Giuseppe Verdi - Aida
La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2017
Alain Altinoglu, Stathis Livathinos, Adina Aaron, Andrea Carè, Nora Gubisch, Dimitris Tiliakos, Giacomo Prestia, Enrico Iori, Tamara Banjesevic, Julian Hubbard
ARTE Concert - June 2017
What is the point of Aida? Well obviously it started out as an attempt to bring Verdi out of retirement with the commission of writing a new work for the grand occasion of the new opera house in Cairo, and while the work was never completed for the occasion, it is nonetheless full of nationalistic sentiments and regional colour with grand marches and ceremonial processions. You can't commemorate that occasion every time the opera is produced, so obviously Aida must have something else worth celebrating since it remains one of the best-known and most frequently performed of Verdi operas.
Unfortunately, most directors miss the point of Aida or at least allow it to be submerged in the crowd-pleasing ceremonial aspects of the Grand Opéra spectacle and the bombastic arrangements of its Arabic melodies. Some have tried to be a little more adventurous with the work, looking more deeply at the relevance of its themes and seeking to find another way to bring them to the surface, but few are entirely successful at meeting not unreasonable audience expectations. That however is not going to deter a progressive opera company like La Monnaie from attempting to do something fresh and original with Aida.
So what is the point of Aida at La Monnaie? Aside from the familiar Verdi themes of father/daughter relationships and the conflict between love and duty, the opera is primarily concerned with power and oppression. It's about the crushing of human feelings, human love and one's own better nature in favour of a cause (war in this case) that is determined by rulers and informed by the will of the gods. It's about those who believe that they have authority and wisdom on their side but who are in reality all too human in their failings and weaknesses, and as a consequence are all the more capable of grave misjudgements considering the power they wield.
So tell me if Aida has a point in this day and age...
Having accepted that there is very much a point to Aida, the question then is how best to put that across on stage with the right emphasis that doesn't actually glorify power, war and oppression, but at the same time still retain something of the spectacle and the pure operatic qualities of Aida. You can try to introduce contemporary elements like Olivier Py's Paris production, but that tends to come over as heavy-handed and also risks dominating over the human love story that is a necessary part of the work. The director of the National Theatre of Greece, Stathis Livathinos, directing his first opera production, goes a little towards abstraction, but not so abstract that it doesn't relate to the underlying reality and the themes or provide necessary spectacle.
There is something ancient but also timeless in set designs for this production of Aida, Alexander Polzin doing well to avoid the imagery of ancient monuments and temples in the desert by symbolically showing the land as a small outcrop of rock; an island in a sea of darkness, that is venerated by the rulers and priests, glittered and shining. There's no mistaking it for anything grand and noble, with soldiers goose-stepping across the stage, blood spattered on their costumes, and there's no exotic dance of Moorish slaves either, the prisoners made to polish the rock during the opera's ballet, ground down into the gleaming rock by their captors until they scream.
The colour coding of the costume design by Andrea Schmidt-Futterer and the perfect lighting by Alekos Anastasiou contribute exceptionally well to defining and differentiating between the various classes and groups of rulers, priests, warriors, common people and slaves. The slaves all wear plain dark blue shifts, the priests in wrapped pale blue robes with Anubis masks - with the High Priest adorned with porcupine-like spikes - the ruling classes in gold, the common people in grey, the warriors in purple. Wonderfully choreographed and directed, it all still captures what is uniquely grand about Aida without the tired grand opera mannerisms, managing to look spectacular as well as stylish and colourful, albeit within a more limited and muted palette.
A more muted palette is also applied to the reduced La Monnaie orchestration under Alain Altinoglu. It can seem a little underplayed and lack the impact of the more bombastic approach, but Aida is a late period Verdi opera where it is worth holding back a little to allow the actual notes of the music to express their own qualities. As a consequence, you can hear the beautiful phrasing of the individual instruments and sections which is all too often submerged under volume and speed. It's not the full-blooded Verdi that many would expect and no doubt prefer, but I thought this account was very refreshing and revealing of other qualities in Verdi's writing, as well as better attuned to the underlying sentiment and themes of the drama.
I don't think you can play an opera like Aida naturalistically, but it doesn't deserve irony either. Stathis Livathinos finds a good balance between stylisation that plays to the themes and the dramatic and musical conventions that call for a certain amount of standing and delivering. The singing is also excellent for what is a very demanding work, all of the singers avoiding any strident expression. Andrea Carè's Radamès and Dimitris Tiliakos as Amonasro fare best with secure and lyrical delivery of their parts. Aida and Amneris present rather more challenges for Adina Aaron and Nora Gubisch who are a more little wavering in pitch and delivery in places, but both bring dramatic character and romantic personality to the roles rather than fall back on operatic mannerisms.
All efforts in trying to bring something new and fresh to Aida however are to no avail if the conclusion fails to deliver emotionally and dramatically (as this season's Madama Butterfly failed to do at La Monnaie). A huge block of stone hanging ominously over the stage and slowly descending to enclose Aida and Radamès while they sang their love duet in delirium was however very affecting and in keeping with the production's question of the price to be paid for power and how it oppresses the human spirit. Such a fresh and ambitious approach to Aida is a difficult task to carry off, but Livathinos and Altinoglu do it with style at La Monnaie, the opera still remaining impressive, but in the right way.
Links: La Monnaie-De Munt, ARTE Concert
Giuseppe Verdi - Don Carlo
L’Opéra National du Rhin, Strasbourg - 2016
Daniele Callegari, Robert Carsen, Stephen Milling, Andrea Carè, Tassis Christoyannis, Ante Jerkunica, Elza van den Heever, Elena Zhidkova, Patrick Bolleire, Rocío Perez, Camille Tresmontant
Culturebox - November 2016
There are some dark operas in the Verdi catalogue - Macbeth and I due Forscari are certainly there and Simon Boccanegra is no bundle of laughs - but none of them are as bleak and pitiless as Don Carlo. What makes it so is that each of the characters is offered the opportunity of love and friendship, but either happiness is snatched from them or they consciously spurn it and make other choices that they feel are for a greater good. None of those choices work out well, but the fact that it could have been so different is what gives the opera a darker edge that Verdi fills with music of overwhelming melancholy and regret.
OK, we get that Don Carlo is dark, so perhaps we don't need Robert Carsen to emphasise it so heavily in his production of the 4-Act Italian version at L’Opéra National du Rhin, Strasbourg. Carsen's idea is to establish the uneasy alliance between the oppressive political regime of Philip II and the merciless persecution of heretics by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church as a kind of death cult alliance. Everyone is dressed in black, wearing dark suits or soutanes, and the set is a black box. Rather more than just visually darkening the work down however, Carsen has a few other ideas and changes that take this a little further.
It's risky to tamper with individual motivations, inner conflicts and the complex inter-relationships in Don Carlo. They already sit on a delicate balance, so you really don't want to be adding additional levels onto them. Verdi's Don Carlo is based on a work by Friedrich Schiller, but Robert Carsen in his Strasbourg production finds a parallel in the work with another of Verdi's favourite writers: Shakespeare, and specifically in Hamlet. In the version without the Fontainebleau scene, Don Carlo opens with the funeral of a king - Carlo's grandfather Charles V - and we see a brooding young man dressed in black with only a skull for company on the stage, reflecting on mortality, as a ghostly voice seemingly from the dead king, calls out a warning to him.
Using Hamlet as a reference, Carsen in this way establishes the tone and the nature of the work as directly and quickly as possible. Without having recourse to the Fontainebleau scene, Carsen's evocation of Hamlet establishes that the primary reason for Carlo's despair is not the death of Charles V, but a more personal conflict and quasi-incestuous sentiments about his father marrying his new 'mother' Elisabeth, the same woman who had previously been promised to him as a bride in the excised Fontainebleau scene. It's an act of a ruler exercising power in the interest of consolidating that power rather than for the sake of the people, and Carlo's response is the only sane one in such a situation; madness. It leads to Philip having to banish Hamlet-Carlo to a foreign land after he takes up arms against him, and even consider whether he might not be justified in killing his own son.
So, all in all, whether you think all the blackness on the stage is necessary, you have to respect that it is justified by the tone of the work itself. And if Hamlet is used as a reference, it is not a framework that can be imposed on top of Don Carlo. The very idea is absurd and surely unsustainable. Rather, Carsen uses Shakespeare's imagery to draw attention to similar themes in Verdi's Don Carlo, taking it away from the historical and even the personal - the Italian version without the Fontainebleau scene facilitates this - and putting the focus instead on the social and political, on questions of state oppression, on religious fanaticism, and the not insignificant application that this has for today.
Verdi, it's true, wasn't a big fan of religious authoritarianism, so the emphasis in the Opéra National du Rhin production of the state being a theocracy that facilitates the will and the violent means of the church is a relevant one, and it's one that Verdi's dark drama is able to sustain. "Death in my hands can reap a harvest", the Grand Inquisitor tells soutane-robed Philip, and together they represent a formidable force of oppression. The crime of the Flemish delegates when they are brought to the court is not insurrection but heresy for not holding to the faith of their Holy Ruler. The auto-da-fe scene, often so difficult to stage convincingly, is effectively handled by Carson. It's the books of the heretics that are burnt in a conflagration, while the black-robed priests execute the hooded kneeling heretics with pistols.
Carsen consequently brings a strong and meaningful focus to the work. It's not only about state oppression but it's also about crushing personal sentiments for the sake of belief in something greater. It's not just Carlo and Philip who have to struggle with the dilemma of killing someone in their own close family. Elisabeth and Carlo's happiness counts for nothing in the greater scheme of things: even Elisabeth believes that her marriage to Philip as the king is more important. Eboli too belatedly recognises the mistakes she makes. There is perhaps only one beacon of light in Don Carlo where integrity remains unsullied by adversity and ambition, and that's Carlo's friendship with Rodrigo. You think so? Think again.
It's one thing to use Shakespeare's Hamlet as a working template to bring out other elements from Don Carlo, but Robert Carsen's biggest intervention is in his manipulation of the ending and its subversion of the friendship between Carlo and Posa. Posa controversially doesn't die here at the end of Act III while visiting Carlo in prison, but his assassination is faked as part of a plot of the church to overthrow Philip and assume total power with Posa as its figurehead. We're not dealing with history here in Carsen's production, and there's precious little historical accuracy in Schiller or Verdi's version anyway, so that matters little. What matters more is finding a way to making the huge flaw of the ending of Verdi's opera work in a more convincing manner, without undermining the essence of the work and the themes it considers.
At the very least Carsen delivers a shock that is greater than the disembodied voice of Charles V bringing about a deus ex machina. Here Carlo looks on aghast as the uprising falters not at the voice of a ghostly monk, but the voice of the Grand Inquisitor - the people bowing before the far more earthly might of the military arm of the church. But what of the inviolable friendship between Carlo and Posa? Well, it wouldn't be the first time that the sincerity of that friendship has been questioned, and indeed the rousing theme of the two men can sound rather hollow and false in the midst of all the through-composed darkness, so all Carsen is doing is taking this further and pushing the tone of the work towards its natural (as opposed to supernatural) conclusion. At the very least, it can't be faulted for shock impact.
Nor can it be really faulted for musical performance. Daniele Callegari strikes a suitable sombre tone that matches the tinta of the score and the minimal bleakness/blackness of the production, but it never pushes it into heavy overstatement. There's a great deal of light and shade in Verdi's score that belies the melodrama of the situations, and Callegari finds that balance well with the orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg. As is often the case with such a challenging work, the principal roles pose a few problems to Stephen Milling's Filippo II, for Andrea Carè's Don Carlo and for Elza van den Heever's Elisabetta di Valois, but they still without question get across the essence of the predicament in those confrontational moments that Verdi brilliantly creates. Tassis Christoyannis is an impressive duplicitous Posa, and Ante Jerkunica an imposing Grand Inquisitor. I was most impressed by Elena Zhidkova's Princess Eboli, who delivers a stunning "O don fatale" and manages to gather more sympathy for her predicament and actions than is more often the case.
Links: L’Opéra National du Rhin, Culturebox
Luigi Cherubini - Medea
Grand Théâtre de Genève, 2015
Marko Letonja, Christof Loy, Daniel Okulitch, Grazia Doronzio, Andrea Carè, Alexandra Deshorties, Sara Mingardo, Alexander Milev, Johanna Rudström, Magdalena Risberg
ARTE Concert - 24 April 2015
I'm not proud of it, but I have to admit that my first thought on seeing the two sulky baseball-capped skate-boarding teenage sons of Medea and Jason racing across the stage in the 2015 Geneva production of Cherubini's version of Medea was - well, I won't be too shocked or distraught when their mother kills those two at the end of this production. A cruel thought maybe, but it's one that is perhaps intended by the director. Almost certainly, since the director here is Christof Loy, and there's little that isn't precisely calculated in a Christof Loy production.
The other thing you can expect from a Christof Loy production is that it will be set in a more modern era. None of this classical stuff, even for the sedate, elegant music of Luigi Cherubini, which is Mozartian with more Classical flourishes. Loy however does indeed take his cue from the music, recognising that there is an edge lying beneath the measured surface of the musical arrangements, if you can cut through the layers of varnish. It might be a myth, but presenting Medea in a modern perspective does just that, forcing you to really consider whether there's a universal, recognisable truth in the characterisation and the situation.
Not everyone like Loy's modernisations and abstractions - and you could question whether it is really necessary in Greek tragedy - but there's no question that his direction and acting instruction makes opera characters fully three-dimensional and human. As such, the creation and playing of Medea herself is a fascinating case study and challenge for any performer. She can be seen and depicted as a monster, but not here. The structure of Cherubini's opera, the music that underscores it, and Christof Loy's direction all go into ensuring that you can sympathise to some degree with Medea, even if you can't justify her actions.
The same attention however needs to be paid to the other characters in order to fully understand Medea and her actions. This is the real trick and it's one that Loy doesn't miss. Despite the impression given at the opening with the children, he doesn't make cheap or easy shortcuts either. You actually feel sorry for Jason as well here for foolishly crossing Medea and betraying her with a marriage alliance with Glauce. If Medea was a sorceress who had indeed bewitched Jason, it would be easy to consider him an injured party, but that's not the case here. Under Loy's direction, taking its cue from Cherubini, Medea is a formidable character, with force of personality and dangerously seductive. Jason's only mistake is in underestimating her as a woman.
Creon too. Loy uses Medea's scenes with Creon to emphasise her particular allure. He sets it up well by showing the King as something of a skirt-chaser, all touchy-feely with his courtiers (or, I don't know, business team or assistants or whatever they are in their smart modern suits). Creon is amenable to the right kind of persuasion then, and this Medea knows it, managing to strip him down in her encounter with him, before he quickly comes to his senses, or takes the opportunity of an interruption to make his escape. He doesn't get off so easy of course.
Even Medea's children aren't as crudely characterised as I make it appear. They are rather just unfortunate bystanders caught in the middle of terrible events that are not of their doing. It's clever directing, allowing you to see the surface impression (which is usually all you get in most productions of Medea), and then reveal a deeper, more human truth. If there's anything monstrous about Medea, it's the situations, it's society, it's the depths of despair that the human heart plummet and it's the extreme actions that one can be driven to in a such a situation that appears to offer no way out.
Cherubini's rich and dramatic score allows for this kind of interpretation in Médée. There's a measure of opera seria expression in the composition, each of the main characters give an opportunity to air their grievances in arias and long scenes, with some Romantic flourishes that elevate and deepen the human elements of the Greek tragedy. This is reflected in the set design, the wood-panelled state-rooms (reminiscent of Loy's Roberto Devereux), giving way (in sliding panels reminiscent of Loy's Jenůfa) to more expansive vistas of the nature in outside world, to the colour and drama of the kingdom of Corinth.
The structure of the work offers opportunities for expression for all the principals, and the detail here is well presented and sung well also. Glauce's fitting for a wedding dress sets the scene well at the beginning of Act I, Grazia Doronzio expressing her misgivings about Medea and capturing the delicacy of the situation well. In Cherubini's Médée, even Neris, Medea's maidservant, has her own expression, sympathising with the situation of her mistress, giving a balance to the work. Neris is sung rather well by Sara Mingardo. Daniel Okulitch is a solid if rather young looking Creonte, and Andrea Carè a fine Jason. Loy's production was conceived with Jennifer Larmore in mind, only for the American soprano to be forced to withdraw through illness. Alexandra Deshorties proves a fine late replacement, her Medea sung forcefully enough although her voice is a little thin on the recitative sections. She has plenty of allure and character.
With Deshorties performance and Loy's direction, this does prove to be an interesting Medea - one that is fully fired and clearly motivated by human impulses. Arguably however, Loy humanises this Medea a little too much, and we lose a little of the opera's high drama. I don't know whether it's to do with the use of the Italian version rather than the original French version (this production uses the 1909 Carlo Zangarini version in its 1953 Maria Callas incarnation) or whether it's conducted in line with this characterisation, but Marko Letonja's conducting tones down some of the more extravagant Romantic flourishes and crescendos in Cherubini's score, finding rather a measure of elegance in its swoops and swirls. A little less restraint in the appropriate places might however have made this Geneva production a little more exciting.
Links: ARTE Concert, Grand Théâtre de Genève
