Category Archives: DVD review

You should have hoped us

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I’ve watched John Adams’ Doctor Atomic three times now. The first time; a MetHD broadcast, I wasn’t impressed at all.  The second time; an AVI rip of the Dutch television broadcast, I started to come around.  Having now watched the Opus Arte DVD based on the Dutch TV broadcasts I’m converted.  This piece is every bit as good as Nixon in China and probably surpasses it in emotional impact due to the more visceral nature of the material.  The orchestral writing is classic Adams.  The musical argument is swept along on a strong rhythmic pulse and overlapping waves of colour.  In contrast the vocal line often seems duller though there are passages of great lyricism, notably Oppenheimer’s big Act 1 aria Batter my heart, three personed God.  Kitty Oppenheimer and the native woman, Pasqualita, also get some good singing.  I also found myself warming to the libretto.  Some rather self conscious passages of Donne and Baudelaire aside, it lacks the poetry of Goodman’s libretti for Adams but Peter Sellars’ selection of words taken from the documentary record is, in its way, quite compelling; reflecting the mix of high and banal concerns that people under great tension express.  It’s particularly interesting to see the relatively high level of respect for and confidence in the moral judgement of politicians displayed by the scientists.  One doubts whether that would be the case today.  In total, it’s a strong additiion to the repertoire of 21st century operas.

Gerald Finley (Oppenheimer) and Richard Fink (Teller) do physics

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Fidelio at Glyndebourne 1979

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Southern Television’s 1979 Glyndebourne broadcast was Beethoven’s Fidelio. The production by Peter Hall with designs by John Bury is conventional enough though tendencies to exaggerate are clearly creeping in. The chorus of prisoners is almost zombie like and Florestan looks disconcertingly like the legless sea captain from Blackadder II. Apart from that it’s a conventional 1800ish setting where the prison’s a prison, the dungeon’s a dungeon etc. It’s also very literal in that the dungeon is so dark it’s almost impossible to see anything.  Continue reading →

Hockney’s Rake

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Having watched quite a few opera recordings from the 70s and 80s recently I can well see why David Hockney’s designs for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Glyndebourne were such a big deal back in the day. They look they were designed by an artist rather than being lifted from an expensive department store furniture catalogue. And, of course, they are still in use. Beyond the design issues, this has a kind of transitional feel as a production. Occasionally some acting breaks out and quite imaginative use is made of the chorus but there is a lot of “park and bark”; perhaps somewhat inevitable on the old, small Glyndebourne stage but very noticeable. It’s hard not to feel that director John Cox could have done a lot more with a neat staging and a talented cast.  Continue reading →

Normal service will be resumed shortly

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On a bit of a hiatus here caused in part by bad luck with some library DVDs; a couple of which turned out to be pretty much unwatchable and certainly not worth a full blown review.  For the record:

Shannon Mercer - Extremely Silly

Le Nozze di Figaro; Glyndebourne 1973.  Dates from the era before acting or stage direction made it into opera.  eg: Susanna “this is the hat that I made”. Stops, grins, points to hat…

Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy); RAH 2009.  I was searching the library catalogue for Claus Guth’s staged Messiah.  Not a chance of course but I did find this.  How bad could a Monty Python oratorio be I thought?  That bad!  How did the lovely Shannon Mercer and a trouper like Rosalind Plowright get mixed up with this pile of dreck?

Hopefully the “to watch” pile will turn up something better soon.

Robert Carsen’s Eugene Onegin

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One of the early Metropolitan Opera Live in HD broadcasts was a 2007 showing of Robert Carsen’s 1997 production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renée Fleming.  It was subsequently released on DVD and Blu-ray by Decca and remains one of the most successful disk releases spawned by the broadcasts.

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L’Amour de Loin on DVD

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I put off watching Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin on DVD until after the run at the Canadian Opera Company because I didn’t want to prejudge the piece.  Now, having seen it live twice and listened to Kent Nagano’s Berlin CD recording it seemed like time to look at the DVD.  The DVD is of the original Salzburg production directed by Peter Sellars but it was recorded at Finnish National Opera in Helsinki.  It features the original cast of Gerald Finley (Jaufré Rudel), Dawn Upshaw (Clémence) and Monica Groop (Pilgrim).  Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts with the Orchestra and Chorus of Finnish National Opera.  If you are unfamiliar with the piece you might want to check out my review of the COC production which gives a plot summary etc.

The production concept is simple enough.  At each side of the stage is a spiral tower representing Jaufré’s castle in Blaye and the Citadel in Tripoli.  The towers stand in a lake which the Pilgrim traverses in a sort of crystal boat.  It’s simple and effective but much less spectacular than Daniele Finzi Pasca’s production seen at COC.  Colour is used to symbolise the two sides and the journey; blues and greens for Blaye, reds and oranges for Tripoli and black and white for the journey.  In typical Sellars style there is a fair amount of stylized and elaborate gesturing.  It all seems to work pretty well.

The performances are excellent.  All three singers have complete mastery of their parts and can act vocally as well as sing.  Some of the acting is a bit overwrought but I think that’s Sellars.  At key moments, and especially in the beautiful final scene, this very intense approach works much less well than the more understated approach taken in Toronto which seems more at one with what the music is doing.  The Orchestra and, off-stage, chorus are just fine.  Salonen has worked a lot with Saariaho and knows what’s required.

Where I have serious reservations with this recording is the video direction.  Sellars directs this himself and like his Nixon in China Met HD broadcast it’s really quite bizarre.  All video directors use close ups.  Most use too many of them.  Sellars takes this to extremes with bizarre partial face shots or body extremities filling the whole screen.  Coupled with the exaggerated acting style, which might just be OK at a distance, this makes for a very overwrought effect that is at serious odds with the music.  I’ve included four entirely typical screen caps at the end of the post to show what I mean.

Technically the disk is OK.  The picture is European TV quality 16:9.  One might have expected a little better for a 2004 disk.  The sound is decent DTS 5.1 (Dolby 5.1 and PCM stereo alternatives).  It’s quite vivid though I think the voices are balanced artificially forward.  Documentation is pretty decent and the subtitle options are English, French, German and Spanish.  There are very informative interviews with Sellars, Saariaho and Salonen that are all well worth watching. This is the only DVD of the piece and it’s pretty adequate. I wish someone would film Daniele Finzi Pasca’s production though.

OK, here are some screen caps of close ups.  These are not cropped.  This is the screen you see watching the DVD.

Zambello’s Carmen

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Francesca Zambello’s Carmen for the Royal Opera House has more going for it than is immediately apparent.  On the face of it it’s a very traditional, conservative production; period costumes, literal sets, hordes of kids in Acts 1 and 4, live animals, but a close look reveals rather more.  Zambello reveals her intentions during the overture where we see a manacled, distraught Don José dragged to execution by a masked executioner.  This is going to be Don José’s story rather than one that focuses almost exclusively on the title character.  What we see here is a stark contrast between what Don José really wants; respectability, an obedient wife, conformity with the Church, honour and what key choices, accidents and conflicts drive him to; criminality, liminality, execution and, we may suppose, damnation.  The staging subtly highlights each of the key moments in Don José’s descent; his arrest and demotion in Act1, the fight with Zuniga in Act 2 and the realisation, in Act 3, that Carmen will never be the women he really wants reinforced by Micaëla’s aria that ironically offers him the choice he can no longer make and does so unmistakeably in terms of Catholic eschatology.  There is so much more going on here than a sexy woman and some pretty tunes.

1.carmendonjose

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Die Fledermaus auf München

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I didn’t really feel that the Mörbisch production of Die Fledermaus was giving me the reference point I needed. The Dalek BDSM ballet and Russian roulette certainly suggested that it was a production with ideas, albeit not terribly coherent ones and a baseline was what I was after. Fortunately the answer was at hand. Surely an Otto Schenk production could be virtually guaranteed to be free of ideas and his 1987 production for the Bayerischen Staatsoper was conveniently to hand. What’s more it’s conducted by Carlos Kleiber so I expected good things musically.

The production is typical Schenk. It’s very opulent; big on stuff, short on ideas. It would go down well at the Met. The only real interpolation is incorporating the Donner und Blitzen polka as a ballet number in Act 2 (which turns into something really a bit bizarre that looks like it might have happened at the Drones’ Club dinner dance) and the updating of a few of Frosch’s gags in Act 3. The transition from ballroom to dining room is carried out by means of a rotating stage, to the applause of a rather easily pleased audience. There’s really nothing much else to say about it.

Musically this performance is very high quality and much more operatic than the other production. The quality is apparent from the first few bars of the overture where Kleiber’s command of this material and his ability to inspire the orchestra is very clear. He’s backed up by a pretty heavy duty singing cast. Eberhard Wächter is Eisenstein, Benno Kusche is Frank and Pamela Coburn is Rosalinde which is pretty heavy duty casting and very effective. Even the roles which might get more operetta type voices are quite heavily cast. Adele, for instance, is sung by Janet Perry who seems to have a biggish voice for the role though she floats lightly enough through the coloratura passages. Similarly the Alfred of Josef Hopferweiser and the Falke of Wolfgang Brendel are full on operatic voices. Orlofsky is cast to a mezzo, Brigitte Fassbaender, and her voice suits the music much better than a counter-tenor’s does. So, solidly good singing across the piece and it’s backed up by good acting. Frosch, here is played by German TV actor Franz Muxeneder and he’s actually quite funny and not too over the top. So, all in all, a satisfying traditional performance which is pretty much what I was after.

The DVD isn’t so great in many ways. The sound is good. I listened using the DTS 5.1 track which is a remix using DG’s AMSI II technology of the original stereo recording. It’s very vivid and quite spacious. There are also Dolby 5.1 and PCM stereo options. The 4:3 picture is typical of 1980s TV recordings. It’s very soft grained and lacks definition. There are English, French, German and Chinese subtitles and a bilingual French/English booklet with a synopsis, cast listing and chapter listing. The only extra is a trailer focussed on Carlos Kleiber.

The main problem with the disk is the video direction. It’s the work of Brian Large whose quirks seem to be exacerbated by the Schenk approach. Schenk puts lots of “stuff” on stage; tons of furniture, chorus, dancers and supers all over the place and then Large focusses in on a head shot or an upper body shot which, inevitably, has all sorts of distracting background whirling in and out of shot. He also does something I’ve never seen before; he films the conductor while there is singing going on on stage. I know appearances by Kleiber were pretty rare but that’s just ridiculous.

I really must contrive to get hold of the recent Glyndebourne version of this work. It sounds like it should be much better.

Die Fledermaus auf Mörbisch

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Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus is a work I know next to nothing about beyond it being an operetta and one that tends to be used for gala events with lots of interpolations, star turns and updated dialogue.  Since in a few months time I shall be seeing a new production by Christopher Alden I figured I had better try and establish some sort of reference base from which I might be able to figure out what Alden was getting up to.

First up in my research project ids a 1996 production from the Seefestspiele Mörbisch.  Since this festival claims to be the operetta capital of the world and is only 60km from Vienna I thought it might be along the lines of going to Stratford to see Shakespeare.  The Seefestspiele is situated on the banks of the Neusiedler See and features a 6000 seat “audience park” overlooking a very large stage/set actually on the lake so obviously it’s not a normal opera house setting.  In this production by Elmar Ottenthal the huge area available is used to stage the big set pieces in Act 2 but otherwise a very restricted area of the stage is used for the main action.  There seems to be quite a lot of background business in Act 2 but the video director (Georg Madeja) rarely lets us see it.

The production starts off feeling like an old fashioned musical comedy and pretty much stays that way through Act 1.  In Act 2 it takes a slightly weirder turn.  There are some very strangely costumed characters wandering around Orlofsky’s ballroom and the ballet is a strange mixture of Swan Lake, a fetish club, Disney Cavalcade of Lights and Daleks with Christmas lights.  It’s not very interesting choreography since the one decent dancer (Marion Rainer playing Ida) spends the entire scene on a silver platter held up by several strapping fellows in scraps of leather while their team mates aim bull whips at her rather ineffectually.  Also the Skovakian Folk Dance Ensemble SLUK puts in an appearance for no obvious reason.  Act 3 is dominated by the Jailer, Frosch, played by one Thaddäus Podgorski.  He is apparently a TV personality so the audience find his every gesture hilarious even if it’s all about as sophisticated (and funny) as Benny Hill.  The whole thing feels a bit disjointed as a result.  Here’s a clip showing the rather weird ballet:

The singing and acting is pretty good if very varied in style.  The Alfred of Tomas Lind is very much a light musical theatre type voice and he rather camps up the “anyone for tennis” approach.i Ute Gfrerer’s Adele is a typical soubrette soprano.  She’s got a pleasant voice, her colotura is lively and accurate and she acts very well.  The genuine operatic component is supplied by Peter Edelmann as Eisenstein and Silvana Dussmann as Rosalinde backed up by Waldemar Kmentt as the prison governor.  All three are solid opera professionals if not exactly international stars and they all sing and act very well.  Edelmann is surprisingly athletic while Dussmann comes across as very much the diva.  Orlofsky is played by a counter-tenor, Artur Stefanowicz.  I didn’t much like his rather thin toned voice or stiff acting and I’m not convinced that there is any good reason not to use a mezzo in the role. Rudolph Bibl conducts the Symphonie-Orchester Burgenland and the Chor der Seefestspiele  Mörbisch.  It’s not the most demanding score in the world and it all sounds fine.

The disk quality is OK for the period.  It’s a 4:3 picture that doesn’t have enough resolution to carry the long shots which pretty much forces the video director to get in close.  Sound is adequate Dolby 2.0.  It places some off screen voices rather well but isn’t especially lively.  Subtitles are English only and there’s a basic English/German booklet.

Dull Tamerlano

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Handel’s Tamerlano cries out for a Regie approach because it’s basically boring. The motivation of the characters is so oddly straightforward that the plot(1) seems inevitable right up until the utterly implausible ending and character development is all but impossible. Unfortunately Regie is exactly what we don’t get in the 2001 production of the work from the Halle Handel Festival.  Jonathan Miller directs and attempts to convey the story in an entirely straightforward way with the barest minimum of support.  The very small stage is furnished with a couple of screens and a chair/throne.  The brightly dressed characters (costumes by Judy Levin) basically wander about and sing.  Any drama is entirely dependent on the acting ability of the cast, which varies.  Tom Randle as Bajazet acts rather well throughout and Anna Bonitatibus is a fiery Irene (complete with a riding crop which she shows every sign of being willing to use and thus provides the obligatory Handel opera BDSM reference) but Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz as Asteria, although very easy on the eye, seems capable of no more than stock gestures from the Dummies Guide to Baroque Acting.  Graham Pushee is a bit better as Andronico but his simpering acting coupled with being a fairly “thin” counter-tenor does come off as a bit effeminate.  Maybe the worst acting of the lot comes from Monica Bacelli in the title role.  She is a sort of low energy Snidely Whiplash (with Snidely like moustache) and manages exactly one emotional register and no hint of menace from beginning to end.  The whole thing feels like a rather dull semi-staged performance.

As to the music, one has to say that the playing and singing are very good.  Everybody can do what’s needed and there are some interesting variations on the normal “voice” one hears in Handel.  Randle and Bonitatibus in particular can sound quite dramatic.  Trevor Pinnock conducts the English Concert so no problems there.  The problem is the music itself.  It’s horribly unvarying.  The first two hours plus go by in a series of reciitatives and da capo arias at what seems to be a constant andante soporifico.  The first lively number comes well after the two hour mark and is so surprising I jumped out of my chair.  It finishes a little stronger with a couple of pleasant duets and the obligatory closing ensemble but this really is not Handel at his best.

Helga Dubnyicsek is the video director.  She really doesn’t have much to work with so, for once, the succession of close ups, angle changes and dissolves seems almost a relief.  The picture is 16:9 and normal DVD quality.  The sound is Dolby 5.1 (LPCM stereo option) and is pretty decent though not as vivid as some more recent releases.  Subtitles are English, French, Spanish and Japanese.  There’s an interesting subtitle option called “Score plus”(2) which projects the score onto a faded out picture of the action.  There a couple of bonus interview features.

There is one other video version of Tamerlano available. It’s from Madrid with Placido Domingo as Bajazet and it’s available on DVD and Blu-ray from Opus Arte.  I think it will be a long time, if ever, though before I sit through this one again.

fn(1) Bajazet, formerly Ottoman emperor has been captured by the Tartar leader Tamerlane.  Bajazet hates Tamerlane unreservedly because (a) he won and (b) he sees him as a lower class usurper.  Bazajet spends most of the opera wishing he was dead but only manages to poison himself right at the end.  Bajazet has a daughter, Asteria, who hates tamerlane because that’s the filial thing to do.  Asteria is betrothed to Andronucus, a Greek client king of Tamerlane.

Tamerlane is betrothed to the Greek princess Irene but decides, for unspecified reasons, that he wants to marry Asteria instead and palm Irene off on Andronicus.  There are multiple misunderstandings as Asteria appears to go along with this while really intending to kill Tamerlane.  She makes two hamfisted attempts to do so which don’t seem to bother Tamerlane as much as attempted murder of a head of state usually does.  Finally Bazajet poisons himself which (why?) causes Tamerlane to repent.  Tamerlane marries Irene, Asteria marries Andronicus and the obligatory triumphal ensemble is sung.

fn2 This is what “Score plus” looks like: