Posts Tagged ‘Schiller Theater’

‘The Magic Flute’ regains its Classical Garb

Friday, November 16th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

As Regietheater becomes the norm on opera stages in Germany, it is a pleasant, if not shocking, surprise to see a production of Die Zauberflöte that looks like a throwback to the time of its world premiere. The Staatsoper Berlin has revived a 1994 staging modelled after designs by the nineteenth-century Prussian architect and landscape painter Karl Friedrich Schinkel, primarily remembered for his Royal Theater (now rebuilt as the Konzerthaus) on Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt. Schinkel’s sets were commissioned to commemorate the crowning of Friedrich Wilhelm I on January 18, 1816, 115 years after the inauguration of Friedrich Wilhelm I. In contrast to the production’s huge success with the audience, the prince was reportedly not pleased with the results of this investment of royal funds. “In the future I won’t mix my opinion into administration affairs,” he wrote to the General Intendant of the Royal Theater.

While stage director August Everding and his team emphasize in program notes that it would be impossible to recreate Schinkel’s vision, as we cannot travel back in time to witness certain conventions in mimic and gesture, they hope to have shed new light on Mozart’s opera in the very city that is home to Schinkel’s neo-Classical creations. The Staatsoper’s current home in the Schiller does not benefit from the 18th-century splendour of the company’s headquarters on the Boulevard unter den Linden, which are currently under renovation, but painted sets by Fred Berndt and costumes by Dorothée Uhrmacher (seen November 9) immerse the audience in an aesthetic that faithfully evoke the mythic realms of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro.

The Queen descends for her first aria on a crescent moon against a starry sky while sets representing the rocky terrain on which Prince Tamino arrives part seamlessly to the side. Sarastro’s priestdom emerges with trompe l’oeil paintings of the Egyptian-inspired architecture indicated by Mozart’s librettist, Emmanuel Schikaneder, with expert lighting by Franz Peter David to give the sets depth. In what could easily offend modern viewers, Monostatos and his gang are represented with blackface as a group of violent thugs, while the three boys first emerge with a unicorn. Surreal animals ushered in by the magic flute bring a further touch of childish charm. The feathered Papageno and the family he joins at the end of the opera also made for humorous moments, even when the libretto was doctored with contemporary gags, such as the bird catcher’s response to Tamino that they are in the Schiller Theater.

In a strange twist to the usual constellation, the evening was not as even musically as it was theatrically. The conductor Julien Salemkour, an assistant to Music Director Daniel Barenboim, gave a somewhat perfunctory performance with the Staatskapelle, often hammering out notes without enough dynamic nuance and rushing the ends of phrases. On a few occasions he also did not coordinate smoothly with the singers. The performance gained intensity and authenticity starting with the more subdued, neo-Bachian passages that usher in Tamino and Pamina’s trials through fire and water toward the end of the second act, but could have used more elasticity in the final chorus “Heil sie euch Geweihten.” Having heard the orchestra in Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro under Barenboim last season, I know the musicians are capable of better.

The visceral, legato singing of René Pape in the role of Sarastro only emphasized how much more attention to line this deceptively simple score deserves, particularly in his aria “In diesen heiligen Hallen.” Pape is surely one of the best Sarastros of his generation, if not the past century, grounding the role with solemn spirituality. The Slovakian tenor Pavol Breslik also gave a beautifully sung performance in the role of Tamino. The streetwise mannerisms of Adriane Queiroz may not have always evoked the innocence of Princess Pamina, but her lush soprano colored ensemble numbers with reliable warmth. She was also affecting in the scene in which Sarastro forbids her from taking the vengeful orders of her mother. As the Queen, Anna Siminska reliably hit the stratospheric staccato notes of her arias but struggled with intonation as she prepared for the climax of “Der Hölle Rache” and did not capture the character’s menacing seduction.

Roman Trekel animated the show with well-sculpted tones as Papageno and a keen sense of comic timing. He found a fine match in his Papagena, Narine Yeghiyan. In the role of Monostatos, Michael Smallwood was equally convincing with a clear, high lying tenor and humorous presence. The Three Women (Carola Höhn, Rowan Hellier and Anna Lapkovskaja) formed a compelling ensemble, as did the Three Boys (of the Aurelius Sängerknaben) despite difficulty following the conductor in their last scene. The guards of the pyramid (Kyungho Kim and Alina Anca) stood out among the male comprimario roles of the priestdom, and the chorus provided well-balanced singing, particularly in the second act. As mythical animals waved at the audience during the final bars, one had the feeling that Mozart and Schikaneder might approve of a production so respectful of the artistic principles that have proved their popularity with audiences time and again.

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Feldman’s ‘Neither’ gets a Virtual Orchestra; A l’Arme! Festival for Contemporary Jazz

Friday, July 20th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

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

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

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

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

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

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

A l’Arme!

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

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

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

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

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Infektion! ‘Europeras 3&4’ and Rihm’s ‘Dionysus’ at the Staatsoper

Thursday, July 12th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dionysus

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

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

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

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

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

Sets by performance artist Jonathan Meese (c) Ruth Walz

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Claus Guth’s Forest-bound ‘Don Giovanni’ at the Staatsoper; Musikfestspiele Potsdam’s new Pleasure Garden

Friday, June 29th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

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

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

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

(c) Monika Rittershaus

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

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

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

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

The production runs through July 6.

(c) Monika Rittershaus

Out at Friedrich the Great’s old stomping grounds…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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