Posts Tagged ‘Munich’

Guillaume Tells

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015

Bryan Hymel in 2014 hits ‘Asile héréditaire … Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance’ right out of Munich’s ballpark

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 23, 2015

MUNICH — Post is under revision.

Still image from video © Bayerische Staatsoper

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Petrenko to Extend in Munich

Friday, July 24th, 2015

Kirill Petrenko in Munich’s National Theater

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 24, 2015

MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera has confirmed by phone it will announce a contract extension for Kirill Petrenko before the start of next season, in September. With the month of August being a house holiday, the news could come as early as next week when the company’s annual Munich Opera Festival winds down.

Petrenko, 43, became Generalmusikdirektor less than two years ago but has quickly earned respect with his musical dedication, technical gifts and impassioned manner. His present contract expires in August 2018.

Although talks to retain the Russian-Austrian’s services longer into the future have been underway for some time, as company Intendant Nikolaus Bachler noted last month, the announcement will be coming at an awkward juncture given Petrenko’s June 21 acceptance of a surprise invitation to serve as Chefdirigent of the Berlin Philharmonic, albeit with no firm start date.

His move from Carlos Kleiber’s orchestra to Herbert von Karajan’s will likely mean a briefer extension than would otherwise have been the case and a phasing in of Berlin commitments that works around his long-range Munich opera plans. Hopes are dashed anyway of a full Petrenko “era” at Bavarian State Opera like that of Wolfgang Sawallisch, who led the company for twenty-one years.

The new contract will have three parties: the conductor, who is currently preparing cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth; Bachler; and Ludwig Spaenle, Bavaria’s Kultusminister.

A perfectionist if ever there was one, Petrenko operates with specific capacity. Strain takes its toll. In 2007 he suffered “exhaustion,” leading to cancellations. He pulled out of a 2011 Fidelio in London due to back problems. Last December he was “indisposed” for his fourth planned Berlin Philharmonic program, and in March he cited strenuousness of assignment as a reason for withdrawing from the Bayreuth Festival in 2016 and 2017. He has just begun to relax in the saddle with the Bavarian State Orchestra.

What separates him somewhat from his nominal peers is his not being good at everything. Instead he brings ideas and expressive depth to scores he identifies with. Mussorgsky and Strauss and Berg are strengths.

Petrenko debuted at Bavarian State Opera with Pikovaya dama in October 2003. He returned five seasons later for a new Jenůfa, receiving personal acclaim. In July 2010 it was leaked that Kent Nagano’s contract as GMD would not be renewed, and immediately, before Nagano “quit,” Petrenko’s and Fabio Luisi’s names were publicly mooted. Bachler’s choice, Petrenko won out on Oct. 5, 2010 (to start Sept. 1, 2013). Luisi withdrew piecemeal from several later staged-opera commitments with the company.

As GMD, Petrenko has led premieres of Die Frau ohne Schatten, La clemenza di Tito, Die Soldaten, Lucia di Lammermoor and Lulu as well as a revival of Wagner’s Ring in Andreas Kriegenburg’s hopeless realization (Siegfried’s encounter with Brünnhilde reduced to bedroom farce).

Next season his commitments here include South Pole (Miroslav Srnka), a new Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and, not least, Die Fledermaus. The Bavarian State Orchestra’s six yearly concert programs, or Akademiekonzerte, will feature Petrenko in music of Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Mahler, Elgar and Sibelius.

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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Mélisande as Hotel Clerk

Monday, June 29th, 2015

Elena Tsallagova, Hanno Eilers and Markus Eiche in Pelléas et Mélisande

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 29, 2015

MUNICH — Noisy and sustained boos fell upon stage director Christiane Pohle and her team after Pelléas et Mélisande last night here in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater. Though not uncommon in this epoch of Regietheater, the intensity of the scorn for Bavarian State Opera’s new production was alarming coming from the dressy summer festival premiere crowd, many of whom were to adjourn to parties after the performance and whose circles deplore boorish behavior.

The fifteen scenes of Debussy’s 1902 drame lyrique to a Symbolist libretto by Maeterlinck unfold in Pohle’s conception in a hotel lobby, with Mélisande as a receptionist. Scene I, where Golaud nominally loses his way while hunting in a forest, has him seated drinking at the hotel’s bar. Scene XV, in which Mélisande will admit no guilt, takes place as a loose, group-therapy session.

The stationary lobby set, with hard, photo-realistic surfaces that look good on camera, is of a type costly to build and awkward to move, restricting scenic transformation in a way ordinary theatrical flats do not. After Golaud’s forest, Maeterlinck and Debussy call for une appartement dans un château, a setting devant le château, une fontaine dans le parc, une grotte, une des tours du château (from which Mélisande’s hair cascades down to Pelléas), les souterrains du château, une terrasse, and so on, a visual feast potentially.

BR Klassik carried the audio last night, preserving a musically imaginative performance. The Bavarian State Orchestra conveyed ravishing nuances as well as the burliness in Debussy’s score as led by Constantinos Carydis. Markus Eiche sang a lucid Golaud in properly projected French. Elena Tsallagova’s lovely tones proved ideal for Mélisande. As a mostly effective Pelléas, Elliot Madore followed bizarre stage directions: on his first date with Mélisande, for instance, he sat with his knees together while she stood. Okka von der Damerau inertly impersonated Geneviève. Peter Lobert as the Doctor outsang Alastair Miles’ Arkel, while Hanno Eilers, 12, of the Tölzer Knabenchor intoned Yniold bravely and drew the loudest applause.

Pelléas et Mélisande becomes the latest of numerous flops for the company’s impenitent Intendant Nikolaus Bachler, who insists on freedom for his stage directors — many of them grounded in straight theater and lacking flair for the visual and inter-disciplinary aspects of opera — without apparently recognizing his own duty to monitor quality during production development. Guillaume Tell (Antú Romero Nunes) and Věc Makropulos (Árpád Schilling) have been mounted here with jaw-dropping ineptitude over the last twelve months. Earlier stagings of Medea in Corinto (Hans Neuenfels) and Saint François d’Assise (Hermann Nitsch) went speedily to the dumpsters and to costume sale, the probable fate of this Debussy.

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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Nézet-Séguin: Hit, Miss

Friday, June 26th, 2015

Yannick Nézet-Séguin rehearses in Munich’s Herkulessaal in June 2015

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 26, 2015

MUNICH — It would probably be asking too much for Yannick Nézet-Séguin to stand still while conducting. He likes to throw himself around, as if anything less might diminish the enthusiasm he intends to convey or deprive his musicians of essential signals. Mostly it works. He is after all a success. Yesterday (June 25) in the Herkulessaal here his physical language neatly fit every idea in Haydn’s E-Minor Trauer Symphony, No. 44 (1771), and contradicted every breath of Brahms’s German Requiem (1868).

Despite its name the Haydn does not overtly relay mourning, although its Adagio has a certain sadness, with violins con sordini and lines tending to descend. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra played the four movements affectionately, lending charm to the two-voice canon of the second and preserving clarity in the Finale, taken prestissimo by the scoreless Canadian maestro. The audience listened in rapt silence.

Closing one’s eyes for the Brahms solved part of the problem on the podium but left an interpretation insistent on bright color and drama, and not only in the second and sixth movements. Forget introspection. The BR Chor sang glowingly and with considerable power as prepared by Michael Gläser. The soloists were disappointing. Christiane Karg lacked ideal control and vocal weight for the soprano’s ethereal Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit. Baritone Matthias Goerne sounded firm in the low notes, but he swallowed consonants and staggered about like a drunk at a banquet, without tie, forearms and belly thrust forward. (Memories of José van Dam and the dignity he brought to this assignment, mostly motionless, accentuated the sad spectacle.) The orchestra mustered passion as well as its customary precision even if flute and oboe lines often pierced the air. At the end, after shaping Brahms’s masterwork so theatrically, Nézet-Séguin stood in place for a long, contrived silence, intended presumably to register the music’s meaning. Today’s performance of the same program (June 26) will be broadcast by BR Klassik, and the German Requiem will no doubt find its way to disc.

Still image from video © BR Klassik

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Bumps and Bychkov at MPhil

Thursday, June 25th, 2015

Semyon Bychkov in 2013 in London

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 25, 2015

MUNICH — 2014–15 has been a rough transitional season for the Munich Philharmonic. Lorin Maazel’s sudden resignation a year ago forced its managers into much recasting, and some feeble programs. Then, midseason, came worse news. An irksome pact between Munich’s Bürgermeister Dieter Reiter and Bavaria’s Minister-Präsident Horst Seehofer nixed plans for a needed new concert hall to replace the Gasteig and instead envisioned a joyously slow disemboweling and inner rearrangement of that acoustically poor facility, which would leave the MPhil homeless starting in 2020. The pact sent Anne-Sophie Mutter, Christian Gerhaher and Mariss Jansons into public displays of betrayal, rage and frustration, respectively. But MPhil managers could not whine so loudly because the city owns the orchestra, so, a week behind everyone else, including the testy Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (also affected), they emitted six splendid bureaucratic paragraphs saying absolutely nothing.

Somehow the musicians have ploughed through this temporum horribilis and on Monday (June 22) managed to sound confident and poised at the Gasteig under Semyon Bychkov. Grandly he propelled them in Brahms’s Third Symphony (1883) stressing contrasts and drama with wide arm gestures. Fine wind contributions, not least from principal horn Jörg Brückner, flattered the score’s textures, and Bychkov took a pleasingly weighty and leisurely approach to the middle movements, observing dynamic markings with care. Ravel’s G-Major Piano Concerto (1931) after the break found everyone on less sure footing, however, despite this being the program’s third iteration. Jean-Yves Thibaudet gave a dull, woolly account of the solo part. Ensemble weakened. The long concert remained in French mode for its conclusion, Debussy’s La Mer (1905), but this listener had to run.

Tomorrow, the same partnership performs in the Pala de Andrè as a guest of the Ravenna Festival. MPhil 2014–15 closes fully with concerts here led by Kent Nagano and Krzysztof Urbański, but in September more headaches loom when Valery Gergiev takes over as Chefdirigent. Systems are supposedly in place to prevent the skimpiness of preparation associated with the new boss. It is unclear what, if any, measures are in place to cope with the political challenge.

Photo © Chris Christodoulou

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See-Through Lulu

Saturday, June 6th, 2015

Marlis Petersen and Dmitri Tcherniakov rip into a münchner Breze

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 6, 2015

MUNICH — After the genetic mismatch of Kirill Petrenko and Gaetano Donizetti here, it was a relief to watch the conductor easily navigate and ignite the tone rows of Lulu last week (May 25 and 29) at the National Theater. Happily he did so using Cerha’s reconstitution of Act III and supported by an eloquent, virtuosic Bavarian State Orchestra, now truly his orchestra twenty months beyond the systemic jolt of the handover from Kent Nagano.

The GMD conveyed the differing compositional powers of each act almost entirely through soft, finely balanced ensemble, favoring transparency. Where the music rose dynamically, as in his ardent account of the palindromic Act II Zwischenspiel or the pithy societal interjections of the Paris scene, its contours and colors palpably stunned the capacity audience.

For these reasons alone these were luxurious traversals of Berg’s stimulating, exacting, 185-minute score. They revolved, though, not around Petrenko but upon the musicianship of the charming and beautiful Marlis Petersen, 47, who drew rapturous applause at evening’s end.

Meek early on, she sang out fully in the anti-heroine’s Act I duettino with the Painter (Rainer Trost on vivid form) and gauged her sound with Lied-art intelligence — but a diva’s command of the stage — from that point forward. The bright firm voice sailed into the house with greater body of tone than many a Lulu, shaded emotionally and locked into Berg’s text.

Having first essayed the role sixteen years ago in Kassel, Petersen has developed crisp, moving inflections for its unaccompanied dialog and Sprechstimme, and on these nights she fashioned from every last morsel the composer provides a gutsy, honest, amusing, vulnerable and above all integrated portrayal.

Daniela Sindram had a harder time making an impact as the pivotal Gräfin Geschwitz in this new production. In fact the mezzo barely stood out at all because director Dmitri Tcherniakov (pictured with the soprano) put her in pants, muting her sexuality and defeating the counterforce Berg intended to the men around Lulu. (Has Tcherniakov only this narrow grasp of what it means to be a lesbian?)

But she sang expressively, with a golden, even timbre, purity of line and good diction, and she capped her interrupted London monologue with a ravishing Lulu! Mein Engel! That last outpouring endured the distraction of Lulu’s death on stage, contrary to Berg’s plan, and so the drama ended out of kilter as the tempos slowed, and anticlimactic.

Lyric tenor Matthias Klink introduced a sweet-toned Alwa whose volume lessened in high-lying phrases. Bo Skovhus, as his father and Lulu’s lethal client, made a perfect foil for Petersen, magnetic of gesture and clever in pointing the text, even if his tenorial baritone lacked ideal resonance. In the supporting roles, besides Trost, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s mellifluous turn as the Marquis stood out.

Like most productions at Bavarian State Opera nowadays, this Lulu will look its best through camera lenses rather than from a seat in the theater. Tcherniakov sets all scenes in one static grove of glass panels, much as he locked us in a gray seminar room for his last work here, Simon Boccanegra. Glass of course is an upgrade: it affords depth, allows vivid use of light and overcomes staging challenges, such as when characters scenically snoop. But only the panning and zooming of cameras can make up for missing spectacle in this case.

During Berg’s several Zwischenspiele — intended for scene changes tracing Lulu’s progress and retrogression — the director populates the background panels with stiffly animated mimes, like mannequins in shop windows. Perversely, given today’s common use of projections, he offers no film for the Filmmusik, but a roving spotlight signals its crucial midpoint.

Placement of the panels forces most of the crowd in the Paris scene behind glass, and Tcherniakov drably lines everyone up in a row. Otherwise he strongly shapes and moves the individual characters and, with the one misstep of Geschwitz’s costuming, engages the viewer convincingly, avoiding cliché and graphic violence.

Today’s performance of Lulu, the fourth in a run of five, streams live at noon, New York time, at www.staatsoper.de/tv. (Although named “Staatsoper.TV,” the service is not accessed at that domain.) Three performances are scheduled for September, when Petrenko hands over to Cornelius Meister.

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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Nazi Document Center Opens

Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 29, 2015

MUNICH — Tomorrow, a year behind schedule but 70 years to the day since Munich fell to the Allies, a six-story-high, slatted white cube opens for visitors here: the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, or NS-Dokumentations-Zentrum. Significantly, it stands directly on the site of the former Brown House, where the fascist leaders maintained offices. As the center’s website points out:

“The City of Munich is aware of its special obligation to keep alive the memory of the Nazi era and its crimes and to inform citizens and visitors about it. After all, it was here in Munich that the rise of the National Socialist movement began after the First World War. Munich was also the scene of the beer-hall putsch of 1923 and of Hitler’s subsequent trial. Here Hitler found influential patrons who gave him entry to bourgeois circles. And it was here in 1938 that Goebbels called for the nationwide pogrom against the Jewish population. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Munich was chosen by Hitler as the place to celebrate the cult of Nazism and given the titles Capital of German Art and Capital of the Movement.”

Designed by Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten, the 5,000-square-meter facility also happens to be a few feet from Germany’s top conservatory, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, itself housed in the Nazi-built former Führerbau. Harshly its positioning and aspect interrupt Bavarian King Ludwig I’s two-century-old, Neo-Classical civic plan between Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz. Munich moved at a snail’s pace to realize the cube, which provides permanent and temporary exhibition space as well as study rooms. In contrast, Cologne and the Obersalzberg resort area, location of the Eagle’s Nest, have long operated similarly purposed learning facilities. Now this city can do the strongest job in furtherance of “nie wieder.”

Photo © Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten

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Mariotti North of the Alps

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

Michele Mariotti

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 26, 2015

MUNICH — He will always be attached to Rossini, but Michele Mariotti, 36, can probe and illuminate a vast repertory besides. This much was evident March 23 in a refreshing return engagement with the Münchner Symphoniker.

The Pesaro-born maestro’s podium technique and constructive manner recall another Rossinian, the late Claudio Abbado, both men omnipresent in Bologna over the last decade. His knack for lifting out seemingly banal musical lines and turning them to instant expressive effect, combined with a certain metrical rigidity, suits him to the opera composer. But like Abbado he savors structure and injects passion somewhat clinically: the ethos is Classical rather than bel canto, Haydn over Bellini, and therefore impossible to delimit.

The Prinz-Regenten-Theater subscription concert followed a same-program runout to Kempten in Bavaria’s cheese-making Allgäu region. Ray Chen provided buoyant pleasures in Mozart’s G-Major Violin Concerto (1775) using a loaned Stradivarius associated with Joachim. If the outer movements sounded generalized, the Brisbane soloist’s ardor in the Adagio compensated.

In the opening Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt Overture (1828), Mariotti gave character and point to even the briefest of Mendelssohn’s phrases, audibly pushing the technical limits of all sections of the cooperative orchestra. After the break, Rossini’s Guillaume Tell Overture (1829) was a study in contrasts, properly stormy, emotional, and detailed in its texture. To conclude: a Schubert Third Symphony (1815) of Beecham-esque charm and Adriatic sunshine, ideally paced and neatly played.

The orchestra’s strings registered greater cohesion than in December; perhaps Kevin John Edusei has less work to do than previously imagined. Flute and oboe passagework tended to be strident, however, with the winds up against a safety curtain at this venue.

The Münchner Symphoniker took its name in 1990. It earns 24% of its annual budget of €4.5 million. The Free State of Bavaria contributes 55% in return for certain services; sponsors, including a savings bank and the region of Upper Bavaria, with Munich, underwrite the rest. By budget the ensemble ranks fifth in this city.

Photo © Rocco Casaluci

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Pogorelich Soldiers On

Monday, March 16th, 2015

Ivo Pogorelich

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: March 16, 2015

MUNICH — Ivo Pogorelich wants to continue to play. He has recital programs planned out till 2020. He keeps several concertos in his repertory, the Chopin F-Minor and Prokofiev Third performed here persuasively in recent seasons. He is “pleased,” he writes, about a new box of his old CDs, and he returns to the recording studio “this year” for “Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Balakirev.” Trouble is, the comfort zone has shrunk, and the technique, while still prodigious, suffers momentary ruptures, often of meter or rhythm. He has been as a result trashed by The New York Times (“interpretively perverse”) and, last month, London critics. But he shows a samurai’s perseverance.

Yesterday morning at the Prinz-Regenten-Theater, the pearly tones, grace and authority that have always distinguished his playing were much in evidence. Liszt’s Dante Sonata (1849) emerged in deliberate, pensive blocks, each relating to context and not without tension. A sumptuous dissection followed of Schumann’s C-Major Fantasie (1838). Its Mäßig, durchaus energisch movement, taut and powerfully executed, caused an eruption of applause and an acknowledging pianist’s smile. This distanced the third movement, helping cast it as a sequence of reflections, also beautifully traced. After the break, however, the tall Croatian failed to summon the virtuosity required of Stravinsky’s Trois mouvements de Pétrouchka (1921), producing only maddening shreds. To conclude he brought handsome character to the majority of Brahms’s Paganini Variations (1863), albeit with further rhythmic jolts. Scores were open throughout this recital, presented by 50-year-old Bell’Arte. There was nothing mannered (or perverse) about the playing. Indeed the impression was of a quest for truth in each score, hindered only by some undisclosed debility or disquiet.

Photo © Alfonso Batalla

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Gergiev Prep Hours Clarified

Friday, March 13th, 2015

Munich Philharmonic basses

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: March 13, 2015

MUNICH — This morning the Munich Philharmonic detailed the rehearsal hours put in by Valery Gergiev for a Stravinsky program here in December 2013. They totaled 14¼, a lavish allocation by the heavily branded maestro given his skimpy work in Poland and Russia the same week, to wit:

     Dec. 11, 2013 — day of “unexpected circumstances”
     Dec. 12, 2013 — Warsaw: sole local Gergiev rehearsal for Iolanta and A kékszakállú herceg vára, postponed by a day
     Dec. 13, 2013 — Warsaw: opening night of Tchaikovsky-Bartók double bill
     Dec. 14, 2013 — flight to St Petersburg; evening: Verdi Requiem
     Dec. 15, 2013 — St Petersburg: La traviata
     Dec. 16, 2013 — flight to Munich; late afternoon: 5¾ hours rehearsing Stravinsky
     Dec. 17, 2013 — morning: 6 hours of rehearsals; afternoon: news conference about pedophilia, Putin, and so on
     Dec. 18, 2013 — morning: 2½ hours of rehearsals; evening: Stravinsky concert

The rehearsal details, a response to a question last year, arrived after a vague outline from the orchestra of its quantitative expectations of Gergiev. Late this month the MPhil will announce its first season with the Russian conductor as Chefdirigent, and in May an ad hoc conference is promised at which he will reveal his long-term Ideen, Ziele und Projekte for Munich.

Photo © Wild und Leise

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