Giacomo Puccini - Turandot
Teatro Real Madrid, 2018
Robert Wilson, Nicola Luisotti, Iréne Theorin, Raúl Giménez, Andrea Mastroni, Yolanda Auyanet, Gregory Kunde, Joan Martín-Royo, Vicenç Esteve, Juan Antonio Sanabria, Gerardo Bullón
France TV Culturebox
Robert Wilson's very distinctive and largely homogenous approach to set design isn't suited to every opera. Looking right back to Einstein on the Beach in 1976, it's clear that his style tends to work better with abstraction and ritual movements rather than with drama and narrative, but even working with Puccini or Verdi the effect of his unique style can be simply stunning in its use of light and colour and in its sheer visual splendour.
Not relying on any real-world situation but on a fantasy fairy-tale Turandot would seem better suited to the Wilson style, the opening Act alone of Puccini's opera being itself almost an abstract expression of living in fear and terror. In Turandot, Puccini was pushing his craft as a composer, exploring a new progressive direction for Italian opera, an endeavour that was unfortunately cut short with the death of the composer, Turandot itself remaining unfinished, its promise tantaslisingly unfulfilled.
That character is described well in Wilson's direction of that remarkable Act I of Turandot, the familiar luminous gradations of cobalt blue tending to darker shades, towards purple and shadow. The light of the moon casts an eerie light over the executioner and his next victim and over the people of Peking who live in fear of the terrible reign of Princess Turandot. After that build-up, her appearance on the stage is as striking as only Wilson's visual language can achieve, gliding in high above the stage on a platform, imperious, static, a fiery or bloody red against the cool backgrounds.
Wilson's stagecraft then is at once familiar as it is expressive to meet the specific demands of this particular opera. As well as extending the palette of colours considerably, there is also an expansion of the visual language Wilson traditionally employs, using beams of light that mark out the horizontal earthly boundaries of the stage as well as vertical beams that descend from the heavens and have chaotic branch-like formations. Even Turandot arrives floating on a platform bordered with light.
Wilson continues to use a minimum of stage props - almost none - preferring to use moving block of panels to close down or open up the stage to the emotional undercurrents and dramatic actions. Movement too is reduced to minimal actions and ritualised gestures. Like his production of Madama Butterfly, there's no Orientalism other than in the costumes, which have more of a classical ceremonial aspect than anything traditional. Additional expression however is used for characters, an all-gray Calaf sings 'Nessun Dorma' to a network of tangled roots, Turandot characterised by blazing reds and a giant black moon.
Like Nicola Luisotti's musical interpretation, it places emphasis on the moody qualities and character of the work, its sinister oriental refrains adding an edge of discord to the proceedings. And in many ways, Wilson serves the score best by not competing with it or underlining it, reducing any distraction or interpretation and permitting the extraordinary qualities of that powerful music room to be revealed. There are less of the director's usual eccentricities - even Ping, Pang and Pong are rather restrained here - with the strangest twist being Liù's stylised standing death, walking off-stage to the praises of the people of Peking, making it tragic in its own way.
The singing in this Teatro Real production in Madrid is good considering how challenging a work this is for all the main performers, Turandot an opera that requires Italian lyricism with Wagnerian depth and stamina. Gregory Kunde comes out best, unfailing in his efforts and secure in his 'Nessun dorma'. Iréne Theorin's Turandot doesn't have the fullness of voice across the range, but is suitably commanding and impressive in her account. There are good performances also from Yolanda Auyanet's Liù, Andrea Mastroni's Timur and from the opera's Ping, Pang and Pong.
It may not be the greatest performances you've heard of these roles, but opera is not a singing contest and you have to take live dramatic performance into account, particularly when you're dealing with the very specific constraints of a Robert Wilson production. I don't see it as the most insightful interpretation of Turandot either (the completion of the work still never entirely satisfactory), but Wilson's unique vision certainly does justice to Puccini and Alfano's score, as does the full-blooded musical performance under the direction of Nicola Luisotti, creating a unique dialectic with Wilson extraordinary visual imagery.
Links: Teatro Real
Filippo Perocco - Aquagranda
La Fenice, Venice - 2016
Marco Angius, Damiano Michieletto, Andrea Mastroni, Mirko Guadagnini, Giulia Bolcato, Silvia Regazzo, Vincenzo Nizzardo, William Corrò, Marcello Nardis
Culturebox - 10 November 2016
Aquagranda was commissioned by La Fenice to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a significant event; the flooding of Venice on the 4th November 1966, when storms and high tide lifted the water two metres above sea level, inundating St Mark's Square and threatening the city's important historical buildings, but it also affected the lives of many ordinary Venetians. Despite its very modern musical language and the fact that it has a libretto co-written by the author of the source novel it is based on, Filippo Perocco's Aquagranda however never seems to find a character of its own beyond the remit of its commission.
Aquagranda looks at the events of November 1966 through the eyes of Fortunato and his son Ernesto. 25 year old Ernesto is unwilling to become Venetian fisherman like his father, and is preparing to leave the little island of Pellestrina for a life in Germany when the flooding occurs. Finding himself deeply affected by the event, Ernesto recognises the feelings he has for La Serenissima and stays to help rebuild the city. There are other figures who appear, and you could say that the waters of Venice play a major role in the work, but essentially that's about as far as any real storyline goes in the opera.
Rather than a conventional drama then, Aquagranda, through Perocco's score and through Damiano Michieletto's stage production for its performance in Venice, is more of an impressionistic commemoration of the 1966 flood. The first third of the work doesn't really have much more to it than Fortunato and another fisherman debating in repeated fragmentary back-and forth phrases just how bad things are going to be. They look at the menacing skies, the full moon, the high tide and watch its irregular rise and fall. Eventually, they are faced with the irrefutable evidence of the mounting level of water and forced to consider its impact.
If there is little of any narrative drive in either the music or the exchanges between the characters, there is at least a vivid impression of the nature of the coming storm in the music and the staging. A chorus placed to either side of the stage chants words and provides rhythm for the atmospheric drone-like score with live electronic elements, the orchestra ensemble conducted by Marco Angius. Avoiding any typical depiction of Venice - no domes or gondolas - production designer Paolo Fantin sets a glass wall of water behind the main figures. The water rises and swirls within its frame, while dancers move behind it, all soon to spill over onto the front of the stage.
The middle part of the opera is then drenched with the water that has built up as the walls which have protected the city for centuries are destroyed in a single day. Father and son, their family and friends are suddenly faced with the impact on their little isola of Pellestrina and consider how much greater a disaster such a deluge must be for the palaces, churches, domes, marble, gondolas and the celebrations in the great city of Venice. The mood is darker, the stage is drenched in water, the singers and dancers move through it all in a state of mourning, lamenting the disaster.
If the first part of Aquagranda relates the coming of the waters and the second part deals with the event itself, it's the third part that lets the overall narrative or structure of the work down. Instead of ending on a note of warning or reminder of the ever present danger that climate change presents to the lagoon city, the opera chooses to end on a celebratory note that doesn't ring true immediately after the disaster. The walls have been reconstructed and life goes on, seemingly with little reflection on what has occurred. Instead of being a work that might continue to have meaning and significance for the future of Venice, it's a conclusion that just presents the event as a wrapped up 50 year old piece of history. Musically, Aquagranda captures a sense of that event reasonably well within the remit of the commission, but Perocco never reveals any ambition to invest the work with any greater sense of purpose.
Links: La Fenice, Culturebox
Giuseppe Verdi - Rigoletto
L'Opéra National de Paris, 2016
Pier Giorgio Morandi, Claus Guth, Francesco Demuro, Franco Vassallo, Irina Lungu, Andrea Mastroni, Vesselina Kasarova, Isabelle Druet, Mikhail Kolelishvili, Michal Partyka, Christophe Berry, Tiago Matos, Andreea Soare, Adriana Gonzalez, Florent Mbia
Bastille, Paris - 14 May 2016
There's been a very evident attempt to make the artistic direction of the Paris Opera a bit more cutting edge again under its new director Stephane Lissner, but Claus Guth's setting of Rigoletto in a brown cardboard box seems to being taking things a little too far. It's hardly the most attractive or imaginative representation for the dramatic setting of the opera in Mantua, and it's hard to imagine how it could even suit the purposes of Guth's usually intense psychological exploration of character and motivation.
It's not so much the case that Mantua and its royal court are represented by a cardboard box however as much as it's Rigoletto's regrets that are packed away in the box. The broken and dishevelled jester walks to the front of the stage at the start of the opera, wearing a grimy overcoat, his whitened clown make-up scored with deep creases, carrying a box that holds his only possessions. Rigoletto despairingly draws out a clown suit and a bloodstained white dress and the opera commences in flashback all within the confines of the larger box that fills the stage.
It's a relatively straightforward device in that respect and there's actually not any real licence taken with the characters or the drama elsewhere. The period is vague and non-specific, the costumes period in style for opening royal court scene, even if the set is plain brown corrugated cardboard, but it gradually moves into more modern styled dress as the opera progresses. As plain as the set is, it's functional, requiring few changes between acts - a staircase added in Act II, some of the flaps opening to provide doorways for the tavern scene and some projections are used. It consistently remains a representation of Rigoletto's life after the event being reduced to the contents of a cardboard box.
For deeper exploration of character then and the complex father/daughter issues at the heart of the work, Guth relies on another familiar device often employed in his productions; the use of doubles. Rigoletto in the flashback is represented by the singer, but the actor who 'unboxed' the memory is frequently present on the stage at the same time, distraught and helpless, unable to intervene and change what has already occurred. This added level of regret does highlight Rigoletto's folly to some extent and bring a little more intensity to the scenes, but no more really than you if you've seen the opera before and already know what is ahead.
Gilda is similarly split and not just to one double but to a series of Gildas in dancers of different ages. Unsurprisingly, these younger Gildas are intended to show the young girl as an innocent, but more than that they also reflect her 'growth'. Rigoletto's protection of Gilda means that her growth is stunted in a way that leads to her innocence being cruelly abused when it comes into contact with the real world, but it does bring about a twisted kind of growth that can also account for her sacrifice in the final act. It's nothing new, just another way to emphasise or perhaps 'translate' a more melodramatic device from the past into one that carries a little more credibility for a modern audience today.
What appears to be given more emphasis in Guth's version that is not so often explored is the relationship between the assassin Sparafucile and Rigoletto, since Sparafucile when he first appears acts as a mirror image of Rigoletto. Again, this is just emphasising what is there in the libretto, Rigoletto even acknowledging that the two men are alike, only one kills with words while the other kills with the sword. Drawing attention to this however does put greater emphasis on the cowardice of the jester, his hiding his failure to act behind words, just as he hides his identity from his daughter. This of course comes back to haunt him and in this version - as it's done in flashback - he already knows it, which only intensifies his failure and his pitiful attempts to shift the blame onto a 'maledizione'.
Cardboard box aside then, Guth's Rigoletto sticks fairly closely to the accepted characterisation with only a little shift of where the emphasis lies and it's fairly successful in where it applies them. In the first Act at least however, it's not at all certain that the music and singing performances measure up to it. It all feels somewhat half-hearted and routine. As is usually the case with Rigoletto however, I find that you have to reserve judgement until Act II and Act III. Which, as an aside, makes me begin to wonder whether the first Act is really all it's cracked up to be. It certainly has all the elements in place and Verdi spices it up with plenty of dramatic colour and some famous arias, but it rarely ever seems to take off. Guth's production doesn't really help matters here in Paris.
Act II and III however, while the direction doesn't particularly contribute much more to the production, are indeed more alive and engaging, which suggests that Act I is really just a prelude to set the scene or act as a counterbalance for the fireworks in the subsequent Acts. Accordingly, there's a noticeably more invigorating drive from Pier Giorgio Morandi's conducting of the orchestra that is matched by what takes place on the stage and in the singing. Franco Vassallo's Rigoletto is by no means one of the great interpretations of the role, but there was no sign of faltering or being challenged by it. The 'Cortigiani' is a good measure of a Rigoletto and Vassallo was more than capable, carrying the role well but not really inspired or even truly fired-up.
The same could be said about most of the other roles in these second cast performances for the later run of the 2016 production. Francesco Demuro's Duke of Mantua was however by far the most impressive, his bright tenor voice clear and ringing, sailing through 'La donna è mobile' with such charm that it appeared natural and effortless. We didn't get to see much of the Duke's 'evil' side, but that was more of a directing decision and a surprising omission for Guth since the Duke seems the most obvious dual-personality in the opera. Irina Lungu had a few wavers, but rose to the challenges of Gilda's role and brought some personality to it. Andrea Mastroni was fine if not making as menacing a Sparafucile as you might like. Vesselina Kasarova is, to say the least, an acquired taste, but she is capable of some interesting interpretations. Not her Maddalena unfortunately, which was wayward, wooly and largely inaudible, her voice now losing much of its former force.
Even if it wasn't traditionally staged and the singing wasn't of the highest standards, the Paris Rigoletto hit the mark sufficiently at all the necessary dramatic and musical points. Act I carried off the tricky staging of Gilda's abduction stylishly if not naturalistically, mainly through the choreography of the courtiers in their masks, the scene ending with the thundering accompaniment to Rigoletto's dread of Monterone's curse. Act II's duets had pace and fury in equal measure and although the staging of Gilda's death scene remained largely off-stage, represented only by a falling curtain, the full impact of the scene was felt.
This performance of Rigoletto was viewed at the Bastille on the 14th May 2016. A recording of the production with the alternative cast that includes Olga Peretyatko (Gilda), Quinn Kelsey (Rigoletto) and Michael Fabiano (Rigoletto) is currently available streaming on-line on France TV's Culturebox website, although region restrictions are in place.
Links: L'Opéra National de Paris, Culturebox
