Living Colour made music that confirmed what you actually already knew, that genre boundaries don't really matter that much. Living Colour not only rocked hard, they also, as is often the case with good music, made you curious about where their music came from. Through Living Colour, I followed the path back to bands like Bad Brains and Funkadelic. Bands that were like the missing link between Jimi Hendrix and the hard rock of that era I was listening to. Living Colour complemented your knowledge and expanded the mind.

I kind of lost track of them after their third record Stain. A gig, as part of the European leg of the Stain 30th Anniversary tour, was a re-encounter with the heroes of my youth. It was an utter pleasant and insistent reminder of what a beast of an album Stain was, and what a powerhouse of a band Living Colour still is.
 
It lasted two songs. It took band and sound a bit to find each other, but once the quartet embarked on an integral performance of their album Stain, it was all hit and no miss.

Go away, opening track from that record, with a riff from the meat grinder, set the tone for a party in multicoloured sound. Forged with metal that splits skulls -spiced with punk, funk, soul, hip-hop, trip-hop and jazz- they enchanted the senses with passion, craftsmanship and elegance.

Living Colour was never a band that resorted to mere platitudes and simple tricks to make their music accessible and engaging. Instrumentation and vocals do not follow each other in obvious ways. No melody over a chord progression played with just barre chords. Beneath those ever-lyrical vocal lines lies a volcano of harmonically and rhythmically challenging instrumentation that sizzles and boils. The exceptional musicianship of the quartet from New York has always guaranteed dazzling live performances but at this gig the band sounded exceptionally inspired. "Never take a sold-out venue for granted," Vernon Reid had tweeted prior, and that thought and feeling translated into a performance that did what good live performances do. It purified and it liberated body and mind.

That the music has more than just stood the test of time was no surprise - we took note of it with exhilaration and delight. Frantically singing along to songs until your head is loose on your neck is sometimes what a person needs on a Friday night at the end of the week. That that person, in politically shaky times, feels a song like Ignorance is Bliss closing in on him and notes that the band's lyrics are as relevant today as they were three decades ago was an experience that was not undividedly liberating. Times don't necessarily change for the better and, like three decades ago, Time's Up. Still.
 
The riffs coming from the guitar of Vernon Reid were like insights cleaving the mind, with his solos exploring the territory from James Blood Ulmer back to John Coltrane - tapestries of notes manifesting into sheets of sound. Sound eruptions that created a sense of freedom, an energy of anything goes, something one finds, for example, in artists as diverse as Prince in his best guitar solo moments, as well as Slayer's Kerry King. The undulations in Corey Clover's voice were by turns like a caress of the evening wind and a scream from the underworld. Doug Wimbish took a moment to celebrate the anniversary of half a century of hip-hop. Wimbish was on fire. This time no fiddling with a laptop, thankfully, but full focus on inspired bass playing that, in a choreography of flowing movements and driving power, smashed its low notes like graceful splotches of paint on a colourful canvas.

At the end of Die Walküre, Wagner lights a fire with orchestral means. A fire that is both earthly and magical. It is a fire in which you see the flames twirl. It is a fire in which you hear a world come to life. Listening to Wagner is like watching with your ears. And this moment - the moment when the magic fire, lit by Loge, invoked by Wotan, with which Brünnhilde is safely shielded from anyone who is not the greatest of all heroes - is the moment in the Ring when the ambitions of the orchestra exceed those of the singers. From here you could say that the symphonist Wagner abandons his original goal, the Gesamtkunstwerk, because he discovers a new force of expression in music that only confirms the primacy of music over everything else.

​Looking with your ears gets an extra boost in a concert performance (hifi on steroids!). A performance in which orchestral splendor together with singers that are acting, with a single prop (Siegfried's horn), and a Waldvogel singing from the balcony are more than enough to bring Wagner's Ring world to life in a uniquely evocative way. The mind goes where the ears lead it and the eyes need little to no inducement to follow the music to a world outside place and time where gods, giants and dwarfs are busy surviving and working themselves up in the food chain.

Unlike in the Nibelungen saga on which he is based, where his character is shaped mainly by his actions, Siegfried's personality in Wagner's opera is for an important part shaped by the young man's search for himself and his origins, his mother. In the forest through which he wanders, he is looking among flora and fauna for something, someone, that can put him in touch with himself and his identity.

Wagner excels in introspection and recapitulation. His music dramas are narratives of the mind. Not to speak short of the physical action (Fafner beating Fasolt to death, Siegmund's death, Siegfried killing the dragon), it plays a relatively minor role in the Ring. The real action is in the characters' state of mind. To shape their roles, the singers need little more than expression and gestures. It is perhaps for this reason that a Wagner opera shows itself in an ideal mode of presentation in a concert performance.

Unlike staged performances where the orchestra is in the pit, the singers had to compete against an orchestra at full exposure. They showed, even in those parts where they seemed to be at the losing end in the decibel battle with the instrumentation, boldness and class. Of the singers, Ya-Chung Huang's Mime and Clay Hilley's Siegfried were well matched in voice and expression. Hilley was still struggling a bit with a few high notes at 11am, but his stamina and delivery in the heaviest tenor role in operaland were impressive. Once he arrived at the final duet, a sonic eruption of passion and borderline lunacy, he found, in Daniela Köhler's Brünnhilde, a woman who teaches him what fear is and someone who united her passion and primal drift in a remarkably compelling way. Her Brünnhilde retained, in the face of the orchestra which here, in the final stage of the opera, was fully propelled by Canellakis, complete control over her voice.Nowhere did she force, always her voice remained defined and in possession of maximum expression. Amongst a cast of standouts, Köhler was the standout.

It was a performance where the orchestra presented itself as the ideal medium to experience Wagner. Because with Wagner, as nothing else in the world of opera, the music is the staging.

Siegfried, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, 25 November 2023

Radio Filharmonisch Orkest
Karina Canellakis conductor
Clay Hilley tenor (Siegfried)
Ya-Chung Huang tenor (Mime)
Iain Paterson bas-baritone (Wanderer)
Markus Brück baritone (Alberich)
Tobias Kehrer bas (Fafner)
Daniela Köhler soprano (Brünnhilde)
Judit Kutasi mezzo soprano (Erda)
Gloria Rehm soprano (Waldvogel)

Listen to Lohengrin, with the (Italian) number opera in mind, and you become aware of the giant step Wagner takes here toward an operatic form that seamlessly integrates the various components of the music (chorus, recitative and aria) into a musical drama that flows and does not stagnate. The choral scenes and individual arias here are not so much climaxes, not points of arrival, but constantly new points of departure. The result is a breathtakingly euphonic soundscape in which you are entrained for almost four hours and in which you are only too happy to get lost. The prelude, a music that is like a flower that slowly opens and unveils a world in which the promise of something beautiful in tantalizing sounds preludes to its fulfillment, is the starting point of a story in which light breaks through in the bleakness of everyday life.

The colorful, hallucinatory sound world of Lohengrin is given an industrial gray cast in the new production of the Dutch National Opera. The factory hall in which the story unfolds is the epitome of a bleak reality in which people have nothing to expect - the hall can be seen as a reference to the time in which Wagner composed the opera, a time of advancing and increasing industrialization. In that world, the hatches literally open when a miracle presents itself. When Lohengrin arrives, the back wall of the hall lifts and light enters. The knight Elsa has dreamed of turns out to really exist. With the arrival of the swan knight, the people may hope for something magical in a disenchanted world and the king may hope for a welcome military reinforcement for his army. The hope pinned on the arrival of a strong man has unmistakably religious, Messianic traits (the fascination Wagner had with the character of Jesus of Nazareth, as in his last opera, Parsifal, does not go unnoticed). Next to that is the arrival of a strong man in a German opera historically brisant (the opera was a favorite of Adolf H. The "Sieg! Heil!" from the libretto, after Lohengrin defeats Telramund, still feels uncomfortable).

Director Christof Loy leaves the historical connotations of the play for what they are and concentrates on what he believes to be the core of Lohengrin's drama. For him, that core lies largely in the loss of trust. Elsa does not trust Lohengrin, cannot accept him for what he is: an unknown savior in distress who must remain unknown if he is to continue to exist among men. The forbidden question, hanging over the opera in word and musical motif (Nie sollst du mich befragen), is one that is inevitable from a human point of view. As a human being, you have a right and reason to know with who you ultimately are dealing with. But it harbors here an extremely bleak picture of human relationships. Trust erodes irrevocably (despite, or perhaps mainly because of, prior agreements and commitments). Wagner's most lyrical opera, then, is perhaps the one in which he is most somber about the relationship between man and woman, the connection between two individuals. It postulates the idea that it cannot ultimately endure, not because of external influences, but because of intrinsic factors.

As a director, Loy enjoys working intensively with singers about the motivations of the characters they portray. That dedication manifests itself in the detail of the Personenregie. When he is embraced as a savior, you can see the doubt and regret on Lohengrin's face. As if he knows what will happen in the end. As if he is in a movie he has seen before. It is a crucial element in the direction of persons in which details are at the heart of a production in which major choices in stage setting are absent. The dynamics on the static stage are provided by the ballet that Loy, as in his earlier productions for Tannhäuser and Königskinder, brings in to physically express a generally prevailing feeling or to emphasize the mood surrounding an (imminent) event. For example, the ballet frames the arrival and announced departure of the swan knight with beautiful choreographed wings. Like a kind of Greek choir in motion that comments on the action without actively interfering itself with that action. It breaks the uniformity and somberness on stage. The king hardly stands out in his outfit compared to his herald. The people in the factory hall walk around in an equally colorless and unremarkable manner. The same goes for Lohengrin, who, despite his stylish entrance, walks around in rather anonymous clothing without any reference to the fairy tale world he comes from. The visual part of the production may remain on the flat side in Loy's direction and Philipp Fürhofer's design, but the musical performance more than does justice to the fascinating arena of extremes that make Wagner's world of Lohengrin (and his other operas) so irresistible.

Until now, Lorenzo Viotti was known as an opera conductor primarily for Italian repertoire, and it will probably not be for nothing that his first adventures in Wagner led him to Lohengrin. The opera in which the vocal lines at times sound like a kind of Germanized Bellini. In his first Wagner opera, Viotti succeeds in balancing that unique interplay of opposites that characterizes Wagner's musical world. A world where the sharp edges are softened by coexisting extremes, and where each step is a journey between extremes that embrace each other in a delicate dance of contrasts. His grand gestures (and Instagram account) attest to a certain vanity but conductors who are not vain do not exist (according to the "humble" Bernhard Haitink). In an opera that may be called a musical ode to the inherent beauty of existence, Viotti, backed by a superbly playing Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, was visibly in his element. Here grand gestures connected with intimate, delicate feelings.

As Elsa, emerging here in an iconic vintage headscarf with sunglasses radiating a kind of old Hollywood glamour (Audrey Hepburn!), Malin Byström does not possess the most rounded, gentle voice. As we know from her Salome from a few years ago, her strength lies mostly in the scenes where she can express herself more explicitly. The scene in which she gives voice to her misfortune - half disappearing in her gigantic wedding dress, in analogy to the drama by which she knows herself to be enclosed - is a sonorous visual highlight..

As swan knight, Daniel Behle does not combine his somewhat high tenor with a robust stage personality, as for example the case with Klaus Florian Vogt. With a clean, initially somewhat sharp, tenor voice that, once it arrives at In Fernem Land, shows itself from its most sensitive, versatile side he manages to convince. His Lohengrin is here endowed by the direction with an extra sad fate. He is already a hero against his will. In addition, under the desperate cries of the young woman he has come to the aid of (Mein Gatte! Mein Gatte!), he must pay for his intervention as a lifesaver with death. (Unlike the libretto in which it is the two women, Ortrud and Elsa, who fall down lifeless at the end.) It is a grim end to a demythologizing process that begins to unfold shortly after Lohengrin makes his entrance.

As so often, the bad guys are the most fun. Ortrud, the evil genius of the story, and Friedrich von Telramund, who lets himself be taken for a ride by the evil genius, impress the most. Thomas Johannes Mayer, he previously sang Wotan in Amsterdam in the Audi Ring, performs a powerful, evil Telramund. In voice and presentation, Mayer is a character whose heart, insofar as it ever was open, has been hardened by Ortrud into a cold, insensitive core, unreachable for compassion or empathy. A fitting fate befalls him when he sets out to kill Lohengrin by surprise and meets his end himself at the end of the swan knight's sword.

Ortrud is of great malicious charm in Martina Serafin's rendition. Her voice sounds a bit harsh on the outer edges but that is entirely in character. Her stage persona is impressive. The scene in which she and her partner in crime Telramund accompany Elsa and Lohengrin to the altar (Telramund on the organ!) is one of great demonic beauty. Here the couple knows that the seed of doubt has been planted in Elsa; its hatching is only a matter of time. The end of the fairy tale is in sight.

In the wedding march that follows at the beginning of the third act (a wedding march played only at weddings of people who do not know the story, and its ending - Ha!), bride and groom walk from the back of the hall in procession to the stage. It is the most pronounced part of the staging in which, as mentioned earlier, major choices, essential choices, are absent. Thus we have to do without a bridal bed during the wedding night of Lohengrin and Elsa, and this absence of a compelling direction regarding the many mass scenes causes the stage setting in the scenes with the chorus to be somewhat cluttered at times.

Of what König Heinrich must lack in grandeur here in the dressing finds its compensation in the voice of Anthony Robin Schneider who grabs the listener and draws them along in a role performed with regal authority. The nuances in Schneider's voice bring to life a man who shifts from forceful decisiveness to subtle introspection. He is joined in that role by his herald, Björn Burger who again excels (Burger has previously been a very convincing Wolfram in Loy's previous Wagner production, Tannhäuser).
 
Worth a special mention is the chorus of the Dutch National Opera which also comes to great achievements under new chorus master Edward Ananian-Cooper.

As a paragon of bleakness, the barren factory hall in which Lohengrin is situated also (unfortunately) models a lack of theatrical imagination. The hall hosts a performance in which singers, orchestra and conductor excel. Against an ash-gray background, a musically colorful landscape imbued with dramatic intensity unfolds. The tones, like vivid brushstrokes, paint a heavenly panorama that challenges and enchants the senses. Gioacchino Rossini once said of Lohengrin (I am writing this review on the anniversary of Rossini's death) that you cannot judge this opera after just one listen, but he certainly had no intention of hearing it a second time! Not free of sarcasm was he, the composer of Il Barbiere di Siviglia.  His words will be listened to amicably and elegantly ignored by anyone who wants to spend an immersive evening at the theater (and who doesn't?). There is simply little in the field of opera that compares to a good performance of a Wagner opera. This performance of Lohengrin, despite its flaws, is convincing proof of that.

Lohengrin, Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam, 11 November 2023 (premier) 

Conductor:  Lorenzo Viotti
Netherlands Filharmonisch Orkest
Stage direction:  Christof Loy
Set design:  Philipp Fürhofer
Costume design:  Barbara Drosihn
Lighting design:  Cor van den Brink
Video design:  Ruth Stofer
Choreography:  Klevis Elmazaj
Dramaturgy:  Niels Nuijten
 
Heinrich der Vogler:  Anthony Robin Schneider
Lohengrin:  Daniel Behle
Elsa von Brabant:  Malin Byström
Friedrich von Telramund:  Thomas Johannes Mayer
Ortrud:  Martina Serafin
Der Heerrufer des Königs:  Björn Bürger
 
Chorus of Dutch National Opera
Chorus master: Edward Ananian-Cooper

The weather was more than appropriate. With 30 degrees in September (we are in the hottest summer ever recorded worldwide), Le Monnaie in Brussels hosted the world premiere of Cassandra, an opera with climate change as its theme. Divided into thirteen scenes, it alternates the story of the Trojan princess Cassandra, whose predictions about the fall of Troy were not taken seriously, with the disbelief that climate scientist Sandra Seymour encounters when she shares her knowledge about the melting of ice caps at the South Pole. In the layers of ice, Sandra sees the past, a past of a warming Earth. With its melting, that view of the past disappears. A past that warns us of the future.

The Belgian composer Bernard Foccroulle, also an organist who has previously recorded all of Bach's and Buxtehude's organ works, and until recently was known primarily as a composer of mainly instrumental music, is creating his first opera with Cassandra. An opera with activitism as its theme, which should not be called an activist opera. The opera is a story about voices that are not heard, not believed, with disastrous consequences. Mythology and the present reach out to each other in a musical drama in which Cassandra and Sandra are equals who see each other's story mirrored and amplified across the boundaries of time.

With the lamentation of a chorus, which like a Greek choir comments and otherwise not interfere with the action, the story opens. We look onstage at a kind of glacial formation that will also serve as a library, the ancient city of Troy and a beehive. Cassandra stands in the center of the stage in front of a ruin that collapses. Troy is going down, and Cassandra is watching in horror.
 
From the then, of Aeschylos and his play "Agamemnon," we then jump to the present in which climatologist Sandra Seymour performs a one-woman show at the conclusion of a conference on climate change. Blake, a student of ancient Greek language and culture, and a member of a Climate Action group, is annoyed by the light-hearted tone with which Sandra addresses climate issues. Needless to say, love will blossom between Blake and Sandra.
 
In the third scene, we encounter a second, more grim love story. The meeting between Cassandra and the god Apollo. We see Cassandra and Apollo engaged in a fierce dialogue. Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy in exchange for sex. But Cassandra refuses the reciprocation upon which Apollo spits in her mouth. No one will believe the words that come out of that anymore.

These three scenes form the foundation on which librettist Matthew Jocelyn builds in later scenes. These include meetings between Sandra and Blake, a dinner with Sandra's family, a meeting between Cassandra and her father King Priam, who is still struggling with the question of why Troy was destroyed, and a poignant scene in which Naomi, Sandra's younger sister, joyfully looks forward to the birth of her daughter. An event that casts doubt on Sandra about the responsibility of having a child, given the ecological developments.
 
Blake does want a child. A bed scene highlighting the differences between Sandra and Blake on the matter of having children is interspersed with discussions about climate and whether scientific research should be accompanied by climate action. Blake chooses climate action and leaves for the South Pole.

In the penultimate, eleventh scene, we once again see Sandra in her one-woman show where she delivers her message. It is her farewell performance, as she has decided to follow Blake in his activism to seize oil tankers. The show is interrupted by someone in the balcony exclaiming, "I came here for stand-up comedy, not an eco-terrorist tirade." During the show, she is told that Blake's ship sank, it is unclear how, perhaps by a torpedo, and that he most likely drowned. Blake's death feels a bit forced - we're in the opera so a protagonist must die. Something like that.

In the final scene, Sandra awakens, as if from a traumatic fever dream, and believes she is meeting Cassandra. In a dialogue in which both Cassandra and Sandra long for redemption from their shared misery, Sandra sings that she will not let anyone take away her voice. The identification with her mythological predecessor is complete. With the man on the balcony still in mind, the current state of the public debate and the current times of information inflation, we think of the role of social media that, like a modern many-headed Apollo, spits into the mouths of people, and Sandra here in particular. The duet between Cassandra and Sandra, its introspection, its looking forward to an uncertain future, may count as the opera's highlight. With twelve scenes in two hours and a story in which dramatic progression is at times pending, the opera is an intense sit. As thought-provoking interludes, there are three moments where we see the world-wide bee population dwindling. As the lights on stage slowly dim, only three more bees buzz the opera to its end.

Foccroulle envelops his story of the tragedy of voices not heard and warnings not believed with music that both sears and pleases, a music that both intoxicates and sharpens the senses. It is music that refers to that other organist who composed, Olivier Messiaen, and is reminiscent of one of Messiaen's pupils, George Benjamin. But whereas in Benjamin's operas the vocal lines are a natural excerpt from the music over which they meander, Foccroulle's vocal parts sound somewhat mechanical. They often linger in what I shall call melodic declamation, as if the drama behind the words needs to be forcibly sung. In the instrumentation, Foccroulle endows Sandra with a marimba and Blake with a saxophone. A helping hand in following the vocal lines in the dialogues that are sometimes a bit too verbose. Conductor Kazushi Ono, with La Monnaiet's symphony orchestra, pulls the musical arcs of tension considerably taut.

Soprano Sarah Defrise excelled as Naomi, Sandra's sister, especially in the lullaby she sang for her unborn child, a lyrical highlight. Jessica Niles gave a spirited interpretation of the character of Sandra Seymour with her firm, clear soprano, and Katarina Bradić, as Cassandra, embodied a woman who is by turns inspired, deficient and desperate.

All in all, Cassandra, the opera, succeeds in impregnating topical issues into art. Its music, along with the themes it addresses, resonates as you walk past the European Parliament in Brussels where huge posters bear witness to the most current concerns: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a desired climate neutrality by 2050. A goal that, for all its good intentions notwithstanding, with the question marks you can place on politics that are not or not sufficiently able to cope with crises, are probably not going to be met. And 2050 is already too late. We hear the unheard voices and the sound of melting ice converge in a roaring silence.

Mozart composed La Clemenza di Tito just before his death, in a time frame of 3 months (there is even mention of 18 days, it was a rush job anyway) on the occasion of the coronation of Leopold II. The commission paid well, twice the amount one usually paid in Vienna for an opera, and that was not unwelcome for the composer in need of money. Because of that short time, no new libretto could be written so a libretto by Metastasio was adapted that was already half a century old at the time. Tito was an opera that served a political purpose and (therefore) was nailed in its time. Moreover, the form, the opera seria, was considered increasingly obsolete by the end of the 18th century. It may have been a more or less forgotten opera in Mozart's repertoire for a long time, but La Clemenza di Tito has since enjoyed popularity. For example, Tito's forgiveness inspired American theater producer Peter Sellars to create a production about coexisting in a modern society and, without attempts at updating, the opera appears to be able to stand on its own musical feet enough to justify concert performances.

Milo Rau, theater maker and self-proclaimed revolutionary, ventures into his first opera with La Clemenza di Tito and begins its production with a kind of apology for it. An opera composed two years after the French Revolution in honor of a king. An opera that provides the nobility, the elite, with an areole of magnanimity. Rau has something to say about that. That is not only suspicious, that is morally reprehensible. That elite, the bourgeoisie, is only out to perpetuate its own power and maintain the status quo. It was so in the late 18th century and it is so now. The elite is disingenuous, its motives cannot be trusted.

Tito's forgiveness is questioned by Rau. He turns the king into a man with narcissistic and neurotic traits, giving his texts ironic overtones and making them the words of an unreliable narrator. Rau turns Tito's court into an art gallery, a place where the king has his work applauded by his compliant entourage. That hip world is in sharp contrast to a refugee camp outside which is in a desolate state and where, as part of "law and order," people are being arrested. We witness an execution. All in the name of the king. Does the "merciful" Tito himself believe what he says? Rau deletes extensively in the recitatives of the original and cuts up the opera. After the overture, we move from court to refugee camp. We hear music from a ghetto blaster, a man (calling himself the last man from Antwerp) makes a speech about the city that has changed beyond recognition during his lifetime. His heart is cut out (literally). By then it has become unequivocally clear that Rau is not so much concerned with Mozart and his opera as with the story he himself has to tell. Mozart's Tito is merely instrumental to that story. A story about the elite imposing its will on the people and using art in the process to keep the people quiet. Art as opium for the people. "Kunst ist macht" we read on a video screen (why in German? I fear there is a, by now, worn-out reason behind it). Art, its capitalization, channels revolutionary thought, ensures that what is dreamed about does not become a reality. The king and his entourage are therefore artists or manifest themselves as such. Thus Tito is a painter and Vitellia presents herself as a kind of Marina Abramovich. All this under the nowadays inevitable presence of a cameraman on stage. (The last five operas I saw all had a cameraman onstage; is this current streaming-on-stage trend the first real theatrical legacy of the Covid period when (laptop) camera and screen proved indispensable tools if we wanted to see a performance and/or our fellow human beings?) Further, the question that arises here is: Are we, as audience in the theater, not both elite (bourgeoisie who benefit from the status quo) and common people (who see the arts as narcotic entertainment) at the same time?

Rau illustrates the story of the opposition between elite and people, between man and his dreams, through clips of people who have sought refuge in Belgium. The performance thus squeezes two performances into one. Mozart's opera on the one hand and the director's story on the other. We see short biographical clips of singers that are a sort of behind-the-scenes footage while the performance continues onstage. We learn, for example, that Anna Goryachova (Sesto, here not a trouser role but 'just' a woman in a female role) is in real life a mother with child (with attendant worries). It creates Brechtian alienation, and a meta-effect, when she, as Sesto, gives evidence of her torned feelings toward Tito.
 
Initially the two worlds of this performance, that of the director and that of Mozart's opera, have something to say to each other but gradually they let go of each other entirely. Then the story of the opera is no longer directed and we listen to beautiful arias that have then become a kind of soundtrack for documentary footage. The sincerity of those images about people telling about their personal history notwithstanding, they lose power toward the end - there is image inflation. One could almost see in it a plea for a concert performance; the music can stand perfectly well on its own when the director has apparently run out of ideas.

As a theater production, this Tito definitely has its moments where Rau makes his point in a haunting way. As a staging of an opera, the result is somewhat poor. For that, the opera is too much of a vehicle rather than a grid to start from. It does not help that the story Rau wants to tell does not develop (it is fairly quickly clear what he wants to say) and that the texts projected on stage leave an increasingly pubescent impression towards the end. The elite, the bourgeoisie, is presented here as an undefined homogeneous bloc. Who are the Titos in today's world? What exactly does the desired radical change entail? It remains unclear. As a director in an opera house, the bastion of the establishment, Rau shows himself a bit like a teenager in a Che Guevara t-shirt. A young man who, in the safety of his room, abandons himself to romantic ideas of revolution.

This production of La Clemenza di Tito deconstructs Mozart's opera and will undoubtedly split minds. But couple (stage) image to music and the music will prevail. Indeed, that music does its job and this Tito is carried by a fantastic cast and excellent musicians. Alejo Pérez gives lead to an inspired playing orchestra. Jeremy Ovenden plays and sings the role of Tito as Rau conceived it with conviction. The aforementioned Anna Goryachova excels, both in acting and singing, as Sesto. Anna Malesza-Kutny appropriately brings Vitellia to the brink of madness and Sarah Yang sings a very beautiful, sensitive Servillia. Of the "ordinary people" that Rau, following his own tradition, brings to the stage, the last man from Antwerp deserves a special mention. His biographical clip reveals that he holds no less than 70 different versions of Parsifal (and now, of course, we want to know which version is his favorite).

Toward the end of the performance, a young man announces in a video his coming-out as bisexual, citing a city as a place where ideas have sex with each other. One could say, with that metaphor in mind, that this La Clemenza di Tito is a production in which Milo Rau courts Mozart but does not let it come to an intimate union. He goes his own way, eventually leaving Mozart to it.

La Clemenza di Tito, Antwerp 10 September 2023
​Perfromances: 10-Sept until 26-Oct (in Antwerp, Ghent & Luxembourg)

After his successful Salome (2017), Ivo van Hove returns to The Dutch National Opera with Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. That return was postponed for three years because the originally planned performances of this production were cancelled in 2020 due to the Covid lockdown. Last year this production was seen at Opera Vlaanderen. Now The Dutch National Opera is opening the new 2023/2024 season with it.

In the barren sands of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht piece together a dystopian story in which man feasts on excess and gives in to primal urges. We see a stage with a large video screen. That's where it all happens. There we see how the city of Mahagonny is founded, becomes a place for all sorts of excesses and finally goes up in flames. Unlike previous opera productions by Van Hove, where the use of video images was often superfluous and gratuitous (Schreker's Der Schatzgräber for DNO!), the use of camera images, video projections and green screens in this production finds a justification within a set-up in which the stage becomes a place in which reality and illusion complement and challenge each other. A reality in which anything goes. A reality that is stripped of its illusions when not having money turns out to be punishable by death. The excesses of Mahagonny find a frenzied imagination in the excessive use of video. On a green screen, ultimum of the illusion in which man loses himself, someone is beaten to death in a boxing match, a line of men can be seen taking a prostitute from behind. These are images that leave little to the imagination, that alternately impress, depress and flatline. Images that, through their lavish use, emphasize the emptiness behind them but also make you wonder if the visual excess does not harm at some point. That the head, deliberately placed above the heart by Brecht, is not pushed away too much by the visual splendor that ultimately has a hypnotic and narcotic effect. The use of video on stage can now no longer be called new, although Van Hove still seems to be searching for the limits of its possibilities; the presence of a cameraman on stage is a fairly recent phenomenon. Social media have found its way to the theatrical stage and, since the Covid period, have hardly been absent. In the last five operas I saw, there was a cameraman walking around on stage whose recordings were projected onto a video screen. Reality recorded by cameras as an indispensable component of experienced reality.

Mahagonny here gets an opera cast with an impressive track record. Evelyn Herlitzius, well-versed in Wagner and Strauss and Nikolai Schukoff (he previously sang the title role of Lohengrin at DNO) are, respectively, the con artist Leokadja Begbick and Jim Mahoney, the man who finds out that an empty wallet literally means the end. Herlitzius has never lacked expression; in addition to her singing, she has always had to depend to a not inconsiderable degree on her acting. In a role where acting is more important than the beauty of a voice, she is perfectly in place (I couldn't escape thinking of Elektra at her occasional outbursts). Nikolai Schukoff, together with Lauren Michelle's Jenny, forms a radiant centerpiece of a love that is, very opera-tesque, doomed. Lauren Michelle sings a beautiful role with which she poignantly colors her desires but at times its deeply human impact, along with the rest of the production, seems to fade into the digital oasis that is Mahagonny. That a production of a play that addresses the emptiness of excess sometimes gets itself caught up in the drive for technological splendor is not without irony.

The story revolving around the seduction and perversion of ideals through greed for money finds a compelling performance with an excellent cast and fine orchestra. The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Markus Stenz, a specialist in 20th-century repertoire, adeptly discharges its duty to bring Weill's musical world with elements of ragtime, jazz and tango to life with rhythmic alertness. Orchestra and singers, in connection with the dystopian story they tell, form a harmonious whole. The Chorus of Dutch National Opera effortlessly switches between a cappella and a quasi-Slave Chorus. They contribute, in no small way, in bringing Weill's musical world alive.
 
In Mahagonny's predecessor Dreigroschenoper, it was said that the common man cannot care about morality until he has food (Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral). In Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, that adage is expanded into the motto of a city, a place where anything goes, provided it is paid for.

"Erstens, vergeßt nicht, kommt das Fressen 
Zweitens kommt der Liebesakt.
Drittens das Boxen nicht vergessen 
Viertens Saufen, laut Kontrakt.
Vor allem aber achtet scharf 
Daß man hier alles dürfen darf.”

The politically-satirical comments on capitalism continue to resonate especially today. With songs that have made it into pop music, the Alabama Song (The Doors) Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny along with its bristling and haunting music can be considered a unique amalgam of extremes. A musical theater that, in this production, is not so much a paragon of Brechtian alienation but rather characterized by an overwhelming of the senses. A production that reminds us with its exorbitant use of resources that it is often the simple gesture that leaves the deepest impression and to which the concluding oratorio-like chorus makes it known that for real drama, even when human degeneration reaches a nadir, real beauty is indispensable.

Conductor: Markus Stenz
Regie: Ivo van Hove
Decor & light: Jan Versweyveld
Costums: An D’Huys
Video: Tal Yarden
Dramaturgie: Koen Tachelet

Leokadja Begbick: Evelyn Herlitzius
Fatty: Alan Oke
Dreieinigkeitsmoses: Thomas Johannes Mayer
Jenny Hill: Lauren Michelle
Jim Mahoney: Nikolai Schukoff
Jack O’Brien/Tobby Higgins: Iain Milne
Bill: Martin Mkhize
Joe: Mark Kurmanbayev*
Sechs Mädchen von Mahagonny
Viola Cheung, Thembinkosi Magagula, Elisa Soster, Raphaële Green, Kadi Jürgens, Jessica Stakenburg

* Dutch National Opera Studio

Chorus of the Dutch National Opera

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra

Coproductie with Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Metropolitan Opera, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen & Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg

First scene
Child of a loveless mother and ugly as hell. Yet, Alberich the Nibelung hopes for romance when, walking along the banks of the Rhine, he hears the singing of three Rhinemaidens.   

The teasing lasted a bit long. It became clear to the Nibelung that the three water nymphs made fun of him and never considered him a serious partner for their love. Fortunately, they were kind enough to point out to Alberich the Rhinegold and the secret it held: the gold can be made into a magic ring which gives power to rule the world, if its bearer first renounces love. 

Second scene
We leave the lowlands and find ourselves in a mountainous landscape where chief god Wotan casts a satisfied glance at the Valhalla that Fasolt and Fafner have built for him. It appeases, for now, Wotan's appetite for megalomania.

​Chain-smoking cunning Loge is certainly not without humour. You are never sure what to make of him but if you are susceptible to it you will certainly laugh at his dry remarks. He talks about Alberich, his golden ring and how the dwarf subjugated his fellow Nibelungen to mine treasures for him. Loge suggests the giants to pay them with the Nibelungen hoard. The giants agree, for now. 

To the sound of a droning, dark orchestral interlude, two ominous-looking fellows descend into Nibelheim. One of them, Wotan, can think of only one thing, the ring and the power it holds. Loge and he are not here for business as usual. Their business is theft. 

Third scene
In Nibelheim the Nibelungen are enslaved by Alberich with the power of the ring. Alberich's brother, Mime forged a magic helmet, the Tarnhelm. With this device one can become invisible and take any shape one want.

Fourth scene
Alberich should have known better when Loge dared him to use the Tarnhelm to take the form of a toad. But the dwarf refused to turn down the challenge and now faces the consequences. Loge and Wotan capture the toad and rob him of the ring, the hoard and even the Tarnhelm. Alberich, who once cursed love, now curses the ring - thus condemning all its possessors.

Once back in the godlike realm, Wotan cannot enjoy the ring for long. The giants won't settle for just the Nibelungen hoard. They want that ring too. Once in possession of it, Fafner, in lust for the ring, beats his brother Fasolt to death. Cain and Abel in the world of the gods. Wotan sees it happen with a certain sense of discomfort. On his way to Valhalla, across a rainbow bridge Donner smashed out of the rocks, the nuisance in him grows. He has been given a preview of the curse the ring carries.

Not that Wotan was not warned about all this. Erda, the Goddess of the Earth, had addressed the chief god in lyrical yet insistent terms, warning him of the misfortune the ring would bring him. So Wotan gave the ring to the giants, but even more than by her words of warning, he was impressed by Erda's seductive innocent appearance. And as soon as this opera, Das Rheingold, is finished he will impregnate her with eight children: the Valkyries. Those children, Brünnhilde in particular, we will encounter in the following opera.

They had one job. And they miserably failed at it. Now, at the end of Das Rheingold, the daughters ​of the Rhine lament in horror over the loss of the gold they were supposed to be guarding. We leave them alone for now but they will return in the last opera of this tetralogy: Götterdämmerung. But more on that later. Next: Die Walküre.

After Das Rheingold, Wotan not only fathered eight children with Erda, the Valkyries, but he also fathered the Walsungen twins Siegmund and Sieglinde. Wotan also had time between operas to stick a sword in a tree, Notung. A weapon for times of need, for him who deserves it.

First act
She found him after a violent storm in the house. It took her a while to recognise in the stranger her long lost brother, the love of her life. After everything Sieglinde had to endure, she no longer dared to hope for a little bit of happiness in her life.

The man she was forced to marry, Hunding, was not the most sensitive of characters. That is not to say he was a man without honour. That stranger who seemed to have a kinship with his wife could stay a night but the next day he would be food for the dogs. 

Second act
Hojotoho! For Brünnhilde, life is a tremendous exciting affair. And soon she is going to assist Siegmund, the one and only true hero of this whole story, in his fight with Hunding. Life is coughing up roses. 

Fricka turned a blind eye to it for a while, Wotan's cheating. But now enough is enough. Wotan must withdraw his support for Siegmund and support Hunding. A marriage must be honoured. And if Wotan has any love for power, he will make sure that he himself abides by the rules he imposes on everyone else. She comes in hard on him, on her husband the chief god. With cool headed arguments she shatters Wotan's illusions of freedom and love. Both old-fashioned and ahead of her time she is: Fricka, the old storm, the old party pooper. 

Third act
It is one of the most recognisable tunes in music history. The sonic storm on which the Valkyries bring dead heroes to Valhalla on their steam-powered horses. The Walkürenritt is exactly the boost this opera needs after the dramatic second act (in which Siegmund is killed by Wotan's intervention, Wotan has angrily gone after Brünnhilde and Sieglinde has fled into the forest with the fragments of Notung).

​All the drama that has preceded finds a climax in Wotan's moving farewell to his daughter Brünnhilde, which may be considered one of the most beautiful moments in all of opera. 

For her who was once his favourite daughter, Wotan had in mind an honourless sleep, in a stove in an old factory far away. Eventually, his anger soothed and he summoned Loge, who was after all the God of Fire, to light the stove. Only the bravest hero will dare to risk his hands on the furnace fire that now protects Brunnhilde. We meet that hero in the next opera: Siegfried.

Software: StableDiffusion XL, Photoshop, After Effects

- Wouter de Moor

While Brünnhilde was sleeping, Sieglinde, whom she rescued, gave birth to a child. That childbirth Sieglinde did not survive. Ignorant of his parentage, her son, Siegfried, has grown up with the dwarf Mime. 

First act
Mime is a clever dude. Good with tools too. But with forging Notung's shards together, he struggles. For the difficult tasks, however, he has Siegfried, the archetypal strong boy, whom he intends to use to eventually get the ring and the treasure of the Nibelungen,

Young Siegfried is a man whose strength is matched only by his foolhardiness. The latter is, to be clear, a virtue. It perhaps requires some mental flexibility to go along with the idea Wagner apparently had of a hero. That he has Siegmund (perhaps the only one in this entire history worthy of the qualification hero) followed in the story by the gullible Siegfried, but in this opera cycle it happens. And who are we to second-guess the master here. 

Second act
After killing his brother, Fafner retreated to the forest where, with the help of the Tarnhelm, he transformed himself into a dragon train. Loaded with the Nibelungen hoard, he rampages through the dark depths of the forest. And no one dares to come close.

Did no one dare to approach Fafner? No, there was one person who dared to face Fafner without fear. Siegfried, the brat who did not even know what fear was (and therefore could not be brave) smashes the dragon locomotive to pieces with Notung. 

After that act of demolition a Waldvogel pops up. Besides telling Siegfried about the existence of Brünnhilde, she tells the pure fool about the ring that is there among all those treasures. Why does the Waldvogel do that? Has that creature of the woods been sleeping the previous operas or something? As we saw at the beginning (after Wotan mutilated the world ash tree) nature is corrupted - and those who represent nature not to be trusted.

Purified by dragon steam, Siegfried can also read Mime's mind now. He kills the dwarf on his way out. 

Third act
They are like a tired old couple. He's too tired and disappointed to be mad at her. And she, despite being the Goddes of the Earth, doesn't know what to say to him anymore. After his farewell to Brunnhilde, Wotan is no longer himself. As Wanderer he still wanders through this opera, but the end he's been longing for since the second act of Die Walküre can't come soon enough for him.

When Siegfried crosses Wotan's/Wanderer's path, an important part of the latter's wish for the end is about to be fulfilled. When Siegfried recognizes in Wotan the man who had a hand in the death of his father Siegmund, he shows, for the first time, some emotion. He smashes the spear of the chief god into pieces, after which Wotan calls it quits. From then on Wotan's presence in this story is reduced to the presence of his two ravens, Huginn and Muninn.

Siegfried continues on his way and arrives at the old factory that the Waldvogel told about. He smashes a door and enters the factory hall. There is an oven at the back against a high wall. Blazing with flames. He goes looking for a pair of asbestos gloves.

The dragon could not frighten him, but now that Siegfried sees a woman for the first time, he is shocked. What to do in such a case? Kiss her awake, like in fairy tales? Allright then. While Brunnhilde, upon waking up, mistakes the lamps in the factory hall for the sun, Siegfried is already preparing for the final duet.

They are a lovely couple, Brünnhilde and Siegfried, the aunt and her cousin. In a frenzied, passionate, insane duet, they scream each other from one climax to the next. Love and death, death and love. And laughing of course. Afterwards they fall into each other's arms. As we saw with Siegmund and Sieglinde, also Siegfried and Brünnhilde ​like to keep it in the family when it comes to love. 

​And while the new love couple snuggles together, we prepare for the final: Götterdämmerung.

Software: StableDiffusion XL, Leonardo, Photoshop

- Wouter de Moor