Tag Archives: sommer

Siegmund as Psychopath

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Following on from Das Rheingold, the second instalment of Dmiti Tcherniakov’s Ring cycle; Die Walküre, recorded at Staatsoper unter den Linden in 2022, has now been released on video.  We are sill in the ESCHE psychological research centre.  During the Prelude we see news footage of Siegmund’s escape from the programme he is in.  He staggers into Hunding’s staff apartment to find Sieglinde.  Hunding, when he appears, is some sort of armed security guard.  This illustrates the problems I have with this production.  The psychology of the Siegmund/Sieglinde/Hunding trio works well but the back story of Wälse, Sieglinde’s forced marriage etc makes no sense at all.  Oh, and Wotan seems to be watching everything that goes on.

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The Rheingold Research Centre

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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.

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The Snow Maiden

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Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden is a rather odd opera.  It’s set in some sort of idyllic pre-Christian Russia where the tsar is approachable, just and benevolent and the people spend most of their time drinking and having sex.  Into this world comes Snow Maiden, the fifteen year old daughter of Winter and Spring.  Her parents have various things to do and so decide to park the girl with the local peasantry.  Various romantic complications ensue involving a rather nasty, rich merchant Mizguir and the mysterious Lel, who may be a shepherd but likely isn’t mortal either.  The mating behaviour of the locals confuses Snow Maiden as she is incapable of falling in love.  Eventually Spring grants her that faculty and she gives herself to Mizguir, while really wanting Lel, but the rays of the sun on the first day of summer melt her. The natives ignore her death and get on with singing and dancing.

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Castorf’s weird From the House of the Dead

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It’s not often that I’m completely baffled by an opera production but Frank Castorf’s 2018 production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead (Z Mrtvého Domu) at the Bayerische Staatsoper comes pretty close.  Since I really can’t explain what’s going on I’ll try to describe the various elements.

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Der Prinz von Homburg

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Der Prinz von Homburg is a 1960 opera by Hans Werner Henze setting a libretto by Ingeborg Bachmann based on an 1811 play by Heinrich von Kleist.  The essential context is Henze and Bachmann’s rejection of German militarism and authoritarianism that they believed was being built back into the new German Federal Republic.  It has been enjoying something of a revival in the last few years, perhaps as a result of the resurgence of the Fascist/nationalist right, with multiple productions in Germany including one in Stuttgart in 2019 which was recorded for video.

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Nabucco a la Visconti

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I guess Verdi’s Nabucco is even more closely associated with the Risorgimento than his other works so it’s not perhaps surprising that, for his 2017 production for Verona, Arnaud Bernard made the connection explicit.  We are in Milan during the Five Days.  La Scala; which does duty as the Temple, the Hanging Gardens and itself, stands in the middle of the huge performance space of the Arena di Verona.  Italian and Austrian soldiers, including cavalry, ride around the arena or clamber over the terraces.  It’s wild and spectacular but it’s more than that.

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Il Trovatore meets Huis Clos

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Dmitri Tcherniakov is an interesting and controversial director.  He’s not afraid to take a very radical approach to a work and that method tends to produce uneven results.  At it’s best, as in his Berlin Parsifal, it’s extraordinary and sometimes; his Wozzeck for example, interesting but perhaps not exactly revelatory, and,again, sometimes; as in his Don Giovanni, polarising.  That said he never does anything merely to shock or show off.  There’s always a logic to what he does and that’s certainly true of his quite radical version of Verdi’s Il Trovatore filmed at Brussels’ La Monnaie in 2012.

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A serious take on Les Indes galantes

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I’m not really sure that it’s a good idea to take Rameau too seriously, especially a work like Les Indes galantes but that’s what Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui does in his production for the 2016 Münchner Opernfestspiel.  As written, the piece has five separate parts; an allegorical prelude and four scènes, each telling a love story in an “exotic” setting; Turkey, Peru, Persia, among les sauvages of North America.  It’s a spectacle but it uses the exotic settings to poke fun at certain aspects of Western culture in Rameau’s usual irreverent way.  There’s no linking narrative and the characters in each scène (the goddesses Amour and Bellona aside) only appear once.

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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…

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Shattering Parsifal

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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…

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