Salome at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu
Production: Claus Guth

Herodes:  Thomas Blondelle (tenor)
Herodias: Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet (mezzo-soprano)
Salome: Allison Oakes (soprano)
Jochanaan: Michael Volle (baritone)
Narraboth: Attilio Glaser (tenor)

In case you hadn't noticed before, Salome is an abused child.  She is sexually obsessed because she has had sex since she was small.  My feeling is that this is absolutely so.  There are many things about this production that I could not explain, but one thing seemed clear--Herod is sexually obsessed with Salome.  You knew that.  His wife knows it.  Perhaps it is as I have long suspected, perhaps Herodias has suggested to Salome that Jochanaan would be better off dead.  Certainly she has told Salome that he is ranting about her.

Jochanaan arises from a pile of clothing on the floor wearing only underpants.  Blond girls of various ages come out and dress him.  I cannot explain the pile of clothing, but the young girls seem skilled at dressing an adult man. From years of practice, perhaps.  Salome begins in a nightgown and changes to a dress.  The other girls remain in their night gowns.  Clearly the girls represent Salome at various stages of her life.

At the end we are in a men's clothing store.  I have no idea why.  Clearly this is a regie opera.  For no reason that I could possibly explain I enjoyed this.  Strauss' Salome is generally about dancing, which here is only symbolic.  Be aware that there are virtually no opera singers who can both sing Salome and actually dance.  Our Salome danced with Herodes.  Perhaps that is why he liked it.

I have seen Alain Altinoglu before only with Jonas Kaufmann.  He conducted the Munich Manon Lescaut and the Met Werther.  He was excellent then and now.  The music was varied and interesting, expressing the changing atmosphere of the scenes as they progressed.

Alison Oakes seems a young woman, who nevertheless performed this difficult role well.  Of the others, I especially liked.Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet.  For some reason there was a lot of twitching which appeared and disappeared.  Men from the ballet stood around and then twitched.  Jeanne-Michele twitched rather better than the others.  IMHO:

Salome normally builds to an overwhelming climax, one where you also feel that someone should kill Salome.  But in this production the perversity is blunted.  She does not actually kiss the head of Jochanaan, though she says she does.  She sings and then sort of wanders off.  They don't kill her.  The effect is unmelodramatic and seems more a successfully executed revenge on Herodes than an obsession.

Footnote:  Michael Volle was the Sachs in the wonderful Die Meistersinger I saw at Salzburg.

Manon Lescaut from Munich

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu
Production: Hans Neuenfels

Manon Lescaut: Kristine Opolais (soprano)
Lescaut: Markus Eiche Il (baritone)
Cavaliere Renato Des Grieux: Jonas Kaufmann (tenor)
Geronte di Ravoir: Roland Bracht (bass)

I didn't mind the production as much as I thought I would.  All that starkness only serves to emphasize how spectacularly wonderful the music was--the conducting, the orchestra, the soloists, Kristine and the ever more wonderful Jonas Kaufmann.  Thank you for bringing me what I wanted.  And thank you for making it even more magnificent than I imagined.
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Jonas Kaufmann's Werther

👍🏻
Conductor: Alain Altinoglu
Production: Richard Eyre
Set and Costume Designer: Rob Howell

Werther:  Jonas Kaufmann (tenor)
Charlotte:  Sophie Koch (mezzo-soprano)
Sophie:  Lisette Oropesa (soprano)
Albert:  David Bizic (baritone)

If you have read this blog for long, you will know that I flew to Paris a few years ago to see Jonas Kaufmann sing Werther.  I loved it even more this time live from the Metropolitan Opera in HD.

I liked the production, which moved the time to the late 19th century, very much.  It did what I always say the production is for:  it explained the action.  They staged the overture to show Charlotte's mother dying at Christmas just as they began to sing carols.  This explains why father is teaching the children Christmas carols in the summer.

We know why Werther is at Charlotte's house--he is her date for the ball.  The production shows a small bit of the ball before returning us to the house.  Every scene shows this attention to detail without becoming distracting.  There's a harpsichord because the libretto says there is, but in the 1890s no one would have owned a harpsichord. 

I enjoyed Lisette Oropesa's Sophie very much and find that I could not forgive Werther when he made her cry.  Sophie Koch warmed slowly into the role exactly as a proper Charlotte should.

But you know we are here for Jonas Kaufmann.  This is the main opera where the person who has the mad scene is the man.  In fact the entire opera is about a man going mad for love.  If Jonas wasn't so good looking, we might be more afraid than attracted.  He overwhelms us with his intensity.  If you have seen Werther without Jonas you will know that it needs this intensity.

She called herself SHAR-LOT, while he occasionally called her car-LOT-tuh.  In other words she pronounced her name French and he pronounced it German.  Curious. In his interview he greeted his fans in Germany and Austria and mentioned that opera is the greatest of all art forms.  I couldn't agree more.

(Spoiler alert) The sound went out in the final scene, but we saw after he is dead she walked over and picked up the gun.

I couldn't help noticing things talked about on Twitter.  Perhaps I'll have to stop reading it.  I noticed when the couple who had no other dialog talked about Klopstock.  Klopstock and Ossian were writers who were talked about in Goethe's time. 

I think Kaufmann is the best thing going, and I'm glad there are so many ways for me to see his work.

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I went again.  You knew I would.  Seeing the ending without the rest of the opera just didn't work for me, so I went to see the whole thing again.  He is a genuine phenomenon.  He treats each aspect of the Gesamtkunstwerk that is opera as its own individual art form, raising it to new levels of beauty and brilliance. I think the one in Paris was sweeter.

Klopstock.