No longer. This season, Germany’s busiest, richest, starriest and arguably best-managed opera company has a cure, one to make any Luddite proud. It does not smash the machines exactly. It instead decries the good system behind them and handicaps the online buyers who use them — seriously, unpredictably, before breakfast. BStO seats below €100 when Anja Harteros or Jonas Kaufmann sing are now all but inaccessible online.
“CTS Eventim’s system sometimes was not up for the amount of people trying to get tickets,” the company claimed in a late-January statement, and buying was “a bit of a lottery.” The system “would throw you out of the purchase process before ending it, which was acceptable neither for the Staatsoper nor for our audience.” Imagine. Computers that sell 100 million tickets annually for 180,000 events get the jitters handling Anja or Jonas.
These flaws and a desire “to make the system more stable,” BStO’s story goes, led to its decision last fall to handicap online buying on certain mornings in 2016–17. How? A delay is “activated” when events in heavy demand go on sale, postponing the moment the buyer “gets access” to the online box office, called in German the Webshop (or occasionally Onlineshop). Phone and in-person selling, meanwhile, proceed as usual from the 10 a.m. start time.
Understandably the opera company has never announced the handicapping, and sources familiar with the Tageskasse scene say CTS Eventim’s system had nothing to do with the decision. The real motive, according to these sources, is to try to replicate online the speed of the physical line (queue) at the Tageskasse following years of grumbling from people who buy that way, and from staff too. A tug-of-war between Internet users and the bricks-and-mortar crowd has accordingly shifted in favor of the latter.
Out-of-town buyers are the worst hit, having fewer routes to tickets. Bavarians resident outside their capital city — it is the “state” opera after all — and fans of the renowned company as far away as East Asia and North America greatly rely on the Webshop.
The disadvantage is not new at BStO. Indeed the artificial online delays effectively bring to the main season the same narrow price availability for out-of-towners they have long experienced with BStO’s 142-year-old summer Munich Opera Festival. Tickets for the festival are first sold in snowy January in person only, and the lower four of eight price categories — roughly, seats below €100 for major performances — sell out this way when the biggest stars are scheduled, months before online ticketing starts.
Surprised, and confused actually. The handicap throws up two screens in place of the Webshop. First, a countdown page, labeled with the quaint metaphor “waiting room” to dupe people into thinking the system is too burdened to process their order. This assigns a wait number, which ironically turns out to be far from “stable.” Then comes a standby page, for buyers whose number has dropped to 0 (zero) before the Webshop opens, i.e. before 10 a.m. — a strange situation, one might think, but the only one with potential to yield broad ticket choice.
| |
A in Augsburg
Unaware of the handicap, she logs on at 9:55 a.m. She faces not her expected Webshop but the countdown page. (She would be there regardless of what event and date she is pursuing. The whole operation is impacted that morning because one heavy-demand performance is going on sale.)
She has of course no idea when the handicap was activated. (The answer could be 6 a.m., about when a physical line might start outside the Tageskasse.) But she is less troubled than buyers who may have purposefully stopped work in Tokyo or climbed out of bed in Boston.
She sees 29 lines of precise instructions auf Deutsch, unless she has opted for English screens, in which case she sees a remarkably compressed version of just five lines. (The complete English is here.) Key instruction: “Do not refresh.” Below, she reads her wait number: a high one, 400. Her chances are nil, but she doesn’t know this. She ties herself up for an hour before learning. |
| |
N in Nuremberg
Logs on at 5:55 a.m. She is too early and goes straight into the normally functioning Webshop. She assumes she can just wait there until 10 a.m. But no. She must refresh the screen every twelve minutes or be disabled for inactivity. No instructions say this because the system was in normal mode when she entered. (To see them, she would have had to arrive via the countdown page and witness her wait number drop to 0 before 10 a.m.)
When she casually returns to the screen at 9:30 a.m., she discovers the Webshop inactive for her. She reloads. Now she is on the countdown page with number 200. Again no chance. |
| |
R in Regensburg
Fares better. He logs on at 6:15 a.m., apparently just after the handicap was activated. He lands on the countdown page with number 10. Like A, he is told not to refresh. He obeys. Later, but before 10 a.m., his number drops to 9, then 7. He wonders how this could be. No orders are being processed. (Possible answer: people on the standby page are failing to refresh and losing their place.)
But for him to succeed, his number must drop to 0 by 10 a.m. Otherwise, whether he’s at 400 or 4, he will be stuck on the countdown page during the crucial initial selling minutes.
Luckily he does drop to 0. He is moved to the standby page, a promising but precarious place. There he sees the instruction to refresh that N missed. He must do this every twelve minutes until 10 a.m. If he has arrived on the standby page early, say at 7:15 a.m., he will be doing a lot of refreshing. Should he fail — just once — he will find himself back on the countdown page holding a high number. (Anja and Jonas never wanted it that way.)
When the hour rolls around and the handicap ends, he must be ready, as in the past, to point and click with decisiveness and accuracy. His seats are secure only when they appear in his Einkaufswagen, the shopping cart. |
A, N, and R may be imagined. The following numbers are real, recorded during the Jan. 18 handicap on Andrea Chénier ticketing in checks using two browsers and two connections:
Logging on at 10:24 a.m., a wait number of 688 with 170 seats left to sell. Three minutes later, wait number 346 with 130 seat left. At 10:43 a.m., number 179 with 38 seats. At 10:54 a.m., number 40 with 19 seats. After another five minutes, access to the Webshop with 4 seats shown as available. By 11:04 a.m., 2 seats left but neither one of them moveable into the shopping cart. At 11:07 a.m., sold out, Ausverkauft. Despite this, a new buyer could log on at 11:10 a.m. and receive wait number 382, which would drop to 0 six minutes later and lead to an empty Webshop.
Bavarian State Opera should end this nonsense. The company is damaging its reputation and working against its own carefully evolved ticket structure and sales procedures, designed to draw people of all income levels from a broad geography.
Those procedures sell tickets three ways: subscription; single-event by written order; and single-event by immediate fulfillment. The latter two are processed on a staggered basis according to performance date. Written orders (traditional mail, fax, email) are worked three months out. Immediate-fulfillment sales (online, phone, physical presence in the Tageskasse) begin two months out.
Each single-event method draws on fixed set-asides, or Kontingente, of seats in the 2,100-seat National Theater. These are broken down across BStO’s eight price categories and to within specific seating blocks, to as few as two seats, allowing near-total price and seat choice for each method. Quite sophisticated. And really quite fair, at least in the case of written orders. Even without handicapping, though, buyers outside Munich have less access to the immediate-fulfillment set-asides: getting to the Tageskasse may not be possible, and phoning is hard when there is heavy demand. Naturally they depend on the Webshop — and their hot connections, firm wrists, pinched fingertips and nanosecond nerves.
CTS Eventim, far from warranting criticism, could be held up as a most capable and user-friendly ticketer. Certainly its system offers an easier buyer interface, more precise seat sectioning, and lower fees, than that of the larcenous near-monopoly Stateside.
Instead of blaming its vendor, the opera company needs to go back to the future and solve its delicate Tageskasse problem with rigor and honesty. This means two things: adjustments to the Kontingente to reasonably protect in-person buyers; and an announcement of the change. Any tactic resulting in Internet screens that mislead buyers and waste their time, or too weird to spell out in a news release, is a bad one.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Staatsoper Imposes Queue-it
Harteros Warms to Tosca
Antonini Works Alcina’s Magic
Portraits For a Theater
Staatsoper Objects to Report
Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Commentary, CTS Eventim, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, News
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Sunday, August 7th, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 7, 2016
MUNICH — Two evenings after an “Allahu Akbar” eruption here cost nine mostly teenage, mostly Muslim, lives, it felt perverse to indulge in 280-year-old French escapism stretching to Turkey, Peru, Iran and the future United States.
But there we were July 24 in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater for Bavarian State Opera business-as-usual, a festival yet, and Rameau’s four-entrée Les Indes galantes as imagined by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the Belgian choreographer with stage-director pretensions.
And safer we were, too, than at a smaller music festival 110 miles away near Nuremberg, the outdoor Ansbach Open, where a Syrian refugee denied asylum in this country was preparing to explode his metal-piece-filled backpack among two thousand listeners. (As luck would have it, Germany’s first suicide bomber killed only himself when he detonated only his detonator and did so outside the festival’s gates, not having known in advance he would need a ticket.)
Before departing for Turkey, the opéra-ballet states its premise by means of a prologue: European lovers pressed to exchange Goddess Hébé’s doux instants (sweet moments) for Goddess Bellone’s gloire des combats can count on intercession from a third god, Amour, as they “traverse the vastest seas” in military service.
This plays out with amusing dramatic variance* in the four locales to music of beguiling harmony and bold instrumental color, in airs, vocal ensembles, choruses and dances. The U.S. entrée concludes with the Dance of the Great Peace Pipe (penned after Agapit Chicagou’s 1725 Paris visit), minuets, a gavotte, and a most charming chaconne.
If you kept your eyes closed, the performance was a treat. Opening them invited confusion, or worse, despite Cherkaoui’s fresh dance moves, tirelessly executed by his Antwerp-based Compagnie Eastman.
Ivor Bolton and the Münchner Festspiel-Orchester, an elite Baroque pick-up band, served Rameau with verve and expressive breadth, ripe string sound and fabulous wind playing. The Balthasar-Neumann-Chor from Freiburg managed its musical challenges neatly, in opaque French.
The score’s 17 roles went to ten generally stylish soloists. Lisette Oropesa proved a graceful musician in the lyric soprano duties of Hébé and Zima. Anna Prohaska, as Phani and Fatime, stopped the show with a divinely phrased Viens, Hymen, viens m’unir. Light tenor Cyril Auvity sang artfully as Valère and Tacmas, while John Moore’s baritone lent a golden timbre to the sauvage Adario. Reveling grandly in the music’s depths were basses François Lis (Huascar and Alvar) and Tareq Nazmi (Osman and Ali).
But soprano Ana Quintans encountered pitch problems as Amour and Zaïre; Elsa Benoit, the Émilie, seemed squeezed by Rameau’s nimble turns; Mathias Vidal pushed harshly for volume in the tenor roles of Carlos and Damon; and bass Goran Jurić, in drag as Bellone, muddied her vital rousing words.
As for the staging, new on this night, conceit and a ruinous idea got the better of Cherkaoui (and BStO managers, who should have intervened if they care about Baroque opera as they profess): he would thread together the prologue and entrées into one dramatic unit. Characters would appear in each other’s sections, mute. Opéra-ballet form be damned.
In place of exotic lands (requiring exotic sets and costumes), the viewer would journey from schoolroom to museum gallery to church to flower shop, to no place, to some closed border crossing. The spectacle of Peru’s Adoration du Soleil, for instance, would unfold in the church. Woven throughout, clumsily, would be tastes of the plight of Europe’s present refugees, and Europeans’ poor hospitality. Count the ironies.
[*In Turkey a melodrama, as the shipwrecked lovers’ fate turns on Osman’s magnanimity (Le turc généreux). In Peru a tragedy, as the couple’s freedom results from Huascar’s molten-lava death (Les incas du Pérou). In Iran a bucolic, as two pairs of lovers ascertain their feelings through disguise and espial (Les fleurs, original version of Aug. 23, 1735). In the U.S. a comedy, as noble savage Zima flirts with and mocks two European colonists, reversing the pattern, before homing in on loving native Adario (Les sauvages).]
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Portraits For a Theater
Nitrates In the Canapés
Harteros Warms to Tosca
Blacher Channels Maupassant
On Wenlock Edge with MPhil
Tags:Ana Quintans, Anna Prohaska, Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Compagnie Eastman, Cyril Auvity, Elsa Benoit, François Lis, Goran Jurić, Ivor Bolton, John Moore, Kritik, Les Indes galantes, Lisette Oropesa, Mathias Vidal, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Rameau, Review, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Tareq Nazmi
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Sunday, July 17th, 2016
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 17, 2016
MUNICH — When Anja Harteros was singing her first Toscas three seasons ago, it was clear she had the vocal resources for the role, and the Mediterranean temperament. Even so, the portrayal didn’t quite compute.
Enter Bryn Terfel, a Scarpia to rattle the aloofest, longest-legged of prima donnas. And Jonas Kaufmann, trusted stage buddy, sweet Cavaradossi. Now the diva’s doubt, fear, passion and rage turn on the instant, her slashing knife grip extending a ferrous will.
Harteros fairly lived the part July 1 here at the National Theater, teamed as she must have wanted and apparently undeterred by Luc Bondy’s clunky 2009 stage conception. Warm chest tones and creamy highs, floated or hurled, came into thrilling dramatic focus this time around. Illica and Giacosa’s words made inexorable sense, the Attavanti canvas and Terfel’s guts sure targets.
The tenor, too, had a great night: astutely colored phrases, gleaming top notes, a clarion but unexaggerated Vittoria! For once, E lucevan le stelle emerged as spontaneous thought, always in Kaufmann’s wonderfully lucid Italian.
If the mighty Welshman sounded a smidgen less opulent of voice than in previous Munich Scarpias, his characterization was as potent as ever, and his savoring of Puccini’s lines most enjoyable.
The snag, alas, was Kirill Petrenko’s conducting. Forceful and weighty, it never felt rooted in the language it was supposedly driving. Still, a terrific night for the Munich Opera Festival, and nowhere more refined than during Io de’ sospiri as sung by the Tölzer Knabenchor’s uncredited soloist.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Manon, Let’s Go
Tonhalle Lights Up the Beyond
Busy Week
Time for Schwetzingen
Schultheiß Savors the Dvořák
Tags:Anja Harteros, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bondy, Giacomo Puccini, Kaufmann, Kirill Petrenko, Kritik, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, Review, Terfel, Tölzer Knabenchor, Tosca
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 23, 2015
MUNICH — Post is under revision.
Still image from video © Bayerische Staatsoper
Related posts:
Nitrates In the Canapés
Muti the Publisher
Honeck Honors Strauss
Kušej Saps Verdi’s Forza
Time for Schwetzingen
Tags:Amanda Forsythe, Andrew Foster-Williams, Antonino Fogliani, Antonio Pappano, Antú Romero Nunes, Bad Wildbad, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bongiovanni, Bryan Hymel, Camerata Bach Chor Poznań, CD, Commentary, Coro del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Damiano Michieletto, Dan Ettinger, Decca, DVD, Evgeniya Sotnikova, Gerald Finley, Graham Vick, Guillaume Tell, Günther Groissböck, Jochen Schönleber, John Osborn, Juan Diego Flórez, Judith Howarth, Kritik, Luca Tittoto, Malin Byström, Marina Rebeka, Michael Spyres, Michael Volle, Michele Mariotti, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, Naxos, Nicola Alaimo, Nicolas Courjal, Opus Arte, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Pesaro, Raffaele Facciolà, Review, Rossini, Rossini Opera Festival, Royal Opera House, Sofia Fomina, Tara Stafford, Virtuosi Brunenses
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Monday, June 29th, 2015
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
Related posts:
See-Through Lulu
Carydis Woos Bamberg
Horses for Mozartwoche
Mahler 10 from Nézet-Séguin
Time for Schwetzingen
Tags:Alastair Miles, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Christiane Pohle, Commentary, Constantinos Carydis, Debussy, Elena Tsallagova, Elliot Madore, Hanno Eilers, Kritik, Markus Eiche, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Nikolaus Bachler, Okka von der Damerau, Pelléas et Mélisande, Peter Lobert, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Review, Tölzer Knabenchor
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Friday, August 29th, 2014
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 29, 2014
MUNICH — Staged works and the legendary Lied evenings hold the limelight here at the annual Opernfestspiele, begun 139 years ago. But veins of chamber music and, since 2008, choral programming run through the five-week schedule, lending scope and affirming organizer Bayerische Staatsoper’s depth of musicianship. The chamber offerings can be hit or miss, depending on the precise collaborations of Staatsorchester members and their scores; string trios on July 24 proved a hit. The choral initiatives attempt to thread back to the company’s 16th-century roots as a Kantorei, drawing on Staatsopernchor members passionate about church repertory; Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle on July 23 proved a stretch.
David Schultheiß (violin), Adrian Mustea (viola) and Allan Bergius (cello) teamed collegially at the ornate Cuvilliés Theater. Their nervous way with Beethoven’s C-Minor Trio from Opus 9 left the 1798 piece sounding brittle and oddly pale, but in Dohnányi’s charming, unpredictable, five-movement Serenade in C (1902) things shifted into vibrant high gear underpinned by Bergius (who once had another career), peaking in the chromatically salted Scherzo. Mozart’s E-flat Divertimento, K563 (1788), with its searching Adagio and rich minuet movements, served as flattering vehicle for the stylish and technically assured work of Schultheiß, one of the orchestra’s concertmasters. Mustea’s unusually resonant viola, here and throughout, provided a firm sense of ensemble and ensured a memorable night.
The 1863 Mass was a feasible festival choice for the reborn “Münchner Hofkantorei,” not needing an orchestra. Even so, its ironic jolts and the matter of choral direction versus leadership by the principal piano tended to defeat efforts at the Court Church of All Saints. Staatsopernchor member Wolfgang Antesberger aptly paced the score and directed robust performances of the Gloria and Credo choruses. But Rossini leaves much of the initiative to the first pianist, requiring bold propulsion and phrasing that Sophie Raynaud at times lacked, although her Prélude religieux took good shape. Solo singing varied widely in quality and approach.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Horn Trios in Church
Blacher Channels Maupassant
Manon, Let’s Go
Mahler 10 from Nézet-Séguin
Verdi’s Lady Netrebko
Tags:Adrian Mustea, Allan Bergius, Allerheiligen Hofkirche, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Beethoven, Court Church of All Saints, Cuvilliés Theater, David Schultheiß, Ernö Dohnányi, München, Münchner Hofkantorei, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Petite messe solennelle, Review, Rossini, Sophie Raynaud, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Antesberger
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Monday, July 7th, 2014
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 7, 2014
MUNICH — It was standing room only for Die Flut yesterday (July 6). Not only was Boris Blacher’s 1946 radio opera sold out, but the audience was expected to stand or stroll through it, as directed by Aernout Mik at a former riding hall here. Improbably part of Bavarian State Opera’s summer festival, the event introduced conductor Oksana Lyniv, the attractive new assistant to Kirill Petrenko.
Blacher might not normally draw a big crowd, but we live in visual times and “video-installation artist” Mik has a following. Hiring him must have seemed a safe bet: he could do whatever he wanted to enhance a work conceived for radio. Sadly he brought only distractions.
Visual cues abound in Die Flut, which reworks an 1885 nouvelle by Guy de Maupassant, L’épave (The Wreck), about an insurance appraiser who journeys from Paris to the endless sandbanks of the Île de Ré where a claimant’s boat has run aground an hour’s walk out from shore. The appraiser approaches the wreck:
Elle semblait sortir du sol et prenait, sur cette immense étendue plate et jaune, des proportions surprenantes. Je l’atteignis enfin, après une heure de marche. Elle gisait sur le flanc, crevée, brisée, montrant, comme les côtes d’une bête, ses os rompus, ses os de bois goudronné, percés de clous énormes. Le sable déjà l’avait envahie, entré par toutes les fentes, et il la tenait, la possédait, ne la lâcherait plus. Elle paraissait avoir pris racine en lui.
But Bay of Biscay tides, he has been warned, need rise only centimeters to cut him off. And sure enough he winds up surrounded by rising water and expecting to die as night descends — in the company of others, as it turns out, including an 18-year-old girl who is feeling cold.
Heinz von Cramer’s postwar German libretto for Blacher is the shrewdest of adaptations, retaining the salty scene and perilous sandbanks while exploring through modified roles some harsher effects of the sense of imminent death.
Cramer’s appraiser is a wealthy banker (Der alte Bankier, bass Miklós Sebestyén) who fatally tries offering cash to fellow tide victims (Der Fischer, baritone Tim Kuypers, and Der junge Mann, tenor Dean Power) if they would only swim ashore for help. His money, tellingly, proves irrelevant as the water rises, supreme as it recedes. And then there is the girl (Das Mädchen, soprano Iulia Maria Dan).
Mik missed it all. His contribution, trite mini-movies of rescues and rituals looping incessantly on screens over our heads, appeared canned, as if the director had merely used the occasion to showcase unrelated pre-existing work. He failed to set Maupassant’s remarkable scene or exploit its potential.
The action itself proved intense, though, partly because the four protagonists were confined to a platform, along with a commenting chorus and the instrumentalists (a dozen members each from the Bavarian State Opera Chorus and Bavarian State Orchestra). This shunted slowly from one end of the 80-yard hall to the other, and back, as the story unfolded, while two dozen mimes mingled with the fluid audience, gesturing in sync with each mini-movie.
Blacher’s mostly tonal 40-minute score for the singers, five wind instruments and string quintet (augmented to a septet yesterday) places passion in the voices but irony in the jaunty, blues-tinged, light-textured accompaniment. It is alas not especially original or memorable.
Lyniv secured eloquent, vivid performances. Dan, Power, Kuypers and Sebestyén projected desperation, resignation, envy, surprise or relief, as required. For reasons unclear, certain sections of the opera were played twice, to altered dramaturgy, stretching the runtime beyond an hour. A tape of the Prologue from the original 1946 broadcast lent authenticity.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Portraits For a Theater
Nitrates In the Canapés
A Complete Frau, at Last
Kušej Saps Verdi’s Forza
Harteros Warms to Tosca
Tags:Aernout Mik, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Boris Blacher, Dean Power, Die Flut, Guy de Maupassant, Heinz von Cramer, Iulia Maria Dan, Kritik, Miklós Sebestyén, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Oksana Lyniv, Reithalle, Review, Tim Kuypers
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Saturday, June 28th, 2014
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 28, 2014
MUNICH — Verdi’s Macbeth is back, for its eighth run in six years at Bavarian State Opera, this time to open the dressy Opernfestspiele. The production’s giant chandelier, plastic sheeting, silly tent and field of skulls are now globally familiar, even if they don’t exactly transport us to 11th-century Scotland. Ditto its unison cast whizz during the witches’ Act III Incantation, made possible by a reverse diaper process and plastic tubes. Obsession still trumps oppression (or patriotism or tyranny), as stage director Martin Kušej in 2008 saw the tale. Mute kid supers still enact the witches. Just don’t look for a heath, castle, cave or Dunsinane Hill.
The dramatic instincts and opulent tones of Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth ignited last evening’s performance (June 27). After a 3½-month break from staged opera, the soprano brought voice to burn to this role debut and had apparently been expertly tutored for it. Her sound, often ingolato, correlated little with her 2012 Giulietta or 2011 Adina here, but power and a new exploitation of her rich chest voice riveted the ear. Stage skills found her reveling in the excesses of the character without descending to caricature.
She read the letter at the start with Italianate declamation and fresh point. Vieni! T’affretta! and both verses of Or tutti, sorgete paraded the value of a plush timbre skillfully deployed. She sailed over the orchestra and ensemble in a thrilling Act I Finale — Schiudi, inferno, la bocca, ed inghiotti nel tuo grembo l’intero creato being precisely what Hell should do with this staging — and rode other climaxes with comparable apparent ease. Act II brought contrast. After a chilling La luce langue, she mustered a series of expressive, varied trills and strong coloratura for the banquet, Salva, o rè! … Si colmi il calice, flatly defying expectations. She conveyed tameness and defeat in the Sonnambulismo, which in Kušej’s concept involves no walking, and invested Verdi’s last phrase with pathetic charm, touching the D-flat and then plunging with rounded certainty to “ndiam,” albeit in something greater than the stipulated fil di voce.
Simon Keenlyside tried hard as Macbeth, a role he has already documented. He observed the musical values of the part and summoned as much heft and intensity, fury and volatility, as his lyric baritone would permit, preserving beauty of tone. He paired credibly, magnetically, with Netrebko and faced the Act II ghost and Act III apparitions with reasonable histrionic flair, dumb dramaturgy notwithstanding. But he never resembled a killer or hesitant dope. Wisely, he saved his best till last, finding dignity and power for Perfidi! All’anglo contro me v’unite! … Pietà, rispetto, amore. He was singing this next to and over the body of his queen when, awkwardly, the news of her death arrived.
If the misdemeanor of this Macbeth is having the cast pee on stage, its felony is forcing Verdi’s witches to sing from the wings. Pushed out of focus and balance, the Bavarian State Opera Chorus toiled and failed to give the opening Che faceste? dite su! its thrilling edge. And so it was for the Incantation, the Apparizioni and the chorus Ondine e silfidi, music dear to the composer’s scheme. When they weren’t being witches, though, the Sören Eckhoff-trained choristers achieved precise and penetrating results. Joseph Calleja rang tenorial rafters with Macduff’s Ah, la paterna mano, the dynamic details well executed. Ildar Abdrazakov’s firm but agile bass delivered Banco’s Come dal ciel precipita in ominous shades, before the character’s swift hoisting by the ankles and exsanguination, as Kušej has it. The Bavarian State Orchestra mustered warm lyrical playing that could turn dazzlingly martial where required, under Paolo Carignani’s idiomatic if measured command. His reading suggested exceptional thoroughness of preparation, as if a certain other maestro had provided background guidance.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Netrebko, Barcellona in Aida
Six Husbands in Tow
Time for Schwetzingen
U.S. Orchestras on Travel Ban
Ettinger Drives Aida
Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Giuseppe Verdi, Ildar Abdrazakov, Joseph Calleja, Kritik, Kušej, Macbeth, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Netrebko, Paolo Carignani, Review, Simon Keenlyside, Sören Eckhoff
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Saturday, August 24th, 2013
By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 24, 2013
MUNICH — What is written on skin? Craftsmanship “as immaculate as anything … composed since the heyday of Ravel” and “glimpses of a 21st-century tonality,” if you read Alex Ross in The New Yorker. And “a psychologically gripping, emotionally heart-pounding and viscerally satisfying drama,” according to Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim for The New York Times. The skin in question is parchment for an illuminated family history, the requisition of which propels a retelling of a short medieval horror story: husband serves faithless wife her (troubadour) lover’s heart. Boccaccio used it in 1351. Verdi five hundred years later did not. The cited critics are praising an “opera” of the bloody tale by George Benjamin to a libretto by Martin Crimp, premiered in Aix-en-Provence last year and given its first German outing here at the Prinz-Regenten-Theater on July 23 as part of the Munich Opera Festival.
To these ears, Written On Skin with its two momentary breaks amounts to a 95-minute triptych of orchestral pieces and an applied, alien vocal overlay: concert sheep in wolf’s clothing. Each piece employs constructs familiar from Benjamin’s Ringed By the Flat Horizon (1980, heard at its London premiere that year) and Palimpsests (2002, played intently here 15 months ago by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra). Those 20-minute works adumbrate with their own kind of anything-but-operatic drama: discreet coloring; cautious pacing; finely splintered textures and balances; spare, crashing climaxes; and retreats of knowing modesty. They hold the attention and lodge themselves in the mind for, well, years. Craftsmanship indeed.
Laced with motifs and fuller phrases for verrophone and bass viola da gamba, the opera’s scoring coyly addresses its ghoulish subject. Sandpaper blocks and a whip contribute against a brooding 8-6-6-6-4 string complement. Stretched atop and across is the Brittenish writing for voice. This is at its most expressive and stirring in several duets, especially those involving the husband, cast by Crimp as the “Protector.” Often, though, the meeting of the earlier composer’s techniques and Benjamin’s deliberative way with structure produces drawn-out phrases — the natural counterpart to his instrumental writing and a reflection of the style and methods he settled into at Cambridge, England, more than thirty years ago. Characters then emote in similar Saran Wrap lines at various pitches. The music cannot under the circumstances shift organically, let alone spontaneously. Instead of driving the action, it merely colors it, albeit with distinction and force: drama as ornament for inescapable, purely musical shapes.
Benjamin cultivates tension right from the start, and sustains it, as he does in concert hall music, until those inevitable but seemingly casual breaks. Tension, not suspense. If some of the same could be said of Bartók’s opera, it could never be said of the average Monteverdi madrigal.
Determined, apparently, to create a music-theater work of feature length after collaborating on the chamber-scale Into the Little Hill (2006), composer and librettist chose a tale with one linear thread: a hiring, a seduction, marital confrontation, murder, a juicy meal and a suicide. This Crimp spins out to the breaking point, even if his words are always fresh and concise; his dead-end subplot offers no substitute for missing theatrical counterpoint. And so the characterizations are limited: the Protector a landed, obsessive-possessive bully; the wife, called Agnès, his hapless vassal; the third principal singing role, called the Boy (and Angel 1), passive and largely inert — yet it is he who, hired at the outset, is tasked with preparing that family history and who stirs rebellion in Agnès, becoming her lover without wishing it or evolving as a result.
Katie Mitchell’s clearly purposed, split-level staging (from Aix) operates supportively enough. She perhaps sensed the need for more action, but she responds with supplemental and ineffectual zombie exploits stage right, and the viewer soon tunes these out. Her principal direction, however, remains assiduously in focus.
Kent Nagano led a committed performance on opening night, taking over from the composer, who had conducted in Aix. That was Munich’s loss: Benjamin, on hand for bows, is a gifted leader. But Nagano’s coordination endured and the Austrian orchestra Klangforum Wien played with obvious dedication. Philipp Alexander Marguerre and Eva Reiter ably traced the vital verrophone and viola da gamba parts. Countertenor Iestyn Davies, taking over from Bejun Mehta who had sung the Boy in France, contrasted ideally with Christopher Purves’s fearsome and all-too-realistic (bass-baritone) Protector. Both were persuasive musically. As the distressed Agnès, soprano Barbara Hannigan acted and sang as if her own life were under “protection.” Marie Victoria Simmonds (mezzo-soprano) and John Allan Clayton (tenor) made vivid contributions as Angels 2 and 3.
Photo © Matthias Schrader for Associated Press
Related posts:
Verdi’s Lady Netrebko
Kaufmann Sings Manrico
Mélisande as Hotel Clerk
Nitrates In the Canapés
Liederabend with Breslik
Tags:Barbara Hannigan, Christopher Purves, Eva Reiter, George Benjamin, Iestyn Davies, John Allan Clayton, Katie Mitchell, Kent Nagano, Klangforum Wien, Marie Victoria Simmonds, Martin Crimp, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Philipp Alexander Marguerre, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Review, Written On Skin
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Staatsoper Favors Local Fans
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 22, 2017
MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera had a delicate problem. It was selling too many tickets online, more with each passing season. Its system, powered by CTS Eventim, was so robust and so fast that little was left to sell via phone or in person minutes after the 10 a.m. start time on heavy-demand days, causing embarrassment and a sense of unfairness inside its bricks-and-mortar box office, the Tageskasse, off chic Maximilianstraße.
No longer. This season, Germany’s busiest, richest, starriest and arguably best-managed opera company has a cure, one to make any Luddite proud. It does not smash the machines exactly. It instead decries the good system behind them and handicaps the online buyers who use them — seriously, unpredictably, before breakfast. BStO seats below €100 when Anja Harteros or Jonas Kaufmann sing are now all but inaccessible online.
“CTS Eventim’s system sometimes was not up for the amount of people trying to get tickets,” the company claimed in a late-January statement, and buying was “a bit of a lottery.” The system “would throw you out of the purchase process before ending it, which was acceptable neither for the Staatsoper nor for our audience.” Imagine. Computers that sell 100 million tickets annually for 180,000 events get the jitters handling Anja or Jonas.
These flaws and a desire “to make the system more stable,” BStO’s story goes, led to its decision last fall to handicap online buying on certain mornings in 2016–17. How? A delay is “activated” when events in heavy demand go on sale, postponing the moment the buyer “gets access” to the online box office, called in German the Webshop (or occasionally Onlineshop). Phone and in-person selling, meanwhile, proceed as usual from the 10 a.m. start time.
Understandably the opera company has never announced the handicapping, and sources familiar with the Tageskasse scene say CTS Eventim’s system had nothing to do with the decision. The real motive, according to these sources, is to try to replicate online the speed of the physical line (queue) at the Tageskasse following years of grumbling from people who buy that way, and from staff too. A tug-of-war between Internet users and the bricks-and-mortar crowd has accordingly shifted in favor of the latter.
Out-of-town buyers are the worst hit, having fewer routes to tickets. Bavarians resident outside their capital city — it is the “state” opera after all — and fans of the renowned company as far away as East Asia and North America greatly rely on the Webshop.
The disadvantage is not new at BStO. Indeed the artificial online delays effectively bring to the main season the same narrow price availability for out-of-towners they have long experienced with BStO’s 142-year-old summer Munich Opera Festival. Tickets for the festival are first sold in snowy January in person only, and the lower four of eight price categories — roughly, seats below €100 for major performances — sell out this way when the biggest stars are scheduled, months before online ticketing starts.
Countless customers were surprised by the handicap on Jan. 12, 14, 18, 22, 30 and Feb. 2 while trying to buy tickets for Philipp Stölzl’s new production of Andrea Chénier, due March 12 and starring — gosh — both Harteros and Kaufmann. All performances were affected on those selling mornings, corresponding to BStO’s two-month lead time.
Surprised, and confused actually. The handicap throws up two screens in place of the Webshop. First, a countdown page, labeled with the quaint metaphor “waiting room” to dupe people into thinking the system is too burdened to process their order. This assigns a wait number, which ironically turns out to be far from “stable.” Then comes a standby page, for buyers whose number has dropped to 0 (zero) before the Webshop opens, i.e. before 10 a.m. — a strange situation, one might think, but the only one with potential to yield broad ticket choice.
Not-so-hypothetical scenarios:
Unaware of the handicap, she logs on at 9:55 a.m. She faces not her expected Webshop but the countdown page. (She would be there regardless of what event and date she is pursuing. The whole operation is impacted that morning because one heavy-demand performance is going on sale.)
She has of course no idea when the handicap was activated. (The answer could be 6 a.m., about when a physical line might start outside the Tageskasse.) But she is less troubled than buyers who may have purposefully stopped work in Tokyo or climbed out of bed in Boston.
She sees 29 lines of precise instructions auf Deutsch, unless she has opted for English screens, in which case she sees a remarkably compressed version of just five lines. (The complete English is here.) Key instruction: “Do not refresh.” Below, she reads her wait number: a high one, 400. Her chances are nil, but she doesn’t know this. She ties herself up for an hour before learning.
Logs on at 5:55 a.m. She is too early and goes straight into the normally functioning Webshop. She assumes she can just wait there until 10 a.m. But no. She must refresh the screen every twelve minutes or be disabled for inactivity. No instructions say this because the system was in normal mode when she entered. (To see them, she would have had to arrive via the countdown page and witness her wait number drop to 0 before 10 a.m.)
When she casually returns to the screen at 9:30 a.m., she discovers the Webshop inactive for her. She reloads. Now she is on the countdown page with number 200. Again no chance.
Fares better. He logs on at 6:15 a.m., apparently just after the handicap was activated. He lands on the countdown page with number 10. Like A, he is told not to refresh. He obeys. Later, but before 10 a.m., his number drops to 9, then 7. He wonders how this could be. No orders are being processed. (Possible answer: people on the standby page are failing to refresh and losing their place.)
But for him to succeed, his number must drop to 0 by 10 a.m. Otherwise, whether he’s at 400 or 4, he will be stuck on the countdown page during the crucial initial selling minutes.
Luckily he does drop to 0. He is moved to the standby page, a promising but precarious place. There he sees the instruction to refresh that N missed. He must do this every twelve minutes until 10 a.m. If he has arrived on the standby page early, say at 7:15 a.m., he will be doing a lot of refreshing. Should he fail — just once — he will find himself back on the countdown page holding a high number. (Anja and Jonas never wanted it that way.)
When the hour rolls around and the handicap ends, he must be ready, as in the past, to point and click with decisiveness and accuracy. His seats are secure only when they appear in his Einkaufswagen, the shopping cart.
A, N, and R may be imagined. The following numbers are real, recorded during the Jan. 18 handicap on Andrea Chénier ticketing in checks using two browsers and two connections:
Logging on at 10:24 a.m., a wait number of 688 with 170 seats left to sell. Three minutes later, wait number 346 with 130 seat left. At 10:43 a.m., number 179 with 38 seats. At 10:54 a.m., number 40 with 19 seats. After another five minutes, access to the Webshop with 4 seats shown as available. By 11:04 a.m., 2 seats left but neither one of them moveable into the shopping cart. At 11:07 a.m., sold out, Ausverkauft. Despite this, a new buyer could log on at 11:10 a.m. and receive wait number 382, which would drop to 0 six minutes later and lead to an empty Webshop.
Bavarian State Opera should end this nonsense. The company is damaging its reputation and working against its own carefully evolved ticket structure and sales procedures, designed to draw people of all income levels from a broad geography.
Those procedures sell tickets three ways: subscription; single-event by written order; and single-event by immediate fulfillment. The latter two are processed on a staggered basis according to performance date. Written orders (traditional mail, fax, email) are worked three months out. Immediate-fulfillment sales (online, phone, physical presence in the Tageskasse) begin two months out.
Each single-event method draws on fixed set-asides, or Kontingente, of seats in the 2,100-seat National Theater. These are broken down across BStO’s eight price categories and to within specific seating blocks, to as few as two seats, allowing near-total price and seat choice for each method. Quite sophisticated. And really quite fair, at least in the case of written orders. Even without handicapping, though, buyers outside Munich have less access to the immediate-fulfillment set-asides: getting to the Tageskasse may not be possible, and phoning is hard when there is heavy demand. Naturally they depend on the Webshop — and their hot connections, firm wrists, pinched fingertips and nanosecond nerves.
CTS Eventim, far from warranting criticism, could be held up as a most capable and user-friendly ticketer. Certainly its system offers an easier buyer interface, more precise seat sectioning, and lower fees, than that of the larcenous near-monopoly Stateside.
Instead of blaming its vendor, the opera company needs to go back to the future and solve its delicate Tageskasse problem with rigor and honesty. This means two things: adjustments to the Kontingente to reasonably protect in-person buyers; and an announcement of the change. Any tactic resulting in Internet screens that mislead buyers and waste their time, or too weird to spell out in a news release, is a bad one.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Staatsoper Imposes Queue-it
Harteros Warms to Tosca
Antonini Works Alcina’s Magic
Portraits For a Theater
Staatsoper Objects to Report
Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Commentary, CTS Eventim, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, News
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Bolton Saves Rameau’s Indes
Sunday, August 7th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 7, 2016
MUNICH — Two evenings after an “Allahu Akbar” eruption here cost nine mostly teenage, mostly Muslim, lives, it felt perverse to indulge in 280-year-old French escapism stretching to Turkey, Peru, Iran and the future United States.
But there we were July 24 in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater for Bavarian State Opera business-as-usual, a festival yet, and Rameau’s four-entrée Les Indes galantes as imagined by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the Belgian choreographer with stage-director pretensions.
And safer we were, too, than at a smaller music festival 110 miles away near Nuremberg, the outdoor Ansbach Open, where a Syrian refugee denied asylum in this country was preparing to explode his metal-piece-filled backpack among two thousand listeners. (As luck would have it, Germany’s first suicide bomber killed only himself when he detonated only his detonator and did so outside the festival’s gates, not having known in advance he would need a ticket.)
Before departing for Turkey, the opéra-ballet states its premise by means of a prologue: European lovers pressed to exchange Goddess Hébé’s doux instants (sweet moments) for Goddess Bellone’s gloire des combats can count on intercession from a third god, Amour, as they “traverse the vastest seas” in military service.
This plays out with amusing dramatic variance* in the four locales to music of beguiling harmony and bold instrumental color, in airs, vocal ensembles, choruses and dances. The U.S. entrée concludes with the Dance of the Great Peace Pipe (penned after Agapit Chicagou’s 1725 Paris visit), minuets, a gavotte, and a most charming chaconne.
If you kept your eyes closed, the performance was a treat. Opening them invited confusion, or worse, despite Cherkaoui’s fresh dance moves, tirelessly executed by his Antwerp-based Compagnie Eastman.
Ivor Bolton and the Münchner Festspiel-Orchester, an elite Baroque pick-up band, served Rameau with verve and expressive breadth, ripe string sound and fabulous wind playing. The Balthasar-Neumann-Chor from Freiburg managed its musical challenges neatly, in opaque French.
The score’s 17 roles went to ten generally stylish soloists. Lisette Oropesa proved a graceful musician in the lyric soprano duties of Hébé and Zima. Anna Prohaska, as Phani and Fatime, stopped the show with a divinely phrased Viens, Hymen, viens m’unir. Light tenor Cyril Auvity sang artfully as Valère and Tacmas, while John Moore’s baritone lent a golden timbre to the sauvage Adario. Reveling grandly in the music’s depths were basses François Lis (Huascar and Alvar) and Tareq Nazmi (Osman and Ali).
But soprano Ana Quintans encountered pitch problems as Amour and Zaïre; Elsa Benoit, the Émilie, seemed squeezed by Rameau’s nimble turns; Mathias Vidal pushed harshly for volume in the tenor roles of Carlos and Damon; and bass Goran Jurić, in drag as Bellone, muddied her vital rousing words.
As for the staging, new on this night, conceit and a ruinous idea got the better of Cherkaoui (and BStO managers, who should have intervened if they care about Baroque opera as they profess): he would thread together the prologue and entrées into one dramatic unit. Characters would appear in each other’s sections, mute. Opéra-ballet form be damned.
In place of exotic lands (requiring exotic sets and costumes), the viewer would journey from schoolroom to museum gallery to church to flower shop, to no place, to some closed border crossing. The spectacle of Peru’s Adoration du Soleil, for instance, would unfold in the church. Woven throughout, clumsily, would be tastes of the plight of Europe’s present refugees, and Europeans’ poor hospitality. Count the ironies.
[*In Turkey a melodrama, as the shipwrecked lovers’ fate turns on Osman’s magnanimity (Le turc généreux). In Peru a tragedy, as the couple’s freedom results from Huascar’s molten-lava death (Les incas du Pérou). In Iran a bucolic, as two pairs of lovers ascertain their feelings through disguise and espial (Les fleurs, original version of Aug. 23, 1735). In the U.S. a comedy, as noble savage Zima flirts with and mocks two European colonists, reversing the pattern, before homing in on loving native Adario (Les sauvages).]
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Portraits For a Theater
Nitrates In the Canapés
Harteros Warms to Tosca
Blacher Channels Maupassant
On Wenlock Edge with MPhil
Tags:Ana Quintans, Anna Prohaska, Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Compagnie Eastman, Cyril Auvity, Elsa Benoit, François Lis, Goran Jurić, Ivor Bolton, John Moore, Kritik, Les Indes galantes, Lisette Oropesa, Mathias Vidal, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Rameau, Review, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Tareq Nazmi
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Harteros Warms to Tosca
Sunday, July 17th, 2016By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 17, 2016
MUNICH — When Anja Harteros was singing her first Toscas three seasons ago, it was clear she had the vocal resources for the role, and the Mediterranean temperament. Even so, the portrayal didn’t quite compute.
Enter Bryn Terfel, a Scarpia to rattle the aloofest, longest-legged of prima donnas. And Jonas Kaufmann, trusted stage buddy, sweet Cavaradossi. Now the diva’s doubt, fear, passion and rage turn on the instant, her slashing knife grip extending a ferrous will.
Harteros fairly lived the part July 1 here at the National Theater, teamed as she must have wanted and apparently undeterred by Luc Bondy’s clunky 2009 stage conception. Warm chest tones and creamy highs, floated or hurled, came into thrilling dramatic focus this time around. Illica and Giacosa’s words made inexorable sense, the Attavanti canvas and Terfel’s guts sure targets.
The tenor, too, had a great night: astutely colored phrases, gleaming top notes, a clarion but unexaggerated Vittoria! For once, E lucevan le stelle emerged as spontaneous thought, always in Kaufmann’s wonderfully lucid Italian.
If the mighty Welshman sounded a smidgen less opulent of voice than in previous Munich Scarpias, his characterization was as potent as ever, and his savoring of Puccini’s lines most enjoyable.
The snag, alas, was Kirill Petrenko’s conducting. Forceful and weighty, it never felt rooted in the language it was supposedly driving. Still, a terrific night for the Munich Opera Festival, and nowhere more refined than during Io de’ sospiri as sung by the Tölzer Knabenchor’s uncredited soloist.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Manon, Let’s Go
Tonhalle Lights Up the Beyond
Busy Week
Time for Schwetzingen
Schultheiß Savors the Dvořák
Tags:Anja Harteros, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bondy, Giacomo Puccini, Kaufmann, Kirill Petrenko, Kritik, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, Review, Terfel, Tölzer Knabenchor, Tosca
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Guillaume Tells
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 23, 2015
MUNICH — Post is under revision.
Still image from video © Bayerische Staatsoper
Related posts:
Nitrates In the Canapés
Muti the Publisher
Honeck Honors Strauss
Kušej Saps Verdi’s Forza
Time for Schwetzingen
Tags:Amanda Forsythe, Andrew Foster-Williams, Antonino Fogliani, Antonio Pappano, Antú Romero Nunes, Bad Wildbad, Bavarian State Opera, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bongiovanni, Bryan Hymel, Camerata Bach Chor Poznań, CD, Commentary, Coro del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Damiano Michieletto, Dan Ettinger, Decca, DVD, Evgeniya Sotnikova, Gerald Finley, Graham Vick, Guillaume Tell, Günther Groissböck, Jochen Schönleber, John Osborn, Juan Diego Flórez, Judith Howarth, Kritik, Luca Tittoto, Malin Byström, Marina Rebeka, Michael Spyres, Michael Volle, Michele Mariotti, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, National Theater, Nationaltheater, Naxos, Nicola Alaimo, Nicolas Courjal, Opus Arte, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Pesaro, Raffaele Facciolà, Review, Rossini, Rossini Opera Festival, Royal Opera House, Sofia Fomina, Tara Stafford, Virtuosi Brunenses
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Mélisande as Hotel Clerk
Monday, June 29th, 2015By 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
Related posts:
See-Through Lulu
Carydis Woos Bamberg
Horses for Mozartwoche
Mahler 10 from Nézet-Séguin
Time for Schwetzingen
Tags:Alastair Miles, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Christiane Pohle, Commentary, Constantinos Carydis, Debussy, Elena Tsallagova, Elliot Madore, Hanno Eilers, Kritik, Markus Eiche, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Nikolaus Bachler, Okka von der Damerau, Pelléas et Mélisande, Peter Lobert, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Review, Tölzer Knabenchor
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Festive Sides
Friday, August 29th, 2014By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 29, 2014
MUNICH — Staged works and the legendary Lied evenings hold the limelight here at the annual Opernfestspiele, begun 139 years ago. But veins of chamber music and, since 2008, choral programming run through the five-week schedule, lending scope and affirming organizer Bayerische Staatsoper’s depth of musicianship. The chamber offerings can be hit or miss, depending on the precise collaborations of Staatsorchester members and their scores; string trios on July 24 proved a hit. The choral initiatives attempt to thread back to the company’s 16th-century roots as a Kantorei, drawing on Staatsopernchor members passionate about church repertory; Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle on July 23 proved a stretch.
David Schultheiß (violin), Adrian Mustea (viola) and Allan Bergius (cello) teamed collegially at the ornate Cuvilliés Theater. Their nervous way with Beethoven’s C-Minor Trio from Opus 9 left the 1798 piece sounding brittle and oddly pale, but in Dohnányi’s charming, unpredictable, five-movement Serenade in C (1902) things shifted into vibrant high gear underpinned by Bergius (who once had another career), peaking in the chromatically salted Scherzo. Mozart’s E-flat Divertimento, K563 (1788), with its searching Adagio and rich minuet movements, served as flattering vehicle for the stylish and technically assured work of Schultheiß, one of the orchestra’s concertmasters. Mustea’s unusually resonant viola, here and throughout, provided a firm sense of ensemble and ensured a memorable night.
The 1863 Mass was a feasible festival choice for the reborn “Münchner Hofkantorei,” not needing an orchestra. Even so, its ironic jolts and the matter of choral direction versus leadership by the principal piano tended to defeat efforts at the Court Church of All Saints. Staatsopernchor member Wolfgang Antesberger aptly paced the score and directed robust performances of the Gloria and Credo choruses. But Rossini leaves much of the initiative to the first pianist, requiring bold propulsion and phrasing that Sophie Raynaud at times lacked, although her Prélude religieux took good shape. Solo singing varied widely in quality and approach.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Horn Trios in Church
Blacher Channels Maupassant
Manon, Let’s Go
Mahler 10 from Nézet-Séguin
Verdi’s Lady Netrebko
Tags:Adrian Mustea, Allan Bergius, Allerheiligen Hofkirche, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Beethoven, Court Church of All Saints, Cuvilliés Theater, David Schultheiß, Ernö Dohnányi, München, Münchner Hofkantorei, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Petite messe solennelle, Review, Rossini, Sophie Raynaud, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Wolfgang Antesberger
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Blacher Channels Maupassant
Monday, July 7th, 2014By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 7, 2014
MUNICH — It was standing room only for Die Flut yesterday (July 6). Not only was Boris Blacher’s 1946 radio opera sold out, but the audience was expected to stand or stroll through it, as directed by Aernout Mik at a former riding hall here. Improbably part of Bavarian State Opera’s summer festival, the event introduced conductor Oksana Lyniv, the attractive new assistant to Kirill Petrenko.
Blacher might not normally draw a big crowd, but we live in visual times and “video-installation artist” Mik has a following. Hiring him must have seemed a safe bet: he could do whatever he wanted to enhance a work conceived for radio. Sadly he brought only distractions.
Visual cues abound in Die Flut, which reworks an 1885 nouvelle by Guy de Maupassant, L’épave (The Wreck), about an insurance appraiser who journeys from Paris to the endless sandbanks of the Île de Ré where a claimant’s boat has run aground an hour’s walk out from shore. The appraiser approaches the wreck:
Elle semblait sortir du sol et prenait, sur cette immense étendue plate et jaune, des proportions surprenantes. Je l’atteignis enfin, après une heure de marche. Elle gisait sur le flanc, crevée, brisée, montrant, comme les côtes d’une bête, ses os rompus, ses os de bois goudronné, percés de clous énormes. Le sable déjà l’avait envahie, entré par toutes les fentes, et il la tenait, la possédait, ne la lâcherait plus. Elle paraissait avoir pris racine en lui.
But Bay of Biscay tides, he has been warned, need rise only centimeters to cut him off. And sure enough he winds up surrounded by rising water and expecting to die as night descends — in the company of others, as it turns out, including an 18-year-old girl who is feeling cold.
Heinz von Cramer’s postwar German libretto for Blacher is the shrewdest of adaptations, retaining the salty scene and perilous sandbanks while exploring through modified roles some harsher effects of the sense of imminent death.
Cramer’s appraiser is a wealthy banker (Der alte Bankier, bass Miklós Sebestyén) who fatally tries offering cash to fellow tide victims (Der Fischer, baritone Tim Kuypers, and Der junge Mann, tenor Dean Power) if they would only swim ashore for help. His money, tellingly, proves irrelevant as the water rises, supreme as it recedes. And then there is the girl (Das Mädchen, soprano Iulia Maria Dan).
Mik missed it all. His contribution, trite mini-movies of rescues and rituals looping incessantly on screens over our heads, appeared canned, as if the director had merely used the occasion to showcase unrelated pre-existing work. He failed to set Maupassant’s remarkable scene or exploit its potential.
The action itself proved intense, though, partly because the four protagonists were confined to a platform, along with a commenting chorus and the instrumentalists (a dozen members each from the Bavarian State Opera Chorus and Bavarian State Orchestra). This shunted slowly from one end of the 80-yard hall to the other, and back, as the story unfolded, while two dozen mimes mingled with the fluid audience, gesturing in sync with each mini-movie.
Blacher’s mostly tonal 40-minute score for the singers, five wind instruments and string quintet (augmented to a septet yesterday) places passion in the voices but irony in the jaunty, blues-tinged, light-textured accompaniment. It is alas not especially original or memorable.
Lyniv secured eloquent, vivid performances. Dan, Power, Kuypers and Sebestyén projected desperation, resignation, envy, surprise or relief, as required. For reasons unclear, certain sections of the opera were played twice, to altered dramaturgy, stretching the runtime beyond an hour. A tape of the Prologue from the original 1946 broadcast lent authenticity.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Portraits For a Theater
Nitrates In the Canapés
A Complete Frau, at Last
Kušej Saps Verdi’s Forza
Harteros Warms to Tosca
Tags:Aernout Mik, Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Boris Blacher, Dean Power, Die Flut, Guy de Maupassant, Heinz von Cramer, Iulia Maria Dan, Kritik, Miklós Sebestyén, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Oksana Lyniv, Reithalle, Review, Tim Kuypers
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Verdi’s Lady Netrebko
Saturday, June 28th, 2014By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 28, 2014
MUNICH — Verdi’s Macbeth is back, for its eighth run in six years at Bavarian State Opera, this time to open the dressy Opernfestspiele. The production’s giant chandelier, plastic sheeting, silly tent and field of skulls are now globally familiar, even if they don’t exactly transport us to 11th-century Scotland. Ditto its unison cast whizz during the witches’ Act III Incantation, made possible by a reverse diaper process and plastic tubes. Obsession still trumps oppression (or patriotism or tyranny), as stage director Martin Kušej in 2008 saw the tale. Mute kid supers still enact the witches. Just don’t look for a heath, castle, cave or Dunsinane Hill.
The dramatic instincts and opulent tones of Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth ignited last evening’s performance (June 27). After a 3½-month break from staged opera, the soprano brought voice to burn to this role debut and had apparently been expertly tutored for it. Her sound, often ingolato, correlated little with her 2012 Giulietta or 2011 Adina here, but power and a new exploitation of her rich chest voice riveted the ear. Stage skills found her reveling in the excesses of the character without descending to caricature.
She read the letter at the start with Italianate declamation and fresh point. Vieni! T’affretta! and both verses of Or tutti, sorgete paraded the value of a plush timbre skillfully deployed. She sailed over the orchestra and ensemble in a thrilling Act I Finale — Schiudi, inferno, la bocca, ed inghiotti nel tuo grembo l’intero creato being precisely what Hell should do with this staging — and rode other climaxes with comparable apparent ease. Act II brought contrast. After a chilling La luce langue, she mustered a series of expressive, varied trills and strong coloratura for the banquet, Salva, o rè! … Si colmi il calice, flatly defying expectations. She conveyed tameness and defeat in the Sonnambulismo, which in Kušej’s concept involves no walking, and invested Verdi’s last phrase with pathetic charm, touching the D-flat and then plunging with rounded certainty to “ndiam,” albeit in something greater than the stipulated fil di voce.
Simon Keenlyside tried hard as Macbeth, a role he has already documented. He observed the musical values of the part and summoned as much heft and intensity, fury and volatility, as his lyric baritone would permit, preserving beauty of tone. He paired credibly, magnetically, with Netrebko and faced the Act II ghost and Act III apparitions with reasonable histrionic flair, dumb dramaturgy notwithstanding. But he never resembled a killer or hesitant dope. Wisely, he saved his best till last, finding dignity and power for Perfidi! All’anglo contro me v’unite! … Pietà, rispetto, amore. He was singing this next to and over the body of his queen when, awkwardly, the news of her death arrived.
If the misdemeanor of this Macbeth is having the cast pee on stage, its felony is forcing Verdi’s witches to sing from the wings. Pushed out of focus and balance, the Bavarian State Opera Chorus toiled and failed to give the opening Che faceste? dite su! its thrilling edge. And so it was for the Incantation, the Apparizioni and the chorus Ondine e silfidi, music dear to the composer’s scheme. When they weren’t being witches, though, the Sören Eckhoff-trained choristers achieved precise and penetrating results. Joseph Calleja rang tenorial rafters with Macduff’s Ah, la paterna mano, the dynamic details well executed. Ildar Abdrazakov’s firm but agile bass delivered Banco’s Come dal ciel precipita in ominous shades, before the character’s swift hoisting by the ankles and exsanguination, as Kušej has it. The Bavarian State Orchestra mustered warm lyrical playing that could turn dazzlingly martial where required, under Paolo Carignani’s idiomatic if measured command. His reading suggested exceptional thoroughness of preparation, as if a certain other maestro had provided background guidance.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
Related posts:
Netrebko, Barcellona in Aida
Six Husbands in Tow
Time for Schwetzingen
U.S. Orchestras on Travel Ban
Ettinger Drives Aida
Tags:Bavarian State Opera, Bavarian State Orchestra, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerischer Staatsopernchor, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, Giuseppe Verdi, Ildar Abdrazakov, Joseph Calleja, Kritik, Kušej, Macbeth, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Netrebko, Paolo Carignani, Review, Simon Keenlyside, Sören Eckhoff
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Written On Skin, at Length
Saturday, August 24th, 2013By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 24, 2013
MUNICH — What is written on skin? Craftsmanship “as immaculate as anything … composed since the heyday of Ravel” and “glimpses of a 21st-century tonality,” if you read Alex Ross in The New Yorker. And “a psychologically gripping, emotionally heart-pounding and viscerally satisfying drama,” according to Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim for The New York Times. The skin in question is parchment for an illuminated family history, the requisition of which propels a retelling of a short medieval horror story: husband serves faithless wife her (troubadour) lover’s heart. Boccaccio used it in 1351. Verdi five hundred years later did not. The cited critics are praising an “opera” of the bloody tale by George Benjamin to a libretto by Martin Crimp, premiered in Aix-en-Provence last year and given its first German outing here at the Prinz-Regenten-Theater on July 23 as part of the Munich Opera Festival.
To these ears, Written On Skin with its two momentary breaks amounts to a 95-minute triptych of orchestral pieces and an applied, alien vocal overlay: concert sheep in wolf’s clothing. Each piece employs constructs familiar from Benjamin’s Ringed By the Flat Horizon (1980, heard at its London premiere that year) and Palimpsests (2002, played intently here 15 months ago by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra). Those 20-minute works adumbrate with their own kind of anything-but-operatic drama: discreet coloring; cautious pacing; finely splintered textures and balances; spare, crashing climaxes; and retreats of knowing modesty. They hold the attention and lodge themselves in the mind for, well, years. Craftsmanship indeed.
Laced with motifs and fuller phrases for verrophone and bass viola da gamba, the opera’s scoring coyly addresses its ghoulish subject. Sandpaper blocks and a whip contribute against a brooding 8-6-6-6-4 string complement. Stretched atop and across is the Brittenish writing for voice. This is at its most expressive and stirring in several duets, especially those involving the husband, cast by Crimp as the “Protector.” Often, though, the meeting of the earlier composer’s techniques and Benjamin’s deliberative way with structure produces drawn-out phrases — the natural counterpart to his instrumental writing and a reflection of the style and methods he settled into at Cambridge, England, more than thirty years ago. Characters then emote in similar Saran Wrap lines at various pitches. The music cannot under the circumstances shift organically, let alone spontaneously. Instead of driving the action, it merely colors it, albeit with distinction and force: drama as ornament for inescapable, purely musical shapes.
Benjamin cultivates tension right from the start, and sustains it, as he does in concert hall music, until those inevitable but seemingly casual breaks. Tension, not suspense. If some of the same could be said of Bartók’s opera, it could never be said of the average Monteverdi madrigal.
Determined, apparently, to create a music-theater work of feature length after collaborating on the chamber-scale Into the Little Hill (2006), composer and librettist chose a tale with one linear thread: a hiring, a seduction, marital confrontation, murder, a juicy meal and a suicide. This Crimp spins out to the breaking point, even if his words are always fresh and concise; his dead-end subplot offers no substitute for missing theatrical counterpoint. And so the characterizations are limited: the Protector a landed, obsessive-possessive bully; the wife, called Agnès, his hapless vassal; the third principal singing role, called the Boy (and Angel 1), passive and largely inert — yet it is he who, hired at the outset, is tasked with preparing that family history and who stirs rebellion in Agnès, becoming her lover without wishing it or evolving as a result.
Katie Mitchell’s clearly purposed, split-level staging (from Aix) operates supportively enough. She perhaps sensed the need for more action, but she responds with supplemental and ineffectual zombie exploits stage right, and the viewer soon tunes these out. Her principal direction, however, remains assiduously in focus.
Kent Nagano led a committed performance on opening night, taking over from the composer, who had conducted in Aix. That was Munich’s loss: Benjamin, on hand for bows, is a gifted leader. But Nagano’s coordination endured and the Austrian orchestra Klangforum Wien played with obvious dedication. Philipp Alexander Marguerre and Eva Reiter ably traced the vital verrophone and viola da gamba parts. Countertenor Iestyn Davies, taking over from Bejun Mehta who had sung the Boy in France, contrasted ideally with Christopher Purves’s fearsome and all-too-realistic (bass-baritone) Protector. Both were persuasive musically. As the distressed Agnès, soprano Barbara Hannigan acted and sang as if her own life were under “protection.” Marie Victoria Simmonds (mezzo-soprano) and John Allan Clayton (tenor) made vivid contributions as Angels 2 and 3.
Photo © Matthias Schrader for Associated Press
Related posts:
Verdi’s Lady Netrebko
Kaufmann Sings Manrico
Mélisande as Hotel Clerk
Nitrates In the Canapés
Liederabend with Breslik
Tags:Barbara Hannigan, Christopher Purves, Eva Reiter, George Benjamin, Iestyn Davies, John Allan Clayton, Katie Mitchell, Kent Nagano, Klangforum Wien, Marie Victoria Simmonds, Martin Crimp, München, Münchner Opernfestspiele, Munich, Munich Opera Festival, Philipp Alexander Marguerre, Prinz-Regenten-Theater, Review, Written On Skin
Posted in Munich Times | Comments Closed
Blogs
Archives
Tags
Meta
Musical America Blogs is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).