By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 26, 2017
MUNICH — Post is under revision.
Photos © Arthaus, BelAir Classiques, Querstand, Supraphon, Warner Classics
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 18, 2017
MUNICH — BelAir Classiques and Mezzo TV have succeeded in getting a ban overturned on their sale and airing, respectively, of a 2010 filmed staging of Dialogues des Carmélites made here at Bavarian State Opera.
The ban, or arrêt, had been imposed in 2015 by the Cour d’appel in Paris following a complaint by heirs of Francis Poulenc and the opera’s source novelist Georges Bernanos.
In that court’s judgment, “the staging by Dmitri Tcherniakov realizes in its final scene a dénaturation of the [opera] and thus infringes the moral rights of authors attached to it.” Dénaturation translates as adulteration or falsification.
Indeed the Russian director substitutes in the climactic scene a deadly gas blast and one self-sacrifice for the serial guillotining of the titular nuns laid out graphically in Poulenc’s music.
But France’s higher Cour de cassation saw the case differently in its June 27 ruling, according to BelAir and Mezzo attorney Judith Adam-Caumeil of Cabinet Adam-Caumeil, a law firm specialized in Franco-German business.
It overturned the ban, she said, because no alteration had been made to libretto or score and the Cour d’appel had admitted that the opera’s essential themes, such as hope, martyrdom, grace, and the communion of saints, dear to Bernanos and Poulenc, had been respected.
Declaring the case a “landmark” with regard to “artistic freedom of staging in French law,” she suggested the ruling would apply equally to “theater, ballet or cinema.”
Not at issue was copyright, even with Dialogues remaining rights-protected in Europe and America, although this status kept BStO and its director from tampering with the words and music.
Adam-Caumeil: “Tcherniakov certainly brought his own vision to the original work by altering the final scene, but the music and text remained unchanged. The essential themes … were respected because the nuns were ready to die … . Thus, no dénaturation of the primary work can be blamed on Tcherniakov.”
BStO joined in appealing the ban. Dialogues most recently appeared on the company’s National Theater stage early last year, in defiance of a letter from the heirs (but not of the ban), and will in 2020 return, said BelAir distributor Naxos in an Aug. 4 statement.
BelAir and Mezzo can now profit from the content as before, and Naxos early this month relaunched BelAir’s DVD along with a new Blu-ray edition.
Illustration © BelAir Classiques
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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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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 8, 2013
MUNICH — The drama of Verdi’s Genovese opera Simon Boccanegra, circa 1339 and 1363, pivots on the protagonist’s Solomon-like statecraft and courage, as deployed in the Council Chamber scene of Act I. Here plebeo and patrizio powers, emotional and familial woes, jostle compellingly. In his new* staging for Bavarian State Opera (heard and seen June 6), Dmitri Tcherniakov places the Council Chamber in a gray-walled seminar room, complete with rows of black chairs, circa 1990. The update and reduction necessarily focuses attention on the characters’ minds, on their decision-making as it were. Problem is, Simon (Željko Lučić) has been introduced as a drunken pawn of Plebeian party politics, Amelia Grimaldi (Kristine Opolais) as a goth girl, Gabriele Adorno (Stefano Secco) as a biker.
Unsure where to go next, or bent on preserving the non-intensity, Tcherniakov stays put in that seminar room for the rest of the opera. Adorno’s Act II tirade finds him knocking the chairs over, and Fiesco (Vitalij Kowaljow as a priest-confessor) spends Act III impassively parked on one of them. In a back-flash of color, a slide is projected of the set for the Prologue, outside an Edward Hopper-esque bar just like Jonathan Miller’s 1982 Rigoletto. As climax, Simon’s poisoning sends him into hallucination à la Boris Godunov; Amelia and Adorno show up in wedding attire, and dad’s behavior, not so much his demise, fairly ruins their big day.
Conductor Bertrand de Billy must have thought he was assigned Parsifal. Nary a pulse emanated from the pit, and no symphonic arc. Forget Verdian phrasing. Still, coordination held up and the Bavarian State Orchestra played cooperatively. Opolais, a substitute for Krassimira Stoyanova, retains the lustrous girlish top she brought to Rusalka here in 2010. She sang securely after a tremulous Come in quest’ ora bruna, but under-projected Italian consonants sabotaged her alert acting. (Anja Harteros sings and acts Amelia ideally on a 2010 DVD.) Secco, a substitute for Ramón Vargas, worked hard as the eager young Patrician but his sound had a pinched quality. Kowaljow essayed Fiesco with apparent indifference at this performance, and in Act III he barely contributed. Lučić by himself carried the show, if it held together at all, with warm legato, keen dramatic expression and powerful outbursts. A deftly floated high F concluded the Figlia! a tal nome palpito duet.
[*New to Munich. The production was first mounted at English National Opera in June 2011. It is the second transfer staging here this season: Richard Jones’s lively Hänsel und Gretel opened in March, long after its 1998 unveiling in Cardiff.]
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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By James Jorden
Of hundreds of juicy anecdotes in Ken Mandelbaum’s indispensable volume Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Flops, one stands out perhaps a little more than the others. It’s about a show called Reuben Reuben which closed out of town in 1955. This was a through-composed absurdist piece by Mark Blitzstein, and Mandelbaum reports that on the opening night of the show over 300 audience members walked out of the Shubert Theater in Boston. (more…)
Poulenc Heirs v. Staatsoper
Thursday, January 7th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: January 7, 2016
MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera will defy the heirs of Francis Poulenc and proceed with revival performances of its literally explosive staging of Dialogues des Carmélites later this month, the company said today.
The 2010 production by Dmitri Tcherniakov departs from the scheme of the composer and the source novelist, Georges Bernanos, in several ways and has been described by the heirs as a “trahison.” Not the least of its transgressions is a substitution in the climactic scene: a deadly gas blast and one self-sacrifice (by Blanche) replace the serial guillotining of the titular nuns laid out graphically in the music.
In a Dec. 23 letter to the Munich company, the heirs demanded that the “rights-infringing staging of the work (ihren Rechten verletzenden Aufführung des Werkes)” be put to “no further use.”
But a slow-won French court victory for the heirs last October constrained only BelAir Classiques and Mezzo TV from, respectively, selling DVDs of the production and screening it. The estates of both Poulenc and Bernanos had begun legal proceedings in October 2012, perhaps not aware of the nature of Tcherniakov’s efforts until BelAir’s DVD release that year. The last onstage revival came, by coincidence, the same month.
Poulenc’s 1956 opera is evidently less tightly controlled, or protected, by his heirs than is, for example, Gershwin’s 21-years-older Porgy and Bess by the American composer’s estate.
In justifying the resolve to proceed, Bavarian State Opera’s Geschäftsführender Direktor Roland Schwab said: “In the context of an earnest grappling with the work, the stage direction must have the freedom to deviate from history. Thus the work is not disfigured, but rather its ideas are depicted from today’s viewpoint.”
The company also noted it had made no alteration to libretto or score. This despite the stripping out of all Christian reference as well as the guillotining from the stage action. BStO Intendant Nikolaus Bachler is a firm, one might say notorious, defender of unfettered Regietheater.
Not only will the show go on, but Bavarian State Opera is supporting BelAir Classiques and Mezzo TV in their appeal of the October court decision, the company said.
Scheduled to sing the opera Jan. 23 to Feb. 1 are Christiane Karg as Blanche, Anna Christy as Constance, Anne Schwanewilms as Lidoine and Stanislas de Barbeyrac as the Chevalier. Susanne Resmark and Sylvie Brunet reprise their roles as Marie and de Croissy on the banned 2010 DVD. Bertrand de Billy conducts.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, BelAir Classiques, Commentary, Dialogues des Carmélites, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Mezzo TV, München, Munich, News, Nikolaus Bachler, Poulenc, Roland Schwab
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