Tag Archives: salzburg

Tosca noir

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The 2018 Salzburg Easter Festival production of Puccini’s Tosca was directed by Michael Sturminger.  The only Sturminger works I’ve seen before are his rather odd Mozart collaborations with John Malkovich; The Giacomo Variations and The Infernal Comedy so I really wasn’t sure what to expect.  The production riffs off film noir and is updated to more or less the present.  It opens with a shoot out between Angelotti and the police  but that lasts only a few seconds and the first act and the first half of the second act are fairly conventional, bar Scarpia on an exercise bike as Act 2 opens.  That said, it’s big and monochromatic and it does have a noir feel.  It starts to get a bit more conceptual around the Scarpia/Tosca confrontation.  It’s an interesting take on Scarpia; perhaps more bureaucrat than psychopath.  The relationship between the two is well drawn and Anja Harteros does a really convincing job of her build up to killing Scarpia including a first class Vissi d’arte sung from some unusual positions.  There’s a hint of what’s to come at the very end of the act when an “I’m not dead yet” Scarpia is seen crawling towards his phone.

1.church

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Karajan’s Walküre – 50 years on

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To quote a quite different opera, “it is a curious story”.  In 1967 a production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, heavily influenced by Herbert von Karajan [1] who conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the performances, opened the very first Osterfestspiele Salzburg.  50 years later it was “remounted” with Vera and Sonja Nemirova directing.  I use inverted commas because it’s actually not entirely clear how much was old and how much new.  It might be more accurate to describe it as a homage to the earlier version.  In any event, it was recorded, in 4K Ultra HD, no less and released as one of the very first opera discs in that format.

1.tree

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Arabella with Fleming and Hampson

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Thomas Hampson and Renée Fleming teamed up for Strauss’ Arabella at the 2014 Salzburg Osterfestspiel.  The production is directed by Florentine Klepper and it’s set late 19th/early 20th century and is conventional in many ways though there are a few interesting touches.  There may be more than a few but video director Brian Large focusses quite relentlessly on the singers 99% of the time so it’s hard to tell.  I noticed a few things.  The hotel set in Act 1 is multi-room but it’s very rare that we see other than the room the principal action is in so who knows what might have been going on.  There’s a use of body doubles during the Act 2 duet to create a sort of “portrait” of Mandryka and Arabella that broods over the stage for the rest of the act.  The fortune teller reappears with the “trouble” card during the “key” scene.  The whole Fiakermilli episode is difficult to interpret because the video gives such a fragmentary view of it.  There’s certainly a couple of suggestive giant dolls.  Otherwise this scene just comes off as pretty crude and lame.  I suspect that there may be much going on here that isn’t on the video.  This all tends to reinforce the weaknesses of the second half of Act 2 and the start of Act 3 which certainly are not Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s best work.

1.matteozdenka

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Faust as you have never seen it before

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The 2016 Salzburg recording of Gounod’s Faust is challenging.  Perhaps the nine pages of the booklet given over to a concept discussion with the directors should have given me sufficient warning that this was not going to be Faust à la Met.  It’s not.  It’s extremely complex and I’m not sure I fully understand it or whether all the ideas work but I did find it fascinating visually and dramatically, and musically it’s top notch.  That said, traditionalists can save themselves a trip to the ER by walking away now.

1.rien

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Spectacular Die Liebe der Danae

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Richard Strauss’ Die Liebe der Danae is one of his least performed operas so it’s not very familiar to most opera goers.  I wrote about its performance history and provided a plot summary in my review of a 2011 recording at the Deutsche Oper, which is the only video recording besides the 2016 Salzburg one which forms the subject of this post.

1.turbans

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Elegant and subtle Otello

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Vincent Brossard’s production of Verdi’s Otello for the 2016 Salzburg Easter Festival is both elegant and subtle; the latter quality being backed up by superb singing and acting from the principals.  In many ways the production is clean and straightforward with a focus on character development but it also makes use of elegant lines and sharply contrasting darks and lights in creating the stage picture.  There’s also a really cool use of mirrors during Già nella notte densa that I can’t quite figure out.

1.storm

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Equestrian Mozart

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Once in a while one comes across a disk that sounds like it could be interesting but turns out to be a bit of a bust.  That was certainly my experience with the recording of Mozart’s Davide penitente recorded in Salzburg during Mozart Week in 2015.  On the face of it using the Felsenreitschule for something like its original purpose isn’t such a bad idea and the idea of choreographed horse “ballet” to a Mozart cantata is quite intriguing.  On the face of it…

1.bartabas

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Netrebko’s Manon

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manonlescautNot too many CDs of new opera recordings, at least of mainstream repertoire, come my way these days.  Studio recordings have become rare and the usual medium is a video recording, itself a spin off from a live broadcast; TV, cinema or web, of a live performance.  This makes sense to me.  Just listening to an opera has always seemed a second best.  Anyway, that’s all by way of saying that I was a bit surprised to find myself listening to a CD edition of a live recording of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut from the 2016 Salzburg Festival.  How did this recording happen you ask?  The answer is on the box, where Anna Netrebko in the title role, gets top billing, even over the composer.

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Kaufmann’s Cav and Pag

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Jonas Kaufmann made a double role debut as Turiddu and Canio in the classic verismo double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2015,  The productions were directed by Philipp Stölzl and Christian Thielemann conducted with the Staatskapelle Dresden in the pit.

1.church

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Bechtolf Round Two – Don Giovanni

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Sven-Eric Bechtolf’s second Mozart/daPonte for Salzburg was Don Giovanni which premiered in 2014.  There are some similarities with his Così fan tutte.  He uses a symmetrical unit set again and shows a fondness for creating symmetrical tableaux vivants but there the similarities pretty much end.  I could find a consistent, believable set of humans in Così but not so much in Don Giovanni.  The problem is really the man himself.  Bechtolf, in his notes, seems to be arguing that Don Giovanni can make no sense in an age of pervasive accessibility and exposure to all things sexual.  Da Ponte’s Don requires a climate of sexual repression for his essence; to Bechtolf a kind of Dionysian force (he cites Kierkegaard), to make any sense as a human.  I think I get that but then, I think, the challenge becomes to create a Don Giovanni who does make sense to a 21st century audience as, in their different ways, do Guth and Tcherniakov.  Bechtolf seems to treat the character not so much as a human rather than as a kind of energy focus who exists by igniting aspects of the other characters; whether that’s lust or jealousy or hatred.  He caps off this idea at the end by having Don Giovanni reappear during the final ensemble as a kind of mischievous presence still chasing anything in a skirt, even if it’s, perhaps, from another world.  It’s an idea that I could not really buy into.

1.stab

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