Category Archives: DVD review

La finta giardiniera in glorious white and white

Posted on by
3

Mozart’s La finta giardiniera is pretty thin stuff.  The libretto is dreadful.  The fits of madness start before the opera gets going when Count Belfiore tries to murder his fiancée Marchioness Violante.  She runs off and becomes a gardener aided by her man-servant Roberto.  There’s another gardener, Sarpetta, who is being wooed by Roberto (alias Nardo) and Violante’s (now Sandrina) boss the mayor has a niece, Arminda, who now plans to marry Belfiore to the dismay of her former lover Ramiro.  And along the way the mayor, Don Anchise, gets the hots for Sandrina.  Throw in a whole lot of confusion about Sandrina/Violante’s identity (because she keeps claiming that she’s not Violante or is just pretending to be Violante depending who she is talking to) and it’s no wonder that everyone goes mad at least once.  Frankly the audience has every right to as well.  And there’s three hours of this.  The music is OK.  It’s Mozart at 18 and he’s writing to a formula most of the time.  So we get workmanlike but predictable arias and ensembles that only occasionally hint at what is to come in the later operas.

1.sandrina

Continue reading →

Barbara Hannigan – Concert Documentary

Posted on by
3

The Hannigan obsession continues.  This time I’ve been looking at a DVD, Barbara Hannigan – Concert Documentary.  It’s in two parts.  There’s a recording of Hannigan as soloist and conductor with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the 2014 Lucerne Festival and there’s a documentary, I’m a creative animal, looking at her life and work.

1.conducting

Continue reading →

Making sense of La Sonnambula

Posted on by
1

I’m not a huge bel canto fan so it’s probably no surprise that I had, previous to this DVD, only seen Bellini’s La sonnambula once.  That was in Mary Zimmermann’s messy production at the Met which had left me with the impression that it was a rather feeble comedy with formulaic music and not much improved by Zimmermann’s attempts to sex it up.  I did wonder if it might be improved by the full on Regie treatment and so I was quite happy to have a chance to see the DVD of Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito’s 2013 Stuttgart production, especially as it had played to significant critical acclaim and won a bunch of awards.  I was surprised and impressed.  Far from being a cavalcade of extraneous elements (the usual charge levelled at Regie), this production probed the libretto and the source materials in a highly intelligent way to produce something really rather moving.  The music is still what it is; tuneful, well crafted but hardly deep, but there you go.

1.inn

Continue reading →

The Devil it is

Posted on by
Reply

Boito’s Mefistofele is a rather odd work.  It’s truer to the original Goethe than other operatic versions of the Faust legend which means it’s very episodic and focuses on the Faust/Mefistofele relationship rather than on Margherita.  In fact she’s dead with an act and an epilogue still to go.  It’s hard to categorize musically too.  Some parts are rather bombastic, vulgar even, yet at other times we seem to be drifting into bel canto territory.  So it’s a bit uneven; listenable enough but not very memorable.

1.mefistofele

Continue reading →

I Capuletti e I Montecchi

Posted on by
5

The story line for Bellini’s opera I Capuletti e I Montecchi will be familiar enough though it’s very condensed and based on the earlier source by Bandello rather than Shakespeare’s more elaborate reworking.  So, lots of feuding but no back story, no balcony scene, no friar’s cell.  But (spoiler alert) the ending is the same.  Vincent Broussard’s production, originally from Munich but filmed in San Francisco in 2012, sets the work around the time of its composition and seems at times to reference that it was composed for the Venice Carnivale.  It also veers around between being quite literal and trying to make the story something going on in Romeo’s head.  The production is quite influenced visually by the fact that the costumes were designed by Christian Lacroix and it’s unclear whether he’s trying to support the production concept or promote his brand.

1.saddles

Continue reading →

We the sheeple

Posted on by
2

Calixto Bieito’s production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov recorded at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2013 is, unsurprisingly, strong stuff.  The central concept is that the political classes “don’t give a fig” for ordinary people and that’s as true , or truer, now than in early modern Russia.  In such a world, where the people are manipulated into acting as their “betters” demand, is it possible for a person like Boris, who has risen to supreme power through manipulation and violence, to have a conscience?

1.placards

Continue reading →

Phantom of Lilith

Posted on by
8

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production of Berg’s Lulu (it’s the three act version with the Cerha completion) recorded at Brussel’s La Monnaie in 2012 is so stuffed full of symbolism it’s really hard to fully unpack.  There’s a sense that Lulu represents Everywoman, for some rather twisted definition of “woman”.  She’s Lilith.  She’s Pandora.  She’s the Black Swan and the White Swan.  She’s lost or corrupted childhood and she’s love gone wrong.  Maybe she’s even the phantom of Berg’s estranged daughter.  All these symbols recur again and again in various combinations.  In fact, on DVD, it’s pretty much impossible to keep track of them.

1.point Continue reading →

La Comtesse Cecilia

Posted on by
4

Rossini’s Le Comte Ory is extremely silly.  It’s a crazy, gender bending romp with no real substance but plenty of rather crude humour and good tunes.  I suspect it’s beyond the wit of any director than do more than make sure the mad cap elements are mad enough but one is, I suppose, bound to try.  For their 2012 production in Zürich, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier chose to set the piece in immediately post war France.  It works well enough and allows for a few visual gags but it doesn’t really add much to the piece.  Nor, though, does it detract.

1.caravan Continue reading →

Brueghelland

Posted on by
1

ETA 6th December 2019:

Rewatching Le Grand Macabre after four years has rather changed my opinion.  It still seems weird and sometimes hard to watch but I think I see a certain logic in it now that completely escaped me before.  So the End of the World is approaching and all the Powers that Be can do is squabble, exchange scatological insults and get very, very drunk while the one sane (if rather weird) character (Gepopo) can’t find a language to communicate the enormity of what’s happening to them.  Sound vaguely familiar?  (Coincidentally, I’m writing this on the day that Andrew Scheer said that the Federal Government should give more heroin to the addicts in Alberta because otherwise they’ll get in a snit).  Of course, in Ligeti’s version Death gets so drunk that he screws up terminating the space-time continuum but we probably won’t be so lucky.  So yes the fart jokes and the raccoon on bins orchestra is still there but it now seems to me in service of something rather more profound than I previously gave it credit for.  Also, Hannigan is not just brilliant vocally.  It’s also, even by her standards, an amazing physical performance. (Original review under the cut).

gepopoprince

Continue reading →

Hunchback Hoffmann

Posted on by
Reply

Giancarlo del Monaco’s production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann recorded in Bilbao in 2006 isn’t nearly as weird as the interviews on the first disk might lead one to expect.  It has its moments but in many ways is more “by the book” than the Laurent Pelly production I looked at last week.  The interviews talk of a “Sartrian” Hoffmann and a Freudian approach to Antonia.  Ok so Hoffmann is portrayed as a hunchback and he’s fairly damaged but he’s basically your standard drunk poet fixated on a woman or women he can’t have.  I can’t actually see this dude nailing his hand to a nightclub table with a knife or drowning his cat to prove a point.

1.kleinzach Continue reading →