No longer. This season, Germany’s busiest, richest, starriest and arguably best-managed opera company has a cure, one to make any Luddite proud. It does not smash the machines exactly. It instead decries the good system behind them and handicaps the online buyers who use them — seriously, unpredictably, before breakfast. BStO seats below €100 when Anja Harteros or Jonas Kaufmann sing are now all but inaccessible online.
“CTS Eventim’s system sometimes was not up for the amount of people trying to get tickets,” the company claimed in a late-January statement, and buying was “a bit of a lottery.” The system “would throw you out of the purchase process before ending it, which was acceptable neither for the Staatsoper nor for our audience.” Imagine. Computers that sell 100 million tickets annually for 180,000 events get the jitters handling Anja or Jonas.
These flaws and a desire “to make the system more stable,” BStO’s story goes, led to its decision last fall to handicap online buying on certain mornings in 2016–17. How? A delay is “activated” when events in heavy demand go on sale, postponing the moment the buyer “gets access” to the online box office, called in German the Webshop (or occasionally Onlineshop). Phone and in-person selling, meanwhile, proceed as usual from the 10 a.m. start time.
Understandably the opera company has never announced the handicapping, and sources familiar with the Tageskasse scene say CTS Eventim’s system had nothing to do with the decision. The real motive, according to these sources, is to try to replicate online the speed of the physical line (queue) at the Tageskasse following years of grumbling from people who buy that way, and from staff too. A tug-of-war between Internet users and the bricks-and-mortar crowd has accordingly shifted in favor of the latter.
Out-of-town buyers are the worst hit, having fewer routes to tickets. Bavarians resident outside their capital city — it is the “state” opera after all — and fans of the renowned company as far away as East Asia and North America greatly rely on the Webshop.
The disadvantage is not new at BStO. Indeed the artificial online delays effectively bring to the main season the same narrow price availability for out-of-towners they have long experienced with BStO’s 142-year-old summer Munich Opera Festival. Tickets for the festival are first sold in snowy January in person only, and the lower four of eight price categories — roughly, seats below €100 for major performances — sell out this way when the biggest stars are scheduled, months before online ticketing starts.
Surprised, and confused actually. The handicap throws up two screens in place of the Webshop. First, a countdown page, labeled with the quaint metaphor “waiting room” to dupe people into thinking the system is too burdened to process their order. This assigns a wait number, which ironically turns out to be far from “stable.” Then comes a standby page, for buyers whose number has dropped to 0 (zero) before the Webshop opens, i.e. before 10 a.m. — a strange situation, one might think, but the only one with potential to yield broad ticket choice.
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A in Augsburg
Unaware of the handicap, she logs on at 9:55 a.m. She faces not her expected Webshop but the countdown page. (She would be there regardless of what event and date she is pursuing. The whole operation is impacted that morning because one heavy-demand performance is going on sale.)
She has of course no idea when the handicap was activated. (The answer could be 6 a.m., about when a physical line might start outside the Tageskasse.) But she is less troubled than buyers who may have purposefully stopped work in Tokyo or climbed out of bed in Boston.
She sees 29 lines of precise instructions auf Deutsch, unless she has opted for English screens, in which case she sees a remarkably compressed version of just five lines. (The complete English is here.) Key instruction: “Do not refresh.” Below, she reads her wait number: a high one, 400. Her chances are nil, but she doesn’t know this. She ties herself up for an hour before learning. |
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N in Nuremberg
Logs on at 5:55 a.m. She is too early and goes straight into the normally functioning Webshop. She assumes she can just wait there until 10 a.m. But no. She must refresh the screen every twelve minutes or be disabled for inactivity. No instructions say this because the system was in normal mode when she entered. (To see them, she would have had to arrive via the countdown page and witness her wait number drop to 0 before 10 a.m.)
When she casually returns to the screen at 9:30 a.m., she discovers the Webshop inactive for her. She reloads. Now she is on the countdown page with number 200. Again no chance. |
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R in Regensburg
Fares better. He logs on at 6:15 a.m., apparently just after the handicap was activated. He lands on the countdown page with number 10. Like A, he is told not to refresh. He obeys. Later, but before 10 a.m., his number drops to 9, then 7. He wonders how this could be. No orders are being processed. (Possible answer: people on the standby page are failing to refresh and losing their place.)
But for him to succeed, his number must drop to 0 by 10 a.m. Otherwise, whether he’s at 400 or 4, he will be stuck on the countdown page during the crucial initial selling minutes.
Luckily he does drop to 0. He is moved to the standby page, a promising but precarious place. There he sees the instruction to refresh that N missed. He must do this every twelve minutes until 10 a.m. If he has arrived on the standby page early, say at 7:15 a.m., he will be doing a lot of refreshing. Should he fail — just once — he will find himself back on the countdown page holding a high number. (Anja and Jonas never wanted it that way.)
When the hour rolls around and the handicap ends, he must be ready, as in the past, to point and click with decisiveness and accuracy. His seats are secure only when they appear in his Einkaufswagen, the shopping cart. |
A, N, and R may be imagined. The following numbers are real, recorded during the Jan. 18 handicap on Andrea Chénier ticketing in checks using two browsers and two connections:
Logging on at 10:24 a.m., a wait number of 688 with 170 seats left to sell. Three minutes later, wait number 346 with 130 seat left. At 10:43 a.m., number 179 with 38 seats. At 10:54 a.m., number 40 with 19 seats. After another five minutes, access to the Webshop with 4 seats shown as available. By 11:04 a.m., 2 seats left but neither one of them moveable into the shopping cart. At 11:07 a.m., sold out, Ausverkauft. Despite this, a new buyer could log on at 11:10 a.m. and receive wait number 382, which would drop to 0 six minutes later and lead to an empty Webshop.
Bavarian State Opera should end this nonsense. The company is damaging its reputation and working against its own carefully evolved ticket structure and sales procedures, designed to draw people of all income levels from a broad geography.
Those procedures sell tickets three ways: subscription; single-event by written order; and single-event by immediate fulfillment. The latter two are processed on a staggered basis according to performance date. Written orders (traditional mail, fax, email) are worked three months out. Immediate-fulfillment sales (online, phone, physical presence in the Tageskasse) begin two months out.
Each single-event method draws on fixed set-asides, or Kontingente, of seats in the 2,100-seat National Theater. These are broken down across BStO’s eight price categories and to within specific seating blocks, to as few as two seats, allowing near-total price and seat choice for each method. Quite sophisticated. And really quite fair, at least in the case of written orders. Even without handicapping, though, buyers outside Munich have less access to the immediate-fulfillment set-asides: getting to the Tageskasse may not be possible, and phoning is hard when there is heavy demand. Naturally they depend on the Webshop — and their hot connections, firm wrists, pinched fingertips and nanosecond nerves.
CTS Eventim, far from warranting criticism, could be held up as a most capable and user-friendly ticketer. Certainly its system offers an easier buyer interface, more precise seat sectioning, and lower fees, than that of the larcenous near-monopoly Stateside.
Instead of blaming its vendor, the opera company needs to go back to the future and solve its delicate Tageskasse problem with rigor and honesty. This means two things: adjustments to the Kontingente to reasonably protect in-person buyers; and an announcement of the change. Any tactic resulting in Internet screens that mislead buyers and waste their time, or too weird to spell out in a news release, is a bad one.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Commentary, CTS Eventim, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, News
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Tuesday, December 6th, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: December 6, 2016
MUNICH — London-born conductor Anthony Bramall, 59, has been appointed Chefdirigent of the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz here, effective next season. He succeeds Marco Comin.
Bramall studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and conducting with Vilém Tauský. He has already led several productions with the Munich company, lauding the way its orchestra combines “brilliant sound body with impressive flexibility.”
The choice was announced today by Josef Köpplinger, the company’s Intendant, following advocacy by the musicians themselves. Bramall presently serves as deputy general music director at Oper Leipzig, where he is pictured.
Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, devoted to opera, operetta, musicals, and occasional orchestral concerts, remains itinerant while its modest and elegant home undergoes a multi-season and seemingly interminable backstage retrofit.
Photo © Andreas Birkigt
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 30, 2016
MUNICH — As fluent as Valery Gergiev is in Prokofiev, he had precious little to say with a cycle of the symphonies here this month. Fluency meant wise tempos, a feel for the boldness in the scores’ structures, a facility in cuing the two orchestras on duty. It also, in effect, prodded those orchestras — the Munich Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra — into articulating with dependable precision in the strings, providing expressive, at times miraculous, wind solos, and mustering energy for the colors, contrasts, metrical effects, patent ironies and elevated humor that define this repertory. But in at least five of the symphonies the man waving the toothpick showed no personal engagement with the material at hand, conveyed no sense of exploration or chance or daring. He never pursued an idea to its extreme, stressed unduly some dynamic detail or the possibilities of some internal balance or rhetorical figure, never exploited tonal beauty (or ugliness) for its own sake, or shed any degree of unconventional light on any section of these now familiar pieces. None of that. He played signalman rather than share anything of himself. If the music spoke at all, it was courtesy of the imagination of individual players or in the power of collective discipline, Munich’s or St Petersburg’s.
Gergiev’s detachment, and a bizarre kind of genius, allows him to flit undrained from one artistic commitment to the next. In this case he moved through much of Prokofiev’s canon on a single day (Nov. 13*). Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5, 2 and 7, 4 (long version) and 6, anchored concerts at 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., the afternoon programs being played by the visiting orchestra, with violin concertos of Mozart separating each pairing. The two-movement Second Symphony (1924) came off best, its barely inhibited caustic din traced plainly so that the Variations outflanked the preceding Allegro ben articolato, in sonata form, as the experimenting composer perhaps wished. The Third (1928) and Fifth (1944) were a bit much before lunch. Even so, the Third, drawn from Ognenny angel, sounded pallid with last season’s methodical and heated account under Vladimir Jurowski still in memory. (Jurowski conducted the opera here the same month, to bold effect.) The MPhil played incisively in the Fifth, but countless particulars of the popular score’s middle movements passed blandly by. After a jolly traversal of the Seventh (1952) came the five-intermission day’s one unalloyed pleasure: a slow Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), as encore, gingerly sculpted by a for once scoreless Gergiev and divinely played by the Mariinsky’s uncredited flutist. As opener to the last concert, the Fourth Symphony (1947) saw the conductor mostly hands-off, but its jerky bombast registered persuasively and superb woodwind ensemble enhanced the Andante tranquillo movement. Gergiev provided utilitarian accompaniment in the concertos: No. 1 in B-flat (1773) gaining from the fresh, stylishly poised thoughts of Vilde Frang; No. 4 in D Major (1775) conventionally but tidily contoured by Yu-Chien Tseng; and No. 3 in G (same year) subjected to Alexandra Conunova’s expressive spinning. This last soloist, although a mismatch in Mozart, held the audience in a trance with her fine dynamic control and determined focus on the musical line. Symphony No. 6 (1945) followed Conunova; we had to leave. If the day offered fewer rewards than last year’s corresponding marathon, climax of the MPhil 360° festival, it was better attended, at 70% of capacity, after a marketing push, and the animated Gasteig lobby confirmed the crowd’s immersion in the project. Medici TV equipment inside the hall no doubt captured clearer sound than the real acoustics, which remain at once bright and gallingly centerless.
[*Symphony No. 1 was played on Nov. 11.]
Photo © Florian Emanuel Schwarz
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Saturday, September 3rd, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 3, 2016
MUNICH — Visiting orchestras cost more for concertgoers. But why exactly? Several factors govern ticket prices on tours, often mitigating each other, and all have a bearing this month as three orchestras from this city hit the road:
— Bavarian State Orchestra (BStO) with Kirill Petrenko, general music director
— Munich Philharmonic (MPhil) with Valery Gergiev, chief conductor
— Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) with Daniel Harding, guest conductor
Here at home these orchestras cost as follows, sampling the top prices for a regular concert without subscriber discount: BStO in the National Theater, U.S. $78; MPhil in the Gasteig, $68; BRSO in the Herkulessaal, $73. Tickets in all price categories include bus and train fares to and from the venue within a 25-mile radius.
Government subsidy, at the federal, state, and in the MPhil’s case city levels, holds down prices to ensure that all Munich audiences can afford to attend. It does not necessarily vanish on tour, at least not within Europe.
For instance, at Berlin’s Musikfest this month, a six-hour drive from here, you would pay a reasonable and consistent top price of $100 for the visiting BStO, MPhil or BRSO, with subsidy applying both to the festival and, federally, to the three German orchestras.
Lack of subsidy may seem to explain exorbitant prices at Lucerne’s Sommer-Festival in Switzerland. Or is a profit motive kicking in? Actually a third factor causes them: currency exchange and the robust Swiss franc. Lucerne, just four hours by road from Munich, wants $245 and $296 for the BStO and MPhil, respectively.
That last detail raises the issue of perceived worth. Why would Lucerne charge a premium for one Munich orchestra over another when Berlin prices all three equally? For that matter, why does Berlin ask more for visiting orchestras than for its own Konzerthaus-Orchester (at a $69 top, staying with the “regular concert without subscriber discount” benchmark) or Berlin Philharmonic ($84) when subsidy applies?
The concert presenter directly, and the concertgoer ultimately, places a value on an orchestra in part as a function of geography. In the small Swiss city but not in the German capital, Gergiev’s orchestra (or Gergiev) is valued more highly than Petrenko’s (or Petrenko). In Berlin, people are willing to pay more to hear out-of-town musicians, a flip side to familiarity breeding contempt.
Price-comparing assumes events have been priced to sell out, and sell out at roughly the same pace. Which in turn assumes presenters know their job. They may. But objectively the worth of an orchestra cannot rise or fall by the tour stop.
If beauty is in the ear of the beholder, the Milanese are more attuned than most. So say Teatro alla Scala’s managers by setting a top of $162 for the BStO’s concert there — far below Lucerne prices yet still double the tag at home. Low government funding in Italy helps shape their thinking, rather than any attempt to gouge, though it will make La Scala’s big platea hard to fill.
Otherwise prices vary against a mental cushion: presenters’ realistic belief that ticket buyers will allow for some unknown but fair travel expense being passed along to them, unaware whether such expense has been covered by grants. Traveling more widely than the other orchestras this time, the BStO costs $94 in Paris, $107 in Vienna and $117 in Luxembourg.
Back in Germany on dates in between those stops, the limited revenue potential of relatively small halls may explain BStO top prices in the range of $118 to $144 for Bonn, Dortmund and Frankfurt. Either that, or someone is profiting, an alien notion when the very existence of orchestras requires subsidy.
Presenters of visiting orchestras are indeed on occasion out to make money, just as they do with non-classical artists. NBS in Tokyo has been a world-renowned price-gouger. In Munich the busy presenter MünchenMusik often prices aggressively. There are several more.
What of three Munich orchestras touring at the same time? Music contracts here commonly run “Sept. 1 to Aug. 31,” with the summer months tail-ending the term ostensibly to provide time off. In practice this structure brings chances to earn extra income at festivals instead. September becomes an odd month: the musicians need a break and audiences are sated from summer performances; the main season is supposed to start yet nobody wants to get down to it. So a window opens for touring.
Photo © KKL Luzern Management AG
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Tags:Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Berlin, Bonn, Commentary, Daniel Harding, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Gasteig, Herkulessaal, Kirill Petrenko, KKL, Lucerne, Luxembourg, Luzern, Milan, München, MünchenMusik, Münchner Philharmoniker, Munich, Munich Philharmonic, Musikfest Berlin, National Theater, NBS, Paris, Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Teatro alla Scala, Valery Gergiev
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Sunday, August 7th, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 7, 2016
MUNICH — Two evenings after an “Allahu Akbar” eruption here cost nine mostly teenage, mostly Muslim, lives, it felt perverse to indulge in 280-year-old French escapism stretching to Turkey, Peru, Iran and the future United States.
But there we were July 24 in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater for Bavarian State Opera business-as-usual, a festival yet, and Rameau’s four-entrée Les Indes galantes as imagined by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the Belgian choreographer with stage-director pretensions.
And safer we were, too, than at a smaller music festival 110 miles away near Nuremberg, the outdoor Ansbach Open, where a Syrian refugee denied asylum in this country was preparing to explode his metal-piece-filled backpack among two thousand listeners. (As luck would have it, Germany’s first suicide bomber killed only himself when he detonated only his detonator and did so outside the festival’s gates, not having known in advance he would need a ticket.)
Before departing for Turkey, the opéra-ballet states its premise by means of a prologue: European lovers pressed to exchange Goddess Hébé’s doux instants (sweet moments) for Goddess Bellone’s gloire des combats can count on intercession from a third god, Amour, as they “traverse the vastest seas” in military service.
This plays out with amusing dramatic variance* in the four locales to music of beguiling harmony and bold instrumental color, in airs, vocal ensembles, choruses and dances. The U.S. entrée concludes with the Dance of the Great Peace Pipe (penned after Agapit Chicagou’s 1725 Paris visit), minuets, a gavotte, and a most charming chaconne.
If you kept your eyes closed, the performance was a treat. Opening them invited confusion, or worse, despite Cherkaoui’s fresh dance moves, tirelessly executed by his Antwerp-based Compagnie Eastman.
Ivor Bolton and the Münchner Festspiel-Orchester, an elite Baroque pick-up band, served Rameau with verve and expressive breadth, ripe string sound and fabulous wind playing. The Balthasar-Neumann-Chor from Freiburg managed its musical challenges neatly, in opaque French.
The score’s 17 roles went to ten generally stylish soloists. Lisette Oropesa proved a graceful musician in the lyric soprano duties of Hébé and Zima. Anna Prohaska, as Phani and Fatime, stopped the show with a divinely phrased Viens, Hymen, viens m’unir. Light tenor Cyril Auvity sang artfully as Valère and Tacmas, while John Moore’s baritone lent a golden timbre to the sauvage Adario. Reveling grandly in the music’s depths were basses François Lis (Huascar and Alvar) and Tareq Nazmi (Osman and Ali).
But soprano Ana Quintans encountered pitch problems as Amour and Zaïre; Elsa Benoit, the Émilie, seemed squeezed by Rameau’s nimble turns; Mathias Vidal pushed harshly for volume in the tenor roles of Carlos and Damon; and bass Goran Jurić, in drag as Bellone, muddied her vital rousing words.
As for the staging, new on this night, conceit and a ruinous idea got the better of Cherkaoui (and BStO managers, who should have intervened if they care about Baroque opera as they profess): he would thread together the prologue and entrées into one dramatic unit. Characters would appear in each other’s sections, mute. Opéra-ballet form be damned.
In place of exotic lands (requiring exotic sets and costumes), the viewer would journey from schoolroom to museum gallery to church to flower shop, to no place, to some closed border crossing. The spectacle of Peru’s Adoration du Soleil, for instance, would unfold in the church. Woven throughout, clumsily, would be tastes of the plight of Europe’s present refugees, and Europeans’ poor hospitality. Count the ironies.
[*In Turkey a melodrama, as the shipwrecked lovers’ fate turns on Osman’s magnanimity (Le turc généreux). In Peru a tragedy, as the couple’s freedom results from Huascar’s molten-lava death (Les incas du Pérou). In Iran a bucolic, as two pairs of lovers ascertain their feelings through disguise and espial (Les fleurs, original version of Aug. 23, 1735). In the U.S. a comedy, as noble savage Zima flirts with and mocks two European colonists, reversing the pattern, before homing in on loving native Adario (Les sauvages).]
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tags:Ana Quintans, Anna Prohaska, Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Compagnie Eastman, Cyril Auvity, Elsa Benoit, François Lis, Goran Jurić, Ivor Bolton, John Moore, Kritik, Les Indes galantes, Lisette Oropesa, Mathias Vidal, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Rameau, Review, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Tareq Nazmi
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Sunday, July 17th, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 17, 2016
MUNICH — When Anja Harteros was singing her first Toscas three seasons ago, it was clear she had the vocal resources for the role, and the Mediterranean temperament. Even so, the portrayal didn’t quite compute.
Enter Bryn Terfel, a Scarpia to rattle the aloofest, longest-legged of prima donnas. And Jonas Kaufmann, trusted stage buddy, sweet Cavaradossi. Now the diva’s doubt, fear, passion and rage turn on the instant, her slashing knife grip extending a ferrous will.
Harteros fairly lived the part July 1 here at the National Theater, teamed as she must have wanted and apparently undeterred by Luc Bondy’s clunky 2009 stage conception. Warm chest tones and creamy highs, floated or hurled, came into thrilling dramatic focus this time around. Illica and Giacosa’s words made inexorable sense, the Attavanti canvas and Terfel’s guts sure targets.
The tenor, too, had a great night: astutely colored phrases, gleaming top notes, a clarion but unexaggerated Vittoria! For once, E lucevan le stelle emerged as spontaneous thought, always in Kaufmann’s wonderfully lucid Italian.
If the mighty Welshman sounded a smidgen less opulent of voice than in previous Munich Scarpias, his characterization was as potent as ever, and his savoring of Puccini’s lines most enjoyable.
The snag, alas, was Kirill Petrenko’s conducting. Forceful and weighty, it never felt rooted in the language it was supposedly driving. Still, a terrific night for the Munich Opera Festival, and nowhere more refined than during Io de’ sospiri as sung by the Tölzer Knabenchor’s uncredited soloist.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tuesday, May 17th, 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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Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Benjamin Bruns, Christof Fischesser, David Bösch, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Kaufmann, Kirill Petrenko, Kritik, Markus Eiche, München, Munich, National Theater, Nationaltheater, Review, Sara Jakubiak, Sören Eckhoff, Tareq Nazmi, Wolfgang Koch
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Tuesday, May 10th, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: May 10, 2016
MUNICH — As if to unify its program of late Beethoven and Schubert last week (May 4) at the Court Church of All Saints, the Arcanto Quartet stressed gloom wherever possible. Playing of intensity and integrity supported this approach, and, to be sure, the Heiliger Dankegesang String Quartet, Opus 132, and the C-Major String Quintet, D956, do at least contemplate the end of life. It was a little much though. Beethoven intends an expression of thanks; Schubert toys with irony, perhaps accepting fate.
Partnered by cellist Maximilian Hornung after the break, the musicians projected a dark dreamlike picture of the quintet’s 17-minute first movement, guilefully detailed and relaxed, with ample soft passagework. This they paid off in the concluding Rondo, lending it surreal salon elegance. In between they plunged to grim depths. Schubert’s Adagio, sustained with formidable concentration around Tabea Zimmermann’s viola, proceeded grave, a Deathly Hallows without the wizards. Much the same was true of the Scherzo’s Trio. Anyway, great listening.
An obvious sense of purpose marked the Beethoven, with first violin Antje Weithaas adding affable stylish touches. But this reading was a tad short on energy, and in the somber guise imposed on it the central movement managed to be both sedate and precious, not as unsettling as usual. Marketing note: although Munich is saturated with chamber music, people were turned away at the door of this sold-out Bell’Arte event.
Photo © Marco Borggreve
Related posts:
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Horn Trios in Church
Tonhalle Lights Up the Beyond
Volodos the German Romantic
Widmann’s Opera Babylon
Tags:Allerheiligen Hofkirche, Antje Weithaas, Arcanto Quartet, Beethoven, Bell’Arte, Court Church of All Saints, Daniel Sepec, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Maximilian Hornung, München, Munich, Review, Schubert, Tabea Zimmermann
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Saturday, April 23rd, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 23, 2016
MUNICH — Before there was Food Babe, there was Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria (reign 1508–1550), a man who valued good music and liked his beer free of nettles, sawdust, roots, and other 16th-century “adjuncts,” as unwelcome food ingredients are now termed.
Wilhelm made musical history in 1523 by hiring Ludwig Senfl as musicus intonator after Holy Roman Emperor Karl V wound down the Senfl-led imperial Hofkapelle. The move enabled him to attract top musicians and clone in Munich that standard-setting body, planting the seeds of the Bavarian State Orchestra.
But his most fondly remembered creation was the Purity Order, or Reinheitsgebot, issued 500 years ago today, on April 23, 1516, and still, Gott sei Dank, indirectly in force.
Beer was to be brewed only from barley, hops and water. Malting was understood. (Science did not identify yeast until the 17th century.) Expanding on earlier local laws, the order applied across the state. It set prices too, specifying the sale of beer at no more than one Pfennig per liter in winter, no more than two in summer, and sending echoes down the centuries that beer should be affordable. Today in Germany, 500 ml of beer can cost less than 500 ml of water.
Enforcement of the Reinheitsgebot throughout the newly unified Germany was a condition in 1871 for Bavaria’s joining with Prussia. Only in 1987 did the order technically go off the books, a casualty of E.U. rules of fair trade. Some viewed it as protectionist. Wilhelm’s strictures returned a few years later, though, in the guise of an E.U.-tailored statute: non-compliant German beers could not be labeled “Bier,” but non-German beers could carry that descriptor if they revealed what they were made from.
Such remains the law today, and it is why Food Babe can frame this rhetorical question: “Don’t you find it interesting that AB InBev is required to [list the ingredients of] Corona in Germany but not [in the U.S.]?”
As the North Carolina activist pursues transparency on caramel coloring, chemically altered hop extract, carrageenan, corn, corn syrup, dextrose, E-numbered anything, genetically engineered anything, fish bladder, insect-based dyes, monosodium glutamate, propylene glycol alginate and rice — all present in one or other beer sold now — she can thank music-loving Wilhelm for showing they have nothing to do with pure beer.
Photo © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
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Tags:Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Beer, Duke Wilhelm IV, Food Babe, Germany, Ludwig Senfl, München, Munich, News, Reinheitsgebot
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Friday, April 22nd, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 22, 2016
MUNICH — Vasily Petrenko’s debut at Bavarian State Opera this weekend prompts a glance at two Russian-born, modestly profiled conductors who have built distinct careers in Western Europe while sharing a last name. The guest from Liverpool will lead Boris Godunov, last revived two years ago by company Generalmusikdirektor Kirill Petrenko.
Inviting Vasily to work in Kirill’s house was sweet, ingenuous. After all, the two Petrenkos are what trademark attorneys call “confusingly similar” marks, a factor that doesn’t vanish just because real names are involved, or because it’s the arts. Are artists products? Their work is, notwithstanding the distance from commerce.
The Petrenkos are not of course the first conductor-brands to overlap, but unlike the Kleibers or Järvis, Abbados or Jurowskis, no disparity of talent or generation neatly separates them. Then, inescapably, there is the matter of dilution: a “Toscanini” needs no specifier.
As it happens, agents have promoted the Petrenkos as if with accidental care over geography. Although both men have enjoyed positive forays Stateside, awareness of them in Europe diverges. For a full decade, Vasily has been the “Petrenko” of reference in Britain. Kirill has been “Petrenko” in Germany.
Kirill has had such minimal renown in Britain, in fact, that retired Bavarian State Opera chief Peter Jonas last summer on Slipped Disc could report the following about the Bavarian State Orchestra’s upcoming European tour: “The [orchestra’s] committee and their management offered themselves to the [BBC] Proms for 2016 … and were sent away with the exclamation, ‘Oh no … . Kirill Petrenko? We do not really know about him over here.’ … The tour will happen all over Europe but without London.” Indeed it will.
In the meantime, Calisto Bieito’s staging of Boris Godunov gets a three-night revival April 23 to 29 with a strong cast: Sergei Skorokhodov’s pretender, Ain Anger’s chronicler and Alexander Tsymbalyuk’s riveting Boris. How will Vasily grapple with the (1869) score? Opera featured prominently in his career only at the start.
| |
Kirill |
Vasily |
| |
Кирилл Гарриевич Петренко |
Василий Эдуардович Петренко |
| born |
Feb. 11, 1972, in Omsk — 44 |
July 7, 1976, in St Petersburg — 39 |
| hair |
auburn, curly |
blond, straight |
| eyes |
brown |
gray |
| height |
5 feet 3 inches |
6 feet 5 inches |
| weight (est.) |
145 lbs., trim |
180 lbs., trim |
| training |
Vorarlberg State Conservatory in Feldkirch |
St Petersburg Conservatory |
| influences |
Bychkov, Chung, Eötvös, Lajovic |
Jansons, Martynov, Salonen, Temirkanov |
| early job |
Kapellmeister, Volksoper, Vienna, 1997–99 |
Resident Conductor, Mikhailovsky Theater, St Petersburg, 1994–97 |
| now |
Generalmusikdirektor, Bavarian State Opera |
Sjefdirigent, Oslo Philharmonic; Chief Conductor, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic |
| lives in |
refused to disclose |
Birkenhead Park, Merseyside |
| companionship |
rumored to have platonically dated soprano Anja Kampe |
married to Evgenia Chernysheva, choral conductor and music tutor; Sasha (11), Anna (2) |
| faith |
private |
Russian Orthodox |
| favorite team |
refused to disclose |
Zenit St Petersburg (soccer) |
| diplomacy |
on Ukraine: “I observe the conditions there with great concern. What is happening there is anything but normal. A political solution [is needed] that does not impinge on Ukraine’s sovereignty.” Speaking at the National Theater, March 6, 2014 |
on women conductors: “[Orchestras] react better when they have a man in front of them … . A cute girl on a podium means that musicians think about other things.” Quoted in The Guardian, Sept. 2, 2013 |
| humor |
while working with Miroslav Srnka on his 2015 opera South Pole: “If the composer is dead, you’d like to ask him questions, but you can’t. If [he] is alive, you can ask him questions, but sometimes you’d prefer he would be already dead.” Reported by Slipped Disc, Jan. 18, 2016 |
while attempting damage control: “We were saying that because a woman conductor is still quite a rarity … , their appearance [on] the podium, because of the historical background, always has some emotions reflected in the orchestra.” Quoted in The Telegraph, May 8, 2014 |
| distinctions |
|
Honorary Scouser
Echo Klassik Award |
| achievement |
survived nine cycles conducting Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth |
completed a Shostakovich cycle for Naxos |
| strengths |
Mussorgsky, Strauss, Elgar, Scriabin, Berg |
Shostakovich |
| weakness |
Donizetti (and probably Verdi) |
|
| what John von Rhein said |
“Solidity of technique, quality of leadership, depth of musical ideas and ability to strike a firm rapport with [Chicago Symphony Orchestra] members … [determine whether a conductor] stands or falls … . By all these standards [he] sent the needle off the symphonic Richter scale at his first concert.” March 2012 CSO debut |
“His beat is clear and he has a knack for focusing on the essentials, his long fingers fluttering in a highly expressive manner … . He inspired the [Chicago Symphony Orchestra] to go well beyond its normal megawatt virtuosity, and this made for a blistering account of the Shostakovich [Tenth].” Dec. 2012 CSO debut |
| CDs |
 |
 |
| |
Suk’s Asrael Symphony and Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina for CPO and Oehms |
Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony and the Shostakovich Cello Concertos with Truls Mørk for Warner and Ondine |
| career trajectory |
modest inclination |
less modest inclination |
| compass setting |
north, tardily |
south, east, west |
Placing the two Petrenkos side by side here, like baseball cards, meant compiling at least some personal facts along with the musical. So, three questions went to the conductors’ handlers. How tall is he? Where does he live (part of town)? What’s his favorite sports team?
This proved awkward, however, especially on one side, and hitherto-cordial staffers turned as cool as, well, trademark attorneys. Vasily’s people cooperated with partial answers. Kirill’s, deep inside Bavarian State Opera, stonewalled: “Mr. Petrenko generally does not wish to answer any personal questions.”
As it turned out, Vasily was on record with full answers over the years to all three questions for various media outlets. The man is an open book. This left Kirill’s side with unflattering holes. But the opera company’s hands were tied. Apparently under instructions from the artist, nobody could even confirm he lives in Munich (where he has drawn a paycheck for 30 months already). And he may not.
Bavarian State Opera: “What’s not to understand about ‘Mr. Petrenko does not wish to answer any personal questions’? Who puts out the rule that a conductor … does have to comprehend or be willing to be part of public relations? … So, in fact, we do not want to convey anything to anybody. This is the ‘line to be drawn’ from our side.”
Mention of Vasily went over badly. BStO: “What kind of idea is it anyways to compare two artists because they share the same last name?” Prepared descriptors accompanied the rhetoric: “ridiculous” and a “game.” How not to kill a story.
Shown the data for the above table, the opera company took to sarcasm: “Yes, sure, [inventing] height and weight [measurements] is of course totally acceptable.” But Kirill’s height had become public half a year ago* at ARD broadcaster Deutsche Welle. BStO did not either know this or wish to share the knowledge. Its hapless official scanning DW: “Oh, it’s on the Internet! It’s gotta be true!”
[*Earlier actually: Lucas Wiegelmann included it in an excellent 2014 discussion for Die Welt.]
Photos © Bayerische Staatsoper (Kirill Petrenko), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Vasily Petrenko)
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Tags:Ain Anger, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Boris Godunov, Commentary, Kirill Petrenko, München, Munich, Mussorgsky, News, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Sergei Skorokhodov, Vasily Petrenko
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Staatsoper Favors Local Fans
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 22, 2017
MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera had a delicate problem. It was selling too many tickets online, more with each passing season. Its system, powered by CTS Eventim, was so robust and so fast that little was left to sell via phone or in person minutes after the 10 a.m. start time on heavy-demand days, causing embarrassment and a sense of unfairness inside its bricks-and-mortar box office, the Tageskasse, off chic Maximilianstraße.
No longer. This season, Germany’s busiest, richest, starriest and arguably best-managed opera company has a cure, one to make any Luddite proud. It does not smash the machines exactly. It instead decries the good system behind them and handicaps the online buyers who use them — seriously, unpredictably, before breakfast. BStO seats below €100 when Anja Harteros or Jonas Kaufmann sing are now all but inaccessible online.
“CTS Eventim’s system sometimes was not up for the amount of people trying to get tickets,” the company claimed in a late-January statement, and buying was “a bit of a lottery.” The system “would throw you out of the purchase process before ending it, which was acceptable neither for the Staatsoper nor for our audience.” Imagine. Computers that sell 100 million tickets annually for 180,000 events get the jitters handling Anja or Jonas.
These flaws and a desire “to make the system more stable,” BStO’s story goes, led to its decision last fall to handicap online buying on certain mornings in 2016–17. How? A delay is “activated” when events in heavy demand go on sale, postponing the moment the buyer “gets access” to the online box office, called in German the Webshop (or occasionally Onlineshop). Phone and in-person selling, meanwhile, proceed as usual from the 10 a.m. start time.
Understandably the opera company has never announced the handicapping, and sources familiar with the Tageskasse scene say CTS Eventim’s system had nothing to do with the decision. The real motive, according to these sources, is to try to replicate online the speed of the physical line (queue) at the Tageskasse following years of grumbling from people who buy that way, and from staff too. A tug-of-war between Internet users and the bricks-and-mortar crowd has accordingly shifted in favor of the latter.
Out-of-town buyers are the worst hit, having fewer routes to tickets. Bavarians resident outside their capital city — it is the “state” opera after all — and fans of the renowned company as far away as East Asia and North America greatly rely on the Webshop.
The disadvantage is not new at BStO. Indeed the artificial online delays effectively bring to the main season the same narrow price availability for out-of-towners they have long experienced with BStO’s 142-year-old summer Munich Opera Festival. Tickets for the festival are first sold in snowy January in person only, and the lower four of eight price categories — roughly, seats below €100 for major performances — sell out this way when the biggest stars are scheduled, months before online ticketing starts.
Countless customers were surprised by the handicap on Jan. 12, 14, 18, 22, 30 and Feb. 2 while trying to buy tickets for Philipp Stölzl’s new production of Andrea Chénier, due March 12 and starring — gosh — both Harteros and Kaufmann. All performances were affected on those selling mornings, corresponding to BStO’s two-month lead time.
Surprised, and confused actually. The handicap throws up two screens in place of the Webshop. First, a countdown page, labeled with the quaint metaphor “waiting room” to dupe people into thinking the system is too burdened to process their order. This assigns a wait number, which ironically turns out to be far from “stable.” Then comes a standby page, for buyers whose number has dropped to 0 (zero) before the Webshop opens, i.e. before 10 a.m. — a strange situation, one might think, but the only one with potential to yield broad ticket choice.
Not-so-hypothetical scenarios:
Unaware of the handicap, she logs on at 9:55 a.m. She faces not her expected Webshop but the countdown page. (She would be there regardless of what event and date she is pursuing. The whole operation is impacted that morning because one heavy-demand performance is going on sale.)
She has of course no idea when the handicap was activated. (The answer could be 6 a.m., about when a physical line might start outside the Tageskasse.) But she is less troubled than buyers who may have purposefully stopped work in Tokyo or climbed out of bed in Boston.
She sees 29 lines of precise instructions auf Deutsch, unless she has opted for English screens, in which case she sees a remarkably compressed version of just five lines. (The complete English is here.) Key instruction: “Do not refresh.” Below, she reads her wait number: a high one, 400. Her chances are nil, but she doesn’t know this. She ties herself up for an hour before learning.
Logs on at 5:55 a.m. She is too early and goes straight into the normally functioning Webshop. She assumes she can just wait there until 10 a.m. But no. She must refresh the screen every twelve minutes or be disabled for inactivity. No instructions say this because the system was in normal mode when she entered. (To see them, she would have had to arrive via the countdown page and witness her wait number drop to 0 before 10 a.m.)
When she casually returns to the screen at 9:30 a.m., she discovers the Webshop inactive for her. She reloads. Now she is on the countdown page with number 200. Again no chance.
Fares better. He logs on at 6:15 a.m., apparently just after the handicap was activated. He lands on the countdown page with number 10. Like A, he is told not to refresh. He obeys. Later, but before 10 a.m., his number drops to 9, then 7. He wonders how this could be. No orders are being processed. (Possible answer: people on the standby page are failing to refresh and losing their place.)
But for him to succeed, his number must drop to 0 by 10 a.m. Otherwise, whether he’s at 400 or 4, he will be stuck on the countdown page during the crucial initial selling minutes.
Luckily he does drop to 0. He is moved to the standby page, a promising but precarious place. There he sees the instruction to refresh that N missed. He must do this every twelve minutes until 10 a.m. If he has arrived on the standby page early, say at 7:15 a.m., he will be doing a lot of refreshing. Should he fail — just once — he will find himself back on the countdown page holding a high number. (Anja and Jonas never wanted it that way.)
When the hour rolls around and the handicap ends, he must be ready, as in the past, to point and click with decisiveness and accuracy. His seats are secure only when they appear in his Einkaufswagen, the shopping cart.
A, N, and R may be imagined. The following numbers are real, recorded during the Jan. 18 handicap on Andrea Chénier ticketing in checks using two browsers and two connections:
Logging on at 10:24 a.m., a wait number of 688 with 170 seats left to sell. Three minutes later, wait number 346 with 130 seat left. At 10:43 a.m., number 179 with 38 seats. At 10:54 a.m., number 40 with 19 seats. After another five minutes, access to the Webshop with 4 seats shown as available. By 11:04 a.m., 2 seats left but neither one of them moveable into the shopping cart. At 11:07 a.m., sold out, Ausverkauft. Despite this, a new buyer could log on at 11:10 a.m. and receive wait number 382, which would drop to 0 six minutes later and lead to an empty Webshop.
Bavarian State Opera should end this nonsense. The company is damaging its reputation and working against its own carefully evolved ticket structure and sales procedures, designed to draw people of all income levels from a broad geography.
Those procedures sell tickets three ways: subscription; single-event by written order; and single-event by immediate fulfillment. The latter two are processed on a staggered basis according to performance date. Written orders (traditional mail, fax, email) are worked three months out. Immediate-fulfillment sales (online, phone, physical presence in the Tageskasse) begin two months out.
Each single-event method draws on fixed set-asides, or Kontingente, of seats in the 2,100-seat National Theater. These are broken down across BStO’s eight price categories and to within specific seating blocks, to as few as two seats, allowing near-total price and seat choice for each method. Quite sophisticated. And really quite fair, at least in the case of written orders. Even without handicapping, though, buyers outside Munich have less access to the immediate-fulfillment set-asides: getting to the Tageskasse may not be possible, and phoning is hard when there is heavy demand. Naturally they depend on the Webshop — and their hot connections, firm wrists, pinched fingertips and nanosecond nerves.
CTS Eventim, far from warranting criticism, could be held up as a most capable and user-friendly ticketer. Certainly its system offers an easier buyer interface, more precise seat sectioning, and lower fees, than that of the larcenous near-monopoly Stateside.
Instead of blaming its vendor, the opera company needs to go back to the future and solve its delicate Tageskasse problem with rigor and honesty. This means two things: adjustments to the Kontingente to reasonably protect in-person buyers; and an announcement of the change. Any tactic resulting in Internet screens that mislead buyers and waste their time, or too weird to spell out in a news release, is a bad one.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Commentary, CTS Eventim, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, News
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Bramall to Gärtnerplatz
Tuesday, December 6th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: December 6, 2016
MUNICH — London-born conductor Anthony Bramall, 59, has been appointed Chefdirigent of the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz here, effective next season. He succeeds Marco Comin.
Bramall studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and conducting with Vilém Tauský. He has already led several productions with the Munich company, lauding the way its orchestra combines “brilliant sound body with impressive flexibility.”
The choice was announced today by Josef Köpplinger, the company’s Intendant, following advocacy by the musicians themselves. Bramall presently serves as deputy general music director at Oper Leipzig, where he is pictured.
Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, devoted to opera, operetta, musicals, and occasional orchestral concerts, remains itinerant while its modest and elegant home undergoes a multi-season and seemingly interminable backstage retrofit.
Photo © Andreas Birkigt
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Flitting Thru Prokofiev
Wednesday, November 30th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 30, 2016
MUNICH — As fluent as Valery Gergiev is in Prokofiev, he had precious little to say with a cycle of the symphonies here this month. Fluency meant wise tempos, a feel for the boldness in the scores’ structures, a facility in cuing the two orchestras on duty. It also, in effect, prodded those orchestras — the Munich Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra — into articulating with dependable precision in the strings, providing expressive, at times miraculous, wind solos, and mustering energy for the colors, contrasts, metrical effects, patent ironies and elevated humor that define this repertory. But in at least five of the symphonies the man waving the toothpick showed no personal engagement with the material at hand, conveyed no sense of exploration or chance or daring. He never pursued an idea to its extreme, stressed unduly some dynamic detail or the possibilities of some internal balance or rhetorical figure, never exploited tonal beauty (or ugliness) for its own sake, or shed any degree of unconventional light on any section of these now familiar pieces. None of that. He played signalman rather than share anything of himself. If the music spoke at all, it was courtesy of the imagination of individual players or in the power of collective discipline, Munich’s or St Petersburg’s.
Gergiev’s detachment, and a bizarre kind of genius, allows him to flit undrained from one artistic commitment to the next. In this case he moved through much of Prokofiev’s canon on a single day (Nov. 13*). Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5, 2 and 7, 4 (long version) and 6, anchored concerts at 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., the afternoon programs being played by the visiting orchestra, with violin concertos of Mozart separating each pairing. The two-movement Second Symphony (1924) came off best, its barely inhibited caustic din traced plainly so that the Variations outflanked the preceding Allegro ben articolato, in sonata form, as the experimenting composer perhaps wished. The Third (1928) and Fifth (1944) were a bit much before lunch. Even so, the Third, drawn from Ognenny angel, sounded pallid with last season’s methodical and heated account under Vladimir Jurowski still in memory. (Jurowski conducted the opera here the same month, to bold effect.) The MPhil played incisively in the Fifth, but countless particulars of the popular score’s middle movements passed blandly by. After a jolly traversal of the Seventh (1952) came the five-intermission day’s one unalloyed pleasure: a slow Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), as encore, gingerly sculpted by a for once scoreless Gergiev and divinely played by the Mariinsky’s uncredited flutist. As opener to the last concert, the Fourth Symphony (1947) saw the conductor mostly hands-off, but its jerky bombast registered persuasively and superb woodwind ensemble enhanced the Andante tranquillo movement. Gergiev provided utilitarian accompaniment in the concertos: No. 1 in B-flat (1773) gaining from the fresh, stylishly poised thoughts of Vilde Frang; No. 4 in D Major (1775) conventionally but tidily contoured by Yu-Chien Tseng; and No. 3 in G (same year) subjected to Alexandra Conunova’s expressive spinning. This last soloist, although a mismatch in Mozart, held the audience in a trance with her fine dynamic control and determined focus on the musical line. Symphony No. 6 (1945) followed Conunova; we had to leave. If the day offered fewer rewards than last year’s corresponding marathon, climax of the MPhil 360° festival, it was better attended, at 70% of capacity, after a marketing push, and the animated Gasteig lobby confirmed the crowd’s immersion in the project. Medici TV equipment inside the hall no doubt captured clearer sound than the real acoustics, which remain at once bright and gallingly centerless.
[*Symphony No. 1 was played on Nov. 11.]
Photo © Florian Emanuel Schwarz
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Tags:Alexandra Conunova, Debussy, Gasteig, Mariinsky Orchestra, Medici TV, München, Münchner Philharmoniker, Munich, Munich Philharmonic, Prokofiev, Review, Valery Gergiev, Vilde Frang, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Yu-Chien Tseng
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Concert Price Check
Saturday, September 3rd, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 3, 2016
MUNICH — Visiting orchestras cost more for concertgoers. But why exactly? Several factors govern ticket prices on tours, often mitigating each other, and all have a bearing this month as three orchestras from this city hit the road:
— Bavarian State Orchestra (BStO) with Kirill Petrenko, general music director
— Munich Philharmonic (MPhil) with Valery Gergiev, chief conductor
— Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) with Daniel Harding, guest conductor
Here at home these orchestras cost as follows, sampling the top prices for a regular concert without subscriber discount: BStO in the National Theater, U.S. $78; MPhil in the Gasteig, $68; BRSO in the Herkulessaal, $73. Tickets in all price categories include bus and train fares to and from the venue within a 25-mile radius.
Government subsidy, at the federal, state, and in the MPhil’s case city levels, holds down prices to ensure that all Munich audiences can afford to attend. It does not necessarily vanish on tour, at least not within Europe.
For instance, at Berlin’s Musikfest this month, a six-hour drive from here, you would pay a reasonable and consistent top price of $100 for the visiting BStO, MPhil or BRSO, with subsidy applying both to the festival and, federally, to the three German orchestras.
Lack of subsidy may seem to explain exorbitant prices at Lucerne’s Sommer-Festival in Switzerland. Or is a profit motive kicking in? Actually a third factor causes them: currency exchange and the robust Swiss franc. Lucerne, just four hours by road from Munich, wants $245 and $296 for the BStO and MPhil, respectively.
That last detail raises the issue of perceived worth. Why would Lucerne charge a premium for one Munich orchestra over another when Berlin prices all three equally? For that matter, why does Berlin ask more for visiting orchestras than for its own Konzerthaus-Orchester (at a $69 top, staying with the “regular concert without subscriber discount” benchmark) or Berlin Philharmonic ($84) when subsidy applies?
The concert presenter directly, and the concertgoer ultimately, places a value on an orchestra in part as a function of geography. In the small Swiss city but not in the German capital, Gergiev’s orchestra (or Gergiev) is valued more highly than Petrenko’s (or Petrenko). In Berlin, people are willing to pay more to hear out-of-town musicians, a flip side to familiarity breeding contempt.
Price-comparing assumes events have been priced to sell out, and sell out at roughly the same pace. Which in turn assumes presenters know their job. They may. But objectively the worth of an orchestra cannot rise or fall by the tour stop.
If beauty is in the ear of the beholder, the Milanese are more attuned than most. So say Teatro alla Scala’s managers by setting a top of $162 for the BStO’s concert there — far below Lucerne prices yet still double the tag at home. Low government funding in Italy helps shape their thinking, rather than any attempt to gouge, though it will make La Scala’s big platea hard to fill.
Otherwise prices vary against a mental cushion: presenters’ realistic belief that ticket buyers will allow for some unknown but fair travel expense being passed along to them, unaware whether such expense has been covered by grants. Traveling more widely than the other orchestras this time, the BStO costs $94 in Paris, $107 in Vienna and $117 in Luxembourg.
Back in Germany on dates in between those stops, the limited revenue potential of relatively small halls may explain BStO top prices in the range of $118 to $144 for Bonn, Dortmund and Frankfurt. Either that, or someone is profiting, an alien notion when the very existence of orchestras requires subsidy.
Presenters of visiting orchestras are indeed on occasion out to make money, just as they do with non-classical artists. NBS in Tokyo has been a world-renowned price-gouger. In Munich the busy presenter MünchenMusik often prices aggressively. There are several more.
What of three Munich orchestras touring at the same time? Music contracts here commonly run “Sept. 1 to Aug. 31,” with the summer months tail-ending the term ostensibly to provide time off. In practice this structure brings chances to earn extra income at festivals instead. September becomes an odd month: the musicians need a break and audiences are sated from summer performances; the main season is supposed to start yet nobody wants to get down to it. So a window opens for touring.
Photo © KKL Luzern Management AG
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Tags:Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Berlin, Bonn, Commentary, Daniel Harding, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Gasteig, Herkulessaal, Kirill Petrenko, KKL, Lucerne, Luxembourg, Luzern, Milan, München, MünchenMusik, Münchner Philharmoniker, Munich, Munich Philharmonic, Musikfest Berlin, National Theater, NBS, Paris, Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Teatro alla Scala, Valery Gergiev
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Bolton Saves Rameau’s Indes
Sunday, August 7th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 7, 2016
MUNICH — Two evenings after an “Allahu Akbar” eruption here cost nine mostly teenage, mostly Muslim, lives, it felt perverse to indulge in 280-year-old French escapism stretching to Turkey, Peru, Iran and the future United States.
But there we were July 24 in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater for Bavarian State Opera business-as-usual, a festival yet, and Rameau’s four-entrée Les Indes galantes as imagined by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the Belgian choreographer with stage-director pretensions.
And safer we were, too, than at a smaller music festival 110 miles away near Nuremberg, the outdoor Ansbach Open, where a Syrian refugee denied asylum in this country was preparing to explode his metal-piece-filled backpack among two thousand listeners. (As luck would have it, Germany’s first suicide bomber killed only himself when he detonated only his detonator and did so outside the festival’s gates, not having known in advance he would need a ticket.)
Before departing for Turkey, the opéra-ballet states its premise by means of a prologue: European lovers pressed to exchange Goddess Hébé’s doux instants (sweet moments) for Goddess Bellone’s gloire des combats can count on intercession from a third god, Amour, as they “traverse the vastest seas” in military service.
This plays out with amusing dramatic variance* in the four locales to music of beguiling harmony and bold instrumental color, in airs, vocal ensembles, choruses and dances. The U.S. entrée concludes with the Dance of the Great Peace Pipe (penned after Agapit Chicagou’s 1725 Paris visit), minuets, a gavotte, and a most charming chaconne.
If you kept your eyes closed, the performance was a treat. Opening them invited confusion, or worse, despite Cherkaoui’s fresh dance moves, tirelessly executed by his Antwerp-based Compagnie Eastman.
Ivor Bolton and the Münchner Festspiel-Orchester, an elite Baroque pick-up band, served Rameau with verve and expressive breadth, ripe string sound and fabulous wind playing. The Balthasar-Neumann-Chor from Freiburg managed its musical challenges neatly, in opaque French.
The score’s 17 roles went to ten generally stylish soloists. Lisette Oropesa proved a graceful musician in the lyric soprano duties of Hébé and Zima. Anna Prohaska, as Phani and Fatime, stopped the show with a divinely phrased Viens, Hymen, viens m’unir. Light tenor Cyril Auvity sang artfully as Valère and Tacmas, while John Moore’s baritone lent a golden timbre to the sauvage Adario. Reveling grandly in the music’s depths were basses François Lis (Huascar and Alvar) and Tareq Nazmi (Osman and Ali).
But soprano Ana Quintans encountered pitch problems as Amour and Zaïre; Elsa Benoit, the Émilie, seemed squeezed by Rameau’s nimble turns; Mathias Vidal pushed harshly for volume in the tenor roles of Carlos and Damon; and bass Goran Jurić, in drag as Bellone, muddied her vital rousing words.
As for the staging, new on this night, conceit and a ruinous idea got the better of Cherkaoui (and BStO managers, who should have intervened if they care about Baroque opera as they profess): he would thread together the prologue and entrées into one dramatic unit. Characters would appear in each other’s sections, mute. Opéra-ballet form be damned.
In place of exotic lands (requiring exotic sets and costumes), the viewer would journey from schoolroom to museum gallery to church to flower shop, to no place, to some closed border crossing. The spectacle of Peru’s Adoration du Soleil, for instance, would unfold in the church. Woven throughout, clumsily, would be tastes of the plight of Europe’s present refugees, and Europeans’ poor hospitality. Count the ironies.
[*In Turkey a melodrama, as the shipwrecked lovers’ fate turns on Osman’s magnanimity (Le turc généreux). In Peru a tragedy, as the couple’s freedom results from Huascar’s molten-lava death (Les incas du Pérou). In Iran a bucolic, as two pairs of lovers ascertain their feelings through disguise and espial (Les fleurs, original version of Aug. 23, 1735). In the U.S. a comedy, as noble savage Zima flirts with and mocks two European colonists, reversing the pattern, before homing in on loving native Adario (Les sauvages).]
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tags:Ana Quintans, Anna Prohaska, Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Compagnie Eastman, Cyril Auvity, Elsa Benoit, François Lis, Goran Jurić, Ivor Bolton, John Moore, Kritik, Les Indes galantes, Lisette Oropesa, Mathias Vidal, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Rameau, Review, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Tareq Nazmi
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Harteros Warms to Tosca
Sunday, July 17th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 17, 2016
MUNICH — When Anja Harteros was singing her first Toscas three seasons ago, it was clear she had the vocal resources for the role, and the Mediterranean temperament. Even so, the portrayal didn’t quite compute.
Enter Bryn Terfel, a Scarpia to rattle the aloofest, longest-legged of prima donnas. And Jonas Kaufmann, trusted stage buddy, sweet Cavaradossi. Now the diva’s doubt, fear, passion and rage turn on the instant, her slashing knife grip extending a ferrous will.
Harteros fairly lived the part July 1 here at the National Theater, teamed as she must have wanted and apparently undeterred by Luc Bondy’s clunky 2009 stage conception. Warm chest tones and creamy highs, floated or hurled, came into thrilling dramatic focus this time around. Illica and Giacosa’s words made inexorable sense, the Attavanti canvas and Terfel’s guts sure targets.
The tenor, too, had a great night: astutely colored phrases, gleaming top notes, a clarion but unexaggerated Vittoria! For once, E lucevan le stelle emerged as spontaneous thought, always in Kaufmann’s wonderfully lucid Italian.
If the mighty Welshman sounded a smidgen less opulent of voice than in previous Munich Scarpias, his characterization was as potent as ever, and his savoring of Puccini’s lines most enjoyable.
The snag, alas, was Kirill Petrenko’s conducting. Forceful and weighty, it never felt rooted in the language it was supposedly driving. Still, a terrific night for the Munich Opera Festival, and nowhere more refined than during Io de’ sospiri as sung by the Tölzer Knabenchor’s uncredited soloist.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tags:Anja Harteros, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bondy, Giacomo Puccini, Kaufmann, Kirill Petrenko, Kritik, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, Review, Terfel, Tölzer Knabenchor, Tosca
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Mastersingers’ Depression
Tuesday, May 17th, 2016By 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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Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Benjamin Bruns, Christof Fischesser, David Bösch, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Kaufmann, Kirill Petrenko, Kritik, Markus Eiche, München, Munich, National Theater, Nationaltheater, Review, Sara Jakubiak, Sören Eckhoff, Tareq Nazmi, Wolfgang Koch
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Gloom, Doom from the Arcanto
Tuesday, May 10th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: May 10, 2016
MUNICH — As if to unify its program of late Beethoven and Schubert last week (May 4) at the Court Church of All Saints, the Arcanto Quartet stressed gloom wherever possible. Playing of intensity and integrity supported this approach, and, to be sure, the Heiliger Dankegesang String Quartet, Opus 132, and the C-Major String Quintet, D956, do at least contemplate the end of life. It was a little much though. Beethoven intends an expression of thanks; Schubert toys with irony, perhaps accepting fate.
Partnered by cellist Maximilian Hornung after the break, the musicians projected a dark dreamlike picture of the quintet’s 17-minute first movement, guilefully detailed and relaxed, with ample soft passagework. This they paid off in the concluding Rondo, lending it surreal salon elegance. In between they plunged to grim depths. Schubert’s Adagio, sustained with formidable concentration around Tabea Zimmermann’s viola, proceeded grave, a Deathly Hallows without the wizards. Much the same was true of the Scherzo’s Trio. Anyway, great listening.
An obvious sense of purpose marked the Beethoven, with first violin Antje Weithaas adding affable stylish touches. But this reading was a tad short on energy, and in the somber guise imposed on it the central movement managed to be both sedate and precious, not as unsettling as usual. Marketing note: although Munich is saturated with chamber music, people were turned away at the door of this sold-out Bell’Arte event.
Photo © Marco Borggreve
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Tags:Allerheiligen Hofkirche, Antje Weithaas, Arcanto Quartet, Beethoven, Bell’Arte, Court Church of All Saints, Daniel Sepec, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Maximilian Hornung, München, Munich, Review, Schubert, Tabea Zimmermann
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500 Years of Pure Beer
Saturday, April 23rd, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 23, 2016
MUNICH — Before there was Food Babe, there was Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria (reign 1508–1550), a man who valued good music and liked his beer free of nettles, sawdust, roots, and other 16th-century “adjuncts,” as unwelcome food ingredients are now termed.
Wilhelm made musical history in 1523 by hiring Ludwig Senfl as musicus intonator after Holy Roman Emperor Karl V wound down the Senfl-led imperial Hofkapelle. The move enabled him to attract top musicians and clone in Munich that standard-setting body, planting the seeds of the Bavarian State Orchestra.
But his most fondly remembered creation was the Purity Order, or Reinheitsgebot, issued 500 years ago today, on April 23, 1516, and still, Gott sei Dank, indirectly in force.
Beer was to be brewed only from barley, hops and water. Malting was understood. (Science did not identify yeast until the 17th century.) Expanding on earlier local laws, the order applied across the state. It set prices too, specifying the sale of beer at no more than one Pfennig per liter in winter, no more than two in summer, and sending echoes down the centuries that beer should be affordable. Today in Germany, 500 ml of beer can cost less than 500 ml of water.
Enforcement of the Reinheitsgebot throughout the newly unified Germany was a condition in 1871 for Bavaria’s joining with Prussia. Only in 1987 did the order technically go off the books, a casualty of E.U. rules of fair trade. Some viewed it as protectionist. Wilhelm’s strictures returned a few years later, though, in the guise of an E.U.-tailored statute: non-compliant German beers could not be labeled “Bier,” but non-German beers could carry that descriptor if they revealed what they were made from.
Such remains the law today, and it is why Food Babe can frame this rhetorical question: “Don’t you find it interesting that AB InBev is required to [list the ingredients of] Corona in Germany but not [in the U.S.]?”
As the North Carolina activist pursues transparency on caramel coloring, chemically altered hop extract, carrageenan, corn, corn syrup, dextrose, E-numbered anything, genetically engineered anything, fish bladder, insect-based dyes, monosodium glutamate, propylene glycol alginate and rice — all present in one or other beer sold now — she can thank music-loving Wilhelm for showing they have nothing to do with pure beer.
Photo © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
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Tags:Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Beer, Duke Wilhelm IV, Food Babe, Germany, Ludwig Senfl, München, Munich, News, Reinheitsgebot
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Petrenko Hosts Petrenko
Friday, April 22nd, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 22, 2016
MUNICH — Vasily Petrenko’s debut at Bavarian State Opera this weekend prompts a glance at two Russian-born, modestly profiled conductors who have built distinct careers in Western Europe while sharing a last name. The guest from Liverpool will lead Boris Godunov, last revived two years ago by company Generalmusikdirektor Kirill Petrenko.
Inviting Vasily to work in Kirill’s house was sweet, ingenuous. After all, the two Petrenkos are what trademark attorneys call “confusingly similar” marks, a factor that doesn’t vanish just because real names are involved, or because it’s the arts. Are artists products? Their work is, notwithstanding the distance from commerce.
The Petrenkos are not of course the first conductor-brands to overlap, but unlike the Kleibers or Järvis, Abbados or Jurowskis, no disparity of talent or generation neatly separates them. Then, inescapably, there is the matter of dilution: a “Toscanini” needs no specifier.
As it happens, agents have promoted the Petrenkos as if with accidental care over geography. Although both men have enjoyed positive forays Stateside, awareness of them in Europe diverges. For a full decade, Vasily has been the “Petrenko” of reference in Britain. Kirill has been “Petrenko” in Germany.
Kirill has had such minimal renown in Britain, in fact, that retired Bavarian State Opera chief Peter Jonas last summer on Slipped Disc could report the following about the Bavarian State Orchestra’s upcoming European tour: “The [orchestra’s] committee and their management offered themselves to the [BBC] Proms for 2016 … and were sent away with the exclamation, ‘Oh no … . Kirill Petrenko? We do not really know about him over here.’ … The tour will happen all over Europe but without London.” Indeed it will.
In the meantime, Calisto Bieito’s staging of Boris Godunov gets a three-night revival April 23 to 29 with a strong cast: Sergei Skorokhodov’s pretender, Ain Anger’s chronicler and Alexander Tsymbalyuk’s riveting Boris. How will Vasily grapple with the (1869) score? Opera featured prominently in his career only at the start.
Echo Klassik Award
Placing the two Petrenkos side by side here, like baseball cards, meant compiling at least some personal facts along with the musical. So, three questions went to the conductors’ handlers. How tall is he? Where does he live (part of town)? What’s his favorite sports team?
This proved awkward, however, especially on one side, and hitherto-cordial staffers turned as cool as, well, trademark attorneys. Vasily’s people cooperated with partial answers. Kirill’s, deep inside Bavarian State Opera, stonewalled: “Mr. Petrenko generally does not wish to answer any personal questions.”
As it turned out, Vasily was on record with full answers over the years to all three questions for various media outlets. The man is an open book. This left Kirill’s side with unflattering holes. But the opera company’s hands were tied. Apparently under instructions from the artist, nobody could even confirm he lives in Munich (where he has drawn a paycheck for 30 months already). And he may not.
Bavarian State Opera: “What’s not to understand about ‘Mr. Petrenko does not wish to answer any personal questions’? Who puts out the rule that a conductor … does have to comprehend or be willing to be part of public relations? … So, in fact, we do not want to convey anything to anybody. This is the ‘line to be drawn’ from our side.”
Mention of Vasily went over badly. BStO: “What kind of idea is it anyways to compare two artists because they share the same last name?” Prepared descriptors accompanied the rhetoric: “ridiculous” and a “game.” How not to kill a story.
Shown the data for the above table, the opera company took to sarcasm: “Yes, sure, [inventing] height and weight [measurements] is of course totally acceptable.” But Kirill’s height had become public half a year ago* at ARD broadcaster Deutsche Welle. BStO did not either know this or wish to share the knowledge. Its hapless official scanning DW: “Oh, it’s on the Internet! It’s gotta be true!”
[*Earlier actually: Lucas Wiegelmann included it in an excellent 2014 discussion for Die Welt.]
Photos © Bayerische Staatsoper (Kirill Petrenko), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Vasily Petrenko)
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Tags:Ain Anger, Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Boris Godunov, Commentary, Kirill Petrenko, München, Munich, Mussorgsky, News, Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Sergei Skorokhodov, Vasily Petrenko
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
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