Tag Archives: blu-ray

Wagner’s Ring at the Deutsche Oper Berlin

Posted on by
4

There’s a new recording out of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen recorded at the Deutsche Oper Berlin last year.  Now the DOB claims a special relationship with the music of Wagner (the “Winter Bayreuth”) and it is, of course, in Berlin which adds an unavoidable dimension to the performance history there.  It has also had, for more than twenty years, Götz Friedrich’s famous production in its repertoire.  So, a new Ring at DOB is a big thing.  Given that, what I want to do in terms of engaging with the recording is to bookend reviews of the four videos of the operas in the usual fashion with two general pieces; one laying out my expectations based on the “bonus” material in the boxed set and the booklets, and one as a sort of final conclusion having watched the whole thing.  This post is, of course, the first of those.

DOB

Continue reading →

Christmas Eve

Posted on by
Reply

Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1894 opera Christmas Eve is based on the Gogol short story The Night Before Christmas which also formed the basis for Tchaikovsky’s The Tsarina’s Slippers.  We are in a small village in Ukraine just before Christmas.  Basically the smith Vakula is in love with Oksana, the beautiful daughter of the rich farmer Chub.  To complicate matters Vakula’s mother, Solokha, is a witch who is (in the words of the subtitles) “having it off” with every prominent male in the village including Chub plus the Devil. Vakula shows up unexpectedly at his mum’s where she has been hiding successive lovers in sacks as the next (unscheduled) one arrives.  Vakula “tidies up” the sacks but then runs into a big party of villagers where the contents of the sacks are revealed (except for the Devil).  Oksana teases Vakula and says she will only marry him if he brings her the Tsarina’s slippers as a Christmas gift.  Vakula vows never to be seen in the village again and sets off with the Devil in his sack.

1.oksana

Continue reading →

Moving Traviata from MMF

Posted on by
2

It’s not all that often I feel genuinely moved by an opera on video.  It’s so much less immersive than experiencing live.  There is the occasional one.  Both the Berlin Parsifal and the Aix-en-Provence La traviata come to mind.  The recently released La traviata from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is another one.  It’s an interesting and effective production with a strong cast centred on the searing Violetta of Nadine Sierra.

1.mirror

Continue reading →

Butterfly at Bregenz

Posted on by
1

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is an opera I really have trouble with.  Done “straight” it’s just a horrible mixture of cultural appropriation and just plain ick.  It does have some good music though and opera companies insist on doing it roughy every five minutes so it would be really nice to find a production that worked dramatically.  The lake stage at Bregenz is just about the last place I’d expect to find that so I was pleasantly surprised that Andreas Homoki’s 2022 production is maybe the most interesting I’ve seen.1.arrival

Continue reading →

Fuoco Sacro

Posted on by
Reply

Fuoco Sacro is a film by Jan Schmidt-Garre.  It’s subtitled “A Search for the Sacred Fire of Song” and was inspired by Schmidt-Garre’s passion for Italian singing of a slightly earlier era rekindled when he heard Ermonela Jaho on his car radio.  This led him to explore how certain singers create something more than “just singing”.  In the film he does this by following the lives of three singers; all women (he clearly doesn’t believe that men have this elusive “sacred fire”) and all very different.  They are Ermonela Jaho (of course), Barbara Hannigan and Asmik Grigorian.  Now these are all singers about whom I have strong opinions and that may colour my view of the film.  You have been warned.  What follows concentrates on what I think the film tells us about its three principals.  The film does this more by show than tell with lots of performance and rehearsal footage as well as interviews.

1.backthen

Continue reading →

L’Orfeo in Paris

Posted on by
Reply

The last time I reviewed a recording of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo was ten years ago and it included Jordi Savali with La Capella Real de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations.  Oddly enough they also figure in a recording made last year at the Opéra Comique in Paris.  Pauline Bayle’s production though is very different from the very HIP Liceu version.

1.lamusica

Continue reading →

Giulio Cesare at Grauman’s

Posted on by
Reply

The 2021 production, by Keith Warner, of Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Theater an der Wien uses Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre as a framing device.  Sometimes the action is clearly the actors, producers, cigarette girls etc involved in the screening of a silent German movie version of “Caesar and Cleopatra”.  Other times they are performing the action of the film/opera.  Sometimes the cinema screen shows clips from the movie.   Other times it shows pictures of the characters on stage.  For example, at the beginning of Act 2 Tolomeo, whose other persona is some kind of sleazy mafioso movie exec, is shooting up.  There’s a B&W picture of him on the screen that slowly changes to bright colours and then becomes more and more a depiction of a pretty heavy trip.

1.dinner

Continue reading →

The Gods look down

Posted on by
2

Robert Carsen’s 2021 production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria was recorded at the Teatro della Pergola during the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The theatre, opened in the 1660s and very much a “renaissance theatre”, is very much part of the production; the loge boxes are used during the prologue, entrances are made through the unusual parterre (individual chairs not rows of seats) and the gallery behind the stage is used by the gods to observe the action below. Monteverdi used three distinct styles of music for gods, royals and lesser folk, Carsen mimics this by giving the three orders distinct costume and acting styles. The gods (and there is the full pantheon, not just the ones who appear in the opera, each with his or her distinctive emblem), costumed in opulent crimson 16th century style costumes, act in a stylised manner. The royals get smart modern dress and naturalistic acting while the others are scruffier and act more broadly.

1.penelope

Continue reading →

The Golden Cockerel

Posted on by
Reply

Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel is a pretty weird opera.  It’s a satire on Nicholas II’s performance as tsar written just after the disastrous 1905 war with Japan and due to entirely unsurprising trouble with the censors it wasn’t performed in the composer’s life time.  As you may imagine, a production of it by Barrie Kosky doesn’t make it any less weird.  Kosky’s production was recorded at Opéra de Lyon in May 2021 and there are still some COVID artefacts.  The chorus, for instance, is masked.  But mostly it feels like a “normal” production.

1.cockerel

Continue reading →

Virtue not blood

Posted on by
Reply

Scarlatti’s Griselda is based on a story from the Decameron.  Gualtiero, king of Sicily, has married Griselda, a shepherdess.  The people are upset that the king has married beneath him and are getting stroppy.  Gualtiero sets out to prove Griselda a worthy consort by testing her constancy.  He repudiates Griselda and sends her back to shepherding while arranging to marry an Apulian princess Constanza, who both he and Corrado, duke of Apulia, know to be his daughter by Griselda.  It’s complicated by one Ottone who is infatuated by Griselda and Roberto, son of Corrado, who is in love with Costanza, who returns his feelings.  Griselda is put through various humiliating trials in which she repeatedly shows her devotion to Gualtiero.  Eventually the people recognise her virtue and all is restored.  One notable thing, unlike his predecessor Cavalli, Scarlatti doesn’t inject any incongruous or comic passages into the opera.  It’s all deadpan serious.

1.gualtierogriselda

Continue reading →