an atmosphere that simply reeks with class
A member of the cher public who attended last night’s premiere of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Opéra national de Paris filed this report:
It was Paris Opera GM Gerard Mortier’s penultimate opportunity – his term ends in July – Â to moon opening night Parisian audiences and he did just that. He flew in bad-boy director Dmitri Tchernlakov from an opera house in Novosibirsk, Russia, to wreak havoc on Verdi’s Macbeth.
Before the overture, we see a ugly town square where someone shows up in a backpack, drawing people from the surrounding buildings who shout a welcome. During the overture, we see projected images of Google Earth circling a town; ironically, Â it was Google Earth I was using earlier in an unsuccessful attempt to locate Novosibirsk. We float down to a lifeless house and look through window at a plain room with a happily flaming gas fireplace.
Clueless stage direction rule number one: when crowds drink, never put a table for the empty glasses. Macbeth set his on a chair and later, when he has his banquet mad scene the couple managed their rough-housing while holding champagne goblets. The departing crowd had to place their goblets precariously on the various chairs when leaving.
Lady M. appears, inexplicably, with a top hat during her mad scene. The Soviet-style pants suit she was given was credited to the director but resembled rather the fashion house of Hormel. Macduff sings his sole aria in a wooden playpen complete with toys. Men are wearing ill-fitting Kruschev-era cheap suits. The costumes for the crowds are 20th Century Refugee. They could have brought the entire lot at the Salvation Army store for $375 but, as the costume shop made them, you can add three or four zeros to the cost. The witches were judged expendable as were the assassins of Banquo – roles assumed by the shabby crowd.
The chorus, although unannounced, was apparently on strike (or the variation the French call service minimum) the first half, singing mezza voce, and make only a little more effort later. You could count on the
fingers of one hand when they entered on the beat – and, remember, the chorus plays a key role in this opera.
The conductor, Teodor Currentzis, was standing on every phone book in the building, partially obstructing the view of anyone with orchestra seats. He managed to convince the lazy orchestra, however, that he actually was 10 feet tall and they played like the polished ensemble they could be but never are. If you can imagine a young John Cleese doing his out-of-control conductor bit, you can come close to the fun I had watching him in action. The good news: he stirred the orchestra into such a pitch, they drowned out most of the singing.
Just as well. Our Macbeth was Dimitris Tiliakos whose approximate Italian, raspy voice and limp delivery was uncomfortable to watch and hear. His wife, Violeta Urmana, took about a half-hour to find the right key but even then sang with an painful edge. Clearly theatrically challenged, she was awkward from first to last and obviously was getting no help from the stage director. There was not a single gesture by anyone this night that seemed real.
Ferruccio Furlanetto’s Banquo sounded shopworn but fortunately his character is dispatched early. Stefano Secco, a well-known tenor in this house, was the parka-wearing Macduff. His new rafter-raising voice, winning large applause for his only aria, had regulars speculating that he was miked.
The production dispenses with the action which ends the opera – the director couldn’t be further bothered. We seen Macbeth alone on stage encouraging the audience to fight while the backstage chorus, well-amplified, reply. The celebratory chorus ending the opera, one of the most stirring Verdi every wrote, is sung offstage as we leave the building and float back up to Google heaven. It was Verdi drained of meaning, passion, truth and purpose. The ones who disemboweled this early masterwork were roundly booed at the curtain but Mortier somewhere was certainly smiling.
Violeta is a real trooper! She throws herself into everything with abandon. Designers have made her look atrocious onstage in numerous productions and yet she continues to appear is a very wide repertoire as a great colleague.
As for Mortier… Nach Spain!
Did someone get it mixed up with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?
By the way, does Mortier LIKE Verdi? I would have thought he was one of those humane, big-hearted composers of whom the repitilian Gerard would disapprove.
You mean we’re not going to get this at NYCO?
Whoever reviewed this knows how to ROAST a director who deserves it. Thank you, un[e] du cher public!
Loved “They could have brought the entire lot at the Salvation Army store for $375 but, as the costume shop made them, you can add three or four zeros to the cost.”
“Dimitris Tiliakos”
WHO?
Cassandra – apparently he’s married to Violet Urmana
Heh. I hope they’ll have finished previews when I see this in a couple of weeks.
#2, the Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk they did recently was quite wonderful — of course, it was the Amsterdam production so GM can’t get credit for that. Cunning Little Vixen was lovely (though could have used a better soprano), and Tristan was fine (again, an imported production). The other four productions I’ve seen so far this year at Opera de Paris have disappointed, and it doesn’t sound like Macbeth will improve the score.
And Mme Urmana is to sing the Met’s Aida next
season? Oh oh.
We live in a time of fat bankers, funds managers headed for prison and NO Verdi voices. Let’s hope all this changes soon. I am ready.
mrmyster,
We’ve been living in a time of no Verdi voices for quite a while now. I, for one, would like to know why.
I’m so glad I decided to pass on spending a lot of money for a ticket to this during my upcoming trip to Paris! So sad to see money going to waste on what looks like a dull and uninspired production. Then again I haven’t actually seen it so I shouldn’t judge.
I think Tiliakos is singing Marcello at the Met next season.
Confusing: Why is so much money going to waste in such tough economic times? Who pays for this Scheisse anyways?!
Here is the comment I posted on my Facebook page when I got home from seeing this last night: The stage direction of Macbeth at the Opera Bastille’s new production can best be described in Macbeth’s own words: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
One “Verdi voice” who has spent most of his career in Germany — well away from the Met’s stage, sadly — is baritone Yalun Zhang. Best known for his interpretation of Rigoletto, he has apparently elected to enjoy a steady income and stable home life in Hannover and Stuttgart. He is also well-regarded for the roles of Amonasro (which he has sung at the Met), Count di Luna, Nabucco, Don Carlos (Ernani), Ezio (Attila), Rodrigo (Don Carlo), and Renato (Ballo). That’s a pretty good Verdi repertoire, I’d say, and he’s also a terrific actor.
To be honest, it sounds kinda interesting for me. Better than a lot of people prancing around in kilts.
#10, yes Amnerees, I quite agree – a long while without Verdi voices. And I, too, wonder why, and a dozen or so years ago I asked the great voice teacher Margaret Harshaw that very same question, she who had sung Amneres quite successfully to a number of Verdi-voiced Aidas. MH said, and this is a close paraphrase, ’singing teachers don’t teach the basics as well as they should and young singers don’t work as hard as they should, and it takes time and diligence to develop a Verdi voice.’ She then went on to explain the specifics of ‘placement’ and ’support’ and so on, which I wont go into here. I don’t think Harshaw was far off the mark. My point in commenting on Urmana as I did was this: I heard her as a mezzo, including a superb Brangaene, then I heard her Gioconda and such, and we went from superb to also-ran. I am not at all sure that Aidas should be singing Lady Macbeths in the same part of their career. Those rolse are so different, they require, really, different voices or voices in differing stages of their careers. Maybe Urmana is already there; I was sorry to see that talent degraded, for that’s how she sounds in the dramatic soprano roles. Oh well…
For some reason i thought Urbana’s husband is a tenor. I might be mistaken, I know he is Italian, balding and not at all attractive.
Funny that Harshaw said those things because she didn’t turn all that many good singers after the 80’s. Her students at the time of my attendance at IU were all known for pushing their voices beyond recognition. There was a soprano (infamous for being a real bitch) who sang both (Massenet’s) Manon and Tosca in the same year, neither was pretty. I sang in Lucia with one of her baritone students and the pushing and yelling was unbearable.
Sanford, I think the problem with Urmana she actually gave up some roles that are perfect for her. Amneris, Eboli and Brangane are dramatic soprano roles and she now thinks that because she officially calls herself a soprano she can no longer sing them. She is now instead stretching her voice in Aida, which she can sing, but not as well as Amneris; plus the tessitura is not congenial to her voice.
I can see a soprano Eboli doing Lady Macbeth, an Aida is a different voice all together.
“Her students at the time of my attendance at IU were all known for pushing their voices beyond recognition. ”
I would say that a majority of the Harshaw students I’ve encountered have always had serious technical issues.
Cassandra:
maybe not all of them. Benita Valente was apparently a Harshaw student and we all know that she has had a long and illustrious career. I am not sure who else from the 70s and 80s was a Harshaw student. Anyone can mention more?
Of the current ones before the public I think Emily Magee was one of them.
I may be wrong, but wasn’t the first Princesse d’Eboli also the same singer as the Lady Macbeth of the Paris revision of Macbeth?
Whichever way the director’s last name is transliterated (preferably Tcherniakov IMHO), it wouldn’t have an “L” in it. Thanks for the report. I did enjoy his Onegin from last year but this Macbeth does sound like a mess.
“Benita Valente was apparently a Harshaw student and we all know that she has had a long and illustrious career.”
We do?
“MH said, and this is a close paraphrase, ’singing teachers don’t teach the basics as well as they should and young singers don’t work as hard as they should, and it takes time and diligence to develop a Verdi voice.’”
That would explain why Ponselle was such a miserable failure in TROVATORE Met debut at 21.
Ponselle’s debut was FORZA, no?
Alto, there are always miracles that one cannot explain and there always will be.
That said, note the length of Ponselle’s career and the fact that the top began to fade early. Legend that she is and as sumptuous as the voice was, the great Normas she sang were negotiated with a lot of downward transposition. (I, for one, do not hold transposition against any singer, because I know that the 18th and 19th centuries regarded transposition as a common and perfectly normal practice. Today I hear contempt heaped on singers who transpose, but in the century that created the works that form the basis of the Italian romantic repertory, transposition was an everyday occurrence–and the orchestral pitch was lower then into the bargain.)
So, yes, Ponselle and Rysanek and Peters and Varnay burst onto the scene singing the most demanding roles in their respective fachs. But they’re the exception and creation of spinto and dramatic voices in particular generally takes longer and more intense training. The entire set-up today is geared to shorter contact with the teacher and the training costs a fortune, making it necessary for most singers to start income-producing careers far earlier in the training process than was the case a hundred years ago, far earlier than may be wise.
From my own opera-going over the past half century and my own work with opera companies designing productions, I’ve gotten to hear hundreds of potentially beautiful young voices in early stages of development already strained or with holes or in the wrong repertory. They succumb to demands for more volume created jointly by many conductors who view even a chamber orchestra as a potential major symphonic opportunity, and by a segment of the public that demands and values volume first, musicianship and other niceties being given a lesser priority.
It is generally agreed, I believe, that we live in an era of pretty good to great Baroque and Mozart singing. The voices for Bellini, Donizetti, Wagner (who revered Bellini’s vocal writing) and Verdi developed from singers trained in the Baroque/Mozart tradition, and I wonder if we shouldn’t be exploring how that development was managed and see if we can’t replicate the process–IF here are enough teachers with the brains, time enough to do the necessary work, and some way to subsidize it all so that good, strong and well-placed voices can again emerge for the big dramatic roles.
My voice teacher studied with Harshaw for a period of time, and agrees that she worked better with the big-voiced folks. Novices and small-voiced folks wouldn’t survive under her.
Marilyn Horne has said that Ponselle told her, “You know, I think I really was a mezzo. . . ” Beverly Sills said the trouble with Ponselle’s top voice was that she didn’t have enough head voice “space” in her top notes, and that is what shortened her range.
BTW, I really loved “Damnation of Faust” Met delayed telecast yesterday. You see – can have a “modern” production with dramatic and technical innovations and not have it distort the composers original intentions. Want to see it “live” when it comes to the Lyric next season.
Will@25: You are, of course, right about almost everything in that post (except that Roberta Peters never tried to be a spinto/dramatic and so her early debut isn’t relevant here). But if the conductors are in part to blame for oversymphonizing everything–and I agree with you on this–aren’t better-informed conductors as important to any effort to reform opera singing as better-informed teachers?
Also, at least in the States, the entire set-up of vocal training is determined generally by its being part of an undergraduate four-year college major program, which all too often assumes that a voice student will be able to go out into the world in four years. This isn’t even true of business executives any more (look at all those MBAs); why should it be true of opera singers?
Indiana, I put Peters in there as an example of a young singer–a “kid” really–who was very early out of the gate in only lead roles, even though she was not in the spinto/dramatic class. It certainly is possible to destroy a voice and career very quickly if you don’t know how to sing, and the myth that Mozart will cure all ills vocally is very misguided. The length and vocal health of the Peters career is testimony to the fact that she did know how to sing, and knew what repertory to do and when.
Yes, I agree totally that conductors are part of the problem and must become part of the solution. Von Karajan was a notorious voice killer, encouraging dreadfully dangerous and destructive role assumptions, and there are others in the pit who do the same.
Of company managers and/or casting directors, much the same can be said–actually, even more so. As teachers and the teaching system seems to have a poor grasp of how to develop voices, so do managers and casting directors demonstrate frequent ignorance of how to use voices.
As to singers, they’re caught in a system that is supposed to be know what they are and what kind of voice they have, but that seems to betray them with great regularity. This is one reason I become impatient with the contempt that is shown for singers so often on this forum. I truly believe our singers are ill-trained, ill-advised, and ill-cast in a system that is frequently concerned only with getting through the season and selling tickets rather than being part of a knowledgeable and mutually supportive community of artists.
Lindoro Almaviva,
Violeta Urmana’s husband is the Italian tenor Alfredo Negri. I believe that the original commentator was referring to Dimitris Tiliakos as her husband with regards to the production; as in, they are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, husband and wife.
Will and Indiana Loiterer III,
I totally agree with the two of you regarding the general observances posited. The most frustrating question that rattles around in my brain is how do we rehab opera into being a “healthy” business, and work to restore (repair?) what is broken? I am not under the impression that opera is broken beyond repair in the U.S., nor do I live under the impression that there ever was a glorious “age of opera” in music history where all of our current problems weren’t manifested in various/sundry other forms.
#23 – Alto, no I would say Ponselle rather proves Harshaw’s observation. Ponselle was far too young and un-trained to sing Forza or any other dramatic soprano role at the Met in the early 1920s — she simply did not have the technique, though God knows she had the natural gift. She is a perfect example of too much too soon. Ponselle’s soprano career basically lasted ten years; she should have had 25-years, or more. I always remember this old truism: “You can sing on your youth until you are about 35; after that you have to sing on technique.” Just ask Ms. Radvanovsky! (No, don’t, she wont admit it.)
Dimitrios Tiliakos is a Greek baritone. Good voice and stage manner, but nothing special in terms of timbre or volume.
For the several posters on here who were questioning Margaret Harshaw’s effectiveness as teacher, let me refer you to OPERA HEWS, issue of March 2, 1996, titled “Miss Margaret’s Way.” You’ll get a better picture of her work there. The following year the UK OPERA NOW carried essentially the same article, somewhat reweritten, with a heading, “A Woman of Influence.” Not a bad description.
A web service called High Beam Reseach can make the ON article available to you for free, if you don’t have or can’t access the 1996 ON. It’s one of the few pieces on Harshaw that’s been published.
and then Madame Harshaw sang a verse of that aria beloved of many, “You kids! Get off my lawn!”
Yes, you’re right of course, 24.
It’s Mortier’s penultimate presentation in Paris? What’s the last one going to be?
ciao, Everybody is right about why voices have long careers but in olden daze they didn’t fly all over the universe constantly–planes and air-conditioned hotel rooms are deadly!!! INMHO Tebaldi und Millo kept those few notes above the chest too fat sooo their tops went crazy at 40 plus. Dear Zinka kept those tones light and slightly hollow, then in her early 50’s could play with placement and fool Bing until she was 60. Tucker, Nilsson and Leonie were freaks!!! Jussi and Leonard died at49 so we couldn’t cluck over them. Blame undeveloped technique, airplanes, and greedy agents—really my drears how bright and humble are all animus singerus–get real!!!!