Category Archives: DVD review

What one calls a happy marriage

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Richard Strauss’ Intermezzo is a very strange semi-autobiographical piece apparently dealing with the married life of Richard and Pauline Strauss thinly disguised as Court Composer Robert Storch and his wife Christine.  What is really a bit weird is how these two characters are presented.  Herr Storch is a bit stuffy and self absorbed but Frau Storch is just awful.  She is rude to everyone, especially her long suffering maid and other servants, and she overreacts bizarrely to just about everything.  She’s spoiled, self-centred, vain and generally a giant PitA.

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Lohengrin with a twist

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Sometimes opera directors come up with a twist to a plot hat is illuminating without requiring pretzel logic to actually align it with the libretto.  I think Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabit’s production of Wagner’s Lohengrin for the Wiener Staatsoper in 2024 manages that pretty well.

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A valuable rediscovery

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Miecysłav Weinberg’s The Idiot, based on the Dostoevsky novel, was composed in 1986/7 but didn’t get a full premiere until 2013 in Mannheim.  The neglect of Weinberg’s music in USSR/Russia is probably explained by him being a Polish Jew but why he’s so little known elsewhere is a bit of a mystery as The Idiot shows that The Passenger wasn’t a fluke.  Anyway, The Idiot got a second outing at Salzburg in 2024 in a rather complex production by Krysztof Warlikowski.

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Frustrating Gambler in Salzburg

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I don’t think I’ve been as frustrated by a video recording of an opera since I watched the 2007 recording of Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland.  This time the culprit is a recording of the 2024 production of Prokofiev’s The Gambler at the Salzburg Festival.  It’s a Peter Sellars production set in the Felsenreitschule and it’s fascinating on many levels.  The problem is that, as is wont, Sellars directs the video too and he seems to think people watch opera videos on their phones.  There’s been a welcome trend since the advent of HD cameras to, generally, show as much of the stage action as possible and ration extreme close ups.  Sellars takes the opposite approach and it drives me nuts.  Not only do I feel that I’m missing a lot; especially in the cavernous Felsenreitschule, but I just don’t need to know how fast Asmik Gregorian is moving her tongue when she’s going for fast vibrato.

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Salzburg’s Hoffmann is hard to decode

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Mariane Clément’s production of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann recorded at the 2024 Salzburg Festival is not the sort of production that one dismisses as pointless and/or ill conceived but it is complex and difficult to read; at least on first viewing.  That said,  being on video rather than live probably doesn’t help.

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Lively Don Pasquale

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The production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale recorded at the 2024 Donizetti Festival in Bergamo is lively colourful and, generally, well done.  Amélie Niermayer’s production is essentially contemporary with a heavy emphasis on class difference between the relatively upscale Pasquale clan and the Malatestas who are shown as some sort of Italian equivalent of “Essex man”.  Doctor Malatesta has tattoos and wears a heavy gold chain and when we first see Norina she’s in braids, a T shirt, fishnets and also sports tattoos.  Her taste doesn’t improve much after the “wedding”.  In contrast, Ernesto is more stylish and less of a dweeb than in other productions I’ve seen.

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Final thoughts on the Zürich Ring

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Overall I rate this cycle very highly.  Andreas Homoki’s production is unusual in that it’s really not conceptual and is often very literal.  That’s rare in Wagner productions in major European houses.  But it’s also not cluttered up with superfluous 19th century “stuff”.  When a thing is essential, it’s there as described.  If it’s not essential more often than not it’s omitted.

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Zürich Ring – Götterdämmerung

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And so to the final instalment… We open with the Rock but now the background room; while still the same 18th/19th century mansion, looks a bit the worse for wear with peeling and cracked paint. The Norns, predictably, are all in white.  It’s all pretty conventional but done well.

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Zürich Ring – Siegfried

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Siegfried has been described as the scherzo of the Ring cycle and Andreas Homoki seems to have at least partly run with that.  There are quite a few places, including some less obvious ones, where he seems to be going for laughs.  The obvious ones are obvious enough.  You can’t really have a bear in the first scene without it being comic but there were also times when Wanderer was camping it up a bit.  We’ll come back to that.

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