Tag Archives: blu-ray

The Merchant of Venice

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André Tchaikowsky’s The Merchant of Venice was written in the years leading up to his premature death in 1982 but, despite interest from ENO in the 1980s, it did not get a full performance until David Pountney decided to stage it at the the 2013 Bregenz Festival with Keith Warner directing.  It’s hard to explain the neglect though Pountney ascribes it some degree as the fate of the emigré  (the composer being a Polish Jew domiciled in the UK).  The Merchant of Venice is a really solid piece.  It’s got all the elements; a strong story, a really interesting but not overly intimidating score and really good writing for voice (it really is singable).  It’s the right length at around two and a half hours and it doesn’t call for unreasonable orchestral or vocal forces.  John O’Brien’s libretto even manages to overcome some of the objections to staging Shakespeare’s play.  While one might consider the Shakespeare piece to be antisemitic, O’Brien’s libretto is much more clearly about anti-semitism.  There’s also a clear homoerotic element in the Antonio – Bassanio relationship and perhaps too in Portia – Nerissa.

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Rusalka à la Freud

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Stefan Herheim’s 2012 production of Dvořák’s Rusalka for Brussels’ La Monnaie Theatre is predictably ambitious and complex.  He takes an explicitly Freudian (by way of Lacan) view of the piece(*).  The female characters are representations of male views of the female and, sometimes it seems, vice versa.  It’s seen most clearly in Act 2 and I found unpacking Act 1 much easier after seeing it so I’m going to start there.  We open not with bucolic, if coarse, peasants preparing for a wedding feast.  We are on a street in a scruffy part of, I guess, Brussels.  The gamekeeper and kitchen boy are replaced by a priest and a policeman.  The traditional dismembered game animals become a female chorus, many of them nuns, with exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics.  There is, essentially, an orgy.  Clearly the human world that Rusalka cannot enter is about sex in its most physical aspects not meaty Central European banquet platters!  Rusalka and the Foreign Princess are dressed and wigged identically.  They are quite freely interchanged.  Lines that are canonically addressed to one are addressed to the other and so forth.  It’s pretty clear that each represents, albeit imperfectly, the Prince’s ideal woman.  Rusalka is the unattainable feminine ideal; flawed in that she cannot engage in fully satisfying sexual activity.  The foreign Princess is sexually satisfying but falls short precisely by not being unattainable.  Some less clear male duality is suggested by the appearance of the Vodnik dressed as the Prince.  It just gets weirder from there with the ballet of nuns, prostitutes, fish, squid and heaven knows what else spilling over into the auditorium while the Prince and Foreign Princess watch from a box and Rusalka and the Vodnik get caught up in the action.  At the conclusion of the act it’s Rusalka not the Princess that he begs for help.

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Wozzeck as puppet theatre

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Wozzeck is a tricky piece for a director.  There seem to be two possible approaches.  One can find a character for Wozzeck himself that resonates with contemporary audiences and treat the piece more or less realistically.  That’s the approach taken by both Bieito and Tcherniakov.  Alternatively one can run with the overtly expressionist aspects of the piece and present it in a more abstract way as Peter Mussbach did.  Andreas Homoki’s 2015 Zürich production takes the second route.  The piece is presented as if the characters are puppets in a puppet theatre in a sort of ultra-grim version of Punch and Judy.  It’s visually quite arresting and there are some very well composed scenes.  To give just one example, immediately after Wozzeck has decapitated Marie the chorus appear as nightmarish Maries while Wozzeck sits nursing the severed head.  That said, the concept does pall and maybe hasn’t really got the legs, absent any other real directorial ideas, to carry the piece for two hours.

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The Romans, being wanton, worship chastity

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Continuing my struggle with Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia I got hold of the Blu-ray recording of Fiona Shaw’s 2015 Glyndebourne production.  I’m beginning, I think, to see my way to understanding the problems inherent in the libretto and some of the strategies that can be used to overcome them.  The more minor problem is Junius and the odd scene early in Act 2 where he seems to be inciting the Romans to revolt while acting as a general in Tarquinius’ army while, also, apparently, been in some sense complicit in the rape.  So we have a two faced power hungry schemer who is oblivious to the consequences of his mischief making; whether rape or rabble rousing (a sort of Roman Boris Johnson).  Most productions ignore this aspect of things and probably rightly.

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Rationing the rapture

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Katharina Wagner’s take on Tristan und Isolde recorded at Bayreuth in 2015 is hard to unpack.  There are some hints in a short essay in the booklet accompanying the disk and a few more in the interview with conductor Christian Thielemann included as an extra but it still leaves the viewer with a lot to do.  It’s essentially unromantic and quite abstract.  A lot of stuff that happens in a traditional interpretation just doesn’t happen but there’s not really anything much to replace it.  What’s left is the story of two people who fall in love in a situation where that is bound to end badly and where, despite the best efforts of pretty much everyone else, it does.  It’s actually quite nihilistic.  Tristan, and maybe Isolde, seek a kind of transcendence in love/death but there is none.  At the end Isolde doesn’t die but something in her does.  It had me thinking of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (but then so much in life does).

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Abstract Fidelio

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Fidelio is an interesting piece.  The music is great and it has a powerful, very straightforward, plot.  There are no convoluted subplots here.  But there is a lot of spoken dialogue which slows things down.  Is it necessary?  Claus Guth doesn’t think so and in his 2015 Salzburg production he replaces the dialogue with ambient noise and also doubles up Leonora and Don Pizarro with silent actor “shadows”; the former using sign language in the manner of the narrator character in Guth’s Messiah.  It works remarkably well.  The ambient noise sections are quite disturbing and the “shadows” add some depth, especially the frantic signing in the final scene.  Perhaps worth noting that the “noise” contains a lot of very low bass and precise spatial location.  It may need a pretty good sound system to have the intended effect.

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Alcina in Aix

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Katie Mitchell’s production of Handel ‘s Alcina recorded at Aix-en-Provence in 2015 is extremely interesting.  It’s almost complete with maybe twenty minutes of the ballet music cut.  None of the ballet is actually staged as such.  It’s also a Mitchell special multi-space set (like Written on Skin) with the lower level having Alcina/Morgana’s boudoir, drawing room or whatever at any given moment flanked by two smaller spaces which are the “personal” spaces of the two sisters.  When the ladies withdraw from the public/enchanted space they are replaced by actresses who look decades older.  Only late in the piece as Alcina’s magic fades do the two worlds get confused.  The upper level of the set is taken up with the giant machine that turns Alcina’s victims into taxidermied animals.  The overall aesthetic is upscale modern with lots of actors as very competent servants.

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The clutter of bodies

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The latest Handel oratorio to be given the operatic treatment by Glyndebourne is Saul, which played in 2015 in a production by Australian Barrie Kosky.  It’s quite a remarkable work.  The libretto, as so often the work of Charles Jennens, takes considerable liberties with the version in Samuel and incorporates obvious nods to both King Lear and Macbeth as well as more contemporary events.  David’s Act 3 lament on the death of Saul, for instance, clearly invokes the execution of Charles I.  What emerges is a very classic tragedy.  Saul, the Lord’s anointed, is driven by jealousy and insecurity deeper and deeper into madness and degradation and, ultimately, death.  This is the basic narrative arc of the piece.

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Another fine Cesare

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Handel’s Giulio Cesare is pretty well served in terms of video recordings.  The very fine Glyndebourne and Copenhagen versions get some serious competition from the 2012 production that inaugurated Cecilia Bartoli’s reign as director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.  The production is by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier.  It’s set in somewhere like Iraq in an immediately post-war period.  It’s quite dark, probably darker than Negrin’s in Copenhagen and world’s away from McVicar’s almost RomCom version.  There’s a lot of violence and some pretty sleazy sex.  A lot of this centres around Tolomeo who is portrayed as beyond revolting.  There’s a scene where he rips guts out of a statue of Caesar and starts to gnaw on them and there is a fair bit in that vein.  Caesar and Cleopatra are portrayed ambiguously too.  Sure they are the “heroes” of the piece but Cleopatra’s delight in flogging off her country’s oil wealth to the Romans shows a degree of cynicism.  This is not a production for the Konzept averse but I think all the choices made have a point and the overall effect is coherent.  It’s not without humour either.  Cleopatra sings V’adore pupille in a 70s blonde wig while riding a cruise missile with Caesar watching through 3D glasses.

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The Rake at 35

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David Hockney and John Cox’s production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress first saw the light of day at Glyndebourne in 1975 and there’s a video of it from back then.  It’s been revived umpteen times since, all with Cox directing rather than an overawed revival director.  It was done again in 2010, with Vladimir Jurowski conducting, recorded and issued on Blu-ray and DVD.  It’s fascinating.

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