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New Releases: ‘Almost Truths and Open Deceptions’; ‘Opus 1’

Friday, July 27th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The New York-based composer Annie Gosfield is best known for her synthesis of industrial sounds and other unconventional sampling into rock-inflected, yet often intricately wrought, compositions. As a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin last semester, she researched encrypted radio broadcasts from World War Two—part of a long-standing fascination with archaic technology and its unusual sounds—for a new violin work that will premiere at the Gaudemaus Muziekweek in the Netherlands this September. Satellite transmissions, the clanking of junkyard metal, factory machinery, destroyed pianos, and detuned radios have all been repurposed in Gosfield’s repertory, to often surprisingly lyrical effect. Underlying many of these explorations is a highly personal thread. “Daughters of the Industrial Revolution” (2011), the most recent work on her upcoming album, Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, was inspired by her grandparents’ experience as immigrant workers on the Lower East Side. “I am a third generation daughter of the industrial revolution,” she writes in program notes, “linked to this history, not only genetically and geographically, but as a composer who often uses raw materials and transforms them into something new.”

The assembly-line rhythms, sampled from a factory in Nuremburg, unshackled electric guitar, ringing sampler melody and percussion in the approximately five-minute excerpt from this work create a punk rock-like fare that contrasts sharply with the album’s title work, a chamber concerto with a cello part written for Felix Fan at its center. The title “Almost Truths and Open Deceptions” refers to the movement of the entire ensemble toward “a mass of open D strings,” as Gosfield explains. At the end of the 24-minute work, the instruments settle through wilting glissandos into a decaying unison that fades ghostlike. The concerto opens with brash string attacks, wild circling motives and pulsing forward motion that settles down deceitfully, foreshadowing the piece’s conclusion, before ceding to a cello that implores and groans. Intimate, folky exchanges between the piano, violin, and cello ensue in the course of the work’s impending movement, propelled through variegated rhythms and animated melodic writing, with a percussive interlude that teases the listener as much as it creates suspense.

‘Almost truths’ would also seem to apply to the album’s first track, “Wild Pitch” (2004), with its double-entendre in reference to “a baseball game gone mad” as well as the musical sense of the word. Fan again takes center stage along with the members of his trio “Real Quiet,” scraping out both tuned and quarter-toned figures against eerie piano (Andrew Russo), also played from the inside with a steel guitar slide among other objects, and high strung percussion (David Cossin). The excitability yields intermittently to meditative stasis, given an authentic flair with Chinese cymbals and broken gongs. Gosfield’s ability to foreground and manipulate pure instrumental sounds emerges even more clearly in “Cranks and Cactus Needles” (2000), inspired by the sounds of the now obsolete 78 RPM records and commissioned by the Stockholm-based ensemble The Pearls Before Swine Experience. Ripping, scratchy timbres in the strings evoke a record player on its last legs, while flute and piano play unaffected. Gosfield herself takes the keyboard for “Phantom Shakedown,” composed specifically for the album in 2010, over cosmic whirring, satellite bleeps, detuned piano, and machine rhythms, the piano’s heavy, if at time monotonous, chords moving through the samples as if drifting through a tunnel.

Some subtleties in the frequencies of the samples may not be as palpable on recording as they are live, yet instrumental balance is generally well-struck throughout the album. The first minutes of the title track are excessively loud at first hearing, but upon grasping the music’s structural strains becomes an absorbing listen. The detoned shades of “Cranks and Cactus Needles” manage to carry through effectively, the keyboard deliberately raucous beneath ripping strings. Roger Kleier’s electric guitar grinds organically with the machine riffs in “Daughters of the Revolution,” while the technical and expressive range of Fan’s cello, featured in four of six tracks, provides visceral continuity throughout the spectrum of Gosfield’s endeavors. David Cossin’s percussion provides a full range of timbral variety and rhythmic energy, fueling this music’s appetite for lyrical noise.

‘Almost Truths and Open Deceptions’ is out Aug.28 on Tzadik Records and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.com.

Opus 1

At a time when young musicians are grappling with the demands of audience development and changing business models, the Israeli Chamber Project (ICP) has created a flexible format that combines high quality performance and outreach into a single mission. Founded four seasons ago by young musicians based in New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv—most of whom graduated from Juilliard or the Manhattan School of Music—the octet divides its time between the concert hall and educational tours to rural parts of Israel, some of which are mostly Arab, that have little or no exposure to classical music. “It’s a response to a social-economic situation where there’s a kind of brain drain,” explains pianist Assaff Weisman, who also serves as the group’s executive director. “No one is left to teach there.” In turn, the chamber music society hopes to bring something of its native musical culture abroad, championing emerging Israeli composers and including pre-concert demonstrations. The ensemble, with two pianists, a clarinetist, and a harpist alongside a quartet of string players, can expand or shrink to suit a wide range of repertoire and has won praise for its inventive programming. The group’s debut album Opus 1 features an originally-commissioned quartet by the Berlin-based composer Matan Porat alongside duets, trios and a sextet.

The selection gives equal measure to late French Romaticism and Eastern European modernism, providing a fitting stylistic context for Porat’s Night Horses (2007). Dreamy piano arpeggios and rhapsodic lines in the clarinet over nearly imperceptible slides and tremoli in the strings yield to tangled melodies that deliberately evoke Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, as liner notes by Laurie Shulman explain. The work was originally inspired by an eponymous lecture by Jorge Luis Borges about the ‘nightmare’ as a ‘night horse’ that invades the psyche. The second movement features moaning strings and emphatic interlocking melodies that seem desperate to escape as the piano gallops along until a soft, waking clarinet melody resolves the emotional turmoil. Martinu’s Musique de Chambre No.1, scored for clarinet, harp, piano and string trio, provides the ensemble with another outlet for vibrant, free-ranging yet highly idiomatic musicianship. Folk rhythms emerge spontaneously alongside neo-impressionist elements, while the mysterious timbre and meditative stasis of in the inner Andante movement underscores the music’s unusual instrumentation.

Bartok’s Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano, the only chamber work in which the composer involved a wind player, also features a slow-fast rhapsodic structure with a Pihenö (Relaxation) inner movement. The late Bartokian fare can barely contain its energy in the final movement as both violinist and clarinetist respectively alternate between two instruments, a detuned fiddle adding a searing touch of nostalgia. The album is balanced with the soothing mood of duets according special prominence to the harp. ICP harpist Sivan Magen performs in his own arrangement of Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, originally written in the composer’s last years after a spell of paralyzing depression. The harp’s dry, rippling timbre is not so convincing in the accompanying chords of the Prologue or the aggressive plucks that bring the final movement to a close but achieves a more compelling blend in the inner Sérénade. The Fantaisie for Violin and Harp of Saint-Saens, who as the liner notes explain was one of the few pianist-composers to write idiomatically for the harp, demonstrates a more conventional, and ultimately more consistently pleasing, use of texture.

The members of the ICP perform with youthful energy and polished, expressive musicianship throughout the album. Magen reveals his mastery of the instrument in French repertoire and blends skillfully in Martinu’s Chamber Music No.1. Weisman anchors the ensemble sensitively in Porat’s Night Horses, while clarinetist and ICP Artistic Director Tibi Cziger nails the dance motives of the opening Verbunkos movement to Bartok’s Contrasts. The performance of this work stands out for its crisp, lively rhythms and effortless sense of structure. Violinist Itamar Zorman, winner of the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition, also impresses in the thorny harmonics of the final movement. Balance problems between the contrasting timbres of the instruments emerge only in the Porat, where subtle violin timbres in the opening do not come through audibly enough. Such are the perils of recording contemporary music, although audio engineering could perhaps artificially address the problem. All considerations aside, ICP’s fresh approach to chamber music breathes life into an art form whose myriad possibilities often go underappreciated in mainstream classical music life.

Opus 1 is already available for download and will be released on Azica Records July 31.

Tags:Almost Truths and Open Deceptions, Andrew Russo, Annie Gosfield, Assaff Weisman, Azica Records, Bartok, Berlin, David Cossin, Debussy, Felix Fan, Israeli Chamber Project, Itamar Zorman, Jorge Luis Borges, Juilliard, Martinu, Matan Porat, Roger Kleier, Saint-Saens, Sivan Magen, Tchaikovsky Competition, The Pearls Before Swine Experience, Tibi Cziger, Tzadik Records
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Feldman’s ‘Neither’ gets a Virtual Orchestra; A l’Arme! Festival for Contemporary Jazz

Friday, July 20th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

In an age of pervasive digital technology and avatars, it was only a matter of time before virtual experience infiltrated the concert hall. No handmade reeds, no tailcoats. Instead, over 70 synthesized speakers encircling the audience. The Berlin-based ensemble phase7, for a new production of Morton Feldman’s opera Neither, has replaced the live orchestra with 3D surround sound created through the spatial audio production procedure of wave field synthesis. The soprano Eir Inderhaug, trapped in a cage of light beams, provides the only human presence. The production premiered at the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden last March before coming to the Radialsystem this month as part of the festival “The Art of Listening,” which included a conference chaired by the University of Potsdam.

A panel discussion following the concert, seen June 13, concluded that new formats were instrumental in preserving the classical tradition as it struggles to assert its value in today’s society, emphasizing that individuals’ different ways of listening must be addressed both in education and in the concert hall. The Radialsystem, founded in 2006 as a creative arts space, champions experimental modes of presentation such as late-night listening in which audience members can stretch out on yoga mats and musical wine tasting. As a positive sign for the future—even for those who prefer certain formalities of the concert hall—the Kreuzberg venue also attracts listeners who do not constitute a regular following for Berlin’s mainstream classical institutions.

A casually-dressed crowd filled the small back space of the Radialsystem’s main concert hall for Neither, given a clubby atmosphere with the help of smoke machines. Whirring surround sound amplified the static, high-pitched tones of Feldman’s opening bars as the first beams of light broke through the darkness. Inderhaug, a very pregnant figure dressed in all white, crouched silently on her platform at the center of the room. Yet the screeching faded mysteriously after about five minutes. A woman in a backpack emerged matter-of-factly to inform the audience: “as you know, there is a small technical problem,” as if such occurrences were par for the course. “Where is my conductor when I need him?” Inderhaug joked to the audience.

The experience was slightly demystified as the opera recommenced a few minutes later, this time traveling through churning industrial sounds and what sounded like a giant percussion set before yielding to the soprano’s existentially unresolved opening line, “to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow.” Neither, true to its name, is a negation of operatic convention and emerged after Feldman and Samuel Beckett discovered a mutual distaste for the genre upon meeting at Berlin’s Schiller Theater in 1976. Shortly thereafter, Feldman received a postcard with an 87-word verse that would provide the libretto for his monodrama, which premiered at Rome Opera the following year. Feldman’s economic, or minimalist, use of material—unsettling atmospheric drones, spiraling melodic figures, cavernous echoes—found an outlet in Beckett’s terse yet open-ended poetry.

As an “anti-opera,” the approximately 50-minute work lends itself well to phase7’s forward-looking concept, and yet the digitally-generated orchestra rarely proved its advantages over the more visceral experience of hearing live music. The metallic timbre of Feldman’s swelling chords, while often larger than life with this technology, took on a slightly digital quality that disengage the music’s emotional core, even as the sounds ricochet strategically from one speaker to the next. Visually, the isolation of the soprano, who hovers through an internal passage to an “unspeakable home,” is an effective dramaturgical solution to a work that does not lend itself easily to stage direction, yet holographic projections surrounding Inderhaug at times dehumanized the experience. On one occasion her stratospheric, incomprehensible tones made me think of the alien opera singer in The Fifth Element (vocal writing lies consistently above the treble clef, making it difficult to pronounce consonants, although a 1997 recording with Sarah Leonard and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra at least makes it clear throughout that she is singing in English).

It is a paradox that such events are touted as an innovative means of reviving classical music when orchestras throughout the western world are fighting to prove their raison d’être, and in some cases struggling to survive. As it happens, the same orchestral technology employed by phase7 was just on display at the Sydney Opera House for a production of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. That classical formats must evolve along with certain contemporary social trends is without question—video projections, DJ shows, and some degree of genre-bending will likely become standard fare for orchestras in future decades—but digital technology is no replacement for a gathering of trained musicians who rely on their brains rather than a circuit board. It is of course counterproductive to fight a certain amount of inevitability: the iPod and internet aesthetics may have already influenced the way we experience all kinds of music. 3D surround sound could provide a myriad possibility of tools to composers and be combined with live orchestra to powerful effect, but as Leonard Bernstein once said, music is about “flesh and blood.”

A l’Arme!

Despite Berlin’s growing reputation as the European mecca of the avant-garde, a platform for contemporary jazz was nowhere to be found until A l’Arme!, or Alarm (July 18-21) debuted at the Radialsystem this week. Bringing together artists from the U.S., Asia and across Europe, the program boasts artists such as the singer Neneh Cherry, returning from a 16-year hiatus in a new collaboration with the Scandinavian quartet The Thing, and German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, something of a jazz icon on the continent. “There’s no better place than Berlin to burst open the cocoon of an entire scene whose self-absorbance is misunderstood as innovative,” state the program notes in a somewhat awkward translation. Indeed, it is no easy task to define free jazz. The movement emerged in the 1960s as a reaction to predetermined tonal structures, regulated timbres, and rhythmic conventions, eventually digging roots in Europe when the genre proved itself commercially untenable in the U.S.. Starting in the 70s, the term ‘avant-garde’ emerged as an alternative to describe this restless yet organized music, pioneered by figures such as John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Ornette Coleman.

As evidenced by Alarm’s opening concert on July 18, a fine line often lies between what we call ‘new’ music in the classical realm and contemporary jazz. A trio formed by festival founder and pianist Louis Rastig with American clarinetist/saxophonist Ken Vandermark and Korean cellist Okkyung Lee opened with serialist patterns that were met with wild, meandering melodies and sawing, scampering motives. The musicians’ disparate improvisations managed to create a satisfying whole as frenetic, insistent patterns interwove with electric energy. A quieter middle section featured a repeated two-note figure in the piano, eventually picked up by a bass saxophone before Vandermark moved into squeaking slides and mechanical whirring. Rastig anchored the group with a charged physical awareness and strategic spontaneity, hitting across the keyboard with flat hands in child-like rebellion on more than one occasion, while Lee contributed a rumbling, shivering interlude that was sensitively echoed by Vandermark.

New York-based trumpeter Peter Evans opened the program with free improvisation demonstrating a virtuosic range of contemporary technique and multi-phonics. Muted trilling, wispy reverberations, exasperated blaring, raspberry blows—there is nothing Evans can’t create with his mouth and the valves of this instrument. The most impressive was his performance with a piccolo trumpet in which he broke out into traditional jazz melodies before reverting suddenly to gasping and sucking noises, creating an ironic halo of nostalgia around the sanguine 1950s style. His last act involved the simultaneous playing of a normal-sized trumpet against the piccolo, fluttering the valves of one instrument against the siren-like blare of the other. When Evans pushes through the call of the trumpet in full force, it is as if the instrument’s internal force has been stirring anxiously behind decades of experimentation.

The main hall of the Radialsystem spilled over with fans for The Cherry Thing, as one-time blockbuster Neneh Cherry dubbed her appearance the with The Thing in reference to their album which was released last month. The ensemble’s jazz-rock idiom is not an obvious match for Cherry’s smooth, hip-hop grooves, but she proved herself fearless enough to give a raspy (and slightly inaudible) scream over the cacophony of Mats Gustafsson’s indomitable saxophone, Paal Nilssen-Love’s across-the-board drums and the electric guitar of Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten in the opening number. The following song “Dream baby dream,” with its cooing vocals over saxophone and double bass in a unison melody that yielded to tonal counterpoint over soft drumming, proved a more effective blend. The Thing’s angry riffs lent themselves well to “Cashback:” you eat me for breakfast when you feed me… you spend me like money, sang Cherry over a catchy beat, her curls bouncing freely as she moved around stage in a black dress and sneakers. Ultimately it was unfortunate to experience this music in a seated hall; such danceable fare lends itself better to a small club, where listeners can chat quietly or sway with the music, and more vehement rock passages were too loud for the space. Still, it is exciting to have more intellectually challenging avant-garde fare combined with music of more popular appeal under one roof. A l’Arme has filled a niche that is likely to grow as jazz musicians of all breeds experiment with new outlets of expression.

Tags:A l'Arme!, avant-garde jazz, Die Tote Stadt, Eir Inderhaug, Festspielhaus Hellerau, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, free jazz, John Coltrane, Ken Vandermark, Korngold, Kreuzberg, Louis Rastig, Morton Feldman, Neither, Neneh Cherry, Okkyung Lee, Ornette Coleman, Peter Brötzmann, Peter Evans, phase 7, Radialsystem, Rome Opera, Samuel Beckett, Sarah Leonard, Schiller Theater, Sun Ra, Sydney Opera House, The Cherry Thing, The Fifth Element, The Thing, University of Potsdam
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Infektion! ‘Europeras 3&4’ and Rihm’s ‘Dionysus’ at the Staatsoper

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Infektion!, the name of the Staatsoper’s annual Festival for New Music Theater could easily extend to describe the presence of John Cage in Germany this year. No other country outside the U.S. has planned as many events for his centenary of his birth, and Berlin is in some people’s minds already ‘Caged out.’ The Akademie der Künste has been holding a multi-disciplinary, year-long retrospective since last fall; the annual new music festival MärzMusik dedicated itself to Cage and Consequences, flying in Joan La Barbara and the entire Sonic Arts Lounge. Cage’s works will take center stage next week in Darmstadt, where his 1958 visit “swept across the European avant-garde like a natural disaster,” in the words of German musicologist Carl Darlhaus. His Europeras 1&2, which premiered in Frankfurt in 1987 and received their last U.S. performance at the MOMA in 1992 (the year of Cage’s death), will be revived next month at the Ruhrtriennale. Meanwhile, at the Berliner Staatsoper, Die Musik ist los—100 Jahre John Cage (July 1-15) features six-hour evenings of Cage in ad hoc programming that includes his Europeras 3&4. The German premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysus, a Salzburg Festival commission from 2010; a revival of the Staatsoper production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress; and a recital with Ian Bostridge are also officially part of the festival, just founded last year.

Cage’s Europeras, of which he wrote five altogether, are intended as a negation of opera, particularly in its synthesis of the arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk. “For 200 years the Europeans have sent us their operas,” the composer reportedly commented. “Now I am returning them all to them.” The first two include ten and nine singers, respectively, in extracts from over 60 operas, with sets and costumes that are meant coexist independently like objets trouvés. The third and fourth, which premiered in London in 1990, are more modest in scale: Europera 3 features six singers in a capella arias of his or her own choice, two pianists in excerpts from Liszt’s Opera Phantasien and 12 record-players, while Europera 4 dwindles to two singers, a wind-up gramophone, and a pianist. A ticking digital clock substitutes for a conductor to synchronize the Happenings, which overlap comically and sometimes irritatingly into a non-linear plot of sorts that is left to the viewer’s imagination.

Seen July 11 in the Werkstatt of the Schiller Theater, a small wing which the Staatsoper uses to stage new music theater, the singers walked onto strategically numbered platforms that also served as seats for the audience (most moved around at will). Unfinished excerpts of Liszt’s at times schmaltzy transcriptions yielded to the entrance of well-known arias, which were sometimes sung over more than one album of opera music. The cacophony built into a messy tapestry of sound that must be a challenge for even the best-trained singer; all were equipped with pitch forks, while the most prominent figure onstage, the soprano Esther Lee, in a tutu and giant plaster mask, had her iPhone (replete with a bunny-eared case) in hand for assistance. Singing one cameo aria after another, from “Dove Sono” to “Sempre Libera,” Lee eventually dropped dead, while a Papageno in leather pants (Roman Trekel) stepped over her in insouciance. This being anti-opera, the female heroine eventually rose for more drama (stage direction by Sophia Simitzis), although her booming timbre became increasingly metallic. Alfredo Daza assumed a kind of Don Giovanni figure as he cavorted around in a robe. He also broke out into the aria antica “O mio dolce ardor” so well-known to voice students, blocking his ear from the waves of Liszt emanating from the piano. Blaring record players intermittently asserted their dominance. Just toward the end of the 110 minutes, the theme from Die Walkyrie charged in unopposed, a satisfying close to an otherwise frustrating musical experience.

Esther Lee drops dead from singing too many arias (c) Staatsoper Berlin

Europera 4 proved more redeeming in its simplicity (and brevity, clocking in at 30:00). The presence of René Pape was overwhelmingly powerful as he sang Sarastro’s arias from Die Zauberflöte, opening the production with “O Isis und Osiris” offstage. As he stood just inches away from the audience in a black cape at the center of the room, the immediacy of his rich, visceral tone, crisp diction, and emotional calm left this listener nearly speechless. The effect turned comic as he put on sunglasses and addressed Trekel with “In diesen heiligen Hallen” (stage direction by Isabel Ostermann). Trekel, emerging in an acid washed suit, had the audience in stiches as he sang through “Ra la la la, ra la la la, heisse Mutter, ich bin da.” The wind-up gramophone had its own comic appeal as old recordings interrupted wiltingly through the cylinder, while Pape continued to amuse as he sat at a baby grand to play air piano (a friend noted that everyone stopped paying attention to the actual pianist, Günther Albers, across the room). “Bella Figlia dell’Amore” was the last artifact to emerge from the gramophone before the lights fell.

René Pape in 'Europeras 4' (c) Staatsoper Berlin

The program continued unexpectedly with a Qi Gong session on the small lawn in front of the Schiller Theater, just in time for those emerging from the intermission of Dionysus to watch us in bewilderment. The non-hierarchical nature of the Happening, which transforms audience members into their own kind of spectacle, also fulfills the increasing demands on arts institutions for interactive audience participation. Despite some shades of absurdity, the fluid movement, stretching, and deep breathing (even if many weren’t wearing the right clothing) was in fact an ideal precursor to a performance of Nicholas Isherwood’s attempt at Japanese throat singing with a meditation bowl, echoed by another singer at the back of the Werkstatt theater space. One can only imagine how happy Cage would be to know that eastern forms of recreation are slowly finding common ground with European tradition, even if westerners continue to pose with their pretensions to worldly virtue, and that Berlin’s leading opera house indulges in such radical programming. The evening opened on a more clichéd note with a performance of 4’33’’ on a tiny toy piano outside the theater. Robert Farkas sat cross-legged playing silently as cars rumbled past, the original idea of mocking concert hall convention evolving into a more abstract, Cagean concept.

Dionysus

Wolfgang Rihm has become a familiar presence in the concert hall this season, starting with the Musikfest last fall and continuing with MärzMusik, which took his 60^th birthday as an opportunity to posit his neo-Romantic idiom as an opposite ‘pole’ to Cage’s anarchic experimentalism—a perplexing bit of programming that nevertheless emphasizes both composers’ reactionary position with regard to the Darmstadt School. In contrast to Cage, who turned increasingly to chance operations and non-musical material in his last years, Rihm only seems to become more Romantic with age. His most recent stage work, the ‘fantasy opera’ Dionysus, takes Nietzsche’s Dionysus Dithrambs as well as the poem Klage der Ariadne as the basis for a self-devised libretto that explores the quest of N. (a character embodying both Nietzsche and Dionysus) for truth and in and out of his conflicted and, in this case, thoroughly nebulous relationship with Ariadne, whom according to Greek myth the god of wine and fertility seduced and deified. The opera, seen at the German premiere on July 8, opens to a sea where N. is taunted by nymphs, travels through Hades and ends on “A plaza. The horse. The skin.”—referencing Nietzsche’s exposure to the flogging of a horse that is said to have precipitated his mental breakdown. Apollo “a guest” accompanies N. only to taunt him: “I am also your labyrinth,” he tells Ariadne in the opening scene, while ensembles of sirens continue to reappear with teasing allure.

References to Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte appear in both the libretto and score, with a flute emerging prominently throughout the opera. The Wagnerian undertones also assert themselves from the opening scene (Rhine maidens) as well as in primordial, brooding harmonies, while Ariadne directly quotes Richard Strauss in the opening tableau. The opera’s quasi-philosophical precepts range from gripping to confounding. It is a journey through the mind of Nietzsche, his struggle to reconcile the destructive powers of an infinite quest for knowledge—“Selbsthenker (my own executioner)” N. repeats in the second tableau, while the ‘The Guest’ counters with “Selbstkenner (your own connoisseur)— yet Rihm also attempts to embed the highly erotic story of Dionysus and Ariadne into this dialectic, making the plot more labyrinthine than many viewers could handle. The music follows this pattern naturally, morphing freely from lush tonality into unsettling dissonance, such as in the female chorus “Tag meines Lebens” which suddenly transforms into a group of anti-sirens. The music in Hades teeters on the edge of insanity, yielding to a raw percussion interlude. As the conductor Ingo Metzmacher states in the program notes, no one knows his craft better than Rihm. The laughing staccato of nymphs in the opening tableau and sinister eroticism that emerges through his orchestration may place Dionysus firmly in the German Romantic tradition, and yet the score lacks the clear deliberation and cohesiveness of earlier stage works such as Proserpina , and even this score had a tendency to wind too freely through the rivers of Hades.

Sets by Jonathan Meese evoke a dark, expressionist fantasy world, drawing carefully upon the symbolism in Rihm’s text while bringing a provocative touch one would only expect from the German ‘enfant terrible.’ While the sloppy black and white drawings assigned to the Dionysian chorus and the “Total Horsebee” at the end are irritatingly tongue-in-cheek, the opening cliff on which N. rows to no avail and the giant bottle and beach balls in the brothel of the third tableau are deliciously imaginative despite the kitsch factor. Meese’s aesthetic was well-matched by Pierre Audi’s direction, who counters Rihm’s intellectual weight with subtly subversive humor. While the contrast was at times jarring and threatened to oversimplify the opera’s internal quest, Audi brought a fresh contemporary approach to a stage work that would have dragged its feet insufferably with a more cerebral approach. Costumes by Jorge Jara were at their height in the bulging female costumes of Hades; lighting by Jean Kalman created artful shadows and further propelled the opera into the realms of the unconscious.

'Magic Flute' references in 'Dionysus' (c) Ruth Walz

Mojca Erdmann, in the role of Ariadne, proved why Rihm has found inspiration in her stratospheric if somewhat soubrette-like soprano, razor-sharp musicality and dramatic flexibility. A sprite seductress throughout, she inhabited the opera’s mercurial terrain with poise. Replacing Georg Nigl as N., James Cleverton, who also sang at the Salzburg premiere, convincingly conveyed the character’s emotional frustration vocally and dramatically. The tenor Matthias Klink was an effectively jeering Apollo despite some strain in the upper range. And yet the female voices ultimately sang the men offshore, with Canadian soprano Elin Rombo bringing smooth, full-bodied tones to the stage, complimented gloriously by mezzo Virpi Raisanen and alto Julia Faylenbogen in ensemble numbers. The Staatskapelle performed incisively yet with calm expressivity under Metzmacher, Germany’s leading conductor for new music, also testifying to the quality that Daniel Barenboim has cultivated as music director of this orchestra. The musicians brought velvety phrasing to Straussian turns while following Metzmacher’s precise conducting through the unpredictable contours of Rihm’s score, which expired into dust after failing to help N. find his way.

Sets by performance artist Jonathan Meese (c) Ruth Walz

Tags:Akademie der Künste, Alfredo Daza, Carl Darlhaus, Daniel Barenboim, Darmstadt, Die Zauberflöte, Dionysus, Don Giovanni, Elin Rombo, Esther Lee, Europeras, Frankfurt, Günther Albers, Infektion!, Ingo Metzmacher, Isabel Ostermann, James Cleverton, Joan La Barbara, John Cage, Jonathan Meese, Jorge Jara, Julia Faylenbogen, Liszt, MärzMusik, Matthias Klink, Mojca Erdmann, MOMA, mozart, Nicholas Isherwood, Nietzsche, Pierre Audi, Proserpina, Qi Gong, René Pape, Robert Farkas, Roman Trekel, Ruhrtriennale, Salzburg Festival, Schiller Theater, Sonic Arts Lounge, Sophia Simitzis, Staatsoper Berlin, Virpi Raisanen, wagner, Walkyrie, Wolfgang Rihm
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The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra takes the Philharmonie

Friday, July 6th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

A timpanist just tall enough to rumble his mallets over the kettle drums stares out from beneath his specs as Lars Vogt slides onto the bench for the opening chords of Grieg’s Piano Concerto.

“I like that sound!” says Music Director Donato Cabrera to the young percussionist as he walks out into the front aisles of the Philharmonie. “Could you do more of a crescendo?”

He immediately resumes.

“Yeah!”

The members of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) stamp their feet in congratulation. As rehearsal continues, former Music Director Alasdair Neale, who has dropped into town for a visit, also weighs in from the aisles, coordinating seamlessly with Cabrera to refine balance issues. The orchestra plays through parts of Mahler’s First Symphony, the strings attempting a dreamy pianissimo that even the world’s best orchestras struggle to create.

Finally, it is time for rehearsal to come to an end. “Breathe, breathe, breathe,” Cabrera offers as a final suggestion. “And play your guts out!”

Donata Cabrera rehearses with the SFSYO at the Philharmonie (c) Oliver Theil/SFSYO -Few professional orchestras enjoy the same degree of artistic adventure as the SFSYO. The orchestra came to Berlin as part of a European tour (June 20-July 6)—its eighth since being founded in 1981—that traveled through three other German cities, Luxemburg, and ended in Salzburg. As the orchestra’s Director of Education Ronald Gallman pointed out, playing on the same stage as the Berlin Philharmonic is already an enormous accomplishment, not to mention a huge boost for the morale. The ensemble, drawing together Bay area musicians aged 12 to 21, exists on a tuition-free basis (thanks to generous sponsorship which also made this year’s tour possible) and receives weekly coaching with members of the San Francisco Symphony as well as yearly sessions with San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. Guest artists have included Yo-Yo Ma, Sir Simon Rattle, John Adams, and Midori.

Vogt, joining the SFSYO for the fifth time, told me backstage that “the sky is the limit” with this orchestra, adding how important it is for professional musicians not to be “set in their frames” and allow the youthful inquiries of musicians playing something like Mahler for the first time to bring a fresh take on issues that more seasoned players take for granted. Cabrera emphasized that the act of discovery is no different with a youth orchestra than any other professional ensemble. “This is what we live for,” he said. “There is always more to peel away and discover.”

Speaking with three of the orchestra’s members, it was clear that they shared these values of music-making as a constant learning process. Principal violist Omar Shelly explained that while they had already rehearsed the programmed works extensively at home, the tour was a “huge opportunity to adjust a prime product to different places, like a catering to a menu.” Principal oboist Liam Boisset, who like Shelly plans to become a professional musician, raved about how the acoustics of the Philharmonie allowed all the orchestra’s members to hear one other. “I’ve learned so much more about Mahler on this tour,” he said. “It makes me much more aware about where I sit in the orchestra.”

At the concert later that evening, the Grieg opened with a precisely built crescendo on the timpani that carried well to the back of the Philharmonie. The close attention in rehearsal to balance made itself clear in the elegant flute and horn solos of the first movement, while Vogt brought a light yet intense touch to the runs underlying the orchestra. Vogt’s emotional togetherness with the ensemble was particularly apparent in the Adagio movement, and the sighing melodies received a lovely rubato in the strings. The final Allegro, featuring Vogt in a spirited evocation of a Norwegian folk dance, was thoroughly polished and on point. Every dynamic shading emerged well-conceived and firmly in its place, yet there was also a mystical quality to the quieter passages, such as when the flute and dusky strings usher in a nocturnal passage on the piano.

In Mahler’s First Symphony, Cabrera and the SFSYO admirably captured the leisurely pace the composer indicated in his tempo indication Langsam, schleppend—as opposed to the third movement (Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen). The playful “kuckuck” wind motifs were particularly endearing coming from a youth orchestra, contrasting at first ironically with the glassy opening strings and the primordial inquiries underlying the music. The orchestra nailed the Scherzo, with its jaunty waltz riff (in fact an Austrian Ländler), executing phrases of mature heft and temperament. Even after the deluge of Mahler last season for the centenary of his death, it is impossible to resist being captivated by the Frère Jacques canon of the third movement, with its slow, resigned march toward death, interrupted by Jewish folk melodies that mourn as they rejoice. After making its way with rapt attention through this spiritual ambiguity, the orchestra let loose in the turbulent final movement, lending charged passages force without becoming muscular. Mahler not being a composer of the greatest psychological simplicity, the Sitzfleisch and intellectual stamina of these young musicians deserve much praise.

Yet it was John Adams’ Shaker Loops that showed the orchestra at its best. The composer’s extensive collaboration with the musicians’ home organization of course strengthens their claim to this music, Adams having inspired the Meet the Composer residency program and established his national reputation with works written for the San Francisco Symphony. Shaker Loops is one of his first major compositions, adapted from a septet to full string orchestra in 1982 and featuring pulsating minimalist textures that, unlike in Reich or Glass, are set to Western harmonies and traditional form. The high energy of the repeated tremoli in the opening Shaking and Trembling immediately brought some west coast wind into the Philharmonie, and the eerie microtonal slides in the following Hymning Slews revealed impressive technical precision. A Final Shaking provided a satisfying close with anxious high-pitched shimmering that yields to ecstatic tonal harmonies. It is not for nothing that the SFSYO won an ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming and the Award for American Programming on Foreign Tours this year.

Cabrera with the SFSYO (c) Jeff Bartee Photography/SFS

Tags:Alasdair Neale, ascap, Berlin, Donato Cabrera, Grieg, John Adams, Lars Vogt, Liam Boisset, Mahler, Michael Tilson Thomas, Midori, Omar Shelly, Philharmonie, Ronald Gallman, San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, Shaker Loops, Sir Simon Rattle, Yo-Yo Ma
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Claus Guth’s Forest-bound ‘Don Giovanni’ at the Staatsoper; Musikfestspiele Potsdam’s new Pleasure Garden

Friday, June 29th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Few operas in history have gripped the human psyche to the same extent as Don Giovanni. Pushkin, Kierkegaard, and Bernard Shaw count among the literary figures to have written their own account of the daemonic seductor since Mozart and Da Ponte staged their ‘drama giocoso,’ a tragi-comedy, in Prague. Since the 19^thcentury, some champions of the work have further added to the opera’s moral ambiguity by excluding the final sextet, “Questo é il fin di chi fa mal/e de’ perfidi la morte/alla vita è sempre ugual” (this is the end for evildoers/death and life are the same for the villainous) after Don Giovanni is sent to hell. Meanwhile, his female conquests have been increasingly interpreted as consenting perpetrators of his sexual games rather than just victims and continue to provide stage directors with ample fodder. Robert Carsen, in his new production for La Scala last December, sets the Commendatore’s murder by Don Giovanni in the chambers of Donna Anna (Anna Netrebko), leaving her white slip covered in blood as she holds her father’s dead body on the same bed where she frolicked with the murderer. In the final scene, the accursed aristocrat reemerges from hell puffing on a cigarette while his avengers descend into infernal smoke.

Carsen’s vision was supposed to travel to Berlin this month as a guest production of the Staatsoper until it emerged that it would be impossible to adapt sets to the company’s current home in the Schiller Theater (the company’s 18^th-century headquarters on the Boulevard Unter den Linden are currently undergoing renovation, recently delayed—again—until 2015). In another strange twist, La Netrebko, the highlight of a live screening that will be broadcast to an outdoor plaza, announced in May that she would withdraw in order to make time for her son. The Swedish soprano Maria Bengtsson was whisked in and Claus Guth’s 2008 production, mounted during Staatsoper Intendant Jürgen Flimm’s tenure at the Salzburg Festival, quietly slated as a replacement. The star appeal was not entirely lost as Netrebko’s husband Erwin Schrott remained on the roster as Don Giovanni’s sidekick, Leporello, while the original Zerlina (Anna Prohaska), her Masetto (Stefan Kocan) and Don Ottavio (Giuseppe Filianoti) provided continuity for an event that has been touted as a highlight of the season.

The Guth staging, seen at its German premiere on June 24, takes a dark, pseudo-cinematic approach to the opera, confining the action to the middle of a dark forest with a rusty bus stop serving as the only manmade shelter. The curtain opens to a beer-chugging, ex-convict like Leporello while Donna Anna rips off the Don’s shirt in the background. In the showdown with the Commendatore, Don Giovanni is shot in the stomach with a plastic gun and walks around through the remainder of the opera with an open wound. During Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir,” he has already become a specter. Meanwhile, a business-like Donna Elvira chases after her one-time husband in heels, gets stoned out of her mind with Leporello, and lies on the forest floor with the dying anti-hero during her aria “Mi tradi.” In the first act, Zerlina and her bridesmaids emerge like wood nymphs in the thick of what appear to be real pines (sets and costumes by Christian Schmidt) before the stage turns to reveal a tree swing that will serve as Don Giovanni’s seduction grounds. The rotating stage spins at its fastest when Donna Anna and Don Ottavio pull up in a sedan, although they are ultimately as damned to roaming the forest as much as any other character.

While it is hard to deny the poetic weight of setting Don Giovanni in the woods—the opening to Dante’s Inferno, “Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” ‘I found myself in a dark forest’ is the first thing that comes to mind—the production is mired in Regie gimmicks that undermine its psychological depth. Staring at tree trunks for two full acts also proved monotonous. Guth omits the final sextet, leaving Don Giovanni to fall into the earth after the Commendatore returns to a wintry forest (further emphasizing the notion of a terrestrial hell in which the characters cannot find the way toward redemption), yet scenes such as Don Giovanni and Leporello roasting marshmallows and the senseless presence of immaculate, bourgeois dressed characters in the brambles linger irritatingly within the director’s otherwise morbid vision. To be sure, his concept is fully in keeping with the opera’s legendary blend of comic and tragic elements, and his surrealist take on Don Giovanni’s existence, trapped somewhere between life and death, could not be more dead-on in literary terms, yet the production demands a level of intellectual engagement that supersedes its theatrical appeal.

Nevertheless, Guth was blessed with a cast that largely rose above the quixotic circumstances vocally and theatrically. The audience hardly seemed to miss Netrebko as Bengtsson, a statuesque blonde with natural allure, portrayed the distraught Donna Anna with creamy tones and fine attention to dramatic nuance. Her voice was tearful in opening stanzas of “Non mi dir,” kept painfully slow by Music Director Daniel Barenboim, while she revealed unblemished strength in her swift declaration that heaven may someday forgive her. As Don Giovanni, Christopher Maltman evoked more of a modern playboy than an irresistibly virile predator, yet his high-lying baritone warmed up to give a fine rendition of his aria “Deh vieni alla finestra,” and his fear was vividly credible in the final scene. Schrott nearly stole the show as the riotous buffoon and manipulator Leporello, his booming bass and excellent Italian diction carrying magnetically in the dry acoustics of the Schiller Theater.

It is almost unfair to cast Elvira, often considered a mezzo role, with a soprano as eloquent as Dorothea Röschmann, and yet her acting skills do not always rise to the same level. While her rich tone and technical polish were the vocal stand-out of the evening, her presence more easily called to mind the countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, which she sang earlier this season, than Don Giovanni’s brash consort. As Zerlina, Prohaska (Musical America’s current “New Artist of the Month”) lived up to her usual standards of musical and thespian excellence, effortlessly singing through “La ci darem la mano” as she pumped herself on a swing. Kocan was a convincingly exasperated Masetto, although his voice retains a thick Slavic quality that interferes with the demands of singing in Italian. By contrast, Filianoti, in the role of Ottavio, cultivates a flexible technique that was ideal for the coloratura runs of the aria “Il mio tesoro,” yet his nasal timbre lacks body. He also failed to remain in time with Barenboim on more than one occasion. Ukranian Bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk was an imposing, expressively full-voiced Commendatore.

Barenboim led the Staatskapelle in a performance that never lacked dynamic shape and dramatic purpose, sensitively accompanying the singers at all times with great emotional depth, yet his tempo relations in Mozart were occasionally perplexing. The second half of “La ci darem la mano,” “Andiam mio bene” was twice as fast as the opening. The orchestra, despite its rich, Germanic sound, is also not terribly flattered by the acoustics of its current home, and its attacks could be rounder. Despite the odds stacked against this production, Barenboim proved that his ensemble is the best in town for Mozart operas, even if the composer is rolling is in his grave as Don Giovanni continues to wander the forest.

The production runs through July 6.

Out at Friedrich the Great’s old stomping grounds…

The city of Potsdam is currently inundated with tributes to the tercentenary of Friedrich the Great, from Das Musical Friedrich to an exhibit of personal items entitled Friederisiko that stretches from the rococo palace Sanssouci to the Neue Palais, built at the end of the Seven Years’ War. While the 18^th-century Prussian king may be best remembered for an aggressive military campaign that annexed parts of modern-day Poland and the Czech Republic in an escalating power struggle with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ‘enlightened despot’ was also a great patron of the arts. A flutist and amateur composer who penned 100 sonatas and four symphonies, Friedrich included C.P.E. Bach and Quantz among his court musicians; enjoyed a legendary if tumultuous friendship with Voltaire; and, fittingly for his time, favored the French language above German. Homages to “Old Fritz,” as he has been nicknamed, have extended to a new album released by Berlin Philharmonic Principal Flutist and soloist Emmanuel Pahud, Flöten König. The Swiss musician even dressed up earlier this season on the grounds of Sanssouci.

Potsdam’s annual Musikfestspiele (June 9-24) similarly seized upon the opportunity to transform city grounds into a courtly celebration, including a “Sanssouci Prom Concert” in the garden of the Neue Palais and ensembles as such as the Freiburger Baroque Orchester and the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment in baroque and classical repertoire. The festival also included a “picnic concert” for the first time this year. The setting on Potsdam’s Freundschaftsinsel, a picturesque botanical garden nestled quietly away from the post-war architecture surrounding the main station just minutes away, proved a fitting escape for the occasion, replete with a couple in 18^th-century garb pushing a tram that carried a baby anachronistically sucking a pacifier. Locals festively spread out their blankets and picnic fare, some including white tablecloths and prosecco on ice with an eye to winning the competition that was underway for “most inventive arrangement” (Potsdam, while only an hour away from Berlin and Friedrich’s summer getaway of choice, maintains its own brand of provincial flair).

The opening concert, however, represented a decidedly non-continental take on celebrations for the Flute King, featuring the band Fine Arts Brass in an all-British program. As both a visiting journalist from a U.K. publication and one of the group’s members individually commented, it felt “surreal.” The concert fell just on the heels of the Jubilee Weekend in England, and the brass band naturally included an arrangement of Handel’s Water Music. The group’s leading trumpeter Simon Lenton, moderating between numbers with a refreshing blend of humor and informative material, joked that the German native was “England’s finest composer.” Yet the program ranged from arrangements of Dowland and Purcell to a suite by Anthony Holborne that is usually performed for Christmas and Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies, living proof in his position as “Master of the Queen’s Music” that the art of patronage has not died.

In conversation with the festival’s Artistic Director Andrea Palent, it emerged that the event was partly modeled after “Last Night of the Proms,” which moves from the concert hall out into Hyde Park and other outdoor venues. She also mentioned the 18^th-century tradition of “pleasure gardens,” which according to Palent spread its influence throughout Europe in Friedrich’s time (although the fact remains that he was Francophile). Palent also grounded the concept in a more general principle of the Enlightenment as championed by figures such as Rousseau—“back to nature”—saying that she hoped the outdoor setting would affect listeners on a sensual as well as intellectual level.

As the Meccore Quartet, a young group of Polish musicians, performed from string quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn during the second part of the program, the music indeed served to heighten the sensory experience of sitting on the lawn and breathing the summer air rather than become an isolated spectacle. While one of the violinists mentioned afterwards that they had been concerned about acoustics, the music felt as if it were meant to be played in this setting, which in fact camouflaged technical and dynamic details that would have been more apparent to a critic’s ear in the concert hall. In an age of technological oversaturation, the event proved a fleeting reminder of the values that bred 18^th-century art, even if a retiree couldn’t refrain from chasing after the musicians to take pictures with her digital camera.

A gabled sculpture from the garden of the Neue Palais © Holger Kirsch for the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci

Tags:Alexander Tsymbalyuk, Andrea Palent, anna netrebko, Anna Prohaska, Anthony Holgborne, Berlin Philharmonic, Boulevard Unter den Linden, C.P.E. Bach, Christian Schmidt, Christopher Maltman, Claus Guth, Da Ponte, Daniel Barenboim, dante, Don Giovanni, Dowland, Emmanuel Pahud, Erwin Schrott, Fine Arts Brass, Freundschaftsinsel, Friedrich the Great, Giuseppe Filianoti, Handel, Haydn Mendelssohn, Jürgen Flimm, La Scala, Maria Bengtsson, Meccore Quartet, mozart, Musikfestspiele Potsdam sanssouci, Peter Maxwell Davies, Potsdam, Purcell, Quantz, Robert Carsen, Röschmann, Rousseau, Salzburg Festival, Sanssouci, Schiller Theater, Staatsoper Berlin, Stefan Kocan, Water Music
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Nézet-Séguin performs Epic Romance with the Berlin Philharmonic

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Conducting the Berlin Philharmonic is no small feat for a 37-year-old, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin—returning to the orchestra’s podium for the first time since his 2010 debut—had no intention to the make the event a small affair. The newly minted music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, seen at the Philharmonie on June 16, juxtaposed Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture with the full three movements of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé as sung by the Rundfunkchor Berlin. It took Ravel three years to complete this ‘choreographic symphony’ to a commission by Diaghilev in 1909, and the score is usually reduced to two-part suite arrangement (penned by composer in 1911) for concert performance. The 1912 premiere of the full ballet in Paris did not go down as a success following Diaghilev’s open disinterest in Ravel’s score during rehearsal and the opening of Débussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune the previous month, featuring provocative choreography by Nizhinsky that usurped public attention.

While Daphnis et Chloé reveals Ravel’s intricate powers of orchestration at their height, with rich impressionist tapestries and pictorial evocations of celestial groves, its subtleties struggle to reign in the listener for its full duration (just under an hour) without the presence of a ballet corps. Much like Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète, which Sir Simon Rattle conducted last season alongside Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, it is—at least based on the performance I saw—a difficult piece to pull off in the concert hall. Nézet-Séguin had a clear sense of what we wanted from the orchestra and did not let the reins slack on a body of players who often dictate what is happening onstage at least as much as the conductor, and his French-speaking roots certainly worked to the performance’s advantage through the ethereal ebbs and flows of Ravel’s music, yet the Philharmonic’s handsome elegance remained a bit staid for moments of sheer nymph-like grace. The orchestra nevertheless thrived through the score’s transparent textures, such as the rapid flute and harp over muted strings that imitate the sound of rushing brooklets before building into a majestic view over the nymphs’ prairie in the third tableau.

The story, adapted by Michael Fokine from an ancient Greek romance, tells of the courtship between the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloé, who is kidnapped by pirates but saved by her father, Pan. Once Daphnis and Chloé are reunited, a tumultuous final dance of the nymphs celebrates their union. Ravel weaves a simple two-note motive throughout the score to designate the pair’s mystical realm, easily evoking the earth’s breaking in the closing scene. The chorus is deployed atmospherically to enhance a sense of rapture, at one point emerging accompanied. The Rundfunkchor, which recorded this work with Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo in 2010, produced glorious tones here, particularly in the soprano section. Concert Master Guy Braunstein delivered his solo numbers with deeply sensitive musicianship, evoking Daphnis’ approach of Chloé and the young Nymph wandering in the meadow with gleaming tone. The flute and clarinet solos of the Lycanion dances emerged with characteristic elegance and fluidity of communication.

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, officially designated as a ‘fantasy overture,’ similarly illustrates the stormy Shakespearean love story in a programmatic development of contrasting tableaus, moving from the prescient concerns of Friar Lawrence before yielding to the feuding Capulets and Montagues. The rich cellos and woodwinds of the opening Andante revealed the Philharmonic in top form, and the violins lamented with a well-rounded vibrato under Braunstein. Nézet-Séguin led a tight, fiery Allegro, and the longing wind solos during the couple’s first meeting on Juliet’s balcony left little to be desired. Still, having recently heard the Marinsky, the seas of string pianissimi had a slightly brittle quality. The orchestra redeemed itself with the clean attacks and immaculate synchrony of the whirlwind inner movement. The elegiac homage to the lovers in the final Moderato, punctuated by the theme of the warring factions, burned with tension.

The program opened with Berio’s Sequenza IXa for clarinet solo, a virtuosic yet poetic exploration that Walter Seyfarth, a player with the Philharmonic since 1985, dispatched with impressive technical control and dynamic nuance. The piece takes the form of a structured yet unstable train of thought, evolving through runs across the instrument’s full range into a kind of internal dialogue that culminates in a blaring high note which is juxtaposed with increasingly vehement melodic opposition until it is echoed in resigned resolution. Allusions to the vocalisations of Berio’s spouse and muse Cathy Berberian and saxophone-like motifs expand the clarinet’s dimensions into nearly operatic planes. While the connection of this piece with the rest of the program remained unclear—an unusual occurrence at the Philharmonic—it is heartening to watch Berio become standard fare in the German capital.

The Philharmonie on Potsdamer Platz (c) Schirmer/Berliner Philharmoniker

Tags:Apollon Musagète, Berio, Berlin Philharmonic, Cathy Berberian, Daphnis et Chloé, Debussy, Diaghilev, Guy Braunstein, Michael Fokine, Nizhinsky, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, philadelphia orchestra, Ravel, Romeo and Juliet, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Sir Simon Rattle, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Walter Seyfarth, Yannick Nézet-Séguin
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Bachfest Leipzig’s Musical Offerings; Radiale Nacht with Colin Jacobsen and Alisa Weilerstein

Friday, June 15th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The motto of this year’s Bachfest Leipzig, “…ein neues Lied” (a new song), could not be a more fitting choice to honor J.S. Bach’s legacy in the city where he spent his final 27 years as cantor. Upon arriving in 1723, he set out to write a cantata every week, enlisting as scribes his second wife, Anna Magdalena, and students who were trained at the Schola Thomana. Now buried beneath a bronze plaque at the foot of the altar in the St. Thomas Church, Bach—or at least his presumed remains which were exhumed from a former cemetery and transported in 1949—continues to infuse local practices with his spirit. The St. Thomas Boys Choir, celebrating its 800^th anniversary this year, has commissioned new music for six major religious occasions and included some of Europe’s most seminal contemporary composers: Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger and Krzysztof Penderecki will have all premiered works in the church by January of next year.

At a concert yesterday, the Bachfest (June 7-17) reprised Easter music by St. Thomas Cantor Georg Christoph Biller and Henze’s Pentecost music alongside two Bach works from the Leipzig period. Pentecost, a holiday of tremendous weight for practicing Christians in Europe, officially took place late last month and celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. Henze, a self-avowed atheist, and his librettist Christian Lehnert take a spiritually inquisitive approach in An den Wind for chorus and orchestra. The chaos of unharnessed natural forces and human doubt yield to the promise of peace: “the dove will wake, its wings,/caught by the gusts, no longer will repose,” begins the final chorus after a solo violin emerges from the dust of a desert storm. Henze references Bach with a direct but unfinished quote “Jesu, meine Freu…” to ominous woodwinds and harp plucks in the first section, while wild counterpoint and a percussion interlude after Simon the Zealot’s proclamation of a burning wasteland recall the dramatic tension of his opera Phaedra (2007), another collaboration with Lehnert.

Henze often separates the high and low voices of the St. Thomas Choir and aligns them with according instrumentation: ethereal celeste, piano clusters and sustained chords accompany the pure timbre of boy sopranos while changed voices are underscored by low strings and woodwinds. Unaccompanied moments such as the Disciple’s urging to “call out…so softly that no one shall hear us but the wind” take on deceptively liturgical importance, yet the orchestra thwarts any sense of resolution, such as the gong crash after the mysterious harmonies of the chorus asking God for immortal strength or the rambling piano and bassoon blast following the sopranos’ quote from the Lutheran Bible, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you….” The Holy Ghost’s powers of salvation transcend earthly strife to restore the natural world—“a wing’s beat, a wind, a simple breath”—bringing the choir together against a billowing atmospheric chord. Biller led the choir and members of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in an intense, precise performance that clocked in at 20 minutes on the mark.

Biller conducting at the St. Thomas Church © Bach-Archiv Leipzig / Gert Mothes: Bachfest Leipzig 2012

The cantor, in his St.-Thomas-Ostermusik, takes a more pious approach, using light-dark imagery to represent the ascent of Christ with direct allusions to Bach’s Passions. Biller himself devised the text for his cantata (also 20 minutes) based on Bible passages and originally composed verse. The opening features a sustained Wagnerian-like minor chord that is punctuated by trombones, only to yield to serenading recorders before the chorus rejoices in this “Easter day! Away with care and sorrow!” Cluster harmonies reminiscent of modern American choral music bring a progressive, optimistic air, while a recurrent rising, whole-tone wind motive and quasi-liturgical structure ground the work in a decisively western European tradition. Some members of the audience sang the descant of the Bavarian/Austrian hymn “Christ is arisen” while the boy sopranos crooned into the stratosphere, a transcendent passage that culminated in the clang of trumpet and chimes. Although the work may have its hokey moments for non-church goers, Biller manages to straddle contemporary developments in religious music with a clear reverence for the St. Thomas tradition. Alongside the immaculately trained choir, tenor Martin Lattke gave a fervent performance as the Evangelist.

Between the two newly commissioned works, Bach’s Ascension Oratorio (BWV 11) transported the audience back to the heyday of cantatas as the Gewandhaus musicians and boys’ choir performed with irreproachable authenticity under Biller. As the program notes explain, the work was written only six months after the Christmas Oratorio and features liberal borrowing from Bach’s earlier works, yet any such knowledge hardly impedes upon the music’s fresh exuberance as the trumpets open the work with a life-affirming proclamation. The ensemble’s sense of pace was particularly striking in the cadence of the opening chorus “Lobet Gott in Seinen Reichen,” and the Gewandhaus players’ flowing but restrained body movement made it clear that they have this music in their bones. The fragile, glassy timbre of a boy soprano in the aria “Jesus, deine Gnadenblicke” further evoked the original spirit of the work while the woodwinds accompanied in sensitive counterpoint. Closing the program was the motet “Der Geist hilft under Schwachheit auf” (BWV 226), performed at the burial of a St. Thomas headmaster in 1729. The music does not mourn but expresses gratitude to “the Spirit” for helping mortals through their weakness. A quiet penitence prevailed beneath the painted vaults of the St. Thomas Church.

Note to interested listeners: the St. Thomas Choir, for its 800^th anniversary, has released a compilation of live performances featuring works by Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn and others on the label Rondeau Productions.

Back on the (non-denominational) scene in Berlin…

The Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) and the alternative arts space Radialsystem teamed up last weekend for their second Radiale Nacht, a rotating program of orchestral and chamber works featuring choreography by Sasha Waltz, live remixes and an after show. The format, scattered between the main hall, the lounge area, and the upstairs deck, exploits the ample space of the converted water pumping plant and creates a relaxed atmosphere in which musicians mingle casually with the audience. Guest artists Pablo Heras-Casado and Colin Jacobsen roamed between the bar and patio overlooking the Spree River before the concert, while one orchestral player dressed in black was mistaken for an onsite employee. The event was first launched in November with sponsorship by the pharmaceutical company Aventis in an effort to provide a Berlin base for the MCO, founded in 1997 as a touring ensemble with offices in the German capital. Radialsystem Intendant Jochen Sandig and MCO Intendant Andreas Richter hope to further cement the relationship despite the fact that they were denied city funding; Sandig reported in conversation that the local government is currently losing half a billion Euro over the delayed launch of the new airport.

Tense cultural politics aside, the energy was high as the youthful members of the MCO took the stage with Jacobsen as concert master under the direction of Heras-Casado. The mostly Russian program, seen June 9, opened in the main hall with Alisa Weilerstein in Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, a tour de force whose ferocity and emotional complexity the 30-year-old conveys with intuitive grace. She moved seamlessly between growling harmonics and whining melodies, shaping every passage with spontaneity and forward-moving inertia as she plunged into the depths of Shostakovich’s despair and rage. The cellist maintained irreproachable beauty of tone throughout the entire rage of her instrument in the Cadenza, which moves cautiously from a slow lament and into wild disillusion. She was matched well by the strings’ sinuous phrasing under Jacobsen and lean, buoyant textures that emerged through Heras-Casado’s economical but commanding gestures, although the tone could have been angrier in the final Allegro movement. As an encore, Weilerstein offered a fast movement from Bach’s Cello Suites, whose spritely baroque character was somewhat of a sudden palate cleanser to the edgy textures of the previous work.

Upstairs on the deck, she and Jacobsen joined with two members of the MCO for a very Berlinified rendition of Shostakovich’s Eight String Quartet featuring live remixes by the DJ Georg Conrad. Jacobsen’s bright, smooth tone led the group through the searing canonic development of the opening Largo—whose main theme is drawn from the First Cello Concerto, while Weilerstein’s fierce playing found a spotlight in the following Allegro molto. Then, in an unexpected twist, the musicians rested their bows as an interlude of house music whirred through the speakers. One can’t deny that the dance beats were well suited to the views of graffitied industrial buildings across the Spree, yet it was quite awkward to watch the quartet sit onstage without playing. While Jacobsen and other audience members started nodding their heads in rhythm, it might have been more organic to have the musicians improvise over the DJ: the connection to Shostakovich’s musical content was otherwise more than spurious. The effect was no less jarring when Conrad’s atmospheric grooves returned a second time after a violin solo during the penultimate Largo movement. The quartet otherwise formed a well-balanced whole, especially considering that they had only rehearsed the set-up that day.

The program retained its progressive flair with an excerpt from Sasha Waltz’s choreographed concert “gefaltet,” a Mozarteum commission originally unveiled earlier this season. The Divertimento in E-flat, as re-experienced at the Radiale Nacht, features a quartet of dancers in mock-ballet movements that range from sweeping, eloquently neo-baroque to angular, tick-like gestures while a trio plays at the corner of the stage. Waltz is strongest when she captures the sensuousness and symmetry of Mozart’s music, while less congruent attempts to stamp the music with a post-modern sensibility are less effective for this viewer. Sandig’s subsequent scenic arrangement of the Schnittke pastiche Moz-Art à la Haydn also incorporated dancers of Sasha Waltz & Guests in “structured improvisation” to mirror the aleatoric demands of the score, which riffs on a theme by Mozart into polytonal madness. In keeping with Schnittke’s original suggestions for blocking, the dancers begin in darkness along the aisles of the main hall before clustering with the dancers in a swarm onstage and running back to their original places. Heras-Casado was spotlighted toward the middle of a piece as a buffoon-like caricature of a conductor, waving his arms only for the sake of imposing control, only to be upstaged by a child dancer-turned-maestro with as commanding a head of curls.

Heras-Casado conducts the MCO (c) Holger Talinski

The official program closed with Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, considered the most neo-classical of his fifteen symphonies in its neat structure and cheerful character, although this is thoroughly tongue in cheek. The symphony was written at the end of World War Two in 1945, upon which Stalin accorded himself personal credit for the defeat of Germany. The dictator was not deaf to the satirical military allusions in this symphony, and announced soon thereafter that his regime could now find time to take appropriate measures toward art that so blatantly challenged his authority. The MCO’s spirited playing did full service to the music’s irony, knit together with fiery attacks under Heras-Casado, while wind solos emerged with confidence. Shostakovich’s writing for the bassoon is particularly prominent in this work, with its humorous melodies in final Allegretto that steer the orchestra away from triumph. The music continued in the lounge outside with Jacobsen’s chamber arrangements of works by Astrud Gilberto and others. The quintet, which included Weilerstein at the cello, was clearly having a great time jamming to samba and tango beats, and the audience rewarded them with wine-imbibed cheers.

Tags:Alisa Weilerstein, An den Wind, Andreas Richter, Ascension Oratorio, Astrud Gilberto, Aventis, Bachfest Leipzig, Christian Lehnert, Christoph Biller, Colin Jacobsen, Der Geist hilft under Schwachheit auf, DJ Georg Conrad, Gewandhaus Orchestra, Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger and Krzysztof Penderecki, J.S. Bach, Jochen Sandig, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Martin Lattke, Pablo Heras-Casado, Phaedra, Radialsystem, Rondeau Productions, Sasha Waltz, Shostakovich, St. Thomas Boys Choir, St. Thomas Church, St.-Thomas-Ostermusik, Stalin
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Classical:NEXT debuts in Munich

Friday, June 8th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Classical:NEXT, an exclusively classical professional forum which held its first edition from May 30-June 2 in Munich, set out with high ambitions. Founded at the behest of the Association of Classical Independents in Germany (CLASS) as an alternative to MIDEM, which has left many attendants disappointed in recent years both for its high costs and lack of innovation, the new event included not only a trade fair and networking opportunities but live showcases, video screenings, panel discussions and after-hours concerts exploring classical club culture. Naxos, a partner of Classical:NEXT, brought its entire brigade alongside countless small labels, distributors, independent entrepreneurs, managers, and more to mingle at Munich’s Gasteig, an elegant event space that also serves as home to the Munich Philharmonic. 700 delegates attended in total, 60% of which came from outside Germany.

The most successful aspect appears to have been the networking opportunities. The managing partner of a small label told me that several people planned on foregoing MIDEM—which is heavy on pop music and serves thousands of delegates—in favor of the new alternative next year. The founder of a new label whom I spoke with at a private party was headed up to his hotel room to sign a contract with Naxos. While none of the (former) ‘Big Four’ labels were represented, there was no lack of promotional activities. Meanwhile, the live showcases and video screenings (for which yours truly sat on the jury) coincided with each other as well as conference sessions, receiving a less than stellar attendance rate and leaving several performers disappointed. One can only hope the coming iteration will attend to the issue. I did manage to catch a performance of composer-performer Thierry Pécou’s “Ensemble Variances” in two original chamber works. His subjective idiom and unusual presentation format certainly fits into the “NEXT” part of the event’s mission, as did a contemporary concert at the Harry Klein club later that evening.

Delegates mingling at the Gasteig (c) Eric van Nieuwland/Classical:NEXT

The topics of the conference sessions included the use of atonality in film music, crowd funding, digital marketing, and perspectives on journalism today. Carnegie Hall E-Strategy Director Christopher Gruits gave an unusually focused presentation about multimedia strategies alongside Bavarian State Opera Head of Marketing Anna Kleeblatt. Video is the operative word for both institutions, while the Bavarian State Opera is also making its first forays in Twitter and has amassed 3,356 followers: the company recently launched a contest for a free weekend in Verona that asked participants to name, among other creative bits, their favorite “manner of death onstage” (hopefully stage directors won’t take the submissions too seriously). The discrepancy in developments across the Atlantic of course could not hide its face—Carnegie Hall has four people on staff for digital marketing as compared to one at the Bavarian State Opera—but the latter is fully on the bandwagon with its newly-launched free streaming service, already attracting 40,000 viewers in the U.S. Up next is an App entitled “I love Opera” to serve the 13 largest opera houses in the German-speaking world.

The ramifications of digital developments for journalism of course also dominated a discussion with BBC Music Magazine Editor Oliver Condy and freelance journalist Jessica Duchen as moderated by PIANONews Editor Carsten Dürer. Condy emphasized that music journalism must be seen as a profession and accorded proper compensation: I wouldn’t invite a plumber to work in my house and say this will be a great promotional gig, he explained. Duchen, who holds a widely read blog, admitted that it has become a bit of a “millstone” for her as she struggled to meet the expectations of readers and PR agents who request that she cover certain topics. The panel members also decried the proliferation of opinion pieces as opposed to solid music journalism. Perhaps it is my American perspective, but the general tone was a bit outdated for the current state of affairs and made too strong a distinction between internet users and print. Surely we journalists have reached the point where we can actively exploit the internet to our advantage, rather than allow it to exploit us, and use multimedia in healthy doses.

Gramophone Editor-in-Chief James Jolly, in his closing speech, emphasized the power of social media (his magazine boasts some 14,000 Facebook followers) and compared the iPad’s impact on journalism to the iPod when it first descended upon the music industry. He also confirmed that the U.S. is leading the way in digital developments, somewhat of a tricky issue at a continental conference including people from countries (40 altogether) at various stages in exploiting new technology. As it happens, some local residents of the conservative Bavarian capital were not so smitten by the forum’s international mission and complained that city funds had been invested in an event that failed to involve enough local arts institutions. Jolly smoothed over any controversy by praising Classical:NEXT as a “relaxed forum…vital to sharing our experiences, developing new relationships and guaranteeing that we will all be in a position to return again next year– in good health and ready for the challenges that will undoubtedly present themselves.” That they will indeed.

Tags:Anna Kleeblatt, Association of Classical Independents in Germany, Bavarian State Opera, carnegie hall, Carsten Dürer, Christopher Gruits, Classical:NEXT, Gasteig, Gramophone, Harry Klein club, James Jolly, Jessica Duchen, MIDEM, Munich, Naxos, Oliver Condy, PIANONews, Thierry Pécou
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Dresdener Musikfestspiele pay Tribute to Eastern Europe

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The theme of this year’s Dresdener Musikfestspiele, “Herz Europas” (the Heart of Europe), inventively returns the East German city to its roots as a thriving cultural hub. While today’s united Germany is roiled by the end of the ‘Merkozy’ era and Eurobond controversy, the emphasis of the festival (May 15-June 3) on central European repertoire and the cultural proximity of Dresden to the former Hapsburg Empire in effect harks back to a time when the arts served as a better common currency than any fiscal pact. As the Intendant and cellist Jan Vogler pointed out in a discussion, no other part of the world has produced a more influential body of composers than Eastern Europe. Vogler, who took over the festival in 2009, has turned a once provincial institution into an international attraction boasting a roster of coveted artists and ensembles. At the same time, he strives in his programming to strike a balance between the local love of native tradition and a more outward-looking approach. While last year’s theme, “Stars of Asia,” must have seemed positively exotic for the conservative ‘baroque’ city, Vogler—who spends most of the year in New York—hopes to provide a kind of ‘double-window’ from Dresden into international trends and vice versa.

The city of former East Germany has received a face lift in recent times, from the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche in 2005 (sixty years after the Protestant church was bombed to the ground) to Daniel Liebeskind’s provocative redesign to the Museum of Military History—a wedge of concrete and steel that slices through the traditional architecture—last year. Boxy post-war buildings line the outskirts of the shell-shocked city while fancy new hotels abut the cobblestone streets of the city’s small but opulent center, where the rebuilt Semperoper stands as a monument to the heyday of late German Romanticism (the original 19^th-century building premiered works by Strauss and Wagner). The resident orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden, has already cemented its relationship with the incoming Music Director Christian Thielemann—who, according to Vogler, may have filled Karajan’s shoes as a leading conductor for many in Germany, unfortunate political allusions aside.

Thielemann with the Staatskapelle Dresden (c)Matthias Creutziger.

The program notes to a performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, presented as a co-production of the Staatskapelle and the festival, go as far as to compare the collaboration to a fated marriage, with the symphony acting as testimony. While a couple of my colleagues from the Music Critics Association of North America found the performance lacking a sense of arch at the expense of attention to dynamic detail, it is hard to deny the authenticity Thielemann brings to this music, with its triumphant Wagnerian brass and inner torment. Performing a 1939 edition that melds Bruckner’s original score with a modified version he penned between 1887 and 1890, the young Karajan kept the orchestra flowing like a well-oiled machine, with the Staatskapelle’s strings providing a full-bodied sound reminiscent of the Vienna Philharmonic. As a tuba solo hovered over a rising string motive in the final movement Feierlich, nicht schnell (a passage not included in the original score), history seemed to stand still.

To be sure, Dresden cannot as easily rest on its laurels as the long established Salzburg or Bayreuth festivals, yet the former imperial city of Saxony boasts its own lineage of noble interest in the arts. Princess Amalie, daughter of Prince Maximillian and the Princess of Parma, wrote a total of twelve operas based on her own libretti between 1816 and 1835, the last of which—La Casa Disabitata—was retrieved from an archive in Moscow with rights to a single unstaged performance at a 17^th-century Lusthaus in Dresden’s Großer Garten this year. The grounds remain largely untended and the salon unrestored, yet the faded glory provided a fitting context for this mock opera buffa involving an orphan, Annetta, who is given shelter in a vacant house owned by the nobleman Don Raimondo where the poor poet Eutichio has secretly taken refuge. In the end, Raimondo and Annetta are finally able to acknowledge a mutual crush, while Eutichio and his wife Sinforosa also overcome their differences.

The plot is somewhat half-baked, and the music can be succinctly described as a rehashed Mozartean farce with shades of Cimarosa and Rossini. Amalie’s attempt to extend the formulaic final coda may reveal a poor grasp of dramatic tension, but at least she had the good taste to resist the lure of courtly indolence by immersing herself in the Mozart-Da Ponte masterpieces. Eutichio even breaks out into a meta-dialogue between Don Giovanni and the Commendatore before Annetta bursts in with her new keys while the poet waves a plastic pistol in his defense. As Eutichio, Matthias Henneberg was a bit of the sore thumb in a cast of otherwise budding young singers as he struggled to tailor his mature bass to the small resonant space. The lyric soprano Anja Zügner gave a stand-out performance as Annetta; Tehila Nini Goldstein (Sinforosa), Allen Boxer (Callisto, the house caretaker) and Ilhun Jung (Raimondo) also displayed fine musicianship to accompaniment by the Dresdner Kapellsolisten under Helmut Branny.

Just around the bend from the grassy promenades of the Großer Garten sits the monumental ‘Gläsener Manufaktur,’ a largely transparent glass and steel complex erected in 2002 that serves not only as a Volkswagon production plant but an event space. On a small stage beneath suspended half-built sedans with their engine parts exposed (call it factory chic), violiniste du jour Patricia Kopatchinskaja joined with both her parents and two other friends for an evening of gypsy-inspired music from Bartok to Ravel. The contrast of her father’s 120-year-old cimbalom with the industrial surroundings and the faint sound of a machine whirring (apparently an air-conditioner to counteract the heat produced in manufacture) was somewhat jarring for this listener, and Kopatchinskaja’s correction to the program notes that this music should not be considered ‘coffee house’ fare despite the fact that she hopes we can all drink coffee through the economic crisis only drove home the irony, but her ensemble’s spirited, authentic musicianship eventually created a world of its own, culminating in an encore of the full quintet performing to the Balkan dance melody “Hora Stacato.”

Back in the center of town a few days earlier, Steven Devine conducted the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and English tenor Ian Bostridge in an all-Bach program at the Frauenkirche. The acoustics of the church were a bit too fractious for the clear textures of the period ensemble—a colleague noted an approximately four-second reverb—yet the musicians increasingly settled into the space with their signature elegance. Bostridge, opening with a dedication to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, gave a tender account of the cantata “Ich habe genug,” although the transcription for tenor did not always flatter his instrument. His timbre found a better match in an aria from the cantata “Lass, Fürstin, lass noch einen Strahl” in which he also revealed impeccable breath control. As no festival would be complete without educational activities, Kristian Järvi was busy rehearsing his Baltic Youth Orchestra together with the MDR Symphony, where he will take over as music director next season. The young musicians, joined by a few professional members, displayed great potential in a performance of Mahler’s Bach Suite at the city’s event space “Messe Dresden,” followed by the MDR in a clean but sorely rushed interpretation of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

Vogler, upholding his commitment to diverse programming, joined Valery Gergiev and the Marinsky Orchestra for his first performance of Honegger’s Cello Concerto, an approximately 16-minute gem that weaves together expressive neo-Romantic lyricism, shades of Gerschwin, and early twentieth-century angst. Vogler shaped the cantilenas expertly and nailed the fast runs of the final movement. Despite the sharply accented style of the Marinsky, Gergiev provided deferential accompaniment, and the music’s precise architecture emerged gracefully. As an encore, Vogler offered a movement from Bach’s Cello Suite in C-major, the lower range of his instrument singing with particular clarity of expression. The concerto was flanked by a somewhat clunky reading of Bartok’s “Miraculous Mandarin” (many noted that Gergiev’s nose never left the score) and Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben,” which vacillated between the brash and the serene. The orchestra silenced all criticism in an encore of Lyadov’s “The Enchanted Lake,” creating a pianissimo as rich and placid as is earthly possible.

The Dresdener Musikfestspiele has tapped a wealth of potential with a new festival orchestra joining players from top period ensembles such as the Academy of Ancient Music, Concentus Musicus Wien and Il Giardino Armonico, which premiered under Ivor Bolton just after I’d made my way back to Berlin. Vogler also let on that Britten’s centenary will receive some deserved attention next year (the Semperoper has no plans to the effect), including the “War Requiem” with Andris Nelsons and the Birmingham Symphony. Dresden can of course also boast its share of extra-musical attractions, which will surely continue to work to the festival’s advantage. The Alte Gemälde Galerie boasts striking paintings of an intact city by the Venetian artist Canaletto, a sizeable collection of Dutch masters and just launched an exhibit with Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” at its centerpiece. The local wine industry, despite its northern location, produces a Gold Riesling on par with Alsatian vineyards. As it happens, the Herald Tribune ran a travel story last week about Dresden’s move away from its communist past (always a newsworthy bit) and toward a vibrant cultural life: perhaps the Elbe is indeed bringing in fresh wind again.

Tags:Academy of Ancient Music, Allen Boxer, Alte Gemälde Galerie, Anja Zügner, Baltic Youth Orchestra, Bartok, Britten, bruckner, Canaletto, Christian Thielemann, Cimarosa, Concentus Musicus Wien, Daniel Liebeskind, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Dresden, Dresdener Musikfestspiele, Dresdner Kapellsolisten, Gläsener Manufaktur, Großer Garten, Helmut Branny, Herald Tribune, Honegger, Ian Bostridge, Il Giardino Armonico, Ilhun Jung, Jan Vogler, Kristian Järvi, Marinsky Orchestra, Matthias Henneberg, MDR Symphony Orchestra, mozart, Music Critics Association of North America, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Princess Amalie, Raphael, Ravel, Rossini, Staatskapelle Dresden, Steven Devine, Strauss, Tehila Nini Goldstein, Valery Gergiev, Volkswagon
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Winds of Change at the Komische Oper: ‘Xerxes’ and ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The Komische Oper champions a populist approach through German-language productions and contemporary stage concepts that for some opera goers is synonymous with the most vexing of Regietheater. While the emphasis of the company’s founder Walter Felsenstein on living theater above musical purity remains a locally prized virtue, the house’s attendance rate sank from an already low 61% to 59% last year while that of the Deutsche Oper increased by 11%. The critical reception to recent premieres such as Calixto Bieto’s “16 and older” Der Freischütz and Thilo Reinhardt’s phallus-ridden Salome has also been mostly unfavorable.

Yet as the adventurous tenure of Intendant Andreas Homoki draws to a close, the house may be headed in a new direction. The incoming Barrie Kosky, an Australian native who recently won England’s Laurence Olivier prize, has not only set out to change the ‘German-only’ policy starting next season but evoke the East Berlin house’s roots in operetta and the legacy of 1920s liberal culture, taking his own ethnic identity and sexual orientation as a case in point (“Will the ostentatious denotation ‘I’m Australian, Jewish and gay’ suffice as the motto for an Intendant?” quipped Manuel Brug in Die Welt).

As fate would have it, the last premiere of the Homoki regime leaves Kosky with fertile ground to usher in a new ethos. Handel’s Xerxes, staged by the coveted Norwegian director Stefan Herheim in his Komische Oper debut, has won understandably glowing reviews across the board. Herheim’s production, seem May 19, takes a deceptively historical approach by setting the opera in its 1738 premiere at the Kings Theater, but the action jumps back and forth between painted naturalist sets (Heike Scheele) and an 18^th-century backstage by virtue of a revolving platform, dissolving any sense of convention. The director calls the concept a “baroque Muppet show” in the program notes, playing with the existential levels of theater within theater and theater within life. At the end of the opera, the platform revolves fully to reveal the towering black walls of the Komische Oper’s actual backstage, with the chorus having shed their elaborate period costumes (Gesine Völlm) for their daily dress.

: A baroque feast of sets and costumes in Herheim’s ‘Xerxes’ @Forster/Komische Oper

Xerxes is a court intrigue set in 5^th-century Persia about a rivalry between King Xerxes and his brother Arsamene for the hand of Romilda, daughter of the prince Ariodate. Meanwhile, Romilda’s sister Atlanta vies for Arsamene. Handel’s version is based on an anonymous revision of a libretto by Silvio Stampiglia. The original cast included the castrato Caffarelli in the title role and other stars of the day such as the soprano Elisabeth du Parc, known as ‘La Francescina,’ in the role of Romilda. Disguised ruses and falsely assigned love letters provide for some chaotic buffo moments, while the opera explores the more serious themes of true love, jealousy and fate. In this sense, as the program notes point out, the opera can be considered a kind of dramma giocoso—a genre which Mozart and Da Ponte would ultimately make immortal—although officially it is still opera seria.

Herheim takes a strictly comic approach, poking fun at the singular arrogance of the title character in both his role as a narcissistic king and as a castrato. Xerxes (Stella Doufexis) sings the opening aria “Ombra mai fu” and parts of other numbers in Italian while the rest of the opera, with the exception of one aria by Arsamene, is sung in German. When the king spits out “Perfido!” (Traitor!) to Prince Ariodate upon learning that he has married Romilda to Arsamene, the production effectively mocks the passionate drama of Italian opera. Xerxes not only calls the shots onstage but within the Komische Oper itself, descending into the pit with the crucial line “what you consider love is often only deception and appearance,” holding up a hand to stop the conductor (Konrad Jünghanel) before bringing the house to darkness with a snap.

Stella Doufexis entertaining the audience as Xerxes @Forster/Komische Oper

Other gestures are just for the sake of having some laughs. During Xerxes’ aria’ “Più che penso alle fiamme del core,” the set is dismantled to reveal cabaret-style lights reading “Xerxes” which are then rearranged to read “Sex Rex.” Doufexis points to the first word as she sings of her passionate flames, an adolescent touch that nevertheless seemed to delight the audience. The third scene features oversized dancing sheep who, while amusing at first, grow wearing as they began to interrupt the music with their ‘baas.’ Still, Völlm’s costumes are so authentic and well crafted—from these creatures to the gilded suits and towering plumed caps of Xerxes and his army to the chorus’ Rafael-like cherub fare—that it was easy to forgive the occasional relapse into directorial indulgence.

The cast was generally strong throughout, delivering punch lines with persuasive comic timing while maintaining high musical standards. Doufexis anchored the production with a velvety timbre, skillful dynamic nuance and a keen sense of Herheim’s highly complex stage concept. When she stepped toward the audience at the end of the opera, eyes widened as if emerging from a time machine, it was hard to suspend one’s disbelief. The mezzo Karolina Gumos was a charismatic, rich-voiced Arsamene, nailing her coloratura in the aria “Amor, tiranno Amor” in which she begs Xerxes to soften. The Swiss soprano Brigitte Geller brought the right touch of beguiling charm to the role of Romilda with a ripe lyric timbre, and Julia Giebel wielded her slightly underpowered soubrette to satisfactory effect as the pesky Atlanta. Katarina Bradic made for an even-voiced, desperate Amastre, and Dimitry Ivashchenko brought a resonant bass to the role of Ariodate. As the servant Elviro, the bass Hagen Matzeit made a stand-out performance in falsetto voice as a disguised flower vendor. Junghänel, an early music specialist, led the orchestra of the Komische Oper in an incisive but muscular account whose charged baroque expression at times compromised a sense of flowing legato, instead underscoring the sharp accents of the German language.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Kosky could hardly have chosen a stronger statement of his vision for the Komische Oper than with his new production of Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins, which premiered February 12 and returned this month. To be sure, his 2011 production of Rusalka featured gutted sea creatures and a German libretto that was too much to stomach for this reader, who once learned Czech and trekked all the way to Prague to hear Dvorak in its authentic setting (call me a purist). But with his latest undertaking, seen May 20, Kosky reveals an aesthetic restraint that is the antithesis of the slap-happy stagings which dominate the Berlin house. Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins was conceived with Bertold Brecht for Balanchine’s Paris company ‘Les Ballets 1933’ as a ballet chanté for the composer’s two-time wife Lotte Lenya and the dancer wife of the British impresario Edward James. The score seamlessly weaves together popular song, cantata, and dance music, while the text refers to a single protagonist, Anna, who has been sent on a voyage throughout the U.S. to earn money for a small house her family is building in Louisiana. She is accompanied by a hedonistic alter ego whom she refers to as her sister—also named Anna—as she dances and turns tricks along the way, learning the consequences of pride, lust, avarice and other sins. The work conveys an even more direct critique of capitalism than The Three Penny Opera, with a prescient understanding of the difficulties that the writers would face upon their imminent exile from Germany.

As a prelude to the work, Kosky inserts a selection of seven Weill songs ranging from Berlin im Licht (1938) to Wie lange noch? (1944). Dagmar Manzel, a well-known German actress, emerges slowly from behind closed curtains to join her pianist (Frank Schulte) in a straight cabaret delivery in which she is lit by a single spotlight. As if to foreshadow the desperation Kosky creates in Seven Deadly Sins, Manzel desperately tugs at the curtains during Youkali, a tango that describes a fictitious utopia, only to pull them back entirely to reveal the orchestra for the central work. As Manzel recounts her travels from Memphis to San Francisco with mounting hysteria, occasionally breaking out into deliberately ungraceful ballet, the male quartet representing Anna’s family sings from darkened balcony boxes above the stage. The most powerful tableau emerges in Los Angeles, where Manzel flap dances with a frozen expression of agony. While guilt-ridden allusions to the horrors of World War Two have become standard fare in Germany, Kosky’s understated, expressionist touch was shockingly relevant in the city whose avant-garde culture once helped breed one of the most powerful artistic collaborations in history.

Dagmar Manzel in Weill's 'Seven Deadly Sins' @Monika Rittershaus/Komische Oper

Kosky does go a bit over the top when Anna shrieks hysterically above her family’s moralist incantations, and the invented a capella epilogue about a drowned woman was far too morbid for the spirit of this resigned yet hopeful satire, not to mention that Manzel’s voice was audibly spent by this point. The singer otherwise gave a gripping performance with her smoky voice, generous presence and dry dramatic detachment. That she may be considered slightly too old for the role is justified by Kosky’s concept which casts the entire journey as a memory; in the end Manzel pinches the flesh on her arms as if unaware of how she had aged. The male quartet formed a musically solid ensemble, and Joska Lehtinen brought a ringing, slightly scolding tenor to the father’s aria about Anna’s greed. The orchestra provided fine accompaniment under Kristiina Poska, its Germanic sound culture providing weight to Weill’s forward-looking yet rigorous harmonic development and wistful melodies.

Tags:Andreas Homoki, barrie kosky, Bertold Brecht, Brigitte Geller, Calixto Bieto, Dagmar Manzel, Dimitry Ivashchenko, Edward James, Gesine Völlm, Hagen Matzeit, Handel, Heike Scheele, Julia Giebel, Karolina Gumos, Katarina Bradic, Kings Theater, komische oper, Konrad Jünghanel, Kristiina Poska, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Manuel Brug, Seven Deadly Sins, stefan herheim, Stella Doufexis, The Three Penny Opera, Thilo Reinhardt, Xerxes
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