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An ambitious new series focusing on the songs of Franz Liszt, starting with all three versions of the Tre Sonetti del Petrarca, (Petrarca Sonnets), S.270a, S.270b and S.161 with Andrè Schuen and Daniel Heide for Avi-music.de.
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It would be an extraordinary, even an unimaginable Wozzeck that failed to move, to chill one to the bone. This was certainly no such Wozzeck; Marie’s reading from the Bible, Wozzeck’s demise, the final scene with their son and the other children: all brought that particular Wozzeck combination of tears and horror.
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An exceptional Lohengrin, this. I had better explain. Yes, it was exceptional in the quality of much of the singing, especially the two principal female roles, yet also in luxury casting such as Martin Gantner as the King’s Herald.
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Spot-lit in the prevailing darkness, Gustav von Aschenbach frowns restively as he picks up an hour-glass from a desk strewn with literary paraphernalia, objects d’art, time-pieces and a pair of tall candles in silver holders - by the light of which, so Thomas Mann tells us in his novella Death in Venice, the elderly writer ‘would offer up to art, for two or three ardently conscientious morning hours, the strength he had garnered during sleep’.
A baroque Christmas from Harmonia Mundi, this year’s offering in their acclaimed Christmas series. Great value for money - four CDs of music so good that it shouldn’t be saved just for Christmas. The prize here, though is the Pastorale de Noël by Marc-Antoine Charpentier with Ensemble Correspondances, with Sébastien Daucé, highly acclaimed on its first release just a few years ago.
Jean Cocteau’s 1950 Orphée - and Philip Glass’s chamber opera based on the film - are so closely intertwined it should not be a surprise that this new production for English National Opera often seems unable to distinguish the two. There is never a shred of ambiguity that cinema and theatre are like mirrors, a recurring feature of this production; and nor is there much doubt that this is as opera noir it gets.
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A little under a month ago, I reflected on Vladimir Jurowski’s tempi in Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’. That willingness to range between extremes, often within the same work, was a very striking feature of this second concert, which also fielded a Mahler symphony - this time the Fifth. But we also had a Wagner prelude and Strauss songs to leave some of us scratching our heads.
Of the San Francisco Opera Manon Lescauts (in past seasons Leontyne Price, Mirella Freni, Karita Mattila among others, all in their full maturity) the latest is Armenian born Parisian finished soprano Lianna Haroutounian in her role debut. And Mme. Haroutounian is surely the finest of them all.
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anniversary of Berlioz’s birth, alongside Michael Tilson Thomas’s fifty-year association with the London Symphony Orchestra.
The Anvil in Basingstoke was the first location for a strenuous seven-concert UK tour by the Prague Symphony Orchestra - a venue-hopping trip, criss-crossing the country from Hampshire to Wales, with four northern cities and a pit-stop in London spliced between Edinburgh and Nottingham.
As a musicologist, particularly when working in the field of historical documents, one is always hoping to discover that unknown score, letter, household account book - even a shopping list or scribbled memo - which will reveal much about the composition, performance or context of a musical work which might otherwise remain embedded within or behind the inscrutable walls of the past.
Reviews
26 Nov 2019
Wozzeck in Munich
It would be an extraordinary, even an unimaginable Wozzeck that failed to move, to chill one to the bone. This was certainly no such Wozzeck; Marie’s reading from the Bible, Wozzeck’s demise, the final scene with their son and the other children: all brought that particular Wozzeck combination of tears and horror.
At its heart, in every sense, lay Christian Gerhaher’s Wozzeck, Gun-Brit
Barkmin’s Marie, and their child, touchingly sung by Alban Mondon.
Christian Gerhaher (Wozzeck)
I have heard some fine Wozzecks over the years; Gerhaher must surely rank
alongside the finest. He has been selective in his opera roles; it would,
however, be an over-simplification verging on distortion to say that he is
more at home in the concert hall. Wozzeck is, of course, a very different
role from his fabled
Tannhäuser
Wolfram
and is surely the sterner dramatic test, perhaps especially for someone
with so heartbreakingly beautiful a voice. Or so it might seem on first
glance, but Gerhaher is an artist at least as celebrated for intelligence
and humanity. His way with words, music, and gesture too simply had one
believe that this was the character he was playing. Verbal nuance without
pedantry, attention to musical line without a hint of self-regard,
harrowing facial expression that demanded our sympathy: yes, this was a
compleat Wozzeck. Barkmin’s Marie, equally well sung (and spoken), equally
sympathetic, made for a fine complement indeed. Through her artistry one
felt her hopes as well as her devastation, her pride as well as her
capacity for love. Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke’s Captain, John Daszak’s
Drum Major and Jens Larsen’s Doctor skilfully trod the line between
character and caricature, no mean feat in a production that often called
upon them to accentuate the grotesque. Kevin Conners as Andres and Heike
Grötzinger as Margret impressed too, carving out their own dramatic
potentialities, even as we knew them no more likely to succeed than the
opera’s central couple. Cast from depth, this was a fine Wozzeck
for singing-actors.
Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting proved efficient most of the time, albeit
with a few too many discrepancies between sections of the orchestra as well
as between orchestra and pit. To be fair, there were also passages—often
the interludes—in which all came together to offer something considerably
more than that. Haenchen’s reading was not for the most part, however, one
to offer any particular revelation. He clearly knew ‘how it went’, yet the
post-Wagnerian orchestra as dramatic cauldron had its juices emerge only
fitfully.
Gun-Brit Barkmin (Marie) and Ensemble
Andreas Kriegenburg’s production seemed conceptually a little unsure of
what it was trying to achieve. Straddling the divide between Expressionist
grotesquerie—some arresting images there—and social realism—with a curious
twist of Brechtian image, not dramaturgy—is a perfectly reasonable
strategy. Communication of how the two might intertwined proved more
elusive. Updated to what seemed to be more or less the time of composition,
the production left no doubt of the gross injustice and poverty pervading
the world in which these events took place. I could have done without all
the splashing round in the lake below. Kriegenburg often scored, however,
in particular dramatic touches: above all, the acts of Wozzeck’s son, keen
to learn from his ill-fated father: watching, listening. and in some cases,
acting, as when this evidently wounded child broke his mother’s heart by
painting the accusation ‘Huren’ (‘whore’) on her wall. All was lost, then:
a moment of devastation. Already we knew what fate, or rather society, had
in store not only for Wozzeck and Marie, but for their child too. ‘Wir arme
leut’ ...
Mark Berry
Alban Berg: Wozzeck
Wozzeck - Christian Gerhaher, Drum Major - John Daszak, Andres - Kevin
Conners, Captain - Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke, Doctor - Jens Larsen,
First Apprentice - Peter Lobert, Second Apprentice - Boris Prýgl, Fool -
Ulrich Reß, Marie - Gun-Brit Barkmin, Margret - Heike Grötzinger, Marie’s
Child - Alban Mondon, Lad - Jochen Schäfer, Soldier - Markus Zeitler;
Director - Andreas Kriegenburg, Conductor - Hartmut Haenchen, Set Designs -
Harald B Thor, Costumes - Harald B Thor, Costumes - Andrea Schraad,
Lighting - Stefan Bolliger, Choreography - Zenta Haerter, Dramaturgy -
Miron Hakenbeck, Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus director: Stellario
Fagone), Bavarian State Orchestra.
Nationaltheater, Munich; Saturday 23rd November 2019.