Swept Away – Continuum Ensemble – Kings Place, 19–21 June 2015

June 22, 2015, 2:59 am

≫ Next: Peter Grimes – Theater Koblenz, 3 July 2015; Theater Ulm, 9 July 2015

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Ernst Toch (photo Schott Music / G. Tillmann-Matter)

The main focus and interest of the Continuum Ensemble’s weekend of concerts and talks at Kings Place under the banner of ‘Swept Away’ was the music of Ernst Toch (1889–1964). He was a key member of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement in inter-war Germany, alongside Hindemith and Weill, but his music and reputation, unlike those of his colleagues, didn’t survive his exile in the US to nearly the same extent. In his heyday, in the 1920s, his music was performed by the likes of Klemperer and Furtwängler; Emmanuel Feuermann played his Cello Concerto and Walter Gieseking gave more than 50 performances of his Piano Concerto. He wrote in all the main media, from chamber music to opera. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Jewish composer suddenly found his music proscribed, and he fled to the US, where he was among the first to follow what would soon become a well-worn trail from Germany to Hollywood. There he became the go-to composer for chase scenes and horror films, though without achieving the film-music success of Korngold, Waxman or Steiner, and he only slowly returned to writing concert music late in life. A more personal exposition of his life as an exile can be read here in the words of his grandson Lawrence Weschler.

But to return to his music of the Weimar Republic era in Germany, these concerts perhaps gave us the most exposure it has yet had in Britain and included more than half a dozen UK premieres. I have already mentioned his miniature opera Egon und Emiliein a previous post and I will discuss the performances of his sonatas for violin and for cello in a forthcoming review in The Strad. The select discography of Toch’s music, most notably on the German CPO label, has passed me by, so this was my first real encounter with it beyond the perennial Geographical Fugue(performed alongside his other ‘spoken music’ pieces by the exemplary BBC Singers).

Was this, then, going to be a revelation of finding a key figure from the period the quality of whose music one cannot understand being so neglected – on a par with the rediscovery of Korngold, Schreker, Zemlinsky and others in recent decades? I’m afraid that, on the basis of the music performed here, the case remains open. There’s no denying that Toch sounds like no one else, but there’s also a saminess about much of his writing in the 1920s – ostinatos, relentless fury, parallel harmonies and so on – that was highlighted by Erik Levi’s illustration of the contrasting range of Erwin Schulhoff’s output over the same period in his talk on Weimar Republic music. The piano miniatures played with great energy by Douglas Finch exemplified this, with their love of extremes and often unforgiving forcefulness, exemplified by ‘Der Jongleur’ from his Three Burlesques of 1923, which, as Prof. Levi also illustrated in his talk, Toch transcribed for player piano to give it even more super-human forcefulness. Indeed, his music suffered a little by comparison with that of his colleagues that surrounded it in these concerts: Weill (a moving account of the Berliner Requiemby the BBC Singers), Krenek, Wolpe and Hindemith.

The expansion into more chamber-orchestral forces brought welcome variety of colour in the Five Pieces of 1924, but the similarity of the individual movements, where short nuggets of motifs are rather worked to death in swirls of parallel harmonies, left me underwhelmed – at times it was rather atmospheric, but also somewhat one-dimensional. It didn’t help that the Continuum Ensemble, conducted by Philip Headlam, lacked the weight of strings to mitigate lapses of intonation and bring greater solidity to the meandering lines.

But there was one particular revelation in Die Chinesische Flöte of 1922. Although this piece doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind if it’s a chamber symphony or a song cycle, there’s more imagination, colour and expressive range here than found in the other music performed over the weekend of concerts. It alternates instrumental movements with three songs setting texts translated from the Chinese from the same collection upon which Mahler drew for Das Lied von der Erde. The music is framed by a rather effective percussive cortège accompanying a languid melody (not unlike the effect of Ravel’s Boléro) and in his vocal writing – effortlessly sung here by Sarah Tynan – Toch at last reveals a lyrical side that has been sorely missed elsewhere. In the song ‘The Rat’ one can hear why his music would later be sought for movie chase scenes, but it was the more reflective side of the work that had greatest impact, not least the beautiful flute playing from the Continuum’s Lisa Nelson, which played an important role in the performance.

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Peter Grimes – Theater Koblenz, 3 July 2015; Theater Ulm, 9 July 2015

July 14, 2015, 3:55 am

≫ Next: Der ferne Klang – Nationaltheater Mannheim – 12 July 2015

≪ Previous: Swept Away – Continuum Ensemble – Kings Place, 19–21 June 2015

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Koblenz: Grimes (Ray M. Wade Jr) and Aurea Marston (Ellen)

Ulm: Grimes (Hans-Günther Dotzauer)

	KOBLENZ	ULM
Peter Grimes	Ray M. Wade Jr	Hans-Günther Dotzauer
Ellen Orford	Aurea Marston	Oxana Arkaeva
Auntie	Anne Catherine Wagner	Rita-Lucia Schneider
Niece 1	Hana Lee	Edith Lorans
Niece 2	Irina Marinaş	Katarzyna Jagiełło
Balstrode	Mark Morouse	Tomasz Kałuzny
Mrs. Sedley	Melanie Lang	I Chiao Shih/Judith Christ
Swallow	Jongmin Lim	Don Lee
Ned Keene	Randal Turner	J. Emanuel Pichler
Bob Boles	Juraj Hollý	Thorsten Sigurdsson
Rev Horace Adams	Junho Lee	Alexander Schröder
Hobson	Kai Uwe Schöler	Joachim Pieczyk
Doctor Crabbe	Eberhard Kurrels	(not specified)
Boy	Carlos Gerhardt	(not specified)
	Opernchor & Extrachor	Statisterie, Opernchor & Extrachor
	Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie	Das Philharmonische Orchester der Stadt Ulm
Conductor	Enrico Delamboye	Daniel Montané
Director	Markus Dietze	Matthias Kaiser
Sets	Bodo Demelius	Marianne Hollenstein
Costumes	Su Sigmund	Angela C. Schuett
Video	Georg Lendorff
Dramaturge	Christiane Schiemann	Benjamin Kunzel

The mob musters in Koblenz...

Britten’s operas remain popular in Germany, and the composer’s centenary year in 2013 seems to have spurred a renewed interest. In the space of a week, I managed to catch two of the half-dozen different productions of Peter Grimes on offer in the country during the 2014–15 season. It offered an interested ‘compare and contrast’ exercise, but also gave that rare experience of hearing a work rooted in one’s own native language and culture – and over the years I must have seen more live performances of this opera than any other – transplanted into a ‘foreign’ milieu. Both companies, in Koblenz and in Ulm, to their credit performed the work in English (original-language performance is virtually the norm in Germany these days), but the success of that English proved surprisingly variable. With several Anglophone members in its cast, Koblenz fared markedly better than Ulm, which could have benefited from a language coach who could have at least ironed out inconsistencies of pronunciation of characters’ names and occasional drifts into American-English (these people inhabited a town called The Burrow; Grrrrrrimes sometimes gained an inauthentic rolled ‘r’; and according to Ellen Orford, ‘we shall be vizz him’). On the other hand, it’s probably something that native speakers of German, French or Italian have to put up with on a daily basis as their repertoire is subjected to multi-national casts.

The pronunciation divide was not the only element that set these productions apart: Koblenz offered the finer musical performance, but Ulm had arguably the more coherent staging. The one area where the Koblenzers left something to be desired was the placing of the orchestra right back behind the stage. Theater Koblenz is a tiny, rare 18th-century survivor, a compact, 460-seater horseshoe auditorium tacked on to a modern stage rebuild. As such, its pit is too small for a full symphony orchestra, so needs must. It was just a shame, therefore, that Bodo Demelius’s set – a modular platform-come-ceiling of girders and decking – had to take up the full depth of the stage, when so much more use could have been made of the covered-over pit as a performing area and allowed the players to sit closer to the audience. As such, the alert playing of the Rhenish Philharmonic State Orchestra was a little too distant and muted, and in Act III it gave the perverse experience of hearing an off-stage main orchestra coupled with onstage dance musicians whose music should really drift in and out of focus from behind the scenes. Enrico Delamboye’s conducting was generally apposite, though the way he and the director spun out the Prologue for laughs lost a lot of its essential swift tautness of character-introduction. The Koblenz chorus was simply magnificent, both in its superbly clear diction and its power – the gathering of the plank-wielding mob at the very front of the stage, just yards from my second-row seat, was perhaps the most terrifying this Act III scene has ever been in my experience.

As Grimes, the Texan tenor Ray M. Wade Jr – much admired as the Emperor in last season’s Die Frau ohne Schatten in Kassel– gave a profound interpretation that revealed the character’s vulnerability, with lyrical, warm-hearted singing and a real feeling for the words (no American drawl here!). Aurea Marston’s Ellen Orford marked this Swiss-born former mezzo’s debut as a soprano and offered firm tone and a sense of line, though her patchy English diction sent me scrabbling for the German surtitles to remind me of the text I thought I knew so well. Mark Morouse’s Balstrode was warmly sympathetic in voice and interpretation and US-born, Guildhall-trained mezzo Melanie Lang was a fruity, cut-glass-English Mrs Sedley. I also enjoyed Junho Lee’s youthfully lyrical Rector and Anne Catherine Wagner’s resonantly sung Auntie, once she had got over her initial squalliness.

I was less taken with Markus Dietze’s production, however. It was unclear what he was trying to tell us – that the impoverishment of this community was what led it to scapegoat one of its number? This was at least a clue given by Georg Lendorff’s often enigmatic video images that during the interludes were projected on to the gauze hiding the orchestra, the one during the Passacaglia showing miserable workers locked out of shipyard – otherwise they were largely a bizarre succession of ‘seaside’ images. The scene in The Boar was an impromptu gathering, with Auntie serving bottles of beer from an old shopping trolley; and I wasn’t sure what to make of the final scene of the whole cast lining up their wellington boots in tribute to the dead apprentice. Characterisation was often over-egged, from Mrs Sedley’s neurotic tic and Auntie’s persistent cigar-smoking to Swallow’s rapacious flirtations, though Wade’s Grimes saved the day with a touching portrayal of a man with naive hopes and dreams and who doesn’t realise his own strength in his treatment of the apprentice.

... and in Ulm

Thus was Grimes on the Rhine. Over at Theater Ulmon the Danube, meanwhile, director Matthias Kaiser conjured up a more focused, Expressionist presentation of the drama, with the chorus as a uniform mass in matching oilskins and with half-white-half-brown faces. Marianne Hollenstein’s set was of a rotting hulk of a ship in a breaker’s yard and much use was made of stage lifts to suggest a highly unstable ground for the people’s existence. But although the effect was often visually striking, there seemed to be too little understanding of the verismatic exactitude of many of the stage directions: how can Mrs Sedley ‘have the evidence’ if she’s not there to witness Ellen discovering the boy’s bruise? Why does Balstrode enter Grimes’s hut through the cliff door from which the boy has just fallen (a theoretically effective staging muffed by an unwilling rope)? And, by the by, what were those gently meandering fish projected on to the front cloth during each of the interludes supposed to represent? Perplexing compared to the large, dramatically colourful canvasses Hollenstein had painted to represent each of the six interludes that stood on display in the foyer.

Hans-Günther Dotzauer gave a very different Grimes compared with Wade in Koblenz. Possessor of a more authentically Pears-like timbre than the American, this German tenor’s gruff, bullish characterisation didn’t grow enough through the drama, though, as if he were hemmed in by his costume of woolly hat and leather jacket and his fate were sealed from the start. Ukrainian soprano Oxana Arkaeva, making her farewell performance in the Ulm ensemble, was somewhat miscast, her Slavic swoopiness and tendency to yell at phrases a long way from the usual demure English schoolmistress, though her lyrical moments had admirable tenderness. Nor was her engagement with her character convincing in her reaction to events around her, smiling in all the wrong places. Tomasz Kałuzny was a pallid Balstrode, who didn’t really command his scenes as a former captain should. I Chiao Shih’s Mrs Sedley was vocally indisposed and the singer mimed (ie overacted) her part while Judith Christ (who coincidentally had been singing the role earlier in Koblenz’s run) sang resonantly from the side of the stage.

The Ulm chorus, indistinct in diction and wayward in English, was no patch on Koblenz. Nor did the Ulm Philharmonic display enough ease with the idiom: Daniel Montané’s conducting was inflexible and the dry acoustic of the theatre gave a perfunctory air to the broad emotional sweep of the music.

Der ferne Klang – Nationaltheater Mannheim – 12 July 2015

July 22, 2015, 3:04 am

≫ Next: Čekovská/Mahler - Prometeo - Tosca: September 2015

≪ Previous: Peter Grimes – Theater Koblenz, 3 July 2015; Theater Ulm, 9 July 2015

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Photos: Hans Jörg Michel

Grete – Astrid Weber

Fritz – Michael Baba

The old Graumann/The Baron – Sung Ha

Graumann’s wife – Petra Welteroth

Innkeeper/Rudolf – Sebastian Pilgrim

A ham actor/The count/Actor – Raymond Ayers

Dr Vigelius, a lawyer – Bartosz Urbanowicz

An old woman – Marie-Belle Sandis

Mizzi – Tamara Banjesević

Milli – Ludovica Bello

Mary – Estelle Kruger

A Spanish girl/A waitress – Evelyn Krahe

The chevalier/A dubious individual – Andreas Hermann

A girl – Juliane Herrmann

First chorus member – Daewoo Park

Second chorus member – Slawomir Czarnecki

Chorus members – Eun Young Kim, Babett Dörste-Ewald

A young man – Jürgen Theil

A policeman – Wolfgang Heuser

Chorus, Extra Chorus and Statisterie of the National Theatre Mannheim

Orchestra of the National Theatre Mannheim

Conductor – Dan Ettinger

Director – Tatjana Gürbaca

Sets – Marc Weeger

Costumes – Silke Willrett

Lighting – Christian Wurmbach

Video – Thilo David Heins

Dramaturge – Merle Fahrholz

Was Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang the first truly modern opera? Given the composer’s sad neglect over much of the 20th century, it’s easy to forget how influential the work and its composer were after the opera’s triumphant premiere in Frankfurt in 1912. Would Berg, who made the vocal score of Der ferne Klang for Schreker’s publisher, have gone on to write either Wozzeck or Luluwithout its example? Both the sense that it is an opera of ideas as much as of incident and that its form and dramaturgy take the medium in new directions make it every bit as revolutionary within operatic tradition as Tristan und Isolde and Pelléas et Mélisande. Fortunately, the musical world is beginning to wake up to its worth, and this is the third production I’ve been fortunate to see in four years, following stagings in Nuremberg (2011) and Bonn (2012), and meanwhile it has also appeared at the Berlin Staatsoper, in Zurich, Strasbourg and at Bard in New York in recent years, and will receive a new production in Graz in the autumn.

Tatjana Gürbaca’s production for Mannheim’s National Theatre, which also returns in the autumn, emphasises the opera’s modernity by stressing its post-Freudian obsessions of dreams, longing and complexity of relationships, or as the conductor Dan Ettinger suggests in a programme interview, exploiting both musically and dramatically the photographer’s idea of gradations between clarity and blurring, between reality and imagination (he reminds us that Schreker was the son of a court photographer). The fraught love between Grete and the composer Fritz that underlies the plot’s search for compositional inspiration – the ‘distant sound’ for which Fritz yearns – is given a back story with video showing the two as teenagers, and the difference between dreams, memories and the present become clouded in the protagonists’ minds – and, indeed, ours, as we struggle to work out if what we are seeing is the product of Grete’s or Fritz’s subconscious. It may not have been an obvious introduction for those seeing the work for the first time, but Schreker doesn’t exactly make things easy himself, with his shifting between realities and dreams (the warts-and-all verismo of the opening scenes followed by the mystical scene in the wood), a seemingly chaotic second act that encompasses proto-cinematic cross-fades between scenes and musics, and a work as a whole that features an almost ungraspable array of minor characters. But Gürbaca’s direction of these cameos was strongly drawn, from the mysterious Old Woman to the sinister lawyer Dr Vigelius, and Marc Weeger’s cavernous set gave plenty of space and atmosphere to the interpretation’s blurring of physicality and imagination.

Fritz (Michael Baba) and Grete (Astrid Weber)

Mannheim’s National Theatre double-casts many of its productions to cover extended runs and, in this case, the autumn revival, and this was what it termed the B-Premiere, though there was no sense that this was the ‘B’ cast. In the main role of Grete was a singer who had appeared in the role when I saw it in Nuremberg in 2011, Astrid Weber. Her identification with the character was complete, even if one sensed a greater than usual degree of cue-watching of the conductor as she worked herself into this production. It was nevertheless a commanding assumption of a role that journeys so far in so short a time and her singing was firm and focused throughout. The Fritz of Michael Baba, Mannheim’s new house Heldentenor, was similarly committed and was conveyed with plenty of passion if not always suavity, though it’s not an easy role to make one’s own when he is absent from the stage for whole swathes of the work. Raymond Ayers’s Count was a treat, his ballad a highpoint of Act II as it should be, and one must make special mention of BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competitor Sebastian Pilgrim, whose resonant bass made its mark as the Innkeeper and Rudolf.

The real star of this performance, though, was the Mannheim National Theatre Orchestra under general music director Dan Ettinger. I’ve rarely heard Schreker’s score come to life with such sensitivity for both colour and dramatic energy, and Ettinger’s understanding of the composer’s unique style – evident in his programme conversations as much as in practice – made the whole, as it should be, an emotionally draining experience and brought Schreker’s own ‘distant sound’ that little bit nearer to repertoire status in our time.

Further performances: 28 July, 3, 28 October, 11, 20 November 2015

Čekovská/Mahler - Prometeo - Tosca: September 2015

September 17, 2015, 1:48 am

≫ Next: Ruhe in the Ruhr

≪ Previous: Der ferne Klang – Nationaltheater Mannheim – 12 July 2015

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Links to my latest concert and opera reviews on Bachtrack.com.

The audience has to find its way through the fog to experience Prometeo

Čekovská and Mahler in Essen 

A new Slovakian work inspired by the life cycle of the mayfly coupled with Mahler's Symphony No.5

 

Nono's Prometeo in Duisburg 

The Italian modernist's expansive exploration of the Prometheus legend takes over a former turbine hall in the Ruhr

 

Tosca in Aachen

A new production takes an anti-clerical approach to Puccini's opera

Ruhe in the Ruhr

October 6, 2015, 6:04 am

≫ Next: Lohengrin’s Lair

≪ Previous: Čekovská/Mahler - Prometeo - Tosca: September 2015

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A former ironworks in Duisburg, now turned into a landscape park

If you thought that the Ruhr region of north-west Germany was nothing but belching chimneys, satanic mills and slag heaps, think again. It is true that vestiges of those images do still exist in places, especially among the chemical factories along the Lower Rhine, but the one-time heart of European heavy industry, mining and manufacture has its sweeter side as well. In recent times, the region has re-invented itself as a cultural hotspot (it was European Capital of Culture in 2010) and has gone to great lengths to exploit its industrial archaeology by turning one-time turbine halls, coking plants and mines into museums, landscape parks and performance venues.

The Untermarkt in Hattingen

But there’s another Ruhr, one that seemingly survives unscathed by modern industry. Admittedly, wartime bombing flattened all the big towns and cities, many of which had historic hearts, and the present-day Altstadts of these are often sad relics of former glories. Move away into the countryside, however – and there’s a surprising amount of open forest and farmland between the cities, as any local train journey reveals – and there are historic villages, townscapes and miles and miles of paths and trails for hiking or cycling.

Fachwerk in Hattingen

The 'clothes iron house' in Hattingen

Essen is the largest city in the Ruhr and was once dominated by the industry of the Krupp engineering empire (the family’s Valhalla-like mansion, Villa Hügel, is now a major tourist attraction in a park to the south of the city). But within easy reach are a handful of unspoilt smaller towns that seem to belie their presence in this part of Germany. Principal among them is the former Hanseatic town of Hattingen, a 20-minute S-Bahn ride south-east from Essen, and a place that with its 143 restored half-timbered buildings seems like a world away. The approach from the Hattingen-Mitte S-Bahn terminus is somewhat unprepossessing, over a ring road and through a modern shopping centre, but soon one is in a medieval square, the Untermarkt, dominated by its 16th-century Altes Rathaus (old town hall - see main image above). Behind it is the parish church of St George, with its jauntily bent spire, and surrounding that an enjoyable maze of little lanes full of half-timbered gems, such as the ‘Bügeleisenhaus’ (iron house, from its top-heavy profile looking like a clothes iron, see picture, right). Even here there’s a heritage of iron- and steel-making, and a modern town gate has been designed to pay tribute to its industrial past, while within walking distance just to the north of the historic town centre is the Heinrichshütte Ironworks, a major component of the Ruhr-wide Westphalian State Museum of Industrial Culture. But it’s the other-worldly Fachwerk, or half-timbered architecture, that makes Hattingen one of the most charming places to visit in the region, especially during the summer, when its many cafés and restaurants spill out into the streets and squares.

Street scene in Kettwig

Except around its mouth at Duisburg and nearby Mülheim, the river that gives the region its name meanders with tranquil insouciance between wooded hills. The worst of the industry left the Ruhr valley for the flatter area to the north in the 19th century and now it’s a pleasant area to explore, whether on excursion boats on its various dammed stretches, walking or cycling along its dedicated long-distance path or visiting its riverside towns. The most attractive of these is Kettwig, on the S-Bahn line between Essen and Düsseldorf (Kettwig and Kettwig-Stausee stations are equally about a 15-minute walk from the town centre). Rather than the traditional black-and-white half-timbering of Hattingen, the architecture here is dominated by green-slate cladding, which gives the place a subdued but austere feel. There’s an attractive square and sinuous main street and a gentle tumble of steps and lanes falling away to the river from below the church.

Lohengrin’s Lair

October 30, 2015, 5:16 am

≫ Next: Parsifal in Wuppertal; Meistersinger in Mainz; Lohengrin in Pforzheim - Spring/Summer 2015

≪ Previous: Ruhe in the Ruhr

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Swan Tower

My regular operatic visits to the Ruhr and Lower Rhine areas of Germany leave me plenty of time to kill between evening performances, and I am always on the lookout for new places to visit during the daytime. Recently I was in Düsseldorf for a couple of nights, so on a very murky mid-October day I took the Regio Express train for 90 minutes to the end of its line at Kleve, just short of the Dutch border. Better known in English as Cleves (it was spelt as Cleve in Germany until spelling reform in the 1930s), it is probably most familiar as the home town of King Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne – the one whom he divorced after a mere six months when her visage proved to be nowhere near as pulchritudinous as Holbein’s portrait of her. But the town itself sets much greater store by a more mythical former inhabitant, the swan knight Lohengrin.

In Wagner’s version of the story, Lohengrin reveals in his Narration in Act III that he has come all the way from Montsalvat, which is presumed to be Montserrat in the mountains outside Barcelona. Given that Kleve is a mere 5km from the Rhine it makes for a far more plausible swan journey to leave his castle, travel down the great river to the North Sea and take the Scheldt up-river to the Brabantine court in Antwerp. Obvious, really. (Quite coincidentally, I had been in Antwerp the day before, following the previous evening’s performance of another Wagner opera, Tannhäuser, though my journey to the Rhineland had been more conventionally land-based.)

Kleve’s Lohengrin connection stems from the castle at its heart, the Schwanenburg, or Swan Castle. The counts who settled and built their fortress on the cliff-top overlooking the Rhine floodplain in the 11th century (‘Cleve’ derives from the word for ‘cliff’) believed they were descended from the local version of the swan knight, Helias, stories of whom were circulating among the troubadours for more than a century before finding literary form in the Teutonic medieval epics that Wagner used as his sources. But the idea of a saviour knight turning up on a swan to rescue a damsel in distress is common to them all. And today the swan has become the symbol of Kleve, from its logo and town website tab ident to virtually every piece of public art in the place. Among these is one of the wittiest water features anywhere: the Schwanenbrunnen (Swan Fountain, see above) in the main square portrays Wagner as Lohengrin, with the swan trying to drag him away into the water by his coat-tails and a buxom opera singer (Elsa?) along with two urchins pleading with him from the shore.

Kleve pictured in 1945, after its air-raids

The line of the Counts and the Dukes of Cleve, who were ruling over much of the lower Rhineland by the time of Anna’s marriage to Henry VIII in 1540, eventually died out in the early 17th century and the dukedom was swallowed up by Brandenburg and, much later, by Prussia. Besieged by the Spanish in 1635 and occupied by the French during the Napoleonic wars, Kleve then enjoyed a century or more as a leading spa town, thanks to a mineral spring that had been discovered in the 18th century, and it became a favoured place for Rhineland/Ruhr industrialists to build their weekend villas. These are some of the only buildings in Kleve to have survived two heavy Allied air-raids, in October 1944 and February 1945, which destroyed 90 per cent of the town, including the castle.

Despite the fact that Kleve had to be completely rebuilt and with only its most notable buildings reconstructed as they had been before the war, it’s an atmospheric place, or at least it was on the misty day I explored it. The Swan Tower at the heart of the castle was one of the first structures to be reborn and now houses a moderately interesting little museum on local geology and history with, on a clear day, views over the whole of the lower Rhineland (open daily April to October, at weekends only over winter); the rest of the castle is now occupied by law courts and municipal offices. Also rebuilt, though it took the best part of 40 years, is the main, double-spired Collegiate Church, whose origins go back to the 10th century; its most recent additions are its striking series of post-Millennial stained-glass windows (pictured right), which give the interior a rare unified feeling (open for visits daily except lunchtimes and during services).

One of the grandest of the 19th-century villas is now the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, an art gallery whose collection spans some five centuries and has an important focus on the work of the leading modernist performance artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who spent much of his early life in and around Kleve. The work of another local artist, Dutch landscape painter Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–62), is celebrated in the villa he built in the centre of the town, one of the few in that area to survive the air-raids, which briefly stood in as a postwar town hall and is now the BC Koekkoek Museum. Otherwise, the architecture in much of the town centre, especially its shopping streets, is blandly 1950s–70s, though the hillier area around the castle at least maintains its historic feel and the original street plan survives.

The area in which Kleve sits, hard by the Dutch border and bound by hills in the west and the Rhine to the east, is known as Cleverland. It’s a popular draw for Netherlanders from over the border, attracted by its lower property prices and cost of living, which I suppose is why the locals call themselves Cleverlanders.

Parsifal in Wuppertal; Meistersinger in Mainz; Lohengrin in Pforzheim - Spring/Summer 2015

November 2, 2015, 2:20 am

≫ Next: Opera in the Ruhr and Lower Rhine

≪ Previous: Lohengrin’s Lair

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From the November 2015 issue of The Wagner Journal

Parsifal (Tilmann Unger, 2nd left) watches as Amfortas (Thomas Gazheli) pays for his betrayal of the community

Parsifal– Oper Wuppertal – 15 March 2015

Parsifal – Tilmann Unger

Kundry – Kathrin Göring

Amfortas – Thomas Gazheli

Klingsor – Andreas Daum

Gurnemanz – Thorsten Grümbel

Titurel – Martin Blasius

First Grail Knight – Andreas Beinhauer

Second Grail Knight – Peter Paul

First Squire/A Voice from Above – Lucie Ceralová

Second Squire – Johannes Grau

Third Squire – Markus Murke

Fourth Squire – Mine Yücel

Flowermaidens – Sandra Borgarts, Lucie Ceralová, Carla Hussong, Ralitsa Ralinova, Silja Schindler, Mine Yücel

Chorus and Extra Chorus of Wuppertaler Bühnen

Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra (Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal)

Conductor – Toshiyuki Kamioka

Director – Thilo Reinhardt

Designer – Harald Thor

Costumes – Katharina Gault

Video – Sönke Feick

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg– Staatstheater Mainz – 5 July 2015

Hans Sachs – Derrick Ballard

Walther von Stolzing – Alexander Spemann

Eva – Vida Mikneviciute

Veit Pogner – Hans-Otto Weiß

David – Martin Koch

Magdalena – Linda Sommerhage

Sixtus Beckmesser – Armin Kolarczyk

Kunz Vogelgesang – Max Friedrich Schäffer

Konrad Nachtigall – Johannes Held

Fritz Kothner/Nightwatchman – Peter Felix Bauer

Balthasar Zorn – Christopher Kaplan

Ulrich Eisslinger – Christoph Wittmann

Augustin Moser – Scott Ingham

Hermann Ortel – Manos Kia

Hans Schwartz – Georg Lickleder

Hans Foltz – Stephan Bootz

Chorus and Extra Chorus of Staatstheater Mainz

Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Mainz

Conductor – Hermann Bäumer

Director – Ronny Jakubaschk

Designer – Matthias Koch

Lighting – Alexander Dölling

Lohengrin– Theater Pforzheim – 10 July 2015

Lohengrin – Reto Rosin

Elsa – Tiina-Maija Koskela

Friedrich von Telramund – Hans Gröning

Ortrud – Anna Agathonos

King Henry – Matthias Degen

Herald – Aykan Aydi

Chorus and Extra Chorus of Theater Pforzheim

Badische Philharmonie Pforzheim

Conductor – Markus Huber

Director – Wolf Widder

Designer – Joanna Surowiec

Enthused by the experience of exploring Wagner performances in Germany away from the big, international houses in the anniversary season of 2013 (see review in TWJ, Nov. 2013), I ventured back earlier this year and, by coincidence, alighted upon two of the dramas that share the idea of an outsider transforming the status quo. It’s a theme that the directors of both Wuppertal Opera’s Parsifal and Staatstheater Mainz’s Die Meistersinger made central to their concepts, emphasising the role of both Parsifal and Walther as agents of change in deeply conservative, rule-obsessed societies.

Thilo Reinhardt’s Parsifal, supported by Harald Thor’s meticulous designs, relocates the grail order to an elite sporting academy where Gurnemanz is the track-suited gym master (a neat way of emphasising his lowly position in the eyes of the tail-coated academic masters/knights). That this is an institution that glories in blood-lust becomes clear when Parsifal enters: as part of some arcane hazing ritual, he has shot the school acrobat (the swan) with an archery bow and rather than attend to the wounded athlete, all the students and masters can do is laugh at his misfortune.

The Transformation Music takes us to a grand initiation function for the new pupils, who include Parsifal. The ‘uncovering of the grail’ – which here seems to be symbolised by a ceremonial cloak – entails a gruesome blood-letting ceremony in which Amfortas is strung up in Christ-like pose and the new recruits have to open up new wounds with their fencing swords before his blood is collected and passed around for consumption among the assembled men. Amfortas’s wounds, plural, it would seem, are inflicted by the community he has dishonoured as revenge for allowing the renegade master Klingsor to steal the spear under his watch.

Parsifal’s response to this violence, as appears to be the case at the start of Act II, is to have run amok among his former fellow pupils, who are seen mourned over by the school cheerleading team – the Flowermaidens. His crucial encounter with Kundry is presented as a vision. At the kiss, she takes up Amfortas’s crucifixion pose from Act I, which triggers Parsifal’s memory and response. And at the end of the act, as if in a dream, Parsifal deflects Klingsor’s spear by simply covering his eyes and ‘waking’ from the enclosed world of the vision.

The curtain opens in Act III on a vision of complete devastation. A grey-haired Parsifal arrives in UN peace-keeping uniform with a posse of war-wounded colleagues. When they demand the uncovering of the grail, Parsifal saves Amfortas from further torture and creates a funeral pyre for the school’s emblematic cloak, spear and old texts. A new order, free from the violence and victimisation of the academy’s former ethos, is welcomed in as the members of the chorus step forward and kneel to greet the closing music coming from the pit, as if to say art and beauty will now transcend evil and provide redemption.

Reinhardt’s approach, then, is more than a simple gloss – it has something deep to convey that is in line with if not exactly the same as Wagner’s conception, and it is in the friction between these two visions – and between action and sung text – that greater comprehension can be found. Perhaps its overriding achievement is in the way it conveys Parsifal’s own growth as a person, from a cocky, ignorant youth thrust into a bewildering community to a mature, worldly-wise man whose experience of and participation in the evils of that community transform him into its saviour, the redeemer who is himself redeemed. This characterisation was enhanced by the performance of Tilmann Unger in the title role. This young German tenor has the youth to be convincing as the ‘pure fool’ as well as the maturity as an actor to convey the old soldier and brings a baritonal depth and charismatic, lyrical warmth to every line he sings. His performance stood out, but not at the expense of his colleagues, from the strikingly intense Kundry of Kathrin Göring to Thorsten Grümbel’s determined Gurnemanz and Thomas Gazheli’s torture victim of an Amfortas, all vocally at one with their roles. Toshiyuki Kamioka’s conducting, in keeping with modern trends, kept Wagner’s musical tapestry moving yet found the space to delineate its many threads of line and colour.

-  -  -

Mainz's 'green'Meistersinger

The city of Mainz can lay a certain claim to ownership of Meistersinger: Wagner was staying in neighbouring Wiesbaden while visiting his publisher, Schott, when by his own account a vision of ‘golden’ Mainz’s skyline silhouetted across the Rhine inspired him to begin the Prelude. And in its own way, Mainz’s resident opera company returned the compliment by staging a fresh, witty production, performed with the consummate sense of a company at the peak of its collaborative power.

Set in a milieu somewhere between Brave New World and The Wizard of Oz’s Munchkinland, Ronny Jakubaschk’s vision for the work creates a regimented society where green is the only permitted colour, where the Lehrbuben form the floor-mopping drone class, where the Masters are indeed the masters and control every aspect of society and where a machine is the arbiter of artistic rectitude. Into this apparently benevolent dictatorship of the Mastersingers enters the daringly red-headed Walther, and his difference begins to have its effects on this stultifying order: Eva is the first to be enticed, and her bright green hair and clothing gradually take on more red as the evening progresses until by the end Walther’s colour has taken her over completely. The moiré-wheeled machine, doing Beckmesser’s job of marking the young knight’s first attempt at a master song, overheats from the novelty and audacity of his singing and begins to turn a shade of pink itself. Kothner’s doubling as the Nightwatchman, meanwhile, emphasises the hold the Masters have enjoyed over the populace, though his powerlessness to quell the riot suggests the people are already on the turn. Of the Masters themselves, only Sachs seems willing to accept and welcome Walther’s difference, though never going so far as to become coloured by it himself. At the end, he firmly asserts his ‘Habt acht!’ before realising that the cause is lost as, in the closing bars, the liberated Eva leads a peaceful revolution in which all – Masters and people – at last intermingle as one beneath a rosy glow.

It would all seem rather simplistic an interpretation were it not carried out with such élan. Matthias Koch’s sets and costumes are integral to that success – in their simplicity and stylisation they pay homage to the austerity of Wieland Wagner, yet Jakubaschk’s direction ensures that characters aren’t reduced to automatons beneath the monochrome visuals. One particular coup comes during Sachs’s Wahn Monologue, when the set revolves to reveal a frozen tableau from the previous night’s riot, complete with Beckmesser in full scream while being throttled by David and everyone held in uncomfortable-looking ‘mid-air’ poses until the scene has disappeared from view. Apart from the riot, stage clutter is minimal – barely more than a last for Sachs’s cobbler’s workshop and a podium for the song contest – very much putting the onus on the singers and the music. While Wuppertal has recently had to lay off its house ensemble to save it from bankruptcy, Mainz’s still evidently thrives: Derrick Ballard’s Sachs and Alexander Spemann’s Walther were just two who were cast from within the resident company. Armin Kolarczyk’s Beckmesser, ‘borrowed’ from the Karlsruhe ensemble, was a scheduled replacement for a house singer at this performance and Mainz’s indisposed David was covered with remarkable assurance at short notice by Martin Koch from Oper Köln. In all, it was evidence of a marvellous company achievement, without a weak link in the cast, though one might have wished for more vocal heft from Spemann in riding the orchestra and, if being pernickety, Ballard could have brought greater warmth to his more lyrical moments. Kolarczyk played the hurdygurdy-wielding Beckmesser vocally and dramatically ‘straight’, rather than for laughs (he and Walther shook and made up amid the concluding celebrations of Act III), and Vida Mikneviciute made Eva a more assertive character than usual, mirrored in the bright vibrancy of her singing. Mainz’s chorus and orchestra did the company proud, and conductor Hermann Bäumer held everything together with the skill of a master himself.

Two highly ‘interventionist’ approaches to staging Wagner, then, both of which succeed on their own terms, in their internal logic and in the insight they provide on the themes underlying the dramas. The composer’s detailed plotting may sometimes go out the window, but is it too far-fetched to suggest that he was more concerned with idea than story-telling specifics in any case? Better this approach than the kind of bland narrative that marked this summer’s Lohengrin at Theater Pforzheim, where Wolf Widder’s modern-dress production promised much (and was tremendously sung and played, with a slightly reduced orchestration) but lacked that crucial element of directorial interpretation that makes operatic theatre a living art form.

Opera in the Ruhr and Lower Rhine

November 23, 2015, 4:07 am

≫ Next: Peter Grimes – Theater Krefeld – 8 December 2015

≪ Previous: Parsifal in Wuppertal; Meistersinger in Mainz; Lohengrin in Pforzheim - Spring/Summer 2015

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The Ruhr/Lower Rhine conurbation, or Ruhrgebiet/Niederrhein, is one of the most densely populated areas of western Europe and as a result boasts as many as nine more-or-less fulltime opera companies. This guide, a conflation of the Southern Ruhr and Northern Ruhr pages listed at the top of this blog, provides a personal introduction to each of them, listed in alphabetic order.

DORTMUND

theaterdo.de

Best known for beer and football, unprepossessing Dortmund can hold its own in the operatic field, too. Theater Dortmund is the kind of place where a Strauss opera, Viennese operetta and West End musical can be in repertoire over the same weekend, yet it also recently mounted the German premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole, and has had a strong line in Mozart stagings in the last few seasons. As the Intendant’s motto puts on the company’s website, ‘We make the popular challenging and the challenging popular.’(Its parallel activities in dance, plays and youth theatre combine to make it one of Germany’s busiest theatre operations.) The company operates a semi-stagione system, with productions in rep over several months.

Theatre: the curved roof of this 1960s building, built on the site of the city’s bombed pre-war opera house, is a striking sight, and makes for a light, airy foyer (the ‘working’ part of the theatre is built into the neighbouring office block that comprises the company’s offices and workshops, and is separate from the Schauspielhaus for spoken theatre next door). The box office is just inside the main entrance, between the two entrance doors, and the foyer includes free, full-height lockers in lieu of cloakrooms. The auditorium is partly shaped by the curvature of the roof and seats 1,170 between Parkett and two Logenrängen (‘vineyard-style’ boxed tiers). Theater Dortmund is a 15-minute walk from the Hauptbahnhof – take the subway under the major ring road to the pedestrian zone and follow the red tourist signs via Hansaplatz.

2015/16 repertoire: Tristan und Isolde, Kiss Me, Kate, Hansel und Gretel, La traviata, Rinaldo, Peter Grimes, plus revivals of Le nozze di Figaro, Der Rosenkavalier

Reviews of performances in Dortmund: Roxy und ihr Wunderteam (Abraham), Don Giovanni

Tickets: €10–49, bookable online, printable or for collection.

Practicalities: Dortmund is a major fulcrum on the Intercity and ICE networks, as well as a major focus of the local train service, so is a useful base. It also has an international airport (served by EasyJet, among others). As such, hotels are plentiful, though they can fill up when Borussia Dortmund is playing at home.

Daytime: despite being flattened in the war, the city has plenty of history, though its cultural interest today lies more in the 20th-21st-century sphere: a leading contemporary art collection in the ‘U’ complex (the city’s former main brewery) and a sobering but fascinating museum covering the city’s history from 1933 to 1945 in the former Gestapo prison just north of the Hauptbahnhof (free admission). On a lighter note, the city is famous for hosting one of the country’s biggest Christmas markets, based around the world’s largest Christmas tree on Hansaplatz. Dortmund’s train connections make much of the rest of the area accessible for trips out.

Nearby(average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Essen (23/3/3), Hagen (30/5/2).

DUISBURG

operamrhein.de

Theater Duisburg is the junior partner in the dual-theatre operation of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein based in Düsseldorf. Indeed, it is junior to the extent that it is in severe danger of being cut back to minimal operatic activities. But for the moment at least it shares productions and staff with the main house in Düsseldorf, though it has its own orchestra, which means performances run in both theatres concurrently, if somewhat more sparingly in Duisburg. It currently puts on about 100 opera and ballet performances a season, running in semi-stagione pattern.

Theatre: a building from 1912, rebuilt in 1950 after bombing, and seating 1,218 in Parkett and two Ränge (see right). The Abendkasse is easily found just inside the entrance. The theatre is under a ten-minute walk from Duisburg Hbf.

2015/16 repertoire: L’elisir d’amore, Turandot, Ariadne auf Naxos, What Next? (Carter)/Trouble in Tahiti (Bernstein), plus revivals of Die Zauberflöte, Aida, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Hänsel und Gretel, Der fliegender Holländer, Werther, Il trittico, Rigoletto, Der Rosenkavalier

Reviews of performances in Duisburg: Die Zauberflote

Tickets: €15–70, bookable online and printable.

Practicalities: Duisburg is well-connected, being halfway between Düsseldorf and Essen on the intercity network and with plenty of local services well into the evening. As such, it would make a good base, if a rather uninspiring one.

Daytime: Duisburg’s claim to fame is in being Germany’s largest inland port, at the point where the Ruhr runs into the Rhine. There’s a small area of surviving/rebuilt Altstadt near the rivers and revitalised dockland areas for eating/entertainment.

Nearby(average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Düsseldorf (20/7/4), Essen (15/7/5), Krefeld (20/3/2).

DÜSSELDORF

www.operamrhein.de

As the capital of North-Rhein-Westphalia and with the seventh largest population among German cities, Düsseldorf is the main cultural hub for the whole Rhein-Ruhr region. The city is well enough known and written about not to need further introduction, though other musical draws include its Tonhalle concert hall by the Rhein and a history that included Robert Schumann as its ill-fated director of music in the 1850s. Its opera company, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, by its very name claiming national status, spills beyond the city to encompass a second base in neighbouring Duisburg (see above). Düsseldorf, though, offers the fuller programme, making it, with the addition of ballet, as busy as the opera companies in Cologne and Essen. It is reasonably well regarded for the scope of its repertoire, and a new Ring cycle has been announced for the 2016–17 season.

Theatre: Düsseldorf Opernhaus is situated on the edge of the Altstadt, the city’s nightlife centre, conveniently next to the well-connected Heinrich-Heine-Allee U-Bahn (underground) station, which is a short three stops from the Hauptbahnhof (or about a half-hour walk). The building, on the site of the bombed-out 19th-century Stadttheater, is a functional and sleak 1950s construction, which can seat just short of 1,300 patrons in a large Parkett and three shallow tiers. Row 14 and back in the Parkett, plus the very sides, are in the overhang, and sides of the upper two tiers offer a somewhat restricted view of the stage.

2015/16 repertoire: Arabella, Die Zirkusprinzessin, Don Carlos, The Golden Cockerel, Die lustige Weiber von Windsor, plus revivals of Die Zauberflöte, Aida, The Fiery Angel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, Hänsel und Gretel, Les contes d’Hoffmann, Tosca, Lohengrin, Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Giovanni, Carmen, Rigoletto, Der Zwerg, Der Rosenkavalier.

Reviews of performances in Düsseldorf: The Fiery Angel (Prokofiev)

Tickets: €15–82, bookable online and printable.

Practicalities: As Düsseldorf is a leading centre for shopping and commerce, there’s no shortage of hotel accommodation, though prices tend to be higher than the rest of the region, especially during trade fairs. There are plenty of options near the Hauptbahnhof, though the area to the south is somewhat insalubrious – the more upmarket places are in the Altstadt or near the Königsallee luxury shopping street. A handful of places include a free Ruhr-wide travelcard for the duration of your stay – always something worth looking out for (equivalent to c.€27 per day, including the full extent of the day you leave). Düsseldorf makes a convenient base for visiting all the other opera houses in the region – Duisburg and Krefeld are even linked by tram. The international airport is an easy ride away via S-Bahn.

Nearby (average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Dortmund (60/3/3), Duisburg (16/7/4; plus tram/U-bahn), Essen (40/6/5), Gelsenkirchen (40/2/2), Hagen (45/2/1), Köln (33/4/2), Krefeld (30/3/2; plus tram/U-bahn), Mönchengladbach/Rheydt (33/2/1; plus further deps changing MG Hbf), Wuppertal (20/3/2 + Schwebebahn connection).

ESSEN

aalto-musiktheater.de

Essen runs on a semi-stagione system, with long runs of new productions interspersed with short ones – maybe just three performances – of revivals. It’s often possible to catch two operas in a single visit.

Theatre:Essen has what must be the only opera house since Dresden’s Semperoper to be named after its architect, but the city was so proud of the result that it named the building, completed in 1988, as the Aalto Theater, after its creator, the Finnish master Alvar Aalto, who had died during its long journey to fruition. It is indeed an iconic piece of modern architecture, admired as much for its sleek beauty as for its practicality – gleamingly white outside and in the foyers and refreshingly blue in the auditorium itself, which is highly unusual in being semi-circular but asymmetrical, as if an uneven bite has been taken out of a Greek theatre. It seats 1,125 in Parkett and two slender balconies, giving excellent sight-lines from all areas; the box office is in a little ‘pod’ within the outer foyer. The theatre is less than ten minutes’ walk due south of the Hauptbahnhof and even has its own eponymous tram stop outside. It’s also worth noting that the Essen Philharmonie concert hall – the main symphonic venue in this part of Germany – is virtually next door and hosts all the great visiting orchestras.

2015/16 repertoire: The Greek Passion (Martinů), The Love of Three Oranges, Faust, Elektra, Il barbiere di Siviglia, plus revivals of Fidelio, Madama Butterfly, Macbeth, La bohème, Un ballo in maschera, Die Zauberflöte, Der fliegender Holländer, Into the Little Hill (Benjamin), Aida, Tosca, La traviata, Rusalka, Don Giovanni

Reviews of performances in Essen: Die schweigsame Frau, Le grand macabre

Tickets: €25–47.

Practicalities: Essen’s central location in the Ruhr (it is indeed regarded as its capital) makes it the ideal base – apart from Mönchengladbach, all the region’s venues can be reached comfortably from here. A couple of hotels (InterCity and City Hotel) offer Ruhr-wide public transport tickets in the room price, which is always good value, but there’s a reasonable spread of places to stay at all prices, many of them close to the station and thus the opera house. Note that, as with a number of cities in the region, room rates rise markedly when there’s a trade fair/Messe on. Restaurant choices are fairly limited, both near the opera house and in the central shopping area.

Daytime: Essen markets itself as shopping capital of the Ruhr, but the city also offers some of the region’s cultural highlights. Principal among them must be the Folkswang art gallery, a short walk across the park from the Aalto Theater, and home to one of the best collections of 19th- to 21st-century art anywhere, with representative works from all the great artists from the German Romantics onwards. The other draw is the Zollverein Coking Plant in the city’s northern outskirts, a vast former industrial complex built between the wars in modernist Bauhaus style and now housing a fascinating museum on the Ruhr as a whole and on the mining history in particular. Essen city centre is a pleasant enough place for a wander, with several historic buildings surviving, including its Romanesque church.

A highly recommended excursion is to the neighbouring town of Kettwig, a rare surviving example of a historic townscape in the region, full of old half-timbered buildings clad in the distinctive local green slate and with atmospheric lanes tumbling down to the River Ruhr – there’s also a pleasant riverside path. The S-Bahn line between Essen and Düsseldorf, along which Kettwig sits, is a surprisingly rural and scenic ride. The town centre is a 15-minute walk from either Kettwig or Kettwig-Stausee stations.

Nearby (average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Dortmund (23/3/3), Duisburg (15/6/5), Düsseldorf (35/5/4), Gelsenkirchen (8/4/4), Hagen (37/2/1), Krefeld (40/2/2), Wuppertal (46/3/1).

GELSENKIRCHEN

(forthcoming)

2015/16 repertoire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tosca, Norma, La gioconda, Die Fledermaus

Tickets: €11–41

Nearby(average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Dortmund (40/4/4), Essen (8/4/4).

HAGEN

theaterhagen.de

On the face of it, Hagen is one of the more unprepossessing of the Ruhr’s towns: a bit down on its luck, saddled with municipal debt and with few cultural sites, though it is scenically situated among hills and adjacent to some of the River Ruhr’s leisure hotspots on its reservoirs. However, its theatre is one of the region’s more enterprising, tackling interesting repertoire (neglected American operas have been a recent theme) with energy and skill - but catch it soon, since recent budget cuts are currently threatening the company's very existence.

Theatre: Theater Hagen is a Jugendstil building from 1911, reduced to a shell by American bombardment in 1945 and rebuilt four years later. Unfortunately, the rather tired state of the seating suggests not much more has been done to the auditorium since, though it’s otherwise a comfortably intimate, rectangular space with 774 seats distributed between Parkett/Orchester and two upper tiers. A neat widget on the website shows what the view is like from different parts of the theatre. Thevenue is on one of the main shopping streets, approximately ten minutes’ walk from Hagen Hbf. Note that the box office (including Abendkasse) is in an annexe to the right-hand side of the main frontage and difficult to find from inside the foyer. Hagen uses the semi-stagione system with extended, overlapping runs that also feature musicals.

2015/16 repertoire: Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio, Madama Butterfly, Das Land des Lächelns, Jonny spielt auf (Krenek), Eugene Onegin, Der Rosenkavalier

Reviews of performances in Hagen: Vanessa (Barber)

Tickets: €15–38, bookable online.

Practicalities: It’s possible to stay in Hagen, but other than on a flying visit it may prove preferable to stay in neighbouring Dortmund, Essen or Wuppertal for their greater general cultural attractions and connectibility.

Nearby(average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Wuppertal (25/3/1), Essen (39/2/1), Dortmund (30/1/2).

KREFELD

theater-kr-mg.de

Theater Krefeld is the northern arm of the two-city Theater Krefeld-Mönchengladbach operation (see below for Mönchengladbach) and uses the ‘semi-stagione’ scheduling system. The two theatres share an orchestra, the Lower Rhine (Niederrhein) Symphony, meaning that although seasons run concurrently, individual performances broadly alternate in short batches between the two venues and it is possible to see a couple of different operas in the same theatre on consecutive nights. Although Mönchengladbach and Krefeld are only 25km or a 20-minute train journey apart, the theatres enjoy distinct audiences, as suggested by the fact that a new production given in one venue one season will usually be presented afresh in the other the following year. Repertoire is an eclectic mixture of popular classics with some rarer material – the company was the only one outside the Wagnerian heartland of Leipzig/Berlin to present Rienzi in the composer’s bicentenary year, for example.

Theatre: a modern building situated to the north of the city centre and a good 20-minute walk from Krefeld Hbf, or a five-minute tram ride. Theater Krefeld (right) has an intimate auditorium seating 674 between Parkett and a single balcony.

2015/16 repertoire: Peter Grimes, My Fair Lady, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Die Schone und das Biest (Spohr), Les contes d'Hoffmann

Tickets: €12-38, bookable online and printable.

Practicalities: there’s a convenient Ibis Budget hotel near the station and places to eat in the shopping streets between the Hbf and the theatre, but it’s not the most inspiring place to base oneself for more than a single night.

Daytime: there’s not much else to keep you in this city, but it provides convenient rail links to the historic towns of Kleve and Xanten to the northwest, as well as to Düsseldorf and Cologne.

Nearby(average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Duisburg (20/3/2), Düsseldorf (35/5/3), Essen (40/2/2), Mönchengladbach/Rheydt (22/3/2).

MÖNCHENGLADBACH

theater-kr-mg.de

Theater Mönchengladbach is one half of the Theater Krefeld–Mönchengladbach operation (see above for Krefeld) and uses the ‘semi-stagione’ scheduling system. The two theatres share an orchestra, the Lower Rhine (Niederrhein) Symphony, meaning that although seasons run concurrently, individual performances broadly alternate in short batches between the two venues and it is possible to see a couple of different operas in the same theatre on consecutive nights. Although Mönchengladbach and Krefeld are only 25km or a 20-minute train journey apart, the theatres enjoy distinct audiences, as suggested by the fact that a new production given in one venue one season will usually be presented afresh in the other the following year. Repertoire, though limited in number of productions each season, is an eclectic mixture of popular classics with some rarer material – the company was the only one outside the Wagnerian heartland of Leipzig/Berlin to present Rienziin the composer’s bicentenary year, for example.

Theatre: just to confuse matters, Theater Mönchengladbach is not in Mönchengladbach itself, but in the neighbouring town/suburb of Rheydt, six minutes south by train – the generously lobbied postwar building (90% of Rheydt was bombed in the war) sits in a little park just a few minutes’ walk from Rheydt Hbf. Its plain, square auditorium seats c.778 divided between Parkett and Balkon.

2015/16 repertoire: Un ballo in maschera, Der Rosenkavalier, Katya Kabanova

Reviews of performances in Mönchengladbach: Les contes d'Hoffmann

Tickets: €12-38, bookable online and printable.

Practicalities: if not using the area as a base, there’s little reason not to stay in Rheydt itself: Parkhotel Hayma (www.parkhotel-rheydt.de/) is reasonably priced and just across the road from the park and theatre. Restaurants and shopping streets are within walking distance. With one of Germany’s major football teams in the vicinity, hotels can get heavily booked out on home match nights. Otherwise, central Mönchengladbach can be reached by twice-hourly trains and additional local buses after performances.

Daytime: there’s little to see in Rheydt, so head to Mönchengladbach itself – this was only 60% destroyed by the RAF and a few older buildings survive, notably the Münster, or abbey church, on the top of the hill that forms the historic heart of the city (church closed Mondays) and a few fragments of the former city walls. There’s also one of the country’s leading contemporary art museums, the Abteiberg (www.museum-abteiberg.de/, also closed Mondays), all about 15 minutes’ walk uphill from Mönchengladbach Hbf. Aachen is an hour away and Düsseldorf 20 minutes.

Nearby: Krefeld, Düsseldorf, Aachen, though late-evening train connections are thin on the ground.

WUPPERTAL

wuppertaler-buehnen.de

Wuppertaler Bühnen has unfortunately recently lost its whole operatic ensemble (and closed its separate Schauspielhaus) in a drastic cost-cutting exercise, and a reduced roster of operas - only half a dozen in 2015/16 compared with eight or more in previous seasons - will now be cast with guest singers. Yet artistically, the company has been on a roll and always seems to throw up something worth travelling for each season, culminating in a Parsifal of international stature in March 2015. Performances are given at the Opernhaus in the Barmen district of the city, also the home of the world-renowned Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal contemporary dance company. The company operates almost to a ‘stagione’ system, with often only a small overlap between productions and meaning it’s usually only possible to see a single work in one short visit.

Theatre: an intimate, modern, semi-circular auditorium in a reconstructed Jugendstil shell from 1905, seating c.360 in the stalls, c.150 in the first tier and c.120 in the second tier. Good sight-lines from most seats, though rows 1-3 and 5 of the stalls are not raked.

2015/16 repertoire: Eugene Onegin, Lulu, Madama Butterfly, West Side Story, plus revivals of St John Passion, Tosca

Reviews of performances in Wuppertal: Krol Roger (Szymanowski), Parsifal

Tickets: €8-41, bookable online and printable.

Practicalities: Wuppertal, the one-time textiles hub of Germany, is a ribbon city strung out for some 13km along the leafy valley of the Wupper river, and a conglomeration of formerly separate towns. The opera house is adjacent to Barmen DB station and close to Adler Brücke station on the Schwebebahn, the ‘swinging railway’ that is suspended over the river and is the city’s main transport link. Most of the hotels and other infrastructure, though, are in Elberfeld, close to Wuppertal Hauptbahnhof and some ten minutes to the west by Schwebebahn (an easy connection). There’s a vast redevelopment of the Hauptbahnhof frontage underway until 2017, which is making getting between station and town a bit of a hassle, but it’s still manageable. Wuppertal is second only to Essen in convenience as a base to stay while visiting different theatres in the region. Especially if you are using Wuppertal as a base, it’s worth considering staying in one of the handful of hotels that provides a ‘free’ (ie included) Ruhr-wide travel pass (worth €27 a day and valid on all non-Intercity transport, including the Schwebebahn) for the duration of your stay, including the InterCity and Central hotels. Apart from the theatre café there’s nowhere to eat immediately close to the Opera House, and in Elberfeld, the Luisenviertel offers more restaurants than the central shopping area.

Daytime: Riding the Schwebebahn is an attraction in itself. Elberfeld is home to a leading art collection, the Von der Heydt Museum, and there are several concentrations of grand villas built by textile magnates in the late 19th century worth wandering past, particularly in the Briller and Zoo areas – pick up a walking guide from the Tourist Office at Schloßbeiche 40. Near the Opera House in Barmen is the birthplace of Friedrich Engels (now a museum) and behind it a further museum of early industry. For a more rural experience, take the S7 train to Solingen-Schaberg and explore the picturesque, wooded lower Wupper valley on foot, with a chance to marvel at the engineering wonder of the Müngsten Bridge, the highest steel railway bridge in Germany, and visit Schloß Burg, the one-time seat of the Dukes of Berg, now a regional museum covering the history of the Bergischer Land. Otherwise, Cologne is only 45 minutes away from Wuppertal by train and much of the rest of the region is equally accessible.

Nearby(average journey times by train / per-hour frequency pre-performance / per-hour frequency post-performance): Düsseldorf (25/4/2), Hagen (25/3/1), Essen (46/3/1), Dortmund (49/1/1), Cologne (45/3/2).

Disclaimer: this guide has been compiled in good faith using facts available at time of writing, but please double-check practical matters – repertoire, prices, train frequency etc – with the appropriate websites and organisations before making any travel or ticketing arrangements.

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Peter Grimes – Theater Krefeld – 8 December 2015

December 15, 2015, 4:41 am

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Grimes (Heiko Börner) with the sinister Dr Crabbe (Tobias Forstreuter) looking on. Photos: Mattias Stutte

Peter Grimes – Heiko Börner

Ellen Orford – Anne Preuß

Balstrode – Johannes Beck

Auntie – Eva Maria Günschmann

First Niece – Amelie Müller

Second Niece – Debra Hays

Bob Boles – James Park

Swallow – Andrew Nolen

Mrs Sedley – Gundula Schneider

Rev. Horace Adams – Michael Siemon

Ned Keene – Rafael Bruck

Hobson – Matthias Wippich

Apprentice – Jonas Trebo

Dr Crabbe – Tobias Forstreuter

Chorus & Extra Chorus of Theater Krefeld und Mönchengladbach

Niederrheinische Sinfoniker

Conductor – Alexander Steinitz

Director – Roman Hovenbitzer

Sets – Roy Spahn

Costumes – Magali Gerberon

This, my third German Grimesof 2015 (see also here), was the first of them to be given the full Regietheatertreatment. The previous two productions had displayed various degrees of naturalism, extending in Ulm’s case as far as Expressionism. Roman Hovenbitzer’s production for the twinned Krefeld/Mönchengladbach theatres extends to surrealism. He has latched on to the British seaside tradition of the Punch and Judy show and used it to cast light on the violence at the heart of the opera. The silent Dr Crabbe is the puppet-master, following and guiding the action, prodding characters into action and forcing Punch’s red cap on to them. The dock in which Grimes faces the coroner in the Prologue is also the puppet booth, and the puppet dolls are occasionally donned to mimic the actions of the people, the baby coming to represent the dead apprentices, whose shrouded, lifeless bodies both come to haunt Grimes in his final mad scene. 

Roy Spahn’s set is like the inside of a plywood box (an analogy to the puppet theatre again, made of the same material) with sides that open up to allow the towns-people to view the court from the outside and which provide a blank canvas for some highly evocative aqueous video projections. The Borough is represented by a model village and the Boar is little more than a rowdy gathering. Hovenbitzer portrays a society where casual violence is the norm: Mrs Sedley trips Ellen up as she is called to the court in the Prologue; knives are drawn in the pub – the idea being, presumably, that Grimes’s brutality (for which he exhibits remorse in the hut scene) is drawn from the environment in which he lives. 

The surrealism comes in with the populace’s fancy dress for the dance scene in Act III, highlighting the commedia dell’arte roots of the puppetry and which gives a gawdy, lurid hue to the posse that hounds Grimes to his death, waving their slapstick weapons like Punch. It also colours the characterisation of the townsfolk, with a certain amount of caricature of the ‘quaint Englishness’ that make this and Albert Herring favourites with German audiences. In a more naturalistic setting one could quibble about the clerical costuming of vicar and methodist preacher, though I liked the idea of Auntie as an escapee from behind the bar at Coronation Street’s Rover’s Return.

The production opened in Mönchengladbach in May and has been running in Krefeld through the autumn, with a few cast tweaks along the way. This final performance had the staging’s original Grimes in Heiko Börner, a singer who looked the part and was a compelling actor but who didn’t sound wholly comfortable with the language or the tessitura [he proved much more at home in Zemlinsky Heldentenor territory a few days later – see here]. Anna Preuß’s Ellen was a treat, with beautifully nuanced singing and strength of tone, though Johannes Beck’s Balstrode felt a little distant dramatically, though this may have been the fault of the direction rather than the singer, an imposing figure himself. Eva Maria Günschmann, who I have previously admired in the trouser roles of Octavian and Adriano (Rienzi) at this house, was as impressive as ever as a blowsy Auntie and Gundula Schneider, although looking formidable in her tweeds, for once under-played the more caricatured temptations of the role of Borough busybody, to good effect. James Park’s detailed Bob Boles, Andrew Nolan’s eloquent Swallow and Rafael Bruck’s fluent Ned Keene were all notable interpretations. The chorus didn’t have the power of Koblenz’s in the summer, but made a decent impression, and the Lower Rhine Symphony under Alexander Steinitz brought their months of familiarity with the score to bear in a performance with bite and plenty of atmosphere.

Bluebeard's Castle/Der Zwerg – Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern – 12 December 2015

December 15, 2015, 4:57 am

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Bluebeard (Guido Jentjens) and Judith (Alelheid Fink) Photos: Thomas Brenner

Bluebeard’s Castle

Bluebeard – Guido Jentjens

Judith – Adelheid Fink

Der Zwerg

Dwarf – Heiko Börner

Donna Clara – Jihyun Cecilia Lee

Ghita – Arlette Meißner

Don Estoban – Alexis Wagner

Maids – Naomi Schäfer, Andrea Zabold, Christina-Mirl Rehm

Girls – Neung Mi Lee, Seung Min Baek

Infantin’s playmates – Women of the Chorus & Extra Chorus

Das Orchester des Pfaltztheaters

Conductor – Uwe Sandner

Director – Urs Häberli

Sets – Thomas Dörfler

Costumes – Ursula Beutler

Lighting – Manfred Wilking

The dwarf (Heino Börner), Clara (Jihyun Cecilia Lee) and Don Estoban (Alexis Wagner)

Double bills often work best when some thought has gone into the pairing. Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) is often twinned with the composer’s other Oscar Wilde opera, A Florentine Tragedy, and last years production in Lübeck (see here) made a good case for linking the two completely different stories. Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castlemakes an interesting coupling for Der Zwerg. There are parallels between the two composers, born a decade apart and both finding refuge from the Third Reich in the USA but dying within a few of years of emigrating. Both operas are based on what might broadly be termed ‘fairy tales’, though definitely from the darker end of the spectrum. Both also involve themes about revelation and self-revelation: Bluebeard’s innermost secrets are progressively revealed through the seven doors of his castle; the dwarf finally discovers the truth about his ugly appearance and dies from the pain. And both Bluebeard and the dwarf seek love but are betrayed by, respectively, self-deception and thoughtless leading-on.

Urs Häberli has made no attempt to link the two operas in his staging, and they inhabit visual worlds as different as their musical ones. Bluebeard’s castle is a split-level wall in shades of blue-grey, in which six of the seven doors are incorporated into the Mondriaan-like squares and rectangles (the other, for the lake of tears, is in the mezzanine floor). In fact I think this must be the first production I’ve seen which actually has physical doors, as opposed to other analogies for the openings on Bluebeard’s mind and realms, though the ‘contents’ are left to the imagination with changing colours of lighting. The interaction of the two characters is naturalistic and well directed, and there is a parallel in the baring of Bluebeard’s soul in the way he gradually removes garments – coat, gloves, jacket, waistcoat – as his secrets are uncovered; the fate of Judith, on the other hand, is to end up veiled and covered up along with the former wives. There was a sense that Adelheid Fink’s Judith was going through the motions for this last performance in a three-month run, and her slightly squally singing (the opera was given in the standard German translation by Wilhelm Ziegler) and unengaged acting detracted from the overall performance. Guido Jentjens’s Bluebeard, though, was richly sung and his fine acting projected much of the character’s pain and disappointment.

The Dwarf was a visual treat, with Ursula Beutler’s costumes giving a whimsical and contemporary twist to Renaissance Spanish court wear, with its extravagant wigs and ruffs. The brightness and lightness of touch of the direction only highlighted the ultimate tragedy, where the dwarf the Infanta, Donna Clara, has been given for her birthday is ultimately forgotten as another broken toy just at the moment his own self-revelation kills him. Heiko Börner, who had sung Peter Grimes in Krefeld only four days earlier (reviewed here), gave a gripping performance of the title role – touching, searing and lyrical in equal measure (and a better fit to his tenor than Grimes had been). Jihyun Cecilia Lee caught the Infanta’s childishness that drives the drama with singing that was bell-like in its clarity yet never sounded precious. The rest of the cast was just as convincing. But most impressive of all was the playing of the Pfalztheater’s orchestra under Uwe Sandner – quite simply the most texturally detailed, beautifully shaped and masterly performance of Zemlinsky’s irridescent score I’ve heard in the theatre.

Ruhe in the Ruhr: 2

December 17, 2015, 4:05 am

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Baldeneysee

My previous posting on the subject of finding the picturesque in one of Europe’s most industrial regions concentrated on the Ruhr’s historic urban relics. This time my focus is on its scenic beauty. Yes, there is plenty – large swathes, especially around the river valleys, forests and open farmland that act as buffers between the main cities. This was often where the German equivalent of the Industrial Revolution originally started, with small-scale mining and cottage industries, before the heavier industry took over and concentrated themselves in the lowlands to the north.

When we talk of the Ruhr today, we tend to think of the whole region, stretching from Duisburg in the west to Dortmund in the east, Solingen in the south to Gelsenkirchen in the north. But the river which gives the area its name and reputation is actually one of these scenic wonders. Flowing down from the hilly Sauerland of the central German massif, it now takes a surprisingly rural route through the industrial heartland, winding in large, sinuous curves from Hagen, via the southern outskirts of Essen to Mülheim and out into the Rhine at Duisburg. For much of its length, this stretch glides through wooded valleys, often enlarged into reservoirs, and with its boating, walking and cycling opportunities has become the main ‘green lung’ and outdoors escape for the millions who live within its reach. In the south of the region, the Wupper and Düssel do a similar job. What follows are descriptions of three walks that, in my humble opinion, offer some of the best exposure to the charms of the Ruhr region’s countryside. All are based around using the area’s rail network for access.

A) Baldeneysee, Ruhr

The water provided by the Ruhr was crucial to the original exploitation of the area’s mineral resources, but is nowadays more important for human use. When the river was dammed just above the ancient town of Werden in 1933 it not only flooded the valley to provide drinking water for nearby Essen, but also allowed the installation of turbines to create hydro-electricity. (The dams that were the focus of the infamous ‘Dam-busters’ of World War II are upstream in the hills of the Sauerland.) The resultant Baldeneysee is now a beautiful, mature-looking lake, surrounded by forest and with its shore peppered with sailing clubs and hugged by a largely tarmacked foot/cycle path. A full circuit is shown locally as 14km, though my GPS registered it closer to 17km, and it is possible t

o do half that by using different suburban rail lines at each end of the lake. Depending on the season, there are various cafés and restaurants offering refreshment along the way.

Baldeneysee

Werden is a stop on the S6 rail line between Düsseldorf and Essen, running every 20 minutes during the week, half-hourly at weekends. This small town with an attractive Alstadt quarter is home to North Germany’s most significant late Romanesque abbey church, founded by St Ludger (who is buried in the crypt), one of Charlemagne’s bishops. In truth the interior is spoiled by typically hideous Baroque Roman Catholic excesses, especially a tasteless altarpiece, and there’s not much else to see apart from Ludger’s cask. Instead head down to the river and follow the shore upstream. The dam is about a ten-minute walk north of the town, and makes an interesting brief diversion to walk along the top, see the hydro turbines working and admire the views of the lake and up to the Krupp dynasty’s Villa Hügel sitting voluminously above the trees.

Villa Hügel looming over the lake

A wide, tarmac road, with minimal traffic, hugs the southern shore for 7km to Kupferdreh, paralleling a historic steam railway line for the last few kilometres – a relic of the numerous industrial lines that peppered the region. Here one can catch the S9 rail line that runs, at a similar frequency to the S6, between Essen and Wuppertal. Alternatively, cross the old box girder bridge over the upper end of the lake and follow its northern shore (foot and cycle paths frequently diverge along this stretch) back towards the dam and Werden. On the way, there’s an old mine lift, left as a memorial to valley’s former industry. If walking all the way back to Werden seems too much, one can cut the circumnavigation short by a few kilometres by catching the S6 at Essen-Hügel instead (this is the stop for the Krupp villa, which is open for visitors most days and is worth seeing in its own right for its moneyed opulence and interesting historical displays).

B) Müngsten Bridge and Schloß Burg, Wupper

Müngstenbrücke

Southwest of Wuppertal, the River Wupper takes a sharp turn to the south and flows between densely wooded hillsides in the Sauerland foothills – a particularly pleasant stretch. Take the S7 train from Wuppertal, or from Solingen, to Solingen-Schaberg station at the western end of Germany’s highest steel railway bridge, the Müngstenbrücke, which magnificently spans the deep Wupper gorge and has just been restored (the journey across by train is spectacular in itself). From the station follow the footpath that zig-zags down to the river, where’s there’s a visitor’s centre and, in season, a rope-pulled pedestrian ferry across the water. Head along the western shore, downstream, for several kilometres (largely flat, though there’s one steep diversion over a ricky outcrop), crossing the river where a small lane takes you to the village of Burg. Looming above the village is a well-restored medieval castle, now the regional museum and well worth the climb up (there is a funicular in season).

Burg church with castle in the background

This was once the seat of the Dukes of Berg, who ruled over much of the Lower Rhineland until subsumed by Brandenburg and then Prussia in the 17th century. Cross the river on the main road (Solingerstrasse) and take the first turning on the right after the corner (Friedhofsweg). Turn right on to a path that climbs up to the top of the hill. From here, a wide, high-level forestry track follows the river (down to your right) all the way back to the pier of the Müngster Bridge and a brief further climb back up to the station.

C) Neanderthal, Düssel

Recreation of a Neanderthal man in the museum

We have the region’s industry to thank for the discovery, in the mid-19th century, of the bones of our near-relative, Homo neanderthalensis, who lived in this area of the Düssel, just 12km from the centre of what would become Düsseldorf, some 40,000 years ago. Quarrymen excavating the rich deposits of limestone made the discovery in a cave here in 1856, in a then canyon-like section of the river valley named after a local pastor and naturalist, Joachim Neander, whose surname almost prophetically was concocted from the Greek for his true name, Neumann, or ‘new man’. In the intervening decades the canyon has been plundered of its limestone and the valley is now broad and tree-lined. Close to the fascinating Neanderthal Museum, devoted to the discovery and the prehistory of the area, are some concrete ‘beds’ on which one can lie and imagine the cave metres above your head, now in the open space of the valley. 

 

The striped poles mark where the discovery was made, several metres above in what is now air!

One can walk up the valley from the museum, or make a longer, one-way walk that takes in more of the local scenery. From Gruiten station on the main commuter line between Düsseldorf and Wuppertal (make sure your train is scheduled to stop here), walk through the car park parallel with the rail lines and pick up the Neanderthalweg that soon becomes a footpath, down past a quaint farmstead and on to a path alongside the rushing Düssel river. Follow this upstream for a couple of kilometres; at the crux of a left-hand bend in the river a track head uphill to the left: climb up here until the road surface improves and you reach some scattered houses. Before the road takes a sharp left-hand turn, pick up a footpath that heads west through fields to another small road. Follow this to the left, take the right turn at the T-junction to its end, cross the main road and take the service road that runs parallel to the left. Cross back over the main road, follow the lane ahead until it becomes a path and enters the woods. From here a path descends down to the Düssel again and head downstream, passing an animal attraction and various prehistoric displays, to the museum. An enjoyable morning’s walk, with refreshment available at the museum cafe or the inn on the main road. From here, a short footpath climbs up to the Neanderthal station on the S28 line between Mettmann and Düsseldorf.

Au monde - Theater Aachen - 26 February 2016

February 28, 2016, 1:20 am

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Photo: Carl Brunn

The father - Randall Jakobsh
The oldest sister - Pawel Lawreszuk
Ori, the second son - Hrolfur Saemundsson
The oldest daughter - Sanja Radisic
Ther second daughter - Camille Schnoor
The youngest daughter - Suzanne Jerosme
The husband of the oldest daughter - Johan Weigel
The strange woman - Marika Meoli

Sinfonieorchester Aachen

Conductor - Justus Thorau
Director - Ewa Teilmans
Set design - Oliver Brendel
Costumes - Andreas Becker
Lighting - Dirk Sarach-Craig

Philippe Boesmans (b.1938) was a leading light of the Belgian avante-garde and the Liege school of Henri Pousseur until in recent years he abandoned it all for New Romanticism. His latest opera, Au monde, premiered at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2015 and received its first German production in this staging by Theater Aachen, which opened last December. Based on a stage play by Joel Pommerat, who fashioned the libretto, it combines the dramatic worlds of Chekhov and Maeterlinck to depict the not exactly clear relationships within a rich industrialist’s family: we have three sisters, two brothers, a husband of one of the sisters and the ageing father, as well as an ‘unknown woman’, whose presence appears to trigger events. Shades of incest, lesbianism and abuse colour the sexual politics; some of the 20 scenes are described in the synopsis as being ‘perhaps a dream’ – the world of the Belgian Symbolists seems to be re-evoked in this modern setting. And Boesmans makes the musical link, too, by using a language that at times could have come from the pen of Debussy (the French word-setting certainly brings Pelleas to mind), coupled with a 21st-century take on the late-Romantic styles of Mahler and Strauss. It’s well crafted, as one would expect from a composer of his experience, but also felt a bit Ersatz, a bit pastiche, and has the rather stylistically incongruous Leitmotif of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’, mimed at salient points by the strange woman and voiced offstage by the father (only one character, the second son Ori, is given a name).

Ewa Teilmans’s production sleekly presents the two-hour span of the opera with only the odd brief hiatus for unaccompanied scene changes (Boesmans seems unsure whether to provide interludes or to stop and start between scenes). The basic shell of Oliver Brendel’s set doesn’t change, but apertures open, furniture appears and disappears and the distinction between reality and dream is subtly blurred. Justus Thorau conducted the score with relish, though the orchestra’s strings – apparently notated by the desk – sounded undernourished and a bit fragile at times. The cast was uniformly good, but special mention must be given to Camille Schnoor’s focused and eloquent portrayal of the second-eldest sister, the opera’s most important role, and to the superbly varnished tone of Hrolfur Saemundsson’s Ori, the character whose return from the army to take over the family business just as he goes blind precipitates the drama. There are many loose ends in the narrative, as one would expect from a story told in half-lights and half-truths, and even a second reading of the synopsis post-performance did little to help, but for all the drawbacks, it was an opera that engaged brain and heart.

Die tote Stadt - Theater Magdeburg - 27 February 2016

February 29, 2016, 12:07 pm

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Photo: Nilz Bohme

Paul – Wolfgang Schwaninger
Marietta/Maria’s voice – Noa Danon
Frank – Roland Fenes
Brigitta – Undine Dreissig
Fritz – Thomas Florio
Juliette – Irma Mihelic
Lucienne – Jenny Stark
Gaston – Eric Schubert
Victorin – Manfred Wulfert
Count Albert – Markus Liske

Opera Chorus & Statisterie of Theater Magdeburg
Children’s Opera Chorus of Georg Philipp Telemann Conservatoire
Magdeburgische Philharmonie

Conductor – Kimbo Ishii
Director – Jakob Peters-Messer
Set design/lighting – Guido Petzold
Costumes – Sven Bindsell

I’m quite used to directors choosing to unfold a different narrative from the one that composer and librettist present in their work, and am generally accepting of this when done convincingly and with perceptive purpose. But I tend to draw the line at playing around with the musical integrity of a through-composed opera in order to pursue this goal. So when Jakob Peters-Messer cuts a crucial scene at the end of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt – the one in which Marietta returns to collect her mislaid umbrella – in order to maintain the fact of the character’s death to the very end, one feels a loss of faith in what one has seen up to that point. And up to that point it had indeed been a generally lucid and well-presented rethinking of a work that offers plenty of ambiguity of its own: how much is real and how much is Paul’s dream? Guido Petzold’s set uses a proscenium arch midway back effectively to mark off the boundary between these two states. Paul’s life takes place wholly in front of this translucent-curtained divide, and the other characters flit between the two, between his conscious and subconscious experience. As the final stage curtain falls, Paul is left alone in front of it – still facing his grief in the real world. Yet when we realise just before this ending that his strangling of Marietta was less the imagined expiation of his attempts to keep the memory of his dead wife alive than a last desperate act of a deranged man, one is left feeling betrayed of one’s trust in the director. There were some other questionable aspects as well, such as the sinister mauling of a young boy – the young Paul? – by Catholic priests at the climax of the Act III religious procession. The stifling effect of the Roman church on the ‘dead city’ of Bruges is a theme in itself (and explored in more depth in the recently revived Frankfurt production by Anselm Weber) and there’s room for an attempt at explaining the roots of Paul’s funerary idolatry in his childhood, but neither aspect was really pursued here. The shrine in which Paul keeps the mementos of his wife is inevitably the sacrificial altar, as it also furnishes the dancers in Act II with their Venetian gondola (a craft often said to resemble a coffin). So, flashes of brilliance, then, in a generally too ill-defined staging.

Fortunately, the musical virtues went a long way to make up for things. I had heard Wolfgang Schwaninger’s Paul in Regensburg in 2012, and was impressed then by his vocal command of what must be one of the most challenging tenor roles this side of Wagner. Here that ringing tone and stamina were again in evidence, while in a more dramatically intense, and indeed deliberately unsympathetic characterisation from this production’s director his acting was even more involving, and his forestage singing of the reprise of the Lute Song at the end was as moving as it has ever been. Israeli soprano Noa Danon, who I heard as Donna Clara in Theater Lubeck’s Zemlinsky double bill in 2014 and who has been in the Magdeburg ensemble since 2009, threw herself physically into the role of Marietta – as a convincing dancer, too – and coupled her stage presence with a vocal performance that was tonally alluring and technically fine-tuned. Roland Fenes’s Frank and Undine Dreissig’s Brigitte seemed hampered by Peters-Messer’s rather wooden direction of their characters (maybe this was a deliberate thing), and Thomas Florio’s Fritz sang Pierrot’s Lied with charm if without the truthful sentimentality of the best interpreters of the role. As for the orchestral playing under Kimbo Ishii’s direction (and the conductor must share some blame for the aforementioned directorial failure in agreeing to the shameless filleting of the final scene), after a somewhat lacklustre opening (not helped by the theater’s dry acoustic) it became ever more involving and seductive.

Der Diktator/Der Zar läßt sich photographieren - Anhaltische Theater Dessau - 28 February 2016

March 2, 2016, 2:14 am

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Photos: Claudia Heys

Der Diktator
The dictator – Ulf Paulsen
Charlotte, his wife – Stefanie Kunschke
The officer – Albrecht Kludszuweit
Maria, his wife – Iordanka Derilova
The dictator’s adjutant – Stephan Seefeld

Der Zar läßt sich photographieren 
A tsar from **** - Ulf Paulsen
Angele – Stefanie Kunschke
The assistant – David Ameln
The boy – Anne Weinkauf
The false Angele – Iordanka Derilova
The false assistant – Alexander Nikolić
The false boy – Kristina Baran
The ringleader – Albrecht Kludszuweit
The tsar’s companion – Andre Eckert
Forensic officers – Stephan Seefeld, Tizian Steffen
Men’s Chorus of the Anhalt Theatre Dessau
Anhaltische Philharmonie Dessau

Conductor – Daniel Carlberg
Director – Doris Sophia Heinrichsen
Set design – Nicole Bergmann
Costumes – Jessica Rohm

Both Ernst Krenek’s Der Diktator and Kurt Weill’s Der Zar läßt sich photographieren are one-act operas that were originally planned to be coupled with other works by the same composers. Both were also premiered with their original companions less than three months apart in 1928 (their composers were also born the same year, 1900) at a time when Zeitopers, short operas on contemporary themes, were at their height. And with plots similarly built around failed assassination attempts on a tyrant, they seem to have been destined to be paired up. At respectively only 25 and 45 minutes in length, though, they make for a short evening, especially as this new production represented the main theatrical event of the annual Kurt Weill Fest in the composer’s birthplace, Dessau. It was perhaps made to feel all the shorter for the admirable directorial links that were made between the two operas. Krenek’s self-penned story concerns a tragic turn of events when an officer’s wife attempts to take her revenge on a dictator for the blinding of her husband by the tyrant’s war-mongering; the dictator’s jealous wife intervenes when things get steamy between the other two and the officer’s wife is accidentally shot. In the more farcical Weill, a group of anarchists takes over a Parisian photographer’s, posing as its staff, in order to assassinate the tsar using a gun hidden in the camera.

For all its brevity, Krenek’s miniature finds room for an overture, interludes and character establishment, as well as a beginning, a middle and an end. Written as he was waiting for what would prove his greatest success, Jonny spielt auf, to reach the stage, it shares something of that work’s musical wit and craft. Weill’s opera, on the other hand, dates from the same period as Mahagonny and Dreigroschenoper, so at the height of his own powers. The music is actually more cutting than either of those two works, with more New Objectivity hard-edgedness, though it features what would be his first commercial hit, Angele’s Tango, played on a gramophone record at the opera’s climax.

Ulf Paulsen and Iordanka Derilova in Der Diktator

Doris Sophia Heinrichsen draws the threads of the two operas together skilfully. A simple set by Nicole Bergmann services tragedy and farce to equally good effect. Musically, the performance was very fine indeed, from the consummate singing of the cast to the vibrant and vital playing of the Anhalt Philharmonic in the pit under Daniel Carlberg’s expert baton. Ulf Paulsen played both the dictator and the tsar, pompously preening himself as the former (Mussolini was supposedly Krenek’s model), embarrassingly revealing himself as all too frail a human as the latter. As the love rivals in the Krenek and real and false photographers in the Weill, Iordanka Derilova and Stefanie Kunschke were a match for each other vocally, and the tenor of Albrecht Kludszuweit was particularly impressive as the blinded officer. It’s a shame that only two performances of this double-bill are scheduled – well worth catching if it returns to the repertoire.

Elektra - Landestheater Detmold - 3 March 2016

March 4, 2016, 12:58 am

≫ Next: Wozzeck (Gurlitt) - Stadttheater Bremerhaven - 5 March 2016

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Elektra – Sabine Hogrefe
Klytamnestra – Gritt Gnauck
Chrysothemis – Susanne Serfling
Orest – Michael Zehe
Aegisth – Markus Gruber
Oreste’s tutor – Insu Hwang
Die Vertraute – Anneke van den Velden-Niggemann
Die Schlepptragerin – Christine Friedek-Dwornik
Young Servant – Bonghan Kim
Old Servant – Kyung-Won Yu
Overseer – Brigitte Bauma
Maids – Sarah Alexandra Hudarew, Rita Gmeiner, Martina Borst, Annette Blazyczek, Katharina Ajyba

Detmold Landestheater Orchestra, Chorus & Statisterie

Conductor – Lutz Rademacher
Director/designer/costumes – Christian von Gotz

In travelling around German theatres regularly, one often finds the most unexpected treats in the most unlikely of places. Detmold, a former ducal town in the Lippe district of north-east Westphalia, has a grand but diminutive 600-seater theatre that one would expect not to extend much beyond being able to stage Mozart. Yet a few seasons ago it put on its own Ring cycle, and this season has mounted a production of Strauss’s Elektra that is the equal of anywhere. Admittedly, the theatre had to use the authorised version for reduced orchestra (but so did Welsh National Opera, the last time it staged it in the UK), but the pit, which extends back under the stage almost in Bayreuth manner, is more capacious than it would seem.

Musically, Detmold assembled a first-class cast, who seemed to be relishing the chance to portray these often larger-than-life characters in such an intimate theatre. It allowed Sabine Hogrefe’s Elektra to articulate every detail of her role, without it becoming the yell that it can in huge houses. She sounds more of a mezzo than a soprano (and bears a passing visual resemblance to Christa Ludwig, another mezzo who stretched upwards on occasion), with a resonant chest register and strongly projected middle; only occasional high notes let her down. But her dramatic assumption of the role was all-encompassing, even if her final, fatal collapse was unconvincingly abrupt. Gritt Gnauck’s Klytamnestra conversely had more the air of a soprano than the usual mezzo, though her shaping of the character’s wily, whining turns of phrase was expertly done and her physical embodiment – a crippled duchess in vivid red – was over-powering. Susanne Serfling, a guest from the ensemble in Darmstadt, where she has proved herself as an estimable Sieglinde and Salome, made Chrysothemis more than the usual wet side-kick to her more forceful sister, and sang the role with admirable control and carefully coloured tone. Michael Zehe was an imposing Orest, though a rapid beat in his voice detracted from his legato line. Markus Gruber was an appropriately oily Aegisth in his short cameo before he has his throat cut, and the rest of the cast suggested a well-tended company at the height of its powers. The orchestral playing – perhaps exhibiting just a little thinness in its string complement in the closing pages – was vibrant, colourful and powerful under the baton of Lutz Rademacher.

Christian von Gotz’s striking production relocates the action from Ancient Greece to a bourgeois country house at around the time the opera was written (c.1909). The upstairs-downstairs/Downton aspect of the social order is emphasised, with the brutal Overseer encouraging the bullying of the Fifth Maid, who sides with Elektra against the others and joins in their butchering at the end. The setting contrasts the idyllic garden with the gruesome violence behind the scenes – and it’s inevitable that the clean linen that the maids are putting out to dry at the start will be blood-splattered by the end. With such intense acting from all concerned, to match the musical qualities, this is truly an Elektra to be reckoned with.

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Wozzeck (Gurlitt) - Stadttheater Bremerhaven - 5 March 2016

March 7, 2016, 7:39 am

≫ Next: Das Rheingold – Jahrhunderthalle, Bochum (Ruhrtriennale) – 12 September 2015

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Wozzeck (Filippo Bettoschi) and Marie (Inga-Britt Andersson)

Wozzeck – Filippo Bettoschi

Marie – Inga-Britt Andersson

Captain – Leo Yeun-Ku Chu

Drum-major – Henryk Böhm

Andres – Tobias Haaks

Doctor/Jew – Thomas Burger

Margaret – Carolin Löffler

Girls – Luise Eckardt, Laura Pohl

Marie’s child – Andrej Albrecht

Old woman – Rietje Riediger-van Overbeeke

Voices of citizens – Kay Krause, Marc Vinzing

Opera Chorus & Statisterie of Bremerhaven Stadttheater

Bremerhaven Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor – Marc Niemann

Director – Robert Lehmeier

Designer – Mathias Rümmler

Marie's child (Andrej Albrecht) and Marie; Drum-major (Henryk Bohm) behind

Musical history is littered with also-ran operas, works that became overshadowed by more successful or famous settings of the same stories or librettos, from Paisiello’s Barber of Seville and Leoncavallo’sLa bohème to Busoni’s Turandotand Ghedini’s Billy Budd. But few instances are more intriguing than that of the German composer Manfred Gurlitt (1890-1972), who was trumped twice over, being beaten by Berg to his Wozzeckpremiere by four months and living long enough to see his setting of Lenz’s Soldateneclipsed by Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s magnum opus on the same subject 30 years after his own.

Gurlitt has his own intriguing life story, one that is still mired in confusion to this day. His emphasis on socially provocative subject matter put him at odds with the Nazis when they came to power in the 1930s, yet he seems to have found accommodation with the regime until the revelation of a Jewish grandmother forced him into exile in 1937. Unfortunately, he chose a soon-to-be German ally, Japan, in which to settle and it was only after the war that he regained his artistic freedom, playing a leading role as a conductor introducing Far Eastern audiences to many of the classics of western opera for the first time.

To backtrack to the early 1920s, Gurlitt apparently had no knowledge that Alban Berg was also working on a setting of Georg Buchner’s early 19th-century dramatic fragment, Woyzeck(as it was originally published – a misreading incorporated in the early 20th-century reprint used by both composers resulted in the spelling we know today). If Berg’s inspiration was his experience of soldiering in the First World War, Gurlitt had a more political agenda in mind and his setting of largely the same text (18 scenes of Buchner’s original, as opposed to Berg’s selection of 16) takes a more hardened social edge, matched to some extent in the music. Gurlitt is very much of the Neue Sachligkeit (New Objectivity) school of musical thought, alongside figures such as Hindemith, Krenek and Weill, and there’s a lack of sentimentality in his writing that makes Berg’s brand of atonal modernism seem almost Romantic by comparison. Intriguingly, Gurlitt also came up with the idea of using closed musical forms to characterise the different scenes, but his is a more brittle, contrapuntal style that soars to lyrical heights only intermittently and most affectingly in the final orchestral elegy that closes the one-act, 75-minute opera.

Gurlitt’s Wozzeckopened in 1926 in Bremen, where he was music director at the time, just a few months after Berg’s had been premiered in Berlin. Comparisons were inevitable and Berg’s won its place in the international repertoire while Gurlitt’s unjustly sank without trace until revived in Bremen in the 1980s, amid the reawakening of interest in the lost Austro-German music of the interwar years. It now crops up occasionally in the schedules of more enterprising German opera companies, lastly in a double bill I sadly missed of both Wozzeckoperas in Darmstadt and now in Bremerhaven, where its run neatly coincides with a production of Berg’s opera in nearby Bremen (see my review at Bachtrack.com).

Proof that rare repertoire can be made to live again without spending big bucks is clear from Bremerhaven’s new production, one that goes by the principle of less is more, or even of every expense spared. The stage is stripped back to its backstage walls; with no scenery, the only addition is a bank of trestle tables and benches on a revolve stage and an array of overhead fluorescent lights. Compared to the over-loaded visual impact of Bremen’s Berg I had seen the previous night, this proved to be a model of clear-sighted narrative and emphasis on the characters as real people. The ever-present chorus emphasised the everyman nature of Wozzeck and his fate – he is just one of many misfits in society, but his bullying by the Captain and Doctor (the latter loses his big scene with Wozzeck in Gurlitt’s version) turns him into a volatile outcast, from a society where anyone with a bit of glamour about them – the Drum-major – can turn the head of a neglected wife, Marie. 

Musically, the orchestra on this first night of the run initially gave the impression that it was still finding its way through the music, but then again a lot of the writing is exposed and often chamber-like in its textures, and once the musicians found their collective feet conductor Marc Niemann was able to exploit the music’s colour, dynamism and swift dramatic pacing to the full. An excellent cast was led by a compelling Wozzeck in Filippo Bettoschi (as with Berg, the role is cast as a baritone), who acted as much with his voice as with his body to portray the sense of degradation and murderous intent that overwhelms the character.

In repertoire at Stadttheater Bremerhaven until 27 April.

Das Rheingold – Jahrhunderthalle, Bochum (Ruhrtriennale) – 12 September 2015

April 8, 2016, 2:55 am

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Alberich (Leigh Melrose) steals the gold from the Rhinemaidens. Photo: Michael Kneffel

Review from the March 2016 issue of The Wagner Journal

Wotan–Mika Kares

Alberich–Leigh Melrose

Loge–Peter Bronder

Mime–Elmar Gilbertsson

Fricka–Maria Riccarda Wesseling

Fasolt–Frank van Hove

Fafner–Peter Lobert

Freia–Agneta Eichenholz

Erda–Jane Henschel

Donner–Andrew Foster-Williams

Froh–Rolf Romei

Woglinde–Anna Patalong

Wellgunde–Dorottya Láng

Floßhilde–Jurgita Adamonytė

Sintolt the Hegeling, Servant–Stefan Hunstein

MusicAeterna

Conductor–Teodor Currentzis

Director– Johan Simons

Designer – Bettina Pommer

Costumes– Teresa Vergho

Lighting– Wolfgang Göbbel

Electronic music–Mika Vainio

Sound design–Will-Jan Pielage

Nibelheim (l to r): Loge (Peter Bronder), Alberich (Leigh Melrose), Mime (Elmar Gilbertsson), Wotan (Mika Kares)

For his first major production as artistic director of the Ruhr Triennale for 2015–17, Dutchman Johan Simons staged Das Rheingold in a former gas turbine hall, a building originally used to provide the heat for the neighbouring steel works’ blast furnaces. A site of exploitation of both natural resources and manpower: the perfect venue for a critique of capitalism. As Simons remarks in the programme, ‘In Das Rheingold Wagner told the history of the Ruhr. A story of industrialisation that destroys nature, of labour and exploitation and finally the fall of the powerful.’ The director’s aim was to return Wagner’s drama to the crucible of revolutionary ideas from which it was born in the late 1840s, and, taking advantage of a festival situation where experimentation is expected, he did more than simply stage Das Rheingold as it stands. In collaboration with Finnish Techno specialist Mika Vainio, he audaciously ‘broke open’ the uninterrupted 150-minute span of Wagner’s score with a handful of interpolations of newly composed electronic music. At least the originally billed four hours had been reduced to under three by the time the production came to fruition.

At one level this intervention was highly effective: as soon as one enters the turbine hall in advance of the performance one is surrounded by the deep throbbing of E flat major harmony, from which the first written notes of the music eventually emerge. It is a neat way of expressing the primeval, always-been-there nature of the opening chord, the matter from which Wagner’s Rhine and whole musical world is conjured and which has by then had time to seep into one’s very being. The first hiatus in which an electronic roar intervenes at the moment of Alberich’s curse is somewhat more crass, but the longest and most significant ‘break-out’ from Wagner’s score comes during the descent to Nibelheim, where the hammering of the anvils is taken to enormous lengths and extremes such that it feels as if the whole edifice in which we are sitting is being hammered into submission. Meanwhile, over the top of this tumult, the gods’ ever-present servant Sintolt the Hegeling – an extra character in Simons’ staging named after one of the silent heroes brought to Valhalla during the Ride of the Valkyries – finds a voice at last and launches into a sustained, yelled denunciation of capitalism: the worker revolts. Patrice Chéreau’s comparable exposé of the work’s political theme in his famous 1976 Bayreuth staging was demure by contrast. And there, perhaps, stands the crux of this one-off production: overall, and perhaps in keeping with the industrial architecture that surrounds it, it is raw, aggressive and unsubtle.

Treating Das Rheingold as a stand-alone music drama is a not unreasonable project: it is self-contained enough in that it has a beginning, a middle and an end and the loose ends that remain can be tied if, as here, it is taken as a parable on the evils of money. Indeed, I have rarely seen as downbeat or pessimistic an ending as in Simons’ vision: the Valhalla that the gods have bought from the giants’ handiwork proves to be nothing more than a façade and the over-stuffed dynasty is left to shuffle off in despair, while Alberich and Mime huddle together for comfort in a stagnant pool with the Rhinemaidens brooding over them and Fafner desperately clings on to the lump of gold over which he has killed his brother. This bleakness and its visual power, when set against the surging D flat of the closing music’s false pomp, make up for some of the rather predictable gaucheness elsewhere: Freia the goddess of love portrayed as a dominatrix, teasing the servant with her whip; Alberich mounting sex-doll alter-egos of the Rhinemaidens; Fricka going berserk when she can’t break down Valhalla’s door. But there are aspects, too, that are more perceptive, such as Erda’s presence from the start, grimly viewing the rape of her natural domain; or Wotan and Loge disguising themselves as miners to secrete themselves into Nibelheim (the Tarnhelm, appropriately, is a miner’s helmet). What is missing, though, is the sense of myth that Wagner himself stated was the way by which an audience could take in his political messages. So no ‘magical’ elements: no toad, no Riesenwurm, not even a rainbow bridge.

The staging is divided between a towering Valhalla façade behind the orchestra and, in the foreground, a trio of shallow pools among the crumbling remains of a plaster ceiling, complete with upside-down chandelier, to represent the cyclic nature of civilisation’s rise and fall, of building anew on the ruins of the old. This layout necessitates quite a bit of traffic flow of singers between the desks of long-suffering instrumentalists, who seem in danger of having their music stands kicked over at any moment. It nonetheless gives a central, visual focus on the orchestra itself and its ranks of brass, line-up of requisite six harps and forge-full of anvils is undoubtedly an impressive sight – we thus see the players as workers, too, just like the Nibelungs, if under a less fearsome overlord than Alberich in Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis. As a rather audacious counterpoint to all this infidelity to Wagner’s original score in formal terms, the orchestra plays on period instruments, with Currentzis’s Perm-based orchestra MusicAeterna imported specially for the festival run. The sound produced was far from the lean, ascetic one that often goes with HIP territory and string tone was full and generous, the woodwind characterful in the best sense and the brass penetrating yet rounded. Despite the deliberate interruptions, Currentzis’s conducting was broad-spanned yet allowed plenty of detail to emerge. And he wasn’t above a bit of showmanship, getting his string players to stand for the most climactic moments, such as Nibelheim’s hammering rhythm, and he had the whole orchestra on its feet for the closing bars.

Given the size of the acting area, the volume of the venue per se and the presence of the additional electronic music, it was perhaps understandable that the singers had to be miked-up. But, at least from where I was sitting, there was no dislocation between sight and sound and what amplification there was proved unobtrusive and the balance natural. And whatever doubts one might have had over the effectiveness of the staging and concept, there were no such misgivings when it came to the singers. Mika Kares’s Wotan had plenty of colour in his voice and despite the driven nature of his characterisation never resorted to bluster. As his nemesis, Leigh Melrose’s Alberich was a character possessed and, while his singing sometimes veered towards Sprechgesang in its expressive veracity, his vocal accomplishment and acting were compelling. Peter Bronder’s experienced Loge was put to good use as the one figure who manages to rise above the general greed and immorality. Maria Riccarda Wesseling’s Fricka, though a little over-acted in places, was vocally warm and sincere and there was a real treat in Jane Henschel’s sonorous Erda. There were no weaknesses among the rest of the cast, among whom must be commended actor Stefan Hunstein’s meticulously performed Sintolt ‘the Marxist’, the anger and force of whose outburst sum up the mixture of admiration and frustration that are the abiding impressions of this Wagnerian experiment.

Tannhäuser – Antwerp Opera House – 14 October 2015

April 8, 2016, 3:16 am

≫ Next: Der König Kandaules - Flanders Opera, Gent - 13 April 2016

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Venus (Ausrine Stundyte) and Tannhäuser (Burkhard Fritz). Photos: Annemie Augustijns

Review from the March 2016 issue of The Wagner Journal

Tannhäuser – Burkhard Fritz

Elisabeth – Annette Dasch

Venus – Ausrine Stundyte

Wolfram von Eschinbach – Daniel Schmutzhard

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia – Ante Jerkunica

Walther von der Vogelweide – Adam Smith

Biterolf – Leonard Bernad

Heinrich der Schreiber – Stephan Adriaens

Reinmar von Zweter – Patrick Cromheeke

Young Shepherd – Merel de Coorde

Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of Opera Vlaanderen

Conductor – Dmitri Jurowski

Director – Calixto Bieito

Designer – Rebecca Ringst

Costumes – Ingo Krügler

Lighting – Michael Bauer

Act II in the Wartburg

As one might have expected from director Calixto Bieito, his concept of Tannhäuser offers a mixture of insight and bafflement, revelation and frustration. In an interview in the programme he recalls that it was the first opera he ever saw on stage, in Barcelona at the age of 15, and it made an abiding impression, which begs the question of why it has taken him so long to stage it for the first time. This Flanders Opera presentation is his third Wagner production, following stagings of Holländer and Parsifal in Stuttgart, and from what I have seen of those in brief video snippets and pictures there’s a shared vision of an apocalyptic milieu with this Tannhäuser. If that teenage experience inspired him and his younger brother to play at being medieval knights, there’s unsurprisingly none of that in the adult Bieito’s concept. And less than a contest between sexual and spiritual love, or between hedonism and socio-religious conformity, he treats the drama as a battle between the natural world and a stultifying civilisation, with Venus the representative of the former, Elisabeth of the latter. But it’s not quite as simple as that. The mise-en-scène for the Venusberg is a forest, with choreographed, upside-down trees suspended from visible stage machinery ‘performing’ the Bacchanal (Act I is given in the Paris version, Acts II and III in the Dresden), and through which Venus runs backwards and forwards like a wild child of nature. The setting is at once threatening and enticing, as is she. By contrast, the Wartburg of Act II is a sterile construction of glossy white pillars, with a dinner-suited populace among which Elisabeth obviously feels alienated: she is at the mercy of her uncle, the Landgrave, and we first see her dressed identically to Venus and writhing on the ground in self-pleasure, a nod perhaps to the idea of a battle of the sexes with earthy, free-spirited womanhood rebelling against rule-bound, controlling masculinity. This idea has certainly already been suggested in Act I, where Tannhäuser escapes Venus’s clutches only to fall in with his one-time compatriots and is subjected to a fraternity-like blooding as his fellow singers exert their macho propensities as a way of luring him back into their circle. By Act III, the two worlds have collided and merged: the trees of the Venusberg have overrun the pristine whiteness of the Wartburg, nature has reclaimed the space occupied by order and, as the final tableau suggests, Venus as the symbol of the natural world is triumphant. It shows that the opera can encompass different readings as wide as exact opposites: here the triumph of chaos over order, in other productions that of civilisation over the excesses of transgression.

Amid this broad scenario, Bieito explores the relationships between the characters with visceral physicality – relationships that all seem to be one-way and unfulfilled. (Apart from plenty of groping, unusually for Bieito the nudity is confined to the printed programme – a reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde provocatively greets one on opening the cover.) As Tannhäuser attempts to pull himself away from the lure of Venus, she uses every ruse, verbal and physical, to try and claw him back. At the Wartburg, we seem to be witnessing a kind of love triangle, with Wolfram after Elisabeth, who only has eyes for Tannhäuser, who in turn seems to have a thing for Wolfram. Tannhäuser himself is portrayed as a rebel, likened by Bieito to Brecht’s Baal. He eschews the formal attire of the Wartburg until he is forced to change for the song contest, and he has the kind of personality that enjoys winding people up with outrageous talk, his ever more scandalous responses to his fellow minstrels’ tame descriptions of love being the epitome – and, of course, his undoing. It might be fair to talk of Wagner pre-empting Freud in his psychological insight of character, but to invoke the name of Schopenhauer, as Bieito does in the programme interview, is to credit the composer with too much foresight – he didn’t encounter the philosopher’s work until nearly a decade after Tannhäuser’s initial completion, and it would be reading too much into the Paris revisions to suggest they were informed by it.

Pushed into the background more than usual – literally so in the sense that the pilgrims’ voices are always offstage – is religion. It’s as if Bieito sees the plot’s premise of Tannhäuser seeking redemption in Rome for his supposed misdemeanour as so ridiculous, even as presented through the prism of Wagner’s very 19th-century view of medieval faith, that it can safely be ignored. ‘It is about something other than religion’, he states. In a sense his is a reading of the medieval legend of the troubadour Tannhäuser, before Wagner added the counterweight of the whole song-contest and Wartburg paraphernalia, and in which our ‘hero’ chooses eternal damnation and Venus once his salvation is seemingly rejected by the Pope. It also fits his rejection of Baudelaire’s celebrated summing up of the plot as the struggle between flesh and the spirit, which he labels ‘pretty simplistic’. ‘Simplistic’ is something this production is certainly not. There are levels of interpretation that only become apparent some time after the final curtain has descended, and there are small touches everywhere too numerous to take in at a single viewing. In other words, it’s a concept that intrigues, even beguiles, but most importantly forces its audience to think. If it is not entirely successful in every respect it is perhaps more down to individual aspects of presentation than the thinking as a whole: there are still some details floating around in the memory that fail to make sense.

Wolfram (Daniel Schmutzhard) and Elisabeth (Annette Dasch)

Bieito asks a lot of his singers, and despite a double-cast Tannhäuser and Elisabeth during this ten-performance run, there was never anything short of total commitment from all involved. At this penultimate performance, Burkhard Fritz may not have been the most heroic-sounding of Wagnerian tenors, but there was subtlety and lyricism in his shaping of line and projection of the text (the intimacy of Antwerp’s opera house is generous in this respect). Ausrine Stundyte’s Venus proved a rich characterisation, employing the vocal reach of a Kundry (a role that she has also sung to great acclaim) to seduce, cajole and ultimately entrap. Annette Dasch’s Elisabeth was less satisfactory – vocally somewhat monochrome and with her control sometimes lost to the permanent distraughtness of the depiction. Daniel Schmutzhard’s Wolfram, too, seemed to exist in a perpetual state of angst, which occasionally disrupted what was largely a detailed, suitably Lieder-esque delineation of the role. The Opera Flanders Symphony Orchestra made a ravishing sound under the direction of Dmitri Jurowski, though his overall tempi were perhaps just a little too on the stately side – it certainly made for a long evening with such a late start time as 7.30pm.

Der König Kandaules - Flanders Opera, Gent - 13 April 2016

April 15, 2016, 1:57 am

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≪ Previous: Tannhäuser – Antwerp Opera House – 14 October 2015

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König Kandaules – Dmitry Golovnin
Nyssia – Elisabet Strid
Gyges – Gidon Saks
Phedros – Vincenzo Neri
Syphax/Sebas – Michael J. Scott
Philebos/Cook – Tijl Faveyts
Nicomedes – Toby Girling
Pharnaces – Leonard Bernad
Simias – William Helliwell
Archelaos – Thierry Vallier
Trydo – Daniela van Lohuizen-Bernoulli

Flanders Opera Symphony Orchestra

Conductor – Dmitry Jurowski
Director/Designer – Andrij Zholdak
Co-designer/Lighting/Video – A.J. Weissbard
Costumes – Tuomas Lampinen

The story behind Zemlinsky’s last opera is almost as unusual as the plot of the work itself. The composer had been working on a drama based on André Gide’s Le roi Candaules through the mid-1930s when he was forced into exile by the Nazi annexation of his Austrian homeland. Settling in New York and with two thirds of the first act orchestrated and the rest drafted in short score, he tried to interest the Metropolitan Opera in staging it, but the inclusion in the libretto of a nude scene was enough to bar its progress. And there it was left. Zemlinsky himself died in 1942 and the manuscript was carefully guarded by his widow. But in the late 1980s, Zemlinsky expert and conductor Antony Beaumont, persuaded her to let him look at it. With so much detail annotated in the short score it proved to be little more than requiring orchestration, which he duly did, to a commission from Hamburg State Opera, where it was premiered in 1996. Since then, it has slowly seeped into the repertoire of some of the more adventurous houses – it was seen at the Salzburg Festival a few years ago and this season has had two new productions, in Augsburg and Antwerp/Gent, and there’s a revival of Palermo’s production in Seville in June.

This latest one from Flanders Opera, though, does the work a serious mis-service. The engagement of a Ukrainian director, Andrij Zholdak, who has apparently made his name through unconventional reinterpretations of the classics should have been warning enough. What a newly introduced work such as Kandaules needs is sympathetic advocacy, not wilful distortion. This was less a case of casting light on aspects of the drama as throwing every cliché of Regietheater at it such to give the ‘anti-modernists’ fuel for their argument. Not only was the plot almost completely rewritten and distorted, with cuts to the music and text to suit the director’s ego, but it was subjected to so many superimpositions and layers of visual distraction that it’s difficult to know where to begin.

Zemlinsky’s plot is itself full of ambiguities, but in short, a king who wants to share his good fortune – his wealth and his beautiful wife – is betrayed by those who benefit from his largesse. The psychologies involved are complex and motivation often unclear, and a reading of the libretto only really makes sense in tandem with the music, which is a masterpiece of suggestion and allusion. As the fisherman Gyges says at the start of the spoken prologue: ‘He who has good luck should conceal himself well! Better still, conceal his luck from others.’ Except that in this production he doesn’t – the whole text of this introductory monologue is omitted. Instead, we are presented with the king, his wife Nyssia and two boys, the latter (uncredited in the programme, though they play a leading role throughout the evening) not in the original, enjoying a family meal.

Those of us unversed in Dutch may not have been able to understand the explanations in the programme at the time, but with the help of Google Translate, I now read that the overall concept is an attempt to portray the hidden subtexts of the characters’ words and emotions through the interaction of the real and subconscious worlds, in what Zholdak terms ‘magic realism’. The two children, who interact with the king and queen as if they are their own children, represent Kandaules and Gyges at a time when they were on an equal footing, differentiated neither by wealth nor happiness. So far, so confusing to the uninitiated. But with a vertical set divided into six or so ‘rooms’, Zholdak doesn’t stop there. Instead he has two or three pieces of action happening at any one time, some of which are crass, others predictable, but none of them enlightening: servants are abused, as if to indicate the court’s degenerate nature, there’s a quite inexplicable appearance of two of the rats from Hans Neuenfels’s iconic Bayreuth Lohengrin, and some superfluous business with some giant fish costumes. Through all this, the two boys – mostly in male but sometimes in female attire – run riot, silent apart from some occasional bloodcurdling screams. We are used these days to multi-layered presentation of opera, allowing for parallel presentation of reality and imagination, but this was all taking things beyond the ridiculous. And this is quite apart from the gross liberties Zholdak takes with the story: he has Gyges kill his wife, Trydo, a while before he does so in the libretto, where his motivation is the revelation of her infidelity – here it seems to be to get her out of the way of his pursuit of Nyssia, the queen. Much of the original plot revolves around that fact that Nyssia is kept veiled from prying eyes, and that a magic ring found in the fish that Gyges has provided for the king’s feast allows its wearer to go around unseen, and thus Gyges tricks Nyssia into believing she is making love with her husband. Needless to say, there is no veil, the ring’s powers seem irrelevant and interaction between the three main characters is reduced to a stormy and steamy menage-a-trois with a higher than prescribed body count by the closing bars.

Fortunately, the musical rewards were far greater. Russian tenor Dmitry Golovnin gave a vocally focused account of the king, and Elisabet Strid’s Nyssia grew in tonal opulence as the evening progressed. Gidon Saks’s Gyges may have had only one dynamic level – forceful – but there was no denying his total engagement with the music. The collection of sycophantic courtiers gave admirable, well differentiated performances and the non-singing roles of the two boys, Trydo and servants deserved applause for their fortitude in following the director’s demands. In the pit, Dmitri Jurowski coaxed Zemlinsky’s powerful, iridescent score into potent life, and although the orchestra had a few moments of insecurity, its playing gradually firmed up, treating us to an overwhelmingly powerful account of the prelude to Act III.
I’m not convinced a repeat viewing would make any more sense of Zholdak’s impositions, and Jurowski should have made a better case for not tampering with the music and libretto – the loss of its spoken passages was especially unfortunate. And it would have been nice to say that the dazzling virtuosity of Zemlinsky’s music-dramatic vision shone through rather than that it was in fact severely compromised – it surely deserves much, much better than this.

Der Traumgörge – Staatsoper Hannover – 16 April 2016

April 26, 2016, 3:20 am

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Robert Künzli as Görge. Photos: Jörg Landsberg

Görge – Robert Künzli

Gertraud – Kelly God

Grete – Solen Mainguené

Hans – Christopher Tonkin

Princess – Dorothea Maria Marx

Kaspar – Stefan Adam

Mathes – Tobias Schabel

Züngl – Latchezar Pravtchev

Marei – Carmen Fuggiss

Innkeeper – Edward Mout

Innkeeper’s wife – Corinna Jeske

Chorus & Statisterie of Staatsoper Hannover

Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester Hannover

Conductor – Mark Rohde

Director – Johannes von Matuschka

Designer – David Hohmann

Costumes – Amit Epstein

Lighting – Elana Siberski

Zemlinsky’s third opera Der Traumgörge(Görge the Dreamer) is one of his least-known works. The composer completed the score of his first act, loosely modelled on Heine’s Der arme Peter, before his librettist Leo Feld and he had even decided how the story was going to continue. Once the whole work had been completed and sent to the printers, Feld made repeated revisions to his libretto – probably at the insistence of Mahler, who had agreed to conduct the premiere at Vienna’s Hofoper – forcing rewrites from the composer and the poor publisher to reprint great chunks of Act II. No sooner had the opera gone into rehearsal in the summer of 1907 than Mahler resigned his Vienna position, and his successor, Felix Weingartner, promptly dropped the work weeks before its scheduled premiere, not wishing to take the flak for a work associated with the previous regime that he predicted was going to be a failure. And there Traumgörge sat for some 70 years, unperformed, while the stoical Zemlinsky moved on to new things in the 34 years that remained to him. The opera finally reached the stage, in Nuremberg, in 1980.

Dorothea Maria Max (Princess) and Robert Künzli (Görge)

Composed in 1904-6, immediately after Der Seejungfrau, it shares that work’s Schoenbergian, late-Romantic volatility and post-Wagnerian chromaticism. Indeed, there is so much of the world of Gurrelieder– at that time incomplete – in its melodies, harmonies and orchestration, that it gives credence to the theory that Schoenberg sourced his early musical language from Zemlinsky – his teacher and brother-in-law – rather than the other way round. It was Zemlinsky who took Schoenberg to the portal of atonality and left him there to go through, while backing away himself. This process on Zemlinsky’s part more-or-less happens in Der Traumgörgeitself. The music of the two acts is different in character, to suggest the competing worlds of fantasy and reality that drive the plot. Act I is Zemlinsky at his lushest, as he sets up the dream-world in which his protagonist, Görge, lives; Act II is harder edged, more angular, to evoke the harsher, real world – indeed, the contrast is very similar to the stylistic divide between Parts 1 and 3 of Gurrelieder, the result of that work’s composer’s own advance over the ten years or so of its composition and orchestration. Zemlinsky’s Epilogue, originally conceived as an Act III, brings the two musical worlds back together again.

Staatsoper Hannover’s new staging, only about the fifth in the opera’s history, is a musical and dramatic triumph. From the first sounds that emerged from the pit it was evident that conductor Mark Rohde and the Niedersächsisches Staatsorchester Hannover had fully absorbed the idiom. Textures were beautifully balanced and Zemlinsky’s leitmotivic play of themes allowed to evolve in their own, ear-catching way. The role of Görge is a demanding one, both in terms of range and length, but Hannover’s resident Heldentenor, Robert Künzli, was tireless and made light work of it, and his acting of the dreamer was convincing and sympathetic. Kelly God’s Gertraud had a wonderfully full sound to her voice, both Solen Mainguené’s Grete and Dorothea Maria Marx’s Princess provided ample timbral contrast and Christopher Tonkin’s suavely sung, full-of-himself Hans stole every scene he was in. There was barely a weakness among the smaller roles and the Staatsoper Chorus sang with appropriate fire in the dramatic crowd scenes.

Johannes von Matuschka, a young German theatre director making his operatic debut, plays with the plot’s idea of dreams – this is after all a work composed in the Vienna of Freud – and sets the whole of Act I as a work of Görge’s somnolent imagination. Görge himself is a bookworm, with an unhealthy fixation on fairy stories, and their characters haunt his mind and rule his actions, despite the pressure from Grete, whom his father has insisted he marry, and the taunts from his rival Hans, whose show of manliness is perhaps one detail that von Matuschka takes a little too far in his attempt to show up his contrast with the dreamer. Left alone, Görge conjures up an image of his ideal princess, who appears to him in his dream, and the act ends with him proclaiming his motto, ‘fairytales must come alive’, as he runs from his impending marriage. Von Matuschka peoples the stage with fantasy figures, and emphasises the Freudian undercurrents with Gorge’s apparent confusion of his ideal wife and his mother. A constant in David Hohmann’s designs is a bed: Görge’s home and comfort, to which he retreats from the harshness of reality. Meanwhile, the set itself is composed of walls made of gauze that underline the real/surreal worlds that the characters inhabit, allowing for mysterious comings and goings and, at the end of the first act, a magical effect as the whole room encompassing the princess floats up into the fly tower.

The fiery end to Act II, with Gertraud (Kelly God), Görge (Robert Künzli) and chorus

Act II is based on a different fairytale, Vom unsichtbaren Königreiche(From Unseen Kingdoms) by Richard von Volkmann-Leander, and was conceived at a time when Zemlinsky personally felt the growing anti-Jewish feeling in Vienna (Mahler’s departure from the Hofoper was but one result). It reveals Görge as an outcast in a different village, where he is singled out for his difference. Also suffering the bigotry of the religiously hardline community in which he has found himself is Gertraud, a woman whom the people condemn as a witch and in whom Görge finds a kindred spirit. In her he thinks he has at last found his princess, and they escape the flame-wielding populace. Von Matuschka makes no bones about the violence that the religious use to inflict their conformity on these misfits, while downplaying the political dimension that is there in the libretto, where the populace are fomenting revolution against their repressive landowners. The act’s climax, where Whitsun fire threatens to consume all and sundry, is impressively staged.

In the Epilogue, back in Görge’s home village, Grete and Hans are a bickering married couple and, in von Matuschka’s reading, our hero, now supposedly married to Gertraud, is seen to have dreamt the whole episode and he dies – or falls asleep again – heartbroken. Here, the gauze cube of Hohmann’s set design comes into its own as it descends again to enclose everyone but Görge in the world of his dreams. From the libretto alone, it’s possible to read the ending as either tragic or blissful, with its repeated ‘Let us dream and play’, but Zemlinsky’s music makes it clear – and this production rightly picks up on it – that happiness does not come from dreams alone.