Strauss - Salome (Paris, 2022)

Richard Strauss - Salome

Opéra National de Paris, 2022

Simone Young, Lydia Steier, Elza van den Heever, Iain Paterson, John Daszak, Karita Mattila, Tansel Akzeybek, Katharina Magiera, Matthäus Schmidlechner, Éric Huchet, Maciej Kwaśnikowski, Mathias Vidal, Sava Vemić, Luke Stoker, Yiorgo Ioannou, Dominic Barberi, Bastian Thomas Kohl, Alejandro Baliñas Vieites, Marion Grange

Paris Opera Play - 27th October 2022

There's not a lot of point in comparing one production of an opera with another, or indeed weighing one against another. There are always going to be differences of musical interpretation and evidently different people singing are going to make it sound and play out differently from one production to the next. Depending on the numerous factors involved in live performance, even the same production can differ from one revival to the next, even from one night to the next. It all comes down to personal preferences, and opinions will always vary. When you view two productions of Salome side by side however - one of the most intriguing of all opera works - it's hard not to make direct comparisons. As far as the Paris 2022 production stands against the recent Tcherniakov one at Hamburg, all it confirms is that this extraordinary work is infinitely open to radical ideas and interpretations.

When I reviewed the Hamburg production earlier this month, I suggested that if you go back to the original Oscar Wilde play, the pre-eminent theme of the work is how the darkest human lusts and behaviours can be tolerated as long as they are kept hidden and not spoken about in polite society. Wilde was of course satirising Victorian society and the underlying moral corruption more than retelling a biblical story, but you could certainly see an interpretation of hypocrisy in religion as well. That idea was largely adhered to in the Tcherniakov production, which managed to draw on the dark power of the work while remaining largely bloodless in explicitness. Not so much here in director Lydia Steier's production for the Paris Opera.

One other vital element of Salome is that it it was written with the intention of being shocking, provocative and taboo breaking, and the genius of Richard Strauss is such that he was capable of pushing the accepted conventions of musical language to similarly provide shock and outrage. This is the beauty of the work, or the ugly beauty of the work, if you like. Steier's Paris production definitely tends towards the character of the work to shock and thereby reveal more of the hidden nature of mankind's inherent selfishness and cruelty, rather than dress it up in flowery Symbolist poetry. As far as it applies to Salome in this production, she is not actively involved in the orgy of sex and violence at Herod's party but bored with it, which perhaps suggests a deeper pathology, but I'm not sure this production really gets to what it might be. 

Of course if you have shown Herod indulging in such activities, you can hardly expect him to be shocked when his stepdaughter shows the same tendencies pushed in another direction and thinking of it as 'love'. Herod's hedonistic party is viewed in a high room with wide glass window, showing a slow motion wild drunken orgy where cruel lusts and desires are freely indulged in the beating, murdering and mutilating of slaves. Semi-naked men and women prisoners are brought up from the dungeons, their bloody brutalised and mutilated bodies later carried down the stairs by men in bio-hazard suits to be dumped off into a pit at the side of the stage only to be replaced from the dungeons with a continuous supply of victims.

Very much tending towards darkness, the production uses lighting to soften and darken during Salome's poetic eulogising of the wild beauty of the tortured emaciated caged Jokanaan. It explodes into light when he rejects her advances, although here he seems to be leading her on somewhat (or maybe only in her fevered imagination) before delivering his imprecations, leading her to strike him with a cattle prod. What is critical in the depiction of this scene is capturing its extraordinary dynamic, here more so since the singing of Elza van den Heever and Iain Paterson delivers it so well. It's intense and compelling on every level. Every perversion is permitted, even as far as Salome masturbating over the cover of the cistern as Jokanaan is triumphantly lowered to the climatic music that Strauss composed for this scene.

The production manages to introduce a little lightness or further dynamic into the opera with the outrageous appearance and dress of Herod and Herodias. It does this without altering the grotesque overblown quality of the work, and crucially the quality of the singing is maintained. John Daszak's Herod enters with a feathered headdress, wearing a silk cloak over a see-through top. Sporting a blonde mullet, he looks like a New Romantic video star from the 80s. Herodias is similarly attired, with a dress supported by nipple hooks (Karita Mattila wearing a false boob set). There is something of a blend of 'Girls on Film', 'Wild Boys' and 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' about the look only taken to nightmarish lengths, with plenty of Pete Burns-like characters among the party entourage. Mattila plays up to the part of Herodias marvellously, flirting with the guard, both she and Herod making suggestive use of fruit in a way that Barrie Kosky would be proud of, but it fits with the florid metaphors used by Wilde to such great effect.

In terms of performance, this is one of the most impressive and impactful I can remember, but then it needs to be in order to rise to the challenges set by the production design, stage direction and musical direction. Simone Young's conducting of the Paris orchestra in particular is just outstanding here. It helps that the sound quality on the Paris Opera Play platform is so good. Using headphones, you can hear every little detail and sweep of dynamic orchestration. All of the cast have sufficient force matched with lyricism to deliver the decadent phrases of Lachmann's translation of Wilde's play. It feels like this play was written to be performed in the heightened state of opera, as effective here in Strauss's version as in Antoine Mariotte's Salomé using the original French text. As with Maeterlinck and Debussy in Pelléas et Mélisande, there is something about Symbolist works that seems well-suited to lyrical interpretation.

Whether or not you find the look of the production distasteful - it certainly pushes all the buttons to shock - this is a very well-directed Salome. The characters, their qualities, their flaws are all laid out to see and the singers are given space to express it. There is no confusion about what is going on, the focus is maintained where it needs to be in the marking and choreography. Whether Lydia Steier manages to probe any deeper into the dark psychology of the character of Salome could depend more on how the viewer responds to it. Having watched another Salome recently and found new elements to consider, it might not be fresh enough for me personally this time, but the singing is outstanding and under the musical direction of Simone Young this wonder of the opera repertoire remains as impressive as ever.

They key to how you might respond to the work lies, as it often does, in the depiction and outcome of the Dance of the Seven Veils. There is no oriental exoticism here whatsoever, the 'dance' shown for what it really is. Herod strips, sexually abuses and pleasures himself over a disgusted Salome, who nonetheless allows this to be taken to its brutal conclusion before she is subsequently gang-raped by the rest of the guests stirred up by the night's revelry of violence. Salome here is not gorily glorious (except in her own mind) but reduced to something pitiful, crawling across the floor, while Herod's page takes a gun to the whole rotten lot of them. It's all pretty revolting, but undeniably as dark and brutal as any conventionally staged conclusion of this magnificent opera.

External links: Opéra National de Paris, Paris Opera Play

Strauss - Salome (Hamburg, 2023)

Richard Strauss - Salome

Staatsoper Hamburg, 2023

Kent Nagano, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Asmik Grigorian, Kyle Ketelsen, John Daszak, Violeta Urmana, Oleksiy Palchykov, Jana Kurucová

ARTE Concert - 29th October 2023

Dimitri Tcherniakov's opera productions have tended to look very much alike in recent times, all tending towards contemporary upper middle-class settings, looking rather brown and dull. The interpretation or reinterpretation of the works in question has however never been dull. They may rarely accord accurately with the original stage directions but the director's approach at least finds new ways to consider the meaning of the works and what they say about contemporary society and the place of the individual within it, often from a psychoanalytical perspective. So while Tcherniakov's production of Strauss's Salome for Hamburg looks similar to his recent stage productions, you can imagine he will nonetheless find considerable riches in the psychology or psychopathy of this particular work.

It doesn't take too long to identify the little twists to the stage directions in this production and find them intriguing enough to see where he will take them. It's a dinner party for Herod's birthday and the assembled well-to-do guests are arranged around the table, some slightly outlandishly dressed. Narraboth observing the pale beauty of the princess Salome in the moonlight is not one of the waiters standing around the walls as you might expect, but one of the guests. The princess has made a late sullen appearance at the table in a white puffa jacket and Ren & Stimpy T-shirt, rejecting the welcome of her mother Herodias.

The initial proclamation from Jokanaan then does not come from a deep cistern but from the other end of the table, from man in a brown jacket and jeans, sporting glasses and comb-over (his hair definitely not like clusters of black grapes), smoking a cigar and intoning his grave pronouncements from a book he is reading. He seems out of place here, lost in his own world, bearing perhaps an air of disdain or self-righteousness, but possibly just oblivious to the frivolity of the dinner party. This Jokanaan is not a prisoner, but a guest, respected for his wisdom, but evidently seen as a bit eccentric.

You could also describe Tcherniakov's take on this opening scene as eccentric, but bearing in mind what we already know about how this party is going to play out, it's intriguing enough to wonder how this idea is going to be developed. Well, one aspect of Oscar Wilde's play is about social decadence and illicit lusts that are acceptable as long as they remain hidden under a mask of outward respectability, and this suggested openness of those behaviours provides a good opportunity to expose that. Not that any further enticement is needed as the work itself is still for me one of the most daring, provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of opera ever written. With Kent Nagano conducting, it enthralls from the first notes here, drawing you into a unique and very specific mood that never lets up as it progresses unbroken on a real-time path towards its shocking conclusion. Some fine singing from Oleksiy Palchykov as Narraboth certainly invites you to remain into the fascinating sound world of dark psychopathology.

As powerful as the work remains, what is still a challenge is finding a way to bring out is the shock nature of the work's subversive element of Wilde’s marriage of Symbolist poetic imagery with Biblical subject matter and a decadent high society. Removing the mystical status of Jokanaan, and presumably removing the removing of the head is going to make that harder, even if the conclusion might have lost some shock value now (but not much). One way is how the setting of this production attempts to bring what people really think about each other is brought much more into the open. When Salome complains about the lascivious looks of John Daszak's Herod and her mother's tolerance of his attentions, she does it in front of them and the guests, while they try to laugh it off as Salome just being Salome. It really heightens the sense of murderous intent.

Again however, Tcherniakov seems determined at every stage to undercut the familiar set pieces and find other means of bringing out ...well, whatever it is he is attempting to bring out. The failure of Narraboth to kill himself is neither here nor there, the Tetrarch slipping in blood only figuratively as a joke for the uproar that has developed at his party should dissipate the dark Symbolist imagery, but the tension somehow still remains. Salome's reaction and outburst at Jokanaan's rejection of her advances that plays out alongside this and the theological dispute of the Jews is however very strange. Delving through her old suitcase that her outraged mother - an excellent Violeta Urmana - throws at her feet, she dresses up with white face paint as a kind of a mime artist or Pierrot figure and sinks into shocked silence.

Similarly, Tcherniakov refuses to rely on the familiar explicit eroticism of the Dance of the Seven Veils, but tries to move past that and find another way of bringing out the uncomfortable nature of the relationship between Herod and Salome. Rather than strip off layers of clothing, Salome is almost naked already as Herod lasciviously dresses the drained, disconnected, semi-comatose Salome in a bizarre clown-like outfit. The whole scene remains static as the dance winds up to an anti-climatic conclusion. Salome remains impassive up until the moment that Herod refuses her wish, when she smashes a glass and threatens to take it to her throat. Kyle Ketelsen's Jokanaan it has to be said, also remains impassive, observing dispassionately as she calls for his head.

She may not be permitted to express anything to feed the lascivious illicit desires of Herod during her dance, but elsewhere the singing role is more than expressive enough to bring out everything that needs to be said/unsaid, and Asmik Grigorian is expressive enough in her singing and acting performance at the call for execution and the aftermath for this to remain as charged as it can possibly be. I'm not sure anyone can fully explore the madness of Salome's obsession and her corruption, but it's there in the libretto and the writing for the voice waiting to be brought to life in performance. Grigorian is lyrical and forceful in her delivery, not particularly loud or strong to carry over the massed forces of the orchestra, but it's an impressive and compelling performance nonetheless that really brings out the complexity of this character, her nature, her emotions and reactions.

Tcherniakov and Grigorian take this as far as it can go, although with this director you always have to wonder if he doesn't take it so far into absurdity that he sometimes undoes the good that has been established. There is no moon, no blood, no headless corpse, so you have to look elsewhere to find out what drives these characters. What is it that Salome wants that Jokanaan’s existence denies her? Respect? Attention? Love? Death? Self worth? Whatever you think it is, whether Jokanaan lives or dies, it's beyond a spoiled, over-indulged rich girl to understand or obtain. The seed of a sick brood, she is only capable of wreaking destruction. Much as you miss Wilde's haunting imagery, Grigorian's performance is enough to ensure that the power of this extraordinary work - still one of the finest in the whole opera repertoire - still comes through in the Hamburg production.

External links: Staatsoper Hamburg, ARTE Concert

Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Paris, 2019)

Dmitri Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

L'Opéra National de Paris, 2019

Ingo Metzmacher, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Dmitry Ulyanov, John Daszak, Aušrinė Stundytė, Pavel Černoch, Sofija Petrovic, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, Oksana Volkova, Andrei Popov, Krzysztof Baczyk, Marianne Croux, Alexander Tsymbalyuk

Paris Cinema Live - 16 April 2019

I love the way the Paris Opera site has a warning for this production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk advising that "Certain scenes may be inappropriate for the young and the easily offended". You could almost take it for granted that the conservative contingent of the audience at the Paris Opera are going to find much offensive in a Krzysztof Warlikowski production, and there is much indeed to find offense with. This time however it's not Warlikowski that brings controversy to a production but rather it's a case that this daring opera that Stalin ordered to be banned still has the potential to shock. Warlikowski merely helps realise its potential on stage for a modern audience.

Personally I think Warlikowski is less of a wild card than he typically used to be at La Monnaie in Brussels, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Berlin and the Teatro Real in Madrid where he really pushed buttons by twisting narratives - brilliantly and meaningfully - and imposing his own vision through extended scenes, movie references and even his own film inserts, throwing in glitter, dancers and all manner of bizzareness. Recently, particularly in Paris, he has actually toned down his interpretations a little, as in the recent Don Carlos and also with From The House of the Dead. With Lady Macbeth again the eccentricities are largely eliminated, the changes are still large but of minimal interference only to make the work even more powerful.

The reason for that is of course that Shostakovich's opera, banned in Russia after Stalin viewed it, is a force in itself. I don't think however that I've ever appreciated the full brilliance of the work as it's expressed here in the 2019 Paris Opera production. All the bold, daring satire of the corruption in Russian society and its treatment of women is given full vent in a rich musical arrangement that is dramatically attuned, expressive of sinister intent and murderous violence, but also warmly seductive and downright lewd. Conductor Ingo Metzmacher has a lot to do with that (and large shoes to fill when the current musical director Philippe Jordan leaves), but it's more a combination of efforts and, as it ought to be, a collaboration between composer, conductor and director. Not forgetting the performers, and we definitely won't forget the performers here.

I guess I'm not going to get tired of praising Aušrinė Stundytė for her singing and dramatic interpretations any time soon, but I might have to work on finding new adjectives if she keeps delivering at this level. This is another extraordinary performance, fearless in her complete absorption into difficult and challenging characters. Her choices to date have been good in that respect (most recently at Aix-en-Provence in Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel) and there are few female roles as superbly written from both character and singing viewpoint as Katerina Ismailova. It's a role Stundytė has impressed in before (Lyon) and she brings a great deal of thought, personality and subtle psychology to this performance, to an expression of complex human emotions pushed to extremes.

I would say that Krzysztof Warlikowski plays no small hand in directing and channeling that performance and in giving it an effective and credible context to work within. Of course, working in collaboration with his regular set and costume designer Małgorzata Szczęśniak, it's far from natural realism, but rather attuned to the undercurrents, to internal hopes and dreams, to fierce personal drive and disillusionment that comes when those ideals clash with reality, with the circumstances of life in rural Russia, with the attitudes of an oppressive patriarchal society, with institutions that are riddled with vice and corruption.

Warlikowski's interventions than are fairly expansive in assuming a very distinctive presence on the production design, but they do not interfere with where the real strengths of the work lie. Instead of a grain factory, this production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is situated in an abattoir. That might sound heavy handed, and yes, the handing of bloody sides of cattle is pretty disgusting, but it does capture something of Katerina's distaste for the world she is trapped in, as well as providing a humorous and ironic contrast between her belief that even cows have a purpose, while her life has none. The set where meat is handled also provides a chilling location for the near-rape of Aksinya. If viewers are easily offended by such scenes, they should be.

Rather than wallow in the degradation of society and how it clashes with individual liberties, Warlikowski and Szczęśniak move on and find other ways that illustrate what Shostakovich vividly depicts in his music. A large part of the drama takes place in a long trailer that represents Katerina's room, moved to a central position on the stage where it rotates and can viewed from a number of angles that permit the viewer to see the all sexual positions Katerina is able to perform with her lover Sergei, Warlikowski choreographing the sensual undercurrents and the outright raunchy actions to what is there explicitly in the music. The room later doubles as the trailer where Katarina and Sergei are held with the other prisoners in Act IV, underlining the impression that she has trapped herself.

Most brilliantly of all however is how Warlikowski depicts Katerina and Sergei's marriage as something of a blood wedding, with blood red curtains surrounding it and the bride and groom all in red. Instead of having the guests whisper rumours and asides about the bride and the mysterious disappearance of her husband, it's delivered by a stand-up comedian with a line in edgy humour, with circus acts also capturing brilliantly the absurdity and farce of the situation that is all there in Shostakovich's playful music for this scene. Similarly Shostakovich's music can't disguise the forced comedy of the police-chief and the institutional corruption of the authorities that even Stalin couldn't miss, and that blends superbly into the high farce that this Act descends into with the discovery of the body hung up with the other sides of beef.

Warlikowski also seeks to use a limited amount of projections, some of them barely noticeable as overlays of dripping blood down the red curtains, but always in an effort to get deeper into the psychology that underlies Katarina's behaviour, fears and dreams. Some 3-D computer graphics are created to capture a sense of floating and drowning underwater, and that also blends effectively into the wider considerations of the work.

I've always felt that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is a compelling work but rarely have I felt so absorbed by its dramatic drive as I have here in its telling by the stunning collaboration of Warlikowski, Metzmacher and Stundytė. Stundytė obviously dominates with her tour-de-force singing and acting performance, but the ensemble action and singing all work together tremendously well, with strong performances also from Pavel Černoch as Sergei, an impressive working of Aksinya's role by Sofija Petrovic, with excellent work also from Dmitry Ulyanov as Boris Timofeyevich, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as the Village drunk/comedian and Oksana Volkova as Sonyetka.

Links: L'Opéra National de Paris

Strauss - Salome (Salzburg, 2018)

Richard Strauss - Salome

Salzburg Festival, 2018

Franz Welser-Möst, Romeo Castellucci, John Daszak, Anna Maria Chiuri, Asmik Grigorian, Gábor Bretz, Julian Prégardien, Avery Amereau

Medici.TV


There comes a point in a Romeo Castellucci production when you wonder if it's worth the effort trying to make sense of it. It's not that they don't have meaning and value, Castellucci's productions are original, striking and do often find a new way of looking at a familiar work, but there are strange elements within that defy any attempt to pin them down or directly relate them to the works in question. Even when the director provides you with some pointers of where he is coming from, you can't always follow where he is takes it. Ultimately however, it fits or it doesn't, it will work for some and not for others. His Salzburg Festival production of Salome presents the same issues and is likely to similarly split audiences.

Salome for Salzburg is typical Castellucci in that respect at least. Some of the director's familiar techniques and obscure images are in there, but the production is not just a rehash of familiar tricks and tics, and - unlike a director with a singular vision like Robert Wilson for example - he doesn't try to force each opera to fit into their distinct worldview, but rather approaches it on it own terms, even if there is sometimes a similar visual aesthetic. This production is very much a response to Salome, even if inevitably it doesn't entirely match the familiar imagery and stage directions that we are accustomed to expect on some level with this opera, and even if it can appear somewhat obscure and occasionally even baffling.

In fact, rather more than most directors who take a work on its own terms, Castellucci is also known for taking the location into consideration and making it part of the production. Not that you really have much choice when it comes to the Felsenreitschule venue in Salzburg, an open air riding school carved into the very rock of the city. There's a reference here then to a Latin inscription carved above the nearby Sigmundstor or Neutor Tunnel 'Te Saxa Loquuntor' ('The Stones are talking of you') that Castellucci employs as a distinctive way to consider the work in terms of its Salzburg production, but what it means is anyone's guess, and easier to describe than interpret.

The location itself is of course spectacular in its own right, even if it's just for scale and atmosphere. The arcades are actually blocked off here to form a more solid surrounding wall, with openings used occasionally for entrances, exits and props. If nothing else it gives 'presence' to the flow and decadence of Oscar Wilde's original text and the taboo-breaking nature of the content that is in line with the employment of Strauss's musical forces. The detail of the composer's attempts to account for the line-by-line control of mood and subtext is where Castellucci perhaps has more of his own personal views and ways of presenting it.

You expect eccentric touches and they are most obviously there with the lower half of everyone face painted red. Everyone that is except Herodias, who is painted green for some reason and Salome, whose face is not painted, but who is marked out in contrast to everyone else by her virginal white appearance. Virginal is very much suggested by the opening scene before the music starts, showing her as little more than a child - whether it's a flashback or a suggestion of her real age is unknown - who cuts through the veil that presents the Sigmundstor Latin inscription. The back of Salome's dress when she appears in the opera appears to be stained with menstrual blood. If it was any other kind of blood, I think we'd know about it from the production and her protective and vocal mother Herodias might have had something to say about it.

The other significant person in the work of course is Jokanaan, or the prophet John the Baptist, whose voice does indeed appear to talk of you from the stones (Te saxa loquuntor), imprisoned below the floor in a cistern. His face is painted black, making his first encounter with Salome very effective indeed; she slight and delicate in white, eclipsed by the dark, wild, primitive and almost bear-like mass of Jokanaan, a man who had lived in the wilderness. Indeed there is an eclipse of sorts, with a huge black circle that overwhelms and enfolds their first encounter. Reinforcing his wild erotic presence, a live horse can be seen rearing out of the circular pit that holds him. So far so much is mostly just giving emphasis to the forces at work in the opera, forces that are most definitely there in the sinister, sinuous, beautiful and violent music, the Vienna Philharmonica well conducted through that variety of moods and colours by Franz Welser-Möst.

The other strange and confusing touches in the production relate to and contrast with how we expect to see the more iconic scenes of the work. During the Dance of the Seven Veils, Salome doesn't actually dance (heaven forbid that Castellucci should be so literal), but instead she kneels head down semi-naked on a plinth with the word SAXA written on it, while a block of stone is lowered 'crushing' her beneath it. Feel free to interpret that how you like. Instead of Jokanaan's head being presented on a silver charger, we have Jokanaan's naked decapitated full torso, with the head of a horse (presented as a first appeal to Salome to change her mind) left beside it in a shallow pool of white liquid. As far as taboo-breaking goes, you would expect an animal head to have additional shock impact and hint at illicit desires - which you should really be aiming for at the conclusion of this opera - but neither the thunderous cacophony of the closing notes nor the staging really make the necessary impact here.

That perhaps doesn't matter as much when the performances have been intense elsewhere throughout (although I do think that the impact of the conclusion should be viscerally felt). Asmik Grigorian certainly carries the kind of soaring intensity that the opera's Salome ought to have, reaching the luxurious heights and the depraved depths of the work. Herod and Herodias can sometimes be given to older singers just past their prime, but that's not the case here with John Daszak and Anna Maria Chiuri. Daszak isn't ideal but does carry a suitable haunted quality. Chiuri is spectacular, giving this Herodias a lot more input than usual. Gábor Bretz is not the most sonorous Jokanaan, but again his presence is felt. I'm not sure that Castellucci has any great vision for the work or the characters, but he certainly gets to the heart of their natures, working with the opera and the location to bring his usual unique qualities and intensity to this Salzburg production.

Links: Salzburg Festival, Medici.TV

Berg - Wozzeck (Salzburg, 2017)

Alban Berg - Wozzeck

Salzburg Festival, 2017

Vladimir Jurowski, William Kentridge, Matthias Goerne, John Daszak, Mauro Peter, Gerhard Siegel, Jens Larsen, Tobias Schabel, Huw Montague Rendall, Heinz Göhrig, Asmik Grigorian, Frances Pappas

Medici.tv - 27 August 2017

Like Alban Berg's only other stage work Lulu, Wozzeck is an opera where the music and the drama are intricately connected. Quite how Berg manages to achieve this synthesis in both pieces is complex and would take years to analyse, but there's not really any need for it to be interpreted; the power of these two remarkable works and how they are expressed speaks for itself. It's not really for a director to interpret Lulu or Wozzeck, as you think an artist like William Kentridge might do, as much as provide mood and context. Kentridge, as with his production of Lulu, does this well in this Salzburg Festival production, staging a Wozzeck that firmly has his own individual stamp (what Kentridge staging doesn't?) while not letting that vision get in the way of the work itself.

Georg Büchner's Woyzeck is a study of a man's - or man's - physical and mental limitations. In the 24 quite harsh and gruelling fragments of the unfinished drama, a body and a mind are tested as far as they can be pushed before their owner goes over the edge. Is there just one thing that proves to be too much for Franz Woyzeck, or is it an accumulation of miseries and torments of a wretched existence? Woyzeck is perhaps not so much a bleak account of how miserable life can be as how much strength is required to deal with the daily vicissitudes of life and how delicate and fragile a balance the human psyche rests on.

There is no strict order to the fragments of Büchner's Woyzeck, which is a factor that tends to work in its favour, preventing it from being a simple matter of cause and effect leading to madness and murder. Whatever way you look at it though, in the case of both Büchner and Berg it's apparent from that Franz Wozzeck is cracking. A common soldier, he is brutalised by the captain in his unit, he is experimented on by the doctor, he takes on odd jobs and consequently has little time or thought for his unmarried partner Marie and their child. The dissatisfied Marie's lewd affair with a handsome drum major is just one other factor that beats him down physically as well as mentally.

But Wozzeck also has another element that is less easily identified or rationalised; Franz is affected by hallucinations. Is this just a reaction of his body reacting to the pressures it is undergoing, an indication that his mind is breaking, or a sign of his ability or desire to see something greater beyond the material world? Franz certainly longs for meaning in order, for life to adhere to a structure that makes sense, but instead he finds nature cruel and capricious. Everyone is either looking for power, fame, recognition or satisfaction of their own private desires. To the doctor for example hoping that his experiments on Franz will make him famous, Wozzeck is "a mere human being" not worth losing sleep over, "The death of a salamander would be far more serious".

The world that Wozzeck inhabits is one where horizons are being closed down, where hopes are being dashed, where darkness is gathering. William Kentridge's production at Salzburg is one then that compartmentalises each of the scenes down into little vignettes, brief little areas of illumination in the dark apocalyptic world of the mind. The doctor's cabinet is like a small toilet space, other scenes open up and close, connected by rickety platforms, where only a watery death at the bottom awaits. The set of Wozzeck's mind is filled of course with projections of Kentridge's animated thick-line black ink sketches, depicting life, war, with grotesque figures wearing distorted face masks. War imagery features prominently, suggesting that Wozzeck's disintegrating mind might be caused by PTSD or, in a wider context, that it is the world that has been distorted beyond recognition by the horrors of war.

Kentridge's concepts and drawings are brought to life by the set designs of Sabine Theunissen and co-directed by Luc De Wit, and they do manage to connect everything and bring a continuity here that's not there in Büchner's scenes. But it feels illustrative and doesn't come anywhere close to expressing the madness or despair that is at the heart of Wozzeck, nor the sense of an order of madness that Berg's music constructions suggest. The tavern scene, for example, should be a scene where in Wozzeck's perspective the whole world "writhes and rolls in fornication", but there's little sense of this, nor in the direction of Wozzeck himself do we really get a sense of him buckling under the pressures of his tormentors and his own delusions.

Kentridge might not get to the heart of Wozzeck then - and maybe that's a place we don't really want to delve into too deeply - but as a performance and a spectacle illustrative of a work of infinite richness, there's still a great deal to admire and provoke thoughts in the 2017 Salzburg Wozzeck. There's much to find of interest in the musical performance of the Vienna Philharmonic directed by Vladimir Jurowski (much too much to take in on a single listening), and the singing performances are all good, although I found little in them that was really satisfying in terms of characterisation and continuity. It's more important for Franz and Marie that the other cast of grotesques, and in that respect Matthias Goerne could certainly have done with a little more direction, and Asmik Grigorian just didn't the lusty verve or the earthy complexity of Marie's emotional openness.

In a work as complex and delicately balanced as Wozzeck, it's important to establish a connection between the music and the drama, and Kentridge sets the mood, illustrates it well and allows Berg's musical score to fill in the areas where it is best placed to probe the deeper questions raised in the work. But Berg's opera still needs more than that. There's a human element that is admittedly submerged in some very dark and abstract ideas, but - like Lulu as well - it is essential that the singers don't just perform it, but are able to bring something human and personal that allows the audience to relate to and find a context for the difficult experiences that Franz and Marie undergo. The Salzburg production has much to admire, but it doesn't have the essential human involvement.

Links: Salzburger Festspiele, Medici.tv

Schreker - Die Gezeichneten (Munich, 2017)

Franz Schreker - Die Gezeichneten

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich - 2017

Ingo Metzmacher, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Tomasz Konieczny, Christopher Maltman, Alastair Miles, Catherine Naglestad, John Daszak, Matthew Grills, Kevin Conners, Sean Michael Plumb, Andrea Borghini, Peter Lobert, Andreas Wolf, Paula Iancic, Heike Grötzinger, Dean Power

StaatsoperTV - 1 July 2017

Franz Schreker's opera Die Gezeichneten is an unusual work, characteristic of a very specific style and of the period of its composition. It's a fairy-tale for the turn of the 20th century, with a late Romantic approach to its ideas and musical development that is perhaps a little too decadent and rich for modern tastes. In this opera, as in much of his other lyrical-dramas, Schreker poses some interesting questions in relation to the function of art that the post-Wagner opera world was (and perhaps still is) struggling to resolve. After 100 years of near neglect, the growing popularity of this particular opera suggests however that it's a question that is not only still relevant but becoming a more urgent issue for our contemporary society.

As far as Schreker is concerned, the pressing question of what should be the function of art and the role of the artist as an outsider is similar to the one considered by Wagner in nearly all of his important opera works. Composed in 1919 however, the world that Schreker explores in Die Gezeichneten is a very different place, and the rules and guidance that might have served as an example no longer seem relevant or are unable to take hold in a rapidly changing world that has gained a new perspective on humanity through Freudean psychoanalysis and the horrors of the First World War. If Die Gezeichneten follows the path of a fairy-tale, it's a fairy-tale where the darker undercurrents are now laid bare on the surface to serve as a reflection of what they say about modern society.

The post-Wagner/post-Parsifal/late Romantic composer/artist/idealist would like to believe that art provides a means of human transcendence from these horrors, but the former ideas about what constitutes art and beauty are now no longer quite as clear or as pure as might once have been thought. Elysium, the Utopian island of marvels and beauty created by the deformed dwarf Alviano Salvago in Die Gezeichneten, has become corrupted as a playground for the rich and the powerful to cultivate 'exotic' tastes, abducting children and exploiting the misery of others for their own pleasure. As Count Tamare describes it, it's a corruption of the realisation of a dream of beauty. There's clearly something there that resonates with our own times and this is keenly explored by director Krzysztof Warlikowski in his new production of the work for the 2017 Munich Opera Festival.

With its creator a deformed and ugly figure of ridicule, the Elysium created by Alviano in Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatised) is in himself representative of the function of art to transform the ugly reality into something beautiful. Carlotta is another artist capable of recognising the beauty of Alviano's true nature and expresses it in the painting of his pure soul. It's the validation of their belief in a higher purpose for art that leads them to love, but also to believe that they have a true and purer understanding of art and beauty. Unfortunately their great ambitions prove to be not only incompatible with the reality of the world, but they prove to be corrupting of their own nature. The seductive power of beauty in the form of Graf Andrea Vitellozzo Tamare leads Carlotta astray, while for Alviano, love has given him god-like aspirations that reveal an ugly side to his nature.

"Give me Carlotta" pleads Alviano when he is in danger of losing her love to the debauched libertine Tamare, "then I'll be a prince, a king, a god". Love has conferred Apollo-like aspirations in Alviano that align with the Wagnerian ideal of the supremacy of the artist in society, but instead he shows himself to be vindictive and egotistical, a "troll" at heart. It seems that the moment the true nature of beauty is grasped by the artist, it confers a sense of power and influence that turns him into a monster who is incapable of responding to that supreme vision of beauty without corrupting and destroying it by his very nature.

That's certainly the image that Krzysztof Warlikowski emphasises in the 2017 Munich production with his usual cinematic references. The director relies on the imagery of David Lynch's depiction of 'The Elephant Man' as a beautiful soul trapped in a monstrous body, but there are also significant scenes projected for classic silent horror films. There is the scene from 'Der Golem' where the monster is confronted and destroyed by the beauty of a child with a flower; a similar confrontation in that famous scene at the lake in 'Frankenstein'; the unmasking of 'The Phantom of the Opera' reveals the ugly side of his nature; and in 'Nosferatu' beauty will expose the monster to an unbearable light that destroys him. Apart from a scene of Duke Adorno working out in a boxing ring and figures starting to appear as mice, Warlikowski sticks fairly closely and directly to this principal theme in the first half, with Elysium a modern art gallery, replete with a Tate Modern style turbine hall showing a brilliant disc, where the idea of art is something living rather than traditional.

In Act III however, after a spoken word reading of Schreker's account of himself as an artist that associates him with Alviano, Warlikowski and Malgorzata Szczesniak's sets and costumes take these themes in an entirely unexpected and unpredictable new direction. So rich is the enigmatic ideas and imagery of the latter scenes of Die Gezeichneten, and so untethered to any kind of musical resolution, that you would expect a similarly free-associative and imaginative response from the director and he certainly delivers. There is an acceptance of art as a "realm of magic" and for Warlikowski the realm where all these concepts can be considered and explored is indeed that of the opera stage. So figures with heads of mice, virtually naked dancers, a reclining figure in a glass cage, all form part of the Elysium of the opera stage, where art is beauty, but it is also challenging and - vitally - alive.

The performances of John Daszak and Catherine Naglestad in particular are perfect fits for Warlikowsi's ideas. Daszak is simply outstanding, his voice lyrical and flexible, full of expression and capable of revealing a darker edge. Catherine Naglestad has a rather more robust soprano voice than the usual piercing but brittle edge of Straussian sopranos like Manuela Uhl or Anne Schwanewilms with whom we usually associate Schreker roles, but her voice brings a rich corrupting glamour to Carlotta. Christopher Maltman is a strong presence as Tamare. I'm not a fan of Tomasz Konieczny's bass-baritone voice and don't find it pleasant here, but as Duke Adorno it doesn't have to be and it strikes an appropriate note of discordance that lies within the music also.

Conducting the work, Ingo Metzmacher wrings all the troubling beauty out of chromatic lines that suggest that a resolution to the themes raised in the opera is unattainable, but between Schreker, Metzmacher and Warlikowski you almost feel that this is as close as the work can come to a state of transcendental perfection. An ambitious selection of works have been instrumental in the success of the Bayerische Staatsoper's exceptional 2016-17 season, attaching creative directors to the projects, finding the right conductor and singers who can bring some new and original ideas to them, and Die Gezeichneten is no exception.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, Staatsoper.TV

Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Lyon, 2016 - Webcast)

Dmitri Shostakovich - Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Opéra de Lyon, 2016

Kazushi Ono, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Ausrine Stundyte, Vladimir Ognovenko, Peter Hoare, John Daszak, Gennady Bezzubenkov, Almas Svilpa, Jeff Martin, Michaela Selinger, Clare Presland, Jeff Martin, Kwang Soun Kim

Culturebox - 4 February 2016

He remains a controversial and divisive figure in the opera world, but Dmitri Tcherniakov is nonetheless always an interesting director. In particular his work is often inspired when he is working in the Russian repertoire; opening up a whole new way of looking on works that are rarely performed and insufficiently explored. His production of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, recently seen at the English National Opera but now transferred to Lyon and sung in its native language with Russian leads, is a typically strong reading of the work that has many of the director's familiar techniques. In fact, it would at first appear that there's not much the director has to offer a work that is surrounded in enough controversy of its own. The touches Tcherniakov introduces here however are subtle and achieve maximum impact.

For a while at least, it seems like business as usual. There are no unexpected twists that subvert the material, nothing too challenging or unexpected. It's updated evidently, but not in an extravagant way to make any obvious contemporary reference. Instead of being a wealthy flour merchant, Boris Timofeyevich Izmailov here runs a more modern warehouse, with workers in hi-vis jackets operating forklift trucks, with a row of secretaries in the office and employees all wearing security passes around their necks. Even from the point of view of merely indicating the banality of business interests and the uniformity of the modern workplace, and in how it pertains to the relative positions of men and women within it, Tcherniakov has it down to a tee.

The background setting is an important matter in the opera, but still, it's not anything that you wouldn't see in any other Tcherniakov production. This one doesn't look that much different from his productions of The Tsar's Bride or Verdi's Macbeth, and if that means that it's not quite as radical as the updating of those works were, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk already has all the sex and violence it needs. What becomes apparent then is not that Tcherniakov's approach is in any way 'tamer' here, or that he has run out of original ideas, as much as Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk may be the definitive Tcherniakov opera. It's as if the director has taken all the boldness, the shock and the impact of this opera and used it as a model that all other operas ought to aspire to match. Tcherniakov seems to want to bring the inner Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk out of every opera he works on.

In as far as dealing with the subjects that Shostakovich depicted in his version of Nikolai Leskov's work, there are certainly other levels that could be emphasised in the opera - and it seems amazing that the composer himself seemed to be unaware of how that might would play out to the Soviet censor - but Tcherniakov is not particularly concerned with those. The wider view of the Russian character, the implications of corruption within the system and the impact that has on a woman living within a male-dominated society are all still there as part of the wider canvas that Shostakovich paints so vividly in his score, but Tcherniakov recognises that there is also an attention in the music to the individual, and in this case that's evidently the 'Lady Macbeth' of the work, Katerina Lvovna Izmailova.

Having established the context only as far as it necessary, without any unnecessary emphasis or distortion, Tcherniakov's focus is almost wholly on Katia. The director often reduces the scene down to the small room where the wife of the boss's son is mostly confined. It's a warmly-lit room decorated with rugs covering the walls, Katia moreover dressed in a more 'traditional' way that emphasises the extent to which she is cut off and set apart from the rest of the world. She daren't venture too far out of that room, and when she does - in the only way that would be possible for a woman in her position - she's soon put back in her place. Her form of liberty eventually leads Katerina and her lover Sergei being arrested and sent to Siberia. As this just closes down her world further, Tcherniakov chooses to depict all the horror that follows within the confines of a small cell rather than on a forced march in the open outdoors.

Closing down the stage in this way, reducing it to a small block, allows Tcherniakov to work in closer detail, more like a film director than a stage director. There is even a fixed camera placed high within Katia's bedroom for the sake of the video recording of the performance in Lyon that allows the level of detail, nuance and intimacy created to be seen, but clearly the impact is felt even at the back of the theatre. Tcherniakov knows he doesn't have to make grand gestures because they are already there in the music and in the subject, and he focuses instead on the performers, on what their characters feel and endure. Even on that level, there's a huge range to cover in the vivid personalities of Katia, Boris, Sergei and Zynovny, to say nothing of the colourful secondary characters. Tcherniakov's direction of the performers is superb, making them and their actions feel utterly real, and it makes all the difference in this work.

The simmering passions and explosions of violence and aggressive sexual behaviour are all fully scored by Shostakovich and brought out in all their wonderful, lurid glory by Kazushi Ono and the orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon. It really is a wonderful account that makes no attempt to play down those verismo characteristics that are what gives the work such an impact. A few of the English cast remain here - John Daszak and Peter Hoare superbly reprising the roles of Sergei and Zynovny - but the Russian production of the opera undoubtedly benefits from having singers like Ausrine Stundyte and Vladimir Ognovenko play Katarina and Boris. Stundyte is exceptionally good in an understated but compelling performance that simmers with the underlying strength of Katia's passions and her capacity to love as violently as she kills.

Links: Culturebox, Opéra de Lyon

Britten - Death in Venice (Teatro Real, 2014 - Webcast)

Benjamin Britten - Death in Venice

Teatro Real, Madrid - 2014

Alejo Pérez, Willy Decker, John Daszak, Leigh Melrose, Tomasz Borczyk, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Duncan Rock, Itxaro Mentxaka, Vicente Ombuena, Antonio Lozano, Damián del Castillo, Nuria García Arrés, Ruth Iniesta

Culturebox - December 2014

While on the surface Death in Venice is about much more than an old man's attraction to a boy's youth and beauty, it is the key to the essential conflict that the aging writer Gustav von Aschenbach struggles with on so many levels. In Death in Venice, the struggle extends to old age meeting youth, beauty confronted by ugliness, art versus mediocrity, fame or obscurity, control over submission and ultimately, of course, life versus death. Venice, a city of contrasts, embodies all of von Aschenbach's fears; a place of incredible beauty and allure that is fading and slowly crumbling into the sea, succumbing inevitably to the forces of nature.

Accordingly, most productions of Britten's Death in Venice tend to emphasise the beauty of Venice (I don't believe you can exaggerate it) without however really considering its dark corrupting side. Like Deborah Warner's acclaimed and successful production for the English National Opera, Willy Decker's production for the Teatro Real in Madrid is visually magnificent, but its clean modern minimalist designs don't seem to be the most natural way of probing beneath the surface to explore the slow decline of Venice alongside that of von Aschenbach, something that the writer seems to anticipate on his way there. 'Ah Serenissima!' '...where water is married to stone', 'what lies in wait for me here, ambiguous Venice?'

As with Warner's production, there are other less obvious ways to create the sense of unease that is evoked in the imagery of the libretto - Aschenbach's journey on a gondola to the Lido compared to crossing the Styx in a black coffin - and in Britten's music. Without intending to be disparaging, since it proves to be largely effective, what Willy Decker brings to the work is a sense of camp, where Aschenbach's desire to hold onto his dignity and reputation is in sharp contrast to the common and vulgar displays he encounters in the city. The first encounter is the most ominous; a kiss planted on him by an old traveller fooling around and having fun, made up to look younger than he really is.

There has to be an attraction there too however and this lively scene along with the handsome costume and set design of the production, can be seen to exert a strong first impression on von Aschenbach as he begins a journey of no return. A seductive rather than a stuffy elegance would be a better way to describe the tone of Decker's production designs. There's a blending of period costumes - the white linen suits and dressed of the holiday makers iconically familiar from Visconti's movie version of Mann's novella - mixed here with immaculate, shiny, minimalist location settings, that does succeed in establishing the kind of contrast and ambiguity that Venice in the opera represents.

That gives the work a freshness here, avoiding cliché or simple representation, while still adhering to the intent of the libretto. "There's a dark side even to perfection", von Aschenbach observes, and he notes the clever thought down in his notebook, always seeking to rationalise instead of feel. But there's an attractive allure to this dark side that the Madrid production captures well, the ornate classical mixing with the clean unadorned modernism, with just a hint of the exotic that is there also in Britten's score. These elements sit a little uneasily side-by-side but, particularly in the way that they are captured in Decker's production, they can also be complementary.

If the production looks terrific and works well enough with the material, it plays a little safe and doesn't entirely manage to achieve the desired impact by the end. Tadzio, for example, is well-characterised as if he could just be an ordinary boy, not one who is flirting on some level with von Aschenbach. The attraction and objectification is entirely on the part of the writer and his imagination, even if his being observed doesn't escape the boy's notice. This is always likely to be the case, but unless you see Tadzio the way Aschenbach does, it's a little harder to 'sympathise' with the confusion that this personification of classical beauty exerts upon him.

There are some good directorial touches that attempt to make this relationship explicit. The playfully dropped red ball is a good visual image for the connection between them, the dancing and choreography kept simplified and expressive, and there's a Punch and Judy show that does give some indication of the state of mind of von Aschenbach in his obsession. The singing is also exceptionally good from John Daszak in the principal role - one that has to be to really carry the work - with good support from Leigh Melrose as the traveller and the other minor parts, but there is never any real sense of how the sequence of events leads to any noticeable decline in Aschenbach.  The musical interpretation conducted by Alejo Pérez doesn't really manage to get the essence of this across either.

Links: Culturebox, Teatro Real

Pfitzner - Palestrina

Hans Pfitzner - Palestrina

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2009

Simone Young, Christian Stückl, Christopher Ventris, Peter Rose, Michael Volle, John Daszak, Roland Bracht, Falk Struckmann, Christiane Karg, Stephen Humes, Kenneth Robertson, Christian Rieger, Wolfgang Köch, Ulrich Reß, Kevin Conners, Alfred Kuhn, Claudia Mahnke

EuroArts - Blu-ray

Although its setting is in the sixteenth century, Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina is a work that is very much defined by the time of its own creation. It's consequently something of a curiosity in that it celebrates the spirit of creativity and progression of music as an artform through one of its earliest innovators, yet in many ways its a very conservative work that attempts to preserve the turn-of the 20th century post-Wagernian Romantic style in the face of the threat of what Pfitzner saw as the decadent experiments of Schoenberg, Strauss (in Salome and Elektra), Berg and Hindemith. Time and history haven't been kind then to Pfitzner with his legacy being associated with Nazi sympathising and anti-semitism, but the scale and force of the work itself - a grand epic that seems to attempt to steamroller over and crush all dissenting voices - is impressive nonetheless.

Impressive perhaps, beautifully orchestrated and quite unlike anything else out there (with the exception perhaps of some thematic connections with Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), but Palestrina could also be considered rather long-winded, dramatically limited and somewhat esoteric in its subject matter. It's set in 1563, around the time that the Council of Trent is being brought to a conclusion in Rome, where archbishops and cardinals from all around the world have been gathered together to hammer out the finer details of reform of the Catholic Church. One of the many important questions to be considered is the nature of the music to be used in Masses and whether it should adhere to the Gregorian model or embrace polyphony.

It may not seem like an important matter, but the patronage of the Church was undoubtedly important in the commissioning of new music in these early years, and it would exert great influence over its form and construction. In Pfitzner's opera, the charge of this matter has been given over to Cardinal Borromeo, who is convinced that the composer Pierluigi Palestrina, currently the Choirmaster at the Santa Maria Maggiore, is capable of providing the kind of polyphonic Mass music that Pope Pius IV hopes will win over the Council and "give meaning to the age". Palestrina however has long been out of favour since he married and thereby lost the papal patronage, but he's also a broken man who hasn't been able to write a note of music since the death of his wife. Inspired by past masters and angels, Palestrina composes his Mass in a single feverish night.

Much of what Pfitzner has to say about the nature of music, creativity, inspiration and composition (he also wrote the libretto for the opera himself) is all there in Palestrina's remarkable first Act. Through contrasting Palestrina with Silla, a pupil of the old composer who wants to go to Florence to write "experimental" music, Pfitzner considers the nature of the composer as an artist who stands above the people and follows his own muse, or as one who writes music for the public, for the people, for it to contribute to and be part of "the universal whole". Aside from academic matters, the weight of history and divine inspiration, Pfitzner is also content to fictionalise elements of Palestrina's life (his wife had not died at the time of the composition of his Mass for the Council of Trent in 1563), in order to consider the question of the human input and the heavy burdens of the composer.

All the marvel of the work, its intent and brilliance of expression, is there in this first Act which culminates with the marvellous ensemble of the Past Masters and choirs of angels that drive and herald the composition of a masterpiece, and it's brought spectacularly to life in this rare 2009 production of the work at the Nationaltheater in Munich by the Bavarian State Opera. Pfitzner was a Munich composer and it's apparent that no-one knows better how to deal with the complexity, contradictions, controversy and conservatism of Pfitzner than the Bayerische Staatsoper. With roots in the theatre and in the Passion plays at Oberammergau rather than in opera, Christian Stückl is a bit of a gamble as a director, but he finds some marvellous ways to illustrate and illuminates the work without straying too far into either literalism or symbolism.

The stage looks highly stylised though the bold use of bright, striking, almost luminous colours - black and white, cardinal pink and angel green - but in reality it's a relatively simple reflection and representation of the subject on an earthly level as well as on a spiritual level. With such bold simple statements, it makes the dramatic monotony of Act II's nit-picking disputes and rivalries between the cardinals and archbishops still look staggeringly impressive simply through the sheer population of the stage by the singers in these fine, bright costumes, and, of course, through the force of the singing and the writing for a cast of almost entirely male Wagnerian singers. The third Act, where Palestrina's music is accepted and praised, ensuring his release from prison, would be almost anti-climatic after all this were the use of colours and lighting not likewise complementary to the work.

In terms of performance, Simone Young's conducting of the orchestra might not have the grand Romantic sweep that the music of Palestrina calls for, but there's a recognition of the human character in the music here with its sorrowful undercurrents, and it's brought out well with good attention to individual instruments and expression. The large cast assembled here contain some of the best German Wagner and Strauss singers around at the moment - Christopher Ventris and Michael Volle in particular standing out in the demanding roles of Palestrina and Morone - all of them combining that necessary heft with lyrical beauty with all the necessary stamina required. Falk Struckmann is also notable for his Borromeo and Christiane Karg is impressive in range and lyrical expression as Palestrina's son Ighino.

Palestrina may not be the be-all-and-end-all that Pfitzner aspired it to be - other than perhaps inadvertently turning out to be one of the final words on a dying operatic legacy left by Wagner - but it's a fascinating and extraordinary work nonetheless, particularly in this fine production. It's looks every bit as impressive as it should in the Blu-ray's HD transfer and it sounds marvellous also in the high-resolution PCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.0 audio tracks. The Blu-ray also includes a 10-minute 'Making of', which consists of interviews and behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage.