Tag Archives: dvd

Makes me want to cut my throat too

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Philippe Boesmans’ opera Julie; libretto by Luc Bondy and Marie-Louise Bischolberger after Früken Julie by August Strindberg, is unremittingly bleak.  In fact, if it lasted much longer than its 75 minutes I could well imagine audience members cutting their throats long before the title character.  That said, it’s pretty compelling stuff.  It’s a tight drama about a young aristocratic woman kicking against the constraints of her privileged life aided and abetted by her father’s rather spineless valet Jean; a suitable occupation as he is one of nature’s lackeys.  The only likeable character is Jean’s young fiancée Kristin, a cook in the household.  Buried in this simple melodramatic plot of lust, betrayal and suicide are all kinds of ideas about heredity, social class and behaviour.  Broadly speaking the message is “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” and woe betide you if your plebeian mother married above herself.

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Abduction in Aix

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Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail is perhaps the most difficult of his major operas to bring off successfully.  I dealt with some of the issues in a review of Hans Neuenfel’s production so I won’t repeat myself here.  Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeïff’s production for the Aix-en-Provence Festival, filmed in 2004, has several interesting features that cast an interesting light on the main characters.  The most drastic is the treatment of Osmin.  Here he’s rather dignified and far from the fat, brutal, somewhat comic lecher of convention.  That side of his character is conveyed by five, mostly silent, sidekicks.  These guys are everywhere, portraying both Osmin’s baser nature and the “walls have eyes and ears” aspects of the story.  They are made to look rather dim and get some fairly funny business to play with.  Next we have Bassa Selim played by a dancer.  This makes it easier to portray him as sensitive but not a wimp through the use of extremely virile choreography.  Clever!  Finally, both Pedrillo and Blondchen are sung by people of colour.  That can’t be a coincidence.  It certainly puts a very interesting spin on the confrontation between Osmin and Blondchen about how English girls are different from Turks.  These ideas are played out against rather dramatically colourful sets and costumes with lots of comic business to make a fast paced and enjoyable romp that makes one think just enough about the underlying meanings.

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Ciboulette

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Reynaldo Hahn’s 1923 piece Ciboulette is considered one of the last great French operettas.  It’s certainly tuneful and highly sophisticated.  I lost track of the number of times the word “raffiné” is used during the interviews with production team and cast.  It’s certainly a highly involved piece of meta theatre running the gamut of operatic conventions and adding a few touches of its own.  It’s just as well really as all of this is wrapped around a conventionally paper thin plot.

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Bergman’s Magic Flute (Trollflöjten)

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Despite having seen many Magic Flutes and pretty much every Bergman movie it’s only now that I’ve got around to watching his famous film of the Mozart opera, or rather Bergman’s version of the opera, because it differs in important ways from Shikaneder’s libretto.  The basic concept is that Pamina is Sarastro’s daughter, who he has removed from the evil influence of her mother.  He intends Pamina to inherit his kingdom and leadership of the Brotherhood but only after he’s found a suitable chap to keep her out of trouble which is, of course, where Tamino comes in.  So whatever else has changed, the misogyny is intact.  There are other changes too.  Monostatos is almost written out of the script and a good deal of dialogue is changed or omitted, as are some musical numbers.  The whole thing comes in at 135 minutes so maybe 30 minutes of material have been cut.  None of this seems very radical today but must have raised a few eyebrows in 1975.

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Dense and dramatic Ariadne

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Claus Guth’s 2006 production of Ariadne auf Naxos recorded at the Opernhaus Zürich in 2006 is a compelling piece of theatre.  It’s one of those Regietheater pieces that combines a workable concept with compelling Personenregie to create a whole that’s extremely illuminating.  The entire Vorspiel is played out, in modern dress, in front of a grey curtain.  We get an immediate idea of how Guth is going to explore/exploit metatheatricality as soon as the Haushofmeister appears.  He’s played by none other than Zürich Intendant Alexander Pereira.  Who is calling the shots?  This is reinforced when he drops the bombshell that the opera seria must be combined with Zerbinetta’s farce.  This speech is delivered by Pereira from among his guests in the Intendant’s box.  It’s very clever.  But there’s so much more going on during the Vorspiel.  The Komponist is getting seriously deranged; perhaps even more so after he begins his infatuation with Zerbinetta.  There’s a moment when it looks like a love triangle is being set up.  The diva just gives one look that suggests that she’s got her eyes on the Komponist.  It’s a typical moment.  A look, a gesture, seems to convey so much.  It all concludes with the deranged Komponist shooting himself.

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Filming Gloriana

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Phyllida Lloyd’s 2000 BBC film of Britten’s Gloriana, based on her production for Opera North, is quite fascinating.  The bonus interviews reveal the utter disdain for films/videos of stage opera productions held by pretty much everyone involved in the project.  It’s an interesting perspective to hear in a world where Cinema and streaming HD broadcasts are increasingly common and where Blu-ray/DVD has clearly overtaken CD as the preferred medium for opera recordings.  In some ways, of course, it’s because the technology has improved enormously.  DVD was still relatively new in 2000 and widescreen, flat screen TVs were yet to come.  In any event, this attitude led to the creation of a rather interesting film.

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Starkly beautiful Carmen

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Matthias Hartmann’s staging of Carmen for the Opernhaus Zürich recorded in 2008 is starkly simple but very beautiful and provides a perfect vehicle for the considerable talents of Vesselina Kasarova and Jonas Kaufmann.  The set consists of a plain backdrop and a raised elliptical disk, reminiscent of a bull ring.  A few, very few, props are added as needed.  A dog lies asleep at the front of the set (replaced by a cattle skull in the final act).

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Keine Ruh’ bei Tag und Nacht

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At the Christmas 2012 Against the Grain Christmas party I won a mega box set of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau goodies which included a couple of DVDs of opera extracts including some footage of him singing the title role in Don Giovanni auf Deutsch.  The full recording from which those excerpts were taken has recently been released on DVD.  It’s a TV broadcast from the opening of the rebuilt Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1961.  It’s the earliest recorded in a theatre, in front of an audience, TV opera broadcast that I have seen.  It wasn’t, apparently, broadcast live.  The recording was made during the final dress and broadcast the following evening simultaneously with the first performance proper.

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Spuren der Verirrten

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Spuren der Verirrten (The Lost) is described on the box as an opera by Philip Glass.  That’s pretty misleading.  It’s more a theatre piece/ballet by David Pountney and Amin Hosseinpour with a soundtrack by Philip Glass.  It was created for the opening of the new Landestheater Linz at the instigation of Artistic Director Rainer Mennicken (carefully trimmed beard, wire rimmed glasses) who wanted a piece that would encapsulate all the various theatrical forms the new building would stage, as well as show off its technical capabilities.  Mennicken also wrote the “libretto” based on a highly abstract play by Peter Handke which seems to deal with the hopelessness of the human condition in some sort of post apocalyptic world.  There’s no plot as such and the work unfolds in a series of scenes.  For example there’s a ballerina point shoeing across the stage followed by a “spectator” in the auditorium commenting on the action followed by dancers with roadsigns followed by a Gumby like couple sitting under a table followed by more narration.  Then come more dancers in Hosseinpour’s signature “jerky” style followed by a woman with an anti-nuclear sign having a row with her boyfriend in front of a giant green brain.  And that’s just the first ten minutes of a piece that goes on for nearly two hours.  Along the way we get a reality TV show in which the characters discuss whether a serial killer is worse than a goalkeeper who lets in a soft goal, a confrontation between the patriarch Abraham and a giant rabbit and a scene where a naked woman cuddles a human head while two dancers do the fish slapping dance around her.  The piece concludes with the orchestra on stage and the chorus in the pit miming playing instruments and singing “blah, blah, blah” which actually fits the music pretty well.

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All who were lost are found

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Thomas Adès’ 2004 opera The Tempest was given at the Metropolitan Opera in 2012 in a new production by Robert Lepage.  It got an HD broadcast and a subsequent DVD release.  It’s an interesting work which, on happening, was compared to Peter Grimes as the “next great English opera”.  Whether this early hype will turn into a sustained place in the repertoire is yet to be seen.  Musically it’s not easy to characterize.  Adès very much has his own style; mixing lyricism with atonality and, in this piece, setting one of the roles, Ariel, so high it’s surprising anyone has been found to sing it.  Certainly it’s a more aggressively modern style than most of the work currently being produced in North America.  The libretto two is unusual.  Shakespeare’s own words were, apparently, considered too difficult to sing though, of course, Britten famously set great screeds of unadulterated bard in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  For the Tempest, Meredith Oakes has rendered the text into couplets; rhymed or half rhymed.  It works quite well with only the occasional touch of Jeremy Sams like banality.

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