Wozzeck, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 14 December 2025 (centenary performance)

Production images: Stephan Rabold

Wozzeck – Simon Keenlyside
Marie – Anja Kampe
Drum-major – Andreas Schager
Andres – Florian Hoffmann
Captain – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke
Doctor – Stephen Milling
Marie’s child – Jacob Tougas Gigling
First apprentice – Friedrich Hamel
Second apprentice – Dionysios Avgerinos
Idiot – Stephan Rügamer
Soldier – Soongoo Lee

Children’s Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

One hundred years ago to the day, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, the greatest opera of the twentieth century, received its first performance at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden, conducted by Erich Kleiber. The composer’s proud teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, sent him a telegram the day before wishing ‘every success for the premiere’ and expressing sadness he and his wife Gertrud could not be present. Inevitable far-Right protests notwithstanding, that premiere proved a great success and the work of course went on to transform the history of twentieth-century music in general and opera in particular. That the twentieth century would overflow with great operas owed more to its example than to that of any other single work, Schoenberg’s included. Earlier that same year, one of its greatest interpreters, whose centenary we have been celebrating all year, was born: Pierre Boulez. It therefore seems doubly fitting that the Staatsoper should offer an excellent revival of Andrea Breth’s production (reviewed first here, in 2011) for the climax and culmination of 2025. 

I hope that I might, on this special occasion, be forgiven a personal excursus. (Please skip the following paragraph if not!) Many years later, this opera changed my life. It was the first I saw in the theatre, as a schoolboy who had not yet heard a note of Berg or Webern, and very little (only tonal) of Schoenberg. Travelling to Sheffield for Opera North’s visit in 1993, the experience opened up more vistas even than a Mahler symphony. Opera had not formed part of my childhood. I had only just begun to explore it, entirely from recordings, as a consequence of having fallen head over heels in love with Mozart (as yet, operatically, only Figaro, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute); and had still more recently begun my Wagner voyage (Tristan and possibly Meistersinger, the Ring definitely still to come). I had heard and indeed seen nothing like it, in Deborah Warner’s first production, conducted by Paul Daniel. To say that it made a great impression would be an understatement. It grabbed me by the throat and never let me go: one of the very few works one can unhesitatingly place alongside those twin lodestars of my operatic life that have never left me and indeed only shone brightrer (Mozart and Wagner). Perhaps if I had not attended that performance, invited by my music teacher, I might never have worked on opera at all; I might also never have grown to love the Second Viennese School as I do, and worked on Schoenberg (or Henze, Dallapiccola, Nono, Kurtág, and others, Boulez included). So to celebrate Wozzeck’s centenary could hardly have been an occasion fuller of meaning for me: whether music-historical or biographical. 

Captain (Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke) and Wozzeck (Simon Keenlyside)

Expectations are set up to be dashed; here they were not. I shall not dwell on memories, notoriously persistent yet notoriously unreliable, of Breth’s staging, which I have written about twice before in any case. (I shall not cheat and look, at least not until after posting.) It was in any case revived here by Caroline Staunton and deserves consideration in 2025 incarnation on its own merits. What I can say Staunton and her team of skilled singing actors brought to it – at the very least I took from it, though I think it was more than that – was a stronger sense than ever of these being real people, with real, human connections between one another. It was an internal as well as an external world that sprang forth before our eyes and ears—and that connection between the two seemed, if different under a new heir to Kleiber, as strong as ever too. 

Marie (Anja Kampe), Drum-major (Andreas Schager)

Breth’s aesthetic is realist up to a point, yet not only that—not unlike Berg and, I should argue Georg Büchner too. A sense of poverty – ‘Wir arme Leut’…’ – and wretchedness was present in enclosed sets, the room in which Wozzeck, Marie, and their child must exist as heartbreakingly abject as one could hope for: a sort of Berlin Alexanderplatz-plus (both Döblin and Fassbinder), if not in period then in something still deeper and recurring. Martin Zehetgruber’s set designs then in turn mirroring and even give the impression of helping to create Berg’s closed musical forms, which yet of course extend—both into other scenes and into the desolation of the ‘open’ lake scene (visually and perhaps also, in its D minor expansiveness, musically). These people, the poor ones anyway, are treated worse than animals and that has consequences, as we see in the joyless fornication of the tavern. And yet there is an interior life: not so banal as being mere projections of the protagonists’ torments, yet in different senses a refuge from and a creation of them. That the child in the final scene is on his own, the children’s choir singing (perhaps in his mind) from the pit does not lessen the realism but expands it with a chill still harsher than that felt by the Captain and Doctor by the lake. 

Marie, her child )Jacob Tougas Gigling), Wozzeck

Thielemann’s way with Berg’s score is strikingly different – again, with that caveat on memory – from that of Daniel Barenboim, who conducted the ever-excellent Staatskapelle Berlin on previous occasions. ‘Romantic’ is a word so stretched and overused as to verge on the meaningless, but if anything, confounding lazy expectations, it was Barenboim who proved the more so: certainly, I think, the more overtly Wagnerian. Thielemann’s approach did not neglect the longer line, but seemed more concerned with the inner characterisation and ‘life’ of those closed forms. The febrile growth and transformation of individual lines, perhaps founded ultimately more on counterpoint than harmony, could be traced in neo-Bachian fashion that was more of the time of Neue Sachlichkeit than of Berg’s youth. It is a matter of degree, of course, and neither neglected the ‘other’ side, but I recognised a tendency heard in certain lines of Thielemann’s summer Schweigsame Frau extended: intriguingly and, again a little surprisingly, closer to Boulez than Barenboim. 

Chorus, Drum-major, Wozzeck

The orchestra itself played superlatively from beginning to end, never sounding Straussian yet at the same time excelling in response to the sort of unpredictable yet ultimately coherent Strauss performances Thielemann has been giving for some time. Their stretching of time, virtuosic yet not for mere virtuosity’s sake, was unquestionably apparent here. What I believe was a swift reading overall ‘on the clock’ never felt rushed and indeed included moments of hallucinatory, post-Mahlerian near-stasis – those vistas again, both physical and metaphysical – in which shimmering colour and harmony alike brought magic to the musicodramatic moment and peered deep into the musical future. I hope we shall hear more Berg from Thielemann.

 

Margret (Anna Kissjudit), Wozzeck

In the title role, Simon Keenlyside brought not only a wealth of experience in this role, but something unique to this production. He sounded and even looked the Wozzeck for this moment, more broken than previously, though doubtless building on earlier performances. He seemed stunned, even stunted, by the horrors he endured, yet the flame of humanity never left him, in no small part due to his Lieder-singer’s way with the libretto—which here sounded just as intense as the score. Anja Kampe’s force-of-nature Marie perhaps lacked the last ounce of tenderness in the Bible scene, but there were unquestionable compensations elsewhere. Hers likewise was a human being brutalised yet, until the end, never defeated. Anna Kissjudit’s Margret made for a rich-toned, dramatically layered counterpart, whilst Florian Hoffmann’s Andres complemented and contrasted Wozzeck in somewhat different, yet no less important, ways. Staunton’s keen Personenregie was surely part and parcel of that, as it was in Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain, brilliantly quirky yet probably more deeply integrated into the greater company than I have previously heard. So too for Stephen Milling’s disconcerting Doctor, poised between malevolent mystery and mere quack, and Andreas Schager’s vain, frighteningly brutal Drum-major. Stephan Rügamer offered a haunting Fool. The chorus brought the rest of the world indelibly to life.

Here, then, was an opera entering its second century as harrowing, as disturbing, and as ineffably, lyrically magical, even Mozartian, as it began its first. We continue to take our leave from it, not because we have thought of nothing new since, but precisely because we have.

Wozzeck, Bavarian State Opera, 23 November 2019

Nationaltheater

Images: © Wilfried Hösl

Wozzeck – Christian Gerhaher

Drum Major – John Daszak

Andres – Kevin Conners

Captain – Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke

Doctor – Jens Larsen

First Apprentice – Peter Lobert

Second Apprentice – Boris Prýgl

Fool – Ulrich Reß

Marie – Gun-Brit Barkmin

Margret – Heike Grötzinger

Marie’s Child – Alban Mondon

Lad – Jochen Schäfer

Soldier – Markus Zeitler

Andreas Kriegenburg (director)

Harald B Thor (set designs)

Andrea Schraad (costumes)

Stefan Bolliger (lighting)

Zenta Haerter (choreography)

Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Stellario Fagone)

Bavarian State Orchestra

Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

It would be an extraordinary, even an unimaginable Wozzeck that failed to move, to chill one to the bone. This was certainly no such Wozzeck; Marie’s reading from the Bible, Wozzeck’s demise, the final scene with their son and the other children: all brought that particular Wozzeck combination of tears and horror. At its heart, in every sense, lay Christian Gerhaher’s Wozzeck, Gun-Brit Barkmin’s Marie, and their child, touchingly sung by Alban Mondon.

I have heard some fine Wozzecks over the years; Gerhaher must surely rank alongside the finest. He has been selective in his opera roles; it would, however, be an over-simplification verging on distortion to say that he is more at home in the concert hall. Wozzeck is, of course, a very different role from his fabled Tannhäuser Wolfram and is surely the sterner dramatic test, perhaps especially for someone with so heartbreakingly beautiful a voice. Or so it might seem on first glance, but Gerhaher is an artist at least as celebrated for intelligence and humanity. His way with words, music, and gesture too simply had one believe that this was the character he was playing. Verbal nuance without pedantry, attention to musical line without a hint of self-regard, harrowing facial expression that demanded our sympathy: yes, this was a compleat Wozzeck. Barkmin’s Marie, equally well sung (and spoken), equally sympathetic, made for a fine complement indeed. Through her artistry one felt her hopes as well as her devastation, her pride as well as her capacity for love. Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain, John Daszak’s Drum Major and Jens Larsen’s Doctor skilfully trod the line between character and caricature, no mean feat in a production that often called upon them to accentuate the grotesque. Kevin Conners as Andres and Heike Grötzinger as Margret impressed too, carving out their own dramatic potentialities, even as we knew them no more likely to succeed than the opera’s central couple. Cast from depth, this was a fine Wozzeck for singing-actors.

Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting proved efficient most of the time, albeit with a few too many discrepancies between sections of the orchestra as well as between orchestra and pit. To be fair, there were also passages—often the interludes—in which all came together to offer something considerably more than that. Haenchen’s reading was not for the most part, however, one to offer any particular revelation. He clearly knew ‘how it went’, yet the post-Wagnerian orchestra as dramatic cauldron had its juices emerge only fitfully.

Andreas Kriegenburg’s production seemed conceptually a little unsure of what it was trying to achieve. Straddling the divide between Expressionist grotesquerie—some arresting images there—and social realism—with a curious twist of Brechtian image, not dramaturgy—is a perfectly reasonable strategy. Communication of how the two might intertwined proved more elusive. Updated to what seemed to be more or less the time of composition, the production left no doubt of the gross injustice and poverty pervading the world in which these events took place. I could have done without all the splashing round in the lake below. Kriegenburg often scored, however, in particular dramatic touches: above all, the acts of Wozzeck’s son, keen to learn from his ill-fated father: watching, listening. and in some cases, acting, as when this evidently wounded child broke his mother’s heart by painting the accusation ‘Huren’ (‘whore’) on her wall. All was lost, then: a moment of devastation. Already we knew what fate, or rather society, had in store not only for Wozzeck and Marie, but for their child too. ‘Wir arme leut’…

Philharmonia/Salonen - Schoenberg, Gurrelieder, 28 June 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Gurrelieder

Waldemar – Robert Dean Smith

Tove – Camilla Tilling

Wood-dove – Michelle DeYoung

Peasant – David Soar

Klaus-Narr – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke

Speaker – Barbara Sukowa

Philharmonia Voices

Choirs of the Royal Academy of Music

Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Trinity Laban Conservatore of Music and Dance (chorus director: Aidan Oliver)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

Opportunities to hear, let alone to conduct, Gurrelieder do not come along very often. Simon Rattle must have had more of the latter than most. What a way, then, for Esa-Pekka Salonen to approach his sixtieth birthday, with a work he had conducted so successfully with this same orchestra, the Philharmonia, in this same hall, not far off a decade ago. (That performance was recorded, and released on Signum Classics.)

The opening Prelude glistened, lacking nothing in warmth or almost pointillistic potential. Salonen was no more likely to wallow than Boulez might have done, and all the better for it. Here one heard – almost saw – water and ice. It flowed, ran, even stood with commendable flexibility, suggestive of a tone poem (which, in a way, it is, even when words intervene). Particularly intriguing was his orchestral balancing, subtle yet telling, highlighting yet never exaggerating the music’s darker undercurrents: pitch, timbre, harmony. The later Schoenberg is not so far away: one only has to listen. This was music after Götterdämmerung as well as after Tristan: unquestionably ‘after Wagner’, in far more than the most obvious ways.

Alas, Robert Dean Smith’s Waldemar often proved something of a trial. An older-sounding Waldemar is fine, repeated uncertainty of pitch rather less so. For much of the first part in particular, he was at best effortful, an especial pity when Salonen proved so adept at balancing those tone-poem, even symphonic tendencies (Pelleas und Melisande often came to mind) with the music’s roots in the song-cycle tradition. (Schoenberg’s first conception had been of a shorter cycle for voice and piano. Zemlinsky would recall that the songs ‘were wonderfully beautiful and truly novel – however we both had the impression that, on that account, they had little prospect of winning a prize.’) There was no denying the through-composed nature of Schoenberg’s writing, but nor is there, after all, in what we generally consider the very first song-cycle, An die ferne Geliebte. Fortunately, Camilla Tilling proved far more able than Dean Smith not only to ride the orchestra but also to make something of the words and phrases, although, to be fair, when foretelling his haunting, this Waldemar proved more convincing. There was plenty elsewhere to ravish: not least the combination of delicacy and splendour from Tilling and upper strings as Tove bade her love join her in raising golden goblets, Tristan-like, albeit with a decidedly æstheticist twist, to mighty, beautifying death (dem mächtig verschönenden Tod). It seemed telling and indeed touching, perhaps indicative of Salonen’s plans for the Ring, that the chords presaging and indeed furthering Tove’s departure from the stage echoed so clearly in combination of harmony and timbre the magnificent, malevolent world of Hagen.

Michelle DeYoung entered stage-right as if a figure from Klimt. (I know it is far too obvious an association, but demeanour and dress were so strongly suggestive that I shall indulge myself.) Jill Crowther’s English horn recalled to us an alte – or perhaps better, an ältere – Weise. Yet even before the Wood-dove sang, Schoenberg’s interlude had proved a kaleidoscopic realm of love and terror, love as terror; she only put it into words – but how! – what we (mostly) already knew. DeYoung offered a song variegated dramatically as well as tonally, almost a little – well, not so very little – cantata in its own right. Her richness of tone against the darkness of harmony and orchestral colour both reminded us of Salonen’s and Schoenberg’s presentiments at the opening, whilst leading us to a shattering climax. Tod/death: after that, life could only fade away – or could it?

The opening of the Second Part quite rightly sounded as if a digest of what had gone before – only, as it would in one of Wagner’s narrations, be it verbal, orchestral, or both, with difference of detail, of standpoint, of import. Dean Smith proved more imploring than angry, but that worked in its way. The aftermath of Waldemar’s outburst was shockingly prolonged – in the best way – by Salonen. Monumental was the word for it.

Variegation again proved the key to the Wild Hunt. Neither here nor elsewhere was there any absence of power to the outstanding massed choral forces, but heft is not enough, nor did it have to be. Salonen ensured an array of colour, even when Schoenberg apparently confronted him and us with blocks of sound. The terror of the first ghostly cry, in reaction to, or perhaps oblivious to, the handsomely dark bass-baritone observations of David Soar’s Peasant, proved quite something: several leagues beyond anything to be heard or even imagined in Der Freischütz. The proper entry of the chorus sounded like nothing so much as Götterdämmerung on acid – which it essentially is. It was, however, the aftermath that truly chilled. So much is in Schoenberg’s scoring here, yet I do not think before now I had quite realised how much. Dean Smith at last recaptured something of Tristan’s delirium, movingly so, as the orchestra seemed to engage in act of self-dissolution – again, as much in timbre as in harmony, before reconstituting itself for what was yet to come.

Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s Klaus-Narr perhaps inevitably suggested Mime: even his orchestral ‘introduction’ seemed to do so. This seemed, however, a more ambiguous ‘character’ still, transformations in mood and/or self-projection of mood disconcertingly yet, in their way, honestly quicksilver. His reflections on – mocking of? – salvation rightly left one uneasy yet wanting to know more. ‘Dann muss ich eingehn im Himmels Gnaden… Na, und dann mag Gott sich selber gnaden.’ Sepulchral chorus and brass alike soon eerily set against piccolos, set the stage, so it seemed, for another orchestral rebirth, now very much an ensemble straining towards Pierrot lunaire. Nothing would ever be the same again – and perhaps, just perhaps, such had been the work of this ‘fool’.

Step forward Barbara Sukowa, as spellbinding as she had been for Salonen in 2009 – or indeed for Claudio Abbado on his Vienna recording. This Speaker was delirious, yet delightful; or was that our æstheticising something too close for comfort? Not only Pierrot, but a whole century’s worth of music thereafter flashed before our ears. ‘Still! Was mag der Wind nur wollen?’ Did these hallucinations, if that be what they were, speak of a bad or a good trip? Schoenberg, as so often, resisted the either/or. Violin and clarinet acknowledged Wagner once again, now the Siegfried-Idyll, paving the way to Schoenberg’s final, glorious, yet ultimately never quite convincing paean to the sun(god). We revelled in that final chorus, yet, whether or not we wished to do so, could never quite shake off those intimations of the ‘air of another planet’. The future was both upon us and not. Schoenberg’s time had come.

Das Rheingold, Opera North, 28 June 2016

Royal Festival Hall

Wotan – Michael Druiett

Donner – Andrew Foster-Williams
Froh – Marc Le Brocq
Loge – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Fricka – Yvonne Howard
Freia – Giselle Allen
Erda – Ceri Williams
Alberich – Jo Pohlheim
Mime – Richard Roberts
Fasolt – James Creswell
Fafner – Mats Almgren
Woglinde – Jeni Bern
Wellgunde – Madeleine Shaw
Flosshilde – Sarah Castle

Peter Mumford (concert staging, design concept, lighting and projection)

Joe Austin (associate director)

Orchestra of Opera North

Richard Farnes (conductor)

Rhinemaiden mechanics at the 1876 Ring

Das Rheingold is, of course, the reddest in tooth and claw of all Wagner’s dramas – which is saying something. The only path to denying its socialism would be never to have encountered it, or at least never to have listened to it. That, I can only assume, must have been the ‘non-expert’ path to enlightenment taken by Michael Gove, whose unpleasant presence I suffered in the row behind me at Bayreuth in 2014. Goodness knows what damage Frank Castorf’s post-dramatic theatre wrought to his 'back-to-basics' mentality; maybe that is why, Alberich-like, he elected to destroy this country, this continent, the world. It is certainly no easy thing to imagine a Rhinemaiden falling voluntarily into his clutches. But then even Wagner did not quite possess the venom to invent Mrs Gove, Sarah Vine. With typical not-quite-even-handedness, he wrote of Lohengrin’s Ortrud to Liszt, in 1852: ‘a male politician disgusts us; a female politician appals us.’ Ladies and gentlemen of the Festival Hall, take your pick: the Conservative Party leadership election awaits.

I could go on, and on, and on, as someone once almost drawled. Opera North, sadly, could hardly have found London in more electrically receptive – ‘electrical reception’ is perhaps a concept better left to the ‘experts’ – mode than today. The Ring can be made, in some senses might even be claimed to be, about everything. (I once even managed to bring in Norman Tebbit; the pleasure was doubtless mutual.) As Wagner wrote, also to Liszt, the following year: ‘Yes, I should like to perish in Valhalla’s flames! — Mark well my new poem — it contains the beginning of the world and its destruction!’ It is, just as much as Marx’s Capital, to quote Maximilien Rubel, ‘a history of a world in the course of self-destruction, a pathology of an inhuman society’. And as we, like the gods in Valhalla, sit back in horror to watch the flames envelop us, we find ourselves, if anything, still more receptive than usual to an inquiry into where it all began, where it all went wrong.

A staging could help, of course, none more so than Patrice Chéreau’s legendary ‘Centenary Ring’. It is not necessary, though. Whilst every bone in my body resists both that conclusion and the admission that the two best Ring performances of my life have taken place in the concert hall, the desire to be a little bit more truthful than Gove, Johnson, et al., a little more scrupulous with my obligations than Wotan, means that I must. Strangely, both took place in the Royal Albert Hall, a less-than-ideal venue, to put it mildly. It mattered not a jot, though, whether under Bernard Haitink (Royal Opera, 1998: my first) or Daniel Barenboim (2013 Proms, see here, here, here, and here!) Nor has it here at the Festival Hall, at least so far. Direction from Peter Mumford and Joe Austin is clear, accomplishing a good deal with relatively little. Projections offer titles, a little atmosphere (the Rhine, clouds, etc.), and, for those who would benefit, a little additional background. Whilst we all await Stefan Herheim and Dmitri Tcherniakov’s stagings for different houses in Berlin, concert stagings continue to have much to offer.

A particular advantage of such concert stagings is the placing of the orchestra, literally, centre stage. It is, at least, an advantage with such excellent playing and conducting as we experienced here. One really had the sense of an orchestra that knew this music, an orchestra that had lived with it, an orchestra that was here reaching the climax of its involvement with it (although let us hope that there will be much more Wagner to come from Opera North). There was barely a blemish to be heard. More importantly, the ebb and flow, Wagner’s celebrated melos, was there to be heard, to be felt: nothing exaggerated, but flowing like – well, the mighty Rhine itself. Richard Farnes proved a sure guide indeed. If he is not Barenboim, then so what? Who is? Farnes’s evident knowledge and understanding of the score, of its twists and turns, of how to navigate them, and of how to maintain the musico-narrative thrust put the generally pitiful efforts of, say, Haitink’s successor at the Royal Opera to shame, likewise those fashion victims who have extolled those sorry attempts. If there were times when I felt the orchestra might have been encouraged to play out a little more, to sound still more as the Greek Chorus of Wagner’s æsthetic imagination, this was never mere ‘accompaniment’.

As Wotan, Michael Druiett looked eerily reminiscent of Donald McIntyre for Chéreau and Boulez. If he did not quite show that depth of familiarity with the work, there was little to complain about. Audibly struggling in the final scene, he lost his voice completely at one point towards the end, but that was clearly a throat problem rather than technical incapability. His was a thoughtful performance throughout. Jo Pohlheim was a properly malevolent Alberich; I look forward to hearing more from him in Siegfried. If a Loge does not steal the show, something will most likely have gone awry; Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s satirical edge, his vivid sense of theatre (even in the concert hall) certainly aided Wagner’s message to hit home. Mats Almgren made for a suitably dark Fafner, James Creswell lighter of tone than one often hears as his brother, Fasolt, but none the worse for that. Richard Roberts’s Mime was more than just wheedling. His words and their import registered strongly, likewise his character’s sheer misery in nostalgia for old Nibelheim. Yvonne Howard’s Fricka offered majesty but also vulnerability. The other gods and, especially, the Rhinemaidens made a good deal of their moments in the spotlight. If Ceri Williams’s intonation as Erda were not quite what it might have been to begin with, she soon made up for that in a dignified portrayal that did not lack mystery. As for the Nibelung scream, ‘recorded by the Opera North Children’s Chorus’: it ‘felt our pain’.

Wozzeck, Zurich Opera, 2 October 2015

Captain (Wolfgang-Ablinger Speerhacke) and Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose)
Images: Belinda Lawley

 

 

Royal Festival Hall

 

Wozzeck – Leigh Melrose
Drum Major – Brandon Jovanovich
Marie – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Andres – Mauro Peter
Captain – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Doctor – Lars Woldt
Margret – Irène Friedli
Apprentices – Pavel Daniluk, Cheyne Davidson
The Fool – Martin Zysset
Soldier – Tae-Jin Park
Marie’s Son – Laura Missuray

Zurich Opera Chorus

Philharmonia Zurich

Fabio Luisi (conductor)

  

The greatest opera of the twentieth century? Without a shadow of a doubt, which is strange, given a century overflowing with operatic masterpieces. I have never been to a performance of Wozzeck that has not left me reeling, even when miserably conducted by Antonio Pappano; this visit from the Zurich Opera, giving its new production in concert, was no exception. It was, despite the indisposition of the anticipated Christian Gerhaher as Wozzeck, at least as strongly cast as any I have heard, and benefited not only from excellent playing from the Philharmonia Zurich but, of course, its presence on stage rather than in the pit.

 

One reservation, which I shall get out of the way first: the conducting of Fabio Luisi. Luisi’s career is a mystery to me. I heard him once, as a short-notice stand-in for Christoph von Dohnányi, give a truly excellent performance of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major Symphony; such success has never in my experience been repeated. (Perhaps it was Dohnányi’s performance the orchestra was really giving?) Otherwise, it has been workmanlike performances without exception. I suppose it takes some degree of skill to have the audience in no doubt where every bar line falls, but Luisi’s bar-to-bar approach and seeming inability to go beyond a purely literalist communication of the notes on the page are really not enough for Wozzeck, not enough indeed for any score.

 

That the orchestra’s playing was of such a consistently high standard throughout, from cultivated chamber-like playing to shattering climax (d-Moll!) offered considerable compensation, not least because in such a concert setting, one appreciated Berg’s closed forms and their astonishing musical invention all the more. That Wozzeck is, amongst so many other things, as great a musical masterpiece as Pierrot lunaire has never, in my ‘live’ experience as opposed to studying the score and recordings at home, been quite so utterly apparent. Indeed, I could not help but wonder whether Stravinsky might just as readily have chosen Berg’s score as the ‘solar plexus of twentieth-century music’. Nevertheless, it remained a pity not to have a more imaginative, probing conductor, who could have turned the musico-dramatic screws, or even shown some appreciation of what and where they were.

 

The loss of Gerhaher turned out to be no loss at all. Indeed, although I was certainly curious to hear what a voice of such beauty would have made of the role, I cannot believe that the dramatic achievement of Leigh Melrose’s portrayal could possibly have been superseded. Melrose’s Wozzeck in English remains unforgettable, like much else from ENO’s brilliant Carrie Cracknell production. Here, he showed that, in the original language, his match of verbal and musical acuity with first-class acting – yes, although this was a ‘concert’ performance, much of what we saw as well as heard was in character – could, if anything, penetrate still deeper. Much nonsense has been spoken, probably more often written, about Fischer-Dieskau’s allegedly too ‘intellectual’ assumption of the role. One needs a mind to be able to understand and to communicate the darkest, most profound reaches of Berg’s – and of Wozzeck’s. This Wozzeck was as thoughtful and as sensitive as he was downtrodden and, ultimately, angered. Melrose’s appearance in Francesconi’s Quartett at the Linbury Theatre also remains lodged in the memory; quite why Covent Garden does not offer him a role on the main stage is a mystery to me.

 

Wozzeck’s final confrontation with Marie was not the least of the moments when tears involuntarily came to my eyes. (Inevitably, the final scene was the most gut-wrenching of all.) Gun-Brit Barkmin offered an equally fine portrayal of her role. Her Chrysothemis in Semyon Bychkov’s Proms Elektra last year gave British audiences an inviting taste of her artistry. This all-enveloping performance, from siren (anticipations, not least in the Louise Brooks ‘look’, of Lulu?) to terrified, guilt-wracked victim, unabashed sensuality and genuine maternal protectiveness in complex coexistence and conflict, lived both in the moment and in Berg’s astonishing depth of character development.

 

The cabaret-duo of Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain and Lars Woldt’s Doctor, high camp never at the expense of solid musical values, was at least as fine as any I have seen. They really should have their own ‘spin-off’ work. Brandon Jovanovich offered a Drum Major as repellent and yet as alluring in his masculinity as any I can recall too; the sheer power of his vocal delivery had all quake before him. Every member of the cast contributed to a greater whole; here, the advantages of having rehearsed and performed on stage prior to performance were abundantly clear. Last but not least, I must mention the astonishing heft and clarity of the choral performance, again doubtless benefiting from not being dispersed around the stage. Echoes of Weber, turned horribly sour, can rarely have been so disturbingly apparent.

Siegfried, Opéra national de Paris, 30 March 2011

Opéra Bastille

Siegfried – Torsten Kerl
Mime – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
The Wanderer – Juha Uusitalo
Alberich – Peter Sidhom
Fafner – Stephen Milling
Erda – Qiu Lin Zhang
Woodbird – Elena Tsallagova
Brünnhilde – Katarina Dalayman

Günter Krämer (director)
Jürgen Backmann (set designs)
Falk Bauer (costumes)
Diego Leetz (lighting)
Otto Pichler (choreography)

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Philippe Jordan (conductor)

Mime (Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke) and Siegfried (Torsten Kerl)
 (Image: Elisa Haberer)



What to do for a Siegfried, or indeed for a Siegfried? Our age stands, not without reason, suspicious of charismatic heroes. Nietzsche would doubtless have pointed to our décadence and likened our descent to that from Homerian epic and the dramas of Æschylus and Sophocles, to the dramas of Euripides he so despised. After Freud, we tend to prefer the neo-Euripidean psychology of anti-heroes – not that psychology is absent in Wagner; after Hitler, we tend to prefer the venal sham of so-called representative democracy to those who would overthrow it, out of fear, a quality quite unknown to Siegfried, that we might arrive at something even worse. Either way, we remain ensnared by what Adorno and Horkheimer so tellingly termed the dialectic of enlightenment, which they traced as far back even as Homer’s Odysseus. Yet Siegfried remains. We struggle to find anyone who can sing the role, let alone to believe in him, at least in the drama that bears his name, the betrayals and tragedy of Götterdämmerung perhaps speaking more easily to us. Siegfried remains too, the ‘scherzo’ of the Ring, an aptly Beethovenian description – Wagner rarely sounds more Beethovenian than at the end of the first act – yet a challenge to an age that rarely seems able to deal with Beethoven, at least the symphonic Beethoven, either. We can only marvel at Furtwängler, quite unable, it would seem, to match him, rarely even to approach him. Yet it is not so straightforward even as that, for the tale of the boy without fear becomes intertwined with that of Wotan’s final renunciation. Of the four Ring dramas, Siegfried makes least sense by itself; it can only be understood as the third part of the cycle. Performers and directors need not only to balance the two, but to bring them into fruitful conflict.

If it would be an exaggeration to say that Günter Krämer straightforwardly sets his Siegfried in the 1960s, there are certainly elements of that era to the setting, which makes chronological sense in terms of the Speer-like designs for Valhalla at its height in Die Walküre. Mime appears to live in a relatively swish, if undeniably bad-taste, apartment. The plant growing there looks as though it might explain a good deal, including the bear’s exit through a lift: were both Siegfried and Mime hallucinating? The time-setting makes a good fit with Wagner’s conception too, given that hopes for revolution were still in the air: a Junge Siegfried twinned with les événements is far from absurd, especially in Paris, though it is a moot point whether Peter Wapnewski’s ‘rebel without a consciousness’ (Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (Munich, 1978), p.169) should have lost it through smoking marijuana rather than never having possessed it in the first place. Designs for this act are garish, verging upon psychedelic.

However, a crucial aspect of Mime’s portrayal edges us into the 1970s. Perhaps it would be hoping too much for subtlety in this respect, since it might therefore have gone unnoticed, but Mime appears, through Krämer’s direction, Falk Bauer’s costumes, and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s acting on stage, to be an outrageously caricatured homosexual, hand gestures, dancing and all, with definite tendencies towards transvestism at least. (Is that yet another dig at Wagner and his pink silk, I wonder?) Given that (s)he appears as something of a cross between John Inman and Mollie Sugden, I could not help but wonder whether Krämer were a devotee of Are You Being Served? Indeed I half expected Miss Johannes Brahms to enter stage left à la Baba the Turk. The concept takes us away from endless debates, whatever one thinks about them, concerning anti-Semitism, and retains the character’s outsider status, and actually seems to be permissible on stage, in a way that a ‘Jewish’ caricature of Mime, were one so inclined, would not be. It also opens up a new angle upon the echt-heterosexual Siegfried’s instinctive aversion towards a parent who claims to be both mother and father, though is actually neither, and who certainly has no offspring of his own. Whilst preparing to forge, Siegfried – immediately, one assumes, bien dans sa peau – mockingly mimics Mime’s gestures; clearly the outcast’s place is in the kitchen. Whether we consider it all a bit of fun, veering dangerously close to homophobia, or even, implausibly, making a serious point concerning gay adoption, is probably more a matter of taste, or at least sensitivity, than anything else. It occurred to me that someone with post-modernist inclination towards hyphens and parentheses might have entitled the first act ‘Mime: (A) His/her-(s)tory’; it is certainly one way to address the paucity of women in the drama. Perhaps a thesis has been launched. At any rate, a possible way of representing Siegfried’s upbringing somewhat overshadows, indeed becomes, the plot.

The Wanderer arrives as a tramp: fair enough. In an interesting touch, he sheds his vagrant’s clothes to become a more recognisable chief of the gods as his wager, whose brutality is often glossed over, with Mime progresses. Brutality, in terms of the aftermath of war, is certainly present in Neidhöhle too. The staging of the second act Prelude is especially interesting. Nude soldiers – although, thanks to Diego Leetz’s thickly atmospheric green lighting, it is quite some time before one knows whether they are nude – carry the Nibelung hoard in dragon formation. (One sees what one hears in the music: an all too rare occurrence in stage direction.) The hoard is composed of crates, which, one eventually makes out, have ‘Rheingold’ inscribed upon them. At the end of the Prelude, the soldiers open the crates, to reveal the weaponry with which the hoard will be defended. Rentier capital – Fafner’s Proudhonian ‘What I lie on, I own’ – constitutes power as lethal as Donner’s hammer or indeed the machine guns we see. Fafner, when he actually appears, is carried aloft, replete with crown: there is something tellingly phantasmagorical to this portrayal, almost Wizard of Oz-like. And that, of course, is at least part of the key to the Tarnhelm’s magic.

If that hits home with considerable dramatic punch, other elements of the production, especially later on, convince less. The Woodbird’s representation on stage as another wartime refugee will not please everyone, and it is a decidedly peculiar conception of an unsullied Voice of Nature. Whatever one thinks of that, it seems needlessly confused to have her played by an actress, whilst Elena Tsallagova sings the role – on this occasion, not without uncertainly – offstage. The office environment of the Wotan-Erda scene does no particular harm, but makes no particular point either: it seems somewhat clichéd. However, there is tightening of tension thereafter. The confrontation between Wotan and Siegfried for once genuinely seems a real struggle. Wagner’s emphasis might have changed from his original conception, but this is still the moment when the sword of revolution shatters the spear of state. For all our – and in many respects, the production’s – reluctance to deal with revolutionary heroism, this deed of an Hegelian world-historical hero registers with surprising force. The backdrop to the final scene both confuses and illuminates. By returning us to the Walküre and Rheingold Speer set, some form of continuity is registered, likewise the changing fortunes of ‘GERMANIA’, now down to only its first three letters. One has to accept that this is just a backdrop rather than Valhalla itself, for the sake of any sense of place.

What possesses genuine dramatic power is the idea of having Valhalla’s heroes, old-fashioned in (almost) genuine Teutonic helmets and so forth, on stage above what ought to be Brünnhilde’s rock, ready and yet unable to defend or perhaps even to attain her, unlike Siegfried, the apparent harbinger of a new age – or should that be a New Age? Wotan, or rather, as I discovered at the curtain call, his body double, staggers up the steps, yet has to be assisted by his heroes, and even then it remains a struggle. So the balance or dialectic between the two principal plot strands, if not perfect, is reinstated. Moreover, the spatial separation between Brünnhilde and her old life is rendered glaringly apparent: she is now ‘purely human’, or, as we shall doubtless discover, ‘human, all too human’. Balanced against that signal achievement, I did not find much sense of annihilation, whether political or metaphysical, at the end. Perhaps the words are held to accomplish that by themselves, and perhaps they should, though my experience is that, somewhat bafflingly, audiences often seem oblivious to what precisely Siegfried and Brünnhilde have actually been singing.

In the pit, Philippe Jordan seemed to have the ‘scherzo’ element well in hand. Masculine drive, delineating the trajectory of Siegfried’s behaviour, was counterbalanced by a welcome ‘French’ – perhaps ‘feminine’ – range of colour in the orchestra. Adorno would surely have applauded the sense of phantasmagoria, which yet did not seem, as sometimes it did during the Berlin Philharmonic’s Aix-en-Provence performances, to be present merely for its own sake. For the most part, the orchestra was on fine form, the ‘Forest Murmurs’ magical indeed. Moreover, I do not think I have heard more impressively resounding kettledrums in this work than here: not a trivial point in recounting the tale of Fafner. It seemed, however, that the early third-act slackening of tension onstage was mirrored in the pit too. The structure of this act is especially difficult to hold together: I have heard far worse, but there were moments of meandering.

Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s vocal performance was as impressive as his stage portrayal: the first act really was Mime’s story. His wheedling second-act deceptions were just as impressive, likewise the ‘evil stock-jobbers’ satire’ (Hans Mayer, ‘The “Ring” as a bourgeois parable. Wieland Wagner’s new conception and its realisation in Bayreuth,’ in Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele, booklet for Götterdämmerung, 1966, p.33) confrontation with Peter Sidhom’s verbally attentive Alberich. Juha Uusitalo handled well the changing demands of role and production: both Wanderer and the emerging-returning Wotan were finely characterised and well delivered. Stephen Milling’s Fafner, however, threatened to overshadow all and sundry; his was an excellent performance in every way. The deep beauty of Qiu Lin Zhang’s voice and the dignity of her stage presence made for a notable Erda, though there were moments of less than perfect intonation. It is a cruel thing to leave Brünnhilde’s entry so late and then to expect her to do what she must. Katarina Dalayman’s delivery was not perfect but nevertheless offered moments of scintillation that augur well for Götterdämmerung. What of the hero himself? Torsten Kerl emerged with considerable credit. His resources, quite understandably, were sapped somewhat during the third act, but he recovered for a powerful final duet. Kerl was surprisingly vigorous throughout: his vocal reserves would appear to have grown considerably. What, then, to do for a Siegfried or a Siegfried? One could do much worse than start here.

Le grand macabre, English National Opera, 9 October 2009

(sung in English)

Coliseum

Venus/Gepopo – Susanna Andersson
Mescalina – Susan Bickley
Prince Go-Go – Andrew Watts
Piet the Pot – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Nekrotzar – Pavlo Hunka
Astradamors – Frode Olsene
White Minister – Daniel Norman
Black Minister – Simon Butteriss
Amanda – Rebecca Bottone
Amando – Frances Bourne

Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco (directors)
Alfons Flores (set designer)
Franc Aleu (video)
Lluc Castells (costumes)
Peter van Praet (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus of the English National Opera
Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)

It is curious when one thinks how inventive a composer Ligeti is, that the greatest impact from ENO’s new production of Le grand macabre is theatrical rather than musical. Sometimes such things happen on account of theatrical overload – one wants to tell the director to calm down a bit, as in, for example, Phillip Stölzl’s Salzburg production of Benvenuto Cellini – but here, I think it was much as it should be. La Fura dels Baus’s production is quite magnificent, yet on occasion it does serve to highlight a certain, surprising lack in Ligeti’s musical invention. This seemed to me rather more the case after the interval. Banality is clearly the point in certain cases; calls from the chorus – very well done, incidentally – threaten to turn into something akin to minimalism. And there are some wonderful musical passages too, not least the passacaglia. However, much as I might wish to do so, I cannot account this one of the composer’s strongest works. Parts are genuinely funny, and were certainly made so by the production, but the slapstick is no competitor to Aventures or Nouvelles Aventures.

A giant woman’s body that almost fills the stage is presaged on video by an appropriate combination of humour and disgust at consumerism and tabloid journalism. As the woman, ‘inspired’ by Claudia, a friend of the Catalan theatrical collective, revolves, characters emerge from and retreat into various of her orifices. It is surreal, fun, and not without a hint of anger, though never does it seem didactic. The direction of the singers is first rate and the sheer cheapness of how late capitalist society would doubtless ‘celebrate’ the apocalypse shines through, without being rammed down one’s throat.

Likewise, the musical performances are strong, though the abiding impression, quite rightly, is of contribution to a company achievement rather than a moment for stardom. Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke and Pavlo Hunka portrayed their central characters, Piet the Pot and Nekrotzar, with dramatic intelligence. Susan Bickley was predictably but no less laudably fine as the apparently intimidating but actually risible Mescalina. If Amanda and Amando remain, for me at least, more irritating than anything else, that is not the fault of Rebecca Bottone and Frances Bourne, who negotiated their musical lines with aplomb, even if their diction left a little to be desired. There was plenty of camp to be relished in Andrew Watts’s Prince Go-Go and his two ministers, played by Daniel Norman and Simon Butteriss. However, if there was a musical star to the evening, it was the orchestra, which has clearly internalised Ligeti’s considerable demands, so as to be able to play a full theatrical part in the proceedings. The orchestral security and expression owed much to Baldur Brönnimann’s command of the score; this was as sure a guide as one could have hoped for.