Category Archives: DVD review

La Clemenza di Tito – Salzburg 2003

Posted on by
9

Second thoughts on this production posted July 20th, 2013.

Original 2011 review

Some time ago, Shezan from LiveJournal pointed me towards the 2003 Salzburg Festival production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. This is not a work I know at all well and previous efforts to watch it without sub-titles failed miserably. Now I’ve had a chance to watch the DVD. I can do the musical part of the review very quickly. It’s virtually flawless. All six principals (Michael Schade – Tito, Dorothea Roschmann – Vitellia, Vesselina Kasarova – Sesto, Elina Garanca – Annio, Barbara Bonney – Servilia, Luca Pisaroni – Publio) sing exceedingly well and Nikolaus Harnoncourt in the pit coaxes a thoroughly satisfying performance out of the orchestra. What I’m less sure of is what to make of Martin Kusej’s production. He uses the arches of the Felsenreitschule to create a three level heavily compartmentalized area which frames centre stage. Sometimes the compartments are used effectively for the various plotting and overhearing bits of the drama; fair enough. At others they are used to frame tableau that no doubt mean something to Kusej but which escaped me. For example, during the overture, Tito rushes around the set making the odd phone call while very young boys in underpants stand to attention in the various archways. Similarly in the final scene the active stage area is surrounded by a repeated motif of a man and a woman in formal dress with a table with a young boy (again in underpants) draped across it as if for a human sacrifice. I had similar problems with some of the Personenregie. Is Tito supposed to be mad? Certainly many of his arm and facial gestures suggest so and they contrast oddly with his classically stylish singing. My guess is that much more of this kind of thing was going on but Brian Large’s (who else?) direction for video was almost all in close up, often super close up. Maybe he couldn’t figure out what was going on either so decided to ignore it. This was one DVD release that could have used an interview with the director or at least some documentation.

Technically, this TDK release is very good. It’s spread across two disks and has a very good 16:9 picture and choice of LPCM stereo, Dolby 5.1 or DTS sound. The sound balance has the voices fairly far forward but not annoyingly so. The second disk has (at least my copy has) trailers for other TDK Salzburg releases including a 1962 Ariadne and a really freaky Turandot. Definitely worth a quick look!

 

Freedom for the Rich

Posted on by
Reply

Brecht and Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny might seem a peculiar choice for the Salzburg Festival but it was performed there in 1998 and was broadcast by ORF and subsequently issued as a DVD on Kultur in North America and Euroarts in Europe.

The musical style is pretty similar to most other pre USA Weill works; it sounds more like cabaret than grand opera and feels as if it would benefit from a more intimate setting than the Grosses Festspielhaus. One also feels that the director (Peter Zadek) is trying a bit too hard to fill up the space; There’s lots of “stuff” and busy action that doesn’t seem to add any meaning. It’s a problem I’ve also noticed with the Met HD broadcasts. A bigger problem though lies in the casting. Voices that can fill a huge theatre are maybe not the most idiomatic for this music. The problem really comes over with the women. Dame Gwyneth Jones as the widow Begbick is truly a piece of WTF casting. Catherine Malfitano as Jenny (a role created by Lotte Lenya) is better but still a bit overly operatic. She does act very well though. The one clear success is Jerry Hadley as Jim Mahoney who seems to manage to be idiomatic and to project enough sound. His is a great performance. Among the other characters I thought Wilbur Pauley as a lean, even cadaverous, Trinity Moses really stood out. The orchestral playing is precise and jazzy at the same time. Dennis Russell Davies gets some really good playing from the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The staging is eclectic and inevitably didactic. Brecht leaves no Marxist cliche unemployed and the staging and direction follows suit. The best examples are early in the second act where Jacob Schmidt is eating himself to death in a scene reminiscent of The Meaning of Life closely followed by a good deal of nudity and more; it seems to be veering towards anal fisting at one point, to underscore the commoditised nature of sex in capitalist society. During this extended indictment of commercialism, Mahoney moves through the orchestra into the audience and we get the irony of him singing surrounded by the Salzbourgeoisie in their finery. Subtle? Not so much. There’s also lots of weird symbolism in the sets; disembodied Statue of Liberty, elephant statues etc, that I just don’t get. All in all, this isn’t a bad production but it’s not one I can imagine watching very often and I feel like I want to see the more recent LA version to see if it’s more successful.

Technically, the DVD is of its era. The picture is 16:9. The only sound option is Dolby Digital 2.0. There are English subtitles only (This production is sung, mostly, in German). Brian Large (surprise!) directed for TV. For once, I don’t mind that he used a lot of close ups as much of the action cropped seemed to serve little purpose but to fill up space.

And in today’s “only connect” trivia moment I can point out that the premiere of Mahagonny was conducted by Alexander Zemlinsky whose Florentine Tragedy will be directed in Toronto this season by one Catherine Malfitano.

Here’s a link to the “Loving” scene from Act 2. Don’t play this at work!

Salome – DVD of 2008 ROH production

Posted on by
2

Strauss’ Salome is not for the faint hearted. It contains perversions including, but not limited to, necrophilia, paedophilia and incest. I think this makes David McVicar an obvious choice as director. In fact, by McVicar standards, this 2008 Covent Garden production is fairly restrained and straightforward. McVicar gves the work a 1930s setting which works just fine. The action evolves on a rather elegant two level set; upstairs is Herod’s banquet and downstairs is a sort of guardroom including Jokanaan’s cistern. It’s all quite elegant in light blues and greys and essentially all the action takes place downstairs. There are a few supers including a naked woman and another not far off floating around for no apparent reason except perhaps to suggest that the Judean army is not the Brigade of Guards.

1.beginning

Continue reading →

Roberto Devereux

Posted on by
2

Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux is based (even more loosely than most Donizetti historical operas) on the relationship between Elizabeth the First and the Earl of Essex. Unfortunately for Liz, Essex is in love with the wife of the queen’s bestie; the entirely fictional Sarah, Duchess of Nottingham, whose ducal husband is also Essex’ bestie. Got that? As the opera opens, Essex has been recalled from Ireland to face treason charges but is vigorously defended by Nottingham. Eventually the queen rumbles Essex and agrees to sign his death warrant. By now Nottingham has also figured out what is going on and ties up his wife to stop her delivering the token ring to Elizabeth that will force her to pardon Essex. Essex is executed and the queen goes mad, abdicating in favour of James VI and I (who has been hanging around all along) and then dropping dead from grief. Pretty much par for the Donizetti course really.

1.papers

Continue reading →

Orphée et Eurydice – Gardiner DVD

Posted on by
3

John Eliot Gardiner chose to videorecord the French version of Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice at the Théâtre Musical de Paris – Châtelet. Choosing the French version is consistent with Gardiner’s other Gluck recordings. The Paris cast is a bit less starry than his Lyon CD version but more than adequate. Orphée is sung by mezzo Magdalena Kozena, Eurydice by Madeline Bender and Amour by Patricia Petitbon. Gardiner uses his usual forces for chorus and orchestra; the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Choreography is by Giuseppe Frigeni, stage direction by Robert Wilson and video direction by Brian Large. The DVD is on EMI, has 16:9 video and Dolby 2.0 sound. It was recorded in 2000.

orphchat1

Continue reading →

Doctor Atomic revisited

Posted on by
Reply

I watched John Adams’ Doctor Atomic again yesterday. Actually this was the first time I’d seen it in its entirety since we left at the interval when it played in the Met “Live in HD” series. This time I was watching a recording of the Nederlandse Opera’s production as broadcast on NPS2 (complete with Dutch subtitles). I think this is the same performance that is available on DVD and Blu Ray; certainly the same cast/production.

I’ve seen and listened to a lot of John Adams’ music since my first exposure to Doctor Atomic including two productions of Nixon in China and a concert compered by the composer so I feel a lot more at home with the style Adams composes in. Also, like many modern works, Doctor Atomic gets easier to grasp musically once heard a couple of times. I found myself liking it quite a lot. I still think the libretto is problematic though I think I see the point of some of the dull bits; the diet scene for example. It seems to be a way of showing how people under great strain behave. I guess it sorta/kinda works. The vocal line can still be a bit dull but the antidote is to let the orchestral accompaniment wash over you. There seems to be a way of listening, not overly analytical, that works for this kind of music.

The Amsterdam (also seen in Chicago and San Francisco) production seemed more dynamic than I remember the Met production being. There’s a lot of use of dance and some pretty garish colour choices. That said, the recording was very heavy on super closeups which made it quite hard to figure out what was going on on stage much of the time. Also, it seemed as if the start and finish had been edited for TV so it wasn’t entirely clear what the audience in the house saw. Needless to say the performances were exemplary as one expects with essentially the cast that created the work and with the very consistent Netherlands Opera Chorus and the Netherlands Philharmonic backing them up.

I guess my revised judgement is that this one of the first significant operas of the century and will likely stay in the repertoire.

So now, an aside. Given that for 300 years Italian and German composers dominated opera composition how come those two countries have produced essentially nothing since 1945? Italy is pretty much batting zero and Germany has a handful of operas by Henze that occasionally get performed. That’s pretty much it. The modern opera stage is dominated by Brits (Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davies, Weir, Birtwistle, Ades) and Americans (Adams, Glass, Barber, Menotti) with the odd Russian, Frenchman, Argentine and Finn kicking in. The last Italian opera of any consequence premiered in 1926. I think that’s really weird.

Lulu

Posted on by
Reply

Berg’s Lulu is a fascinating piece. The plot is unremittingly bleak including (by implication) child abuse, murder, cholera and prostitution culminating in Lulu’s death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. The music is dense and fascinating. Most of it is written using twelve tone technique with a different tone row for each character. It’s not an easy listen. I watched it on a DVD of a 1996 Glyndebourne production directed by Graham Vick, with Andrew Davis conducting and Christine Schafer, then 30, in the title role.

The set for the entire production is a series of contrarotating circles of floor set around a hole in the stage by which characters can enter and exit. Behind this is a high curving wall with a staircase up it and various doors. This allows Vick to use space to explore the relationships between the characters in some interesting ways.

At the heart of this production is Schafer(*) she has the ideal looks and voice for the part. There are only a handful of singers in the world who can throw off the some of the fiendishly high coloratura work and wear the outfits she wears in this piece. The rest of the cast is stellar and the orchestral playing and conducting is about as lyrical as Berg ever could be. It all adds up to a musically and dramatically satisfying package.

Video direction (by Humphrey Burton) is unfussy and undistracting. The DVD is 4:3 and the only audio option is Dolby Digital 2.0.

Here’s the scene with Lulu and Jack the Ripper as a sampler.

*The more I see of Schafer the more impressed I am. She sings a lot of difficult modern music but she also brings real character to a wide range of traditional lyric soprano roles. I’ve seen her as Sophie in Rosenkavalier, as Gretel in Hansel and Gretel and as Cherubino in Il Nozze di Figaro. She really inhabits the characters she plays. As she does in Lulu.

Theodora

Posted on by
6

Handel’s Theodora was conceived and first performed as an oratorio and it was a flop. closing after three performances. I’m not sure why. It may not be Handel’s best work but it’s got some very good numbers and it’s dramatically very strong.

1.valensIn 1996 Glyndebourne staged an operatic version conceived by Peter Sellars. Occasionally Mr. Sellars frustrates me but most of the time I think he’s a genius who stages some of the most thought provoking music theatre out there. This Theodora is pure genius. Sellars sets the piece in contemporary America. The President of Antioch, Valens, (Frode Olsen) is a typical American politician; a nasty mixture of imperialist bluster, bonhomie and crass consumerism and he’s well supported by a brightly clad coke can bearing heathen chorus. The Roman soldiers wear US Navy helicopter pilot uniforms. By contrast the Christians wear combinations of black and white in pretty restrained cuts and combinations. The set is mostly bare but for some giant shattered glass vases and, as needed, a few props such as a lectern, chairs and, most chillingly, the gurneys on which Theodora and Didymus are executed by lethal injection. It all works really well. Although conceived 15 years ago it could have been last week. The idea that one can’t be a “proper Roman/American” if one doesn’t adhere to the state and socially approved approved religion and the chilling, deadly self righteousness of Valens seem especially contemporary in a week that sees an IRA supporter chairing a House investigation into Muslim disloyalty.

Continue reading →

Yet another Carmen

Posted on by
Reply

This time it’s the 2002 Glyndebourne production directed by David McVicar. Anne Sofie von Otter sings the title role with Marcus Haddock as Don José. The production is quite restrained by McVicar standards of this period, perhaps an indication of the tamer Met productions to come, though the final scene is gruesome enough and Carmen and Don José make out more enthusiastically than in some other productions. It’s in appropriate period costumes and is pretty enough to look at without being ‘different’ in any significant way.

1.habenera

Continue reading →