Category Archives: DVD review

Boulevard Solitude

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My DVD of Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude arrived the day before his death at the weekend and so went straight to the top of the reviewing pile.   It’s an intriguing piece.  It’s based on the same Abbé Prevost novel as all the other versions of Manon but updated to the period of composition (1952) and told from the viewpoint of des Grieux rather than Manon.  In this version des Grieux picks Manon up at a railway station while she is on her way to finishing school in Lausanne.  They run away to Paris but des Grieux is broke and Manon’s brother pimps her to a rich old man, Lilaque.  The brother robs the old man’s house which gets them both kicked out.  Manon has a brief fling with des Grieux before her brother pimps her out again; this time to Lilaque’s son.  By this time des Grieux has a pretty serious cocaine problem.  The cocaine, naturally, is supplied by Lescaut.  Lescaut is in the process of stealing a painting from Lilaque fils when Lilaque père shows up.  Lescaut hands Manon a gun and she kills the old man.  In the last scene we are back at the railway station where a disconsolate des Grieux waits for one last glance at Manon as she is taken to prison.

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Rosenkavalier on the brink

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Robert Carsen’s 2004 production of Der Rosenkavalier at the Salzburg Festival was apparently enormously controversial at the time.  In many ways that says more about the iconic status of the piece in Salzburg tradition than about Carsen’s production.  There are a few controversial elements.  He has updated the period to 1914 and the third act is set in a brothel with a fair amount of nudity.  Beyond that, the production is pretty faithful to the libretto and has, I think characteristic Carsen touches like long lines of tables and chairs and a certain geometric elegance.  He seems to be using the sides of the stage to comment on the action which tends to be fixed centre stage.  I say seems because the video direction (by Brian Large) is utterly perverse and makes it extraordinarily difficult to see what Carsen is doing, let alone decode it.  We see the whole stage, maybe, for three seconds in the whole piece.  Otherwise 99% of what we get is either close up and even closer up or apparently shot from the restricted view seats high up and close to the side of the stage.  The other 1% is just plain nuts and includes a section of the Sophie/Octavian duet in Act 2 where, on stage, Octavian is maybe twenty feet to Sophie’s right but on camera he’s standing right up close on her left hand side.  I could go on but I won’t.  Suffice it to say the video direction comes close to wrecking an otherwise excellent DVD.

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Rigoletto in Zürich

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This is another of those Arthaus Blu-ray disks that’s sold at a silly cheap price as a carrier for two hours of trailers from the Arthaus catalogue.  That said, it’s very high quality indeed.  GIlbert Deflo’s production is, in the end, quite conventional though with careful and effective Personenregie.  He does trick us a bit at the start.  The scene opens with what is, apparently, a rather louche 16th century court entertainment/orgy.  There are bare breasted women and dancers of both sexes dressed as Satanic imps.  Everyone is in period costume including Rigoletto with jester hat, bells etc.  The scene is, perhaps, what we expect.  The “ladies” are very receptive to the duke’s advances.  The men are resentful but not actively so.  Then in comes Monterone in mid 19th century dress to denounce the proceedings and we, perhaps slowly, realise that this is a costume party.  From there on there’s nothing very tricksy.  The story gets told effectively and straightforwardly.  We have been pulled, effortlessly, from the time of the libretto to the time of first performance and the parallels are drawn.

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The dream is over but the night not yet

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So closes Aribert Reimann’s 2010 opera Medea.  It’s a two hour piece in four “pictures” that premiered at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2010 and the Blu-ray/DVD recording is taken from that initial run.  Actually there’s a good deal more nightmare than dream in this version as, I suppose, there is in just about any version of the Medea story.  This one draws on Franz Grillparzer’s version for the libretto and is entirely concerned with events after Jason and Medea reach Corinth.  It’s unusually sympathetic to Medea herself with Jason and Kreon very much the villains.

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A journey through space and time?

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Tan Dun’s Marco Polo is hugely ambitious. He uses Marco Polo’s legendary journey as a metaphor for Space and Time.  He fuses a range of Western musical styles with Chinese, Tibetan and Indian instruments and vocal styles.  Although most of the work is sung in English there are sections in Italian and Chinese and other bits in a sort of random polyglot.  The cast includes a range of real, allegorical and psychological figures.  Marco and Polo are in fact two characters; one representing action and the external and the other the psychological and internal.  Kublai Khan, Dante, Shakespeare, Sheherazada and Mahler put in appearances and much of the narrative is carried by a Chinese opera singer playing the part of Rustichello; “the questioner”.  To be honest, despite having read the booklet, watched Reiner Moritz’s “Making of” documentary and studied the chart below, most of the time I had no idea what was actually happening.  It’s really all too abstract and involved to really work as music drama.

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Traditional Traviata

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The 2007 recording of Verdi’s La Traviata from Milan’s Teattro alla Scala is extremely traditional but very satisfying.  Liliana Cavani’s production is set in the mid 19th century with entirely conventional sets and costumes (with the obligatory cleavage) and nothing in the direction that adds up to an original concept or idea.  Act 1 is set in a glitzy ballroom.  Act 2 scene 1 takes us to a slightly odd sort of country house bedsit with billiard table  In Act 2 scene 2 we are back with the glitz with actual gypsies and bare chested matadors. Act 3 is set in a suitably dark invalid’s bedroom.  Angela Gheorghiu’s Violetta goes from ballgown to nightdress to ballgown to nightdress while maintaining Ange levels of, you guessed it, cleavage.  The guys are all in evening dress or operetta dress uniforms.  It’s all pretty and doesn’t distract from the music.
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Beyond Good and Evil

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Rameau’s Zoroastre is a tragédie lyrique in five acts.  It’s basically a story of love, power and revenge coupled with a metaphysical struggle between Good and Evil.  It has a seriously convoluted plot involving demons, incantations, good and evil spirits, a magical talisman book and human sacrifice.  Watching the illustrated synopsis on the disk is strongly recommended!  Being the baroque French beast that it is this work also has lots of ballets.  Pierre Audi’s production was staged and filmed at the court theatre at Drottningholm and is a sort of almost, but not quite, HIP concept, somewhat akin to Robert Carsen’s production of Les Boréades.

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Maybe opera is not made for film… shit!

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So says Rolando Villazón towards the end of the “Making of” documentary that accompanies Robert Dornhelm’s 2008 film of Puccini’s La Bohème.  Fortunately for us Dornhelm, Villazón and the rest of those involved provide another piece of evidence that films of operas can indeed be made, and made very successfully.  This one is a curious hybrid.  It uses just about every technique that I’ve seen used in such a venture.  The whole thing was originally recorded in the studio and most of the film is lip-synched using a mixture of the singers and actors who weren’t art of the singing cast but some of the arias were sung on set to a taped orchestral track.  I’m not sure why and I couldn’t tell which was what.  It all works pretty well anyway.

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Bartoli’s Semele

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Robert Carsen’s clean, refined production of Handel’s Semele originated in Aix, was recorded in Zürich and eventually made it’s way to Vienna and Chicago.  In many ways it is classic Carsen.  It’s elegant and uncluttered, is strong on the detailed Personenregie, has a consistent design concept but isn’t really pushing a concept driven agenda.  It’s also quite funny without descending to priapic donkeys.  Also there are lots of chairs.

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The Scrapheap of Capitalism

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The 2010 La Fura dels Baus Madrid production of Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is much the best version of the piece I’ve seen on DVD.  The production starts and ends on a rubbish dump and the dump and its people, curiously reminiscent of the vegetarian terrorists in Delicatessen, are present pretty much all the time.  It doesn’t pull any punches and tackles Brecht’s characteristically unsubtle parody of commodity capitalism straight on and without sentimentality or apology.  Perhaps the most effective scene is the sort of “orgy by Frederick Taylor” that accompanies Second comes the loving match in Act 2 but there are lots of telling moments from the widow Begbick first appearing from a derelict fridge to the pyre of mattresses on which Jim is executed.  Curiously perhaps the piece is given in Michael Feingold’s English translation but it’s a very good translation and little or nothing is lost.

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