You know we’ve got Regie in the cellar?
The premiere of a new production of Lohengrin at Bayreuth is obviously this week’s hot topic. La Cieca suggests we continue on this thread thd discussion that began elsewhere on parterre.com and is also raging over at opera-l. (La Cieca invites the cher public and visitors to post links from other sites as well where the Neuenfels Lohengrin is discussed.)
La Cieca will start the ball rolling this morning by musing (ahem!) that it was perhaps not Shirley Apthorp who wrote her review’s lurid lede with its gratuitous Godwinning, but rather the executive editrix (not pictured) of Bloomberg’s arts and leisure section, who (imagine!) has a book coming out next year on what is apparently her idée fixe, i.e., a certain German dictator’s association with the festival.
Jonas Kaufmann Bayreuth July 2010 “In Fernem Land”
Sweet-freakin’-Jesus!!! Thanks so much for posting that clip – the sound is fabulous. Increasingly, I’m wondering if Kaufmann’s actually some kind of freak of nature. Sure, he’s easy on the eyes, but what astonishes me is the musicianship. He so effortlessly controls the dynamic and pace. My take – he’s truly setting a new standard in young Wagnerians. So far, I doubt we’re witnessing the second coming of Peter Hoffmann.
Suedeutsche’s “Rattendämmerung” critic, Von J. R. Bembrek, must have a tin ear because he has reservations about JK’s golden throat: Sudeuhttp://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/bayreuther-festspiele-rattendaemmerung-1.979838
Hofmann, though talented and very easy on the eyes, had a lighter voice than Jonas, and a relatively short career. He is now suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
Bayreuth’s Parsifal performance/stream is now underway; Parsifal is a role I think will better suit Jonas’s timbre better than the swan sing. But we’ll have to wait for JK’s Parsifal.
Kaufmann sang Parsifal several years ago in Zurich.
Jay, what did you think of today’s Kundry, Susan Maclean? Beautiful, exciting sound but she came to grief in the usual high lying spots at the end of the 2nd act.
Yikes! Blew my little mind so bad (good??) it near took the top of my head off. And I don’t even like Lohengrin. Yes, the musicianship, absolutely, but it’s also dramatically bang on. That certainly cleared the sinuses after a depressing morning’s work.
@Peter, I went into an hour-long meeting at work just as McLean sang “Parsifal” in Act 2, so I missed the best part of the opera. I’ll try to catch it on the rerun. (We had a power outage where I live just as Lohengrin was about to end on Sunday, so it’s been a frustrating week re: Bayreuth streaming.)
BTW, Jessye Norman could handle Kundry’s top notes in 1991, but dramatically…
Jonas compared to Peter Hoffmann ?? That’s fucking insulting. Hoffmann was just a nordic piece of meat who never had a voice.
And to think that some lout recently claimed that great sing was disappearing-
Jonas makes our age golden.
YOU SAID IT!!!!!
Jennifer Wilson is perhaps the greatest dramatic soprano of the last 90 years, and you would NEVER know it given how little she has sung in the great houses.
THIS IS THE GREATEST LIVE PERFORMANCE OF IN QUESTA REGGIA EVER!!!!! If we had directors patient enough to work with her on movement and dedicated enough to the music as music to make accommodations for her size, the world would be a better place. Here she is costumed horribly.
One commends Wilson for going up and coming down on particular critical notes where many others have got various mixed results ‘pushing up’ to try to find them. Listening to the clip makes one realize how Puccini in the right conductor’s hands as this example showed: can extend the musical allusion at the end of a phrase. That the soprano appeared to be still contributing, When it is that flattering and complimentary case at all. Supporting a singer totally, all the way. Clever! Is this the performance she did in Australia? Where the tenor had to fly in at extremely very short notice from the U.S as a desperate cover for Denis O’Neil? ‘Re-briefing himself the parts of the Score on the jet, there.. How nerve whacking, would that be!
If it was….just remember the Sydney Opera House is a pup….just a little -1100 seat max. capacity -joint….and if someone cannot sound big there…they never will.
As for the best sung Turandot ‘In Questa Reggia’ in 90 years…. that, will certainly ‘raise eyebrows’ amongst Parterre fans. When one thinks of the supreme nobility and security of a Turner or a Nilsson….etc.
I found my shill on blueberry hill.
Sorry luvtennis- “the greatest live performance of In Questa Reggia” ever???? I think that’s drawing a really long long long bow.
I don’t make this claim lightly. I have listened to just about every In Questa Reggia ever recorded – I think it the most beautiful aria that Puccini ever wrote and the most emotionally complex.
Nilsson – Birgit meets the vocal challenges with ease. No question of her qualifications for the role. That said, there is more in the aria than Nilsson finds. Where is the desperate sadness so implicit in the music. Where is the yearning when Turandot cries that “no one will have me.” Nilsson gets the defiance of the statement right, but not the emotional cost that Turandot suffers for that defiance. Vocally speaking, Birgit does not have the legato I want in this music. She sounds too much like Electra.
Turner – Magnificent for many of the same reasons as Nilsson. The middle voice is more interesting (to me at least) than Birgit, but the overall effect is one dimensional. Turandot as deranged, vengeful harridan.
Farrell – Although she never sang the complete role, Farrell offers what I believed up to now was the most complete performance of the aria. Yes the volume and the high notes are there (the latter not so penetrating as Turner or Nilsson admittedly), but so is the anguish, the vocal beauty, the regret. It’s all there in Farrell’s performance. Technically speaking, Farrell is unequalled in her control of the legato line, even in the most demanding passages. The only thing lacking in Farrell is the youthful gleam in the tone and the last bit of oommph on the high C.
Wilson – Her performance is now my ideal. She displays all of Farrell’s virtue, including a superb legato, but with a tonal gleam, a golden splendor that not even Farrell can summon. And that final high C simply glistens. We haven’t had a dramatic soprano with this degree of tonal finish since Flagstad and Leider.
I suppose that Grob Prandl might have offered something similar, but her recordings of the aria all suffer from passing vulgarities that ruin the effect that she had it in her to make. Maybe there is a better recording somewhere else.
Luvt: Wow, she is something!! And who is that tenor? Plenty of squillo and a killer high C. I enjoyed your comments on the aria and different recordings. What do you think of Callas’s rendition?
Kashi:
It depends on the version. The complete recording works in the context of the recording, but the boxy sound does Maria no favors. Additionally, Maria is stretched by the climaxes – the final triumphant “Mai nessun m’avra” is hard toned and strained. Wilson is just extraordinary there – as if there were a giant, perfectly tuned bell in her throat.
Maria is better in the version she recorded for the Puccini arias album. The voice is still stretched by the role, but the high climaxes are more expansive. All in all, Maria was a great Turandot on record. I think the opera would have probably killed her voice even sooner had she sung it more frequently onstage.
Alessandra Marc has left some good recordings of the aria, but she can be sooooo undisciplined, and the endless glottal attacks are just vulgar in the final analysis. Like Caballe on a really bad day.
Truthfully, I would have loved to hear Margaret Price tackle the aria circa 1975. She might have been the perfect lyrico spinto Turandot. But given the “tonal spread” that afflicted her high fortes from about ’80 onwards, it’s probably a good thing that she resisted the temptation.
Wilson sang Turandot at Covent Garden last year. I had been very much looking forward to seeing her, and though she wasn’t disappointing, she didn’t blow anyone’s socks off. Clean sound – definitely more Germanic than Italianate, less imposing (though secure) at the top than I would have hoped and an interpretation which fell on the subtle side of ‘dragon lady’. Overall, I liked her performance, but she didn’t make a major impact in the house. Latonia Moore’s Liu is the performance that has remained with me — what a gorgeous, pliable sound. For the record, Johan Botha was Calaf — not much in the way of squillo or charisma, but a very fine (Germanic) singer per se. (I haven’t watched the video of In questa reggia yet.)
Hippolyte: You’re right re: Zurich; meant to say we’ll have to wait several years (2013?) for Kaufmann’s Met Parsifals.
MacLean, not McLean. Too much multitasking. Hard to work and chew opera at the same time.
Jay, I’d like to hear the 1964 Broadcast of Parsifal with Crespin. I’m still waiting, Sirius. Has anyone noticed how few, if any, new archival broadcasts Sirius is playing?
Peter, hearing Crespin’s Kundry would be a real treat. Also, one of Waltraud’s Bayreuth performances after she took over for Rysanek.
Perhaps some of this material will someday wend its way to Unnatural Acts of Opera.
Peter, re: Sirius. And how ! It’s been like that for a year or so now. Between seasons it’s not worth the cost of subscribing.
Betsy, Sirius is on autopilot. Besides playing the same stuff over and over again, occasionally, I will get 5 minutes of one opera broadcast in the middle of another or the end of an act cut off. And why are there some singers (i.e. Cruz-Romo) that have never made to a Sirius broadcast? Rant, rant, rant.
If MetPlayer were competitive in terms of the live broadcasts, I’d switch. The scary thing is that opera broadcasts are drying up all over. Even the European stations are cutting back their programming.
Peter, awhile after reading your Crespin/Kundry post, I went to YouTube to hear Mdme. Crespin sing “Ich sah das Kind”.
Upon re-entering earth’s orbit I ordered the EMI album/DVD, from whence the YouTube audio clip derives. So, thanks for mentioning this.
My favorite Sirius story is when they broadcast two acts of the scheduled Corelli/Pilou R&J, but then switched to the Bjoerling/Sayao for the conclusion. And speaking of rant rant rant, there has never been an archive BORIS or PELLEAS on Sirius. Odd, yes?
When Franco slowly walked off stage after the R&J garden scene, dragging his cape, screw Pilou! I was ready to jump onstage and be Corelli’s trainbearer
Parsifal (Wagner) Act 2
Parsifal: Hans Beirer Kundry: Regine Crespin Klingsor: Gustav Neidlinger. Festspielhaus Bayreuth. August 5, 1960. Hans Knappertsbusch.
Wait a second – he IS from the country that gave us Milli Vanilli. What if he’s out there lip synching away, while a less handsome version of Jabba the Hutt is backstage doing all the singing? Oh well… that voice and phrasing would actually make the less-handsome-than-Jabba guy kind of hot too.
What if he really sounds like Lina Lamont and Debbie Reynolds was really singing?
Hmmmmm, new game. Gardner MacKay onstage lip-synching to Richard Tucker.
So Bayreuth’s Rathaus is now on the Green Hill rather than at 13 Luitpoldplatz?
The only interesting consideration I have for most regie productions, is looking at analyzing to what degree has the director – ‘shit for brains’ Then what caused it. Whether it was lack of necessary funds, an accident, sheer incompetence, a rampant ego or a raging agenda pushing their personal form of ‘politico – artistic school’ shit on others.
I do not feel I want to be confronted with some monotonous ‘punk grunge Brechtian’ in Verdi or Puccini….which is so very ‘cool’. Or dire misery laden view from ‘East European bloc – thinking’ at the moment. Take Freyer’s L.A Ring: speaking to someone who saw the entire production and then judging from the numerous photos: it looked like a art gallery exhibition in the latest styles of free-form anatomical wire work set on moving human figures. What!…Not one of the old-regie ‘crumbling corporate empire’ type productions???!! JeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeZ!
Opera as a Art form is an escape into another World, let’s be honest; and own up to it. What’s to be apologetic about? Its situations, plots and characters combined with the music: belong in that merging mental mix of our senses. It calls for some unity, not conflict nor collisions. We draw and distill our private reactions of it, across Time itself. Would anyone except a oaf when listening to music by say Chopin or Beethoven if they were unfamiliar with it .. start thinking…”Yah! that composer whoever he is… must be a real cool dude , don’t yeah think’! …’Make good background music for a gross out CGI- action comic book based character movie in 3-D too”!
Enhanced no doubt if taken, by existing with a strict diet of ‘weed’, fizzy drinks and greasy fatty junk food 3 times a day.
Now let’s consider a counter reverse attack on the punk theater directors who have crawled out of their crevices of rat -infested ‘experimental performance holes’ and invaded the field of Opera.We can see what results that they have produced.. A Kafka like plague of infesting pestilence….those bugs, mites, termites, fleas, locusts, cockroaches, crabs or even some varieties of BABs’s favorite lovely spiders. For inspirations there they are… devouring every morsel of detritus they can latch onto and spewing out their refuse waste, as a show of their personal finest artistic achievements.
Imagine an Elizabethan play, dressed it in mod chic clothes, having the actors strut around mouthing “Sir…..off to the Tower for execution!”… or ” M’Lady your carriage, and ladies -in waiting are here” .Then Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with a female Caesar who got too big for her bloomers ‘for breaking through the glass ceiling of business’. I have in fact seen a professional -done version of Julius Caesar the poor man was on stage in traditional toga while the senators came down the theater aisles, loud mouthed and dressed in latest mod gear ..like sports hooligans. Such things become the stuff of mega -Mel Brooks style risible mirth. Yet that is these sorts of practices that are also being exercised / happening today to Opera. Yet….incredibly, expected to be ‘taken seriously’ by people who want YOU to take THEM ‘doubly seriously’. That is the final hilariously insane part of their act. These defenders of such stupidity ‘at all costs’ also in themselves ,become a living breathing walking example of it. As they espouse this fashionable rot for the current cultural generation. Any wonder…opera audiences are disappearing.
Even…. by sinking to attempting to market opera to ‘the silly dumb masses’ on opera- reality shows with clowns like Villazon and Jenkins. Or producing stadium size versions of Aida and Carmen with animals. With off stage warnings : with calls like …..”Watch out and don’t step in the horse shit as you get to your stage mark!”….or “Stand back or you might ‘get some’ when the dancers come on, and start kicking up their feet as well!” See where it all went???!!! Degraded it to the point: where Opera as an art form is not something looked up to…but to be touted like a desperate slut swinging the bag at any street corner getting no offers….or a cheap ad on the back of a bus.Yet as a result of such promotion , getting few real lasting takers from the impulsive cultural imbecile masses who they are trying – by misdirection – to tantalize for a moment.
Why is it that great exhibitions of ‘period Art’ brought together in one gallery/or museum for patrons are doing ‘gang buster business around the World? It is the ramped up sense of ‘exclusivity’?
Take nightclubs…if any ‘Joe Blow can get in…its tacky…..and considered so-so. If it has a tight door policy…..and considered ‘exclusive’ everybody wants to go?
Now back to my recordings, where I can be my own perfect director, too….I create the settings to suit whatever opera I am listening to. And draw up my own season of opera for the next week. At the moment :it is consecutive season of different versions of Ariadne Auf Naxos’ and Pelleas & Melisande. Perhaps next week it will be the entire Wagner canon. Perfect!
Wow, there was a whole lot there wasn’t there, and I’m not sure its all really about the issue of “regie” directors. But one thing I could pull out of that rant that I do agree with is that as “out of the box” as many of these directors claim to be their settings fail to take us beyond Eastern Europe or the West. I was thrilled to see the stills from the Don Giovanni production set in the middle east from the regie contest a few weeks ago. That’s a production I’d be incredibly eager to see because its actually interesting. The live broadcast of the Don Giovanni as incestuous version of the Clue boardgame, *yawn* and (unintentionally) a pointed commentary at the insular vision of a lot of these directors. You can take us to Asia or Africa or Latin America in operas besides Turandot or Aida, no really, you can.
But ON, and I know this isn’t your main point, taking us to China via Turandot is a pretty dicey proposition. Problematizing the Orientalism found in “exotic” operas is actually the kind of thing that Regie can do really well.
Absolutely, I don’t think there’s really a need to set Madama Butterfly in Asia in order for us to get a message about the relationship between feshitization and empite. So maybe a Madama Butterfly where Cio Cio San just happens to be a chunky girl that Pinkerton is ashamed to bring around his politically connected friends and the Act III wife is all skinny. Thus showing us that our desires (and by proxy) our sexual identities respond more to social and economic pressure more than “biology.”
On the reverse end I’d be interested in seeing is a production of Traviata set in South Africa, maybe even Zimbabwe. Flip the script and Alfredo starts out the story with HIV and Violetta is a virgin, but that still makes her incredibly desireable because of this myth within sub-saharan nations that sex with a virgin will cure HIV. By the end, our South African Violetta has the disease HIV etc. etc. It’d probably piss off just as many people as would eastern bloc Traviata or Neo-Nazi Traviata, but its at least relevant to a present day geopolitical issue.
empite = empire.
I would totally sign up for your Butterfly. Because instead of just taking out the exoticism problem by trying to be accurate about whatever Other is depicted (as in the Minghella Butterfly) or by avoiding showing a Western/non-Western split at all (making Monostatos white), a Regie production that works against the text can challenge the opera’s depiction of the foreign characters or group itself. It can remind us of the pleasure we still get out of music that demeans the people it depicts. This is the kind of thing that really pisses non-Regie fans off, because opera isn’t supposed to make you uncomfortable. To be a little bit on topic, this the kind of thing Hans Neuenfels’s 1981 Aida was after.
And I would love to see more non-European societies depicted onstage, as long as they turn out better than the Schlingensief Parsifal.
Opinionated Neophyte: Back in the early 60′s there was a Don Giovanni with everybody moving about on a black and white chess board…. done by the original stage director of The Rocky Horror Show.
o that makes the ‘newer’ Clue broad game version … what we could call ‘Antique Regie’!
The chess board thing sounds interesting if super boring. But thanks, I learn a ton on this site almost everyday.
Unfaihful Zerbinetta; In an dramatic plot,to make some sense out of the ‘why and wherefore’ motivations of a character, we have to discern anyway ‘what and how’ they themselves felt ‘demeaned’ and whether it is justified. Collisions over sex, cultural, religious, and political outlook are in order as plot ‘drivers’. I suspect many regie directors are not so much radical and provocative… once you look underneath all that deceptive surface shock floss: they visually create. But ‘little children’ unable to accept straight -up unpalatable truths/conflicts about human existence, contained in the plots. After a while, watching some of these regie director’s works, you twig the branded type of confused slurry pattern going through their heads, examining their produced resume’. A trail of one form or another …of similar /identical mental hang-up ‘droppings’ can be seen!
Unfaihful Zerbinetta; In an dramatic plot,to make some sense out of the ‘why and wherefore’ motivations of a character, we have to discern anyway ‘what and how’ they themselves felt ‘demeaned’ and whether it is justified….
Can you be clearer about what you mean here? I don’t want to assume you’re saying something super problematic.
Christ that was supposed to be a quote….
OpinionatedNeophyte here goes…The trouble I find with a lot of the upgrading directors is….they grab an opera , have some big bright new idea/concept and yet once when seen – performed- has laughable historical and behavioral conflicts newly create; as a result of using that concept. Things start colliding and making nonsense. O.K. so some director throws a few boxes and gadgets on the stage to create this ‘new look’ of theirs. But tend not to ask : in that mod framework – what the f… are those characters doing there? Does every incident of the opera FIT IN with their new setting or do some, (perhaps the lot!) contradict and make it ludicrous? Would this or that character behave that way, in that setting? What real connective theme, has the director established to provide them the bona -fides to justify, even attempting what they are trying to do? Today we see all this nervousness ‘about depicting ethnicity’ of characters in Opera, from leftish regie directors full of their own nihilistic shit.
Take Verdi’s Otello, is not plain to see, the shrewd master stoke of Verdi to cut the Venetian scenes from Shakespeare’s Othello when composing his opera. On the one hand, he had to condense text. Two, by setting it totally in Cyprus, he accentuated the locale in tht period : as the hot- bed cross roads of intrigue between two contrasting areas of civilization. A place where Otello would be much more inwardly vulnerable and touchy to the manufactured rumors that destroy him. A place where rightly he can claim the expertise and respect for being a commander, rather than say Venice. Therefore when his fall comes, it is greater in the surroundings where he commanded greatest respect!. Imagine if some clown came along and set the opera in Scotland….the opera would fall apart. As it was Verdi faced umpteen battles with the censors….Ballo in Maschera (a Boston governor instead of a Swedish King, Rigoletto (A Duke instead of the King of Paris)etc. Yet these clot directors are once more, by default – not celebrating today;s freedoms to ensure what Verdi actually wanted…but act ‘not as church but secular- arbitrary political censors blunting Verdi’s message! How ironic. .
What people forget is, some of these regie directors are not daring but are, in fact sanitizing …(I used that word word with complete deliberation) the contents of various operas ACCORDING to their own twisted politically correct agenda view of of History and how people once did behave or still behave.
Their motto:’The World is fucked, I’m fucked too and I am going to take the lot of you …with me.’ The bible of this league of politico sicko commissionaires that escaped out of their play pens. Wanting to wreck havoc on everything, before shown up for their antics.. A methodical case study : not approaching a Work and recognizing the tragic situation contained in it. Not trying to illuminate it with shafts of light, compassion and understanding but to ridicule, sneer and shit on it all. Beito;s opening of his Maschera (on the parterre clip)….says it all. Perhaps the latrines should have been suspended over the orchestra pit….as his final directorial coup de grace. Beito appears to have a fascination with base bodily functions like a infantile 2 year old. Not forgetting, there are others competing with him as rivals in this game of ‘class war agenda’ directors ‘.
A perfect model I would put up as ‘mod concept achieved’ would be the Ken Russell direction of Madame Butterfly.For once he was self controlled ‘dug deep’ and at the top of his game. As well he went back to the original version of the opera in places to help achieve it. Yet it was still set in Nagasaki! It made complete sense and he polished it off with a final flourish. The A-bomb blast! Nothing jarred, except those that ‘love cherry blossoms at all cost’.
Looking back Ken Russell was an absolute genius….compared to the regie clowns of today. They are not fit to lick the bottom of Ken Russell’s shoes.
Harry, maybe I should have been more specific. This should help:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/09/introduction-to-edward-said.html
I talked once to a fellow connected to the classical recording industry and he made what I thought was an interesting observation. That Callas from the time of her recording of Turandot,that it was the turning point of her real down turn. I forget how many attempts he said Calls made of some parts of it. We must remember that in those days there was no digital wizardry. Sure there were some clever editing but ‘the sonic consistency’ of what was achieved with it , is tending today to be slowly revealed….care of 24bit/96KZ CD remastering. I was shocked to hear his stories then of some singers making say 20 full attempts at an aria to ‘get it right’. If that is not ‘wear and tear’ in a short space of time I do not know what is.
Talking of Turandots’s listen to Sutherland’s studio attempt on record ….exciting yes, but just after Pavarotti successfully answers the Second Riddle, her next entrance….she literally nearly did untold real physical damage to her voice chords.. There it is…captured on CD for evermore.Of note too, the Decca /London analogue tapes were not re-tweaked ‘cleaning up of any joins’ by the engineers when it was transferred to CD.
The axiom with Turandot as an opera. Turandot gets her suitors’ heads….Puccini on the other hand kills the sopranos’ voices.
I didn’t realize that one could literally nearly do something. I thought you could nearly do it…or literally do it.
Well, now you know.
That’s why it was untold, though real.
Now I’m so confused I’ve forgotten what I should have literally nearly done. I must ask Malibran or was it… um um
Now we know Ruxton! …..Talking to Malibran and you lost communication? ….Must keep that finger of yours on the glass at your next seance. What caused that break in that Menotti episode? Wasn’t Toby pulling the levers behind the curtain? Did you nearly have to get up from the table to have a wee but thought nearly better of it and had a nearly untold incontinent moment instead? The nearly untold damage ….being muddled whether you nearly or merely had a puddle,.