Intermezzo

Wozzup?

Wozzeck - Metropolitan Opera, 6 April 2011(season premiere)

The most moving moment in this brief evening came before a note had been played. As James Levine entered the pit for the first time in over a month, it seemed as if the cheers and applause might never stop. Still visibly suffering from the chronic back pain that sidelined him recently, the Met's revered maestro turned to acknowledge the audience with his hand over his heart. The scenario played out again at the end of the evening. Levine remained in the pit for his ovation, presumably too frail to ascend to the stage for a bow.

Swiss go to war - against Bernard Haitink

 
Unprecedented hostilities at Zurich Opera House on Tuesday night. No, they didn't whip out their Swiss Army knives and torment each other with the corkscrew attachment. 

But, most unusually for Zurich, the 80-something conductor of Tristan und Isolde, Bernard Haitink, was roundly booed by a large section of the normally placid Swiss audience.

His offence? The last-minute replacement of the scheduled Isolde, Waltraud Meier, by Barbara Schneider-Hofstetter, following "musical differences".

“Haitink and Meier are two exceptional artists and strong personalities, who express their opinions clearly. They couldn't agree on this project,” Joachim Arnold, marketing head of the opera house, diplomatically explained.

*UPDATE* an unofficial record of the incident (booing begins around 3:18):

the other Lohengrin

Lohengrin - National Theatre Munich, 25 July 2010

There were two Lohengrins in Bavaria on Sunday. I was at the other one. I had time to take in only the first act of the new Bayreuth one (sounded pretty good) on the radio before setting off for another look at Munich's version. I didn't care much for the production itself last year. Richard Jones's silly lego house and class conflict twaddle was if anything even more irritating second time round. It can't help the performers when the audience are tittering away at inappropriate moments, but when Lohengrin arrives with a nodding swan tucked under his arm, or kills Telramund with a wave of his arm, what can you expect?

Prom 50: Barenboim's Fidelio

Prom 50: Fidelio - West-Eastern Divan Orchestra / Barenboim - Royal Albert Hall, 22 August 2009

This Prom was, predictably, packed out. So why did the BBC need once again to occupy precious space and block people's views with yet another podium-mounted camera positioned slap bang in the middle of the arena? They already had a battery of equipment stationed at the sides, not to mention a roaming cameraman right in front of the stage for those all important up-nostril shots. The Met, the Royal Opera House and the Berlin Philharmonic, to name just a few, manage to produce professional DVDs with far less gear, all unobtrusively positioned, and without disrupting a large chunk of the audience. But then they're dedicated to music, not to viewing figures.

Year by year the Proms inches further away from its origins as a live performance festival and further towards reincarnation as a BBC-branded TV special 'filmed in front of a live audience'. At least the evening Proms concerts haven’t yet sunk to the depths of the daytime ones, where the audience are instructed not just how and when to applaud, but how loudly to chat amongst themselves to generate the prescribed ‘atmosphere’.

But back to the music. 

This concert performance was punctuated by a mostly pre-recorded English narration from Waltraud Meier as a disillusioned Leonore, some years later, a bitter and apposite reflection on the difficulty of living up to ideals. The choice of opening overture - the Leonore 3 - in itself a backward-looking summary of the opera - emphasised the point, a nostalgic evocation of a past forever lost.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra played incredibly well (and this is not an easy score), meeting all of Daniel Barenboim's detailed and demanding requirements, by turns dark, thrilling and joyfully defiant. Barenboim's pushing and pulling and tweaking around sometimes perplexes - but not here. It's as if he has a magic key to Beethoven's secrets. There was not one routine passage, yet everything sounded inexorably right.

The soloists were on this occasion simply outshone by the orchestra. John Tomlinson came out best as a convincing Rocco, an involuntary wobble here and there only adding to the impression of age and inconstancy.

Leonore, as I have previously observed, is not the greatest showcase for Waltraud Meier's vocal skills, lying in her least comfortable range and making unfulfillable demands on her agility. Her pitch was often wildly off but at least her earnest intensity was some compensation, and her dramatic presence is undeniable. She cut a chic figure in a white taffeta wrapover ensemble-thingy, and like her contemporary Renee Fleming, seems able to spin the wheel of time in reverse. A flattering new dark pixie haircut complemented her smooth-browed peachy complexion.

Simon O'Neill made a brilliant start with an arresting, needle sharp “Gott, welch Dunkel hier!”, but his big voice doesn't manoeuvre easily around Florestan's rapid lines. When things sped up, he trailed in the orchestra's wake, chasing the notes at the expense of the text.

Gerd Grochowski's Don Pizarro and Viktor Rud's Don Fernando were efficiently sung, but lacking in the necessary authority and presence. Adriana Kučerová's Marzelline and Stephen Rügamer's Jacquino were again efficient, but simply anonymous.

The best singing of the evening came from the back of the hall as the sterling BBC Singers and Geoffrey Mitchell Choir delivered the prisoners' chorus with an intensity and commitment that was often lacking at the front.

 

 

Parsifal in Berlin - Domingo flubs it

Parsifal - Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, 6 March 2009

This Parsifal has the distinction of being the worst production ever mounted at the Berlin Staatsoper, according to my local source. At its 2005 premiere, normal etiquette was inverted - there were apparently so many boos that the handful of applauders were shamed into silence.

On this showing, I didn't think it was that bad. Incompetent, yes, idiotic (a la Barrie Kosky), no. It was movie producer Bernd 'Resident Evil' Eichinger's first (and so far only) venture into the world of opera - and who knows how the Beverly Hills-based millionaire got the gig? Predictably, his Wagnervision incorporates extensive use of video back projections - technically beautifully executed (by Möller and Hinrichs aka fettFilm). The stage is uncluttered, there's no extraneous detail. So far so good.

It's the content that's the problem. A spinning Earth is projected over the first scene, where the squires are hydrocephalic aliens, the main characters your regular medieval types. Then the grail knights appear as ancient Egyptians (possibly - my history's not that good) in a shattered temple. Klingsor's garden is a bare stage, but a window later reveals a sub-aquatic vista - have we dropped beneath the sea?

The last act opens in a 1940's New York park (hyper-realistic, mums with prams, etc) - but then the knights reappear as a Mad Max biker gang on a climbing frame. Evidently time travel is indicated - but why? And why stop at those specific points?

Eichinger goes some way to redeeming himself by getting a few things absolutely right. 

When the bleeding corpse of the very realistic swan he has just shot is presented to Parsifal, he understands the consequences of his actions, that he has taken a life, in a way that no limp hanky or ceramic bird (just a couple of the other productions I've seen) could ever achieve.

And the image of the swan's death-wound is echoed in the posture and flowing white robes of Amfortas. The grail ceremony begins with his heart - rendered in gruesomely accurate form - which he tugs out for communion-style distribution amongst the knights. The connection with Christian ritual is made explicit. Kundry's transformations are simply but effectively indicated with costume changes. It's just the bits in between that are the problem......

It was certainly baffling, but rarely irritating (though the delicious and deceptively alcoholic himbeer bowle I enjoyed at each interval may have affected my twerp-tolerance), and if there were any boos for the production this time round, I didn't hear them.

The only boos (and there weren't many) were directed at Plácido Domingo, possibly here to compensate for pulling out of a couple of earlier stagings. He looked totally unrehearsed, needed a prompter throughout the second act, and missed, cracked or whispered every highish note. And, even with bad light and squinting, there's no way he could pass for a day under 60. But - but - close your eyes - and the voice (or most of it) is still there, burnished and ardent. And the presence is undeniable. The third act, where in this production Parsifal is older as well as wiser, showed him at close to his best though. Despite all his faults, it was an impressive showing.

Waltraud Meier's Kundry, horridly curdled top aside, was unassailable. Her face, strangely inexpressive in recent months, seems to have relaxed and regained its life along with its wrinkles. An all round lack of direction/rehearsal enabled her to craft the part around her own skills. This incoherent production became Kundry's opera by default.

With Rene Pape suffering from some unspecified long-term ailment, Matti Salminen was drafted in at short notice to play Gurnemanz. Wearing his years even better than Domingo, he provided an authoritative anchor, sage and stately. Even if his singing is not the smoothest or loveliest, that's hardly a big drawback in this part.

The standout performance came from an unexpected source. Hanno Müller-Brachmann has an unusually light and lyrical voice for Amfortas, but the flexibility and the range of colour made his physical and spiritual torment devastatingly real and his vulnerability desperately touching.

And of course Daniel Barenboim was reliably unreliable, his graveyard-pace Vorspiel no clue to the abrupt and idiosyncratic tempo shifts he was to apply later on. But somehow it flexed and breathed organically, even if the gear changes were a little too obvious in places. The Berlin Staatskapelle played marvellously for him, and the translucency of sound, the sheer detail, were just astonishing. I look forward to their joint visit to the Royal Festival Hall at the end of the year.

 

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more curtain call photos over teh page..................

Barenboim and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra end their summer in Paris

 West-Eastern Divan Orchestra / Barenboim / Meier / O'Neill / Pape - Salle Pleyel, Paris, 25 August 2008

Schoenberg Variations for Orchestra, Op.31
Wagner Die Walküre, Act I

Just a few days after the Barenboim/Divan Proms, I was in Paris for second helpings - quite literally in the case of the Schoenberg Orchestral Variations, a repeat of the lush, expansive London performance. 

The Parisian audience, totally starved of music for the last month (when they say everything shuts down in Paris in August, they mean it), lapped it up. Despite charging double the regular Salle Pleyel prices (and ouch, that rampant Euro really hurts these days), the concert was a sell-out. A long and over-optimistic returns queue snaked across the entrance as I arrived. A few enterprising punters even waved banknotes hopefully at the incoming ticket holders. Was it really just because there was nothing else on that night? Or had it become, despite low-key publicity, a bit of an Occasion? It was reported that Barenboim had paid Sarko a visit earlier in the day, an encouraging sign. Can you imagine Gordon 'Arctic Monkeys' Brown owning up to having even heard of Daniel Barenboim?

Barenboim's Wagner is of course legendary, and I'm sure Die Walküre and its starry trio of soloists were the main attraction of the evening for many.

Although this was a concert performance, there were no seats and no scores for the singers.

Of the three, Waltraud Meier proved most able to take advantage of this, ignore the surroundings and throw herself into her role, despite the conductor's podium separating her from her Siegmund, Simon O'Neill.  Her ever-unpredictable intonation firmed up as she progressed, and her voice seemed as agelessly smooth as her forehead (compare and contrast if you will with a violinist half her age, left).

O'Neill's sound, clean and hard-edged, is not the biggest voice, but it cut through the orchestra like a laser. A long-breathed "Wälse!" that left him purple-faced was one of several moments that tested his limits, and he looked less at ease with the compromises of the concert format than Meier.  Good Wagnerian tenors are in short supply, and he's definitely in the top drawer. But I find the voice simply efficient, like bleach scouring a blocked drain, and hard to warm to.

Rene Pape was his usual laconic self. Added to this, the part of Hunding lies a little low for him, so it was a less than jaw-dropping performance, but the natural beauty of his voice shone through.

Almost inevitably though, Barenboim was the real star, teasing a thrilling performance from the orchestra, even if it lacked a little of the weight and refinement customary in his Wagner.

I don't think I've ever heard applause quite as shattering and prolonged as what followed. There was an almost instant standing ovation, and few audience members left, even though Barenboim took his time going round each orchestra member thanking them individually. He hugged, he kissed, he shook hands. Another first - I've never seen him smile so genuinely or respond so warmly as he did to the young musicians of the orchestra.

There was to be no encore though - just a speech (in perfect French).

Barenboim started by explaining his extended individual congratulations - it was because it was their "last concert". Leader Michael Barenboim almost jumped out of his seat, then sank back as his father corrected himself "that is, the last concert of the summer".

He went on to say that each musician had shown enormous courage in coming to play in the orchestra.

"It's not a political project, but a third way. We think only that there's no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We want to learn to live together".