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.

Lulu in HD

👍🏻
Conductor:  Lothar Koenigs
PRODUCTION:  William Kentridge

Lulu:  Marlis Petersen (soprano)
Countess Geschwitz:  Susan Graham (mezzo-soprano)
Alwa, Dr. Schön’s Son, a composer:  Daniel Brenna (tenor)
The Painter / The African Prince:  Paul Groves (tenor)
Dr. Schön / Jack the Ripper:  Johan Reuter (baritone)
Schigolch:  Franz Grundheber (bass)

Today we were treated to Berg's Lulu live in HD from the Metropolitan Opera.  I have taken the liberty of correcting the Met cast list which said:  Alwa / Dr. Schön’s Son / A Composer Daniel Brenna.  This gives the impression that Daniel Brenna played three different characters when Alwa is Dr. Schön’s Son and a composer.

It is hard to know where to begin.  So let's try the beginning.  Most Lulu productions begin with animal cages, and it is only clear that Lulu is the snake.  In this production when the lion tamer announces the animals, we see each animal followed with a line drawing portrait of one of the men in the drama whom we assume is assigned to that animal.  I liked this.  Here is Lulu wrapping her snake-like arms around Dr. Schön.

The black and white drawings that fill the stage are intensely erotic even when the costumes are not. The drama exists on three levels:  the singing actors, the vivid, always moving projections mainly at the back of the stage, and two mime figures dressed mostly in black who had only a symbolic meaning.

Joanna Dudley (Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

Deborah Voigt assured us that the production is far more interesting in house, but I couldn't help wondering if it wasn't clearer and less distracting as filmed for transmission.  We could focus on the actors and only have the ever changing pictures shown when we needed them.  The characters would kiss, but the most erotic intensity came from the drawings.

There is a level of professionalism in this cast that I have not seen before.  All were comfortable in their roles and at ease in the difficult music.  I have seen Lulu performed from the intensely sexual of Evelyn Lear at one extreme to the complete passivity of Ann Panagulias at the other.  Barbara Hannigan's mind always seems elsewhere.  Marlis Peterson is on the aggressive end of the spectrum.

Susan Graham was my favorite Geschwitz.

We never see the portrait of Lulu which the characters hold up and describe to us.  I have seen this opera often enough now to feel that I understand.  Certain women become the object of obsession of many men.  It's like being a movie star or perhaps an opera singer.  This work balances these many obsessions with the obsession of Lulu for Dr. Schön.  At the end she meets a man who looks just like him, in this production he dressed like him, and he murders her.

The result of my research on this opera has resulted in the conclusion that if you want high level professional performers and a fascinating production, you cannot beat this Lulu, but if you want to feel it as though it were life itself, you will need West Edge.

Read about Christine Schaefer's Lulu here;  read about Barbara Hannigan's Lulu here; read about West Edge Lulu here and here.
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Figaro #75

Conductor:  James Levine
Production:  Sir Richard Eyre
Host:  Renée Fleming

CAST
Figaro:  Ildar Abdrazakov (bass)
Susanna:  Marlis Petersen (soprano)
Doctor Bartolo:  John Del Carlo (bass)
Marcellina:  Susanne Mentzer (soprano)
Cherubino:  Isabel Leonard (soprano)
Count Almaviva:  Peter Mattei (bass)
Don Basilio:  Greg Fedderly (tenor)
Countess Almaviva:  Amanda Majeski (soprano)
Antonio:  Philip Cokorinos (bass)
Barbarina:  Ying Fang (soprano)

Today was James Levine's 75th time conducting Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera.  There aren't enough superlatives to describe this.

This was also the best staged Figaro I've seen.  The countess stays in her disguise until the end, and for me this works much better than when she changes back into the countess before surprising her husband.

Thank the opera gods for allowing Isabel Leonard to get over her cold so we could see her marvelous Cherubino.  How many mezzos can do pushups?  She was the best Cherubino I've seen.  They have her take a leak on the stage.  Hmmm. 

Here is a surprise for me:  both Isabel Leonard and Amanda Majeski were in Griselda in Santa Fe.

Missa Solemnis

My free month of medici.tv is still running.  Earlier Thursday they streamed the Beethoven Missa Solemnis from Amsterdam.

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Nikolaus Harnoncourt conductor
Marlis Petersen soprano
Elisabeth Kulman alto
Werner Güra tenor
Gerald Finley bass

The performance is surprisingly plodding and never seems to quite take off.  I always feel that it is correct to get very carried away with Beethoven, something Harnoncourt doesn't seem to do.  Nevertheless, one needs a Missa Solemnis every once in a while.

I wrote a lot about the form of this piece here.

Hamlet in HD

Hamlet..................Simon Keenlyside
Ophélie.................Marlis Petersen
Claudius................James Morris
Gertrude................Jennifer Larmore
Laerte..................Toby Spence
Polonius................Maxim Mikhailov
Horatio.................Liam Bonner

Conductor...............Louis Langrée
Production..............Patrice Caurier, Moshe Leiser

Not one note of Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet (1868), today's HD simulcast from the Metropolitan Opera, was familiar to me. Not to worry. The romantic idiom of the piece is exactly as expected.

In Renée Fleming's interviews at intermission it was mentioned that the opera originally did not include Hamlet's death, and Anglo-Saxon audiences were horrified. As a result, an alternate ending was written in which Hamlet and Laertes fight and mortally wound one another. This later ending is the one used today.

On the whole I would recommend while viewing this opera to remember that this is an opera and not the immortal play by Shakespeare. Hamlet's father's death in the opera is the result of a conspiracy, and Polonius, Ophelia's father, is a co-conspirator. Ophelia's role is naturally bigger, and Hamlet's is smaller than in the play. It's still a wonderful role for an acting baritone, such as Simon Keenlyside. His voice didn't seem at all odd to me this time as he had at Garnier last month, and he seemed ideal for this role.

Marlis Petersen replaced Natalie Dessay. She was acceptable, especially in the mad scene. The general level of intensity was high across the cast with the exception of Marlis who seemed rather cool. It would have been different with Natalie.

The biggest shock for me was Jennifer Larmore as Gertrude. She was a bit out of her Fach in a dramatic mezzo part, but she developed a fully realized characterization that was quite intense.

All in all it was a lot of fun.

[See Kinderkuchen History 1850-70]