La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday March 21 2010
Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production: Ivo van Hove. Sets and lighting: Jan Versweyveld. Costumes: Lies Van Assche. Video: Tal Yarden. Idomeneo: Gregory Kunde. Idamante: Malena Ernman. Ilia: Sophie Karthäuser. Elettra: Alexandrina Pendatchanska. Arbace: Kenneth Tarver. Gran Sacerdote di Nettuno: Nigel Robson. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.
The quotation from The Economist was about poets and their poetry, not singers and their warbling, but reading it the morning after Idomeneo in Brussels I was struck by its relevance to what we’d heard: “… teasing, finicky word players who often write in disappointingly short lines and seem to lack the ambition, the emotional force, the rhetorical reach, and even the range of subject matter of great poets of the past. Where to go these days to find the real thing?” Just change a few words here and there…
Our complaint, or more particularly the frequent complaint of one of my French friends, is that too many singers these days “finassent.” If you look “finasser” up in the dictionary you’ll probably find it means “to nitpick.” What this friend means is that too many of today’s singers seem to focus parsimoniously on sweetness of timbre and shaping of phrase, and too few open up their throats and let rip (“sing frankly” is how he puts it in French) à la Del Monaco or Dame Gwyneth.
On paper the cast of Idomeneo looked promising. In the theatre it turned out to be patchy. Some of that might have been due to the set design, at times wide open to the rear of the stage, but the acoustics at La Monnaie are usually good and the house is comfortably small. No, in the case of Alexandrina Pendatchanska at least, this was definitely a case of “finassing” when something more overtly thrilling was needed. She had a very sweet voice and shaped it carefully and tastefully. Now, I’m not suggesting Elettra demands a Gwyneth Jones (supposing one were available). But the higher she sang, the quieter, apparently by design, so just when you hoped you might be thrilled you weren’t. The climax of her big Act 1 set piece was simply inaudible over the orchestra. Yet I’m almost certain she had reserves of power and volume to spare; she was just using them too sparingly.
This tendency towards vocal mimsiness is in addition to the general downsizing of voices per repertoire. Time was we were so used to Margaret Price and Dame Tin Knickers as the Countess that we turned our noses up at Lella Cuberli. There was nothing inherently wrong with Sophie Karthäuser yesterday, but I wonder if she’d have had a leading Mozart role on a major stage in the 70s. What was most remarkable about Malena Ernman was her ability to act a man – something she’s had a lot of practice at, it’s true (e.g. in Agrippina in the same house). Indeed, it took the old lady to my left some time to realise that, with her long sideburns, natty dark suit and mannish movements, Ernman wasn’t the real thing. But the acting was fairly good overall, that wasn’t the trouble…
Kenneth Tarver’s voice was a touch green or tart and his intonation was sometimes hazy, but he was more generous with his sound and took more risks than the girls; and Gregory Kunde went the whole hog, which was a relief after so much vocal mincing around (and come to think of it proved that there was no problem with the sets or acoustics) and actually woke the audience up and got some proper applause. Other than Kunde, the real stars were the orchestra under Rohrer, who seems to be in the pit every where we go these days, and above all the chorus.
The acting, as I said, was good, but overall the production was not. It was a standard update to the present day in contemporary warring states, opening with film footage of Idomeneo raising his young son and watching Al Qaeda on the TV news. After that it was set mainly in the perfectly reproduced ugliness of a Crowne Plaza conference room with gloomy, sage green wallpaper, cheap, flat, dull-gold aluminium mouldings, a nasty fitted carpet and stackable plastic chairs (that got kicked and thrown around a great deal in moments of drama). The walls rose from time to time to reveal the bare stage behind and giant video projections: scenes of war, a cargo plane discharging armoured cars, the arrival of a coffin draped in the stars and stripes… It was a staging could have been used for any number of updates, including but not limited to (as they say in the US) Händel and Rossini.
That it was somehow fidgety – e.g. characters going out through doors between verses in mid-scene and coming back in again, or Idomeneo forever putting down and taking up the notes for a speech – was a minor irritation. But for tragedy to work we need to believe in the dignity and nobility of the key players, and one problem with these updates is that by portraying the heroes as sleazy or potentially sleazy (or just plain ordinary) modern politicians (think Berlusconi, Clinton or, for the plain ordinary, Gordon Brown ) they seriously limit our sympathy with their plight. Another is that if you aim to show the full awfulness of modern politics and the full horror of war, you have to do it very well indeed; that is tough when your material is singers and chorus members and opera extras. This particular production failed to make much of what, as written, should be moments of hair-raising drama, e.g. when a son recognises a beloved father he thought dead, while the father knows he has promised to sacrifice the son; and failed to bring off other such moments introduced as part of the konzept: there was no sea serpent at the end of act 2, but a terrorist attack in the conference room, in the presence of cameras, killing innocent children present. This was so weakly handled it took a while for us poor spectators to grasp (thanks mostly to close-ups of the dead, bloodied children on the screen) what was happening.
There were two intervals, so the show ran for nearly four hours in total (“It’s very long and a bit repetitive,” as the usherette put it). As we had a train back to Paris, we left before act 3, but with no regrets.
Translate
22 Mar 2010
18 Mar 2010
Grétry - L'amant jaloux
Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday March 17 2010
Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production, Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau. Sets: Thibaut Welchlin. Costumes: Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau and Claudine Crauland. Léonore: Magali Léger. Isabelle: Daphné Touchais: Jacinte: Maryline Fallot. Florival: Frédéric Antoun. Don Alonze: Brad Cooper. Don Lopez: Vincent Billier. Le Cercle de l’Harmonie.
L'amant jaloux, ou Les fausses apparences, is a classic, inconsequential three-act comedy involving an ageing father, his eligible daughter and her best friend, a crafty servant, two penniless suitors, a serenade with mandolin accompaniment, people hiding behind doors by day or at night in gazebos, and mistaken identities (“les fausses apparences”).
According to Wikipedia: “The rich merchant Don Lopez does not want his young, widowed daughter Léonore to remarry. However, she is in love with [… note from Nigel: several lines cut …] Alonze finally recognises his sister. Alonze has just come into an inheritance which allows him to marry Léonore, and Florival marries Isabelle.” You get the gist.
It contains a hint of Cosi and a fair foretaste of Le Nozze: “The musicologist David Charlton," says Wikipedia again, "claims Lorenzo da Ponte knew Grétry's opera and Mozart and his librettist were influenced by its ensembles when they wrote The Marriage of Figaro.” Grétry’s light-hearted piece only lasts a reasonable 80 minutes, however; having weightier questions to raise, Mozart and his librettist weren’t influenced at all by its length.
It’s the French version of a Singspiel, having lively and - still today - funny spoken dialogues interspersed with “ariettes,” and musically it mostly brings to mind Mozart in his popular, Papageno, “ditty” mode, or the Rossini of “Quando mi sei vicina, amabile Rosina.” I say mostly, however, as it also contains some set-piece arias of the “Come scoglio” kind and on the whole can’t be any easier to sing than Cosi fan tutte.
The youngish cast at the Salle Favart (in a production first aired last year in Versailles, where the work premiered in 1778 – I read somewhere it was a favourite of Marie-Antoinette’s) acted and sang with conviction, making it a good evening’s entertainment, so I won’t complain if the sopranos weren’t actually up to Cosi, the contemporary equivalents, say, of a Rita Streich - or Mady Mesplé, who appears to have recorded this piece some years back. Alagna has also recorded an aria.
The best of the bunch was Frédéric Antoun. I’ve been told he’s good in Rameau; I wonder if he can handle Rossini’s Lindoro? There was something of the Florez in his timbre last night and he has looks and swashbuckling presence. The orchestra was a touch ropey, but again, we were all having a good time so why complain?
It was a simple, pretty production, with flat, lightly-coloured engravings of Louis XVI interiors (lots of fluted columns, cartouches and garlands) for sets and a trellised summer house for the last act, at night in the garden. The costumes were good too, especially the girls’: embroidered silk over masses of fuchsia and tangerine tulle.
My first Grétry and, so long as they don’t get any longer, I wouldn’t mind some more.
Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production, Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau. Sets: Thibaut Welchlin. Costumes: Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau and Claudine Crauland. Léonore: Magali Léger. Isabelle: Daphné Touchais: Jacinte: Maryline Fallot. Florival: Frédéric Antoun. Don Alonze: Brad Cooper. Don Lopez: Vincent Billier. Le Cercle de l’Harmonie.
L'amant jaloux, ou Les fausses apparences, is a classic, inconsequential three-act comedy involving an ageing father, his eligible daughter and her best friend, a crafty servant, two penniless suitors, a serenade with mandolin accompaniment, people hiding behind doors by day or at night in gazebos, and mistaken identities (“les fausses apparences”).
According to Wikipedia: “The rich merchant Don Lopez does not want his young, widowed daughter Léonore to remarry. However, she is in love with [… note from Nigel: several lines cut …] Alonze finally recognises his sister. Alonze has just come into an inheritance which allows him to marry Léonore, and Florival marries Isabelle.” You get the gist.
It contains a hint of Cosi and a fair foretaste of Le Nozze: “The musicologist David Charlton," says Wikipedia again, "claims Lorenzo da Ponte knew Grétry's opera and Mozart and his librettist were influenced by its ensembles when they wrote The Marriage of Figaro.” Grétry’s light-hearted piece only lasts a reasonable 80 minutes, however; having weightier questions to raise, Mozart and his librettist weren’t influenced at all by its length.
It’s the French version of a Singspiel, having lively and - still today - funny spoken dialogues interspersed with “ariettes,” and musically it mostly brings to mind Mozart in his popular, Papageno, “ditty” mode, or the Rossini of “Quando mi sei vicina, amabile Rosina.” I say mostly, however, as it also contains some set-piece arias of the “Come scoglio” kind and on the whole can’t be any easier to sing than Cosi fan tutte.
The youngish cast at the Salle Favart (in a production first aired last year in Versailles, where the work premiered in 1778 – I read somewhere it was a favourite of Marie-Antoinette’s) acted and sang with conviction, making it a good evening’s entertainment, so I won’t complain if the sopranos weren’t actually up to Cosi, the contemporary equivalents, say, of a Rita Streich - or Mady Mesplé, who appears to have recorded this piece some years back. Alagna has also recorded an aria.
The best of the bunch was Frédéric Antoun. I’ve been told he’s good in Rameau; I wonder if he can handle Rossini’s Lindoro? There was something of the Florez in his timbre last night and he has looks and swashbuckling presence. The orchestra was a touch ropey, but again, we were all having a good time so why complain?
It was a simple, pretty production, with flat, lightly-coloured engravings of Louis XVI interiors (lots of fluted columns, cartouches and garlands) for sets and a trellised summer house for the last act, at night in the garden. The costumes were good too, especially the girls’: embroidered silk over masses of fuchsia and tangerine tulle.
My first Grétry and, so long as they don’t get any longer, I wouldn’t mind some more.
14 Mar 2010
Wagner - Das Rheingold
ONP Bastille, Wednesday March 10 2010
Conductor: Philippe Jordan. Production: Günter Krämer. Sets: Jürgen Bäckmann. Costumes: Falk Bauer. Lighting: Diego Leetz. Wotan: Falk Struckmann. Donner: Samuel Youn. Froh: Marcel Reijans: Froh. Loge: Kim Begley. Alberich: Peter Sidhom. Mime: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. Fasolt: Iain Paterson. Fafner: Günther Groissböck. Fricka: Sophie Koch. Freia: Ann Petersen. Erda: Qiu Lin Zhang. Woglinde: Caroline Stein. Wellgunde: Daniela Sindram. Flosshilde: Nicole Piccolomini. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.
It doesn’t take long to sink in. You’re sitting there in the dark with the orchestra scraping away, singers tootling about on stage in a smudge of lights and colours and movements, your neighbours are coughing and sneezing and rooting around for tissues or sweets, and it dawns on you: I’m bored. So it was with Das Rheingold on Wednesday night. Now I know it’s a matter of taste and some people hated Bob Wilson’s Ring. But for me, at the Châtelet, with so little apparently happening, time flew; at the Bastille, with so much variety and activity on stage, it dragged. And as with Das R. you can’t escape for over 2 hours, I even found myself thinking back to the excruciating L’Amour de Loin, my all-time reference in matters of aching bums. Though an experienced friend rightly pointed out you can’t judge a Ring from its prologue – things that seem silly at first might make more sense later in the series – this bodes ill for the longer evenings to come, even if they offer escape at half time.
My conclusion re the production was: under-rehearsed, unconvincing and unconvinced. The critics keep saying it’s all déjà vu and I see what they mean: not carbon-copy déjà vu, but a kind of compendium of (often good) ideas already seen in productions over the years, from producers as diverse as Kokkos, Sellars, Serban, Zambello or Fura dels Baus, rehashed in brighter colours and clever lighting but with less conviction and to less effect. It was one of those shows where you wonder if with more rehearsal time and better acting, thanks to a different director, it might have been got to work.
It opened in the Rhine. In it. Well, actually not, but in a lot of dry-ice steam in clever lighting and with one of the evening’s several striking images (only a few striking images don’t necessarily make a coherent staging): a shoal of red-gloved hands, brightly lit from beneath, writhing about behind the Rhine maidens like hyperactive goldfish. The maidens were in slinky, flesh-coloured, sequinned mermaid dresses, trimmed with pink down and lined in red, with red sequinned nipples and pubes, frolicking on long-roped swings. Alberich looked more or less like a miner just up from the pit, which is normal; but the shenanigans with the maidens set the unconvincing, not-quite-well-done-enough tone of the whole show. The large sphere of gold made its appearance in a giant, inclined mirror. The déjà vu had already clicked in: the swings, oddly but inevitably, recalled the Bastille’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The mirror, if you replaced the golden ball with a horse’s head, the Châtelet’s Les Troyens. And on it went…
The gods, when they appeared, were lounging on and around a giant globe of the Earth, ribbed with bright green strip lighting and accessible by a steel ladder or stairs, eating golden apples. Male and female, they wore pink plastic torsos, buxom for the women, muscular for the men – an ideal form hiding a more decadent reality, I guessed* (they took their torsos off when drooping for want of apples). There was nothing remotely heroic about them (Donner frequently brandished a ridiculous little silver hammer to no effect at all), a fact that undermined Wotan’s character all evening. Climbing up and down the globe was tricky, letting slip lack of rehearsal again. On the right were vertical white banners marked “Germania” in gothicky letters. In the distance, men in dark overalls were polishing up a gigantic metal structure: Valhalla. The giants were got up like guerrillas in dark fatigues; when payment was refused, the house was invaded by more guerrillas in balaclavas, builder’s tools sprouting from their backpacks, waving red flags while red tracts showered down from the roof. Loge, the most successful, best-acted character of the show, was a kind of nutty professor in clownish makeup who sprang out of a trapdoor in the globe.
This is getting long, I must get a move on… The Nibelungen were besmirched, bare-chested miners with pit helmets and "knee-boots" to help them get around. By this stage a giant, serrated pendulum had worn its way through a fair bit of the golden globe and the lads, kneeling in serried ranks to right and left, swung back en masse as the blade approached. They played the dragon, which might have made more sense if they hadn’t crept in from both sides instead of one. They played the toad, too – all of them hopping around like kids at Kindergarten. That didn’t work either. Nor really, did the raising, on red ropes, of a giant silk curtain, covered in sky, that, released, became a sea of clouds (I couldn’t see a rainbow, though there’s one in the photos of the set designs) as Valahalla advanced in a blaze of light and the gods ascended its steps, gingerly.
Just as you must be careful not to judge a Ring from the trailer, so must you be careful not to condemn the music from the patchy acoustics of the stalls of the Bastille. Also, the sets were not designed to reflect sound back at the audience: often the singers had nothing behind them but the (amazingly) vast stage. But certainly the Rhinemaidens were weak (“even” the Rhinemaidens, as Le Monde put it, while my neighbour remarked that it must be possible to find people able to sing them). Struckmann was disappointing until the final scenes – saving his voice till the end? Mime was a good deal better than Alberich, whose curse fell flat. Sophie Koch was alright but not exactly sock-popping (but perhaps later in the series, when she has better stuff to sing?). Ann Petersen was unconvincing… Peter Sidhom was very good ("a discovery," said one of my friends), but only Kim Begley and Qiu Lin Zhang (who seems to sing nothing else but Erda) were really up to scratch.
The whole show, singing and acting, lacked conviction; and while I agree that Jordan had the orchestra playing transparently and full of internal detail and all that… I do wish (as I often do, I admit) he’d injected more energy into it. Those droopy Rhine maidens... It may not, however, have been his fault if there was no deafening, Berlin-style “wall of sound” brass effect as the gods moved into their new house: we were in the stalls, where orchestral noise has trouble reaching over the edge of the pit. It may well have been a good deal more impressive upstairs.
To sum up, a Rheingold in which the “best bits” are Loge, Erda and the lighting is a shaky start to a Ring in a house that hasn’t had one since 1957. I fear for my bum in the coming episodes...
*It would certainly be the case if I myself unbuckled a plastic he-man torso.
Conductor: Philippe Jordan. Production: Günter Krämer. Sets: Jürgen Bäckmann. Costumes: Falk Bauer. Lighting: Diego Leetz. Wotan: Falk Struckmann. Donner: Samuel Youn. Froh: Marcel Reijans: Froh. Loge: Kim Begley. Alberich: Peter Sidhom. Mime: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. Fasolt: Iain Paterson. Fafner: Günther Groissböck. Fricka: Sophie Koch. Freia: Ann Petersen. Erda: Qiu Lin Zhang. Woglinde: Caroline Stein. Wellgunde: Daniela Sindram. Flosshilde: Nicole Piccolomini. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.
It doesn’t take long to sink in. You’re sitting there in the dark with the orchestra scraping away, singers tootling about on stage in a smudge of lights and colours and movements, your neighbours are coughing and sneezing and rooting around for tissues or sweets, and it dawns on you: I’m bored. So it was with Das Rheingold on Wednesday night. Now I know it’s a matter of taste and some people hated Bob Wilson’s Ring. But for me, at the Châtelet, with so little apparently happening, time flew; at the Bastille, with so much variety and activity on stage, it dragged. And as with Das R. you can’t escape for over 2 hours, I even found myself thinking back to the excruciating L’Amour de Loin, my all-time reference in matters of aching bums. Though an experienced friend rightly pointed out you can’t judge a Ring from its prologue – things that seem silly at first might make more sense later in the series – this bodes ill for the longer evenings to come, even if they offer escape at half time.
My conclusion re the production was: under-rehearsed, unconvincing and unconvinced. The critics keep saying it’s all déjà vu and I see what they mean: not carbon-copy déjà vu, but a kind of compendium of (often good) ideas already seen in productions over the years, from producers as diverse as Kokkos, Sellars, Serban, Zambello or Fura dels Baus, rehashed in brighter colours and clever lighting but with less conviction and to less effect. It was one of those shows where you wonder if with more rehearsal time and better acting, thanks to a different director, it might have been got to work.
It opened in the Rhine. In it. Well, actually not, but in a lot of dry-ice steam in clever lighting and with one of the evening’s several striking images (only a few striking images don’t necessarily make a coherent staging): a shoal of red-gloved hands, brightly lit from beneath, writhing about behind the Rhine maidens like hyperactive goldfish. The maidens were in slinky, flesh-coloured, sequinned mermaid dresses, trimmed with pink down and lined in red, with red sequinned nipples and pubes, frolicking on long-roped swings. Alberich looked more or less like a miner just up from the pit, which is normal; but the shenanigans with the maidens set the unconvincing, not-quite-well-done-enough tone of the whole show. The large sphere of gold made its appearance in a giant, inclined mirror. The déjà vu had already clicked in: the swings, oddly but inevitably, recalled the Bastille’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The mirror, if you replaced the golden ball with a horse’s head, the Châtelet’s Les Troyens. And on it went…
The gods, when they appeared, were lounging on and around a giant globe of the Earth, ribbed with bright green strip lighting and accessible by a steel ladder or stairs, eating golden apples. Male and female, they wore pink plastic torsos, buxom for the women, muscular for the men – an ideal form hiding a more decadent reality, I guessed* (they took their torsos off when drooping for want of apples). There was nothing remotely heroic about them (Donner frequently brandished a ridiculous little silver hammer to no effect at all), a fact that undermined Wotan’s character all evening. Climbing up and down the globe was tricky, letting slip lack of rehearsal again. On the right were vertical white banners marked “Germania” in gothicky letters. In the distance, men in dark overalls were polishing up a gigantic metal structure: Valhalla. The giants were got up like guerrillas in dark fatigues; when payment was refused, the house was invaded by more guerrillas in balaclavas, builder’s tools sprouting from their backpacks, waving red flags while red tracts showered down from the roof. Loge, the most successful, best-acted character of the show, was a kind of nutty professor in clownish makeup who sprang out of a trapdoor in the globe.
This is getting long, I must get a move on… The Nibelungen were besmirched, bare-chested miners with pit helmets and "knee-boots" to help them get around. By this stage a giant, serrated pendulum had worn its way through a fair bit of the golden globe and the lads, kneeling in serried ranks to right and left, swung back en masse as the blade approached. They played the dragon, which might have made more sense if they hadn’t crept in from both sides instead of one. They played the toad, too – all of them hopping around like kids at Kindergarten. That didn’t work either. Nor really, did the raising, on red ropes, of a giant silk curtain, covered in sky, that, released, became a sea of clouds (I couldn’t see a rainbow, though there’s one in the photos of the set designs) as Valahalla advanced in a blaze of light and the gods ascended its steps, gingerly.
Just as you must be careful not to judge a Ring from the trailer, so must you be careful not to condemn the music from the patchy acoustics of the stalls of the Bastille. Also, the sets were not designed to reflect sound back at the audience: often the singers had nothing behind them but the (amazingly) vast stage. But certainly the Rhinemaidens were weak (“even” the Rhinemaidens, as Le Monde put it, while my neighbour remarked that it must be possible to find people able to sing them). Struckmann was disappointing until the final scenes – saving his voice till the end? Mime was a good deal better than Alberich, whose curse fell flat. Sophie Koch was alright but not exactly sock-popping (but perhaps later in the series, when she has better stuff to sing?). Ann Petersen was unconvincing… Peter Sidhom was very good ("a discovery," said one of my friends), but only Kim Begley and Qiu Lin Zhang (who seems to sing nothing else but Erda) were really up to scratch.
The whole show, singing and acting, lacked conviction; and while I agree that Jordan had the orchestra playing transparently and full of internal detail and all that… I do wish (as I often do, I admit) he’d injected more energy into it. Those droopy Rhine maidens... It may not, however, have been his fault if there was no deafening, Berlin-style “wall of sound” brass effect as the gods moved into their new house: we were in the stalls, where orchestral noise has trouble reaching over the edge of the pit. It may well have been a good deal more impressive upstairs.
To sum up, a Rheingold in which the “best bits” are Loge, Erda and the lighting is a shaky start to a Ring in a house that hasn’t had one since 1957. I fear for my bum in the coming episodes...
*It would certainly be the case if I myself unbuckled a plastic he-man torso.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)