Some performances catch your attention from moment one because of their excellence, but they can be predictable (because everybody more or less knows how perfection should be), while others are simply fascinating in their imperfection. When it comes to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, one will probably found the second type more often. Not as often as performances that are just uninteresting, I’m afraid. The main reason is that this is a work for a truly great orchestra. If it is just ok, then it won’t be memorable and you’ll know it before you arrive at the opera house. And you still need singers at least apt enough for the conductor to let the orchestra go without having to adjust for a cast not truly up to it. If you share my opinion, the Opéra de Paris won’t ever deliver a group one Tristan. This evening, my neighbor asked me how was the cast (she had missed act one). When I started to talk about the orchestra, she interrupted me “we all know too well how the orchestra is…”.
Yet the conductor was Gustavo Dudamel, and I was curious about what he would do. I am always curious about what non-German conductors will make of Tristan, because they weren’t brainwashed into thinking that they have to emulate Furtwängler and end up offering pseudoprofoundness. To be honest, I have never heard Dudamel conduct Wagner and guessed he would offer something very fast, loud and intense. Yet he didn’t. The whole performance was the opposite of that. It is actually difficult to say what it was, for it was something different for every act.
Act one opened to a very a tempo prelude, the building intensity so gradual that you hardly noticed it. The orchestral sound was airy in the sense that the strings were so smooth in sound (I’m trying not to use the word “thin”) that you could actually hear the woodwind with unusual immediacy. And the beat was flowing and forward moving, which is a good thing. In this act, all events are coming up in the last minute. Everything that didn’t happen during the whole trip from Ireland is happening now, and the audience has to feel it. The problem is that all this repressed energy should be there too – and this evening it all felt like Mahler’s 4th. To be honest, it didn’t bother me – It was a valid approach considering the forces available, and it actually sounded beautiful and transparent.
When it comes to act 2, the sense of “real time” is not really there anymore. This is a actually a matter of atmosphere. And this is achieved through tonal coloring and a flexible beat. There was a tad more orchestral sound, for the very nature of the first part of the soprano/tenor scene demands it. But the whole act seemed concert-bound in its isolated beautiful elements in a business-like context.
Only act three actually brought something In terms of story-telling from the orchestra. From that third act, one could see that with experience (and a top level orchestra), Mr. Dudamel could create something worth while the detour. Unfortunately, this new intensity and creativity did not last to point of the Liebestod, here an entirely uneventful affair.
Now you’ll ask me if the cast was an asset or a liability, and the answer is in between. I’ve read the name of Mary Elizabeth Williams as Isolde with puzzlement. I had seen her Amelia in Verdi’s Ballo with the Welsh National Opera. She did sing well, but the part seemed a bit heavy for her. She has solid technique – and she has been singing increasingly heavier roles. So, no, she did not disgrace herself at all in Wagnerland. This was actually a lesson in how to sing a heavy role. She lightened the tone in every conversation passage, charmed the audience with floating mezza voce whenever she could, worked her acuti from brightness and focus rather than beefing up and only resorted to chesty low notes in congenial phrases. She is a highly musician singer, who sculpted her phrases à lá Margaret Price and tried to respond to every mood shift, yet her manner is diva-ish in an Italianate way. I mean, she didn’t sing it like Puccini, yet she sounded foreign in her carefully pronounced and only occasions mispronounced German, in the way the phrase giving pride of place to word-pointing (for stunning effects sometimes, truth be said), in the recessed quality of her middle register and in the rather bottled-up quality of her high notes. In lyrical passage, the combination of fleece and reed à la Roberta Alexander in her soprano brought a distinctive sensuousness to her singing. In terms of acting, she stroke some big arm movements and responded to every little development in the staging. On one hand, it felt a bit soap opera-ish in its excessively “knowing” quality. On the other hand, it filled a lot of blanks in a vacuous staging. I have to say that I listened to every turn of phrase. She sang the part differently from everyone else – and only in the Liebestod I felt her lacking.
Even if Okka von der Dammerau was not in her best voice – her calls in act two were flat and unsubtly loud – the natural radiance of her voice (now more soprano in sound that it uses to be) – exposed the prima donna’s lack of Wagnerian raw material. She sang throughout with admirable spontaneity and effortlessness. In terms of acting, she did not seem to have found herself in this production (and I can’t blame her).
I considered Michael Weinius technically irregular when he sang Tristan in Zurich last year, as if he were trying to make his voice bigger and darker. So I am glad to report an entirely different experience this evening. Here his tenor sounded at its brightest and – in a positive way – lightest. His voice had an immediate, clear sound throughout, and his high g’s and a’s pierced though naturally. He offered a solid act 3, did not sound tired and only cut some high notes a bit short and the tone could seem more Charakter- than Heldentenor. But that’s just a side comment. He even acted with more enthusiasm than in Zurich. A commendable performance.
Ryan Speedo Green has a voice of Wagnerian proportions (and an ideal stage persona for the role of Kurwenal), yet there is anoverkilling vocal production that stood between him and complete success. Everything is excessively covered, supported, emitted – it is so extenuating that the voice more than once derailed, and it shakes a bit in softer dynamics. It is sad that Eric Owens is past his prime – the voice is quavery and reduced in power these days – for he has the measure of the role of King Marke and did some sensitive things this evening.
This is the second time I see Peter Sellars production with Bill Viola videos (the first time was in 2008, with Waltraud Meier, Clifton Forbis and Semyon Bychkov), and I realize that I have not changed my mind about it. Reading what I wrote last time, I notice that this evening I preferred to follow the stage action than the videos – and I can’t say that it was for the best.
I HEAR VOICES 
Appreciate this. Thanks!
Thanks, Jerold! Good to hear from you!