Janáček - The Makropoulos Case (Paris, 2023)

Leoš Janáček - The Makropoulos Case

Opéra National de Paris, 2023

Susanna Mälkki, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Karita Mattila, Pavel Černoch, Nicholas Jones, Ilanah Lobel-Torres, Johan Reuter, Cyrille Dubois, Károly Szemerédy, Peter Bronder 

Paris Opera Play - 13th October 2023

I could think of several reasons why the idea of Krzysztof Warlikowski directing a Janáček opera would be an attractive proposition - attractive enough in my case to start a subscription with Paris Opera Play to watch a livestream broadcast. The science-fiction nature of The Makropoulos Case and its modernity lends itself to wild flights of imagination, and the relatively short running time of the opera means that an adventurous director like Warlikowski doesn't have to strive too hard to make it fit with what will undoubtedly push a concept beyond the limits of what the opera can sustain. And the promotional 'King Kong' images it has to be said show that Warlikowski is going to push his own ideas and distinctive view of opera as far as he can.

He can't help himself with this one, such is the richness of the 'script' and the 'soundtrack' he has to work with that he can indulge his love of classic and iconic movies to the extent that even a short opera like Makropoulos is somehow extended to almost 2 hours. Regardless of what you think of the director's style and techniques, you can hardly argue with is his choice of 'Marilyn Monroe' to represent the superstar fame of the opera's ageless icon Emilia Marty and her tragic situation.

The opening section, that this director often fills with filmed movie footage of his own for his productions, this time uses original classic Hollywood footage of 'Sunset Boulevard' and 'King Kong', neither of which feature Monroe of course, but blending these with documentary footage recounting the string of marriages and the tragedy of a legend, the fall of Marilyn Monroe, they tangentially serve to provide an effective link between her life and The Makropoulos Case. Rather than take place within the offices of the lawyer Kolenaty then, this merges into a kind of on-stage reenactment of the unveiling of bound King Kong to a New York audience. No, definitely not the most obvious of connections to the start of The Makropoulos Case.

And yet, there are plenty of references in the libretto to connect the tragedy of Elina Makropoulos with Marilyn Monroe - "Nothing is eternal. 'Vanitas' …ashes to ashes!" "What can you care about a woman of ill repute who lived 100 years ago?". It might not draw anything new out of the opera, but it certainly provides a fresh way to look at the work, a new way to connect to its themes, since the plot is a fairly convoluted one. Warlikowski's production certainly brings out how women have been objectified by men over the years the harm inflicted on Emilia Marty as a woman who has lived through it and seen it all, been abused and mistreated by men trying to mold her in the image of their fantasies. "See this scar on my neck? Another man tried to kill me. I'm not going to undress to show you all the marks men have left on my body". she tells a besotted Albert Gregor, in thrall to the lure of the glamorous image.

It's a gift of a role for any star soprano who is able to project a similar glamorous allure, and Karita Mattila proves to be a good choice for her ability to inhabit the persona of the enigma that is Emilia Marty; a star, diva, a Norma Desmond. Dressed as Marilyn Monroe in a constantly billowing Seven Year Itch dress is a bit more of a stretch, but this is opera and almost every opera has a singer cast in a role that they don't match physically or in age, and Mattila carries it off surprising well. This is after all an opera where we are dealing with a character who is an ageless 337, so anything goes surely? 'Anything goes surely' being the philosophy of Warlikowski as well you could say. What matters is that she can sing the role and inhabit the role with personality. 

Mattila's voice might be a little weaker now in terms of volume, but she delivers a hugely convincing performance and the personality is definitely all there. Her voice sounded a little muffled in places, but it's hard to judge that from a live web broadcast. She still sings with great control, singing in Czech, which is doubtlessly challenging. As is the role itself, which Warlikowski doesn't make any easier, but there is little room for doubt about her ability there, her performance very impressive, genuinely magnetic and charismatic. All the roles are similarly well-cast and performed with notable performances from Pavel Černoch as Albert 'Bertik' Gregor and Ilanah Lobel-Torres as Krista. As often proves to be the case, 'Maxi' Hauck brings a humorous touch to the opera, sung here by Peter Bronder as an ice-cream salesman during the interval at the theatre/movie theatre where Emilia is appearing in a fully-staged reconstruction of Fay Wray being picked up by Kong.

Set designer Małgorzata Szczęśniak provides an impressive set and staging for this scene, a key scene in the work that succeeds in capturing the wonder, humour and the underlying tragedy of life that - like Jenůfa and The Cunning Little Vixen - lies at the heart of the work. Also, since the work does relate to the nature of the artist taking on many roles, exploring human experience, the nature of aging or remaining ageless, it does relate well also to Sunset Boulevard. Maxi becomes Erich von Stroheim's butler to Emilia's Marilyn Monroe/Norma Desmond, the opera finishing with a swimming pool scene that captures the glamour of the lifestyle and the tragedy to unfold there. Ars longa, vita brevis.

It's all there - glamour, spectacle, consideration of the nature of living and being human - all wrapped up in a marvellous entertainment with glorious music conducted here by Susanna Mälkki. That's The Makropoulos Case and there's no question all the glamour, spectacle and full consideration of what the opera has to tell us about the nature of living is fully what you get in Krzysztof Warlikowski's new production for the Paris Opera.

External Links: Opéra National de Paris, Paris Opera Play

Verdi - Macbeth (Salzburg, 2023)

Giuseppe Verdi - Macbeth

Salzburger Festspiele, 2023

Philippe Jordan, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Vladislav Sulimsky, Tareq Nazmi, Asmik Grigorian, Caterina Piva, Jonathan Tetelman, Evan LeRoy Johnson, Aleksei Kulagin, Grisha Martirosyan, Hovhannes Karapetyan

ARTE Concert - 29th July 2023

By now, we are probably all familiar enough with Krzysztof Warlikowski's bag of tricks to have some idea of how his opera productions are likely to play out. They are almost always willfully subversive of the stage directions, imposing a period updating on them, usually relating to whatever movie is currently popular or indeed willfully subversive, such as David Lynch or Nicolas Winding Refn. Pasolini's Salò too is often a favourite for opera directors, not just Warlikowski. The question is whether his approach is ideally suited to the tone and themes of the opera or whether it brings anything new out of them, but often it can be surprisingly effective. I'm not convinced that the directness of Verdi works from this kind of overly elaborate approach, even in a work as emotionally complex as Don Carlos, where I felt Warlikowski was lost for ideas. In the case of his Macbeth for Salzburg, it has the disappointing and for this opera the somewhat unfortunate effect of rendering it essentially bloodless.

Ordinarily, failing to live up to Verdi's dark tone for Macbeth would be almost fatal, but there are some compensations here. Up until relatively recently it was a largely neglected Verdi opera, particularly in the UK where it was considered lacking the depth and poetry of Shakespeare, too condensed into little more than the sound and fury of the play. Now it can be recognised for the magnificence of its set pieces and the musical attunement to the work's dramatic power. It's the consummate blood and thunder Verdi opera, one that also provides great roles and arias, notably for Lady Macbeth, and a famous chorus in 'Patria oppressa'. If nothing else, the greatness of those elements remains apparent in the Salzburg production, although muted slightly by the musical and stage direction.

Warlikowski chooses to align this production of Macbeth with Pasolini's film Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex), both in term of its visual look and period inconsistency, as well as using it as a way to delve into the underlying psychology for the murderous couple deriving from their inability to have children. This is hinted at in Shakespeare's drama but never made explicit (although many productions have similarly explored this angle). Lady Macbeth is shown visiting a gynaecologist in similar period costume to the framing 1920's Italy of Pasolini's Oedipus Rex, and being told she will never have children. That film is also referenced explicitly in a clip of a mother breastfeeding her baby. This presumably is the suggestion for Macbeth's murderous campaign against any successor, incited by jealousy and fear of being supplanted at the breast by his or indeed any child. It's an idea certainly, but whether it holds up in terms of Shakespeare or even Verdi's version of Shakespeare is debatable/doubtful.

Krzysztof Warlikowski retains the 1920s imagery for the main part of the production design, giving it also something of the feel of the Godfather or a 1930s' Hollywood gangster movie. Mixing periods, a widescreen television is used for Macbeth's viewing of Edipo Re (setting off his fear of a successor), which could stand in for a projector, although no effort made to make it look so. Live projections and filmed segments are of course used (a still photo from the production shows Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew is also referenced, but I didn't see this while viewing the production from the online steaming) and this is effective not just for showing behind-the-scenes views like the killing of Duncan, but helping lay the psychological groundwork and set mood. It's a dark mood certainly, but all of the suggestion and explicit explaining avoids a more direct and dangerous bloodletting drama, and the murder scenes of Duncan and Banquo consequently fall rather flat.

I'm not sure what to make of the weird sisters chorus in this production either. A mix of women in dark sunglasses and children wearing sinister masks, they seem to hint at a more radioactive doom for no apparent reason. The banquet scene for the appearance of the ghost of Banquo is more effective, the period used to establish Lady Macbeth like a vampish singer in Hollywood movie night club. Macbeth's breakdown is effective as he reacts to a balloon where he has unconsciously drawn Banquo's face, although its impact on his high society guests less apparent. Serving up a dead child at the climax of breakdown hits the mark however, and this becomes a running theme, with children in masks continually haunting Macbeth.

This leads to an unconventional approach to 'Patria oppressa', which becomes less about a downtrodden and despairing people rising up against the horror that Macbeth has inflicted upon a nation but is tied nonetheless into the obsessive idea of total genocidal destruction through its connection to the murder of Macduff's family. The chorus remaining offstage, replaced by about 20 children of Macduff dressed all in white underwear, who all partake of a drugged drink passed around by their mother to end their lives. Macduff's despair is somewhat heightened then - 'Ah, la paterna mano' suitably heartfelt and expressive in Jonathan Tetelman's delivery - as the bodies of the innocents are laid out. It's certainly effective as such, but some might think this traditional highlight of the opera has been underplayed.

A lot of the impact being dissipated is I feel partly due to the large size of the Grosses Festspielhaus stage. Warlikowski is partly forced to fill the large space with projections and supernumeraries, but Macbeth is an intense intimate drama that doesn't scale up effectively. Or not here in any case. Verdi's music often makes up for such failings, but filling in for an unwell Franz Welser-Möst, Phillippe Jordan's conducting felt a little too slick in places. Although the drive and impact was effective in the key scenes, there was perhaps not enough unbridled passion in it for me, which I think is also the main failing of the direction also. 

One place where there were few such qualms was in the singing. The huge choral forces certainly filled the space in vocal presence and the principals similarly all had the personality and singing ability to make an impression. Asmik Grigorian is superb as Lady Macbeth. Along with recent performances over the last few years, particularly at Salzburg, where she has worked with Warlikowski before on Elektra she is proving to be one of the best dramatic sopranos in the world. She doesn't quite bring the full fireworks you would like for a Lady Macbeth, but I would fault the direction on that point, as her acting and singing delivery can scarcely be faulted. The same could apply to Vladislav Sulimsky's Macbeth. It's a solid performance, the passion and fear are evident when the direction is effective (the banquet scene), less so in others (the assassination of Duncan). Bass Tareq Nazmi's Banco was astonishing in his depth and lyricism. It's unfortunate that Banco is not given a greater role and is killed off too soon, but we at least were able to enjoy an excellent 'Studia il passo, o mio figlio'.

If it was a bit of struggle to connect Warlikowski's ideas, direction and production design to Verdi's opera and at the same time make it fully inhabit the stage, the production gained force as the opera progressed. The downward spiral of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth was well depicted, the murder of Macduff's family during ''Patria oppressa' hit home, as the opera made its way towards its suitably dramatic conclusion. I can't help feel that a little less over-thinking in the direction and the conducting, a smaller scale production and a little more trusting in Verdi's score would have been much more effective.

External linke: Salzburg Festival, ARTE Concert, Photographs - © SF/Bernd Uhlig

Gluck - Iphigénie en Tauride (Paris, 2021)

Christoph Willibald Gluck - Iphigénie en Tauride

Opéra National de Paris, 2021

Thomas Hengelbrock, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Tara Erraught, Jarrett Ott, Julien Behr, Jean-François Lapointe, Marianne Croux, Jeanne Ireland, Christophe Gay, Agata Buzek

Palais Garnier, Paris - 26 September 2021 

The essence of what is continually great and everlasting in the later works of Christoph Willibald Gluck is that despite the formality of the 18th century musical conventions and the poetic licence of contemporary adaptation, he manages to make the stories and predicaments of the great mythological figures of Greek drama feel completely human. Despite appearing to have a very limited idea for presenting the drama, Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski's production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride nonetheless similarly strives to find the underlying humanity in his production for the Paris Opera, and perhaps even delve deeper into the mindsets and troubled history of the Atreides family. The success of the production is mainly down to Gluck of course, but Warlikowski knows when to defer to genius.

Essentially, the Orestia deals with the downfall of a great family, a royal family, and assuming that they aren't really lizard people - something I'm prepared to keep an open mind about - even royal families are human too. Hmm. Anyway. Warlikowski has been here before - or rather later - with his Princess Diana influenced production of Alceste, and this production of Iphigénie en Tauride which was first produced in Paris in 2006, opens somewhat obscurely with a title 'Dedicated to Queen Marie Antoinette'. Other than it being about a royal family and it being produced for Paris, I'm not sure what the intention of that is, but it doesn't prove to have any real bearing on the rest of the production.

Warlikowski's setting for Iphigénie en Tauride is, well, it looks very much like most Warlikowski sets designed by Malgorzata Szczesniak, with glass panels, mirrored rooms, a wall of showers on one side and a wall of sinks on the other. Here Tauride is an old people's home where Iphigenia as an old woman in a gold lamé dress looks back at the defining incident in her experience of a troubled family life. Or not so much looks back on it of course as much as relives it, her mind failing, flitting between her current infirmity and mental state in old age and the incident on Tauride that may have helped reduce her to her condition.

This Tauride or old people's home is of course less a physical place than a state of mind, and it's the impact that her experience has on her mind that Warlikowski wants to explore. Within that however, the actual drama plays out much as you would expect, with Orestes and Pylades brought by the priestesses as strangers to be sacrificed at the paranoid King Thoades, who while trying his best not to fall victim to the fate an oracle has decreed for him, inevitably ends up bringing it about.

Warlikowski illustrates a few scenes behind the reflective shield of her mind, showing the now and the past, but it's fragmented and nightmarish in its visualisation and not a narrative illustration. Doubles are used, as they often are in productions of this work  which seems open to such divisions and analysis, (Lukas Hemleb, Geneva 2015), (Claus Guth, Zurich, 2001) More than just use an actor to double Iphigénie past and present, internal and external, the director also doubles or contrasts the past as a mirror of the present. What plays out simultaneously is a kind of shadow nightmare scenario of her experience in Aulide, where it's now Iphigenia the priestess who is to carry out the human sacrifice, with Thoas becoming her surrogate father.

The psychoanalytical approach is quite appropriate, the dysfunctional family issues compounded with Iphigenia's encounter with the stranger who is her brother Orestes, and in Orestes seeing in Iphigenia the image of the mother he has just murdered. It's inevitable then that the familiar influence of the films of David Lynch also plays a part in this Warlikowski production, with scenes and imagery reminiscent of Wild at Heart (another horrific family saga of murder and brutality) and Mulholland Drive (a glamorous life on the surface with hidden horrors surfacing in the moment of death). Mix in a bit of royal scandal and there's plenty to make this visually impressive and troubling while still largely leaving the drama to tell its own tale.

Here, as is often the case, the best a director can do is find a suitable setting for mood and let Gluck's music and the drama speak for itself. Warlikowski does a little more than this, finding a way to bring the audience into the human drama that is playing out in the mind of Iphigenia. There are a few other touches, having the chorus and other players in the Tauride drama placed in the boxes, isolated and pushed off to the sidelines away from the wholly personal interiorised nature of Iphigenia's relationship with the drama. Diana's appearance at the end of Act 4 is appropriately sung from the back of the Palais Garnier up in the gods, all contributing to present as immersive a presence as possible of the drama replaying out in her mind.

Evidently it's Gluck's beautiful music, his attunement to the drama and the understated emotional states that drive the drama forward and it was successfully led from the orchestra under Thomas Hengelbrock. Vocally it was impressive also in the three leading roles. As Iphigenia Tara Erraught was superb, deservedly stepping into major opera house roles like this after a successful career as a repertory singer in Munich. Her musical range is consequently wide and varied, but she can do a leading Mozart role well (The Marriage of Figaro) and is certainly impressive in her French delivery of Gluck. Jarrett Ott was an excellent Orestes and Julien Behr offered strong lyrical support as Pylades.

Links: Paris Opera

Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Munich, 2021)

Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2021

Kirill Petrenko, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jonas Kaufmann, Mika Kares, Anja Harteros, Wolfgang Koch, Sean Michael Plumb, Okka von der Damerau, Dean Power, Christian Rieger, Manuel Günther

Staatsoper TV Live Stream - 31 July 2021

The final production of Nikolaus Bachler’s exceptional tenure as General Manager of the Bavarian State Opera may not be a perfect send-off, but it's certainly one that typifies his time there. It's a style that is adventurous, takes chances and divides audiences, and putting Krzysztof Warlikowski on Tristan und Isolde is something of a gamble. It's not uncommon to be left confused about what is going on and what the point of a production is, but more often than not, Munich productions manage to find a way to connect with a work in new and interesting ways. Warlikowski production of Tristan und Isolde actually doesn't appear that adventurous or controversial, or at least no more absurd and bizarre than a work with magic love potions, over-fervent raptures and philosophical ideas wrapped up in flowery language.

This time it looks - as with his Don Carlos - as if Warlikowski has again run out of ideas when confronted with the big beasts of opera. On one level, Tristan und Isolde takes place mainly within the ordinary surroundings of a wood-panelled 1920s' hotel room, while on another level, projections show an alternate - perhaps heightened emotional or fantasy - playing out of events. On one level it's Christoph Loy and another it's Bill Viola, whose extraordinary art installation screens for the Paris Tristan und Isolde separated the physical or material with projections of the ecstatic spiritual heights that would otherwise be difficult to translate into purely human actions on the stage. And when music and visuals come together, this opera can certainly achieve that level of transcendence.

Warlikowski's lack of any new ideas to separate those states (and connect them) is most evident in Act II. There's a build-up here that is expressed as the secret lovers meet that demands a corresponding gradual increasing intensity of feeling before they almost dissolve in rapture, but where little happens on a dramatic level other than the inevitable release of tension - a false release - with their discovery by Marke. On the stage in this production, there's not a lot going on and little visual sign of such deep feeling as it is expressed in the music. Warlikowski takes it to the other level in the projections that show the lovers physically separate but tantalisingly close, as water rushes out beneath the bed they lie on and submerges them.

The director emphasises this separation of the world we see and the one we feel right from the start, using people dressed as dummies with no distinguishing features to stand in for Tristan and Isolde during the Vorspiel. Its not so much an idealised form as a negation of one, where the physical characteristics don't matter as much as the interior lives. Without wishing to 'body shame' any performers, there's nothing new about that idea, and opera viewers have had to use their imagination to see less than perfect human forms and shapes aspire to an image of sublime godlike perfection ever since opera was invented.

You can take this idea too far - and Warlikowski inevitably does - bringing the dummies back as a doubles for Tristan and Isolde in Act III, populating Kareol with baby Tristans who, for some obscure reason, sit around a table in the wood-panelled room setting that the director also seems to have settled upon for no discernible reason. It takes more than a few odd references and mannerisms however to hold Tristan und Isolde back from reaching its goal, and it does seem to be the case that there's no need to be hasty in judgements; you need to wait and see where this takes us, and if any work repays delayed gratification, it's surely this one.

Warlikowski, for all his mannerisms and lack of any imaginative response to Tristan und Isolde (compared for example to Simon Stone's recent production at the Aix-en Provence festival that I viewed just a week before this), does however bring out one element of the work that hadn't really struck me before. I'm not quite sure how he does it, since there is little that visually alludes to it, but between him and Jonas Kaufmann, it's possible to see the commonalities of themes in Tristan that are developed further in Parsifal. The pain of the wound, the enlightenment through pain to consider one's origins, birth and mother's suffering on the way to achieving an enlightened state. Kaufmann - and very much Harteros too - at least made it feel that there is something deeper behind the pathology of both characters in their conflation of love and death, and it has nothing to do with a magic love potion. Their love-death union is derived from an awareness of human existence and love as a path to attain spiritual bliss that can only be completely fulfilled in the union of death.

Anja Harteros in fact embodies this much better than Kaufmann. She is a fine singer and a superb actress; you can practically see the music and every emotion it provokes flow through her. Her embodiment and communication of a role I find is always unerringly accurate - or makes you believe it so - but her voice isn't always able to match the same heights, particularly in the Wagnerian range. She's good, a true artist, but just not fully up to the demands of Isolde here right across the board. Kaufmann is also very weak, struggling to gain volume over the surge of the orchestra, but he is also simply unconvincing in a role that demands total and utter commitment. Kaufmann and Harteros have been much more convincing as a duo in Verdi, in Otello, in La Forza del destino and in Giordano's Andea Chenier, but most assuredly not in their role debuts as Tristan and Isolde.

There's no question however that both give it their all and Kaufmann is actually quite impressive in the critical Act III. I thought he might hold back from the exceptional demands placed on Tristan in this Act, and holding back is not something you can do in this opera. As committed as his Act III is, and as well as it is delivered, it still seems to lack the underlying conviction, of someone dying and longing to die, but unwilling to do so while his soulmate is still alive and separated from him - on several planes of existence. It's a lack of connection to his character here that I've felt in some of Kaufmann's performances; in some it might not matter so much in some works, but in Don Carlos and in Tristan und Isolde - two of the pinnacles of opera - half-measures and almost-theres are not good enough. 

With neither Kaufmann, Harteros nor Warlikowski being entirely up to the admittedly huge task of Tristan und Isolde, Kirill Petrenko - another person who has a huge impact in making Munich one of the centres of exciting opera in Europe - has his work cut out for him. In the absence of any kind of real stirring of passion on the stage, he has to make the music do most of the work. He doesn't quite manage it and in fact, judging by the sound purely on the live stream performance, it feels like he is trying too hard. He pushes the orchestra to those extremes, trying to conjure up day and night, light and dark, but there is little on the stage to match the intent, and the work often sounds aggressive. He is of course aware of the dynamic and pace and is able to rein it in and slow it down for 'O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe' in Act II, before building up the rush of emotions (the preparation of lethal injections, the lovers awash in a hotel room) that is shattered by the arrival of Melot and Marke. If it's fury you want to show, this is the way to play it, but it should be disappointment and resignation, shock and disillusionment. And credit where its due, you can see it in Harteros, if nowhere else.

Think what you will of the singing and the production - and there's good support from Wolfgang Koch and Okka von der Damerau as Kurwenal and Brangäne - but there is nothing else in all opera like the Liebestod and the finale of Tristan und Isolde. It's one of the most sublime expressions of human feeling put into music or indeed any form of art, unparalleled in its capacity to reach deep inside and express something wonderfully mysterious and sublime. Despite the imperfections elsewhere, Kaufmann's final utterance of "...Isolde" and Harteros's soaring Liebestod touch on the work's extraordinary and unmatched core of emotions, the essence of life and death, of striving for a love that surpasses human boundaries and attains something spiritual and sublime. Despite the failings of the production as a whole, this moment as ever is worth waiting for. And if it still achieves its purpose, what has come before and the contributions of the performers must have succeeded on some level.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper TV

Strauss - Elektra (Salzburg, 2020)

Richard Strauss - Elektra

Salzburger Festspiele, 2020

Franz Welser-Möst, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Aušrinė Stundytė, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Asmik Grigorian, Derek Welton, Michael Laurenz, Tilmann Rönnebeck, Matthäus Schmidlechner, Sonja Sarić, Bonita Hyman, Katie Coventry, Deniz Uzun, Sinead Campbell-Wallace, Natalia Tanasii, Valeriia Savinskaia, Verity Wingate

ARTE Concert - 1 August 2020

Back in 2013, Krzysztof Warlikowski set the Munich production of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten in an asylum. That's not a particularly original way to deal with such a wonderfully colourful and rich fairy-tale, but it remained largely effective through the power of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's extraordinary vision, with its psychoanalytical undercurrents that Warlikowski was careful not to dilute with too many distractions or modernisms. If there's ever a Strauss opera that deserves to be set in a mental institution though it's Elektra, where the mental disintegration of its lead figure as scored by Strauss is even more extreme than that of the preceding Salome (also recently reworked by this director). Warlikowski doesn't explicitly set this 2020 Salzburg production of Elektra in an asylum, but for all the aberrant behaviour on display in the House of Atreus, it might as well be.

As is often the case it's difficult and usually not particularly instructive to deconstruct Warlikowski's intentions or examine too closely how they align with the themes of the work in question, particularly when he goes overboard in cinematic references such as in the recent production of The Tales of Hoffmann. Some of the director's familiar mannerisms are there in the Salzburg Elektra, but mainly evident only in the set design of his partner and regular collaborator Małgorzata Szczęśniak. They take full measure and width of the Felsenreitschule venue in Salzburg to create a huge (socially distanced) space for the work, much wider than the usual claustrophobic set usually reserved for this intense work. If there's a method to this, it can only be to rise to the scale of the orchestration itself, and in terms of that and Franz Welser-Möst's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic, it certainly gives full expression to the opera's immense forces.

One side of the stage does indeed have the look of a rundown asylum, with a long narrow communal bath and row of showers with rust stained steel walls on Elektra's side of the House. The water from the shallow pool causes flickering reflections that highlight and suggest the constant uncontrolled agitation of Elekra's mind over the murder of her father Agamemnon and her desire for vengeance upon her mother Clytemnestra. The other side of the stage holds a glass panelled interior room of the palace where Clytemnestra and her maids are bathed in blood red lighting, Warlikowski using video cameras to project what goes on inside. In its totality the set effectively creates an environment that simultaneously reflects the internalised emotions barely controlled by external appearances.

Other than that Warlikowski sticks fairly closely to the ample expression that is already there in the music with few of the distractions or diversions that you usually find with this director. There is an autopsy, a few stray figures who wander dazed onto the stage, some dummies of children, but there are no dancer interludes and no short film introduction, although the scene is set with a recital of backgrounding text before the opera starts. With the spirit of Agamemnon made present, it's clear then that the director wants to bring motivation and characterisation to the fore and, aligned with the score, it's impossible not to feel Elektra's pain on a deep and visceral level which, without taking away from the quality of the poetry and the psychological depths explored, is surely where opera is most successful and notable.

Crucially, you can't really achieve that level of dramatic intensity without an Elekra to match it and, well, there was little doubt that on her recent performances of growing power and intensity, Aušrinė Stundytė would be capable of measuring up to it. It's an outstanding performance, the Lithuanian soprano as ever almost completely immersed in character (to be completely immersed would surely be next to madness). But a damaged Elektra can't work in isolation. Warlikowski takes care not to present Clytemnestra as a domineering caricature and sung by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, we see a more troubled and not unsympathetic figure who has been a victim of circumstances, but still very dangerous. Asmik Grigorian also permits you to have some sympathy for the usually wet Chrysothemis, the force of her delivery undoubtedly contributing to the success of that characterisation.

Make no mistake however, violence, madness and death are the inevitable outcome, deliriously unravelled in Strauss's extraordinary score and put into words in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's very distinctive and poetically rich spin on Sophocles' version of the Greek tragedy. For all the beauty of the language, it distills the essence of the drama down into the big questions and conflicts of life and death, hatred and love, family bonds and debts of honour, irreconcilable extremes that descend into madness and death. Krzysztof Warlikowski effectively visualises that violent climax with large scale projections of splattered blood and masses of flies. Whether you follow it or just feel it, the Salzburg production as a whole certainly succeeds in doing justice to one of the greatest opera works of the 20th century, still capable of leaving you almost breathless and in shock.

Links: Salzburg Festival, ARTE Concert

Offenbach - Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Brussels, 2019)

 

Jacques Offenbach - Les Contes d'Hoffmann

La Monnaie-De Munt, 2019

Alain Altinoglu, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Eric Cutler, Patricia Petibon, Michèle Losier, Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo, Gábor Bretz, François Piolino, Willard White, Loïc Félix, Yoann Dubruque, Alejandro Fonte, Byoung-Jin Lee

ARTE Concert streaming - December 2019
It's not hard to recognise that there's a darker side to the stories and the fate of the character Hoffman in The Tales of Hoffmann, but it's by no means certain in my experience that Jacques Offenbach actually manages to draw them out in his opera. The composer's only true opera aside from his delightful comic operetta entertainments, The Tales of Hoffmann is often treated the same way as his opéra-comique works and it's rare that a director will address the underlying issues of alcoholism and mental illness in any serious way. You might expect Krzysztof Warlikowski to try to do a little more with this at La Monnaie, and he does even if it feels he's trying a little too hard.

Always keen to give a classic work a contemporary treatment that addresses the issues in a way that we are more familiar with, often using references to whatever is currently hot in the movie world, Warlikowsi goes the whole hog this time and updates the drunken fantasist of ETA Hoffman's tales into a Hollywood screenwriter-director going through a personal crisis. Obsessed with his leading actress Stella, who whatever way you look at this opera is very much the muse for his creativity, he strives to find a way to overcome his own demons through the roles he develops for her.

When it comes to movie references it's well known that Warlikowsi often relies on the films of David Lynch for inspiration, and since Lynch has tackled similar subjects of Hollywood chewing up its stars in his films Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, it makes sense (some kind of sense) to employ the same sinister qualities and techniques that Lynch evokes in those movies. Warlikowski doesn't stop there however, borrowing the three pink showgirls from the casino from Twin Peaks: The Return, sets the Olympia segment in Twin Peaks's The Black Lodge, has a microphone stand from similar sequences in Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive and even has Nicklausse and Giulietta swap identities wearing black and blonde wigs in a nod to Lynch's surreal noir Lost Highway. I'm sure Wild at Heart must be in there somewhere too.

The other current hot movie reference is where the villain(s) of the piece, Lindorf/Coppélius/Doctor Miracle/Dapertutto and his crew all adopt the make-up and look of the Joker. As far as getting underneath the surface these references are definitely in the right zone for using farce and fantasy to suggest a sinister undercurrent where drawing on personal resources and responses for the sake of entertainment can take its toll on creative artists. It's most evident in the Olympia story where the automaton becomes a kind of manufactured starlette groomed for stardom, Hoffmann's "beer goggles" blinding him to the superficiality and fakeness that his assistant Nicklausse is able to see. Olympia indeed becomes a Mulholland Drive-like victim of the Hollywood system.

As far as that goes Warlikowski gets the point across effectively in Act I, but even though the concept permits Hoffmann as director to pour his auteur obsessions out on the screen in the other sections of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, it does - as I often find with this work - tend to drag and get somewhat unwieldy. Warlikowski's references, interventions, interpolations, twisting of the narrative and adding layers doesn't really add much more to this, but tends rather to make it all even harder to follow than usual. In the Antonia section for example, Patricia Petibon breaks out of character (see Laura Dern in Inland Empire) and into another character as an actress who uses her own trauma of the death of her son to feed into her performance of Antonia, and show how it takes a lot out of her emotionally.

Essentially Krzysztof Warlikowski just wants to bring an edge of realism/surrealism to the work, showing that behind Hoffmann's fantasies are real people with real personal lives and drama that Hollywood exploits for the sake of entertainment. If you want to you can extend that another level in that this also makes you aware that the performers of the opera also have their own lives and baggage that it can be difficult to reconcile with an artistic lifestyle. Certainly the fake Oscar ceremony that Warlikowski inserts before the conclusion hits those points about home in a hugely effective and even slightly discomforting way.

Unfortunately it's just all too much, Warlikowski as he is wont to do throwing everything at the opera, much more than I feel Offenbach's writing can sustain, and as a result it feels like a bit of a mess. Which, to be frank, and accepting that Offenbach left the work unfinished at the time of his death, would be how I regard The Tales of Hoffmann as an opera anyway. Less is often more with this work in my experience, and it's telling that the only wholly successful stage productions I have seen are those that scale the whole thing down. The 2015 ETO production (which also used Hoffmann as a movie director much more effectively than Warlikowski) and the Irish National Opera's 2018 version demonstrate that despite my misgivings the work can indeed aspire to something greater.

Whatever its structural or narrative weaknesses, the one redeeming quality of The Tales of Hoffmann as far as I'm concerned is in its melodies and songs that run through the work, in the repetitive catchiness of the "Chanson de Kleinzach" and in the charm of "Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour" and it's there that the real strength of the La Monnaie production conducted by Alain Altinoglu can be found. The latter sung by Patricia Petibon and Michèle Losier is certainly worth waiting for - well, almost worth waiting for as I found my patience running out as usual with this work. Losier is superb, genuinely making something greater out of the Nicklausse role, Petibon not always able to meet the challenges of the demanding soprano roles in the opera. Eric Cutler's Hoffman is sympathetically engaging and Gábor Bretz cuts a suitably sinister figure as The Joker basically, in a production of Hoffmann that is certainly no laughing matter.

Links: La Monnaie-De Munt, ARTE Concert

Strauss - Salome (Munich, 2019)

Richard Strauss - Salome

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2019

Kirill Petrenko, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, Michaela Schuster, Marlis Petersen, Wolfgang Koch, Pavol Breslik, Rachael Wilson, Scott MacAllister, Roman Payer, Kristofer Lundin, Kevin Conners, Peter Lobert, Callum Thorpe, Ulrich Reß

Staatsoper.TV - 6 July 2019

When you come up against a Krzysztof Warlikowski production that appears to be at great variance from what you expect, as in his Munich production of Salome, it can be useful to remind yourself what the work is supposed to be about. A straightforward biblical story it is not, but rather one of Oscar Wilde's most daring works, far more incisive of Victorian morals than any of his society comedies, a confessional work of taboo in Symbolist drama form, exposing the hypocrisy of a decadent order of repressed lusts hiding behind a veneer of respectability. Along with Freud's studies in Vienna at the turn of the century, it was certainly a work that appealed to Strauss as a way of breaking through the mannerisms of old music and expressing an unspeakable truth, ushering in a new millennium in a violent fashion.

That's over one hundred years ago however, so can Salome still have relevance today? Musically it's still an extraordinary piece of music, perfectly and meticulously connected to a subject that still has the power to shock on the stage, and it doesn't have to be tied to a Biblical story either to have a transgressive taboo feel. Warlikowski taps into that power in his Bavarian State Opera production, but appears to turn the focus away from exposing corrupt individual lusts and delves rather into the self-destructive nature of exposing those individual lusts - something Wilde could certainly attest to - and how they feed into a broken society that is collectively heading for self-destruction.

Is that something we can recognise today? Perhaps it's still not that evident, but Warlikowski chooses not to hit the audience who might be blind to the dangers in our own world today over the head with any heavy-handed contemporary associations. Evidently it's not set 2,000 years ago either, but looks closer to the first half of the 20th century, perhaps 1930s, a time when again, that dark desires and will of human nature would push individuals into a collective self-destructive death wish. There's no obvious war references that point to this either it must be said, but the force of Strauss's music and the fact that this production takes place in Munich make it hard not to make those obvious associations.

I've rarely seen the illicit desires of Salome expressed as powerfully as they are here in Krzysztof Warlikowski's production, and I don't just mean the desires of Salome herself, although Marlis Petersen of course gives a reliably intense performance, nor indeed the rather perverted degeneracy of Herod - likewise an impressive performance from Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke - but it's taken much further than usual also in Pavol Breslik's Narraboth, who clings, gropes and paws desperately at the Princess even as she appeals lasciviously to Jochanaan, and then commits suicide by taking a vial of poison, much to the horror of Rachel Wilson's Page who is clearly in love with Narraboth herself.

All this creates an explosive situation that plunges all of these figures into dangerous ground. That is reflected within Malgorzata Szczesniak's set, the library where Herod has been (strangely) entertaining his guests splits open to reveal a chasm, a gangway downwards to where the prophet Jochanaan, no less wrapped up in his own obsessions, lies in the cistern - but again the chasm isn't one into which Salome alone peers with dark self-destructive desire, but all of Herod's retinue eventually succumb. The contrast between the old world library and the modern gangway to destruction also works with the powerful violence of contrast Strauss's plunge into the development of modernism in his music.

That descent into madness is of course best exemplified in Salome's dance, which is consequently often problematic, particularly in finding a new way to present it. Warlikowski at least keeps it consistent with the central theme here, having Petersen literally engaged in an erotic dance with Death, or a courtier with his face painted in a Death mask, with an animated projection in the background of some kind of heraldic congress (don't ask, I'm not even sure I know what I mean by that). But since Wilde's drama is very much Symbolist in its stylisations this all works well with the text, particularly with the constant references to death heard in the beating of wings.

There's a lot going on, as there often is in Warlikowski productions, and as is also often the case, perhaps even too much. For a work as powerfully focussed as this there's a risk of distraction or spreading it out too thinly. If the dramatic charge consequently isn't always there as it might be, the musical and singing performances achieve everything that is required of them. It's simply a joy to have a conductor like Kirill Petrenko at the helm for a work as dynamic and charged as Salome. I don't think Warlikowski's direction works perfectly in alignment with Petrenko's reading and conducting of the score, but musically in its own right it's as powerful and measured a performance of this music as you can get.

Marlis Petersen as ever gives a committed intense performance. I don't think her voice has the fullness that it once had, but her voice has a perfect lyrical character that is essential for those switches between seductive and dangerous pleas and close-to-shriek utterances of exasperation. But my goodness, this was an exceptionally strong cast across the board, with Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke in particular bringing an other dimension to Herod, Michaela Schuster also avoiding lazy cliche with an almost sympathetic Heriodias, and committed performances from Pavol Breslik as Narraboth and Rachael Wilson as Heriodias's Page.

Wolfgang Koch made less of an impression as Jochanaan, not so much for his singing, which was impeccable, as it seemed that Warlikowski was less interested in the Prophet than in the other depraved characters. This was evident even in the usually gore-filled finale where Jochanaan's head is not presented on a silver platter but in what looks like a safe-deposit box, which doesn't even seem to contain a head since Koch's Jochanaan can be seen sitting to the side of the stage casually smoking a cigarette.

This seems to tie into something of a Liebestod moment here in the Munich production, since not only is Jochanaan alive or resuscitated, but Naraboth is also resurrected so that Warlikowski can provide an alternative twist on the ending of the opera. "The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death", sings Salome as the whole ensemble, with a kind of bunker-like death cult mentality, hand out vials of poison and commit mass suicide. Make of that what you will - and it's good if there remains some element of shock and controversy about Salome - but aligned with Strauss's thunderous juddering final chords, it makes for a hugely effective conclusion that should leave you much to think on.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, Staatsopertv

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

Janáček - From the House of the Dead (Brussels, 2018)

Leoš Janáček - From the House of the Dead

La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels, 2018

Michael Boder, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Willard White, Pascal Charbonneau, Štefan Margita, Nicky Spence, Ivan Ludlow, Alexander Vassiliev, Graham Clark, Ladislav Elgr, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Aleš Jenis, Pavlo Hunka, Florian Hoffmann, Natascha Petrinsky, John Graham-Hall, Peter Hoare, Alexander Kravets, Alejandro Fonte, Maxime Melnik

La Monnaie Streaming - November 2018

Krzysztof Warlikowski's production of Janáček's From the House of the Dead received mixed reviews when it opened at the Royal Opera House early last year. Seen again as a co-production with La Monnaie in Brussels - who would be much more familiar with the director's working methods - it's clear that Warlikowski does try to impose too much onto Janáček's final opera, but even though it has enough going on in its own terms, it's not as if the opera can't take it. As with the Royal Opera House production, if it serves just to get this magnificent work performed - it's not only Warlikowski's debut there but From the House of the Dead that had never before been performed at Covent Garden - then it's job done, and despite the usual reservations and sometimes valid complaints about the director's methods, it's largely a job well done.

As far as trying to do too much, well Warlikowski could probably have done without the theoretical philosophising of Michel Foucault distracting from the strong musical opening scored by Janáček that takes you into a world of masculine power-play and violence that has a heightened malevolence within the confines of a prison. It matters little whether that is a work camp in Siberia, as it is in Dostoevsky's original work - one written about from hard-earned experience as a political prisoner - or in what looks more like an American prison yard. It's a work about observations on the nature of life in the prison camp, the kind of people from all walks of life who end up there and what confinement does to them.

While the philosophical elements add little to the essential meaning of the work, they do at least present an observational view on the nature of justice and imprisonment. Far more successful are the real-life observations in the filmed interviews that give the production a more genuine human touch that is far from theoretical. Projected onto the steel curtain that drops between acts, a prisoner talks about his detachment from the world around him and how it leads to a greater awareness of the presence of death. It adds to the deeper exploration in Janáček's opera of sentiments that are brought out rather than submerged or destroyed by the pervasive violence, anger, hatred, bitterness and regret around them. Women are almost never out of their thoughts or stories - love and family - but even though it is twisted and distorted in this all-male environment, it's a spark that still ignites passions.

That spark needs to be there in a production and From the House of the Dead doesn't have much in the way of action to dramatise. Warlikowski finds other fine ways of expressing those inner underlying sentiments and the complex way they manifest themselves in words and actions, stories acted out with cartoon violence and life in the prison environment with much more realistic brutality. He also avoids what would now appear to be hackneyed imagery in the references to birds, and in particular an injured eagle that is looked after by the inmates and released at the same time as the political prisoner Gorjančikov. Warlikowski finds a more modern and original form of expressing it using two black dancers (dancers often serving a similar function in the director's productions). Cross-dressing and play-acting out the drama in Act II is given perhaps too much emphasis with too much going on that is distracting (another frequent feature in Warlikowski's productions), but it's an attempt find a modern way to relate to those deeper masculine concerns expressed in the work.

From the House of the Dead then is not a conventional work and it doesn't have a central figure much less a hero, as that would go against the intentions of what the work is about. Gorjančikov's narrator becomes an observer, collecting not just stories but also recording the impact these significant incidents have had on the inmates. It's about how hope and the spark of human kindness is never extinguished, even in such a place, even after all they've been through. Each of the characters relate their stories, their fears and complexes, their humanity submerged by the proximity and behaviour of other male characters, of having to get on and live with them, of having to survive not being shafted by them in one way or another, and Warlikowski does this by focussing on the relationships, on little acts of kindness between them, even after acts of appalling violence.

Janáček was always a progressive 20th century musical innovator, a unique voice who had developed a few tricks in his time and never rested on a single simple means of expression but was constantly seeking to innovate. His use of adapting the rhythms of the spoken voice to determine flow and rhythm are expanded further here for the specific challenges of adapting From the House of the Dead. The rhythmic pulse could be seen as representing the monotony and repetition of daily existence, but Janáček - particularly in this new critical edition of the score, a score that Janáček was unable to oversee though to completion - shows subtle shifts under Michael Boder's direction. Never simply repetitive, it's constantly developing and changing, showing how people can adapt to their surroundings and change it by degrees.

Within the score and the world it depicts, human actions, words and behaviours are not negligible and can cause unpredictable shifts as hope turns to despair, the progressive rhythm broken by outbursts of violence, then repaired and finding its rhythm again. It's an incredibly rich work, Janáček also employing harder sounds and unconventional instruments including chains, not as a dramatic element, but as part of the fabric of the world the work operates within. Ultimately however personal interpretation is vital to bring the work to life and it's that investment that is brought to it by an outstanding cast of singers who are given plenty to get their teeth into. Pavlo Hunka in particular makes Šiškov's Act III story heartbreaking and Nicky Spence is a menacing figure in a number of character roles that exhibit a surprising but necessary emotional range for this work. That's all to fit perfectly not with Janáček's score, but with the thoughtful interpretation of this remarkable work by Boder and Warlikowski.

Links: La Monnaie-De Munt