A video recording of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex is a bit of an oddball really. It’s quite short (55 minutes) and it’s an oratorio rather than an opera. I guess it could be staged but the version recorded at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2022 isn’t. It’s a concert setting, in concert dress, with music stands. There’s not even minimal blocking.
Giordano’s Siberia is less well known than some of his other works such as Andrea Chenier and Feodora but it has been getting something of a revival recently with a production at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2021 (released on Blu-ray and DVD by Dynamic) and at the Bregenz Festival in 2022 which has also now been released on Blu-ray and DVD.
Carlus Padrissa’s (of La fura dels baus) take on Verdi’s La forza del destino for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is nothing if not ambitious. He interprets this rather banal and meandering melodrama as a tale of cosmic inevitability. Leonora and Alvaro are metaphors for two stars, which after an epic journey through time and space, will collide and form a black hole extinguishing each other. FWIW the recording was made in June 2020 under COVID restrictions so the chorus is masked and it sounds as if the theatre is a lot less than full.
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.
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.
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.
Verdi’s Falstaff, of course, is a farce so there’s no reason why a director shouldn’t treat it as one but all three of the other productions I’ve seen in the last few years have transposed it to the 1950s and put a spin on it. Sven-Eric Bechtolf, in his production for the 2021 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, just doesn’t do that. It’s a 1590s (ish) setting and it’s played very broad. There are big costumes, big gestures, entrances and exits and characters “hidden in plain view”. It could be Dario Fo or Brian Rix.
Catalani’s La Wally is not much performed outside Italy so I was interested to get my hands on a recording made at the Theater an der Wien in 2021. It’s about what one might expect from an Italian opera of the 1890s; an everyday story of country folk plus murder.
Wagner’s Parsifal both attracts and repels. It has gorgeous music but a problematic plot that, on the surface, is a weird mash up of Christian symbolism, medieval romance and (more than likely) anti-Semitism. With reference to the latter it’s no great surprise that an Israeli conductor taking on the work would want to take an approach that deals with that aspect head on. That’s what Omer Meir Wellber does, with the willing collaboration of director Graham Vick in a production staged and recorded at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo in 2020.
Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka is sometimes regarded as Poland’s national opera. It’s one of those mid 19th century works that tries to create some kind of national idiom broadly within the framework of the musical style of the age (the composer was conservatory trained in Berlin). It’s really quite good but rarely performed outside Poland so it’s interesting to look at it, especially in a rather good production by Mariusz Treliński that was given and recorded at Theater an der Wien in 2019.
operaramblings 