Muti

I enjoyed very much this article about Riccardo Muti in the New York Times. He was in New York to conduct Verdi's Otello at Carnegie Hall.  I was always told not to sing when conducting, but Muti appears to have another opinion.

It was followed by this review.  I posted the picture because it shows the singers in a curious clump around the maestro.  These are two very different perspectives, but without actually hearing the concert, it's impossible to judge.  Perhaps the singers should be offered the opportunity to hear Muti sing their parts.

Just Listen

These come and go.  This one is 1999 with Chailly.

Der Abschied. The final movement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Brought to you by the earth herself.

Der Abschied

Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge.
In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder
Mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind.
O sieh! Wie eine Silberbarke schwebt
Der Mond am blauen Himmelssee herauf.
Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Wehn
Hinter den dunklen Fichten!

Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel.
Die Blumen blassen im Dämmerschein.
Die Erde atmet voll von Ruh und Schlaf,
Alle Sehnsucht will nun träumen.
Die müden Menschen gehn heimwärts,
Um im Schlaf vergessnes Glück
Und Jugend neu zu lernen!
Die Vögel hocken still in ihren Zweigen.
Die Welt schläft ein!

Es wehet kühl im Schatten meiner Fichten.
Ich stehe hier und harre meines Freundes;
Ich harre sein zum letzten Lebewohl.
Ich sehne mich, o Freund, an deiner Seite
Die Schönheit dieses Abends zu genießen.
Wo bleibst du? Du lässt mich lang allein!
Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute
Auf Wegen, die vom weichen Grase schwellen.
O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunkne Welt!

Er stieg vom Pferd und reichte ihm den Trunk
Des Abschieds dar. Er fragte ihn, wohin
Er führe und auch warum es müsste sein.
Er sprach, seine Stimme war umflort:

"Du, mein Freund,
Mir war auf dieser Welt das Glück nicht hold!
Wohin ich geh? Ich geh, ich wandre in die Berge.
Ich suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz.
Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte.
Ich werde niemals in die Ferne schweifen.
Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde!

Die liebe Erde allüberall
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt
Aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig
Blauen licht die Fernen!
Ewig... ewig..."

The Farewell

The sun goes down behind the mountain,
Into all the valleys the evening descends
And brings cooling shades.
O see! Like a silver bark
The moon floats up the blue lake of heaven.
I feel a gentle breeze stirring
Behind the dark spruce.

The brook sings melodiously through the darkness.
The flowers grow pale in the gloaming.
The earth is breathing, full of peace and sleep.
All longing now turns into dreams.
Tired men make for home,
In sleep to recapture forgotten happiness
And youth!
The birds hold still in the branches.
The world is falling asleep.

A cool wind blows in the shadow of the spruce.
I stand here waiting for my friend;
I wait to bid him a last farewell.
I long, my friend, at your side
To enjoy the beauty of this evening.
Where do you linger? You have left me alone for so long!
I wander up and down with my lute
On paths soft with swelling grass.
O beauty! O deep love, so drunk with life!

He dismounted his horse and proffered
the parting glass. I asked him where
He was going and why it had to be.
He said, voice trembling:

"O my friend,
In this world fortune was hard on me.
Where I am going? I am going to wander into the mountains.
I seek peace for my lonely heart.
I am making for home, for my resting place.
I will never roam into strange lands.
My heart is still and awaits its hour.

The dear earth everywhere
Blossoms in spring and grows green
Anew! Everywhere, forever,
Blue lights the horizon!
Forever... forever... "

Contraltos, whoever you are, listen only to Ewa Podleś. There is a deep mystery to her voice that I have never heard in any other artist. She is a magnificent bass clarinet, a sound like no other. And here she is in the most deeply mysterious piece ever written. How could such sad words achieve such ecstasy?

Previously my favorite has been Janet Baker in this piece. Janet is wonderful, but she is a bit too much in her head, if you know what I mean.

And the audio is so good. How is this even possible in a live performance? I can die now.

Wagner

Alex Ross wrote an essay for this week's New Yorker about 10 measures in Wagner's Die Walküre. I have a tape of it somewhere. You know, the one with Jessye Norman as Sieglinde. Perhaps I'll look it up.

I'll never be a regular writer about music because I always hear it as music. Maybe it would help never to have gone to school. For instance, never once does he mention that a phrase is supposed to be 8 measures, not 10, and therefore some kind of extension must be going on.

I see Wagner as the child of Berlioz, for it was he who invented the Liedmotiv, calling it an idée fixe. It was an idea used in instrumental music, particularly the Symphonie fantastique.

It is Wagner who took an independent medium--opera--and subsumed it within the forms and content of the symphony. My problem is that I like opera the way it was.

I see Wagner as the child of Liszt, his father-in-law and contemporary. It was Liszt who could not tolerate the boundaries of symphonic form and invented the unstructured symphonic poem. Berlioz tried always to fit his new ideas into the old structure, but Liszt saw no need. He wanted to be guided by a more poetic muse.

I see Wagner as the child of Meyerbeer, the ultimate practitioner of French Grand Opera. He reached for the grand and inflated emotions that are the essence of Wagner.

I see Wagner as the ultimate exploiter of tonality. It took 200+ years to create the expectations that are the tonal expression of Wagner's youth. For me he is the great manipulator of expectation. Except for the extended overture of Rheingold, he hardly waits to establish a tonal center before he goes flying off in another direction. This can be exhilarating or merely annoying, depending. When talking about this, I usually say, "If only he didn't modulate all the time." Or something like that.

I see Wagner as the destroyer of worlds. First Verdi succumbed, then all the Italians followed, leading inexorably to the death of Italian opera. When Alfano traveled to Germany to study, it was over.

It wasn't tonality itself that led to modernism, but I am convinced the all too skillful manipulation of emotion through modulation found in The Ring that inevitably led to the desire to destroy its power. I see Wagner as the destroyer of worlds, worlds right here and not in the clouds.

Which doesn't mean I can't enjoy a nice Wotan's farewell now and then.

Siegmund

He's right, of course. He should not move into this repertoire at his age, and maybe even 5 years is too soon. It's too low. But hear how he feels the phrase rise. Wagnerians will lose patience.

You might enjoy reading this review. He hates the set as much as I do and for the same reasons.

Capriccio in HD

Countess................Renée Fleming
Clairon.................Sarah Connolly
Flamand.................Joseph Kaiser
Monsieur Taupe..........Bernard Fitch
Count...................Morten Frank Larsen
Olivier.................Russell Braun
La Roche................Peter Rose
Major Domo..............Michael Devlin

Conductor...............Andrew Davis
Production..............John Cox

It is interesting to me that I have seen Strauss' Capriccio three times, and all have been in this set by Mauro Pagano. It's been decorated and painted differently, but always there are large doors going out to the garden stage right, and a harp ends up in the center of the stage. The other times were in the 90's with Kiri Te Kanawa. First Hanna Schwarz played Clarion, and all wore astounding black and white Versace. Then it was Tatiana Troyanos as Clarion in her last performance on any stage, but with period costumes. How could this set be improved upon?

Hanna Schwarz was the best Clarion because of her impeccable Bühnedeutsch, which means stage German. You believed completely that she was a professional stage actress when she spoke her German lines. Few if any foreigners achieve this. This time it was Sarah Connolly, and she was good, though a bit arrogant.

In the same performance as Hanna Schwarz Reri Grist as the Italian soprano ate an entire cake.

Kiri's countess was simply too fine for any mere mortal. Renée Fleming brings her to earth. She loves being vied for by two different men. Perhaps she loves it far more than she loves the men themselves. She alternately touches her cheeks as if to ask which cheek is the more beautiful. She pretends to play the harp very convincingly. For my money Renée is a great actress and brought the ending to a magnificent climax.

What we are seeing is real life transformed into an opera. Men, as is usual for them, are worrying over how to appropriately form themselves into a hierarchy.  Strauss and his theater friends have gathered for a party, and each claims that he is the most important all the way down to the prompter. All agree to praise Gluck and trash the Italians.

I give an advantage to Music, and not just because of my personal preference. Music does not feel humbled by the process of combining his art with words, but Words wishes to have nothing at all to do with Music. Generosity must surely lead to superiority, at least as husband material. Joseph Kaiser as the composer Flamand is also better looking and a better singer than his rival Olivier. The woman has to go to the tenor, though the opera does not tell us.

So Strauss and his friends argue over the issue until, just as in the opera, one suggests what a fine opera this would make. But does it? The Grafin's soliloquy rises to the level of the greatest Strauss, but the rest is not entirely pleasing. Just as it says in the dialog, the arias all sound too much like recitative.

I'm glad I went for Renée.

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Seeing Jonas in New York

I am going to be in New York in a couple of weeks and tried to get a ticket to see Die Walküre at the Metropolitan Opera. Nothing. I even asked Sarah, and she said even she could not get in. I put my name on the waiting list. It's ok. I can see it in HD.

I remember watching operas from the wings and from standing room. I also recall a performance of Carmen that I watched from the overhead lighting. It was an excellent seat as I recall.

I was able to purchase a very nice seat to see Joyce DiDonato in Ariadne auf Naxos.

I could get in to see The Book of Mormon, but it would cost $300+.

Lorraine

While waiting for the second half at Temple Emanu-El a couple of weeks ago, we (bloggers and critics) began to discuss Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and how much we loved her. I said it was because she played the viola. She sang as though she were playing the viola. The critic mentioned the variety of her colors.

Here is a bit of her Handel.


Of course, it is not a good thing to be at one singer's recital and talking the whole time about another singer.

Takesha

Currently making a big splash in Australia is Takesha Meshe Kizart. It would be nice to see her a little closer to home.

Fledermaus Forever

Last night my alma mater, California State University, Sacramento, produced the greatest of all operettas--there is almost nothing in second place--Die Fledermaus. It lives forever because the story could be anywhere, any time. Last night it was New York City in 1970, and it was a perfect fit.

So perfect was the casting that you should be able to guess from the picture above who each character is.  Go ahead.  Guess.

From left to right in the first row are:

OMG. There is no credit for the Frosch in the yellow Converse Allstars and shower cap. We know this is an opera, but you must credit the actors, too. He smokes grass instead of drinking Slivovitz.

Next is Falke, sung by Matthew Surges. Falke always looks something like him.

Surely you guessed that the next person, Jonathan Hansen, sang Alfred. He was the most perfect Alfred I have ever seen.

The woman in the fur can only be Rosalinda, ably sung by Michelle Lajeunesse. Certainly you will have guessed this. I wouldn't have known she was sick if her mother hadn't told me. They cut the czardas. If you don't know when it comes, you don't miss it.

She is next to her Gabriel, sung by Andrew Nickell. He totally got this character.

The star of the evening is next. People shouted loudly when Vanessa Martucci took her bow as Adela. She sang both arias and was simply fabulous. When I think of the singers I fly around to see, few are more fabulous than she. I definitely preferred her to the nameless singer I recently flew to LA to see. She has it all.

We see only the white suit for the pleasant Orlofsky of Frances Swiecki.

This is the right end of the lineup:  Orlofsky, Frank (sung by Will Tvrdik, who did a bit of Groucho Marx), Horowitz the lawyer (sung by Anthony Tavianini), and two of the astounding nightclub workers. 

I have long been mad for Fledermaus and hum along in two languages.

There were some coordination problems due to the venue, a warehouse on R street. The small orchestra sat behind the set stage right, and the conductor stood behind the audience. It's hard to keep together in such an arrangement. There is apparently no credit for the conductor either, unless his name is Tatiana Scott. I'm confused.

All the old jokes appeared. Frosch draws a hook on the wall and hangs the hat on it. Apparently the jokes are forever as well.

One more thing. "Brüderlein und Schwesterlein" in the party was just as one would wish it. We loved every minute of it.

Jonas as Siegmund

Here's an AP article about Jonas Kaufmann's appearance at the Metropolitan Opera as Siegmund:

NEW YORK (AP) — Jonas Kaufmann knew he was taking a risk when he agreed five years ago to sing the role of Siegmund, the doomed hero of Wagner's "Die Walkuere," in the Metropolitan Opera's new production that opens next week.

Five years is about how far in advance top opera singers like the German tenor get booked by leading houses. The offer for Siegmund came from Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, after he heard Kaufmann sing another Wagner role, Parsifal, in Zurich, Switzerland.

"It's an insanely long time," Kaufmann exclaimed in a recent interview before the start of the day's rehearsals. "It's a contradiction to art, because what an artist usually does, he follows his instincts, and the more he goes into what he is keen on doing at that moment, the more enthusiasm or passion is in it.

"If you would ask a painter to choose the colors now that he's going to paint in five years, I mean of course he would refuse. What is that idea? It's so weird. But we are forced to do that, to think over where we'd like to go, what we guess our voice is capable of doing in this amount of time."

Meanwhile, with the "Walkuere" contract tucked away, Kaufmann continued building a career that now, at age 41, has made him perhaps the most sought-after tenor in the world. With a sturdy sound that can handle melting pianissimos or full-voiced high Cs with equal ease, leading-man good looks and fluency in multiple languages, he has been able to triumph in a wide range of roles.

There was Cavaradossi in Puccini's "Tosca" in London; Des Grieux in Massenet's "Manon" in Chicago; Wagner's "Lohengrin" in Munich and Bayreuth; Massenet's "Werther" in Paris. He's also an accomplished performer of German songs, giving recitals and recording one of the touchstone works in that repertory, Schubert's "Die Schoene Muellerin."

Now here he is, preparing to make another high-profile role debut in the second installment of Robert Lepage's new staging of the "Ring" cycle, a production filled with operatic stars but dominated by the set, a 45-ton metal structure run by a computer.

"We just have to keep our fingers crossed that the machine is doing its job," Kaufmann said of the Lepage contraption. "Unfortunately, there's this little worry that's around because it has happened that it hasn't worked perfectly."

Siegmund, son of the god Wotan, has an unusual story line for an operatic hero: He enters into an incestuous relationship with his twin sister, Sieglinde.

"Obviously, it's forbidden, but it's not our fault," Kaufmann joked during a recent panel discussion about the production. "We've been separated, we didn't know who we are, we met that night in this hut in the middle of nowhere. And there we are!"

Siegmund dies at the end of the second of the opera's three acts. But Kaufmann said that even though the role is not particularly long, learning it was harder than he had expected.

"Especially at the beginning of Act 1, it's always bits and pieces, two or three phrases at a time. I don't want to say it was frustrating, but it was close to it. For a while I thought, 'Am I getting old or something?'"

But he trusted his usual procedure for learning new parts. "There's a natural process with me," Kaufmann said. "Once you've sung it through, with the score in your hand, three, four times maybe, the whole thing starts ringing in your head.

"And obviously you have tons of rehearsals to double check if that was correct. Because it's so much easier to fix it for eternity when you learn it combined with staging. The text, the singing and the visual — that puts it into a different place of the brain." 


The finale to Act 1, an extended love scene for the twins, is one of the most rhapsodic passages in all of Wagner. Kaufmann said he and soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, making her Met debut as Sieglinde, are aiming for what conductor Herbert von Karajan called "controlled ecstasy."

"We have to convince the audience, and even ourselves, that we are out of control, that we are driven away by all those emotions," he said. "But still deep inside there is something that controls it and can unplug it if it's too much.

"To always be at this edge, this borderline, that's really the interesting bit. And that gives you also the possibility to fill up the words and the singing with your real emotions, because you're feeling exactly what you're saying at this very moment. That makes it credible. Without going over this edge, without really falling in love with your partner, without really being in tears, and no longer under control of your breath," Kaufmann said.

The role of Siegmund sits low for a tenor, something that Kaufmann said colleagues warned him about.

"They said, 'Oh you have to wait until you lose your high C,'" he recalled with a chuckle, "'because otherwise you're going to ruin your high notes.' And I said, well, in my theory this would be never, because it's not that I'm estimating in the next three years to get rid of my high C."

To illustrate how low the vocal line descends, he sings the phrase that concludes Siegmund's soliloquy midway through Act 1: "Tief in des Busens Berge glimmt nur noch lichtlose glut." ("Deep in the recesses of my heart only a flameless fire still smolders.") The final word "glut" is sung a full octave below middle C.

"You have to trust your voice," he said. "If you try to sing like a bass, if you squeeze it and try to project it, it actually won't carry."

Early in Kaufmann's career, Siegmund wouldn't even have been a possibility. He started out in 1990's sounding "like a typical young German tenor with a very light, white voice."

As for his lower register, he said, "I had none at all. I think F or F sharp (below middle C) was the lowest note I had. Under that it was only hot air."

He also found that when he tried to sing out to express emotion, "I lost control. My voice just wasn't reliable."

That led him in 1995 to a teacher, American baritone Michael Rhodes, who had moved to Germany after World War II.

Rhodes said in an email reply to questions that he instructed Kaufmann in the use of a technique he calls "sbadigliare," from the Italian for yawning, which he himself had learned from the great baritone Giuseppe De Luca.

"Sbadigliare requires one to relax the whole body and really yawn — an involuntary reaction," Rhodes said. "In this state of relaxation, the voice is completely free, as Jonas's is."

Kaufmann said that after he had studied with Rhodes, many colleagues who knew him from before predicted he would quickly come to ruin. "They said, 'Maybe another two to three years, maybe five, but then it's over.' Because everyone expected me to overdo, to artificially darken the sound. It was impossible to believe that this would be my own voice."

Instead, his career started to take off. Kaufmann's relationship with the Met began in 2000, when he auditioned for music director James Levine in Munich. The following year he was offered contracts for his debut season in 2006 (that five-year lag time again), as Alfredo in Verdi's "La Traviata" and Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute."

"I was very happy," he said. "I came, I sang, and they said, 'Well, what's next? Why didn't we book you more?'"

Eager to have Kaufmann return, Gelb arranged for the next couple of seasons for him to fit in a few performances in between his other engagements.

"I didn't have enough time to learn a production," he said, "so we always scheduled "Traviata," because that was the thing I knew. They could just throw me in."

Finally, after 14 Alfredos, last spring Met audiences got to hear him as Cavaradossi and as Don Jose in Bizet's "Carmen." Now, after Siegmund, there are other roles lined up: Gounod's "Faust" next season, and after that reportedly a new "Parsifal" and a "Werther."

Elsewhere, he'll add Aeneas in Berlioz's "Les Troyens" for Covent Garden next season, and plans to expand his Verdi repertory, working toward "Otello" through Manrico in "Il Trovatore" and Don Alvaro in "La Forza del Destino."

One thing Kaufmann won't be tackling for now is more Wagner. The roles he hasn't yet sung — Tristan, Tannhaeuser and Siegfried — are widely regarded as ultimate voice killers.

"As soon as you put one step into this repertory, all the theater managers immediately try to offer you everything up to Tristan, because there's this desperate need.

"If I have the chance to be able to sing for a long time, then hopefully I'll be able to do those things later," Kaufmann said.

"But I don't want to get into the hit books of history as one of the youngest Tristans ever, and who lost his voice right after."

[Dr.B He always says exactly the right things.]