Heggie - Dead Man Walking (New York, 2023)

Jake Heggie - Dead Man Walking

The Metropolitan Opera, 2023

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Joyce DiDonato, Ryan McKinny, Susan Graham, Latonia Moore, Rod Gilfry, Krysty Swann, Wendy Bryn Harmer, Chauncey Packer, Helena Brown, Briana Hunter, Magdalena Kuźma, Matteo Omoso Castro, Alexa Jarvis, Justin Austin, Chad Shelton, Raymond Aceto, Regan Sims, Mark Joseph Mitrano, Jonah Mussolino, Christopher Job, John Hancock, Patrick Miller, Jonathan Scott, Earle Patriarco, Ross Benoliel, Tyler Simpson

The Met: Live in HD - 21st October 2023

It's the start of a new Met Live in HD Season, and no longer enjoying the star power of Anna Netrebko since their falling out over the war in Ukraine as a draw for the opening broadcast, the Metropolitan Opera in New York have instead chosen to go down an unexpected route of promoting contemporary American composers, as they did with Terence Blanchard's incendiary Fire Shut Up In My Bones in 2021. It's a risky strategy, but as Peter Gelb acknowledged in the introduction before the cinema relay, perhaps a necessary one for the Met to change and recognise opera as a relevant contemporary creative artform, not just a revival of music composed centuries ago. And presumably, such an approach might be necessary to attract new younger and more diverse audiences.

To that end not only does the 2023/24 season open with the Met premiere of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, but the next two broadcasts are also new or modern works, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X by Anthony Davis and Florencia en el Amazonas by Daniel Catán. That is certainly an appealing line-up for me, at least in as far as having the opportunity to experience unfamiliar works in the next best way to seeing them live (which would be highly unlikely outside of the United States in any case). The Met have their Live in HD broadcasts down to a fine art, and that was certainly the experience with their completely stunning production of Dead Man Walking.

Composed in 2000, and having the distinction of being the most successful or at least most widely performed (in America) new opera of the 21th century (so far), the Met are late catching on to Jake Heggie's first opera, but they certainly make up for it with a production that does the work full justice and which may even consolidate its reputation and popularity. I'm late to the work myself, as American contemporary composers are not particularly fashionable in Europe and rarely get performed here. As if seeking to make that cross-over, the Met chose the Belgian experimental opera and theatre director Ivo van Hove to direct their first production of the work, and that was enough to entice me out to see it in the cinema, when I otherwise might not have. I'm very glad I did, and it will certainly bring me back to see their other new productions this season.

Some of my initial hesitation and doubts about having any interest in Dead Man Walking would have been down to it being made into a film (that admittedly I haven't seen) and the subject matter. Although based n a real life story of a nun, Sister Helen Prejean and her memoir of the friendship she struck up with a man on Death Row in the days leading up to his execution, it not only seemed to me designed to stir emotions and gain Oscar nominations, but I imagined that the opera would have similar intentions and be a little ...well, over-emphatic perhaps if not overly sentiment stirring. And it turns out there is some truth in this, Heggie and his librettist Terrence McNally designing the opera to play out as much like a movie screenplay as an opera follow along similar lines, which is where the choice of Ivo van Hove to direct it comes across as a true masterstroke.

Ivo van Hove is a theatre director who is used to working with cinematic drama. He has adapted Bergman's 'After the Rehearsal' and 'Scenes From a Marriage', Cassavetes' 'Opening Night' and Visconti's 'Ossessione' among many film adaptations for the stage, but he also brings a cinematic quality to his plays, using on-stage cameras and projections. His opera productions have similarly benefitted from these kind of techniques that open up backgrounds and underlying tensions, but his success with opera is as much in his ability to draw marvellous acting performances out of the principals and the secondary singers, using every means to express the maximum impact and insight out of whatever he is working on.

Surprisingly, for Dead Man Walking he is much more restrained in how he presents the work, settling for a minimalist set with lots of open space and limited use of on-stage camera-operators and projections. I thought at first that he might be reining in any excesses for an audience less used to experimental European theatre, but it soon became clear that van Hove was actually just serving the needs of the opera Dead Man Walking. Aside from the filmed opening sequence depicting the murders, the menacing prison scenes with guards and prisoners seeming to erupt out of swirling infernal mists, his direction here allows the drama to focus and bring out what is already well-scripted and scored in the relationship between Sister Helen and Joseph De Rocher, letting the characters come alive through their words and interaction rather than employing and of his usual tricks and techniques.

That is almost certainly the right way to approach Heggie and McNally's Dead Man Walking. Ivo van Hove makes what could otherwise be film-like theatrical, as well as theatrical for the big screen in the cinema broadcast. Such is the nature of the subject, the direct way it is handled in the superb libretto and the sometimes heavy-handed score by Heggie, that any further emphasis or extraneous action would be too much. Scene after scene had huge emotional impact, and the director doesn't get in the way of that. The final execution scene, as is surely intended, is almost devastating, the director here choosing to get right in close on the act of delivery of the lethal injection with a hand-held camera projecting the procedure. If the rights or wrongs of capital punishment are largely left to the viewer to decide, the inhumanity of taking another's life is not and the production makes sure you see exactly what it entails.

I'm not sure what I expected from Heggie's score, not being familiar with the composer, but his writing for this opera surprised me. He is stated as being in the American tradition - whatever that is, Bernstein maybe? - but Dead Man Waking reminded me of Poulenc and Dialogues des Carmélites. Perhaps the amount of nuns on stage influenced that idea, but I think emotionally, thematically, structurally and musically it's a close match. It's powerfully composed for maximum impact, if perhaps a little too over-emphatic and bombastic in places under the musical direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, but I'm sure he delivered it the way the composer intended. It certainly achieves the desired impact; invigorating and draining at the same time.

As well as every other element of the production being up to the extremely high standards of the Metropolitan Opera, the casting of the principals, the singing and acting performances are simply beyond reproach. Every role, not just the central relationship between convict and nun, is filled with character, the performances consequently utterly committed to doing them justice and superbly delivered. You couldn't expect more from Joyce DiDonato and Ryan McKinny, both absolutely rivetting, but it's hard to imagine anyone surpassing the deeply felt emotional delivery of Susan Graham as De Rocher's mother. Secondary roles are just as well written and performed, with Rod Gilfry in particular standing out as the father of the murdered girl, but impressive performances also from newer Met singers Latonia Moore, Krysty Swann, Wendy Bryn Harmer, Chauncey Packer all providing notable performances, particularly in the family scenes with overlapping dialogue and raw emotion pouring out.

While I am instinctively suspicious of work that is this emotionally charged and direct, it's almost impossible for any aspect of Dead Man Walking to be "too much" considering the subject and the way it demands to be presented. No one element however overshadows another in the Met's 2023 production, everything comes together to present Jake Heggie's opera in the best possible light, from these incredible singing and acting performances and the perfectly pitched direction. Even the Live in HD presentation is just perfect, engaging the cinema audience with the filming, the close-ups, Ivo van Hove's own on-screen camera and split-screen shots, making this feel like they were sharing something truly remarkable and even momentous. Impressive on big screen, the video capture of this final performance will no doubt continue to resonate and secure the place of Dead Man Walking in the American contemporary opera canon.

External Links: The Metrooolitan Opera, The Met: Live in HD season

Gluck - Iphigénie en Tauride

Christoph Willibald Gluck - Iphigénie en Tauride

The Metropolitan Opera, New York

Patrick Summers, Stephen Wadsworth, Susan Graham, Plácido Domingo, Paul Groves, Gordon Hawkins

The Met: Live in HD - February 26, 2011

It was through his French opera works that Christoph Willibald Gluck would bring to fruition the reforms to opera he had begun in Vienna in 1762 and 1767 with Orfeo ed Eurydice and Alceste (which themselves would later be revised in French versions), culminating in his 1779 masterwork Iphigénie en Tauride. Returning to the origins of where opera derived – an attempt to recreate ancient Greek drama with the accompaniment of music – Gluck’s intention was similarly to strip back anything that didn’t serve to primarily support and enhance the drama.

Gone then are the excessive arias with their da capo repetitions designed to show of the coloratura of the star singers, gone is the recitativo secco left to fill in the narrative, and gone is the inexpressive sound of the harpsichord of Baroque opera. In its place Gluck would use the orchestration, continuo singing, and significantly make stronger use of the chorus, to enhance and give psychological depth to the characterisation and the drama, to the extent that, famously in Ihpigénie en Tauride, characters can say one thing while the music reveals the contradicting meaning to what they are saying. The reforms of opera instigated by Gluck were hugely influential and very important, leading the way towards the more modern form of opera as we know it today.

It’s that sheer depth of human emotion and psychological drama that comes out of the Stephen Wadsworth’s production of Ihpigénie en Tauride for the Metropolitan Opera, their production to be broadcast live in HD. Less cerebral than Claus Guth’s 2001 Freudian interpretation of the Euripides drama for the Opernhaus Zurich, the Met orchestra is also rather fuller than William Christie’s period arrangements for that production, but both in their way get to the heart of the human tragedy of Greek proportions that are at the core of the opera. There’s not too much scene setting in this version of Iphigenia in Tauris, a silent dramatic prelude re-enacting the horror of Iphigenia’s execution at the hand of her father Agamemnon at Aulis, in an effort to appease Artemis on his way to fight the war in Troy, only to be spirited away at the last moment by the goddess Diana (the event recounted in an earlier Gluck opera, Iphigéne en Aulide). After 15 years in Tauris, a priestess now to King Thoas, the trauma remains so deep that she is unable to recognise her brother Orestes, who has arrived in shipwrecked in Tauris, and who is about to be sacrificed to the Gods by his sister, according to the custom of the land.

Dramatically, Iphigénie en Tauride is a sequel to Iphigéne en Aulide then, but it has links also to Elektra (where Orestes has just taken revenge on his mother Clytemnestra for the murder of his father Agamemnon, and is equally as traumatised by the experience), and the brooding melancholy of Gluck’s score in some ways sets the tone that Strauss would match, even more discordantly, some time later in his opera Elektra. The same qualities of deep remorse mixed with guilt lie at the heart of both – the traumatic events that Ihpigenia and Orestes have endured have had a profound impact on their personalities (one indeed with pre-Freudian connotations, as in the initial encounter between brother and sister when Orestes, coming out of a nightmare, calls out “Mother” on seeing Iphigenia) – and, like Elektra, Iphigénie en Tauride is likewise stripped down to its pure emotional core, the singing is allowed to stand alone and express the heart of the drama more through the voice than through any narrative drive.

The split stage is effective, reducing the stage down into distinct areas where the psychological drama can be enclosed and heightened in suffocating prison cells and sacrificial tombs. It may have just been the sound mix to the cinemas or perhaps the less than perfect French diction of the singers, but the staging also seemed to affect the acoustics of the voice. Scarcely a word could be made out of Gordon Hawkins’ delivery as Thoas, but Susan Graham and Plácido Domingo’s singing also seemed to have a little too much reverb. Both however were in fine voice – and wonderful voices they are – despite both suffering from a cold. There were noticeable sniffles from Graham in Act 1 and 2, but whatever remedy she was taking kicked in after the interval, resulting in a commanding singing and dramatic performance in the final two acts. Domingo seemed to be holding back and conserving his energy, but by the same token he is not a grandstanding scene-stealing kind of performer and played within the confines of the role (as I’m sure Gluck would have approved), graciously allowing both Graham and Paul Groves to give full account of their voices and the roles they played.

Berlioz - Les Troyens

Hector Berlioz - Les Troyens

Théâtre du Châtelet Paris, 2003

John Eliot Gardiner, Yannis Kokkos, Peter Maniura, Anna Caterina Antonacci, Susan Graham, Ludovic Tézier, Laurent Naouri

Opus Arte

Presented across two dual-layer BD50 Blu-ray discs, Berlioz’s adaptation of Virgil’s The Aeneid is truly an epic undertaking, both in terms of the production and the opera itself. His penultimate opera, Les Troyens is considered to be the composer’s masterpiece, and indeed it brings together all the elements and the variety that is characteristic of Berlioz’s range, from darkness to light, from blood and thunder to tender lyricism, with rousing choruses, dramatic singing performances, musical interludes and dance sequences.

Despite that, the opera was never performed in full during the lifetime of the composer, the first two acts dealing with the fall of Troy to the Greeks despite Cassandra’s highly emotive premonitions of doom, excised in favour of the Trojans in Carthage section of Acts 3 to 5. There is certainly a strong division between the two parts, with many of the principal’s inevitably dying at the sacking of Troy at the end of Act 2, including Cassandra and her lover Choreobus (Hector already dead before the start of the opera nevertheless makes a highly effective appearance at the start of the Second Act in the form of a projected apparition), but it’s hard to imagine the opera feeling complete without the darkness and the powerful impact of the first half. Anna Caterina Antonacci, in particular, showing what the role of Cassandra has to offer the opera as a whole, a striking contrast to Susan Graham’s Dido, who dominates the second half, though no less effectively.

As the surviving Trojans flee, they receive temporary shelter in the North African city of Carthage established recently by exiles from Tyre, under the rule of Queen Dido. Both exiles, the respective leaders of the two tribes, Aeneas and Dido, find comfort for their loss in love for each other, but only until the gods remind Aeneas of his duty to lead his people to Italy. In contrast to the opening acts, the second half of Les Troyens consequently covers a wider range of emotions and the musical accompaniment is likewise as broad and as colourful as the set designs for Carthage, the tone darkening again at the end in a manner that echoes the restored opening of the opera.

The 2003 production at the Châtelet in Paris is accordingly spectacular, the stage filled with movement and action, but never cluttered, the score dominated often by the power of the choral writing, but individual roles are strong and the performances are exceptional, Gregory Kunde a fine Aeneas to stand alongside Antonacci and Graham. Everything about the production, the orchestra under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, is of the highest order, every single scene offering something of fascination and wonder, whether it is in the music, the singing or the staging. But, particularly in this full version of Les Troyens, there is an overall impression of completeness here. Total opera.

Les Troyens is perfectly presented on Blu-ray, the division between the two parts of the opera much better than on the 3-disc DVD edition. Act 1 and 2 are on the first disc along with the extra features, the other three acts on the second disc. Image and sound can hardly be faulted, the audio presented in PCM 2.0 and DTS HD Master Audio 5.1. The tone on the surround track is soft and warm rather than clean and precise, but the dynamic range is nonetheless excellent, handling the extremes well, and it is well suited to the arrangement. The hour-long documentary features contributions from the main performers and makes some interesting observations, but is over-long, being mostly made up of a complete walk-through of the synopsis by John Eliot Gardiner, illustrated with extended sequences from the opera.