Category Archives: DVD review

Zürich Ring – Die Walküre

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Continuing on from Das Rheingold we come to Die Walküre.  There’s a lot of continuity with the earlier work.  It’s basically the same rotating set though in some scenes one of the “rooms” becomes a forest.  Another thing we see is characters who aren’t canonically “there” appearing in scenes.  So right at the beginning, when Siegmund and Sieglinde meet, Wotan is lurking and doing things like handing drinks to Sieglinde.  We’ll see more of this with Hunding’s henchmen appearing in various places, Wotan and the henchmen appearing when Sieglinde is describing her wedding and the Valkyries showing up at the start of Act 2.

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A new Ring from Zürich – Das Rheingold

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A new production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is always a bit of an event and all the more so when it’s in the city where the work was composed.  Andreas Homoki’s production premiered and was recorded for video at Opernhaus Zürich in 2024.  I’ll be working my way through the whole cycle but here are my initial thoughts based on Das Rheingold.

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Dancing with Death

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Stephen Langridge’s production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux recorded at the Donizetti Festival in Bergamo in 2024 is heavy on death symbolism.  The general look of the sets is fairly abstract with a sort of light box with a gallery and a few bright red elements; the throne, the Nottinghams’ bed and so on, but there are skulls and other memento mori everywhere.  Costuming is sort of operatic Tudor but Elisabetta’s dress is a print that includes skulls and she’s doubled by a human size, identically dressed, Death puppet.  As seems to be the fashion, much of the time only the front of the stage is lit leaving characters lurking in the gloom upstage.

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Zoraida di Granata

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Zoraida di Granata is an early serious opera by Donizetti.  It’s set in Muslim controlled Granada in 1480.  The city is under siege by the Spanish and the usurper Almuzir is in control and wants to marry Zoraida, daughter of the former king, but she’s in love with Abenamet, leader of the aristocratic and warlike Abencerrages.  Almuzir makes Abenamet commander in chief of his army and entrusts him with a sacred flag.  If he returns victorious and with the flag he gets Zoraida but if he loses the flag he’ll be executed as a traitor.  Naturally Almuzir has arranged for his sidekick, Ali, to betray the flag to the Spanish.  The victorious hero is going to be executed but Zoraida promises to marry Almuzir if he spares Abenamet.  Then the lovers meet secretly and after the statutory rowing about Zoraida betraying him Abumet exits.  But Ali has overheard the conversation and gets Zoraida sentenced to death for treason.  Only a knight showing up to defend her in trial by combat can save her (that again!).  Of course it’s Abenamet in disguise and he beats Ali who fesses up.  The clan want to kill Almuzir and Ali but Abenamet forgives them and in return gets the girl.

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A Tancredi for our times?

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Rossini’s early opera seria Tancredi is set in Syracuse in the early 11th century and turns on two rival families coming together in the face a threat from both Byzantines and Saracens.  The hero is the knight Tancredi, secretly in love with the daughter of one of rival families.  Jan Philipp Gloger’s production filmed at Bregenz in 2024 updates it to the present with the families being rival drug gangs and the “threat” the police.  There’s a further twist.  Tancredi is a mezzo role and always sung by a woman.  Here Tancredi is played as a woman pretending to be a man; at least to everyone except her lover Amenaide.

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Un Ballo in Maschera in the dark

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Vincent Boussard’s production of Vedi’s Un Ballo in Maschera staged and filmed at Barcelona’s Liceu in 2017 is dark.  Basically there’s a light box in which the characters at front of stage can be seen while others lurk in the darkness.  According to the notes Broussard is using light and shadow to bring out the themes of illusion and truth, duty and betrayal.  That sounds to me like cleverness masquerading as a production concept and bar a few striking visuals this is hardly a production at all.

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Orphée as love triangle

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Gluck’s Orpheus opera; in either Italian or French guise, is usually presented as a short and cheery “love conquers all” with an uncomplicated happy ending.  Pierre Audi in his production of the 1774 Paris version of Orphée et Euridice, recorded at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2022 takes a different tack.  Here Amour, who is on stage 100% of the time, forms a love triangle with Orphée and Euridice and while she’s happy to work to reunite the lovers Orphée gets in a snit in the last act when he realises that her interest isn’t entirely altruistic and comes close to violence when the two girls show more interest in each other than in him!

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Jurowski and Tcherniakov do War and Peace

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How does one do (if one does at all) a propagandistic Russian opera in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.  Dmitri Tcherniakov and Vladimir Jurowski’s approach to Prokofiev’s War and Peace, filmed at Bayerische Staatsoper, is radical, complex and controversial.  See my full (and ridiculously long) review at La Scena Musicale.