Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - The Tale of Tsar Saltan
La Monnaie-De Munt, 2019
Alain Altinoglu, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Svetlana Aksenova, Bogdan Volkov, Olga Kulchynska, Ante Jerkunica, Stine Marie Fischer, Bernarda Bobro, Carole Wilson, Vasily Gorshkov, Alexander Vassiliev, Nicky Spence, Alexander Kravets
La Monnaie steaming - June 2019
The Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov has lately been viewing opera in the context of therapy, in productions like Carmen, Pelléas et Mélisande and Les Troyens, the intention always clearly to delve more deeply into the works and explore their underlying themes. The results have been to varying levels of success and suitability for their subjects, but with Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tale of Tsar Saltan, the director is on much more familiar ground, in Russian opera where some of his best work has been achieved.
The idea of exploring the underlying psychology of works actually has a two-fold purpose, perhaps even three in the case of The Tale of Tsar Saltan. One is to bring less familiar Russian classics to the attention of a modern western audience who may be less enamoured of fairy-tales and make them accessible. The second is indeed to delve into the subtext of the fairy tale, and - when considered as being a technique used widely by this director - the third is to show perhaps that opera is indeed a kind of therapy in its own right, reaching out and communicating on a non-verbal level through music and dramatic subtext.
In the La Monnaie production of The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Dmitri Tcherniakov adds a modern-day real-world framing device around the fairy tale that doesn't so much put the magical fantasy at a distance as bring us closer to it. (This is something that Romeo Castellucci has also been doing to powerful effect in the mythology of Orphée et Eurydice and the monumentally fantastical The Magic Flute). Here the fairy story is told to a young boy with autism. He has never seen his father and doesn't understand why his parents are estranged, so his mother tells him The Tale of Tsar Saltan, finding that the only way of reaching him is through the toy soldiers and magical tales that so enchant him, hoping to communicate the truth through the fable, casting herself as the tsarina.
The characteristics of Pushkin's fairy tale are familiar, his mother suffering a kind of Cinderella upbringing, abused by her mother and two wicked sisters. When they are presented to the tsar who is looking for a bride her sisters can only promise extravagant weddings while the youngest girl - a humble seamstress - promises she can deliver a worthy heir for the tsar. And becoming tsarina she does, but on the birth of the child her disgruntled sisters intercept the messenger and the tsar is informed that that the tsarina has given birth to a monster. To the astonishment of the villagers on this occasion for happiness and celebration, a message returns from the tsar saying that his wife and child should be thrown into the sea in a barrel.
Mythology and fairy tales traditionally have an important role to play in putting an important message across to a wide audience in a way that can endure for centuries, and opera can be seen to fulfil the same function. More than just musical drama for entertainment, and certainly more than being a singing contest to debate over who sings roles best, opera at its best and most meaningful - like Die Zauberflöte cited above - communicates something essential about our understanding of the world and of humanity's place within it, along with all the joys and troubles that come with it.
Tcherniakov's production of Tsar Saltan is a way of finding a route back to the underlying meaning of the work and to some extent necessarily reinterpreting it for a new age. The fairy tale and the opera are essentially about the loss of innocence of a child struggling to come to terms with the reality of the world. The realisation that it can be cruel, unfair and unjust needs to be reconciled with an awareness that life itself is a miracle, and that it can still be possible to find good within it. Using an autistic child allows the audience a way of seeing the 'magic' in the fairy tale of existence again.
In fact watching the opera in this way the concept is so good and the performances so impressive that it feels completely natural and authentic, as if this is the only way to see the opera and you couldn't imagine it being done any differently. And it's hard to imagine a more traditional representation being as profoundly moving as the progression and resolution that Tcherniakov devises for it, which - very much in line with truth and reality - doesn't mean that there is necessarily a happy ending to the fairy tale, much as one might wish for it.
There's much more that needs to be done to make this more than just a clever idea and Tcherniakov's production design is perfectly up to the task. It starts with a plain wood panelling background, mother and child playing together enveloped in a dull reality. As the story is related, the narrative magic exerts its influence and begins to take over, first populated by characters in cross-hatched puffy costumes (similar to David Hockney's designs for the famous Glyndebourne production of A Rake's Progress), with sketchy animation gradually drawing the boy/Gvidon into the swan's womb-like world of security. The blending and balance of ugly reality with animated magical fantasy is masterful.
There are of course other benefits to be gained from Dmitri Tcherniakov introducing a work well-known only in Russia in such an effective manner to western Europe, and primarily that's permitting us to enjoy Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's beautiful orchestration and melodic flair - the Flight of the Bumblebee originating from this work - perfectly attuned to the dramatic and emotional core of the story, overflowing with glorious choruses. These are all very much essential Russian opera characteristics of course and brought out marvellously by Alain Altinoglu conducting the orchestra of La Monnaie.
Just as wondrous are the singing performances since Rimsky-Korsakov's vocal writing can be underestimated in favour of his considerable fame as an orchestrator. Svetlana Aksenova as the mother/tsarina and Bogdan Volkov as the boy/Gvidon are just incredible with the kind of Russian voices needed here; strong in delivery, but filled with warmth and passion and a little bit of an edge of bordering on despair. This is another outstanding, imaginative production from Tcherniakov, Altinoglu and La Monnaie, every element working perfectly in service of the opera, recognising the extraordinary ability of the medium to communicate on so many levels, and using them all brilliantly.
Links: La Monnaie-De Munt
Giacomo Puccini - Tosca
Den Norske Opera, Oslo - 2017
Karl-Heinz Steffens, Calixto Bieito, Svetlana Aksenova, Daniel Johansson, Claudio Sgura, Jens-Erik Aasbø, Pietro Simone, Ludvig Lindström, Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy, Aksel Johannes Skramstad Rykkvin
Opera Platform
One of the criticisms that can perhaps be legitimately be made against Tosca is that it is indeed little more than a cheap violent thriller, or a "shabby little shocker" as Joseph Kerman once characterised it, a term that it now wears as a badge of honour. Kerman's other criticisms against it for breaking the so-called rules of opera composition are rather more dubious subjective opinions based on a personal interpretation of what opera should be, but Tosca certainly is a dark, violent piece of verismo whose shock value threatens to submerge any human qualities that might be found in the opera, if indeed you think there are any. You could pretty much say the same about Calixto Bieito's production of Tosca for Den Norske Opera's production in Oslo.
Bieito's rather bleak outlook on the opera then might well be the only really valid way of approaching this work. To take it seriously as a historical piece or even as a strictly realist piece of drama, it's obviously absurd and quite overblown. Whether Tosca has any real commentary to make on historical events or whether it has any insightful point to make about ordinary people caught up in a political nightmare is doubtful. It's safer to think of Tosca as purely a political thriller and nothing more, and on that basis it is undoubtedly a thoroughly effective piece.
Similar criticisms could be made about Puccini's final unfinished opera Turandot, which is a work that seems perversely cruel and rather heavily scored out of all proportion to the opera's fairy-tale setting, and Calixto Bieito likewise focussed on the sinister authoritarian undercurrent that runs through that work in his production of it. Bieito's Tosca is more or less a companion piece to that Turandot, a study in the corruption and brutality of totalitarian rule that crushes individual freedom, going further to explore the repression of the arts within such a regime and the duty of the artist to speak out against it.
"Your silence will not protect you", states the placard wielded by political prisoner and fugitive Angelotti before the Oslo production of Tosca starts, and more so than in Bieito's Turandot where a similar warning was made about the silencing of dissent by artists who dared speak out against a cruel regime, Tosca does indeed deal with two artists - the opera singer Tosca and the artist Cavaradossi - who find themselves forced to take a stance against a cruel regime and address the real issues of its corrupt activities when those issues are brought to their door.
Director Calixto Bieito does his best to make that situation as shocking and as sinister as it is possible to make it on a stage and within this particular work. The audience are subjected to an onslaught of violence for the full three acts of the opera, with no interval to provide a breathing space. It's somewhat stylised and representational, but it still carries the requisite shock value. The Madonna painted by Cavaradossi is not a painting but a real woman, stripped naked, her robe held out as a 'fan' for Tosca to discover. Cavaradossi is brutally tortured on-stage, Bieito makes use of dwarfs in school uniforms for henchmen, and even introduces a son for Scarpia, another schoolboy who licks lasciviously on a lollypop. There's no innocence to be found anywhere here.
Least of all in Scarpia. And, as you might expect, Bieito makes him as vile a character as possible, pawing over Floria Tosca and another woman who we presume is his wife, and Claudio Sgura does his best to make him as repugnant as possible. That's to be expected, but Bieito also seems to want to explore how this corruption also extends to destroy the purity of the artist and how this might even be a necessary thing. This Floria Tosca goes rather further than most before killing Scarpia (bizarrely with his own spectacles rather than a knife) and is fired up by the experience. As Cavaradossi observes those "sweet hands pure and gentle" have "dealt out death".
For Bieito's emphasis to work - if it is even possible to truly depict the horror of a totalitarian state on a live theatre stage and in an opera like Tosca - it needs a Tosca who can respond to it on those terms, reacting to the violation of her integrity with horror and then come to terms with opposing it, even if that endeavour in Puccini's opera is ultimately futile. That, on top of the kind of the role's singing demands is a lot to ask of any soprano, and Svetlana Aksenova struggles somewhat. Aksenova doesn't have quite a big enough voice or personality to carry such a role, but sings well nonetheless. Her acting performance however lacks conviction to such an extent that when Scarpia says his is fired up by the new woman who has explosively adopted a new role he has never seen before, you do wonder what he's talking about.
Aksenova however does come more into the part in Act III when the trauma of the experience seems to tell on Tosca, and it's in this act that the effectiveness of Bieito's direction of the work becomes evident in its relationship with the music. You can't really put the true violence of Tosca on the stage; it's too brutal and it needs the medium of music to translate it. Karl-Heinz Steffens's conducting is a bit light in places when you need more forceful hand and a greater dynamic between the verismo violence and the more idealised human sentiments, such as those sung so beautifully by Daniel Johansson in Cavaradossi's 'E lucevan le stelle'. Half measures won't do and I don't think you can overstate in Tosca; the contrast needs to be there to show the force with which those gentle human sentiments will inevitably be crushed.
Puccini shows no mercy for any of his characters and neither does Bieito. The lighting is harsh permitting no soft colours, the stark bright spotlights picking out the characters in the darkness and throwing shadows. There is no place to run and no place to hide on Susanne Gschwender's sets. Nor is there a place to jump. You can hardly expect Bieito to be as crude as actually having Tosca leap from the Castel Sant' Angelo, but whether it's an acknowledgement that there's only so far you can push such 'realism' before it becomes sentimental or whether the director believes that both Tosca and Cavaradossi have to live at least long enough to acknowledge their actions, Bieto spares them the final famous denouement, but not their torment. Ultimately however, it's Puccini's extraordinary building and contrasting of the musical forces that determines their fate and Bieito follows it to its appropriately devastating conclusion.
Links: Den Norske Opera, Opera Platform
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - The Queen of Spades
Dutch National Opera, 2016
Mariss Jansons, Stefan Herheim, Misha Didyk, Alexey Markov, Vladimir Stoyanov, Andrei Popov, Andrii Goniukov, Mikhail Makarov, Anatoli Sivko, Larissa Diadkova, Svetlana Aksenova, Anna Goryachova, Olga Savova, Maria Fiselier, Pelageya Kurennaya, Morschi Franz, Christiaan Kuyvenhoven
The Opera Platform - July 2016
Never one to take an opera libretto on face value, Stefan Herheim's production of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades for the Dutch National Opera is another of his composer portrait productions. Herheim is a director who likes to explore a composer's life and times and see how they inform the works they create, and consideration of Tchaikovsky's life, his passions and particularly his repressed homosexuality, make those great works all the more fascinating. Perhaps not so much for anyone less familiar with the composer or someone just wants to see a more straightforward account of Pushkin's tale.
Herheim's previous work at the DNO with Tchaikovsky led to the creation of a Eugene Onegin that presented a kaleidoscopic view of Russian culture and history. As much as Tchaikovsky's intimate love story might have seemed inappropriate for such a grand treatment, it did nonetheless successfully tap into deeper undercurrents of the Russian nature of the work and open up an entirely new perspective on it. The Queen of Spades, by way of contrast, draws back on the Russian nature of the work towards the more intimate and personal, making a direct link between Hermann's mad passions and those of the composer himself.
Herheim might have sidelined Wagner to each of the Act Preludes of his Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg in his previous (unimaginative) composer portrait, but it's clear that Tchaikovsky himself is going to be firmly at the centre of the DNO's The Queen of Spades. The opening scene before the overture shows a man who looks very like Tchaikovsky - but who later principally plays the part of a Yeletsky as an older man - paying a soldier who he has just given a blow-job, a soldier who turns out to be Hermann. It's an image that on the surface has nothing to do with the Queen of Spades and is clearly designed to shock, but it's not without justification for the examination of secret and illicit passions that drive much of the work.
Fired with invigoration and some measure of shame, Tchaikovsky is immediately inspired to pour his feelings into his music, making for the piano with pen and paper to hand to dash down the overture and the opening scene of the Queen of Spades. He then inserts himself into the opera as Yeletsky, who is engaged to marry Liza. A reference to Tchaikovsky's own failed attempt at marriage, Yeletsky's sincere and dignified approaches and his later protestations of love as a deep friendship are also significant. "Tchaikovsky" also flees from Liza's desire to believe in Hermann's sincerity in the bridge scene (which evidently doesn't take place on a bridge). All of this can be seen to mirror in some respects the inappropriateness and unviability of Tchaikovsky's own marriage, particularly as we know from the first scene that Tchaikovsky/Yeletsky's inclinations lean another way.
Thereafter it is impossible not to view Yeletsky as anything else but a surrogate for Tchaikovsky, but we are also invited by Herheim to see Tchaikovsky in Liza's friend Pauline and in other characters. It's as if Tchaikovsky has poured various aspects of his own personality into all the characters in the opera, which is a valid way of looking at art even if it doesn't really take the motivations of the original author Pushkin into consideration. It also tends to become complicated when you try to fit Hermann into the equation. As the person whose mad passions are central to the work, it would seem more obvious to associate Hermann with the composer, but Herheim doesn't always do the obvious.
That's because, to judge by the music and the composition of the opera, Tchaikovsky is evidently a lot more complex a personality than Hermann is in the Queen of Spades. There's a lot of indulgence on the part of Tchaikovsky in the musical arrangements of this work, but these are traits that can also be played upon to good effect, particularly in the second Act with its Pastorale and the grand fanfares to welcome the arrival of Catherine the Great. Herheim seems to poke fun at such extravagances, but at the same time he tries to make it relevant to who Tchaikovsky is, or might be, as the man behind the music. This culminates with Hermann flouncing in as 'the Queen' however, which is more camp than psychological - but then there's always a thin line there where Herheim is concerned. And perhaps Tchaikovsky too.
The mirroring of Tchaikovsky with every element of The Queen of Spades is problematic, but Herheim is not attempting a full deconstruction or psychoanalytical reading of the opera. If you want to you can consider Hermann's obsessive behaviour on a more generalised level as being symptomatic of a pathology that develops when secrets are kept hidden, you could take that from it. Rather than adding layers by including Tchaikovsky himself in the drama, it does seem more of a case of stripping the work back to its bones and exploring the emotions that underlie it.
Much like his production of Eugene Onegin, unless you are very familiar with Tchaikovsky and already know the story of the Queen of Spades, you're not going to get much out of this. Even if you do manage to pick up and piece together the elements that Herheim introduced, the value of those speculative fantasies into Tchaikovsky's motivations are scarcely any more valuable than the work (and Pushkin's work) itself. I suspect that most people would prefer to just see the story told well rather than have all these confusing and contradictory elements weighing it down. Fortunately, the production has much more to offer.
As it often is with Herheim, the production design is extravagantly beautiful. The action takes place mostly in a single drawing room that converts into a ballroom as required - although if you are less literal minded, you could see it as taking place entirely within Tchaikovsky's own mind, which obviously it does on one level. Whichever way you look at it, Philipp Fürhofer's set and costume design is just magnificent, the lighting immaculate in terms of mood as well as simply illuminating the set to look its best. Somehow, the DNO seem to have managed to persuade Mariss Jansons to work with Stefan Herheim again, despite his evident confusion (seen in the behind the scenes feature on the DVD release) over what the director was trying to achieve in their previous collaboration on Eugene Onegin. Jansons; conducting of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra through Tchaikovsky's rich score is just ravishing in its attention to the mood, to the little orchestral flourishes and to the dramatic intent of the work. This is really another wonderful collaboration.
Last but not least, the singing is outstanding. There's really no substitute for a Russian cast singing Russian opera, and the cast here are all marvellous. I've been critical of the anguished whine of Misha Didyk in the past, but he has "filled out" a little in appearance since I last saw him sing this role and that tight, high constricted tenor has also expanded into a fuller, more rounded timbre. It's by no means an easy role to sing at the best of times, but Didyk is impressive here and may even be the ideal Hermann. Because of the dual role and the acting requirements, Yeletsky/Tchaikovsky is more challenging here than the role usually is, but Vladimir Stoyanov is superb, his voice warm, lyrical and sensitive.
Larissa Diadkova is an experienced Countess, and proves her worth here again. Svetlana Aksenova's Liza is also impressive, but there's a feeling that Herheim has paid less attention to the women in the opera, or at least found Tchaikovsky's writing of them to be not as interesting as the male characters. Liza's finale however is well-staged. All the roles are most impressive, and there's much to enjoy simply in the beauty of the singing performances here. And in the choral arrangements. I'm beginning to think that the DNO build their season around works that will show their chorus off in the best possible light. The precision of the employment of the chorus is all important to the wider dynamic of this work and once again, the DNO chorus are nothing short of phenomenal.
Links: The Opera Platform, DNO
