Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Genia Kühmeier, Christiane Karg, and Elisabeth Kulman Photo: Hermann und Clärchen Baus/Salzburg Festival 2010

Without a doubt, the new production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice was the best opera I saw at this year’s Salzburg Festival. I know that may come as a surprise, and I’ll admit that it wasn’t what I was expecting either. In fact, getting a ticket to Saturday’s performance, which featured members of the Vienna Philharmonic led by Riccardo Muti, was somewhat of an afterthought and was not part of my original plan for the week. And I’ll admit that I may have overreacted somewhat considering that I felt I had just slogged through three days of musically exceptional, but dramatically inert opera performances. Suddenly being surrounded by Dieter Dorn and Jürgen Rose’s bright, simple, attractive, and often witty staging seemed like a godsend. The largely empty and deep stage is surrounded by a white frame that further encloses a circular space with a revolving floor. The space is further surrounded at times by a semi-circular back wall which may be mirrored at times. The three principals and entire chorus are in modern street clothes and there is a small non-singing “chorus” of women who act as doubles for Orfeo, and who later transform into Euridice after her redemption. Amore arrives on a glowing magic carpet surrounded by a tableau vivant of gods who watch the actions play out. And in a move swimming against the current stream, there are no dance numbers to go along with the substantial orchestral passages in Gluck’s score. Instead, Dorn and Rose rely on a variety of scenarios enacted by the chorus. Most humorously in the final interlude as the lovers are reunited, they watch couples enter the stage and act out unspoken conflict and resolution. Flowers are rejected and thrown, and, bless their hearts, Dorn and Rose even toss in a gay male couple in the mix right here in straight-laced Salzburg.

But besides a staging that is active and interesting to look at, this Orfeo ed Euridice is blessed with immensely satisfying musical credentials. Riccardo Muti takes everything he does with great care. He may not always be right about somethings, but his leadership of the orchestra was impeccable and this was the most satisfying account of the opera I’ve yet heard. The Vienna Philharmonic players had sounded great this week in many settings. But after richly polished Bruckner and the most romantic Berg I’ve heard, who would have imagined such a light and detailed turn of this particular opera. And then there were three excellent vocalists paired with an uncommonly good Vienna State Opera Chorus. Elisabeth Kulman sang Orfeo and gave one of the most honest-to-goodness heartbreaking renditions of Che farò senza Euridice you’ll ever hear. For once the aria sounded like the remorseful funerary music it actually is. Genia Kühmeier was the Euridice, and Christine Karg sang Amore. Both were bright and light and beautiful. For names that don’t get billing above the title this was superb casting, and, even more importantly, beautiful singing. So, it just goes to show, hang around long enough, and something good is bound to turn up. It was a great week in Salzburg, and the current Orfeo ed Euridice is absolutely the opera most worth seeing in a festival full of big names and big stars. It runs through the 24th of August.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010

Piotr Beczala and Anna Netrebko
Photo: Hermann, Clärchen & Matthias Baus/Salzburg Festival 2010

Probably the most popular show at this year’s Salzburg Frestival would be the five performances of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette that Anna Netrebko is scheduled to appear in over the next few weeks, the second of which I saw on Friday. Given that she is one half of the festival’s "it-couple," it’s no surprise, even though the production is a revival from 2008 which starred a radiant Nino Machaidze at the time. Plus the road to her performances in this particular Bartlett Sher production has been somewhat of a long one. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we? Eager to recapture the excitement Netrebko and Rolando Villazon had created here in the 2005 Willy Decker production of Verdi’s La Traviata (the one that will premiere as a “new” production at the Met this coming New Year’s Eve), the Salzburg Festival made plans to feature the pair in Romeo et Juliette as had the Metropolitan Opera. The two had appeared in the opera in February 2005 in L.A. (and Massenet’s Manon in 2006) to great excitement. But faster than you can say “vocal crisis” Villazon was out of the Met’s 2007 outing, and Salzburg had it’s fingers crossed for 2008 when they would take a stab with the same pair. While Villazon pulled it together for Salzburg that year, Netrebko went and fell in love and all that, eventually resulting in her dropping from that production due to pregnancy and leaving Villazon to film a DVD with Machaidze. Now it’s 2010 and Sher’s Romeo is back as is Netrebko and the new tenor of the moment, Piotr Beczala as Romeo.

So understandably, these appearances by Netrebko have probably seemed a long time in the making though she has been a staple at the festival for nearly a decade. And it certainly seemed by audience response that the show was in fact worth the wait. Netrebko is still one of the most interesting performers around and she does appear to put quite a bit into it. Vocally, she is not the singer she was in 2005 with a much darker tone and I found her runs a bit sloppier than I remember from 5 years ago. But this doesn’t take too much away from her Juliette. Beczala is well paired with Netrebko overall. He’s got an athletic sound, and though I found him a little pinched at the top in this particular performance, he was more than satisfying overall. Yannick-Nézet-Séguin, who is currently leading all of the Don Giovanni performances at this year’s festival, was in the pit with the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. He was a bit more tame in his choices than what I would have expected after hearing him rip into Carmen eight ways to Sunday last year at the Met, but it was an attentive and often loving performance.

As with a number of other show’s here in Salzburg this week, the biggest problem was the visually boring Sher production. Bartlett Sher is wise in deciding to use his strongest asset, the Felsenreitschule to full advantage with little if an other scenery. He does have a thing for stairs however and litters the stage with platforms that everyone must climb up and down during their frequent lengthy treks back and forth across the very wide stage. There’s a lot of billowing fabric and enough swashbuckling to make the average 8 year old happy, but the staging does little to generate any excitement. The costumes can be a problem as well, turning Netrebko into a walking ball of cotton candy with hair for Act I. In fact I’m not sure about what all the long hair business is for Netrebko and Beczala in this staging, but if it weren’t for the costumes, you’d think it was a Whitesnake reunion. But cotton candy or not, people are getting what they want as long as they get a ticket before Netrebko is out of town. Which is a shame since the production continues through August 30th and the last four performances will feature the return of the excellent Nino Machaidze as well as two performances from Stephen Costello as Romeo. In fact, if you can do without the celebrity, you may just want to catch one of these shows.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010

Iréne Theorin and Waltraud Meier in Elektra
Photo: Hermann und Clärchen Baus/Salzburg Festival 2010

Following the return of Claus Guth's formerly controversial Don Giovanni in Salzburg, I was anticipating what boo-inducing surprise Nikolaus Lenhoff’s new production of Strauss’ Elektra might have in store. Perhaps one of the opera companies most associated with the Regietheater movement over the last thirty years, the Salzburg festival has been there and done that when it comes to the unusual. But sitting through Elektra in its second performance here on Thursday night one might be excused for thinking the days of stage-director induced scandale here are long, long gone.

Lenhoff’s vision of this Greek tragedy is so tame, it wouldn’t look out of place on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera – even prior to Peter Gelb. In fact take out a brief upstage appearance by Klytamenstra’s body suspended from above in a bloody abattoir, you’d pretty much have the 1992 Otto Schenk/Jürgen Rose production last revived at the Met for Susan Bullock and Deborah Voigt in 2008. Just tilt the set back and to the left at a more rakish angle and, voilà, you’ve got about 20 years of opera history. The large empty concrete hall serves as little more than a place for the principals to stand and sing while staring off in the distance and avoiding any falls into any of the pits in the stage floor.

Ironically, virtually everything else about the show is near perfection. Iréne Theorin sings the title role bracingly and is well matched with her Klytamnestra, Waltraud Meier, and Chrysothemis, Eva-Maria Westbroek. And in a bit of luxury casting, René Pape sings the brief but critical role of Orest. All faced some challenges in the listless staging. An excellent sounding Westbroek was evidently instructed to enter and exit in her best simpering Carol Brady impersonation. Having seen her give such excellent acting performances in other settings, I’m pretty sure this wasn’t her idea. Meier was announced as having “lumbago” prior to the curtain, which would restrict her movement even though she would still be able to sing. And sing she did, giving one of those sterling performances that it seems only she can, back pain or not. Theorin was very strong despite her gothic-influenced makeup and her time in the stage floor’s many trenches.

But the most amazing element for me was the incredible performance of the Vienna Philharmonic under conductor Daniele Gatti. Now I know that Gatti is a bit of a polarizing figure, loved deliriously be some and reviled by others. For Elektra he led one no-holds-barred dramatic, loud, and fairly aggressive orchestral performance. Undoubtedly any lesser cast would have been overwhelmed without a second thought. But this was not a problem here. So tame as the evening was as theater, there were more than a few sizable consolations. And at least for tonight, the notion of “Regietheater” couldn’t have been any further away from the reality of the moment.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010

Patricia Petibon and Michael Volle in Lulu Photo: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Festival 2010

On Wednesday in Salzburg I got a chance to see what has so far been the most challenging and confounding opera production of this year’s festival, Vera Nemirova’s take on Alban Berg’s Lulu. Just about everything you’d expect from Lulu both musically and theatrically is thwarted in this staging. And while I’m not sure if that makes it good or bad, it certainly makes it thought provoking. For an opera that already stands out in the standard repertoire musically, Nemirova’s attempt to challenge assumptions about the work risk making it even more alienating. The staging itself is highly static and minimal. Almost all props and set elements are removed in favor of a few huge painted backdrops by German artist Daniel Richter. Richter’s dayglo colored primitive figure drawings are interesting to look at but come nowhere near carrying the lack of activity on stage otherwise. Much of the rest of the action takes place near the foot of the stage involving little more than performer interaction. There is a large black lacquered triangle with several doors that serves a “Laugh-In” style peep show for Act II and is upended as a sort of hovel for the characters in the second scene of Act III. All of this is upended in the first scene of Act III which takes place almost entirely in the auditorium with the Paris party attendees tossing fake 500 Euro notes in the air and the vocalists sliding in between rows and walking atop partitions in the theater all under the spin of several mirror balls. And while this was an interesting change of events, it comes quite late in a very long show.

Probably the most frustrating thing though is the acting performance of star Patricia Petibon in the title role. The petite coloratura soprano has recently taken up the role and vocally she’s strong, even if I wasn’t always crazy about her German diction. However, she almost always seems emotionally uninvolved from the rest of the cast. Not that her Lulu was self-absorbed, she just seemed uninterested in anything going on around her one way or another. I debated for a while if this was a flaw, but I later decided that this may have been Nemirova’s intentional directorial choice. In the extensive program notes, Nemirova argues that Lulu represents a mythical figure. She points out the relationship between Lulu and Pandora in the original theatrical source materials the opera is based on and suggests the Lulu is a primal force bringing a world of ills into existence as a sort of bridge between the Gods and Humanity. This is strictly in keeping with the Salzburg Festival’s theme this year about the interaction between Gods and Man resulting in tragedy, particularly in Greek Mythology. To drive this idea home, there are moments where the audience is asked to identify with characters other than Lulu. In addition to the Act II party scene, the conclusion of Act I features a huge mirror backdrop that reflects the audience as the house lights are turned up during the scene when Lulu forces Dr. Schön to sign the message breaking off his engagement. The gesture implies a unity between himself and the audience in the wake of Lulu’s force of nature.

I should caution, though, that Nemirova does not see this as simply a “war-between-the-sexes” issue with women representing Earth/Nature/Instinct and men representing Reason/Logic/Order. There’s even some arguably feminist alterations in the plot with Countess Geshwitz escaping Jack the Ripper in the final scene to actually do what she says she plans to do, go to University and fight for the rights of women. Still this sort of detached Lulu who is neither exactly femme fatale or capricious woman-child does come off as blank and uninvolved at times. Despite Petibon and Nemirova’s best intentions I’ll admit I found the first two acts pretty dull and it wasn’t until the rapid expansion of the performance area in Act III that I really began to feel involved in any way. That’s not to say there weren’t some remarkable vocal performances among the cast. The consistently excellent Michael Volle made the most of the space he was given with Dr. Schön. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s final moments as the Countess Geschwitz were some of the most beautifully sung of the whole evening. Thomas Johannes Mayer’s turns as both Animal Trainer and Athlete pretty much grabbed the audience as much as they did Lulu.

This unexpected approach in the staging was paralleled musically in some ways. The Vienna Philharmonic gave a superb performance under Marc Albrecht, but one that sounded nearly Romantic given the circumstances. Many of the rough edges of Berg’s score seem polished to an intense shine creating an almost pretty sound at times. Which I guess is only fair. If it’s legitimate to make Salome and Elektra sound like they were written by Schoenberg in a live performance, I suppose having Berg sound like Der Rosenkavalier is within reason. It just wasn’t what one might normally expect. And while I believe there is a value in confounding expectations, I’m also not convinced Nemirova’s Lulu achieves enough of what it sets out to do. There are some excellent ideas here, but not enough of them come to fruition over the course of five hours to make the show a real success.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010

Jörg Widmann, András Schiff, and Miklós Perényi Photo: Silvia Lelli/Salzburg Festival 2010

I’ve been sorry to not have more time to sample the wonderful live performances of Wolfgang Rihm’s music that is on display everywhere this year at the Salzburg Festival. Such a broad based dedication of time and resources to a living composer’s music is undoubtedly a huge honor, and it makes one wonder who will step into these shoes in years to come. One answer may be German composer and clarinetist Jörg Widmann who at 37 has already racked up a number of significant awards and commissions in both Europe and the U.S. He appeared in both roles at the Salzburg Festival on Tuesday in a chamber music program in the lovely Grosser Saal of the Stiftung Mozarteum. The three other participants in this program were pianist András Schiff, cellist Miklós Perényi, and the composer Johannes Brahms. Brahms was ostensibly the influence for this series of chamber music programs at this year’s festival, and Schiff was the star performer who was consistent throughout the evening.

He started off with excerpts from Bach’s Art of the Fugue, which was unsurprisingly super. Then came the actual Brahms on the program, the Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 1 where Schiff was joined by Perényi for one of those great performances that makes you wonder how something like this is related to what you normally call chamber music. Subtle and endlessly surprising are not two sentiments I typically associate with Brahms, but there you have it. The second half of the evening belonged to Widmann in one manner or another. First up was the premiere of a solo piano work Widmann composed especially for Schiff called Intermezzi for Piano. Widmann notes these five short movements are heavily influenced by a series of Intermezzi composed by Brahms in 1892/1893. Widmann describes his composition as being intermezzi in the sense that he views them as tapping into “the secret after a sound, as well as the anticipatory pre-sound, the space of the in-between.” And, as the description suggests, Schiff played the series of notes by turns dramatic and restrained as if each set presented elements simply hanging in the air. It was well received by the audience and made way for the closing work: Zemlinsky’s Trio for Clarinet, Piano and Cello in which Widmann played with the other soloists. Zemlinsky’s late Romantic swirl provided an excellent cap to some extremely impressive playing and a wonderful show. And while nothing is certain for the future, musical otherwise, Widmann left the audience wanting to hear more and that is always the best possible sign.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010

Christopher Maltman and Erwin Schrott
Photo: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Festival 2010

The Salzburg Festival upped its celebrity hoo-haa quotient this weekend with the opening of the first of its two opera revivals this summer, Claus Guth’s controversial staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which was last seen here in 2008. Much of the stellar cast from the prior outing remains intact including Christopher Maltman in the title role, Dorothea Röschmann as Donna Elvira, and Erwin Schrott as Leporello. Of course, Schrott is one half of this decade's Salzburg glamour couple, the other half being soprano Anna Netrebko who opens up in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette here on August 10. And, of course, this being Salzburg, when she showed up to her husband's opening night all big-hair and red satin evening gown, the audience went all googled-eyed, standing and taking their own photos as she entered the theater as if she were Cameron Diaz or something. Netrebko and Schrott love Austria and, baby, it loves them right back. I have to admit there is a part of me that's jealous that opera starts don't get this kind of treatment in the U.S. as I sit here watching lengthy profiles of Netrebko, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the winner of Salzburg's firs Young Conductors Award, David Afkham, on television tonight.

But I digress. There was some Mozart to attend to, and it was attended to quite well with utmost care. This time around the conducting fell to Yannick Nézet-Séguin (who’ll also be leading the Vienna Philharmonic in Romeo et Juliette). He’s got the chops to keep things moving and his Mozart never got too heavy or dragged. Of course, you can’t go wrong when the Vienna Philharmonic plays just about anything, so there was little to complaint about from the pit. On stage the cast was pretty much excellent in both acting and singing terms. Maltman and Schrott are cast as drug-addicted low-lifes in Guth’s vision, but they manage to inject the parts with a lot of dark humor. Schrott does this whole drug twitch thing that’s hysterical. And then there’s the pecs and guns issue. This is not a staging for out-of-shape guys, that’s for sure. And while pretty much everybody is fully dressed the whole time, if you doubt it’s a consideration, just check out which image made the cover of the upcoming DVD release of the 2008 performance.

I was particularly thrilled to hear Dorothea Röschmann who has pretty much dominated every Mozart role she has sang here over the last several years. She’s is simply amazing. Best of all, she didn’t outclass anybody in the cast. Aleksandra Kurzak sang Donna Anna with real tenderness and clarity. Meanwhile, Joel Pietro made his Salzburg debut as Don Ottavio when the scheduled Joseph Kaiser called in sick for the opening. Anna Prohaska was convincing in a very physical Zerlina. Adam Plachetka, who sang Masetto, was good as well and got in on the hairy bare chest action in his limited stage time.

As for the Guth staging, what a difference two years makes. While he got nowhere near the audience response anyone else did on opening night, there were few if any boos to be heard either. All of the opera’s action is set in a very realistic looking dark forest. The huge wooded area fills the stage and rotates with characters popping out of the dark for scenes at every turn. The main conceit is that Giovanni is shot in the abdomen by the Commandetore during their altercation in the very first scene and our favorite player spends the rest of the opera living on borrowed time as he knows he is slowly dying himself, though still going throughout the motions that make him who he is. Giovanni and Leporello are portrayed as junkies and shoot up in the arm and neck on at least one occasion. There are handguns at times and a scene where Donna Anna and Don Ottavio drive a car onto the stage where Giovanni poses as a mechanic in another failed effort to seduce Donna Anna. This somber tone is maintained right through the end when the final chorus is eliminated in favor of Giovanni’s descent into hell being the last word. Guth notes n the program that for him Don Giovanni is not funny and he resolves the tone problems of the opera by focusing instead on what he perceives as the protagonist's struggle to come to terms with his own death. Certainly a reasonable idea and I felt it was a very enticing and good-looking staging. I appreciated the relentless sobriety underpinning a rather disturbing story that is sometimes too easily played for laughs. But admittedly, this forest scenario provides few distinctions between scenes and can be a bit hard to follow. Guth also upends many of the characters’ individual motivations in various scenes in a way that makes sense, but may be hard for some audience members to absorb. But no matter. This is one great sounding and star-studded Don Giovanni. And who is going to complain about that during the middle of a warm and beautiful Austrian summer.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010

Mojca Erdmann, Virpi Räisänen, Julia Faylenbogen, Elin Rombo, Johannes Martin Kränzle Photo: Ruth Walz/Salburg Festival 2010

One of the star attractions of this year’s Salzburg Festival is the work of 58-year-old composer Wolfgang Rihm whose music is being featured in numerous settings including the world premiere of his latest opera Dionysus. The festival has pulled out all the stops under the banner “Kontinent Rihm.” As the program for these events attests, Rihm’s music is so varied and multifaceted, it is a continent of its own. While that geographic metaphor may or may not be an overstatement, it is true that I’ve had some fortunate opportunities to travel a remarkable, if compact, sampling of Rihm’s work in as little as two days. Rihm’s music has taken various forms over his highly productive and lauded career, but he has been firmly rooted in a European and typically atonal modernism throughout much of it. In more recent years, his works have had a higher and higher accessibility quotient that can be heard both in Dionysus as well as 2007’s Das Gehege, which premiered in Munich.

Anne-Sophie Mutter and Riccardo Chailly with members of the Vienna Philharmonic
Photo: Wolfgang Lienbacher/Salzburg Festival 2010

On Saturday, there was a very short chamber performance of two string quartets, Nos. 5 and 10, from the Arditti quartet. Written almost 15 years apart, the two reflect changes in the composer’s attitude despite their common interest in structural issues. The No. 5 quartet is a single movement written in conjunction with two others, No. 6 and No. 7, to for a sort of meta-quartet when taken together as a set of three. Meanwhile, the No. 10 is a three-movement work in its own right that fades into existence with a quiet movement of simple pizzicato notes and dissipates in a similar fashion. The Arditti’s committed and technically superb performance showed the works in their best light and set the stage nicely for the following morning when Anne-Sophie Mutter appeared with the Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Chailly with Rihm’s Gesungene Zeit or “Time Chant.” Like the tenth String Quartet, Rihm’s single movement violin concerto has a fascination with small quiet notes and gestures. He composed the piece specifically for Mutter who has made it a staple of her repertoire. It begins with a series of extremely high notes played slowly and very softly. It’s in a range that often trips up the best performers, and Mutter’s certainty about the material gives it a beauty even in the quietest and highest of registers. Rihm was welcomed here, as he has been everywhere in the festival, with warm and enthusiastic ovations.

Wolfgang Rhim with the Arditti Quartet (behind music stands
Photo: mine 2010

So it was no surprise to see the composer get such a positive response at the curtain call for the final performance of his latest opera, Dionysus, which I saw on Sunday. It’s subject is Friedrich Nietzsche who is identified only with the letter N in the libretto. Moreover, Rihm fashioned the text almost exclusively from Nietzsche’s poetic text Dionysos-Dithyramben. And while there are certain references to historical aspects of the philosopher’s real and imagined life, this is not a narrative piece. Instead, it’s a consideration of philosophical concepts and an imagined psychological profile. N is paired with an adversary/companion, Ein Gast (a guest), who will later become the god Apollo and flay N’s skin from his body. That skin then becomes a separate actor in the work re-enacting a much-repeated story surrounding Nietzsche’s decline into insanity where the philosopher physically intervened to stop the beating of a horse. It’s never exactly clear what is going on, and scenes rapidly shift from one to another in a dream-like fashion. The poetic language never describes action or emotional states as it does reference other psychological concepts. All of this is further abetted by director Pierre Audi and visual designer Jonathan Meese who cover the set in abstract shapes and mysterious images of faces and words referenced in the libretto. Perhaps my favorite image was at the start of Act III when a giant pair of yellow eyes stared out from behind a scrim featuring a black and white video image of patrons milling about the adjacent Karl Böhm Hall complete with reproduced crowd noise. It's a puckish image as if to glare at the audience and say "Having fun yet?"

The final scene from Rhim's Dionysus
Photo: Ruth Walz/Salburg Festival 2010

But Dionysus is not all about the clever gesture. The dense and beautiful music fills the two and a half hours with real purpose and drive. The opera was an ideal assignment for Ingo Metzmacher and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin who sounded warm and detailed in the midst of a very thorny score. The music is often like N's own rush of thoughts and dreams and it provides the most crucial link between the listeners and the action on stage. The soloists were all wonderful including Mojca Erdmann as Ariadne, one of the many women in the cast N seems unable to obtain in any way. N himself is sung by baritone Johannes Martin Kränze who has the guts to wear a tight bodysuit throughout much of the final scene. The guest is Matthias Klink who brings a tone that is alternately playful and regal to his part. And even when there is relatively little in Rihm's dreamscape to hold onto, the players project the utmost certainty and confidence. I must say that it was thoroughly enjoyable and impressive.

As a side note: Some may wonder why I liked Rihm's Dionysus so much compared to Lewis Spratlan's recent premiere in Santa Fe, Life is a Dream. It is true that the two works do have a number of musical techniques and stylistic issues in common. For instance, both operas rely on atonal compositional techniques, and both deal primarily with philosophical issues. For me the big difference is that Dionysus doesn't attempt to give you any of the answers. Rihm is perfectly content giving the audience layers and layers of puzzles to consider in working out his project for themselves. On the other hand Life is a Dream takes the exact opposite tact, assigning characters lengthy platforms to lay out positions and ideas over and over. Rihm relies on relatively short passages from Nietzsche's writing that are repeated in different contexts to different effects while Spratlan's characters have a lot of explaining to do often crushing the music aside. In Rihm's Dionysus the music often does the talking. The audience is then an active participant in trying to figure things out. What I like best about opera is when it engages you directly not just simply as a viewer, but as a thinker as well.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010

Anja Harteros and Wolfram Rieger
Photo: Wolfgang Lienbacher/Salzburg Festival 2010

I started my week in Salzburg on a high note. Or perhaps it would be better to say I started them on Anja Harteros’ high notes. On Saturday night, she gave a recital at the Haus für Mozart that was simply incredible. It was as if I’d never actually heard a Lied recital before now. What’s more, there wasn’t an ounce of clever programming gimmicks to give the show unnecessary structure. There was no set of songs that required research or extended explanation. No unifying non-musical theme was used to pull a group of disparate works together. Instead it was simply Lied: Brahms, Schubert, Wolf and Strauss. Better yet, her accompanist Wolfram Rieger provided really eloquent playing in conjunction with Harteros’ bright and clear vocals.

There were so many strong points in the recital, it’s hard to pick only a few to mention. The evening started with some of Schubert’s moment of religious fervor, “Die Allmacht” and “Die junge Nonne.” And while the sacred may not have seemed like a natural place to start a vocal recital in Salzburg, Harteros provided a searing connection to Schubert’s own humanistic version of Christianity. As the show continued, all of the usual German romantic themes of love and nature were there, but sung like this, they seem fresh and new. I’ve always been particularly fond of Strauss as well and his “Meinem Kinde,” based on a poem by Gustav Falke was another of the evening’s highlights. Maternal love may be another of those hackneyed themes, but this was immensely touching. It’s too bad I won’t get to see Harteros in any staged operas at this year’s festival, but take heart Southern California, she's scheduled to perform the Marschallin in San Diego Opera’s production of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier next April.

Labels: Salzburg Festival 2010