Srnka - Singularity (Munich, 2021)

Miroslav Srnka - Singularity

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich - 2021

Patrick Hahn, Nicolas Brieger, Eliza Boom, Juliana Zara, Daria Proszek, Yajie Zhang, George Vîrban, Andres Agudelo, Andrew Hamilton, Theodore Platt 

Bayerische Staatsoper TV - 7 June 2021

Aside from the difficulties of composing and staging an opera under current lockdown restrictions, another challenge that must face every new composer or artist is to create something new that stands up against the great artistic achievements of the past. Composing for a world premiere at the historic Cuvilliés-Theater in Munich, which opened in 1753 with Catone in Utica by Giovanni Battista Ferrandini and saw the premiere of Mozart's Idomeneo in 1781, you wonder whether Miroslav Srnka felt any additional pressure to live up to the greats. Despite the popular image of Mozart as composer who never suffered from self-doubt, I expect that even he must have had the same insecurities following in the footsteps of the greats before him, so the pressures are probably the same as they ever were.

What Mozart would also have recognised however is that one of the real challenges for any artist creating something new is that there is a need to break from the past and create something meaningful and relevant that reflects and speaks the language of our own times. While other artforms and audiences may appear to be more amenable to change and progress and opera perhaps slower to accept modern ideas and technology, in truth opera is one of the most innovative of art forms, constantly evolving in how it incorporates disciplines and brings new advances in them together under one roof. At the very least - if maybe not much else - we can say that Mirsolaw Snrka's Singularly - A Space Opera for Young Voices - is not lacking ambition in that regard.

Whether the work has anything important to say, whether it makes any real advances in the world of music and opera, or even whether it is likely to be remembered and revived remains to be seen, but it doesn't seem that likely. It's perhaps mired too much in the contemporary language and technology of the day to be more than a curious remnant of a challenging period not just for opera composers, but for any artist. Essentially of course, as a science-fiction opera its intention is to touch on more universal issues, and Tom Holloway's libretto does manage to relate to the dangers of alienation brought on by the growing human reliance on and relationship to technology. 

Having acknowledged that it does tackle a relevant universal subject, it has to be said that Singularity doesn't really dig down too deep into that theme. The advances in technology and social media that allow everyone (including opera bloggers) to have a voice and be more likely to use it to criticise than praise is however perhaps one of the contemporary issues that Singularity takes in along the way. There is undoubtedly a fear that a reliance on technology, games and social media - particularly in a time of enforced social distancing - leads not just to a sense of dumbing down, but puts ever greater distance between us and our true empathic selves. It's not a massive concept and I'm sure there are more pressing issues to consider for the futures of the younger generation, but it's certainly something worth discussing.

The problem however with highlighting the idea of dumbing down technology being dangerous to our psychological and intellectual make-up is that the charge could also be leveled against the way that such work lays out that idea. We shouldn't confuse the medium with the message or necessarily see something that challenges the superficial appearing itself to be superficial, but it's by no means clear that Tom Holloway's libretto avoids that pitfall. It certainly doesn't help and it's not particularly clever that the opening lines of the opera strive to show their engagement with contemporary language and modern issues by reeling off a string of expletives.

Rather, the language provides a ready-made criticism for the work, or at least for those less likely to look favourably on modern opera and contemporary music. "This is fucking shit, this sucks balls, [vomit green stuff]" - Singularity at least surely distinguishing itself by being the first opera with a libretto that employs emojis in the text - is the limited means of expression used by a young man so addicted to computer games that he is no longer able to appreciate the human attraction of his neglected girlfriend. He's not a particularly promising subject target for an opera to tackle, but it's undoubtedly a true reflection of where many young people are and it's something that could potentially have more serious consequences down the line.

And in a science-fiction work, the idea is really to explore where this is indeed likely to lead further down the line. For some reason, not entirely explained, the young man finds himself sucked down a vortex into a strange alien space environment that looks like the inside of a block of cheese, where he finds two other young people also with sociability problems. One of them is a young man who has never known the love of a woman who has a canary for a comfort zone, a substitute for a mummy who didn't love him. The other is a young woman who, I don't really know (or care to be honest), seems to also have issues of intimacy.

The three remain in this huis clos situation to work though their problems with the help of an out-of-date computer, Screeny. They are there for a long, long time, for upwards of 50 years - which seems to be about right as the amount of time it will take for this generation to be cured of the problems brought about by over-reliance on technology, and - to judge by the dialogue and inadequate attempts at communication that relies heavily on emojis - their inability to express their feelings, much less get in touch with them.

So it's not entirely irrelevant then, but whether you take to the opera's ideas and characters will depend on how well the creators put them across, and Singularity is not an easy opera to engage with. Certainly the libretto doesn't provide any real depth of insight or poetry, but that's inevitable when dealing with characters who talk in the common parlance of the day about losers getting triggered, getting cancelled and unfriended, people who find any sentence longer that 5 words a case of TL:DR, who litter their communication with smiley face, blowing a kiss and vomit green stuff emojis (all replicated in the subtitles).

The libretto attempts to get around this to some extent by splitting each of the characters into two as Analogue and Digital selves, all of them singing roles. The digital self is hard to separate from the analogue person - since in this near future world, each person has implants to allow instant messaging (which some find convenient to turn off when they don't want to hear) - and they have almost equal roles in the opera. Although the digital selves are dressed like shadows, it's not always easy to know who is singing what and why, but it's a meaningful distinction and connection to make.

Raimund Bauer's set design for Nicolas Brieger's production is effective in its use of digital effects to achieve much in a relatively simple stage design. Kaleidoscopic projections present the room where most of the opera takes place as a futuristic science-fiction space world with holes of black matter. Whether it relates to any psychological state of the characters is anyone's guess, but it keeps the visual interest sustained at least. Engaging with the characters or caring about their predicament is much harder, and the libretto doesn't really find a way of making them sympathetic. Nor unfortunately does the singing which, despite the quality of the performers, is often required to be delivered in English as barked speech.  

Specifically subtitled as a Space Opera for Young Voices, it is the voices that dominate over the musical content. Whether through intent or through necessity because of the Covid pandemic, this is a considerably reduced orchestration from Srnka's previous opera for Munich (South Pole, 2016) - from snow storm to snow flake - also written in collaboration with librettist Holloway. Klangforum Wien however are skilled practitioners of new music and unconventional instrumentation and under conductor Patrick Hahn they deliver the impact of the bursts of analogue and digital worlds in conflict, more in the realm of sound art than conventional music. Whether you judge Singularity to have succeeded in its modest ambitions, at the very least it doesn't fall into the trap of the well-meaning but patronising moralising and platitudes that can blight opera for young people. That's something, but I'm not sure the opera entirely avoids the pitfall of dealing with superficial characters or handle the contemporary issues of technology in our lives with any originality or insight.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper TV, Bayerische Staatsoper

Reimann - Lear (Munich, 2021)

Aribert Reimann - Lear

Bayerische Staatsoper, 2021

Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christoph Marthaler, Christian Gerhaher, Angela Denoke, Ausrine Stundyte, Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, Georg Nigl, Andrew Watts, Matthias Klink, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Ivan Ludlow, Jamez McCorkle, Brenden Gunnell, Graham Valentine, Dean Power, Marc Bodnar

Bayerische Staatsoper TV - 30 May 2021

There aren't many late 20th century operas that have made such an impact as Aribert Reimann's Lear, a modern opera that has had around 30 productions since its creation in the 1978. And impact is an appropriate and apposite word to describe this extraordinary and still most challenging of operas, a work that is nothing less than an assault on the senses. Some might find that true of most modern opera, but when it comes to adapting this darkest and most violent of Shakespeare's plays - one that Verdi had ambitions to write but never achieved - it's an opera should shake you to the core. Reimann's Lear is indeed - in the best possible meaning of the term - an assault on the senses.

What is also extraordinary about the opera is how much it remains close to the original in text, tone and theme, a challenging work with a diverse cast of characters each with their own motives, character and personality. It retains as much as possible of the two almost distinct story-lines, Lear and his daughters on one hand Gloucester and his sons on the other, each one informing and enhancing the themes of the other. It's all there in the opera, right down to all the notable lines straight out of the play and, in this concentrated form, you'd be hard pressed to think of anything significant that has been cut.

What is even more extraordinary is how Reimann's music enhances the dramatic intensity of the original. In the play, much depends on a director's or actor's interpretation on how the characters come to life, how they interact, what they generate between them. Reimann is wholly the director here and scores those personalities even more intensely into the vocal lines. Few characters are more formidable in drama than Regan and Goneril, and in Reimann's version they are even more stridently terrifying creations, made all the more so by the layering of vocal lines in a way that cannot be done in the theatre, doubling the voices and thereby concentrating and intensifying the drama.

Given all that, Shakespeare and Reimann combined on a work as dark, dramatic and powerful as Lear, is it any wonder that director Christoph Marthaler decides that it needs no further dramatic intervention from him. Although that does seem to be a guiding principle for this director, preferring to offer a contrasting new element on top of the work rather than seek to provide mere dramatic illustration, he's not wrong with adopting that approach in this work. Whether what he brings to it has any merit or indeed interest is a matter of taste and interpretation, but you would hope at least that it doesn't get in the way of the inherent force of the work.

Some might think however that he does fail to adequately present the work on the stage, but at the very least one thing you could count on with Marthaler is that it would not be like any other production and be completely unpredictable, if not even barely comprehensible. He doesn't disappoint on that front. If you can reduce the concept down to a brief description, Anna Viebrock’s stage set is based on the Museum of Natural History in Basel, and Lear is a collector of insects who likes to preserve the past, viewing his own subjects and family as if they were exhibits pinned to a board.

Hence at the start of the Bayerische Staatsoper's 2021 production - with a live audience back after the most recent Covid-19 lockdown - we see a museum guide or scientist showing a small group of visitors the exhibits of the Lear family all mounted in glass display cases in a room of the museum. Other eccentric ways of complementing the drama follow, but hardly bear up to any real scrutiny or commentary. In the first half, Goneril and Regan's dismissal of Lear and his retinue is done by opening boxes of perfume and spraying it in their direction, while in the second half the cast are largely confined within transport cases and cupboards.

If Marthaler doesn't directly engage with the opera however, Reimann's score is certainly capable of presenting the subject on its own terms. It's the sound of a world descending into disorder and madness. Not just one old man's personal decline but all the beliefs, certainties and securities that we have held - even the order of tonality - being cast aside and utterly destroyed in halftones, quartertones and a barrage of thunderous percussion. It's literally the end of the world as we know it; the destruction of hope, of faith in humanity, the sound of despair and regret at the realisation of the reality, the truth about the nature of people revealed, the horror that people can inflict on one another and the depths to which they will stoop out of greed and self interest. It's the nature of the modern world laid bare.

Sadly there is little evidence of that in Marthaler's production, which actually seems to go out of its way to lessen the impact. Fair enough, you might not need to see the gory detail of Gloucester's bloody eye sockets, but putting two glass spheres onto Georg Nigl's eyes does not provoke the essential visceral response that the situation - and Reimann's scoring of it - uses to demonstrate the horrors that man (and woman) are capable of inflicting on one another. There might not be a whole lot Marthaler has to say about Lear, and there may indeed not be a whole lot more that anyone can add that isn't already there to its fullest in Shakespeare and Reimann, but interpretation is of course still an essential part of any opera performance and I was particularly looking forward to hearing the fine cast assembled for this production.

The singing at least tries its best to deliver the magnificent dark poetry of the text and the music that maximises its impact. Christian Gerhaher as Lear and Hanna-Elisabeth Müller as Cordelia are both excellent, doing their best to overcome the largely neutral inexpressive stage direction. Gerhaher manages to be typically lyrical while still describing the horror of his experience, but is still somewhat held back by the direction. Rather more successful since they have great roles to sing no matter what, Ausrine Stundyte is typically impressive as Regan and Angela Denoke suitably dramatic as Goneril, her unsteady and erratic pitch actually suiting Reimann's slides into horrific dissonance. Matthias Klink is outstanding as Edgar/Poor Tom.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper TV

Alfano - Risurrezione (Florence, 2020)

Franco Alfano - Risurrezione (Florence, 2020)

Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 2020

Francesco Lanzillotta, Rosetta Cucchi, Anne Sophie Duprels, Matthew Vickers, Leon Kim, Francesca Di Sauro, Romina Tomasoni, Nadia Pirazzini, Ana Victoria Pitts, Barbara Marcacci, Filomena Pericoli, Nadia Sturlese

Dynamic, Blu-ray

Rosetta Cucchi's production of Franco Alfano's Risurrezione was something of a revelation for me when when I first saw it at the Wexford Festival Opera in 2017. Not only did it serve to give much better representation of a composer who is only really known by most for having completed the last Act of Turandot when Puccini died, but it helped illuminate better the idea of opera verismo. More than just being about realism and the misfortunes of ordinary people, it can also be seen in many of its best works (La Bohème, Cavalleria Rusticana) to elevate the lives and suffering of ordinary people to something of a spiritual level.

If you are looking for an author in literature author who is capable of doing precisely that it's Count Leo Tolstoy. To be fair many of the classic Russian writers including Turgenev and particularly Chekhov achieve that in their writing, but no-one else lived their beliefs out quite the same way as Tolstoy. Repudiating even his greatest works and turning his back on the wealthy, dissolute lifestyle of being born into nobility, Tolstoy would choose to dedicate the rest of his life to not only celebrating the spiritual and morally pure existence of a life of hard work and poverty in his writing, but he would live his life according to those values as well.

Tolstoy documented his early life experiences in 'Childhood, Boyhood and Youth', and there's clearly also a semi-autobiographical element to the character of Prince Dmitri and his reckless womanising behaviour in his later work 'Resurrection'. A well-off noble, on a visit to his aunt's country house just before joining the army, Dimitri renews a childhood romance with Katyusha, one of the maids of the household who has now grown into an attractive woman. It's not so much a renewal of an innocent romance as much being aware that he has the power, position and authority to prey on the naivety of the young woman to seduce her.

In Act II we discover that Katyusha is pregnant from that fleeting encounter. Hearing that Dimitri is returning wounded from the front on his way home to St. Petersburg, she goes to the train station to see him and tell him of her predicament. Fearful, hoping he will understand, the bleakness of the conditions don't offer much comfort to Katyusha agonising outside in the cold winter, her fate hanging in the balance. Alfano's opera (not unlike Act III of La Bohème) cleverly interweaves a scene of drinking, gambling and a drunken dispute going on in the station, a scene that also alludes to other vices of the young Tolstoy. 

When Dimitri passes by without seeing her, a beautiful woman on his arm, Katyusha's fate is sealed; vagrancy, destitution, prostitution and a decline that sees her in Act III and IV unjustly condemned to 20 years imprisonment in Siberia. Dimitri however has recognised her, is repentant of his actions, has sought her out and wants to gain forgiveness by trying to save her. Katyusha's feelings about how that can be attained however are quite different and on a different level from Dimitri.

Musically, Alfano's score is wholeheartedly verismo in its range and dynamic, reminding one certainly of Puccini. The situations, the passing of the seasons, the joy of young love and foolishness turning to trials and pain of dealing with the harsh realities of life mirror scenes in La Bohème to an extent. The difference between them is that Puccini's subjects never let him achieve the same kind of of redemptive, soaring spiritual enlightenment that Alfano reaches for in Tolstoy's writing, failing to see - perhaps realistically - any other outcome for his troubled protagonists than death.

Risurrezione strives for a higher purpose, looking beyond death and material concerns towards a spiritual rebirth, and in that respect, Katyusha's journey is perhaps closer to Manon Lescaut in its trajectory and search for redemption for past sins. In the light of Risurrezione I wonder however whether it might be worth looking anew at this lesser and often unsatisfactorily staged Puccini to consider whether he wasn't striving towards a similar transcendental experience in that problematic final act, and whether the opera might be made to work with a staging as sympathetic to it as this one is to Alfano.

In staging Risurrezione it would be enough just to match the emotional content of the music and the drama to the weather conditions of each of the seasons that accompany and heighten the situations and experiences to an almost unbearable level of anguish. The shock of the verismo realism is powerful in its own right, and Rosetta Cucchi's direction doesn't flinch from showing the grim situations to the full. Much more tricky is allowing a sense of hope and meaning for such misery and suffering to take you through to the extraordinary finale of death and rebirth, but the director does that extraordinarily well. Using the image of a young girl seen out of the corner of Katyusha's eye to occasionally wander into each scene, it's a fine way to suggest a sense of the inner woman, the inner child and the necessity to rediscover the innocence of youth.

It's a fantastic idea that works well with the intent of the piece. How much you can hear of that in Alfano's music I'm not so sure, but there is repeated motif reflecting on a photograph of Katyusha taken when she was young in garden of Prince's aunt and the director expands on this to great effect. Conductor Francesco Lanzillotta certainly brings out the fullness of the emotional content of the score, but in order to feel the pain that deeply there must be some sense of human vulnerability there, as well as the human strength to rise out of it. That comes out in all its glory in the finale of the opera and the production's magnificent staging of it.

The human element in opera is of course best expressed through the voice and although Katyusha is evidently a challenging central role to deal with emotionally as well as on a technical level Anne Sophie Duprels reprises her 2017 performance of the role at Wexford here to striking effect. Matthew Vickers is a little bit stiff by comparison, but Dimitri it must be said is a rather more difficult figure to relate to. Vickers nonetheless sings the role well enough to feel some sympathy for this character. Leon Kim sings the baritone role of Simonson, the prisoner who falls in love with Katyusha in Siberia, warmly and with feeling.

This world premiere video recording of Risurrezione, recorded in January 2020 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, is released on DVD and Blu-ray by Dynamic. Image and sound are marvellous on the Blu-ray capturing the tone of the work and its presentation well in Hi-Res Stereo LPCM and surround DTS HD-Master Audio mixes. The enclosed booklet contains a tracklist, a full detailed synopsis and an informative essay on Alfano's and an analysis of the opera. The booklet is in Italian and English. The Blu-ray is region-free, BD50, and offers subtitles in Italian, English, French, German, Korean and Japanese.

Links: Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Blacher - Romeo und Julia (Duisberg, 2021)

Boris Blacher - Romeo und Julia

Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Duisberg - 2021

Christoph Stöcker, Manuel Schmitt, Florian Simson, Jussi Myllys, Lavinia Dames, Katarzyna Kuncio, Günes Gürle, Andrés Sulbarán, Beniamin Pop, Renée Morloc

OperaVision - 19 March 2021

Adaptations of Shakespeare to opera inevitably involve some level of cutting and reworking, to various extents and to various levels of success. Compromises would have also been made in centuries past - in Verdi, in Thomas and Berlioz - in libretti where the composers were working from less than ideal translations of Shakespeare's text. Some relatively modern adaptations have been much more successful in retaining as much of the poetry of the text and the spirit of the original as possible, notably Aribert Reimann's Lear and Brett Dean's Hamlet, surely two of the most difficult Shakespeare works to imagine being adapted to music.

The narrator at the prologue of Boris Blacher's 1943 chamber opera Romeo und Julia - a German cabaret chansonnier dressed in drag as Queen Elizabeth - suggests that this is not going to be the most faithful of Shakespeare adaptations, and although he promises a two hour telling, the 70 minute running time doesn't really appear to be capable of providing anything more than just a surface retelling of a doomed romance. That's still a lot of Shakespeare to compress down without losing the poetry and essence of the work, so evidently the music is going to have to do some heavy lifting here.

And to some extent, Blacher's opera does so much more successfully than you might imagine - impressively even - particularly since the reduced orchestration consists solely of string quintet, piano, flute, bassoon and trumpet. Secondary characters, including Friar Laurence, are combined in a tightly harmonised eight person chorale singing in oratorio-like fashion. Musically it's surprisingly varied in tone and arrangement, with a Kurt Weill-style cabaret narrator interludes and chamber orchestration that manages to capture the mood of each scene, from the dramatic fight, to the celebratory party, to the famous romantic encounters and the tragic finale.

The abridged and musically reduced version might have been something of a necessity for an opera composed during the war, but Romeo und Julia nonetheless benefits from this kind of compression and condensing, bringing a tighter focus to the love story. If it is less attentive to the detail of the wars between the Capulet and Montague, the real world outside would have provided plenty of context for that. Which in turn makes this an opera not only eminently suitable for staging in the current lockdown conditions, but one where we can understand the difficulties of people trying to carry on relationships under adverse conditions where circumstances and vast forces beyond their control strive to keep them apart.

Inevitably the drama of Romeo und Julia seems a little rushed and overheated if you are familiar with the play, but in truth, even the original play is overheated in how quickly passions and bloods are ignited in both love and in violence, and in how deeply these experiences cut. It's about young people, impetuous, quick to react, dismissive or even contemptuous of the consequences of not following the rules of their elders. The concision of Blacher's opera works then to the benefit of the headlong rush to abandon oneself to the passions of the moment, and the music does it's best to keep up with them.

Even if you're not all that familiar with the play, the tighter focus, the choice of scenes, the music, the handling of the characters and the use of a chorus makes it relatively easy to follow in this opera version. It helps that the poetry of the original is retained in as much as it can be in German translation, the English subtitles in this recorded version for OperaVision even choosing to adhere directly or much more closely to Shakespeare's original text. And when it has such famous lines, well, why wouldn't you?

Manuel Schmitt's directing for the Deutsche Oper am Rhein production is fairly simple but effective in the way that it contributes to highlight Blacher's take on the work and matches its austere chamber arrangements. The costumes are contemporary but there's nothing here trying too hard to be radical, just enough to be suitable and give a sense of the roles of each character. There is little need for over-decoration of the set either, the main action taking place on simple bare stage surrounded by neon-pipe lighting. Romeo and Juliet and the youths occupy centre stage, while fathers, mothers and other authority figures taken up by the chorus remain above on a surrounding platform.

There is however another level hinted at here, the stage rising to reveal a backstage underworld of sorts. Without getting too meta, it's partly an allusion to a narrative level, since the work has the chansonnier walk-on interludes, but it also hints at those external factors that extend the story outwards. All the world is indeed a stage, and each has their role to play. The distinctions and boundaries between our roles as actors, observers or facilitators is not always clear and that's also perhaps hinted at in the work or the production - particularly with many roles being subsumed into a chorus - or something at least that occurred to me while watching this.

Likewise, it's telling that there is a role for musicians on stage here and for "music with her silver sound", a minor scene in Romeo and Juliet (not one I even remembered, but I checked and it is there), but one which Blacher feels duty bound to include in his opera. The music Blacher writes for the work is indeed lyrical and dramatic for all its minimalism, conducted here by Christoph Stöcker to full heightened effect. The writing for the voices is lyrical too and beautifully sung here by Jussi Myllys and Lavinia Dames as Romeo and Juliet, the chorus also contributing to the overall success of this worthy and fascinating work that Deutsche Oper am Rhein have revived for us.

Links: OperaVision

Henze - Das verratene Meer (Vienna, 2020)

Hans Werner Henze - Das verratene Meer

Wiener Staatsoper, 2020

Simone Young, Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito, Vera-Lotte Böcker, Josh Lovell, Bo Skovhus, Erik Van Heyningen, Kangmin Justin Kim, Stefan Astakhov, Martin Häßler, Jörg Schneider

Wiener Staatsoper Live - 14 December 2020

Yukio Mishima's novella The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea seems like an unusual work to be adapted to opera, but it's a layered work of unusual psychological complexities that must have been of interest to Hans Werner Henze. Mishima was certainly interested in exploring unusual and taboo behaviours in characters seeking to break out from social restrictions and find an inner sense of order, purpose and meaning. In order to achieve that there is a need for dedication to purity, never showing weakness, seeking to find the spiritual in the physical. That conflict can develop into disillusionment or perhaps even something darker and more dangerous.

Short but densely layered, Henze finds a way in his musical treatment of his 1989 opera Das verratene Meer (The Sea Betrayed) to illustrate and probe those lusts, passions and urges and then attempt to align them with a sense of order that topples over into disorder. There are signs of repression of urges and taboo behaviour in the household of Fusako Kuroda, a widow in the Japanese port of Yokohama, the owner of a clothes shop, who still has sexual urges and seeks out company of sailors. Her 13 year old son Noboru has incestuous thoughts about his mother and spies on her when she undresses at night.

Mrs Kuroda is invited by Ryuji Tsukazaki, the second mate on the freighter Rakuyo Maru which has just come into port, to look around the ship, bringing Noboru with her. Ryuji describes himself as a man of the sea, someone who has a close relationship with the sea that is different from those who live on the land. The sea offered him a sense of excitement exploration and adventures, the sense of something else out there, but it hasn't lived up to its promise. He finds one port very much the same as the other, yet is still drawn towards the sea. When Fusako invites him over to get to know him better however, he sees the possibility of settling down there. 

Noboru isn't sure what to make of this new man in his mother's life. He sees a man conflicted and spies on Ryuji and his mother making love. Lacking a father and fascinated by the sea and adventure he idolises the sailor, wants to ensure that he finds his purpose, a sense of fulfillment, something that proves that there is meaning and order on the world. His friends however are less impressed. Influenced by them Noboru comes to lose faith in the sailor, seeing his infatuation with his mother as a weakness, one that steers him away from his much more important 'pure' relationship with sea.

In some ways the psychology of the work is basic archetypes, a little bit Freudian, but there is definitely an ambiguity to the resulting shock outcome that Mishima and Henze perhaps have different outlooks on. For Mishima its an allegory for the Japanese nation's fall from glory whereas for Hans Werner Henze - without changing a single thing about the work - Das verratene Meer can be seen as something different. Not unlike his version of Der Prinz von Homburg, it undercuts the idealisation of a heroic death, and like Homburg,Henze is undoubtedly drawing on the same personal response to his own country, his father, his experience of the military and his homosexuality.

Henze's music is by no means purely illustrative accompaniment then but seeks to conjoin the drama with the inner forces and the nature of the world. Order is imposed by man and is not only contrary to nature - as the killing of a cat can be said to demonstrate - but it can lead to harmful and dangerous consequences. Inevitably it's tense, driven, dark music that inhabits the same sound world as Benjamin Britten's dark explorations of human conflict and lusts as The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice, although coming a different musical tradition, that of Alban Berg with a little of the harsh dissonance of Aribert Reimann.

Henze uses a full range of orchestra resources at his disposal to achieve this, with full orchestral blasts as well as reduced instrumentation, punctuated with various percussion sounds. As with the Stuttgart Der Prinz Von Homburg, there is  terrific cast and orchestra here to do justice to the force of Henze's unsettling score, and a sympathetic conductor in Simone Young. The final cymbal claps of the execution of the sailor by the teenage boys coming across not just like killing blows, but like the crashing of waves from the vengeful sea.

Superbly directed by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito for maximum impact of the unsettling qualities of the work, the production sets the opera in the surroundings of a port of bare concrete. That and the presence of railings that signify the presence of the sea through, remain throughout the fourteen scenes that overlap and draw together the mental as well as physical locations of a bunker, a bedroom and the door of the shop. Brutalist ugliness and poetic reverie are in this way combined in the set design as they are in the music. Most impressive - as she was also in the cast for the 2018 Stuttgart Der Prinz von Homburg - is Vera-Lotte Böcker singing the challenging vocal range of Fusako, but there are excellent performances also from Josh Lovell as Noboru and Bo Skovhus as Ryuji.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper, Wiener Staatsoper Live

Gounod - Faust (Vienna, 2021)

Charles Gounod - Faust

Wiener Staatsoper, 2021

Bertrand de Billy, Frank Castorf, Juan Diego Flórez, Nicole Car, Adam Palka, Étienne Dupuis, Martin Häßler, Kate Lindsey, Monika Bohinec

Wiener Staatsoper Live - 29 April 2021

It doesn't surprise me that some opera lovers would not be too fond of the directorial style of Frank Castorf. He certainly has his own unique approach to opera that is not to everyone's taste. Even if you are open to new ways of presenting opera, there's an awful lot thrown into a Castorf production; some of it obviously related to the work, other elements rather less so. It can be hard work and while you might want to put the effort in for something like Der Ring des Nibelungen, From The House of the Dead or Die Vögel, you might be less inclined to see all the Castorf tricks employed on something as popular as Gounod's Faust.

Opera however is a multi-faceted artform and the best works prove to be adaptable to renovation and reconsideration. Through its very nature Faust should provide not only plenty of entertaining songs, beautiful arias and dramatic situations for singing and dancing, but it should also be able to address other deeper elements in Dr Faustus's search for love, youth and the meaning of life. Entering into a pact with Satan in exchange for such knowledge inevitably brings up questions of morality, religion and war, which means there is plenty for a director like Frank Castorf to get his teeth into.

Castorf's approach is seemingly haphazard and random, a bit of a mess frankly on first viewing, particularly if you are looking for all the familiar situations and signposts. I mean, there are signposts up there pointing to Paris locations, but not the kind that help you find a direction through the drama. Rather than view the opera as a continuous narrative or, in the case of Gounod's opera, a series of separate scenes that build up into an overall work, Castorf goes for the holistic approach and puts everything on the stage all at once. And it's not just the sets all on a revolving platform and even piled on top of one another, but characters and separate incidents, unrelated to the main scene, are all shown simultaneously backstage, projected in live camera shots on screens. It's an awful lot to take in all at once.

So there on Aleksandar Denić's revolving set, you can see a condensed Paris, past and future all piled on top of one another, front and behind, interiors opening onto exteriors, with a cafe, a church, a butcher shop, the Folies Bergère, and residential apartments. It's dressed in typical Castorf fashion, with obscure movie posters, a telephone booth, a Coke machine. There's even a metro station recreated, the Stalingrad station, where Kate Lindsey's Siébel comes out wearing a desert combat military uniform, his feet bloodied.

With police and foreign legion soldiers in kepis, one of Castorf's targets here is at least clear enough. Valentin emerges out of the metro and paints the words "Algeria is French" on the wall, while additional texts and commentary point to a less idealistic view of Valentin's military exploits, De Gaulle and France's colonialist history and atrocities. The devil is indeed in the detail and there's no doubting the nature of Mephistopheles here. He's not some smooth businessman or smart-dressed nobleman. He comes complete with demonic accoutrements; hairy goat legs, horse tail and hooves. He's a voodoo practitioner, using live snakes, he's menacing and seductive. 

Having thrown all that onto the stage with not a great deal of rationale provided, there's little evidence either of much character development or direction of the singers. Juan Diego Flórez is allowed to stand and sing arias out directly to the audience in an arm waving concert performance delivery. Nicole Car likewise delivers arias outward, but makes up for this by appearing to be much more emotionally attuned to Marguerite and her sad fate. Here Marguerite is not the naive waif we are accustomed to, but since this is the 21st century (or 20th maybe) she is more worldly wise. She puffs on opium and has a good time, but is not fool enough to trust Faust and takes responsibility for her own mistakes.

Frank Castorf appears to be more in his element when he can abandon the limitations of the libretto and "surreptitiously" film Faust and Marguerite behind the scenes with handheld cameras in manufactured situations. This can be a little bit 'random' particularly when filming and developing the other characters Marthe and Siébel. If there is anything that helps guide you through Castorf's production, something compelling that holds like an anchoring point in all the madness, it's Nicole Car's performance that places Marguerite at the heart of Gounod's opera. It's an outstanding performance which could prove to be her defining role.

Juan Diego Flórez can hit the notes all right but his voice is a little too lightweight for Faust, when it needs more of an Alagna or Kaufmann. He doesn't make the same kind of impression that Car does, but aside from the operatic gesturing to the non-existent audience (the production here filmed during lockdown in an empty theatre), it's not a bad performance. Adam Palka is an excellent Mephistopheles, fully entering into the demonic nature of this version of the character and proving to be menacing in tone and performance. Bertrand de Billy conducted the work with a fullness of melody and drama.

I'm not so sure that Castorf really connects with Gounod's Faust or has anything insightful to say about it, but he certainly gives you plenty of opportunity to reconsider the work and see it in a new light. You can question the validity of that approach since for the most part that has less to do with the actual work than the peripheral action, in the additional behind the scenes projections and twists of characterisation. Whether it works or not, whether it's convincing or not isn't the point. You don't have to agree with his choices, but even that allows you to firm up your own convictions about the work. That, as far as I'm concerned, is certainly better than having nothing to contribute.

Links: Vienna State Opera, Wiener Staatsoper Live

Wagner - Parsifal (Vienna, 2021)

Richard Wagner - Parsifal

Wiener Staatsoper, 2021

Philippe Jordan, Kirill Serebrennikov, Jonas Kaufmann, Georg Zeppenfeld, Elīna Garanča, Ludovic Tézier, Wolfgang Koch, Stefan Cerny, Ileana Tonca, Anna Nekhames, Aurora Marthens

ARTE Concert  - 18 April 2021

With its blend of philosophy, religion, mythology, spirituality and humanism, Wagner's Parsifal can be a tough prospect to make sense of on a narrative level, particularly in translating that to a modern audience in recognisable human terms. Not that it needs a coherent narrative. Almost every production I've seen of this masterpiece has found original endless (and sometimes baffling) ways of presenting it, while at the same time everything that it is about is all there in the music. And when I say music, it's not just the notes on the page, the singing or even the interpretation of it but the space and time it occupies in performance. The viewer enters into communion with Parsifal in a way that does not happen quite the same way with any other opera.

High-flown words maybe, but there is truth in this. You could write volumes exploring the work, you could write books alone on productions like Herheim's Bayreuth Parsifal, and yet however the work is dressed up, whatever means are used to explore its themes, it rarely fails to make some kind of impact and it's often a profound one. At heart the theme and message of the work can be said to be relatively simple, but in its simplicity it touches on something vast, the essence of an important aspect of what it means to be human, perhaps the most important. Redemption through Compassion, the understanding of which will put us on the path to our soul's salvation.

Even though there are clear religious and ceremonial overtones in the presentation of these themes in Parsifal's Easter Good Friday message, it certainly doesn't need to be seen through a Christian or religious perspective. Indeed such grave solemnity and reverence in a production can get in the way of letting the music express its deep human qualities. Not to make excuses for the sometimes unclear situations and direction in the current Vienna State Opera production by Kirill Serebrennikov, but even the idea of putting that into a coherent dramatic narrative is ridiculous. Anyone expecting or needing a "story" to get it across is missing the point. Richard Wagner utterly and completely puts it all into musical language, which is even more direct and yet complex in how it manages to achieve that with such incredible impact.

It's difficult to describe convincingly how the Vienna 2021 lockdown production manages to get that across - it would take a long time and a lot of pointless analysis - but it unquestionably does. Serebrennikov's setting certainly looks unlike anything else you might associate with Montsalvat. Here's it's a prison, looking more like Janáček's From The House of the Dead. Gurnemanz is the respected veteran lifer who takes young ones under his wing, shows them the ropes and even does tattoos for them. Unlike any other Gurnemanz, this one even collects packages of contraband drugs from bent wardens for them. He knows they need something else to get them through the misery of their situation, and tells them stories that give hope that some kind of redemption may be possible. Even those living in an eternal hell like the seriously ill Amfortas.

It seems unlikely that the new young man on the cell block is going to be any kind of saviour in this production. Young and foolish, he's forgotten his good upbringing and got into a lot of trouble. Not so innocent, in prison he has even killed a man, a "swan", an albino man with tattoo wings who tried to get close to him naked in the showers and paid the price. Someone however sees his potential; Kundry, a visitor who has been granted permission to photograph inside the prison, gathering images of raw masculinity for a fashion magazine, "Schloss". She however lives within a prison of her own and is seeking a way out, seeing something within this young man that might help her overcome her own demons if they don't swallow him up as well.

Aided by projections, the production plays the long first Act out as if it happens over a number of days, and that works well, in its own way bending time and space, encapsulating the inner world and dreams of the prisoners with the harsh reality of their confinement. The idea of being outside of time in any linear narrative is also put across in the use of flashback, Jonas Kaufmann the older wiser Parsifal looking back with regret on his past mistakes and innocence of his younger self, played by actor Nikolay Sidorenko. If you don't quite understand where it is going however that also turns out to be a good thing, as the whole opera is a process, you need to live through it and experience it in its totality to understand it in any kind of way.

Act II however proves to be pivotal here as it should be but far too often fails to adequately achieve. It opens up some of that in the unlikely setting of the offices of Schloss, a fashion magazine run by the tyrannical Klingsor. The Flowermaidens are fashion journalists, office staff and even cleaning staff, all lusting over the new cover model, which really is no less relatable than having mythical female ciphers float around him. What makes Act II striking is by bringing in what is only alluded to in the original and making it central to the purpose of the work, and that's Parsifal's mother Herzeleide.

Many productions have sought to extend the range of Parsifal far beyond the singing characters - Philipp Stölzl even recreating the crucifixion of Christ in a Deutsche Oper production - and with good reason, as much of what is learned as a process doesn't just extend over a lifetime, but over many lifetimes. The production here finds that the best way of expressing what sparks Parsifal's journey to self-realisation is the image that Kundry evokes of his mother. The director brings not just one but three Herzeleide's to the stage. Parsifal's first true feelings for another person are, appropriately and meaningfully, for his mother. Understanding what she has suffered for him only for him to go off the rails, is a profound revelation. Through this he suddenly realises what Amfortas has been going through, and sets out to find a way of bringing healing to his suffering.

And quite what role Kundry plays in this is also difficult to describe but it's vital, the Flowermaidens likewise presenting him with different aspects of what it means to be a woman, deepening his understanding of his own mother's situation. Somehow the director Serebrennikov - mainly though the medium of an astonishing performance from Elīna Garanča - manages to match up the sense of deep sorrow, regret and loss with a sultry undercurrent that runs through the music in this Act. Act II can often feel disjointed and unfathomable, but at its best it is enigmatic and the key to the work, and the new Vienna production makes the most of it, not least in Philippe Jordan's conducting, pacing and navigation of the dynamics of the score.

Trying to analyse and correlate the production with a predetermined idea of what Parsifal should be and even expecting it to deliver a coherent narrative is however besides the point. It's a metaphor, and it makes no more sense than expecting Wagner's mythology of the Knights of the Holy Grail, the suffering of Amfortas, the killing of a swan, the evil of Klingsor and the revelation in a kiss to make sense on any level of reality that is relatable to our lives. The best that a production can do is perhaps illuminate one aspect of the many themes and ideas expressed in the work and put it into terms that are recognisable to a modern audience. And if you can get across an important message - as this one does about imprisonment of the soul and finding a way to freedom - then it's more than enough. Anyone expecting to make narrative sense of the director's production however is only distracting themselves from the beauty of the sentiments expressed and the performances.

And what performances! It's not just a starry cast with a few experienced and distinguished Wagnerians in key roles, but there are some chances and risks taken in a few of the other casting choices that make it much more interesting and bring a little something extra to the production. Jonas Kaufmann sings the role of Parsifal well, if inevitably a little detached by being doubled with an actor. It's sung in the manner that you may be accustomed to, a manner not to everyone's taste, slightly over-pushed. He can do grave and anguished but personally I felt that he lacks sensitivity for Parsifal, and crucially lacks compassion for the role. Elsewhere however there is little to fault.

As we've come to expect from his other Wagner bass roles, Georg Zeppenfeld is just perfect. Hunding, Heinrich der Vogler and King Marke are one thing, but Gurnemanz is a much more extensive role on another level entirely. If the strain sometimes showed over the four hour running time, there was little evidence of it in his singing, which was faultless throughout, warm and compelling. As mentioned earlier, Elīna Garanča also takes her performance to another level. Kundry does present such opportunities for a singer, and even if this production didn't give her as much of a central role or room for interpretation, Garanča takes it to the level required in her singing and acting performance. I've never seen her sing a role so deeply.

Defining Klingsor as a sleazy office manager abuser of his position and power is more relatable than viewing him simplistically as an evil sorcerer, and Wolfgang Koch is suitably sinister in a typically reliable performance. Ludovic Tézier is one of the world's finest Verdi baritones and that doesn't necessarily translate over to a traditional Amfortas role in Wagner, but it certainly makes for an interesting interpretation. He carries some of the mannerisms of Italian opera across, but nonetheless gives a lyrical, sincere and heartfelt performance here. Avoiding the cliches of the spear healing the wound, he nonetheless finds peace as Parsifal's healing message of love, forgiveness and compassion sees the swan reborn and mankind freed from the pain and prison of their everyday existence to possibility of a better world.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper, ARTE Concert