Tag Archives: wagner

Back to Tristan

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Last night the lemur and I braved the biggest snow storm in several years to catch Tristan und Isolde at the Four Seasons Centre.  It was the same production I saw last Tuesday but with Michael Baba and Margaret Jane Wray replacing Ben Heppner and Melanie Diener in the title roles.  I was also sitting at the front of the Orchestra Ring which is a very different sight line than the back of Ring 3.  There’s no way to avoid saying this, it was hugely disappointing and especially so as it was the first time the lemur had seen the show and I had been talking it up excitedly since Tuesday.  Baba and Wray sounded underpowered and under-rehearsed.  The big Act 2 duet, O sink’ hernieder, Nacht der Liebe, that had left me literally shaking on Tuesday merely left me shaking my head.  What had been a glorious, transcendent, hypnotic wave of sound had turned to mush.  It was a relief when Franz-Josef Selig, King Marke, took over.  At last we got some Wagnerian singing of style and class.  Act 3 wasn’t much better.  To be fair, the rest of the cast was just as good as on opening night and the orchestra deservedly got the loudest and longest applause of the night.  But Tristan und Isolde needs, as Isolde points out, Tristan and Isolde.

Tristan und Isolde - 0013 - Credit Chris Hutcheson

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Highest, purest joy

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12-13-03-MC-D-0022-21After seeing Peter Sellars on Monday night I decided that (a) I had to see Ben Heppner as Tristan and (b) I couldn’t wait until next Friday when I have tickets to see Michael Baba in the role.  So, I skipped out of the office yesterday morning and with a little help (thanks Sergey!) scored a standing room ticket for last night’s opening.  (At $12 for nearly five hours music this was a remarkable bargain!).  I’m back at my desk on five hours sleep and I’m still in shock.  This will go down in legend.

I’d only seen Tristan und Isolde once before, in a disastrous MetHD broadcast, which had been so irritating that the music left little impression.  Other times I’d attempted it on DVD I couldn’t get past the nothinghappensness of it.  Last night I finally got it.  In Sellars’ production not much happens on stage.  The singers, in non descript monochrome outfits, come and go or stand around in square light spots.  They gesture in characteristically Sellarian fashion but it’s almost classic “park and bark”.  But, and it’s a huge but, behind them there is a giant screen on which videos by Bill Viola play more or less continuously and through them he evokes time and place and we see the inner journeys of the characters.  It’s really hard to describe but it works brilliantly.  To counterpoint the long meditative sections, when there is action it often happens off stage.  The chorus sing off stage from various parts of the house and characters, too, appear on the orchestra apron or high up in the Rings.  These action moments are often accompanied by lighting that encompasses the auditorium and implicates us in the action (but not the dark inner journey of Tristan and Isolde).  It’s great.  (1)

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Death, the Universe and Everything

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Last night Peter Sellars, in town directing Tristan und Isolde at the COC, made an appearance at the Toronto Reference Library.  It was billed as an interview with The Star‘s Richard Ouzounian but bar a couple of questions at the end and a brief set up by Ouzounian it was pretty much a 75 minute monologue by Sellars.  Like the man himself it was fascinating but very hard to pin down.

hi-peter-sellars

Peter Sellars at the Four Seasons Centre last week (CBC)

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Look! No swan

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1.kingSurprisingly perhaps I started out liking this 1986 recording of Lohengrin from the Metropolitan Opera quite a lot.  It’s a very traditional, literal and 70s/80s dark production but the orchestra and chorus are great, the P-regie seems pretty well thought out and the singing in the opening scenes is great.  Unfortunately it really rather goes downhill once Elsa, Lohengrin and Ortrud make their appearances.

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Secret Senta

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Martin Kušej’s production of Der fliegender Holländer for De Nederlandse Opera recorded in 2010 is high concept and it’s worth looking at the interviews with the cast and conductor before watching the main event.  Certainly the essay in the booklet will do little to prepare you.  For Kušej, Daland’s ship is a cruise ship or pleasure yacht full of expensively dressed partygoers.  The Dutchman’s “crew” are refugees or desperate economic migrants.  The Dutchman himself has made his pile in human trafficking.  The framework of the “outsiders” wanting a share of the “insiders'” goodies is the backdrop for the interpersonal drama of Senta, the Dutchman and Erik.

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There were rats

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I guess Lohengrin is one of those operas that’s so loaded up with symbols it just begs directors to deconstruct it.  Well that’s what Hans Neuenfels’ Bayreuth production, recorded in 2011, does and then some.  There is so much going on in this production that I think it would take many viewings to really get inside it.  The bit most critics have fastened on is the costuming of the chorus as rats or, on occasion, half rat, half human.  It’s visually interesting and since there are also ‘handlers’ in Hazmat suits it’s clear that some sort of experiment is being alluded to.  Add in bonus rat videos at key points and there’s a lot to think about.  One thing this does do is solve the Teutonic war song problem.  A chorus of rather timid looking rats singing with martial ardour is a good deal less Nurembergesque than a similar chorus in armour or military uniforms.  Rats aside the story is really told in a quite straightforward and linear way while providing all sorts of moments that one might want to interrogate further,

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‘Tis the season to speculate

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Finley-Gerald-02With a month or so to go before the Canadian Opera Company officially announces its 2013/14 season it’s surely time for some uninformed speculation.

There are three big anniversaries in 2013; the bicentenaries of Verdi and Wagner and the centenary of Benjamin Britten.  One would think all would be represented but maybe not.  We know Verdi will be.  Gerald Finley announced at the Rubies that he would make his role debut in the title role in Falstaff at COC in 2013/14 so we can ink that one in.  Britten seems probable.  There’s a Houston/COC co-pro of Peter Grimes, directed by Neil Armfield that is due to to come to Toronto.  I think we can pencil that one in.  No idea on casting but I would love to see Stuart Skelton myself.  Wagner, I’m not so sure.  Maybe February’s run of Tristan und Isolde will be COC’s sole nod to Wagner.  Certainly the next most likely candidate; the Lyon/Met/COC Parsifal is, apparently, not expected before 2015.

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Get your tickets now

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Photo Credit - Kira Perov 2005

Photo Credit – Kira Perov 2005

Word on the street is that there are only “a few hundred” tickets left for the COC’s February run of the Peter Sellars/Bill Viola Tristan und Isolde.  It’s a fair bet that most of the available tickets will be for nights when Burkhard Fritz is singing rather than Ben Heppner.  If you want to see Heppner I’d plan on buying now rather than expecting something last minute to turn up.  I’d expect there to be horrific line-ups for the same-day nosebleeds and standing room tickets (and I don’t have the stamina to stand through Tristan!).

tito05Christopher Alden’s production of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito apparently isn’t selling so well, despite a stellar cast and a production that got very good reviews in Chicago.  This makes me a sad panda.  Unfashionably, perhaps, I regard Clemenza as one of Mozart’s best operas, perhaps his very best, so the chance to see it with a wonderful cast is one I would not miss.  My current plans call for me to see it twice; with the principal cast and with the Ensemble Studio, but I shall be sorely tempted to get in for an extra look earlier in the run than my current tickets!

Flashbacks

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I’ve been banished from the living room and so the home theatre by the lemur practicing for a dance recital.  As a result I’m listening, on my iPod, to Solti’s recording of The Ring, which I was introduced to nearly four decades ago.  Listening to Das Rheingold again today after a long lay off I’m struck by how utterly brilliant it is.  Gustav Neidlinger’s Alberich is a marvel.  He’s singing lyrically not snarling or barking and it sounds quite lovely.  Solti’s command of rhythm is astonishing.  One could dance to this!  And has John Culshaw’s sound engineering ever been bettered?

Still wonderful as it is it’s having much the same effect as Proust’s madeleine.  I first heard this recording (on vinyl of course) courtesy of the man who taught me Applied Maths for ‘A’ level .  He was a rather sad old chap but he introduced me to Wagner, Quad electrostatic speakers and gin.  He’s long dead of course.  So it goes.

We’ve already got one you see

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Last night I tried to watch Parsifal – The Search for the Grail.  Ostensibly it’s a documentary about the origins of Wagner’s opera and to give it opera cred they roped in one Placido Domingo as narrator.  Valery Gergiev is also involved.  What a load of tosh!  It’s basically a rather weak history of the Grail as portrayed in popular culture complete with Monty Python, Indiana Jones, real Nazis as well as fake ones, pitiful reconstructions of crusader battles and on and on.  Mind numbing cliché follows mind numbing cliché.  Nul points!  What was Domingo thinking of associating himself with this dreck?