Proms 29 and 30 – Swedish CO/Dausgaard - ‘The Brandenburg Project’: Bach, Turnage, Hillborg, Caine, Neuwirth, Dean, and Mackey. 5 August 2018

Royal Albert Hall

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.1 in F major, BWV 1046

Mark-Anthony Turnage: Maya (2014, UK premiere)

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.3 in G major, BWV 1048

Anders Hillborg: Bach Materia (2017, UK premiere)

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.5 in D major, BWV 1050

Uri Caine: Hamsa (2015, UK premiere)

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.4 in G major, BWV 1049

Olga Neuwirth: Aello – ballet mécanomorphe (2016-17, UK premiere)

Brett Dean: Approach – Prelude to a Canon (2017, UK premiere)

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no.2 in F major, BWV 1047

Steven Mackey: Triceros (2015, UK premiere)

Fiona Kelly, Claire Chase (flutes)

Per Gross, Katarina Wiedell (recorders)

Lisa Almberg, Daniel Burstedt, Mårten Larsson (oboes)

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)

Göran Hülphers, Terése Larsson (horns)

Pekka Kuusisto, Antje Weithaas (violins)

Brett Dean, Tabea Zimmermann (violas)

Maya Beiser (cello)

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

Uri Caine (piano)

Swedish Chamber Orchestra

Thomas Dausgaard (conductor)

It is always a fascinating prospect to hear contemporary and indeed earlier composers respond to repertoire works. Think of Mozart learning from and adding to Bach and Handel. Last year in Vienna, I heard newly commissioned responses from eight composers to Le Marteau sans Maître, interspersed with the movements of Boulez’s work. This summer, Bach’s were the masterpieces, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra having commissioned six composers to write companion pieces to each of his Brandenburg Concertos. Rarely if ever will all contributions be of equal stature or prove equally satisfying to different tastes. Such was certainly not the case, in my experience, with the responses to Boulez; nor was it to be so here. Alas, only two of the new works seemed to me to have been worth the effort; the other four proved at best over-extended and, in at least two cases, probably more, meretricious. Still, even in somewhat variable performances of the ‘originals’, Bach, as Boulez would have put it, remained.

First up was the first of Bach’s set of six. Its first movement was light, airy, not unlike Claudio Abbado’s late way with these pieces with his Orchestra Mozart, if not quite so secure. Although there was much to admire in the playing of the Swedish CO under Thomas Dausgaard, here and elsewhere, rarely if ever did I gain the feeling of being truly grounded in Bach’s music; it seemed as much an excursion to them as, perhaps still more so than, the new works. Still, it breathed – just about, and was well balanced, in itself no mean feat. What a relief, moreover, it was to hear modern horns in this music. The following Adagio enjoyed some delectable oboe playing; I also loved the dark, velvety bassoon tone. Its successor danced freely – not, thank goodness, in the bizarrely dogmatic ‘This is a Baroque dance and this is how a Baroque dance must sound and be experienced, exterminate, exterminate…’ so prevalent in certain circles. Mahan Esfahani, playing harpsichord continuo throughout the first concert, never failed to work with Bach’s harmony, to call it by name and thus create it anew (if I may slightly misquote Adorno). If certain ‘effects’ in the Polacca irritated, the closing dances nevertheless beguiled. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Maya perplexed – that is, before it merely bored. Beautifully played by all concerned, not least cello soloist, Maya Beiser, its status as response, companion piece, anything at all to the Bach work was less unclear than absent. It did not employ the same musical forces, had no connection, at least so far as I could hear, to its material; worst of all, though, it came across as a frankly cynical prolongation of what might have been a couple of minutes or so of television serial mood music. Vaguely blues-y at times, vaguely threnody-like, it might initially have filled a gap in a concert programme; soon, however, I developed a suspicion that the gap would have been better left unfilled.

Bach’s Third Concerto offered cultivated modern playing, albeit with very small forces. (Is that really a sensible way to treat this music in the Royal Albert Hall?) It was not hard-driven as so many authenticke performances tend to be, even if it lacked a good deal in gravitas. Again, it was the continuo playing that afforded the greatest pleasure, grounding the harmony and rendering Bach’s form dynamic. About Anders Hillborg’s ‘new’ second movement, the less said the better. On a slow day, it might, I suppose, have taken five minutes to jot down. The third movement (Bach’s, thank God) was very fast yet not unreasonably so; something of Bach’s spirit and humanity remained. Hillborg’s Bach Materia opened intriguingly, out of the orchestra’s tuning up. Alas, it was all downhill thereafter. The music moved into vaguely minimalist churning out of violin arpeggios from soloist Pekka Kuusisto, offered ‘effects’ aplenty, from silly chirping noises to shouted interjections as Kuusisto and double bass player Sebastien Dubé improvised. The collaboration showed Dubé to better advantage than Kuusisto. Should unpleasant wailing be your thing, however, there was some of that too. Again, the sense was of filling in time that really had no need to be filled in. When bits of Bach returned, there was some enjoyment to be had, soon not so much dashed as dissipated. Attempts to be ‘right on’ rarely prove edifying; this, frankly, was just a mess.

The Fifth Brandenburg Concerto was for me the unquestioned highlight of the first concert and indeed of the Bach performances as a whole. Here, it seemed, the soloists, especially Esfahani, took the lead rather than Dausgaard and turned what they were doing into a performance in the living, emphatic sense. The first movement was lively and breathed, its contours and formal dynamism not only apparent but felt, experienced. Esfahani’s way with the cadenza not only impressed, but reminded us what astounding music this is. It would be foolish to imitate Furtwängler, even on the piano, but his incredible recorded 1950 performance from Salzburg remains the model here. Esfahani proved a worthy successor. The second movement was true Kammermusik: flexible, beautifully balanced, with all the give and take one might have hoped for between harpsichord, flute (Fiona Kelly), and especially violin (Antje Weithaas). Bach’s closing Allegro danced with far greater ease than any of those aforementioned self-conscious ‘Baroque Dance Lessons’ and, naturally, went far deeper. These were not soloists who, again to borrow from Adorno, said Bach yet meant Telemann. Its contrapuntal complexity was embraced; that complexity embraced both performers and audience in return. It was perhaps a little puzzling not to have a ‘response’ that involved the harpsichord, but Uri Caine’s Hamsa was doubtless written with himself in mind as piano soloist. There is no doubting the quality of his pianism; his tone was often to die for. Hamsa, named after the Arabic word for ‘five’, seemed to me sincere and ambitious. It certainly confronted Bach in quotation, allusion, and, in its way, vaguely neo-Classical procedure. Again, it seemed far too long for its material, whose treatment began to sound merely arbitrary. Perhaps I simply did not ‘get’ Caine’s aesthetic. There was certainly no gainsaying the quality of the performances here.

Bach remained, of course, and endured into the second concert. The Fourth Brandenburg Concerto reverted somewhat to the more tentative or at least constricted ‘early-ish’ style of the First and Third, at least so far as the orchestra and Kuusisto were concerned. Per Gross and Katarina Widell on recorders, however, offered infectious enthusiasm. Dausgaard seemed overly keen to mould the central Andante; its fussiness continued into the finale, which alas, had something of that ‘This is a Baroque Dance’ quality to it. A somewhat disappointing performance, then, prefaced Olga Neuwirth’s brilliant Aello – ballet mécanomorphe, to my ears by far the strongest of the new works. In three movements, like its companion, it immediately spoke with the tones – in every sense – of a serious composer at work. Figures remembered from Bach, whether melodic, rhythmic, or both, sounded as if trapped in a machine. Or were they actually perfectly happy to be there? Claire Chase on flute, shadowed by two muted trumpets, offered breathtaking virtuosity, set against an ever-changing ensemble that included synthesised harpsichord and glass harmonica as well as portable typewriter. Machines can be fun as well as serious – indeed sometimes especially when they are serious. So too can Bach. An almost Berio-like malaise, material dragged down into something mysteriously different yet related, led, toward the end of the first movement, into a reinvention of Bach and Neuwirth in almost jazzy style (all the more convincing for making no claims to be jazz ‘itself’). The glass harmonica soundworld of the second movement, however ‘artificial’ – what art, by definition, is not? – seemed to incite more ‘traditional’, arabesque-like flute writing which yet did not lose its ‘mechanical’ edge. Jesting with form – or perhaps simply my lack of understanding! – had me think for a while we were embarked upon a transition to a finale in which Bach would reassert himself, only to realise that ‘transition’ had been the finale along. I very much look forward to hearing it again.

Brett Dean’s Approach – Prelude to a Canon was written to preface the Sixth Concerto. Its opening busy counterpoint seemed to evoke, in melody and harmony, a Bach who may or may not have been ‘real’. Different moods, never predictable, whether ludic or songful, prevailed at different times, sometimes suggesting a more ‘modern’ conception of double concerto for the composer and fellow violist, Tabea Zimmermann, sometimes very much a reinvention of Bach’s own terms. Emotional and intellectual tension was often coincident; when not, the disparity proved equally suggestive. If I responded more strongly to Neuwirth’s piece, there was no doubting the accomplishment of Dean’s either. Bach emerged from its final bars. Again, my ears had been tricked; I had expected another section of Dean. This is a very difficult work to bring off. However, if I found the first movement unreasonably fast, Bach’s dark colours nevertheless shone through (or whatever the more appropriate verb for darkness here would be). The outer movements benefited from being Dean and Zimmermann taking the lead as soloists; the central Adagio ma non tanto seemed less certain in direction.

Bach bade farewell with his Second Brandenburg Concerto. It was hard-driven and light-textured in the now fashionable way. Nevertheless, balance came across very well: no mean feat in this of all works. Perhaps the highlight was the central Andante: not, I hasten to add, because the excellent Håkan Hardeberger was not playing, but because it flowed more freely, again taken as chamber music. I am afraid I could not get on with the machine-like approach to the finale. Even Stravinsky, I imagined, might have asked Dausgaard and company to calm down a little. That said, it helped pave the way for Steven Mackey’s Triceros, which followed without a break, a held trumpet note for transition. Its initial (post-)minimalism passed amiably enough. It certainly came across in polished, even accomplished fashion when contrasted with the offerings by Turnage and Hillsborg. Again, the aesthetic is one to which I find it difficult to respond, so I shall not say too much, other than again to say that it could have done with being half, even a third of the length. Note-spinning may have been the way of many a sub-Telemann composer; it was never Bach’s. Bach, however, remained – and always will.

Prom 26: Prohaska/Il Giardino Armonico/Antonini - Purcell, Graupner, Sartorio, Handel, Costello, Cavalli, and Hasse, 2 August 2018

Royal Albert Hall

 

Purcell: Dido and Aeneas: Overture and ‘Ah! Belinda, I am pressed with torment’
Christoph Graupner: Dido, Königin von Carthago: ‘Holdestes Lispeln der spielenden Fluthen’
Antonio Sartorio: Giulio Cesare in Egitto: ‘Non voglio amar’
Matthew Locke: The Tempest: ‘The Second Musick: Curtain Tune’
Sartorio: Giulio Cesare: ‘Quando voglio’
Graupner: Dido: ‘Der Himmel ist von Donner … Infido Cupido’, ‘Agitato da tempeste’
Handel: Concerto grosso in C minor, op.6 no.8
Handel: Giulio Cesare in egitto: ‘Che sento? Oh dio! … Se pietà di me non senti’
Dario Costello: Sonata no.15 in D minor
Cavalli: Didone: ‘Re de’ Getuli altero … Il mio marito’
Hasse: Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra: ‘Morte col fiero aspetto’
Purcell: The Fairy Queen: ‘Chaconne – Dance for Chinese Man and Woman’
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas: ‘Oft she visits this lone mountain’, ‘Thy hand, Belinda … When I am laid in earth’
 

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Il Giardino Armonico
Giovanni Antonini (conductor)
 

In this, her Proms debut, Anna Prohaska offered something akin to a cantata of two queens, complementary and contrasted: Dido and Cleopatra. Returning in a sense to her ‘early music’ roots – her career has always been far richer, more varied, but that world has always played an important part – she collaborated with the Italian ‘period’ ensemble, Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini. It made for a splendid late-night concert, a fine mix of repertoire familiar and (to me, at any rate) unfamiliar, any minor reservations I may have entertained relating entirely to the orchestra and conductor. Prohaska, if I may be forgiven for saying so, crowned herself queen of this repertoire, notwithstanding the frankly unpromising surroundings of the Royal Albert Hall.

 

We began, as indeed we should end, with Purcell, with Dido and Aeneas: one of the very greatest of English operas and indeed of ‘Baroque’ operas, if that problematical term may be held to mean anything at all. ‘Tristan und Isolde in a pint pot,’ that legendary conductor of what was then not quite ‘early musicke’, Raymond Leppard, called it. There was no question from the Overture that Antonini was more at home with these, ‘his’ musicians than he had been with members of the LSO Chamber Orchestra in a concert last year at the Barbican. For one thing, the acoustic was kind to the instruments, lessening intonational problems, which were in any case rarely grave. Resplendent, regal in gold, our soprano walked onto the stage as the Overture drew to a close, ready to give a rich-toned, clear, beautifully ornamented account of Dido’s first number. Here, as elsewhere, what struck me about her ornamentation, aside from the awe-inspiring ease with which it and any other coloratura were despatched, was how it did not really register as ‘ornamentation’. It was musical and indeed verbal expression, created seemingly on the spot. (Whether that were actually the case is neither here nor there.) Her lightly acted performance also proved just the ticket. In homage perhaps to Goldilocks, another queen of sorts, it was neither too much nor too little.

 

Christoph Graupner’s Singspiel for Hamburg, Dido, Königin von Carthago (1707), was quite new to me. It is one of those curious – to our ears, yet not necessarily to those of the time – works written in German and Italian, standard Italian arias doing their thing whilst the action was largely advanced in the vernacular. I should certainly be keen to learn more. The Egyptian princess Menalippe’s ‘Holdestes Lispeln der spielenden Fluthen’ proved vividly pictorial. One could almost see – one could certainly hear – those rippling waters through ravishing instrumental playing. This may be too early and the wrong country too, but Poussin more than once came to my mind. When later Prohaska turned to the Queen of Carthage herself, we heard first a German accompagnato (‘Der Himmel ist von Donner Keylen schwer…’) followed by its Italian aria, ‘Infido Cupido’. This was very much music written and communicated in the terms of early eighteenth-century opera seria. Hearing it in this particular context, we understood both its roots in earlier opera and much of what distinguished it from its predecessors too. Prohaska’s stylistic awareness is never a sterile thing, ‘dogma’ in the slightly misleading popular understanding of the term; it is and here was always put to expressive, dramatic use. Much the same might be said of her performance of the tempest aria that ensued: of a genre yet not over-determined by it.

In between the Graupner excerpts, we heard music by Antonio Sartorio and Matthew Locke. The former’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto contains, according to the programme note, no fewer than sixty-five arias. Prohaska gave us two, ‘Non voglio amar’ and ‘Quando voglio’, the first furious – with foot-stamping – and, that inescapable word, tempestuous. I could not help but wonder whether the musicians might have been better off without a conductor in the first; Antonini looked a little awkward and the results might have been a little freer. No harm was done, though, and his provision of a recorder obbligato in the latter aria offered winning counterpoint to the woman of desires revealed by our queen of song. The Locke excerpt offered an ineffably ‘English’ contrast, much of it mysteriously veiled, harking back to the days – still current, of course, yet somewhat old-fashioned – of the viol consort.

 

Handel was next on the menu. Antonini’s way with the Concerto grosso, op.6 no.8, made me long for something a little grander, a little more aware of harmonic motion. This is, after all, orchestral music. Tastes being what they are today, that was never likely to be the case, though. I liked the way the Siciliana, its fifth movement, harked back in context to the seventeenth century. A hard-driven account of its Allegro successor proved less welcome. Handel’s own Giulio Cesare followed, its libretto derived by Nicola Francesco Haym from that of Giacomo Bussani for Sartorio. What a wonderful idea – obvious, one might think, yet unusual – it was to offer excerpts from both operas. In Cleopatra’s ‘Che sento? Oh dio! … Se pietà di me non senti’, Prohaska’s shading to dramatic ends opened up a new creative, expressive world. I felt – and I suspect much of the audience did likewise – a window into understanding of the queen’s character had been opened wide, even just by this account of a single aria. More please!

Dario Castello’s D minor Sonata, published in 1629, performed its bridging role well. It is perhaps not especially thrilling music, but it has its moments of interest; it also benefited, I think, from being given as chamber music, without a conductor. Moving forward a few years, yet remaining in Venice, we heard from Cavalli’s Dido, Prohaska adopting just the right – to my ears, at least – slightly post-Monteverdian air. (Yes, the great man was still alive in 1641, but that is hardly the point.) I can hardly offer greater praise than to say that her singing brought Frederica von Stade to mind, both in command of line and in its generosity of spirit. Hasse’s aria, from his Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra, sounded very much again from the world of later opera seria. Prohaska’s coloratura probably deserves another endorsement here: impeccable, both ‘musically’ and ‘dramatically’, not that the distinction is especially meaningful.

 

And so, we returned to Purcell. The Chaconne from The Fairy Queen had me long for Britten’s more generous way with such music, yet unquestionably it danced. A vivid narration from Dido and Aeneas, the Second Woman’s ‘Oft she visits this lone mountain’, was imbued with quite the sense of drama, given brevity and (relative) lack of context. Dido’s Lament was sung with expressive freedom that never approached licence, a reminder of Leppard’s Tristan­ designation, dignified without a hint of sentimentality. As an encore, we heard ‘Fear no danger to ensue’, the duet part taken by Antonini on recorder. A lovely concert, then, but in the best sense an educative one too. Bildung, one might say, is an excellent thing indeed.

 

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Parsifal, 31 July 2018

Nationaltheater

 

Parsifal (Jonas Kaufmann) and the Flowermaidens
Images: Ruth Walz

Amfortas – Christian Gerhaher

Titurel – Bálint Szabó

Gurnemanz – René Pape
Parsifal – Jonas Kaufmann
Klingsor – Wolfgang Koch
Kundry – Nina Stemme
First Knight of the Grail – Kevin Conners
Second Knight of the Grail – Callum Thorpe
Squires – Paula Iancic, Annika Schlicht, Manuel Günther, Matthew Grills
Flowermaidens – Golda Schultz, Selene Zanetti, Annika Schlicht, Nolevuyiso Mpofu, Paula Iancic, Rachael Wilson
Voice from Above – Rachael Wilson
 

Pierre Audi (director)

Georg Baselitz, Christof Hetzer (set designs)
Florence von Gerkan, Tristan Sczesny (costumes)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Klaus Bertisch, Benedikt Stampfli (dramaturgy)
 

Children’s Chorus, Chorus and Extra Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus masters: Stellario Fagone and Sören Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Kirill Petrenko (conductor)

  

And so, this year’s Munich Opera Festival and this year’s Bavarian State Opera season came to a close with everyone’s favourite Bühnenweihfestspiel, Parsifal, in the final outing this time around for Pierre Audi’s new production. With a cast of dreams, an orchestra of distinction conducted by Kirill Petrenko, not to mention a world-class opera chorus, what could be not to like? Nothing for much of the audience, it would seem. Alas, for me it proved a grave disappointment, for which the responsibility must either lie with me, Audi, or both of us.

Amfortas (Christian Gerhaher) and members of the chorus

I am not sure I have ever seen a production of Parsifal so lacking in – well, anything. Goodness knows one can argue about what this work is about, what its problems might be, what its extraordinary virtues might be, even what it might be made to be about, and so on and forth. Goodness knows directors can come up with execrable concepts or execute their concepts, good or bad, less than well. I speak from the bitter experience of having attended a good few, not least the present Uwe Eric Laufenberg farrago at Bayreuth, which somehow manages both to be intensely offensive in its Islamophobia and unbearably boring. Audi, however, seems to have no discernible thoughts about it whatsoever. I almost have nothing beyond that to say, so shall keep the rest of this very short. Its selling point – to some, anyway – seems always to have been designs by the strangely overrated visual artist, Georg Baselitz. They struck me as very much in keeping with what else I have seen from Baselitz; if you like to look at this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you would have liked to look at. The first act, all of it, is set in a forest. For some reason, the knights take off their outer clothes to reveal unflattering fattish naked suits, which suggest a degree of androgyny, although that suggestion seems later – by the Flowermaidens – to be refuted. The second act is barely staged at all, yet without any of the virtues of a concert performance. The third act returns to the forest. The end. To think that this succeeded a production by Peter Konwitschny beggars belief.

Parsifal and members of the chorus

Yet so oppressive are the designs, for that is really all the production can be, so different is the experience from a concert performance, that much very good – although not, I think, quite so good as many seem to have thought – musical work went largely to waste. Petrenko’s conducting was excellent, although it never seemed to me to dig so deep as, say, the work of a Barenboim or indeed, in days not so very distant, a Haitink. Still, there could be no real complaints either with Petrenko or his orchestra. His tempi in the first act, at least earlier on, felt relatively swift; I have no idea whether they actually were. Yet they never felt rushed; his was a fleet, at least slightly Boulezian conception, until it was not. For there was plenty of space, well taken, to manage the work’s ebb and flow – whilst seeming, and doubtless to a certain extent, being managed by the work’s ebb and flow. Interestingly, the opening of the third act, its Prelude in particular, sounded more anguished than anything in the second. If only some of the pain implied for Parsifal’s wayfaring had been otherwise reflected in the staging. This was certainly a reading that developed and, by any standards, marked a fine debut run in the work.

One oddity: I do not think I have heard such feeble Grail bells. According to the programme, however, this was a special instrument modelled by the Bayreuth piano company, Steingraeber, after the instrument used at the 1882 premiere. If so, the Meister was – not for the first time, nor even for the last – surely mistaken. The Bayreuth bells we know from, say, Karl Muck’s 1927 recording, in their 1926 design pack sound to my ears more impressive in every way. Or maybe I am just too wedded to what I think I ‘ought’ to hear.

Kundry (Nina Stemme) and Parsifal

 

Singing was certainly distinguished, although it was really the Amfortas and, perhaps more oddly, the Klingsor who stood out for me. Christian Gerhaher has recently, surprisingly, seemed more at home in opera than in Lieder, and so it was here. His fabled beauty of tone was never an end in itself but put to sweet, agonising dramatic work – alongside the fascinating suggestion, apparent in his eyes if nowhere else on stage, of a crazed, ecstatic religious visionary. Could that not have been the director’s concept, if he had no other? It would certainly have opened up all manner of possibilities. Wolfgang Koch’s way with words, music, and their combination marked him out as an uncommonly excellent Klingsor – even if Klingsors rarely disappoint. Again, one learned much simply from observing his facial expressions. Jonas Kaufmann offered lovely moments, lovely passages, and a great deal of verbal acuity too in his assumption of the title role. However, his voice really did not sound as I recall it from not so long ago; there were times when it sounded not only strained but worn. Let us hope that this was just an off-day (a highly relative off-day). He and Nina Stemme as Kundry were certainly not helped by Audi’s non-production. I am not entirely convinced that this is Stemme’s ideal role, but it is surely not unreasonable for us to adjust our expectations according to a particular artist’s abilities and conception. Something a little wilder either on stage or in voice, or ideally both, would not have gone amiss, but again there were no grounds for true complaint. Likewise with René Pape’s Gurnemanz. His beauty of tone remains, yet there is now far more of a sense of verbal response than once there was in his singing. If Parsifal, then, is for you primarily, even exclusively, about singing and more broadly about musical performance, you would have experienced something undoubtedly special. If, however, it needs to be for you a drama too, I cannot imagine your response would have been so very different from mine.

 

Munich Opera Festival (3) - From the House of the Dead, 30 July 2018

Nationaltheater

Images: Wilfried Hösl

Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov – Peter Mikuláš
Aljeja – Evgeniya Sotnikova
Luka Kuzmič (Filka Morozov) – Aleš Briscein
Skuratov – Charles Workman
Šiškov – Bo Skovhus
Big Prisoner, Prisoner with the Eagle – Manuel Günther
Little Prisoner, Bitter Prisoner – Tim Kuypers
Governor – Christian Rieger
Old Prisoner – Ulrich Reß
Čekunov – Johannes Kammler
Drunk Prisoner – Galeano Salas
Cook – Boris Prýgl
Smith – Alexander Milev
Pope – Peter Lobert
Prostitute – Niamh O’Sullivan
Don Juan (Brahmin) – Callum Thorpe
Kedrill, Young Prisoner – Matthew Grills
Šapkin, Happy Prisoner – Kevin Conners
Čerevin, Voice from the Kirghizian Steppes – Dean Power
Guard – Long Long

Frank Castorf (director)

Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretski (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert (video, live camera)
Stefanie Katja Nirschl (live camera)
Jens Crull (video, live editing)
Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)
Martha Münder (revival director)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Simone Young (conductor)

  

Frank Castorf might have been born to direct From the House of the Dead. In this, his third opera project – or better, his third opera project in the opera house, for his Volksbühne Meistersinger must surely be reckoned with, even by those of us who did not see it – many of his hallmarks and those of his team are present, yet without the slightest hint of staleness, of anything other than being reborn for and in the work. And how the work suits such an approach; in many respects, the deconstruction has already been done. Probably Janáček’s greatest opera, indeed his greatest work of all, it is no accident that it is the one Pierre Boulez chose to conduct, towards the end of his life. Alas I never heard that live, although in 2014, I would see Patrice Chéreau’s production in Berlin. That was, of course, a fine piece of theatre, as indeed was Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Covent Garden staging, seen earlier this year. Castorf, however, revelling in its fragmentary nature – for it is in many respects his own – triumphantly, I should say dialectically, offers the strongest sense of a whole I have seen or could imagine. By taking it as it is, Castorf’s team and a magnificent cast, aided greatly by Bavarian State Opera forces under Simone Young in the finest performance I have heard from her, alert both to the needs of the minute and of the greater architecture, present and represent the opera as it is and might be. Quite without sentimentality, they write and rewrite, igniting and reigniting that Dostoevskian redemptive spark that is both present and absent throughout, depending when and where one looks and listens, how and with what one pieces together one’s own narrative, musical and dramatic.

We are in Russia – no doubt of that. It is Russia at a dark time – again no doubt of that. (When, however, was that not the case, save for a few years under Lenin, and even then…?) But is it a ‘real’ Russia? And what indeed could so impossibly naïve a formulation mean? Live camerawork performs all manner of tasks, questioning our ability to comprehend, to view, to narrate, whilst making it all the more necessary that we try to do so. There is little doubt concerning the realism – until, that is, a true Carnival of the Dead comes amongst the prisoners and the prison. Magic realism? Perhaps, but if so, it is the blackest of magic to follow, perhaps even to sublate, the blackest of comedy and (non-)redemption. Whereas, in his Siegfried and Gotterdammerung, Castorf took us to an alternative historical path for the GDR, an alternative that turned out not to be so very alternative at all, (Al)Exander Platz still a commercial, post-socialist wasteland, Wall Street still failing to burn, here we seem perhaps to have joined the USSR for an alternative 1930s.

Bitter Prisoner (Tim Kuypers), Prisoner with
the Eagle (Manuel Gunther),
Aljeja (Evgeniya Sotnikova)

Or have we? Trotskyist hints abound: the rabbit hutch (many thanks to my friend Sam Goodyear for having pointed out the connection), Mexico too (‘Partido liberal’, we read on one of many historical and/or imaginary signs), a film advertisement (in Spanish), starring Alain Delon. (Hang on, if we are in 1972…?) Even a carnival bird Aljeja, splendidly sung by Evgeniya Sotnikova, seems both to suggest and to disavow that possibility. Or are we, was I, confusing him/her – here most definitely ‘her’ – with the Prisoner with the Eagle, or his eagle? What might that mean here, whether the confusion or the eagle? Russia or the USSR, however, it certainly remains, even down to the affinity – which seems to have been overstated by some – with Aleksandar Denić’s Walküre set (Azerbaijan, 1942). What does a sign for Pepsi Cola in English and Russian tell us? And what, at the end, does the English poster invitation to travel to the USSR as a holiday destination mean, not least in such appalling circumstances? Stop trying to ascribe meaning to everything: is that not what, as an imprisoned intellectual, one is compelled to do? Are we to see the future and will it to work, or perhaps indict it? Is it just a joke, as suggested by the presence of a Ring crocodile? Who knows? We shall never make the journey, just like so many of those prisoners, yet unlike, perhaps, Gorjančikov, who thinks he has something written in his head. Like Dostoevsky, like Trotsky, like Castorf, like our writer, Alexandr Petrovič Gorjančikov, we write and rewrite. So too does the action all around, on stage, on film, seen and unseen; so too, of course, does the orchestra.

Šiškov (Bo Skovhus), Statisterie and Chorus

It is complicated, yes; how can a fragmentary drama with so many ‘characters’ or at least people not be? But it is also visceral, direct. Violence we see, we feel, whether we like it or not, be it in the Guard’s sadistic flagellation (a truly nasty Long Long, almost a match for the still nastier Governor of Christian Rieger) or in the metal of the steppes’ orchestra. Opera too, even in this most inhospitable of circumstances, is reborn. If the Wanderer seemed to have been an inspiration for our noble prisoner’s initial journey to this camp, Peter Mikuláš capturing both intelligence and a certain camouflaged nobility, then it is the Wotan of the second-act Walküre monologue who comes to mind in that of Šiškov. That is partly a matter of Bo Skovhus’s searing portrayal, quite the most powerful performance I have seen and heard from him in a long time. But everyone involved has played a role in putting these pieces together, in constructing something from these musico-dramatic shards. ‘A mother gave birth even to Filka,’ after all – and we know it, because, like Šiškov, he sings, not least in this devilish incarnation from Aleš Briscein. So too, earlier, do Don Juan (an outstanding Callum Thorpe) and his pseudo-Leporello (another excellent performance, this time from Matthew Grills), in a play-within-a-play. That, thanks to Castorf’s lengthy experience with and rejuvenation of post-dramatic commentary, seems more of a play-in-itself than I can recall – until, once again, it does not.

 

Šiškov, Cerevin (Dean Power)

For, like Don Giovanni, this is redemptive within and without, or seems to be: as I said, it takes life and drama as they are. A (post-)religious consciousness is at work here. It also, perhaps, suggests what they might be, or at least what one day, when the revolution comes again, the revolution to which we cling no matter what, we might hope it to be. The noble prisoner leaves, though, so most likely not. He has used, learned from his experience; so, we imagine, have we. The carnival of (Russian) death continues. There is a chink of something uncertain. In the blackest of comedies, we might even think it light. Humanity even – though are we not all now post-human(ist) as well as post-dramatic? Who knows, who cares? This human comedy and tragedy of which we are part rolls on, just as it did for those Calderón-like figures of a reimagined Salzburg World Theatre in the celebrated post-war Furtwängler Don Giovanni. The final scene alienates – like Mozart’s. And yet, like that too, it moves (us). We have experienced something, even if we have not a hope in our living hell of learning what it may have been. We have, like this Gorjančikov, written a work of sorts in our head. No one will read it or even remember it, perhaps it would be impossible for anyone to make sense of its difficult, even nonsensical fragments; yet that spark of creativity, of art, of that which Marx just as much as Schiller considered made us human, has flickered. At least we think it did. Perhaps. Or at least we thought it did. Once. Perhaps. We return, like Gorjančikov, like Trotsky, to watch the post/non-human (non-)drama for the rabbits in their hutch, caged like us and yet (to the sentimental?) more free. Perhaps.

Aljeja and rabbits in their hutch

Munich Opera Festival (2) - Orlando Paladino, 29 July 2018

Prinzregententheater

Angelica – Adela Zaharia

Rodomonte – Edwin Crossley-Mercer

Orlando – Mathias Vidal

Medoro – Dovlet Nurgeldiyev

Licone – Guy de Mey

Eurilla – Elena Sancho Pereg

Pasquale – David Portillo

Alcina – Tara Erraught

Caronte – François Lis

Gabi and Heiko Herz – Heiko Pinkowski, Gabi Herz

Axel Ranisch (director)

Falko Herold (designs)
Magdalena Padros Celada (choreography)

Michael Bauer (lighting)

Rainer Karlitschek (dramaturgy)

Munich Chamber Orchestra

Statisterie and Opera Ballet of the Bavarian State Opera

Ivor Bolton (conductor)

Gabi and Heiko Herz (Heiko Pinkowski, Gabi Herz), Angelica (Adela Zaharia)
Images: © Wilfried Hösl

Should you not like eighteenth-century opera very much, if at all, and should you have no or little interest in Haydn either, this may have been the production for you. The fundamental premise of Axel Ranisch’s staging of Orlando Paladino seems to have been that this was a work of little fundamental merit, or at least a work in a genre of little such merit, and that it needed the help of a modern medium – perhaps, it might even be claimed, an equivalent medium – to speak to a contemporary audience. Speak to the audience in Munich’s Prinzregententheater it certainly seemed to – rightly or wrongly. I could only wish that both the work and those of us in the audience who thought otherwise had not been treated with such condescension. That may sound reactionary. Perhaps indeed it is; perhaps all that matters is that those many people who enjoyed such an ‘entertainment’, to use a properly eighteenth-century word, did indeed enjoy it. Perhaps. Let me, however, try to explain why I found this, much fine singing notwithstanding, a somewhat dispiriting experience.

Alcina (Tara Erraught) and Pasquale (David Portillo)

No one, I think, would claim Nunziata Porta to be one of opera’s greatest librettists; this is not a Da Ponte, a Wagner, or a Hofmannsthal. Nor indeed a Metastasio. However, his libretto here is, by the same token, likely to be underestimated, precisely because of where his talents lay. His principal occupation at Esterháza was to adapt texts, including provision of insertion arias. (If you do not know any of Haydn’s, for obvious reasons far less widely known than Mozart’s, then they are well worth discovering.) And that is what he did here, on a larger scale, with Orlando Paladino, helping Haydn create a rather extraordinary work, a dramma eroicomico after Ariosto. Its skill lies not just in parodying Ariosto, indeed not primarily in that at all, but in permitting Haydn to do so and indeed to parody much else besides: often wryly, subtly, sometimes more overtly – here, at least in one particular instance, in Pasquale’s ‘Ecco spanio’, Ranisch worked highly successfully with libretto and music. Otherwise, I am afraid, far too little of that came through – which was surely something a skilled production might have seen as its purpose or at least a good part of it.

Alcina and Angelica

Yes, one might respond, but what if an audience does not understand the conventions of late-ish eighteenth-century opera seria? Do we not need to find a way of leading many listeners in? We probably do, or at least in certain circumstances it might be a good idea. (Heaven forfend we might actually expect some work from an audience; nevertheless, if I do not read Russian, I do not claim the problem to lie in Pushkin.) A similar problem, after all, seems often to be experienced with Così fan tutte, which very few seem to understand – or, more to the point, take the trouble to try to understand. (Sometimes it is not ‘all about you’.) By all means, though, lead us in, show us what the opera is or might be about. Ranisch, however, seemed to have no interest whatsoever in doing so. Not unlike Christof Loy in his unforgivable Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten, albeit less aggressively, the message seemed to be: ‘forget about this; I do not like this story very much, so here is another one’.

Alas, Ranisch’s new story seems to me only slightly less banal than Loy’s. For all the filmic creativity – undeniable in its way, if hardly groundbreaking – what we have ultimately is a new, less than captivating, tale of a married couple who own a cinema. One of them is at least partly gay and fantasises about the handsome Rodomonte (or perhaps the actor/singer who plays him). When technical problems cause an explosion in the cinema, he takes the opportunity to wander into the scenes on screen to learn a bit more about himself. A huge amount of silly running around, pulling faces, and so on, detracts entirely from the opera and at best has one wonder what on earth is going on. Now there may well have been a way, even within this particular metatheatrical framework, to engage with the work, to do more of what I have suggested it might. It really does not seem, though, to happen here. A pair of actors, ‘Gabi and Heiko Herz’, seem the most honoured here. Ironically, however, the banality of their story, the striking Cinema Paradiso homage in Falko Herold’s designs notwithstanding, throws one’s attention back towards the singing, if only out of desperation. We end up with another tired old cliché, that eighteenth-century opera other than Mozart’s is ‘really’ only about singing. Orlando Paladino and Haydn thus found themselves doubly damned.

Medoro (Dovlet Nurgeldiyev) and Angelica

Such might have been less the case, had it not been for Ivor Bolton’s rigid, often hard-driven conducting, which paid little attention, if any, to Haydn’s harmonic rhythm, living if indeed it lived at all only in the moment – perhaps not so ill-suited a complement to the production. The playing of the Munich Chamber Orchestra was in itself excellent, however. One longed for it to be let off its leash, though, not least for the strings to be permitted greater vibrato. There seemed little doubt that they longed for that too. Nevertheless theirs was fine playing, woodwind solos especially joyous. For the real thing, though, turn on record to Antal Doráti – or even, should this be your real thing and you can somehow stand the weird perversities, to Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Those perversities may eclipse formal understanding, or at least the communication thereof, but at least they seem less generated on auto-pilot.

Rodomonte (Edwin Crossley-Mercer)
and Heiko Herz

It was, then, to recapitulate – more of such formal understanding from the conductor, please! – from the singers that considerable pleasure and insight was to be gleaned. Mathias Vidal as Orlando trod a fine line, sensitively and stylishly, between bravado and acknowledged weakness. So indeed did all the male singers; such, not without a pinch of what we might anachronistically think feminism, is indeed the point. Edwin Crossley-Mercer’s diction was not always clear as it might have been, especially in so small a theatre; however, his dark tone proved full of allure – increasingly compromised allure. Dovlet Nurgeldiyev, for me one of the true discoveries of the evening, offered almost heartbreaking tonal beauty, whilst also making as much of the words as the production permitted. Likewise his intended, Adela Zaharia. David Portillo, a supremely versatile singer, finely attuned both to line and style, impressed greatly as Pasquale; his aforementioned aria was probably the highpoint of the entire evening. Elena Sancho Pereg, as Eurilla, proved very much his equal: a fine foil, but also a spirited character in her own right. Tara Erraught’s rich mezzo Alcina left one longing for more. It was she, above all, who brought moments of true drama to proceedings. Perhaps she, instead, should have been directing and/or conducting.