Strauss - Salome (Hamburg, 2023)

Richard Strauss - Salome

Staatsoper Hamburg, 2023

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

ARTE Concert - 29th October 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

External links: Staatsoper Hamburg, ARTE Concert

Hosokawa - Stilles Meer (Hamburg, 2016)

Toshio Hosokawa - Stilles Meer

Staatsoper Hamburg, 2016

Kent Nagano, Oriza Hirata, Susanne Elmark, Mihoko Fujimura, Bejun Mehta, Viktor Rud, Marek Gasztecki

EuroArts - DVD

The impact of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami on Fukushima in Japan is unquantifiable in human terms and surely a challenge for any artistic endeavour, literature, film, or even documentary to fully depict. The nature of the event, the devastation it caused and the lives it took are difficult enough to deal with, but the longer term disaster set in motion by the damage caused to the nuclear reactor in Fukushima and the implications this has for future generations is a lot more to take on. That however is exactly what Toshio Hosokawa attempts to do in his opera Stilles Meer - Silent Sea, written for the Hamburg Opera in 2016.

Even before the opera starts, we get some indication of how the composer is going to approach such a task, introducing other sounds, influences and techniques in order to extend the range of what opera can achieve. Somewhat unconventionally, the first sounds that break the silence at the start of the opera are the sounds of the sea and the voice of a robot warning that the site at Fukushima is currently a safe zone free from radiation. Nature and technology sit uneasily side by side and the danger that they pose is underlined by the first heavy percussive sounds of an earthquake and aftershocks.

The stage set for the Hamburg world premiere of Stilles Meer also sets out to create a similar uncomfortable fusion of the natural and the synthetic. A platform leads down to a patch of blue sea that is covered with a circular glass framework that suggests the shape of a nuclear reactor. Rods hang down from the sky instead of clouds. The fishermen of Fukushima, celebrating the lantern festival of O-Higan, carry globes that look like they are glowing with radiation. The impression, matching the mood created by Hosokawa's music, is that everything has changed, all that is natural has been altered and distorted.

The human story that takes place in this environment is also one where the composer and librettist attempt a fusion of ideas and cultures in order to get across the deeper impact of the disaster on people's lives. Claudia's 12 year old son Max died when the tsunami struck the coast of Japan, lost when out on a fishing trip. His body and that of Claudia's partner Takashi have never been found among the debris that continues to be washed ashore. Stefan, Claudia's former partner and father of Max, has come to see her, but is shocked to find that Claudia still hasn't accepted what has happened.

Takashi's sister Haruko has a plan to help Claudia begin the grieving process. Claudia is a dancer who makes a living teaching the local children and Haruko believes that Claudia might be able to find a way to relate to what has happened through her love of the Nôh drama 'Sumidagawa'. It's the same Nôh drama that Benjamin Britten based Curlew River on, the story of a mother who has lost her son and is unable to accept his death. but here it retains its Buddhist origins. It is only through the chanting of a Buddhist prayer that the mother in 'Sumidagawa' is able to take her grief into another dimension and Haruko hopes that Claudia might be able to relate to her own grief on this same level.

Essentially, Stilles Meer is itself an attempt to collectively take the suffering of Fukushima to another dimension where it can be processed, and evidently that is through the transformative process of art in music and opera. That's a tall order and it's difficult to judge the merit of a work on those terms, but it's clear that the composer believes very strongly in the spiritual side of music and his opera is a sincere attempt to process a significant event of indescribable horror. The approach adopted by Hosokawa, director Oriza Higata and conductor Kent Nagano certainly makes every effort to create a suitable reflective environment for that to occur.

Hosokawa makes good use of silence and stillness to achieve that, using the rhythms of nature and obviously that relies primarily on the motions of the sea. The music rises and falls and maintains a low background presence even in the quieter moments. This allows room for reflection, which is also the role to a large extent of the other members of the Fukushima fishing community heard in the opera. There is indeed something of a tone of an oratorio or a requiem about the opera in these passages, a respect even for the power of the sea and a wariness of technology that would be instilled in the people who live there.

The rather more unpredictable side of the sea and the devastation that it can cause is there in the voices of the principal singers. Susanne Elmark gives a great performance, channeling the forces at work within her character that occasionally spill over into uncontrollable emotional outbursts. Mihoko Fujimura is like an unshakable vessel, battered and beaten by the tides but still afloat. There's deep emotion there too, her song to the "shoes on the beach" deeply affecting. Bejun Mehta sings "Claudia!" a lot, with an occasional exclamation of "Max!", but in many ways this is another refrain of appeal like the later Buddhist prayer, and Mehta's countertenor is still sweetly voiced.

Whether Stilles Meer achieves what it sets out to is difficult to say, but it's an important work that addresses a significant terrible real-world event and tries to make some kind of sense out it it. There might not be a sense of resolution or complete closure at the end of Stilles Meer, but unlike Philippo Perocco's similarly themed Aquagranda, which only seemed capable of providing resolution to the 1966 flooding of Venice in an historical context, there is an indication in Hosokawa's work that there's a deeper learning and healing process to follow and that the process necessarily must be an on-going one.

Links: Staatsoper Hamburg

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.

Puccini - Madama Butterfly (Hamburg 2012 - Blu-ray)

Giacomo Puccini - Madama Butterfly

Staatsoper Hamburg, 2012

Alexander Joel, Vincent Boussard, Alexia Voulgaridou, Christina Damian, Ida Aldrian, Teodor Ilincal, Lauri Vascar, Jürgen Scaher, Viktor Rud, Jongmin Park, Thomas Florio

Arthaus Musik - Blu-ray

One thing I've noticed about the  few opera productions I've seen by Vincent Boussard (La Finta Giardiniera, La Favorite), other than the fact that he likes reflective stages, is that he manages to do a lot with very little, with minimalist stagings that are eye-catching and give the impression of being more elaborate. There are some places where this approach works better than others, and it's usually when the music and the libretto of the operas in question are strong enough to stand on their own. Madama Butterfly is certainly a work that fits into that category, but it nevertheless usually comes with a lot of additional stage baggage and stereotypical imagery that borders on kitsch.  Can Madama Butterfly survive without cherry blossoms, silk kimonos and bamboo houses with paper screens?

Boussard finds a way to retain the essence of this imagery, but presents it in a relatively minimalist fashion in this Hamburg production of Madama Butterfly, and he does so without losing anything of the exotic spectacle. That much is essential in as far as it presents the idealised beauty and perfection of an arranged marriage that underneath isn't quite as ideal as it appears on the surface. That is something that Boussard takes as the basis for the overall concept here and by and large it works without distorting the intent of the work, but there are also one or two interpretative twists here that everyone might not agree work as well or even consider necessary.

The costumes, by Christian Lacroix, look stylised traditional, with obis and big hats, although reflecting Cio-Cio-San's adoption of American ways she wears jeans and a sweatshirt for Act II. In terms of the set design itself however, this Madama Butterfly looks every bit as minimalistically oriental and yet subtly elegant as it ought to do. Largely, the set for the entire three acts is based around a spiral staircase at the centre of the stage, with only large panels behind. These however slide back to open up to the seasons and the passage of the day outside, as well as being used for off-stage locations for Madama Butterfly and Suzuki to retire to at significant points. It's very much an 'interior' design then and functional for the purposes of the work, but a subtle play of light and colour suggests other moods and situations.

If it's all about establishing the essential mood for each scene, you could say that Boussard's production is a little over-elaborate in its use of colour. More than just reflecting the time of day or the seasons, the lighting here changes from moment to moment with purple and yellow washes adjusted by bold reds and greens, saturating the stage like a scene from a Wong Kar-wai movie. Whether Puccini's rich scoring and balance of moods needs that kind emphasis is debatable and a matter of taste, but there's no doubt that the set and lighting follows and relates closely to those rapid switches between one extreme emotion and another.

It's this idea of extremes, of being bathed in an image of perfection and an ideal, that lies at the heart of Madama Butterfly. The exotic of the Oriental appeals to US Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. His marriage to a young 15 year-old Japanese girl something of a dream in which he succumbs to the illusion of a perfect marriage to a submissive and attentive wife for a brief period before having to deal with the reality back home. For Cio-Cio-San, the fantasy is more deep-rooted and necessary to escape from an otherwise terrible fate as a geisha, a prostitute or bound to a loveless marriage in the Japanese style.

This is why Cio-Cio-San buys into her husband's American lifestyle with the Western ideal of it being a marriage based on love. She can't afford to consider the event, even after three years absence, the Pinkerton will not return. Her illusions are all crystallised in her centrepiece aria 'Un bel di vedremo', where every detail and every gesture of their joyful reunion is perfectly rehearsed in her mind. Those hopes are confounded if not entirely shattered in the very next scene with the Consul bringing a letter with news from Pinkerton, since Cio-Cio-San is unwilling to admit the intent of the words and Sharpless can't quite bring himself to deliver them.

This creates a kind of dramatic tension between two different kinds of reality that Puccini, with his basis in verismo, vividly depicts. The romantic illusions that sustain both Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton are just as "real" to them as reality, and they consequently pack a full emotional punch as they are elaborated and just as quickly punctured in the next scene. More than just holding a suspension between illusions and reality however, Madama Butterfly likewise swings between the difference between male and female sensibilities, as well as between the clash of cultures and it sustains a similar weighted tension between them all.

Boussard's production, mood and lighting, follows these developments very closely but it leads the director to make a few decisions that don't perhaps hold up as well. One can understand how Cio-Cio-San can make a little shrine to her delusions - a letter, a whisky glass and a bottle of liquor - but whether those should be seen as extending to their child is another matter. It's clear from the libretto that the child is real, but Boussard muddies the issue by not having a real child on the stage, but making use of a large doll instead. He also takes the final death scene off-stage, which is a brave decision, but there's no denying that it does rob the conclusion of some of its intended emotional impact.

If the intention is to let the strength of the music and the singing speak for itself, at least the Hamburg production has some fine singers who are capable of giving the work a full and nuanced expression. It's absolutely essential that you believe in these characters that are so well written by Puccini (in spite of some stereotypes), and if sung well they work. They work here. Freed from the usual mannerisms, Alexia Voulgaridou is able to emotionally delve into the work anew and sings wonderfully and with tremendous force. It's a riveting performance. Teodor Ilincal is a lyrical tenor in the classic traditional mould, his B.F. Pinkerton naive and romantic rather than exploitative and insensitive. Christina Damian's Suzuki is also very fine and adds considerably to the overall quality of this production. As too does the excellent account of the work by the Hamburg Philharmonic conducted by Alexander Joel.

On Blu-ray, the video transfer is very good. It looks a little softer than most, mainly on account of the colour saturation, but the colour reproduction and the beauty of the set is impressive. There's only one audio track on this release, a PCM stereo track, but it's strong and gives a good account of the singing and the orchestration. Other than trailers, there are no extra features on the BD, but the booklet comes with an interview with Vincent Boussard that discusses his approach to the work. Region-free, subtitles on the release are in Italian, English, German, French, Spanish and Korean.

Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Francis Poulenc - Dialogues des Carmélites

Staatsoper Hamburg, 2008

Nikolaus Lehnhoff, Andreas Morell, Simone Young, Anne Schwanewilms, Alexia Voulgaridou, Nikolai Schukoff, Wolfgang Schöne

Arthaus Musik

Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera, for which he both composed the music and wrote the libretto (from a play by Georges Bernanos), has many distinct and individualistic qualities that set it apart, not least of which is the unique subject matter of the execution of Carmelite nuns by French Revolutionaries in 1794. The treatment however is just as fascinating, the subject of death ominously present not only through the novice nun Blanche’s pathological fear of death, through the suffering of ailing Mother Superior and the eventual martyrdom of the nuns, but also in the delicacy of the musical accompaniments that evoke an almost romantic relationship or fascination with the idea of death.

One other notable and unusual aspect of Dialogues des Carmélites is the dominance and importance of female voices, in recitative dialogue and in relation to one another. The opera really is a celebration of the female voice, ranging from soprano to mezzo-soprano and contralto, all used marvellously and, it has to be said, sung magnificently in this production. There are male roles in the opera and they are not insignificant, lending a welcome variety of colour and tone to the overpowering predominance of female singing that could otherwise become a little tiring at such length.

The staging of this Hamburg production is a masterpiece of the minimalist style, well suited to the dark subject matter and achieving incredible intensity and drama mainly from its use of light and shade and some subtle colouration. It’s perhaps a little too intense and austere when the opera is more lyrically varied in its score and libretto, but it’s true that the sense of death is omnipresent, the questions of faith and life discussed by the nuns all coloured by consideration of death. When combined with the remarkable singing, the power of the denouement is simply shattering. A truly unique opera experience.

The Blu-ray quality is superb, certainly in terms of the audio - an exceptional DTS HD Master Audio 7.1 mix - although, as noted elsewhere, there are issues with the image. Rather than being a flaw with the recording or the transfer, the mosquito noise dots actually seem to be part of the staging, caused by a fine gauze screen at the front of the stage. This is often used in stage productions for light diffusion, but rarely throughout a whole opera. Although it seems a strange decision to film the opera with a screen in-between, it’s presumably part of the production design to soften the otherwise harsh direct lighting. The dots are not always noticeable - only when performers are filmed in close-up and when they are towards the front of the stage. There’s little here however that spoils the enjoyment of this beautifully staged and fascinating opera.