Tristan und Isolde from Munich 👍🏻

 

Conductor -  Kirill Petrenko 
Production - Krzysztof Warlikowski 

Tristan - Jonas Kaufmann 
Isolde - Anja Harteros 
King Mark - Mika Kares 
Kurwenal - Wolfgang Koch 
Brangäne - Okka von der Damerau

This is Wagner's Tristan und Isolde from the Bayerische Staatsoper.  It's a regie production, naturally.  Almost everything from there is.  I'm not sure it provides a context.  They all wear modern clothing, and we don't seem to be on a ship.

Act I.

Tristan has traveled to Ireland to bring back the future bride of King Mark of Cornwall.  He is there in his official capacity as representative of Cornwall.  Actually Tristan and Princess Isolde have an already existing relationship.  In a war between the two kingdoms, Tristan has killed Isolde's fiance and been seriously wounded in the process.  Isolde with the help of Brangäne nursed him back to health.  

On the journey she tries to order him around.  He remains distant and sends his assistant, Kurwenal.  This bit is not precisely clear.  Brangäne prepares a potion that Tristan and Isolde are to share.  Tristan drinks half, and then Isolde drinks the rest.  They seem to think it will kill them, but instead they fall hopelessly in love.  I thought the sudden falling in love was well handled.  We appear to be doing social distancing in this production.  No one touches in this part.

Act II

Isolde keeps turning the lights on and off.  I'm not sure what that's about.  I've never seen this character portrayed as perverse.  A feature of this production is that we see the characters live on the stage and projected on the wall in the form of a film at the same time.  Brangäne blames herself for administering the potion, but Isolde blames the Love Spirit who spreads love all around.  Isolde sees herself without love as destined for death.

I am an hour and a half in and did not ever before realize what a bear of a part Isolde is.  Other characters make brief appearances.  Finally Tristan enters and they talk about their time traveling to Cornwall.  She feels that she loved him then, but he was there in the role of foe.  Now they cannot simply forget that they love one another.  There is much discussion of which is better:  day or night?  Night is chosen.  Tristan wants to die.  The picture above comes from this section.

In the real world they sit in chairs and sing, but in the film behind they meet in the bedroom.  I don't know why I like this, but I do.

They sing for a long time about death, then suddenly they take needles from a bowl on the table and give themselves shots.  Death?  The bed in the background is suddenly surrounded by water.  Then people begin to enter.  They are discovered.  King Mark tells his story, that it was Tristan who thought he should marry.  Isolde is hearing this story for the first time.

This hardly seems like the same opera.  We want these two singers together in this opera because they are together emotionally.

Isolde says that she will follow Tristan to his home.  Melot, the betrayer, complains and the two men draw swords.  The bald person reappears.  Melot stabs Tristan.

Act III

Bald people in uniforms drinking coffee?  This part of the production I don't get.  Tristan sits with them and drinks coffee.  Next to him they look like children.  All but one appear to be puppets. A return to childhood?  An English horn plays on the stage.  

Kurvenal sings to the puppet Tristan while Jonas sings.  Then they exchange places. The puppet in the yellow blouse is Isolde herself.  I don't think I realized before how little time Tristan and Isolde spend on stage together.  I feel like I have never seen this opera before.  Opera's greatest singing actors have brought it to life as never before.  Absolutely stunning.

Old age advice.  Do not mourn that your love cannot be fulfilled.  Rejoice that passion can come to you.

Die tote Stadt, Munich

 

Conductor: Kirill Petrenko 
Production: Simon Stone 

Paul (tenor):   Jonas Kaufmann
Marie/Marietta (soprano):   Marlis Petersen
Juliette (soprano):  Mirjam Mezak
Brigitta (mezzo-soprano): Jennifer Johnston
Frank-Fritz (baritone):  Andrzej Filonczyk

This performance of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die tote Stadt, 2019, finally came to me from the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.  I've been wishing for it.  It's a reminder that the current management disappears in the fall of 2021.  Goodbye to Petrenko.

We begin with Paul returning home where he has been away.  He removes sheets covering the furniture and throws everything to Brigitta.  Paul's young wife has recently died, and he has become obsessed with another young woman who looks like his dead wife.  Paul appears to be a screamer role.  I love Jonas but prefer him not screaming.  When he's not screaming, Jonas is glorious.  You know that.  He's a wonderful singer and actor with spectacular diction and a fabulous legato.  The rotating stage set seems to work well.

A blond woman comes in on a bicycle.  She enters the house through the window.  He appears to have invited her for dinner since the table is set.  She puts on one of his wife's dresses, and he calls her Marie.  She reminds him that her name is Marietta.  They sing Mariettas Lied.  It's very beautiful and intense.  It's Jonas.  What else would it be?  I like the production a lot so far.  [My favorite]

Very quickly we move to a flashback with a bald woman who must be his wife who died, and she must have died of cancer.  What a fast change, for this is also Marlis Petersen.  No hair, bare feet, hospital gown.

At the beginning of Act II we see Brigitta in a nun's uniform with other nuns.  She says this is her life now.  Marietta is having fun with a group of friends.  Paul drags her away and initiates sex.  Marlis Petersen may be just the right singing actress for her role.  She wears the unfeminine shoes throughout, except when she's barefoot, to protect her feet in this very athletic role.  The plot becomes confused, especially for me whose copy has no titles.

In Act III we still have the rotating building, but in each act the configuration has changed. A chorus of children appears and disappears without explanation.  And here we have Marie and Marietta in the same scene.  Then there are a crowd of bald Maries.  I have a feeling this is brilliant.  Jonas is having such a great career.  Both of these roles are bears.  That's reason enough not to perform it.  She's dancing around in his dead wife's wig, and he strangles her with it.  "Now you're just like her."  Just when we think she's dead, she comes out, gets on her bicycle and rides away.  I think I love it.

We return to the beginning with the return of Brigitta and Fritz.  Marietta returns for her roses.  Paul burns stuff including Marie's wig.  This is the best part of the regie.  Marie wore a wig because of her cancer treatments.  Jonas sings Marietta's Lied, and there is still ein Auferstehen.  I'm so glad I returned to see this.

Salome from Munich

Conductor: Kirill Petrenko
Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski

Herodes Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Herodias Michaela Schuster
Salome Marlis Petersen
Jochanaan Wolfgang Koch
Narraboth Pavol Breslik
Ein Page der Herodias Rachael Wilson

Salome by Richard Strauss streamed today from the Bayerische Staatsoper.  This was an extraordinary production with great depth of imagination.  It was performed in German by the best company for German diction.  A commenter on FB said, "They dock your pay if you make mistakes in your German."  One of the results of this is that while the orchestra is spectacularly musical (Kirill Petrenko), the singers don't bring us the best of all possible Strauss phrasing.  This shifts the focus away from the singing onto the theatrical presentation.  Usually your attention is distracted from the story by either the striptease or the intense lyrical singing of the soprano.  We had neither distraction.

The biggest surprise came when the curtain opened to a countertenor singing the opening song of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.  Perhaps this is an entertainment for the party.  Or perhaps it is to tell us that whatever we may be seeing, this is an opera about children.

It was Regie, of course, which means there were clothing designs from around 1950, plus something intended to be a swimming pool that is visible when the center of the stage opens up to show Jochanaan's cell.  The singers mention frequently that it's cold, and they would like to go inside.  However, we seem to be in a library.

People smoke, including Salome.  When the opera begins, Narraboth sings about how beautiful the princess Salome is this evening.  Nothing about the women on the stage suggests that one of them is Salome.  The Page is usually a trouser role, but here it is staged as a woman who is in love with Narraboth and jealous of Salome.  Maybe I'm explaining too much.  When she finally sings, we see Salome is the woman in the red dress.

Why is one so fascinated?  Salome herself is clearly too old to be a child.  This is the main problem with this opera in general.  Salome is a teenager who sings like a fully mature spinto soprano.  Maria Ewing destroyed her voice singing it because she made a perfect stripper in the dance scene.  This is a problem without a solution.  Our Salome is not a teenager and also not a spinto.  I'd call her a full lyric.

Herodes is something of a pedophile and wants to see his wife's daughter dance.  Throughout the opera the stage shows a young girl with long dark hair sitting and observing.  She moves from place, has a mother who occasionally approaches her, but does not interact with anyone else.  She sees everything without reacting.  Maybe she's a Salome alter ego.

The dialog clearly states that Jochanaan is young, yet when we see him he is late middle aged.  Why she loves him we do not know.  But does anyone know the why of love?

For her dance Salome dresses as a bride and dances with a man made up as a skeleton:  Death.  It is relatively pleasing.  Animation appears on the wall behind.  They show afterward when the cast goes outside to greet the onlookers in the platz, that the box she is singing to actually has a head inside.  It couldn't be seen on the stream.

Narraboth comes back to life, and so does everyone else.  What is that about?  One is fascinated but not sure exactly why.

Otello is Here

👍🏻
Conductor: Kirill Petrenko
Production Amélie Niermeyer

Otello Jonas Kaufmann
Jago Gerald Finley
Cassio Evan Leroy Johnson
Roderigo Galeano Salas
Lodovico Bálint Szabó
Montano Milan Siljanov
Ein Herold Markus Suihkonen
Desdemona Anja Harteros
Emilia Rachael Wilson

This performance of Verdi's Otello from Munich is unquestionably a masterpiece. We have here the ultimate domestic violence story.  It was a simple regie production in modern dress with many pictures to be seen here.  There are a few plot alterations.  Normally Otello and Desdemona are married before the opera starts, but here they marry shortly after he returns from war, after the love duet.  People enter and cover their bed with flowers.

In the past I have doubted that this opera was exactly right for Jonas Kaufmann, but now I may have to reconsider.  He refrained from pushing, as do many tenors here, and won me over.  This Otello is not black but he is also not beautiful.  This is why it is so easy for him to believe that this particular woman doesn't love him.  He believes in himself as a warrior but not as a lover.  Jonas has created this character in the manner of the great performer he certainly is.  We are lucky to live in his time.

The sets and staging focus on the couple and their relationship, and who better to play this couple than the great opera stage couple of our own era:  Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Harteros.  Anja is a stage creature.  To come to her greatest triumphs requires the stage where she can show voice, movement, beauty, expression and I think perhaps most of all acting.  In my mind I think of Desdemona as a light, relatively insignificant role.  With Anja we have the greatest depths of tragedy.  We have love and fear together in abundance.  Like many others before and after, she prepares for her own death and does not think of escaping.  It was a triumph.

And as if that were not enough we have the dream Iago of Gerald Finley, one of the greatest singing actors in opera.  You need to overlook the outfit where he wears baggy pants and Adidas.  He approaches Otello rather more intimately than one would generally expect, creating a new dimension to the opera.  Our imaginations immediately leap to lovers.  Could it be jealousy that motivates all this mayhem?

Petrenko was marvelous, as usual.  In my group people complained that he is seen rather more during the drama than they would prefer.  At the start they jumped immediately to film of Anja, which meant no shots of Petrenko.

This was a genuinely great thing.  I'm going to watch it again tomorrow.

P.S.  I did.  It was wonderful the second time, too.

Parsifal

Conductor: Kirill Petrenko
Production: Pierre Audi

Amfortas: Christian Gerhaher
Titurel: Bálint Szabó
Gurnemanz: René Pape
Parsifal: Jonas Kaufmann
Klingsor: Wolfgang Koch
Kundry: Nina Stemme

I was overdosed on television, so I waited until the second act to see Wagner's Parsifal from Munich.  The opera started off with the most discussed part of the staging, the fat suits.  Nina was not required to wear a fat suit.  Nor was Jonas.  But I did recognize Golda Schultz.  Most of the Dresden Amens which I always dislike are in Act I, so this turned out to be a good decision for me.

Many people commented that they loved the production, but I felt it explained nothing.  I liked very much the collapsing wall effect, but that was pretty much it.  No subtitles and a production that explains nothing didn't work for me.  Too many things were not portrayed, such as Parsifal baptizing Kundry.

The biggest applause, as always in Munich, was for Kirill Petrenko.  I'm not sure I want to write any more about this.  As a listening experience, it was fabulous.  Such wonderful singing and conducting.  It was an especially good role for Nina Stemme.  I loved her blond wig.  Thank you.

Die Walküre

Conductor:  Kirill Petrenko
Production:  Andreas Kriegenburg

Siegmund:  Simon O'Neill
Hunding:  Ain Anger [Ain Anger is bae. I stole this]
Wotan:  John Lundgren
Sieglinde:  Anja Kampe
Brünnhilde:  Nina Stemme
Fricka:  Ekaterina Gubanova

Die Walküre streamed from the Bayerische Staatsoper today.  Somehow I thought it was tomorrow and missed the first part.  I'm watching it on demand.  This is my favorite Wagner.

The first thing we notice is the stage is full of thin young women from the ballet.  They seem to be mostly set dressing.  When the sword theme plays, they shine small palm lights on the sword in the tree.  The director says they represent a context.

The second thing we notice is that while Ain Anger is beautiful to hear and see, in his role as Hunding he is a pig.  He dries his hands on his wife's dress.

I would describe this production as rural minimalism.  Without the ballet women it might get too dull.  Above you see the dead who are brought to Valhalla hanging on poles.  Perhaps that's who the girls are--the paradise maidens.  This production is making me smile.

I love this opera, more than any other Wagner.  The singing from Munich is glorious.  I love that the story is about love.  I like Tristan, but this grabs me more.  Kirill Petrenko wins again with the most applause.  Perhaps my operatic soul is German.

There is lots of shouting.  This is as it should be.

Post Script.  I always love Nina Stemme best, but it is curious to see her drinking from a plastic bottle of water and then rolling it into the wings.  Anja Kampe was outstanding as Sieglinde.

John Lundgren as Wotan was powerful and godlike with a wonderful low register.

Tannhäuser 👍🏻

👍🏻
Conductor:  Kirill Petrenko
Production:  Romeo Castellucci

Hermann, Landgraf von Thüringen: Georg Zeppenfeld
Tannhäuser: Klaus Florian Vogt
Wolfram von Eschenbach: Christian Gerhaher
Walther von der Vogelweide: Dean Power
Biterolf:  Peter Lobert
Heinrich der Schreiber: Ulrich Reß
Reinmar von Zweter: Ralf Lukas
Elisabeth, Nichte des Landgrafen: Anja Harteros
Venus: Elena Pankratova

There appears to be some nudity in this production of Wagner's Tannhäuser from the Bayerische Staatsoper.  Or maybe we are seeing body stockings.  Or some of each.  I'm imagining the casting call for the set of archers shown who are clearly topless.  Their boobs are too uniform to be ballet.  [Research indicates that the archers are members of the ballet.  I'm still not sure I believe it.]  Later in the opera are people lying on the floor who are wearing body stockings.

The archers are very carefully blocked so that when they are actually shooting, they are always facing up stage.  The cocked arrows are never pointed anywhere else. It is interesting to notice that none of the arrows fell to the floor.  Later in the opera one of the characters pulled back an arrow and pointed it in the general direction of Elisabeth.  I did not like this at all.

I did not hallucinate that the Dresden Amen appears in Act III.  I'll have to learn to sublimate my reaction to this showing up in Wagner.

The most reaction in my group was to these feet.  Feet!  I won't bother to try to explain this production and have probably already shown the most interesting parts.

The orchestra, chorus, conductor and soloists were glorious.  I especially liked Anja Harteros, but then I generally do.  It was entirely beyond ones very high expectations.

Anja looks down on her dead self.  Please note:  the tombstones are named after the singers and not the characters they portray.  The talking heads said that this was to show that an opera staging is just pretend.  No attempt is made to explain her death, except we are told that an hour has elapsed.

The production is a cross between Star Wars and The Hunger Games, and instead of Venusberg we have Venusfleischberg [mountain of flesh].

Again the greatest applause is for Petrenko whose contract has been extended to 2021.

Sign back stage during this performance.  Attention Life Danger!!!  Bow and arrow action.  It is forbidden to enter the stage when the doors are locked by staff.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Conductor: Kirill Petrenko
Production: Harry Kupfer

Boris Timofeyevich Izmailov, a Merchant: Anatoli Kotscherga
Zinoviy Borisovich Izmailov, his son: Sergey Skorokhodov
Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, wife of Zinoviy Borisovich: Anja Kampe 
Sergei, a workman employed at the Izmailovs: Misha Didyk
Aksinya, a workwoman employed at the Izmailovs: Heike Grötzinger
Sonyetka, a convict: Anna Lapkovskaja

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Dmitri Shostakovich streamed today from the Bayerische Staatsoper.  I have seen this opera twice before, both times at the San Francisco Opera.  This is different somehow.  Kampe is marvelous, but the most applause goes to Petrenko.

Noch einmal Meistersinger

I'm listening to Die Meistersinger stream from Munich.  I think I really like only the third act with the gorgeous trio, the procession of the Meistersingers, the Prize song and the sometimes, lately most of the time, the imaginary happy ending.  In my heart it has a happy ending.

I am liking Jonas Kaufmann, of course, but I also like marvelous chorus, Sara Jakubiak as Eva, and Wolfgang Koch as Hans Sachs (though not as much as Michael Volle in Salzburg.)  The opera belongs to Sachs.

Petrenko's conducting is masterful.  The biggest applause is for him.

Ariadne auf Naxos from Munich

Conductor:  Kirill Petrenko
Production:  Robert Carsen

Haushofmeister:  Johannes Klama (spoken)
Ein Musiklehrer:  Markus Eiche (baritone)
Der Komponist:  Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano)
Bacchus/Der Tenor:  Peter Seiffert (tenor)
Ein Offizier:  Petr Nekoranec (tenor)
Ein Tanzmeister:  Kevin Conners (tenor)
Ein Perückenmacher:  John Carpenter (baritone)
Ein Lakai:  Christian Rieger (bass)
Zerbinetta:  Brenda Rae (coloratura soprano)
Ariadne/Primadonna:  Amber Wagner (soprano)
Harlekin:  Elliot Madore (baritone)

I don't think of Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss as a dark opera, so I was not exactly comfortable with all the black, especially in the second part.  On the live stream it was hard to see.  I think you could fake this with the technology and make it a bit lighter.

We begin in a mirror lined room, like a ballet studio only without the horizontal bars.  People are dancing.  The two entertainments must be performed as one because (as we know from the original Ariadne) the wife has requested fireworks when it gets dark at 9:00.  There is much dressing and undressing, which was wonderfully amusing, by both ballet men and singer men.  Very dark set with almost nudity.  For me this is incongruous.  They almost have to take off their clothes before we can see them at all.

I'm not sure why we love this opera.  Because it's successfully silly?  Or is it because it includes two of the greatest arias in the German repertoire:  "Es gibt ein Reich" and "Großmächtige Prinzessin".  This was an excellent cast from all over the opera world.  For me the highlight of the performance was Amber Wagner's "Es gibt ein Reich."  Glorious.  I can't think of when I've heard it better.  Brenda Rae approached "Großmächtige Prinzessin" more from a sexy/romantic direction than the usual showing off.  She was previously seen in Die Schweigsame Frau.  Both of these women are American.

Musically it was the very best.  Zerbinetta flirted with Petrenko.  Wenn es irgendwas heiliges gibt, muss es die Musik sein.