14 Dec 2007
WAGNER: Götterdämmerung
You will wonder what designer Rosalie could have been thinking when she put Brunnhilde in trousers twice as wide at the waist as the soprano wearing them, with a nippled plastic bustier above.
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Le Monde Reviews Lamento
Cela arrive rarement, le souffle coupé dès les premières notes. Une minute entière à retenir sa respiration dans une apnée d’émotion totale pour recevoir la première phrase du Lamento pour contralto, de Johann Christoph Bach, d’après les Lamentations de Jérémie, son ascension douloureuse, ornée de sanglots, puis les deux accords d’une longue plainte instrumentale, avant l’entrée, magique, de la voix de Magdalena Kozena. “Ach, dass ich Wassers g’nug hätte.” “Ah, si ma tête était remplie d’eau, si mes yeux étaient une source de larmes.” L’insouciance a été jusqu’alors votre lot ? Vous, toi, nous tous, pécheurs, allons connaître ce que pèse le lourd fardeau de nos iniquités – et la récompense de cette connaissance : 7 minutes 22 d’une pure splendeur musicale.
MOZART: Le Nozze di Figaro
Recorded in Tokyo on October 23, 1963, this live recording of Nozze di Figaro boasts fine sound, a top cast, and the leadership of a conductor of great skill and experience. The label, Ponto, has joined the ranks of such other companies as Opera D’oro and Gala in making available broadcast and in-house recordings at affordable prices. Sometimes these releases are not even worth the modest price asked for; this one may well have more to offer than higher-priced studio sets. After a slightly hesitant first few moments, the sound quality settles down and becomes admirably strong and well defined. There is relatively little stage noise, the voices have a natural presence without being too forwardly placed, and Böhm’s orchestral control can be relished. His may be an old-fashioned reading, but it never lags or lacks for humor or beauty. The audience can be heard laughing from time to time at the stage antics; applause only interferes with the musical pleasures at the end of Non piu andrai, when unrestrained clapping covers a bit of Böhm’s ironically happy martial send-off.
WAGNER: Tristan und Isolde
Elsewhere on Opera Today readers can find a recent review of a live recording of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro from the Ponto label, a company that has joined the ranks of Opera D’oro and Gala in offering, at budget price, live recordings of various provenance. At their best, as with that Nozze, these recordings offer in acceptable sound (sometimes better) performances of such quality they rival their more expensive competitors. At less than the best, however, even the budget price becomes exorbitant. This Tristan und Isolde, recorded on January 25, 1967, unfortunately belongs to the latter category. Unless one has a strong personal reason for wanting a keepsake of this company or the artists involved, the recording is unlikely to please most listeners. The primary reason is the sound. While not unlistenable, the recording is clearly an “in-house” affair, and probably from an audience member, as some of the coughing is more up-front than the singing. Worse, during the climax, some audience members are whispering as Isolde enters the Leibestod. One would love for a Jon Vickers to have been present to yell out, “Stop your damn whispering!”
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Recordings
Too, she has sheathed the norns in plastic tubing (surviving slices of the Midgard serpent?), and then there are the colored pompoms on the heads of the perpetually tumbling Rhinemaidens and the orange panniers on poor Gutrune (all the Gibichungs wear Halloween colors). One expects little questions like this when watching any Wagner production nowadays, but designer Rosalie – who apparently stole the spotlight (Manfred Voss did the superb lighting) from producer/director Alfred Kirchner when this 1997 Bayreuth Ring premiered – seems to have a real causa against the female anatomy. With Wagnerian leading ladies as svelte as Mmes. Polaski, Schwanewilms and Schwarz, it seems ungrateful to say the least to costume them as if they were steatopygous Neolithic goddesses.
The sets, too, are Rosalie’s work. Gunther and Gutrune in their Expressionist lounge chairs clearly signal rich, decadent, too-too to take seriously, but Hagen is in the usual black leather. (Just once I’d like to see Hagen performed as a loafing aesthete who surprises people with his long-concealed plots – it’s absurd to make him so sinister and have no one on stage ever suspect what he’s up to.) Sword and Ring and Tarnhelm are present if tacky in closeup, and Siegfried looks genuinely alarming when he’s in disguise, his head covered in the Tarnhelm and his shoulder in Gunther’s chic orange cloak.
Kirchner, however, is responsible for the staged action; it’s unusually clear and the acting choice. I liked ardent, enthusiastic Siegfried rushing so eagerly into Gunther’s palace that he overshoots the stage and has to walk back from the wings, Hagen making love to his own spear, the tumbling Rhinemaidens, the threatening movements of the crowd of soldiers such that Siegfried seems a simpleton (which he is) never to perceive its whiff of the Night of the Long Knives.
The set is the top of a globe, its lines of latitude and longitude implying the universality of the mystery. The rest of the stage is matte black against which the colorful singers stand out like symbols in a morality drama – which this is and they are. The trees of the forest are barren metal stalks, like expressionistic crucifixes, and they bow low to mourn dead Siegfried. A huge screen descends during the Immolation to display light-show fire that evolves on cue into light-show flood. (You should watch these scenes in a very dark room. Or all of it.)
The singing, despite a few stretches here and there (Schwanewilms’s Gutrune seems whiny, which has not been my impression of her on other recordings), is excellent. I don’t know how many different performances (or rehearsals) were culled for the final tape (there is no audience noise or applause), but Polaski’s somewhat chilly Brunnhilde is in floods of voice from love duet to immolation, which has not always been true of her on a single night, and Wolfgang Schmidt, who sounds as if he would have trouble managing Siegfried’s punishing demands in a larger house, continues to sound youthful and eager to the bitter end here.
The glory of this recording is the orchestral sound which, under James Levine, rises through the floor in Bayreuth’s unique configuration (a discussion of how the miking for recordings is done there would be of interest) and surrounds the singers, so that they seem to be breathing music and moving through an atmosphere of it. The various instruments (and not merely their leitmotifs) seem to be characters in the drama as important as the singers and not nearly so awkwardly dressed.
John Yohalem