Die Zauberflöte, Komische Oper, Berlin, 13 April 2014

Komische Oper, Berlin

Pamina – Adela Zaharia

Tamino – Adrian Strooper

Queen of the Night – Olga Pudova

Sarastro, Speaker – Alexey Antonov

Papageno – Tom Erik Lie

Papagena – Julia Giebel

Monostatos – Peter Renz

Three Ladies – Mirka Wagner, Theresa Kronthaler, Caren von Oijen

Two Armoured Men – Christoph Späth, Bogdan Talos

Three Boys – Jakob Göpfert, Laurenz Ströbl, Samuel Baur

Suzanne Andrade and Barrie Kosky (directors)

Paul Barritt (animation)

Esther Bialas (designs)

Diego Leetz (lighting)

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: David Cavelius)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Kristiina Poska (conductor)

It seems more difficult to produce a satisfying Magic Flute than one might expect, if not nearly so difficult as the case of Don Giovanni. Barrie Kosky and ‘1927’ (Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt) come closer than many with this intriguing ‘silent film’ treatment. Doubtless predictably, I think it sells short the seriousness at the heart of this extraordinary work, but crucially, unlike many stagings falling into that category, it retains a space for one to think, to imagine and indeed to think of more serious things oneself. It was a pity that a sizeable section of the audience, seemingly intent on taking every opportunity to applaud through the music, did not avail itself of that space, but anyway… In Kosky’s words, ‘This concentration on images makes it possible for each spectator of the show to experience very much his own way,’ and to a large extent, that worked in practice.

In a reworking both radical and not, the dialogue – at least as dialogue – is dispensed with. Certain passages, old and new, conversational and explicatory, appear as part of 1927’s film. Whilst there are losses, and one clearly would not want to experience the work like this all the time, it is striking how much remains. And whilst Schikaneder deserves more credit than is often his due – how often one hears his magical, enabling text belittled! – it is of course for Mozart that we come to this work. What we see centres upon the 1920s, but is not confined to that era: associations, some freer than others, are made through what Andrade in a programme interview describes as ‘a journey through the most diverse fantasy worlds’. Meanwhile, what do we hear? Music from Mozart’s Fantasias for solo piano – to add to the post-modernism, on fortepiano. And yet, this somehow emerges as postmodernism that works. It might sound absurd to have Papageno dream (instead of his wine) of a pink cocktail, and through his experience to see pink elephants, but the free association benefits from the conviction of the ‘original’. It is certainly refreshing to experience the fruits of imagination as opposed to the mere silliness we often endure.

Musically, the situation was more mixed. Bonnie Wagner’s fortepiano playing – not in general, my usual readers will know, a favourite instrument of mine – was excellent: strong yet yielding, hinting at a larger whole yet imparting particular character to each ‘excerpt’. Kristiina Poska’s conducting was more problematical, despite generally fine playing from the orchestra. Most of the first act, from the Overture onwards, was rushed. Various tempi can work, of course, but the very difficult trick is to make them work; here, too often, one felt Mozart’s score harried. Matters settled down in much of the second act, however, and it was a relief to hear a performance of Pamina’s aria that, whilst certainly not of the Colin Davis variety, allowed Mozart’s pathos to shine through. Indeed, Adela Zaharia, a member of the Komische Oper’s Opera Studio, was definitely one of the stars of the show: hers was a genuinely touching performance. Her Tamino, Adrian Strooper, had his moments, offering a generally winning earnestness, but sometimes forced his voice. Tom Erik Lie was a characterful Papageno, hints of sadness informing even his most ebullient moments. Olga Pudova’s Queen of the Night did pretty much everything asked of her – often with considerable sparkle. The Sarastro of Alexey Antonov and Monostatos of Peter Renz were disappointing, however: the latter often shouting rather than singing, the former woolly of tone and too often insecure of pitch. The Three Ladies – Mirka Wagner, Theresa Kronthaler, and Caren van Oijen – were an excellent bunch, however, both individually and as a group. So were the Three Boys from Tölz: Jakob Göpfert, Laurenz Ströbl, and Samuel Baur. I am not sure I have heard better. Above all what impressed here was not only a strong sense of company but also of commitment to the staging, to the drama as a whole. That is worth a good deal – and the Komische Oper is strongly to be commended for it.

Le nozze di Figaro, Komische Oper, 6 April 2010

Images: Monika Rittershaus

(sung in German, as Die Hochzeit des Figaro: translation by Bettina Bartz and Werner Hintze)

Count Almaviva – Tom Erik Lie
Countess Almaviva – Ina Kringelborn
Susanna – Christina Landshamer
Figaro – Tilmann Rönnebeck
Cherubino – Olivia Vermeulen
Marcellina – Christiane Oertel
Basilio – Thomas Ebenstein
Don Curzio – Peter Renz
Bartolo – Hans-Peter Scheidegger
Antonio – Hans-Martin Nau
Barbarina – Julia Giebel
Two Young Girls – Saskia Krispin, Mechthild Sauer

Barrie Kosky (director)
Jasmina Hadžiahmetović (revival director)
Klaus Grünberg (designs)
Marianna Häntzsche, Birgit Wünschmann (costumes)
Franck Evin (lighting)
Werner Hintze (dramaturgy)

Choral Soloists of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Robert Heimann)
Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin
Patrick Lange (conductor)

Comedy clearly means different things to different people, and, to be fair, it can unquestionably mean different things in different contexts. I was, however, quite unprepared for Barrie Kosky’s reduction of Mozart’s and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s – not to mention Beaumarchais’s - sophisticated comedy into an incoherent farce centring, bizarrely and apparently arbitrarily, around a middle-class Jewish wedding. Having greatly admired Kosky’s Abu Ghraib production of Iphigénie en Tauride for the Komische Oper, I was intrigued as to what political point might be made here. None at all, it seemed – and, indeed, it was difficult to find any point whatsoever being made. Moreover, where Kosky’s sensitivity towards Gluck’s score had been noteworthy, it was difficult to find any sense even of respect towards Mozart’s, since more than once, it found itself interrupted by directorial imposition, whether from the Count’s extraordinarily loud mobile telephone, a weird, Klezmer-like accordion interpolation during the third act dances, or, perhaps worst of all, Bartolo’s rendition of My Way in the middle of the fourth act.

I eventually gave up trying to discern any coherence to this Carry on Figaro. Insofar as it matters, various people – it is not at all clear why they were living together in the same house – seemed to be gathered for a wedding. Many extras kept appearing out of highly contrived – and not in Da Ponte’s sense – stage openings and engaging in slapstick activities. Sometimes the libretto, in German translation, was tampered with. Marcellina’s cry of ‘Mazel tov!’ was not the first and certainly not the last instance. At other times, the more-or-less original text was rendered nonsensical: what on earth did it mean to speak of the Count’s embassy to London, Cherubino’s commission, or the old days in Seville? It seemed very odd that the Countess should sleep in a closet, by which I mean a place for storing clothes, rather than anything more interesting, though the brief interlude of lesbian dancing during the third act female chorus might have led somewhere – alas, it did not. The truly bizarre transformation of Basilio into something beyond Sascha Baren Cohen’s Brüno, replete with tight cycling shorts and a desperate tendency to try to hump every male leg that moved, amused some, but for this reviewer seemed merely to regress beyond the days of the late Kenneth Williams. As for the strange scent of apples sent out through the theatre at the beginning of the fourth act, I cannot begin to attempt to explain. Where were the social tensions, whether of Mozart’s declining society of orders, or any other time? There was no fruitful tension, or even just tension, between work and staging, so far as I could tell, just a lack of connection. Doubtless this is all terribly anti-post-modernist of me, but here I stand…

It is, then, a relief to relate that the musical side of things was much superior. Figaro in German is always going to sound odd to me; I listen to it for Furtwängler’s sake, but that is generally the only reason to do so. And the German language is no more suited to Mozart’s lines here than English is. German does not lend itself to such quicksilver delivery, especially during recitatives, a necessary qualification not always realised in performance. It was thus a relief to hear Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio in Italian; presumably the idea was that Cherubino had written the song in a foreign language. Quite why, who knows? The particular elegance and sentiment of slower arias does not translate well either.

Nevertheless, as I said, the general level of musical performance impressed. Patrick Lange encouraged a full, decidedly non-authenticke sound from the orchestra, which played with verve and with tenderness. There were occasions when tempi were on the fast side, but few conductors nowadays, Sir Colin Davis excepted, are likely to satisfy entirely in that respect. There was a commendable flexibility to Lange’s approach, which stood light-years from today’s merely fashionable. I was a little puzzled by the fortepianist, Pawel Poplawski’s Meistersinger interpolations, and a little more puzzled that no one else appeared to notice.
Given that the singers’ energies were perforce often directed to the business of stage action, there was much to admire vocally too. Tilmann Rönnebeck, himself a substitute Figaro, was ailing, but did a more than manful job in the title role. Hoarse by the fourth act, he had managed to hold a little in reserve for his final lines, and could certainly act. Christina Landshamer was a lively, sweet-toned Susanna, without a trace of the irritating quality that can sometimes attach itself to portrayals of the character. Tom Erik Lie had the masculinity of voice required by the Count, but his consort, Ina Kringelborn, did not quite attain the requisite grace and nobility. She was not, of course, helped by a production that presented her merely as an annoyed, pampered wife, whose ultimate forgiveness was childlishly undercut by a final finger-wagging. (That moment of forgiveness should be divine in its nature; here, theology was replaced by the sitcom.) Christiane Oertel and Hans-Peter Scheidegger’s Marcellina and Bartolo emerged as more central characters than is generally the case: well-sung and, in Oertel’s case, convincingly sassy. Thomas Ebenstein certainly threw his all into Kosky’s outlandish conception of the Almavivas’ music-master. Clearly a talented singing actor, it would be good to hear him again (see here) in a more conventional portrayal.

Perhaps it indicates a lack of a sense of humour that I do not find lots of coat hangers falling down or someone manically waving around a vacuum cleaner intrinsically hilarious; perhaps it renders me ‘elitist’ that I look for something more in The Marriage of Figaro. But there it is. It seemed to me a great waste of considerable musical talent. At least the production was not inflicted on the more fragile Così fan tutte.