A Wagner Valentine

WAGNER: DIE MEISTERSINGER

Deutsche Oper, Berlin
February 14, 2010

Berlin’s Deutsche Oper gave its supporters a valentine of sorts on Valentine’s Day: a performance of Die Meistersinger. Nothing special about that, were it not for the presence of Klaus Florian Vogt as Walther von Stolzing. Despite a uniformly upper drawer cast that included Michaela Kaune as Eva, James Johnson as Sachs, and Markus Brück, Kristinn Siegmundson and Paul Kaufmann as Beckmesser, Pogner and David respectively, it seemed as though the stage darkened to a pin spotlight on Vogt, whenever he was on the boards, which, as those familiar with the work know, is most of the time.

In the seven years since I first heard Vogt as Lohengrin in Bremen, he has become, justifiably, I think, internationally known as one of the finest Wagner tenors of this age. Considering how few really great Wagner singers there have been in any age, his emergence into pre-eminence may be more a matter of luck than talent simply outing itself. What is extraordinary is that he is also emerging as one of the great voices of this or any other age. That is a real accomplishment in the light of how many singers of widely varying quality are vying for attention via their press agents, recording companies and media machines.

Some listeners have described his unusual sound as “boyish” while others have called it sort of “androgynous.” Actually, it is neither. Vogt played the horn at Hamburg’s Staatsoper, before a vocal teacher suggested that he might have a brighter future singing above the pit, rather than playing out of it.
 
Sometimes things work out.

Vogt’s sound in its current disposition is indeed reminiscent of a French horn played by Philip Miller or Dennis Brain: sweet in soft passages, penetrating and dominant under pressure. It is immediately recognizable, it commands attention even in the thick of competition from other voices and other instruments. It never tires the ear. I’ve never heard anything quite like it. It is, in the grandest sense of the word, unique.

Wagner created a real character in Walther von Stolzing, and the role gives Vogt an opportunity to act. His Walther is youthful, quick to anger and ardently passionate, but the passion is imbued with intelligence and humility. You get the impression that he’s really listening to Sachs, matter-of-factly sung by James Johnson, when the Master of the Mastersingers gives him a lesson in songwriting in the third act. And the Prize Song in the next scene becomes, in Vogt’s voice, a cumulative rather than repetitive precipitate of the Master’s tuition.

With such masterful singing in a work about the Art of Singing (among a few other things), it’s hard to comment on the able efforts put forth by Vogt’s colleagues: the aforementioned aural pin-spot on Vogt tended to occlude them. Nontheless, Michaela Kaune was an effectively flirtatious Eva, Markus Brück portrayed a delightfully irritating Beckmesser, Kristinn Sigmundsson’s height enabled him to present a grandly imposing Pogner, Ulrike Helzel sounded pleasantly youthful as Magdalena, and Paul Kaufmann as David showed hopeful signs of becoming an Almaviva with whom to be reckoned.

The Deutsche Oper’s new Music Director Donald Runnicles stepped in for the originally designated conductor, so his somewhat lackluster reading may have been the result of brief rehearsal time and the effort to avoid disasters in such a wildly complex work.

Götz Friedrich’s production from the mid-90s hold up well, primarily because it never strays far from the composer’s stage directions. In fact, it is a delight to see the festival in the final scene look and feel festive.

The current run of Meistersinger is part of the Deutsche Oper’s Wagner Weeks, in which most of the composer’s works -- including a new production of Rienzi -- are being presented over the course of several months. Rienzi has attracted a lot of press coverage, largely because its producer has turned it into a quasi-allegory in which the eponymous hero bears the appearance of a certain Austrian-born dictator. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t report much more, except to say, I’m looking forward to hearing the Leipzig Oper’s production this spring with none less than Elena Zhidkova as Orsini.

If you’re in Berlin this weekend, do what you must to get a ticket to Meistersinger on Sunday, providing that Vogt is singing. There’s only one bad seat in the house: the one you don’t get. But caveat emptor: it’s pretty much sold out.

©Sam H. Shirakawa

A Rocket to Mannheim

DIE FLEDERMAUS / ROBERTO DEVEREUX
National Theater, Mannheim

Why do you want to come all the way to Mannheim just to hear such an old production of Die Fledermaus? asked a lifelong Mannheimer and operagoer.

“Because I need some ear candy,” I replied.

Mannheim has supplied an estimable variety of ear candy to the world for well over three centuries. Most notably: Mozart visited the city four times and spent a total of 176 days here. Some of the venues where he made music are still functioning. The so-called Mannheim School made its home here. The Court Orchestra under Carlo Grua (1700-1773) won renown as one of Europe’s finest ensembles. In the last century, its opera house, first established in 1779, became a way station for such up-and-coming musicians and singers as Artur Bodansky, who led the German wing of the Metropolitan Opera from 1915 to his death in 1939, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Donald Runnicles, Jun Märkl, Adam Fischer; Inge Borkh, Diana Damrau, Franz Mazura, Jean Cox and Scott McAlister.

With such a formidable history that is continually in the making, performers in Mannheim have a lot to live up to, and they know it. Of the 30 odd performances I’ve heard here since 1990, only a few have been lackluster. (A couple of disasters -- yes -- but interesting catastrophes.)

During my most recent stay, I attended two consecutive performances at the National Theater: a production of Die Fledermaus, dating from 1978, and the premiere of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux in concert-format, apparently the first time ever that this opera has been performed professionally in Mannheim. So it came as a surprise to me, how lively and vital the 30 year-old production of Fledermaus came across, whereas the premiere of Devereux seemed somewhat phlegmatic in comparison.

I doubt that any Fledermaus can match the sparkle and fizzle that the Metropolitan Opera’s mounting nearly always manages to produce, but Mannheim comes close. Friedrich Meyer-Oertel clearly conceived his production with fun as the guiding principal, and the principals, bit-players and chorus at this performance were determined to play out this comedy of manners with mirth always in mind.

Particularly rewarding for me was to hear Eisenstein sung by a tenor, as Johann Strauss originally intended. I never heard Uwe Eikötter before, but I’d like to hear him again. He has precisely the right lilt in his voice as he tries to play a not-so good-natured trick on his wife. A mellow sweetness in the timbre suggests he might do well to attempt a more ambitious Fach than Melot, Monostatos and Pong -- parts he apparently regularly sings.

Cornelia Ptassek took a while to get inside Rosalinda, but by the time she got to her rousing Czardas in the second act, she turned into a spouse not to be trifled with.

I’m told that Diana Damrau made Adele into one of her signature roles during her stay in Mannheim, but Katharina Göres at this performance left little to long for. She has clean coloratura, a bright top and an attractive stage personality -- a package that could take her to stages far beyond Germany. Whether she has Damrau’s dramatic range and vocal allure, remains to be seen.

Edna Prochnik as Orlovsky was delightful to experience, not merely because she reveals an incipient vocal temperament that portends bigger roles. She is also a refreshing change from the counter-tenors that I’ve encountered too frequently in this role. Which brings to mind a suggestion for the idea-starved directors, whose da-duh productions of this wonderful work I’ve had to endure in the past couple of years: How about an Orlovsky performed by a counter-tenor in an evening gown?

The big surprise of the evening, though, was Wolfgang Neumann as Alfredo. Yes, the Wolfgang Neumann everybody who has survived his Siegfried and Tristan loves to hate! Rarely, have I experienced Alfredo so electrifyingly sung and non-acted! And on this occasion, he was even funny. Neumann sings his farewell this spring in Mannheim, but surely he has more than enough voice left to return for an occasional turn as Alfredo.

At this performance, Lars Møller, Thomas Jesatko and Uwe Schönbeck were cast as Dr. Falke, Frank and Frosch respectively. Møller eschewed the manipulative side of the role and made the most of the merry side of Eisenstein’s sidekick. Jesatko enlivened the party scene, and Schönbeck clearly had the audience in his bottle the moment he stepped on stage as the inebriated jailer. Oskar Pürgstaller’s Blind was a treat.

The linking entity between Fledermaus and Devereux was Alexander Kalajdzic on the podium. He is among the batch of younger conductors cutting their teeth on the international circuit. Currently, the Zagreb native is wrapping up his tour of duty as first Kappelmeister in Mannheim. Next season, he moves on to become Generalmusikdirector at Bielefeld’s opera house.

On Friday night he generated high voltage with his reading of Fledermaus. It became clear at the outset of the overture, that he has Strauss the Younger in his blood, and he communicated his affinity with this music with bodacious enthusiasm. On Saturday, though, his wattage sputtered: possibly because the house orchestra, still after nearly 300 years one of the finest in Europe, seemed disinterested during Devereux. Several back-stand violinists were leaning back in their seats throughout the evening, and the winds and brass generally lacked punch in the big ensemble passages. I would have expected this at Fledermaus. After all, it was the upteenth performance of an old production, but the musicians played like New Year’s Eve. Devereux was a premiere and a First for Mannheim. Yet, the orchestra sounded as though nobody wanted to go to the party.

The seeming lack of enthusiasm among the players seemed to infect the principals, all of whom were performing their respective roles for the first time. Ludmila Slepneva has sufficient power and technique to essay Elizabetta, but she seemed preoccupied with the notes rather than the music. And the notes to which she devoted such care were thrifty on ornamentation. Her voice on this occasion also had a tendency to spread at the top in some instances, while turning shrewish at others. Nonetheless she turned out an effective “Vive Ingrato” in the final scene. Comparisons with singers of the past who have scored in this role are admittedly silly. But Slepnova has formidable competition in this Fach from contemporaries such as Alexandrina Pendatchanska. There’s an Elisabetta!

Marie-Belle Sandis fared better as Sara, Elisabetta’s rival for the affections of Roberto Devereux. Hers is a dark mezzo that retains its warmth from top to bottom. She is not exactly suited for Sara, but she came closest to surmounting the lethargy around her.

Juhan Tralla in the eponymous role sounded the most energetic of the three principals, but it became apparent that he has yet to master his part. He has a pleasing and flexible lyric instrument that holds up under pressure, but he too seemed preoccupied with getting out the notes, rather than enlivening them.

The rest of the principal roles were capably rounded out by Thomas Berau (Nottingham), Mihail Mihylov (Raleigh) and Christoph Wittmann (Cecil).

Thinking back on these two performances and the marked contrast in effect, it occurs to me that Fledermaus is a German/Austrian work that was performed by German-speaking artists, whereas Devereux is an Italian work that was played out on this occasion with quite possibly no Italians onstage. Admittedly, most of the live performances of Devereux I’ve heard have been sung by non-Italians, but the Italianate stylistic panache was always there. At the same time, I failed to sense a Germanic or northern European approach to the music, as is palpable in numerous pirate recordings of Donizetti operas in German. Are we now in a New Age of an intra-national style of performing opera?

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Disdaining the Master's Art

Sam Shirakawa went to Cologne last week to see Wagner's Die Meistersinger:

WAGNER: DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG
26 September 2009
Cologne

As I was leaving the Cologne Opera House, following a performance of Die Meistersinger last Saturday night. I couldn’t help but overhear two women conversing behind me:

“I didn’t understand the production at all,” said one in a distinctive Kölner accent.

“Neither did I,” replied the other.

I could barely keep myself from turning around to add: “And neither did I.”

Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s new production starts off with all the characters, with the exception of Walther von Stolzing, in period costumes--possibly the Wilhelmenian era. He is sporting a tie-less black suit that could possibly bear a Hugo Boss label. He is also snapping photos with a camera that is presumably digital. (The flash didn’t function on Saturday night.) The set sketches out a church -- presumably St. Katharine’s Church in Nuremberg. Is Walther then a visitor from the future?

In the second Act, the outdoor setting, top hats and bustles suggest the same period. Walther’s white satin dress coat suggests that he has quickly adjusted to the fashions of the times.

The interior of Hans Sachs’ house in the final act, though, is decked out in what looked like 1960s Bargain Outlet or maybe DDR Moderne. And the final scene takes place, not on the meadows outside Nuremberg’s walls, but on the plaza outside the Cologne Opera House -- presumably NOW. A mini-Jumbotron flashes a video montage of Cologne’s history over the past century, using archive photos, newsreels and other films, many of which I have never seen before. As a bonus, televised excerpts of from an earlier production of Meistersinger (no sound though) are interspersed with the other images.

Confusing? Distracting? No, just awful.

Thanks largely to Markus Stenz’s leadership at the podium, the performance withstood most of the on-stage shenanigans. Stenz’ love of Wagner was palpable in every measure of the score, as he moved the musical impulses in a seamlessly ascendent direction from start to finish. Only in the final scene did the powerful images on the Jumbotron overwhelm the thrust of the music. Despite a flub here and there, the Gürzenich Orchestra produced continuous incandescence.

Before the performance started an announcement from the stage informed the audience that Marco Jentzsch (Walther) and Johannes Martin Kränzle (Beckmesser) were suffering from colds and asking for indulgence. Kränzle fared better of the two. In fact, his scrivener was one of the most touchingly sung I have experienced live. Kränzle plays Beckmesser as an infatuated middle-age schoolboy. The desperate desire to please in his protracted second act serenade was well-nigh embarrassing.

Jentzsch, singing the role for the first time, got through the first two acts with style and in full, rounded voice. In the third act, he nursed his voice through the first scene and managed to deliver a prize-winning Prize Song in the finale. Given the circumstances, it’s difficult to assess what appears to be potential revealed, rather promise fulfilled. Jentzsch is young, tall and good-looking with a bright sizable tenor in the middle range. Since he sang most of the exposed upper notes between F and A in half voice, it’s impossible to say whether he’s in full possession of The Right Stuff for middle-weight Wagner.

Astrid Weber delivered a charming, occasionally neurotic Eva. Her voice shows signs of turning acidic at the top, but it retained its focus throughout the long evening.

Carsten Süß as David has two voices -- a candy-sweet lower and middle voice and another voice in the upper register that falls back into the head. If he can knead the two voices into one instrument, he could become a Lohengrin to be reckoned with.

The two glories of the evening were Bjarni Thor Kristinsson as Pogner and Robert Holl as Sachs. I never have heard Kristinsson before, and I wondered where I’ve been keeping myself. If you remember Gottlob Frick and Kurt Boehme, remember this: they live on in Kristinsson.

I’ve heard Robert Holl here and there for many years, but it’s hard to believe that nearly four decades have gone by since he started making the rounds on the international opera circuit. He is one of those blessed few singers who last long enough to implement the experience they acquire. Holl is still going strong and sounding better than ever.

As he struck a solid F in Sach’s peroration, I wondered what he thinks of some of his colleagues, who, though much younger, can barely make it through a performance.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Is Lust Also Blind?

Sam Shirakawa was recently in Amsterdam where he caught a performance of Halévy's La Juive:

HALÉVY - LA JUIVE
NEDERLANDSE OPERA, AMSTERDAM
12 SEPTEMBER 2009
(see a video clip)


For some reason, the opera world has seen a revival resurgence in recent years of Halévy’s La Juive -- possibly because the number of competent singers willing to take on the four demanding principal roles has increased. The opera was a triumph for Caruso, when the Met mounted a new production for him in 1919. According to the Met archives, Eleazar proved to be his final appearance at the House.

Following World War II, Juive was seldom performed anywhere until the turn of this century. Currently, it can be heard in a surprisingly well-cast production at the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam. Dennis O’Neill is a superb Eleazar. His voice has darkened with maturity, but it has retained its balance between registers. He fires off those killer top notes will little sign of effort, and his grasp of that elusive Gallic style is impeccable.

O’Neill unfortunately has also put on quite a bit of weight -- much more girth than required for even the heaviest roles. While he nimbly scales the stairways to the upper level of the set, the burden he bears is bound to take a toll--at least on his legs.


The surprise find of the performance I heard on 12 September was Angeles Blanca Gulin. Of the three Rachel’s I have heard, she by far is the most dynamic; captivating pianissimi, bracing high notes, an intense stage personality. Plus a big instrument with a tight vibrato under pressure. (NOTE: This is not the soprano of the same first and surname, who had an estimable international career in the 1970s and 1980s. But I must confess to detecting a faint similarity in the timbre of the middle and upper registers.)

American John Osborn as Leopold/Samuel took a bit to warm up, but eventually produced a solid, sympathetic Leopold/Samuel. I would caution him to refrain from taking the part often.

Alastair Miles in the role of Cardinal Brogni balanced his thin low notes with a ringing middle and upper register. But the Vatican enforcer is not really suited to him.

I quite liked Annick Massis when she debuted at the Met as Lucia in 2002. I am not so mad about her Princess Eudoxie in Amsterdam. The notes were all there, but her heart appeared to be elsewhere.

Carlo Rizzi led a clearly focused traversal of the score and drew some excellent playing from the Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest.

Pierre Audi’s staging was hampered by the constricted playing space imposed by George Tsypin’s massive chrome girders, built on three levels. A layer of grates carpeting his stage floor clattered relentlessly every time the singers made a move.


La Juive has lots of pretty music that’s also challenging to the prinicipal singers. But it also labors under a libretto that strains credibility. A major part of the plot, for example, hinges on Leopold’s confession to his lover Rachel, who is Jewish, that he is not. If they are lovers, wouldn’t she have drawn the hood from his secret long before the opera began? If love is blind, is carnal lust then borgne?

It has been some years since I visited Amsterdam, and it was comforting to find that most of the central district of the city remains architecturally unchanged. Het Muziektheater, which Nederlandse Opera calls home, seats about 1,600 spectators, distributed over a wide shallow parquet (17 rows) and two upper circles. The acoustics are bright with ample bass reverb. Its terrace overlooks a triangular plaza and one of Amsterdam’s wider canals. The people are as friendly and helpful as they always were. The food is another story. Cheap, tasty meals are hard to find. It was not always so.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Being Bohemian

Picture, if you will, a student production of Puccini's La Boheme, staged as an opera within a documentary. Well, Sam Shirakawa was in Munich on June 17th for the premiere of just such a production. He reports:

PUCCINI: LA BOHEME
A production by
the Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding, Munich
Premiere 17 June 2009


I usually anticipate attending student productions of operas with a mix of curiosity and dread. They bait curiosity because you never know if a future Caruso or Callas may be taking the stage. They arouse dread because there is nothing quite so dreadful as a vocally dreadful performance of an opera.

In recent years, though, I’ve found that student opera performances of opera are getting better. Professional preparatory academies seem to be turning out singers who appear more confident in knowing they have the right stuff. The tension arising from having a now-or-never opportunity to prove it endows their performances with that extra dollop of excitement that’s becoming increasingly rare at “big” opera houses.

That shared anxiety between performers and audience produced an especially exciting performance of La Boheme on 17 June at the Theater Academy of Bavaria August Everding (Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding) in Munich, primarily because the singing was so good. I frequently had to remind myself that these are students -- most of them around 30 years old and taking their vocal training at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München -- because they’re not merely ready for prime time, they are performing as though they are in prime time.

The Mimi, Myung-Joo Lee, from South Korea, is in full possession of a warm lyric soprano that opens out effortlessly above the staff. Her “Mi chiamamo Mimi” had a melancholy timbre reminiscent of Ileana Cotrubas. But she had her own way with the sad nostalgia reflected in “Donde lieta uschi...”

As her lover Rodolfo, Jun-Ho You, also from South Korea, displays a tightly focused lyric-spinto tenor, some of whose inflections remind me of Jussi Björling. His upper register is thrilling, but maintaining its bracing freshness is the challenge he and all those with similarly bright potential face.

American-born Vanessa Goikoetxea is a Musetta who is a born showgirl -- leggy and shamelessly flirtatious. Her middle and upper registers contain a fine resin that gives her voice an unusual personality. Her options are wide open.

Christian Ebert’s sonorous Marcello is a guy who can’t live with his Musetta, but can’t live without her either. His ample warm baritone points to Posa via Onegin. Nice sound. I wonder if he’s listened to Gerhard Hüsch....

Benjamin Appi and Tareq Nazmi are excellent respectively as Schaunard and Colline. The roles of Benoit and Alcindoro are so well characterized, that you need to check the program to realize that Thomas Stimmel sings both. Mauro Peter deserves a bigger part than Parpignol.

The cast has the good fortune of having a first-class professional orchestra in the pit, the Munich Radio Orchestra, under the steady guidance of Ulf Schirmer, whose stints include the Vienna State Opera and, beginning next season, Music Director of the Leipzig Opera.

Both singers and orchestra are blessed with the superior acoustics of the Prinzregententheater, which is the Akademie's own performing space. Small wonder. The house was completed in 1901 by architect Max Littman, who based his concept on the designs of Gottfried Semper and Otto Brückwald for Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. The acoustics of the "House on the Green Hill" are unique, but the

sonorities of the Prinzregenten Theater are thrillingly similar, especially after its recent renovations, which have also revitalized the Jugendstil decor in the access areas. It is a spectacular setting for any kind of performance. The building's interior is a must-see if you visit Munich -- but you must have a ticket for an event.

The singers also have a good deal more to do than sing. Balazs Kovalk's staging sets out to capture a slice of life through a documentary-in-the-making about bohemian life in modern-day Paris. The concept is relevant because Puccini’s music is the mother of all western film scores. (And how many shows have you seen that are shameless recycles of Boheme and Butterfly?) So the cast must not only enact the lives of starving Parisian artistes, but also enact those lives before multi-cams and crews. The audience can see portions of the taping on monitors and scrims and witness the difference between “Being and Seeming,” as a program note puts it -- or reality and appearance.

Theoretically it works: you get a behind-the-cameras look at Life In The Making. But I couldn’t help remembering what Wolfgang Wagner once told me, when I asked him why Leonard Bernstein never conducted at Bayreuth. “Bernstein insisted that his contract include a documentary on the rehearsals and preparations for the production,” he said. “I learned long ago, that when you allow film crews, everybody plays to the cameras. You lose the impact of what is LIVE. You can’t really rehearse for the performance.”

Indeed, the presence of a camera crew on stage vitiates the impact of the drama and tends to siphon off the impact of the music into a separate realm. There are simply too many people on stage in the love scene of the first act, for example, when only two of them -- the lovers -- really matter.

Bertolt Brecht might have loved this view of Boheme. Intentionally or inadvertently -- I can’t discern which -- Kovalik’s production gives new meaning to the term Brecht invented: Verfremdungseffekt, or, for want of a better translation, alienation. Brecht coined this term to force his audiences to pull back from emotional involvement in the plot and characters and to push them toward viewing the proceedings on stage critically.

The intervention of a video/film documentary crew within any setting, not to mention a love duet, rudely yanks everybody back from plugging into “reality.” But here is where Kovalik ups the ante: the shots the crew is recording -- close-ups, wide angles, pans, and so on -- are shown on monitors and mini-Imax screens, thereby thrusting the audience in the direction of yet another reality. Or the appearance of another reality.

Exploring levels of reality -- or the illusions of those realities within the framework of the stage as “the place devoted to articulating the conflicts between past and possible worlds, the dialogues between our perceptions of mundane experience and our desires” -- is at the root of the Akademie’s primary objectives under the guidance of Klaus Zehelein, who has been its president since 2006.

Zehelein was General Manager of Stuttgart’s State Opera for 15 seasons before he came to lead the Akademie. During his tenure, the Annual Survey of German Critics voted the Stuttgarter Staatsoper “Opera House of the Year” six times. He has accrued international recognition as both pedagogue and all-around man of the theater. When he decided to make a change, he received offers from several high-profile theaters including the Salzburg Festival and the Berlin State Opera. Zehelein declined them all, opting to take over the Akademie, one of Germany’s foremost teaching institutions for the performing arts. He explained at the time, that he wanted to do his part in securing the future of the performing arts by bringing young artists and technicians to the highest standards.

He also wants to further the cause of live theater as a forum. As he warns in the Welcome Page of the Academie website:

“If we abandon the stage, by consigning it to the compromises of mundane superficialities, we betray that part of our lives that constitutes an indispensable necessity for existence, which we risk losing beyond recall.”

In times when the prospects of continued financial support for the performing arts look increasingly grim, Zehelein appears to be steering the Academie on a steady course. Hopes for his ability to enable the Academie to surmount the economic realities that are now threatening the arts everywhere may prove illusory. But his leadership through the challenges he now faces may well turn out to be exemplary, indeed the stuff of legend.

© Sam H. Shirakawa
Production photos © A. T. Schaefer

Revised 6/23/09 - 1:45PM EDT - added production photos; removed some theater photos.

Happy hour @ Hunding's Hovel

Sam Shirakawa went to Essen recently to see Wagner's Die Walküre:

WAGNER: DIE WALKÜRE
ESSEN
11 JUNE 2009
[see Video Clip]

The curtain goes up long before the house lights dim. The audience attending Dietrich Hilsdorf’s new production of Die Walküre at Essen’s Aalto Theater has little choice but to contemplate a huge faded reception hall, fungus-stained green paint peeling from the walls and columns. The salle de réception, which doubles as a banquet hall, is designed in the mock-Hellenic style that characterized many bourgeois German mansions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A few chairs, a long banquet table covered with a white table cloth, and a coal-burning stove are the only noteworthy furnishings. An enclosed staircase leads to an upper floor, and a wide escalier center-stage leads somewhere below. It’s a place that’s notable for its palatial size. The joint has seen better days.

So This is supposed to be Hunding’s hovel?

Yup.

Oh, so that rod with a handle sticking out of the column at stage left is really the sword Nothung!

Yessiree.

And that’s why the stove is so close to the column -- so the flames can light up the sword during Siegmund’s big solo!

In fact, this unit set is going to serve as the environment for all the proceedings that take place during the First Day of The Ring.

In his program note, Hilsdorf explains why he instructed his designer Dieter Richter to create such a room for all the action in Walküre:

“Hunding’s abode distills the essence of the world as the setting for the struggle for power and its loss. Despite changes in physical locale [throughout the opera], the inner setting remains unchanged.”

It’s a fascinating metaphor: A decaying mansion as the setting for power plays that ultimately produce no winners, only losers; its main remaining feature -- a banquet table where deadly deals are served.

Unfortunately, Hilsdorf doesn’t work his fecund conceit out. Once the idea of the idea is set forth, the players are left pretty much on their own -- to sit, stand and move around the banquet table -- sometimes rather awkwardly. For some reason almost everyone is dressed in evening clothes -- the Valkyries in crimson gowns and red Dorothy-in-Oz pumps, Fricka in a blue and white number, custom-tailored for a Cecil Beaton portrait sitting. Brünnhilde is in a party mood in her initial appearance, as she fills goblets of wine while flinging out the high notes of her Brindisi -- i.e. the War Cry. When Wotan puts his errant daughter to sleep, he leaves her slumbering erect at the banquet table, not on it.

A rude awakening awaits this Hilde: She’ll have to do the dishes...

We may never know which detergent Brünnhilde favors because Hilsdorf won’t be supervising next season’s new production of Siegfried. Essen is following the trend set by Stuttgart’s wildly successful Ring Cycle, which assigned each of the four operas to different directors.)

In one of Hilsdorf’s hilarious violations of the text, Sieglinde shows up in the second act very much in the family way. My, how time flies when you’re committing incest! Have the Wälsung Twins managed to elude Hunding, his henchmen, and their dogs for eight months between act one and two? Did they motel hop all that time? Slum with friends? (I thought neither had any.)

Oddly enough, though, the performance I heard on 11 June was spellbinding, owing primarily to Stefan Soltesz’ masterful leadership of a superb cast and orchestra. At age 60, Soltesz is becoming something of a cult figure. He’s well known on podiums throughout Europe, South America, and the Far East, but his appearances in the United States have been spotty. His well-deserved reputation as General Music Director in Essen brings visitors to his performances from far beyond the Ruhr area -- including me. His appearances are always well attended, if not sold out.

His view of The Ring has aroused huge expectations.

From the sound of Walküre, Soltesz is fulfilling those expectations. He served part of his apprenticeship under Karl Böhm, and the much-missed maestro’s influence is unmistakable. Soltesz tends to favor brisk tempos; the drive behind the tempo seems to be ruled more by the exigencies of the moment than a structural vision. At least, that’s how it sounded a few days ago. I’m looking forward to hearing how he takes things at a future performance.

Thomas J. Mayer is one of four Wotans cast for the current run of this production. (The others are Egils Silins (see photos), Terja Stensvold and Almas Svilpa.) Mayer is a bitter and angry Wotan -- bitter at how badly his shady deals have turned out; angry at himself for letting things slip so far and so fast. His fury is all the more alarming as he confronts his favorite errant daughter before her sisters. Through it all, Mayer never resorts to shouting out notes or barking to make a point. It’s clear that he’s heard Thomas Stewart’s recordings of the role at least once, and that by no means is a bad thing.

Idilko Szönyi as Fricka is truly a bad thing for Mayer’s Wotan, as she cooly exploits her diesel middle register to harass her wayward husband into submission. It’s been a while since I’ve heard Fricka sung with such elegant bitchiness.

Catherine Foster’s Brünnhilde could use a bit more shading, but for me, she can do no wrong, after the mini-vaudeville moment she essays, batting out those hellish Bs and Cs way over the Green Monster while, with steady hand, she fills goblets with Zinfandel. The glasses, helas, didn’t shatter. (But can she also rap out the War Cry while juggling a half-dozen raw eggs, and balancing a unicycle perched on a high-wire?)

Jeffrey Dowd sounds better, even more attractive, each time I hear him. He’s narrowed the vibrato in the upper register and deepened his middle and lower voice. His Siegmund is boyish and nervy -- especially effective in “Ein Schwert verhiess mir der Vater,” but his gestures and movements betray not merely an American Wälsung, but a Ziggy from New York. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it takes a bit of getting used-to.

Marcel Rosca’s Hunding also takes a bit of getting used-to. He’s not nearly as menacing as you might expect from a Hunding, but his svelte bass charms the ear. He may be better suited for Philip or Mephistopheles. In truth, he may be hampered by Hilsdorf's staging: His Hunding is a sappy middler, doomed to fall because of a mess that’s not entirely of his own making.

Now for the major find: I often wonder what Regine must have sounded like before she became Crespin. If a certain Danielle refuses to pack it in for family and security, she stands an excellent chance of becoming Danielle Halbwachs, the Sieglinde to be reckoned with. She’s sympathetic, warm and her immense soprano gains strength and amplitude as it rises above the staff. What she still lacks, though, is interpretive insight; her Wälsung sibling emerges at this point from her head, not from her heart. Despite a second act maternity costume that makes her look as though she’s just shoplifted a honeydew melon, it’s Danielle Halbwachs’ voice, a gorgeous instrument, that lingers in the memory.

No standouts among the Valkyrie Sisters, but they were all up for it.

© Sam H. Shirakawa 2009

Weekend Child

Sam Shirakawa took a break from opera-going to attend the Berlin premiere of a new documentary about Otmar Suitner (this film was shown in at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City in November 2007 as part of the Berlin in Lights festival):

NACH DER MUSIK (English Title: A Father's Music) [105 mins]
A Documentary on Otmar Suitner by Igor Heitzmann
Premiere: Berlin 17 May 2009

Few are the documentaries about musicians that reveal more about their subjects than their audiences already know -- or should know. Little and much is known about the Austrian conductor Otmar Suitner (pronounced Sweet-ner), who is now 87 years old. Little besides the chronological facts is known about him professionally and personally, primarily because he spent most of his career behind the Iron Curtain, making only periodic guest appearances in the West and Far East. A lot, though, is known about him musically through his huge output of recordings on Communist-backed labels and Japanese imports.

The release of a documentary entitled Nach der Musik is remarkable, because it opens the door -- just a crack-- on a man and musician, who coulda-woulda-shoulda become a Titan among conductors in the second half of the twentieth century. And didn't. But the want of giga-stardom seems of no concern to Suitner. Nor does it worry film maker Igor Heitzmann, possibly because of his relationship to his film's subject:

Heitzmann is Suitner's son out of wedlock.

As Music Director of East Berlin's Staatsoper (1964-1989) and a privileged citizen of the Communist Block, Suitner was pretty much free to shuttle between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. What started off as a regular break from the bleakness of Bebelplatz became a regular necessity after he began an extra-marital relationship with a woman living in West Berlin. She eventually bore Suitner a son-- Igor -- a "Weekend Child" as such progeny were then called. Suitner's (recently deceased) wife discloses that she knew about both the relationship and the child, but she never sought to leave him. A telling glance, gesture, and inflection here and there conspire to obviate the necessity for explanation: there could be no other man for her. The same can be said for why Heitzmann's mother, who also appears in the film, remained single.

Heitzmann reportedly spent four years on the project, much of it, I imagine, chasing down archive performances and news clips. He disperses them generously throughout what emerges as an engrossing labor of love -- as rich in subtle detail as it is thoughtful in design. Heitzmann is indeed his father's son. And here is where Nach der Musik forks away from most other music documentaries: We get a cumulative sense of the ineffable human impulse that sparks the inexplicable musical impulse. Sometimes a book or an article can convey that sense, but only a film or video can (with lucky timing) capture it with that's-it! that's-it! immediacy. Heitzmann lucks out frequently.

Suitner all but disappeared from the musical scene shortly before the Wall crumbled in 1989. Many assumed the Stasi or some other evil had caught up with him. Indeed: Parkinson's. Suitner says he quit because he considered the disease unsightly, even though he acknowledges that some other well-known conductors (past and present) have persevered despite their afflictions. But his reasoning proves disingenuous when, in a revealing sequence, he conducts a portion of his favorite symphony (I won't name it) at a recent reunion with his former colleagues at the Staatsoper. A wonderful performance, profound in its simplicity. I suspect it wasn't embarassment that prompted his withdrawal from the podium; it was abrogation of will.

Suitner attended the premiere two weeks ago at Berlin's fabled art-deco cinema, Babylon. We spoke briefly, and he seemed agreeable to a lengthier conversation soon. I hope he keeps his word.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Chicken or the Egg

Sam Shirakawa is back in Cologne to see a new production of Strauss's Capriccio:

R. STRAUSS: CAPRICCIO NEW PRODUCTION
COLOGNE
30 May 2009

Which comes first in creating musical theatre – the music or the words?

Who cares? Of all things to be concerned about in 1942, as Armageddon approaches!

The premiere of Richard Strauss’ Capriccio took place that year on 28 October in Munich. The War was now in its fourth year, food rationing had begun, the deportation of Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables to death camps had been initiated. The Gestapo was everywhere, the number of wounded soldiers on leave was increasing daily.

Despite the huge costs of prosecuting the aggressions the Nazis had initiated, the performing arts continued to function with lavish support approved by Hitler himself. Keeping up the appearance of normalcy on the home front and distracting the public from worrying about the war were top priorities for the regime. According to historian Gerhardt Splitt, more than a dozen new books appeared that year, in addition to premieres of 17 new plays, seven films and three operas, including Capriccio.

If the intent of all state-sanctioned works at the time was distraction, what better theme for a distracting opera than what comes first --words or music? Strauss was particularly concerned with textual matters at the time, because he had long since lost two valued collaborators: Hugo von Hoffmannstal had died in 1929, and Stefan Zweig was forced to emigrate because he was Jewish. Strauss ultimately set the text of Capriccio himself, with the help of Clemens Krauss, who conducted the World Premiere in Munich.

What must it have been like to be a performing artist during that period? On the one hand, musicians, singers and actors had certain privileges, such as extra food rations, military exemption and preferred living accommodations. On the other hand, a false step could mean dismissal, even death. Strauss felt compelled to be especially circumspect, because he was protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law.

Such is the milieu in which Christian Götz sets his production of Capriccio at the Cologne Opera, which opened this past Saturday 30 May. Everything happening on stage takes place under the watchful eyes of the Gestapo. The backdrop at first shows a tilt-up view of a winding staircase leading to a dome showing mythological maidens dancing around the perimeter. Later, it depicts the staircase crumbling from an explosion and one of the maidens falling from the dome. Everybody tries to act normally, but even the act of acting takes on peculiar tension, as the Gestapo in grey leather trench coats reveal their menacing presence amid the bright silks, powdered wigs and 18th century costumes.

Götz has come up with a superb conceit that gives new meaning to the seeming triviality of the text and even the music, which many listeners have deemed a work of finely-laced drivel? In fact, the “Reichsdramaturg”Rainer Schlösser submitted a report on the premiere in which he called the libretto “a lovely Nothing, out of which Strauss could have composed a magical Something, had both [Krauss and Strauss] not become so talky.” But Götz and his designer Gabriele Jaenecke transform the prattle-filled dialogue into nervous gibberish, as the characters try to function under the stress of surveillance. Strauss’ self-pastiche is also turned into neurotic repetition, as he not-so-subtly reminds his Nazi masters of his past glories, with not-so-subtle whispers from Rosenkavelier and Ariadne. What sounded in the past like senile pastiche becomes through Götz' production a heartbreaking testament of a once-masterful composer broken by intimidation and reduced to pandering.

It’s still crap, you may argue. No rebuttal. But Götz takes his point from the Beatles: try to see it his way. And if you try, as I did after attending this performance, you can’t help but be moved.

Götz’ view was aided in no small part by a uniformly superior cast, as well as a born Strauss-sympathzer at the podim. At times, Solveig Kringelborn as the Countess, looked and even sounded like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, perhaps the most-admired interpreter of the role. But Kringelborn makes the role her own, not merely through her soaring lifts in the Countess’ monologue, but by parsing out a series of telling gestures and glances that probably would never have occurred to the late great Liz. Only at the final moment, after delivering the Countess’ impassioned plea for an opera with words and music that avoid triviality, does it become clear who and what she really is: she changes clothes, dons an extravagant fur coat, picks up two suitcases, and is led away by the Gestapo… Both Götz' staging and Kringelborn are better than Capriccio deserves.

Lest one forgets the estimable contributions of Kringelborn’s colleagues, they were submitted in no special order, by Ashley Holland as the Count, Martin Homrich as Flamand, Miljenko Turk as Olivier, Michael Eder as La Roche, Dalia Schaechter as Clairon, Johannes Preißinger as Monsieur Taupe, Csilla Csovari and Benjamin Bruns as the Italian Singers, Ulrich Hielscher as the Hausmeister, and Luisa Sanch Escanero as the Dancer.

Cologne Opera’s Music Director Markus Stenz is proving himself as capable at steering late Strauss as he is in driving postdiluvian Wagner. The orchestra was in superb form.

Capriccio was the opera in which Kiri Te Kanawa took leave of the Metropolitan Opera. She’s hitting the job market again, by returning to the boards in Cologne next year. Maybe she’ll retread the Countess here too.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Tristan via Monorail

Sam is on to Wuppertal to see yet another Tristan und Isolde:

WAGNER: TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
WUPPERTAL
24 MAY 2007

Wuppertal has a brand new opera house. Well, almost brand new. The theater building underwent a major overhaul during the past several years at the cost of a gazillion euros and re-opened last autumn. The renovations have produced a brightly lit creme and gold auditorium of about 800 seats, distributed over the progressively widening parquet and two steeply raked balconies. All price ranges have democratized views of the stage.

The acoustical characteristics struck me as typical of newly constructed spaces meant for music: generous reverb and rapid response from top range to bottom. The litmus test, though, is whether the acoustics amplify the singers over a large orchestra. Few works are better suited to providing the tough questions than Tristan und Isolde, which I heard this past Sunday. The house passed the test admirably, at least from my seat in a box at the side of the first balcony: The voices thrust forward over the pit, even when the orchestra was going full-tilt. The ambiance, though, tends to favor male singers.

The acoustical qualities of the house came into sharp relief for me, as I was listening to Marion Amman as Isolde. A couple of weeks ago, I heard her in the same role in Cologne, where she simply sounded better -- bigger, brighter, a more varied timbre in the upper middle register -- aural peculiarities that have nothing to do with how she was singing, which was superbly. Amman is a singer to be reckoned with no matter where she performs.

The acoustical quirks of the house were especially unkind to Anette Bod, whose Brangäne seemed acidic at the bottom and shrewish at the top. Her dark mezzo has size, and she has abundant musicality going for her, but her sound in Wuppertal struck me as hectoring rather than heartening. Maybe elsewhere...

On the other hand, the acoustics seemed to caress John Uelenhopp's unhappy Tristan. His is not the most beautiful voice you're likely to encounter in the role, but it projects boldly under pressure, retains its virility in soft passages and, most importantly on Sunday, did not tire in the fevered throes of Tristan's third act mad scene.

Kay Stieferman as Kurvenal also benefited from the ambiance. His baritone is a powerful engine that also yields rich subtleties, though the lower end of his range has yet to come fully into its own.

As King Marke, Gregory Reinhart delivered a compelling oration in the second act.

The backstage area has undergone a complete update too, but producer Gerd Leo Guck, who is also General Manager, apparently decided to abjure a splashy display of the theater's state-of-the-art technical facilities. Instead, his designer Roland Aeschlimann provided him with literally a blank page -- a series of stark black-white rectangular frames, one behind another. No hint of place, except from subtle lighting changes dominated by shades of blue. For some reason, the characters are dressed mostly in muted Japonaiserie costumes by Andrea Schmidt-Futterer. But in a jarring costume switch, Isolde shows up to bid Tristan farewell dressed in a black haute-DDR evening gown.

I don't get it. Are we meant to be in Cornwall, Kareol, Kanagawa or Karl-Marx-Stadt? But I also admit, that the production is attractive and doesn't get in the way of the music.

Speaking of which, the performance was delayed for nearly 40 minutes because conductor Toshiyuki Kamioki was caught in traffic. It's a miracle that the show got started at all, if he drove as slowly as he led parts of the first and second acts. As noted by one critic, who wrote enthusiastically about the premiere, Kamioki not merely conducted, but celebrated Tristan. That was obvious from the belated start. But if there's a line separating celebration from self-indulgence, Kamioki crossed it by a kilometer. The sluggishness that crept in during those doncha-just-love-it? passages didn't bother me as much as his stop-light running races to get to the next Big Moment. Oddly enough, though, he managed to create remarkable tension in some spots. But Kamioki reveals himself still in the formative stages of an interpretation-in-progress.

Absent a ragged entrance here and there, the orchestra played for him with polished verve.

Again, no program credit for the English horn soloist, who played with reedy passion. Can't the musician's union do something about such omissions?

And now a confession: the really really fun part of visiting Wuppertal for the first time, was discovering the monorail that took me four stops from the main train station to Adlerbrücke, where the opera house is located. The Schwebebahn runs through most of the city, hovering over the (river) Wupper for much of its eight-mile route. It was designed by Eugen Langen, known best for his part in developing the gas engine, and completed in 1901. It's the oldest monorail system in the world and is unique in Germany. It suffered massive damage during the Second World War, but it was hastily rebuilt and has operated almost continuously ever since. If your travel plans take you through the Ruhr area this summer, a stop in Wuppertal is well worth a detour, just to take a ride over the city on its Schwebebahn. The whole trip takes only a half hour and costs less than two dollars per person.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Or Am I Losing My. . . Head?

Sam Shirakawa has moved on to Lübeck, where he caught a performance of Salome:

RICHARD STRAUSS: SALOME
LÜBECK
22 MAY 2009

Lübeck is an amazing city. Quite apart from its fame as the birthplace of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, this quaint northern port city on the Baltic coast has had a lively cultural scene since the 18th century. The population numbers about 220,000, but the city maintains a calendar-crowded concert hall and a 900-seat Jugendstil theater completed in 1908, as well as several other spaces that serve as focal points for its musical and theatrical offerings. Conductors who cut their teeth here include Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hermann Abendroth and Christoph von Dohnányi.

To celebrate the centenary of its theater building, the game management is mounting several productions of operas and plays that relate to Thomas Mann's wide-ranging interests -- including Wagner's Ring and, in a cunning move, Richard Strauss' Salome, which I heard this past Saturday. Scheduling any Strauss work in this context is a shrewd move, because Mann apparently loathed Strauss, and the hostility was fully reciprocated.

Knowing that Mann disliked Strauss, I was hoping for a production that would reflect the Nobel laureate's enmity: ugly sets, hideous costumes, putrid orchestral playing, exaggerated vocal lines and something deliciously disgusting in the eminently spoof-able Final Scene. No such luck. If only the late and much lamented Charles Ludlam could rise from the grave, be brought to Mann's hometown, and do with Strauss' breakthrough opera what he did in New York with Wagner's Ring...!

As it turns out, Roman Brogli-Sacher, doing double-duty as conductor and stage director of Lübeck's Salome, has avoided opening old wounds between Strauss and Mann and seems intent on reflecting the city's well-known pragmatic values. Rightly so, perhaps. Lübeck remains much as it was in Mann's youth: a town of hard-working, thrifty, no-nonsense citizens, retaining the bourgeois values that inform Mann's novel Buddenbrooks. In fact, the building that housed the Manns' family business and became the inspiration for the setting of Buddenbrooks now houses a museum devoted to the Mann Brothers that is one of the town's must-visit attractions.

Swiss-Born Brogli-Sacher takes his cue for the production from the masterful color mixing and quasi-musical qualities of the large format painting by Paul Klee "Ad Parnassum." Small wonder. Klee was well known for inspiring musicians. Gunther Schuller's Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee speaks for Klee as much as it does for Schuller. Steinway even produced a limited edition of grand pianos called "The Paul Klee Series" in 1938.

Designer Ulrike Radichevich in turn takes her cues from Klee's hues -- cool blue, musty grey and warm orange -- for her unit set and oriental-flavored costumes.

They work.

On the musical side, Brogli-Sacher has two advantages that are not necessarily available to conductors who attempt such a difficult work as Salome at so-called provincial houses: an excellent orchestra (especially the brass section) and a cast that's up for the task, right down to the Fifth Jew.

The major excitement generated by this production, for me at least, was Manuela Uhl in the title role. I heard her sensational Ricke in Franchetti's potboiler Germania a couple of years ago in Berlin, and I was eager to hear how she's sounding these days. The audience mumbled worriedly as a house spokesman -- possibly the General Manager himself -- appeared to say, that Uhl had just undergone an eye operation. More mumbling. Nonetheless, she would sing, he continued, but she might have to don sunglasses and possibly nurse her voice, should the rigors of singing irritate her retina. Grateful applause.

So how did Uhl sound? Sensational again, though understandably not in peak form. Not, at least, until that protracted Final Scene. While Uhl was running on four cylinders up to that point, she shifted into high gear, as she launched into "Ah, du wolltest mich nicht deinen Mund Küssen lassen..." The impact of this well-known phrase may have sounded more powerful than might usually be expected because she had been husbanding her resources somewhat, but it was turbo-charged nonetheless. Uhl's unpremeditated sexual allure and commanding stage presence converged in her voice as she revelled in Salome's mortifying triumph -- her mulberry middle
register opening out with steely pinions as it ascended fearlessly beyond the staff. Helga Pilarczyk came to mind, but Uhl grew more intense at these heights than my recollections of Pilarczyk in this scene.

Even the unplanned designer shades worked. After all, wasn't Salome the Original Jewish Princess?

Antonio Yang as Jochanaan articulated disdain and impending doom with every note. His acting needs some Stella Adler, but the turbulence driving his voice intimates the devouring potential of Scylla in his bass, and the gale-force promise of Charybdis in his baritone. Yang is yet another South Korean on the threshold of a major career. Is it the water that's producing such a bumper crop of South Korean F-clef singers of late?

The surprise finds of this performance, though, were the Herod of Matthias Grätzel and the Herodias of Roswitha C. Müller, who both appear regularly in Lübeck. Grätzel is apparently concentrating on developing character roles, but he may want to consider upgrading to major parts: This was the first time, I've heard Herod sung as though it was Tannhäuser. Müller has a lush, ear-rattling mezzo that has both a snifter of madeira and a smattering of Jean Madeira. Thrilling.

Daniel Szeili's Narraboth displayed a resplendent tenor that could, at this stage of his burgeoning career, go in several directions. He reportedly is already a masterful Tamino, but his Narraboth reveals a glimmer of Faust.

To experience Salome in a relatively small theater is always a treat. To have heard it sung with such ample voices and no-holds-barred orchestral playing under a bolt heaving conductor was like attending a rock concert.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Springtime for Hitler and Berlin

Sam Shirakawa was there for the opening night of The Producers in Berlin. Here's his squib:

THE PRODUCERS
Berlin Premiere
17 May 2009
See some video clips

Adolf Hitler returned to conquer Germany this past Sunday... in Mel Brook's The Producers.

It took about eight years to bring the smash Broadway hit musical to Germany, but both critics and glitterati attending the gala premiere at the Admiralspalast -- one of Hitler's favorite theaters -- agreed that it was worth the wait.

Security was extra tight. Any show or film dealing with the Third Reich arouses Angst among Germans. It's unlawful to display the Nazi flag in public, and even pretzels replacing swastikas on banners outside the theater have regularly prompted complaints to the police. But once the crowd filed past the flanks of paparazzi, TV reporters and their crews to settle into their seats, everybody seemed prepared for a Happening.

And a Happening it was. But don't get the wrong impression: at no point did the audience lapse into jaw-gaping, freeze-frame paralysis at what was happening on stage -- possibly the most hilarious moment of the 1968 film. Just uncomfortable silence here and there, when a gag fell short of its mark. But I'll come back to this shortly. First, a little mood-setting.

Mel Brooks had been invited to attend the premiere, but even the lure of receiving the prestigious Ernst Lubitsch Award before the Opening Night crowd failed to draw him away from California. Accepting the award in his place, his long-time collaborator and co-producer Thomas Meehan mumbled perfunctory excuses for Brooks' absence but said in clearly enunciated German, "Sie haben Mel Brooks sehr glücklich gemacht" (You have made Mel Brooks very happy). So the hype, tone and presentation of this event was designed to celebrate Brooks' achievements and revel in his musical. And celebrate and revel they did.

Since many among the glamorous first-nighters appeared to be Broadway-savvy or familiar with Brooks's aforementioned 1968 film classic on which the musical is based, they responded in most of the right places to Philipp Blom's mostly superb German translation of the gags and lyrics -- frequently with that gravelly show-biz-insider guffaw that sounds infectiously the same in any language. What is more important: they got the point of the plot from the very outset. As Frederik Hanssen of Der Tagesspiegel put it, The show is neither about Hitler nor the Nazis, "it's about turning shit into gold."

And truly golden was the cast headed by Cornelius Obonya and Andreas Bieber as Max and Leo. No vestige of Zero Mostel, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane or Matthew Broderick in either of them, thank goodness. They go their own way. But. Both Obonya and Bieber are more accomplished hoofers than Lane and Broderick, and that cuts several ways -- Lane and Broderick had kind of a double left shoe clunkiness that made their terpsichoric efforts all the more endearing, while Obonya and Bieber make their mark by "selling it" all the way. Different folks, different strokes. Terrific all the same.

The posters of the show reveal Bettina Mönch in a semi-reclining position, as the undulating Ulla Inga tor Hansen Benson Yansen Tallen Hallen Svaden Swanson. When she's standing up anywhere on stage, though, her legs are even longer than her character's name. Mönch's voice at full blast also goes right through the roof. She's every bit as impacting in every Fach as the irresistible Cady Huffman was on Broadway, and she is far more alluring than the otherwise wonderful Uma Thurman was in the film of the musical. (Don't get me going on the dreadful 2005 film.)

Now a word about Martin Sommerlatte, as Roger DeBris, the drag queen director of Max and Leo's sure-fire would-be flop. The saga of how the musical took form has it, that Mel Brooks created a whole new section for the original Broadway DeBris, Gary Beach, while he was rehearsing the "Springtime for Hitler" extravaganza. Brooks overheard Beach doing a Judy Garland impression, and Brooks' brain waves went into over-drive. The result was a pastiche/tribute to Judy at the Palace. Sommerlatte as the Teutonic DeBris was hugely effective up to this point in the show on opening night, but it became clear to me that he was not doing Judy Garland. Had it only been Dietrich! If it was Marlene, ya cudda fooled me. Possibly another German-speaking icon -- maybe Claire Waldorf or Zarah Leander or Lilian Harvey? Net-net: Sommerlatte should be imitating somebody in this sequence, and there are plenty of legends -- German and otherwise -- that would work. Nonetheless, the audience scooped him up as though he were freshly churned Schlagsahne.

Herbert Steinböck nearly stole the show as Franz, the alt-Nazi turned author, as he stomped and mummered his way through the hilarious translation of "Haben Sie gehört die deutsche Band?" He would have been even more side-splitting, had he played the Hitler-wannabe with a puerile Austrian accent. A missed opportunity that should be corrected.

Some of the wit, as I said earlier, didn't quite make it around the language barrier. As one reader of the New York Times duly commented, "Be a smarty, come and join the Nazi Party" was translated into something like "Sei kein Barzi/komm zu uns und werde Nazi," or: "Don't be a Bavarian boor, become a Nazi." Huh? "Barzi" is a deprecating slang term for Bavarian and it's neither funny, as the Times reader rightly noted, nor, in my view, appropriate in this context: Weren't the Bavarians Hitler's first and biggest supporters? The line would be both accurate AND acerbic if it went: "sei ein Barzi..." or "Be a (dumb) Barzi, and join the Nazis." But acerbic is also not what the show is about.

What HAS translated well is Nigel West's production -- pretty much the same as Susan Strohman's slick, fast-paced, and often exhilarating original. Leigh Constantine has all but cloned Strohman's choreography, except for an amendment here and there. The bevy of chorus girls in Leo's "I wanna be a producer" number emerge from filing cabinets, but they file off up stage, as the accounting office set splits apart. If I recall the original correctly, they receded back into their filing cabinets, which gave the number one last poignant gesture.

The Producers is set to run through July at the Admiralspalast in Berlin's hotsy-totsy Friedrich Strasse. The theater was often frequented by Hilter. A special box he had installed was only recently removed. The Berlin edition of the show has been dubbed an unqualified critical success, but wags on both sides of the Atlantic are making bets on whether it will be a box office hit. When this production was originally mounted in Vienna, it was hardly a smash. Small wonder. A musical spoofing native Austrian Adolf as a sissy? I don't think so. Certainly not after decades of hard slogging, trying to market Hitler as a German and Beethoven as an Austrian.

But Berlin's public during the Third Reich was never nearly as adoring of the Führer, and theater regulars in the German capital today may well cotton to a show that has its true origins in the wry Jewish humor that flourished in Berlin for decades before the diaspora. Frederik Hanssen of Der Tagespiegel, in fact, all but hailed The Producers as a dazzling precipitate of that bygone age, that Germans today can at best only import.

The Producers in German is by no means going to turn the grimmest page in Germany's history, but it does bring back a cynical, crude, hilarious and curiously humane view of life to the city it once called home.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

More Than Glamor?

Sam has moved on to Berlin where he caught Jonas Kaufmann's Cavaradossi:

PUCCINI: TOSCA
Deutsche Oper Berlin
16 May 2009

Germany now has a star tenor and he's getting the star treatment: Photographs on music magazine covers, and billboards, shallow interviews, plus a High-C contract to be the bedroom eyes behind the wheel of BMW.

His name, by the bye, is Jonas Kaufmann.

A sold-out celeb-strewn crowd flocked to the Deutsche Oper in Berlin to hear him as Cavaradossi this past Saturday. The assembled Prussians, many dressed to the tens, gave him a hero's welcome, even though he's a native Bavarian. Nobody's perfect.

It would have been His Night, if it hadn't been for the Tosca -- Nadja Michael -- and the Scarpia -- Ruggero Raimondi, both of whom were willing to share the stage with Kaufmann but not concede it to him.

In fact, Raimondi received the biggest hand at the final curtain calls -- and with good reason. It was he who gave the most involved portrayal of the evening. What a pleasure to find that some opera singers are as good if not better than they ever were. While Tito Gobbi's Scarpia often left the impression of a sadistic bureaucrat, Raimondi, who made his Met debut in 1974, delivered an object lesson in implied, unspeakable malevolence.

Nadja Michael reportedly is no favorite among rear rung regulars at the Deutsche Oper, but she managed to keep the usual booing at bay at this performance. Hers is a huge but wieldy voice, capable of dynamic swings that sound inevitable rather than interpolated: an especially effective "Vissi d'arte."

Which brings me to swingin', I mean, singing Kaufmann. No doubt: he has more than glamor -- He manifests intelligence and imagination. His large, dark tenor is already casting a shadow toward late Verdi and, of course, the W word. In fact, he's set for Lohengrin at the Munich Festival this July. But for me on Saturday night, he also cast a shadow on his musical taste -- milking alargandi nearly to the point of full stop -- crooooooning "O dolci mani..." with enough syrup to induce sugar shock. Bitte, nicht so schleppend, Lieber Jonas!

It's not clear if veteran conductor Pier Giorgio Morandi -- who is new to me -- had a hand in the liberties Kaufmann took. Even though he received some catcalls, no one could deny that Morandi steered the orchestra effectively, while eliciting some details that I've seen in the score, but rarely have heard.

The production by Boleslaw Barlog dates from 1969. Like Barlog himself, who is now in his 90s, it shows no signs of wear.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Double-Dalila

Sam revisited Samson et Dalila in Cologne:

SAINT SAËNS - SAMSON ET DALILA
COLOGNE
13 MAY 2009

I couldn't resist returning for a second visit to the Cologne Opera's scandal-ridden new production of Samson et Dalila, on Wednesday night (13 May), even though I knew full well, like Samson himself, that yielding to such temptation could prove catastrophic. In my report on the premiere, I rehearsed the series of issues that led to two singers portraying Dalila. Net-net: last-minute substitute Ursula Hesse van den Steinen contracted a throat ailment, so she ended up miming the role, while Irena Mishura (who has portrayed the role at the Met) was flown in from Geneva to deliver Dalila from a bridge over the orchestra pit.

At the second performance, Ursula Hesse van den Steinen (is there a marquee anywhere wide enough for this name?) was supposed to mime and sing Dalila, but an announcement from the stage informed us, that she had not yet sufficiently recovered, so Ms. Mishura again did voice-over duty from stage-left. While I couldn't help looking over at the singing Dalila at the premiere, a big-haired woman blocked my view this time around, forcing me to keep my eyes on stage-center.

Several widely circulated opinions about the premiere expressed bewilderment at all the noise surrounding Tilman Knabe's violence-filled production. I fully agree. Truly offensive spectacles are readily available on the tube. What passed nearly unnoticed at the premiere but impressed me most at this performance was the dazzling erotic energy displayed by Ursuala Hesse van den Steinen and the horny High Priest of Eglis Silins in their scene that begins the second act. The heat coming off them as they circled an outsize bed, eyes locked in fervid foreplay: that kind of animal sensuality is found rarely in a live performing framework, much less at the opera. In addition to Ursula's gifts as singer (I've heard her before), -- her dime store negligee reveals a stacked body. Correspondingly, Eglis Silins moves his tall, slender and paunchless frame to and fro with gainly amble. So why, apart from unzipping his fly, does Knabe make him keep his clothes on?

The question is salient, because Ray M. Wade, Jr. as Samson does remove his trousers in the ensuing seduction scene, unfurling a mega-monumental midriff and thundering thighs that herald nothing short of a tsunami. This is a directorial decision that is far more shocking than any truly gross exhibition of violence that Knabe could have concocted. What is the frigging point? Is this well-nigh obscene spectacle of obesity a perverse hommage to Shirley Stoler in Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties? Is Knabe issuing a declaration of himself a chubby chaser? What is clear is that this scene is embarrassing, most specifically for Mr. Wade. This, at the very moment of his hard-won triumph in one of the most demanding roles in the Tenor Fach.

By the way, the singing was uniformly top drawer, and Enrico Delamboye's conducting compared favorably once more to vintage Gewurztraminer -- intense and piquant.

I'm still looking forward to experiencing Ursula multi-task. Meanwhile, I implore Knabe to let Ray keep his pants on.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Barber in the Bull Ring

Sam is still in Cologne - his latest squib is on the final performance of Barber of Seville of the season:

ROSSINI: IL BARBIERE DI SEVIGLIA
COLOGNE
10 May 2009

It was only a matter of time before an opera director would come up with the idea: Plop a new production of Rossini's Barber of Seville in the middle of a bullfighting arena. The time came two seasons ago at the Cologne Opera. A production team headed by Christan Schuller dumped the action into the bullring of a bisected stadium. Mini sets, placed on stage wagons of various sizes, rolled on and off by choristers and supernumeraries, gave the audience a notion of where the proceedings were actually taking place.

I don't know what kind of reception Schuller and company received at the premiere, but this past Sunday afternoon, an attentive, nearly full house of spectators responded enthusiastically to this season's final performance of the production's revival. Much of the enthusiasm focused on the cast, which dutifully went through the motions of the staging while focusing their efforts on fleshing out Rossini's delightful score.

She's not ideally suited to the role, but Regina Richter was vocally a cunning Rosina. She rattled off her flights of fioritura with ease and drew wit and irony from the outset with her "Una voce poco fa."

Richter had a versatile foil in Gerardo Garciacano's Figaro, who proved himself as equally at home with Rossini as he was comfortable with Mozart a few days earlier. Garciacano's partner in mischief at that performance of Cosi fan tutte, Benjamin Bruns, turned up again, this time as Almaviva and pursued the Count's amorous adventure with a secure, mellifluous line.

Maurizio Muraro turned out to be a sympathetic Bartolo, while Wilfried Staber turned Don Basilio's "La Calunnia" into a showcase of sonority. Enrico Delamboye returned to the pit on a short turnaround, following a nerve-wracking but successful evening on the podium at the premiere of the Cologne Opera's new Samson et Dalila. His way with Rossini could use a bit more zest, but maybe he and the excellent Gürzenich Orchestra were recovering from a bout of Saturday Night Vibe.

In fairness to the musicians as well as the performing artists, though, much of the sparkle was vitiated by Schuller's middle-brow Barber-in-the-Bullring concept, which he has not thought out clearly. If his view of the mise en scene makes Bartolo the ill-fated bull, as it perforce must, does Rosina embody his ears? Or tail? The concept is further muddied by Jens Killian's brown-dominant stadium and shlock house garments. And where are the blood-thirsty crowds? The stands remain empty for most of the proceedings.

There's a gaping hole here, that Schuller makes no apparent effort to close: Bullfighting rings are places for a blood sport that is tragic at its crux. Il Barbiere di Seviglia is bloody good fun and comedic to its core.

This Barber needs a haircut. And a makeover.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Do Me, Dalila!

Sam Shirakawa is still in Cologne, this time attending the premiere of Saint-Saëns' Samson et Dalila:

SAINT-SAËNS: SAMSON ET DALILA Premiere
COLOGNE
9 MAY 2009

I think it was Mae West who said, "Call me anything, just call me often."

The Cologne Opera has been called a lot of things -- and often -- over the past year. Scandal Number 69: After a variety of problems forced the premiere of its latest new production to be postponed by a week, the curtain finally went up on Camile Saint-Saen's Samson et Dalila before a sell-out crowd this past Saturday evening, 9 May. The time-line of the tempest runs like this (sort of): The originally cast Dalila dropped out about a week before the premiere was set to take place on 2 May, claiming the violent excesses of Tilman Knabe's production were distressing her to the point of indisposition. Her replacement, Ursula Hesse von den Steinen (no, the name is NOT taken from The Producers), fell prey to a throat ailment, thereby increasing the suspense -- and the publicity. Meanwhile, a goodly number of chorus members called in sick, because of said production excesses.

Determined to go on with the show nomattawhat, the Cologne Opera management scraped together a quorum of choristers and hastily recruited Irena Mishura from Geneva to sing Dalila from the side of the stage with score in hand, while Ursula Hesse van den Steinen mimed the role.

Did it work? Mostly. In fact, as Mishura vocalized her sultry she-devil with the gratifying confidence of a seasoned courtesan, glancing over at her from time to time over the course of the intermission-less evening became a merciful respite. Here's why:

First of all, Samson et Dalila, apart from two top-o'-the-charts arias, is a third-rate opera by a fifth-rate composer; frequent distractions of almost any sort are a blessing. Second, Knabe's production is not dynamic enough to keep the attention focused on center-stage for the duration. Neither are Beatrix von Pilgrim's sets sufficiently eye-catching to hold undivided attention. Nor do Kathi Maurer's costumes -- including a ticki-tacky seduction outfit for Dalilah -- compel unconditional surrender. Nonetheless, I look forward to attending a future performance, in which Ursula Hesse van den Steinen juggles stage business and singing along with simulated shtupping. (Her Dalila turns two tricks -- the High Priest and Samson -- within a half hour and still comes up like she's humming for more!)The lip-sync compromise would have worked perfectly as a diversion, had it not been for the mesmerizing, nuanced Samson of American and long-time Cologne Opera member Ray M. Wade, Jr. Whenever he opened his mouth, all eyes and ears gravitated to him alone. Whenever I’ve heard him previously, he invariably essayed a large, disciplined, but dynamically invariable spinto tenor that hardly betrayed a trace of the Gallic heroism required by such a hefty role as Samson. Maybe he's been tutored under the care of an expert in la Style Français, or maybe he's just listened closely to recordings left us by the likes of Paul Franz and Emile Scaramberg -- or maybe both. Whatever. Ray purveyed the pay-off of his studies on Saturday night with stentorian passion and muscular grace. He's made a break-through with Samson, and intendants at international houses might do well to pay heed. This production, though, raises a serious issue, that could prevent Ray from attaining the heights he otherwise deserves. That matter I will discuss in discursive terms shortly.

Another worthy distraction took shape in the High Priest of Eglis Silins, whose virile, athletic vocalism matched his colleagues note for note. This lanky Lithuanian bass-baritone has an easy-going sensuality in both his singing and stage demeanor that renders him international star material. Why the stars have yet to align in his favor in a big way remains one of the mysteries of contemporary opera politics.

Nearly forgotten in the midst of all the hoo-ha: the idiomatic and fluidly paced conducting of Enrico Delamboye. He won a huge ovation from the audience at the curtain calls, as well as a round of floor stomping in the orchestra pit.

For all the outrage and external noise the production has aroused, the opening night crowd sat still through the scenes of amok-running on stage and, minus a boo here and there at the curtain calls, gave the production team a big hand. The magazine Das Bild has dubbed the event "brutally good."

Now a couple of thoughts about Tilman Knabe's production. He's updated the period from Biblical antiquity (11th century BC, I believe) to the current age, so muted machine gun fire replaces sabre-clunking. (It's not clear who the Philistine soldiers are supposed to be in this frame of reference.)

No matter.

The operative word in viewing the scenes depicting sex, mass rape and genocide is "simulation." Given the numbing glare of today's real-life prurience and violence on TV news, cable and the Internet, Knabe's simulations of human behavior at its ugliest strike me as anemic. If he knows what it's like to be in the midst of a combat zone, he is obviously at a loss to portray convincing tableaux of it. Much too tame, lieber Knabe! Give us some real violence on stage! Why not, for example, slay the uppity prima donna and rebellious choristers, five or six at each performance, and eviscerate them in full view of the audience? But even that seems old hat, given the plethora of snuff films floating around.

So here is where Knabe and other "artists" paint themselves into a corner, when they try exploiting gratuitous violence in the theater of our times. It's cold coffee. They might succeed in offending a few colleagues, but the shock-inured public is way ahead of them. On Saturday evening, some audience members, far from being outraged, were snickering dismissively. The only viable option left to stage directors who keep pushing the violence envelop is, in my view, to co-opt and advance the animation-driven, blood-drenched universe of certain best-selling video games: Out-grand Grand Theft Auto, by splashing mindless beheadings and such in blown-up detail beyond the limits of the proscenium arch. And go 4-D by dousing the audience with genuine cold blood. Do Next-Level Wannabes like Knabe, though, have the stomach for truly upsetting bourgeois audiences?

All of which is not to say, that Knabe's staging failed in inducing Aristotelian awe, pity and so on. Far from it. I cannot recall a moment throughout years of theatre-going, in which I felt so seized with grim amazement, as when Ray M. Wade, Jr., shucked his trousers to mount Ursula Hesse van den Steinen in the second act seduction scene, baring girth so gargantuan that it mocked Biblical proportions, flashing corpulence so awesome, that I wanted desperately to look away. But couldn't. Was it really socially responsible for Knabe to treat us to the breath-stopping harvest of Ray's evident penchant for massive consumption? Would Knabe have been so needlessly flesh-forward had he been directing Pavarotti?

But now, at least, I suspect I know the real reason why the originally cast Dalilah pulled out: she found the role too heavy.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Love’s Labours Belaboured

Sam Shirakawa was back in Cologne to catch a performance of Mozart's Cosí fan tutte:

MOZART: COSÍ FAN TUTTE
Cologne
7 May 2009

Having heard most of the Mozart’s stage works that I've attended performed in large international opera houses, I’m always struck by the pleasure I find in even a faulty production, whenever I hear it in theaters less cavernous than, say, the Met or Covent Garden. Mozart composed for the masses, but in small gatherings. The architecturally distinguished home of the Cologne Opera is hardly a hole-in-the-wall, but it’s just the right fit for the revival of Michael Hampe’s virtually fault-free, no-frills 2006 production of Cosí fan tutte.

He’s retained the locale – the Bay of Naples – but he’s moved the period from the 18th century to what looks like the 1930s, if his sets and Carlo Tomassi’s quietly elegant costumes are anything to go by. Despite a penchant for grey, their production still sparkles by leaving most of the pep-work to Mozart’s contrapuntal wit and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s cheerful irony.

The rest of the labors, of course, are carried out by Christopher Mould’s stylish conducting and a cohesive cast that’s drawn from company’s resident roster. Katharina Leye and Adriana Bastidas Gamboa as Fiordiligi and Dorabella respectively have just the right weight and agility to convey their weaknesses as characters, as they fall prey to their lovers’ scheme to test their constancy. Gerardi Garanciano’s Gugliemo and Benjamin Bruns’ Ferrando purvey more than enough charm to outshine the peculiar side of their characters: Have these guys nothing better to do than to embarrass their sweethearts? Werner van Machelen as the instigator of the plot Don Alfonso gives the winking impression that his bet against the ladies' fidelity is a guaranteed win. Claudia Rohrbach’s irresistable Despina consistently proves that a resourceful maid is always mistress to her mesdames.

It would be churlish to pick out arias and the way this singer or that one has with them in this performance. The artists work as a team, interacting and relating to one another in ways that you rarely find at international houses, where Grabbing the Spotlight is the name of the game. Which leaves me to wonder whether I'm getting the right point of all the delightful shenanigans the Mozart and da Ponte concoct: If all women are fickle, aren't men all the more fatuous for loving them no less?

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Aural Viagra (or Tristan Redux)

Sam went back to the Cologne Tristan to see if he could catch lightning in a bottle ... he claims to have captured "aural Viagra" instead:

WAGNER: TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
Cologne
8 May 2009

To discover a dream singer before the Great Unwashed is told what to think: It makes all those ho-hum hours of so-so opera-going worthwhile. There’s little else to compare with the thrill of hearing–-to name only a few--Regine Crespin, Jon Vickers, Marilyn Horne, Kiri te Kanawa, René Pape, Juan Diego Flórez before they became big stars. But to discover within a week not one but two turbojet singers who may be destined to join their ranks... that’s aural Viagra!

Recently I reported on finding mezzo-soprano Elena Zhidkova at the Cologne Opera, belting out what I called a “hair-raising” Brangäne. I could hardly believe it, so I returned a few days later to the succeeding performance of Tristan. She took a few dozen bars to really get with the program this time, but she nonetheless confronted me again with a voice that diddles the nerve-endings and invigorates those arcane longings that only a select few larynges can induce.

At this performance, a second discovery: Samuel Youn as Kurwenal. This South Korean bass-baritone, now in his mid-30s, was reportedly one of the few cast members who drew approval at the production’s much maligned premiere two months ago. (I have no doubt, that some readers may well be muttering: You’re only discovering him now? Catch up, Sam,– this guy’s already appeared at Bayreuth in Christoph Schlingensief’s production of Parsifal!. To which, I with abject contrition can only reply: Silly me, who could possibly forget that fabulous Second Knight on the radio four years ago...?)

Youn’s curriculum vitae shows that he’s been around and around, and he’s used his time profitably in honing his voice into a force to be reckoned with. It’s big, bright and it lingers in the ear -- a baritone with a distinctive vocal (and stage) profile. Unfortunately, Wagner gives Kurwenal only one real crack at taking command of the stage, but Youn made the most of it on this occasion in his third act duologue with Tristan.

The Cologne Opera has in Youn and Zhidkova a pair of powerhouse vocalists, and its beleaguered management should make sure it doesn't miss a golden opportunity to market their respective and combined merits. Here’s a proposal for the suits to consider: Cast Zhidkova as Dalilah in the current dropout-ridden new production of Samson, whose scandals are making it fodder for ridicule. Nobody will give a damn about the production if she’s on stage. (If she hasn’t learned the role yet, lock her in a rehearsal room with a coach or just have her sing it from the vocal score.) Mount Rigoletto and Il Tabarro for Youn. Recast Barbiere and revive Don Carlo for them both. Top line them in a Germany's Got Talent monster benefit concert. If you don’t do it now, somebody else soon will...

Two other noteworthy cast changes at this performance: Barbara Schneider-Hofstetter as Isolde and Mischa Schelomianski as King Mark. I first heard Schneider-Hofstetter as Minnie about seven years ago in Wiesbaden, when big plans for her were being hatched. A number of them have materialised. The voice has also grown in the interim – large enough to give Zhidkova a breath-baiting sprint for the money. Their first and second act exchanges raised the decibel level way into the red zone -- unusually exciting Can Belto -- more commonly heard on Pasta Nights. In its current estate, Hofstetter's soprano is evenly distributed and brightens metallically under pressure. She also possesses two pigments that complete the picture Gabriella Schnaut tried with variable success to paint: a pair of secure, well-placed and sustained high-Cs. (In fact, Gabi could manage neither top C convincingly, when she visited Cologne with Siegfried Jerusalem in Gunter Kramer's laser-lousy production a couple of years ago.)

If the audience applause level at the curtain calls was any indication, Schelomianski is a house favorite. He has a rich, compelling sound, but I would have welcomed a more plaintive articulation of King Mark’s self-pity.

Robert Gambill’s Tristan was in far better form that in his previous performance. His top, especially in the third act, seemed freer and more luminous than it was five days earlier. In fact, Gambill enacts the role more effectively than a couple of better known Tristans, who have appeared at the Met lately.

Some ragged entrances and intonation issues – an oboe was at one point markedly out of tune in the third act – diminished the otherwise grand sweep of the orchestral playing somewhat, but the Cologne Opera’s music director Markus Stenz maintained the impression he initially gave me of a master Wagner conductor well into the making.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Wagner alla Romana

Sam Shirakawa will be in Europe for the next few months, reporting to us periodically on what he sees and hears.

WAGNER: RIENZI
Bremen 2 May 2009
video clips

You may know that Richard Wagner's breakout work was Rienzi, his third opera. It was supposed to have its premiere in 1840 in Paris, but Wagner had to get out of town because of his political activities. The first performance finally took place in Dresden in 1842. Despite its six-hour-plus duration (long even for Wagner), it was perhaps the composer's most frequently performed work during his lifetime. It's often said, that this opera is rarely produced these days, but that's not really the case. A partial list: The English National Opera staged it in 1983, the Komische Oper Berlin mounted it in 1992 and revived it in 1999, the Vienna State Opera put it up for Siegfried Jerusalem in 1998, Oper Leipzig produced it last year, and the Opera Orchestra of New York has presented it twice in concert form.

Wagner himself, of course, eventually found his breakout work to be an embarassment, and his heirs have yet to permit a production of it at Bayreuth--though certain family members have been agitating for mounting ALL of the composer's stage oeuvre at the composer's shrine.

One of those activist clan members is Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of the Master and youngest child of Wolfgang Wagner, the composer's grandson and recently retired Lord of the Sanctum Sanctorum. She, along with her half-sister Eva, is now co-director of the annual Festival at Bayreuth. This year she directed a production of it in Bremen, so I trekked all the way to this lovely Hanseatic city to attend its 13th and final performance this season.

The fascistic themes of the plot, based on a book by the 19th century English nobleman, writer and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton, may have emboldened Katharina to revisit those very leitmotifs that her family has sought assiduously to avoid since the end of World War II. The story revolves around Cola di Rienzi, a medieval Italian politician, who defeats a grim coterie of nobles in behalf of the populace. But the power Rienzi accrues goes to his head, and he ultimately is crushed by his erstwhile supporters.

In a simple stroke of theatrical brilliance, Katharina uses wigs to show how the trappings of power and the futility of vanity are inextricably related in the hero's ascent. Katharina's Rienzi is bald, but donning facsimiles of hair invigorates his political potency: the trendier the wig, the greater his power. She also arms Rienzi with a flame-throwing device that becomes a one-man instrument of annihilation. Katharina's designer Tilo Steffans places a huge faux-alabaster statue of a female deity on a stage-length set of steps. The statue ultimately devolves into a prurient cartoon poster, as the decadence that Rienzi causes turns the Glory that was Rome into a lascivious caricature of itself.

While Katharina's basic take on her great-grandfather's nascent work frequently provokes even as it amuses, it's hard to make out where she is leading us. Yes, power corrupts and ultimately destroys itself. But so what? Rienzi doesn't lose all his hair as he loses power. And yes, I am also aware of the commonplace wisdom that tells us that powerful friends can turn into deadly enemies. (A certain recently elected world leader is learning that sad fact.) Perhaps the point lies in those immoveable steps, spanning the stage. They remain unchanged through bloodbaths and debauchery- They also lead nowhere...

What strikes me as most fascinating about the work as a whole, though, is that Wagner is forced to articulate in a musical language that is not his own. You hear bits and chunks of Tannhäuser and Dutchman straining to burst out, but hardly a trace of Tristan, not to mention Parisfal. Wagner at this stage of his career must still speak through the tub-thumping, rum-ti-tum conventions of early 19th century Italian opera and the inflated gestures that animated Parisian Grand Opera of his time. To experience the eventual revolutionary composer of the Ring "putting out" for paltry approval is both unnverving and, at times, utterly delectable.

No less delectable in this production, which was performed with about half an hour worth of cuts -- not including the 40-minute ballet -- is the singing. Hats off to American heldentenor Mark Duffin in the killer title role. His big, beefy timbre never tires, as it bulldozes its way through page after page of stentorian declamation. While Duffin's tenor runs the risk of turning coarse if he sings like this too often, his musicality prevents it in this instance from taxing the ear.

As Rienzi's sister Irene, Duffin's fellow American Patricia Andress soared effortlessly above the staff, as her role evolved act by act into what might be described as Senta's step-sister. If Andress' professional ambitions are leaning toward Wagner, she already has at least one listener looking forward to her Brühnnhilde.

Why Wagner conceived of Irene's lover Adriano as a trouser-role remains a mystery for me, even though he tailored it for his favorite Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, who created the role. But if singers like Tamara Klivadenko are assigned to it, I have no regrets. It's hard to say in which direction Klivadenko is leaning, but her bright and warm Adriano left me with the impression that her options are wide open.
The English National Opera staged it in 1983, the Komische Oper Berlin mounted it

Other standouts in the cast were Pavel Kudinov as Steffano Colonna, Loren Lang as Paolo Orsini and Franz Becker-Urban as Kardinal Raimondo.

Daniel Montané leading the Bremen Philharmonic and the Theater Bremen Chorus brought focus and clarity to a score that seems at times to ramble. Speaking of the orchestra, it never fails to astonish me how much superior the brass and woodwinds sound among so-called provincial pit orchestras in comparison to some of their counterparts in so-called "major" opera houses.

© Sam Shirakawa

Selective Listening

Sam Shirakawa heard the Met's first Götterdämmerung of the season, but he didn't see it. He explains:

WAGNER: GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG
METROPOLITAN OPERA
25 APRIL 2009 Season Premiere

Have you ever felt glad that you didn’t get into an opera performance you really wanted to attend?

Through quirks of fortune, I was unable get to the Metropolitan Opera’s first performance this season of Götterdämmerung--which happened to take place on last Saturday´s broadcast matinee. So I tuned in to the radio at home--late--just in time for the Brünnhilde-Siegfried Duet that caps off the Prologue.

Ugh!

In my recent report on the Met’s first Siegfried of the season, I said that Christian Franz in the eponymous role had learned to refrain from squawking out notes, an annoying proclivity that had marred his previous performances, when I had heard him elsewhere as Siegfried.

I spoke too soon.

Apart from barking out note-less words here, there, and a lot, Franz was also afflicted on this occasion with a nasty wobble that often straddled at least two semi-tones.
Incipient motion sickness I was beginning to experience from that wobble was little helped by Katerina Dalayman’s squally Brünnhilde. She hit the top C in the duet squarely on target, but her mid-size voice appeared to be laboring fruitlessly under the weight of the role.

What to do?

Listening via radio or computer allows you do other things at the same time or just tune out. So, I opted for the latter and went outside to enjoy a beautiful spring afternoon--pitying, from time to time, those sea-worthy Wagnerites consigned to stay afloat in their seats at the Met.

When I returned home, the live performance was over, but a delayed transmission of the third act was about to begin online by way of a European station [Editor: Ireland's Lyric FM]. The Rhine Maidens were in good shape. A good omen maybe? If it was, Franz’ pneumatic delivery of the Hunting Narrative fell short of it. Some tender moments, yes, but I nonetheless found myself craving Siegfried's demise.
The Funeral Music came as an ear-cleanser. Levine’s Spell held the Met Orchestra in thrall. Great playing.

The phone rang, so I didn’t hear much until Brünnhilde’s Big Moment.
Dalayman had the energy for her Immolation Scene but not the gravitas. Rarely have I been so grateful for Brünnhilde to catch fire; this is no role for a pleasant, pushed-up mezzo. Several years ago, I heard Dalayman as Lisa in Pique Dame in Munich, and she was wonderful. She should stick with roles in which she sounds wonderful.

Judging from snippets I heard, John Tomlinson as Hagen was a study in malevolence, Margaret Jane Wray was a good Gutrune and Iain Paterson, making his Met debut as Gunther, was a revelation--a singer on the threshold. Don’t be surprised if he soon becomes a star Amfortas, Dutchman, and, of course, Sachs.

I am told the Schenk/Schneider-Siemsen/Langenfass production is not being dismantled after this season. Is the Met hedging its bets on the new production of the Ring, set for 2010? No matter. If the news proves true: O tidings of comfort!

© Sam Shirakawa

DIE WÄLKURE - Season Premiere

Sam Shirakawa, peripatetic Wagnerian that he is, was at the opening night of Die Walküre at the Met on Monday night. His squib:

Season Premiere 6 April 2009
Metropolitan Opera

The Muses were in attendance at the Met on Monday night. I never thought “riveting” would be an appropriate way to describe James Levine’s reading of any score, but absent a lapse here and there, his umpteenth traversal of Wagner’s [who else’s?] Die Walküre was indeed riveting. The pacing seemed livelier, the dynamic thrust more propulsive than ever before.

After a briefly tentative start, James Morris sang possibly his finest Wotan at the Met to date. Few veteran singers get to show what they have learned over the years, because their voices give out before they get the chance. Morris is one of the lucky ones. Drawing from a wealth of acquired and innate reserves, he rendered a deeply moving account of an embattled god, forced to sacrifice two of his most beloved children. On Monday, though, his soft and heartbreaking farewell to his love child was overshadowed by the orchestra. Too loud, Jimmy!

The much anticipated curiosity of the evening was the debut of Iréne Theorin, a hastily recruited Brünnhilde, replacing the indisposed Christine Brewer. The Swedish soprano has an ample voice that’s evenly distributed from top to bottom, and she showed no signs of strain in scooping up to those treacherous Bs and Cs in the valkyrie’s signature war cry. What her voice lacks at this point in her young career is a personality that is distinctive and lingers in the ear. Withal, Theorin proved herself an effective actress on her first showing, and she needed no extra makeup to highlight her estimable comeliness.

The same can hardly be said of Jan Botha’s appearance. The stage lights may have been kept on extra low wattage to mask his corpulence. Ah, but the rotund sound of his Siegmund! Think Jon Vickers meets Franz Völker: seductive, sweet and potent. Too bad Wagner kills the Wälsung off at the end of the second act.

Too bad, too, that the composer also kills off Hunding almost at the same moment. Especially when the role is so deftly portrayed by John Tomlinson -- another veteran Wagnerian, who’s made a well-deserved name for himself as Wotan and Sachs over the years. As an acquaintance sagaciously commented during the first intermission, Tomlinson purveys a depth of understanding about the role that makes Hunding far more complex than a brutish cuckold. And it’s not all about the singing, about which: no complaints. The way he listens to Siegmund’s tale of woe and becomes aware that he’s giving hospitality to his arch-enemy; the way he makes his long-suffering trophy wife stand up so that he can sit down.

And speaking of that long-suffering wife, Waltraud Meyer is back again as Sieglinde. I’ve always liked her, but I don’t care for mezzo-Sieglindes. I long for that slightly girlish inflection that real sopranos bring to the role. But Meyer was in full possession of her dark powers on Monday night, and satisfied customers gave her huge ovations.
Yvonne Naef is a cooly bitchy Fricka in her Virginia Woolf encounter with Morris. When she quits the stage with no loss of perspiration, you know it’s Game Over.

The eight Valkyrie Sisters -- all in great shape.

Monday’s cast is set to appear on the broadcast matinee. Theorin will also appear in Siegfried, which is fortunate. But not, apparently, in the broadcast of Götterdämmerung, which is unfortunate.

A sidebar to Monday night’s performance: It was marred by the cacophony of cellphones beeping and jangling throughout the performance. The hall frequently sounded like an intensive care unit. Isn’t it time for a full-page ad opposite the cast listing in the program, telling patrons to shut off? Or maybe the security personnel at the entrances should make it mandatory. Even better, why not create a firewall around the building to prevent incoming calls? If Wotan could do it for Brühnnhilde way back in those pre-digital days of yore, certainly the Met management can do it for its public now.

© Sam Shirakawa

Passion Punch

Sam Shirakawa was at the Met on Tuesday evening for the season premiere of L'elisir d'amore. Here's his squib:

L’ELISIR D’AMORE

METROPOLITAN OPERA
SEASON PREMIERE
MARCH 31,2009


When the Metropolitan Opera mounts a good production, new or old, there’s nothing like it.

On Tuesday night, the delightful setting of Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’Amore by John Copley and Beni Montresor returned to the schedule with Angela Gheorghiu as the village belle Adina and Massimo Giordano stepping in for the ailing Ramon Villazon as Nemorino.

There was little doubt beforehand, that Gheorghiu would succeed. What I found surprising was how well she succeeded. If the reports that she can be a vixen are true, she certainly has channeled that penchant into an irresistibly coquettish Adina. She moves about the stage as if she owns it, interacts both musically and dramatically with her colleagues, as though she’s known them forever, all the while making flawless runs up and down the scale. Thinking back on her glamorous but somehow vague portrayal of Magda in La Rondine earlier this season, she seems infinitely more comfortable as Adina. I for one am dreading her Carmen, set for next season. Don’t do it, love! Don't! If you must do it, have them replace the Card Scene number with “Dunque io son...?” You know-- that thing from The Barber of Seville?

While some critics seemed to miss Villazon on Tuesday -- he’s supposed to be back for future performances -- Giordano proved to be an able deputy. His voice is big bright and flexible, and he too has comedic talent. But a peculiarity in his coloratura technique is worth mentioning: Certain notable sopranos of the past, Leyla Gencer, for instance, may have gotten away with aspirating vowels --- instead of ah-ah-ah-ah (correct), ha-ha-ha-ha. But Giordano sounds as though he’s just hyperventilating. Otherwise, he has the right stuff and delivered an unusually impassioned “Una furtiva lagrima.”

Simone Alaimo meanwhile aspirates a quantum of fun with every word he utters as Dulcamara and with every move he makes. Franco Vassallo embodies an attractive pre-nuptial foil as Sergeant Belcore. Ying Huang sounds like an aspiring big-league Adina.

It’s easy to dismiss any conductor leading L’Elisir as a timekeeper, but Maurizio Benini’s light touch with tempi laced the passion punch with plenty of Asti.

Hard as it may be to believe, the lovely storybook sets by the late Beni Montresor (1926-2001) date from 1991. Some sets at the Met, thankfully, never look outdated.

© Sam H Shirakawa

One for the Price of Two

Sam Shirakawa attended this past Monday's performance of Cavalleria Rusticana/I Pagliacci at the Metropolitan Opera. As always, we hereby present his take:

CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA

I PAGLIACCI

METROPOLITAN OPERA 30 MARCH 2009


A reviewer of the Met’s current Cav/Pag revival complains that Franco Zeffirelli’s 1970 production is beginning to look old -- maybe too old.

Rubbish.

In fact, the sets and costimes, which Z also designed, are beginning to look exactly as they should have when they were brand new -- sun-bleached, dusty and a bit tatty.

Depending on what you think of the Met’s current casting policy, though, some patrons may feel shortchanged: Cav/Pag is usually cast with two tenors, one for each opera. In the current run, Roberto Alagna sang Turiddu and Canio in a few performances, and now Jose Cura is taking over to do double duty.

I skipped Alagna because he doesn’t pique my interest in either role. Cura is another matter. His voice is sufficiently “brown” to bear the pressures both roles impose with the kind of swagger they demand. The animality in Cura’s sound -- brash but vulnerable -- sparks the imagination.

As it turned out on Monday evening, he seemed more involved as the rake Turiddu than as the cuckold Canio. I had the impression that he was rushing the tempo in Pag and looking for a peg on which to hang his costume, rather than sinking into the morbid brooding that drives his character to tragic action.

His Turiddu, on the other hand, rocked with chauvinistic testosterone, brandishing portamento like a deadly weapon. There was more there in Cura's Turiddu, possibly because his Santuzza is far more compelling as a foil than his Nedda.

I first heard Ildiko Komlosi about ten years ago in Mannheim, when she stepped in on short notice as Octavian. She was a pleasant though somewhat reticent surprise on that occasion; she was a wow on Monday night. Komlosi has spent her time expeditiously and her talent wisely in the intervening decade. She sounds like she’s targeting the gap left by Cossotto and Verrett. From the way she cut loose in “Voi lo sapete” and in the protracted duet, she's aiming in the right direction.

Nuccia Focile has a pleasant stage personality, but her vocal profile sounds like it’s in transition from lyric to spinto. Only in the final moments of the play-within-a-play did she finally display the conviction she earlier was trying to muster.

Which brings me to the pair of elements that glued Monday evening’s performance together. Alberto Mastromarino also did double duty as Alfio in Cav and Tonio in Pag. You might want a bit more deadly assurance in the former and a larger dollop of grease in the latter, but his account of Tonio’s prologue had just the right cautery, topped off with an ecstatic A natural.

Pietro Rizzo drew marvelous playing from the Met Orchestra and reminded me again of what wonderful music both scores contain.

Cav and Pag are incessantly derided as warhorses, but when they are treated with the care that the Met is giving them at the moment, they are exciting to ride again and again.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

Comfort Food

Sam Shirakawa was present for the premiere of the Met's new production of Il Trovatore on Monday night:

IL TROVATORE

METROPOLITAN OPERA
16 February

Premiere New Production

Once upon a time, when opera was an affordable passion, I regarded Il Trovatore as Verdi's Smorgasbord, a cucina toscana laden with comfort food. Who cared if a mezzo was day-old, a baritone bland, or a soprano overcooked? Trovatore has so much melody to munch on! In those halcyon days, Trovatores were also as plentiful as pizza parlors. Easy to cast.

Now that the Metropolitan Opera is about to bang its neediest patrons with a 33 percent price increase, though, Trovatore is turning into white truffle. And casting a competent quartet of leads has long since turned tougher than lining up a Marfa in Mauritius.

Then too, the Met has had little luck with mounting Trovatore in the past 20 years. Remember that awful production by Fabrizio Melano for Joan Sutherland in 1987? Graham Vick's attempt at producing an opera in 2000 lasted two seasons.

If third time lucky and multiples of three exert a positive influence, David McVicar's elaborate production was unveiled Monday night on the occasion of the Met's 600th performance of the opera. Except for the final scene, the Met now has a palatable if not delectable mounting of the opera. Thanks to a revolving stage (whose gears need a grease job -- it squeaks and creaks alarmingly), scene changes take less than 30 seconds. Thick high walls -- separating Charles Edwards' innocuously realistic sets -- also serve as massive sounding boards. They bounce the voices out into the house to create marvelous reverb enhancement. (The wide stairs dominating the unit set of the Met's I Vespri Siciliani and the oval wall in the second act of Tannhäuser create a similar effect.) But the final scene fails to make sense. It's supposed to be a prison dungeon, but it's unmistakably the gypsies' camp of Act II. A lot of press was given to the influence of Goya on the current production, but the only vestige of the Spanish master I could discern was the scrim, covered with cartoons of horrified facial expressions, that's used as the house curtain.

Of course, attractive resonant sets serve no purpose unless they're amplifying world-class voices. It's hard to imagine a more tantalizing cast than the one the Met has convened. I first heard Sondra Radvanovsky as Leonora at the Met almost ten years ago to the day. She was good but green. She is now at the threshold of a huge career that sadly keeps receding before her for some reason. She should be up there with Anna, Karita and Renee, but she's still Sondra Who? Hers is one of the few voices before the public today that has a distinctive instantly recognizable timbre. It may not appeal to all tastes. A quick poll among acquaintances during intermission wrinkled some noses. But I can't get enough of it. There's room for some work on the lower register, but the middle and top are firmly in hand. The interpolated high notes are thrilling. "D'amor sull' ali rosee" has a way to go before it smacks down memories of Leontyne, but the anticipation it aroused at the premiere was compelling indeed. Radvanovsky, as I've commented before, is about as close to a real Verdi soprano as we're likely to get.

Reporting on a recent Adriana, I wished that Borodina would cut loose a bit more. Delora Zajick's Azucena, however, bolted with her usual high-gear elan. She's capable of endless nuance, but fortunately for those who like their Azucenas wild, she left her fennel at home.

Marcelo Alvarez' Manrico tends to swing toward the lighter side, but his way with "Ah si, ben mio" and the stentorian declamations that followed elicited an ovation that only a happily surprised audience can confer. He merits more work at the Met.

Dimitri Hvorostovsky as Luna is also capable of deliriously nuanced vocalism, but he might do well to remember that Luna is, and always will be, a meatball role. Put in some more Parmesan, Dimitri! and take the cue from the character's name: Be looney, a la the late and still lamented Lenny Warren!

Perhaps the little-noticed surprise of the premiere was the admirably lyrical conducting of Gianandrea Noseda. But his work, too, could use a fistful of peperoncino. You're Italian, Gianni, so don't fuggetaboutit!

"The characters are always on their feet, singing their hearts out," proclaims the program note. Actually, in McVicar's production, Leonora and Azucena spend a lot of time on the floor. Radvanovsky even hits a high note just before she collapses on her back. Which only goes to suggest that among the celebrities in attendance at the premiere was the spirit of Magda Olivero, who will be 100 years young next year. Were you there in 1975, when she sang the first part of "Vissi d'arte" flat on her back, after Ingvar Wixell as Scarpia threw her to the floor? Scrumptious!

© Sam H. Shirakawa 2009

Adriana Lecouvreur

And another squib from Sam Shirakawa, who attended Friday evening's performance of Adriana Lecouvreur:

ADRIANA LECOUVREUR

METROPOLITAN OPERA
13 FEBRUARY 2009

SHRINKING VIOLET

That's right. If you're a star soprano, you can't be a shrinking violet, especially if you're headlining a cruddy opera like Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur. You need to believe there is more to this trash heap of notes than the two lovingly composed arias Cilea set for its legendary creator Angelica Pandolfini [whose elusive recordings constitute the Avalon if not the Holy Grail among record collectors. Read the riveting interview with Sir Paul Getty by Richard Bebb]. More than believing, though, you need conviction. Caballe had it. Scotto too. So did Tebaldi, although I never heard her sing the role live.

Maria Guleghina -- the Met's current Adriana -- has a plethora of belief and conviction, but from the get-go, she's severely handicapped in portraying the immortal diva of La Comedie Français: She must make her entrance speaking a few lines before launching into song. Whadishesay? Mind you, a lot of suspension of disbelief is required at this point -- indeed throughout the whole plot. The setting is backstage at La Comedie Française, where French is the lingua franca, but the text of Cilea's opus, of course, is in Italian. Guleghina's sung Italian diction more than passes muster. But her spoken Italian?

So unintentionally stunning is Guleghina's elocution, that it's hard to comment on how she delivered her first aria -- you know, the one in which the eponymous diva declares that she is but the humble handmaiden of genius. Having only partially recovered by the time her fourth act aria came up, I can only say that the Ukrainian-born Met favorite left me with the impression of an unusual Adriana.

An unusual performance of another sort was rendered by Olga Boradina as the Princess. She was oddly detached in a role that screams for some "trucking."

I must confess now that I attended this performance partly out of morbid curiosity: to hear Placido Domingo attempt Maurizio -- his debut role at the Met in 1968. Amazingly, he can still do it. Domingo has become a walking object lesson in style, musicality and vocal technique and proves that age does not necessarily wither. The squillo -- that wounded animal sound -- still squeezes out of the upper register, the phrasing is indeed more natural than in his salad days, and he's gained the aura of a compelling stage-presence. That was not always at his command.

Roberto Frontali made the most of what he could out of Adriana's love-lorn suitor Michonnet.

Marco Armillato is conducting a lot at the Met these days. Is he taking charge of its Italian wing? His reading of Cilea's loose score -- maybe it's just lousy -- is tightly disciplined, if not always dramatically taut.

Something is missing from Mark Lamos' production. The sets could also use a few more walls. Maybe that's what's missing -- not enough scenery to chew.

The Met has assembled just about the best star cast that money can buy in these moribund days of the economy and romantic lyric theater. But where to buy that touch of wonder that sparks enchantment?

Speaking of money, the Met is upping its ticket price in the Family Circle from $15 to $20 next season. That's a 33 percent increase. Not enchanting. Other price ranges apparently remain unchanged [editor's Note: prices for the partial-view balcony box seats are also going up]. Why is the Met financially penalizing most the people who can afford opera least? This decision may well be a cynical move to capitalize on subscribers who are moving down in the world from the Dress Circle and the Balcony. A five dollar increase in less superior seats is still cheaper than staying where they are. This is outrageous, but nobody seems to care. Very well. Both the callous Met management and the silent stalwarts who keep opera going long after the fat cats have slunk away will each get exactly what they deserve. The Met will get less reliable patrons hopefully grabbing up the cheapest seats, while those who previously bought them will have no opera at all. Trickle down... down... down.

© SAM H. SHIRAKAWA 2009

Heavenly Harps

We were unable to post to this blog for about ten days, so now we make up for some of the lost time with a couple of reviews from our friend, Sam Shirakawa:

HEAVENLY HARPS

CONCERT:
MARIKO ANRAKU, Metropolitan Opera
JESSICA ZHOU, New York City Opera
NANCY ALLEN, New York Philharmonic
REBECCA RINGLE, mezzo-soprano
WEILL HALL 28 January 2009

Harps may sound heavenly, but they're hellish to play. I should know, because I'm a recovering harpist. You have to tune constantly, a pedal slip can instantly turn Mozart into Mayhem, strings can break with no warning. These are just a few of the angelic thoughts swirling through a harpist's mind while performing.

All that plus a challenging group of works must certainly have been on the minds of the principal harpists from the Big Apple's three most prestigious musical institutions, as they presented a concert Wednesday evening at Weill Hall. But you'd have never guessed it, as Mariko Anraku of the Met, Jessica Zhou from the City Opera, and the Philharmonic's Nancy Allen sallied elegantly through a delightful assortment of uncommon music for two and three harps, as well as a familiar work featuring mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle.

In fact, it was Ringle's participation in Manuel De Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas in a transcription by legendary harpist Carlos Salzedo that added extra spice to an unusual musicale. Ms Ringle is currently making her way through the operatic circuits, notably as a Valkyrie, but her true calling may be as a recitalist. She has an unusual claret timbre that retains its erotic resin from bottom to top. Blessed with a commanding stage presence, she communicated the full range of moods in the seven songs.

The preponderance of the heavy lifting throughout the evening was shared by Mss. Anraku and Zhou, starting with Cesar Franck's Prelude, Fugue and Variations in an arrangement by Dewey Owen, a Sonatine for Two Harps by Jean-Michel Damas, and a delightful self-arranged rendition of Ravel's Mere L'Oye. Nancy Allen joined them at the end of the concert for two substantial works by Francis Poulenc -- Fresco, Bela Bartok -- Hungarian Peasant Dances, and an encore -- Seguedilla by Isaac Albeniz.

The bitter-sweet take-away from this concert is how badly composers, especially great composers, have neglected the harp, thereby denying demonstrably virtuoso artists such as Anraku, Zhou and Allen opportunities to purvey their artistry to a broader public. Mozart hated the harp, Richard Strauss liked the instrument but never mastered writing for it, Salzedo tried in vain to persuade Stravinsky to compose at least one major work for harp, and he was similarly rebuffed by other composers. So harpists must rely on transcriptions or compose their own music.

A pity because the harp has a wealth of tonal possibilities that has yet to be fully explored by a major composer. And that confines wonderful harpists like Anraku, Zhou and Allen to the shallows of a still-uncharted musical sea.

©Sam H. Shirakawa 2009

YOU SAY NETREBKO, I SAY NEBTREBKO...

Sam Shirakawa is back with his first squib of the new year....

LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR | Metropolitan Opera | Monday, January 26, 2009

So were they fabulous?

In a word: No.

That was the gist of my brief chat with an acquaintance shortly after Monday night's Met Lucia. (By now, you must know who "they" are.)

Despite an economy that appears to be collapsing by the minute, the crisis failed to prevent a sold-out audience from attending Anna Netrebko's first Met Lucia. The crowd was presumably also there for her frequent stage partner Rolando Villazon, performing Edgardo, also for the first time at the Met.

For all the hubba-hubba swirling around the opera world's current super-primadonna, who once spelled her surname Nebtrebko, it was Rolando -- he always spelled it Rolando -- who unintentionally elicited the breath-taking moments during a messy performance. He showed signs of vocal difficulties in the first act, but by the middle of the middle act, the symptoms were acute. In the middle of the finale ensemble, he "just stopped," as one Met regular rightly put it during the 40-minute intermission that followed. Indeed, that breath-stopping pause was long enough to make you gag.

At the start of the third act, the Met's GM Peter Gelb stepped on stage to ask the audience for indulgence. Rolando muddled through without further incident, and he received a big hand at the curtain calls, but it remains clear that he has yet to surmount the highly publicized problems that recently caused him to take an extended sabbatical.

Anna, meanwhile, was not invulnerable to the "fraught" conditions visited upon this performance. The coloratura passages were clean, but the high notes were, with one exception, off-target. All in all, her first Lucia was less a descent into madness than a middling effort to transcend an ailing tenor and some scrappy orchestral playing led by Marco Armiliato.

Separating themselves admirably from the downward slide, though, were the orchestral soloists: Harpist Mariko Anraku, flutist Stefan Ragnar Höskuldsson, and armonica soloist Cecilia Brauer.

By the way, Ildar Abdrazakov as Raimondo sang flawlessly. But who noticed?

And by-the-by, too, the aforementioned 40-minute intermission is required at every Lucia performance -- as the program now notes in boldface type -- by the complexities of mounting the last act sets in Mary Zimmerman's production. The centerpiece is an enormous flying staircase. But it serves merely a series of utilitarian rather than dramatic purposes -- to provide a means of access to a room in the Wolf Crag's Castle, to enable Lucia to ascend to the bridal chamber with her ill-fated husband, to allow her to descend deranged therefrom without him, and to permit the Ravenswood lackeys to carry her lifeless body back upstairs again after she drops dead from a high note.

Is it worth the interminable wait?

In a word: no.

© Sam H. Shirakawa

DRIVING MS ELEKTRA: A BRIEF NOTE

On Saturday evening Sam Shirakawa revisited the N. Y. Philharmonic's concert Elektra for its final performance . . .

New York Philharmonic

13 December 2008

Backstage following one of her concert triumphs in 1961, Judy Garland is said to have told a gushing admirer who had just seen her perform live for the first time: Don't attend again. She explained that her on-stage magic rarely struck twice.

I recalled that odd piece of advice while attending the fourth and last Elektra on Saturday evening given by the New York Philharmonic. The first performance over a week ago was nothing less than a sensation. Word-of-mouth on the second and third performances was enthusiastic. But the net-net of Saturday night's presentation struck me as more summary than summation. A couple of missed cues, an unnerving memory lapse and some pitch issues were among the cardinal signs that magic wasn't striking.

Deborah Polaski sounded tired. Who can blame her? At least this time. But her handlers should be raked over the coals for letting her sing one of the most grueling roles in the operatic repertory four times in ten days. (Not even Flagstad had to do anything like that "back in the day...") And the Philharmonic management should be reminded: it's not fair to subscribers.

With one exception, the other lead singers appeared to be relieved rather than elated to be giving their final accounts of their roles, for now. Only Anne Schwanewilms seemed as deeply involved as she was on 4 December -- again a thrill to hear.

The New York Philharmonic was in a boisterous, end-of-a-long-haul mood -- behaving more like a Mack truck than a Maserati. But Lorin Maazel's firm grip steered the orchestra without knife-jacking over some rugged terrain in Strauss' treacherous score, making it sound, all in all, as though it was meant to be played that way.

©Sam H. Shirakawa

ELEKTRA - NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

Sam Shirakawa attended the concert performance of Strauss's Elektra with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday evening. Here's his squib:

AVERY FISHER HALL

4 DECEMBER 2008


When Lorin Maazel returned to the Metropolitan Opera earlier this year to conduct an eccentric but riveting series of Walküres, I wondered why he stayed away for 45 years. For all of New York's nightly array of world-class performers, local opera fans have merely a faint idea of what they've been missing without Maazel.

But we do have a good idea of what Maazel is like conducting Richard Strauss' masterwork Elektra. He first brought it to Carnegie Hall in 1974, leading the Cleveland Orchestra in concert with a cast that headlined Jose van Dam, Kenneth Riegel, Astrid Varnay and Ursula Schröder-Feinen. In 1991, he stepped in for Claudio Abbado, when the Vienna Philharmonic presented the opera here in concert form with Eva Marton in the title role.

On Thursday night Maazel led it with the New York Philharmonic in a remarkable concert performance. The evening was especially phenomenal because so much was "new."

For starters, the music was new to the Orchestra. It's a sure bet that few if any of its members had played the difficult score at its most recent performance back in 1964 -- apart from venerable First Clarinetist Stanley Drucker. Mastering over 100 minutes of new music within the space of a few rehearsals is no mean feat, when you consider how much other work the Philharmonic has on its plate. Look, for example, at the mess the Philadelphia Orchestra made, when they tried to play The Flying Dutchman in its entirety some years ago under Riccardo Muti. The Philharmonic in stark contrast performed Thursday night with the kind of bravura it brings to a frequently recurring work such as the composer's Ein Heldenleben. Some of the woodwind and brass playing was hair-raising--especially among the soloists.

Wisconsin born Deborah Polaski is no stranger to Elektra, having performed it at the Met, but she is new to the Philharmonic, making her debut as she reportedly nears her 60th birthday. I have heard her in various cities at least seven times in the past decade, and she never has sounded better. Absent a couple of under-pitched notes during the morbid Monologue, a recondite warmth informed her singing on Thursday, that I previously found lacking. She went from strength to strength, unleashing vast reserves of tonal contrasts. At a age when most other sopranos have long called it quits, Polaski is now squarely at the top her game. She must have been wearing comfortable shoes, because she also remained standing throughout the intermission-less performance.

Strauss' librettist Hugo von Hofmansstahl pits Elektra against three formidable foils, and Polaski stood up admirably to all of them. As Klytemnestra, Polaski's fellow American Jane Henschel re-affirmed her growing reputation as a powerhouse mezzo-soprano. She is still too young to portray Elektra's mother -- and certainly too young to play Polaski's mom, but her portrayal was as deliciously addled as it was devoid of camp -- especially when Klytemnestra quizzes her daughter giddily on performing the correct animal sacrifices to dispel her bad dreams. She also elicited sympathy for the queen's drugged out derangement with a faint and daffy far-away smile, oddly reminiscent of Laurette Taylor in her legendary screen test.

And then there was Anne Schwanewilms, also making her Philharmonic debut. I have heard this young woman several times over the past decade and found her very... okay. Suddenly, though, she's blossomed into an artist in full command of her estimable vocal arsenal. What strikes me most is how the formerly dark steel in her voice appears to be turning into gold up and down the registers. At several junctures during Thursday's performance, the present character of her voice recalled Ursula Schröder-Feinen's in the brief moment of her prime: beguiling and brilliant, always teasing the imagination.

Fitting, perhaps, that young debutant Julian Tovey, who sings Orest, has been cast in an opera full of archetypes, for he embodies the archetype of the contemporary British baritone: well schooled, cooly polished and unthreateningly attractive. Orest, however, is essentially monochromatic, which makes it hard to assess Tovey's net assets. I say this much, though: the first time I heard Donald McIntyre, he sang Orest (at Covent Garden). He was excellent, as I recall, and look what became of him. Tovey sounded every bit as impressive on Thursday. Put all that under his musicologically resonant surname, and he too is on a glide path to a bright career.

Tenor Richard Margison used his ten minutes in the spotlight to articulate a nasty Aegisthus. It's immensely satisfying to hear the role sung for once by a tenor who is no has-been Tristan or Siegfried as too often is the case.

The cast was rounded out by mostly young, healthy voices: Jessica Klein, Soprano (Clytemnestra Confidante) - Renee Tatum, Soprano (Clytemnestra Trainbearer) - Ryan MacPherson, Tenor (Young Servant) - Frank Barr, Bass (Old Servant) - Matt Boehler, Bass (Orestes's Tutor) - Helen Huse Ralston, Soprano (Overseer) - Janice Meyerson, Mezzo-soprano (Maid 1) - Stephanie Chigas, Mezzo-soprano (Maid 2) - Linda Pavelka, Mezzo-soprano (Maid 3) - Priti Gandhi, Soprano (Maid 4) - Julianne Borg, Soprano (Maid 5), Members of the New York Choral Artists contributed the off-stage hoo-ha, following the deaths of Klytemnestra and Aegisthus.

The brightest lights of the evening, all in all, were Maazel and the Philharmonic. Placing a Straussian orchestra at the same level as the singers predicates huge acoustic risks, but Maazel let the singers soar above the roar without appearing to hold the band at bay. Along the way, he brought forth delightful instrumental details I never heard before.

But there must have been something about this performance that wasn't for everyone. I saw about 15 affluent-looking patrons racing to the exits less than 20 minutes after the performance begin. Maybe they were just philistines. Maybe they were expecting to hear Johann Strauss.

Elektra will be performed tonight/Saturday, Tuesday 9 December and next Saturday 14 December. If you're going to visit a dysfunctional family over the holidays, what better way to rehearse the right spirit than experiencing Strauss's and Hofmannsthal's primer on the Atreus Clan?

©Sam Shirakawa

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE at the Metropolitan Opera

Sam Shirakawa has been to the Opening Night of the Met's run of Tristan und Isolde:

28 November 2008

A surprise saved Friday night's season premiere of Tristan und Isolde at the Met from terminal boredom:

René Pape has sung King Mark over a dozen times at the Met, and it would seem that he's old news. He is still too young for the part, but surprisingly, he is even more astonishing every time you hear him, and he turned out to be the glue that held a patchy performance together.

Headlining the new news, of course, was the house debut of Daniel Barenboim. It seems he's performed everywhere, except at the Met. He has recorded Tristan commercially, and numerous live performances and broadcasts of his forays into the work can be found on tape.

Remember that sampling of his way with Tristan back in 1989, when he assembled Hildegarde Behrens, Gary Lakes and L'Orchestre de Paris for a concert version of Act Two at Avery Fisher Hall?

If you don't remember, that may be the key to the disappointment I, at least, felt at Friday's performance. That long ago performance was not memorable, and neither was Friday night's.

Forget about those knee-jerk complaints that may come up: the orchestra was too loud, the sound synthesis was overly brass heavy, the textural contrasts were exaggerated. These are all signature characteristics of the Barenboim-the-Conductor brand. A lot of people love it and buy it, especially on CD where digital technology can produce aural miracles that have little to do with the source material. But no filter except denial can disguise the zits, warts and whoopsy-daisies exposing themselves mercilessly within the real-time exigencies of a live performance. On Friday, there was plenty of rhythmic smudging among the singers and vast stretches of listlessness that prevented the performance from taking off or shaping up into an organic whole. This, despite the Met orchestra playing as though its life depended on it. [During rehearsals several orchestra members commented on how exited they were to work with Barenboim.] Fabulous as the Met Orchestra always is, and no-less so for the wonderful English Horn solo by Pedro R. Diaz, it was left to Pape to provide rescue and respite.

Evidence of the Gestalt that Friday's performance was producing could best be seen in the droves of people departing, even during the first intermission. Does this say more about the departed than about brand DB? Barenboim brings them in, oh yes, but for those many who left, it apparently was not a night to remember.

Barenboim was not entirely to blame, unless he approved the casting, which he almost certainly must have. After all, he led the opera just two months ago with three of the principals -- Katarina Dalayman, Michelle DeYoung and Gerd Grochowski -- at Berlin's Staatsoper unter den Linden, where he is Music Director. (And another lead singer in that short string of performances is also in town at the moment.)

Let's face it folks: Dalayman is at best a B-line Isolde. Despite some attractive singing in the softer passages of the second act love duet, she failed to summon mortal rage in the cursing climax of the Narrative and delivered a diffident Liebestod. Her top notes were squally, her middle range middling, and her lower register thin. Dalayman was a laudable Brangaene when she made her Met debut in 1999, and I marveled at her Lisa in Pique Dame in Munich several years ago. Net-net though: Katya Darling, Isolde is not the way to go.

Peter Seiffert as Tristan is an appealing Wagner tenor and an effective stage personality, but he is developing a worrisome beat in his voice -- which also is showing signs of wear. He tired toward the end of his third act delirium. A few seasons ago, he sang one of the finest Tannhäusers that the Met has heard since the opera was revived in 1976. Why is he now palpably ruining his voice?

Michelle de Young reprises her well-received Brangaene from last season. She is one of the Met's brightest young singers, and she might well take a hard look at Dalayman's misstep in considering what roles she would be ill-advised to undertake.

Gerd Grochowski made an objection-free debut as Kurwenal. Stephen Gaertner was a serviceable Melot.

While Barenboim deservedly has won acclaim for his Wagner, I have always thought his true life resides at the piano. He is scheduled to perform Liszt's operatic transcriptions at the Met on 14 December. Now THAT should be a treat.

©Sam H. Shirakawa

Damnation Redux - Friday, November 14, 2008

Some comments on Sam Shirakawa's squib on the Met's new production of The Damnation of Faust, based on my own observations at Friday evening's performance:

G and I sat near the back of the Family Circle, but off to one side. I was not aware of the whirring of the projectors from the lighting booth above the Family Circle, so I suspect Sam heard the racket because he was sitting closer to the center of the Family Circle. Since Opening Night, the Met may also have worked to dampen the noise.

I agree with Sam about the the two-dimensionality of the production. This was especially obvious in the dance sequences where the dancers all moved laterally to and fro across the stage, but the stretches of stage they had to work with amounted to wider than normal catwalks.

Some of the video effects were striking - one of the more arresting images came late in the second act: as Méphistophélès stalks Faust to seek his signature on the deed, one by one the trees with their fall foliage wither as Méphistophélès advances across the stage towards his quarry - chilling and effective.

As for the singing, Susan Graham was wonderful throughout, perhaps the best I had ever heard her, with warm and plangent tone, long-breathed phrasing and generally good diction. Patrick Carfizzi, as the drunkard, Brander, made the most of his aria, with admirably clear diction. I have always loved Carfizzi's voice and presence and wonder why he has not been given meatier roles (I suspect he could handle Méphistophélès with more panache than John Relyea did tonight).

Relyea looked smashing in his red leather suit and feathered cap, but I wish his singing had more of the French suavity required for the role. His serenade in Part III passed without note (or applause). After such a promising beginning as a young singer, his singing has become more throaty and constricted over the last few seasons. Marcello Giordani's singing was coarse and unstylish all evening, and his diction was unintelligible.

Sam is right about James Levine's conducting, and I also agree with Sam that it was distracting to watch the reflection of him conducting in the onstage screens all evening. I am sure no one in the production staff ever went upstairs to see if there would be reflection problems for those sitting in the gods....

Altogether a mixed bag - Berlioz's music and his orchestrations are constantly dazzling, and the ending was sublime, but the singing was more disappointing that one might wish. Still I wouldn't want to have missed this extraordinary event.

BERLIOZ Romeo et Juliette

Another squib from Sam Shirakawa --

Philadelphia Orchestra 16 October 2008

I never have understood why Berlioz composed Romeo et Juliette. I know, I know. It's a paean to the British actress who eventually became his wife. I understand too that he apparently was looking for a means of expressing transcendent longing by transcending every means he was using to express it.

Ah the French! Never tiring of searching for a way to say "fuck me" without actually saying it.

As a result, Beau Berlioz ended up with an entity that's never quite an adequate substitute for the actual sensation. Romeo et Juliette is frequently operatic but it is not an opera, it is short of a cantata but much too long on cant, it aspires to be a kind of a symphony but it remains bereft of... You get the idea: It's a mishmash. But it's a mishmash that left a searing impression on what Balzac called the "brains of Paris" at its wildly successful first performances in the autumn of 1839.

Love, as mentioned already, played a huge role in its composition: the composer's adoration of Shakespeare and the bard's play, as well as his passion for Harriet Smithson, the English actress with whom he fell in love, while witnessing her portrayal (in English) at the Odeon. All this made more remarkable by the realization that Berlioz' command of languages excluded English.

Odd too is the composer's use of a text by Emile Duchamps. Much of it is derived from a version of Romeo and Juliet that was popular at the time by the English actor and entrepreneur David Garrick. No matter how much sauce béchamel you may ladle on to it, Duchamps' text is trop liquide compared to the ambrosial verbal harmonies of the source material.

While the hot 'n' heavy passion Berlioz poured into what he called a "Dramatic Symphony" (what symphony should not be dramatic?) remains unmistakable in the score even today, it takes inspiration of a special sort to pull it off in performance -- the kind of oomph that Leopold Stokowski and even Eugene Ormandy were able to conjure up virtually at will when they were on the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where the work now is in the midst of a four-performance run in the City of Brotherly Love. For good or ill, the Orchestra has changed beyond recognition, and its current Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit is more intent upon laying wreaths in memory of Berlioz than on reviving the spirit of the music at its creation.

So the net-net impression left by the first performance in the current series of R & J at Verizon Hall was one of admiration rather than epiphany. Dutoit revealed the contours of this odd work efficiently, drawing some nice performances from the vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, but without uncorking the magic that palpably intoxicated its first audiences.

Berlioz assigned the bulk of the solo vocal line to the bass role of Friar Laurence, who appears toward the end of the work to exhort (at some length) the warring Capulets and Montagues to bury their hatchets. British baritone David Wilson-Johnson carried out his duty flawlessly, spinning out a fine cantilena, where there often was little melody to latch onto. Papa Laurence is a thankless role; I hope Wilson-Johnson received merit pay for flying in to do it.

I wondered if Rumanian mezzo-soprano Roxana Denose and American tenor Gregory Kunde (making his Orchestra debut) would be as good at story-telling if they had to speak their brief lines, instead of singing them. Churlish as it might be to say it, these parts offer these gifted artists little to chew on. I also wondered why Berlioz used these vocal parts for telling what happened rather than for enacting what took place. There are no soaring lines to speak of, no invocations to l'amour, no protracted expressions of longing. Some of that is left to the Philadelphia Singers Chorale under the direction of David Hayes, the rest is left to the Orchestra, both of which performed satisfactorily on 16 October.

I must admit I longed for Stoki's ghost to stoke some fire into the proceedings. There was hélas no sign of him, possibly because he never conducted the work with the Orchestra. In a few weeks one of the most underrated conductors of the 20th century is set to conduct Wagner with the Philadelphians. Stokowski, Ormandy et le auteur will surely be listening...

Performances of Romeo et Juliette continue on tonight and 21 October in Philadelphia.

Sam H. Shirakawa

Irina Rindzuner as Turandot

Sam Shirakawa has been lurking on the Upper East Side:

Dicapo Opera -- 10 October

Just when I was beginning to despair that Birgit Nilsson was really the End of the Wagnerian Line, up pops a voice that appears to be fulfilling The Promise of a new dynasty.

But I had a problem with Irina Rindzuner at the dress rehearsal of Dicapo Opera Theater's up-coming Turandot: her voice is simply too big for Dicapo's intime home in the cellar of a church on the Manhattan's East Side. When Rindzuner fired off those notes above the staff with such laser beam accuracy, I could feel my gums rattling.

The voice is huge, but it also is beautiful. It's even from top to bottom and opens out gloriously as it ascends to those killer Bs and above. As with most quality singers of her ilk, Rindzuner has vibrato to spare, but it's tight and torrid. Think Eugenia Burzio meets Magda Olivero, but not quite as devouring as either.

Skeptical? Check her out on YouTube. As they used to say about Leider, Lawrence and Big F, the documentation is but a shadow.

Maybe it's fortunate that Rindzuner is only covering Santuzza at the Met this season. But given some of the Wiener Schnitzel scheduled for this year's Ring Cycle, she'd be a sensation there, if she stepped in.

Best not to say too much, because I attended a dress rehearsal.

The rest of the cast was noteworthy, but some of them were marking, so no names will be mentioned here. For all I know, Rindzuner was marking too. The US economy should only have such reserves.

Turandot begins a four-performance run this Friday at their home on East 76th Street at Lexington.

Sam H. Shirakawa

LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR OR What I Did for Love...

Our old friend Sam Shirakawa gives his view of the Met's Lucia (keep them coming, Sam!):

Metropolitan Opera -- 3 October

If love can make you loony, there was plenty of lunacy to be found during the first fortnight of the Metropolitan's 125th season. On Friday 3 October Lucia di Lammermoor returned to the boards. It's the opera (1835), some critics claim, that restored the themes of transcendent love and death to lyric theater of the 19th century.

Gaetano Donizetti and his librettist Salvatore Cammarano stick fairly closely to the story Sir Walter Scott tells in The Bride of Lammermoor, but they amend some salient details. In the opera, for instance, Lucia is said to be extremely distraught over her mother's death. In Scott's novel (1819), Lucia's shrewish mother is very much alive and takes the lead in forcing her daughter to renounce her paramour and enter into an expedient marriage. In another deviation from the source, Donizetti's Lucia fatally stabs her bridegroom on their wedding night, while Scott's Lucy wounds Arthur Bucklaw seriously, but not fatally. The victim, pursuantly goes to some length in forbidding evermore the mere mention of the incident in his presence.

Why such emphatic entreaties for discretion?

Some surmise, perhaps correctly, that hapless Lucy, having become irreparably separated from her senses, attempts to separate her groom from his private parts. [How many sane women throughout the ages have done that?] In simply eliminating Bucklaw entirely, Donizetti and Cammarano saved countless impresarios from having to hire a castrato/counter-tenor for just one expository scene.

The Arturo, by the way, was the big surprise at the premiere. Sean Panikkar made a meal out of the bit-part and displayed a clarion lyric tenor that was nothing less than large. Blessed with musicality as resplendent as his voice, he brought his all-too-brief appearance into bold relief against some hefty competition from the lead singers.

Those who know, knew that Diana Damrau's Lucia would be good, but few could have guessed how much so. It took a moment or two for her to find her focus, but by the time she got around to the second verse of "Regnava nel silenzio" Damrau was well on her way to surpassing her immediate predecessor at the Met in the part -- vocally at least -- in this hold-over of last season's hotly hyped new production. Damrau traversed the fiortituri up and down the scale with the ease of a gold-medal skateboarder, and her top notes were uniformly bang-on. [Yes, all the high Cs and Ds have been restored, thank you very much.]

Dramatically, she still needs to decide what kind of heroine she wants to embody, but she appears to be working on it. The challenge lies in her genes: a German coloratura and then some, but she's on Italian turf. Berger was perhaps the most recent of that pedigree to assimilate this rep comfortably. And that was eons ago. If Damrau can succeed in making her Lucia sound easy and inevitable, she stands a chance of fading fond memories of Jaws, who owned the role from 1959 until her retirement.

Piotr Beczala as Edgardo was no real surprise either. Watch his stuff on YouTube. Do it in chronological order, and you'll see how rapidly he's developing into a contender. But enjoy him while you may: imbecilic agents and moronic managements have a way of wasting up-and-comers like Beczala or just ignoring them.

Vladimir Stoyanov made a likable debut as Lucia's dislikable brother Enrico. There is no doubt that a fine baritone, faintly reminiscent of Bastianini, has come among us. Fine as the basic equipment may be, it remains to be heard how refined an artist this Bulgarian can become.

The payroll was respectably rounded out by Ildar Abdrazakov, Ronald Naldi and Michaela Martens as Raimondo, Normanno and Alisa respectively.

Mary Zimmerman's production is arguably the most interesting Lucia seen at the Met in decades, but problems with Daniel Ostling's Adobe-driven sets continue to generate interminable intermissions. Adding a dubious lagniappe at the season premiere, the huge flying staircase refused to recede into the wings at the conclusion of Damrau's riveting Mad Scene. That left the poor lackeys carrying Lucia to the balcony holding the bag, so to speak, for what seemed an eternity. And that left the audience madly clapping and clapping and... Really, now, must any production of Lucia in this day and age of nifty hi-tech scene changes shlep on for nearly three hours and forty minutes?

Proceedings in the pit went much more fluidly. The orchestra under Marco Armilato performed miracles with a score that all too often falls prey to oom-pah-pah listlessness; sensational solo playing by harpist Mariko Anraku, flutist Stefan Ragnar Höskuldsson and Celia Breuer on glass armonico. Only Anraku, however, got to go home before the epic-length second intermission.

Sam H. Shirakawa

Tristan Unseen

Our friend Sam caught one last Tristan:

Have you ever attended an opera performance and wished the awful sets would disappear? Of course, you can always simply listen to broadcasts or recordings. But nothing quite takes the place of being in medias res, especially if there's a ballet, battle or parade that you don't want to miss.

You CAN have your wish and hear it too at the Metropolitan Opera.

Score desks are located along each side of the uppermost tier next to the seats in the Family Circle boxes. They cost $10 (for regular performances). They afford no view of the stage, but they have (mostly) superb acoustics. You can hear nuances in the voices and instrumental details that sound engineers manning hi-def mikes rarely pick up. The lamp-lit desk allows enough room for a score or a libretto. If the performance is going great, the aural experience is made all the more exciting. If it sucks, you can substitute the score with a book, magazine or racing form. (Newspapers are not advised. Even tabloids are too large and make a racket when you turn pages.)

Visually, there's not much to miss in the Met's current production of Tristan, which finished its six-performance series on Friday night. The unit set is unremittingly dreary (perhaps intentionally). Brief splashes of retina blasting back-lighting give little respite. And Tristan, unfortunately, has no ballets.

Friday night, I attended my fourth Tristan at the Met in little over two weeks, and I really didn't want to spend five more hours counting all the triangular forms built into the scenery. So I acquired a score desk.

No diversions were necessary. It was arguably the best performance of the four I heard in the house, and a photo-finish with last Saturday's broadcast. Ben Heppner AND Deborah Voigt appeared together for the first time in the title roles at the house, after illness forced them each to cancel several performances. (Heppner dropped out before the season premiere; Voigt withdrew from one performance in the middle of the second act, and skipped another one entirely.)

Heppner rarely has sounded better, despite some wrongly sung passages in the second act. Voigt regained her poise and confidence, following intermittent vocal squalls in previous performances. Michelle deYoung (replacing Margaret Jane Wray), Eike Wilm Schulte, and the redoubtable Matti Salminen rounded out what turned out to be as close to a dream cast as anyone could hope for in this day and age.

But the star of the show was the Met Orchestra under James Levine. The ensemble always plays well, and frequently scales the heights, but the muses were in attendance last night: the playing was uniformly Olympian. Primus inter pares: Pedro R. Diaz in the English horn solos.

If you didn't make it to the Met on Friday night, you could have experienced almost exactly what I heard. At the last minute, the Met decided to stream the performance live via its website. That meant that opera lovers anywhere in the world with access to a computer could have heard it. The Met should do it more often -- but with a bit more advance notice.

© SAM H. SHIRAKAWA

Travails of Tristan continued...

Can one believe that the Met's jinxed Tristan run this season has fallen prey to yet another disaster? Read on . . . .

Tristan und Isolde - Metropolitan Opera, March 18, 2008

First Ben Heppner took ill and withdrew from the Met season's first performance of Tristan und Isolde last week. His place was taken by John Mac Master. At the next performance, Gary Lehman replaced Mac Master and Deborah Voigt quit in the middle of the second act, felled by an upset stomach. Last night, a scenery malfunction in the last act knocked out Gary Lehman, who was singing Tristan.

Here's how it looked like it happened. The mat on which Lehman was lying supinate apparently cut loose from its moorings and sent him like a trajectory head-first down the steeply raked stage right into the prompter's box. A computer glitch could also have been to blame, because the mat glides slowly down stage from the rear over the course of several minutes. Suddenly the mat simply raced toward the prompter's box.

Mark Showalter and Eike Wilm Schulte, who were on stage at the time, rushed to the side of the motionless Lehman, followed by several stage personnel. Lehman stood up after a few moments, and walked about the stage, rubbing his neck. The curtain was brought down, and a stage manager appeared to say, "Gary is o.k., but he needs a few moments and a glass of water before he continues."

According to the Associated Press report, a doctor examined Lehman, before allowing him to proceed with perhaps the most arduous scene for any singer in all opera. When the curtain went up again about 10 minutes later, a huge round of applause greeted Lehman, who was again lying, arms outstretched, on the killer mat. By any standard, he gave a towering performance of Tristan's delirium ridden visions -- all the more astonishing, given the potentially serious injury he had just sustained.

At the final curtain calls, could James Levine, who is well-known for passing around complements, have given Lehman a pat on the back, an extra solo bow or some kind of acknowledgment? Yes. Did he even bother to shake Lehman's hand in full view of the public? No.

Despite a momentary memory lapse by Lehman late in the second act, and some rhythmic uncertainty from Voigt shortly after her third act entrance, the performance was, by and large, the best of the three given so far. Michelle De Young, Matti Salminen and Schulte were in especially good form.

So who will sing Tristan at Saturday's world-wide live telecast? At last night's intermissions (both long enough to hit the head twice), the video screen above the box office said, TBA. According to Robert Dean Smith's website, he will go to the Mat from Hell on Saturday (the Associated Press refers to him as Roger Dean Smith.)

© 2008 Sam Shirakawa

TAG TRISTAN AND A TALE OF TWO ISOLDES

Herewith Sam Shirakawa's take on Friday evening's Tristan (and he had NOT read my post before sending this to me):

Friday, 14 March 2008

Opera distills mankind's noblest instincts. Opera harmonizes the cognizance of what lies within our innermost selves. Yadda yadda yadda. Mozart said so. So did Wagner.

Attending the first two performances of the Met's Tristan this season has made me cognizant about something of my innermost self: I'm a blood sport fan.

The indisposition of Ben Heppner last Monday (10 March) pushed a certain John Mac Master into the Coliseum of modern day opera. Nearly four thousand pairs of ears heard him come close to eviscerating his lovely fragile voice in the Killer Third Act.

John Mac Master emerged bloodied, but apparently not sufficiently able-bodied to be thrown to the lions again on Friday night (14 March). Heeding the implicit mumblings for fresh meat, the Met's management shoved one Gary Lehman onto its mopped-up stage. His Met debut (!) was preceded by an appeal for understanding for the intrepid Christian from guilt-edged Met General Manager Peter Gelb, doing his utmost to refrain from sounding like a carnival barker.

Lehman's first act went better than I, at least, expected. In fact, for someone who was singing the role for the first time professionally, he performed beyond expectations exceedingly. But Lehman's Trial by Tristan was far from over.

A seemingly long first intermission had some speculating that James Levine was furiously tickling the ivories backstage, taking Lehman through pesky parts of the next act. Maybe.

But another drama was unfolding.

Shortly before the love duet in the second act, the evening's franchise, Deborah Voigt, walked off, leaving Lehman to continue singing his part, even after the tabs were brought down. A stage manager or such promptly appeared to say that Voigt was feeling unwell, but the performance would continue shortly with Janice Baird.

The switch must have been pre-determined, because James Levine never left the podium, and the performance continued at roughly the same place where it had dribbled to a halt. When the curtain went up again, a huge round of applause greeted Lehman and his new Isolde. And just as though you were switching your remote from CD 9 to CD 10, Baird picked up as if she had been performing from the start.

Statuesque and exuding confidence, Baird went on to conquer. She already had created a buzz so positive in the unpaved parts of the operatic world over the past decade, that I've often tried to chase down her Salome, Bruhnnhilde, or ANYTHING at Chemnitz, Essen and a couple of other venues. But her schedule never coincided with my travel plans until last night.

Now, suddenly, I was confronted with an Isolde whose luminosity emanated from within, rather than from the real and metaphorical spotlights thrown on her. Voigt already had traversed the two ceiling-level Cs before Baird stepped in, but Baird evinced the requisite range and palate for adumbrating what remained with variety, flexibility and most appealing vulnerability. A few gaffes here and there centered mostly on patches of un-centered intonation. Eminently forgivable if you remember that some other Isoldes have shlepped through whole evenings under the note.

Baird is listed on the Met's current roster, but a search of the Met's website turned up no scheduled performances. If this was also her Met debut [editor's note: it was.] under most unusual or unique circumstances, didn't she too warrant a let's-give-it-up-for-Jan pep spiel from Gelb? But more substantively: If you're playing Tag Tristan with the guys, Pete, how about letting a gal join the game? There are four performances left in the current series.

Changing partners left Lehman unfazed, as he forged on to surmount the rigors of the love duet and the terrors of the third act with blazing thrusts of energy and voice. This was heady stuff -- about as close as opera is likely to come anytime soon to Manning and Tyree in that Unforgettable Fourth Quarter.

The vice that nearly trapped him a couple of times, though, was sporadic rhythmic sluggishness. No big deal. Before we get ahead of where he's possibly heading, though, let's realize that Lehman may be a herrliches Knabe, but he is no force of nature yet. Now that he's proven that he can do big Wagner in the Big Time right out of the box, he should stick to Erik and Parsifal for a while.

The rest of the cast sounded even better than on Monday night. Especially Salminen.

For the record, the performance drew to an end around half-past midnight, making it a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records.

All in all, my thirst for blood sport, or just blood, was certainly aroused on Friday but left largely unquenched. But then, there's next week...

That's when it's said that a tenor who has sung Tristan more than once will face the lions. If Robert Dean Smith does as well as he's been doing in Europe of late -- and he has done well every time I have heard him in person -- nobody will be confusing him with Harry Dean Smith.

© SAM H. SHIRAKAWA 2008

Full Circle?

Sam Shirakawa has been busy attending performances in New York of late. Here is his second review for us in the past week:

Tristan und Isolde - Season Premiere, March 10, 2008

A poignant reunion of sorts may have gone unnoticed at the Metropolitan Opera's season premiere of Tristan und Isolde last night (10 March). Twenty-seven years after Matti Salminen made his sensational house debut as King Marke, he returned to portray the cuckolded king under James Levine, who led his first Tristan that same evening, 9 January 1981.

The depredations of time may have taken their toll in various ways on both men, but not on their talents. Levine's on-going musical achievements need no reprise here, for they are neither surprising in their extent, nor unexpected in their proportions. He's a superstar. Salminen has trumped the odds for survival in the stellar regions of the lyric theater, where brilliant vocal talents blaze and burn out each season like Eoman candles.

At his debut, lo those nearly three decades ago, Salminen transformed Marke's usually interminable monologue from a dreary whine-fest into the pivotal moment of the performance, his glowering basso forging the old monarch's "why-me?" self-pity into a statement of Lear-like rage against the death of friendship and the dying of the light. At Monday's performance, Salminen ruled again, but differently this time, as he stood before the drug-addled lovers in their post-coital disarray, to render a heart-breaking requiem for Marke's hope -- his dreams of happiness in old age so cravenly destroyed. While usage and the passage of time have mellowed that bronze hue that captivated listeners at Salminen's debut, the essential plangency of his magnificent instrument has deepened and fermented nobly. Rare is the bass who can survive long enough to nurture his resources to endow this frequently tedious music with such supernal sorrow. Blessed is the listener who savors it.

The big buzz on the season premiere as an event, of course, was Deborah Voigt's first complete New York Isolde. She's already recorded the role and given us live bleeding chunks of her take on the "Irische Maid" at other local venues, so the first-night crowd had a good idea of what to expect.

If expectations centered on revelation, Ms. Voigt delivered disclosure. All the notes were there, and she looked better than ever, having shed a wardrobe's worth of weight. Voigt has always been an interesting listen but a rather dowdy look. That, mercifully, is changing. Girth loss has had no perceptible impact on her voice, but it has palpably enlivened her stage presence. Her figure has hardly become glamorous, but her movements have become more animated and her gestures more telling. Her Isolde is still a promising work in progress.

That progress was challenged by the last-minute substitution of John Mac Master as Tristan, who stepped in at the dress rehearsal for the indisposed Ben Heppner. Some jerk at the back of the house booed him at the curtain calls, but such disapprobation was both cruel and unwarranted. Mac Master has a way to go before he becomes a world-class Tristan, if indeed he strives toward that end. But he, unlike so many other newbies to the role, has the core material for it. It would be a stretch to call his voice big, but Mac Master makes no effort to stretch it either. Which is a good thing, for he had patches of near-distress while traversing Tristan's mad scene. Nonetheless, it is big enough to cut through the orchestra at full tilt. There is musicality in every note he sings, and thanks possibly to Levine's wise tutoring, he parses out the cantilena with enticing style. This is a voice with which one can abide comfortably over five hours (yes, the performance began at 7:00 pm and ended about midnight). But it would be churlish to cast a verdict prematurely on his future as a Wagner singer, as some critics have done already.

Levine's predilection for slow tempi in later Wagner appears to have ripened over his 30-some performances of Tristan at the Met, but they seem less listless than they used to be. At Monday's performance, in fact, his basic tempo -- despite some rhythmic quirks in keeping orchestra and singers together -- served to illuminate the score rather than belabor it. Reginald Goodall often cautioned conductors to wait until they mature sufficiently before tackling late Wagner. Levine has arrived at that point.

Rounding out Monday's cast, Michelle DeYoung was a thrilling Brangaene, and Eike Wilm Schulte, starting off a bit brusquely, turned in a surprisingly mellifluous Kurvenal, especially in the final act.

If the voices that inhabit the imperiled state of opera are meaningful to you, do not fail to attend the Met's current Tristan. Matti Salminen is a treasure. Hasn't the time come for New York to hear his Philip and Sachs?

© Sam H. Shirakawa 2008

[Editor's comment: Geoffrey was also at Monday evening's performance. He was likewise impressed by Salminen and Schulte. Having seen Salminen's debut as King Marke, his mastery of this role remained deeply satisfying, for which no surprise. The surprise of the evening was Schulte's final act -- by far the most intrinsically musical, most nuanced and most moving reading of Kurwenal's music Geoffrey has ever heard in person. It was also gratifying to hear an uncut Tristan, but was this a wise decision given that Mac Master was virtually untried in the role?]

What's Become of the Good Old-Fashioned opera Gala?

Correction added 3/15/08

Our good friend, Sam Shirakawa, attended Thursday evening's OONY Gala. HIs review follows:

Following nearly 100 minutes of ho-hum turns by some of opera's brightest luminaries,a flash of longed-for lightning finally struck the Opera Orchestra of New York gala at Carnegie Hall on Thursday (6 March). Dowager super-diva Renata Scotto, who hosted the affair, appeared with the rest of the singers to participate in a round-robin rendition of the Brindisi from Traviata. Marcello Giordani and Bryan Hymel split Alfredo's lines, and Violetta's part was divided among no less than Renee Fleming, Krassimira Stoyanova, Eglise Gutierrez, Dolora Zajick (yes!), and Signora Scotto (YES!).

Looking perhaps even better now than she did during her glory days as the Met's reigning prima donna (317 appearances), Scotto then shamelessly took possession of the stage, moving around the podium area, kissing and hugging her colleagues. Not to be outdone, Giordani knelt before Scotto and kissed her hand and then scooted over to Fleming and performed the same ritual. For a moment, the occasion came to startling life, reflecting fleetingly the days when opera galas were, well, fun!

All the more poignant, because Scotto's official contribution to the evening was a brief spoken introduction at the beginning of the program. While she dutifully advertised OONY's next event (Edgar, 13 April), she also launched into a recitative on her performance and the recording she made with OONY 21 years ago (was it that long ago?).

But her most telling statement, in which she established herself absolutely as the event's only true prima donna assoluta, was her departure from the stage, dragging her shawl (down-stage side, altro che!), as she receded behind the double doors.

The ensuing musical numbers were performed in assembly-line procession, a string of lyric lollypops that seemed mostly sweet but oddly mono-flavored. Owing to the absence of Latonia Moore, the order of the numbers were shaken up radically, so that you really had no idea who was appearing next. Never mind. Tenor Bryan Hymel, replacinf Stephen Costello who was listed to appear third, had the unenviable task of warming up the crowd with that aria from Rigoletto [you know which one]. His rendition was about as good as any I've heard in the past couple of years from tenors with brand-names. But the audience tossed him a few perfunctory bravos and sent him packing.

So it was with the rest of the intermission-less evening. Aprille Millo (who should get new publicity photos to match her current appearance -- on second thought, scratch that) and Stephen Gaertner substituted "Mira d'acerbe lagrime" from Trovatore without interpolated high notes, which would have been fun to hear. Millo returned later to give us the Mefistofele aria but declined to appear with her coevals in the evening's concluding Brindisi-- which was performed twice. Gaertner came back with Daniel Mobbs for "Il rival salvar..." from Puritani, the gala's only showcase for the lower register. A tune or two more from these rising suns might have been exciting as well as fun.

Eglise Guttierez and Krassimira Stoyanova have both been stoking fires in their recent Big Apple appearances, but they seemed a tad phlegmatic in their respective turns. Guttierez didn't miss an opportunity to fire off a high note, but her "Qui la voce" from Puritani seemed bereft of the pathos and delightful girlishness she brought to her riveting Amina in the OONY's rocking Sonnambula last week. What a thrilling scream-fest that was! Maybe it was too much to expect lightning to strike twice in the same place within eight days. Stoyanova couldn't quite get her sympathies around Anna Bolena's Home-Sweet-Home reminiscences, but she appears to have the vocal material for this kind of music.

She was joined by Marcello Giordani in the challenging duet from Huguenots ("Tu l'as dit), during which he drew gasps from the audience with his helium-induced high notes. Giordani hit them all bull's-eye perfect, but they sounded as though he was channeling a beefy Munchkin.

Anybody's guess who Renee Fleming may have been channeling in her "M'odi, ah m'odi..." from Lucrezia Borgia. Possibly Maria Malibran (1808-1836), who, like Fleming, was unconditionally adored by her public, even though some accounts say, she occasionally fell short of a high note. Fleming did fall a bit flat in the aria's climatic moments. Nonetheless, she showed herself, as always, gracious and musically elegant, even though the true riches of her estimable talent may reside in realms outside bel canto.

You may well ask why I've been harping on high notes and FUN. It's because the event I'm talking about was a gala. For me, that's an occasion for artists to shake off the shackles of convention and do something more and differently. Galas should, especially for the money they now demand, also be entertaining -- replete with high wires, acrobatics, fireworks and all the rest of it. They should be fun from start to finish. Dolora Zajick, for example, delivered a flawless "O mon Fernand" from La Favorite -- not the down-at-the-cuff "O mio Fernando" but the rarer and trendy French version. But it wasn't until her eyeballs frantically bounced over the sheet music for the Brindisi -- which she obviously had never seen before and may never look at again -- that I caught a glimpse of the Zajick persona that contributes to making her tick as a much-loved artist. In that instant, she grabbed the spotlight from Scotto and dominated. Scotto promptly took back the spotlight, but there you have it: a few seconds of a diva in real-life distress was worth the price of admission, which for me was free -- a birthday gift. In the proverbial Old Days, there was a lot more of this un-premeditation. Today, most galas resemble cheerless product demos.

Speaking of admission prices and concomitant demographics, the seat I was given cost $25, all the way up top. A bargain in this day and age. Most of the expensive seats downstairs were sold out, but despite the big-draw names -- there were bags of empty seats in the rear and sides of the balcony. Not so long ago, those seats would have been the first to go -- filled by combative regulars, rabid fans and enthusiastic young people. Where have they gone? When the cheapest seats for an important cultural attraction fail to sell, it suggests attrition in the baseline audience. All the more worrying when the competition for the same audience on Thursday at the other major musical venues was far from frenetic.

Perhaps the only person having a perceptably good time at this gala was an elderly fellow sitting alone in the empty row in front of me, a veritable front-seat conductor. Both hands were gesticulating broadly throughout the evening, to keep the orchestra and soloists together -- which didn't always happen. He appeared more than ready to give a few tips to Eve Queller, who, by the way, was celebrating her 100th performance conducting in Carnegie Hall. I'm not sure why I resisted the urge to tell him to cease and desist. Maybe because his frequently wayward beat was an hypnotic distraction. Maybe because I found the specter of chronic rhythmic inaccuracy as a possible indication of encroaching age too intimidating to interrupt. Maybe because it dawned on me that we all make our own fun. Ah, well, two entertainments to witness for the price of none -- remember, the ticket was a gift -- may be about as amusing as it gets...

© Sam H. Shirakawa, 2008

Correction: The changes forced by Latonia Moore's absence from the gala also fomented some confusion in reporting who sang and what they sang. I wasn't the only reporter who had difficulty keeping track of the proceedings.

The substitution of the duet from Trovatore with Stephen Gaertner and Aprille Millo in place of the originally programmed number from Norma with Millo and Moore was announced in a program insert distributed at the performance. I got that right in my article, the New York Times did not. What I got wrong was as follows: Stephen Costello was listed in the program to sing that Rigoletto aria, but Bryan Hymel took his place. That's Bryan with a Y. The details of this change are said to be in the press kit, which I didn't receive, because I was attending the performance as a member of the Great Unwashed. Sounds a bit like the plot of Mignon, but all this could have been avoided, if Ms. Moore had only shown up...

Sam's Adventures - Part 4

Here's the fourth (and last) installment of Sam Shirakawa's account of his operatic travels in Germany (Blogger has been balking at picture uploads all night, so I will be loading some more pictures later):

Paukenmesse. 18 September 2007
Leipzig

Leipzig boasts one of Germany’s larger opera houses, a separate home for operetta, and the world-famous St. Thomas Boy’s Choir, which gives regular concerts -- many of them free of charge. The MDR Symphony Orchestra (formerly the Leipzig Symphony) is not as well-known as its neighbor, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, but it reaches a wider day-to-day audience through its radio and television broadcasts over its parent organization, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (hence MDR).

Having heard both orchestras in the concert hall they share, it’s hard to understand why the MDRSO has played second fiddle to its more illustrious neighbor. During the decade-long tenure of recently departed Music Director Fabio Luisi (now ensconced at Dresden’s Semper Opera), the orchestra has morphed into a world-class instrument. New Chief Conductor Jun Märkl says, he’s on a Mission of Discovery, and he is promising unusual programs for his orchestra that will be performed at off-beat venues. Since Leipzig is located in the center of the former East German province of Saxony and was largely off-limits to visitors for nearly half a century, the list of fascinating places to “discover” right in the orchestra’s own backyard is nearly endless.

On one of my trips to Leipzig during my recent stay, I attended an MDRSO concert that demonstrated Märkl’s Mission of Discovery in action: five works for orchestra, chorus and soloists by Arnold Schönberg, followed by Haydn’s “Mass in a Time of War.” In what may have been an effort to eschew commentary about current angst-raising political conditions, Haydn’s work was discretely billed on the program by its alternate name, Kettledrum Mass (Paukenmesse).

But the supplicatory theme of the entire program could hardly be missed: Schönberg’s Psalm 130 and Modern Psalm, Three Thousand Years, Peace on Earth, and Kol Nidre, plus Haydn’s Mass -- not exactly a warmer-upper for the Oktoberfest.

Despite the evening’s solemn mood, the resplendent playing and first-rate vocalism were, to say the least, uplifting. Märkl not only has inherited a superb orchestra, but a fabulous chorus, that has its own series of programs that it broadcasts and takes on tours. While the brass and woodwinds could use some balancing, the strings sound was nothing less than astonishing -- consonant, responsive and warm.

Germany has no shortage of wonderful oratorio singers, and a quartet of fine soloists distinguished themselves in the Mass. Soprano Christiane Oelze has been making a name for herself as a lieder singer and Mozart interpreter and has already gained attention at the big summer festivals. Her voice is mid-sized, semi-sweet, and frequently capable of being ravishing. Claudia Mahnke is also a rising star, who commutes between operatic and concert appearances. She appeared to be lightening the brownish texture of her mezzo voice to blend in with her colleagues, and the effect was riveting.

The young fraternal coupling of tenor Christoph Genz and baritone Stephan Genz rounded out the vocal quartet. They were born in Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, not far from Leipzig. Who knows what would have become of them, if the Iron Curtain had not fallen? Within a short space of time, though, they have proceeded along the stations to the larger international platforms. It may be a while before their substantial talents find their best expression, but pay attention to them, because they are the genuine articles, and their sibling status makes them a press agent’s dream.

The program offered Jun Märkl the opportunity to display his grasp of radically contrasting musical languages, and he showed remarkable fluency in both. Märkl tends to favor brisk tempi and rich, homogenized sonorities, which, at this concert,
worked to his advantage. But what the MDRSO needs sorely now is a leader who can transform it into an organic instrument that has its own sonic identity. In the
past 15 years, Märkl has proceeded through the small and bigger platforms of his world (including the Met, Chicago Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra). He is also Music Director of L’Orchestre de Lyon and now, with in his new position, appears poised for a breakout. If he sticks at it, he has the chance to do for the MDRSO, what Stokowski and Ormandy, Rattle and Levine have done for their orchestras.

DIE FLEDERMAUS. 21 September 2007
Komische Oper

OFFENBACH KANN-KANN. 22 September 2007
Saalbau Neuköln

I’m coupling these two performances because I had not intended to attend either of them, I arrived late at both, and they both center around the undisputed kings of operetta’s Golden Age in the mid and later 19th century. Arriving an hour late for the final dress rehearsal of Fledermaus at the Komische Oper was not my fault. The starting time on the ticket stated 17.00 hrs, but the run-through had already begun an hour earlier. Go figure. I took my seat just as the big party was about to get under way: Prince Orlovsky had just launched into “Chacun a son Gout.” Whoever was singing, it wasn’t Jochen Kowalski, who owned that part for years in its previous incarnation at the Komische Oper.

It went downhill from there. The nadir of disappointment for me about this new production was its unremitting mirthlessness. While a sizable dollop of tart hypocrisy flavors the score of Strauß-the-Younger’s delectable bon-bon, it is the work’s inebriated merriment that enlivens what Anthony Trollope called “the soft sad wail of delicious woe,” which characterizes Golden Age operetta at its finest. The audience at the Generalprobe tittered at some of the sight gags, but the current of enjoyment had been switched off by the time I arrived.

On the next evening, quite by coincidence, I stopped in the lobby of the Saalbau -- a cultural center serving the Berlin district of Neukölln. A performance of Offenbach kann-kann had just begun, and the ticket office was still open. As I entered the auditorium on the second floor, the usher handed me a postcard. The only information on it besides a color production photo was a brief plot summary: Offenbach spends far more than the considerable sums he makes, so he has to keep composing to stay ahead of his creditors. Over the next two and then some hours, we learn how three of his one-act opera-bouffes -- "Tromb-Al-Ca-Zar",
"Häuptling Abendwind" und "Ritter Eisenknacker" were born. And how did Offenbach create them? The old fashioned way: Work, Work, Work.

The underlying problem for the spectator is that it takes a lot of work to get through the mounds of arid dialogue that lead to snippets of ambrosial music. But the slog was worth it, for I learned that there is much more to this underrated composer than Tales of Hoffman and La Belle Hélène. The bouffe was performed by a group of five admirably multi-tasking singers, an actor and two musicians.

You may wonder why I haven’t mentioned any names. In the case of Fledermaus, the event was a dress rehearsal for friends and colleagues and not a performance meant for public comment. If you really want to know more, go to the Komische Oper’s website. And go to see it! The mirth may well have switched on for the paying public. In any event, a Bat in foul mood is better than no Fledermaus at all. As for Offenbach kann kann, no casting information was provided on the postcard-program. Web-surfing yielded the same information on the postcard plus the website of the agency that promoted it.

If you want to see off-beat events in Berlin, a visit to the Saalbau is well worth the 20-minute U-Bahn ride from more familiar areas of the city. It’s set in an elegant row of pre-war buildings in the middle of a colorful multi-ethnic area. The Neuköllner Oper (which had nothing to do with Offenbach kann-kann), and numerous other musical, theatrical and visual arts organizations are based here. The Saalbau complex also has two atmospheric restaurants: Cafe Rix and the recently opened Hofperle. Cafe Rix has long been a hangout for local artists. Both have excellent food at modest prices.

DIE MEISTERSINGER. 22 September 2007
Halle

The operagoing public of Halle, birthplace of Georg Friedrich Händel, has not seen a new production of Meistersinger since 1965. The city’s Municipal Opera spared no effort in bringing Wagner’s glorious, issue-ridden work back to life on 22 September: vastly augmented chorus, enlarged orchestra, dozens of supernumeraries -- the works. But the most impressive dimension of this production is that it is cast almost entirely from the house’s resident ranks.

Anke Berndt, I was told, was singing her first-ever Eva, but she sounded as if she was born to the part. It’s hard to believe that she has been engaged at Halle since 1990. Tall, slender, youthful and deceptively demure, she parsed out Eva’s conflicting affections before bursting gloriously into “O, Sachs, mein Freund!” Her estimable talent appears to be arching toward its apogee, and it’s time for capital opera companies to take notice of her.

It was also a first-ever performance of Walther von Stolzing for Gunnar Gudbjörnsson. The husky Icelandic tenor has the requisite vocal weight for Walther von Stolzing, and he seems capable of dramatic shading. But the supertitles told the tale: Gudbjörnsson has a way to go before he knows the role. No small task, for Walther has more music in the first act, than Rodolfo has in all four acts of La Boheme. Time and again, Gudbjörnsson garbled the words and jumped the beat. Some of the gaffes may be written off as first-night fright, but Gudbjörnsson also had issues with ascending toward the top of the staff, especially in the second section of the third act, where Walther transforms his dream into reality with Sachs’ help. The exposed parts of the role rise no higher than A natural, but Wagner’s writing for Walther all but sits around this area. Tenors tackling the role can ill-afford to develop vocal piles.

Friedemann Kunder as Hans Sachs also showed signs of stress starting off, but his voice relaxed as the evening progressed, and he delivered a heartfelt oration in the
final tableau. His Sachs is neither a professor nor a surrogate father, but an acute thinker whose deep feelings about his little-spoken past are sublimated through helping Walther win the jackpot. Kunder’s bass-baritone is an acquired taste, nonetheless. It has a pronounced vibrato that sometimes widens alarmingly. But the salubrious influence of Hans Hotter suffusing his performance transcends all niggling.

Nils Giesecke as David was the other major find. He has been active even longer than the aforementioned Anke Berndt. As he recited the litany of rules to the wannabe master singer, I couldn’t help thinking: Fritz Wunderlich lives! Giesecke apparently makes most of his bread as a concert and oratorio singer. Small wonder I found him in Halle.

The rest of the cast was rounded out ably by Gerd Vogel as an exquisitely mean-spirited Beckmesser, Harold Wilson in excellent form as Pogner and Raimund Nolte’s rewardingly pedantic Kothner. Katharina von Bülow as Magdalene lived up to her musical namesake.

Niksa Bareza’s flexible tempi and palpable knowledge inspired both the orchestra
and singers to exceed themselves. But his skills at the stick were sorely tested by having to follow Gudbjörnsson’s rhythmic vagaries, while keeping everyone else in check. It was knuckle-whitening to witness.

By the way, Andreas Wehrenfennig did a yeoman job playing the Beckmesser harp on stage, keeping one eye on the conductor, watching Gerd Vogel lurk about with the other eye, while wrapping his fingers around some treacherous music. But his moronic yodel-hey-hee-hoo get-up needs to be replaced with something hip, and his hideous Halloween 3 make-up shrieks for Dove Evolution.

The production by Frank Hilbrich has some provoking insights: Walther sings the first strophe of his Trial Song from inside the Marker’s box. He literally breaks out of the box to complete it and make his sub-textual point. The decorative banners in the first and last act draw the lines in the conflict between classic and romantic,
reactionary and radical, old and new.

But Hilbrich plunges from the inspired to the irretrievable at the end of the final scene, when he has the chorus abandon the stage, leaving Sachs alone with a gaggle of fans -- sort of like a latter-day Socrates holding court on banks of the Pegnitz. The image leaves me cold, but the removal of the chorus amounts to a lot worse than mere opera interruptus.

The summation of everything Wagner has to say about the myriad themes he brings up throughout Meistersinger is unleashed in unison through the crowning polyphony of its concluding anthem. To send the chorus to a backstage microphone and squeeze the opera’s grandest moment through the theater’s tinny ill-balanced sound system is to castrate the work and queer the audience. Specious stunts like this reek of dilettantism and heave fodder at those critics who claim that German theaters get too much taxpayer money and have no accountability.

The warrants of full disclosure constrain me to advise you of brief “bleeding chunks” on video. In spite of the idiocy to which the production ultimately succumbs, the musical portions of this Meistersinger are, thanks largely to Bareza’s majestic stewardship, a treasure.

A word about the theater. Halle’s opera house, built in 1886, is home to the city’s music theater and ballet. The house sits on one of Halle’s several hills and is accessed from a gently sloping garden, leading from one of the city’s main thoroughfares. Its prominent location made it a clear target for allied bombers less than two months before the end of the war. The house was re-consecrated six years later. The same management under the direction of Klaus Froboese has led the company, since Germany’s reunification in 1991. For a relatively small house (692 seats) serving about 230,000 people, its management has racked up some estimable achievements recently: the Ring, an on-going Handel revival that includes at least one new production per year -- this season it’s Belshazzar -- and an extensive performing arts program for children.

You may be asking yourself why I haven’t mentioned the new production of Meistersinger at Bayreuth this summer and the controversy it engendered. I didn’t see it, and I haven’t heard a broadcast of it yet. So there. It has been mentioned.

© 2007 Sam Shirakawa

Sam's Adventures - Part 3

Herewith Part 3 of Sam Shirakawa's travels:

DER FLIEGENDE HOLLÄNDER. 14 September 2007

AachenWhen you walk up to the stately portico fronting the opera house in Aachen, you’re seized with a sense of "occasion." Justifiably so, when you consider that this city near Germany’s current western border, has been producing opera steadily since 1753. The interior of the current theater building -- erected in 1901 -- was bombed out during World War II, but the huge Ionic columns and the façade they shelter survived with minimal damage. Once inside the recently refurbished foyer, you might notice discreet busts of Beethoven and Herbert von Karajan flanking the portals into the parquet promenade. Karajan? Actually, Karajan began his conducting career at this theater in 1934. There are no statues, however, honoring some of the truly illustrious artists who paid their dues at this Triple-A way station, notably Leo Blech, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Karl Burrian, Tiana Lemnitz -- and more recently Kurt Moll, Linda Watson and Luana De Vol, as well as film luminaries Max Ophüls and Jürgen Prochnow.

Aachen’s new production of Fliegende Holländer that I visited on 14 September was mostly a treat to hear, but somewhat confusing to watch. The program notes say, that young Bulgarian soprano Irina Popova studied the fife before turning to singing -- worth noting because she supports her immense voice with an apparently endless supply of air on one breath. It tends, nonetheless, to blanch at full-blast. Her Senta was impassioned and soulful, though she would do well to give more thought to the subtleties of the Senta’s cantilena.

At age 33, the Korean bass-baritone Woong-jo Choi might do his career a favor, by abjuring the Dutchman until he has repeatedly endured such rites of passage as Colline, Wurm, and the Herald. Choi is among a growing number of outstanding Asian singers making their way through Germany’s operatic venues. But he must learn, as Leontyne Price has often advised, to sing on the interest, and save the principal.

Polish bass Kristof Borysiewicz proved that experience counts, as he presented a stylishly burly account of Senta’s father Daland. This up-and-comer already has a number of major roles under his belt, and he navigated his way around Daland’s music with bodacious ease.Tenor Gary Bachlund had an uncomfortable evening as Erik. His lackluster showing may have amounted merely to an off night. On the other hand, he might be taking on an unsuitable role or showing signs of vocal issues. But his is an attractive voice, and I look forward to hearing it again.

The Steersman is one of the roles on which tenors aspiring to Tannhäuser and Tristan cut their teeth. It’s too soon to tell if Andreas Scheiddeger will develop sufficient bite for a Wagner singer, but he has wisely been developing his Mozart repertoire. If he confines himself to such roles for a while longer, his imposing talent could eventually elbow out numerous pretenders.

The performance was led by Marcus R. Bosch, who has been Aachen’s chief conductor for the past five seasons. His appetite for the instrumental details in Holländer was undeniable, but knowingly or not, he frequently sacrificed the balance between stage and pit in favor of letting the brass section have its way. No great sin for an up-and-comer, if you recall Levine’s thump-happy days in the not-so-long ago.

A mesmerizing image informs the final act in Alexander Müller-Elmau’s production. Villagers unravel the veils of Senta’s wedding dress, after the Dutchman mistakenly accuses her of duplicity. The tableau connects the yarn spinning scene in which she vowed to disentangle the Dutchman from his unhappy fate to her now threadbare state of abandonment.

Had costume designer Julia Kaschlinski left Ms. Popova with something a tad more alluring than an ill-fitting slip, the metaphor might have worked brilliantly: Senta alone and shamed, vulnerable and frail. But Ms. Popova’s va-va-voom torso makes her ripe for a chat with Isaac Mizrahi.

Ergo, the image ravels like a crocheted sweater made in China.

JENUFA. 15 September 2007
Cologne

Operas almost always are about the vicissitudes of love, and they rarely end happily. Janacek’s Jenufa is singularly depressing: a morose menage involving two half-brothers and the titular heroine, whom only one of them wants to marry. Factor in a Jenufa’s illegitimate baby that her step-mother drowns, and you’re set for an evening of chest-clenching bawling.

The production team led by Katharina Thalbach, though, has served the Cologne Municipal Opera an oddly restrained view of the work. Winter is everywhere in Momme Röhrbein’s sets and Angelika Rieck’s grey-hued costumes. Not necessarily a bad thing, because the chilly mood puts Janacek’s sizzling vocal writing in bold relief.

The eponymous heroine held no terrors for Irish soprano Orla Boylan. Those who have heard her Donna Anna at the NYCO are familiar with her velvety upper register and crisp intonation. Dalia Schaechter, a Cologne regular, keeps growing artistically. She was at her best confessing Kostelnicka’s murderous face-saving deed. Texan Roy M. Wade, Jr. is also a member of the Cologne Opera and was entirely at home in the conflicted role of Laca. Hans-Georg Priese as Steva, rounded out the unhappy quartet, making the most of a thankless part.

Audiences reportedly went wild for Lothar Koenigs when he conducted Jenufa at La Scala last spring. The public in Cologne was appreciative on the night I attended. I didn’t hear anything new or notably charismatic in his reading, but he moved the pit band to play marvelously. Janacek fans and Koenigs’ followers might do well to keep an eye on Lyon’s opera calendar. He’s embarked on a complete cycle of the composer’s operas there.

Les Troyens. 16 September 2007
Duisburg-Düsseldorf

Sunday, 16 September was an unusual day for an inveterate operagoer: two performances of the same opera in two different cities. Well, almost two operas. Berlioz’ monster Les Troyens taxes the resources of any opera house that produces it. The Deutsche Oper am Rhein ("DOamR") went double-duty by presenting Part One -- The Siege of Troy as a matinée at its theater in Duisburg, and by setting up Part Two -- The Trojans at Carthage -- at its opera house in Düsseldorf. A shuttle jitney sped a handful of intrepid spectators wanting to see both parts in one day from Duisburg to Düsseldorf 15 miles away.

It was a strange experience for me, because Part One is the bigger opera in its historical and dramatic sweep. But I heard it at the smaller of the two houses. (Duisberg has 1,118 seats, Düsseldorf can accommodate 1,342 spectators). I felt as though I was watching the epic destruction of Troy through a close-up lens, and the intimacies of Dido and Aeneas through a wide-angle attachment. All in all, though, it was a sensational day’s journey into night, albeit a long one, further lengthened by "technical issues," which delayed the start of Part Two by more than 20 minutes and eliminated supertitles.

Evelyn Herlitzius as Cassandra appeared only in Part One, but her spectre as Cassandra dominated both performances, much as Hector’s ghost pervades both the opera and Virgil’s Aeneid, on which the work is based. She is, as a friend recently described her, a "very loud Pilar Lorengar." While she is no insane stage personality, like Anja Silja, Herlitzius unleashes a tragedy-laden storm, as her Cassandra desperately tries to save the Trojans from themselves.

Steven Harrison as Aeneas has virtually all the makings of a superior dramatic tenor, except vocal variety. His monochromatic delivery wearies the ear and may prevent him from attaining lasting above-the-line billing in the big leagues. Three other singers, on the other hand, had the style and beauty to make you sit up and want more. Jeanne Piland was a compelling Didon. She brought dignity and grace to Didon’s tragic passion for Aeneas, especially in the big love duet. Mirko Roschkowski as the poet Iopas and Norbert Ernst as the home-sick soldier Hylas regretably had too little to sing. Here are two supernal voices worth a detour to hear.

Masterful crowd control is key to the coherence of any Troyens production, and Christopher Loy proved himself to be a good traffic cop in Part One. But mayhem threatened to reign in Part Two. Piland nearly had to elbow her subjects out of the way to get to her spot in the opening scene. Carthage residents and visiting soldiers often seemed constantly at odds with each other throughout the remaining three hours.Despite tableau turmoil Loy has some interesting ideas: The besieged Trojan women, for example, gas themselves along with their Greek captors in their underground hideout, as the ruins of Troy tumble on Part One.

American John Fiore led an animated, reading that was nearly note-perfect, even though he did not have the full cadre of instrumentalists demanded by the score. Possibly agitated from the rush to get from Duisburg to the podium in Düsseldorf, though, he seemed out of sorts in finding rapture in the rhapsodic portions of Part Two. But he caught the amble and sweep of the work unerringly. Fiore has been Music Director of the DOamR since 1999, and has been honing the musical forces at both theaters into a disciplined, highly flexible mechanism. If he could just get his musicians to put a little more heart into their playing, he might have a band to beat the Met’s.

© 2007 Sam Shirakawa

Sam's Adventures - Part 2

Herewith, Part 2 of Sam Shirakawa's account of his recent travels to German opera houses:

PHAEDRA. 10 September 2007
Staatsoper unter den Linden

Hans Werner Henze has legions of devoted fans. I can take him or leave him.

What to make of his new “concert opera?” It’s called Phaedra, the disagreeable tale of a Greek queen’s all-consuming lust for her fatally disinterested step-son Hypolitus. Henze completed it last year when he was 80. His librettist Christian Lehnert has based the text on Euripides, Seneca and annotations by classical scholars.

Several facets of Peter Mussbach’s staging of the work’s World Premiere may be worth mentioning. First: the chamber orchestra of 22 instrumentalists -- the Ensemble Modern -- conducted by Michael Boder was placed at the rear of the house under center loge of the first balcony. A catwalk à la Al Jolson’s Winter Garden concerts bisected the parquet level and connected the orchestra platform to the stage, enabling the singers to commute. (No one, unfortunately, broke into a chorus of “Mammy.”) This semi-thrust arrangement allowed only spectators seated at the sides of the three balconies to have a reasonable view of the proceedings. The arrangement seemed to harken back to the days of theater-in-the-round, when, in the words of Mel Brooks’ immortal impressario, Max Bialystock, nobody had a good seat.

Second: Danish lighting and set designer Olafur Eliasson placed a network of mirrors on the stage and visually doubled the length of the playing area. The relevance of the expansion to the music or the drama escaped me, but the effect was grimly enchanting.

Third: John Mark Ainsley -- that superb singer -- spent a substantial portion of the second act lying nude and supine on a tablet center stage. During the course of this sequence, in which Artemis brings Hypolitus back to life, Ainsley’s scrotum appeared to constrict somewhat, causing his testicles to bulge. Whether this physiological vaudeville was caused by nerves, the somewhat under-heated hall, or both, we may never know. But the vignette may be instructive: Could placement of the genitalia play a role in producing superior vocal emission? I don’t think Manuel Garcia has anything to say about it in his writ on singing. Perhaps a bottom-less production of, say, Billy Budd might illuminate the matter....

Maria Riccarda Wesseling (Phaedra), Marlis Petersen (Aphrodite), Axel Köhler (Artemis), and Lauri Vasar (Minotauris) are also wonderful singers. I look forward to hearing them all again. In something else.

A source of irritation during my visit to the third and final performance of the work this season was having to sort out how Euripides and Seneca each approached the story. I have never read Racine’s take on the story. The scholarly details are to be found in the program notes, of course, but I guess I was looking for a way to remain attentive.

For me in my unwashed condition, Henze’s Phaedra, its unremitting antiphony and dense text, all require much too much knowledge aforethought. To get with the program, you have to be really up on the classics as well as the precious musical materia which constitute Henze’s erudite board game. For a cogent view of the production from a bona-fide initiate, I suggest Anne Ozorio.


Véronique Gens. 12. September 2007
Philharmonie
Berliner Festspiele

Berlin has hosted an annual autumn cultural festival for the better part of a century, but the Berliner Festspiele have been running under that name only since 1951. The Festival’s continued success has made Germany’s ever-trendy capital the final stop for summertide festival falcons. The French lieder singer Véronique Gens was among the distinguished visitors to this year’s Festival. Appearing with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Charles Dutoit, Gens offered a sultry glance into Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l'amour et de la mer. Hers is a warm luxurious sound, whose amber glow exudes cheerful nostalgia mixed with lachrymose anticipation. Her tall, pastel presence and delicate sad smile spoke silent volumes to such lines from Maurice Bouchor’s text as:

Mon âme unique m'est ravie
Et la sombre clameur des flots
Couvre le bruit de mes sanglots.

My very soul is torn away
And the dark clamoring of the waves
Covers the noise of my sobs.

I concede, though, that after wading through such endlessly gossamer longueurs de melodies, I wished that Madame Véronique might have saluted her German hosts with something un peu éveillant, like Veronika, der Lenz ist da...

Charles Dutoit apparently likes soccer, for he has taken to using referee gestures to communicate instructions to the orchestra -- rolling his forearms around each other and using his hands as levers. The members of the Philharmonia, arguably the finest of London’s five major orchestras, must have enjoyed his divertissements: they played fabulously for him -- especially in La Valse, the crowd-pleasing finisher of the all-French program, and gave him a rousing ovation.

FAUSTUS, THE LAST NIGHT. 13 September 2007
Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Here’s one for the Comparative Cultures Department: A new opera composed by a Frenchman, sung in English and staged for its world premiere in Berlin. Since its first performance last year, Faustus, the Last Night has also been produced in France and at the Spoleto Festival.

The plot -- if you can call it that -- of Pascal Dusapin’s sixth opera follows a middle road between the path to damnation followed by the hero of Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlowe and the detour to salvation taken by Goethe’s errant protagonist. The fate of Dusapin’s hero is left undecided.

And that, for me, is where Faustus, the Last Night ultimately collapses. If the fate of a man who sells his soul to the Devil is not to be defined in some dramatic way, why are we witnessing his story? Dusapin sprinkles the text with a wide range of allusions, including Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. Just so we don’t miss how well-read he certainly is, he’s created a character named Togod. It unscrambles into Godot -- get it? (Hasn’t someone else also used this anagram for a character’s name?) Some European critics adored Dusapin’s exhibits of middle-brow literacy, but I failed to see how any of it served to shed light on the nature of a man who has made a choice that everybody faces at one time or another.

The spoken musings of Shakespeare and the quarrels of Beckett’s scrappy personae -- which who Dusapin’s characters resemble -- accumulate compelling counterpoint that speaks hauntingly to the drama of their lot and the tragedy of mankind’s existence. But Dusapin’s clever harmonies and arcane text tend to become distracting. Given the uncertainties with which he ends his work ends, he dissipates the dramatic and moral fiber on which the Faust story feeds.

The principals, Georg Nigl (Faustus), Urban Malmberg (Mephistopheles), Robert Wörle (Sly), Jaco Huijpen (Togot) and Caroline Stein (Angel), under Michael Boder’s direction, all sang the challenging score in good voice. More about them I can’t say, because I’ve never heard any of them before, and I’m not familiar with the score.

Peter Mussbach’s efficient staging places the characters on a huge clock. At first, it seemed like an apt cliché, but the end-effect was oddly disturbing. For me, both Phaedra and Dusapin’s Faustus show advanced symptoms of the same alarming malady: emotional necrosis. Our whining helplessness before powers that control
our existence is as terrifying as never before, but it’s nothing novel, just harder to recognize: The gods and the devils of our times both wear Prada. Truly harrowing are the man-made deities to which we nolens volens have rendered our identities, our innermost longings, and the remnants of our souls. Where is the Arthurian composer who has the vision and courage to write an opera about the tragi-comic consequences of mankind’s unwitting covenant with that fearfully benign repository of all that is We: Google?

© 2007 Sam Shirakawa

More to come . . . .

Sam Shirakawa's Latest Foray to Germany

Our friend Sam Shirakawa has recently returned from a trip to Germany to see several operas. We always enjoy reading what he has to say about the performances he has seen, so here is the first installment of his reviews from his September trip Germany:

DER FREISCHUTZ. 7 September 2007
Staatsoper unter den Linden (Berlin)

Weber’s Freischutz or The Marksman was an instant hit when it received its first performance on 18 June 1821 in Berlin under the composer’s direction. The poet Heinrich Heine and the young Mendelssohn were in attendance. Weber’s use of Teutonic folk songs and recurring themes of the period -- pacts with the Devil, sorcery, the powers of the forest -- were seized upon and further refined by most of the significant cultural figures of the mid- and late-19th century.

So it was a thrill to hear the work performed in the very theater where it was born. Weber would surely have approved of the musical side of the performance headed by Burkhard Fritz (Max),Carola Höhn (Agäthe),Sylvia Schwartz (Ännchen) and Hanno Müller-Brachmann (Kaspar) under the direction of the Algerian-German conductor Julien Salemkour.

Fueled by obvious devotion to the work, and bound by the language common to them all, the cast embued the performance I attended with an esprit you rarely find in multi-national productions. The stand-out was Müller-Brachmann, who goes from strength to strength every time I hear him.

Given the eccentric stagings of many opera productions these days -- this past summer’s Salzburg Festival production of Freischutz -- the composer also would probably have approved of Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s generally respectful production, dating from 1997. Despite some bloody excesses in the Wolf Glen scenes, Lehnhoff’s carefully considered production makes sense and holds up after a decade.


LOHENGRIN. 8 September 2007
Chemnitz

Chemnitz once wore the dubious crown of "Dirtiest City" in Germany. Now, nearly 20 years after the nation’s reunification and a relatively corruption-free drive to clean up the environmental mess left by East Germany’s Soviet-backed regime, the former Karl Marx-Stadt is being lauded as the nation’s Cleanest City. But many inhabitants still suffer long-term health problems owing to decades of deadly pollution.

Throughout its environmental and political travails, the city’s Municipal Opera has managed to make quality music continuously. Much of its high standard of operatic excellence in recent years is credited to the team of stage director Michael Heinicke and Niksa Bareza, who completed a distinguished seven-year tenure as Music Director last spring. Among their achievements: a complete cycle of Wagner’s so-called ‘Bayreuth Operas.’

On my current visit, the Opera’s new Music Director Frank Beermann led Lohengrin with a cast of mostly house artists. Despite the disappointment that facing a half-filled house must have given the artists, the performance frequently
generated excitement and yielded two big surprises: Kouta Räsänen as Heinrich der Vogler and Hannu Niemelä as Telramund -- Two Finns, who rattled me out of an attack of jet lag. What a pleasure to hear these steel-reinforced voices buttressing Wagner’s bass lines!

Canadian Nancy Gibson is an irresistibly sympathetic Elsa, and her voice at full-throttle soared over the orchestra. She showed some stress occasionally at the top, and she seemed to tire somewhat toward the end of the Bridal Chamber Scene. But she rallied for Elsa’s final moments in the last tableau.

Albert Bonnema stepped in on short notice for the indisposed Edward Rendell. His Siegfried (Götterdämmerung) has become well known through Stuttgart’s multi-producer Ring. At this performance, he was at his best declaiming, but Lohengrin’s tender moments gave him difficulties. Regrettable, because his outsize voice yields honey, when he deigns to sing softly.

Undine Dreißig struck me as a tiring Ortrud. But I confess that my reaction may have more to do with my aversion to the role’s irritating hectoring than the singer’s vocalism.

Heinicke’s production emphasizes spectacle, by mounting his production on the theater’s massive revolving stage. It’s hard, though, to make out what he is aiming at. In the big finales of the second and third acts, it seems like rush hour on the
shores of the Scheidt -- principals and chorus scurrying to hop aboard the
spinning turntable before blocks of Antwerp shut them off.

Bareza’s successor as Music Director, Frank Beermann, led a fast-paced and nicely pointed reading, but it remains, at the moment, a reading. He needs to submerge himself deeply into the score and mine its mysteries bar by bar. The talent is there and the forces drilled by Bareza are also present to bring him along. Whether he has the obligatory modesty to avail himself of the help at hand remains to be heard.
In the few years since my last visit, the central part of Chemnitz, where the opera house is located, has emerged from its sullen DDR hangover and developed into a colorful multi-cultural venue. The reboubtable Cafe Moskau still brims with "Ostalgie" -- nostalgia for the good ole days -- and a Turkish bistro now resides next to Schalom, a Jewish restaurant, which has managed to thrive more than seven years.

After the performance, I renewed acquaintances with Schalom’s proprietors, Ariel and Uwe Dziuballal, over some Jewish pastry. Ariel, who I met during my last visit, presented me with a bottle of kosher beer that he and his brother have just brought on the market. It has a richer, deeper taste than most pilsners from that area, and it leaves a mild pleasant aftertaste. Ariel says he’s trying to find a distributor in the United States.

Before I left Chemnitz the next day, I visited the newly renovated Protestant Church of St. Petri (1888), which shares the broad plaza dominated by the Opera House. A long, costumed procession began the festive Sunday service, commemorating European Heritage Day -- held each year throughout Europe on the second Sunday of September. The event celebrates all places, buildings and monuments of historic significance and enables visits to many sites that are closed for most of the year.

My visit to St. Petri gave me a chance to hear the colossal neo-Gothic organ, originally constructed by the renowned Friedrich Ladegast. Unfortunately, the music for the service didn’t require full deployment of the organ’s 4,000 pipes, but the sound at full tilt was thrillingly shattering.

© 2007 Sam H. Shirakawa

Stay tuned for more of Sam's adventures.