Larcher - Das Jagdgewehr (Bregenz, 2018)

Thomas Larcher - Das Jagdgewehr (Bregenz, 2018)

Bregenzer Festspiele, 2018

Michael Boder, Karl Markovics, Sarah Aristidou, Giulia Peri, Olivia Vermeulen, Robin Tritschler, André Schuen

C-Major - Blu-ray

Ideally the best works of opera should be the ones that achieve a perfect balance between musical expression, dramatic content and delivery of the singing performances, all coordinated by a good director. It's of course by no means obligatory, least of all in a contemporary opera where there isn't the same pressure or even expectation that a work should conform to any preconceived ideas or rules. The balance however can be compensated for however and the right impact achieved through good direction that harmonises with the intent of the piece (assuming it has a specific intent) and in that respect contemporary opera has the advantage of giving the director the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with the composer to make those intentions clear. Thomas Larcher's Das Jagdgewehr (The Hunting Gun), premiered at the 2018 Bregenz Festival, is a fine example of what contemporary opera can achieve when all those elements fall perfectly into place.

All the effort of composition, playing and direction is to little avail of course unless the opera has something meaningful to say and the subject is one that is worth setting to music, a subject that has wider relevance and depth that can reveal different aspects through interpretation and performance. And, rather like the music as well, it helps if it's not just a formal experiment. There is however at least an intriguing formal device in Larcher's opera that is based on a similar device used in the original book by Yasushi Inoue, in that Das Jagdgewehr is based around three letters. The story and the truth within the situation they describe lies within those three different perspectives. Even with four people involved, the three writers of the letter and the person they are addressed to, with a fifth person reading them, there's room for a great deal of interpretation as to where the truth lies.

There's nothing new about this Rashomon-like idea, where even one of the people relating the story in The Hunting Gun is also a dead person whose words live on in a letter, but it does present opportunities and challenges for a composer. Not only is it essential to keep those strands clear and relatable, but the music can also find connections and perhaps even some measure of truth that can be picked up on by the audience, perhaps with the assistance of skillful stage direction to tease those elements out. The structure of the work then is more than just a framing device, as it might have been in the original book, and more than just experimental, but a way of looking beyond the words to discover the true nature of the people involved and perhaps finding something there in the music and the direction.

The person notionally at the centre of the work is the hunter, Josuke Misugi. Although by no means a devotee of literature, the hunter has nonetheless been moved by a verse that he has read in which a poet living nearby seems to have seen him and described him perfectly in a way he could never express. He gives the poet three letters that he has received, asking him to read them and make of them what he will. One of the letters is from his lover Saiko, now dead, the second an accusatory letter from her niece Shoko, and the third from Josuke's wife Midori, who is appears has been aware of her betrayal but has remained silent about it.

On its own terms this story of an illicit affair that has ended badly seems fairly commonplace, and even with the prospect of having to read between the lines of the words of the people involved to determine who is responsible for the tragedy, it doesn't hold out much promise of any great insights or revelations. The difference however is of course that Das Jagdgewehr is an opera and offers considerable extra scope for expression and interpretation on the part of the composer, the director, the singers and for the audience to bring their own impressions and interpretation to it.

Some of the issues and questions that the work considers are expressed in the words and the situation. Who can tell what motivates people to act as they do, particularly in a love affair? In her letter - noting from the outset that she will be dead by the time this letter is read - the mistress Saiko considers egoism, jealousy, destiny and karma all playing a part in what is to follow, some parts perhaps more than others. Midori, the wife, finds the human need to love and to be loved makes humans pathetic, keeping secrets from one another like an impregnable fortress. Despite the apparent simplicity of the situation there are numerous questioning conflicting emotions involved, but Larcher's music holds attention throughout, inviting the audience to actually feel these emotions and engage with the characters and the drama.

Conducted by Michael Boder, Larcher's music comes across as intricate and detailed, lyrical and expressive, measuring out the nuances of meaning and expression contained within the words and the drama, probing the various layers with extraordinary precision. Considering the nature of the subject and the imagery of a hunting gun in the background, there is always with a hint of menace not far beneath the surface of the tensions, but the emotions and situations are more complex than that, with no need to follow Chekhov's dictum to its conclusion. The imagery is poetic and it's presented as such, almost dream-like in the stage direction, exploring another level that lies somewhere in the questioning and overlapping content of the letters, the director Karl Markovics finding the simplest way to open up and give each of these elements room for expression and interpretation.

There's even the additional element of a vocal ensemble - beautiful harmonies from the Schola Heidelberg - that brings emphasis to certain scenes, boosting expression and almost a kind of harmonisation between the divergent conflicting personal viewpoints. All the roles are scored and sung to perfection, Robin Tritschler's Poet a clear and lyrical voice that tries to bring order and rationality to the story, while Sarah Aristidou on the other hand is pure emotion as the niece Shijo, exploring the wild range and stratospheric highs of those emotions incredibly well. Josuke remains an enigma at the centre, hoping that the Poet can explore the depths of his soul, even without knowing him. But there are no answers; just letters, words and human behaviour which refuses to be pinned down, each carrying their own truth like a snake within.

It doesn't surprise me that this opera successfully transferred to Aldeburgh, very much within the idiom of Britten's intense chamber operas, the narrative and emotional complexity and the ominous undercurrents of Death in Venice and The Rape of Lucretia very much coming to mind. If it comes across as a powerful experience, it's undoubtedly assisted by the quality of this recording made at the 2018 Bregenz Festival and the remarkable detail that can be heard in the High Resolution audio tracks. This is a work that pushes the dynamic range in the music and in the voices crystal clear yet fully rounded and resonant. I got the most impact from the LPCM stereo mix on headphones, but you could lose yourself in the equally detailed DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround mix. This is an impressive new opera in a first-class presentation.

Links: Bregenzer Festspiele

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

Haas - Morgen und Abend (Royal Opera House, 2015 - London)

Georg Friedrich Haas - Morgen und Abend

Royal Opera House, 2015

Michael Boder, Graham Vick, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Christoph Pohl, Sarah Wegener, Will Hartmann, Helena Rasker

Royal Opera House - 28 November 2015 

There must have been some kind of communication breakdown between the stage and the audience on the first night of Georg Friedrich Haas's new opera Morgen und Abend when it opened at the Royal Opera House on 13th November. When I caught the work at the last of its five world premiere performances at Covent Garden, I saw little that corresponded with some of the indifferent to outright dismissive reviews of the work in the press. On the contrary, this was a spellbinding piece that held the audience rapt over its 90 minute running time, was warmly received and even enthusiastically applauded at the curtain call.

Undoubtedly however, the subject and the musical approach of the work are very different from what one is accustomed to hearing on the main stage at Covent Garden. The meaning or progress of the work would be difficult to grasp simply because it is about something that isn't capable of being easily defined and for which there are is no familiar musical accompaniment. By which I mean that the subject is Death, and it's not accompanied here by either by the dramatic build-up and crescendos that usually accompany an on-stage expiration, nor by mournful laments that follow. Rather in his adaptation of Jon Fosse's drama 'Morgon og Kveld', G. F. Haas's Morgen und Abend (Morning and Evening) explores the moment of transition between those two more familiar states - the moment of death itself.

That, admittedly, leaves the listener not quite sure where they are or how they should be responding to the lack of dramatic narrative. In the long prologue, an old fisherman called Olai (Klaus Maria Brandauer) sits in a grey sterile landscape, unsure himself where he is or what he is supposed to be doing. In Graham Vick's production design, there's a door, but it stands alone, there are chairs and a bed, but also an abandoned fishing boat. Everything slowly revolves, time operating in a circular fashion, where the ending is also the beginning. Gradually, the old man comes to realise that he is dead, but paradoxically, he is reliving the moment when his son Johannes was born. Johannes is no sooner born than Olai makes his exit through the door, and Johannes is no sooner born than he too makes his way onto the grey stage of his death.

What has happened in between is ...well, life - and Morgen und Abend isn't particularly concerned with that. A few articles have suggested that the lack of familiarity in the English speaking world with Jon Fosse's work, in contrast to his high literary standing in Europe, could have further alienated the UK audience, but the question of passing over is common in literature, and even in mainstream cinema (in 'Ghost' or 'The Sixth Sense'). While deaths frequently occur in many operas, it's true however that exploration of death itself is not at all common. The dead may have a voice in opera, going right back 400 years to the earliest works by Peri and Monteverdi's on the Orpheus myth 400 years ago, but even though the state of death is considered in Orpheus' journey to the underworld, and it is particularly the main focus in Gluck's version of the myth - opera's treatment of death (even in the martyrdom of Donizetti's Poliuto or Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites) is almost always qualified by desire to live.

Life is not entirely absent from Fosse and Haas's Morgen und Abend, but it's a shadow world that is far beyond reach. That fishing boat has already sailed. Johannes, still unable to comprehend where he is and what has happened, is confused by the appearance of his dead wife and his living daughter, but also by the need he feels to visit his old friend Peter, help him cut his hair and go out fishing with him once again. As the appearance of Olai on the stage just before Johannes appears, this (Death) is a place where time no longer follows familiar rules. Everyone exists here simultaneously, but they are also alone. It's not a place either for contemplation of one's life or weighing up the balance of one's achievements - it just is.

If there is any justification for there being a communication breakdown between the opera and the audience then, it's hardly due to the content of the libretto, as "difficult" and uncommon as the subject it deals with might be. The synopsis is summarised in a single line in the Royal Opera House programme - "Morgen und Abend (Morning and Evening) is the struggle of Johannes into and out of life". There's not much you have to 'get' here. A more valid concern appears to be the inability on the first night to hear Klaus Maria Brandauer's Olai's spoken monologue over the orchestra and percussion. This criticism seems to have been taken on board at Covent Garden, and when performed at the final performance on the 28th November, Brandauer had evidently been hitched up to a radio microphone and could be clearly heard in the mix.

I would also find it difficult to accept that anyone would find the music of Georg Friedrich Haas difficult to grasp either. It's true that the Austrian composer has a much higher profile elsewhere in Europe, and his work is not as well known in the UK. It's also true that Haas works experimentally in improvisation and microtonalites, as well as with works that have directions to be performed in pitch darkness, but his music is not inaccessible or only of interest to music scientists. Nor is it cold and theoretical, but as Morgen und Abend and the composer's other works in the lyric medium testify, Haas is very much interested in transitional human states, as uncommon and indefinable as some of those might appear to be.

In Morgen und Abend, the music is beautiful, haunting and fully connected to the interim nature of the state of non-existence, of being neither here nor there. Notes hypnotically slip and slide, the pitch is bent, stretched and altered, wavering between one state and another with percussive jolts thundering and echoing moments of confusion, recognition and realisation. There's a hypnotic flow here that finds a musical equivalent for Jon Fosse's unpunctuated flow of words, but Haas also writes beautifully for the voice, with variety of expression (in spoken dialogue and singing) and in the blending together of voices and the music, sections of which are underpinned with the ahhhh-ah hum of a rather more musically conventional heavenly chorus. A strong cast provided all the necessary colour.

Morgen und Abend is a modern opera in the truest sense. It's musically progressive and experimental, seeking to find the truest musical expression for its subject in an inventive way, not falling back on familiar operatic models or musical conventions but not destroying them either. There are no grand ambitions here to satisfy public or critical tastes by making grand musical or dramatic gestures, but rather Georg Friedrich Haas follows the artistic imperative of exploring the subject through his own musical language, and Morgen und Abend quietly impresses.

BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a recording of Morgen und Abend at the Royal Opera House on Saturday 5th December.  It will be available for listening on the BBC iPlayer for four weeks after this date.

Links: Royal Opera House, BBC Radio 3

Ligeti - Le Grand Macabre

György Ligeti - Le Grand Macabre

Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, 2011

Michael Boder, Àlex Ollé, La Fura dels Baus, Valentina Carrasco, Werner van Mechelen, Chris Merritt, Frode Olsen, Ning Liang, Barbara Hannigan, Brian Asawa, Inès Moraleda, Ana Puche, Francisco Vas, Simon Butteriss

Arthaus Musik

Although it may be one of the most popular works of contemporary opera, you aren’t going to see too many productions of György Ligeti’s only opera, Le Grand Macabre due to its demanding nature and its limited appeal to a rather specialised opera audience. So when the Liceu in Barcelona (with La Monnaie in Brussels and the ENO in London) decide to put on a rare production of the work and go as far as to make a world premiere video recording of it, you can be thankful that the challenge of finding an appropriate look for the all-important visual representation of this work has been given to La Fura dels Baus, the experimental Catalan production team perhaps most in tune with such an unusual work and capable of relating to its status as an “anti-anti-opera”, which is not quite the same thing, as you might imagine, as just an opera.

Le Grand Macabre most certainly isn’t “just” an opera, but it is one that fully exploits the full range of dramatic, musical and singing opportunities for expression that the medium is capable of. Often dissonant and cacophonic, it’s not however unmusical and indeed is made up of quite expressive musical passages and “quotations” that draw from a wide range of classical influences that demand a certain musical virtuosity, creating a complex soundscape of musical language and sonic textures. The singing in particular is extremely demanding, full of flourishes and vocal gymnastics in near-impossible tessitura. The difference between Le Grand Macabre and this kind of musical expression in other Ligeti compositions lies however in the visual and dramatic nature of opera, which is equally if not even more important for this particular work, and in that respect this extraordinary production, spectacularly imagined and directed by Àlex Ollé of La Fura dels Baus with Valentina Carrasco, enables the viewer to experience the work in its fullest expression.

Based on the play ‘La balade du Grand Macabre‘ by Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode, quite what the opera is an expression of however can be rather difficult to determine from the playful wordplay, gross vulgarity and nonsense dialogue that makes up most of its libretto. Like the musical accompaniment however, the tone of the words and the highly expressive delivery of them all serve to add to the sonic picture of its depiction of the imaginary Breughelland, with all the grotesque characterisation and the end-of-times connotations for our own reality that the name suggests. In the midst of all the absurd, lascivious, perverse and violent activity of the characters on the stage however, the main narrative thread is clear enough when Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre, arrives in Breughelland and announces to Piet the Pot that the end of the world is nigh. The moral, when this prediction is proved to be false, is made clear at the end and delivered in traditional operatic fashion - face fear and it will pass, enjoy life without worrying about death or putting your faith in those who would claim to know better acting as guides and leaders.

“All men on earth must perish” - even Piet the Pot knows that, “…but no-one knows the hour“, Nekrotzar, tells him. Àlex Ollé appropriately seems to choose to set the production of the Liceu’s Le Grand Macabre indeed during the few seconds preceding the imminent death of an overweight woman - seen in a short video introduction - who has enjoyed the excesses of a Big Mac-abre junk-food feast and is lunging for that last pizza slice when she suffers a heart attack. A huge model of this woman in her death throes dominates the stage, her face contorted in agony, those final moments and the excess that has clearly been part of her life, drawn out and encapsulated within the surreal and nightmarish situation depicted by Ligeti through the operatic medium. The huge splayed naked body revolves 360-degrees between the four scenes of the two acts and is clambered over and dissected in a disturbing fashion, with a wiggling tongue, detachable nipples and other moveable parts and orifices that the characters delve into and appear from. Costumes too are cleverly designed to suggest body parts, organs and musculature. Technically, with the impressive use of projections, it’s a theatrical tour-de-force by La Fura dels Baus, but more than just spectacle, it’s a brilliant interpretation that adds further levels of resonance and involvement to a work already quite rich in symbolism and suggestion.

I don’t think this work could be performed in any other way than with complete abandonment of any sense of propriety or dignity - and perhaps even comprehension - but it does demand extraordinary discipline on the part of the singers and commitment to the unusual methods of expression that Ligeti resorts to. The English diction isn’t always perfect here with some of the Spanish members of the cast, but it’s hardly the most important consideration. That’s not a problem for Barbara Hannigan, but her challenges lie elsewhere in the vocal exertions that are demanded from her in the roles of Venus and Gepopo, the Chief of Secret Police. She not only handles these with astonishing facility, but also with verve and character, as difficult as the roles must be to play. Similar commitment and flights up and down the vocal range are called for from Chris Merritt as Piet the Pot and Frode Olsen as the Astronomer Astradamors, but really, there isn’t anyone in this cast who doesn’t impress on a number of levels in how they rise to the challenges presented by this work.

Le Grand Macabre is still a rather demanding work that can be loud, vulgar and disorienting in its absurdity and nonsense, not seeming to have anything particularly enlightening to reveal for all the effort that is required to view and listen to it, but this is all undoubtedly an essential part of what the work is about. As an anti-anti-opera, it does seem to work both within the framework and as a reaction to the original anti-opera inclinations of Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht, exploring similar field of the baseness of human impulses that can be found in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny (also impressively produced by La Fura dels Baus recently at the Liceu and also available on DVD and BD), not in any elevated or theatrical manner, but in a way that revels in and supports the basic (or base) intents that lie at its heart. This production and its performance at the Liceu in Barcelona can hardly be faulted for the imaginativeness of its vision, the boldness of its interpretation and the technical brilliance of its presentation.

Undoubtedly a production that it would be better to experience live in the opera house, Le Grand Macabre nonetheless comes across very well on the small screen. It’s very well filmed to focus on the details of the performance, while keeping you in mind of the larger picture that, in any case, would be hard to ignore. The quality of the High Definition Blu-ray transfer is excellent, the 2-hour work fitting comfortably onto a single-layer BD25 disc, the image quality near-flawless, handling the darkness of the stage lighting well. The audio tracks are a vital aspect of the whole experience and they come across well in both the PCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 mixes. The BD also includes a good in-depth conference-style Making Of feature that has all the key players in the stage production discussing the development of the ideas, influences and technical considerations behind the concept, and an interview with Michael Boder on the musical side of things. The BD is all-region, full-HD, with subtitles in Italian, German, French, Spanish, Korean and Catalan.

Tchaikovsky - The Queen of Spades

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades)

Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona 2010

Michael Boder, Gilbert Deflo, Misha Didyk, Lado Ataneli, Ludovic Tézier, Ewa Podleś, Emily Magee, Francisco Vas, Alberto Feria, Mikhail Vekua, Kurt Gysen

Opus Arte

Adapted from a short story by Pushkin, The Queen of Spades is something of a ghost story, but its roots lie firmly within the Russian tradition, and those aspects are emphasised brilliantly, with a few additional extensions to meet the demands of Grand Opera in Tchaikovsky’s version, first performed in 1890. The booklet notes in the Blu-ray release of this 2010 production from the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona also note the influence of Dostoevsky’s writing, and while that deeper psychology isn’t fully brought out in the performance of Misha Didyk, who plays Hermann with no greater subtlety than near foaming at the mouth, eye-rolling madness, the work itself certainly taps into a certain fatalistic Russian quality seen also in Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler (made into a fine opera by Prokofiev that complements Pique Dame well). It’s not so much that this relates to the rush of gambling or the acquisition of money, but on the extravagant romantic notion of its main characters only being able to live life to the fullest by throwing oneself into the hands of fate and risking everything – a circumstance that would, of course, lead to the early death of the author of The Queen of Spades himself in a duel.

That single-minded determination to win at any cost drives Hermann, who is unlucky in gambling and in love, discovering that the mysterious woman he has been observing and preparing to approach – even though she is clearly above his station – has just become engaged to Prince Yeletsky. Hermann however has heard the stories about Lisa’s aged mother, the Countess, once known as the Venus of Moscow, and now known as the Queen of Spades. Legend has it that she has learned the secret desired by gambler of three winning cards. She has shared this secret with two others and cannot reveal it to a third – but Hermann becomes obsessed with the myth and is determined to discover the mystery of the three cards. The interest of this intense young officer in her hasn’t gone unnoticed by Lisa however, so even though surprised by his appearance on her balcony one night, she resolves to help him – with inevitably tragic consequences for all involved.

Tchaikovsky’s music is designed to impress, the period of Catherine the Great (1762-96) and the romantic Russian nature of the piece matched by a tone of splendour, stateliness and order as well as the hint of underlying madness that struggles beneath the surface of the lives of these characters. The full range of the situation and the emotions of the characters is expressed in beautiful duets, in the chorus of the St Petersburg society, and in the tormented arias of Hermann and his obsessive refrain about the mystery of the three cards – but, playing to the conventions of Grand Opera, there is room for Tchaikovsky to introduce additional colour and take those sentiments into the medium of a Mozartian pastorale in Act II. There’s a certain coldness and calculation involved in the composition, as I often find with Tchaikovsky, but it’s well suited to the character of the work here.

The staging for the Liceu by Gilbert Deflo, at least superficially matches the splendour and opulence of the work, the classicism of the storyline and the tone of Tchaikovsky’s work, but it doesn’t really manage to delve into the deeper themes raised in the opera. Where it does try to make the effort, it’s rather unimaginative and awkward, using black screens to block off parts of the backgrounds or the whole of it, isolating Hermann in his madness from the rest of society (while also serving to allow quick changes to be made to the set behind the screens). There’s a similar lack of imagination in the characterisation of Hermann on the part of Misha Didyk, who wanders in a daze across the set with limited acting ability, a wide-eyed madman consumed with his own inner torment and obsessions. Didyk’s steely tenor doesn’t allow for any subtler range of expression in his singing either, hard and constricted, spitting out the harsh Russian consonants with admirable force and expressiveness, but it’s limited in terms of musicality and nuance.

If one isn’t looking for anything deeper out of the operas themes, this serves reasonably well however, and it’s a strong enough performance on that level alone. It certainly lends an edge to his encounter with Countess (sung with an equally dramatic edge by Ewa Podleś) that leads to her death as well as in his re-encounter with her ghost on the bridge (which is hauntingly staged using simple smoke and lighting effects), and it’s also effective in the magnificent duet scene with Lisa – a strong performance also from Emily Magee – that in turn leads to her doom (which could have been better staged). There’s a lot to like about the singing, the performances (the orchestra, conducted by Michael Boder deliver a fine account of the score), and a fairly traditional staging that at least has a coherence and consistency with the production, but a little more subtlety in the singing and imagination in the staging along the lines of Dmitri Tcherniakov’s direction of Prokofiev’s The Gambler, could have brought much more out of this particular opera.

The Blu-ray from Opus Arte looks and sounds fine, with a clear, sharp and colourful transfer, and good sound mixes in PCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1. There are no extra features on the disc other than a Cast Gallery, but a brief introduction to the work and a synopsis is provided in the enclosed booklet.

Reimann - Medea

Aribert Reimann - Medea

Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna, 2010

Michael Boder, Marco Arturo Marelli, Marlis Petersen, Michaela Selinger, Elisabeth Kulman, Michael Roider, Adrian Eröd, Max Emanuel Cencic

Arthaus, Blu-ray

With very little to compare it to, the best way I can think of to describe Aribert Reimann’s Medea is that it can be very difficult to listen to. But, with it being a modern opera, you probably could have guessed as much anyway. As a world premiere, recorded in 2010 at the Vienna Staatsoper, it’s not even as if you can measure or contrast the performance against other recordings. What you can be sure of however, since the composer is still alive and taking an active part in its production – even down to writing the libretto himself, choosing the cast and writing specifically for their voices (as opera would have been traditionally done in the past) – is that this version of Medea is, for better or worse, as close as it is possible to be to Reimann’s intentions.

Whether it’s difficult or not is not what matters then, whether it’s not the most harmonious or beautiful sounds you’ve ever heard in an opera, nor whether it’s completely faithful to the composer’s intentions (though it is undoubtedly is all of the above), as much as whether it works as an opera on its own terms, that its story or message connects with the listener on some level and that its presentation is suited to the content. Medea is a familiar figure in the opera world – Cherubini’s version of the Greek tragedy and Maria Callas’ interpretation of it are almost legendary – a formidable female role on a par with Salome and Electra, and perhaps in that respect the name of Strauss can be invoked in the intensity and psychological acuity with which Reimann scores his version of the Medea legend.

The source is classical, of course, but Reimann draws from other sources than Euripides, bringing in the legend of the Golden Fleece and the Argonauts from Franz Grillparzer’s version of the stories. Reimann is known for his literary adaptations (particularly for his version of Lear), but as to what purpose or intent a modern opera looks back at classical subjects is difficult to say. Surprisingly, the composer seems to view Medea’s dilemma as being one of class anxiety and social climbing, both on her part from her background of Colchis - she is seen by herself and others as a barbarian - and on the part of Jason who, after suspicion has fallen on them for the death of Pelias, has fled Jolkos and sought sanctuary from King Creon, abandoning Medea in the process for the sophisticated life of Corinth and the hand of his rather more beautiful daughter Creusa.

Relating this conflict between old world and the new, between past and present – the set contrasting the bleak lunar landscape inhabited by Medea with the almost space-age nature of Corinth – the orchestration is accordingly made up of slow, discordant notes that are stretched and bent, a strangled string section, with woodwind trills, flatulent brass and deep percussive, almost industrial sounds. But it’s the voices that are the most expressive of the dilemma of the characters – high, emotional, intentionally strained, notes of anger, betrayal and despair that come close to a scream, yet – particularly in the case of Marlis Petersen as Medea – always remaining tuneful and musical. Medea consequently is not for those seeking beautiful melodies or harmonies, but rather a deeper expression of darker natures, uncomfortable alliances and fractured relationships in an intense retelling of the ancient Greek myth. On that level, Reimann’s Medea expresses everything the story ought to and as forcefully as it ought to be.

On Blu-ray, the opera looks and sounds magnificent (or indeed terrifying and deeply unsettling). The High Definition image is superbly clear, with strong contrasts and deep, well-defined colours. Both the PCM Stereo and the DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 tracks carry the full force of the music, the surround mix in particular deep and reverberating on the lower frequencies. Other than some notes on the composition and its performance in an accompanying booklet, there are no extra features on the Arthaus disc.