Opera is full of patriarchy. It’s a bit odd then that Leoš Janáček wrote two operas about dominating matriarchs and the consequences of their actions. The better known of the two is probably Jenůfa but the later Kát’a Kabanová deals with similar themes. Both are bleak and have watery endings.
It’s quite rare nowadays to stage all three Il Trittico operas in one evening and it will probably get rarer as financial pressures force shorter shows. Nonetheless it was done in Salzburg in 2022 in productions by Christof Loy. The USP was having Asmik Grigorian sing all three principal soprano roles so, not unreasonably, the usual order was switched up with Gianni Schicchi coming first and Suor Angelica closing things out. Unsurprisingly, and as intended, the evening increasingly became the Grigorian show as each opera succeeded the previous one.
The remastered SACD release of Siegfried from the Solti Ring cycle is now out. There’s only so much I can add to my reviews of Die Walküre and of the sampler disk of the whole cycle. Overall observations about the technical side of the record remain valid and the Vienna Philharmonic is again fabulous. The packaging is as with Die Walküre… luxurious.
The singing is also very fine and I didn’t have any reservations about anyone sounding “dated”. Hotter and Nilsson are again fantastic and Wolfgang Windgassen’s Siegfried combines beauty and power in full measure. Gustav Neidlinger and Kurt Böhme are back as Alberich and Fafner to good effect. Gerhard Stolze is effective (and not too affected) as Mime and there’s the famous cameo as the Woodbird by Joan Sutherland. Solti’s conducting is once again thrilling. He’s not afraid to take things at pace but can also be intensely dramatic and lyrical; sometimes at the same time. Culshaw’s “soundstage” effects come off really well, especially in the Fafner’s lair scene. This is another impressive instalment in an impressive project.
The version I listened to is the the four SACD disk release. It’s also available (for roughly the price of a Nibelung’s horde) as five vinyl LPs or much, much cheaper digitally in formats ranging from MP3 to 192kHz/24 bit FLAC which I suspect will be very good but not quite up to SACD quality.
Catalogue number: Decca 4853161
I have now had a chance to listen to the new SACD release of the 1965 Solti recording of Wagner’s Die Walküre. (For some reason Das Rheingold hasn’t arrived yet). I’m not going to do a detailed review of the performance since pretty much everything that could be said about it has been, and by people better qualified than me. As you might expect for a recording twice voted “recording of the century”. I’ve also already written about the technical details of the new transfer in my review of the sampler disk.
Live from Salzburg is a new CD featuring music recorded live at Salzburg during the pandemic. The performers are Elīna Garanča, The Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann. There are two sets of songs; Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder (recorded in 2020) and Mahler’s Rückert Lieder (recorded in 2021). Both recordings were made during live performances in the Großesfestspielhaus.
I like Garanča a lot in this music. Sometimes I find her a bit “cold” but here there’s a really nice balance of emotion and clarity. Her articulation of the text is excellent and she sounds good throughout her range. The lower and middle ranges have a kind of burnished quality; not really dark but definitely not soprano like , while her upper register is controlled and smooth. The low end is perhaps best heard in Um Mitternacht where she shows real power and depth of emotion.
Schubert could write great melodies and he had a real affinity for the voice so one might expect him to have been successful when he turned his hand to opera. He wasn’t with Fierrabras which wasn’t performed until decades after his death and has been revived seldom since, most recently at Salzburg in 2014 where it was recorded. It’s easy to see why. The libretto is awful and even if the music were really amazing, which it isn’t but more of that later, I doubt it would have made much impact.
Fidelio is an interesting piece. The music is great and it has a powerful, very straightforward, plot. There are no convoluted subplots here. But there is a lot of spoken dialogue which slows things down. Is it necessary? Claus Guth doesn’t think so and in his 2015 Salzburg production he replaces the dialogue with ambient noise and also doubles up Leonora and Don Pizarro with silent actor “shadows”; the former using sign language in the manner of the narrator character in Guth’s Messiah. It works remarkably well. The ambient noise sections are quite disturbing and the “shadows” add some depth, especially the frantic signing in the final scene. Perhaps worth noting that the “noise” contains a lot of very low bass and precise spatial location. It may need a pretty good sound system to have the intended effect.
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