Epilepsy, a gambling addiction and a murderous deadline.  Just a selection from the list of ailments and circumstances that surrounded the conception of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. Lack of money and a resulting strangulation contract with a publisher (he would lose the rights of all of his works when he wouldn't meet the deadline) forced Dostoyevsky to write a novel within four weeks. Drawing on his own experience as a gambling addict, he wrote The Gambler, a story about a man who looks back on his own downfall. 

In 1915 Sergej Prokofiev started to write an opera, based on this story of Dostoyevsky. He took out the retrospective view and told the story in the present time. For her production for Opera Vlaanderen of The Gambler, director Karin Henkel brings back the flashback of the novel. It is her first opera production but her third production concerning a piece of Dostoyevsky. In a clever staging she shows her affinity with the writer and his talent to put moral decay and dormant lunacy in a gripping narrative. 

In addition to the perspective of hindsight, Henkel provides the main character, Aleksej, with a double. It is with him that the opera begins. Aleksej, or rather his doppelganger, wakes up in a hotel and tries to recollect the last eight months of his life. He tries to reconstruct his own deterioration - hoping to see something, if only a glimpse, of his real self between all those memories. Aleksej's doppelganger is played by dancer Miguel do Vale who is, from a narrative point of view, the real protagonist of this story.   

An opera with a dancer in the lead. A dancer who physically responds to the story that he sees passing by in his memory. Karin Henkel, together with set designer Muriel Gerstner, let the story take place on a stage that consists of three levels. Three levels within which we see present, past, reality and dream depicted without sharp distinction. It's a deliberately chaotic whole in which Henkel, with great dramatic and comical effect, shows the decay of Aleksej and the moral deprivation of the people around him.

In composing The Gambler, Prokofiev was largely inspired by Modest Mussorgsky and his opera "The Marriage". An opera in which Mussorgsky took the rhythm of spoken word as a guiding principle for the writing of the vocal lines. He thus came to an opera consisting solely from  recitatives: an "Opera Dialogue". In The Gambler, speech simulation - a musical translation of voice proxies, something that would in Janacek's operas reach a certain zenith - and martellato, a hammering staccato, results in a piece of music theatre that is filmish rather than it is operatic. One will look in vain for an aria  - or a beautiful melody in the sung text (the lover of Italian opera has been warned). The arioso recitativo of the dialogues, which are largely copied 1-on-1 from Dostoyevsky's novel, are almost continuously agitated in character. The aspect of contemplation of Dostojevski's novel is a bit left to it. In interludes with spoken texts, coming from the novel, Henkel gives Prokofiev's opera some relief. She grants us a few moments in which we are given a more intimate look into the inner world of Aleksej. 
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​The Sprechstimme and Sprechgesang in, let's say, Wozzeck, don't stop that opera from making an emotional impact and although The Gambler certainly makes its mark, it's the Russian-kind of Sprechgesang together with the language that keeps the story, for me, at a certain distance. The question rises whether a text-based opera like The Gambler would benefit from a translation in, say, English. That one, rather than listening to sounds that doesn't make it into meaningful words,  get a grasp of the finesse of the speech simulation. That the idea that lies behind this way of writing vocal lines becomes more eminent, literally more meaningful, and results, eventually, in a performance that is, in the end, a more engaging one. (Like the English translation in the ENO-version of "The Makropulos Case" that sheds some light in Janacek for me.)

In an opera that doesn't dwell on beautiful arias, with music that is more orientated on action than melody, the acting of the singers is, even more than usual, as important as their singing. Ladislav Elgr as Aleksej and Anna Nechaeva as Polina perform that task, together with the rest of the cast, more than adequately. But it is Dostoyevsky-expert Karin Henkel - with an ingenious staging in which she does justice to both Prokofiev's musical wit and sarcasm as well the stratification of Dostojevski's novel - who is the real star of the evening.

Opera Vlaanderen   17 June 2018
Dates:  13 June until 7 July 2018 

Conductor: Dmitri Jurowski

Regie: Karin Henkel
Decor: Muriel Gerstner

Polina: Anna Nechaeva
Aleksej: Ladislav Elgr
The General: Eric Halfvarson
Babulenka: Renée Morloc
The Marquis: Michael J. Scott
Blanche: Kai Rüütel

RING OF CANTATAS
This year's BachFest featured something special. A Ring of Cantatas, sung in Thomaskirche and Nicolaikirche. Under the baton of John Eliot Gardener, Ton Koopman, Hans-Christoph Rademann and Masaaki Suzuki - conductors with  a complete recording of Bach's cantatas (the ones that survived ink corrosion, flames and other mischief) under their belt - a rarely seen (and heard) series of concerts were given in which 33 of the best cantatas (and yes this is subjective) were played  within a 48 hours timespan.   

Contractual obligations refrained Bach from composing operas. The cantor of Thomaskiche was not supposed to occupy himself with such worldy matters. But changing times and the accompanying relaxation in the relationship with religious heritage have brought Bach to the opera house after all.

JOHANNES PASSION
For me BachFest started with Johannes Passion, a 2017-production of Opera Leipzig, in which Bach's most dramatic of passions was paired with modern dance. In a choreography of Mario Schröder, the clerical music of Bach was staged with a worldy ballet. A ballet in which Schröder did not bother, and rightfully so, to put a literary telling of Jesus' cloister on stage. What can be heard in music and text needs no doubling on stage. More than a depiction of the crucifixation, the ballet was a rendering of themes, lying beneath the story of Christ. A visualition of a story about suffering and the need for salvation. The need of humans to appoint someone savior. The ballet put the story in a world of decay. A world with a possible chance for a new beginning, awaiting at the end. Together with the theatrical and dramatic element already in the music this Johannes Passion obtained with its vividness and sensual aspect of contempary dance by times the energy of a rock opera.

Jesus was not played/danced by one person but by a pair of dancers: one man and one woman. A Jesus-tango of sorts, dressed in black, as to seperate them, in image, from the rest of the dancers: the crowd and the Pharisees that would eventually come for Jesus' blood. The couple that was Jesus danced with each other, danced against each other, as to depict an inner struggle, and kept themselves at save distance from their environment. Their duet was, although not devoid from sensuality, a somewhat stylistic affair, it never reached, let's say, a Cherkaoui-kind of rapture or tempation. The couple never fully interwined as if Jesus, the supposed savior of mankind, was a broken  person. A person that was looking for balance and salvation him/herself. With "Ruht Wohl", that ending of Johannes Passion that never fails to move, it started to rain. It was an ending that supplied Bach's oratorium with a stage filled with bodies, presumably dead, covered with blankets  - worthy  of anything this side of Götterdämmerung. A pairing of the end of the world with the resurrection of Christ. The Jesus-couple kept dancing till the end, against all odds. As if their continuing doing so would save the world, if only in mind,  from perishing. Thus keeping the illusion alive that mankind was redeemed and offered a new start.

In this setting, the role of musicians and singers was limited (if one can say that when Bach's music is played) to a guiding one. The musical direction was in the hands of Paul Goodwin who led the Gewandhausorchester in a swift and energetic reading of the score. Martin Pertzold was a versatile Evangelist and Alexander Knight a powerful Jesus. In comparison with her male colleagues the soprano of Magdelena Hinterdobler sounded a bit stiff, as if she wasn't performing up to her abilities.

It was a  performance in which the ballet was up to a difficult task: to provide Bach's oratorio with a worthy visual counterpart on stage. It worked for the better part, thanks to a choreography that left enough room for interpretation and did not bother to literary depict a story that was already very present in music and text. The undoubtedly good intentions behind the added intro - with a call to prayer from a mosque and a synagogue, as a reference to topical times with it tensions between religions - did not save that intro from falling flat on its face. It sounded like a technical error rather than a convincing start. But then, what else than the stirring Herr, unser Herrscher is a better start for the oratorio that, as it was proven here again, can serve as an excellent music drama?

BACH FOR BRUNCH
The next day I had  Bach for brunch. Together with cantates of Heinrich Schütz (composer of the first German opera - "Dafne" in 1672 - and considered a founding father of lutheran baroque), Telemann and instrumental music  of Biber, a musical brunch was served in  Alte Börse. An old Exchange in the centre of Leipzig that housed a concert that was, on all counts, a heartwarming  event, The heat made a repeatedly tuning of the violins necessary, sweaty as the gut strings became in these tropical circumstances. 

In the cantatas of Schütz, Telemann & Bach, mezzo-soprano Genevieve Tschumi sang divine melodies with gravity and beauty and delivered them with the qualities of someone who doesn't only know how to sing but - as if the cantatas were "Lieder" - also know how to act. This musical brunch was followed, later that day, by an organ concert by Johannes Lang in the Gewandhaus. A concert that was an encounter with that other famous inhabitant of Leipzig, Felix Mendelssohn. Lang delivered the sonates for organ from Bach and Mendelssohn with finesse and fury on the most majestic and theatrical of all instruments. In Mendelssohn Sonate A-Dur op. 65, the Fuga led to a frenzy in the audience. It was as if a mad professor, sitting in a high castle, turned his drift for world domination into the most frantic of heavy chromatic music. 
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For BACH/BLOG see also:

Bayreuth has Wagner and Leipzig has Bach. Two cities and two composers who mark for me, among many other things, the beginning and the end of the summer of 2018. This summer starts for me at BachFest in Leipzig, a more than appropriate start, and ends, at the end of August, with Parsifal in Bayreuth. From the Cantor of Leipzig, who is perhaps the most important point of reference in Western music, to the Sorcerer of Bayreuth with his self-declared music of the future. One can regard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach as a construction kit, used by many, if not all, who came after him. (Of the composers who have not been influenced by Bach, I cannot in any case mention one.)

​​More than 250 years after his death, Bach follows in the footsteps of time. At the festival that bears his name, an app keeps me up to date with last-minute offers, programme highlights and news I shouldn't miss. In Bach-Archive you can learn about Bach's life, his family background, his working method and the research into his manuscripts. 

​The composer who spent the last 27 years of his life in Leipzig, buried here in the Thomaskirche - although there are doubts about the true identity of the skeleton that lies beneath the floor of the church - now belongs to everyone. (With special thanks to Felix Mendelssohn, also a resident of Leipzig, who turned Bach's music into repertoire for the concert hall in the first half of the 19th century.) His music can be heard on the market square, within easy reach of a beer and a Kalbsschnitzel, and in the opera house where his Johannes Passion is paired with contemporary dance. In his time Bach often received criticism on his music, which was supposed to be old-fashioned and unnecessarily complicated. That old-fashioned and unnecessarily complicated music has turned out to be astonishingly timeless. Whether it sounds in historically informed performances on a harpsichord by Gustav Leonardt or is shredded on the fretboard of an electric guitar by Yngwie Malmsteen. Bach's music is, a comparison with literature is unavoidable, a story that is bigger than the story itself. Widely interpretable, rich and fascinating enough to return to again and again - from the Wagnerian (Mahlerian) late-Romantic version of the St. Matthew Passion by Willem Mengelberg to the historical informed performance of the Johannes Passion by Masaaki Suzuki. It is music that has been resistant to rapidly changing trends. There is something reassuring in the fact that there are things from the past that can be rediscovered, every generation again. In a world where everything is changing, it is good that some things don't. They provide a certain grounding, as a possible threshold against alienation. 

From my own first meeting with Bach's music, I remember an animated tv-series in which the Toccata & Fugue in D minor was used as soundtrack. Even before I knew the composer by name, I heard his music introducing a cartoon about the history of mankind. Once upon a time ... I was introduced to the divine notes of a Bach score and the sound of a church organ. I heard organ sounds drawing an impressive cathedral of sound. Even before I knew anything about music theory and its terminology, I got my mind enlightened by refined counterpoint. Bach's music is like a massage for the brain - an encounter with someone, or something, of superior intelligence. The art of sound in which - despite all the math that lies under Canons and Fugues - you'll always end up with the genius of the composer. For although Bach's music may be there for those who find comfort in structure, it is the brilliant spirit of Leipzig's most famous cantor that prevents his music from being reduced to a mere mathematical model in which artificial intelligence can take over a composer's job. 

For BACH/BLOG see also:

On the birthday of Robert Schumann (born this day in 1810), Wagner & Heavy Metal goes on its way to Leipzig, the city where Robert Schumann, like Johann Sebastian Bach one century before him, lived and worked for some time. Many composers found themselves under the spell of the contrapuntal finesse of Bach's music and Schumann was one of them. With Schumann's second symphony, perhaps his most Bach-inspired composition, as a soundtrack in the early morning I'm heading for Leipzig, the city of Bach, Mendelssohn and BachFest. A train journey that will take more than seven hours, a travel of considerable lenght but a sign in open air compared to the three days that Bach once walked from Arnstadt to  Lübeck to pay Buxtehude, his idol, a visit. Buxtehude who offered the young Johann Sebastian to become his successor as organist of the Marienkirche, requiring that Bach should marry his daughter first (she was a bit old and not so beautiful). The composer/organist had previously made a similar proposal to George Friedrich Händel. Like Händel, Bach politely refused but stayed in  Lübeck for almost four months to study Buxtehude's music. It was a time extremely well spent and of considerable influence on Bach the composer. The four months stretched a holiday, that was only supposed to last four weeks, to such an extent that Bach almost lost his job in Arnstadt. Much of the music that Buxtehude wrote (including a lot of vocal church music) has been lost and it is partly thanks to the transcriptions that Bach made during his stay in Lübeck from Buxtehude's compositions that we now know how that music sounded. Nowadays Buxtehude is seen as someone who occupied a unique place in music history, as a composer who had a considerable influence on composers who would eventually surpass him in fame (Bach and Händel) and who was also a contemporary of Heinrich Schütz, the man who is seen as a founding father of lutheran baroque  and founder of the Hofkapelle, the later Staatskapelle Dresden (founded in 1548 it is the oldest symphony orchestra in the world). A few cantatas by Schütz will be on the programme on Saturday morning, together with other God-praising works by Telemann and, of course, Bach. 

That's for Saturday, tonight BachFest will start, for me, with Johannes Passion, a performance were Bach's oratorio is staged with a ballet. A consortium of disciplines in which clerical music is paired with worldly dance. More to follow. 

​For BACH/BLOG see also:

He would rather die ten times than sail the seas for one more day, but the curse that has struck him has condemned him to roam the earth forever. He has become discouraged, only the possible perishing of the world seems to offer him a solution. Every seven years he is allowed ashore to find a woman who can rid him of his curse. To find a woman who - by a vow of eternal fidelity - can give him the peace he so desperately seeks. 

In Amsterdam we didn't have to wait seven years for Der Fliegende Holländer  to dock again. Last weekend it was exactly five years ago that the captain of the ghost ship gave its semi-concertante acte the presence in the Concertgebouw. Where the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by a conductor of Bayreuth-fame, Andris Nelsons, gave a rather cumbersome reading of Der Fliegende Holländer on that occassion, Benjamin Levy, in a production for De Nederlandse Reisopera, led the Noord Nederlands Orkest with relatively swift tempi and a swinging impetus through the turbulent waves of the opera that can be considered as the beginning of Wagner's mature oeuvre.

Director Paul Carr uses the overture to introduce the audience to Senta's obsession before the libretto does. We see a woman in a wedding dress, her arms clinging to a book, in a certain state of frenzy. Longing for a man who is out of reach: like a teenage girl who dwells at the poster of a pop idol. Almost religiously inspired, Senta claims a leading role in the story that follows. In search of fulfilment, she will sacrifice her life so that the Dutchman can be freed from his curse. She will find her reward with a life after death (a transfiguration in love) and a central place in this production. We look at a projection of a big eye, as if Senta is taking us along in the story that unfolds, looking at it through her eyes.

This production of Der Fliegende Holländer is, following their excellent Ring des Nibelungen and the mother of all Erlösungsdurftige operas, Tristan und Isolde, the next triumph in the field of Wagner from De Nederlandse Reisopera. From the overture on (was a stormy sea ever more strikingly turned into music than Wagner does here?) dancers play an important role. In beautiful scenery, abstract enough to trigger the imagination and specific enough not to get lost in the story, dancers, singers, video projections and the clever use of stage sets makes that the turbulent sounds that come from the orchestra pit find in the things shown on stage a worthy partner. Motion is key, no Park & Bark (a stiff declamation of one's lines) but motion that comes with dynamic scenery sets that transform the stage in the ship of Daland, turn the entrance of the Dutchman into a memorable scene and, in a beautiful scenery change with open curtains, make the stage into the atelier where Senta, obsessed with the story of the Dutchman, becomes the target of mockery. Mockery of her fellow tailors in the atelier for wedding dresses who fight their own loneliness and uncertainty while waiting for the safe return of their husbands with singing and dancing. Sound and image do justice to the ferocity of the sea, which is both a décor of action and a reflection of the stormy inner lifes of the protagonists.

Aile Asszonyi performs the role of Senta with passion and fury. With a voice in which, besides broad, romantic panoramas, a place is reserved for belcanto. Powerful, fragile and beautiful. There is, after all, no real drama without real beauty. Beauty that dies, at the moment when she puts the knife in her own belly, thus liberating the Dutchman and eventually, although that remains a matter of interpretation, also herself.

As a sailor Senta's father Daland is a rough, naive man who, blinded by money, finds out too late which doom the Dutchman has in store for his daughter. In Yorck Felix Speer, no stranger to the Wagner repertoire, he has already played in Das Liebesverbot (sparsely staged, please see this reference as a plea for a new production of it), Daland finds a singer who shows, besides strength, a certain humorous quality. As is the case with his fellow members of the cast Speer's singing qualities are accompanied by a good stage performance and an enjoyable talent for acting.

This production is a reminder of what the story of Der Fliegende Holländer actually is. A ghost story, in which the Dutchman and his crew were as gothic & undead as my 19th century horror loving heart could have wish for. Beautifully done and a reminder of Dracula, that most famous representative of the undead, whose novel was published exactly 120 + 1 year + 1 day ago (26 May 1897).

With Der Fliegende Holländer Richard Wagner was still two operas removed from Das Rheingold, the first opera of Der Ring des Nibelungen, the opera cycle with which he would write music and theatre history, the tetralogy that would anticipate 20th century film music and a whole lot more. In Der Fliegende Holländer Wagner already plays with the idea of the leitmotif, those ´directional indicators of feelings´ with which he would string his Ring operas together. Although still a long way from the Gesamtkunstwerken that he had in mind, Wagner shows himself in Holländer already a true master in integrating music and theatre. A craftsman in building expectation and creating suspense. In this production of De Nederlandse Reisopera, Der Fliegende Holländer is a dynamic piece of music theatre that is above all an ode to Wagner the theatre man. It’s a production that makes you longing for more and nourishes the hope that the Reisopera will devote  themselves to an opera of the sorcerer of Bayreuth again in the not too far away future.

De Nederlandse Reisopera, Theater Carre, 27 May  2018
 
Conductor: Benjamin Levy
Noord Nederlands Orkest
Choir: Consensus Vocalis
 
Regie: Paul Carr
Choreography: Andreas Heise
Decor- en costumes: Gary McCann
Light: Alex Brok
 
Daland: Yorck Felix Speer
Senta: Aile Asszonyi
Erik: Samuel Sakker
Der Steuermann Dalands: Thorsten Büttner
Mary: Ceri Williams
Der Holländer: Darren Jeffery

​The Swedish queen Christina refused to marry, did not want to have children, could (as a direct consequence) not provide a successor to the throne and voluntarily abdicated and handed over the crown to her cousin. Her life, the subject of controversy and wild speculation (did she have a relationship with a woman?) has already been filmed - in 1933 with Greta Garbo in the lead role and her grave was - more than 300 years after her death - violated more than once (for further investigation - was she perhaps not secretly a hermaphrodite?) The Dutch-Swedish composer Klas Torstensson was no less fascinated by the life of the 17th-century queen from the land of his birth and dedicated a cycle to her, composed over a period of more than 10 years. At May 24th this cycle was completed with the world premiere of its last movement, L'autunno di Christine. A piece of music in which Christina, in the person of soprano Charlotte Riedijk, reports of her earthly passion and post-mortem rage. For the first part of the Christina cycle Torstensson draws from his own In Grosser Sehnsucht (a song cycle about remarkable and tragic women) and continues to build on the music we also know from his opera The Expedition. A musical landscape in which the contrasts between the composers who once served as an example to him, Varèse and Xenakis, and the Puccini-like lyricism with which he created a sensation in The Expedition, are explicitly searched for. Tonality as a building block, for love is not possible without it, but without sailing the seas of cheesiness. Besides melodies that please, Torstensson offers performers and listeners some challenges - challenges of a physical kind for the performers, because what is difficult to compose should not be too easy to play and therefore not too smooth for the listener to listen to. It's easy, and lovefully, to get lost in the musical panoramas that Torstensson carves out of aural basalt. In a live setting it is all the more striking that what is scarce, the accompaniment of Riedijk in the first movement by just the violin of Joseph Puglia, is no less in strength and eloquence than what is added to Christina's story at a later stage with a more extensive set of instruments. Even more than the percussion that abruptly ends the lyrical beginning of the third movement, it is the pregnant force of the continuation that attracts the listener and holds him in its grip. With descending tones we are entering Christina's rage over her desecration and the timpani-led bass theme - known from The Expedition - creates, in the tradition of the best film music, suspense and expectation. Torstensson may be drawing from musically complex patterns, his orchestration does not lose itself in mathematical detachment and remains, with a great feel for human proportions, focused on both head and heart. In changing combination with each other he uses different instrument groups to colour a variety of timbres. It are Nordic sounds that show a respect for nature, sounds that contain the elements that make his music sound organic. The inevitable references of a 21-century Mahler, Sibelius or Bruckner impose themselves. It is mightily beautiful. Even more than for orchestral power, Torstensson has an ear for the human voice, the soprano of his wife Charlotte Riedijk, whom he never - as if he loses the vulnerability of man in his struggle against the elements never out of sight - buries under the aural concrete on which he builds the house in which the misunderstood queen tells her story in three different languages. In Italian, Christina talks about the bittersweet sides of love, reports about the violation of her grave, and her anger about it, with the dimensions of the coffin proclaimed in Swedish as a funny intermezzo - thanks to the acting qualities of Riedijk. In French she looks back on her role as queen, after which in Italian she tells the story of her platonic love for Cardinal Azzolino. Encrypted words whose meaning is musically expressed by claves (wooden sticks specially made for the oocassion by Torstensson). The story of Queen Christina ends with her epitaph and the sound of a little bell that freezes time and echoes the hope that the queen, who did not let herself be dictated by laws, has finally found peace, free from grave offenders.

Torstensson's Christina cycle was accompanied by psalms of Huygens and madrigals of Monteverdi and Gesualdo. The late madrigals of Gesualdo (of which we heard a selection from the sixth book) are musical confessions and cries of despair. The longing for inner peace and subsequent death wishes of a man who seeks absolution for the murders he committed on his adulterous wife and her lover. A hunger for salvation from earthly suffering with the idea of eternity as an unspeakable curse. The composer-murderer has this in common with the captain of that ghost ship who waits for me on Sunday when Wagner's Der Fliegende Holländer set sails to Amsterdam. But more about that later.

Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ - 24 May 2018

Klas Torstensson Christina Cyclus

Carlo Gesualdo Madrigali a cinque voci, Libro sesto: 
Claudio Monteverdi Confitebor terzo alle francese (Selva Morale e spirituale)
Constantijn Huygens 5 Psalms for solo voice


Performers:

Sinfonietta Riga
Normunds Šnē conductor

Joseph Puglia violin
Charlotte Riedijk soprano
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Consensus Vocalis
Agnes van Laar soprano
Chantal Nysingh mezzo soprano
Franske van der Wiel alto
Japser Dijkstra tenor
Christiaan Peters bass
Punto Bawono lute
Klaas Stok conductor

A wave of horror went through the Muziektheater. It had just been announced that Teodor Currentzis was ill and had to leave his duties as conductor for this afternoon's performance to his assistant Artem Abashev. Currentzis, the Greek-Russian boy wonder of classical music, has become an attraction on his own. A self-proclaimed saviour determined to give the genre that is, supposingly or not, on life support a much needed shot in the arm. (Here classical music meets heavy metal, if I had to believe the media the latter is in a state of deadlock for as long as I can read.)

I was not able to judge whether it made a big difference or not - I did not see another performance to compare - but it can be assumed that this La Clemenza di Tito, a production which, after Salzburg and Berlin, is in its third series of performances, with an assistant-conductor who was closely involved in the rehearsals, was carried out entirely according to Currentzis's wishes. A HIP-style approach with swift tempi and contemplative slow-downs - executed with the energy that can be expected from an orchestra of which the majority of its musicians play their parts while standing on their feet. Besides the orchestra and its enigmatic conductor there was Peter Sellars who gave the opera a contemporary look and there was, of course, Mozart. Above anything else, there was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Because, as is often the case with opera productions in which directors expressly seek their own added value in centuries-old repertoire, it became (also here) vividly clear that it is ultimately the music that remains. La Clemenza di Tito is an opera, a rush job, written by a man, Salzburg's most famous son, who at the time of accepting the assigment only had six months to live. It is an opera (as demonstrated by the semi-concertant performance with which the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century toured Holland last year) that can stand on its own feet. Whether this Sellars/Currentzis production is a valuable addition to the catalogue of Mozart-operas, and that of La Clemenza di Tito in particular, others may decide, certain is that Sellars (who has passed 60) lives up to his reputation of enfant terrible for those who are attached too strong to tradition. In this production Sellars does what he does more often, making connections between past and present, explicitly seeking the involvement of topical subjects. Things that should otherwise not matter (the colour of the cast) receive their place in the narrative while things that are drawn to current events (e.g Sesto becoming a terrorist) inadvertently emphasize that it is not Mozart's opera that needs saving from oblivion but Sellars', undoubtedly, good intentions. Sellars adapts Tito's story and together with Currentzis he brings other pieces of Mozart's oeuvre to the show.  

The addition of extra music in a for this occasion adapted storyline works wonderfully well in the first act. The Adagio & Fugue gives, for instance, an extra depth to Sesto's reflections on his role in the rebellion against Tito and the two pieces from Missa KV 427 (Benedictus & Hossanna and Laudamus te), brought in to honour Tito, grow into an excellent showcase for the choir of musicAeterna - it is pure gold that sounds here. But what works well before the break decends into emo-kitsch in the second half. In the second act, we make a jump to the recent past: the attacks, and their aftermath, in Paris, Brussels, Nice and Manchester. We see a wake with flowers and candles in commemoration of the victims, in which the Kyrie from the aforementioned Missa serves as a kind of John Lennon's Imagine on piano. It are images that are still too fresh to make an impression in the theatre. Where the adjustments of Sellars before the break feel natural, they loose their credibility in the second part. Tito turns into a soap that unintentionally reveals that the original libretto was not so bad to begin with. In the original libretto Tito is supposed to be dead after Sesto attacks him, he seems to be alive after all when it turns out that another man was stabbed by Sesto in Tito's place. Sellars thinks of this as weak dramaturgy (indeed) so he lets Sesto attack (and wound) Tito, visibly for the audience,  after which Sesto, after having been imprisoned and handcuffed, is happily left alone with Tito on his deathbed (the perhaps not so strong original dramaturgy is replaced here by something as equally, if not more, far-fetched). Tito, initially determined to punish his good friend's betrayal with death, grants Sesto mercy. On the Mauerian Trauermusik, in the face of a grieving crowd, the generous king, as a major departure from the original plot, eventually dies of his wounds. 

From the aforementioned production of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, we again encounter the Irish mezzo-soprano Paula Murrihy in the role of Sesto. As a mezzo-soprano in a male role (it regularly occurs in Mozart) she/he is a white traitor of a black king. Tito, fiercely sung by Russell Thomas, and his courtiers are all black, with Annio, a beautiful role of Jeanine De Bique (another mezzo-soprano in a male role) as his confidant. In the Vitellia of Ekaterina Scherbachenko, anger and despair are fighting a vicious fight with each other. A inner struggle that is made explicit in the scene - I found it one of this staging's stronger ideas - in which she is joined on stage by Florian Schüle, whose basset horn sounds like her inner voice. Janai Brugger is a sensitive Servillia and the cast, where it comes to the most important roles, is completed by the warm bass of Dutch National Opera-veteran Sir Willard White.   

​In this production, La Clemenza di Tito is a piece of music theatre that makes its case not so much for Tito-the-opera as for the Mozart-the-composer. The overly adapted storyline, the eagerness to make an emotional impact and the frantic attempt to stay on top of the news in an opera production, triggers an, all too strong,  attention-shift from staging to music. 

For all what goes wrong (mainly in the second part) we get back a beautiful final chorus, excellent, but the music becomes, by that time, more a soundtrack to invented scenery than part of a coherent whole. It is therefore, with the music of the divine Mozart still ringing in my ears, that for a future return to this production an audio-only document will most likely suffice.  

​The Dutch National Opera 13 May 2018
Dates 7 May until 24 May 2018

Musical director: Teodor Currentzis (Artem Abashev conducted on 13 May)
Orchestra: MusicAeterna
Chorus: MusicAeterna

​Stage director: Peter Sellars

Tito Vespasiano: Russell Thomas
Vitellia: Ekaterina Scherbachenko
Servilia: Janai Brugger
Sesto: Paula Murrihy
Annio: Jeanine De Bique
Publio: Sir Willard White

It was, if I am not mistaken, Pierre Boulez who once expressed his frustration about the fact that performance practice did not keep up with composers practice. That music developments were delayed because it took too long for new music to become accepted. It was a disappointment, probably announced because concert programmes would not provide enough room for new music. An aversion to venues that would hold on too much, whether or not under pressure from public and sponsors, to repertoire that could be regarded as accessible and had already proved itself. Much of what is now repertoire of stainless steel was once considered unplayable (with the Ninth of Beethoven as a famous/notorious example). With the obviousness with which much of that previously misunderstood material now finds its way to the concert hall, it is sometimes difficult to imagine the incomprehension that composers met when a new composition was considered too complicated. Anton Bruckner, for example, has had his share of aversion shown to his work. Not only by renowned Romantic-haters like Eduard Hanslick but also by musicians who were generally well acquainted with his music. For his 8th symphony the teacher's son from Ansfelden had to deal with criticism, coming out an unexpected corner. Hermann Levi, a collaborator for a long time, the conductor of a very successful performance of Bruckner's Seventh, worked his way up to the score of the Eighth and advised the composer to work on it a bit more. Those words didn’t fall in deaf man ears, it brought the ever doubting Austrian to many revisions (which were, during and after his lifetime, continued by others, amongst them Haas and Nowak). In 1892, four years before Bruckner's death, it finally came to the premiere of the Eighth. The symphony was to be performed only twice during Bruckner's lifetime after that.
 
Last week, it was performed two times in the Concertgebouw. Once by the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Jaap van Zweden (I missed that one) and once by the orchestra with which Van Zweden recently recorded a complete Bruckner cycle: the Nederlands Radio Filharmonic Orchestra. That orchestra, which has just announced that Karina Canellakis will be the new chief conductor as of 2019, the successor to Markus Stenz, was led for this occasion by David Zinman. Zinman is a man who likes to keep a sober, earthly perspective. That was anyway the conclusion I drew from his reading of Bruckner's 8th symphony. He distances himself from religious panoramas and shows little interest in the nickname of this symphony: the "Apocalyptic". In relatively swift tempi and with an exceptional sense of proportion, the American conductor worked his way through the Eighth. In a reading in which, and this is very much a recommedation, the first two movements were an equal partner of the magnificent third one: the Adagio. The Adagio, in which Bruckner takes a dip in the sound world of Robert Schumann's second symphony, was here not so much an ascent into the thin air of higher spheres as well a trip through Teutonic Lowland. A landscape where flowers grew out of the sound of a harp and the sultry air, on a beautiful spring afternoon in May, breathed comfort and redemption.
 
At his worst, a Bruckner symphony is a story in which the narrator fails to make his point (the 4th and 5th symphony can be problematic for me in that regard). But also performances of the Seventh and Eighth in which repetitions can take on a compulsive character, can be hard a hard pill to swallow. At the beginning of the 8th symphony, the sound of a flute suggests the awakening of the world. An awakening, an announcement, with which a symphony begins that bears in it the character of a salutation - as if a message is repeatedly proclaimed. For Zinman, this repetitions always retained a fresh character; it gave the music a forward moving power without falling into the trap of a mechanical repetition of moves. With the awakening of the symphony, nature emerges and even more than a cathedral of sound -  a reference that surfaces rather often when it comes to Bruckner's music - it is nature that finds in this performance an almost perfect depiction. Here the notes of Anton Bruckner, once exposed to gravity and time, are made into a conjuction of organic impressions that emphatically sailed through Mahlerian waters.
 
It was halfway the final movement (about fifteen minutes from the end) that the violins let go of the decisiveness with which they have worked themselves through the symphony up to that point - as if they were overcharged by the demands that Bruckner maked on bow and fingering. Those vicious string arpeggios, that enable the majestic theme, played by the brass, to rise - it's the perfect soundtrack for a SF and/or superhero movie - stumbled. Very briefly, because this performance, which seamlessly kept its attention span from beginning to end, was one of exceptional quality.
 
Time will tell if Jan Welmers' new composition (Memories III) will become a repertoire piece. This piece for organ was played by Concertgebouw organist Leo van Doeselaar. A world premiere on an instrument that referred to Bruckner the organist, with musical means that referred to Bruckner the composer. It was a piece of music in which you could not only hear the notes but also feel them. It proved to be a perfect prelude to a sensuous ride through the world of Brucker's mighty Eighth.

Concertgebouw 12 May 2018
Jan Welmers – Memories III (world premiere)
Organ: Leo van Doeselaar

Bruckner – Eight Symphony in c
Conductor: David Zinman
Nederlands Radio Filharmonic Orchestra

As early as 1927, serious thought was given to a fully-staged production of Arnold Schönberg's Gurre-lieder, but it was not until 2014, at express wishes of conductor Marc Albrecht and under the direction of Pierre Audi, that this idea really materialized. Once started as a song cycle for soprano, tenor and piano (an entry for a competition of the Vienna Tonkünstler-Vereins), the composition would burst out of every conceivable musical joint by the time it was completed in 1911. At the premiere in 1913, under the baton of Franz Schreker, 757 musicians took part (thereby almost reducing Gustav Mahler's 8th symphony - in which more than 400 musicians took part at its premiere in 1910  - to a piece of chamber music). That enormous number of the first performance is not reached in this production of The Dutch National Opera, only 235 musicians populate the stage and orchestral pit, but the use of musical means is still far above average when compared to other pieces in the Late-Romantic repertoire.

In the story of Gurre-Lieder - based on a poem by Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885), who in turn drew inspiration from the story of King Waldemar Atterdag (1320-1375) - Waldemar is having a love affair with Tove. An affair to which Waldemar's wife Helvig do not react too subtly: she gets Tove killed, after which Waldemar fell into insanity. Schönberg captures all of this in opulent music in which he deliberately pushes more than a few boundaries.

Gurre-Lieder was a point of arrival for Schönberg, the conclusion of an era, not only for himself but also for the history of music up to that point. From now on everything had to change. When the orchestration of Gurre-Lieder was completed in 1911, he had already gone on the atonal path with Erwartung in 1909, and after Gurre-Lieder, the man who wanted to emancipate the dissonant no longer wished to look back. (That his music after that was considered merely atonal Schönberg contested. His music might have come about according to other musical principles, but it still contained tones. According to him, the fact that the dissonants were experienced as ugly was mostly a matter of conditioning - by upgrading the dissonance to something with which beauty could be expressed in addition to ugliness and conflict, the musical vocabulary could be considerably expanded.)

Gurre-Lieder does not suffer too much from dissonants. Their presence is amply counterbalanced by pleasant, at times coquettish, harmonies. Music in which Waldemar and Tove share their ecstasy and their fear of loss. As it befits a good Late-Romantic work, in Gurre-Lieder we also find a pre-occupation with death. The fear of the end, before the end is even there. Finiteness that can only be overcome with love. The end comes, for Tove and also for Waldemar, who after the message of the Waldtaube about Tove's death, must be considered lost for this world. They find each other again, the king and his beloved, in nature, transfigured in love, transcending death. A gathering that we find, more than on stage and in the sounds that rise from the orchestra pit, back in the score, because in Gurre-Lieder the music is quite dense. Pleasant, sensual tones together with musical saccharides are transformed into a tapestry of sound in which many who are enchanted by it still regret that the composer, Schönberg, would devote himself after the completion of this super oratorio mainly to atonal music.  Not by me because Gurre-Lieder is at its most interesting in the moments when Schönberg grants the listener a glimpse into the future. When he, rather than dwelling in Romantic loftiness, looks forward to the music that will come after Gurre-Lieder, the dodecaphony, and refers to cabaret.  The Sprechgesang van Der Sprecher and the cabaratesque character of Klaus Narr are both highlight and delight. Here Schönberg explicitly seeks the contrast with the (all too) Romantic density of the piece – it lets the audience some air and gives Gurre-Lieder more texture.  

The massive orchestration (I will think of it the next time I see someone questioning the orchestration of  the symphonies of Robert Schumann for being too dense) gave the impression that what works, for example, well in Tristan und Isolde, an approach that emphasizes the passion that speaks from the score, has the opposite effect in the case of Gurre-Lieder. The idea surfaced (and never left) that Marc Albrecht could have suffice with a lighter and more transparent approach - whether or not accompanied by a further reduction of the orchestra - because the singers were hardly able to cope with the sonic violence to which they were subjected by orchestra and conductor.

For this production of Gurre-Lieder, the piece has been adapted on a few points. The play begins with a poem by Jacobsen, recited by the Sprecher, who normally appears only in the third part, while Klaus Narr, who normally also only appears in the third part, shows up next to Waldemar right from the start. It are interventions that glue together on stage what has been cut by the different songs and orchestral interludes. It inadvertently sheds light on the lack of a strong narrative and makes clear what Gurre-Lieder is not: an opera or a music drama. Even in this production, in which designer Christof Hetzer depicts decay in a beautiful and atmospheric way - in an environment where you can imagine Götterdämmerung or Elektra - the operatesque Gurre-Lieder remain a mega-cantata with beautiful pictures. Rather a piece with compelling moments than a compelling piece.

It wasn’t meant to be, also after a second visit. The hope that Schönberg's Late Romantic super cantata would grab me turned out to be largely in vain. Again, the piece did not seem to me the opera that Marc Albrecht and Pierre Audi apparently see in it. The coin, when it comes to Schönberg's Late-Romantic compositions (with the inevitable Verklärte Nacht as its most famous example), has not yet dropped. This is, in Gurre-Lieder's case, partly due to the sumptuous orchestration in which Schönberg refers to Wagner and Richard Strauss but remains miles away from them in terms of expressiveness. I could appreciate it better now than four years ago when Gurre-Lieder didn't speak to me at all. Then the supposingly next-step-after-Wagner turned out to be a seven mile step backwards - both musically and dramatically. But I had a better time this time, I managed to cope better with what is clearly an important piece in the musical canon. It was not the composers Schönberg himself refered to but the composers who were (partly) inspired by his Late-Romantic compositions (Korngold, Schreker) who made Gurre-Lieder's music more comprehensible for me. A declaration of love, however, will have to wait. The Lied der Waldtaube is insanely beautiful (for the version of Jard van Nes with the Schönberg Ensemble you can wake me up at night), but the choral singing keeps puzzling, or better baffling, me – here Schönberg doesn't exactly present himself as the prodigal son of Georg Friedrich Händel to put it mildly.

Waldemar Attevar was the historical character that formed the basis of the Waldemar of Gurre-Lieder. Attevar is Danish for "another day" and with the beginning of a new day Gurre-Lieder closes. A choir sings about the rise of the sun (Seht die Sonne) and it becomes clear how fed up Schönberg must have been with tonality. He must have meant this closing as a cynical joke. More than the (obvious) musical references of Gustav Mahler (Auferstehung) and Richard Strauss (who shows us with the intro of Also Sprach Zarathustra the true grandeur of a C major chord) I have to think of a Dutch stand-up comedian: Hans Teeuwen. He once concluded one of his shows with an epic poem that turned out to be a big joke - it was just a mash-up of clichés. He resolutely expelled the audience that had rewarded him with an ovation - refusing to receive their final applause. I couldn’t help thinking of Schönberg's refusal to receive the applause after Gurre-Lieder's successful premiere where he firmly kept his back turned to the audience.  A few years earlier ( in 1908) the public at large had rejected the fresh air from other planets from his second string quartet ('Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten'), now they rewarded the stench of the overblown power chords with which he had set a closing bar behind music history with a standing ovation. He didn't want and couldn't hide his chagrin about that.

By times, Gurre-Lieder took my breath away – be it not always for recommended reasons. Once home, the breath of fresh air, coming from the second string quartet, was more than welcome.

​The Dutch National Opera
Dates 18 April - 5 May 2018

Conductor: Marc Albrecht
Nederlands Philharmonisch Orkest
Koor van De Nationale Opera
Kammerchor des ChorForum Essen

Director: Pierre Audi
Stage and costumes: Christof Hetzer
 
Waldemar: Burkhard Fritz
Tove: Catherine Naglestad
Waldtaube: Anna Larsson
Bauer: Markus Marquardt
Klaus Narr: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Sprecher: Sunnyi Melles