Posts Tagged ‘Wolfgang Koch’

Mastersingers’ Depression

Tuesday, May 17th, 2016

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at Bavarian State Opera in May 2016

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: May 17, 2016

MUNICH — Beckmesser blew his brains out at the end of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg last night here in the Nationaltheater. That was after first aiming his gun at the back of the head of Sachs, and after a graphically brutal beating by David and bat-wielding apprentices had left him in a wheelchair — a predicament from which he had miraculously recovered, back onto his feet, within the few hours separating Johannisnacht and Johannisfest. Sachs, for his part, never saw the gun; he was sitting moping because Stolzing had ignored his Verachtet mir die Meister nicht, had declined to honor German art or the masters safeguarding it, and had simply walked out with Pogner’s prized daughter.

Whether Beckmesser’s character is of the suicidal type is a fair, though in context minor, question. Stage director David Bösch’s new production for Bavarian State Opera offers an altogether transformed view of Wagner’s erstwhile comedy, funded by the same hardworking Bavarian people who brought you the first, on June 21, 1868, when Hans von Bülow occupied GMD Kirill Petrenko’s podium.

Swiss-trained Bösch explores the role art can play in society by winding the clock in the opposite direction from the composer. Instead of reaching back three centuries to show the art-guild tradition at its liveliest, when Nuremberg prospered, he forwards us to a faceless town that has seen better days, where the institution feted by Wagner is in yet more jeopardy than when the score was written and where the masters in their trades suffer the effects of debilitating, distant economic forces. Somewhat outside these problems is the presumably flush Stolzing, but even he cannot invigorate through his candidacy a guild whose masters find it easier to delude themselves than honestly confront demise. Sachs’s Wahnmonolog fits right in. Not much else does.

The idea of collective depression finds little use for such musical-dramatic particulars as the scent of the Flieder (lilac) or the shade of the Linde (basswood). Bösch has to invert the humor in, for instance, the Nachtwächter’s round and Sachs’s gift to Beckmesser. He defies Wagner’s time-of-day and lighting directives. Indeed, clashes with the composer create an uneasy mix of narrative, pomp, violence and slapstick (song-trial errors marked via shocks to the applicant in an electric chair; a town-clerk serenade from atop a scissor-lift, constantly raised and lowered by the cobbler).

But Bösch’s own visual-stylistic trademarks are firmly in place, reminding us of his spacy, zoned-out previous work for this company: L’elisir d’amore (2009), Mitridate, rè di Ponto (2011), and, his touching flower-power effort, La favola d’Orfeo (2014). Neatly arranged decay, locally lit props, black limbo backgrounds, a funky insouciance to the stage action: these are some.

The Bavarian State Opera Chorus sang magnificently for this premiere, achieving levels of expressive detail and shading it reserves for its obsessive GMD; Sören Eckhoff did the coaching. Sara Jakubiak from Bay City, MI, made a welcome debut as Eva, acting well and producing girlish tones in mostly clear German. Benjamin Bruns coped sweetly with the boisterous lyric challenges of David. Jonas Kaufmann added the quality of heroic delivery to the youthful ardor and Lied skills evident in his Scottish Stolzing of long ago. Wolfgang Koch, vocally opulent, looked sloppy as Sachs but conveyed enlightenment anyway. He projected his words impeccably and never forced for volume. Markus Eiche’s musically ideal Beckmesser deserved and received the loudest applause, after tough toiling in Bösch’s action. Christof Fischesser intoned nobly and richly through Pogner’s wide vocal range, while the Nachtwächter’s chant seemed all too short as securely phrased by Tareq Nazmi.

Petrenko drew playing of color and sparkle from his Bavarian State Orchestra, favoring momentum (78’ 58’ 70’ 42’) over reflection but pointing the rhythms with ceaseless energy and emphasis, much to the opera’s advantage. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg will be streamed as video over the Internet at 5 p.m., Munich time, on July 31, 2016, under sponsorship from Linde.

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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A Complete Frau, at Last

Friday, November 22nd, 2013

Die Frau ohne Schatten in Munich

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 22, 2013

MUNICH — Everything looked ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille, at Die Frau ohne Schatten last night (Nov. 21). Down to the last falcon feather. When the cameras roll for a Dec. 1 live stream of this new Bavarian State Opera production, the copious blue-greens, red and purple accents, photo-realistic surfaces, world-of-wildlife accessories, and yes, even Krzysztof Warlikowski’s dramaturgy, should block, pan and zoom handsomely, variedly. From a fixed seat in the National Theater, though, visual stimulus was scarce once the viewer tired of the staging’s massed white tiles or wood panels at a certain distance, and its falconine helmets.

Ironically the theater building itself was ostensive hero yesterday. Exactly fifty years have passed since it reopened, with this same epic opera, after a 1943 pummeling by American and British bombers, much recalled this season in dozens of black-and-white promotional images and a fat new book.

The festive evening also marked Day One of public opera duty for the company’s new Generalmusikdirektor Kirill Petrenko and, remarkably, the first complete performance in Munich of the grandest score (1915) of local lad Richard Strauss. The music triumphed.

Warlikowski shifts Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s story of regeneration to a 1940s sanatorium — cure facility à la Thomas Mann, not madhouse. The Kaiser and Kaiserin (Johan Botha and Adrianne Pieczonka) are customers. Barak and wife (Wolfgang Koch and Elena Pankratova) have traded dyeing work for careers in spa-based healthcare, specifically in the establishment’s busy laundry. Prone to hearing voices, self-identifying as a gazelle, and troubled with visions of her husband turned to stone, the Kaiserin has submitted to a drugged-out regimen of extended lounging, accompanied by her fawning, pawing, animated gay Amme (Deborah Polaski).

Trips between the earthly and spiritual planes of the Hofmannsthal scheme are reduced to walks and elevator rides around a wing of the sanatorium. But Warlikowski compensates. Pretty raptors — more of them than a hunting Kaiser could need, and more than would ever get along in the wild — enliven scenes with deft sudden neck-rotations. Keikobad is enacted as a bent stick-insect of a man on a cane, a silent Max Schreck in need of chiropractic. Video projections provide aqueous segues in the action, and clips from Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad throw at least an opening light on the imperial couple; Warlikowski fails to close it out.

Miraculously Petrenko mastered pit-and-stage balances on this first night, something his predecessor seldom did in seven years with the Bavarian State Orchestra. (Guest conductors typically get them wrong, too. Ivor Bolton succeeds, but he has worked here for two decades and favors more temperate music.) These, and restrained, beautifully intoned woodwind playing alone made the listening a pleasure. But the strings, besides, emitted wondrous silky shimmers we don’t often hear.

Then there was the singing, none of it forced or shrill. Pieczonka reveled in warm, glorious tones, from the agile passages of Act I to the trenchant, focused declamation of her trial. She had no need to milk Ich will nicht! because she had built up the scene so powerfully leading to it. Polaski made her character a credible close presence in the Kaiserin’s life, sustaining the director’s conception. She sang with impeccable control (at age 64) and let loose new energy in her final, bitter scene.

Botha had the notes, even if his pitch wavered here and there. Koch, in the shoes of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau fifty years ago, furnished his role with a pleasing cantabile sound. In Act III’s Schweiget doch, ihr Stimmen! … Mir anvertraut, dass ich sie hege sequence, he wisely declined to push to match Pankratova’s volume. Without a home of her own in Warlikowski’s staging, the role of the Färberin is curbed dramatically. Pankratova made her considerable impact last night mostly through the music, painting words in detail, coyly in her early dialog with the Amme, and shaping vocal lines tellingly rather than coming on strong with her mighty instrument. Supporting roles were well taken. Vocal-ensemble and choral contributions had evidently been tightly rehearsed, although some lapses of coordination marred the last pages of the opera.

Realized with ideal balances and alert intonation, Strauss’s uncut music rose from the bottom under Petrenko, its counterpoint resilient and its parts properly weighted. Not a single ugly note sounded all evening, vocal or instrumental. No one audibly tired. Oddly for a premiere here, no one booed at curtain, not even at the director and his team. And the five hours flew by.

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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Petrenko Preps Strauss Epic

Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

Krzysztof Warlikowski with Kirill Petrenko

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 12, 2013

MUNICH — Some like to tiptoe into a new job. Kirill Petrenko, 41, prefers to plunge. The fresh Generalmusikdirektor at Bavarian State Opera is now deep in rehearsals for his first production here: Strauss’s ambitious, arduous Die Frau ohne Schatten, uncut apparently.

Krzysztof Warlikowski directs. Known in Munich for a loosely cowboy, loosely gay 2007 Evgeny Onegin, the Warsaw-based régisseur brings a strong background in legitimate theater.

Whatever the director’s take on Frau, though, Petrenko will stand in his own light. He calmly weathered lengthy booing at his Bayreuth Festival debut this summer, for Frank Castorf’s provocative staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen, only to receive praise later for his conducting.

Die Frau ohne Schatten opens on Nov. 21. That will be fifty years to the day since the same opera reopened the company’s war-gutted home, the National Theater, in a legendary performance conducted by Joseph Keilberth.

Adrianne Pieczonka and Johan Botha sing the imperial couple, Elena Pankratova and Wolfgang Koch their mundane counterparts. Deborah Polaski essays the unpleasant Amme. On Dec. 1 the performance will be streamed online without charge at www.staatsoper.de/tv.

As it happens, Petrenko’s second opera as GMD will be a revival of that Warlikowski Evgeny Onegin, opening on Jan. 4, 2014.

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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In Your Face, Astrid

Thursday, October 17th, 2013

Astrid Varnay by Maurizio Anzeri

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: October 17, 2013

MUNICH — Spirograph needlemaniac defaces legendary (and conveniently deceased) Brünnhilde. And so on.

Bavarian State Opera’s anticipated additions to its portrait gallery went public yesterday, their twenty-one victims — er, honored subjects — being depicted in various media by twenty-one visual artists. Scattered docent notes:

• Anja Harteros – toner light
• Astrid Varnay – best in person
• Brigitte Fassbaender – high treason
• Christian Gerhaher – sun shines out of his … mouth
• Diana Damrau – per pietà
• Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau – cluster analysis
• Edita Gruberová – background material
• Fritz Wunderlich – for Hasselblad‎
• Hermann Prey – about to …
• Hildegard Behrens – Dietrich? Garbo? both?
• Jonas Kaufmann – David? Cellini? finished?
• Júlia Várady – ready for her close-up
• Klaus Florian Vogt – Brabant H.S.
• Kurt Moll – a wash
• Lucia Popp – monochrome Sophie
• Margaret Price – unmasked!
• Peter Seiffert – got THaT rigHt!
• René Kollo – eye, nose, mouth, eye
• Waltraud Meier – Broadway-bound
• Wolfgang Brendel – every inch the Bavarian
• Wolfgang Koch – unhappy camper

The needleman in question is Maurizio Anzeri, a London-based Italian whose stock-in-trade is embroidered photography, much of it stunning though not usually intended to depict a specific person.

Anzeri likes to cover a face, spurred on perhaps by its energy. It is unclear why, but the Freunde des Nationaltheaters München e.V. chose him to portray soprano Astrid Varnay, and he has overcome the obvious hurdle by recourse to a diptych (shown). Whether he listened to her work for inspiration or direction, or has sensed what she achieved, is anyone’s guess.

Raised in New Jersey, Varnay debuted at the Metropolitan Opera at the age of 23 singing Wagner’s Sieglinde and, days later, Brünnhilde. After successes in the 1950s at Bavaria’s Bayreuth Festival as well as at Bavarian State Opera, she settled in Munich and is buried here.

Photo © Bayerische Staatsoper

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Portraits For a Theater

Sunday, October 13th, 2013

National Theater in Munich

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: October 13, 2013

MUNICH — Next Wednesday (Oct. 16) new portraits go on display in Bavarian State Opera’s lobby. Twenty-one new portraits.

Astrid Varnay, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kurt Moll, Brigitte Fassbaender, Lucia Popp, Edita Gruberová, René Kollo, Hildegard Behrens and Waltraud Meier are among the worthy singing subjects, company troopers all.

But theatergoers expecting traditional oils on canvas in pretty frames may be in for a shock.

The new dauerhaft pieces embrace painting, drawing, tapestry, photography, hot wax, and at least one video requiring its own flat-panel display, to be hung in a hall that once serenely separated our electronic world from the madness on stage.

To create space in the company’s 114-year-old portrait collection, fifteen tired canvasses recently disappeared into das Lager des Theatermuseums, a.k.a. deep storage, leaving bare walls.

Safe, at least for now, are well-varnished depictions of such epoch-defining Munich musicians as Heinrich Vogl and Therese Thoma, Wagner’s first Loge (1869) and first Sieglinde (1870).

But 21 new faces? The growth spurt — involving the same number of visual artists and two years’ gestation — is intended to correct a lull. Apparently only conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch and impresario Peter Jonas have been added to the collection since the 1960s.

And it serves another purpose. Fifty years have passed since Bavarian State Opera resumed operations at Munich’s National Theater, on Nov. 21, 1963, long after the house was cratered by Allied bombs. Rebuilding cost: 60 million Deutschmarks, or thereabouts.

Friends of the company (Freunde des Nationaltheaters München e.V.) wanted to seize the occasion to acknowledge the work of singers in each subsequent decade.

The result is portrait commissions that are a little front-loaded. Hermann Prey, for instance, who sang leading roles starting in the 1960s, is honored alongside salad-green contributors such as Klaus Florian Vogt, who began in the 2000s and may or may not prove to be a singer of lasting artistry.

At any rate, the collection is made current, and presumably hipper, by this large initiative.

Other subjects of the commissions include Munich favorites Margaret Price, Júlia Várady, Wolfgang Brendel and the still-active, though wobbly, Peter Seiffert.

An odd choice is Fritz Wunderlich, the honey-toned Mozart tenor who died young. He went through the company’s apprentice program before the house reopened, but then bolted for a career contract in rival Vienna.

Today’s singers in the lineup, besides Vogt, are Anja Harteros, Diana Damrau, Jonas Kaufmann, Christian Gerhaher and Wolfgang Koch.

Administrative enthusiasm and the sheer scale of the effort have led to at least one creaky assignment, its outcome already made public, that for Damrau. The soprano gets photography-based treatment that manages to degrade and marginalize her without giving the viewer a sense of who she is.

With luck, this will be the qualitative exception.

Bronze busts of the company’s music directors, meanwhile, comprise another facet of the theater’s art. At present this series is complete through Zubin Mehta, who left in 2006.

As it happens, a new Generalmusikdirektor, Kirill Petrenko, took over last month on a five-year contract, and so the just-departed Kent Nagano will likely soon be commemorated in three-dimensional metal.

Print and online material related to the company’s 2013–14 season, not incidentally, showcases black-and-white photographs of the bombed-out house as well as 1963 crowds after the reopening.

Soberly its slogan taps Nietzsche: Wie man wird, was man ist.

How One Becomes What One Is — a smooth segue to a bleaker side of the retrospective. Official research has at last begun into correspondence between the Nazi Party and two former Bavarian State Opera GMDs, Richard Strauss (tenure 1894–1896) and Clemens Krauss (1937–1944).

Petrenko, looking forward, gives his first concert next month, a freebie with Nina Stemme, Kaufmann, and the virtuosic Bavarian State Orchestra.

A few days later, on the anniversary itself, he leads a new staging of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the opera that reopened the National Theater under GMD Joseph Keilberth one day before Kennedy was shot.

Some of Petrenko’s initial work will be streamed at www.staatsoper.de/tv: Die Frau ohne Schatten (directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski) on Dec. 1; La clemenza di Tito (Jan Bosse) on Feb. 15, 2014; and Die Soldaten (Andreas Kriegenburg) on May 31.

Here’s hoping the new portraits, in the aggregate, adequately reflect the virtues of this remarkable institution!

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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