ONP Bastille, Tuesday April 21 2009
Conductor: Renato Palumbo. Production: Gilbert Deflo. Riccardo: Ramon Vargas. Renato: Ludovic Tézier. Amelia: Deborah Voigt. Ulrica: Elena Manistina. Oscar: Anna Christy. Silvano: Etienne Dupuis. Sam: Michail Schelomianski. Tom: Scott Wilde. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.
This revival was not in my subscription this season, and as Un Ballo is not one of my favourites (I can do without the whole of act 1, and if Riccardo gets knifed at the end, Oscar should get shot at the outset) and this is not much of a production (described by me here), I wouldn’t normally have bothered to get tickets. But Deborah Voigt is a singer I’ve admired since she sang a gobsmacking Chrysothemis in Paris’s awful former “blue-and-red” production of Elektra and the only one I’ve deliberately travelled far to hear: London for Die Frau, Vienna for Tristan, New York for Aida and Tosca (in memorably ghastly Met productions), not counting her Senta, Lady Macbeth, whatever other roles I’ve forgotten and concerts at home in Paris. So I found myself back at the Bastille on Tuesday evening wondering how she was getting along these days.
The answer, on Tuesday evening, was “not too well.” I hope this was just an off night rather than a sign of terminal decline. Voigt’s Amelia brought to mind a heavy truck negotiating a tricky mountain pass involving steep gradients and numerous hairpin bends. You could hear the revving up, the spit of the brakes, the crunching of gears and jolting stops and starts as she prepared to attack each passage - and sometimes she stalled. Though not a catastrophe, the performance was laboured and uneven. The volume and diction are still there. The perfect intonation and laser-like top notes are not: she preferred, in the act 2 duet, to stay a fifth below the (apparently: I consulted a well-known opera oracle to check) written C, leaving the top to her tenor partner, and opted out of the upper part of the last chorus, leaving that to Oscar. The silvery sheen went some time back: her timbre is now perilously close to sour at the top, with still the familiar dark undertone, but a hollowing-out in between. And to my surprise, her phrasing sounded short-winded. She was most comfortable in slow passages in the middle range: “Morro ma prima in grazia” was the best part of her evening.
So the star of the show was Tézier. He will presumably never acquire more presence, but he scowls well and was in magnificent voice. Vargas is good enough, but just when you want a thrill from clarion high notes, his voice retreats into the top of his skull, leaving him no louder than Anna Christy’s lightweight Oscar.
I said very recently of Currentzis’s conducting of Macbeth that “This was Verdi exactly as I like him.” Renato Palumbo’s conducting of Un Ballo was Verdi exactly as I don’t: bland and soupy and ponderous and at times so slow the poor singers ran ahead.
Perhaps I’ve made this sound like an awful evening. It wasn’t. By today’s Verdi standards it was fair. But not what I’d hoped for, at all.
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21 Apr 2009
Macbeth revisited
It’s interesting to go back and see a good production a second time and see what else you can pick up. It may even be perplexing to see how little you understood the first time that becomes quite obvious the second. I went back to Macbeth last night and soon wondered why I was so puzzled before. For a start, I had simply forgotten that, before the music starts, we see Macbeth arrive on the deserted town square in battledress with his kit bag. One person spots him, then another, until he is mobbed by the joyful crowd. So I realised last night what I hadn’t last week, that Macbeth is a victorious military hero and what we see is his gradual progress from victory to tyranny, from adulation (by a crowd happy to predict his rise to the throne) to detestation (as people abandon their homes and country to flee). And at the end he is mobbed again, this time in fury, by the same crowd. Symmetry, then. Similarly, I hadn’t picked up, last week, that in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene she is not only trying to use her top hat and magic tricks to out the spot, but is re-enacting, obsessively and repetitively, gestures and exhortations from the time of Duncan’s murder. Symmetry again, reinforcing – along with many other details that registered only yesterday evening - my admiration for the care that went into this production.
There were cameras yesterday. For TV only or DVD, I wonder?
There were cameras yesterday. For TV only or DVD, I wonder?
12 Apr 2009
Verdi - Macbeth
ONP Bastille, Friday April 10 2009
Conductor: Teodor Currentzis. Production, sets and costumes: Dmitri Cherniakov. Video: Leonid Zalessky/Ninja Films. Lighting: Gleb Filshtinsky. Macbeth: Dimitris Tiliakos. Banco: Ferruccio Furlanetto. Lady Macbeth: Violeta Urmana. Dama di Lady Macbeth: Letitia Singleton. Macduff: Stefano Secco. Malcolm: Alfredo Nigro. Duncan: Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Medico/Domestico: Yuri Kissin. Un sicario: Jian-hong Zhao. Chorus and orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.
Reviews of the ONP’s new production of Macbeth have been mixed, though of all those I’ve read only one hated everything: staging and singing and music. On Friday night there were some isolated outbreaks of booing, but at the end the reception was loudly enthusiastic and to me it was just about as good an evening of Verdi as you are likely to get these days (unless of course you’re a Met regular hooked on Zeffirelli).
Violeta Urmana was an unexpected name to find on the season’s schedule as Lady Macbeth. She’s nothing like Callas or Verrett and isn’t ideal in the role, of course: her voice is warm, round and, overall, beautiful. She hasn’t the D-flat or whatever it’s supposed to be at the end of the “spot” aria, but neither did Christa Ludwig under Böhm and as far as I know no-one complained much about Ludwig, so we weren’t complaining about Urmana on Friday. She had most of the other notes (so long as she didn’t linger over the top ones), a surprising degree of agility and decent trills.
Her Macbeth, Dimitris Tiliakos, is perhaps a touch lightweight for the part and was wavering to begin with, but firmed up as the evening went on and made up in acting skill for any trifling vocal deficiency.
Whenever I hear Stefano Secco I wonder why so much fuss is made about Villazon. Secco is an excellent Verdi tenor with more volume and overall éclat than Villazon and less histrionics. I wonder if it’s because he’s small and not especially handsome that Secco isn’t yet more famous, but then Villazon isn’t a giant and famously looks like Mr Bean. Whatever: the longer we can keep Secco in Paris (rather than having New York monopolise him as a Met star) the better, so, again, we aren’t complaining*.
Furlanetto was dark and cavernous and right, Letitia Singleton was a convincingly timorous Dama and the rest of the cast were up to the usual rest-of-cast standards.
As I remember, I complained that in Don Carlos Teodor Currentzis’s conducting bordered on mannerism. In Macbeth I found him perfect. This was Verdi exactly as I like him: fast but accurate with a wide dynamic range and lots of bounce - but also beautiful shaping and deep feeling when required: the “Patria oppressa” chorus was a marvel. The orchestra was on top form. As in Don Carlos, Currentzis's speed and drive had him occasionally losing the singers, the chorus especially, but – I’ll say it again – we weren’t complaining. I lapped it up.
Having seen this production, I now regret having missed Cherniakov’s Onegin earlier in the season. His Macbeth (from Novosibirsk) is excellently directed, consistent and thought-provoking, the cursor hovering somewhere between intriguing and, occasionally, puzzling. His central couple are more arriviste than royal. Lady Macbeth, an efficient society hostess in trousers and glasses, eggs her tormented husband patiently (and wearyingly) on to greater things. At first it’s hard to place them: are we in some sort of mafia society in which they are advancing? Is it a world of Russian-style oligarchs and shifty politicians? Or, as in the end, once he’s king, Macbeth does pull on trousers with a red stripe down the side, one of Europe’s more “middle-class” royal families – the Belgians or Danes, say? The stiflingly enclosed society in which they move is reminiscent of Peter Grimes or even the recent Albert Herring, and also of a Coliseum production I remember in which the witches were Edinburgh matrons in Miss Jean Brodie hats.
That Albert Herring was also brought to mind by the staging. The production starts with the curtain looking like a giant Google Earth or Mappy screen. We hover over the rooftops of a small provincial town. At the opening and between scenes, at the click of a mouse, we home in (the word is apt here) on one of the two sets. And as the action turns rough, the town is first set alight and, finally, reduced to smoking ruins.
The heath, outside the castle, the witches’ cave, the border and the battlefield are all one oppressive town square, with tall, narrow, grey houses (little boxes, little boxes – and they all look just the same, except that their windows are of different sizes) and video storm clouds rolling menacingly above. The local community (I’m tempted to say “the Borough”), in costumes ranging from the 20s to the present day in a palette of greys and beiges, are ever present, in and out of their houses. There are no witches – their chorus is sung by the women of the town and it isn’t clear if we’re to believe that what we hear is their sentiment or simply Macbeth’s imagination. Similarly, there are no apparitions, and when Macbeth reacts, he is laughed at by the locals. Banco’s murder takes place invisibly in a sudden movement of the crowd. The same square sees the people abandoning their homes to flee, and Macduff sings his aria from his child’s cot.
The second set is a large, austere room with a fire blazing at the rear, some panelling, and high-backed chairs around a table. The “Google Earth” application comes nearer and nearer to the rooftop, veers to a window at the front of the house and is blacked out, and we find ourselves in the room - a shoebox affair that unfortunately captured some (but fortunately by no means all) of the volume – where the Macbeths play out their intimate drama: in this production, for example, once the letter has been read out by Macbeth’s voice over speakers, the lights go up in the grim drawing room and Lacy Macbeth sings Vieni! T’afretta! to her husband, urging him to act. Here too Lady Macbeth entertains, in both senses of the word, Duncan, played as a crashing bore in slacks and a sweater fawned on by his court, and later the strait-laced local nobs: in the brindisi, she appears with a top hat and performs conjuring tricks for them all. When sleep walking, she will try to use the same hat and its magic to remove the spot from her hand. And from here, Macbeth observes the battle from the window before the crowd surges in to attack him. He is left alone as – a striking coup de théâtre – the walls of the room are literally reduced, with deafening thuds, to rubble and dust around him.
All of this is, as I mentioned above, intriguing, beautifully directed and powerfully acted, and with the sound cast and excellent music-making in the pit, made for a very satisfying evening. I will from now on be on the lookout for more Cherniakov, just as I was already doing for Warlikowski.
*I have now been informed, by an omniscient mussel I know, that we can start complaining as from the 2010-2011 season, when Secco debuts at the Met in two roles. Bloody buggering bollocks...
Conductor: Teodor Currentzis. Production, sets and costumes: Dmitri Cherniakov. Video: Leonid Zalessky/Ninja Films. Lighting: Gleb Filshtinsky. Macbeth: Dimitris Tiliakos. Banco: Ferruccio Furlanetto. Lady Macbeth: Violeta Urmana. Dama di Lady Macbeth: Letitia Singleton. Macduff: Stefano Secco. Malcolm: Alfredo Nigro. Duncan: Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Medico/Domestico: Yuri Kissin. Un sicario: Jian-hong Zhao. Chorus and orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.
Reviews of the ONP’s new production of Macbeth have been mixed, though of all those I’ve read only one hated everything: staging and singing and music. On Friday night there were some isolated outbreaks of booing, but at the end the reception was loudly enthusiastic and to me it was just about as good an evening of Verdi as you are likely to get these days (unless of course you’re a Met regular hooked on Zeffirelli).
Violeta Urmana was an unexpected name to find on the season’s schedule as Lady Macbeth. She’s nothing like Callas or Verrett and isn’t ideal in the role, of course: her voice is warm, round and, overall, beautiful. She hasn’t the D-flat or whatever it’s supposed to be at the end of the “spot” aria, but neither did Christa Ludwig under Böhm and as far as I know no-one complained much about Ludwig, so we weren’t complaining about Urmana on Friday. She had most of the other notes (so long as she didn’t linger over the top ones), a surprising degree of agility and decent trills.
Her Macbeth, Dimitris Tiliakos, is perhaps a touch lightweight for the part and was wavering to begin with, but firmed up as the evening went on and made up in acting skill for any trifling vocal deficiency.
Whenever I hear Stefano Secco I wonder why so much fuss is made about Villazon. Secco is an excellent Verdi tenor with more volume and overall éclat than Villazon and less histrionics. I wonder if it’s because he’s small and not especially handsome that Secco isn’t yet more famous, but then Villazon isn’t a giant and famously looks like Mr Bean. Whatever: the longer we can keep Secco in Paris (rather than having New York monopolise him as a Met star) the better, so, again, we aren’t complaining*.
Furlanetto was dark and cavernous and right, Letitia Singleton was a convincingly timorous Dama and the rest of the cast were up to the usual rest-of-cast standards.
As I remember, I complained that in Don Carlos Teodor Currentzis’s conducting bordered on mannerism. In Macbeth I found him perfect. This was Verdi exactly as I like him: fast but accurate with a wide dynamic range and lots of bounce - but also beautiful shaping and deep feeling when required: the “Patria oppressa” chorus was a marvel. The orchestra was on top form. As in Don Carlos, Currentzis's speed and drive had him occasionally losing the singers, the chorus especially, but – I’ll say it again – we weren’t complaining. I lapped it up.
Having seen this production, I now regret having missed Cherniakov’s Onegin earlier in the season. His Macbeth (from Novosibirsk) is excellently directed, consistent and thought-provoking, the cursor hovering somewhere between intriguing and, occasionally, puzzling. His central couple are more arriviste than royal. Lady Macbeth, an efficient society hostess in trousers and glasses, eggs her tormented husband patiently (and wearyingly) on to greater things. At first it’s hard to place them: are we in some sort of mafia society in which they are advancing? Is it a world of Russian-style oligarchs and shifty politicians? Or, as in the end, once he’s king, Macbeth does pull on trousers with a red stripe down the side, one of Europe’s more “middle-class” royal families – the Belgians or Danes, say? The stiflingly enclosed society in which they move is reminiscent of Peter Grimes or even the recent Albert Herring, and also of a Coliseum production I remember in which the witches were Edinburgh matrons in Miss Jean Brodie hats.
That Albert Herring was also brought to mind by the staging. The production starts with the curtain looking like a giant Google Earth or Mappy screen. We hover over the rooftops of a small provincial town. At the opening and between scenes, at the click of a mouse, we home in (the word is apt here) on one of the two sets. And as the action turns rough, the town is first set alight and, finally, reduced to smoking ruins.
The heath, outside the castle, the witches’ cave, the border and the battlefield are all one oppressive town square, with tall, narrow, grey houses (little boxes, little boxes – and they all look just the same, except that their windows are of different sizes) and video storm clouds rolling menacingly above. The local community (I’m tempted to say “the Borough”), in costumes ranging from the 20s to the present day in a palette of greys and beiges, are ever present, in and out of their houses. There are no witches – their chorus is sung by the women of the town and it isn’t clear if we’re to believe that what we hear is their sentiment or simply Macbeth’s imagination. Similarly, there are no apparitions, and when Macbeth reacts, he is laughed at by the locals. Banco’s murder takes place invisibly in a sudden movement of the crowd. The same square sees the people abandoning their homes to flee, and Macduff sings his aria from his child’s cot.
The second set is a large, austere room with a fire blazing at the rear, some panelling, and high-backed chairs around a table. The “Google Earth” application comes nearer and nearer to the rooftop, veers to a window at the front of the house and is blacked out, and we find ourselves in the room - a shoebox affair that unfortunately captured some (but fortunately by no means all) of the volume – where the Macbeths play out their intimate drama: in this production, for example, once the letter has been read out by Macbeth’s voice over speakers, the lights go up in the grim drawing room and Lacy Macbeth sings Vieni! T’afretta! to her husband, urging him to act. Here too Lady Macbeth entertains, in both senses of the word, Duncan, played as a crashing bore in slacks and a sweater fawned on by his court, and later the strait-laced local nobs: in the brindisi, she appears with a top hat and performs conjuring tricks for them all. When sleep walking, she will try to use the same hat and its magic to remove the spot from her hand. And from here, Macbeth observes the battle from the window before the crowd surges in to attack him. He is left alone as – a striking coup de théâtre – the walls of the room are literally reduced, with deafening thuds, to rubble and dust around him.
All of this is, as I mentioned above, intriguing, beautifully directed and powerfully acted, and with the sound cast and excellent music-making in the pit, made for a very satisfying evening. I will from now on be on the lookout for more Cherniakov, just as I was already doing for Warlikowski.
*I have now been informed, by an omniscient mussel I know, that we can start complaining as from the 2010-2011 season, when Secco debuts at the Met in two roles. Bloody buggering bollocks...
2 Apr 2009
Rameau - Zoroastre
Opéra Comique, Paris, Sunday March 29 2009
Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Production: Pierre Audi. Choreography: Amir Hosseinpour. Zoroastre: Anders J. Dahlin. Abramane: Evgueniy Alexiev. Amelite: Sine Bundgaard. Erinice: Anna Maria Panzarella. Chorus and dancers of the Drottningholms Slottsteater. Les Talens Lyriques.
“You put your left leg in, your left leg out, in out in out and shake it all about…” I don’t think Amir Hosseinpour’s quirky modern ballets were meant to be comical and I don’t for a moment imagine he is familiar with that staple of English family weddings, the Hokey Cokey. But the Hokey Cokey (or France’s own party special, the “danse du canard”) is what came to mind during the ballet numbers at last Sunday’s Zoroastre.
The ballets weren’t the only thing wrong with it.
From what I’ve read, this Drottningholm production is on DVD, where it comes across better than on stage. The Drottningholm pedigree had me worried beforehand that it would be all eighteenth-century prettiness (which made a friend laugh, as we waited outside, that anyone else would be glad of it) but, though anchored in the period it avoided that.
The set was simple: a series of receding proscenium arches in storm-cloud grey with gold mouldings that reminded me half of Frigerio’s sets for Paris’s long-lived (but now dead) Strehler production of Le Nozze and half of the Rohan palace in Strasbourg. In the second part, some nice cardboard clouds descended to the stage; and in the last, the sets disappeared entirely, leaving just the bare boards and bricks, ironwork and steel stage doors in view.
The costumes (beautifully lit, by the way, throughout) managed to be at once sober and sumptuous: a Chardin palette of white and cream (the goodies), black and grey (the baddies) but swathes of material in abundant, well-tailored billows, pleats and folds; Watteau-style gowns à l’anglaise for the women and the more swashbuckling, bare-chested and pantalooned version of period fashions, with flowing, unpowdered hair, for the men. In fact, even though the first part (acts 1 and 2) was fairly anodyne (it could have been used to stage any 18th-century work), the men had already brought Pirates of the Caribbean to mind.
It was in the second part (acts 3 and 4) that it moved from just chic-but-dull to decidedly odd, with the behaviour of Abramane (increasingly deranged movements, rolling eyes and nervous tics) and his followers ever more reminiscent of the tongue-in-cheek villainy (the sword drawn across the tongue, for example) of Captain Jack Sparrow and his crew. By the final, unmemorable, act, both the friend who’d laughed at my fears, and the man at the back of our box who had coughed, sneezed and cleared his throat at all the quietest moments, had left.
But that wasn’t just because of the production. The principal women were fine enough: Anna-Maria Panzanella isn’t as good as she was, but still managed to sing with style, force and (in this production, rare) personality, and Sine Bundgaard rolled off the roulades prettily if not very audibly. But the men were not up to scratch. Evgueniy Alexiev’s voice was dark enough for the part, but many notes were off and some sounds plain ugly. He was not the only person singing out of tune. And Anders J. Dahlin, from whom I expected better, lacked the clarion declamatory power needed for Rameau’s heroic haute-contre roles and had all the heroic presence of a teenage geek.
What’s more, the Drottnginholm chorus are not Les Arts Florissants. So it was left to Rousset and his orchestra to do what they could; and though often I prefer Rousset’s balanced, bouncy style to Christie’s exaggerated tempi and occasional featheriness or Minkowski’s brute force, in this case the latter might have injected some dramatic oomph into the proceedings.
A disappointing afternoon, all the more so as we’ve been spoilt by so many good Rameau productions.
Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Production: Pierre Audi. Choreography: Amir Hosseinpour. Zoroastre: Anders J. Dahlin. Abramane: Evgueniy Alexiev. Amelite: Sine Bundgaard. Erinice: Anna Maria Panzarella. Chorus and dancers of the Drottningholms Slottsteater. Les Talens Lyriques.
“You put your left leg in, your left leg out, in out in out and shake it all about…” I don’t think Amir Hosseinpour’s quirky modern ballets were meant to be comical and I don’t for a moment imagine he is familiar with that staple of English family weddings, the Hokey Cokey. But the Hokey Cokey (or France’s own party special, the “danse du canard”) is what came to mind during the ballet numbers at last Sunday’s Zoroastre.
The ballets weren’t the only thing wrong with it.
From what I’ve read, this Drottningholm production is on DVD, where it comes across better than on stage. The Drottningholm pedigree had me worried beforehand that it would be all eighteenth-century prettiness (which made a friend laugh, as we waited outside, that anyone else would be glad of it) but, though anchored in the period it avoided that.
The set was simple: a series of receding proscenium arches in storm-cloud grey with gold mouldings that reminded me half of Frigerio’s sets for Paris’s long-lived (but now dead) Strehler production of Le Nozze and half of the Rohan palace in Strasbourg. In the second part, some nice cardboard clouds descended to the stage; and in the last, the sets disappeared entirely, leaving just the bare boards and bricks, ironwork and steel stage doors in view.
The costumes (beautifully lit, by the way, throughout) managed to be at once sober and sumptuous: a Chardin palette of white and cream (the goodies), black and grey (the baddies) but swathes of material in abundant, well-tailored billows, pleats and folds; Watteau-style gowns à l’anglaise for the women and the more swashbuckling, bare-chested and pantalooned version of period fashions, with flowing, unpowdered hair, for the men. In fact, even though the first part (acts 1 and 2) was fairly anodyne (it could have been used to stage any 18th-century work), the men had already brought Pirates of the Caribbean to mind.
It was in the second part (acts 3 and 4) that it moved from just chic-but-dull to decidedly odd, with the behaviour of Abramane (increasingly deranged movements, rolling eyes and nervous tics) and his followers ever more reminiscent of the tongue-in-cheek villainy (the sword drawn across the tongue, for example) of Captain Jack Sparrow and his crew. By the final, unmemorable, act, both the friend who’d laughed at my fears, and the man at the back of our box who had coughed, sneezed and cleared his throat at all the quietest moments, had left.
But that wasn’t just because of the production. The principal women were fine enough: Anna-Maria Panzanella isn’t as good as she was, but still managed to sing with style, force and (in this production, rare) personality, and Sine Bundgaard rolled off the roulades prettily if not very audibly. But the men were not up to scratch. Evgueniy Alexiev’s voice was dark enough for the part, but many notes were off and some sounds plain ugly. He was not the only person singing out of tune. And Anders J. Dahlin, from whom I expected better, lacked the clarion declamatory power needed for Rameau’s heroic haute-contre roles and had all the heroic presence of a teenage geek.
What’s more, the Drottnginholm chorus are not Les Arts Florissants. So it was left to Rousset and his orchestra to do what they could; and though often I prefer Rousset’s balanced, bouncy style to Christie’s exaggerated tempi and occasional featheriness or Minkowski’s brute force, in this case the latter might have injected some dramatic oomph into the proceedings.
A disappointing afternoon, all the more so as we’ve been spoilt by so many good Rameau productions.
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