Strauss - Salome (Helsinki, 2022)

Richard Strauss - Salome

Finnish National Opera, Helsinki - 2022

Heikki Tuuli, Christof Loy, Vida Miknevičiūtė, Mihails Culpajevs, Nikolai Schukoff, Karin Lovelius, Andrew Foster-Williams, Elli Vallinoja

ARTE Concert - April 2022

There's something very familiar about the look and feel of this staging of Salome at Helsinki, which is not a surprise as it's a case of the typical Christof Loy production of performers in formal dress in a minimal classical white room look that he has been doing now for decades. There can be variations on the theme, sometimes it's more minimal than others, sometimes Loy can veer off and do something a little more elaborate. Here, it's the very minimal approach. Not quite the almost concert performance semi-staging look of Theodora, a little closer to the formal tuxedos and bow ties of Le nozze di Figaro For Salome? You have to ask why.

Well, I've seen enough Christof Loy productions to have made enough excuses for that kind of thing, not that the end results need any justification. One argument you can make is that without the more typical exoticism of period costumes it allows the audience to focus intently on the intense drama, and they don't come much more intense than Strauss's Salome. The Tetrarch's palace here is a curved white room with two wide pillars on either side, a single brown leather chair and a large rock at the centre of the room. The elegance of the palace is contrasted not with the unkempt appearance of a raving prophet in a cistern as much as one wearing nothing at all. It makes a change from Salome divesting herself seven skimpy veils, but unfortunately it's poor Andrew Foster-Williams (Euryanthe) who is again called upon to bare all and leave the audience not knowing where to look.

If the intention is to bring back a little of the shock value of the source material and the extraordinary interpretation of the psychological Symbolist underpinning of it in Strauss's score, well it's clearly not necessary. This is one work that is still bold, powerful and transgressive and needs little - if anything - in the way of added controversy. Jochanaan's imprecations against Herodias are usually bellowed from off-stage, so it's not even necessary to bring him onto the stage as soon as Loy does. Again you can look at this as being more directly confrontational, for the impression his chaste nakedness makes on Salome who only knows the decadent court of Herod. It certainly gives you an opportunity to think about it in this context.

Where Loy is usually more successful is in how he manages through his technique as a director to bring acting and conviction to the fore. In a Symbolist work where naturalism is not required, the stylised responses here are perfectly in keeping and suited to a dramatic art form that specialises in enhanced reality. This is much more effective when Salome attempts to remove her clothing - long before the Dance of the Seven Veils - her wantonness made explicit to a score of courtiers, who are at first angry at her and then stirred up to try to physically assault her. This spirals into a frenzy of motion in perfect concord with Strauss's score. 

The actual Dance of the Seven Veils is - by way of contrast  - obviously undercut. Instead of traditional eroticism it becomes an exercise in flirtation; a three-day exercise in power and control between Herod, Salome and Jochanaan. Inevitably it similarly draws the testosterone-charged courtiers circle around, creating a kind of dream sequence where even Narraboth is brought back to life. Herod claims his prize, thinking he is victor, but it's Salome who believes she is the one with the power now to fulfil her own desires.

Despite the liberties taken there is no doubt that Loy does successfully tap into the dangerous erotic and taboo undercurrents of Salome in a quite powerful way. He takes on a big challenge by not providing the traditional shock of a demented princess writhing in the gore of a decapitated head, choosing instead to give her a fully formally dressed Jochanaan. If it's about the depth of forbidden desires, this is another way to emphasise how the power of her desires is matched by the power of her madness, her delusion as a damaged victim perhaps of sexual abuse. It's all expressed anyway in the singing and the score and Vida Miknevičiūtė, this production's Salome, is just superb.

There is no question that Loy puts Salome firmly at the centre of this production; everything literally revolves around her desires and corrupted upbringing, a creature that has inherited the dark ambition of her mother and the avarice for power of her stepfather. The singing however is just as fine from Nikolai Schukoff as Herod and Karin Lovelius as Herodias. I'm not convinced that Andrew Foster-Williams presents the ideal image of an object of dark desire, or at least, not as Loy chooses to present him here. The contrast that Loy perhaps strives to express between female desire and the male gaze is not really established. I would venture to say however that Loy is perhaps working to a bigger picture of the relations between men, women and desire; some of his other more recent productions (Euryanthe, Così fan tutte, Francesca da Rimini, Das Wunder der Heliane) all present different views of the same idea.

Musically this sounded good on the streamed broadcast, but without the benefit of live performance or full uncompressed sound, it's unfair to judge. It's clear enough however that this is still one of the most remarkable scores ever written and with Heikki Tuuli conducting the orchestra of the Finnish National Opera, its force was fully felt. That's where the real power of Salome lies, and often the best a director can do is not to get in the way of that. Loy's stage production might not provide the typical reference points, but he does nonetheless draw out terrific performances that show that this opera is much more than a biblical story, is still relevant to our experience of today and still has the ability to shock and amaze.

Links: Finnish National Opera, ARTE Concert

Fagerlund - Autumn Sonata (Helsinki, 2017)

Sebastian Fagerlund - Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata)

Finnish National Opera and Ballet, Helsinki - 2017

John Storgårds, Stéphane Braunschweig, Anne Sofie von Otter, Erika Sunnegårdh, Tommi Hakala, Helena Juntunen, Nicholas Söderlund

Opera Platform - 23 September 2017

Ingmar Bergman's films manage to strike such a fine balance between realism and heightened drama that it's hard to imagine that they would gain anything from being adapted into an opera. Bergman however was always a director keen to experiment in film expression and indeed even a creative opera director himself, his filmed version of The Magic Flute in particular showing that perfect balance between dealing with the practicalities of the dramatic stage and sparking the imagination.

Adapting Bergman to the stage is particularly challenging in the case of working with one of Bergman's intense late works of family drama and personal crisis from the late seventies onwards. Autumn Sonata, like Scenes from a Marriage, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander and Saraband, are all characterised not only by fraught situations of lives in pain with brutal exchanges that cut to the bone, but there is also often a less tangible element in them dealing with death and ghosts, or ghosts of the past.

Both elements weigh heavily on Autumn Sonata, and Sebastian Fagerlund addresses them immediately from the start of his new opera Höstsonaten, setting the dramatic and musical tone for what is to follow. There's an anguished exchange between Eva and her husband Viktor while they are expecting the arrival of Eva's mother who is visiting them. She hasn't seen her mother in seven years, Charlotte having largely neglected her family for the demands of her career as a famous international concert pianist.

There are issues on both sides that suggest that tensions are likely to arise. In the seven years of her absence, Charlotte has not only missed the birth of Eva and Viktor's son Erik, but she didn't even return when the boy died, drowned a day before his 4th birthday. Charlotte herself has recently lost her husband Leonardo, also a musician, who has died a slow, agonising death. To add to the tensions Eva has been looking after her mentally disabled sister Helena, and Charlotte is still reluctant about dealing first-hand with her child, and would have preferred to have her out of the way in a nursing home where she had been committed.

Those however are only the most recent and present issues that are likely to be the source of tension between mother and daughter; the latent animosity between them goes back further and deeper than that. Eva has a lifetime of hurt, pain, disappointment, lack of affection and validation left unspoken that she holds against her mother. It's been building up in her and it's time she had her say. She doesn't hold back, airing all her grievances, reproaches and recriminations in wild outbursts like "I love you" and "You hate me".

Some might expect a little more from an opera than self-absorbed people involved in a full-blown domestic dispute, and there's no doubt it's all more than a little overstated, but that's the point. Bergman's attempt to lay bare the stark reality of mother/daughter relationships is incisive and beautifully crafted, and essentially, the parent/daughter melodrama is no lesser a theme and treatment of the subject than many of Verdi's operas (Simon Boccanegra or Rigoletto). Still, the challenge remains for Sebastian Fagerlund to justify Autumn Sonata's translation from cinema screen to opera stage, and he does that well.

As the title indicates, there is an implicit musical dimension to Autumn Sonata that connects creativity to artistic inspiration. "Where do you draw it from? The brilliance, the pain" the chorus ask, Charlotte's public always with her and in the back of her mind. The question is not just where the artist draws their inspiration from but the hard price they often have to pay for it in the failure of their personal lives is also realistically considered here. Charlotte's career has left her in severe physical pain, and her taking of sleeping pills and painkillers compound her failure to be a good and understanding mother. Above all however, her public comes first.

Fagerlund interweaves all these elements well, pitching the music towards the emotional tenor of the work without letting it add to the high melodrama that is being expressed on all sides. The scoring for the voices is particularly good in this respect, permitting arias of reflection, duet duels and competitive trios of overlapping sentiments spilling over one another as they vie for attention. Fagerlund even permits the rarely lucid Helena her moment of vocal expression. With a chorus always ready to well up also in the background, temperatures are raised in intensity as Charlotte's visit descends into increasingly violent verbal blows.

The other critical factors contributing to Autumn Sonata working as an opera are of course the singing performances and the staging. All the roles are well sung and all the different voices here play a significant part in the work as a whole, but the principal roles are very much tied into the mother/daughter relationship of Eva and Charlotte. Erika Sunnegårdh is compelling and credible in her expression of Eva, and Anne Sofie von Otter shows none of the weakening that has been detected in other traditional roles, but is actually in superb voice in her creation of the role of Charlotte. The only fragility she shows here is her character's inability to continue to deny the damage she has done to her family.

With expression of personality and interaction of characters of primary importance, it's all very well directed by Stéphane Braunschweig, who also designs a set that helps express the multiplicity of views and sentiments. The stage is broken down into rooms and compartments, with backgrounds that open and close in response to the various levels that the libretto and characterisation operate on, showing parallel scenes, flashbacks, ghosts and even expressions of inner-life in the case of Helena. Without question, Bergman proves to be well suited to opera, and Fagerlund serves Autumn Sonata well.

Links: Opera Platform

Wagner - Der fliegende Holländer (Helsinki, 2017)

Richard Wagner - Der fliegende Holländer

Finnish National Opera, Helsinki - 2017

John Fiore, Kasper Holten, Johan Reuter, Camilla Nylund, Gregory Frank, Mika Pohjonen, Sari Nordqvist, Tuomas Katajala

The Opera Platform - January 2017

Just for a second I had to think twice about which Wagner opera I was actually watching until the familiar overture - furiously played here in a way that made it unmistakable - reassured me. It isn't that Kasper Holten's concept for the Finnish National Opera production is anything outlandish, it's just that it opens on a scene that is almost exactly like Robert Carsen's Tannhäuser for the Paris Opera. Both show an artist furiously working on a painting while a model/lover reclines semi-naked on a mattress on the floor beside him. It's not the kind of familiar image you normally associate with the very distinctive setting of Der fliegende Holländer.

The role of the artist in society may be better suited to Tannhäuser, but those themes can also be applied with some validity to pretty much any Wagner opera, even if it sometimes seems a bit of a stretch. Kasper Holten's Helsinki production however is boldly resolute in presenting the opera in those terms and he doesn't have to ditch all the familiar sea legend imagery either, but subtly reworks it to support the central theme of the artist suffering for his art. It forces the viewer to reconsider the work in relation to the composer's use of mythology and indeed how it can be applied to Wagner's own mythologising of himself. The brilliant production values help make the point convincingly enough, but the musical values at Helsinki make this nothing less than a resounding success.

As the overture progresses, we already gain a vital grasp of the nature of The Dutchman as a suffering artist. It's not just one woman who is in his studio, but a never-ending succession of one beautiful model after another. The artist's curse, like the Dutchman's curse to endlessly wander the seas, is to never know rest in his duty to his art and to remain an outsider with no place to call home. Such is his dedication to his muse that he also risks never knowing true love. It's a lonely life, and even surrounded by admirers at Daland's art gallery, the Dutchman remains a solitary sorry figure. There's not a black mast, a red sail or storms in sight here, the only concession to the sea imagery being the agonised Abstract Expressionist blue-splash paintings that the Dutchman compulsively creates. It's all the "treasure" he has to offer the gallery owner in exchange for marrying his daughter.

You might be less inclined to buy into this concept were the musical delivery and performances not as good as they are here. Right from the outset, John Fiore leads the Finnish National Opera orchestra through a devastatingly powerful, dynamic and emotionally charged musical performance. In another context, the vocal delivery might appear to be a little over-emphatic, but it's a perfect fit here, with Gregory Frank's Daland, Johan Reuter's Dutchman and Tuomas Katajala's Steersman all intense, lyrical and forceful in delivery. What couldn't you do with a cast and performances like this, and it permits Holten the opportunity to explore more deeply the themes in this intriguing early work from Wagner when the composer was still trying to find his own voice.

Act II (after the interval in this three act version of the opera) extends the themes of art taken to obsession rather well, and is likewise boosted by an outstanding performance from Camilla Nylund. Senta and the sailor's wives are not spinning yarn here, but spinning pottery wheels and the phallic clay construction on Senta's plate shows where her distracted mind lies. To make it clear to the rest of her colleagues, she recounts her obsession with the great artist known as the Dutchman and her belief that she could be his redemption by creating her own painting and throwing herself down onto the splattered paint in a mixture of Abstract Expressionism and performance art. As sung by Nylund, it's quite a performance, the familiar attractive timbre of voice covering the range from entrancement to exultation and enrapture with every expression perfectly pitched.

It provides all the more reason why Senta and the Dutchman are immediately attracted to each other. As the Dutchman states, his first impression is that her "image" speaks to him and he can see a kindred soul in the painting she has made. Holten captures that sense of souls coming together well with a nice piece of stage trickery, using a handheld camera that Senta and the Dutchman share to record their direct perspective on the other person. Projecting it 'live' in the background, it's a brilliant device. Philipp Fürhofer's sets also do much to contribute to the natural fluidity of the piece, the large glass-panelled walls creating a cross-section of rooms on a rotating platform, with wilder projections of stormy sea abstractions enveloping the stage.

Act III still requires an imaginative response to present the crew of the ghost ship in Act III in terms of the concept of the artist. Holten comes up with... a nightmare. It might sound like a cop-out, but it fits perfectly with the nature of the Dutchman, seeing him assailed by doubts in the faceless figures of an uncomprehending society. If it works, again it's got much to do with the drive of the performances, but the choreography and dance movements all flow into that same swirl of emotions and artistic passions that were evident during the overture. Johan Reuter's charged performance as the Dutchman is key to holding this together so well, his deeply sensitive character subject to overwhelming emotions that surge like the tides of the sea and threaten to drown him.

Speaking of which, there have been many ways of depicting that final scene in Der fliegende Holländer and many ways of reading its message, but Kasper Holten's version is one of the best I've come across, having both meaning and impact. And impact perhaps just an important a factor that should not be underestimated as a means to deliver the 'message'. In a masterstroke bordering on exploitation, Senta turns the recordings that she and the Dutchman have made - images that capture his own death - into a piece of video art. If that is not striking enough, introducing further ambiguity on the nature of the artist to exploit their lives and loves for material, Camilla Nylund's delivery of the final ecstatic lines and her realisation of the personal price to be paid for great art is utterly devastating.

Broadcast on the Opera Platform in an all too brief viewing window, this is a truly great Der fliegende Holländer and essential viewing. If this is the standard they are accustomed to, it's a fine introduction to the quality of the work at the Finnish National Opera. It's also a reminder of how creative and insightful Kasper Holten can be in his grasp of what makes particular works great as well as in his ability to convey it clearly and inventively to an audience. I will be interested to see how Oliver Mears succeeds him at the Royal Opera House, but watching this and a number of his recent production, I can't help thinking that Holten's early departure has been an unfortunate loss to Covent Garden.

Links: Opera Platform, Finnish National Opera

Korngold - Die Tote Stadt

Erich Wolfgang Korngold - Die Tote Stadt

Finnish National Opera, 2010

Mikko Franck, Kasper Holten, Klaus Florian Vogt, Camilla Nylund, Kirsti Valve, Markus Eiche, Sari Nordqvist, Kaisa Ranta, Melis Jaatinen, Per-Hakan Precht, Juka Riihimaki, Antti Nieminen

Opus Arte - DVD

Written when he was just 23 years of age and first performed in 1920, the high Romantic notions conflating love and death are particularly evident in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt - The Dead City. The Liebestod-like sentiments are expressed in Wagnerian fashion with an underlying Straussian Salome-like discordance, but what is notable about Die Tote Stadt is how it takes these ideas to even greater levels in its consideration of the underlying psychology or even pathology of his main character through dreams fantasies and impressions. The formal challenges of representing this in a production of the work then are considerable, but so too is the technical virtuosity of the orchestra and the singers to express this often difficult work. Both elements however are handled exceptionally well in this 2010 production from the Finnish National Opera.

Much like Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo', which follows a similar dysfunctional character who attempts to recreate his dead love in another person and relies very much on the varying tones and labyrinthine character of San Francisco and its outlying locations, Die Tote Stadt is a psychological study that is connected very closely with the nature of a city, in this case Bruges. You could say that this aspect is somewhat over-emphasised in the libretto, Paul noting that "the dead woman, the dead city... there's a mysterious bond between them" and Brigitta quoting Paul as saying "Bruges and I, we are one, we worship the most beautiful, the Past", but this is just one element in a deeper conflict that Paul has to reconcile between the past and the present, between the living and the dead, between an ideal and the reality.

Just as Paul's home then is a shrine to his dead wife Marie, so too he sees Bruges as a city of the dead, a monument to those who have lived before, the memory of the past being desecrated by the living. Whether this needs additional emphasis or not, Es Devlin's designs for Kasper Holten's production emphatically puts both Paul's room and the city, as a reflection of his inner mindset, right up there on the stage. It looks terrific, the room expressionistically designed with oppressive angles, littered in an obsessively organised fashion with pictures, portraits, mementos and shrine-boxes dedicated to Marie. At the back, tilted, but almost at right-angle to the stage, a vertiginous section of the city is revealed, bearing down on Paul.

Two other elements of the production and the stage design are relevant to this expression of Paul's mindset. One is the large bed in the centre of it all, which indicates on the one hand that much of what goes on is a dream in Paul's head and on the other hand it reflects much of Paul's repressed and misplaced urges. Much like Stefan Herheim's psycho-sexual study of Wagner in his Bayreuth Parsifal, where figures similarly emerge from beneath the sheets, there's a sense of guilt and corruption that Paul here associates with the sexual act, unable to reconcile the pure memory of the dead Marie with his feelings for the sensuous dancer Marietta. The other element helps make this problem more concrete by using an actor to play the ghost of Marie, having her present on the stage with her lookalike Marietta. It may not be called for, but it does make Paul's dilemma all the more real.

If there are any questions about Kasper Holten employing such techniques, they are at least borne out in how they fit with Korngold's musical arrangements for Die Tote Stadt. Musically, the opera doesn't follow any straightforward formal structure or narrative but follows its own chromatic muse, blending styles and working with a fragmentary montage of songs and waltzes, switching from lush orchestration to discordance according to the ecstatic reverie or the the tormented state of its protagonist. Wagner and Strauss may be the antecedents of this style, but there's a commonality here with Puccini, particularly the impressionistic style of Il Trittico and his latter works, and an awareness of cinematic structures which Korngold would develop later through his years in Hollywood.

The opera is consequently highly demanding of its performers, particularly the role of Marietta, which is pitched at the level of a Straussian soprano. Camilla Nylund has everything that is required here, the range, the stamina, and a necessary beauty in the colour of timbre and expression. She is simply phenomenal. This is a great performance. Klaus Florian Vogt's high sweet tenor might not seem like the ideal voice for the equally challenging role of Paul and he does struggle sometimes at the lower end of the tessitura.  He brings a glorious soaring quality however to those ecstatic moments and a sense of vulnerability to his character that is not there, for example, in Torsten Kerl's strident singing of the role on the 2001 Opéra National du Rhin recording.

The Opus Arte release of the Finnish National Opera's 2010 production is released on DVD only, spread across a 2-disc set. The source is certainly not HD, but even in Standard Definition the image quality is somewhat disappointing, lacking real clarity and even appearing to be a little juddery in its NTSC transfer. It does however represent the light, colour and detail of the darkened stage production reasonably well. The LPCM stereo and DTS Surround 5.1 audio tracks don't have the depth of a high resolution recording either, the music not really lifting out or revealing the detail and colour of the orchestration, but that could also be down to the performance which doesn't seem to express the full quality of Korngold's lush score.  The only extra feature on the disc is a Cast Gallery.  Subtitles are in English, French, German, Japanese and Korean.