Intermezzo

Nagano elbowed out of Munich

Kent Nagano, music director of the Bavarian State Opera since 2006, will not have his contract renewed in 2013 according to German newspaper reports.

The American conductor took a while to win round Munich audiences, and his press is mixed. But the real reason behind his departure is said to be a clash of personality and principles with Nikolaus Bachler, Intendant since 2008. Nagano, like his conducting, is cerebral and self-contained. For a big-house music director, he's unusually open to experimentation too - take the surprise hit of the 2007 Munich Opera Festival, Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland. Bachler on the other hand goes for big, safe and splashy - and the success of his methods can be measured by an increase in average attendance, despite the economic downturn.

The newspapers' favourite to replace Nagano is Kirill Petrenko, who conducted a well-received Jenufa in Munich recently, and is claimed to be Bachler's own choice.

But Petrenko's career, despite his undoubted musical talents, has been troubled of late. He was forced to cut engagements in 2007 due to exhaustion, which may be an ongoing problem. He's fallen out with directors Christof Loy (a Munich mainstay) and Claus Guth. On a more practical note, he's scheduled to conduct the Bayreuth Ring in 2013 and the following 4 to 6 years. This will take him out of play each July. Can Munich really afford to appoint a music director who won't be around during the key event in its calendar, its own opera festival?

Daniele Gatti's name has also been mentioned (as it is - yawn - when any vacancy comes up), and so has Bertrand de Billy's, but neither fared well in their recent Munich engagements. So it looks like Petrenko is the front runner for now.

Bavarian Culture Minister Wolfgang Heubisch is responsible for the final decision. The big tease is torturing everyone by delaying any announcement until autumn.

The Munich audience have their own views - there was a noisy show of support for Nagano at last night's Don Giovanni.

Nagano dissects Mahler in Paris

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal - Salle Pleyel, Paris, 28 April 2009

The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal haven't visited France for a while, which might account for a less than packed-out Salle Pleyel. Indeed the Salle Pleyel were marketing this concert largely on the back of soloist Klaus Florian Vogt's knockout performance in last year's Lohengrin.  But music director Kent Nagano's mission to raise the orchestra's international profile has resulted in a short European tour (the UK is off the list), of which this was the last but one date.

The result was taut and accomplished playing all round, ensemble sharpened by repeated performance. Details positively sparkled in the first two of Debussy's Nocturnes, Nuages and Fêtes.

Tan Dun's Orchestral Theatre 1:O followed. This 1990 composition is far more interesting than the tired oriental cliches he's been peddling recently. The O is for Origin, and the piece recreates a shamanic ritual symphonically with minimalist textures and odd sonorities evocative of traditional Chinese instruments. Col legno strings provide a rattling percussive backbone, and the orchestra sigh, shout and grunt en masse, an effect which provoked a few unsuppressable titters around me. Still, it was hypnotically fascinating, and very well-received.

The Chinese theme was picked up again in the second half with Das Lied von der Erde. The soloists were Christian Gerhaher and Klaus Florian Vogt, two singers I admire hugely, but very different from each other. Gerhaher is one of today's great lieder singers, with a rich colour palette and a fanatically detailed approach to text. Vogt on the other hand is pure sonority, a voice with the abstract qualities of a musical instrument. It was never clear quite what Nagano hoped to achieve from this odd marriage, apart from a clearly-delineated break between songs.

The Tan Dun piece proved a canny entrée, as Nagano's reflective reading underlined the novelty of Mahler's scoring. Carefully nuanced detail was laid out coolly and clearly - no red-blooded romanticism here. But Nagano wasn't afraid of unleashing the full power of the orchestra either, a little to the detriment of the first song, Das Trinklied, where a slightly tired-sounding Klaus Florian Vogt struggled to be heard. Neither this nor Der Trunkene im Frühling were ideally matched to his elevated qualities of luminous clarity and effortlessly exquisite tone. But his Von der Jugend was as near perfect as it gets.

A scarily intense Christian Gerhaher demonstrated the real reason this cycle is usually attemped by an alto rather than a baritone - it's simply too hard and too high. Gerhaher nailed every note perfectly, but it was touch and go, with the effort at the top particularly apparent. But this was another fine performance from him - always attentive to words, his immaculately-crafted phrasing was particularly telling in the lied-like Der Abschied.

It was overall an idiosyncratic reading that split the audience two ways - a minority of ostentatious coughers and fidgeters who dashed for the doors the minute Nagano's baton dropped, and a far greater number of enthusiasts whose applause brought conductor and soloists back to the stage at least six times - I lost count.

 Christian Gerhaher mit Mahler tribute haircut:
 

Klaus Florian Vogt:
 

 

Give me the underpants and I'll show you the man - Parsifal in Munich

Parsifal - Bayerische Staatsoper, Nationaltheater, Munich, 23 March 2008

On to my second Parsifal in two days, and my third this month. This infamous Peter Konwitschny production has been illuminating, baffling and enraging audiences since 1995, though this was the first time I'd managed to fit it into my diary.

Even before a note is heard, Konwitschny's central preoccupation is established - the symmetries of the work. For replacing the curtain is a huge screen (above) pasted with multilingual versions of the same message - 'Erlösung dem Erlöser', or 'redemption to the redeemed' - the final words sung in the opera.

Konwitschny doggedly exposes the music's repetitions and binary oppositions, even when this is at the expense of clarity or fidelity to the text. At times it's frustrating or downright silly, as when the grail - here represented by a silent actress playing the Virgin Mary - is reproduced in the second act as a Lourdes-tat statuette, hugged by Klingsor like a teddy bear.

But the themes and leitmotifs are superbly organised around a tree theme.

A huge central tree with a roughly papered trunk is white and branched at the start, leaved in yellow paper in the magic garden, and a bare black trunk by the end.

Paper - the manufactured fruit of the tree  - is interleaved throughout the production both as motif and as symbol of culture in opposition to nature, as represented by the tree. A single sheet of red paper is suspended over the stage at the start. It drops as Parsifal kills the swan. He is attracted to Kundry from the start in this production, so he presents her with a heart torn from the paper. On parting in the second act, they each take one half of the heart. In the third act, matching up the halves prompts mutual recognition.

The matching overcoats and underpants of Klingsor (John Wegner, left) and Amfortas (Michael Volle, right) graphically exposed lookalike injuries. The text may say Amfortas is wounded in the side, but Konwitschny clearly sees a second castration.

Parsifal shoves aside the healed Amfortas at the end  - in disgust that Amfortas yielded to the passion that Parsifal resisted? Parsifal's own comfort at the end appears to lie in Kundry, treated tenderly until her death at the close.

Grating irrelevances like Kundry's toy wooden horse, or Parsifal's Tarzan-like entrance on a swinging vine may only be fleeting moments, but unfortunately they stick in the memory just as long as than the more solid elements of the production and detract quite disproportionately from its overall impact.

At least Kent Nagano's conducting was free of gimmicks. Resonant, measured, OK rather risk averse, it was the polar opposite of what I'd heard a couple of days before in Dresden.

The Bayerische Staatsorchester are a fine bunch of musicians anyway, one of the world's best opera orchestras, but here they excelled themselves in flawlessness and responsiveness.

Nagano never pushed to extremes of tempo or dynamics, or hung on pauses so long that the music framed the silence. But there was always the sense that he knew exactly where he was going, and how each moment related to the next. His delicate emphasis on the music's rhymes and alliterations subtly pointed up this key aspect of Konwitschny's production, making the whole experience a lot more coherent than I suspect it could have been in lesser hands.

It was a truly mature performance that drew Nagano not just applause but Richter-scale, camera-shaking, foot-stamping appreciation, turning most of my photos into a tremulous blur.

Whether it was more down to the production or the performers it's hard to say, but the character of Parsifal himself was more to the fore here than in any other performance I've seen. Nikolai Schukoff, light voiced and slight framed by Wagnerian standards, looks an egregious miscast on paper. His may not be a conventional portrayal, but he was remarkably effective as the savage jungle boy turned Christ figure this concept demanded, and produced power without strain, clear phrasing and a profoundly human dimension. And yes, he ended up in his underpants - rather grubby cut-off longjohns that look as if they haven't been washed since the production debuted in 1995 (right).

Lioba Braun has a smallish voice for a Kundry, but she sang beautifully and intelligently and sympathetically. Her subtle characterisation embodied the unusual degree of femininity and compassion that this production demands.

The mighty Kurt Rydl was alternating nights in Munich and Dresden all week. Quite how he was managing the 500km commute on top of the demanding role of Gurnemanz I don't know, but here as in Dresden, his performance was simply magisterial. Actually, it was even better here, his voice more resonant and alive, his relationship to the other characters more engaged.

Michael Volle was an unusually lyrical Amfortas, a contrast musically if not visually to the Klingsor of John Wegner, whose dark timbre gave him all the menace required without resorting to pantomime theatrics.

As ever in Munich, there is no such thing as a small part, and all the lesser roles were superbly handled by company performers, with singers of the calibre of Aga Mikolaj and Daniela Sindram included amongst the Flowermaidens, and Steven Humes as Titurel.

This is not an undemanding production, either for performers or audience, but it's an incredibly rewarding one that, minor annoyances aside, continues to provoke my thought long after leaving the opera house.