Wagner’s Lohengrin, Theatro Municipal, São Paulo, 11.10.2015

São Paulo has been called the no.1 destination in South America for classical music, mainly for its compelling symphonic orchestra (the OSESP) and its home theatre (the Sala São Paulo). Things, however, are not up to the same levels in the opera house. I saw a complete opera in the Theatro Municipal just once in my life, more than 10 years ago – and it happened to be Wagner’s Tannhäuser. The performance was nothing to be ashamed of, and it was my first encounter with Albert Dohmen, who happened to sing Wolfram then. The present series of performance can boast an even more impressive cast (I’m speaking of the “premium” cast, since I was not able to see more than one evening). And singers are the redeeming feature of today’s experience.

Marion Ammann is an exemplary Elsa in terms of style, musicianship and good taste. Her creamy soprano has its unstable and hooty moments, but it is mostly easy on the ear, especially in soaring mezza voce. She was aptly contrasted with the provocative Ortrud from Marianne Cornetti. Hers was an Italianate approach to the role – keen on legato, powerful in top notes, varied in tone coloring and distinctively mezzo-ish in quality. Her second act was entirely built around seduction, subtlety and intelligence. In proper circumstances, she could have offered something truly memorable. Here let’s say that it was highly commendable that – having to guess the conductor’s beat – she was able to find leeway to develop an interpretation. Tomislav Muzek was a light, firm-toned Lohengrin, with natural tenor quality and ardent phrasing. Extremes of dynamics did not come very easily to him, but the spontaneity was more than compensation. I’ve seen Tomas Tomasson’s Telramund in Bayreuth, unfortunately not in a good day. This time we were luckier – he was in incisive voice and only showed sign of fatigue by the end of act II. He and Marianne Cornetti established a winning partnership that rescued the whole performance of its emptiness. In spite of Luiz-Ottavio Faria’s nobility of tone and volume, his King Henry could not go beyond the lack of focus and wooliness. Carlos Eduardo Marcos’s Herald too had its throaty moments.

I am afraid that there is nothing positive to report other than that. John Neschling conducted a score notorious for its sameness of tempo as squarely as possible. This was made more evident by the blatant imbalance in his orchestra: a piercing brass section saturating a sound picture with strings as good as inexistent. Woodwind were not terribly expressive either. Then there was a colossal problem of synchronicity, most seriously in what involved soloists. By the first 15 minutes it was clear that the performance was scandalously under-rehearsed. Elsa was often ahead the beat, Lohengrin would constantly look hopeless trying to figure out where he was, Ortrud and Telramund mostly conducted themselves (and proved to be more efficient than the maestro in charge, for that matter). Ensembles were often everyone-doing-their-thing. To make things more “interesting”, the chorus was short of disastrous: tenors could not produce mezza voce to save their lives (in this of all operas), sopranos produced some funny sounds and I have never heard the altos as constantly as this evening.

I first thought that Henning Brockhaus’s production was amateurish, but curiously he seems to be a professional stage director. Hmm…  The first scene had the men from the chorus playing billiards, some “dancers” contorting themselves standing on chairs and people acting like zombies. Then Lohengrin appears, the swan is a grey box with feathers stuck on a black fabric. There is a curtain of brass instruments to show that Lohengrin represents a dimension of beauty and transcendence. It is replaced by a curtain of knives for the duel. Characters enter from wrong places, exit through nonsensical spots (Elsa invites Ortrud in, but they take different directions; the grey box is supposed to be the swan, but Gottfried – here a piece of marble – appears in the opposite side of the stage), cast and chorus are required to squat and lie on the floor 80% of the time… Fremdscham is the bottomline here. Wagner deserved better.

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Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, Teatro Regio di Torino (at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan), 01.12.2013

Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera is something of a tough cookie. Verdi seemed keen on trying superposition of “affetti”, not only by mixing comedy and tragedy, but by exploring situations in which characters in highly contrasting state of mind sing together. From the overture on, the shifts of mood can be sudden and difficult to manage – and the vocal parts are extremely challenging, especially the prima donna role. Gianandrea Noseda is a conductor who reads his scores with an open mind and is ready to discover new things in them. However, he is no Karajan. This investigation is often made on the expense of musical flow, dramatic intensity and a beautiful orchestral sound. This evening, for instance, Riccardo and his courtiers seemed more mechanical than lithe in the opening scene, Ulrica’s conversations with darker forces anything but dangerous – the orchestra displayed an extremely dry, brassy and common sound throughout, some singers had light voices for their roles and, having a colorless accompaniment kept on leash to help them, brought about the extra challenge of giving them the whole burden of producing any expression, something that they did very occasionally. After the intermission, act III seemed to benefit from the increase in raw energy demanded by Verdi and the performance finally took off. There is a chorus by the end of the opera (Cor si grande e generoso) which is the key moment of this opera. A performance that has succeeded in everything but failed here has ultimately failed. So the beautiful increase in tension built this evening in this passage has redeemed a mostly uneventful afternoon.

A great share of the uneventfulness has to do with Lorenzo Mariani’s disgraceful production, a blend of the kitsch, the superficial, the inefficient and the sloppy. To make things worse, singers have sung the “American” version of the libretto, while the extremely incoherent and anachronistic staging shows something more in keeping with the “Swedish” alternative. A country with such fame for design and theatrical tradition such as Italy should not render its reputation such bad service by exporting something like this to an audience that has paid extremely expensive tickets.

When I left the theatre this evening, I did not know what to say about Oksana Dyka’s Amelia. Listening to her singing this evening was something similar to witnessing a brain surgery: it is not beautiful, there are moments when one would rather go out, but at the end one is relieved to know that there is someone who can perform something as difficult as this when one needs it. Her steely, voluminous and invariably loud soprano opens up in ear-splitting high notes without much effort. I was going to write that she can hold very long lines, but there is very little sense of phrasing in what she does, except when things become very high and very loud. In these moments, her solidity is truly impressive. This all has very little to do with Verdian singing – and one just needs to listen to his or her recordings with Callas, Tebaldi, Stella, you name it, to confirm that – but there is something very honest about her bluntness nonetheless. There is nothing elegant or stylish about her (if you have SEEN her onstage, you know what I mean) and she does not try to be. What she has to offer is consistent loudness – and she does that. I wonder if she has tried Turandot. It might work in a fascinatingly scary way.

Although Marianne Cornetti is moving towards dramatic soprano roles, she still finds time and energy for such a low-lying role such as Ulrica. She does still have her low notes, but her voice now sounds soft-grained for the part. That did not prevent from offering a very commendable performance with feeling for Verdian lines. Ai Ichihara (Oscar) has the necessary ebullience, but the volume is what the French call “confidential” and the high notes were sour rather than silvery.

The role of Riccardo is a bit heavy for Ramón Vargas, who took one whole act to warm up. His low notes are undersupported and there is some flutter in his basic sound, but his is an essentially pleasant voice used with good taste and sense of line. His act III aria was generously sung. If Gabriele Viviani too is on the light side for Renato, he knows how to produce the right effect in this repertoire in his firm-toned, slightly dark baritone.

 

 

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Verdi’s Nabucco, Tokyo New National Theatre, 19.05.2013

The first word I could hear while on entering the auditorium of the New National Theatre today was “escalator” and I thought that those ladies were referring to the new ones in the lobby, but then I saw a couple of them on stage.  “Aren’t you performing Nabucco today?”, a man asked one of the ushers. “Yes, sir”, she answered in a very professional tone. “But why there is a department store on stage?!” “It seems that this is the modern way of staging an opera”, she repressed a smirk. “Aaah…”.

The New National Theatre has had its share of stylized stagings, but it seems today many members of the audience are going to google the word “Regietheater” for the first time. In any case, the program had an explanatory text in which you could see side by side pictures of Zeffirelli’s and Calixto Bieito’s stagings of Verdi’s Aida. I am not sure if I truly like Graham Vick’s new production of Verdi’s Nabucco, but I am grateful for not seeing choristers in Life-of-Bryan costumes trying to walk like a Babylonian. Most of all, I am glad that Mr. Vick had intended his production to the Japanese audience. I am not sure if he understands it or even really had something to say, but he did get it right that many of those in the the National Theatre watch and listen to opera as if it had nothing to do with their lives, but rather as a a) traditional, b) foreign; c) respectable entertainment. I am no sociologist, but I would rather believe that in many points, audiences in Japan could relate more directly to it than those in Milan or in Munich. You’ll only need to read Japanese newspapers to see my point.

In any case, there is a shopping mall on stage. Well-dressed people are drinking their cappuccini, fidgeting with their Iphones and buying Italian designer items. There is a beggar with a “the end is near”-sign, but nobody seems to notice him, until he grabs a passer-by, strip her from her overcoat to reveal her funkier clothes. She is Fenena. Later a gang of terrorists in pig masks would invade the mall led by some sort of Tracy-Turnblad-meets-the-bride-of-Chucky (Abigaille). Then you realize that: a) the Hebrews are the consumerists; b) the shopping mall is their temple; c) the Babylonians are the Die-fette-Jahren-sind-vorbei terrorists (they basically mess things around and place them in funny places) who put them in a hostage situation. As much as the no-fourth-wall approach could be interesting, this scenario does not really go with the plot. In Verdi’s Nabucco, we first witness the Babylonians in Jerusalem breaking down the Kingdom of Judah and then, and then in Babylon as the established power with an army, the power to pass laws etc etc, while the Hebrews are reduced to an oppressed “nation without a state” with no one to protect them but their invisible and very abstract God (as the Babylonians more or less would describe it). I can see that Mr. Vick wishes us to have a fresh look into the situation – and I would guess that he finds the Hebrews as portrayed in this story some sort of uncongenial conservative bunch – but his reversal of values requires so much suspension of disbelief that in the end you just give it up: if the Hebrews are here the bourgeois clientele of the shopping mall and the Babylonians are the terrorists, where is the police? I mean – the terrorists are not the State and therefore have no right to resort to violence. So they are criminals, right? So, where is the police? Also, how come Zaccaria the beggar “belongs with” the mall clientele? Why would the clientele follow his lead in the first place instead of just calling security to escort him out? Finally, since we are adapting the story to give it a second layer of meaning, why God’s lightning is just good, old meteorological lightning? I mean, the anarchistic terrorist leader would loose his sanity because the shopping mall was struck by lightning? Well, that was enough for  the biblical Nebuchadnezzar , but he really meant it when he declared that he was God when that happened… Also, the option for  literal lightning makes the collective conversion in the end of the opera hard to take. In the libretto, Nabucco regains his sanity as a miracle once he accepted God in his heart. Is it what happens here? Seriously?! Once you stop caring about these “details”, there are somethings to enjoy here: Paul Brown’s realistic sets are extremely convincing, the underage offender Abigaille is an interesting take on the role and the choristers are very well directed.

This is my second Nabucco conducted by Paolo Carignani (the first one was in Munich) and, if my memory does not play me a trick, I find this performance superior. I was going to write that the orchestra this afternoon sounded as an orchestra entirely different from the one that played in the New National Theatre’s Aida and Tannhäuser – and the reason is very simple: this is the Tokyo Philharmonic  while Aida and Tannhäuser had the Tokyo Symphonic. This seems to be an evidence that larger-scale works should always get the Philharmonic. Today, the orchestra basically had SOUND. And that made all the difference in the world, especially when those musicians proved to be engaged in the drama, keeping up with some fast tempi. While Carignani cared for beautiful sounds first in Munich, here he seemed primarily concerned in keeping things exciting and animated, which is always a safe option in this repertoire. When one listens to Riccardo Muti’s studio recording, one finds that there are moments when one can find some dramatic depth in nobler phrasing in key moments and attention to detail, but that would be an unfair comparison anyway.

Abigaille is such an impossible role that pointing out this or that shortcoming in a singer is an entirely futile exercise. Does Marianne Cornetti make something of Verdi’s excruciating demands? Yes, with great distinction, I would add. Her voice is not the kind of flashy Italian soprano with big chest notes and piercing acuti one would expect to find here. Moreover, she is sometimes caught short when things get too Semiramide-esque but, except for a rather breathless Salgo già del trono aurato, she proved to be very much mistress of her resources, singing with unfailingly big, round and warm tones, admirably homogeneous throughout her range. One could observe that her singing lacked verbal specificity (especially in comparison to Renata Scotto in Muti’s recording), but her almost Mozartian poise in some fiendishly passages made her Abigaille more “human” than what I am used to hear (Anch’io dischiuso un giurno particularly touching without ever being schmaltzy). This very generous artist showed great abandon in her stage performance too – costumes and blocking showed her in her less glamorous (to put it mildly) but she seemed to relish the opportunity to give herself entirely to the experience of performing this role in such an approachable way.

As Fenena, Mutsumi Taniguchi proved to have a very interesting mezzo – the sound is dark and has a slightly veiled quality until it opens up in a gleaming and very firm top register. Oh dischiuso è il firmamento was beautifully and sensitively sung. Tatsuya Higuchi (Ismaele) has an attractively hued tenor with some piercing top notes, but he is over-emphatic in his phrasing and, as many Japanese tenors, operate in a very taut – but not thin – high register. This was a good afternoon for Lucio Gallo too, probably the best performance I have ever heard from him. He was in very firm and rich voice and, although his baritone is not as voluminous as those of many famous Verdian household names, it projected easily in the auditorium. He alone could highlight Verdi’s parole sceniche as singers in this repertoire are supposed to do and often ventured in soft singing that verged on falsetto sometimes. As his Abigaille, he seemed very comfortable with the stage direction – their scenes invariably being this performance’s best moments. I am afraid, though, that Zaccaria is not Konstantin Gorny’s role – it is indeed a very difficult role, but he found it hard to pierce through the orchestra and, when he did, the sound was often fluttery and curdled. He never cheated, though, and never showed himself less than fully engaged, but the part requires a nobler and ampler sound.

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