By ANDREW POWELL
Published: October 29, 2016
RAVENNA — Imprints, sub-brands, and discreet licensing entities were once a way for artists with bargaining power to secure fatter stakes in the published output of their work. Among conductors, Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Nikolaus Harnoncourt enjoyed the privilege.
Are such endeavors still viable, given social media and the glutted commercial market for sound and video recordings? One artist who is surely finding out is Riccardo Muti. Some years ago he set up RMM, or RM Music Srl, here on the neat stone alley linking Dante’s tomb with Teatro Alighieri, main venue of the Ravenna Festival.
This is, sources say, a family business intended to provide income streams into the future for the maestro’s children: Francesco, 45, an architect; Chiara, 43, actress and stage director; and Domenico, 37, laureato in legge and in charge of contracts.
Holding “all the image and recording rights of Riccardo Muti,” no less, RMM produces, publishes, and licenses on its own account and in association with such names as Corriere della Sera and CSO Resound — the former an Italian daily newspaper, the latter a nine-year-old Chicago Symphony Orchestra “response to the upheaval in the music industry.”
Unlike those departed maestros coddled by Bertelsmann, Sony or Universal, Muti is charting an autonomous, probably arduous, path involving rights-retention, brand-building, and deal-adjusted marketing strategies. On its own, RMM lacks clout. In association with others, it must permit assorted offerings and suffer faults in packaging and distribution.
Worthy products bearing RMM’s stamp-like logo face the same hurdles to profitability nowadays confronting the conglomerates, on less publicity. It is practically a secret, for instance, that three new Muti-led Verdi opera recordings arrived on the market this past spring.
Nonetheless RMM operates as cagily as a pure-play licensor, disclosing little online. For this post, it declined an invitation to expound on mission or plans. RCS MediaGroup, which runs the newspaper and calls RMM a “partner,” said it had to confer before confirming the success of a lengthy recent operazione congiunta, and in the end could not.
The conductor began discernibly to tighten control over recordings of his work after Decca’s DVD release of the 2006 Salzburg Die Zauberflöte. This was and remains his last new release on a “major” label, a remarkable halt considering his eminence.
Rights started to move to RMM almost certainly through revised clauses in Muti’s engagement contracts, including those with orchestras, opera companies and festivals whose output is broadcast using public money.
The pace of Muti releases then slowed. In the nine years through last December, only a handful of new orchestral discs appeared, and only three opera issues — a 2008 Salzburg Otello DVD on the lately launched C Major label; a 2011 Otello audio CD set from Chicago; and Mercadante’s I due Figaro, recorded in 2011 for Ducale.
More recently, though, any instinct to restrict supply has given way to pragmatism. RMM products have grown in number despite market conditions. (The glut was not in any case constraining promoters of less bankable artists, or issuers of pirate Muti discs.) Even with these, however, an attractive backlog remains of unreleased broadcast recordings of the conductor’s work.
RMM as a standalone label tends toward specialty discs, many featuring the Orchestra Cherubini, based here. An 11-hour DVD set of orchestral rehearsals, led in Italian and wide-ranging in repertory, will be among the most prized of these long-term. Packaged in saintly white, it sells for €99. Then there is a 100-minute documentary about conducting Verdi; “assolutamente trascinante,” reads one plaudit.
The lineup, RMM-produced, can be sampled and acquired on the company’s website, but not, pointedly, at the ubiquitous online retailer or through channels outside Italy.
Of RMM’s deals, one with Warner Classics presumably earns revenue. The 2013 Verdi documentary, filmed in Chicago and Rome and directed by Gabriele Cazzola, fittingly caps the American company’s new single-box reissue of all eleven of Muti’s former EMI Verdi opera sets. This represents something of a bargain, at about $75, under a dark and piercing RMM cover image.
RMM’s largest project has been with the Corriere’s distribution arm: a €317 collection of 32 Muti titles (roughly 50 CDs) chosen by the artist himself and classically presented in black and bronze. Finalized in August after a 32-week rollout, it carries the banner La musica è la mia vita.
It is also, alas, a jumble. Most of the discs are reissues stretching as far back as 1970s concerto recordings with Sviatoslav Richter and the old Aida with the New Philharmonia Orchestra. Later efforts from Philadelphia and Vienna occupy much space. Inevitably many collectors will already own parts of the set.
Yet hidden in the huge box are three legitimate new Verdi opera recordings that would once have caused a global stir. They originate in strongly cast live performances during the Verdi bicentennial year of 2013 at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma:
— Nabucco, with Tatiana Serjan (as Abigaille), Sonia Ganassi (Fenena), Francesco Meli (Ismaele), Luca Salsi (Nabucco) and Riccardo Zanellato (Zaccaria);
— I due Foscari, the most recent of seventeen Verdi operas now in Muti’s repertory, with Serjan (Lucrezia), Meli (Jacopo) and Salsi (Francesco); and
— Ernani, with Serjan (Elvira), Meli (Ernani), Salsi (Carlo) and Ildar Abdrazakov (Silva).
Rome’s production of the biblical opera had made news two years earlier when Muti lectured Italy’s politicos — President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi each attended at least once — on the perils of low cultural subsidies. Halting one performance, he related Italy’s destiny to the “beautiful and lost” Jewish homeland before indulging the house in a leaden Và, pensiero, sull’ali dorate sing-along.
Aptly enough for a newspaper company, Corriere della Sera’s slow rollout took place on newsstands across this country, allowing buyers to skip unwanted titles if they could do without the “unedited little book of [Muti] memories and anecdotes” included in the set.
Cost per title: a modest €10.90, whether one, two, or, for Guillaume Tell in Italian, four discs. News vendors on Piazza dei Caduti and Piazza del Popolo here reported sales of “tanti” discs and “un successo,” evidently freer to speak than RCS MediaGroup.
At the Corriere’s online store, shipping can be arranged worldwide. But product details are missing. Shoppers see only the front covers and a footnote about the recording source. The new Verdi items come up without casts.
With the Chicago orchestra, RMM has weaker terms. The CSO made clear this month that it holds sole copyright in CSO Resound recordings and that RMM’s stamp, present by agreement on five of its published titles, indicates no financial participation by the Muti family entity. Nor is the label intended to function as a profit center within the umbrella CSO nonprofit, the orchestra said.
RMM-branded discs and downloads on CSO Resound are a motley array, no doubt reflecting goals and realities other than Muti’s artistic emphases as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director.
Issued: a Berlioz pairing of Symphonie fantastique with Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (2010, much delayed); Schönberg’s Kol Nidre coupled with Shostakovich’s Suite on Verses of Michelangelo (2012, much delayed); Mason Bates’ symphony Alternative Energy and Anna Clyne’s “sonic portrait” Night Ferry (2012); numbers from the first two of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suites (2013); and Bates’ Anthology of Fantastic Zoology (2015).
Those realities have to do with how orchestras raise funds in the U.S. — meaning conditions or incentives attendant on specific subsidizing grants and gifts — and naturally whether a product is considered saleable. The Zoology item has sold relatively well, the CSO said, without providing figures.
Having no stake, managers at RMM have no reason to care about CSO Resound repertory, but other observers away from South Michigan Avenue — and record buyers — must wonder at the lack of music from the Classical period, where Muti excels. His discerning Schubert, for example. Moreover the CSO would not confirm it will issue the Verdi Macbeth it recorded in 2013, or Falstaff, basketed a few months ago.
As for RMM’s stamp, it appears merely “in support of [Muti] and his wider activities around the world,” explained the orchestra with lawyerly reticence. (It is omitted from two Verdi issues on CSO Resound, the mentioned Otello and a recording of the Requiem Mass made before Muti assumed his post.)
CSO Resound gives RMM visibility Stateside and has good distribution, using multiple online retailers for disc and download versions of most titles.
The label’s packaging, on the other hand, with crude typography and slipshod billing, cannot match RMM products created in Italy. Take the Berlioz disc. Finally released in 2015, five years after being recorded, its cover declares “Chicago Symphony” three times, plus “CSO”; lists the conductor before the orchestra, then the soloists, whose names are separated by a slash, and chorus; and allows the most noteworthy item, Lélio, to get lost essentially.
Muti the publisher, then, faces a host of hurdles. For RMM to be viable, never mind guarantee long-term family income, it needs all elements pulling in its favor. It must balance the pros and cons of independence against those of joint ventures while avoiding unforced errors such as caginess, intentional product delays and narrowed distribution.
At a glance, its best prospects lie in content from tax-supported broadcasts, as newly marketed. WFMT, WQXR, Italy’s RAI and Austria’s ORF have all aired the conductor’s work since 2006, filmed or taped. Standards are high, and in terms of production the output is largely ready for release — ready, but at present held up and falling to pirates.
Listing just operas, and not counting items discussed above, RMM may have “recording rights” in: Il ritorno di Don Calandrino (Salzburg) and Sancta Susanna (New York), from 2007; Così fan tutte and Don Pasquale (both Vienna), 2008; Iphigénie en Aulide (Rome) and Moïse et Pharaon (Salzburg), 2009; Attila (New York) and Orfeo ed Euridice (Salzburg), 2010; Macbeth (Salzburg), 2011; Simon Boccanegra (Rome), filmed in 2012; and Manon Lescaut (Rome), 2014 audio.
There is a solid if limited market on DVD or CD for this body of work, and one instinctively wishes the family venture every success in using the associated rights, even if the era has likely ended when imprints could assure fortunes.
That said, Riccardo Muti’s personal priority may be something else: legacy. His own, and more emphatically the artistic traditions he values. Hence the not necessarily lucrative documenting of preparation and rehearsal methods in RMM productions. It is no coincidence his Italian Opera Academy is headquartered on the same alley.
Images © RM Music Srl and RCS MediaGroup
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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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U.S. Orchestras on Travel Ban
Tuesday, January 31st, 2017By ANDREW POWELL
Published: January 31, 2017
MUNICH — The New York-based League of American Orchestras yesterday issued this statement in response to Executive Order 13769, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States:
“The music that orchestras play and the communities they serve are global and include people and cultures from [Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen] now subject to the travel ban issued by Executive Order on Jan. 27.
“We firmly believe that concerns related to national security can be addressed while also continuing to welcome people [from] beyond our borders. [We believe] in the power of music to communicate across differences, express and animate the issues of our time, and advance international diplomacy and our democracy.
“With each concert U.S. orchestras perform [at home] and abroad, as many as 100 musicians from diverse traditions, faiths and political perspectives play in unison in the shared pursuit of artistic expression. … In a time of [division] in our country, intentionally listening to the full spectrum of voices is key … . Democracy, like music, flourishes when we encourage … and respectfully engage with a diversity of ideas.”
Separately, the League and the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) have jointly created the website Artists from Abroad to help foreign guest artists and their managers navigate the process of obtaining non-immigrant visas and presenting artists from abroad to U.S. audiences. The website will carry guest-artist-related updates to the Jan. 27 Executive Order.
Photo © National Park Service
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Tonhalle Lights Up the Beyond
Friday, January 27th, 2017By ANDREW POWELL
Published: January 27, 2017
ZURICH — It was not the most natural of programs. Beethoven’s familiar C-Major Piano Concerto (1795) prepared nobody for Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà … , or Lightning Over the Beyond … , the 65-minute theological ornithological astronomical would-be symphony Messiaen finished in 1991. Wary of the exotic fare ahead, many in the Tonhalle-Orchester’s subscription audience here Jan. 7 left at intermission. Others returned to their seats only to grow restless as Éclairs unfolded, and they then feet-shuffled and door-slammed between its movements. Maestro and program architect Kent Nagano maintained his serenity nonetheless, all the way through.
Daniil Trifonov turned in a leaden, joylessly intense reading of the concerto, nowhere near Beethoven’s world. He reduced the solo part to a stilted struggle of his own devising, albeit a sincere one masterfully played. He overstated dynamic contrasts within phrases, creating alien shapes. The first movement, played slowly, essentially lacked a pulse; Nagano began it in that manner, evidently at his soloist’s behest. As Trifonov’s sweaty bangs swished near Steinway’s S&S logo and his chin hovered just above the backs of his hands, he telegraphed a crazily forced disquiet. The second movement sounded numb. Life emerged, somewhat, in the crowd-pleasing Rondo.
Messiaen’s opus summum in its Zurich premiere wound up defying the defectors and sent most listeners home with the spiritual boost its writer must have intended — at least if their spirited applause was any sign. The performance confirmed Messiaen’s wisdom in scoring, sequencing, and above all timing his material so as to build a coherent and moving structure, even as he sought the most divergent attributes for his eleven movements.
There is no climax. Instead, the eighth movement, employing 128 musicians, anchors Éclairs by recognizing every strand of thought it possesses, and the plush string harmonies of the last movement bring the composer to his point (and his title): a glimpse of the Celestial City, the Au-Delà, made possible by shafts of lightning, the Éclairs. It is a “journey,” one decorated in seven of the movements with birdsong from 48 species — a trait that separates it from its closest cousin in Messiaen’s canon, the Turangalîla-Symphonie, which is somewhat longer with one movement less.
The Tonhalle-Orchester balanced an astonishing range of sonorities, neatly intoning the unison passages, diligently tracing the glissandos and melismas, and somehow preventing the textural lurches between movements — and between ideas within them — from undermining Messiaen’s last, vast statement on mortality. Nagano favored a brisk pace overall and cued the vital bird entrances with fanatical clarity.
Tempo can be conjectural in Messaien, properties varying, and Éclairs has been no exception over the years. Nagano on this occasion came close to Simon Rattle’s workaday 61 minutes, as recorded in Berlin in 2004. But Sylvain Cambreling’s diligent 2002 Freiburg recording spreads to 75 minutes. Myung-Whun Chung, who worked with Messiaen on a benchmark 1990 recording of Turangalîla, taking 78 minutes for that work, completes Éclairs in a middling 65 minutes on his 1993 Paris disc, yet his view is not especially compelling.
There is one great recording of Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà … . In fact it is an essential disc for any Messiaen collection: a live 2008 performance complete with coughs and moments of shaky brass intonation on the Kairos label. Listening, one cannot imagine that anyone walked out in the middle, such is the joy and focus in the Vienna Philharmonic’s music-making. Ingo Metzmacher adopts moderate tempos (running to 67 minutes) and allows the intervals of silence to tell, but he presses on between movements, creating a palpable sense of urgency and spontaneity. His third movement, devoted to birdsong, is exhilarating. In the fifth, the Vienna strings flatter Messiaen’s long and soaring lines. Metzmacher seems to channel Mussorgsky in the fully scored eighth, and in the ninth he secures the most vivid demonstration — possibly ever recorded — of Messiaen birdsong. From his abode in the Celestial City, the composer will have been pleased.
Photo © Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich
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Tags:Beethoven, CD, Daniil Trifonov, Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà, Ingo Metzmacher, Kairos, Kent Nagano, Lightning Over the Beyond, Messiaen, Review, Tonhalle-Orchester, Vienna Philharmonic, Zurich
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Antonini Works Alcina’s Magic
Wednesday, January 11th, 2017By ANDREW POWELL
Published: January 11, 2017
ZURICH — Christof Loy’s staging of Alcina here, new in 2014 and just revived, imagines a blurred line between a theater troupe’s onstage roles and its members’ backstage passions and asks what it means to break free of illusion — this last substituting for Ariosto’s island magic, happily without demeaning the source. States of mind hinge on costume changes. Multiple stage spaces allow contexts to shift. Neither stylized nor abstract, the scheme advances judiciously on its own logic with nobody the center of attention, until Loy draws together his loose ends to reveal one trouper entrapped: Alcina herself.
At Friday’s performance (Jan. 6), Julie Fuchs sang a girlish and game Morgana with gleaming top notes but no real trill. As her sister the sorceress “queen,” Cecilia Bartoli commanded slenderer tones; extended arias Ah! mio cor! schernito sei! and Mi restano le lagrime, lacking resonance, aurally diluted rather than crowned an earnest, witty portrayal. Varduhi Abrahamyan offered the counterforce of a vocally plush, heroic Bradamante able to trace coloratura flights while sliding half-dressed between genders.
In his Opernhaus Zürich debut, Philippe Jaroussky ornamented Ruggiero’s music more sparingly than he had at Aix-en-Provence eighteen months earlier, for the good. He placed his notes in the service of complete phrases and longer ideas, largely through impeccable dynamic control. His sound: consistently sweet. His Verdi prati seemed frozen in time, floated as it was while he descended steps from the stage in an escape from Loy’s illusion. The contreténor from Maisons-Laffitte later kick-turn danced with the ensemble, sealing a triumph.
But the highest tributes to Händel’s score came from the pit, and not with showiness. Right from the overture, conductor Giovanni Antonini set his priorities: breathing musical lines, gentle accents, unexaggerated dynamics, sharp attacks. Orchestra La Scintilla, devoted to period-performance practice at this ornate 1,100-seat lakeside theater, responded flexibly, with fine internal balances. The strings sounded lush and mellow. There were wonderful wind solos, including from Antonini, who had no trouble leading with his recorder; this partnership began years ago.
Photos © Monika Rittershaus (performance), Philippe Jaroussky (backstage), Opernhaus Zürich (curtain call)
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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
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Muti the Publisher
Saturday, October 29th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: October 29, 2016
RAVENNA — Imprints, sub-brands, and discreet licensing entities were once a way for artists with bargaining power to secure fatter stakes in the published output of their work. Among conductors, Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein and Nikolaus Harnoncourt enjoyed the privilege.
Are such endeavors still viable, given social media and the glutted commercial market for sound and video recordings? One artist who is surely finding out is Riccardo Muti. Some years ago he set up RMM, or RM Music Srl, here on the neat stone alley linking Dante’s tomb with Teatro Alighieri, main venue of the Ravenna Festival.
This is, sources say, a family business intended to provide income streams into the future for the maestro’s children: Francesco, 45, an architect; Chiara, 43, actress and stage director; and Domenico, 37, laureato in legge and in charge of contracts.
Holding “all the image and recording rights of Riccardo Muti,” no less, RMM produces, publishes, and licenses on its own account and in association with such names as Corriere della Sera and CSO Resound — the former an Italian daily newspaper, the latter a nine-year-old Chicago Symphony Orchestra “response to the upheaval in the music industry.”
Unlike those departed maestros coddled by Bertelsmann, Sony or Universal, Muti is charting an autonomous, probably arduous, path involving rights-retention, brand-building, and deal-adjusted marketing strategies. On its own, RMM lacks clout. In association with others, it must permit assorted offerings and suffer faults in packaging and distribution.
Worthy products bearing RMM’s stamp-like logo face the same hurdles to profitability nowadays confronting the conglomerates, on less publicity. It is practically a secret, for instance, that three new Muti-led Verdi opera recordings arrived on the market this past spring.
Nonetheless RMM operates as cagily as a pure-play licensor, disclosing little online. For this post, it declined an invitation to expound on mission or plans. RCS MediaGroup, which runs the newspaper and calls RMM a “partner,” said it had to confer before confirming the success of a lengthy recent operazione congiunta, and in the end could not.
The conductor began discernibly to tighten control over recordings of his work after Decca’s DVD release of the 2006 Salzburg Die Zauberflöte. This was and remains his last new release on a “major” label, a remarkable halt considering his eminence.
Rights started to move to RMM almost certainly through revised clauses in Muti’s engagement contracts, including those with orchestras, opera companies and festivals whose output is broadcast using public money.
The pace of Muti releases then slowed. In the nine years through last December, only a handful of new orchestral discs appeared, and only three opera issues — a 2008 Salzburg Otello DVD on the lately launched C Major label; a 2011 Otello audio CD set from Chicago; and Mercadante’s I due Figaro, recorded in 2011 for Ducale.
More recently, though, any instinct to restrict supply has given way to pragmatism. RMM products have grown in number despite market conditions. (The glut was not in any case constraining promoters of less bankable artists, or issuers of pirate Muti discs.) Even with these, however, an attractive backlog remains of unreleased broadcast recordings of the conductor’s work.
RMM as a standalone label tends toward specialty discs, many featuring the Orchestra Cherubini, based here. An 11-hour DVD set of orchestral rehearsals, led in Italian and wide-ranging in repertory, will be among the most prized of these long-term. Packaged in saintly white, it sells for €99. Then there is a 100-minute documentary about conducting Verdi; “assolutamente trascinante,” reads one plaudit.
The lineup, RMM-produced, can be sampled and acquired on the company’s website, but not, pointedly, at the ubiquitous online retailer or through channels outside Italy.
Of RMM’s deals, one with Warner Classics presumably earns revenue. The 2013 Verdi documentary, filmed in Chicago and Rome and directed by Gabriele Cazzola, fittingly caps the American company’s new single-box reissue of all eleven of Muti’s former EMI Verdi opera sets. This represents something of a bargain, at about $75, under a dark and piercing RMM cover image.
RMM’s largest project has been with the Corriere’s distribution arm: a €317 collection of 32 Muti titles (roughly 50 CDs) chosen by the artist himself and classically presented in black and bronze. Finalized in August after a 32-week rollout, it carries the banner La musica è la mia vita.
It is also, alas, a jumble. Most of the discs are reissues stretching as far back as 1970s concerto recordings with Sviatoslav Richter and the old Aida with the New Philharmonia Orchestra. Later efforts from Philadelphia and Vienna occupy much space. Inevitably many collectors will already own parts of the set.
Yet hidden in the huge box are three legitimate new Verdi opera recordings that would once have caused a global stir. They originate in strongly cast live performances during the Verdi bicentennial year of 2013 at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma:
— Nabucco, with Tatiana Serjan (as Abigaille), Sonia Ganassi (Fenena), Francesco Meli (Ismaele), Luca Salsi (Nabucco) and Riccardo Zanellato (Zaccaria);
— I due Foscari, the most recent of seventeen Verdi operas now in Muti’s repertory, with Serjan (Lucrezia), Meli (Jacopo) and Salsi (Francesco); and
— Ernani, with Serjan (Elvira), Meli (Ernani), Salsi (Carlo) and Ildar Abdrazakov (Silva).
Rome’s production of the biblical opera had made news two years earlier when Muti lectured Italy’s politicos — President Giorgio Napolitano and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi each attended at least once — on the perils of low cultural subsidies. Halting one performance, he related Italy’s destiny to the “beautiful and lost” Jewish homeland before indulging the house in a leaden Và, pensiero, sull’ali dorate sing-along.
Aptly enough for a newspaper company, Corriere della Sera’s slow rollout took place on newsstands across this country, allowing buyers to skip unwanted titles if they could do without the “unedited little book of [Muti] memories and anecdotes” included in the set.
Cost per title: a modest €10.90, whether one, two, or, for Guillaume Tell in Italian, four discs. News vendors on Piazza dei Caduti and Piazza del Popolo here reported sales of “tanti” discs and “un successo,” evidently freer to speak than RCS MediaGroup.
At the Corriere’s online store, shipping can be arranged worldwide. But product details are missing. Shoppers see only the front covers and a footnote about the recording source. The new Verdi items come up without casts.
With the Chicago orchestra, RMM has weaker terms. The CSO made clear this month that it holds sole copyright in CSO Resound recordings and that RMM’s stamp, present by agreement on five of its published titles, indicates no financial participation by the Muti family entity. Nor is the label intended to function as a profit center within the umbrella CSO nonprofit, the orchestra said.
RMM-branded discs and downloads on CSO Resound are a motley array, no doubt reflecting goals and realities other than Muti’s artistic emphases as Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director.
Issued: a Berlioz pairing of Symphonie fantastique with Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie (2010, much delayed); Schönberg’s Kol Nidre coupled with Shostakovich’s Suite on Verses of Michelangelo (2012, much delayed); Mason Bates’ symphony Alternative Energy and Anna Clyne’s “sonic portrait” Night Ferry (2012); numbers from the first two of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suites (2013); and Bates’ Anthology of Fantastic Zoology (2015).
Those realities have to do with how orchestras raise funds in the U.S. — meaning conditions or incentives attendant on specific subsidizing grants and gifts — and naturally whether a product is considered saleable. The Zoology item has sold relatively well, the CSO said, without providing figures.
Having no stake, managers at RMM have no reason to care about CSO Resound repertory, but other observers away from South Michigan Avenue — and record buyers — must wonder at the lack of music from the Classical period, where Muti excels. His discerning Schubert, for example. Moreover the CSO would not confirm it will issue the Verdi Macbeth it recorded in 2013, or Falstaff, basketed a few months ago.
As for RMM’s stamp, it appears merely “in support of [Muti] and his wider activities around the world,” explained the orchestra with lawyerly reticence. (It is omitted from two Verdi issues on CSO Resound, the mentioned Otello and a recording of the Requiem Mass made before Muti assumed his post.)
CSO Resound gives RMM visibility Stateside and has good distribution, using multiple online retailers for disc and download versions of most titles.
The label’s packaging, on the other hand, with crude typography and slipshod billing, cannot match RMM products created in Italy. Take the Berlioz disc. Finally released in 2015, five years after being recorded, its cover declares “Chicago Symphony” three times, plus “CSO”; lists the conductor before the orchestra, then the soloists, whose names are separated by a slash, and chorus; and allows the most noteworthy item, Lélio, to get lost essentially.
Muti the publisher, then, faces a host of hurdles. For RMM to be viable, never mind guarantee long-term family income, it needs all elements pulling in its favor. It must balance the pros and cons of independence against those of joint ventures while avoiding unforced errors such as caginess, intentional product delays and narrowed distribution.
At a glance, its best prospects lie in content from tax-supported broadcasts, as newly marketed. WFMT, WQXR, Italy’s RAI and Austria’s ORF have all aired the conductor’s work since 2006, filmed or taped. Standards are high, and in terms of production the output is largely ready for release — ready, but at present held up and falling to pirates.
Listing just operas, and not counting items discussed above, RMM may have “recording rights” in: Il ritorno di Don Calandrino (Salzburg) and Sancta Susanna (New York), from 2007; Così fan tutte and Don Pasquale (both Vienna), 2008; Iphigénie en Aulide (Rome) and Moïse et Pharaon (Salzburg), 2009; Attila (New York) and Orfeo ed Euridice (Salzburg), 2010; Macbeth (Salzburg), 2011; Simon Boccanegra (Rome), filmed in 2012; and Manon Lescaut (Rome), 2014 audio.
There is a solid if limited market on DVD or CD for this body of work, and one instinctively wishes the family venture every success in using the associated rights, even if the era has likely ended when imprints could assure fortunes.
That said, Riccardo Muti’s personal priority may be something else: legacy. His own, and more emphatically the artistic traditions he values. Hence the not necessarily lucrative documenting of preparation and rehearsal methods in RMM productions. It is no coincidence his Italian Opera Academy is headquartered on the same alley.
Images © RM Music Srl and RCS MediaGroup
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Tags:Berlioz, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Commentary, Corriere della Sera, CSO Resound, Ernani, Gabriele Cazzola, Giuseppe Verdi, Italian Opera Academy, Lélio, Nabucco, Orchestra Cherubini, Ravenna, RCS MediaGroup, Riccardo Muti, RMM, Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Warner Classics
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Muti Casts His New Aida
Friday, September 9th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 9, 2016
SALZBURG — Today’s iconic Verdian has completed the casting for his delayed return to the iconic Verdi opera, sources say. Due next summer here, Riccardo Muti’s opening-night roster for Aida reportedly will be:
Aida — Anna Netrebko
Amneris — Anita Rachvelishvili*
Radamès — Francesco Meli
Amonasro — Luca Salsi
Ramfis — Dmitry Belosselsky
Confirmation is expected in November along with other details of Salzburg Festival 2017. The participation of Netrebko and Meli, in role debuts, was made public in July; Rachvelishvili will be working with Muti for the first time. In the pit: the Vienna Philharmonic.
An astonishing 38 years will have passed since Muti last conducted Aida, in Munich. During this time he long served as direttore musicale at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and for six seasons (2008 to 2014) was actively engaged at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, where he remains direttore onorario a vita.
Muti’s past performances of the score belong to a different era, the 1970s, when his prime donne were Gwyneth Jones, Teresa Kubiak, Tamara Milashkina, Ljiljana Molnar-Talajić, Montserrat Caballé, Marie Robinson and Anna Tomowa-Sintow.
Aida will be Netrebko’s sixth complete Verdi role and the third requiring broad spinto heft. With Muti she has already prepared and sung the title part in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, in Rome, and it was during rehearsals there that she met her husband, tenor Yusif Eyvazov. Cast as des Grieux, he had been working in Ravenna with the conductor’s wife, stage director Cristina Mazzavillani.
Muti first planned to reinterpret Aida in Rome two years ago, eight months after the Puccini, but he abruptly severed what were informal ties with Teatro dell’Opera weeks before the premiere. His grounds: cyclical problems at the company and insufficient peace of mind.
Anticipating high ticket demand for the Salzburg run, the festival will reportedly announce as many as seven dates, with some rotation* of cast, including Eyvazov as Radamès. Written orders will be processed starting in early January.
[*At its Jahrespressekonferenz on Nov. 10, the Salzburg Festival listed Ekaterina Semenchuk as Amneris. Dates are Aug. 6, 9, 12m, 16, 19, 22 and 25. Vittoria Yeo and Eyvazov replace Netrebko and Meli for the last two performances.]
Illustration © Casa Ricordi Srl
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Tags:Aida, Anita Rachvelishvili, Dmitry Belosselsky, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Francesco Meli, Giuseppe Verdi, Luca Salsi, Netrebko, News, Riccardo Muti, Salzburg, Salzburg Festival, Salzburger Festspiele, Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Vienna Philharmonic, Vittoria Yeo, Yusif Eyvazov
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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
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Safety First at Bayreuth
Friday, August 19th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 19, 2016
BAYREUTH — Clouds over Europe’s festivals this summer are as figurative as they are literal. The trouble is not lower standards or Regietheater, or even money, but has to do with Europe itself and macabre shifts that are gradually threatening the way of life accepted since 1945. Last year, you could see it in the organized beggars at the very doors of the Salzburg Festival under the noses of undirected Austrian police. Now it shows, conversely, in a massive security operation around this city’s Festspielhaus. Nobody knows what is coming for the various main seasons.
Consider: nine police vans at Wagner’s theater, forty officers; Arndt Gruppe protective staff, carrying; no visitor walk-around of the building without recourse to the street; segmented access areas; Siegfried-Wagner-Allee closed to vehicles; taxis on a footpath loop to the Liszt-Büste; endless patrols; bag searches (but no metal detectors); and ticket checks at the doors, at the feet of the interior stairs, and on entry to the auditorium. Heightened security was announced months ago — before an Afghan asylum-seeker armed with an ax hurt four people on a train here in Bavaria on July 18, before an Iranian-German obsessed with mass killings shot nine people dead in Munich on July 22, before a Syrian asylum-seeker slew a pregnant woman with a meat cleaver near Stuttgart on July 24, and, pertinently, before another Syrian that same evening botched a plan to explode his metal-piece-filled backpack among two thousand listeners at a different music festival in this state.
No extra measures applied, the Bayreuth Festival said, for Tristan und Isolde (Aug. 1) or Parsifal (Aug. 2, pictured) with Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel in discreet attendance. Both performances upheld high levels of artistry, at least in terms of the listening.
Christian Thielemann, whose impulsive musicianship suits the love-potion work, gauged the score’s climaxes shrewdly and made as much of its barely pulsing nostalgia as of its ecstasies. His hidden orchestra — drawn from a roster of 198 musicians from no fewer than 55 orchestras, 52 of them German — delivered entrancing, duly rapturous sounds, though detail in this instrumentally driven Musikdrama would have registered more luminously in a normal theater. Petra Lang, a past Brangäne for Thielemann and here for the first time an Isolde, produced consistently full and secure dark tones but swallowed much of the text; stage direction presented the promised bride as violent as well as sarcastic. Stephen Gould’s noble Breton tended toward blandness in the high notes, but a musically astute and unstinting portrayal in accented German emerged anyway. Georg Zeppenfeld sang Marke richly, with solid lows, but projected little in the way of authority; being depicted as a kind of thug did not help. Claudia Mahnke’s Brangäne got somewhat quashed by Lang’s timbre and haughty stage presence, while Iain Paterson, as Kurwenal, wobbled vocally on the approach to Cornwall before finding his form.
Hartmut Haenchen’s way with Parsifal, finely executed by the orchestra, brought a perceptive sense of purpose to each phrase, not least in a deeply focused Act I Vorspiel. But the conductor proved less potent in ensembles and dense passages, seemingly unwilling to home in on any single musical line. He had a strong cast: Elena Pankratova, whose thrilling top notes, resonant chest voice and attentive musicianship as Kundry reinforced impressions of a major artist, albeit one who appears to have doubled her weight in three seasons; Klaus Florian Vogt, a pleasing and relatively credible Parsifal; Ryan McKinny, intoning suavely as Amfortas; and Gerd Grochowski, musically incisive but dramatically betrayed as Klingsor. Zeppenfeld, alas, conveyed limited pathos in his neat delivery of Gurnemanz.
Neither of the two stagings offers an uplifting visual counterpart to the music or masterful use of color and form. Katharina Wagner’s considered production of Tristan und Isolde, new last summer, at least allies its Personenregie with cues in the score, and at Kareol musters a plausible probe of Tristan’s mind. But its spaces are confined, notably in Act I when the composer is breathing the sea air. And the young régisseuse undercuts the nobility of both Isolde and Marke. Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s Parsifal staging is at its most poignant as Act III ends and the stage is left bare by exiting Muslims, Christians and a token group of Jews. What comes before is a leaden admonition, set in the unholy and here timeless Middle East, on the perils of religion. Topically for the German audience, it begins with Muslim refugees in Christian sanctuary. Act I’s Verwandlung lifts us on a cosmic flight out of Iraq courtesy of NASA and Google Maps. A quasi-Muslim Gurnemanz hands us off to a quasi-Muslim Klingsor who collects and fetishizes crucifixes. Kundry starts in a hijab, progresses to a mini-dress (in which she bizarrely nods off during her mission to seduce), and terminates as a graying kitchen hag in the service of the ruined knighthood. Less inventively, Laufenberg has Amfortas’ wound parallel Jesus’ stigmata; it won’t heal because the knights keep knifing it open to refill their sacred chalice. So much for ambiguity. DVDs of both operas are promised under a new deal with Deutsche Grammophon.
After a prolonged renovation, the wraps are off the Festspielhaus’s iconic façade for this first summer under the sole leadership of Katharina. The place looks spiffy, an impression reinforced by the uniforms as much as the gowns. A window right next to the unused central door now ventilates a men’s room. Newly sponsored carry-in cushions now enhance comfort in the auditorium. To their credit, festival staff are keeping up an amiable demeanor despite the security strictures. The caterer, meanwhile, is keeping up its margins. Steigenberger Hotel Group, out of Frankfurt, sells a wild boar sausage on a roll for €7 and a small beer for €5.50 (versus €5 for a better sandwich and €3.50 for a beer in Munich’s National Theater); its on-site manager jokes that steep prices pay for the security. In what amounts to a slap in the face for Landkreis Bayreuth’s own pilsners, such as the outstanding Hütten Pils made with water from the same mountain range as above Plzeň, Steigenberger serves a Saxon beer.
BR Klassik will audio-stream the Aug. 1 Tristan und Isolde at 12:05 p.m. EDT on Aug. 27, 2016, here. Video of the opening night of Parsifal (July 25) is here: Act I, Act II, Act III.
Still image from video © BR Klassik
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Tags:Bayreuth, Bayreuther Festspiele, BR Klassik, Bühnenweihfestspiel, Christian Thielemann, Claudia Mahnke, Deutsche Grammophon, DVD, Elena Pankratova, Georg Zeppenfeld, Gerd Grochowski, Hartmut Haenchen, Iain Paterson, Klaus Florian Vogt, Kritik, Petra Lang, Review, Ryan McKinny, Stephen Gould, Tristan und Isolde, Uwe Eric Laufenberg
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
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