Der Freischütz

Conductor: Antonello Manacorda 
Production: Dmitri Tcherniakov 

 

Ottokar, Prince: Boris Prýgl (baritone)
Kuno, forrester: Bálint Szabó (bass)
Agathe, Kuno's daughter: Golda Schultz (soprano)
Ännchen: Anna Prohaska  (soprano)
Kaspar / Samiel: Kyle Ketelsen (bass)
Max: Pavel Černoch (tenor)
Ein Eremit: Tareq Nazmi (bass)
Kilian: Milan Siljanov  (baritone)

 

Der Freischütz, 1821, by Carl Maria von Weber streamed from the Bayerische Staatsoper.  It's a Singspiel, which means there is spoken dialog just as in Fidelio.  I remember it was covered in school as an historically significant event, though performances are rare.  Once long ago I was in Vienna when it was playing, and I thought not to miss it.  It is my only previous experience of this opera.

You can tell from the picture that it's regie.  These are business men in an office tower.  In the front is a man in a blue suit with brown shoes.  He has not been properly raised.  Blue suits go with black shoes.  I am not buying Freischütz in an office.  Waiters come in wearing pandemic masks.  The contest isn't about marksmanship, it's about being willing to shoot someone.  So the cops don't show up if you shoot someone through the window of an office building?  I'm not buying it.

I love the music in this opera.  I suppose it's the most like Beethoven.  The arias are nice.  Ok.  Alles gute.  So no one is really shooting anyone.  The waiters tell us that it's all fake.  The scenes end entirely without applause.

Max is told he must go to the Wolf's Glen, but in this single set production it looks just like the other scenes.  Max must shoot his fiance.  The music leads us to a happy ending, but then there is a twist.  I won't give it away.  The music is pretty good.  This is the same director that put Les Troyens in a mental hospital.  If you've never seen the opera, this will give you a rough idea.  It streams for 30 days.

Porgy and Bess in HD

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Conductor...............David Robertson
Production..............James Robinson
Choreographer.........Camille A. Brown

Porgy...................Eric Owens
Bess....................Angel Blue
Sporting Life.......Frederick Ballentine
Crown.................Alfred Walker
Clara...................Golda Schultz
Jake....................Donovan Singletary
Serena.................Latonia Moore
Maria..................Denyce Graves

Host...................Audra McDonald

Saturday we were treated to a live in HD transmission of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.  This was a wonderful experience.  It was announced that Eric Owens had a cold, but we loved him anyway. They have spared no expense in assembling the above cast.

It was a new production shared with the ENO and some other companies.  Rooms are outlined in transparent beams, allowing for private spaces when needed and open spaces for the larger crowd scenes.  Porgy wears a brace like he had polio, a reasonable explanation for his crippling.  The only aspect of the production anyone seemed to mind was the choice to portray Clara and Jake's child as a babe in arms, a tiny, always sleeping babe in arms.  The current trend in opera is to eliminate any children without dialog and replace them with puppets, robots, or maybe inert blobs of cloth.  This reduces rehearsal time.  The baby doesn't grow with the passage of time.  It wasn't terrible, but it was a distraction.

All the supporting groups were in top form.  The great Met orchestra played Gershwin in perfect style.  One comment about the chorus said, "They're doing the Verdi Requiem."  Big singing.  We go to the opera to hear big singing, and we got it here.  The ballet was choreographed to suggest what might have been happening in this place and time.

The singing was incredible, including Eric.  But the thing that set this Porgy apart from all others was the drama.  The individual characters came to life.  The director and the actors themselves get the credit for this.  Opera is so dense and complicated, and this certainly includes Porgy and Bess, that the development of complete personalities is often left by the wayside.  We loved them all.

The extremely high quality was maintained in the interviews by Audra McDonald.  She was a friend to all.

Thank you for bringing us such a magnificent Porgy and Bess. 

Die Zauberflöte in HD

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Conductor:  James Levine
Production/Costume and Puppet Designer:  Julie Taymor

Pamina:  Golda Schultz
Queen of the Night:  Kathryn Lewek
Tamino:  Charles Castronovo
Sarastro:  René Pape
Papageno: Markus Werba
Speaker:  Christian Van Horn

Nadine Sierra was our announcer today for Mozart's Die Zauberflöte from the Met, and she did a fine job.  She has charisma to burn.  Julie Taymor's production of The Magic Flute first played in HD with cuts and in English in 2006 and has replayed since then. This performance was for those of us who love this opera in German.  It was lovely to hear the original words in an uncut version.

It is interesting to me that in his final year of life Mozart wrote two operas about forgiveness.  Die Zauberflöte and La Clemenza di Tito.  Perhaps it was for us.  This is Kurt Moll.  In this holy hall we don't speak of revenge.



Out of the cast listed above, only Markus Werba was completely new to me.  His Papageno was a joy.

Kathryn Lewek was in Cecilia Bartoli's Ariodante which I very much wish I had seen.  She was outstanding here.

Golda Schultz appeared in the La Clemenza di Tito from Salzburg this past summer. Pamina suits her better.

Charles Castronovo has appeared a few times in San Francisco.  My favorite outing from him was Il Postino with Placido.  His voice is robust for Tamino, but I agree with his comments--he enjoys a heroic sounding Tamino.

Everyone knows the one and only René Pape who flew over just for this performance.  He's the best now.

I love the Julie Taymor production and enjoyed seeing it again.

La Clemenza di Tito from Salzburg

Vitellia and Tito

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Teodor Currentzis | Conductor 
Peter Sellars | Stage director

Russell Thomas | Tito Vespasiano (b) USA
Golda Schultz | Vitellia (b) South Africa
Christina Gansch | Servilia (w) Austria
Marianne Crebassa | Sesto (w) France
Jeanine De Bique | Annio (b) Trinidad
Willard White | Publio (b) Jamaica

This is Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito from the Salzburg Festival in a staging by the American Peter Sellars.  I put letters next to the cast to show that most of the cast is black.  They are from everywhere.  I know what this would mean to Americans but am not sure how a European audience would react.  It would be difficult to persuade me that the timing of this was a coincidence.  All appear to be fine singers.  This is on medici.tv until November, and I see no titles.

When the opera opens the crowd of mostly white people are herded into a corner by army.  Some of the women wear head scarves.  Tito picks Sesto and Servilia out of the crowd.  This is such wonderful music.  How have I not known this?

There are Roman arches across the stage as the only reminder of the Roman Empire, but the costumes are all modern.  I read elsewhere that Tito is compared to Nelson Mandella.  This is rather more profound than I normally expect from Peter Sellars.  This is clearly a concept production, much more so than the Claus Guth from Glyndebourne.  Mandella, the great reconciler is evoked.  Clearly Sellars has changed it into a story of racial conflict and broadened the impact by placing it in modern South Africa and using black singers.

Sesto and Annio

Sesto shoots Tito who does not die.  This is intensely serious.  A miracle could happen -- I could become a fan.  This is so brilliant I am truly amazed.  The timing couldn't be more right.  It goes to the top of my list of great Regietheater.

Annio sings a Kyrie for those who have died in the raid on the Campidoglio.  Jeanine De Bique's Annio was for me the best singing.  I liked Golda Schultz but thought she struggled with the low parts of her arias.  The use of chorus is spectacular and may truly be his area of expertise.  Russell Thomas raises Tito to new heights and then dies in the hospital.  Tutto perdono.  Are we ourselves so large?

This version has a sad ending which is achieved in part through the presence in this performance of music not originally in the score for this opera, music undoubtedly added by Peter Sellars.  One may feel free to complain.  The first clue came with the Kyrie sung by Annio.  He liked the singer and wanted her to have more to sing.  In part the tragic ending is created through the addition of serious music from Mozart's Great Mass in C minor.

I felt the brilliance of this interpretation long before the ending and therefore did not require this musical interpolation.

Bayerische Staatsoper Il Trovatore

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Conductor Paolo Carignani
Production Olivier Py

Conte di Luna: Alexey Markov
Leonora: Anja Harteros
Azucena: Elena Manistina
Manrico: Jonas Kaufmann
Ferrando: Kwangchul Youn
Ines: Golda Schultz
Ruiz: Francesco Petrozzi


It was a lot of fun watching the stream of Il Trovatore from the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.  Nowadays the European producers are all ex-psychoanalysts.  Everything happens for some deep psychological reason which we then display on the stage.  And what better reason for this treatment than the twisted motives of Il Trovatore?

Count di Luna's father killed Azucena's gypsy mother because she looked at his new born son?  This is another racial hatred plot.  When people in white cone hats show up, we Americans imagine it has something to do with the Ku Klux Klan, but my sources say this is supposed to represent the inquisition.  Azucena spends the rest of her life trying to avenge her mother's death.  In our production Azucena's mother is constantly present on the stage in the person of a thin skeletal woman with long blond hair (ballet, I think).  We aren't allowed to forget her importance in the story.

So Manrico is also a mess.  Azucena tells him that in a frenzy she threw her own son into her mother's flames.  "So then who am I?" he asks.  He is a warrior and a singer and a lover and a very confused guy.  Early in the opera he tries to kill di Luna but something prevents him.

Count di Luna has the mysterious ghost of his lost brother whom rumor would tell us is not dead but kidnapped by the gypsies.  Of course, this brother is Manrico.  It's interesting that I am interested in the plot of this opera for the first time.

This leaves Leonora, the romantic object of both Manrico and di Luna.  How can we make her more complicated, too?  In this production she is blind, making her mistaking di Luna for Manrico more  believable.

There is a stage within a stage which in the anvil scene contains a large cylinder that someone beats on.  It's something to make noise when there are no anvils.  Though not in the score, the anvils are such a firm tradition that no one but Muti ever leaves them out.  The following scene included real nudity by a dancer in the small stage.  Only her shoes remain after she removes her clothes.  I am tempted to digress into nudity at the opera, but will resist.

We are not here for the production, interesting as it may be.  Anja Harteros doesn't really like to travel and is most at home performing in her home house, the Bayerische Staatsoper.  She was simply magnificent and received the most accolades.  I shouted a few bravas at my computer for fun.  This is how we like our Verdi.  The soprano dominates the ensembles with the natural force of her voice and not through shouting and distortion of the tone.  Her phrasing is a joy.  I am a fan.

There was a fuss because Jonas Kaufmann sang "di quella pira" a half tone down.  This is an established operatic tradition every bit as firmly established as the anvils.  Muti leaves out the uncomposed high C that makes this transposition necessary.  Jonas's performance of this aria was exciting.  I listened to this opera in a pirated recording earlier in the week, and I liked him a lot more in this performance.  His confused Manrico was very sympathetic.

They put together an excellent cast for this.  Is Munich now the center of the operatic universe?

P.S.  I see in the teaser a lot more nudity than I saw on the stream. This specific performance is not really suitable for DVD release because while Frau Harteros was generally wonderful, she fudged most of her high notes, perhaps the conductor's fault.

In the teaser the director says that the production is supposed to be a nightmare.  Does that make it less horrible?