Il mondo alla rovescia, Salzburger Landestheater, 30 April 2025

Images: SLT / Tobias WItzgall

La Generala – Daniele Macciantelli
La Colonnella – Hazel McBain
L’ajuntata maggiora – Katie Coventry
Marchesa – Nicole Lubinger
Amaranto – Luke Sinclair
Il Conte – George Humphreys
Admiral – Yevheniy Kapitula
Il gran Colombo – Michael Schober
Girasole – Alexander Hüttner

Director – Alexandra Liedtke
Set designs – Philip Rubner
Costumes – Johanna Lakner
Dramaturgy – Anna N.M. Lea
Lighting – Sebastian Schubert

Chorus and Supplementary Chorus of the Salzburg Landestheater (chorus director: Mario El Fakih)

Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra

Carlo Benedetto Cimento (conductor)

La Generala (Daniele Macciantelli), Il Conte (George Humphreys), L’ajuntata maggiora (Katie Coventry), La Colonnella (Hazel McBain)

If it often proves difficult to think or write about, say, Alexander Zemlinsky without invoking his still-more-celebrated brother-in-law, how much more difficult is it for Salieri—without, well, you know mention of a certain other composer contemporary to him, perhaps all the more so in Salzburg. Or perhaps not, since Salieri has been doing relatively well there of late. Last year’s Mozartwoche offered him a number of opportunities, those I heard very well taken. This year, the bicentenary of his death, the Landestheater gives his 1795 dramma giocoso, Il mondo alla rovescia, on which he had begun work in 1779, only to set it aside and return to it in 1792, renewing an initial collaboration with his (and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s) friend Caterino Mazzolà, who the previous summer had worked with a Salzburg composer on a revision of Metastasio’s La clemenza di Tito for Leopold II’s coronation as king of Bohemia. (In the meantime, Mazzolà’s libretto, then entitled L'isola capricciosa, had been set by Giacomo Rust, briefly Hofkapellmeister in Salzburg, for the 1780 Venice carnival.) It is perhaps ironic that we now know Mazzolà best for an opera seria, when by far the greater part of his operatic work was in the buffo genre, here taking its leave from Carlo Goldoni’s Il mondo alla reversa (another Venice carnival piece, by Baldassare Galuppi in 1750). Some may know another Salieri collaboration, La scuola de’ gelosi, but any opportunity to acquaint oneself with further Mazzolà as well as further Salieri is greatly welcome. This opera, given its modern premiere in 2009 in the composer’s home town of Legnago, is now heard in a new version prepared at the behest of conductor Carlo Benedetto Cimento by the same musicologist and mandolinist Bernardo Ticci, now drawing on all available sources. Some music, including a vocal duet with mandolin, here played expertly onstage by Mert E. Akyüz, thus receives its first hearing since 1795. 

Generala, Conte, wedding guests

This is not the place for a synopsis, but for a work that will be unfamiliar to most, the basic idea is that two shipwrecked Europeans, a Count and Marchioness are taken captive by a female General (Generala, hence I have kept Italian in the cast list) and the island society over which she rules, one in which usual gender roles have been reversed, so that men do the housework, women do the soldiering, and so on, so that the Count comes to enjoy being fought over by two women, the Generala and a younger Colonella, whom he favours and with whom ultimately he will elect to stay on the island. In a sense, the idea is simple, but its ramifications are not, a dichotomy well realised in Alexandra Liedtke’s staging, brought to life in excellent, often outstanding performances from a fine cast and the Mozarteum Orchestra, galvanised by Cimento, for whom this resurrection has clearly been a labour of love. 

Projection of a few words and pictorial scenes sets the scene, yet it is still a surprise to see men in happy if oppressed domesticity when the curtain rises, clad in Barbie (Ken) pink, cleaning equipment to hand, soon lorded (ladied) over by military women who engage in the crudest of seduction—though a question immediately posed by the shadow projection of its outcome is how consonant that particular act might be with the island’s ‘natural order’ of things. Doubtless it can be and for some in a twenty-first century will be, but the question hints at an inability of any of us to escape certain aspects of gender roles, whether or no we wish to do so. The variety of means – action, designs, thought bubble interventions, etc. – with which points are made might sound didactic on the page, yet notwithstanding one or two sobering exceptions, for instance a reminder of the gender pay gap today among musicians, the general tone is comedic, even comical. If one does not get one reference, say to Barbie, one will probably do so another, say to The Magic Flute or to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, alluding to the Count’s arrival on land as well as gender-reversal, as he sits to be painted. And lest you think this all sounds too binary, the painter and dressmaker Girasole are evidently more interested in one another. (In the programme, we learn that, ‘according to Salieri’, presumably Mazzolà too, the latter will end up partnering the Generala’s adjutant, but it counsels us to find out the meaning of ‘lavender marriage’.) So the production lightly yet firmly develops the drama from its original state, well aware of the differences in outlook between societies 230 years apart, but also of what has not changed. I was a little surprised to see the Generala’s grotesquerie – the joke being she is an older woman, sung en travestie by a basso buffo – go unquestioned, but perhaps that is also the point. We have not moved on as much as we think, and we still find the premise in large part absurd. The production’s openness to different standpoints is a strength and arguably a necessary one. 

Amaranto (Luke Sinclair) and others

Intention is always a fraught issue, whether in performance or ‘the music itself’ (‘TMI’), a once-fashionable problematising term in musicology (feminist critiques included), but from which we now have mostly moved on. Whether Cimento ‘meant’ to bring to the fore things I thought and heard I cannot possibly know without asking him, but I can certainly say that much did come to mind, dramatically and conceptually. Above all, he drew outstanding, committed playing from the orchestra, big-boned and subtle, characterful and situational, fully aware of structure, form, dramatic momentum, and their interaction. No, Salieri does not have the gift of musical characterisation that someone else does, but nor does Haydn; even Gluck’s gift here is distinctly limited in comparison. Very few composers from any period of musical history do, if indeed that is what they are attempting (which we should by no means take for granted). I found particularly interesting the way vocal writing and number form more generally adapted or did not according to gender reversal. Was this parody? And if so, whose parody was it anyway? How much was playing with expectation, in a different way from Così fan tutte, yet one whose requirements for musical learning did not, amongst the more knockabout material, necessarily seem less. Moreover, the wind and specifically brass writing, often associated, obviously enough, with militarism set me to think how much might this have been (re-)conceived, or at least received, as an opera in wartime, coming about two years before Haydn’s Missa in tempore belli. Indeed, in broader conception, Haydn’s Goldoni opera Il mondo della luna, written only two years before Salieri’s initial compositional work, often came to mind dramatically—and perhaps even musically. 

Individual performances were uniformly excellent. Daniele Macciantelli clearly had a ball as La Generala, never putting a stage or vocal foot wrong whilst doing so. If you wanted to know how soprano coloratura – and much else – might be used to convey toxic masculinity/femininity, Hazel McBain was your person as La Colonnella. George Humphreys managed the competing demands – allure, cunning, and resolve – as well as, well, any woman might have done. In a strikingly different role from Lucio Silla (not JC Bach’s), in which I saw him last year, our Amaranto Luke Sinclair showed that comedy, properly understood and presented, is so much more than mere amusement—whilst offering that too. In a ‘smaller’ role that nonetheless seemed considerably greater, Alexander Hüttner did likewise as Girasole. Nicole Lubinger’s Marchesa’s journey to greater feminist self-knowledge was finely traced. As the Generala’s adjutant, Katie Coventry similarly combined striking stage presence and every musical virtue, as she had as Cecilio in that Lucio Silla.  Yevheniy Kapitula as the Admiral and Michael Schober’s Gran Colombo rounded off the cast in ‘smaller’ roles that yet contributed to an evening that was so much more than the sum of its parts.

Colonnella, Conte, Ajutanta

Overall, then, the overt emphasis was comedic, although creditably not to the extent one could not also consider what else might have been done, always bearing in mind that no one staging or performance is likely to cover all bases. Dramas worth performing are usually more open, if sometimes to the discomfort of their creators, than any single approach will allow. Scenically, what I missed was a stronger sense of that wartime context. That is not a complaint but rather an observation concerning what further layering might be added—and doubtless reflecting my own historical (and contemporary) preoccupations. Austrian defeats of the previous year 1794 (Fleurus and Aldenhoven) would doubtless have informed the first critical responses of many to an opera premiered in January 1795. And there may be reason to consider a gendered element there too. Little more than three years earlier, during the Bohemian coronation festivities for Emperor Francis II’s father and predecessor, Leopold II, La clemenza di Tito received star theatrical billing, its premiere the evening of the coronation itself. That, however, was as first among equals in a programme that also included August Kotzebue’s topical, one-act comedy Der weibliche Jacobiner-Club, pitting the Parisian Madem (sic) Duport, radicalised by revolution, against her traditionalist husband. 

There is a case to be made that bourgeois revolutionaries strengthened gender binaries and power relations; certainly with hindsight that seems to have been the case. But it was not necessarily how things seemed at the time. Comedy was often a ‘safe’ way of expressing and exaggerating fears of social upheaval. Revolution and the revolutionary wars, which were how the former most immediately manifested itself in this part of Europe, might also threaten another variety of the ‘world turned upside down’, or at least be feared to do so. Music could – and did – deepen and question such assumptions and indeed their questioning too.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (6) - Peretyatko/Danish CO/Fischer: Mozart and Salieri, 30 January 2024

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Mozart: Lucio Silla, KV 135: Overture; Don Giovanni, KV 527: ‘Crudele! Ah no, mio bene!’ – ‘Non mi dir, bell’idol mio’
Salieri: Sinfonia, ‘La Veneziana’
Mozart: Concert aria, ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ – ‘Non temer, amato bene’, KV 505; Idomeneo, KV 366: ‘Oh smanie! Oh furie!’ – ‘D’Oreste, d’Alace’; Symphony no.36 in C major, KV 425, ‘Linz’

Olga Peretyatko (soprano)
Danish Chamber Orchestra,
Ádám Fischer (conductor)

Images: Wolfang Lienbacher

Ádám Fischer is a fine if sometimes eccentric Mozartian. His concert performance of Il re pastore with the Mozarteum Orchestra at last year’s Salzburg Festival was for me a highlight, and his work with the Danish Chamber Orchestra has gained many plaudits. Understandably, if this concert, my final engagement at this year’s Mozartwoche, is anything to go by. Moreover, it confirmed the sensational qualities of soprano Olga Peretyatko, whom I had admired in Idomeneo at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden last year. 

The concert opened with the Overture to Lucio Silla, a new production of which has just opened next door at the Landestheater, for which I hope to return to Salzburg later this season and report. In the meantime, this proved quite a taster, as bright, theatrical, and vigorous as one might expect of the young Mozart in D major, here palpably excited to get his hands on the Milanese orchestra. (Paris was not the only fruit.) Woodwind in the first section foreshadowed those of the warm, central Andante in A, with just a hint of the shadows to come. In the final section, Fischer employed a favoured device of his, also to be heard in the Linz Symphony, of restricting certain passages to solo instruments only. 

Peretyatko joined Fischer and the orchestra for three numbers. First was ‘Crudele! Ah no, mio bene!’ – ‘Non mi dir, bell’idol mio’ from Don Giovanni. Opening very much in medias res, giving the accompagnato permitted the performers to prepare us for Donna Anna’s aria, rather than experience it as a pretty, even generically ‘dramatic’ thing-in-itself. It certainly emerged as consequent, treated not only to pinpoint, expressive coloratura and a luxuriant voice, but equal excellence from the orchestra as a whole, gorgeous horns included. ‘Ch’io mi scordi di te?’ – ‘Non temer, amato bene’ was written by Mozart for Nancy Storace, creator of roles for both Mozart (Susanna) and Salieri. Here again, we experience the most vivid of communication through words and music. Fischer’s decision to play Mozart’s piano part too was unfortunate. I have little doubt that he could play or conduct the piece perfectly well; doing both proved, alas, a mistake, and renewed one’s admiration for those pianist-conductors able to do so. Strongly connected to Idomeneo, the aria’s words (though not its recitative’s) coming from Giambattista Varesco’s libretto, it paved the way for the appearance of Elettra after the interval, in which Peretyatko’s star shone, if anything, still brighter. Immediately in character, she had us feel the vipers in Elettra’s bosom, as did the Danish strings, bows fairly bouncing off the strings. Voice and oboe entwined in a veritable dance of death. A whole opera with Fischer, perhaps indeed Idomeneo, would be just the ticket.

 

In between Donna Anna and Mme Storace’s aria, we had heard Salieri’s Sinfonia, latterly called La Veneziana by its 1961 editor Renzo Sabatini. It is not an ‘original’ work, but rather the encounter of two opera overtures, its first movement from La scuola de’ gelosi (indeed written for Venice) and the second and third from La partenza inaspettata. Fischer and the Danish players were again in their theatrical element; anyone could and surely would have guessed this to be the world of opera buffa. Conviction and skill in performance placed this on a different level from any of the Salieri performances I had heard earlier in the week. Counterpoint, gesture, and harmony in the first movement had the composer seem fully worthy of standing in this musical company. The charms of the second could likewise well have been thought the equal of an ‘early’ Mozart symphony or overture. Fischer made it sound easy: as important here as in Mozart. A rollocking hunting finale echoed Haydn, if without his single-mindedness, which might in any case have been less the thing for an opera overture. 

The Linz Symphony, in its usual key of C major rather than the D intriguingly if alarmingly promised by the programme, showed in its first-movement introduction that certain ‘period’ characteristics can readily be employed, should one wish, in this music without loss to a sense of mystery. The exposition proper responded in kind, offering as did the performance as a whole a judicious balance between, well, balance and symmetry on one hand and symphonic development on the other. (Those who complain Mozart unduly emphasises the former could not be more wrong.) The second movement was both more intimate and starker, Fischer excelling once more in reconciling apparent opposites and also displaying a keen ear for colour, to which the orchestra eagerly responded. Just occasionally, his handling could be a little fussy, but there was nothing too grievous. The night-air of Mozart’s Salzburg serenades was to be felt, albeit framed a little more darkly. A minuet hewn from fine marble framed a trio (her for soloists) with effortlessly idiomatic lilt and especially delightful bassoon. The finale went as it ‘should’, apparently competing demands again reframed in collaborative fashion. A noisy audience proved an increasing trial for listening, so observation of the final repeat was a definite advantage in this case. The music sounded all the more urgent until a final blaze in which Fischer gave modern brass its glorious head. It was a little showy, but why not? Clarinets returned to the stage for a remarkably keen encore performance of the Figaro Overture, bringing my Salzburg visit almost full circle.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (3) - Mozart and Salieri, 28 January 2024

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Mozart: Die Zauberflöte, KV 620, Overture; Andante for flute and orchestra in C major, KV 315/285e; Rondo for flute and orchestra in C major, KV 373/285c (arr. Pahud)
Salieri: Concerto for flute and oboe in C major
Mozart: Symphony no.38 in D major, KV 504, ‘Prague’

Emmanuel Pahud (flute)

Camerata Salzburg

François Leleux (oboe/conductor)

Images: Wolfang Lienbacher

This was an interesting concert of music by Mozart and Salieri, the lesser known music faring better for me than the celebrated symphony on the programme. There is nothing unusual in that, of course, especially in repertoire in which very different aesthetics are in play—and ultimately, it may be of greater importance to grant an opportunity to rarely heard music than to present a Prague Symphony to rival Karl Böhm or Daniel Barenboim. 

The Magic Flute Overture, well known though it may be, stood somewhere in between. Tempi were apt and François Leleux took evident care with elements of Camerata Salzburg’s shading. The performance was clear and directed, if somewhat excitable, even fierce. Better that, though, than the po-faced puritanism of many in the Anglo-American wing of the ‘authenticke’ brigade. I sensed an idea – and the most any of us can have is an idea – of the eighteenth-century theatre, though it was difficult to warm to the astringent string tone, worlds away from Sándor Végh. Salzburg woodwind, however, sounded splendid, as they did throughout. 

There followed two pieces for solo flute and orchestra, for which Emmanuel Pahud joined Leleux and Camerata Salzburg. I cannot claim to be a great fan of the lone Andante, KV 315/285e, probably an alternative slow movement for the G major Flute Concerto, KV 313/285c, but it was certainly played well here, with an Italianate long-breathedness that Salieri would surely have admired too. That said, a sense of the ballet – to my ears – is also suggestive of French music. (Think, for instance, of Gluck’s ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’.) Nothing wrong with that: Mozart often blends different stylistic influences. It is not always clear to me, though, quite how those different traits come together. Pahud’s arrangement of the C major Rondo for Violin and Orchestra, KV 373/285c, clearly struck a note of recognition among the audience. Hand on heart, do I think it works as well for the flute as for the violin? No, but it offers new repertoire for a solo instrument less blessed (though hardly without blessings) and, arguably, greater intimacy and sensuality. Occasional solo ornamentation was always tasteful. 

Leleux collected his oboe, whilst continuing to conduct, for Salieri’s Concerto for Flute and Oboe. The first movement’s opening tutti brought both a different voice and a recognisable sense, once again, of theatre. The two solo instruments’ duetting enhanced that impression of opera. Echo effects amused some in the audience: they were well done, if with diminishing returns. I was surprised by the motivic insistence of some passages, but then I suppose we should recall Salieri was a teacher of Beethoven. At other times, the orchestral part was more rhetorical, again breathing the world of the theatre. The slow movement was charming enough, if without the memorability of even lesser Mozart (or Haydn, for that matter). I was not always convinced by its twists and turns, but remained grateful for the opportunity to hear it at all. Here, as elsewhere, Heinz Holliger’s cadenzas offered something new yet in keeping. The finale offered a few surprises, though I struggled sometimes – doubtless labouring under an aesthetic too much derived from Mozart and Haydn – to understand their motivation. A sudden spotlight for the violas, for instance, was intriguing, but ultimately the movement remained somewhat four-square. As an encore, Leleux and Pahud played, without orchestra, the Magic Flute’s encounter between Papageno and Monastatos. 

And so, on to the Prague, its first movement introduction rhetorical, even theatrical, rather than a harbinger of a notably symphonic performance. It was certainly full of incident and notes continued to fly off the page during the main Allegro, whose hallmark, gentle contrast for the second subject notwithstanding, was ebullience: very much a D major for (natural) trumpets and drums. Although enjoyable enough in its way, it felt a little long, especially given the exposition repeat, for something that seemed more inclined towards the early ‘sinfonia’ than the traditional Austro-German symphony. The Andante flowed quickly, as is now fashionable. It was similarly strong in gesture, weaker in overall line. Ultimately, it seemed more a collection of episodes than what we have come to expect. The finale worked best for me, if still lacking a strong enough sense of harmony. Melodic events tumbled forth and sterner passages had an undeniable drama to them, sometimes blazingly so. In context, observing the repeat seemed questionable: again making the movement over-long for Leleux’s approach in performance.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (1) – Mozart and Salieri, 27 January 2024

 

Salzburg Marionette Theatre

Images: Bernhard Mueller

Salieri: Axur, re d’Ormus: Piccolo sinfonia to Act IV; La secchia rapita: ‘Son qual lacera tartana’; Il ricco d’un giorno: ‘Eccomi più che mai – ‘Amor, pietoso Amore’; La grotto di Trofonio: ‘La ra la ra’
Rimsky-Korsakov: Mozart and Salieri

Director, designs – Matthias Bundschuh
Lighting – Matthias Bundschuh, Alexander Proschek
Production manager – Philippe Brunner

Isora – Ekaterina Krasko/ Svetlana Schönfeld/Maximilian Kiener
Mozart – Konstantin Igl/Ursula Winzer
Salieri – Brett Pruunsild/Eva Wiener
Blind violinist – Philipp Schmidt

Students from the Mozarteum University Salzburg
Kai Röhrig (conductor)

After a few years concentrating on Mozart alone, Rolando Villázon, Intendant of Salzburg’s Mozartwoche, has turned to Mozart and Salieri. There is so much more, so much more of interest, to Salieri than the preposterous charge that ‘everyone’ knows, but it has been greatly influential, whether we like it or not, and that of course includes its artistic legacy. Most celebrated of all is Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus, which will be seen here both as film and play. (I should have been keen to see the latter, but alas the scheduling gods had other ideas.) But long before Schaffer was Pushkin, with his short story: basis, almost verbatim, for Rimsky-Korsakov’s short, one-act opera of 1897, here given at Salzburg’s Marionette Theater with puppets, three young singers, and a chamber ensemble of students from the Mozarteum conducted by Kai Röhrig. 

It is a very short opera, so Matthias Bundschuh has decided, in a prologue, to provide a back-story and to redress a little the Mozart-Salieri imbalance by offering a little of the latter’s own music. A middle-aged prima donna Isora recalls her career in its prime: she worked often with Salieri, ‘Antonio’, though sadly never with Mozart. She sings us some of his music, from the buffa rather than seria end of his output, and tells of his unrequited love – he desired marriage – which resulted in her joking dismissal of him through the gift of poison (happily or unhappily, Gift in German). The scene is set, dramatically and musically, for the opera proper to begin, in a German translation by Bundschuh and Philipp Schmidt. And so, in brief, Mozart, full of live and a levity Salieri finds irresponsible, even obscene, calls upon the elder composer, brings him a blind violinist as a joke, massacring his own ‘Batti, batti, o bel Masetto’ – here accomplished with wicked skill – and is invited to dinner, for which he returns in rather darker mood. He tells Salieri the story about the mysterious stranger who has commissioned his Requiem, drinks from the goblet Salieri has prepared, goes to the piano to play from the work he is composing, and is killed. 

All is accomplished through collaboration and synthesis in music, a little speech, and of course the excellent working of Bundschuh’s own puppets. Nice additional touches include a crackly record of Mozart as tango which, somewhat incongruously, the two composers dance, and the intrusion of a recorded excerpt from the Requiem itself. But the scene in which the puppet Mozart plays a new composition of his own at the piano, with interjections from Salieri, is perhaps most impressive. One sees, hears, and appreciates just what craft is required in the collaboration of puppetry and music.

In a programme note, Bundschuh tells of his dislike for ‘Russian pathos’: fair enough, I suppose, but I wonder whether the approach adopted sells Rimsky’s opera, which in any case is hardly Eugene Onegin, somewhat short. It is partly owed, of course, to the requirements of marionette theatre, but might there not have been room for something a little stronger, dare I say more Amadeus-like? Still, the general lightness of what is in any case a light score by Rimsky’s standards has its own allure, and allows our vocal Mozart and Salieri to impress. Konstantin Igl as the former reveals an adept, characterful tenor. The (literally) deeper, even more fragmented Salieri is a Chaliapin role, no less. (The bass apparently claimed to have sung the work as a monodrama, given Mozart’s part also lay within his range.) It was equally well sung by baritone Brett Pruunsild, the two achieving considerable chemistry, notwithstanding the necessity of singing offstage. Similarly impressive was Ekaterina Krasko’s sparkling despatch of the Salieri arias, likewise to sympathetic playing from the conservatoire students and lively overall direction by Röhrig.

There is charm and not a little magic here in this co-production between the Stiftung Mozarteum, the Mozarteum University, and the Marionette Theatre. And once again, I find myself wishing more composers would, as Pierre Boulez suggested some time ago, avail themselves of the possibilities puppetry might offer opera. There is something unquestionably Mozartian to the idea.

Salzburg Festival (5) - Soloists/Mozarteum/Pichon: Mozart, Paisiello, Salieri, and Martín y Soler, 18 August 2019

Grosser Saal

La folle giornata

Mozart: Lo sposo deluso, KV 430/424a: Overture, Quartet, ‘Ah che ridere!’, and Aria, ‘Dove mai trovar quel ciglio?’

Paisiello: Il barbiere di Sivilgia: Cavatina, ‘Saper bramate’

Mozart: Recitative and aria, ‘Bella mia fiamma, addio’ – ‘Resta, oh cara’, KV 528; Insertion aria, ‘Chi sà, chi sà, qual sia,’ for Vincente Martín y Soler’s Il burbero di buon cuore, KV 582; L’oca del Cairo: Aria, ‘Ogni momento dicon le donne’; Canzonetta, ‘Ridente la calma,’ KV 152/210a; Nocturne (trio), ‘Se lontan, ben mio, tu sei,’ KV 438

La scuola degli amanti

Mozart: Der Schauspieldirektor, KV 486: Overture; Aria, ‘Männer suchen stets zu naschen’, KV 433/416c; Aria, ‘Io ti lascio, oh cara, addio’, KV Anh.245/621a; Der Schauspieldirektor: Arietta: ‘Da schlägt die Abschiedsstunde’

Salieri: La scuola de’ gelosi: Sextet, ‘Son le donne sopraffine’

Mozart: Lo sposo deluso: ‘Che accidenti! Che tragedia!’; Canzonetta, ‘Più non si trovano,’ KV 549

Il dissoluto punito

Mozart: Thamos, König in Ägypten: Entr’acte: Maestoso-Allegro

Vicente Martín y Soler: Una cosa rara: Sextet, ‘O quanto un sì bel giubilo’

Mozart: Recitative and aria, ‘Così dunque tradisci’ – ‘Aspri rimorsi atroci’, KV 432/421a; Aria, ‘Vado ma dove? oh Dei!’, KV 583; Aria, ‘Per pietà, non ricercate’; L’oca del Cairo: Sextet, ‘Corpo di Satanasso!’; Thamos, König in Ägypten: Chorus, ‘Ne pulvis et cinis superbe te geras’, and final music to the fifth act of the play

Claire de Sévigné, Siobhan Stagg (sopranos)

Lea Desandre (mezzo-soprano)

Mauro Peter (tenor)

Huw Montague Rendall (baritone)

Robert Gleadow (bass)

Choir of Soloists from the Young Artists’ Project

Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra

Raphaël Pichon (conductor)

Image: Salzburger Festspiele / Marco Borrelli

Now this is just what the Salzburg Festival should be doing in its longstanding Mozart-Matinee series: one of the most delightful and thought-provoking I have yet to attend. Divided into three ‘scenes’, each accorded as title the subtitle of one of the Da Ponte operas, this concert, from an excellent cast of young singers, the Mozarteum Orchestra, and Raphaël Pichon, offered suggestions as to inspirations, sources, context, and sometimes just affinities between music for a number of principal characters in each opera from other works by Mozart and contemporaries. So, for ‘La folle giornate’, we welcomed to the stage the Count, Countess, Figaro, Susanna, Cherubino, and Dr Bartolo; for ‘La scuola degli amanti’, the full Così sextet; and for ‘Il dissoluto punito’, its entire cast too. Arrangements, where necessary, were credited to Pierre-Henri Dutron and Vincent Manac’h. One may sometimes have quibbled about the programme attribution of certain parts to certain others, but that was part of the fun and enlightenment. We all approach these greatest of operas in different ways, with different ears, with different memories, at different times. One of the great losses of recent years in the Festival has been that of a core Mozart ensemble of singers, often singing the major operas for several years in succession. This concert not only hinted at that time-honoured practice, but also brought many thoughts to mind of Mozart’s own work with particular singers on particular operas.

A decent-sized orchestra for a small hall (strings 8.7.6.4.3) played with verve, vigour, and great sensitivity, all on show in a warm account of the Overture to the operatic fragment, Lo sposo deluso, its second, Andante section winningly prayerful – reminding us that Mozart, like any good man (or woman) of the Enlightenment, made little or no distinction between sacred and secular. (Such, in broadest outline, will be the starting point for my next book.) I may have preferred more string vibrato there, but such was Pichon’s style, and my ears soon adjusted. Moaning that this was not Colin Davis would rather have missed the point on this very particular occasion. Pichon handled very well the transition to the quartet, ‘Ah che ridere!’ from our reassigned Count, Countess, Figaro, and Cherubino, all of whom excelled in concert-ish-performance acting too: the knowing glance, the perfection of timing, and so on. Mozart’s prophetic progression to full vocal ensemble: well, we know very well where that was heading. Huw Montague Rendall’s following aria marked him out as perhaps first among equals for me, though I had no complaints from any of the singers. It was, in any case, an absorbingly full, characterful performance, quite as vivid as any on stage. Mauro Peter’s aria from the ‘other’ Barber of Seville, Giovanni Paisiello’s, was beautifully sung, capturing the sense that this was far more straightforwardly Italian a serenade than anything Mozart would have written – and more seductive than anything Rossini would. Paisiello’s lovely writing for pizzicato strings (as well as mandolin) and clarinet was relished by players and conductor alike. Siobhan Stagg’s concert aria suffered a little from unduly ascetic violins, especially during the recitative, but my goodness, she knew how to use recitative – as, of course, did Mozart, in accompagnato of extraordinary musico-dramatic riches. As for his chromaticism in the aria itself, we were but a stone’s throw already from Wagner and Schoenberg. Lea Desandre’s coloratura was sometimes a little shaky in the insertion aria Mozart wrote for Vicente Martín y Soler’s Il burbero di buon cuore, but her tone was nicely suggestive of Cherubino. A vigorous contribution from Robert Gleadow, a palpably sincere – if a little too ‘white’ for my taste – early canzonetta from Claire de Sévigné, and a refreshing choice for ‘finale’, the delectable Metastasian ‘Se lontan, ben mio, tu sei’, rounded off a first scene that, like Figaro itself, had one straining for more.

On then, after the interval, to ‘La scuola degli amanti’ and ‘Il dissoluto punito’. If Pichon, here as elsewhere, never quite managed to hear, or at least to communicate, the Schauspieldirektor Overture in a single breath, it had pleasing weight and vigour. Gleadow, who, it was revealed was suffering from excruciating back pain, offered a lovely Don Alfonso-ish aria, to which Montague Rendall responded with a poignancy that threatened almost to eclipse his own Guglielmo and touch the (allegedly) more sensitive Ferrando. If I thought the ‘Fiordiligi’ Schauspieldirektor number closer to Pamina, that opera was not on offer here – and the final coloratura made its own point. Salieri’s sextet from his strikingly similar (in plot) 1778 La scuola de’ gelosi, to a libretto by Caterino Mazzolà (librettist for Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, after Metastasio), was, like the Paisiello number, more straightforwardly Italian, less contrapuntal – but then, it would be, and not only because it was written for Venice. Mozart, upon a return to Lo sposo deluso, followed on seamlessly, almost immediately demonstrating who was the greater composer and dramatist, but then, he would. A Metastasian closing number, again written for quartet and three basset horns, offered prayerful continuity with the first scene as well as a degree of contrast in the same respect. What could be more apt?

We stepped back slightly in time for the final scene, to the second of the three Da Ponte operas, or rather to music in its orbit. For ‘Il dissoluto punito’, we opened and indeed closed with some of the astonishing incidental music for Thamos, King of Egypt. Here was the full-bloodedly Romantic Mozart we knew from the piano concertos as well as from Don Giovanni, the Mozart ETA Hoffmann had no doubt was of his party. On hearing the sextet from Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara, we might well by now have replied, like Leporello on hearing a snatch of ‘Non più andrai’, ‘Questa poi la conosco pur troppo’, so often have we heard its quotation in Don Giovanni. But why? What a lovely opportunity, not least in so compelling a rendition, to hear the original, genuinely admired, it would seem, by Mozart. Its move to the minor was perhaps especially interesting – and quite differently accomplished from any instance I could immediately recall in Mozart. Gleadow’s aria, once again, spoke wonderfully on its own terms; no one would surely have known the conditions under which he was having to sing. Desandre’s, which followed, displayed here absolute control of her instrument and clarity of line, was well as a wonderful way with Italian. Peter (or ‘Don Ottavio’) offered typical sincerity in his preceding a splendid clarion call (Montague Rendall) and full ensemble from the unfinished L’oca del Cairo. I do not think I have ever heard the music leap from the page with such joy. That, in a sense, was the ‘finale’; but, in an inversion of the practice of Don Giovanni, we returned to the tragic, minor mode, Montague Rendall leading his colleagues, an additional quartet of vocalists included, in a magnificent, Gluck-haunted ‘Ne pulvis et cinis superbe te geras’. If this were not sacred music in the fullest sense, I do not know what would be.

La grotta di Trofonio, Bampton Classical Opera, 15 September 2015

(sung in English, as Trofonio’s Cave)

St John’s, Smith Square

Aristone – James Harrison

Dori – Aoife O’Sullivan
Ofelia – Catherine Backhouse (sung)/Marieke Bernard-Berkel
Artemidoro – Christopher Turner
Plistene – Nicholas Merryweather
Trofonio – Matthew Stiff
Ladies’ Maid – Triona Adams

Jeremy Gray (director, set designs)
Triona Adams (movement)
Vikki Medhurst (costumes)

CHROMA

Paul Wingfield (conductor)

The best and most important production and performance I have seen yet from Bampton Classical Opera, on its annual visit to St John’s Smith Square! I cannot have been the only member of the audience seeing a complete Salieri opera for the first time; to say that it exceeded my expectations would be an understatement. I had previously heard a few operatic excerpts, some of his sacred music (treated with all the respect it deserves by Riccardo Muti) and some instrumental music. La grotta di Trofonio emerged, with the usual caveats concerning a first hearing, not only as a work I should happily hear again, superior to many operas in the dread repertoire, but as a musical achievement not so far off the operas of Haydn. (Any regular readers will know that is no idle compliment from me.) The Gluckian side of Salieri, about which we hear more often, is considerably less in evidence, but this is a comedy, and Salieri marshals his resources accordingly.

 

Indeed, it is the symphonic Haydn who comes immediately to mind in the Overture, its slow, mysterious Introduction, swiftly put to side by high yet directed spirits, having, in a display of long-term musico-dramatic thinking, sown the seeds for the mysteries of Trofonio’s cave. Over the work’s two acts, a full Classical orchestra engages the mind and the senses to a degree I should never have imagined. Vocal writing is at the least accomplished throughout, and often rather more than that. Ensembles are perhaps a particular revelation, reminding or informing us that both the genesis of opera buffa and its musical modernity are a more complicated story than many would have us believe. What we lack, you may not be surprised to hear, is what we lack in Haydn: depth of characterisation and of emotion, a hint of those musico-dramatic epiphanies which change one’s life forever, etc. And, like many operas, it goes on longer than it need, especially in the second act. (You see how hard I am struggling not to mention someone else by name.)

 

The plot is easily dealt with. A father, Aristone, is – unusually! – happy with his two daughters’ choice of suitors. They enter Trofonio’s cave, emerge, following his incantations, with their personal qualities reversed: bookish to fun-loving and vice versa. The reversal is reversed, but then the daughters, tempted into the cave, suffer the same fate. After similar incomprehension, their reversal too is reversed. A wedding can be prepared. You might think there a similarity with a certain libretto of Lorenzo da Ponte (which Salieri actually began to set); I couldn’t possibly comment.

This revival, almost certainly the first British production, is the project of Gilly French (the English translation is also hers) and Jeremy Gray, who also directs and provides set designs. There is no attempt to offer the depths that the opera itself lacks. What might seem simply to be of the surface for a certain opera whose premiere came not so much as five years later, in 1790, also at Vienna’s Burgtheater, proves well suited to the different nature of Salieri’s collaboration with the far-from-unintellectual Giovanni Battista Casti (whom many of us will know both from Prima la musica e poi la parole and its role in the genesis of Strauss’s Capriccio). Action moves to 1910; I know, because I was the lucky recipient of a dated ‘Downton Abbey’ wedding invitation during the performance. That seems to be a favoured period of the company – attractive, doubtless, to the English country-house opera scene, and also easy to dress, but here, in its Importance of Being Earnest atmosphere, perhaps particularly appropriate. Trofonio’s cave is the TARDIS: make of the time-travelling what you will. It is decidedly unclear whether the Tom Baker-clad Trofonio himself should be a charlatan (a few years later, someone might have offered a Mesmerist slant) or someone who enables self-reflection. Does the one exclude the other? Such invitations and ambiguities are anything but heavy-handed interventions; indeed, they are present in the work, whether intentionally or otherwise. Most importantly, they offer one space to think beyond the bare bones of the plot. (You might be surprised how many people complain about misogyny and a lack of ‘realism’ in one Ferrarese entertainment, how many take it at its librettist’s apparent word.)

 

The playing of CHROMA under Paul Wingfield was nothing short of magnificent, aided by the excellent acoustic of St John’s, Smith Square. I cannot recall a single tempo choice that did not convince, and the array of musical colour, not least in the woodwind section, showed quite why a young composer from, say, Salzburg might have chosen to make his living in Vienna. The orchestral contribution was not the least, indeed was arguably the greatest, musical offering of all, given the scale and ambition of Salieri’s writing.

 

Moreover, the cast would have graced any house. As Aristone, James Harrison made much of the musical and verbal text, providing a crucial anchor of stability, but never dullness, as identities switched around him. Matthew Stiff proved an engaging, properly ambiguous agent of disruption as Trofonio; his invocation of the spirits, bolstered by an able chorus, had me thinking of Saul’s visit to the Witch of Endor.  Nicholas Merryweather and Christopher Turner proved equally successful in both of their personalities, offering as much character, generally born of subtlety in vocal colouring, as such an opera permits. Likewise Aoife O’Sullivan as Dori, in her transformation from fun-loving daughter to would-be Platonist, her brightness of tone never wearing. We should have heard Anna Starushkevych as Ofelia, but visa problems – is this not a country to be proud of? – prevented the Ukrainian mezzo from travelling, so instead we were treated to a collaboration from the side-of-stage singer Catherine Backhouse and the centre-stage acting of Marieke Bernard-Berkel. It was no distraction at all; indeed, there was arguably an intriguing dramatic alienation – think of the subject matter, assumption of different personas – to be had from the situation. More to the point, perhaps, Backhouse’s short-notice performance showed her to be an excellent artist, rich of tone and admirably clear of diction, and Bernard-Berkel’s stage presence proved equally impressive.   

 

No, of course it is not an opera by you-know-who. It is an opera by Salieri. The action remains largely on the surface, but does not prevent one from thinking further for oneself, and arguably invites one to do so. There is none of the agony, indeed none of the greatness in any respect, of Così fan tutte – all right; I shall finally name it and him by name – but if we are to restrict ourselves to the level of Mozart, then survivors will be well-nigh non-existent.  Bampton Classical Opera has done La grotta di trofonio and Salieri proud. May our opera houses take note. Alas, I shall not hold my breath; after all, is not another revival of La triviata a more pressing artistic requirement?