Category Archives: DVD review

Fear and loathing in Corinth

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Cherubini’s 1797 opéra comique Médée was one of the first to use the form for serious drama.  Krzysztof Warlikowski’s 2011 production filmed at La Monnaie in Brussels is certainly that.  Jason, Medea and the rest are very contemporary characters though we often see them against a backdrop of 1960s style home movies and the chorus too, which tends to remain in the background also seems to be from the same period.The meaning of this juxtaposirtion isn’t clear and there is nothing on the disks or in the documentation to help.  We are also told that the libretto was adapted by Warlikowski and dramaturge Christian Longchamp but nothing more than that.  This is definitely a production where the director’s notes would be a major plus.

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Jealousy, rage, love and fear

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It’s a curious thing how some works get over recorded and others are almost entirely neglected.  For example, there’s only one video recording of Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper and that a 1931 film that omits huge chunks of the stage work.  It’s inspiration fares little better.  There’s only one video recording of The Beggar’s Opera by Johann Pepusch and John Gay.  It’s a 1963 BBC TV production of Benjamin Britten’s reworking of the piece for the English Opera Group based on a stage production by Colin Graham. [ETA: There are actually two other versions; a 1953 movie version with Lawrence Olivier and a 1980s version with Roger Daltrey and John Eliot Gardiner].

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Can Bayreuth really tackle Meistersinger?

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Die Meistersinger is a problematic opera, particularly for Bayreuth.  It has rather disturbing elements of German nationalism and a performance tradition at the festival of those being used for ends that most people would rather be able to forget.  No surprise then that Katharina Wagner’s production, recorded in 2008, tries to deal with both.  It’s a bold effort.  Like Robert Carsen’s Tannhäuser it tries to use visual art as a metaphor for music and art in general.

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Brünnhilde lives

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The concluding instalment of Kasper Holten’s Copenhagen Ring really does wrap it up as Brünnhilde’s story.  It’s very effective in so doing too.  Holten states that the central problem in interpreting the Ring is the ending and he points out that Wagner struggled with it for years before resorting to what Holten sees as a cop out; the tired, patriarchal device of wrapping things up by having the heroine sacrifice herself for her man.  Holten rejects this and instead offers us a living Brünnhilde as a symbol of hope and renewal at the end of a century of terrible strife.  I wish I were as optimistic.

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Meyerbeer in the museum

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Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine was a huge hit in Paris, London and New York when it premiered in 1865.  I’m not sure why.  It has all of the things that make Meyerbeer seem very dated and not as much of the good stuff as Les Huguenots, or even Dinorah.  It’s ostensibly about Vasco de Gama but that’s just a peg to pin a love triangle and a bunch of exoticism on.  Are we actually supposed to believe that the Portugese wanted to find a way around the Cape to find out what was there?  It would have been a lot easier to get hold of a copy of Herodotus.  It’s also long.  Even with cuts it runs well over three hours in the version recorded at San Francisco Opera in 1988.

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Ponnelle’s Ulisse

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Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria is the third of the Ponnelle/Harnoncourt Monteverdi collaborations and perhaps the best.  Itseems to stick closer to the original Zürich staging and be less obviously a film though it was recorded in the studio and lip synched.  The orchestra and conductor are visible and, in Act 3, Irus descends into the pit throws himself all over Harnoncourt.  It’s the conductor too who gives him the knife he kills himself with.  Is this the first (of many) times when Harnoncourt has been drawn into the theatrical action?

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My darling goat

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Meyerbeer’s Dinorah ou le Pardon de Ploërmel must be a very strong candidate for the silliest opera ever written.  It concerns a young girl, Dinorah, who is deserted on her wedding day by her fiancé Hoël who disappears in search of a cursed treasure.  She goes mad.  There’s sheep and goat ballet, a lullabye to a goat accompanied on the bagpipes, more sheep and goat ballet and a scene where Dinorah sings a very difficult aria to her own shadow.  There’s a “ghastly” enchanted glen scene at the end of which Dinorah, pursuing her pet goat, falls into a river; apparently fatally.  Rather than resolve this we then get another half hour of pastoral with a hunter and a reaper and assorted shepherdesses and, inevitably, dancing sheep and goats before Hoël shows up having rescued Dinorah. He persuades her that the last twelve months have all been a bad dream and they get married accompanied by much pious singing.

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Armide at Versailles

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Lully’s Armide is pretty much the archetypal tragédie en musique.  It features an allegorical prologue praising Louis XIV’s multiple virtues, delivered as a dialogue by La Gloire and La Sagesse followed by five acts based on the Armida/Rinaldo story from Tasso.  There are also, of course, lots of ballet interludes.  As such, it isn’t all that easy to stage for a modern audience.  Robert Carsen and William Christie’s approach for their 2008 Paris production is to frame the story in the context of Versailles.

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The god-damn son of a bitch is dead

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“The god-damn son of a bitch is dead”.  So says one of John A. Macdonald’s henchmen on checking his watch to see that the scheduled time of Louis Riel’s execution has passed; at least in Harry Somers’ 1969 operatic version of the story.  Louis Riel, on the face of it is a historic narrative about the leader of the 1869 and 1885 Métis opposition to the expansion of the Dominion of Canada.  But it’s deeper than that.   It’s a complex work dealing with fundamental questions of identity and belonging and of the relation between people and state.  Written during a weird combination of the orgy of cultural nationalism that greeted the centenary of Confederation and Canada’s most turbulent political violence it transcends the Canadianness of its story and clear parallels could be found in many countries, including Canada, today.  This is really about “culture wars” in all their complexity and horror.

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Adventure story

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Robert Carsen doesn’t seem disposed to treat Handel too reverentially.  Although there is some of the trademark Carsen cool minimalism in his 2011 Glyndebourne production of Rinaldo (not to mention symmetrically arranged furniture) there’s also a degree of humour, as there is in his Zürich Semele.  I find it very effective and, judging by the audience reaction, so did the people who saw it at Glyndebourne.

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