Category Archives: DVD review

A fun La Belle Helène from Zurich

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Having had a lot of fun with the Lyon recording of Orphée aux Enfers I decided to try and track down some more Offenbach operetta and managed to find a Zurich recording of La Belle Helène conducted, perhaps surprisingly, by Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

It’s not perhaps as wildly funny as the Orphée nor perhaps does it have as many memorable tunes but it’s good fun in an undemanding (at least for the audience) sort of way.  The Zurich production, by Helmut Lohner, is painted in pretty broad brush strokes.  The costumes a re very colourful, a bit silly and most have writing on them, much of it, oddly, in English.  The thunder machine is positively Heath Robinsonish.  There’s lots of stage action and fairly silly dancing around.  It’s all very fast paced and doesn’t take itself too seriously despite the sleeve notes leading one to expect more in the way of social satire.  Harnoncourt is obviously having a whale of a time and occasionally gets caught up in the stage action rather as he does in the Salzburg King Arthur.  Continue reading →

Scintillating Il Turco in Italy from Zurich

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I don’t suppose anybody watches a Rossini comedy for profundity or great insights into human nature but there’s no denying that done well they can be great fun.  This 2002 performance of Il Turco in Italia from the Opernhaus Zürich certainly manages to be that.

The basic plot is predictably silly and full of stock characters; gypsies, flirty young wife, dim older husband, lecherous Turk etc. but wrapped around this is the idea of a poet who is recording what he is seeing as the basis for a new play while, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, trying to influence the action to meet his needs.  It’s quite clever and often very funny.

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Very traditional Don Giovanni from the Metropolitan Opera

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The 2000 Metropolitan Opera recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is based on Zeffirelli’s 1990 production somewhat modified by director Stephen Lawless.  It’s an entirely traditional “breeches and boobs” affair with baroque painted flats, tricorne hats etc.  Blocking is mostly very basic with a lot of “park and bark” just livened up with a bit of prop twiddling.  It works because it has a superb cast who sing and act (within the limits of the production) extremely well.

At the core is Bryn Terfel in the title role.  You get what you expect; a big voice that can be scaled back to quite beautiful, menace, physical presence and a touch of humour when required.  If you have seen his more recent Scarpia or Mephistopheles you know what to expect.  He’s backed up Ferruccio Furlanetto in a rather broadly comic take on Leporello which, though I find it unsubtle, isn’t inappropriate in this production.  The Terfel/Furlanetto relationship is very much master/servant.  No ambiguity about two sides of one character here! Continue reading →

Back to Offenbach

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After the hours of discussion about what Lee Blakeney really meant in his COC Les Contes d’Hoffmann a little light relief seemed called for.  Fortuitously I had just got my hands on the 1997 Opéra National de Lyon recording of Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers so I thought that might do the trick.  I was dead right.  The production by Laurent Pelly is an absolute hoot (or, to quote young British mezzo, Emilie Renard “FILTHY!”).  The high speed, somewhat surreal production is brilliantly executed by a predominantly French cast including Natalie Dessay as Eurydice and Laurent Naouri as Jupiter.  There’s so much going on that it would be tedious to provide a full description.  Continue reading →

Tosca at La Scala

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This 2000 La Scala recording of Puccini’s Tosca is straightforward and rather good.  It’s a revival of Luca Ronconi’s 1996 production which I’m somewhat astonished to read was regarded as controversial.  Sure, the sets are sort of fractured and feature some weird angles but everything else seems to be “by the book” down to the smallest details like the candlesticks and cross.  Regietheatre this isn’t.  In this performance the acting is OK, if tending to the “stand and wave your arms about” default Italian mode.  The stand out exception is Leo Nucci’s Scarpia.  He doesn’t have the physical presence to be brutal in the way that, say, Bryn Terfel can be but he manages to project a very nasty securocrat indeed.  This is a Scarpia who would be good at making Powerpoint presentations to his bosses detailing how many women and children his unmanned drones had killed today.

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Patchy Figaro

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There are, I think, eighteen DVD versions of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro currently available so there needs to be something very special about a recording for it to stand out. Unfortunately Stephen Medcalf’s 1994 Glyndebourne production doesn’t really despite having a strong looking cast. It’s a pretty traditional looking production with breeches and crinolines and sets which look a bit like a giant doll’s house. The Personenregie is well thought out and the stage picture often artfully composed. The acting is almost uniformly excellent. It’s a good solid production but with nothing original in the least about it. Continue reading →

One can rob a bank or use a bank to rob others

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I don’t really know whether the collaborations between Brecht and Weill deserve to be called operas but some of them at least are sung by opera singers and produced in opera houses so I think they are legitimately within the ambit of this blog.  Arguably the best known of them all is Die Dreigroschenoper which premiered in Berlin in 1931.  I’ve seen it a couple of times in English translation and, like most people I guess, I’m familiar with the music (in both English and German) through recordings by people like Lotte Lenya, Ute Lemper and Robyn Archer.  With that background I was very interested to take a look at the 1931 film of the work directed by GW Pabst. Continue reading →

de Bello Gallico

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Bellini’s Norma is a tale of illicit love between two Gaulish priestesses (can women be called druids?) and a Roman tribune.  In this 2006 production for the Bayerische Staatsoper director Jürgen Rose has set the piece in the present day in a vaguely Middle Eastern setting.  Within that framework the story is told quite straightforwardly and there’s no attempt to project some kind of agenda.  The designs are very striking.  Blue figures a lot.  Norma’s home is an underground bunker.  When the Gauls arm for war they put on ski masks and supplement their spears with assault rifles.  It all looks really good.  The acting is also excellent and we get some real intensity in the Norma/Pollione/Adalgisa love triangle and in the tension between Norma and her father Oroveso.  It works as drama.

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Don Giovanni – choices and futures

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This is a continuation of a discussion of how Martin Kušej treats sex in his Salzburg Don Giovanni. The first installment, dealing with Act 1, is here.

At the conclusion of Act 1 the cycle of, at least apparently, consensual kinky sex has been broken by the first clearly non-consensual action; Zerlina has been hunted down by Don Giovanni and forcibly borne off by the sisters of Persephone. Where is this going? Continue reading →

Don Giovanni – delusion and collusion

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This is a follow up to yesterday’s review of Martin Kušej’s Salzburg production of Don Giovanni.  What I want to explore here is how Kušej treats issues of collusion, consent and delusion as it applies to sexual relations.

There are some real problems in updating Don Giovanni.  After all, central to the plot is the death in a fight/duel of a man fighting to defend his daughter’s “honour”.  Since the notion that female “honour” is a simple matter of pre-marital chastity and post-marital fidelity makes no sense in the setting Kušej has chosen something else has to be seen to be happening. Continue reading →