Nielsen - Maskarade (Frankfurt, 2021)

Carl Nielsen - Maskarade

Oper Frankfurt, 2021

Titus Engel, Tobias Kratzer, Alfred Reiter,.Susan Bullock, Michael Porter, Liviu Holender, Samuel Levine, Michael McCown, Monika Buczkowska, Barbara Zechmeister, Božidar Smiljanić, Danylo Matviienko, Gabriel Rollinson

Naxos, Blu-ray

Personally I've always thought of Carl Nielsen as a very serious composer; an interesting composer we could perhaps consider as working in the neo-classical style, but whose Danish heritage and ventures into modernism gives him a distinct character and musical approach of his own. His symphonies are only recently being more widely performed, but his two operas are less well known in the rest of Europe. Composed in 1906, Maskarade however is apparently seen as almost a national opera in his home country and, more surprisingly, it's a comedy. Comedy doesn't always succeed in translation and there are few successful comedies in opera (it tends to be more of a mainstay of operetta), which might explain why the work is not better known outside Denmark. So while there is little doubt about Nielsen's (growing) reputation as a composer, the pertinent question around this Frankfurt production in a German translation of Maskarade is whether it is actually funny or not.

What is tricky about the comedy of Maskerade is that its source is a drama by the 18th century Norwegian playwright, Ludvig Holberg. That’s not necessarily an issue as Shakespeare’s comedies and Restoration comedies all have fairly broad universal characteristics that are still funny today. What keeps revivals of those works successful and what always remains amusing are the characters and situations, often involving the nobility being undermined by their own pomposity or by the cleverness of their servants. In opera, the comedies based on the works of Beaumarchais still resonate in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, but the same revolutionary sentiment thrives even earlier in works like Pergolesi's La serva padrona. Unquestionably, however, the comedy in opera is most successful in the works of Mozart and Da Ponte, in Le nozze di Figaro, in Così fan tutte and even in Don Giovanni. Mozart and Da Ponte draw such beautiful characters that you are completely at their mercy.

Nielsen's Maskarade draws from the same heritage and while it's not Mozart and Da Ponte - for which there is no match anywhere in opera - it still manages to combine a good blend of music and character and find its own national character. It takes a while to develop its comic credentials across the three acts, but there are other ways to build up the anticipation of a riotous comedy and it doesn't have to be subtle either. Here in Maskarade, the comedy of the first two acts relies on much repetition of the word 'maskarade' as something anticipatory. The opera opens with Leander and his manservant Henrik waking up with a hangover from the previous night's drinking and dancing at a masquerade, and looking forward to another the same evening. Leander's mother Magdelone has heard about these youthful extravagances and wants to join in the fun and dancing. The masquerade craze on the other hand is met with vociferous disapproval from Leander's stern, joyless, conservative father Jeronimus as "a devilish place" of "horny mayhem", ruining the fabric of society, responsible for the growing spread of "whores, drinking, gambling and murder".

Boy, after a build up like that you can't wait to see one of those masquerades staged now. Evidently it doesn't entirely live up to that reputation in Act III, but Jeronimus isn't entirely wrong, since it was at the last masquerade that Leander met and fell in love with a young woman even though he is engaged and about to be imminently married to another: Leonora, the daughter of Mr Leonard. Squeezing this confession out of Henrik, Jeronimus is furious and concerned about breaking the promise of the marriage to his friend’s daughter. Only Mr Leonard turns up to announce that his wayward daughter has also refused the marriage having met a young man at the masquerade. That confounded 'maskerade'! There'll be no more of those! But of course there will, and it comes as no surprise that the mysterious masked woman Leander has fallen in love with and the mysterious masked man Leonora has thrown over her marriage for are not exactly unrelated.

All the requisite elements are there for a typically broad comedy that is guaranteed to entertain, but is there any deeper meaning to the work? Nielsen's treatment certainly characterise and emphasises well the opposing viewpoints and disagreements. Henrik makes the argument for the masquerade as a brief moment of joy and colour in a dull, cold world of hunger, hardship and misery, accompanied by swirls of musical colour in Nielsen’s orchestration, while the beautifully scored dances themselves are likewise persuasive. Is that hedonistic justification the extent of the moral position of the opera? Adopting a mask of being who you want to be, it's not that different to Mozart’s take on Beaumarchais, valuing freedom and egalitarian principles, or indeed Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s view in Der Rosenkavalier that the youth need to make their own choices (and mistakes) and not be constrained by the old ways. Despite a number of classical allusions that suggest there is more to the character of the masquerade than "horny mayhem" I'm not sure it's any more nuanced than that, but it is certainly entertaining.

Director Tobias Kratzer doesn't try to overburden the work with clever distractions, focussing on developing character and colour, keeping the set design simple and modern with little meta-theatrical visual amusements. It's an appropriate and measured response to a work of neo-classicism that you could consider a dress-up masquerade in itself. It's no Mozart and Da Ponte, it's no Strauss and Hofmannsthal (closer to the other Strauss, Johann’s Der Fledermaus) but there's a recognition of the qualities of the theatrical experience and setting it in a way that is appropriate to the character of the music score. There is of course plenty of opportunity for additional amusing visual touches by reworking the masking as cosplay, as it is now called, or as fancy dress as it used to be called.

The Fach for voices seems to me to be very much in the Mozart range; light and lyrical even the bass-baritone roles, fitting for a comedy and for this opera’s style and lightness of touch. The singers all perform well, all with substantially principal roles, but nothing that is too exacting. For the 2021 Frankfurt production, the Danish libretto is given a German translation which fits closely with the original Danish to make it more immediate for a German audience. That intent is lost when it is taken out of the theatre for an international DVD/BD release, but it still works just as effectively as it should thanks to an amusing, saucy and suggestive English subtitle translation.

Titus Engel is more commonly seen conducting experimental and avant-garde opera, but proves to be a good conductor to find the little quirks in Nielsen's score. It's an elegant and sophisticated score in its folk and its dance compositions but it has to be said that there is no 'Dance of the Seven Veils' here and the music doesn’t quite live up to the scandalous reputation that has been built up for the masquerade.

The Naxos Blu-ray of Carl Nielsen's Maskarade from Oper Frankfurt in 2021 looks very good indeed on a BD50 disc. It has lossless LPCM stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtracks with clear vocals and the orchestration has a good dynamic sweep, if not the precise detail in the mixing that you can get in other HD releases. As you would expect, the BD is all-region. The only extra feature is the booklet which contains an interview with the conductor Titus Engel in English and German.

External links: Oper Frankfurt, Naxos

Glass - Einstein on the Beach (Geneva, 2019)

Philip Glass - Einstein on the Beach (Geneva, 2019)

Grand Théâtre de Genève, 2019

Titus Engel, Daniele Finzi Pasca, Jess Gardolin, Stéphane Gentilini, Andrée-Anne Gingras-Roy, Evelyne Laforest, Francesco Lanciotti, David Menes, Marco Paoletti, Félix Salad, Beatriz Sayad, Allegra Spernanzoni, Roland Tarquini, Micol Veglia, Melissa Vettore

GTG Digital

You don't see a new production of Einstein on the Beach in an opera house programme very often but it's always an exciting prospect, even if you imagine that it's going to have a hard time to live up to its original visualisation and collaboration between its creators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs. Glass's most experimental and original opera has already proven it is still a force to be reckoned with in revival, but if Einstein on the Beach is to ever have any kind of extended life - and despite the lasting impression it has made so far its legacy is by no means assured - it needs to be seen whether it can stand up on its own merit without the hand of its creators involved.

Knowing how to approach a new production is an unenviable task because one of the more unusual characteristics of Einstein on the Beach as an opera is that it doesn't exactly have a plot to follow. Despite its unconventionality and lack of adherence to almost any of the rules of what we consider to be essential to opera, it does however have most of the basic components in their purest form. It offers up music as purely music with no relationship to any dramatic or emotional context, it provides drama without a narrative, the words operating as mere text that convey little in the way of meaning, while the stage design and dance are there to provide a visual reference for the space and movement to add another dimension to the music. Einstein on the Beach is intended to be a spectacle for the eyes and the ears, a five-hour flow of rhythm and repetition, the audience invited to enter and leave as they liked. As this was something Philip Glass and his Ensemble were quite used to people walking out of some of their earliest performances, it made sense to make this an acceptable part of his first opera.

Somehow, whether it was the mere fact of hanging this all onto a title like Einstein on the Beach, or some of the imagery that Robert Wilson provided to work in conjunction with the music, the work seemed to acquire a significance of its own. Glass's music does have the ability to establish a strong bond with images, as evidenced by his collaborative efforts with Godfrey Reggio on the soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi, which this opera is closer to in conception than the other operas in what would become known as the Portrait Trilogy (with Satyagraha and Akhnaten). It captures the pace of modern life, the rhythm of life itself, science, technology, progress, time, the repeated rhythms measuring out the idea of life changing gradually and almost imperceptibly over time but very much changing and gathering pace.

Since there are many ways of expressing that idea, Daniele Finzi Pasca and his company obviously find their own way to explore what Einstein on the Beach means and how it can be developed. The long ten minute opening Prologue, played as the audience are still entering the theatre and taking their seats, consists of three descending notes on an electronic organ repeated with slightly variations in the length, while a woman recites random numbers between 1 and 3000. You can find yourself searching for a pattern, and maybe even find one, but more than anything it creates a trance-like state where the mind is gradually cleansed of any such attempts at rationalisation or search for meaning. It just expects you to accept and appreciate the simplicity of three notes played together with random numbers recited and it is indeed utterly entrancing. A figure dressed like Albert Einstein then joins the woman during the first Knee Play (one of the connecting pieces between scenes) reciting meaningless cut-up text, the chorus then taking up a one-two-three-four repetition that speeds up to Glass's racing rhythms while a red shiny curtain billows behind them.

It sounds completely pointless in description yet utterly entrancing to watch and enter into a receptive rather than passive state that the music creates. This first scene hints that the director Daniele Finzi Pasca is following in the simplicity of Improbable, the production company of Phelim McDermott, a director with a strong affinity for Glass's music who often finds inventive ways of representing it on stage. Finzi Pasca creates a visual language of his own that reacts to the music and sets off other associations rather then rely on Robert Wilson's. There's no 'Train' scene, instead we have Einstein at a desk, dancers, a remote controlled toy plane, and possibly in reference to Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan and Bicycle Thieves there's a floating bike on a wire, a woman in a wedding dress and a groom in white. All of this builds a loose visual narrative that the audience are free to bring together into a meaning of their own.

There's no 'Trial' scene either and some of the libretto monologues are cut or reduced to take the opera down from five hours to four. The 'Mr Bojangles' monologue is recited by a performer within a flickering glow of a rotating spiral array of neon pillars against a deep blue background (the closest this gets to iconic Wilson imagery) with figures moving walking across in slow rhythmic movements, the floating bike reappears as the scene transitions into a badminton game on beach with deck chairs for the 'Paris/All Men Are Equal' scene (although the 'Paris' text is moved to Act 4). A mermaid floats above and it is all observed on the beach by Einstein, which is as close to literal as this interpretation comes, but it also shows that this is a work that has imagery and ideas that are infinitely adaptable.

Any further description of the differences and disconnect between what we might expect to see is rather pointless, as you're doubtless beginning to grasp, since it doesn't illuminate any kind of narrative or conceptual coherence, employing images inspired by the music with no rhyme or reason. Cutting evidently has no real impact on any narrative or meaning, merely swapping some of the irritating nonsense texts for irritating ideas and nonsense of its own. There's no 'House', 'Spaceship' or 'Train' but there are Bullfighters and Buddhist Monks. The Compagnia Finzi Pasca production is what it is; music and visuals, shadow plays, projections, acrobatics, trompe d'oeil and fantastical images with a few recurrent themes mostly involving a kind of transcendental levitation, flying and floating (gravity?). It's not always gripping but that's the nature of this work, you are free to make up your own connections or not as you choose, and you can always (in theory) walk out during the bits when nothing much happens for ages (I zoned out at the appearance of bullfighters in Act 4 'Bed/Aria' here).

Familiarity with the music actually adds another level of fascination as you are anticipating the length of each repeated phrase waiting on the next change to kick in. It still holds you rapt, which when you consider that there is no narrative or meaning to grasp and a lot of repetition, is quite an achievement. That's a testament also to conductor Titus Engel, the orchestra made up of music students of the Haute école du musique de Genève and the indefatigable efforts of the chorus that they are able to keep this together for four hours without a pause. The challenges posed by Einstein on the Beach are like no other and seeing it performed like this really does underline what an incredible achievement it is.

But does the opera have the capacity to be renewed beyond its 1970s origins and outlive its creators? Well, personally I don't think the Geneva production is a patch on Robert Wilson's original, but evidently going ahead it's Wilson's contribution as co-author that is always going to be left behind. Whether there's any life left in Minimalism is a matter in the hands of posterity, but there seems to be little doubt that, as Phelim McDermott has demonstrated for his other operas, Philip Glass's music is capable of inspiring new and creative responses. It's the largely unchanging force behind this enormously original and still totally absorbing work of opera, and yes it still remains opera. Great opera endures and 45 years haven't been bad to Einstein on the Beach.

Links: Grand Théâtre de Genève, GTG Digital

Stockhausen - Donnerstag aus Licht (Basel, 2016)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Donnerstag aus Licht

Theater Basel, 2016

Titus Engel, Lydia Steier, Peter Tantsits, Anu Komsi, Michael Leibundgut, Rolf Romei, Paul Hübner, Emmanuelle Grach, Merve Kazokoğlu, Evelyn Angela Gugolz, Stephen Menotti, Eric Lamb, Ansi Verwey, David Dias da Silva, Markus Forrer, Romain Chaumont, Emilie Chabrol

Sonostream - 1 October 2016

In the world of contemporary music, there are still few compositions that are more formidable, challenging and controversial as those of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Whether it's his 'Helicopter String Quartet' to be played by four musicians on separate helicopters, 'Gruppen', his work for three orchestras or his various experiments and innovations with tape recordings and electronics, there are few modern composers who have stretched musical boundaries quite so far.

It's not surprising then that Stockhausen's major opera work Licht, written between 1977 and 2003, is also one that pushes the art form to its limits. A series of seven operas, one for each day of the week, adding up to about 29 hours of music, it's not surprising that Licht (Light) isn't performed more often, even in its individual day components. It's a major event then when a segment of Licht is performed and Theater Basel's production of Donnerstag aus Licht (Thursday from Light), first performed at La Scala in Milan in 1981, is the only full performance there has been of this work in the last 30 years.

It's no easy matter then to summarise what Licht, or even Donnerstag aus Licht is all about. It's certainly possible to describe what takes place in Donnerstag on a narrative level, but the musical element (which is far from conventional), the autobiographical elements (which appear strange and eccentric to say the least), and the spiritual element (which is a level that is intended to run through everything else, musical, narrative and autobiographical), are all wrapped up in religious symbolism and a great deal of narrative and musical symbolism that Stockhausen has developed for himself.

To try and describe it as simply as possible however, Donnerstag aus Licht describes the early childhood of Michael, a spiritual being or angel who has been born in the body of a man with the intention of growing up to be the saviour of mankind. That salvation will be through the gift of music. As the final lines of Donnerstag describe it, Michael says his purpose is "to bring celestial music to humans and human music to the celestial beings, so that humanity may listen to GOD and GOD may hear his children." Michael's ascension to this messianic role is however not an easy one and he is tormented in his progress by Lucifer, who despises mankind and is full of disgust that Michael has taken on the form of one of these low creatures.

Michael's troubled childhood in Act I is not that far removed from Stockhausen's own, his mother - who takes on a symbolic form as Moon-Eve, while his father is to some extent aligned with Lucifer - is incarcerated in an institution for mental illness after her husband accuses her of having an affair. Confined to an asylum himself, Michael however receives a vision that tells him he is a celestial being who is to be the saviour of mankind, providing spiritual nourishment through his music (a belief that would come to be another part of Stockhausen's increasingly eccentric personality in later life).

In the entirely musical Act II of Donnerstag aus Licht, Michael assumes his role of saviour in a three-form incarnation, one as a tenor singer (Peter Tantsits), one as a trumpeter (who does all the 'singing' for this Act), one as a dancer (there are three-part Evas and three-part Lucifers as well). He undertakes visitations to major centres around the Earth; to Cologne, to New York, Japan, Bali, India, Central Africa and Jerusalem. His appearances heralding his Mission are followed with his trials of Mockery, Crucifixion and ultimately Ascension. Act III sees Michael's homecoming, a return to his celestial residence. Worshipped by choirs and greeted by Eve, Michael performs a ritual of Light with plants. It's here that Lucifer makes his strongest play to turn Michael away from his mission in a fight and a bitter exchange, but Michael resists.

Quite how seriously you are supposed to take this is not really open to question; you're supposed to take it very seriously indeed. Theater Basel were even obliged to publish a statement from the Stockhausen Institute that largely approved of the performance of this major work by the composer, but expressed grave reservations that the tone was darker than the composer would have liked, that it was too earth-bound with not enough emphasis on the 'light' that embodies the spiritual side of the work. It's a very stiff and humourless statement and unnecessarily restrictive and intolerant of any idea of interpretation.

Lydia Steier's direction for Theater Basel does however stick closely to the detailed descriptions and copious notes that Stockhausen lays out for the presentation of Donnerstag aus Licht, as well as for the musical delivery, complete with its precise indications and enumeration of noises, clicks, syllables, symbols and gestures that are as significant a part of the score and the singing as any conventional instrumentation. The production even opens with a Thursday Greeting in the lobby of the Theater Basel before the start of the main performance, humorously performed here with Titus Engel and a small band dressed in 70s' outfits and wigs puffing away on cigarettes between, and it closes outside the theatre with a Trumpet Farewell after the performance.

Steier takes much of the actual opera at face value, although she does attempt to tie it to a more conventional reality than the high-flown ideals of the Stockhausen Institute might have liked. Michael's journey around the globe in Act II seems to take place here from within his own mind while in the asylum, his mission an attempt to re-establish contact with his catatonic mother. There's a bit of humour as the trumpeter Michael destroys Godzilla at the second station in Japan, but apparently there's little room for either interpretation or humour in Stockhausen's self-important vision of himself as a cosmic musical saviour. All the grandeur of the piece is there however, particularly in Act III's choirs and battle with Lucifer.

What the Basel production does manage to achieve then is the sense of Licht as a real operatic event. Evidently the streamed version is a very different experience to being present at the actual event, but the sense of this being an opportunity to experience a rare work of genuine interest and significance, and share it with the world is commendable. Barbara Ehnes's set design is impressive in its efforts to make the complex musical lines, vocal lines, and multiple levels of Donnerstag aus Licht easy to follow. A rotating stage allows the work to flow beautifully around a tower that is used for back projections and as a window into Michael's mind and scenes from his childhood. Whatever the merits of Stockhausen's epic work, at the very least you have the opportunity to see that vision staged and it's hard not to be impressed either with the ambition of the work or its execution here.

Links: Theater Basel, Sonostream

Wuorinen - Brokeback Mountain

Charles Wuorinen - Brokeback Mountain

Teatro Real, Madrid - 2014

Titus Engel, Ivo van Hove, Daniel Okulitch, Tom Randle, Heather Buck, Hannah Esther Minutillo, Ethan Herschenfeld, Celia Alcedo, Ryan MacPherson, Jane Henschel, Hilary Summers, Letitia Singleton, Gaizka Gurruchaga, Vasco Fracanzani

Medici, ARTE Concert - Internet Streaming, 7 February 2014

Although it goes right back to the source short story, and even has a libretto specifically written by the original author Annie Proulx, the initial idea to compose an opera based on Brokeback Mountain came to Charles Wuorinen after watching Ang Lee's 2005 film. It's likely that the popular and acclaimed film will also be the point of comparison for most people viewing Wourinen's opera version, the work receiving its world premiere in Madrid in 2014. As with any adaptation of material from another medium, the opera version of Brokeback Mountain in such a case must not only stand up on its own terms but it needs to bring something new, something specific to the nature of music theatre that literature and cinema can't. Wourinen's opera succeeds in this to a large extent and does full justice to the nature if the story, if not in any way bring anything spectacularly new to it.

In terms of the content, while Annie Proulx does go back to the source material and treats some aspects rather differently from the cinematic version, the nature, the character and the development of the relationship at the centre of the story remains essentially the same. It deals with the troubled love affair between two men in an American mid-western cowboy community who are unable to openly express their feelings for each other, partly due to concerns about how their relationship will be viewed by a society with rather harsh and unforgiving attitudes to anything that doesn't fit in with their accepted conventional moral views, but partly due to their own masculine inability to come to terms with their emotions.

Those feelings and the contrasting views on this subject in Annie Proulx's story are very much tied into the contrast between life on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming where ranch hands Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar first meet, and the rather less freedom that the men enjoy when they come down from summer on the isolated mountain and have to fit into "normal" society again, finding work, marrying and providing for their families. In the opera version, the concision and compression of the material in Proulx's libretto gives greater prominence and emphasis to this division between the laws of nature and society, but it's also given additional weight through Charles Wuorinen's very distinctive musical treatment.

The tone that is adopted by the work as a whole is established immediately right from the first bold, dramatic, troubling chords that are struck, and there's not an ounce of sentimentality, romanticism or even false optimism to be found elsewhere in the music score or the dialogue. Right from the outset, the relationship between Jack and Ennis is a troubled one, one that will never be fully accepted by either society or on equal terms by both men, and it colours and deeply affects even those few moments of bliss that the two of them are able to snatch together over the years on the rare occasions that they are able to "go fishing" on Brokeback Mountain. Proulx's concisely drawn libretto authentically reflects both the sparse exchanges and general inarticulacy of the men themselves, yet is also able to use literary techniques to draw out the underlying characteristics of their relationship.

As suggested by the location and the title, the primary expression of the men's relationship is that of Brokeback Mountain. The libretto consequently is scattered with references to the natural world, but reflecting the nature of that relationship it's rarely comforting, the mountains populated with coyotes, wolves and bears. For the brief moments that they are far away from the ordinary cares of the world, they are however eagles, at least in Jack Twist's mind. Ennis however, mindful of the responsibilities placed on him, knowing that he is going to marry Alma, finds it more difficult to enjoy the same freedom of thought, but allows himself to succumb to the image of the free-flying hawk. Another highly evocative image - although it's not over emphasised - is that of the sheep. In a way, the sheep could be seen to represent regular society, and since they are employed to look after them by Aguirre, a man who we know is a stickler for rules, the two men feel some obligation of responsibility towards the social construct that allows them to make a life for themselves.

On its own, this leaner this more stripped down version of the storyline expresses the intensity of the relationship and feelings well, but for it to find full expression in an opera it needs the music and the staging to support it. In this particular work, what remains unspoken is often just as important as what is, and that has to be elaborated on further than just a few poetic images and references to nature. The American composer Charles Wuorinen manages to find a strong way to express this in the music which is 12-tone and modernist but not atonal. Without impressionism or abstraction, it's actually quite lyrical and expressionistic, well-suited to the material, the musical language not unlike the Richard Strauss of Elektra and Salome. It's never folk or country inflected, but rather directly connected to the tenseness of the situation, to the uneasy nature of the men and their relationship, matching and underlining every word and sentiment.

As such, the music follows the vocal line rather than setting it, attempting to capture the rhythms of English-language speech patterns, as well as the halting delivery and uncertainty of the nature of the underlying sentiments they are expressing. Daniel Okulitch as Ennis and Tom Randle as Jack deal exceptionally well with this type of expression, totally convincing in terms of characterisation while managing to make the singing quite lyrical and melodic. These are strong performance indeed, and they need to be. As Alma, Heather Buck's role is no less important to the development of the drama and she also gives a terrific performance. Using projections to open up the Teatro Real stage for the outdoors scenes that allow for moody silhouettes, and closing it down with the clutter of furniture and household appliances, Jan Versweyveld's sets match Ivo van Hove's note perfect direction of the characters.

Likely to be seen now as Gérard Mortier's legacy as the controversial but hugely creative and experimental artistic director of the Teatro Real in Madrid, the World Premiere production of Charles Wuorinen's Brokeback Mountain was streamed live on the ARTE Concert and Medici websites. The opera is currently still available to view on both sites, in English with English subtitles.