With Jonas Kaufmann’s long-awaited role debut as Lohengrin and Anja Harteros as Elsa, Wagner’s epic of love and loss was not only the opening premiere of the Munich Opera Festival, but its uncontested highlight as well. Which is why the performance was followed not only by a longsold- out house, but also by tens of thousands of spectators at a live public viewing event in Munich and Vienna.
Palestrina
Requiring 38 soloists, chorus and large orchestra, “Palestrina”, Hans Pfitzner’s (1869-1949) “most important work” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), is a challenging opera to stage. In Munich, the city in which it was given its world premiere in 1917, the Bavarian State Opera succeeded – director Christian Stückl, best known for his staging of the Oberammergau Passion Play and the Salzburg Festival’s “Jedermann”, transformed the monumental work into an optical pop art event. Stückl’s production infuses such color and life into the serious work that even the German tabloid “Abendzeitung” delightedly wrote: “Who would have thought that Pfitzner could be such fun?”
Admeto
When one of Germany’s most famous filmmakers and stimulating operatic directors focuses her creativity on a rarely performed Handel opera, the result is a ‘mixture of dancers and singers, comedy and pathos’ (The Times). ‘Admeto’, one of Handel’s most popular operas in his lifetime, was premiered in London in January 1727. Doris Dörrie, whose Japan-inspired feature film ‘Cherry Blossoms – Hanami’ was a major German box-office hit and won several international awards, returns to her beloved Japan in this production. Flowing robes, translucent panels and the participation of Japan’s Mamu Dance Theater and its choreographer/dancer Tadashi Endo add an evocative dimension to the work whose lead roles were written for a popular castrato and two rivaling primadonnas.
La belle Hélène
A superficial view may regard Offenbach’s lightweight masterpiece, La belle Hélène, as „merely“ an opera buffa. But closer scrutiny of this charming, imaginative firework of intrigue makes one thing clear: the story of the Greek queen who started off the Trojan war is, in this version, a humorous and satirical caricature of the vulgar, decadent Parisian upper classes of Offenbach’s own day. Who better suited to produce a modern rendering of this work than the now highly acclaimed Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who also ensured the work’s historical accuracy? Employing a small string section, shining, colourful brass and richly varied percussion, the opera still strikes one as exceptionally modern. This impression is also enhanced by the designers of the production, recorded in 1997 at the Zurich Opera House: no less a figure than the fashion designer Jean–Charles de Castelbajac was responsible for the humorously expansive costumes; and the highly subtle stage–set was the work of Paolo Pivas.
Wozzeck
Libretto by Alban Berg after the Play by Georg Büchne. r
Berg was conscripted during the 1914-18 war and acquired from his experiences the compassion and loathing to write his first, terrifyingly great opera, about a soldier tormented and mocked by his superiors until he loses his reason, cutting the throat of his mistress, and drowning himself. A devious world destroys Wozzeck’s sense of identity and turns him into a murderer.
This brutalisation is made palpable in Peter Mussbach’s highly-stylised production which, in ist expressionistic artificiality, heightens the emotional intensity of this searing work. In his hands Wozzeck becomes an agonising lament over lost innocence. Mussbach is a master of visual and dramatic effect and the impact of his staging is enhanced by the framing opportunities afforded by video recording under studio conditions. Surfaces are steeply raked and blaze in primary colours; perspectives are flattened and distorted; space is confined; decoration has been stripped away; character is manifested through costumes, masks, make-up, movement; the particular stands for the collective.
Dale Duesing, as Wozzeck, is a charismatic central figure, an agile performer, restless and tormented. The role of Marie is taken by Kristine Ciesinski, a consummate singer and actress of Berg’s work. Mussbach’s Hauptmann is reminiscent of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and his Doctor brings to mind a frock-coated Frankenstein. These monsters of inhumanity are incisively portrayed by Dieter Bundschuh and Frode Olsen. A powerful tenor, Ronald Hamilton sings the role of the grotesquely overblown Drum Major. Conductor Sylvain Cambreling’s reading of the score is characterised by ist structural clarity.
Salome
From the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden 1997 Staged for the Royal Opera, Luc Bondy’s Salome is a terrifying study of a family of degenerates. Never decadent, it is about decay. Spare and severe, it is staged in close focus in the bowels of Herod’s palace, with every small exchange of his monstrous family spotlit in a dismal and cavernous space. The characterisations of Catherine Malfitano, Bryn Terfel, Kenneth Riegel and Anja Silja are exceptionally powerful. Conductor Christoph von Dohnányi draws every strand and fleck of colour from Strauss’s cauldron of a score. (Sung in German)
The Cunning Little Vixen
Nicholas Hytner’s enchanting production, sung in the original Czech, is conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, a master of the best Janácek style. Through myriad shifts of scene, the episodic story is presented in brightly-coloured sets and costumes of blissful innocence and simplicity, designed by Bob Crowley. Jean-Claude Gallotta’s choreography for the insects and animals, and Jean Kalman’s lighting add to the nostalgically poetic effect of the whole. With Sir Thomas Allen as the Forester, the cast includes Eva Jenis, Hanna Minutillo, Richard Novak and Ivan Kusnjer.
Tannhäuser
From the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich 1995 Recorded under studio conditions from the stage of the National Theatre in Munich, David Alden’s challenging production of Tannhäuser is a desolate ‘endgame’, far-removed from traditional, representational stagings. One of the most iconoclastic interpreters of classical opera, Alden stirs up the visionary, erotic and archetypal elements in Wagner’s work. The Bavarian State Opera fields a top-flight cast of Wagnerian singers includes René Kollo in the title role, Waltraud Meier, Jan-Hendrik Rootering, Claes-Håkon Ahnsjö, Bernd Weikl and Nadine Secunde. Zubin Mehta conducts a musically outstanding performance. (Sung in German)
The Fiery Angel
Valéry Gergiev is said to be at his best when interpreting Russian composers. Convincing evidence is given with this production of Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Ange”l from the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Prokofiev’s disturbingly enigmatic opera was never performed during his lifetime – it was considered too decadent by Stalin and his successors – but David Freeman’s imaginative production asserts it as one of the composer’s greatest masterpieces. Galina Gorchakova and Sergei Leiferkus inspire with brilliant performances in the two main roles.
The opera is derived from a novel by the Russian decadent Valéry Bryusov. Ostensibly, it is a tale of religious hysteria and demonic possession and also explores symbolically the love triangle endured by the writer and his self-destructive lover, the poet Nina Petrovskaya.
David Freeman has completely entered into this opera’s strangely unnerving world. Evil is all around us and in his sensational production the image is taken quite literally.
Capriccio
From the San Francisco Opera 1993: Dame Kiri Te Kanawa has made the role of the Countess in Capriccio her own and her performance in Stephen Lawless’s San Francisco Opera production met with high critical praise. Her suitors are sung by David Kuebler and Simon Keenlyside and the cast also includes Tatiana Troyanos in her last role, Håkan Hagegård and Victor Braun. Richard Strauss’s opera about opera is set in the eighteenth century and the period is evoked poetically in Mauro Pagano’s exquisite salon set and Thierry Bosquet’s lavish costumes. (Sung in German)