Posts Tagged ‘La Scala’

Requiem aeternam

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid
The Festtage of the Staatsoper Berlin, founded by Daniel Barenboim in 1996, is not officially an Easter Festival. But while the Berlin Philharmonic left the Philharmonie for some mountain air (taking up residence for the first time this year in Baden-Baden), the maestro— between conducting the first full cycle of the Cassiers/Bagnoli Ring production, which has unfolded between the German capital and Milan since 2010—presided over ensembles of both the Staatsoper and La Scala in two different Requiem masses.

The pianist and conductor, currently music director of both opera houses, opened Mozart’s Requiem on April 1 with W.A.’s last piano concerto, KV 595. The Staatskapelle’s rich warm, strings lent the music great strength—particularly in forte passages—while gentler nuances could have been more florid and secretive. Still, the balance with the piano was ideal in the opening Allegro. Barenboim brings a wonderful spontaneity to his performances—even if there were a couple of smudges on the keyboard—and he masters the Staatskapelle’s full-bodied sound with a firm but giving hand. The final Allegro movement, which opens deceptively with a variation of the chirping song Komm, lieber Mai, attained a mysterious quality that provided a captivating bridge to the Requiem, where Mozart could no longer take refuge in the childlike playfulness that masks a complex spectrum of emotions in other late works.

The mass, which lay unfinished on the composer’s deathbed, conveys a God-fearing sense of his own mortality. It is not until the bright E-flat major triad of the Sanctus movement, completed largely by Mozart’s contemporary Frank Xaver Süßmayer, that the light of day shines. There is nothing operatic about the work—one of several masses Mozart wrote between 1768 and 1791. As penetrating as the voices of the Staatsoper chorus were, one almost wished for a more penitent approach. Of the soloists, it was René Pape and Bernarda Fink—respectively the lower male and female voices—who captured the music’s demands for internal spirituality.

Rollando Villazòn seemed to vie for attention with his hystrionic facial expressions, so it was all the more excruciating when he switched suddenly from head to chest voice mid-entrance in Tuba Mirum. He managed to push above the ensemble later but it seems unlikely his timbre will ever recover the luster it bore pre-vocal crisis. Soprano Maria Bengtsson lent every line a pretty, creamy sound, but her inflections were often mannered. The Staatskapelle performed with increasing intensity, investing Domine Jesu Christe with an incision that drove to the heart of the music. Barenboim brought the final Lux Aeterna to a spaciously paced close.

Verdi’s Requiem, performed March 30 with the orchestra and chorus of La Scala, is unarguably the more theatrical of the two masses, emerging in the 1870s when the composer wrote no new operas. Verdi, moved to complete the work upon the death of his literary hero Alessandro Manzoni in 1873, nevertheless commented modestly that with so many Requiem Masses “there’s no point to writing one more.” He was wrong. His Dies Irae is one of the most petrifying moments in musical history, the chorus descending into a fiery pit of swirling strings and brass so demonic that even Wagner looks tame. The effect was nearly ear-numbing from my seat on the balcony above the stage, but I couldn’t miss the chorus’ homogeneity of tone and commitment to every syllable.

Daniela Barcellona gave a lesson in rich shading, carrying effortlessly across the hall in her solo of the second Dies movement. Soprano Maria Segreta, stepping in last minute for Anja Harteros, has a sweet timbre that sometimes struggled to hold its own alongside the voluminous mezzo, although it’s impossible for me to judge properly given the acoustics from my seat. They struck a placid balance in Agnus Dei. Pape was his usual serene self, and tenorissimo Fabio Sartori rounded out the ensemble with a penetrating but unpretentious tone. The musicians of La Scala made clear how deeply this music flows in their veins, phrasing with an unforced fluidity worthy of the highest Kunstreligion.

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THE REGENERATION GAP

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

By James Conlon

A few months ago I wrote about two extraordinary projects in Rome that introduce children, from five to eighteen years of age, to opera. Performances of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni were presented to thousands of young people by two completely separate entities:  the Rome Opera and the Tito Gobbi Foundation. The method I witnessed seemed to me an ideal model for introducing opera through participatory–“interactive” if you like–performances.

In the course of a recent series of concerts in Berlin and tour in Spain with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, I conducted an introductory program for children (ages six to twelve) of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, excellently presented by moderator Christian Schruff. It consisted, naturally, of musical excerpts, and the participation of special guest, Jocelyn B. Smith, a New York born jazz singer who has lived in Berlin for many years, who coached the audience in singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” while explaining its coded meaning. The cost was four euros for children and ten for the adults who accompanied them.

Not long ago I participated in a similar program in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchester: Alexander Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid) interlaced with Hans Christian Andersen and the composer’s life as a young man in love with Alma Schindler (later Mahler).

We do all this in the United States, and, in many places, we do it well. But what struck me about the success of these European ventures was the depth of commitment on the part of all the participants; musicians, moderator and parents.

Concerts take place on weekends, so families can attend together. Whereas events organized through schools are often excellent, I believe that arts attendance with older members of the family adds a valuable additional context to the experience.  My septuagenarian friend from Berlin brought his granddaughter with him for her eighth birthday. Two musician friends, who had travelled from Cologne, were joined by their twenty-five year-old (!) daughter who studies in Berlin. On the way out, they told me, they had overheard a little boy, who they had guessed to be about five or six, turn to his mother and say (roughly translated): “That was not at all as terrible as I expected!”

This is a tiny example of how things can be turned around in rebuilding a future audience and in maintaining a great tradition. This is one more young person for whom the beautiful world of classical music has possibly been opened, despite the negative preconceptions that surround him and many others.  The point is that Germans have recognized that the process of whetting an appetite for classical music must begin early and may be best accomplished with family participation. Their systematic and broad commitment to reaching children is exemplary and merits our attention.

And what happens when those children are in their twenties and actually want to go to concerts but can’t afford to? Two striking examples I have encountered in as many months have suggested to me that we can also do better on that count.

At La Scala in Milan, I conducted ten performances of Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette (turned into an opera/ballet), the first of which was part of a series called “Preview.”  The theater was sold out (sold out!), exclusively to an audience under thirty years old. Top age, thirty years; top price, thirty euros.  La Scala has tacitly recognized and addressed the financial challenge to our young people. It is no use only educating the young and then abandoning them when they cannot (yet) afford to buy tickets. The “Preview” model at La Scala is helping them (and us) foster a love for classical music (in this case, opera). These previews are not rarities, but a regular part of La Scala’s season. The low ticket prices are obviously highly successful in drawing an audience. In the U.S. we face the same challenges, but there is no consensus as to how to resolve them.

Once a year at LA Opera we offer two performances in Los Angeles’ Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Six thousand free tickets are requested each year within hours of the announcement of their availability over the Internet.  This would seem to indicate that “ordinary” people do want to come, and will come, when they can afford to so. It is interesting to note that, though one hears so much talk about how classical music needs a way to “get the message out,” thousands of people do respond within hours when financial obstacles are removed.  This suggests that the message is out—that classical music and opera are things people believe they will enjoy, and when they can afford it, they will come to performances.

The tradition of attending Classical music concerts will have difficulty prevailing, given the many factors mitigating against it, if we don’t abandon, at least temporarily, economic models that may have satisfactorily functioned for the last half century but cannot be expected to do so any longer.

In November I returned to Madrid to conduct the Orquesta Nacional de España. Three subscription concerts were relatively well attended, given the severe economic difficulties at the moment. Given those difficulties, I was struck by the large and very enthusiastic presence of young people in the audience. The Spanish have clearly been effective in developing a young audience that, despite today’s challenges, has integrated concert-going into their lives.

It can be done, and there is hope for all of us in the future.

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Après lui, le déluge…reflections on Wagner at the Akademie der Künste

Friday, February 1st, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

Richard Wagner has managed to slowly dominate the scene internationally in recent seasons, but with the official arrival of his bicentenary, the saturation in Germany has only begun. Nürnberg, Leipzig, Munich and Dresden have unveiled new exhibits; in the latter’s case, an entire new building. A stream of publications has hit the market, leading Nike Wagner—rebellious daughter of Wieland, one-time bidder for the Bayreuth Festival upon Wolfgang’s resignation—to point her finger at the ‘tsunami-like influx’ (NB: her book Über Wagner comes out February 20). And then there’s the 15-hour opera. Klaus Zehelein, president of the Deutscher Bühnenverein (German Stage Association), called for a moratorium on Ring cycles last June. ‘We should leave the work alone, ideally worldwide,’ he said, denouncing centenary programming as a series of ‘encyclopedic events without artistic relevance.’

In what may be an attempt to provide an antidote, the exhibit, lecture and stage production series Wagner 2013 Künstlerpositionen at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste has set out to grapple with the German master’s polarizing effect and his place in artists’ lives, from painters to contemporary composers. A spokesperson explained that the concept arose from the international enthusiasm for Wagner and was intended to take place prior to this year. Why that didn’t happen is anyone’s guess. On January 27 the academy invited four composers and academy initiates of different generations—Dieter Schnebel, Erhard Grosskopf, Manos Tsangaris, and Enno Poppe—to discuss their relationships to Wagner in the same hall that is exhibiting the legendary rat costumes from Hans Neuenfels’ 2010 production of Lohengrin in Bayreuth.

Musicologist and moderator Jürg Stenzl opened the dialogue with a quote from Pierre Boulez, who declared Wagner ‘forgotten music’ for his generation and invited the composers to express their views on the issue. Schnebel, born in 1930, admitted that he had been corrupted as a child of Nazi times and, upon re-listening to Tristan post-war, couldn’t resist. His Wagner-Idyll (1980), for soprano and chamber orchestra, reworks the lines of Gurnemanz, the veteran knight in Parsifal, into Sprechgesang for a mezzo-soprano—naturally a subversive use of the material. At the other end of the spectrum, Poppe considers Wagner a ‘historical phenomenon,’ much as he considers Nazi Germany part of the past.

None of the composers stated they could ‘believe’ in Wagner. He is too ambiguous, a man who works with symbols, said Schnebel, as opposed to Verdi, whose operas he considers ‘clear cut’ and ‘music of reality.’ This is a fair assessment, although morality is far from clear cut in an opera such as La Traviata (based on the life of the singer Giuseppina Strepponi, whom the composer married). Nor is it true that Verdi didn’t work with symbols—he used entire allegories. The Jewish people in Nabucco represent Italians fighting for liberation from the Hapsburg Empire; the title character of Rigoletto is a disguised king.

Stenzl ended the discussion with a quote from Mauricio Kagel who, upon Beethoven’s centenary, suggested that there be a hiatus from his music for an entire year so that ‘we could then look forward to January 1’ (for a hilarious commentary of the mania around Beethoven, see Kagel’s film Ludwig Van). Tsangaris suggested that, contrary to Cage—who was feted for an entire year at the Akademie der Künste last year—there is already enough interest in Wagner from the public at large (perhaps the academy should have taken up the centenaries of Britten and Lutoslawski instead?). Poppe joked that we will need a ten year break from the Ring because the singers will have to recover their voices.

By many accounts, the music world is already weary. In New York, Robert Lepage’s colossal, machine-generated cycle has provoked a scandal of seemingly irreparable proportions. In Berlin resentment has long been brewing over a tetralogy that the Staatsoper mounted in co-production with La Scala, yielding a light, futuristic aesthetic that one critic likened to a Star Wars film. Meanwhile, in Milan, the decision to open the season with a new Lohengrin by Claus Guth was more than enough to leave national pride wounded in a country where people sing along to the ‘Brindisi’ on New Year’s Day. Still, few can ward off an endless fascination for Wagner, even if it necessitates psychiatric support (as Simon Rattle recently joked in an interview with Die Zeit). For better or for worse, we will be wandering the dark forests of myth for the next year.

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Claus Guth’s Forest-bound ‘Don Giovanni’ at the Staatsoper; Musikfestspiele Potsdam’s new Pleasure Garden

Friday, June 29th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Few operas in history have gripped the human psyche to the same extent as Don Giovanni. Pushkin, Kierkegaard, and Bernard Shaw count among the literary figures to have written their own account of the daemonic seductor since Mozart and Da Ponte staged their ‘drama giocoso,’ a tragi-comedy, in Prague. Since the 19th century, some champions of the work have further added to the opera’s moral ambiguity by excluding the final sextet, “Questo é il fin di chi fa mal/e de’ perfidi la morte/alla vita è sempre ugual” (this is the end for evildoers/death and life are the same for the villainous) after Don Giovanni is sent to hell. Meanwhile, his female conquests have been increasingly interpreted as consenting perpetrators of his sexual games rather than just victims and continue to provide stage directors with ample fodder. Robert Carsen, in his new production for La Scala last December, sets the Commendatore’s murder by Don Giovanni in the chambers of Donna Anna (Anna Netrebko), leaving her white slip covered in blood as she holds her father’s dead body on the same bed where she frolicked with the murderer. In the final scene, the accursed aristocrat reemerges from hell puffing on a cigarette while his avengers descend into infernal smoke.

Carsen’s vision was supposed to travel to Berlin this month as a guest production of the Staatsoper until it emerged that it would be impossible to adapt sets to the company’s current home in the Schiller Theater (the company’s 18th-century headquarters on the Boulevard Unter den Linden are currently undergoing renovation, recently delayed—again—until 2015). In another strange twist, La Netrebko, the highlight of a live screening that will be broadcast to an outdoor plaza, announced in May that she would withdraw in order to make time for her son. The Swedish soprano Maria Bengtsson was whisked in and Claus Guth’s 2008 production, mounted during Staatsoper Intendant Jürgen Flimm’s tenure at the Salzburg Festival, quietly slated as a replacement. The star appeal was not entirely lost as Netrebko’s husband Erwin Schrott remained on the roster as Don Giovanni’s sidekick, Leporello, while the original Zerlina (Anna Prohaska), her Masetto (Stefan Kocan) and Don Ottavio (Giuseppe Filianoti) provided continuity for an event that has been touted as a highlight of the season.

The Guth staging, seen at its German premiere on June 24, takes a dark, pseudo-cinematic approach to the opera, confining the action to the middle of a dark forest with a rusty bus stop serving as the only manmade shelter. The curtain opens to a beer-chugging, ex-convict like Leporello while Donna Anna rips off the Don’s shirt in the background. In the showdown with the Commendatore, Don Giovanni is shot in the stomach with a plastic gun and walks around through the remainder of the opera with an open wound. During Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir,” he has already become a specter. Meanwhile, a business-like Donna Elvira chases after her one-time husband in heels, gets stoned out of her mind with Leporello, and lies on the forest floor with the dying anti-hero during her aria “Mi tradi.” In the first act, Zerlina and her bridesmaids emerge like wood nymphs in the thick of what appear to be real pines (sets and costumes by Christian Schmidt) before the stage turns to reveal a tree swing that will serve as Don Giovanni’s seduction grounds. The rotating stage spins at its fastest when Donna Anna and Don Ottavio pull up in a sedan, although they are ultimately as damned to roaming the forest as much as any other character.

(c) Monika Rittershaus

While it is hard to deny the poetic weight of setting Don Giovanni in the woods—the opening to Dante’s Inferno, “Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” ‘I found myself in a dark forest’ is the first thing that comes to mind—the production is mired in Regie gimmicks that undermine its psychological depth. Staring at tree trunks for two full acts also proved monotonous. Guth omits the final sextet, leaving Don Giovanni to fall into the earth after the Commendatore returns to a wintry forest (further emphasizing the notion of a terrestrial hell in which the characters cannot find the way toward redemption), yet scenes such as Don Giovanni and Leporello roasting marshmallows and the senseless presence of immaculate, bourgeois dressed characters in the brambles linger irritatingly within the director’s otherwise morbid vision. To be sure, his concept is fully in keeping with the opera’s legendary blend of comic and tragic elements, and his surrealist take on Don Giovanni’s existence, trapped somewhere between life and death, could not be more dead-on in literary terms, yet the production demands a level of intellectual engagement that supersedes its theatrical appeal. 

Nevertheless, Guth was blessed with a cast that largely rose above the quixotic circumstances vocally and theatrically. The audience hardly seemed to miss Netrebko as Bengtsson, a statuesque blonde with natural allure, portrayed the distraught Donna Anna with creamy tones and fine attention to dramatic nuance. Her voice was tearful in opening stanzas of “Non mi dir,” kept painfully slow by Music Director Daniel Barenboim, while she revealed unblemished strength in her swift declaration that heaven may someday forgive her. As Don Giovanni, Christopher Maltman evoked more of a modern playboy than an irresistibly virile predator, yet his high-lying baritone warmed up to give a fine rendition of his aria “Deh vieni alla finestra,” and his fear was vividly credible in the final scene. Schrott nearly stole the show as the riotous buffoon and manipulator Leporello, his booming bass and excellent Italian diction carrying magnetically in the dry acoustics of the Schiller Theater.

It is almost unfair to cast Elvira, often considered a mezzo role, with a soprano as eloquent as Dorothea Röschmann, and yet her acting skills do not always rise to the same level. While her rich tone and technical polish were the vocal stand-out of the evening, her presence more easily called to mind the countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, which she sang earlier this season, than Don Giovanni’s brash consort. As Zerlina, Prohaska (Musical America’s current “New Artist of the Month”) lived up to her usual standards of musical and thespian excellence, effortlessly singing through “La ci darem la mano” as she pumped herself on a swing. Kocan was a convincingly exasperated Masetto, although his voice retains a thick Slavic quality that interferes with the demands of singing in Italian. By contrast, Filianoti, in the role of Ottavio, cultivates a flexible technique that was ideal for the coloratura runs of the aria “Il mio tesoro,” yet his nasal timbre lacks body. He also failed to remain in time with Barenboim on more than one occasion. Ukranian Bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk was an imposing, expressively full-voiced Commendatore.

Barenboim led the Staatskapelle in a performance that never lacked dynamic shape and dramatic purpose, sensitively accompanying the singers at all times with great emotional depth, yet his tempo relations in Mozart were occasionally perplexing. The second half of “La ci darem la mano,” “Andiam mio bene” was twice as fast as the opening. The orchestra, despite its rich, Germanic sound, is also not terribly flattered by the acoustics of its current home, and its attacks could be rounder. Despite the odds stacked against this production, Barenboim proved that his ensemble is the best in town for Mozart operas, even if the composer is rolling is in his grave as Don Giovanni continues to wander the forest.

The production runs through July 6.

(c) Monika Rittershaus

Out at Friedrich the Great’s old stomping grounds…

The city of Potsdam is currently inundated with tributes to the tercentenary of Friedrich the Great, from Das Musical Friedrich to an exhibit of personal items entitled Friederisiko that stretches from the rococo palace Sanssouci to the Neue Palais, built at the end of the Seven Years’ War. While the 18th-century Prussian king may be best remembered for an aggressive military campaign that annexed parts of modern-day Poland and the Czech Republic in an escalating power struggle with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ‘enlightened despot’ was also a great patron of the arts. A flutist and amateur composer who penned 100 sonatas and four symphonies, Friedrich included C.P.E. Bach and Quantz among his court musicians; enjoyed a legendary if tumultuous friendship with Voltaire; and, fittingly for his time, favored the French language above German. Homages to “Old Fritz,” as he has been nicknamed, have extended to a new album released by Berlin Philharmonic Principal Flutist and soloist Emmanuel Pahud, Flöten König. The Swiss musician even dressed up earlier this season on the grounds of Sanssouci.

Potsdam’s annual Musikfestspiele (June 9-24) similarly seized upon the opportunity to transform city grounds into a courtly celebration, including a “Sanssouci Prom Concert” in the garden of the Neue Palais and ensembles as such as the Freiburger Baroque Orchester and the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment in baroque and classical repertoire. The festival also included a “picnic concert” for the first time this year. The setting on Potsdam’s Freundschaftsinsel, a picturesque botanical garden nestled quietly away from the post-war architecture surrounding the main station just minutes away, proved a fitting escape for the occasion, replete with a couple in 18th-century garb pushing a tram that carried a baby anachronistically sucking a pacifier. Locals festively spread out their blankets and picnic fare, some including white tablecloths and prosecco on ice with an eye to winning the competition that was underway for “most inventive arrangement” (Potsdam, while only an hour away from Berlin and Friedrich’s summer getaway of choice, maintains its own brand of provincial flair).

The opening concert, however, represented a decidedly non-continental take on celebrations for the Flute King, featuring the band Fine Arts Brass in an all-British program. As both a visiting journalist from a U.K. publication and one of the group’s members individually commented, it felt “surreal.” The concert fell just on the heels of the Jubilee Weekend in England, and the brass band naturally included an arrangement of Handel’s Water Music. The group’s leading trumpeter Simon Lenton, moderating between numbers with a refreshing blend of humor and informative material, joked that the German native was “England’s finest composer.” Yet the program ranged from arrangements of Dowland and Purcell to a suite by Anthony Holborne that is usually performed for Christmas and Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies, living proof in his position as “Master of the Queen’s Music” that the art of patronage has not died.

In conversation with the festival’s Artistic Director Andrea Palent, it emerged that the event was partly modeled after “Last Night of the Proms,” which moves from the concert hall out into Hyde Park and other outdoor venues. She also mentioned the 18th-century tradition of “pleasure gardens,” which according to Palent spread its influence throughout Europe in Friedrich’s time (although the fact remains that he was Francophile). Palent also grounded the concept in a more general principle of the Enlightenment as championed by figures such as Rousseau—“back to nature”—saying that she hoped the outdoor setting would affect listeners on a sensual as well as intellectual level.

As the Meccore Quartet, a young group of Polish musicians, performed from string quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn during the second part of the program, the music indeed served to heighten the sensory experience of sitting on the lawn and breathing the summer air rather than become an isolated spectacle. While one of the violinists mentioned afterwards that they had been concerned about acoustics, the music felt as if it were meant to be played in this setting, which in fact camouflaged technical and dynamic details that would have been more apparent to a critic’s ear in the concert hall. In an age of technological oversaturation, the event proved a fleeting reminder of the values that bred 18th-century art, even if a retiree couldn’t refrain from chasing after the musicians to take pictures with her digital camera.

 A gabled sculpture from the garden of the Neue Palais © Holger Kirsch for the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci

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