In the booklet accompanying David McVicar’s production of Le nozze di Figaro, recorded at the Royal Opera house in 2006, there’s an essay by the director in which he raises all kinds of questions about the rise of the bourgeoisie, the nature of revolution and romantic conceptions of love. He even appears to draw a parallel between Joseph II and Tony Blair. Then he declines to explain how he has embodied all these ideas on the stage and challenges us to “Watch, listen, participate”. Well I did and I’m none the wiser. What I see here is an essentially traditional approach; transferred cosmetically to 1830s France but so what? It’s darker than some Figaro’s but not nearly as dark as, say, Guth. Curiously, the main “extra” on the disks “Stage directions encoded in the music” tees this up much more clearly than the essay.
Hands on Figaro
5
Well not strictly baroque. I wanted a category for pre-Mozart rep since so many houses (and audiences) ignore it and there are some very odd ideas about performing it. So we are going to cover ground from the earliest days of opera to the late 18th century here, including staged versions of oratorios, because I rather like them. Here, in rough order of composition, then are my picks; from Monteverdi to Rameau. 
The opera video recording is in some ways a rather recent phenomenon. Before the DVD there really wasn’t a very satisfactory way of distributing a product with a decent sound though there were TV broadcasts and some have been preserved in the catalogue. Most of the extant recordings are “made for TV” and tend to show the limitations of the technology of the time. Interestingly, most pre 1980 recordings are of films made in the studio and lip synched to a pre-recorded track. There are only a handful of recordings of live performances in the opera house plus some pioneering BBC recordings of Britten works where the singers are “live”.
operaramblings 