Category Archives: DVD review

Ercole amante

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Cavalli’s Ercole amante was written for the wedding of Louis XIV to Marie-Thérèse, a Habsburg princess.  The marriage itself being the seal on the French victory over Spain in the war that had lasted until 1659.  It’s an odd work considering.  It’s not nearly as weird as, say, Il Giasone or La Didone but it’s hardly what one would expect for the nuptials of Le Roi Soleil.  It’s clear from both the Prologue and the ending that Ercole is Louis but he’s also a most unlikeable character.  In this version of the Hercules story he’s in love with his son’s (Hyllo) girlfriend (Iole) and will stop at nothing to bed her including casting off his wife (Deianira), imprisoning his son and bumping off Iole’s father.  In the end he’s attacked by the spirits of various people he has wronged before succumbing to the trick with the centaur’s poisoned shirt.  He’s made immortal and paired off with Hebe in the heavens but it’s hardly a tale of kingly virtue or marital fidelity.  For good measure, along the way a good chunk of the Graeco-Roman pantheon make an appearance.

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Grimes on Blu-ray

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There is, finally, a recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes on Blu-ray.  It’s a Richard Jones production with a largely British cast, recorded at La Scala in 2012.  The sound and picture quality are first rate.  Unfortunately the production and performances aren’t so much.

1.moothallRichard Jones has chosen to set the piece in the 1980s and to portray the inhabitants of the Borough as a sort of inbred hive mind fuelled by prejudice, alcohol and drugs.  Actually it’s not a bad concept but it comes off as exaggerated with cast and chorus repeatedly making more or less coordinated middle aged disco moves.  He also portrays the nieces as the sort of permanently stoned bubble heads one wants to avoid on the last train home. There are some neat touches.  The Moot Hall, The Boar and Grimes’ hut are all formed by box like spaces that are tilted and rotated to good effect.  The lighting is effective too.  Unusually for a modern production Jones doesn’t provide any staging for the interludes, leaving the theatre dark with the curtain down.  Overall, it’s a production I’d want to take a second look at but I suspect it’s just painted too broadly to be really effective.

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Elegant and Powerful Ulisse

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Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria hasn’t proved as popular as his other late work L’incoronazione di Poppea but, given as compelling a performance as it got at the Teatro Real, it’s a bit hard to see why that is.  On this 2007 recording we have an elegant and interesting production by Pier Luigi Pizzi, an excellent cast headed by Kobie van Rensburg and Christine Rice and the incomparable William Christie and his Les Arts Florissants.  It’s a compelling package.

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From the House of the Dead

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Janáček’s last opera, From the House of the Dead, is a curious piece.  It sets certain episodes from Dostoevsky’s account of his life in prison into a collage of stories that doesn’t have a straightforward narrative arc at all.  It’s quite brutal, as one might expect, and very male dominated.  Few characters stand out as individuals and so the piece becomes very much an exercise in ensemble musical theatre.  The music is unusual too.  In Pierre Boulez’ words it is “primitive”.  Certain phrases are repeated over and over with minimal development to create a sort of “expressionist minimalism”.  It’s extremely interesting to listen to and a great sonic match for the brutal and repetitive nature of prison camp life.

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Perplexing Tannhäuser

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In Kasper Holten’s production, recorded at Royal Danish Opera in 2009, Tannhäuser is a poet torn between family and the conventional world of the Landgraf’s court and his creative processes symbolized by Venus and Venusberg.  There are numerous visual clues that perhaps we are even supposed to identify Tannhäuser with Wagner himself.  Far from being a young man, this Tannhäuser is middle aged, married to Eizabeth and has a son.  He has withdrawn into a psychological world of his own and Venus, his muse, and Venusberg are in his imagination.  Only after death is he recognized as a genius.  Of the rest, how much is supposed to be external and how much internal to Tannhäuser’s imagination is a bit hard to grasp.  If nothing else it goes some way to making the sixty year old Stig Andersen as Tannhäuser and the equally mature Susanne Resmark as Venus almost believable.  The 1900ish setting works quite well for the sexually repressed court of the Landgraf von Thüringen though a chorus of pilgrims returning from Rome in full evening dress is a bit of a jar.  The concept is quite interesting but really probably stretches further than the libretto can accommodate.  This Venus isn’t remotely credible as a goddess of love and the matronly Elisabeth singing about being a pure, young maiden is just odd.

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In which Dido doesn’t die

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Oddly enough, given the post previous to this, Reiner Moritz’s essay in the booklet accompanying this recording of Cavalli’s La Didone brings up the Harnoncourt/Ponelle Monteverdi recordings as a precursor to what he sees as Bill Christie’s similar championing of Cavalli.  I guess the big difference is that only three of Monteverdi’s operas survive while we have 27 of Cavalli’s.  I think he may have a point though.  It seems to me that 17th century Italian opera works on an aesthetic which is very in tune with today.  The relative spareness and clarity of the music seems closer to Britten than to Verdi and the cynicism and explicit sexuality of the libretti closer to Anna Nicole than La Bohème.

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Back to the beginning

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Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is one of the few 17th works still in the canonical opera repertoire though little performed before the “early music revival”.  So it was quite a bold step when the Opernhaus Zürich in the 1970s staged all three extant Monteverdi operas in productions by J-P ponelle and with Nikolaus Harnoncourt leading an orchestra of period instruments.  All three productions were subsequently made into lip-synched films and have been re-released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon as a boxed set.

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What’s green and blue and Carsen all over?

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Robert Carsen’s production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as visually striking as any of his productions.  It’s also one that’s done the rounds, playing in Aix and Lyon before being recorded by a strong cast at the Liceu in Barcelona in 2005.  The challenge with Dream is to create visual worlds for the Fairies and the Mortals that are different but work together.  Carsen and his usual design team do this very well in this case.  The Fairies are given striking green and blue costumes with red gloves.  The mortals mostly run to white and cream and gold and they seem to spend a lot of time in their underwear.  The lighting, as always with Carsen, forms an important part of the overall design.  Carsen completists will also notice certain other characteristic touches like starkly arranged furniture.

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Cendrillon

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Massenet’s Cendrillon is less often performed than Rossini’s take on the same basic story.  I’m really not sure why.  Rossini’s take is a bit weird (in a good way), especially in the Ponelle production, but Massenet’s is much more interesting musically.  Oddly enough there’s only one version on DVD; a 2011 recording from the Royal Opera House.  Fortunately it’s very good.  The production is by Laurent Pelly and it has quite a bit in common with his La Fille du Regiment.  Here the set is made up of pages from the original syory by Perrault rather than military maps but the effect is similar.  Costumes are quite cartoonish (shades of the recent Alice in Wonderland ballet) except for Cendrillon herself, the prince and her father.  There’s a strong emphasis on the humorous side of the piece and the “ballets” are thoroughly subverted.

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Sher ham

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Bartlett Sher’s concept for his production of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory is a theatre within a theatre setting with scruffy bewigged footmen types operating old fashioned stage machinery.  Throw in costume design that seems to cross the slutty middle ages with My Little Pony and one gets a production that would probably appeal to the average seven year old girl.  Fortunately the singing and acting is really rather fine with splendid vocal contributions from Juan Diego Flórez, Joyce DiDonato and Diana Damrau well backed up by the likes of Stéphane Degout and Susanne Resmark and it’s Maurizio Benini and the Met orchestra so no problems there either.  To be honest they are hamming it up for all its worth but that doesn’t seem unreasonable in this very silly piece.  The second act trio which features some mind boggling gender bending with the three principals swapping partners faster than Liz Taylor swapped husbands is hilarious.

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