Dvořák - Armida (Wexford, 2022)

Antonín Dvořák - Armida

Wexford Festival Opera, 2022

Norbert Baxa, Hartmut Schörghofer, Jozef Benci, Jennifer Davis, Stanislav Kuflyuk, Jan Hynk, Rory Dunne, Gerard Schneider, Josef Moravec, Thomas Birch, Andrii Kharlamov, Libuse Santorisova, Chris Mosz, Josef Kovačič

O'Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford - 2nd November 2022

Harking back to the standard 19th century operatic tensions involving war and love, based on Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata during the time of the crusades, you would think that it shouldn't be too difficult to make a version of Armida exciting and dramatic. Dvořák's dynamic music in his final opera certainly lives up to the drama, expressing high passions of love and betrayal where the stakes are high between the opposing forces of Christian and Saracen armies. Add in some magic, sorcery and an Act II finale that includes a swooping dragon to stage a dramatic escape at a critical point and this seems tailor-made for the 71st Wexford Festival Opera's Magic & Music theme. And yet, something is lacking in this production.

It's definitely not Dvořák's music. There is no fake Eastern exoticism here, there are no romantic light arias; it's straight ahead drama and high passion on a war footing. Ismen, ruler of Syria and sorcerer, is however under no illusions as to the limits of his powers to make Princess Armida love him. He knows she loves another, but he and King Hidraot, the father of Armida, believe that she is better placed to infiltrate the enemy camp and use her magic powers against the mighty forces that have already gathered to take the city of Jerusalem. Armida however has other ideas having been bewitched herself by the appearance of the knight Rinald out hunting. There is powerful vocal writing to match these emotions, not least of which is the inexplicable passion that grips Armida and leads her to side with the enemy.

And yet, much of what passes for drama in the first two acts feels detached from the characters and more like symphonic colouring and scene setting as characters define their position and plan their course of action. Director Hartmut Schörghofer doesn't have any great ideas to make it visually more engaging as a human drama, keeping it in a First Crusade (1096 - 1099) setting, using the backdrops for projections of locations with the principals and choruses filling a mainly bare stage, often singing outward. Norbert Baxa's rousing conducting makes this sound terrific and the singing is outstanding, and that proves to be more than enough for a satisfactory presentation of this rarely performed work, but you are left feeling that it could do with a little more action or activity. And contemporary relevance, possibly.

There really isn't much to help the audience engage with the predicament at hand, the festival theme of Magic & Music taken a little too literally here and not enough attention given to the human side, or to the reality and scale of the war being played out. You can hear it ok, not least in the fine singing of Jennifer Davis as Armida and Stanislav Kuflyuk as Ismen, and the impressive choral work certainly suggests the might of the Christian forces on one side and the women of the court of King Hidraot on the other. The set relies on a mirrored background cutting the stage diagonally to visualise the divisions, with screens that open up and supply depth on one side, and computer generated projections of the army camp on the other. A huge dragon on the screen swoops down and explosions of magic do a little to match the content, but it still feels distanced and stage operatic.

You might expect the opera to pick up after this pre-interval magical intervention by Ismen, but the sorcerer for some reason leaves Armida and Rinald to wander and wonder in an enchanted garden in the third act. It doesn't really work musically or dramatically in any sense of taking the opera forward - feeling more like an operatic convention to have a romantic interlude - and here the director also fails to find a way of making this engaging or even capitalise on the visual splendour and magic that such a scene offers. Projected computer graphics are used and, like the movies when they are overused (Avatar came to mind in this scene), it lacks a sense of real substance, a sense of reality. Perhaps if you are seated lower and at a better angle it might have looked more enveloping (the accompanying images seem to testify to that), but from the left of the stage and above, the mirrored effect wasn't visible.

The final act should bring about action and passion, and musically it really did. Down in the orchestra pit Baxa and the Wexford Festival orchestra delivered the rolling punches, the fearsome chorus of Crusaders - superbly managed by Andrew Synnott - even though only a representative handful, completely gave the impression they could overrun Jerusalem themselves. The principal singers raised their game also, striking blow after blow. Partly however because there was little conviction behind the buildup of the previous acts to merit it - in the dramatic content of the opera as much as in the stage direction - it still appeared to fall short of what was needed to make this opera work.

Still, any opportunity to see a rare Dvořák opera performed live is an occasion to relish, and although it is imperfect in conception and with the death of composer in 1904 there was no opportunity for revision, it didn't disappoint in a fully orchestrated live performance. The timing was a little bit off between orchestra and chorus in the opening scenes, but there were no issues elsewhere. I was concerned that conductor might be a little heavy-handed and sacrifice melody for overstatement, but it was wholly appropriate for a staged version of Armida, attempting to make those high emotions, passions, conflict and heightened magical content all blend with the intent of the drama, and it sounded terrific in the O'Reilly Theatre of the National Opera House.

The performance certainly revealed some excellent singing. Looking like she hadn't been given a great deal of direction, Armida spent much of it almost looking like she was in a state of trance, but Jennifer Davis sung out those passions impressively. Ismen is a choice role, a rather more interesting figure than Rinald, and it was taken superbly by Stanislav Kuflyuk. Gerard Schneider did what he could with Rinald, but the character is not greatly defined in either the music or the direction. As already noted, but it's worth saying again, the male and female choruses were outstanding, giving the work that extra edge of lyricism and dramatic dynamic where needed.

Links: Wexford Festival Opera

Alfano - Risurrezione (Wexford, 2017)

Franco Alfano - Risurrezione

Wexford Festival Opera, 2017

Francesco Cilluffo, Rosetta Cucchi, Gerard Schneider, Anne Sophie Duprels, Charles Rice, Romina Tomasoni, Louise Innes

National Opera House, Wexford - 2 November 2017

Late in his life, Leo Tolstoy embraced a radical form of Christianity and would look back with disgust at the indulgence and sin of his former aristocratic upbringing. Adopting a more ascetic lifestyle he would also come to repudiate his greatest works, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina, believing that art and literature had no purpose unless it was instructive. Some of his descriptions of his former life of dissolution can be found in the early semi-autobiographical work Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, and a more reflective and penitent side of his rebirth can be found in later works like The Kingdom of God is Within You, The Forged Coupon and Resurrection.

The idea of penitence and rebirth is evidently very much to the fore in Resurrection. It might seem primarily like an exercise in guilt, but Resurrection is not so much about wallowing in self-pity and self-abasement as much as reflecting on how one's actions affect others, and whether any real good can be brought about by repentance and a change of heart. Tolstoy reportedly wasn't impressed by the indulgence of Resurrection being adapted into an opera that caters to a well-off audience, but you can also see why Franco Alfano's Risurrezione didn't set the world alight and even now remains a neglected piece. It is a gloomy affair for the most part and Alfano's treatment of the work is as serious as it gets, but it is also beautiful and ultimately uplifting.

The opera is structured neatly into four parts that, since the story is instructive and not bogged down with distracting sidelines, are easily summarised. Prince Dmitri reflects Count Tolstoy's early life of indulgence of the aristocratic lifestyle, without a thought or care for the needs and feelings of others. In Act I he seduces the maid Katiusha on a fleeting visit to the family mansion and then disappears again, forgetting about her.  In Act II we discover that Katiusha is pregnant from this encounter and as a consequence she has been thrown out of the house and her life has fallen into ruin. She abandons an attempt to tell Dmitri about the situation when she discovers him with a prostitute.

Dmitri belatedly discovers Katiusha's fate, which has ended up with her becoming a prostitute and falsely imprisoned, and he tries to make up for what has happened in Act III, visiting the fallen woman in prison. He pleads that he knew nothing of what had happened, that he is still in love with her and that he can help get her released from the harsh prison environment so that they can marry, but Katiusha remains impervious to his entreaties and doesn't believe that he can really change his ways.

Alfano sets Risurrezione very much in the Italian verismo style of the day, which proves to be quite appropriate, at least for these first three acts. It's actually not unlike La Bohème, the meeting of Dmitri and Katiusha in Act I similar to that of Rodolfo and Mimi; on shaky ground from the start, the brief spark between them soon extinguished by the cruel reality of their circumstances. In Risurrezione, Act II and III also relate closely to the situation in Act III of La Bohème, where attempts to rekindle the spark seem even more unlikely; the couple despairing of the impossibility of their union. Surely death is also on the horizon in Risurrezione?

Well yes and no, and that's the point of Tolstoy's work. Hard lessons have to be learned, there needs to be an acceptance of one's true self and true repentance and reparation. Dmitri tries to show this, but it is worthless without Katiusha's acceptance and forgiveness, which can also only come with an acceptance of her own true self. This is visually represented in Rosetta Cucchi's impressive Wexford production by a young girl seen briefly throughout, but to be fair it's hinted at in Alfano's score, which is not as relentlessly downbeat as it sounds, but alive to dynamic and emotional tone.

The focus is very much on Dmitri and Katiusha for most of Act I, much of Act II, the latter part of Act III and all of Act IV.  Considering the challenging nature of their characters' predicaments, that places a lot of pressure on Gerard Schneider and Anne Sophie Duprels, but both take their parts exceptionally well, remaining strong and consistently lyrical throughout. Alfano does however break the story down into memorable scenes with a greater variety of dramatic situation than might be expected, even if variation of the overall despairing tenor of the work up to the final scene is negligible.

That makes Risurrezione quite a challenging work also for a conductor trying to harness Alfano's verismo score towards the true character of Tolstoy's original work. Francesco Cilluffo however drew a magnificent performance out of the Wexford Festival orchestra that was entirely sympathetic to the sensibility of the work and the composer's treatment, holding to a consistent through-line while finding the right adjustments of volume and tempo to allow the score to hit all of its dramatic points. The Italianate orchestration might seem at odds with the spiritual Russian side of the work, but Cilluffo uses the verismo aspects of the score as another way of trying to find "truth", albeit in a very different way from Tolstoy.

The conclusion then in Act IV is worth waiting for, even though the treatment up to that point never drags or begs indulgence but is rather just earnest and purposeful. For the climactic moment of enlightenment Alfano has to abandon his verismo principles for a heavenly choir as an inner revelation dawns (literally) on both Dmitri and Katiusha and takes them to a spiritual awakening. It really does strike the perfect note of transcendental attainment that the work should be aiming to reach. The traditional operatic death that might be expected at the conclusion then is replaced by a metaphorical death, a letting go of the past and to ways that have held both Dmitri and Katiusha back from being open to their better nature, allowing them to be reborn, resurrected.

Links: Wexford Festival Opera

Verdi - Il Trovatore (Salzburg 2014 - Webcast)

Giuseppe Verdi - Il Trovatore

Salzburger Festspiele, 2014

Daniele Gatti, Alvis Hermanis, Anna Netrebko, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Diana Haller, Francesco Meli, Plácido Domingo, Riccardo Zanellato, Gerard Schneider, Miloš Bulajić, Raimundas Juzuitis

Medici, ARTE Concert - August 2014

The Di Luna family seem to have fallen on hard times in the 2014 Salzburg Festival production of Verdi's Il Trovatore. Like many other once aristocratic families with large expensive estates to manage, their home is now open as a museum to the general public as a means of paying for its upkeep. This one in particular has some colourful history attached to it. The eldest son, Ferrando, takes on the role of tour guide and tells the latest group of tourists all about how the fortunes of the Di Luna family went into decline following the death of the youngest son, consumed in the same fire where they burnt an old witch accused of putting a curse on him.

This isn't a bad way to present the 15th century melodrama of Il Trovatore. The opera opens with a tale that relates the background of the story, and unquestionably, it's this historical event that is to continue to have grave repercussions for the Di Luna family. It's perhaps not a device that can be sustained for the whole of the work, so Latvian director Alvis Hermanis - who brought Alphonse Mucha paintings spectacularly to life in La Monnaie's Jenůfa last year - works on a similar 'Night at the Museum' idea here, where the paintings in the galleries come to life and recreate the past. It's not an ideal arrangement, requiring the cast to make some awkward on-stage quick changes, but the crimson colour scheme looks fabulous and there could even be come conceptual merit to the enterprise.

Perhaps it's the troubadour reference, but this intentions of this production of Il Trovatore reminded me of the concept of George Benjamin's and Martin Crimp's Written on Skin. It's about looking back at history and bringing the past back to life through art, through painting, through the power of storytelling. And, of course, through the power of opera as well. It's not a grand concept by any means, but Alvis Hermanis manages to apply it to Il Trovatore without interfering too much with the primary purpose of the opera to entertain and inspire passions through storytelling, since that is also essentially the primary purpose of the troubadour.

It's not uncommon to apply such a distancing framing device to operas (mostly bel canto works) where the plot is a little over-heated or lacking in credibility. Although the plot of Il Trovatore can be expressed in such terms, it doesn't necessarily need a modern framing device because Verdi's score is powerful enough to carry you along through the roaring melodrama. Aside from the abundance of memorable melodies, arias and choruses, the music also succeeds in how it is able to give full dramatic expression to the heightened sentiments of the characters without adding to the hysteria.

Those arrangements seemed to be slightly restrained here as conducted by Daniele Gatti to the point that where very familiar pieces aren't immediately recognisable. I would be reluctant to judge it on the highly compressed live sound-mix for an internet stream, but there does seem to be some holding back from the traditional playing of Verdi at full-tilt, withholding in the process some of the pleasures that come with it in this particular work. On the other hand, it does reveal some of the musicality and beauty of Verdi's writing. Some of the choices however may be determined by the staging - there are no hammers on anvils in the art gallery of this production, for example - but in scenes such as the conclusion where the impact is all-important, it hits home powerfully.

In terms of the singing or the playing of the characters however there was little such compromise. The only real constraint on some of the performers was the necessity of changing costumes in their transformation from museum attendants in modern dress to historical figures in period costume, while continuing to keep singing at the same time. Anna Netrebko seemed to be half in and half out of a dress in some scenes (not that I'm complaining), but it scarcely mattered as far as her performance is concerned. She might not be the ideal Leonora, but she certainly has the ability, the voice and the charisma to carry it off. She's deservedly the star attraction here and remains riveting to watch, never giving anything less than total commitment to the role. If this production itself is less than perfect, Netrebko's raises this Il Trovatore to one that is well worth seeing.

Whether she was well-matched here with Plácido Domingo's Conte di Luna however was difficult to judge. Domingo was announced as indisposed due to illness and his subsequent performances were all cancelled, but he still took to the stage to perform for the live broadcast. He was visibly unwell and struggling for breath, but held up remarkably well even if his performance as the Count is still very much in baritenor mode. Marie-Nicole Lemieux played Azucena exceptionally well. Her account of the Zingarella's fate and her chilling closing exclamations could hardly be more dramatically delivered. Francesco Meli combined power with a rare delicacy as Manrico. The song of the troubadour should have the power to bewitch and enchant, particularly given the requirements of this staging, and that was all here.

Links: ARTE Concert, Medici.tv, Salzburg Festival