Salzburgo - II

Desta feita, chegamos a Salzburgo via Verdi. O Macbeth conduzido por Muti enfermou, acima de tudo, de uma mise-en-scène deplorável, segundo consta...

«Leaving home at 5am and spending nine fraught hours travelling to a sweltering Salzburg may not have put me in the best frame of mind for this new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, but I trust it is critical impartiality that leads me to judge it a disappointment.

It wasn’t all bad. How could it be, when Riccardo Muti was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in an interpretation which he has developed for over 30 years?

He is less fiercely driven with the music than he was as a younger man: the translucency of texture and the precision of ensemble remain constant, but the phrasing has become more expansive and there is more relish of the score’s meditative aspects.

Watching him in the pit, one was aware of his economy of gesture, his close attention to the singers and his damping of any irrational orchestral exuberance. The result was a sombre Macbeth marked by introspective intensit,y rather than visceral excitement.

Muti made you realise that at this point of his career, Verdi was a far more sophisticated composer than is commonly recognised, but I do wish that the last two acts had been more fired up. The inclusion of the normally excised ballet music as a prelude to Act 3 was an error, I think, even if it allowed the amazing Vienna Phil a chance to frolic: it slowed the drama down when it ought to be hurtling.

You don’t hear sloppy singing when Muti is in charge and Zeljko Luˇci´c and Tatiana Serjan gave vocally admirable performances in the leading roles: Luˇci´c has the power and richness of tone of the true Verdi baritone, while Serjan was impressively accurate, and as forceful in piano passages as she was at forte. There was exemplary work from Giuseppe Filianoti (Macduff) and Dmitry Belosseslskiy (Banquo), too, and the Vienna State Opera chorus was stunning.

But oh dear me, what to say about Peter Stein’s staging? I know we all get fed up with clever-clogs post-modernist updatings, but mere mechanical dullness is not the answer either. Devoid of imagination or insight, it looked like a dud episode of Robin Hood and His Merry Men, with a battle scene and ghostly effects straight out of Monty Python. One simply cannot take this sort of thing seriously.»

Salzburgo - I

(Anne Schwanewilms, em A Mulher sem Sombra - Salzburgo, Agosto de 2011)

Terá sido da minha vista, porventura menos fina e atenta, mas a crise mundial parece ter afastado a imprensa dos festivais de Salzburgo e Bayreuth!

Até à data, apenas encontrei duas notícias consagradas ao festival austríaco! Quanto a Bayreuth, NADA! Dado que não domino o idioma alemão... Mesmo assim, mantenho a tese da crise famigerada, bode expiatório de todos os dissabores do mundo actual.

Posto isto, dado que me habituei a seguir os ditos festivais, aqui vão as novas. Desta feita, não recorro a critério algum, no tocante à divulgação dos eventos. Com tamanha escassez de divulgação...

Eis, assim, a crítica de A Mulher sem Sombra (Strauss, R.).

«Strauss and Hofmannsthal envisaged Die Frau ohne Schatten (“The Woman without a Shadow”) as an exotic fairy-tale, in the style of the Arabian Nights, embedding in it an allegory of the role of children within marriage (the shadow being a symbol of female fertility).

But in his extraordinary new production of this vast and complex work, Christof Loy strips the libretto of its coat of fantasy and re-clothes it in more modern dress. In a hall in the 1950s, a recording of the opera is being made. The singers are confronting their roles, which echo their own off-stage psychodramas: in particular, the naïve young soprano singing the childless Empress faces an education in human nature.

I don't altogether understand what Loy is getting at and judging from his waffle in the programme (“the self-recognition of the characters also signifies to me that the past and the future must be considered so as to dervive from them worthy ways of acting in the present”), neither does he.

His conception doesn't hold water logically, and he resorts to all sorts of contortions ­ sudden dream sequences, arbitrary comings and goings - to paper over the cracks. One basic problem is his failure to find a metaphor for the supernatural agency on which the plot hangs.

But although I was often baffled and exasperated, I was never bored. The set is stunning, the acting mostly brilliant and the sheer audacity of it all exhilarating. Far better this, in any case, than the drearily predictable version of Macbeth which I'd seen the night before.

No such ambivalence attaches to Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic. Both the score's thunderous tumults and its sweetness, stillness and simplicity were realised with unfaltering clarity and authority one wondered whether this music can ever been played better.

Anne Schwanewilms made a rather droopy Empress, pure in tone but cloudy of diction, and the stage was dominated by Evelyn Herlitzius, slight of figure but thrillingly heroic of voice, as the Dyer's Wife, and Michaela Schuster as the scheming Nurse. Wolfgang Koch was a sympathetic Barak, and Stephen Gould kept his dignity as the Emperor. Great careers loom for some of the excellent younger singers in smaller roles.

It's a measure of the performance's overall power that I came away in the certain knowledge that this is Strauss' greatest opera.»

Salzburgo II - Lulu & Petibon

(Patricia Petibon, em Lulu, Salzburgo 2010)

Vera Nemirova, em Salzburgo, propõe uma Lulu (Berg) mais crua do que é hábito (?!). Contudo, a sua encenação parece conter tiradas muito originais e inventivas.

Pela parte que me toca, confesso que o maior interesse desta nova produção radica na prestação de Petibon, que ocupa o lugar de Schäfer como protagonista desta ópera.

Desde a estreia de Patrícia Petibon no papel titular – em Genéve, na temporada passada (aqui e aqui) – que se percebeu tratar-se d’A LULU DA DÉCADA!

Veremos. Por ora, o momento é de festa!

«SALZBURG, Austria — From the first minutes of the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Berg’s “Lulu,” which opened here on Sunday night at the Felsenreitschule, it was clear that musical matters were in very capable hands. The German conductor Marc Albrecht drew a consistently plush, urgent and taut performance from the Vienna Philharmonic.

In the prologue, as the baritone Thomas Johannes Mayer snarled and bellowed the words of the Animal Tamer, inviting the audience to witness a menagerie in which the principal attraction was the snake representing “woman’s original form and nature,” the orchestra reveled in Berg’s insinuating music for the bleakly comic scene: all abrupt phrases, jagged lines and bursts of astringent chords.

But Berg’s 12-tone score is also rich with wistful allusions to late-Romantic lyricism. Under Mr. Albrecht, the chief conductor-designate of both the Netherlands Opera and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna musicians played Berg’s score as if it were a natural extension of Wagner, late Brahms and early Strauss — a completely valid approach. The warmth and body of the Vienna Philharmonic’s strings proved ideal for Berg’s unfinished final work (played here in the now standard three-act version, with the final act orchestrated by the composer Friedrich Cerha).

Still, the talk of any new production at the Salzburg Festival inevitably focuses on the staging. Well before opening night, predictions circulated in the opera world and on opera chat lines that this “Lulu,” by the Bulgarian director Vera Nemirova, was going to be another Eurotrash outrage.

Yet Ms. Nemirova’s daring and engrossing production earned her, and the production team, a sustained ovation. She has clearly worked closely with the German artist Daniel Richter, who designed the sets and painted some stunning flats. In Act I the backdrop is a huge blowup of a surreal portrait of the voluptuous Lulu, dressed only in underclothes and wearing incongruous angel wings, that the Painter is working on as the lights go up. And in Act II, when a cholera epidemic has broken out, the backdrop is a panorama of sickly, ghostly faces in garish reds and yellows that change color with the stage lighting.

That Ms. Nemirova is more than a purveyor of directorial high concept comes through in the minutely detailed characterizations she draws from her cast. The French soprano Patricia Petibon is a blithely amoral Lulu. When we meet her, she is married to Dr. Goll, a browbeaten professor of medicine.

As Lulu, she sometimes sang with a hard-edged sound and wavering high notes. Yet those qualities fit the character of this cagey seductress, who gets ahead by using the only power she has: her allure over men. Slender and sensual, she was riveting in every scene. And she nailed the skittish passagework of this high-lying role while summoning earthy rawness when Lulu was up against it and had to take charge, however ruthlessly.

The Painter was the tenor Pavol Breslik, and it was fascinating to see this character, usually an oily opportunist, presented as a handsome, cocky young artist. And as Dr. Schön, the editor of a newspaper, a controlling man who has supported, groomed and demanded sexual favors of Lulu for years, the baritone Michael Volle towered over Ms. Petibon and sang the role with menacing power.

All the characters were similarly fleshed out. Though the tenor Thomas Piffka has a big, robust voice, he was movingly befuddled as Alwa, Dr. Schön’s lost-soul son, hopelessly smitten with Lulu. The mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner as the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, who adores Lulu, brought both pitiable longing and fragile dignity to her portrayal. And the bass-baritone Franz Grundheber as the old, shriveled Schigolch, who may be Lulu’s no-good father (or a former lover or an abusive stepfather; it is not clear), found endless ways to convey the character’s creepiness.

Ms. Nemirova’s staging was sometimes heavy-handed in its symbolism. Did we need to see seven agonized, blood-stained, shirtless men of various ages and body shapes crawling on the floor and clinging to Lulu to get that she is irresistibly sexual? On the other hand, the choreographed writhing was quite a sight.

For nearly the entire first scene of the final act, which takes place at a Paris soiree, Ms. Nemirova had the cast sing out in the auditorium, walking up and down the aisles with the house lights on. The singers, in over-the-top evening wear (thanks to Klaus Noack’s inventive costumes), passed out drinks and scattered gambling money (bills playfully marked 500 eros) to delighted audience members. The wily Marquis (the tenor Andreas Conrad) walked across the auditorium on a narrow wooden rail that divided two sections of seats.

This theatrical coup proved an effective setup for the harrowing final scene, in which Lulu, reduced to prostitution in London, is murdered by a pickup who turns out to be Jack the Ripper. I have never seen the climax staged with such matter-of-fact degradation.»

Salzburgo I - Gluck, Orfeo & Muti

(Elisabeth Kulman, como Orfeo, em Salzburgo)

Muti-vedeta brilha em Salzburgo, ofuscando tudo e todos: intérpretes, encenador and so on. Eis a crónica do Orfeo ed Euridice, de Gluck, d'après Riccardo Muti:

«Hasta cierto punto supone también una recuperación histórica la ópera Orfeo y Eurídice, de Gluck, que anteayer dirigió magistralmente Riccardo Muti después de más de medio siglo sin representarse en Salzburgo, entonces de la mano de Karajan. Bien es verdad que Gardiner había estado al frente de una versión concertante, con su orquesta y coro habituales, en 1990, pero para la escena, esta ópera estaba prácticamente desaparecida, después de una década como la de los treinta en la que Bruno Walter la había dirigido en 1931, 1932, 1933, 1936 y 1937, bien con la puesta en escena de Karl Heinz Martin o bien con la de Margarete Wallmann. De 1938 a 1944 fueron los años de influencia nazi. Únicamente Krips y Karajan la dirigirían hasta 1959 despues de la muerte de Hitler. Muti ha tomado el relevo.

La ópera de Gluck lleva asociada en la memoria colectiva el aria de Orfeo Che faró senza Eurídice?, que Elisabeth Kulman cantó con sensibilidad. Con el maestro Muti deberíamos señalar algo parecido: "¿Qué haríamos sin Muti?". La verdad es que el director napolitano se ha convertido en la estrella mediática del festival. Figura como el mejor director de orquesta en la encuesta anual de la revista Festspiele, por encima de Abbado y Thielemann; a comienzos del otoño afronta los conciertos inaugurales como director de la Sinfónica de Chicago; dirige el Festival de Pentecostés de Salzburgo, y se va a hacer cargo de la Ópera de Roma. Hace un par de décadas se le veía como el sucesor de Karajan en Salzburgo y en el camino se cruzó Mortier. Ahora los dos son buenos amigos. En la nueva producción de Orfeo y Eurídice, Muti estuvo colosal al frente de la Filarmónica de Viena. Los cantantes se mostraron tan correctos como distantes, el Coro de la Ópera de Viena realizó una prestación admirable y Dietern Dorn presentó una puesta en escena de una cursilería casi ofensiva, con una coreografía de Ramses Sigl tan pretenciosa como inoportuna.

Una parte del espectáculo estaba, en cualquier caso, en la sala. Aunque días antes se había representado la nueva ópera de Wolfgang Rihm, la presencia de Muti y la Filarmónica de Viena confería a la representación de Orfeo y Eurídice el ambiente de "verdadera" inauguración del festival. Era, cómo decirlo, la imagen del imperio de lo efímero, del poder económico, de la necesidad de ostentación en tiempos de crisis.»

Salzburgo? Bayreuth?!

Com ou sem perplexidade (mas, indubitavelmente, com toda a razão), a Teresa aponta a minha ausência de referências a Salzburgo'09. Isto, a propósito do Così de Guth.

(Claus Guth)

A verdade, caríssima, é que a imprensa especializada - vá lá saber-se por quê (crise, desinteresse?) - poucas ou nenhumas referências tem feito, tanto a Salzburgo, como a Bayreuth!

Com muita pena minha - diga-se -, posto que este ano não tive a felicidade de me deslocar a nenhuma das catedrais...

Não se pode ter tudo! Temos o São Carlos, com a sua excelsa direcção artística, pois então!

Há pessoas eternamente descontentes com o que têm...

António Lobo Antunes em Salzburg (2005)

No site oficial do Festival de Salzburg, no ano de 2005, no capítulo do Drama, destaco a presença de A. Lobo Antunes: "Dichter zu Gast

ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES

Schauspielhaus Salzburg

Program
Poet in Residence: António Lobo Antunes

Antunes reads Antunes

António Lobo Antunes reads from his new book which will be published in fall 2005. The German translation will be read by Klaus Bachler.
»Das Handbuch der gebrochenen Worte« ? A Poetic Approach to the work of Lobo Antunes' by Albert Ostermaier

Thursday, August 11, 8.00 p.m.


Os cus de Judas

with Werner Wölbern
Director: Tina Lanik

Friday, August 12, 8.00 p.m.
Saturday, August 13, 8.00 p.m.


Tratado das Paixoes da Alma

Members of the ensemble of König Ottokars Glück und Ende read from the novel
Leitung: Martin Kusej

Monday, August 15, 8.00 p.m.


Hommage à António Lobo Antunes

Performance with Albert Ostermaier (texts) and Bert Wrede (guitar and sampling / composition)

Tuesday, August 16, 8.00 p.m.
Wednesday, August 17, 8.00 p.m."