Puccini - La Bohème (Paris, 2017)

Giacomo Puccini - La Bohème

L’Opéra National de Paris, 2017

Gustavo Dudamel, Claus Guth, Nicole Car, Aida Garifullina, Atalla Ayan, Artur Rucinski, Alessio Arduini, Roberto Tagliavini, Marc Labonnette, Antonel Boldan, Bernard Arrieta, Jain-Hong Zhao, Fernando Velasquez

Culturebox - 12 December 2017

No, no matter how much you try to rationalise it, there could surely be no justification for director Claus Guth reinventing La Bohème as a science-fiction space adventure. As strange as Guth's productions can often be, this one for the Paris Opera was always going to be a bit of a stretch. But you've got to admire Guth's nerve for even attempting something like this at La Bastille, where a large conservative element in the audience don't usually take kindly to such directorial indulgences. I couldn't wait to see what Guth did with this, even if failure and the disapprobation of the Paris audience was likely to be the outcome of such a conceit.

As outrageous as the idea might seem and as outlandish as it indeed looks seeing La Bohème take place on a space station crash-landing on a distant moon, Guth's approach to making it fit actually isn't all that surprising. It's one step removed from 'it was all a dream' brought on by bereavement and deprivation leading to mental breakdown (as Stefan Herheim also basically proposed in his reverse deconstructed Oslo production), and in a futuristic space context that kind of idea tends to play out like Solaris (which has already been adopted to opera in recent years by Detlev Glanert and Dai Fujikura), a work which leaves room for some in-depth consideration of the nature of human relationships.

La Bohème then actually has some suitability for this kind of feverish nightmare outlook. The forced comedy of impoverished artists facing starvation projecting their creative imaginations towards surreal displays can be seen as a distraction from the reality of their circumstances. The 'pretend' feast and acquiring of riches in Act I then results in the surrealism of fantasies of dining at Café Momus and in a parade of life that surrounds the toy seller Parpignol. The charade becomes harder to maintain as the realities hit home on Act III, and in Act IV the playing becomes a grim dance of death.

In such a creative mindset, Marcello's painting of the Red Sea in Act I could just as easily be a vision of the Red Planet, couldn't it? Well, in Guth's production it literally is the view outside the window that faces a small team of astronauts whose ship has broken down, but that's about the only easy transition in the production between a garret in fin de siècle Paris and the cabin of a rocket ship. Elsewhere, like Rodolfo, you're going to have to be a bit imaginative in finding any convincing connection or rationale for the production's extraterrestrial setting, but Guth tries to give us one based on Henry Murger's original stories being viewed by the protagonists as older people reflecting on youth and mortality ...only in an outer space setting evidently.

The captain's log, rolled out on a screen, tells us that the four-man team's mission has gone off course 136 days into their space voyage; their reactors are down, resources are almost exhausted and time is running out for the crew. In an effort to keep their spirits up they let their imaginations run free on an idealised version of a long gone past. Seen largely from the perspective of Rodolfo's disintegrating grasp on reality, it's no surprise that suspended in a state between sleep and waking delirium his mind returns to happier times and he is haunted Solaris Hari-like by visions of his lost love Mimi.

It's absolute nonsense - quite literally, of course, since we are perceiving events through a mind on the edge of complete breakdown. But at the same time that doesn't add or bring anything new to the state of mind of La Bohème's characters living on the margins of society, or to the nature of the relationships of love, friendship and camaraderie that develop between them in their straitened circumstances. Worse, Guth's transposition of it onto another planet in some science-fiction future runs the risk of actually distracting from the sentiments of the work; which is just wrong, even if you think that La Bohème is a sentimental work (which I don't).

The attempt to sustain the idea of course just becomes more and more ludicrous the longer it goes on. By Act III, the pilots have been driven to make a forced landing on a barren planet or moon, and the inevitability of their fate lost in the void of space - and a lack of oxygen to the brain - just pushes their delusions further into absurdity. Yes, you can probably make a connection between Rodolfo in a space suit cut off emotionally from a Mimi who contorts and cavorts in a red dress on an airless dusty moonscape - although you're more likely to think it's a wonder she's only coughing - but you would get that anyway from a traditional production without the added distraction.

Act IV is increasingly desperate, and I don't just mean for Rodolfo. With Schaunard and Colline already dead, their suits running out of air, Rodolfo starts to imagine himself and Marcello as part of some kind of cabaret act on the moon, complete with glittering strip curtain backdrop. Parpignol is still cavorting around as a mime artist (please!), not for the first time being presented as a kind of death-like master-of-ceremonies figure (cf. Herheim again). Full marks to Claus Guth for this effort at provocation - I sometimes feel the Paris audience deserve such baiting - but I don't think La Bohème deserves it.

I also felt curiously unmoved by Gustavo Dudamel's conducting of the score, which highlighted the delicacy of the composition but lacked any real feeling for the work. It floated along pleasantly enough, but never made any emotional connection with the drama, although it's hard to tell how much of that is down to the failings of the stage direction. The singing too felt merely adequate for the most part, Atalla Ayan's Rodolfo a little harsh-sounding and imprecise, but Nicole Car's Mimi certainly stood out, and Aida Garifullina was a sparkling Musetta - not bad for figments of Rodolfo's imagination and memory. I doubt that Guth's space-age production of La Bohème will be considered as imaginative or memorable, but it's unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry.

Links: L’Opéra National de Paris, Culturebox

Verdi - La Traviata (Baden-Baden, 2015 - Webcast)

Giuseppe Verdi - La Traviata 

Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, 2015

Pablo Heras-Casado, Rolando Villazón, Olga Peretyatko, Atalla Ayan, Christina Daletska, Emiliano Gonzalez, Tom Fox, Konstantin Wolff, Simone Piazzola, Deniz Uzun, Walter Fink

ARTE Concert - June 2015

La Traviata has nothing to prove. It remains Verdi's most popular masterpiece. Aside from the quality of the work itself, which is reason enough never to tire of it, there is always the opportunity to see its universal themes approached differently and to see how some of the best sopranos in the world take to it. At the Baden-Baden 2015 festival, we have the opportunity, for the first time as far as I know, to see Olga Peretyatko pit herself against one of the greatest works in the repertoire. Directing this production is none other than the troubled tenor Rolando Villazón.

As impressive a singer as she is, the casting of Olga Peretyatko is by no means an assured success. One of the finest bel canto singers of our time, Peretyatko has been impressive in her Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini, as Blonde in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and has shown some fine dramatic soprano capabilities as well in Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride. Singing Violetta however is another matter. It's a challenging role to sing, with a dramatic and dynamic range that would put any soprano through their paces. Most importantly, it demands that a soprano bring something of her own personality to imprint upon the character.

Even in the modern age, La Traviata remains a soprano's opera more than it does a director's one, although a radical interpretation can get to the burning anger that lies in Verdi's fierce condemnation of social hypocrisy. That's evidently not what Rolando Villazón's circus-like production for Baden-Baden sets out to achieve.  It's hard though to work out what angle the director is coming from though other than just making it a colourful, abstract and entertaining spectacle.

The circus stage is actually more of a music-box scene, with a few large colourful discs like gambling chips that provide good platforms for the scenes of all four acts. The idea seems to be that the music box is contemplated by the dying Violetta before the opera starts, prompting her to reflect on the significant scenes of her life in flashback. I guess a music box is as good a description for this opera as any, but I can't see how it benefits the drama in any way. As good as Olga Peretyatko is, there's just not much life in this production.

Few of Villazón's ideas really amount to anything. Violetta seems to identify with a blonde acrobat, who acts in some of the scenes as her double. Her appearances are fitful and arbitrary and it's not as if a double was needed to do some gymnastics. Rather it tends to make the connection and relationships between the characters rather awkward in some key scenes. In what is usually one of the most powerful scenes of the work for example, Alfredo's denunciation of Violetta at the party in Act III, rather than the usual flurry of notes cast in Violetta's face, Villazón finds another way of showing the violence of this action. Alfredo rolls the money up into a knife, but the impact is lessened somewhat when he thrusts it into the ground while Violetta looks on a little way off.

There's only so much Peretyatko can do this this kind of direction, which never really captures the dynamic of Violetta's journey. Vocally, she's impressive, with a distinct quality of her own, a gorgeous rich full tone and a flowing legato that is able to do full justice to the role. Played rather slower than usual, the pace allows her voice and her technique to be heard clearly and it never falters. Whether it's paced as such on her account or on the reading of the conductor, I don't know, but it does unfortunately suck the life out of the work, particularly the energetic Act I. She doesn't look the sickest Violetta you've ever seen in Act IV, although it's still almost impossible for you still not to feel the impact of her final moments, so well has it been managed and scored by Verdi.  

The dynamic was also missing from the conducting of Pablo Heras-Casado. I was looking forward to seeing what the Spanish conductor did with this, having heard him conduct one of the best Die Zauberflotes I've ever heard at Aix-en-Provence last year. I was disappointed here. There should be energy, passion and anger here and it just doesn't come across that way. Very much worthwhile for showing how capably and largely successfully Olga Peretyatko can extend her range into Verdi's dramatic opera, this is however not the best production or musical treatment you'll see of La Traviata.

Links: ARTE Concert

Mozart - Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Don Giovanni

Oper Stuttgart, 2012

Antony Hermus, Andrea Moses, Shigeo Ishino, Simone Schneider, Atalla Ayan, Matthias Hölle, André Morsch, Rebecca von Lipinski, Pumeza Matshikiza, Ronan Collett 

ARTE Internet streaming - 25 July 2012

You’ve got quite a few masterpieces to choose from - Die Zauberflöte and Le Nozze di Figaro to name the two most likely candidates - but in Don Giovanni I think you have perhaps Mozart’s richest work of opera. Musically and in terms of the range of characters and the arias composed for them, it’s certainly one of Mozart’s strongest compositions. Added to that, Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto is one of the most brilliant, containing universal sentiments in witty yet incisive writing and strong psychological observations. A ‘dramma giocoso‘, the opera is however much wider in its reach, comedy and tragedy, love and lust, cynicism and romanticism all coexisting in the work without conflicting, expressing so many different and contrasting facets of human nature. This is why Don Giovanni is the one Mozart work most amenable to variations of interpretation and modernisation. The 2012 Stuttgart production - broadcast on television, to outdoor screens and via internet streaming in a new initiative to reach out to a wider audience - isn’t the most consistent of concepts, but it’s strong and ambitious enough to meet that outreach, and it comes through most successfully through some fine singing performances.

By and large, the setting developed by Andrea Moses for the Stuttgart State Opera is modern present-day. The set, designed by Christian Wiehle, is based around a hotel owned by Don Giovanni - one that seems to be going through difficult times in the current economic climate, with a Sale sign stuck up in what appears to be his own personal living room. The hotel proves to be a good all-purpose set for the opera, with its compartmentalised spaces and, crucially, bedrooms. There’s also a bar there where Don Giovanni can pick up Donna Anna during the opera’s overture, leaving Leporello to get her fiancé Don Ottavio drunk while he attempts to have his way with her. The modern touch is used also when the uninvited guests come to Don Giovanni’s party wearing sunglasses instead of masks, but it’s most effective in Leporello’s use of a smartphone to catalogue his master’s conquests, the images projected on a backdrop for Donna Elvira.

For most of the characters, the dress is also fairly generic modern, the wealthier characters of Donna Elvira and Donna Anna wear designer dresses, Don Ottavio is always seen in a smart suit, while the lower classes wear modern casual, Leporello in jeans and a leather cap, Masetto and Zerlina in more glitzy urban street clothes, Masetto in a Puffa body-warmer and with lightning-strike tattoos down his arm. The one exception to the modern-style dress is Don Giovanni, who wears a white suit with panama hat and fur coat and carries a gun, looking like a gangster from the 1930s, and with his unreconstructed attitudes, it is perhaps intentional that he appears to be an anachronism in this world. The distinction between the class of the characters is a feature in the opera - not an important feature, but it has relevance in a work where the sentiments of love, betrayal and revenge are shown as universal.

Distinctions of class however mean something different to Don Giovanni, who doesn’t care whether he beds a servant or a countess, as long as they are female. It’s his position however as a nobleman - or in this case, a gangster who owns his own hotel - that allows him to abuse his position of authority. There’s that and there’s the actual magnetic charm of his personality itself, which allows him to get away with much more, though perhaps not murder. This production however doesn’t seek to place too much emphasis on a traditional interpretation of Don Giovanni. It neither characterises him as a heartless demon or a misunderstood romantic seeking love and affection but unable to commit to just one woman. What does come through uniquely here, mainly through the performance and the singing, is the idea of Don Giovanni as the complete egotist. He’s not interested in the social class or distinctions of personality in who he beds, he’s only interested in what he can get for himself. As we well know from his behaviour towards his faithful servant Leporello.

It’s the betrayal of this relationship and Don Giovanni’s egotistical self-importance to the exclusion of the feelings of everyone else that play an important part then in how the normal course of events play out in this Stuttgart production. The Commendatore isn’t actually killed here by Don Giovanni in the opening scene then, but wounded and pulled aside by Leporello who uses him to get his own back on his boss after more grievous mistreatment that almost gets him lynched. There’s no talking statue here then either, but rather an attempt to put the fear of God into Don Giovanni for his crimes, Leporello ensures that Don Giovanni is quite drunk when the apparition appears. The complete egotism of the Don is carried through brilliantly. There’s no wavering of doubt, no remorse, no fear of retribution in the afterlife - he’s above it all. What appears to be some regret over his treatment of Donna Elvira, pointing a gun at his head while he uses Leporello to seduce here again, is nothing more than his own self-pity, and it’s appropriate then that his death at the finale is by his own hand. It’s a smart interpretation that works well, with enough ambiguity to leave it open to other interpretations.

It’s the performances however that are crucial to making this work, particularly the principal role of Don Giovanni. Shigeo Ishino is simply terrific, singing marvellously, credibly presenting an air of complete arrogance and self-importance that is based on Don Giovanni’s justifiable sense of self-belief. There’s never a waver in the voice or the characterisation. André Morsch isn’t quite as strong of voice, but fills the role of Leporello appropriately. There are good performances also from Pumeza Matshikiza as Zerlina and Ronan Collett as Masetto, but Matthias Hölle’s Commendatore is rather weaker than he should be, particularly in this context where he is very much alive. Other than the Don, the strengths in the casting are best placed in the roles of the three avenging angels, and all are excellent here. Simone Schneider is an outstanding Donna Anna. She has a lovely tone of voice that is able to push her character’s anger to the limit with strength and conviction yet still retain a melodic quality that reflects the purity of her nature. That’s not something that is always taken for granted with this character (does she lead the Don on in Act I or is her naivety taken advantage of?), but it’s emphasised here in her relationship with Don Ottavio. Atalla Ayan is also strongly characterised and well sung so as not to appear the weak figure that he is often portrayed as being. Rebecca von Lipinski ’s Donna Elvira remains a worthy opponent for Don Giovanni, although she’s not quite as strong a character here as the production’s Donna Anna.

Conducted by Antony Hermus, the Staatsorchester Stuttgart give a fine account of Mozart’s scintillating score that hits all the emotional and virtuoistic high points of the work, the pace and tone suiting the production and supporting the singing very well. In every respect, this was a production that rose to the challenges of Mozart’s great work, finding something new to draw from its rich endless source of inspiration, while at the same time making sure that the wider audience it was reaching out towards would find plenty that was memorable and entertaining in its traditional musical and dramatic strengths.

The production reviewed here was viewed via Internet streaming on the ARTE WebLive site but was only made available for viewing for a week after the live broadcast.