Category Archives: DVD review

Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein König

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In many ways Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots is a typical mid 19th century French grand opéra.  It takes a sweeping, epic story; in this case the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and grafts onto it the elements the paying public demanded; spectacle, ballet, showpiece arias etc.  The result is unwieldy and, when applied to such grim subject matter, almost grotesque.  The 1991 Deutsche Oper production by John Dew (performed in German as Die Hugenotten) takes these disparate elements and works with them; mixing laugh out loud and extremely grim to create a piece of music theatre that is truly disturbing.

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Allons enfants de la Patrie

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There can’t be many French Revolutionary propaganda comedies but Cherubini’s Koukourgi is one of them.  Written in the crisis year of 1792 and intended for the Théatre Feydeau it never actually made it onto the stage and remained unperformed until it was staged by the Stadttheater Klagenfurt in 2010.  By then the dialogues, the overture and the finale had been lost but music director Peter Marschik found a couple of bits from other Cherubini operas to fill the musical gaps and director Josef E. Köpplinger supplied rather arch German dialogue to link the musical numbers (sung in French).

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Born to the anvil, not the hammer

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Manuel de Falla’s La Vida Breve is often credited with being the first true Spanish opera.  It’s certainly one of very few works in that language one might encounter in an opera house.  It’s hard to see why it’s not performed more often.  It’s a dramatic story about the tragic love affair of a gtpsy girl and a wealthy young man and the music is a blend of verismo and flamenco.  The orchestration is quite exciting and the Spanish influenced vocal lines are very easy on the ear.  It really ought to have a rather wide appeal.

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Starry Tosca

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Puccini’s Tosca doesn’t seem to lend itself to Regie type treatments.  Even quite adventurous directors seem to mostly stick to the very specific time and place of the libretto (even though, as Paul Curran pointed out to me, the plot makes no sense in the Rome of 1800).  In the 2012 Royal Opera House recording Jonathan Kent certainly takes very few liberties with the piece; the church is a church, the palace a palace and the castle a castle. There are a few deft design touches.  Both Cavaradossi and Tosca wear very bright colours indicative of the new dyes that became available at the period (actually I think this is a slight anachronism – must check with the fashion lemur) whereas Scarpia is more conservatively attired.  Generally though it’s pretty straightforward.

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Campy Poppea

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J-P Ponnelle’s 1979 film of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with Zürich forces conducted by a young Nikolaus Harnoncourt is like his Orfeo only more so.  Sets and costumes are that rather odd “ancient baroque” that Ponnelle is so fond of.  The acting is stylized and hyperkinetic and so is the camera work with close ups from weird angles all over the place.  So far, so Ponnelle.

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Straightforward but effective Il Trovatore

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Verdi’s Il Trovatore really is a peculiar piece.  It’s a bit of a musical hybrid with huge, rousing choruses interspersed with bel canto arias which I suppose is fairly typical of middle period Verdi.  It has a truly silly plot (perhaps based on Blackadder’s lost novel) with gypsies, dead babies and  improbable coincidences galore.  It’s also notoriously hard to cast with five very demanding roles combining a need for flawless bel canto technique with lots of power.  David McVicar’s production at the Metropolitan Opera was broadcast in HD in April 2011 and subsequently released on Blu-ray and DVD.  I saw the HD broadcast and enjoyed it enough to buy the Blu-ray.

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Paramore shall welcome woe

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Various thoughts about the Channel 4 film of Britten’s Owen Wingrave led to me seeking out the original BBC TV version from 1970, now available on DVD.  It’s extremely interesting and worthwhile.  Britten himself conducts and the cast includes many of the people involved in the first productions of many other Britten operas.  They include Peter Pears (General Wingrave/Narrator), John Shirley-Quirk (Coyle), Benjamin Luxon (Owen), Janet Baker (Kate), Heather Harper Mrs.Coyle) and Jennifer Vyvyan (Mrs. Julian).  The quality of the music making is superb and I found myself constantly surprised and delighted by details brought out by Britten supported by the excellent English Chamber Orchestra.  At the same time, the fluent and idiomatic singing pointed up the excellence of Myfanwy Piper’s libretto.  This really is Britten at his best.

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Schade rocks

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Today’s summer second thought is the 2004 Salzburg festival production of Purcell’s King Arthur.  I really enjoyed this first time around and I think it stands up extremely well to repeat viewing.  I pretty much stand by my original review but certain aspects of the production did stand out on repeat viewing.  The first thing that struck me is how these English 17th century works are very much a blend of the vulgar and the sublime (one could argue that that is the defining characteristic of English culture; from Chaucer to Trooping the Colour).  This production, like Jonathan Kent’s The Fairy Queen, successfully blends the two elements.  There’s a really good example at the very end where Michael Schade’s panty strewn rock star “Harvest Home” is followed by a gorgeous and dignifieed “Fairest Isle from Barabara Bonney but there’s lots more; much of reinforced by the sort of special effects that a Restoration audience would have loved.  There’s also some real depth in how it’s done.  First up I found the Merlin dressed as banker’s wife episode very funny but just that.  On rewatching I realised that much more is going on as the scene segs into Merlin explaining to Arthur that everything around him is an illusion.

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Paramore revisited

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Great though my admiration for Benjamin Britten’s music is I wouldn’t consider him a creator of memorable female characters.  There’s Ellen Orford, of course, but one struggles to find a Tosca, Lucia or Violetta in his oeuvre.  I open with this because what struck me watching the 2001 Channel 4 film of Owen Wingrave for a second time was how generally unsympathetic the female characters are.  This is an opera with a female librettist (Myfanwy Piper) and the film has a female director (Margaret Williams) yet, with the exception of the fairly ineffectual Mrs. Coyle, the female characters embody an unthinking militarism and behave with extreme malevolence towards Wingrave; none more so than his “girlfriend” Kate. The filming reinforces this with close up scenes of groups of the women spitting venom at young Wingrave.

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Theodora redux

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Peter Sellars’ 1996 Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Theodora just gets better with every viewing. I utterly retract my original view that the music isn’t Handel at his finest. It’s very good indeed and the production and performances on this disk are fantastic. Despite not being the best recording ever (though the recent Blu-ray release is an improvement) it remains a “must see” for any fan of Baroque opera or challenging music theatre.

What makes it so compelling? I think it’s two factors. The first is the production. The contemporary American setting works with very little violence to the libretto or music and yet speaks directly to very contemporary concerns. It’s particularly effective that current reality is inverted with respect to mainstream Christianity. Added to this are some extraordinarily intense performances led by the late Lorraine Hunt as Irene, the leader of the Christians. “As with rosy steps the morn” and “Lord to thee, each night and day” bring me out in goosebumps every time. The chemistry between David Daniels and Richard Croft is also palpable and Dawn Upshaw could hardly be bettered in the title role. Even Christine Schäfer in the only competing recording doesn’t come close.

One of the notes I made while watching this the other night reads “anybody not moved by this is an emotional cripple”. It’s a fair summary.