
21 Sep 2011
Willy Decker’s staging of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron
As a rule the celebrated incomplete operas of the repertory eluded completion due to the untimely death of the composer.
Excellent programming: worthy of Boulez, if hardly for the literal minded. (‘I think you’ll find [stroking chin] Beethoven didn’t know Unsuk Chin’s music, or Heinrich Biber’s. So … what are they doing together then? And … AND … why don’t you use period instruments? I rest my case!’)
On a recent weekend evening the performers in the current roster of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago presented a concert of operatic selections showcasing their musical talents. The Lyric Opera Orchestra accompanied the performers and was conducted by Edwin Outwater.
On April 6, 2018, Arizona Opera presented an uncut performance of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. It was the first time in two decades that this company had staged a Ring opera.
The 2018 London Handel Festival drew to a close with this vibrant and youthful performance (the second of two) at St George’s Church, Hanover Square, of Handel’s Teseo - the composer’s third opera for London after Rinaldo (1711) and Il pastor fido (1712), which was performed at least thirteen times between January and May 1713.
Saint-Saëns Mélodies avec orchestra with Yann Beuron and Tassis Christoyannis with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Markus Poschner.
The Moderate Soprano and the story of Glyndebourne: love, opera and Nazism in David Hare’s moving play
Well, it was Friday 13th. I returned home from this moving and inspiring British-themed concert at the Barbican Hall in which the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sir Andrew Davis had marked the centenary of the end of World War I, to turn on my lap-top and discover that the British Prime Minister had authorised UK armed forces to participate with French and US forces in attacks on Syrian chemical weapon sites.
This seemed a timely moment for a performance of Stravinsky’s choral ballet, Perséphone. April, Eliot’s ‘cruellest month’, has brought rather too many of Chaucer’s ‘sweet showers [to] pierce the ‘drought of March to the root’, but as the weather finally begins to warms and nature stirs, what better than the classical myth of the eponymous goddess’s rape by Pluto and subsequent rescue from Hades, begetting the eternal rotation of the seasons, to reassure us that winter is indeed over and the spirit of spring is engendering the earth.
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In 1969, Mrs Aristotle Onassis commissioned a major composition to celebrate the opening of a new arts centre in Washington, DC - the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, named after her late husband, President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated six years earlier.
This is a landmark production of Hans Werner Henze's Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of the Medusa) conducted by Ingo Metzmacher in Amsterdam earlier this month, with Dale Duesing (Charon), Bo Skovhus and Lenneke Ruiten, with Cappella Amsterdam, the Nieuw Amsterdams Kinderen Jeugdkoor, and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, in a powerfully perceptive staging by Romeo Castellucci.
This was the first time, I think, since having moved to London that I had attended a Bach Passion performance on Good Friday here.
It was a little early, perhaps, to be hearing ‘Easter Voices’ in the middle of Holy Week. However, this was not especially an Easter programme – and, in any case, included two pieces from Gesualdo’s Tenebrae responsories for Good Friday. Given the continued vileness of the weather, a little foreshadowing of something warmer was in any case most welcome. (Yes, I know: I should hang my head in Lenten shame.)
‘In order to preserve the good order in the Churches, so arrange the music that it shall not last too long, and shall be of such nature as not to make an operatic impression, but rather incite the listeners to devotion.’
The white walls of designer Peter McKintosh’s Ikea-maze are still spinning, the ox-skulls are still louring, and the servants are still eavesdropping, as Fiona Shaw’s 2011 production of The Marriage of Figaro returns to English National Opera for its second revival. Or, perhaps one should say that the servants are still sleeping - slumped in corridors, snoozing in chairs, snuggled under work-tables - for at times this did seem a rather soporific Figaro under Martyn Brabbins’ baton.
Time was I could hear the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge almost any evening I chose, at least during term time. (If I remember correctly, Mondays were reserved for the mixed voice King’s Voices.)
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Four singers were awarded prizes at the inaugural Glyndebourne Opera Cup, which reached its closing stage at Glyndebourne on 24th March. The Glyndebourne Opera Cup focuses on a different single composer or strand of the repertoire each time it is held. In 2018 the featured composer was Mozart and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment accompanied the ten finalists.
As a rule the celebrated incomplete operas of the repertory eluded completion due to the untimely death of the composer.
Think Turandot or Lulu. Arnold Schoenberg lived on for many years with two acts of Moses und Aron finished, but the third act he had planned never became a reality. He did not allow for performances of his incomplete opera, and so it was only shortly before his death that Moses und Aron was first performed. In the decades since then, this harsh but fascinating work has made it to the stage of most of the world’s great opera houses and festivals.
The Ruhrtriennale is an arts festival in Germany, and Willy Decker has led it since 2009. His staging of Moses und Aron was filmed in 2009, and the DVD preserves a scintillating performance, well outside the bounds of standard operatic performance. The only criticism of the DVD package is that there is no bonus feature on the production, and that is a keen disappointment not just because such features have become ubiquitous. Generally they are only modestly enlightening, if even that, but after viewing this production, many a viewer is likely to want to hear more - from the director, musicians and performers - as to the experience just seen. At least the modest booklet offers the director’s thoughts (translated into English by Stewart Spencer). Decker basically provides a detailed synopsis that probes the psychological reality of the libretto’s action. Then in his last paragraph, Decker finds in the unfinished state of the opera a metaphor for the work’s themes: “Schoenberg equated his own inevitable failure with the tragic failure of his eponymous hero Moses ”
The performing area is unorthodox. The audience sits in two bleacher-like sections, facing each other, and the orchestra is off to one side. At key moments the bleachers pull apart to create a performing space. Sometimes a scrim-walled box descends from the rafters. At other times, one side of the theater, opposite the orchestra, opens for entrances and exits. The contemporary costumes of Wolfgang Gussmann and Susana Mendoza come in shades of gray and black. Instead of suggesting a specific time, however, they help to create a sense of timelessness, which makes the action both metaphorically consistent with the libretto’s narrative and evocative of its universal themes.
Decker has always been a master of theatrical movement, a very real rarity in the world of opera. Anyone who has seen Decker’s Salzburg Traviata should know that. His work here with the chorus, let along the leads, is phenomenal. The sense of a lost people, torn in their allegiance, prey to the more ferocious impulses of human weakness, makes for a stage orgy that is not risible - a notable achievement in itself.
Dale Duesing as Moses and Andreas Conrad as Aron live every moment, some of which must have been physically arduous. Their vocalism is unimpaired, thanks to being projected through small microphones. Michael Boder leads the Bochumer Symphoniker in a reading that makes the sheer aggression of the score an adrenaline rush, a bravura demonstration of orchestral power. No, no one will leave humming any tunes, but Schoenberg’s sound world leaves its own impression, one of force and honesty.
At around 100 minutes, the sheer intensity of the performance almost becomes exhausting. Perhaps with a completed third act, Moses und Aron would simply be too brutal an experience. Someone may yet attempt a completion, as was done for Berg’s Lulu. But even if successful, a completed version won’t eclipse the achievement of Willy Decker and company in this remarkable DVD.
Chris Mullins