Dmitri Tcherniakov’s 2015 production of Wagner’s Parsifal recorded at the Staatsoper in Berlin in 2015 left me emotionally drained as I don’t think I’ve ever been after watching a recording. I can only imagine what it must have been like to experience this live. The combination of the production, exceptional singing and acting and Daniel Barenboim’s conducting is quite exceptional. It’s not going to be easy to unpack it all coherently but here goes…
La Scala and Riccardo Chailly have embarked on a project to record all the Puccini operas. The first one, recorded in 2015, is Turandot with a new completion of the third act by Berio rather than the usual Alfano version. The director was Nikolaus Lehnhoff with Nina Stemme as Turandot and Aleksandrs Antonenko as Calaf.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Hamburg State Opera cooperated with Polyphon and NDR to make a series of thirteen films for television of assorted operas. They are all available as a boxed set called Cult Operas of the 1970s but one or two of them are also available separately. One such is a 1968 recording of Weber’s Der Freischütz. It was directed for film/TV by Rolf Liebermann and recorded in the studio using the HSO’s stage production. I think the action is lip synched to a pre-recorded soundtrack (normal practice at the time) but I’m not sure.
Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci are not only a commonly coupled pair of operas but pretty much define the genre we call verismo. It’s a curious genre in a lot of ways. Musically it defines a style, brought to its highest state by Puccini, that is a sort of Fukuyama-esque “end of opera” after which everything is, for a section of the opera audience, modern, inaccessible and frightening. It’s also dramatically an attempt to get away from stories from myth and history and root the drama in “stories of everyday folk”. Which is fine, I suppose, if one believes the only things “everyday folk” care about are female constancy and the more pagan end of Catholicism for these stories tend to be a touch unsubtle; “she done him wrong so he killed her” (and her dog and he probably crashed her truck too). It’s actually quite ironic that Puccini, held up as the arch exponent of verismo, rarely actually goes down this path. Il Tabarro perhaps, maybe Suor Angelica, at a stretch Tosca but in large part his material is drawn from the usual well of opera plots. So Cav and Pag is interesting as almost pure verismo.
Eugen d’Albert is largely forgotten as a composer but his seventh (of twenty) opera, Tiefland, is still performed occasionally in German speaking countries. It’s an odd work. The plot is melodramatic with a cloying degree of sentimentality; sort of Mascagni meets Gounod, while the music is like pastoral Wagner (think the way the woodwinds are used in Tristan) with touches of Carmen and, just occasionally, hints of Sullivan (one of d’Albert’s teachers). For a 1903 work it feels curiously retro.
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.
The 2010 Oslo recording of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea is one of the strangest opera videos I have ever seen. Besides having an almost complete set of the characteristics that critics pejoratively assign to Regietheatre it also has a very unusual video treatment that goes well beyond quirky camera angles and overly intrusive close-ups. So the box is being entirely accurate when it states “Based on a performance directed by Ole Anders Tandberg. Adapted and filmed by Anja Stabell and Stein-Roger Bull”.
Deutsche Grammophon have re-released the Mozart M22 recordings in a new edition. It contains all the operas, singspiels and other bits and pieces mostly recorded at Salzburg in 2006. The whole thing comes to 33 DVDs recorded in HD and with 5.1 surround sound. It’s also incredibly cheap. Amazon.ca has it listed at C$139.99 including shipping. Full details are available on the Presto Classical site which is likely a good source for UK buyers but others might want to watch the postage charges on this one! The set includes some fine productions including Kušej’s Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito and Guth’s Le nozze di Figaro. It’s also still currently the only way of getting hold of Herheim’s notorious Die Entführung aus dem Serail which has been out of the catalogue for ages and still isn’t available separately. The only drawbacks I can see are that many collectors will already have many of these discs and it’s only available on DVD rather than Blu-ray (but most of these recordings never did make it to Blu-ray). It would make a great Christmas present for someone starting an opera DVD collection.
Carl Nielsen’s operas don’t get performed much outside his native Denmark so it’s no surprise that the only video recording of his 1902 opera Saul og David was recorded in Copenhagen. The libretto is a fairly straightforward telling of the familiar story of Saul, David, Goliath, Samuel and so on. The music is very much of its time. It’s bold and lyrical; perhaps reminiscent of Strauss in a conventional mood or, perhaps, Elgar. There are some really good choruses and David and Michal get a gorgeous duet in Act 3.
If I had been languishing in obscurity for 250 years like Joseph Bodin de Boismortier I think I’d rather stay that way than be rescued by Hervé Niquet and the French “comedy” duo Dino and Shirley (Corinne and Gilles Benizio). To be fair their take on Boismortier’s 1743 ballet-comédie Don Quichotte chez la duchesse isn’t nearly as bad as their previous brutal murder of Purcell’s King Arthur but it’s really weird and patchy. It’s rather hard to describe in fact. It’s a sort of mash up of farce, commedia, slapstick and pastiche in which bits of baroque opera occasionally break out. It’s also staged as meta theatre with the stage interacting with the pit and Niquet himself ending up in the action.
operaramblings 