Puccini - Tosca (Baden-Baden, 2017)

Giacomo Puccini - Tosca

OsterFestspiele, Baden-Baden - 2017

Simon Rattle, Philipp Himmelmann, Kristine Opolais, Marcelo Álvarez, Marco Vratogna, Peter Rose, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Peter Tantsits, Douglas Williams, Walter Fink

ARTE Concert - 17th April 2017

It's too easy to write Tosca off as either a tawdry thriller or as a pure romantic melodrama. Those aspects are central to Puccini's verismo adaptation of Sardou's drama, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the characters have to be one-dimensional. There can be a little more nuance to how each of the three principal protagonists meet their fate in three of the most dramatic deaths in all opera, and a lot more to Puccini's dramatic music than heavy-handed underscoring. The Baden-Baden 2017 Easter Festival production of Tosca attempts to draw this out in Philipp Himmelmann's updating, while Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic make a strong case for the musical qualities of the work.

The conventional view of Tosca is a fairly black and white one of good guys and bad guys. On one side we have Scarpia as evil personified, twisted by the power that gives him freedom to indulge his lusts and baser instincts. On the other side we have the painter Cavaradossi as a brave rebel who stands up to arrest and torture by refusing to betray Angelotti, a colleague who has escaped from prison and hidden in the chapel where the painter is finishing a portrait of the Madonna (a very saintly enterprise). It's Tosca who takes Scarpia on directly, turning his lusts against him to buy time and escape.

All the main characters are however eventually doomed in their enterprises and it's not just cruel twists of fate; they can be seen in no small part to be the agents of their own destruction. For Tosca, it is jealousy that leads Scarpia's men to Cavaradossi's house. For Cavaradossi, it's a foolhardy embarking on revolutionary activism from what seems to be a matter of honour than for any real political conviction. Scarpia; well, his flaws are clear enough but his actions are twisted into some kind of delusional invulnerability conferred upon him by his religious devotion. In some ways, all of then can be seen to regard their fame and celebrity rendering them immune from any real harm.

As an opera, Tosca certainly merits more however than just playing to the stereotypes of sneering villainy and noble self-sacrifice. Those elements are an enjoyable element that are a necessary part of the character of the work, but there are other considerations that can provide a rather more thoughtful drama. The Baden-Baden production chooses to dispense with the Napoleonic flavour of the work for a more modern perspective, but it doesn't want to boil the baby in the reheated bathwater, to somewhat mangle a metaphor and likewise risk missing its intent.

Act I of the Baden-Baden Tosca takes place in a bright and airy cathedral, not at all like the dark ornate enclosures we are accustomed to seeing. There's space here for Cavaradossi to set up his computer and project the image he is working on onto a larger canvas. Tosca is dressed in a much more stylish bright red trouser suit and Scarpia, wearing a suit with his blond hair tied back in a ponytail, arrives with the finger-snapping efficiency of a business executive or politician with his underlings. Act II also presents a refreshingly modern outlook that gets rid of all the heavy drapes and candlesticks of a Napoleonic chamber.

There's no point in modernising Tosca however unless you can find a way to capture the same sense of menace and oppression that is in the original setting and Philipp Himmelmann finds a modern equivalence in the surveillance society of an authoritarian power. Scarpia's office is a wall of screens that are used to monitor and control the behaviour of its citizens. There is even a camera used to record his interrogations and, in an extra-creepy way, his seductions of women like Tosca that he can use to exert further influence and control over them. It's an effective enough modern context for how power is used and abused that doesn't in any way lessen the impact of the original.

Whether the singing meets similar expectations that an audience demand is another question, but again comparisons have little relevance. Everyone has their own favourite performances of past Toscas, and the cast here are unlikely to challenge any historic greats, but then opera is not a singing competition. That said, the performances are all good, and certainly effective in bringing a degree of characterisation and personality to the roles, as well as making sure that it serves to bring about the necessary impact.

Marcelo Álvarez gives the most assured performance as Cavaradossi. There's never been much doubt about his ability to sing this role before, even if he is inclined towards standing and delivering old-fashioned operatic arm-spreading gestures out to the audience. Here he is better directed and proves to be a much more competent actor: and it makes all the difference. It's a performance of intense feeling that has all the drama heroics you might like, while also singing the role exceptionally well.

Kristine Opolais may not have the commanding presence of some of the more notable Toscas in the history of opera, but by the same token she doesn't rely on the mannerisms of old. If she initially shows a few areas of weakness, they are scarcely worth drawing attention to and she gives a fine performance that grows in confidence as the drama progresses and her own character grows in response to the situations. There is no question that she hits every one of those key moments effectively and nails her 'Vissi d'arte'. Opolais also establishes an intense struggle of wills against Marco Vratogna's Scarpia in the second Act, where again the direction helps bring out Scarpia's calculating menace.

As is often the case now, Act III plays out with Cavaradossi being under no illusions about his fate, taking a more realistic view in spite of Tosca's protestations that she has their rescue all figured out. The use of lethal injections to the head instead of a firing squad deprives the audience of the traditional dramatic conclusion and from Tosca's famous leap from Castel Sant' Angelo, which is always a risky thing to do. Tosca's final cries however never fail to hit their mark, and with Simon Rattle harnessing the full power of the Berlin Philharmonic, the vital impact isn't lessened in the slightest. It all goes to show that you may get tired very easily of all the familiar imagery and costume drama, but Puccini's Tosca is bigger than that and the efficacy of its drama endures.

Links: Baden-Baden, ARTE Concert

Boito - Mefistofele (Munich, 2015 - Webcast)

Arrigo Boito - Mefistofele

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2015

Omer Meir Wellber, Roland Schwab, René Pape, Joseph Calleja, Kristine Opolais, Heike Grötzinger, Andrea Borghini, Karine Babajanyan, Rachael Wilson, Joshua Owen Mills

Staatsoper.TV - 15 November 2015
There's a problem with Mefistofele, and it's surprising since it is the only complete opera written by Arrigo Boito, the librettist for some of Giuseppe Verdi's greatest works. Boito's librettos for Otello and Falstaff are so filled with poetic insight, depth of characterisation and tense drama that they spurred Verdi on to the late creative peak of his career. While Boito is evidently no match for Verdi as a composer, what is surprising is that it's not the music that is the weak point in Mefistofele, it's the drama. Admirably tackling for the first time a work that nonetheless deserves greater recognition, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich only manage to emphasise those weaknesses in a spectacular but dramatically inert production.

During his introduction, Nickolaus Bachler, the director of the Bayerische Staatsoper, calls Mefistofele "an opera for experts". This means that Boito, choosing to illustrate a number of scenes from 'Faust' in the manner of Berlioz rather than attempt to create a dramatic narrative in the style of Gounod, expects his audience to be familiar with those operatic antecedents, or with Goethe's work itself. Accepting it on those terms, Mefistofele is a powerful work that does have a character of its own, as well as a distinct perspective - the title indicating that the interest lies with Mephistopheles here rather than Faust - that suits Boito's lyrical strengths. That doesn't mean however that it can't be given a greater dramatic presence on the stage.

The problem with Roland Schwab's production for Munich is not that it is short of ideas or spectacle, as much as it lacks any distinctive real-world vision that would give the work a greater coherence and a stronger dramatic line. It's clear that the director makes an effort to flesh out the characterisation, particularly in the central role of Mephistopheles. He also introduces both Faust and Margherita onto the stage a little earlier than they need to be there, and keeps them there even when there's not a great deal for them to do. Sustaining this kind of characterisation however ultimately becomes difficult within the rather abstract conceptual framework that the director has come up with, and the character are often left standing around or singing out to the audience.

There are many ways you can interpret the setting here, but essentially, it seems to me that the purpose is to emphasise the hold that Mefistofele wields over the world. Starting with Mefistofele putting a record onto an old gramophone, it's the devil who is calling the tunes here, settling back in his armchair to watch a plane hurtling towards a city tower, with a somewhat random image of John Lennon also projected over this scene. Freezing the moment, the remainder of the opera seems to take place in what looks like the framework fuselage of this plane that is about to crash into the city, held there only as long as it takes Mefistofele to win his bet against the heaven as to the extent of his power and influence over mankind.

Boito's scoring and writing would certainly indicate that this influence is considerable, and that ultimately all the horror and havoc caused by human agency is scarcely negated by a last-minute death-bed redemption. He may not have ultimate control of Faust's eternal soul, but by heck, he causes a great deal of death and horror in the world while he is alive. Isn't that bad enough? Boito's vision is certainly a dark one that explores this nihilistic element, and his musical interpretation of it can often be overblown, how else are you meant to deal with a war on this scale between heaven and hell?

It would be very easy to apply this despairing nihilism to the situation in the world today, but the Munich production squanders the opportunity. Mefistofele still surely reigns in the world today. The fact that this performance took place just two days after the Paris attacks just emphasised how abstract and vacant the production was, totally incapable of making any meaningful connection to the very subject that Boito is writing about. Boito's imagery is strong - "Let us dance! For the world is now lost. On the countless dead shards of the fatal globe, our steps blaze and mingle in a wild dance of Hell" - but all Schwab has to offer are empty theatrical cliché's, S&M costumes, zombie demons, stock dance gestures, operatic overacting and empty spectacle. We even get the obligatory asylum scene at the conclusion.

Detached as it might be from the real world, conceptually, Schwab's production holds together well. Mefistofele's influence - particularly as it is so well-played and sung by René Pape - is shown to hold sway. The bet here is not so much that Mefistofele can corrupt Faust, as reduce him to despair at the realisation of his own nature and the extent of his corruption. Strapped to one of the chairs on the plane, Faust is raised up to see the consequences of his actions and the true nature of man - "Who pushed her into the abyss?" Mefistofele asks Faust of Margherita, "You or I?". The realisation of what he has done inevitably drives Faust mad. The final scene, albeit that it takes place in an asylum, is also simultaneously in the crashed plane, where a forensic team picks through the wreckage for clues.

Boito's Mefistofele has its flaws then, but its philosophy is not one of them. With a strong production willing to delve into the depths it explores and a musical accompaniment that supports it, Mefistofele is capable of being turned into something more meaningful and become more of a fixture in the repertoire. Munich's production feels strangely detached and absent, failing to ignite even the coup de théâtre of the opening scene by having the huge choirs of heaven sound like they were singing from an adjacent building. Perhaps the sound mixing just wasn't the best for the internet streamed production, but there was a similar disengagement throughout between the stage and the pit. The Bayerische Staatsoper's failure to do justice to this work is very disappointing.

So too is the singing. René Pape at least gives an impressive performance that is full of character. Mephisopheles is a role that he is is familiar with in Gounod's Faust, but he is able to take advantage of the more detailed characterisation and prominence that Bioto gives to the role in Mefistofele, and is wonderfully menacing in his singing and delivery. Joseph Calleja is a terrific singer with a great voice that just oozes classic Italianate lyricism, but even though you couldn't fault his singing or his performance here, he just feels wrong casting him as Faust. This is surely more of a role for Jonas Kaufmann, were he not already overworked in Munich and on the world stage. Kristine Opolais is another Munich regular who is miscast in roles that are out of her depth. She's good when called upon to project high emotion, but thin and nearly inaudible in middle range and insecure in pitch at the lower register. Good singers all, but Pape aside, not the kind of performers who are capable of rescuing this dramatically inert production in Munich.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, Staatsoper.TV

Puccini - Manon Lescaut (Munich, 2015 - Webcast)

Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2015

Alain Altinoglu, Hans Neuenfels, Kristine Opolais, Markus Eiche, Jonas Kaufmann, Roland Bracht, Dean Power, Christian Rieger, Ulrich Reß, Christoph Stephinger, Petr Nekoranec, Evgenij Kachurovsky, Okka von der Damerau

Staatsopertv

While it's always interesting to see what the Bayerische Staatsoper come up with in their efforts to reinvent and revitalise familiar opera works, sometimes I think they try too hard and end up missing the point. In the case of Hans Neuenfels' productions, the approach is undoubtedly well-considered, purposeful and usually has something meaningful to say about the works themselves, but it rarely does the work any favours. In the case of Manon Lescaut, the attempt to explore and comment on the work itself seems to miss the main point that opera is to provide dramatic as well as musical coherence. And entertain. Much of those vital aspects were missing from the new Munich production.

Then again, although it is rapidly finding its way in recent years into the Puccini canon and has undoubted merits, Manon Lescaut is far from perfect and has evident musical, dramatic and structural flaws. It's infuriatingly lacking in any kind of through narrative and, set as a number of almost standalone acts that make it more Scenes from Manon Lescaut, there are huge gaps in the narrative that lead to inconsistent characterisation. It's structured much like La Bohème then, but Puccini would make up for it there with the most extraordinary arias, melody and melodrama. In Manon Lescaut, you rely on either knowledge of the Abbé Prévost original or - more likely - you can fill in some gaps from familiarity with Massenet's more satisfying version of the work, Manon.

Most obviously and fatally, there's a whole act missing between Act I and Act II of Puccini's version. Des Grieux and Manon run away to Paris after their meeting at the end of Act I. Act II then starts with Manon established as the mistress of Geronte. There's no scene to show the brief period of happy poverty of her time in Paris with Des Grieux that becomes so important a bond that it brings them back together and persuades Manon to (almost) give up her life of luxury in Geronte's apartment. It's alluded to but never shown, making what follows - not least the bizarre out of nowhere Act IV scene of them dying in the Utah desert - much harder to relate to or piece together.

Considering that there is nonetheless some terrific music and situations even within this mangled adaptation of the story, most productions and directors tend try to make the most of it and strive to give it a greater coherence. Not Neuenfels. His production seems to follow my own personal dissatisfaction of the work by following it to the letter and letting it stand in its own imperfect state. The bare minimalist stage for Act I, for example - lit only by a box-like neon frame - shows the characters and the setting as something unsubstantial and vacant. Act II gains nothing much more than trinkets in a room with no walls and a floating ceiling, with chorus figures and secondary characters dressed and behaving absurdly. By the time we get to Act IV in the desert, the stage is again completely bare.

According to Hans Neuenfels, his production is an attempt to reach an "emotional truth", but it seems more of a commentary on the weaknesses of the work itself than an attempt to mitigate against its failings. It also seems to either ignore the deeper "emotional truth" in Puccini's musical compositions, or else - and it's a valid response - doesn't find them to hold any real emotional content. I don't think the latter is the case, personally, and I don't really think that's what Neuenefels believes either. It's true that the orchestration and the Romantic sweep can be hugely overwrought, never really making the connection with the characters that you will find (arguably) in later Puccini works, but Neuenfels isn't consistent in his approach where the set design seems to be at odds with the musical and singing performances.

Alain Altinoglu recognises and gets across all the rich colour of Puccini's score, hammering out all its overblown dynamic and force, but it lacks subtlety. That's obviously as much as a failing with Puccini on this particular work, and you could argue that Neuenfels' minimal staging is an attempt to under-compensate, but it does leads to an uncomfortable disjoint between the music and the characterisation. The singing unfortunately isn't able to do a great deal to strike a balance between them. Kristine Opolais is a fine singer, but she doesn't have the size of voice that is required to fill out Manon's character across the range. She can't compete with Jonas Kaufmann in terms of volume evidently, but it's more than that. Unsupported on a bare stage, without Antonio Pappano's more sympathetic conducting to give her more room, those weaknesses are more evident here than in the recent Royal Opera House production opposite Kaufmann.

Jonas Kaufmann is of course still incredible, his performance just about flawless, and he's still clearly just about the most gifted tenor in the world today. He has the power to sing Des Grieux like every note of Puccini comes from a deep, meaningful place, even when it doesn't, which is the case in this insubstantial production. There's a sense that Neuenfels recognises that a credible Des Grieux might be the key to making Manon Lescaut work. Passages from his point of view are quoted at length between scenes and acts, but it's not really enough to make up for the lack of coherence in the approach elsewhere. This is exemplified beyond any question by the lack of emotional connection that results in the intense melodrama of Act IV's death scene in the desert. If that doesn't hit you hard, something has gone badly wrong somewhere, and once again Manon Lescaut fails to convince.

Links: Staatsoper.tv

Puccini - Manon Lescaut (Royal Opera House 2014 - Cinema Live)

Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut

Royal Opera House, London - 2014

Antonio Pappano, Jonathan Kent, Kristīne Opolais, Christopher Maltman, Jonas Kaufmann, Maurizio Muraro, Benjamin Hulett, Robert Burt, Nadezhda Karyazina, Luis Gomes, Jeremy White, Jihoon Kim, Nigel Cliffe

Royal Opera House Cinema Live - 24 June 2014

While there isn't much hope for Le Villi and Edgar, there has at least been a concerted effort in recent years to bring another of Puccini's earliest works into the mainstream opera repertoire with numerous productions worldwide of Manon Lescaut. Puccini's first major success, the reasons for Manon Lescaut's neglect are a bit of a mystery. Antonio Pappano makes a strong case for the dramatic quality of the opera, the power of its dramatic score and the beauty of its melodies. The director of the Royal Opera House Kasper Holten suggests that it could be because it needs at least two world-class singers in the main roles, but that's also the case for La Bohème and Tosca. With Pappano conducting then and two major stars - Jonas Kaufmann and Kristine Opolais - in place and on fire for the Royal Opera House's season-closing live cinema broadcast, you would think that this new production would be a revelatory affirmation of the worth of Manon Lescaut, yet by the end of the evening, doubts about the work remain.

It seems obvious then to point the finger of blame - as many critics have been quick to do - at director Jonathan Kent, but while it is indeed difficult to follow where exactly the director is taking the story in the sets for Acts III and IV, the tone and line of the production is firmly on the side of the drama and the emotional journey of the two lovers. It's too easy to blame the production just for being modern - if the opera can't stand up to being placed in a modern context then it might well indeed be an old-fashioned work that has little to offer a modern audience and its relative obscurity is probably merited. Mariuz Treliński had a fair go at it in La Monnaie's 2013 production, so that doesn't seem to be the whole story with Manon Lescaut.

There are certain elements of L'Abbé Prévost’s original novel 'L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut' that are perhaps a little out of place. You'd have a bit of trouble trying to force your sister into a convent nowadays, as Lescaut intends to do here with Manon. Accepting instead an offer to selling her off to a old rich man and then into prostitution is a bit of a change of heart for Lescaut and perhaps not that a common experience that many will identify with either. The way that that this separates the young woman from the ability to make her own choices however and love the young man she chooses - the Chevalier des Grieux - has timeless resonance and, most importantly, real conflicts between the heart and material desires. Certainly none of these issues have prevented the subject from reaching modern audiences in Massenet's popular and enduring Manon.

None of it has been any obstacle either for Puccini doing much the same thing in making Mimi's dilemma - again, one that remains tied very much to the times and morals of the period - the successful and heartbreaking heroine of the romantic tragedy of La Bohème. It's clear then that this is not the issue with Manon Lescaut, or at least not the main issue. There are however certain leaps and gaps in Puccini's version of Manon Lescaut that flow less well dramatically than Massenet's version, leaving out a lot of important details. Most critically, Massenet's choice to end the work with the death of Manon at the boarding of her ship as she is being deported to America spares us what amounts to an extended death scene that lasts the entirety of Act IV in Puccini's version where Manon and Des Grieux find themselves for some unexplained reason dying of thirst and starvation in the Utah desert.

There's not an awful lot that a stage director can do to make that fit with the rest of the work. The earlier scenes may take a rather sleazy modern approach to Manon's downfall - the young woman becoming a porn-star performing for a live audience rather than a dancer - but this gives exactly the right impression of how sordid the enterprise is. Glamour is of course part of Manon's ambitions, part of the unresolved conflict that keeps the young woman from simply following her heart, but you ought to make you feel uncomfortable at how she is being exploited and that is done well. The stylised deportation of Manon and the prostitutes along a gaming table and through a poster inscribed 'Naïveté' in Act III, coming out on a crumbling road that twists towards the upper heights of the stage in Act IV (the other side of the poster forming a desert backdrop) is however as baffling as the dramatic development itself, but it at least looks great. It doesn't however in any way undermine or reduce the emotional impact of how the scene is written or how Puccini scores it.

But yet it's hard to imagine that any of this provoking a single wet eye in the house. With Kristine Opolais and Jonas Kaufmann both in superb form throughout belting out the agony of their character's dilemma, Manon coming to regret the path that has left her "sola, perduta, abbandonata"; with Antonio Pappano sensitively wringing every ounce of drama and emotion out Puccini's exquisitely beautiful and heart wrenching score; with the on-screen film direction taking us into cinematic extreme close-up in a way that both Opolais and Kaufmann can sustain dramatically as well as aesthetically; you really ought to be a quivering wreck at the end of Manon Lescaut. If that much effort is put into it however and it fails to make the necessary impact, something is very wrong. Perhaps it's all just too much.

It's not too much on the part of the singers, the director or the conductor - they are just performing what Puccini has written the way he intends it to be played - it's just that it's musically overwrought without there being enough genuine character and dramatic development put into making the audience really care for the characters. It's not necessarily that Manon is a bit of a gold-digger - Mimi is fairly mercenary in her attachments in La Bohème and we care infinitely more about her sad and lonely death - but Puccini and his numerous librettists haven't put the necessary work into establishing the romance between Manon and Des Grieux as something credible. It's significant to note that Puccini has no equivalent for the second act in Massenet's Manon showing their humble but happy home in Paris with its little table, albeit a short-lived happiness where the relationship is already in trouble. We don't really get much of an opportunity to see Manon and Des Grieux together in Manon Lescaut, and when we do in Act IV, it's too much too late.

Mozart - La Clemenza di Tito

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - La Clemenza di Tito

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, 2014

Kirill Petrenko, Jan Bosse, Toby Spence, Kristine Opolais, Tara Erraught, Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, Angela Brower, Tareq Nazmi

Staatsoper.tv Live Internet Streaming, 16 February 2014

The intentions of Jan Bosse's production of La Clemeneza di Tito for the Bavarian State Opera can be - like most Munich productions - difficult to decipher. Fortunately - and thankfully mostly down to some pruning of Metastasio's libretto for Mozart's version - the purpose and moral of La Clemenza di Tito is not at all difficult to fathom. In terms of the complex nature of the relationships between the characters, yes, there are the usual Metastasian coincidences and cruel twists of fate, but essentially the underlying sentiment is as clear as the title of the opera itself. It's all about the virtue of mercy, clemency, understanding and love for one's fellow man.

If a production can get that essential point across, even if the manner of presenting it isn't the most expressive, then that's really what counts. And in this particular work, perhaps more so than elsewhere, that relies very much on how well attuned the production is to Mozart's music. That's because while Metastasio's libretto for La Clemenza di Tito is very much a classical text - the libretto having already been set to music by some of the most notable composer's of 18th century Baroque opera seria - it's very much transformed and enhanced in this particular instance by the hand of Mozart.

The circumstances of the writing of La Clemenza di Tito are well-documented. The composer's final opera was composed as a commission for the coronation of Leopold II in Prague in 1791. Written in haste and completed in only 18 days to a pre-existing libretto (adapted and reduced to two acts by the poet Caterino Mazzola), the composer assisted by his pupil Süssmayr (who actually only worked on recitatives, and even then those were corrected by Mozart), the composition of La Clemenza di Tito bears all the hallmarks of a rush-job done on autopilot. Even if that were true, Mozart on autopilot is no minor matter, but there is considerably more of the composer's beautiful soul and sensibility in the work that might be apparent within the restrictions of the opera seria form.

It's this quality that Mozart himself brings to the work that it is important to keep in mind when considering La Clemenza di Tito and perhaps that is the intention of the director here. Even though the stage set is a curved forum in the style of the Capitol in Rome at the time of Titus Vespasianus, the costumes are closer to the late 18th century period of Mozart's time. It's worth noting that some figures in period costume with powdered wigs, also take up place at the side of the stage to emphasise this and that the orchestra itself takes their place in the pit as if it's a lower level of the stage. There's not much made of this afterwards, but some elements are brought out further on one or two occasions to add to the effect and remind you that it is by Mozart, that it's an entertainment and that it was meant for a specific audience.

One example is during Sesto's Act I 'Parto, ma tu ben mio' aria. The most conflicted character in the opera, it's Sesto (urged on admittedly by the rather less conflicted Vitellia) who is unable to recognise the more open, kinder nature that sets Titus apart from how rulers are expected to behave. The importance of this character, and the need to show the complexity of his nature and how it is affected by the conflict in his position, is vital to the work. Just so that you don't miss how Mozart scores this aria with some beautiful obbligato clarinet, the musician is brought up onto the stage also. It tells us that we should have some sympathy for Sesto's predicament to the work Mozart. Attention is drawn to the music in this way on several other occasions, in Vitellia's important 'Non piu di fiori' aria not significantly here with a softer fortepiano accompaniment for the recitatives of Titus rather than the usual harpsichord continuo.

Other than that however, there's not much else that is notable about the stage direction or Stéphane Laimé's set design, or much variation between the two acts other than, evidently, the second part taking place in what are now the burnt ruins of the forum. There's one other nice touch at the start of Act II when the action starts without the orchestra being in the pit. Annio actually has to walk down into the pit and play the harpsichord himself to the recitativo secco. It seems to emphasise that the characters can't live, can't exist, and can't really be fully brought to life without Mozart's music there to draw it out.

The singing is evidently just as important when it comes to expression of the sentiments and the themes in the work. Kristine Opolais was the only performer that seemed less comfortable with the particular demands of the Mozartian soprano tessitura. She's a fine soprano and sings well, but is clearly uncomfortable with the high coloratura and the challenge of the sudden drops to the lower end that characterise Vitellia. Toby Spence however proves to have the ideal kind of voice for lovely soft, lyrical tenor that we expect for Titus, and he has all the necessary warmth as well. Sesto, of course is a key role and Tara Erraught performed well. Sesto's arias in particular were handled with great sensitivity for the conflicting sentiments and an awareness of his underlying nature. I was impressed by Angela Brower's Annio - and not just for playing her own accompaniment - but Hanna-Elisabeth Müller's Servilia and Tareq Nazmi's Publio were also of note.

For all the good points about the singing and for the attention given to emphasising the importance of Mozart's score, the production nonetheless never really managed to match the nobility of spirit or find the necessary warmth that characterises the best performances of this work. The fault would seem to lie with the actual stage direction, which was mostly static, with lots of standing around and little on-stage activity (other than a few close-up video projections and the huge conflagration at the end of Act I) to break it up. Kirill Petrenko's conducting and the delicate playing of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester captured the delicate transparency of Mozart's scoring, but it failed to connect with the narrative drive of the dramatic action in the way that it should.

Dvořák - Rusalka

Antonín Dvořák - Rusalka 

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich 2010

Tomáš Hanus, Martin Kušej, Kristine Opolais, Klaus Florian Vogt, Nadia Krasteva, Günther Groissböck, Janina Baechle, Ulrich Reß

Unitel Classica/C-Major

From the man who envisaged the Flying Dutchman as an asylum seeker in a 2010 production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Hollander for the Nederlandse Opera, cutting-edge opera director Martin Kušej reworks Dvořák’s dark fairy-tale Rusalka into a case of child abuse, where an innocent wood nymph and her sisters are victims of a Josef Fritzl-like Water Goblin. Evidently then, this production for the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in 2010 is not one for the traditionalists. For anyone a bit more open minded to the greater potential of opera, this is an incredibly imaginative interpretation that gets right to the dark heart of the opera, and it’s sung magnificently by all the principal performers.

In the context in which it is presented, lines like “I’d like to leave her to escape from the depths/I want to become a human being/And live in the golden sunshine” take on an entirely new meaning when they are uttered by a young woman being held captive with her sisters in the basement and routinely abused by their father. Cut off from the outside world, it’s not surprising that they see their world differently, considering themselves wood nymphs and their father as a Water Goblin as a way to evade the reality of their situation. Could any sense of what these poor creatures endure be any more powerfully achieved than by such a production, where this abusive captor descends from the upper-level of the set down into the dark, dank cellar, where a group of young girls wait fearfully for his arrival, and have to deal with him forcing himself upon them?

Escaping from this dungeon, and faced with the reality of life outside the abusive circle that is the only kind of relationship she has even known, Rusalka is evidently profoundly traumatised and damaged by the experience, her “womanhood defiled”, and she remains mute and unable to communicate or function as any other human being. It destroys any chance of sustaining a normal relationship, and destroys her chance at happiness with the Prince who has discovered her in the woods. “I am cursed by you”, she accuses her abuser, and the words, the tone and the true depths of what this means takes on an incredibly sinister and infinitely more tragic edge when it is applied to real-life in this way and taken out of the realm of mere fairy-tale.

Is this a distortion of the original intentions of the opera, or does it get to the heart of what is already suggested in the fairy-tale story (and we all know the dark origins of such tales), and to the heart of what is there in the often sinister tone of Dvořák’s score itself? Even where there is a playful tone in the music and singing, this can also be played upon – and has been used often in opera in this way – for the additional emphasis that can be achieved when contrasting what is played and sung with what is actually shown. In most cases however, there is no need for such excuses, and it’s uncanny just how often the actual libretto and the music score chime in perfect accord with Kušej’s brilliant and powerful interpretation.

This radical staging allows for some incredibly powerful moments and shocking imagery. The scene where Rusalka totters like Bambi on her human legs, looking with wide-eyed innocence down the barrel of the Prince’s shotgun is absolutely breathtaking, Rusalka’s background of abuse only emphasising the distinction between their roles as hunter and prey, and the problems that this is going to create in any kind of relationship between them. This is echoed in another nightmare scene (really, this is not a production for lovers of Bambi) where bloody, skinned deer are ripped open and their entrails devoured by brides in wedding gowns.

It’s hard to argue that such interpretations have no place in opera when the power of the piece speaks for itself, when it shows an audience something of the world we live in today, tackling in a genuinely artistic and insightful way a subject that we would find hard to relate to or even come close to comprehending. One could question why not create a new opera to deal with such subjects rather than use Rusalka, but it’s hard to dispute that this production doesn’t give as much to Rusalka as it takes from it, using the power and an edge that is already there in the music, but taking it to a new level.

A lot of credit for this has to go to also to Tomáš Hanus, the Bayerische orchestra and the performers who all work together to help bring this off. Kristine Opolais, who has recently made a major impact in Covent Garden in a new production of Madama Butterfly, not only has the voice to carry this, but she has excellent acting ability also in a highly challenging role, and it makes all the difference here. Klaus Florian Vogt’s lyrical tenor should already be well-enough known and he not unexpectedly demonstrates a fine sensitivity as the Prince here, but the darker tones of Nadia Krasteva as the foreign princess and Günther Groissböck as the Water Goblin also make a lasting and unforgettable impression. This quality of interpretation ensures total fidelity to the intent of the opera as it was originally written.

There’s little to fault either with the presentation on Blu-ray. The image is clear and sharp with no significant issues, though some minor flutter can be detected in one scene. Audio tracks are PCM Stereo and DTS HD Master Audio 5.1.  The surround track is listed on the cover as DTS HD-MA 5.0, but this is incorrect, and there is definitely activity on the LFE channel (which isn’t even usually the case on most 5.1 mixes). The BD comes with a fine half-hour featurette on the production, featuring interviews with all the main contributors.

Prokofiev - The Gambler

Sergei Prokofiev - The Gambler

Staatsoper unter den Linden, Berlin, 2008

Daniel Barenboim, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Vladimir Ognovenko, Kristine Opolais, Misha Didyk, Stefania Toczyska

Unitel Classica - C-Major

Dostoevsky’s short novella The Gambler is usually paired in book form with Poor Folk, the two stories reflecting rather contrasting themes and styles, but also in a way complementing each other. In Poor Folk, (if memory serves me correctly) a letter-writing couple find that their choices are limited, and the nature of their love defined and denied by the more pressing efforts put into simply struggling to exist. The characters in The Gambler on the other hand may appear to have so much money that they can fritter thousands away on the spin of a roulette wheel, but in reality they are similarly trapped in a lifestyle that restricts and distorts their course of their lives and their actions towards other people. In many ways both stories say a lot about social distinctions, but more in a way that reveals various attitudes and aspects of the Russian character.

Prokofiev’s opera version of The Gambler adheres fairly closely to the characters, themes and narrative of Dostoevsky’s book, the action set in a resort town of Roulettenburg, where the General, his family and entourage are staying at a hotel and making use of its casino. Alexsy, the tutor, has recklessly lost all of the General’s step-daughter Polina’s money on a game of roulette, but is determined to do everything he can to not so much win it back – though that would help – as much as win her favour. Polina however is toying with him, at the same time as accepting the advances of the Marquis, urging Alexsy on to act outrageously towards Baron and Baroness Wurmerhelm. The General meanwhile is in serious debt to the Marquis, but is expecting to gain an inheritance from the imminent demise of his mother. His engagement to Blanche rests on this inheritance also, since it is clear that she will not stick around unless the money comes through. To everyone’s great surprise however, the ailing old lady, Babulenka, thought to be on the point of death, turns up in Roulettenburg, with her own ideas on how to spend her money.

Composed in 1916, The Gambler is a little-known and rarely performed early Prokofiev work, and it’s not the easiest opera to like. It’s filled with unsympathetic, rather hateful characters whose sense of reality and the nature of their relationships with other people have been corrupted by money.  The music and singing moreover are not exactly harmonious – you won’t find any hummable arias here. On the other hand, the rising fever pitch that eventually explodes in Act 4 (with some magnificent singing in the last two Acts) is perfectly appropriate for qualities and themes of Dostoevsky’s work, and those are brought out exceptionally well in controversial director Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging for the 2008 production at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin. A modern-day staging (there’s nothing in this opera that fixes it in any period, and the themes are completely relevant and modern), Tcherniakov assists in putting across the complexity of the relationships between the characters by allowing different rooms of the hotel and casino to be seen simultaneously in a kind of split-screen form, adding to the picture we have of the personalities, even contradicting and contrasting what is being said by the characters with what is really going on behind the scenes.

Prokofiev’s score does much the same thing, underscoring the behaviour of the characters with emphatic woodwind trills, staccato strings and deep notes from the brass section. The DTS HD Master Audio 5.1 track on the Blu-ray disc is marvellous for capturing the huge dynamic range of the score, balancing the mix superbly between the singing and the orchestra. Partly that’s down to the scoring being composed not to compete with the singing but rather support it, partly that’s down to Barenboim’s management of the orchestra, and partly it’s down to the excellent surround mix. Consequently the singing dominates and is strong and clear, but when the orchestral parts and flourishes are called for, they are almost overwhelmingly powerful. The 1080/60i transfer is perfectly clear, the direction for television (with some side-stage angles) capturing the flow of what is occurring on the stage. Other than some brief notes in the booklet, there are no extra features on the disc.