Strauss - Salome (Amsterdam, 2017)

Richard Strauss - Salome

Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam - 2017

Daniele Gatti, Ivo Van Hove, Malin Byström, Evgeny Nikitin, Lance Ryan, Doris Soffel, Peter Sonn, Hanna Hipp, James Creswell, Roger Smeets

Culturebox - June 2017

It's isn't often obvious to judge what play or opera you are looking at just from a view of the sets alone in an Ivo van Hove production, but the set for the one-act drama of Salome for the Dutch National Opera is unmistakable. It might not be in the obvious Biblical setting, but the tones, contrasts and the basic functional requirements for Strauss's opera, or indeed Wilde's play, are all there. A large frigid moon hangs over the scene where an elegant room bathed in red light set to the back of the stage, and at the front is terrace like a circus arena with a hole at the centre.

Whether it's modern or Biblical, the hole is always more than just an entrance to the cistern where Jokanaan, John the Baptist is imprisoned in Herod's palace. It's a place where Herod and Heriodas want to hide the witness who speaks out about their decadence. It's also a gaping maw of desire, a dark abyss that exerts an irresistible attraction to their daughter Salome, a young woman who has grown up in this house of corruption. Those undercurrents of forbidden lusts are there in Wilde's original 1891 work, a play that still has the capacity to shock. Salome is a play dealing with a taboo subject whose importance still hasn't been fully acknowledged I feel, darker and more daring than the image of corruption and decadence in 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray', both of which now take a back seat to the image of Oscar Wilde as wit represented more often on stage by his Victorian comedies and social satires.

Richard Strauss however clearly recognised the power of the work and its underlying attack on social conformity when he first saw the controversial play in German translation in its first European performances, the original (in French and in English) having been banned in England. It's an outright attack on the hypocrisy of outward respectability covering over darker impulses, and it chimes with a climate of Viennese turn of the century Freudian analysis and exploration of repressed self-destructive impulses and bloodlust festering under a layer of surface respectability; an impulse that would soon be unleashed in the horrors of the Great War.

It was also a time when music was looking for a new expression or outlet for these new modernist views. Strauss retains the post-Wagnerian lush lyrical romanticism and exoticism that reflects the elegant surface of social respectability, but found an extraordinary new musical language to probe beneath the surface, a darker and more violent edge that lies within its unsettling dissonance, sudden shifts of tone and juddering declines and suspensions. As one of the most daring pieces of music written to that point, changing the face of music for a century, or at least pointing the way towards it, it's not only in Strauss's opera that Wilde's Salome is more frequently presented, but it's in it that it really lives.

A staging of the work then should also be radical and have the capacity to shock, or at least find a way that represents the spirit of the original. On the surface, Ivo van Hove's production isn't the most radical, but in the direction of the performers at least, he does find a way of getting to the heart of what remains compelling and shocking about the work. It need hardly be said that the central tension in the drama is between Salome and Jokanaan. How Herod, Herodias and Narraboth interact with Salome is very much contributory to the direction the work does in and its overall impact, but the focus here is very much on the pivotal confrontation between Salome's worldview and the one that Jokanaan both represents and decries.

Salome is the offspring of this corrupt society that hides its true face. In her generation's twisted view of the world, she wants to bend it to satisfy her own desires and at the same time turn her power towards exposing the true nature of this hypocritical society and completely destroy it. Speaking out against that hypocrisy and indulging those desires. This small incidental drama of a Biblical nature sets out to do achieve nothing less than complete annihilation. As Wilde prophetically recognises the fate that would befall him later, such actions and indulgence comes at a cost and ultimately prove to be self-destructive. Somehow Strauss's music carried the same seed of self-destruction in it, a darker abyss that Strauss would soon turn away from himself.

It's asking a lot of a young singer like Malin Byström, but under Ivo van Hove's direction she largely succeeds. There's a youthful innocence there at first, with a dark dirty desire from an abused corrupted childhood that is straining to get out. Jokanaan provides that foil to set herself against and test where the limits lie. She's not sure at first what she wants, but becomes dangerously capable of pushing taboo boundaries. Rejected by Evgeny Nikitin's solemn restrained Jokanaan, Byström handles Salome's transition over from pleading princess to violent murderous intent brilliantly, but it's also underscored well and delivered with jarring intensity from Daniele Gatti in the DNO orchestra pit. She's a dangerous spark waiting to ignite and Herod and her mother supply all the fuel she needs to set the world on fire.

The mechanics of the stage directions are mostly adhered to in Van Hove's production, but with a few varying points of emphasis. The moon gets larger, Narraboth kills himself in full public view looking down at the abyss, not away in some dark corner. Projections play a role, as they often do in the Belgian director's productions. They come into play mainly during the Dance of the Seven Veils, which is danced by Byström, but enhanced to show her dancing not for Herod but Jokanaan. The prophet's head is not delivered on a silver platter, but Jokanaan himself, covered head to foot in gore in a shallow basin that Salome wallows in. He's not entirely dead either, or perhaps moves only in Salome's head, crawling to an illicit and bloody union. If there's any contemporary commentary in Ivo van Hove's production it eludes me, but as an image of how Wilde and Strauss incautiously explored the direction society was going in, the DNO production is immensely powerful.

Links: DNO, Culturebox

Wagner - Götterdämmerung

Richard Wagner - Götterdämmerung

Teatro alla Scalla, Milan - 2013

Daniel Barenboim, Guy Cassiers, Irène Theorin, Lance Ryan, Mikhail Petrenko, Gerd Grochowski, Johannes Martin Kränzle, Anna Samuil, Waltraud Meier, Margarita Nekrassova, Aga Mikolaj, Maria Gortsevskaya, Anna Lapkovskaja

Arthaus Musik - Blu-ray

While there are undoubtedly critical elements that it's important to get right in the earlier parts of the tetraology, it's Götterdämmerung that is ultimately the real test of any Ring cycle. After the years of hard work preparation that go into putting on a work of this scale, it has to come together meaningfullly at the end. It really wouldn't do if the epic end of the world finale of Götterdämmerung proved to be anticlimatic. The La Scala production is certainly unconventional in how it presents that all-important conclusion, but I don't think anyone could say that it is anything but bold and deeply impressive. That's not to say that the production here doesn't suffer from the same problems that face any company staging this demanding and exhausting work - principally in casting and singing - but it's a fitting conclusion nonetheless to a consistently impressive if not exactly revelatory new Ring cycle.

There is at least one important aspect to the La Scala Ring that has remained consistent and left no cause for concern about how the final segment would play out, and that's Daniel Barenboim's contribution. The sheer scale and ambition of Wagner's masterwork means that Götterdämmerung has to bring together all the earlier themes and leitmotifs the earlier works and bear the conceptual weight of the Ring as a whole. It's an enormous musical challenge, but Barenboim has been remarkably consistent and adaptable to Guy Cassiers' concept and he conducts the orchestra of La Scala through the varied tones of this particular work with a beautiful fluidity and a rising sense of urgency. It feels of a whole in a way that Götterdämmerung rarely does, consolidating those elements elaborated in the earlier parts into something much grander than their constituent parts. The whole point of Götterdämmerung is that all the little dramas and personal tragedies add up to something meaningful in the grander scheme of things, and in this production under Barenboim, that is exactly what is achieved.

There has also been a strong consistency to the look and feel of Guy Cassiers' production design, even if any deeper meaning or significance has been hard to determine. The source of certain imagery that has cropped up regularly throughout the cycle however is revealed here - in all its glory at the finale - to have been inspired by Jef Lambeaux's relief sculpture 'Les passions humaines'. This certainly gives substance to imagery and the ideas the director has been working with and leads to an immensely powerful conclusion, finding a strong visual concept that supports and illustrates Wagner's music and ideas, even if it doesn't add anything new to our understanding of the meaning of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Even with its mythological setting and its play on the affairs of Gods, Giants, Dwarfs and Nymphs, the Ring is indeed about "human passions". It's about stripping away those God-like ideals and revealing the complexity of those human passions that are no less capable of destroying the world. There's nothing in the greed of Alberich and Mime, in the marital discord between Wotan and Fricke, in the pride of Wotan and the despair he feels at the defiance of his will by his wayward daughter Brünnhilde that isn't representative of real human passions. There's an inevitability too that the great romantic forbidden love of Siegmund and Sieglinde and the actions of the great hero Siegfried will inspire great passions and lead humanity to new heights, but that ultimately even those will eventually come to a tragic end.

That at least is one aspect of what the Ring is about. The mythological aspect is also a vital component in Wagner's exploration of human passions in his search for a national identity and his expression of it through a new art form for a new nation. That's not neglected either in Guy Cassiers' direction with its spectacular visuals and projections, while the question of where the wielding of that newfound power will lead is to be found throughout in the mutilated body parts that merge together in Lambeaux's sculpture. It's a superb illustration of those themes on a number of levels, but in itself it's also a stunning state-of-the-art visual spectacle that has the look and conceptual qualities of an art installation. With Barenboim conducting the groundbreaking, genre-defining brilliance of Wagner in the full-flower of his genius, this is every bit as "momumental" as Götterdämmerung ought to be. 

It also reveals and emphasises however the weaknesses or the difficulties that are nearly impossible to overcome in a work of this scale and ambition. With the emphasis on the grander scale, the actual playing out of the drama with any kind of conviction is unfortunately, and perhaps necessarily, often neglected. In the context of Guy Cassiers' production, in a the set never looks naturalistic but merely an arrangement of stage props and "installations", there is scarcely any dramatic playing within it. That's understandable considering the exceptional demands placed on the singers in Götterdämmerung, but even so, there's an awful lot of standing and declaiming out to the theatre and very little interaction or dramatic interplay between the characters. Anna Samuil for example, although she sings well, only has eyes for the conductor and barely glances at her on-stage companions.

For Götterdämmerung sadly we lose Nina Stemme, who made such an impression as Brünnhilde in Die Walkure and Siegfried, but Irène Theorin proves to be a more than worthy replacement. She's perhaps not as strong across at the lower end of the range, but her top notes hit home in a performance that is full of fire. Just about passable in Siegfried, Lance Ryan's weaknesses are however cruelly exposed in the more open and testing environment of Götterdämmerung. His delivery is sometimes good, particularly in shorter phrasing, but any long notes waver around wildly. I'm not sure that there are many heldentenors around nowadays though who are capable of holding down this role, and at least he appears engaged in the role. Mikhail Petrenko sings Hagen well, although his delivery is a little too Russian in declamation. The other roles are more than competently played by a strong cast that includes Gerd Grochowski, Johannes Martin Kränzle (as a disturbingly distorted version of his already sinister Alberich), Waltraud Meier and Anna Samuil.

A four hour forty-five minute performance is a lot to get onto a single disk, even a BD50 Blu-ray, but the image and sound quality hold up alongside the fine presentation of the other releases in this cycle. Like those, the BD is region-free, with subtitles in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Korean. These can only be selected from the player remote or from the 'Pop-up' menu during playback. There's no synopsis in the booklet, just a fanciful essay that unconvincingly attempts to link Götterdämmerung with Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and with the Belgian Congo. It does however provide that useful information about Jef Lambeaux's 'Les passions humaines' sculpture, which might otherwise not be recognised. Its significance however can fully be felt in this powerful conclusion to an intriguing Ring cycle.

Wagner - Siegfried

Richard Wagner - Siegfried

Teatro alla Scala, Milan - 2012

Daniel Barenboim, Guy Cassiers, Lance Ryan, Peter Bronder, Terje Stensvold, Johannes Martin Kränzle, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Anna Larsson, Nina Stemme, Rinnat Moriah

Arthaus Musik - Blu-ray

Siegfried, the Second Day opera in La Scala's new Ring Cycle doesn't reveal any new angle on what has come before or expand on any identifiable concept, but even with variations in casting it remains consistent in look and feel and has the appropriate sense of the epic scale that is required for this part of Wagner's masterwork. It benefits however from another robust performance from the orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim, from some good singing performances and even one or two exceptional ones. When it comes to a work as challenging as Siegfried, you can't really ask for much more than that.

What is important about the work itself is the consolidation of the mythology outlined in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre and the musical language of those works coalescing into the heroic qualities of the character of Siegfried himself. The earlier parts of the production achieved this as well as can be expected, both in terms of the stage production and the musical direction. Equal attention was given to the darker nature of the events unwittingly set into motion by the greed and ambition of both Wotan and Alberich, as well as to the more noble and heroic sentiments of the Wälsung offspring and Brünnhilde. This was particularly evident in how Barenboim's dynamic direction of Die Walküre spanned the epic proportions of the story with a premonitory eye on what lies ahead.

The challenge of Siegfried is that the same dynamic needs to be contained solely within one single character and, almost impossibly, taken to an heroic new level. There aren't too many singers capable of fulfilling those demands across the intense four hours of the opera, and Lance Ryan isn't perfect, but he at least remains undaunted by the challenge and comes through the experience here relatively well. That doesn't mean that there are not challenges elsewhere or that the other roles are any less important to the work and to the Ring as a whole, and fortunately those are very well supported in the Scala's production, most notably in the vital casting of Nina Stemme, who reprises her Brünnhilde here towards a powerful conclusion.

Guy Cassiers' direction and stage design is however is also a crucial supporting element that brings a sense of wholeness and consistency to this Ring cycle. The production design remains fairly abstract, with little sense that there's any deeper meaning behind the concept, but it has a fine dark and otherworldly mythological quality that suits the presentation. It may not be naturalistic, but it creates the right impression. Mime's workshop here in Act I for example is a network of mesh boxes and platforms with a jagged wall of swords on both sides, with a wall of screens behind displaying complex swirls and patterns that evoke a world in turmoil, not yet fully formed.

The abstract simplicity of the staging is carried though to Act II and Act III, but less successfully. The trees in the forest in Act II are formed out of chains, which glisten impressively in the darkness and the moonlight. Fafner is a combination of projections - a seething mass of lava - and dancers. It's perhaps not the best way of staging this problematic scene, but it works relatively well, and at least returns the dying Fafner to his Giant form (well sung by Alexander Tsymbalyuk). Act III relies heavily on lights and projections, and does indeed create an impressive spectacle, but it's a fairly basic and static staging that gives Siegfried and Brünnhilde very little to work with. This is a failing throughout Cassiers' Ring cycle, with very little attention paid to the acting and stage direction and only Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's dancers providing any sense of flow and movement.

Lance Ryan's Siegfried, as suggested earlier, is a little bit imprecise and strained in pitch, but he has stamina and enough character to fill the role in the absence of any real acting direction. On occasion, such as his fine soliloquy outside Fafner's cave, he's often good or at least good enough, which in itself is no small matter. Peter Bronder is a superb Mime; singing well and full of character he pretty much carries Act I. The third Wotan/Wanderer in this Ring Cycle, Terje Stensvold is also good, but it's a static performance that shows little personality or emotional engagement. Johannes Martin Kränzle reprises his excellent Alberich from Das Rheingold, injecting the Dwarf with the necessary darker edge here. What really raises this Siegfried however and is worth waiting for is Nina Stemme's Brünnhilde. In Cassiers' vacant but spectacular production, Lance Ryan alone could never carry the weight of the third Act, but with Barenboim directing the musical force and Nina Stemme's beautiful rich tone giving it real emotional meaning, it gets there in some style.

The specifications of the Arthaus Blu-ray remain very fine for this series of Ring operas. Despite the darkness of the stage and the complex nature of the lighting and projections, the image is clear and stable. The audio tracks too present the singing and orchestral performance well in the PCM stereo and the DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 surround. Other than trailers for other works, there are no extra features on the disc. Subtitles are in German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Korean. The disc is region-free.

Berlioz - Les Troyens

Hector Berlioz - Les Troyens

Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia, 2009

Valery Gergiev, Carlus Padrissa, La Fura dels Baus, Lance Ryan, Daniela Barcellona, Elisabete Matos, Gabriele Viviani, Giorgio Giuseppini, Stephen Milling, Eric Cutler, Oksana Shilova, Zlata Bulicheva

Unitel Classica - C-Major

In principle, I’m all for the approach and the use of new technology that the experimental Catalan theatre group la Fura dels Baus bring to opera productions. In practice however, I can never get past the dumb ideas that they sometimes base their concepts upon. Although I have avoided it myself, a lot of people like their Valencia Ring cycle, and I can see how their approach to total music theatre would work with Wagner (a recent production of Tristan und Isolde was handled very appropriately) – much as it suits, in principle, the dramatic theatricality of Hector Berlioz (they’ve done La Damnation de Faust in the past). In practice however, I’m afraid it just doesn’t work for me in the case of Les Troyens.

I’ve seen Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte destroyed by la Fura’s “concept” of the split in the hemispheres of the brain that could be seen as marking the divisions between enlightenment and obscurantism in that opera taken to the extreme of putting inflatable brains on the stage with the singers hanging suspended over them – a wooly concept taken over-literally that added nothing to Mozart (I won’t even get into them removing the recitative and replacing it with poems read out by French actors). The same sense of facile concept not thought-through in any meaningful way and taken over-literally applies also to the approach taken in this Fura production of Les Troyens. Thinking of the notion of a Trojan Horse in modern computer technology parlance, they apply the concept to the computer network of ancient Troy being the victim of a computer virus. Seriously.

What genius (that would be Carlus Padrissa) though it would be a great idea to take the metaphor of the Trojan Horse virus back to its source and make it literal? The phrase, “Beware of Greeks or other outside hostile agencies bearing gifts of laptops carrying viruses that may compromise the integrity of your system”, doesn’t really have all that great a ring to it. Even if you were to find this feeble concept worthy of more than a minute’s consideration, there’s little to support it in this staging, which is an impressive spectacle certainly (you are always guaranteed that at least from la Fura dels Baus), but it’s also a complete hotchpotch of ideas and concepts that look a complete mess and don’t come across particularly well on video. There’s little sense of and physical location of Troy in the first part of the opera (presented here in its entirety as originally intended as a 5-act opera, rather than two operas), but I suppose in this version it is supposed to be a virtual world. Quite why the cast are dressed in sports padding, hockey helmets, Tae kwon-do outfits and what looks like Stormtroopers costumes from Star Wars is however anyone’s guess.

There are nonetheless impressively staged scenes mixing projections and live action – and inevitably, much wire work, hanging singers and acrobats from cables – which enhances the nightmarish visions of Cassandra and representing the death of Laco’on well in the first half. The idea of designing Carthage as a particle accelerator to represent the idea of a modern technical paradise in the second half of the opera (Acts III to IV) at least carries the concept through, the Trojans spreading their virus before leaving for an ideal (in Mars!) and it looks impressive – but really, does this bring anything meaningful out of the work, or is it just half-baked concepts and Cirque du Soleil spectacle? More often however, the spectacle doesn’t really come to life, failing to find anything meaningful to do in the ballet sequences – a boxing match? a fashion parade of warrior fetish costumes? – and it is actually quite static, particularly when compared to the active, inventive and always impressive production at the Châtelet.

Conducted by Valery Gergiev, the Valencia production at least remains hugely entertaining from a musical viewpoint, although I wouldn’t put it above the John Eliot Gardner version. The singing is mostly of a good standard, particularly the two female leads Elisabete Matos (Cassandra) and Daniela Barcellona (Dido), but again, personally, I prefer the performances of Anna Caterina Antonacci and Susan Graham in the Châtelet production. Gregory Kunde is however certainly a better Aeneas than Lance Ryan here, who I thought delivered everything in a dreary declamatory fashion and in a tone that becomes unpleasantly nasal on the high notes. His poor diction moreover painfully murders the French libretto.

The quality of the Blu-ray itself – the entire opera on a single BD50 disc – is reasonably good, the image as clear as it can be on a dark stage that uses a lot of back and front-screen projections. The audio tracks – PCM stereo and DTS 5.1 HD master audio – are both fine, if there is little to choose between them. Overall, if you don’t think too much about the terrible concept and are able to simply just enjoy the spectacle of the staging, this isn’t a bad version of Les Troyens, and it’s certainly well performed – but there is a much better version out there already on Blu-ray in terms of production values, spectacle and overall quality of the performance.