Berg - Wozzeck (Salzburg, 2017)

Alban Berg - Wozzeck

Salzburg Festival, 2017

Vladimir Jurowski, William Kentridge, Matthias Goerne, John Daszak, Mauro Peter, Gerhard Siegel, Jens Larsen, Tobias Schabel, Huw Montague Rendall, Heinz Göhrig, Asmik Grigorian, Frances Pappas

Medici.tv - 27 August 2017

Like Alban Berg's only other stage work Lulu, Wozzeck is an opera where the music and the drama are intricately connected. Quite how Berg manages to achieve this synthesis in both pieces is complex and would take years to analyse, but there's not really any need for it to be interpreted; the power of these two remarkable works and how they are expressed speaks for itself. It's not really for a director to interpret Lulu or Wozzeck, as you think an artist like William Kentridge might do, as much as provide mood and context. Kentridge, as with his production of Lulu, does this well in this Salzburg Festival production, staging a Wozzeck that firmly has his own individual stamp (what Kentridge staging doesn't?) while not letting that vision get in the way of the work itself.

Georg Büchner's Woyzeck is a study of a man's - or man's - physical and mental limitations. In the 24 quite harsh and gruelling fragments of the unfinished drama, a body and a mind are tested as far as they can be pushed before their owner goes over the edge. Is there just one thing that proves to be too much for Franz Woyzeck, or is it an accumulation of miseries and torments of a wretched existence? Woyzeck is perhaps not so much a bleak account of how miserable life can be as how much strength is required to deal with the daily vicissitudes of life and how delicate and fragile a balance the human psyche rests on.

There is no strict order to the fragments of Büchner's Woyzeck, which is a factor that tends to work in its favour, preventing it from being a simple matter of cause and effect leading to madness and murder. Whatever way you look at it though, in the case of both Büchner and Berg it's apparent from that Franz Wozzeck is cracking. A common soldier, he is brutalised by the captain in his unit, he is experimented on by the doctor, he takes on odd jobs and consequently has little time or thought for his unmarried partner Marie and their child. The dissatisfied Marie's lewd affair with a handsome drum major is just one other factor that beats him down physically as well as mentally.

But Wozzeck also has another element that is less easily identified or rationalised; Franz is affected by hallucinations. Is this just a reaction of his body reacting to the pressures it is undergoing, an indication that his mind is breaking, or a sign of his ability or desire to see something greater beyond the material world? Franz certainly longs for meaning in order, for life to adhere to a structure that makes sense, but instead he finds nature cruel and capricious. Everyone is either looking for power, fame, recognition or satisfaction of their own private desires. To the doctor for example hoping that his experiments on Franz will make him famous, Wozzeck is "a mere human being" not worth losing sleep over, "The death of a salamander would be far more serious".

The world that Wozzeck inhabits is one where horizons are being closed down, where hopes are being dashed, where darkness is gathering. William Kentridge's production at Salzburg is one then that compartmentalises each of the scenes down into little vignettes, brief little areas of illumination in the dark apocalyptic world of the mind. The doctor's cabinet is like a small toilet space, other scenes open up and close, connected by rickety platforms, where only a watery death at the bottom awaits. The set of Wozzeck's mind is filled of course with projections of Kentridge's animated thick-line black ink sketches, depicting life, war, with grotesque figures wearing distorted face masks. War imagery features prominently, suggesting that Wozzeck's disintegrating mind might be caused by PTSD or, in a wider context, that it is the world that has been distorted beyond recognition by the horrors of war.

Kentridge's concepts and drawings are brought to life by the set designs of Sabine Theunissen and co-directed by Luc De Wit, and they do manage to connect everything and bring a continuity here that's not there in Büchner's scenes. But it feels illustrative and doesn't come anywhere close to expressing the madness or despair that is at the heart of Wozzeck, nor the sense of an order of madness that Berg's music constructions suggest. The tavern scene, for example, should be a scene where in Wozzeck's perspective the whole world "writhes and rolls in fornication", but there's little sense of this, nor in the direction of Wozzeck himself do we really get a sense of him buckling under the pressures of his tormentors and his own delusions.

Kentridge might not get to the heart of Wozzeck then - and maybe that's a place we don't really want to delve into too deeply - but as a performance and a spectacle illustrative of a work of infinite richness, there's still a great deal to admire and provoke thoughts in the 2017 Salzburg Wozzeck. There's much to find of interest in the musical performance of the Vienna Philharmonic directed by Vladimir Jurowski (much too much to take in on a single listening), and the singing performances are all good, although I found little in them that was really satisfying in terms of characterisation and continuity. It's more important for Franz and Marie that the other cast of grotesques, and in that respect Matthias Goerne could certainly have done with a little more direction, and Asmik Grigorian just didn't the lusty verve or the earthy complexity of Marie's emotional openness.

In a work as complex and delicately balanced as Wozzeck, it's important to establish a connection between the music and the drama, and Kentridge sets the mood, illustrates it well and allows Berg's musical score to fill in the areas where it is best placed to probe the deeper questions raised in the work. But Berg's opera still needs more than that. There's a human element that is admittedly submerged in some very dark and abstract ideas, but - like Lulu as well - it is essential that the singers don't just perform it, but are able to bring something human and personal that allows the audience to relate to and find a context for the difficult experiences that Franz and Marie undergo. The Salzburg production has much to admire, but it doesn't have the essential human involvement.

Links: Salzburger Festspiele, Medici.tv

Berg - Lulu (English National Opera. 2016)

Alban Berg - Lulu

English National Opera, 2016

Mark Wigglesworth, William Kentridge, Luc De Wit, Brenda Rae, Sarah Connolly, Michael Colvin, James Morris, Nicky Spence, Willard White, David Soar, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts, Clare Presland, Graeme Danby, Sarah Labiner, Rebecca de Pont Davies, Sarah Champion, Geoffrey Dolton, Joanna Dudley, Andrea Fabi

The Coliseum, London - 12th November 2016

Every time I see it, I marvel at how dense a work Lulu is and how frustrating it is to get a grasp on. It's never a question of liking or loving it - it's a work of art that lies beyond such superficial considerations. Lulu is an opera that demands engagement but at the same time keeps you at a distance. Almost by definition it's a piece whose meaning and wider application must remain elusive, since its main character herself must remain an enigma.

I can only imagine how much more difficult then it must be for the performers and directors to take on its musical challenges and at the same time draw it into something coherent and comprehensible for an audience. It must be a challenge of Ring-like proportions. Lulu is a work that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but at the same time it defies any attempt to pin it down. Or if not so much interpretation, it demands artistic engagement. Whether on the part of the singers - particularly in the leading role - or the director, there's room to make a mark, place a personal stamp on the raw material that Berg provides.

Although it almost adds another level of complexity that for the sake of attention and focus it could well do without, William Kentridge's production for the English National Opera is an almost perfect way to approach Lulu, being neither illustrative or interpretative. Using projections of bold Indian ink sketches and splatters on a canvas of text, William Kentridge's designs address the question of art within Lulu, and in doing so they provide a new insight into the work. Lulu is not just a figure immortalised in a painting by the Artist, she is a living work of art. This is what gives Berg's opera its endless fascination at the same time as it frustrates the viewer and the director who attempts to pin it down.

The inability to pin Lulu down - she even resists attempts to give her just one name - is exactly what Kentridge brings to the production through his constantly reworked drawings, sketches and inkblots. Painted on top of blocks of newspaper or dictionary text, the illustrations are neither decorative nor illustrative of the drama, but perhaps more attuned to the music and to the art of the music. The images layer on top of one another, cutting and jumping, flipping reverses and mirror images, reflecting the impossibility of defining Lulu - the person, the opera, the concept, the idea - into one single image. Notoriously, Lulu is all things to all men; an object, the personification of men's lusts and desires who cannot possibly live up to the ideal.

In contrast to my usual experience with Lulu then, fascination with a production's attempts to define her or at least define the ideal gradually leading to frustration as the work slips away from any efforts to exert control over it, Kentridge's production had the opposite effect. Act I was the most frustrating since it didn't offer any 'vision'. The projections seemed to be little more than a series of gestures, slapdash ideas without any strong conceptual core behind them, offering no way of making the narrative any easier to follow, even if it has a distinct and attractive visual presence.

By Act II however, this constant reworking of the enigma of Lulu became mesmerising. You really do see the turning point in the reinstated 'film sequence', the moment that Lulu's ascendancy starts to decline, the moment her currency devalues and how afterwards she starts to become weary of the attentions of men, recoiling from the constant gaze, only to find that she has never had an identity of her own. Act III then becomes captivating in a way that productions using Friedrich Cerha's impressive efforts to complete the third Act of the work - the incomplete opera creating an enigma and fascination of its own - rarely achieve. The production leaves you with a sense that it has continually added to the picture of Lulu rather than taken away from her in her decline to a horrible end.

In fact, Kentridge and co-director Luc De Wit do make the fractured narrative of Berg's efforts to condense Wedekind's two 'Lulu' plays much easier to follow. Each of the characters is colourfully dressed, contrasting with the start black-and-white imagery of the projected ink illustrations. And not just colourfully dressed, but colourfully interpreted, each showing a distinct personality in character and in voice. Without the distraction of trying to work out who was who and who is married to Lulu now, the complexity of the relationship between the narrative, the production design and the difficult shifting musical landscape is actually much easier to grasp. Two silent figures of a man and a woman - dressed in black-and-white, the man wearing a newspaper head mask, the woman more Lulu-like - also add an indefinable quality of living artworks to the unspoken matters of the work. Even if if the principal character remains elusive, she is not a void.

A considerable part of the success of achieving that must lie with the singer performing the role of Lulu and Brenda Rae fulfilled the role marvellously. Aside from the technical challenges of the role, she brought an ideal tone and temperament that suited the intent of the production here. This Lulu as portrayed by Rae is neither lascivious nor hysterical, but essentially and necessarily human, as flawed and capable of misjudgment as anyone. If she is irresistible to men, it's clearly more of a projection of what the men impress on her than anything she initiates. She's more victim than vamp. Sarah Connolly is luxury casting for Countess Geschwitz and Nicky Spence made a great impression as Alwa, but there was much to admire in all of the cast; in James Morris's Dr Schön, Michael Colvin's Artist and David Soar's Athlete. With so much going on I always find it hard to take in Berg's huge complex score, but Mark Wigglesworth's conducting proved to be the unifying force for all its tones and styles, as well as for its dramatic content.

Links: English National Opera

Mozart - Die Zauberflöte

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Die Zauberflöte

Teatro alla Scala, Milan 2011

Roland Böer, William Kentridge, Günther Groissböck, Saimir Pirgu, Albina Shagimuratova, Genia Kühmeier, Ailish Tynan, Alex Esposito, Peter Bronder

Opus Arte

I think the mark of Mozart’s genius in the composition of his strange and still enigmatic final opera is pretty much agreed upon by most critics and its popularity as one of the most performed works in the repertory deservedly still endures, but in terms of presentation on the stage, Die Zauberflöte still represents a challenge that has perhaps been neglected in recent times by the major modern revisionist directors in favour of finding new ways to explore the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy of works – The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte. This is perhaps surprising, since The Magic Flute itself is such a rich and interesting work, historically and personally in terms of the nature of its composition towards the end of Mozart’s life, but it’s also notable for the tremendous musical variety and innovation with which Mozart approaches the Singspiel format, the music not only illustrating or illuminating Schikaneder’s playful and sometimes nonsensical libretto, but bringing structure and depth to the work, breathing life into it in a way that makes its mysteries endlessly fascinating. What more can any director possibly bring to the table or bring out of this work that could make it any more entertaining or even comprehensible?

The stage director for this production of Die Zauberflöte at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan may not have any new ideas about the opera’s central theme of light versus darkness being that of man seeking to rise above their baser natures and impulses, seeking enlightenment over obscurantism, or rationalism over superstition, but as an artist, illustrator and animator South African director William Kentridge does at least approach these themes with a very distinct style of his own. The period setting chosen appears to be late 19th century, the beginning of the age of technological advancement, the characters dressed to looking like figures from a Jules Verne or a H.G Wells novel. At the centre of these scientific advances in this production is the camera, a box that in itself represents the use of light – the ingenuity of man – to forge something out of the darkness, much as Mozart uses the music of the magic flute for the same purpose. Within the box of the stage, Kentridge uses shadows and light in a variety of ways that fits in well with this theme, as well as often being visually very striking.

Thus, in the opening of Act 1, Tamino battles with a snake that is a projection, but rather than being the kind of CGI spectacle that one might expect with the use of modern technology from a production by someone like La Fura dels Baus (one of the conceptual director’s who actually have tackled Die Zauberflöte, but the less said about their unlikely concept of the Magic Flute being a battle between the opposing hemispheres of the brain the better), it’s more in keeping with the chosen time period and created by the three ladies of the Queen of the Night, who form it out of the shadowplay of their arms. So right from the outset, Tamino literally defeats a shadow of the forces of darkness. It might not be as spectacular as some wirework serpents, but it still works effectively and in keeping with a meaningful overall concept. Elsewhere, through black-and-white reversal charcoal designs, animation and even some silent movie footage Kentridge finds a variety of means to illustrate the journey and trials of the protagonists, their acquisition of wisdom and knowledge, as well as reflect the symbolism, numerology and the Masonic imagery that is associated with the themes of the opera.

At times, one might like to see more familiar traditional props and backdrops, but at least the flute and the bells are physical objects here, which is not always something you can count on. Sometimes, the drawings themselves evoke those traditional references, the classic domed canopy of stars that represents the domain of the Queen of Night given a spin here that fits with the artist’s own sense of concept and design. The ideas don’t particularly illuminate this strange, beguiling work in any new way, but neither does the director attempt to impose any ill-fitting concept onto it. It does at the very least have a distinct sense of personality, freshness and originality, which is more than you can say about the only other version of the opera currently on Blu-ray, the Royal Opera House production directed by David McVicar. At times, the imagery here – enhanced it seems by a little post-production overlays for television – is simply spectacular.

In terms of performance however, that earlier mentioned production conducted by Colin Davis, may have the upper hand. The orchestration here sounds somewhat lifeless, and no-one on the stage – with the exception of Alex Exposito’s Papageno, looks like they are having much fun with what should be a delightfully invigorating work. I’m presuming that the arrangement used here by Ronald Böer is period – or more likely semi-period for La Scala – as it’s not orchestrated as lushly as you would normally hear it. That allows for some interesting touches in places that takes it back to its Singspiel origins and there is even continuo for some of the recitative (courtesy of René Jacobs), but it feels like there is a distinct lack of verve in the playing and the performances. In a good interview in the extra features, Böer recognises that Die Zauberflöte contains all the different facets of Mozart’s work, but the complex personality of Mozart himself is in there too, reflected in each of the characters, and that doesn’t always come across here.

I can’t fault the singing of this production’s Tamino or Pamina. Tamino can be a difficult role to breathe any life into, but you don’t necessarily need to – the character’s (and Mozart’s) purity, youthful idealism and single-minded determination (yet one that is open to new ideas and a sense of betterment) is all there in the music and Saimir Pirgu sings it beautifully. So too does Genia Kühmeier’s Pamina represent the other side of that nature with a similar clear purity of voice – her ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’ is one of the loveliest I’ve heard. Alex Exposito is the only figure who demonstrates any kind of life and personality, and he sings Papageno well with clear diction. Where Die Zauberflöte really needs character however, a sense of grandness and imperiousness to give depth and gravity to the work, is in the opposing forces of Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, and unfortunately, neither Albina Shagimuratova nor Günther Groissböck are entirely up to the task. Groissböck, so powerful as the Water Goblin in the controversial Munich Rusalka, is particularly disappointing, not really having the authority in presence or indeed the depth to the voice required for a strong Sarastro. Shagimuratova hits all those notes ok, if a little breathlessly, but she doesn’t command that essential presence or menace either as Queen of the Night.

All in all however, if it’s a little dryly performed and lacking a little bit of spark, this is nonetheless a strong performance of Die Zauberflöte that manages to take a fresh approach to the score and the themes of the work. It’s certainly worthwhile for William Kentridge’s unique approach to production design that makes this never anything less than a rich and imaginative spectacle. The Blu-ray is of the usual high video and audio standards, with extra features consisting of a Cast Gallery and a very interesting twelve-minute Interview with the director and conductor. Region-free, BD50, 1080i, PCM Stereo and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1, German language with English, French, German, Spanish and Italian subtitles.