Wagner - Götterdämmerung (Berlin, 2022)

Richard Wagner - Götterdämmerung

Staatsoper unter den Linden, Berlin - 2022

Christian Thielemann, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Andreas Schager, Anja Kampe, Lauri Vasar, Mandy Fredrich, Mika Kares, Johannes Martin Kränzle, Violeta Urmana, Noa Beinart, Kristina Stanek, Anna Samuil, Evelin Novak, Natalia Skrycka, Anna Lapkovskaja

ARTE Concert - October 2022

To save you time - and not everyone has the endurance to last through the fourth segment of a Ring cycle - what goes for Siegfried also holds true for Götterdämmerung. There are no sudden revelations in the last part that build on what little we have been able to make of what came before in Dmitri Tcherniakov's 2022 Ring cycle for the Berlin Staatsoper. There is little that is different in style, theme, singing and musical performances. You could say that Tcherniakov has run out of ideas, but some would dispute (and it would be hard to disagree with) that he didn't really have any new ideas in the first place. The bringing down to earth of high-flown spiritual, philosophical and mythological elements in Wagner's music dramas through psychological exploration has been a feature of his Wagner productions, and indeed many of his other recent opera productions.

Götterdämmerung's opening showing a happy home and everyday domesticity before the rot sets in, has been done numerous times, not least in the just passed 2022 Bayreuth Götterdämmerung. The three Norns are wobbly bent-over old ladies, previously seen as being present in the background in the rotating passing between rooms. Perhaps the point is that they are ancient and wise, or perhaps not so wise as they can't prevent what has happened and the course that future events will take. All in all though it's a very dull prologue, lacking on any kind of drive, purpose or meaning in the context of this production, but at least consistent within it.

Also not unlike the recent Bayreuth production, Gunther (Lauri Vasar) and Gutrune (Mandy Fredrich) in Act I are styishly dressed and think themselves sophisticated, giggling and making fun of the rather square Siegfried when he turns up in his yellow pullover with elbow patches and grey blue slacks and jacket. He presents a suitably naive figure it must be said, Tcherniakov making sure you don't mistake him for anything heroic. And let's not forget that this is supposed to be taking place within a virtual reality experiment of some kind, isn't it? Is everyone else but Siegfried in on the scheme? It would appear so, Gunther playing along with the idea that this fool's cuddly toy is his horse Grane to see where the experiment will end up. Although his delusions could be dangerous. Just look at what happened to Alberich in Das Rheingold! (Johannes Martin Kränzle's shambling semi-naked figure in the prelude to Act II reminds us of that).

There is little to enliven the scene between Brünnhilde and Waltraute (long time since I've seen Violeta Urmana), who wanders into their home in a blue trenchcoat. As with Siegfried, there is a lot of pacing up and down, but Kampe and Urmana at least get across the import of Waltraute's impassioned warning to her sister about the fate of Valhalla (are we talking about the E.S.C.H.E institute?) should she fail to renounce the ring. Christian Thielemann's equally impassioned musical direction certainly helps get this across; the swirling fire leitmotif at the end of the scene heralding the arrival and menace of Siegfried and Gunther's deceit is powerfully employed. Andreas Schager is suitably threatening also in his thuggish assault as Gunther on Brünnhilde, still Siegfried in appearance, which perhaps adds to the menace.

As elsewhere, not just in the previous scenes but throughout the whole Tchernaikov version of Das Ring des Nibelungen, the subsequent prelude to Act II between Hagen and Alberich is a mixed affair. The director fails to find any interesting way to stage the dramatic scenes of confrontation in any interesting way, or indeed connect it in any meaningful way to his testing centre experiment idea, but the performances of Mika Kares and Johannes Martin Kränzle nonetheless set up very well what is at stake and the tragedy that is to ensue in the subsequent scenes.

That at least is fully realised - or at least goes someway to redeeming Tcherniakov's staging elsewhere and deliver on Götterdämmerung as an effective conclusion - in the remaining scenes in this production. Avoiding making any real connection to the stress laboratory experiments - which let's face it, have contributed very little so far - the drama of Brünnhilde revealing Siegfried's betrayal carry the full weight of Wagner's intent. Anja Kampe is excellent here, as is Kares's Hagen and Lauri Vasar's Gunter. Andreas Schager fits the bill perfectly as Siegfried, showing that attention to the characters and their reactions to this scene are critical to the charge of the scene.

This takes place in the "assembly room" of the testing centre, which stands in here for the Gibichung Hall, and for the first time, it struck me as similar to Lohengrin's playing out of tragedy and betrayal by those who would see themselves as leaders or upholders of laws as a wider act that affects/involves the public/the nation. Whether that was intended or not, it does enhance the effectiveness of the scene. I also actually liked the baseball team locker room as a stand-in for the "hunting" scene that leads to the death of Siegfried. The gossip and toxic attitudes expressed suited the context of the scene and the death scene was genuinely touching and dramatic. Likewise the mourning gathering appearance of the old lady Norns, Erda and the Wanderer sufficed as a moving substitute for the usual theatrical conclusion of conflagration and immolation.

Overall then, this was a good Das Ring des Nibelungen at the Staatsoper unter den Linden, particularly as far as the musical performance and the majority of the singing were concerned. As far as Tcherniakov's science laboratory experiment is concerned, the only worthwhile experiment here, whose results are indisputable, is the force of Wagner's music to carry mythology, narrative and opera in service of something so powerful it resists time and fashions, something capable of renewal and reexamination of its meaning which remains a remarkable piece of art and culture, something that indeed has created its own mythology around it. It's been "stress tested" again, this time by Dmitri Tcherniakov, and The Ring still endures.

Links: Staatsoper unter den Linden, ARTE Concert

Strauss - Capriccio (La Monnaie, 2016)

Richard Strauss - Capriccio

La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2016

Lothar Koenigs, David Marton, Sally Matthews, Dietrich Henschel, Edgaras Montvidas, Lauri Vasar, Kristinn Sigmundsson, Charlotte Hellekant, François Piolino, Elena Galitskaya, Dmirty Ivanchey, Christian Oldenburg

ARTE Concert - November 2016
 
"Primo le parole, dopo la musica" or is it vice-versa? There's obviously no definitive answer to the question of whether the words or the music are more important in opera. Even precedence is very much down to the practicalities and working methods of the creators and dependant upon the individual preferences of the listener. So on paper at least an opera about a composer and a poet, Flamand and Olivier, debating the subject with a Countess at a private concert soirée doesn't hold out much promise as a rivetting subject for an opera. And yet, Capriccio itself is a work of art that proves that opera can transcend such debates and distinctions.

There's a lot of truth then in what the boorish theatre director La Roche says; on paper both words and score are lifeless. It's a stage production that puts flesh and blood into an opera, that allows it to live and breathe, to reach out and touch the heart of an audience. Of course, even that distinction is academic if the work itself isn't of sufficient quality, insight and humanity, but Strauss's abilities and his work within opera are among the highest the artform has ever seen. Capriccio, his final work, might sound trivial and self-regarding, but it's a fitting testament that still has something important to say on the nature of people and the important role music and art plays in their lives.

Capriccio is indeed a masterpiece from a great composer but, in the spirit of the work itself, even Richard Strauss wouldn't be the opera genius he is without the collaboration of some great writers. His finest works are unquestionably those written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but Stefan Zweig and Joseph Gregor clearly also contributed the ideas and texts that would inspire Strauss to greatness in Capriccio. The writers are important, but so too presumably is the audience those works were written for and the artists who would perform them. And life itself. The genius of Capriccio is that it is there in this exquisite little work which might seem frivilous, but in reality touches on some fundamental questions about art and its relation to life.

So it is always a risk, but it would be a bit of a crime if a production of Capriccio only managed to come over as trivial and self-important. The words and the music are not enough - although they are a great place to start and Lothar Koenigs certainly brings out the luminous beauty of the orchestral colours - but Capriccio does need attention paid to its characters and their personalities, and that rests on the ability of the director and the performers to bring it to life. Fortunately that's handled very well indeed in David Marton's direction of the work for La Monnaie, and it's also very evident in the singing, with Sally Matthews in particular finding all the beauty and anguish of life in the words and music written for the Countess.

Marton's production does well to strike a balance between the intimacy of the work (that has a basis in the small chamber orchestra performance that opens the opera) and its expansiveness that takes in all the sentiments that the work touches on in passing. There's no avoiding the self-referential nature of the work (which is an opera about a group of people discussing opera and making an opera about themselves discussing opera), so it's not surprising that the set consists of a stage on the stage in a side view of a theatre. A small private theatre obviously that explores the inner workings of the human heart and human interaction as much as it does the craft that goes into writing, directing and performing a piece of music theatre.

It's not just a tussle for artistic recognition and it's not even a tussle between two men trying to seek the affections the Countess; there are other parties involved that have a role to play, however small it might seem. It's not always easy to work out who each of them are at first, or where they are coming from, but Strauss gives them all consideration and blends them into the little world of Capriccio's complications. The prompter, for example, might not seem to be all that vital a role, but without him, the whole enterprise might indeed fail. The Major-domo, the Haushofmeister, also looks on here, clearly in love with the Countess. He might be vital to the smooth running of the household, but he knows he can never be a solution to the conflicts in her heart.

This master/servant role as a metaphor for the impossibility of the mastery of the heart is a device that has been used for a similar effect between the Marschallin and her servant in some productions of Der Rosenkavalier. It's possible to see Madeline, the Countess of Capriccio, as an extension of the thoughts and sentiments that plagued Marschallin, a recap if you like to summarise such themes in this comprehensive work. Marten also uses the young dancer here, showing her in three ages from child to young woman to old lady, to touch on those considerations of the passing of time as it applies to the hard choices that the Countess has to make. Ostensibly that's about how she wants the opera to end, but also evidently it's about where she wants her life to go, knowing that the decisions she makes now will determine the rest of her life.

The successful direction of Capriccio is all about bringing out such undercurrents. What takes place on the surface of Capriccio, in all the discussions of art and opera, is just a metaphor for life. It's what goes on beneath that is just as important; the personalities and the interpretation of them. It would be a shame to miss out on the applying some personality to the richness of the sumptuous music that Strauss has composed for even the most seemingly minor of characters, but it doesn't mean that there have to be any big revelations or deep psychological underpinning. The big things are already there and Marten and the performers concentrate on the little moments and the finer detail.

There is always the danger of the Countess appearing detached, too caught up in the technicalities of the musical debate and her personal love dilemma. Sally Matthews isn't the most expressive actress but her singing is beautiful here, carrying the essential warmth of the Countess and a wider sense of her conflict as being one that applies to life in general. It helps that the other roles are also well defined and sung, with Edgaras Montvidas in particular wonderfully lyrical and charming as Flamand, and Lauri Vasar posing a credible threat as his rival Olivier. Kristinn Sigmundsson is a fine La Roche. I still find it hard to really grasp what the role of the Count brings to the opera, but Dietrich Henschel sings it well alongside Charlotte Hellekant's Clarion. All the performances really count here however in contributing to the rich fabric of the work.

Links: La Monnaie, ARTE Concert

Reimann - Lear (Hamburg, 2014 - Blu-ray)

Aribert Reimann - Lear

Staatsoper Hamburg, 2014

Simone Young, Karoline Gruber, Bo Skovhus, Katja Pieweck, Hellen Kwon, Siobhan Stagg, Erwin Leder, Lauri Vasar, Andrew Watts, Martin Homrich, Christian Miedl, Peter Gallard, Jürgen Sacher, Wilhelm Schwinghammer, Frieder Stricker

Arthaus Musik - Blu-ray

Shakespeare has been adapted to opera many times, sometimes even successfully, but rarely with fidelity to the richness of the text and the wealth of themes. To do Shakespeare justice, you need a robust musical language that can not only support and fill in the gaps that are inevitable in the transfer of a work from one artistic medium to another, but bring something new out of it. The occasions when Shakespeare is done well in opera are rare, rarer still (to the point of nonexistence) are works that can be said to improve on Shakespeare, but there are moments, Verdi coming closest in the dark thunder of Macbeth, in the dramatic concision and focus of Otello, and in the lightness of the comic touch and sensitive characterisation of Falstaff. 'King Lear' was Verdi's cherished project that he occasionally sketched and started to work on, but which eventually ended up eluding him.

Aside from Macbeth, 'King Lear' is one Shakespeare work that doesn't really need any darkening of the themes or emphasis on the madness, but this is exactly what Aribert Reimann's 1978 opera Lear does. It doesn't so much strive to faithfully represent the dramatic progression of Shakespeare's original or attempt to build on its themes and apply them to another context (although it does do both to a certain extent), as much find a musical equivalent for the drama and condense it down into abstract musical structures and intense vocal expression. The result, when filtered through Aribert Reimann's own experience and musical language, is close to terrifying. Which is really just the impression you ought to get from 'King Lear'.

The impression is one thing - and there's little doubt that Reimann's atonal noise can make a huge nerve-shattering and ear-splitting cacophony - but Lear also must engage the audience with its characters, its language and its drama. Claus H. Hennenberg's adaptation of the German translation holds close to the original (if the English language approximations are anything to go by), to the essence of it at least, but certainly in terms of fitting the language and expression to the characters. Inevitably, it's much condensed, but without losing any of the import of the original. It's not so successful if you judge the pacing of scenes and the passage of time to be critical, as they might be more on the theatre stage. What it loses in that respect however, it unquestionably gains from concision, intensity and from the musical expression.

King Lear in any case is fairly intense in the original, wasting little time in scene-setting, getting straight to the nature and heart of nearly all its characters in its opening scene where "majesty falls to folly". Reimann's Lear is exactly the same. The first thing you notice that is going to be characteristic of Reimann's treatment - aside from the difficult discordant music - is the layering in the first scene, with several characters simultaneously expressing their misgivings about the king's actions. That technique is nothing new in opera, but applying it to the density of Shakespeare's characterisation is a challenge. Reimann daringly and successfully layers those contrasting personalities and emotions and allows their musical voices to interweave and clash. The effect is extraordinary.

As thrilling and as astonishing as it is to see such expression in an opera based on a noted work of incredible power (simply one of the greatest dramas ever written), it does however inevitably become more and more difficult to sustain as the drama develops. Reimann is at his strongest in the first half - or at least he's operating at a level that is semi-endurable to an audience who are really put through a dark and deeply disturbing situation. It climaxes at the end of part one with Lear descending into madness at the treatment and rejection he has received from his daughters Goneril and Regan. 'Blow winds, blow!", he proclaims after an hour of intense drama, and in a scene that according to the composer was inspired by his own experience in Berlin at the end of the war, Reimann's music descends into its most cacophonic, the sound of a world collapsing entirely in a storm to end all storms.

Thereafter - particularly in Karoline Gruber's 2014 staging for the Hamburg State Opera - events are less related to the real-world and have more of a post-apocalyptic feel, where the world has changed unrecognisably. It can become very difficult to engage with the characters as they descend into a monstrous state, the world rocked by the decline of the house of Lear and the house of Gloucester. These two overlapping storylines feed off and inform one another, but although every effort - musical and dramatic - is employed here to create a similar dissonant interaction, it's difficult to get a sense of how they come together. Reimann's musical language, or perhaps merely the challenge of listening to it at length, becomes accordingly more difficult.

Karoline Gruber's direction attempts to address this by giving prominence to the Sprechstimme role of the Fool, using him as a means of grounding the work with a measure of real-world truth, as bizarre and contradictory as that might seem. This is however the role of the Fool in Shakespeare's 'King Lear', to say the things that others fear to express before the king, finding humorous ways to put the truth to him. As he says in the opera version "Truth is a dog to be whipped. A lapdog though may lie before the fire and stink". (A fine condensation of "Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out / When Lady the brach may stand by th' fire and stink" in the original). In the stage production here, he seems to be detached from the drama, a commentator, the action even stopping in places to allow him to speak. In the latter half, he is something of the conscience of Lear, a touchstone to draw him from madness back to a form of clarity, as terrible as the realisation of the truth now is to him.

The Fool in this way takes up a lot of the abstract expression of the themes that can't be fully expressed otherwise in the operatic dramatisation, and aligned with Reimann's music, it's a powerful device for the director to use. Gruber's production however is not short of other abstractions and ideas, finding different ways of expressing Lear's madness, from multiple doppelgängers to nightmarish visions, the old king's personal guard reduced symbolically to a pile of boots. A revolving set keeps the rapid succession of events flowing, imperceptibly changing, forming and reforming, using words to emphasise the conflict within the king and his kingdom. In line with Reimann's reworking of the title, there is however no traditional imagery of royal trappings, and no period detail in the production. It's vaguely 1940s/50s in dress and appearance, but generic. This is about larger themes than a king who foolishly abdicates too soon.

If the music wavers between unsettling and punishing, it's also a challenge for the singers to work within it and, at its most intense, rise above it. The casting here is superb for the variety of voices and for the sheer force of expression that they are capable of. Lear is not an older man in this production, and it's doubtful that an older man could have the force and stamina necessary to battle with the instrumental madness the way Bo Skovhus does. Yet he never bellows, always showing the underlying humanity in this Lear. It's no surprise that his three daughters all have formidable voices. There's volume and venom aplenty in Katja Pieweck's Goneril and an even more piercing pitch in Hellen Kwon's magnificently scary Regan. Cordelia might be initially reticent in Lear, but by the time she revisits the mad king, Siobhan Stagg shows the full strength of her underlying character. Simone Young's conducting of the Hamburg orchestra through this score is, to say the least, impressive.

The recording certainly benefits from the High Definition presentation on the Blu-ray release. The image is clear and detailed (although a few scenes take place behind a mesh curtain), and the audio tracks (PCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1) are well balanced, handling the extreme sounds of the percussion and the high voices very well. The recording can be a little echoing in both mixes, but although the 5.1 mix gives a better separation of the orchestral playing, the focus is better when listened to on headphones. There is a 20 minute Making Of that consists mainly of interviews with Simone Young and Aribert Reimann discussing the history of the work, its composition, and the approach to producing it in Hamburg. The booklet contains a tracklist, a synopsis and an informative essay on the work. Subtitles are in German and English. These can only be selected and changed while the programme is playing, not from the menu. The Blu-ray is region-free.