The Enchantress (sometimes translated as The Sorceress) is a rather infrequently performed 1887 opera by Tchaikovsky. It got a production in Frankfurt in 2022 with an interesting cast. Asmik Grigorian plays the title character; Kuma or Nastasya, and Iain MacNeil, late of this parish, is Prince Nikita. It’s the first time I’ve come across him since he moved to Germany.
It’s pretty difficult to judge whether or not a high concept production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is going to work or not just from Das Rheingold but I thought Dmitri Tcherniakov’s production for Staatsoper unter den Linden recorded in 2022 was pretty promising. His world is a large research complex designated ESCHE for reasons that aren’t clear. The time period seems to be 1970s or thereabouts. The research is essentially psychological and the characters are variously executives, scientists and experimental subjects.
Sometimes one comes across a previously unfamiliar work that just blows one away. Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus did that to me. It’s a work written by Hartmann in 1934/5 as he watched the early years of Nazi power and the banning of “degenerate” art. By the time it got its premier in 1949 it’s story of a Germany physically and morally ravaged by war would seem all too prescient. It’s a simple story based on the early chapters of a novel by Grimmelshausen set during the Thirty Years War(1). It concerns a simple shepherd boy who is drawn into the conflict. There are three scenes. In the first, the entirely innocent boy witnesses the brutal destruction of the farm he works on by vagrant Landsknechten. In the second he is befriended by a hermit and undergoes a sort of moral education before once again being left abandoned by the hermit’s death. In the thirdhe becomes jester to the drunken and corrupt Governor; the idiot who tells the truth, until all is overthrown by a Peasant’s Revolt.
operaramblings 