Gluck - Orfeo ed Euridice (Český Krumlov 2013 - Blu-ray)

Christoph Willibald Gluck - Orfeo ed Euridice

Český Krumlov Castle, 2013

Václav Luks, Ondřej Havelka, Bejun Mehta, Eva Liebau, Regula Mühlemann

Arthaus Musik - Blu-ray

They don't often put on opera in Český Krumlov Castle, which has one of the oldest working Baroque theatres in the world and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The restoration of the theatre was celebrated in 2011 with a performance and subsequent DVD/BD release of Domenico Scarlatti's Dove è Amore è Gelosia. Hardly an important or great work, it was an entertaining opera buffa, more notable for its historical and rarity interest as the first work written to be performed in the original theatre, but it gained considerably from the authentic Baroque presentation in its original setting.

I don't know if Gluck has any historical connection with Český Krumlov castle, but in the 300th year of the composer's birth, it's a fine place to re-examine one of the most important works in the entire opera repertoire in hopefully a more authentic light. With Václav Luks conducting the period Collegium 1704 orchestra, a traditionally-informed stage production lit only by wax candles and countertenor Bejun Mehta as Orpheus, an alto-castrato role more often performed by a mezzo-soprano, this Orfeo ed Euridice is undoubtedly closer to the original than most other productions. There are however a few caveats that can be given about the nature of the film itself.

Primarily, this production of Orfeo ed Euridice is shot as a film rather than a concert, which does take away somewhat from the charm of seeing it performed in a Baroque theatre. It's not filmed in the traditional manner of a live theatre performance, but it is nonetheless clearly a live performance, shot in seven days over a number of takes, with perhaps a small amount of overdubs. That's fine, and it's a good account of the work that matches the stripped-back reformist nature of the work with a reduced period orchestra. The casting is also good with Bejun Mehta's sweet countertenor giving this Orpheus a suitably lyrical quality, Eva Liebau a strong Eurydice and Regula Mühlemann a bright Amore.

This works wonderfully when its performed in Act I on the stage of the Baroque theatre where Orpheus mourns the death of Eurydice who is laid out on a marble catafalque. It's old-style theatre, with painted forests to the wings and a sea at the back with old-fashioned pulley-operated rolling sea effects. Amore too descends in an authentically shaky manner on a mechanical cloud to give Orpheus a chance to bring his beloved back to the land of the living. Unfortunately, once Orpheus descends through the trapdoor to the Underworld, much of the remainder of the performance takes place in the wider setting of the backstage of the theatre and the castle caverns and - other than the Elysium scene - not on the stage at all.

The locations backstage and in the wings are at least well used in this respect, retaining the candlelight illuminations, giving the underworld a suitably eerie and otherworldly appearance. Even here, with wooden beams and stone staircases there are no anachronisms, although you would suspect that the Furies here might be familiar with the "zombie shuffle" choreography of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' video. There are some clever touches like the play of shadows embracing and holding hands as Orpheus leads Eurydice out of the underworld that don't need to rely on special effects. The idea is nice, playing on the magic of the theatre experience and how it extends beyond the stage and takes on a life of its own, but I did find that the 'film' concept and editing distracted from the power of the work itself.

Musically however, it sounds wonderful, the theatre creating a natural acoustic reverb rather than an amplified sound. It's not the clean, precise HD audio you might be used to, but there's no big orchestra here and neither should there be. There is rather a harder edged gut string pluck and rhythm that isn't quite so smooth, and heard this way it does present the opera in a new light. The original 1762 Vienna edition of the work has however been cut back slightly with most of the ballets shortened or excised entirely. The Act III, Scene 3 dances, for example, are all missing here. I suspect that the decision was made for artistic reasons (Bejun Mehta is credited also as Artistic Advisor here), since they get in the way of the clear narrative flow that is needed more for the film than a stage production, but such cuts aren't unusual.

On Blu-ray, this looks very fine indeed. There's a slightly softer edge to the image on account of it being filmed by candlelight, but it's clear and detailed with lovely tones and textures. The audio mixes are PCM stereo and DTS HD-master Audio 5.0. The mix is bright but there's a pleasant naturalness to the sound. The balance between the voices and the orchestra is different in the two mixes, the surround track seeming to make more use of reverb and give prominence to the voices, while the stereo track is more direct and evenly balanced. There are no extras on the BD25 region-free disc, but the booklet gives some background on how the film was made and the history of the Baroque theatre. There's no synopsis provided, but the plot of Orfeo ed Euridice is simplicity itself. Subtitles are in Italian, English, German, French, Spanish and Korean.

Wagner - Parsifal

Richard Wagner - Parsifal

Salzburg Easter Festival, 2013

Christian Thielemann, Michael Schulz, Johan Botha, Michaela Schuster, Wolfgang Koch, Stephen Milling, Milcho Borovinov, Eva Liebau

Deutsche Grammaphon - Blu-ray

The Salzburg Easter Festival production of Wagner's most enigmatic work is not the most attractive you've ever seen, nor is Michael Schulz's strange take on the work particularly obvious in its intentions. Even with the use of actors playing doubles of the main characters, their personalities and motivations remain for the most part remote, flat, mysterious and largely lifeless. If the production is difficult to fathom, it does nonetheless hold close to the mood and meaning of Parsifal. The real insights, innovations and illuminations on the work here however are almost entirely on the musical side. This is very much Christian Thielemann's show, which means that it may not meet the expectations we have of Parsifal, but it is never less than a thoughtful, fascinating and revealing exploration of this remarkable work.

Since there's not much in the way of a narrative line to follow, there's consequently a lot of room in Parsifal for a director to find ways to explore and express its themes, its symbolism and its philosophy. There's no indication here then in Michael Schulz's production of Monsalvat existing in any earthly location, nor of the Holy Grail being protected by any traditional kind of medieval knights. This Parsifal takes place in abstraction, Monsalvat in Act I being a mostly bare stage with plastic tubes, almost glaringly lit with the knights wearing what looks like white radiation suits. Klingsor's kingdom in Act II is just as brightly lit and bare, with broken statues of dead ancient Gods scattered around, while Monsalvat on Parsifal's return in Act III is a barren frozen waste, with bodies lying on representations of shards of ice and a few snarling wolf-like creatures at the sides.

It's a fairly lifeless production, with no sense of meaning, and - critically for this particular work - little in the way of mood or atmosphere. Part of that could be down to the nature of the film recording, the lighting boosted to ensure pinpoint detail in the High Definition image, but in the process it almost completely sucks any theatrical ambience out of the performance. The DG recording of the Vienna Anna Bolena, also directed by Brian Large, similarly suffered from the same over-brightness of the image. I usually at least find Large a solid and reliable television director, but in this respect and in the camera work he fails to do justice to the stage presentation here. There's no rhythm or approach consistent with the work and the cameras often miss the action or look to the wrong characters when there are both singers and actors on the stage. It all feels very static, forced and artificial, more like an art installation or a piece of performance art.

While the appearance might be a little unsettling, unfamiliar and alienating, it's clear nonetheless that the production addresses many of the themes in Parsifal. There are five young boys and then five young men who shadow Parsifal; a bruised and battered Jesus who appears to be a physical representation of Kundry's curse; and a dwarf actor who represents the evil of Klingsor (who is sung moreover for extra significance here by the same singer who plays Amfortas). Two almost naked dancers meanwhile clinging to Amfortas are credited as Nike here may be representations of the pain that clings to him in his eternal torment. Whatever the meaning, there are clear references here to youth and innocence, age and experience, death and rebirth, suffering and redemption, and together with the musical expression, the meaning in this imagery does come through in those key moments with immense power.

Much more significant and much more interesting in the expression of the work however is Christian Thielemann's musical direction. Whether Parsifal can work as effectively outside of the very specific design of the Bayreuth stage that it was written for is debatable, but Thielemann's most unusual approach attempts to redress the balance of the instruments for the very different acoustics of the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg, and it really is an extraordinary account of the work. You really have never heard a Parsifal like this. Between the strangeness of the production and the unfamiliarity of the sound, it's hard to know what is going on in Act I, but the two come together to powerful effect at the conclusion of the act that they have clearly been building towards.

Act II however reveals the true nature and the merits of the approach. This is a Parsifal delivered with delicacy and sensitivity, the reduced orchestration not only working for the requirements of the auditorium and the singers, but finding another way to deliver the extraordinary beauty of the compositional elements so that they reveal the true brilliance of the work. Act II might appear too delicate then for the dark content and drama of Parsifal's encounter with Klingsor and Kundry, floating aimlessly and almost evaporating, but Thielemann's conducting of the orchestra finds the warmth and Romanticism within the work and still commands tremendous force. Act III is still familiar but in an entirely new way. Nothing sounds like a routine account of the work, but every note is carefully delineated, measured, weighted and balanced. It's extraordinary, the delicacy actually revealing even greater force of expression in this most enigmatic and unique of musical works.

It's not just a matter of toning down the orchestration to prevent it overwhelming the singers either. All of these singers here are capable of singing with considerably more strength, but the choice seems to have deliberately made to allow them to sing the words softly, sweetly and soothingly, avoiding any sense of declamation. The sweet tones of Johan Botha are perfect for this Parsifal then, but he moves around awkwardly and the suit is most unflattering for his very large frame. Michaela Schuster is not a typical Kundry either and difficult to fathom, but her interaction with her own "personal Jesus" and with the other characters can be utterly shattering in its intensity. Wolfgang Koch has a very difficult task by taking Amfortas and Klingsor as a dual role and does tremendously well. Stephen Milling's soft cooing Gurnemanz lacks the traditional authority and wisdom, but his beautiful timbre and the staging really does bring another dimension out of the character.

It's not how you expect to hear Parsifal then, but it is surprisingly effective. The abstraction of the production design often makes it harder to relate to the characters, or at least difficult to see them in their traditional roles, but each act seems to be paced quite deliberately for effect, building in intensity, leading towards moments of almost transcendent release, and when it gets to those moments, the impact is fully achieved. That's largely down to Christian Thielemann, and his contribution and that of the Dresden Staatskapelle orchestra is fully recognised at the curtain call with the orchestra even invited onto the stage. For the musical interpretation alone this Parsifal a very worthwhile experience, but that doesn't mean that it should be separated from the stage presentation, which may be unusual but exercises a strange fascination of its own.

The High Definition presentation of the opera on Blu-ray from Decca is also exceptionally good. I don't think the production is well served by the lighting or the filming, but the image quality is flawless and the audio tracks - LPCM stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.0 - are superb at capturing the warmth and detail of the orchestration and the singing. There are no extra features on the disc, but there's a synopsis and an essay in the enclosed booklet. Subtitles are in German, English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande

Claude Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande

Opernhaus Zürich, 2004

Franz Welser-Möst, Sven-Eric Bechtolf, Rodney Gilfry, Isabel Rey, Michael Volle, László Polgár, Cornelia Kallisch, Eva Liebau, Guido Götzen

Arthaus Musik

The 2004 Zurich production of Pelléas et Mélisande is a curious one, but then Debussy's only complete opera is a strange and enigmatic work.  It's a work that is founded on ambience and ambiguity, as much in the libretto - Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist drama brought over almost intact - as in the haunting qualities of Debussy's music, which do not underscore or emphasise specific emotions in the traditional manner as much as suggest otherworldly mood and mystery in the hidden depths that lie within it.  The production design consequently also goes for a non-specific, otherworldly location within a snow-bound world that seems to work well with Debussy's floating lines, the coldness and detachment of the expressions, as well as the enclosed intimacy and oppressiveness of the subconscious passions that underlie them.

By far the strangest element of Sven-Eric Bechtolf's production however is the use of life-size dummies, looking uncannily like the characters themselves, which are carried around by them or maintain a presence throughout the performance.  Not only are these dummies carried around, sometimes propelled around the stage in wheelchairs, but the characters interact more with the dummies than the actual people they represent.  The key to this, of course, is that they are indeed representational and symbolic - the word symbolism deriving from a separation into halves between the real and the representational - and this feels entirely appropriate within an opera that, derived from a symbolist drama, is about much more than the surface interaction between the characters.  The idea emphasises not only a failure to connect meaningfully with the other characters, but that they even suffer from a sense of detachment from their own sentiments and feelings.

This is expressed wonderfully within the drama itself in a number of enigmatic scenes that rely on creating resonances and sensations, and Debussy adds to the growing sense of unease through his unsettling scoring and linking musical interludes.  Rolf Glittenberg's set designs for the Zurich production, although strange, create an equally unsettling and ambiguous atmosphere that works well with the nature of the work, while even the strange marbled stone suits worn by the inhabitants of the royal castle (but not Mélisande) raise questions or create impressions about their inner nature.

The minimalism, the symbolism and the obsessive repetition, all emphasised in this production through the division between the disembodied figures and their mannequins, seems to reflect a similar haunted quality to the one in Robert Wilson's distinctive production of this opera, where the characters seem to be ghostly figures acting out roles and gestures that have been played out many times before, perhaps at the instigation of Golaud - or even obsessively inside his own head - though his inability to discover, or recognise "the truth".  There's a fatalistic quality in the work that bears out this idea, Arkel in particular for example mentioning, at the news of Golaud's marriage to Mélisande - the woman with no past - that "we only ever see the reverse side of destiny, the reverse even of our own", that Golaud "knows his future better than I", and that "perhaps nothing that happens is meaningless".  These figures all seem to be searching for meaning and significance in objects, in rings, in towers (a Citroen car here), in a golden ball, and even in the indecipherable blank expressions of dummies.  By the end they seem to be no nearer to an answer and the eternal mystery of Pelléas et Mélisande persists.

The production design won't be to everyone's taste, but this is a good all-round performance of the opera.  Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Zurich orchestra marvellously through the beautiful floating score with a mood and tempo that matches the ambience of the snow-smothered production and the fluid revolutions of the set.  The singing and the performances are excellent, particularly Rodney Gilfry, who seems to delve deeply into the character as Pelléas, but Isabel Rey is also a fine Mélisande, Michael Volle a particularly tormented Golaud, bringing a remarkable intensity and much needed dynamic to the work, and László Polgár brings deep beautiful tones, to a dignified but somewhat opaque Arkel.

The Blu-ray release from Arthaus is a repackage of the previous TDK release, retaining even the label on the disc itself and the original TDK menus.  The HD picture quality is very good, the sound well distributed with a cool tone on the PCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 7.1 mixes.  There are no extra features on the disc itself, which is region-free.  Subtitles are in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

Halévy - Clari

Jacques Fromental Halévy - Clari

Opernhaus Zürich, 2008

Adam Fischer, Moshe Leiser & Patrice Caurier, Cecilia Bartoli, John Osborn, Eva Liebau, Oliver Widmar, Giuseppe Scorsin, Carlos Chausson, Stefania Kaluza

Decca - DVD

It’s very rare to see any work by Jacques Fromental Halévy performed nowadays, and he may indeed be an unjustly neglected composer, but discovered by Cecilia Bartoli while exploring the repertoire of the famous Rossinian mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran, this early work, Clari from 1828, composed to allow her to demonstrate her extraordinary range, is certainly one of his most obscure and forgotten works by the composer. Respectfully played with period instruments by the Zurich La Scintilla orchestra under the baton of Adam Fischer, treated to a fresh production from Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier to give some character to a dreary and uneventful plot, and with Bartoli demonstrating her wonderful vocal range, Zurich Opera certainly give the opera a fair shot, but whether Clari is an opera that merits such treatment is debatable, and the overall feeling is that it really wouldn’t have been such a great loss if it had remained buried.

Composed for an Italian libretto, before Halévy’s more famous, or at least more celebrated, French opéra comique work, Clari is an opera semiseria, which doesn’t mean that it’s only half-serious and plays its silly plot out with tongue firmly in cheek (although the production half-heartedly and perhaps out of necessity plays it that way). Rather, it’s a kind of mixture of opera seria (long after it had gone out of fashion even in 1828) and bel canto, full of long arias pondering internalised emotions expressed with extravagant coloratura in the da capo singing. This is fine if an opera has an involving plot and strong characterisation that can bear the weight of all the deep expressions of guilt and shame that are agonised over in Clari, but the story is not so much ludicrous as flat and pedestrian.

It involves a young peasant girl, Clari, who leaves her family in the provinces and runs off with a rich Duke in search of wealth, a better life and, most importantly love – or at least at the bare minimum, marriage. The Duke however hasn’t fulfilled his promises in this respect – to the great shame of her parents – and when he starts referring to Clari as his cousin, the young woman is further dismayed with the situation she is in. When the Duke’s servants Germano, Bettina and Luca put on a play for Clari before assembled guests at a birthday party in her honour, the story so resembles her own situation that Clari – believing it to be real (!) – faints out of shame. That’s about as far as any plot goes in Act I. Act II has each of the characters agonise over the situation until Clari eventually recovers from the shock and decides she has to run away, returning to her home in the country to try to gain the forgiveness of her parents in Act III.

As far as dramatic and emotional content, that’s about as far as it goes. One doesn’t necessarily expect a complex or credible plot in a bel canto opera, but really, the libretto, by Pietro Giannone, is pretty banal and sparseness of the plot and hollowness of the emotional charge scarcely merits all the moaning and wailing about wanting to die of the shame and guilt of it all that is expressed at length in the arias. None of it feels sincere, although it not for want of trying on the part of the performers or the stage direction team. Leiser and Caurier go for a non-specific relatively modern time period, glitzy and colourful with big props in the style of Richard Jones, adding humorous and self-knowing little touches, but none of it is enough to breathe any life into this corpse of an opera, and their efforts consequently feel leaden and fall flat.

The Zurich audience don’t seem to be sure what to make of it either, laughing politely at one or two places, but are clearly bewildered about what to make of the character of Clari herself or the amount of effort and technique Cecilia Bartoli expends on the empty phrases of the libretto, all in the vain attempt to make her character come to life. It’s only in Act III that they belatedly decide to applaud the efforts of John Osborn’s Duke and give an enthusiastic and deserved ovation for Bartoli – but one feels they might have mistaken her gargantuan efforts as signaling the end of the opera a little before its time. Eva Liebau as Bettina and Carlos Chausson as Clari’s father also make notable contributions, but it’s hard to take their roles seriously or indeed “semiseriously”.

Released on DVD only as a 2-disc set, the colourful qualities of the staging suffer a little from the lack of a High Definition presentation. The image looks reasonably well in the brighter sequences, but it’s a little murkier in the scenes at the end of Act II and start of Act III. Perhaps being spoilt by DTS HD-Master Audio mixes, the quality of the audio lacks precision of tone, particularly on the lower frequencies, but it’s actually not bad on either mix, although I think the LPCM Stereo wins out over the DTS 5.1 Surround. There are no extra features on the DVD set, but there is a worthwhile booklet enclosed which includes an interview with Bartoli, an introduction to the work, productions notes, a synopsis and even a photo-novella of the opera.