la pace’, musicians onstage imitating Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. What could the director have been thinking of? And what could any conductor – presumably not Ivor Bolton, who did not conduct the premiere – have been thinking of, permitting such a radical step without any discernible motivation? Pity poor Pavol Breslik as Idomeneo, who then had to set though the concluding ballet music eating a sandwich, as dancers, more furries than Furies, did their thing. Martin Kušej’s 2014 production for Covent Garden, much misunderstood at the time and sadly unrevived, showed quite how this extraordinary music can grip as drama (and despite an indifferent musical performance). This, alas, simply became tedious. 

Bolton’s musical direction did not help in that respect. It certainly had its moments over the evening as a whole, but the problem was that they were mostly moments. It cannot have been helped by the ‘version’ with which he was presumably presented, but a greater sense of dramatic pulse could readily have been achieved, as could more generous vibrato for the strings and less ‘period’ rasping from the brass. Trombones, though, sounded splendidly otherworldly for the Oracle. Occasional discrepancies between stage and pit, especially during choruses, were swiftly and tidily resolved. The array of continuo instruments was odd, as well as choices made as when to use them; however well played, the presence of a theorbo made little sense. A wind machine, though, offered a nod both to older stagecraft and to onstage atmosphere. 

The greatest satisfaction for me was to be had from the singing. For me, a highlight was the beginning of the third act, Olga Kulchynska’s ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’ and the quartet the other side of KV 505 vocally breathtaking and dramatically very much on point. The four singers’ coming together could not have spelled  fear and fate more clearly. Breslik’s assumption of the title role was beyond reproach, ringing in musical security yet permitting of doubt and nuance in character. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s Elettra was very good too, though there was a strange moment in her final aria in which she seemed to pause; it was unclear to me whether this were a demand of the production, an interpretative strategy, or something else. Indeed, throughout, her character seemed strangely minimised by the production. Jonas Hacker’s Arbace made the most of both his arias, as did Liam Bonthrone and Alexander Köpeczi in their smaller roles. The chorus likewise made a fine impression, hinting at a greater meaning that seemingly eluded the director.