Music News
Scaling the Ring
HAMBURG — Who is the first woman to have conducted Wagner’s mammoth Der Ring des Nibelungen? The same who did it the second time, and now is in the middle of her third production of the cycle. Besides being first, second, and third — she is still the one and only.
Australia’s Simone Young has led Berlin and Vienna Ring productions in this decade, and now, as artistic director of Hamburg’s 330-year-old Staatsoper, she is beginning a third cycle, which will run through 2012 — coincidently in the same timeframe with the San Francisco Opera’s “American Ring.”
Apparently, it’s not enough just to produce the 16-hour marathon Ring; it must have an “angle,” too. Come June, the San Francisco Ring — a coproduction with the Washington (D.C.) Opera — will have scenes set during the California Gold Rush and even in the Roaring Twenties. In Hamburg, it’s a sharply and at times grotesquely scaled Ring in which characters range across oversize sets that dwarf the singers, while designer Christian Schmidt has the gods trampling inches-high mountains and looking out of scale again, only in the opposite direction.
Alberich (Wolfgang Koch) cavorts with the Rhinemaidens
Photos by Monika Rittershaus
Claus Guth’s stage production is full of tricks and ideas, some vastly entertaining, some half-baked at most. After the March 24 performance in company’s 82-year-old house, rebuilt in 1955 — with stunning acoustics for a hall this large — there were some boos, but mostly applause, the latter perhaps occasioned more by musical values than the tricky physical production.
Young conducted a rock-solid vocal and orchestral performance, short on brilliance, but impressively long on consistency, balance, and sustained (if unvaried) energy. Except for occasional weaknesses in the brass, the Hamburg Philharmonic — which serves as the Opera’s orchestra, also headed by Young — did itself proud. In the cast without “big names,” the balance among uniformly good singers served the work remarkably well.
From the very beginning, with the three Rhinemaidens cavorting under the “waves” of a bedspread on an enormous, slanted bed (quite without a river), the voices of Ha Young Lee, Gabriele Rossmanith, and Ann Beth Solvang blended perfectly — with each other and with the orchestra. The hall provided flawless audibility for text and music, the former augmented with supertitles.
Appearing first in some kind of chemical suit, in search of something other than love or money (but what?), Wolfgang Koch’s Alberich sustained a fine singing-actor’s performance, well-balanced in his interactions with Mime (Jurgen Sacher) and Loge (Peter Galliard, made by the director to do magic tricks endlessly).
Wotan (Falk Struckmann), on top, surveys his domain
Even Falk Struckmann’s human and beautifully sung Wotan fit in, part of an all-around well-matched cast. Katja Pieweck’s matronly, tea-serving, and surprisingly unshrewish Fricka, as well as Deborah Humble’s brief, but powerful appearance as Erda were noteworthy. The two not particularly large, but definitely Mafia-looking Giants were Tigran Martirossian (Fasolt — but known to San Francisco audiences as Nerses, Catholicos of Armenia, in the 2001 Arshak II) and Alexander Tsymbalyuk (Fafner).
Between the bedded Rhinemaidens and the final scene of Loge thrusting at the audience a hand dripping with Fasolt’s blood, an eventful, but somehow not excessively distracting time was had by all. The most significant director’s touch was in eliminating the Nibelung altogether — the gold-processing race of dwarves, not the Nibelung of the cycle’s title. Alberich’s slaves did their work down below, and later carried the gold to the gods invisibly, which may mean considerable savings in the budget for chorus (actually shriekers, that being their only part in the score), and extras to be whipped and otherwise abused.
The gods of the Hamburg “Ring” depart for Walhalla
Again, beyond all the liberties and shticks, the Hamburg Rheingold is a musically excellent, theatrically “interesting” production, which may well turn out to be far less galling than American flapper gods, doing the Charleston on their way to Walhalla.
Laying an Easter Egg With Young Brahms
HAMBURG — When you celebrate your hometown hero’s birth 175 times, you will assuredly run out of standards, and start digging for the lesser known. And so, on Easter Sunday morning, the Hamburger Ostertöne concert offered Johannes Brahms’ 1863 Rinaldo, the 30-year-old composer’s incomplete entry for a choral competition. Brahms finished and presented the 35-minute cantata in 1869 (it’s numbered as Opus 50), but it never caught on.
What’s interesting about this how-Beethoven-might-have-written-Baroque-music piece is that if Brahms ever seriously ventured into opera, chances are it might have had a sound similar to this — uniformly heroic and loud, with an unconvincingly lyric fringe. Apt descriptions by others include: “endless shades of gray,” “excessive Baroque conceits,” and “lack of sensuality.”
The story is the episode from Tasso’s 1580 Gerusalemme Liberata, which has to do with the knight and the witch Armida (to whom Handel did justice a century and a half before Brahms’ treatment, and followed by Haydn and Rossini, who favored the lady over the knight). The cantata is written for tenor and men’s chorus, performed here in Laeiszhalle by Johan Botha and members of the Staatsoper Hamburg Chorus. A small configuration of Philharmoniker Hamburg was conducted vigorously by Simone Young.
Simone Young
Botha, possibly the most lyrical of heldentenors today, had his head deep into the score, giving the impression of winging the part. I have always been impressed by Botha, and always had an unspecified misgiving about him. This morning, clarity came in that matter. This wonderful, forward-set voice is as plain-vanilla tenor as a voice can get, quite without color or personality. The chorus sounded as if the men were somewhere backstage, occupied with other matters. My companion, a choral director, pointed out that the Hamburg singers have a “professional sound, not like American opera choruses.” But as for me, give me passion and a presence of sound, never mind “professional sound,” whatever that may be.
Chances are you may not be bothered again (soon or ever) in the matter of Rinaldo, so here is a bit of the text to give an idea of the piece:
A spacious garden … where not a light leaf shakes or zephyr strays, but breathes out love; here, on the fresh green ground in his fair lady’s lap the warrior will be found. But when th’Enchantress quits her darling’s side, and elsewhere turns her footsteps from the place, then, with the diamond shield which I provide, step forth and so present it for a space. That he may start at his reflected face, his wanton weeds and ornaments survey: The sight whereof, and sense of his disgrace, shall make him blush, and without delay from his unworthy love indignant break away.
When sung in German, at least for this listener, the meaning is even murkier.
The concert also included homage to Messiaen (a century-old birthday boy) in the form of Messiaen disciple Gérard Grisey’s Modulations for 33 Musicians, a piece far more cacophonic and disjointed than anything Messiaen ever wrote. Young presented a long introduction to the piece, arguing for its artistic merit. The performance itself attempted to do the same, although conductor and orchestra seemed totally submerged in the score. Seeing this, just 48 hours after a concert in San Francisco with Gustavo Dudamel, makes you wonder if having total mastery of the score might not be a prerequisite of a decent performance.
Janos Gereben (janosg@gmail.com) is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice.
©2008 By Janos Gereben, all rights reserved.
Realizing the difficulty of proving a negative, namely that “no female conductor other than Simone Young has lead a `Ring’ cycle,” I have checked long and hard with artists, friends, colleagues, Google, the Hamburg Opera, and eventually Young herself. Nobody would say with certainty that the claim in the lead of my story is true, but there wasn’t a single strong possibility brought up either.
Then, just after publication, Ed Gordon, an inveterate traveler to European opera houses - big, small, and smallest - came up with the name of Ewa Michnik, head of Poland’s Wroclaw (Breslau) Opera House. She has conducted a complete “Ring” between 2003 and 2006. Young’s first “Ring” came in 2000, so she still has the “first” title… at least until somebody comes up with another piece of information.
So then “there were two.” Young says the important thing is the future, and its unlimited possibilities for artists regardless of gender.
Posted by Janos Gereben on March 25, 2008 at 2:14 pm