The Opera Queen

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Hannu Lintu, conductor, Finland, classical, opera

Hannu Lintu Travels Into The Forest Of Pelléas et Mélisande

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On July 15, 2024

In classical, Europe, interviews, music, opera

Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera that inspires automatic if not always well-founded ideas: it’s (seemingly) impenetrable; it’s the French Tristan und Isolde; it’s romantic; it’s intense; it’s ultimately very tragic. It is also, in the words of conductor Hannu Lintu, something people may find “baffling.”

Yet Lintu, who is currently leading a new production of the opera with Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, has found a unique clarity in Debussy’s 1902 opera, itself based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 symbolist play of the same name about a tragic love triangle of two half-brothers who love the same woman. Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen’s new staging premiered earlier this month as part of the annual Münchner Opernfestspiele, a co-production with The Dallas Opera running through 22 July featuring Ben Bliss and Sabine Devieilhe as the doomed titular lovers, along with Christian Gerhaher as the jealous Golaud, Sophie Koch as Geneviève, and Franz-Josef Selig as Arkel. Lintu, who is also Chief Conductor of Finnish National Opera, emphasizes the work’s episodic structure and uses its orchestral interludes not merely as time-filling transitions but as both commentary and complementary characters on and within the unfolding narrative. This musical approach serves to heighten the dramatic interplay between characters as well as underline the extreme tension of their world – its mystery, mysticism, and narrative momentum. Set and costume designer Ben Baur has created a world that channels both the time of the opera’s premiere (the early 20th century) while adding abstract elements and making substantial use of water, which becomes a visual motive. The decidedly structured approach Lintu takes to the score is intriguingly complemented and contrasted by such textured visual cues, highlighting both the form and the formlessness that awkwardly co-exist and fight for dominance via the interwoven relationships within the opera.

Along with his duties at Finnish National Opera, Lintu is also Music Director of Orquestra Gulbenkian in Portugal, and will become artistic partner of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland in autumn 2025. He has lead a number of celebrated orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and Orchestre National de Radio France, to name a few. Lintu’s varied repertoire features an intriguing mix of old and new, with a distinct focus on the latter; the works of contemporary or near-contemporary composers (Magnus Lindberg, Thomas Larcher, Sebastian Fagerlund, Kaija Saariaho) feature prominently along with an assortment of 20th century works by Lutoslawski, Berio, Zimmerman, and Messiaen, with recordings done for Ondine, BIS, Naxos, Avie and Hyperion. A 2012 recording of George Enescu’s Second Symphony (Ondine) with Lintu leading the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award, one of many nominations the conductor has received from the prestigious music magazine, and one of many outlets who have praised and recognized his wide-ranging work; Lintu is multiple GRAMMY nominee who is also the recipient of two International Classical Music Awards. 

In his native Finland, Lintu has lead a range of operatic works including Wozzeck, Ariadne auf Naxos, Don Giovanni, Dialogues des Carmelites, Turandot, Salome, and Billy Budd. Earlier this year he completed the house’s massive Wagner Ring Cycle with Götterdämmerung, having already lead performances of Die Walküre and Siegfried from 2022. Music writer Anna Aalto noted in June that “(u)nder his direction, the orchestra’s sound is rich and velvety, and the details of the music are thoughtful and intense. The brass section stands out as mesmerizing and well-balanced.” (Seen & Heard International, June 6, 2024) This attention to balance is just as noticeable in his Pelléas in Munich. Lintu and I spoke about achieving that balance, along with his history with the opera, the role of language, and his ideas on the notion of “colour”, a word important to the music of Debussy, and not always easily achieved. Our conversation took place two days after the production’s opening, with the conductor offering detailed musical reflections, highlighting the work’s inherent connections to its contemporaries as well as its inherent mystery and beauty.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Bayerische Staatsoper, stage, Jetske Mijnssen, staging, stage, performance, opera, classical, music, theatre

Ben Bliss as Pelléas and Sabine Devieilhe as Mélisande in Bayerische Staatsoper’s new production of Debussy’s opera. Photo: Wilfried Hoesl

When did you first encounter Pelléas? And how have your perceptions changed since that time?

The history is long – I remember when I was still in high school and I was playing piano and cello. I always went to a local music library, which was huge, and I remember borrowing the score of Pelléas and and trying to read it and realizing that I couldn’t understand a single measure of it. I was probably 16 or 17 and I had already been playing Debussy’s preludes and things like that, but I had the feeling that (the opera) was some kind of thick forest which I could not penetrate or even step into. But I was listening to it a lot with the score when I was young.

Then I started to study conducting – I became very symphony-focused – though I saw a couple of productions at various points and then bought the score because I thought, ah, that it’s one of those pieces of the 20th century that I really need to know! My approach then wasn’t for performance but purely for analysis. I bought the play also, the Finnish translation, and read it a couple of times, and I knew a bit of the philosophy in its background, although I always found, as a whole, it was difficult to digest as a musician; it takes time before this work gets into your system. I could see the details but I couldn’t put them together, a problem throughout much of Debussy’s music: it’s made up of so many details and so many layers, hidden meanings without an actual horizontal line – well it is horizontal, but not in the melodic way, it’s mostly it’s vertical, with many fascinating things going on with the harmonies and the middle voices. So I was lost in the forest, metaphorically, in a different way – but now I could actually penetrate that forest.

In preparing for this production I started to work on two different levels: studying the score as if it were a symphonic poem of some kind, and reading the text. I’m not a French speaker and I knew that I would be working with these fantastic singers who, all except one, speak French – and I have done some French operas, like Carmen, Dialogues des Carmelites, but Pelléas is a very different approach to the French language. When I came to Munich and met the soloists for the first time I said, “Look, you have all done this” – except Christian Gerhaher, who had sung Pelléas before, not Golaud – “but you have done this and I have not.” It was actually a fascinating situation. I said, “I am now approaching you, actually not with a solution, but with questions.” This was my attitude during the whole rehearsal process: I wanted to learn from them.

When the orchestra came in I tried to combine the German orchestra sound and my own orchestra sound into something which I think might be a little bit French. It’s been a very complex and joyful process at the same time. It’s fascinating to think about all the ways music goes into musicians’ brains, and then of course how it comes out, because it’s not only just getting it into your system, but it’s also technical: how does this music enter into my technique? And how am I able to transmit my ideas to the musicians?

I want to pick up on one of those ideas; you said in a Staatsoper video interview that Debussy should be “in shape”– I could hear that structure at the premiere. Did this arise through that study or was it something that came with rehearsals and being around singers?

Well, at some point the themes became more familiar, and they clarified especially when I started to see what was about to happen on stage – when I saw the movement. For me movement is really important; I play with it. I need to see people moving when I conduct opera, because that gives me a goal. Each scene in Pelléas has its own musical shape; each one of them is a musical piece as such, which could be performed separately, almost sometimes in some kind of a form, not necessarily a classical form, but maybe a form which comes from, even from earlier times – Renaissance or Baroque. Each scene has its own arc. The only piece that comes to my mind here is Wozzeck, which is built in the same way; each scene has its own musical form. But for Debussy it was more, I think, subconscious in the way he created Pelléas.

At some point during the rehearsals I tried to play each piece, each scene, as if it were the only one, standing on its own feet. And then later when the orchestra came along, I tried to connect these forms. How the story develops is actually very strange because so little happens in the beginning. When the first act ends, I always have this feeling like, “Where is this going?”

… which is very symbolist…

Yes! And these symbols say a lot about the time in which the opera was written, in 1902. I remember when I read the play for the first time, those symbols were a little bit more touching and I have a feeling that Debussy lost part of the symbolist nature of the play because he was so involved with the vocal writing and the orchestration – I might be wrong! The form is there, then it develops, eventually into disaster, but then it doesn’t end – there’s one more act, which is almost half an hour, like a kind of epilogue. The question arises: why did Debussy take it there? Maybe he wanted to create another world. The structure of that final section is entirely different than the others. The whole opera is episodic, and I wanted to show that this epilogue is commenting on what has happened before.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Bayerische Staatsoper, stage, Jetske Mijnssen, staging, stage, performance, opera, classical, music, theatre, Sabine Devieilhe, Debussy

Sabine Devieilhe as Mélisande in Bayerische Staatsoper’s new production of Debussy’s opera. Photo: Wilfried Hoesl

I suspect the epilogue is also a commentary on the nature of inherited trauma…

You could be right.

… the musical language has a sense of doom. Regarding that language, I wonder how much of your other work, particularly that of Messiaen, Berio, Enescu, and of course Kaija Saariaho, was in your head when you were going through the score.

It wasn’t consciously doing that, but now that you say it, there’s lots of Kaija’s music, especially in that fifth act of Pelléas. As to Messiaen, I just conducted some early works of his, and they are very Debussy-like in the language – so I think that’s where his harmonies grew from, although it’s organized as an instrument, of course, and turns the musical language to another direction.

You can approach Pelléas from two different sides: from the past, which would include Wagner and probably some French composers before Debussy; and then of course, what came afterwards. I think Debussy is one of those composers we all know was incredibly influential in terms of what’s happened in the 20th century – him, Stravinsky, Webern, and all these great masters from the beginning of the 20th century. Their works are still modern. We probably need to live a couple of hundred years more before we really understand their music. I was thinking about this other night – we pretend that we do (understand), but especially with regards to Debussy, except for La Mer, people are a bit baffled. “What is happening? I don’t get it. I’m getting a little bit intimidated” – whereas the musicians are like, “Oh, this is so beautiful!” Debussy’s music hasn’t entirely reached the ordinary public, but it is going to – it is still travelling towards us.

Or us toward it…

Yes.

Do you think that the journey for appreciating Debussy might be helped along by programming more contemporary, or at least complementary composers more often?

I have always believed in showing the connections, whether it’s the connection between Beethoven, Wagner, or Mahler, or Mahler and Berg. I understand that the people who come to concerts may not have time, knowledge, or interest in educating themselves in this way. But I think we, who plan the programs and do the programming, could take a little more responsibility and gradually show them that the history of music is continuous, and that’s how the so-called canon is built. And those composers who are important, they are important because they influenced others, not because some musicologists or musicians have decided that they are or must be the greatest. They would have been great anyway, because they affected so many other composers. I think of Kaija and I know that some of her ideas, yes, came from Debussy and some of them came from Messiaen, and some came from others.

Hannu Lintu, conductor, Finland, classical, opera

Photo: Marco Borggreve

So what kinds of things do you carry back, then, from this experience? You’re not finished the run yet, but what ideas or approaches might you carry back to the Finnish National Opera?

I don’t know yet, but certainly, whenever you do a big piece like this, which is, again, if we are talking about the 20th century, if we’re talking about Salome, Elektra, Wozzeck, these pieces which every conductor wants to do, you think of the structure. If something has changed, I’m not sure what it is yet. I’m almost sure that if I have changed, I will notice it after I have started to do something else. When the run here ends, I will be going on to Cleveland, Music Academy in the West, Tanglewood and Taipei also, doing the music of Sibelius, Walton, Mahler, Bruckner, and Saariaho… so when I get into the various pieces I’m set to do in those places, it’s possible that I will do them differently because of this experience – but I don’t know it yet, because now I’m still living Pelléas here.

“Colour” is a word used not only applied to the music of Debussy, but to that of many composers whose works you’ve done. Have your ideas on colour changed through the years?

We tend to speak of colours in music and very often we don’t actually have any idea what we are talking about. You read the critics: “Oh, there’s those wonderful colours” – but sometimes it’s just words. There are composers like Sibelius, who was incredibly synesthetic in his thinking, and he heard every key in its own colour, but then there is no direct connection from this into the score itself, how we experience it and how we play it, so I would say that colour is technique. It’s the composer’s technique to orchestrate, and then the musicians’ technical abilities to do exactly what the composer wanted to do. Debussy wrote a lot of instructions, as did Mahler and Bartok. You should read those instructions carefully. They knew words, and whenever there’s a word in the score, they are very important. But mainly colour is a very simple thing: play at the tip of the bow, or more pressure, or short, long, achieving a balance that reveals and makes those colours.

If you look at the orchestration of Pelléas, you very soon noticed that use of brass is very subtle; they very seldom play. A tuba plays probably four or five notes, and there are some beautiful trumpet melodies also, as well as various motives – I almost think that that’s something he learned from Wagner’s scores. It was actually something we worked on, the brass balance. So… yes, colour is technique, it’s orchestration, and then trying to do what the score says.

Pelléas et Mélisande, Bayerische Staatsoper, stage, Jetske Mijnssen, staging, stage, performance, opera, classical, music, theatre, Sophie Koch, Christian Gerhaher, Debussy

Christian Gerhaher as Golaud and Sophie Koch as Geneviève in Bayerische Staatsoper’s new production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Photo: Wilfried Hoesl

How do you think this plays into the vocal writing? You said in another interview that it’s very in the middle – have your ideas changed throughout rehearsals?

They have changed, but only within the last eight or nine days. Originally I thought – and I still think – that they are essentially instrumental parts with words. They are in the texture of the overall sound. They have their own character, and sometimes they are peculiar. It also took me some time before I realized that the French language needs to have certain rhythms, even more than other languages. Every language has its own character, but now when I really know the words (to Pelléas) better I realize that if I try to speak them, then the character comes through the spoken rhythm and its related spoken tempo.

Also if you listen Debussy for three-and-a-half hours you have to have some variation in the sound, it can’t always be just one sound, “French” or whatever; you really do need to be earthbound for this opera. You need to find the structure and maintain the intensity and momentum, and keep some sense of direction pushing it through. You listen to recordings of Pelléas and that all of that comes through, even if the recordings are very different from each other; I can’t tell you which one are the best ones, maybe I admire the ones which are more orchestra-focused – but yes, I always thought that I have to treat those vocal parts as instrumental parts, that I have to make the balance where the words are, that they need to come through somehow. And it’s not always possible. With every opera, you have to make some compromises in balance. And having a Dutch stage director, a Finnish conductor, a German orchestra, a French singer, a German singer – it is inevitable that we all have our own national characteristics when it comes to the music, but sometimes it yields fascinating results.

Top photo: Veikko Kähkönen

David Trippett, musicologist, professor, Cambridge, classical, opera, British

David Trippett on Editing ‘Wagner in Context’: “You Have To Make The Object Of Your Study Move”

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On June 28, 2024

In books, classical, Europe, history, interviews, music, opera

What’s the c-word? Regular readers and former students might know the answer. Likewise Cambridge University Press, whose In Context book series is dedicated to multifaceted explorations of law, literature, music, and ideas. The collection offers much more than life-and-times surveys by highlighting detailed and often surprising aspects of those lives and those times via deep dives on tangibles (money, partners, projects), intangibles (ideas, philosophies, lifestyles), socio-cultural trends, and, in the case of music, elements of composition, recording, and reception, as well as historic and contemporary interpretation and practice. Through an interconnected series of brief if in-depth essays, material is presented with thematic and chronological considerations, with each essay curated in order to illuminate its surrounding colleagues. The series is an indispensable resource for both fans and scholars, with its composers series exploring an array of famous names, including Puccini, Brahms, Mozart, Mahler, Stravinsky, Strauss and The Beatles.

Wagner in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024), released this past March, contains 42 essays by music scholars, writers, and other classical figures (including conductor Leon Botstein), all probing the life and legacy of composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Divided into six sections including geography, politics, people, performance, and reception, the book offers meaty dives on well-known topics (i.e. The Ring and its stagings through time), practicalities (money), realities (criticism), as well as pointed socio-cultural examinations (performing his work in Israel; Buddhism, video game music). The book’s release is particularly timely what with houses in Zürich and Berlin having presented complete Ring cycles recently, and those in Milan, Munich, and Paris (the latter featuring Ludovic Tézier as Wotan) starting in the 2024-2025 season. Amidst the contemporary online discourse – alarm that opera is in a state of crisis and/or “burn it all down” and/or “the old days were better” – actual interest in Wagner and his work would seem to be growing in leaps and bounds, even if audiences at historic houses like Bayreuth have grown shaky.

Musicologist David Trippett, Editor of Wagner in Context, has assembled a rich collection of essays, many of which speak to these communities and ongoing conundrums. Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College, Trippett was also the guiding force behind the rediscovery, reconstruction, live presentation and recording of Franz Liszt’s lost opera Sardanapalo in Weimar in 2018. The author of Wagner’s Melodies (Cambridge University Press, 2013), he has also edited collected volumes on music and science as well as music in digital culture. His own essay for Wagner in Context (“Sentient Bodies”) is a thoughtful contextualization of the composer’s tonal language via its sensory effects, using historical and philosophical frameworks; Nietzsche’s infamous 1888 claim that “Wagner increases exhaustion” is its starting point. In the introduction Trippett offers a thorough examination of the meaning and role of context as related to the composer and his legacy, fusing old and new with immense confidence. He raises the reality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (which occurred during the book’s editing process) and in noting the presence of the Wagner Group and the Mozart group writes that “these tatty battlefield personae beg the question of how reception contexts engineer and amplify such different moral valences, and what and what role is played by the signs and nodal gateways of modern media in their dissemination.” The connection to the immediate subject matter, and his overarching shadow on contemporary opera life, couldn’t be made clearer.

Still, I was curious as to the process of editing a book on one of classical music’s most (in)famous figures. In conversation, Trippett is involved, detailed, fascinating to speak with, his engagement warm and friendly. There’s always something new to learn about Wagner, and, as this conversation proves, lots more to talk about. The c-word is indeed a grand and wondrous thing.

The Selection Process

You have an array of distinguished contributors in this book, and I’m wondering how you chose them, and, relatedly, the way that the chapters and respective contributions are divided; did you approach people like Mark Berry and say, “I need you to write about revolutionary politics,” or Leon Botstein with “We need an article about America” ?

The first thing to say is that I think the quality of contributors is a vote of confidence in the field of Wagner studies. People want to write about Wagner and there is so much that changes with time – so when we listen to works, reread his writings, and see how the world has changed, the meaning of those works and those writings changes also. There is a perennial reinvention that takes place, and I think in looking at contributors I really was inspired by people whose work I admire. It really was a case of asking myself two questions. On the one hand, there was a sense of thinking, what does a book like this need? Wagner had so many interests and it would be impossible to chase them all down and try and do a serious scholarly dive into vegetarianism, or into his trouble with debt, or his attitude towards women; there isn’t space. These are short chapters; they have to be bite-sized, like a kind of elite tasting menu.

The other equally important question was, whose opinion do I want? Who would be really good to write about this? So to pick at random, the head of The National Archive for Wagner Studies in Bayreuth is a wonderful Wagner scholar, Sven Friedrich. I happen to know that before he moved to directing the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, the Jean Paul Museum, the Franz Liszt Museum, and the National Archive and Research Centre of the Richard-Wagner-Stiftung, Sven had a career in banking –  his training is in finance – so he knows a lot about the area of merchant banking and money. I suggested to him to look at the copyright and the royalty situation for Wagner (“Wagner’s Finances”), and to translate his findings into current figures, in order to really try to understand whether the myths and the easily-parroted opinions about Wagner are warranted; I was very lucky that he agreed.

And you mentioned Leon Botstein, who is such a learned and incredibly wide-ranging, talented musician and scholar. He is somebody who I would say can almost literally write about anything to do with music. But the notion of America was interesting because we know that Wagner, later on in his life, thought about emigrating. I wrote to Leon and I said, “There’s this thread we can pull out” and he had so many ideas about where to take (the topic) – in the end, there’s a very important set of sources that he brings to bear. He does a wonderful job of really positioning this ambivalent history in America to race relations with things like Parsifal, German immigration, and The Birth of a Nation. It really was amazing to chase down what is a very textured history that I think we don’t really receive in biographies of Wagner or in normal narratives that accompany performances in program notes and other material. This was an opportunity to find excellent, insightful people and to think harder than we might normally do about the kind of subjects that Wagner in the 2020s warrants in the world as we find it.

Did those subjects for Wagner in Context arise naturally, or did they arise out of the material that you received? Gundula Kreuzer already wrote about the technical side of Wagner’s stagings, and Mark Berry has his book (written with Nicholas Vazsonyi) on The Ring. Was it a grand plan or something more organic?

Like you, I’ve read all of this literature when it comes out, and I was guided by people who’ve made a very significant contribution. To ask, for instance, Katharine Ellis, to write about Paris – there’s almost nothing that Katharine doesn’t know about Paris and Wagner in the 19th century. Her work has developed, of course, and gone in many directions but she is a figure who is just a world authority in this area.

Likewise Gundula Kreuzer is an authority on the stage technology. In her case, because I felt the history of stage technology is just too big, there are three chapters that kind of fit together on that overall topic, so you’ve got Gundula’s history of staging (“Stage Technology), which pretty much goes up to the premiere of The Ring Cycle in 1876; then you’ve got Patrick Carnegy, who picks up the baton just after the premiere (“Historic Stagings: 1876-1976”) and looks at the history of the 20th century staging up to Chereau in 1976; after that there’s a wonderful chapter by Clemens Risi that really looks at performance traditions (“Regietheater in Performance”) and more exploratory and risque presentations; he’s written very thoughtfully about how, for instance, performers and performance psychology are affected by some of the very real challenges the directors throw at them, some really quite undignified visuals that we might think, “Gosh, that’s risqué” we maybe don’t stop to think about how it feels to be a performer, doing a dream role, but being told by a director to do X-Y-Z. And I think that there was a very interesting levelling of perspective there. I suppose if those three chapters are linked one could tack them on to “The Wagnerian Erotics Of Video Game Music” by Tim Summers.

I found that essay particularly fascinating, and very contemporary…

Yes, Summers is a wonderful scholar at Royal Holloway in London. That essay began life as something about internet memes and the way the themes and motifs from The Ring Cycle can bounce around the internet and be repurposed – how they acquire meanings in different video games. Lo and behold, he brings Schopenhauer into a reading of the game player who escapes themselves in the projections they experience within the game, and this becomes “The Wagnerian Erotics of Video Game Music” – it was quite unexpected, but incredibly unique and really insightful. So you can really look at the different configurations, I think.

“Flickering” And Editing

Different configurations, but they speak to something that you write in the introduction, that “the point about contexts is that they start to flicker with insight only when they run deeper than biography.” I thought of this with relation to the Summers essay while simultaneously considering how many might only know Wagner from cartoons or The Blues Brothers, how Wagner himself wasn’t interested in artsy silos – were these sorts of things “flickering” in your mind as editor? And why does do these “flickerings” matter in appreciating an artist like Wagner in 2024?

I think it’s a wonderful question. The way this was initially presented to me was as an opportunity to rethink the relationships between figures that we think we know quite well and some of the deeper history. As historians we’re always looking at the deeper history, but very often we don’t have the chance to write about it as the primary object because it’s only the background, so this is why at the end of that introduction I mention the metaphor that writer José Ortega y Gasset introduces when he’s talking about modernist art.

In 1925 he wrote a book called The Dehumanization of Art (Princeton University Press), and at one point in it he gives the example of looking through a window at a beautiful garden; you can focus on the garden and you can see the beautiful pictures, or you can see the colour used by Kandinsky or some of the textures in a sculpture – or you can look at the frame. You can zoom back and you can actually look at the window frame and see how it’s making the garden a picture. That drawing of attention to the medium was central to what Ortega was saying about modernist art.

For this question of context, I thought, well, that’s exactly what we can do now. We already study the “scene” – of literature from Spain or France or whatever, and we do put our favourite composers into that, but we never actually focus on the framing. So what this book does is give scholars and readers a chance to play with that lens of focus and zoom in on one thing or another and to really ask how Wagner fits into the world of finance, or into the literary culture of Spain, or media theory. There are lots of different elements at play. So yes, “flickering” is the right word because it’s that dynamic sense, a type of motion that is not fixed to where you actually are as a reader or scholar; you have to make the object of your study move, not just try to learn all the details about it as a sort of stone sculpture but make it real for the here and now.

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Photo: mine.

How real did it become for you, particularly in light of your work on Liszt’s Sardanapalo? I would imagine that experience changed your own lens with Wagner.

Oh yes.The relationship between Wagner and Liszt has been problematised a little bit in recent years. At the beginning, Liszt had far more fame, wealth and status than Wagner did, but of course that changed. At the end of his life Liszt regarded himself as “Bayreuth’s poodle” – that’s his expression – that he was wheeled out for big events. He felt like he was being used. I think the challenge for historians is to think about, not only at a personal level, what it costs to have this changing relationship to Wagner, but to track the ways in which that was manifest with money. All of these things were there to be documented, but I think the broader question is: what should historians make of these artists now?

Wagner’s music has made him enormous and very widely performed; Liszt’s legacy as a composer remains restricted in a popular sphere, I think, to the keyboard works, and even then, only to a very small handful of keyboard works. We might flip the coin and say, “Well, what about Wagner’s keyboard works?” – because there are keyboard works by him. They were composed after Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. But we don’t talk about them; they’re not a main part of his legacy. I think the question of why we value some music and not others, and why that’s so unbalanced, is an interesting one. Joanne Cormac does a really great job in her essay (“Franz Liszt”) of bringing some of these larger historical options to the fore, and also the biases of our own historical narratives that tend to marginalize Liszt and bring Wagner ever more into the larger sphere.

This was what I was getting at regarding musical marginalizing: Sardanapalo seemed like an attempt at historical balance, among other things.

Well, when Liszt insisted on pursuing an Italian opera, Wagner advised him not to do it – he tried to give him a cast-off libretto and said, “Why don’t you set this to music?”. I think Liszt stuck to his guns and Wagner then said, “Well you should write something in German for Weimar and stop trying to be an Italian composer” – so while I don’t know what he would have said (to the Sardanapalo presentation) I do think your point is absolutely right, that Liszt had a musical talent, the likes of which is hard to imagine. He was so versatile and able to absorb so much from his surroundings. His work ethic was phenomenal if you look at the rate of production when it gets to Weimar. The opera that he spent on and off seven years really working to complete is a testament to his absolute fluency in not only a Bellini and Donizetti style, but the fact that he had absorbed aspects of the orchestrations for Tannhauser and Lohengrin. I think that kaleidoscopic imagination made itself known in an incredible ability to synthesize and draw together threads that seemingly don’t make sense, but actually sound great, and you’re right, it is very important, I think, to hear it. You can’t really understand it theoretically; you have to experience it.

David Trippett, musicologist, professor, Cambridge, classical, opera, British

Photo courtesy of David Trippett.

Sensory Relevance… ?

How do you see perceptions of Wagner evolving in the 21st century? What role can (or should) context play in presentation?

I think on the one hand there is a magnetic appeal to Wagner’s music. It is so rooted in what he called “Sinnlichkeit” – an appeal to the senses – that that alone, in the hands of a driven, skilled orchestra and wonderful singers, will create a spectacle and an artistic experience that will always be revelatory. It is not too hyperbolic to state that something like Tristan is a miracle of humanity; the job of performers and directors is to convey that value with the audiences.

I think the question to begin with is: how do we relate something that was composed in 1865? Or relate to The Ring Cycle, which premiered in 1876? How do we present it anew to an audience that can hear it on YouTube? Or that can get any parts of the score for free and are more likely to be involved in pop or any number of different new musical trends? The whole world has changed so much in such a short time – and on the one hand, Wagner’s style and language has an eternal appeal, but on the other hand there’s a very real question as to what one does to update and remain relevant in the here and now. There are many cases of directors not quite getting it right, of being too shocking; there’s the case of a production of Tannhauser in Germany (2013) which had to close after one performance because it was gratuitous in its references to the Holocaust – it didn’t have an organic relation to the opera – and many found it very upsetting.

Where does the word “relevant” fit then?

Well I think we do have to be relevant, but I think being relevant doesn’t mean always drawing on objects in the here and now. A whole genre of opera in the 1920s called Zeitoper was precisely meant to be relevant; they used all of the gadgetry of the times, like telephones and gramophones, and had contemporary themes and allusions to popular music, all aimed at making the art form accessible to audiences. For example, there’s an aria in Hindemith’s opera Neues vom Tage (1929), which praises hot water and gas, and was originally sung by a soprano wearing a flesh-tone suit in a bathtub. But this genre had a very short shelf life – it was relevant only for ten years. I think that is the problem of, you know, being “up-to-date” and being “relevant”; the more up-to-date you are, the sooner you become out-of-date. The challenge is to balance the music’s eternal appeal with things that matter in the here-and-now, and that is, I think, an issue to be solved by each director.

Top photo: Graham CopeKoga
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Kai Hinrich Müller: “What Can Opera Do For Society?”

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On June 1, 2024

In Berlin, Canada, classical, education, Europe, history, interviews, music, new music, opera

As opera companies look to attract new audiences and cultivate relationships with existing patrons, specific combinations of knowledge, passion, and energy are increasingly required. There’s work to be done with nitty-gritty issues like funding, management, casting, commissioning, programming, and presenting. Companies have made conspicuous efforts to expand the definition of the widely-understood canon of classical music. Opera watchers (including yours truly) live in hope that such decisions are more than mere gestures, that they are made with an eye toward evolution, not just optics. More than ever, works are being programmed which have been penned by composers off the well-beaten path of Opera Hits – composers who were often persecuted because of race, gender, religion, sexuality and who remain largely unknown because of a stubborn adherence to that path.  Broadcaster Kate Molleson wrote a whole book about this, and I have written about it as well.

So where does the idea of “democracy” fit within the world of classical music, particularly opera? What role does (or can) art play in cultivating the idea – and the reality – of democracy? How do the notions of representation, choice, voice, equity and equality relate to opera’s history, goals, old audiences, intended audiences, financial demands, and day-to-day realities? The current Thomas Mann House series Opera & Democracy has been exploring these questions over the past six months. Instigated by musicologist and 2023 Thomas Mann Fellow Kai Hinrich Müller, Opera & Democracy is a unique combination of academic investigation, discussion, and live performance, with topics including power dynamics, representation, programming and casting choices, updated formats, and what the Villa Aurora-Thomas Mann House website calls “audience expectations as well as to academic challenges and opera’s ability to amplify the voices of silenced or persecuted artists.”

So far those artists have indeed included many persecuted figures: Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, Rachel Danziger van Embden and Amélie Nikisch, Rosy Geiger-Kullmann, Ernst Toch, Tania León, and Ursula Mamlok, to name a few. Launched in Los Angeles in January,  the series has gone on to see packed houses in Munich, Cologne, New York, and Dresden. More dates are set to follow in Providence (RI), Berlin, and Hamburg; most immediately is an upcoming online event June 11th with Black Opera Research Network featuring composer Philip Miller, the composer of Nkoli: The Vogue-Opera (detailing the life of  anti-apartheid gay rights activist Simon Nkoli) and its musical director, Tshegofatso Moeng. Allison Smith, Civic Engagement Coordinator of Virginia Opera will also be joining the discussion together with Müller. In a recent blog entry reflecting on the New York City-based events for Opera & Democracy this past April, the musicologist wrote that “(b)y shining a spotlight on the works of composers who were once silenced by dictatorship, the week offered a way to reclaim their voices and honor their contributions to the cultural tapestry of humanity.”

Kai Hinrich Müller, scholar, musicologist, professor, Thomas Mann fellow, Opera & Democracy

Kai Hinrich Müller

That tapestry is one Müller has sought to explore in various facets. Having studied Musicology, Business Administration and Law at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Müller has worked as an advisor and curator on a number of international research and cultural projects, including an exhibition at Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum called “Richard Wagner and the Nationalization of Feeling” in 2022. He has also also worked with musico-historical group Musica non grata and led its Terezín Summer School, the 2023 iteration of which featured Rachel Danziger van Ambden’s Die Dorfkomtesse (The Village Countess), subsequently presented as part of Opera & Democracy’s presentation in Dresden. Müller’s publications explore musical life in the interwar and Nazi periods, past and present musical structures, and the functions of music within social discourse, topics which are also long-term research focuses. In addition to his teaching work at the Cologne University of Music and Dance (since 2017), Müller also works with the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, German public broadcaster WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln) and various concert and opera houses. As Director of the Bauhaus Music Weekend, he told RBB’s Hans Ackermann:

Meine Projekte sind immer an der Nahtstelle von Wissenschaft und Praxis angesiedelt. Schön finde ich, wenn man die Forschung “in den Klang” bringt. Musikwissenschaft soll nicht trocken sein, sondern wieder zum Klang werden. / My projects are always located at the interface between science and practice. I like it when you bring research “into sound”. Musicology shouldn’t be dry, it should become sound again.
(“Die Musik war fest im Alltag am Bauhaus eingebunden“, RBB24, 9 September 2023)

Opera & Democracy is anything but dry. Along with being an important forum for timely conversation and interaction, it is a refreshingly intelligent expression of creative advocacy, coming at a time when many (including those holding the purse strings) are questioning the role of culture within contemporary life. What can (or should) art’s role be in shaping the future? Over the course of our nearly hour-long exchange, the musicologist offered a few ideas, a real willingness to listen, and an interest in engaging with different experiences and ideas. Mehr davon, bitte…

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The Goethe Institut New York hosted the opening event of the week-long New York section of Opera & Democracy. Photo: Jamie Isaacs

Where and how did the idea for a series about opera and democracy originate? Relatedly: why this series, now?

The idea came out of my fellowship at the Thomas Mann House. The theme for the 2023 season of the Thomas Mann House programme was the political mandate of the arts, examining the question of the arts having a kind of political mandate, and what that means in a broader sense. I’m a musicologist; my habilitation was on Richard Wagner and Richard Wagner’s afterlife, a bit like Alex Ross in his last book, Wagnerism, so it was totally clear for me when I got to the Thomas Mann House that I would focus on opera.

Also there is one very important centenary in 2024, and it’s related to the Krolloper, which was this very important opera house in Berlin that hosted a lot of avant-garde works. But then it became the Nazi assembly hall of the Reichstag between 1933 and 1942. So on the one hand it’s a very important place for European history, and on the other it’s a very important place for international opera history; this was such a great coincidence that I wanted to use the centenary to think about the place of opera in society and politics, especially since the United States and the EU both have very big elections this year, and Germany is struggling with the rise of right-wing parties. In organizing the series I was in touch with many colleagues in the US and Germany – directors, singers, musicologists – and initially they all said, “Hey Kai, are you joking? ‘Opera and democracy’, this is a kind of contradiction!” – sure, but sometimes the tension is much more interesting with such pursuits. So we started, and so far it’s a real success for the Thomas Mann House and the broader academic world.

How did you choose the lineup of guests and events?

Some of it was interest from my side, and it was also a lot of magnetism from my research over the last few years, which has focused on the musical life in Theresienstadt, one of the big camps during the Nazi period. I also worked for Musica non grata, and that is why I’m very deep in this whole discourse on persecuted artists and artists in exile. This history, of course, brings up the question of democracy, because if you have a dictatorship, like the one during the Nazi period, you see what happens to artistic freedom. We thought about a kind of overall programme for the series, and everybody was very interested in unearthing unknown music, especially music by women composers. In Dresden we did a kind of Theresienstadt-influenced programme of opera and operetta by women. I can’t stand the fuss over the differences between opera and operetta, this idea of supposedly “highbrow” and “lowbrow” art forms; it’s music theatre, period.

Related to that, we also decided to present several works of Ernst Krenek – they will be focused in an event presented at Staatsoper Hamburg in January. He was living in exile in Los Angeles when he composed a very moving work called Pallas Athene weint (Pallas Athena Wept), which was also written during the McCarthy era in the US. Nobody knows it, but it’s fantastic! This opera actually reopened the house in Hamburg after the Second World War. It’s atonal, and presents a dystopic situation exploring the struggle between Athens and Sparta; Athens is the city of democracy and Sparta stands for dictatorship, but Sparta wins. There are these amazing correspondences which exist from that time between Krenek, Thomas Mann, and all the artists living in exile on the West Coast, all of them examining the question of the role of arts and politics. It was also during this time that German emigres were being accused of being communists. I think the history around Krenek’s work is very much tied to the ideas we’re exploring in the series.

Connecting the past & the present

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At Dresden’s Palais im Großen Garten in May as part of Opera & Democracy. Photo: Clara Becker

To what extent is this series intended to expand opera’s breadth, especially in an intercontinental sense?

This is a very important question because it highlights two key questions in the Opera & Democracy series: what can opera do for society? And, how can opera itself become a more democratic art form via the means of plurality, diversity, accessibility?. I think it’s very important to bring both sides into a dialogue, particularly with a view to the two opera systems in North America and Germany, which have massive differences. The biggest intercontinental difference is the question of funding, because in the United States, opera is privately funded, and in Germany, it’s state funded. And this is why I think North American opera sometimes  seems to be much more aware of the ideas and wishes of the audience. At the Met there is a total change in repertoire, a shift to works which are much more focused on questions of diversity and black culture and history.

For me, one of the most influential experiences so far in the series was my panel discussion with Kira Thurman, an African American musicologist teaching in Wisconsin. She wrote her last book on black opera singers in Germany. She was in our opening session at the Thomas Mann House with Alex Ross and Daniela Levy, a researcher in Los Angeles. Kira’s perspectives were certainly eye-opening for me because discussed the last 100 years of opera from a racial history perspective.

Some opera companies have started installing a wider variety of language selections for seat-back translations – what do you make of that? 

The interesting point here is that you really can learn from history. At our opera week in New York City recently, I presented the case of Paul Aron. He was a very successful contemporary composer during the wars, and then the Nazis came and he had to flee to the United States. When he came to New York City in the 1950s he founded an avant-garde opera company and he brought all of the music of the other émigrés – works which had originally been composed in German – with new English versions for American stages, because he was aware of the question of language. It is a barrier; you have to be able to understand the language to participate in the story and the plot. It’s really good to see companies installing these technologies – it’s totally in line with the history of opera.

Invest in education

Kai Hinrich Müller, Thomas Mann House, Opera & Democracy, scholar, series, Los Angeles, music, opera, performance, theatre, lecture, ideas

Kai Hinrich Mülller at the inaugural event of Opera & Democracy at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles in January 2024. Photo: Aaron Perez

To what extent does a series like this act as an educational aid?

Well I hope it helps because I’m a teacher myself; I teach professionally here in Cologne. All of my programs are built around students. They are the next generation, and they are much better-placed than I am to do this work, because, well, I’m 39 years old, I have maybe 20 or 30 years in the opera system, but these students have at least 50 more years. So it absolutely doesn’t make any sense to stop education; you have to invest in education because this is the next generation, and if we want to change the system, we have to empower young people and invite them to become part of everything in the first place.

What are you bringing back to the classroom then?

The most important point is that I open a kind of dialogue between their interests and my interests. Very often I am told things relating to casting processes, about not feeling heard in current discourses, that nobody is interested in questions of their generation. We had very intense discussions after October 7th about Israel and Gaza. Sometimes it’s important to listen and to give them the sense that, “Yes, you are welcome, give me your speech, give me your opinion; I don’t have to agree, but I think you have the right to an open and safe space for discussion” – and this is especially applicable to an opera system that is largely not democratic.

Where do unknown composers fit in with the series?

They are very important! One of my most favourite composers right now is Rosy Geiger-Kullmann. We premiered three of her operas during our New York festival. She was a very successful woman composer in Germany, then the Nazis came to power, and it’s the same story as so many others – she fled, first to New York, then to Monterey; her son Herman Geiger-Torel, went to Canada and became a very important figure in opera in Canada through the 1950s to 1970s. Rosie herself composed five big operas. It was hard to believe that we were the first person to perform excerpts from her work during the festival. The 20th century is so full of rarely-heard or played operas.

I think this is another thing I learned from the series: that we really don’t have to be afraid of bringing unknown music back to the stage. Every event in this series so far has been totally sold out. We often play unknown composers, so clearly there is openness in the audience to learning more about new music.

“Opening connections between groups of people who might not normally talk to each other”

Opera & Democracy, series, history, Kai Hinrich Müller, New York, talk, discussion, arts, opera, music, performing arts, scholarship, ideas

(L-R) Composer/conductor Carl Christian Bettendorf, composer Alyssa Regent, and choreographer Miro Magloire in a discussion at 1014 – space for ideas as part of an April event in New York for Opera & Democracy. Photo: Sarah Blesener

What sort of an approach do you take in introducing new works?

We use the opera to open the discussion. For example, in the Thomas Mann House at the launch in Los Angeles, we started with Kurt Weill’s The Yes-Sayer, which is a 30-minute opera about belonging and the power of tradition. Directly after it was when we opened the discourse, first in a panel discussion, then for the audience. My first question was, “If this is a story essentially about saying yes or no, what would you have said?” People in the audience looked at me like, “Why is he talking with us?” but then more and more people engaged, and then we had a great discussion on the question of saying yes or no to traditions, and saying yes or no to opera. In Dresden it was, I think, probably quite simple but very effective storytelling as well.

What effect do you see this series having on the opera world?

Since I started it in January, more and more people are taking notice. Opera companies will knock at my door and say, “Hey Kai, this is interesting. Maybe we can do something together? Let’s think about it.” I see more and more institutions that would love to join us in thinking about the democratic potential of the art form. I think opera is very good for opening eyes, opening emotions, opening the brain, and opening connections between groups of people who might not normally talk to each other – and that is more important than ever right now.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Top photo: Students from the Manhattan School of Music perform in April 2024 at New York’s Leo Baeck Institute as part of the Opera & Democracy series. Photo: Jamie Isaacs
close up, orchids, detail, floral

Reading List: May Flowers, Rain, Sounds, & A Memory

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On May 9, 2024

In art, Berlin, books, Canada, classical, Europe, history, music, opera, Paris, preview, programming, remembrance, writing

May traditionally brings flowers, rain, more flowers… more rain, as well as abrupt temperature shifts. Those shifts might be a good metaphor for today (May 9th), a day fraught with many things, or possibly nothing, depending on where you happen to be. The whole month feels like a deep inhale before the intense demands which come with many summer music festivals. The following reading list includes oodles of opera, bundles of Beethoven, and little bites of chewy foods for thoughts when it comes to memory, live presentation, and seelenökologie; it also includes (I hope) a little bit of room to breathe.

In a personal sense, today marks 4o days since the passing of my godfather, who experienced his first opera at the age of 87. (More on that below.)

Spring has sprung – inhale, exhale, slowly; repeat.

Live Live Live (& Read)

My review of Medea (the Cherubini version), currently being presented by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, can be found here. Soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who had been scheduled to sing the title role, was forced to cancel the remainder of her performances during the run. Italian soprano Chiara Isotton is taking over. TL;DR: See if you can; Isotton is truly great.

Médée (the Charpentier version) is currently running at Opéra de Paris (Palais Garnier), with mezzo soprano Lea Desandre receiving much acclaim for her titular performance, together with conductor William Christie and Les Arts Florissants in the pit. The production is, like Medea, directed by Sir David McVicar, and was first created for English National Opera in 2013 before receiving a staging in Geneva in 2019. The presentation marks the first time Charpentier’s opera has been presented at Opéra national de Paris since 1693. It closes on Saturday (11 May); allons-y!

An opera that made its premiere at the Opéra Garnier: Guercœur by Albéric Magnard, in 1931. The work, which has a tragic real-life backstory, is enjoying a renaissance with Opéra national du Rhin having just finished a run in Strasbourg; the Christof Loy-directed production will be subsequently be presented in Mulhouse, on the 26th and 28th of this month, with baritone Stéphane Degout in the lead. The 2024-2025 season sees another presentation of the work, by Oper Frankfurt and featuring baritone Domen Križaj; the production will be directed by David Hermann with Marie Jacquot (and later Lukas Rommelspacher) on the podium.

Among the many offerings at this year’s edition of The Dresdner Musikfestspiele is the event “Silent Voices In A Noisy World” which features the music of Amélie Nikisch (wife of conductor Arthur Nikisch) and Rachel Danziger van Embden (a student of Wagner biographer Jacques Hartog). Condensed piano versions of Nikisch’s 1911 operetta Meine Tante, deine Tante (My Aunt, Your Aunt) and Danziger van Embden’s operetta Die Dorfkomtesse (The Village Countess) from 1910 will be performed at Dresden’s Palais im Großen Garten, with arrangements, curation, and moderation by Dr. Kai Hinrich Müller, who, as I wrote last month, is spearheading a series of events this year for The Thomas Mann House connected to the formal theme of Opera & Democracy. The Dresden concert is part of this initiative, and is also part of the Musica non grata program, both which I will be writing about in more detail as part of my upcoming conversation with Müller. The interview will be posted later this month; stay tuned!

Also on Sunday: a performance from Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin at the city’s Konzerthaus featuring soprano Camilla Nylund (singing Strauss’s Four Last Songs) and led by Finnish conductor Tarno Peltokoski. In a recent exchange with Helge Berkelbach at Concerti, Peltokoski discusses his debut album with Deutsche Grammophon (Mozart symphonies), his passion for Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and the importance of clarity over emotions when standing before an orchestra: “Wenn ich beim Dirigieren von Wagner in meinen Wagner-Gefühlen schwimme, macht das überhaupt keinen Sinn. Ich meine, das Orchester wüsste nicht, was es tun soll, und das Publikum hätte auch keine Freude daran.” (“If I’m swimming in my Wagnerian feelings when I conduct Wagner, it makes no sense at all. I think the orchestra wouldn’t know what to do and the audience wouldn’t enjoy it either.”) Peltokoski’s responses belie his youth (he turned 24 last month), and I am curious to follow him on what may well be a very interesting journey involving Wagner, Strauss, and… ? We shall see.

Speaking of Wagner journeys: Wagner In Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024) has recently been released and it is a delectable slow read. Divided into clear themes (places, people, performances, politics), the book, edited by Cambridge Professor David Trippett, offers an assortment of thoughtful takes on varied aspects of the composer’s work and his impact on modern classical culture. Featuring essays from a wide range of contributors – including Barry Millington, Mark Berry, Katharine Ellis, Leon Botstein, and Gundula Kreutzer (whose  book Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera has been on my wish list since its release in 2018) – this is a book which quietly demands slow digestion. I hope to speak with Trippett in the coming weeks about the book and Wagner’s enduring socio-cultural footprint; stay tuned.

Progressive…ish?

Bode-Museum, Berlin, statue, sculpture, man, woman, assault

Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission. (Collection Bode-Museum, Berlin)

In the new and not-so-new realm: a recent article published at The Stage provides food for thought on serious issues which reach well past the immediate British opera landscape. Quoting analyses released in March by Arts Council England, writer Katie Chambers includes thoughts from a variety of figures including Opera North general director and chief executive Laura Canning, Musicians’ Union general secretary Naomi Pohl, and stage director Adele Thomas, who offers a valuable insight: “The critical response to the way that any feminist interpretation gets greeted with has forced [opera] to give us a flatter representation of what women are.”

At a time when many houses engage in self-congratulatory gestures on what they perceive as a wonderful form of progressivism (the examples are really not difficult to find), it’s interesting to note how many tow a traditional line at heart, particularly in the years since the worst of the covid pandemic. Approaches promoted as “progressive” often employ straight-male gaze wrapped in the coat of creative inquiry (italics mine); question it and you are deemed stupid or uptight, or (gasp) woke. I’m not sure what will change within industry except for the way productions are dressed (more accurately, undressed) via publicity teams and traditional media, an element Thomas rightly acknowledges: 

We are at the tail end of a generation of opera critics who don’t question how much of their opinions are internalised misogyny rather than a genuine reaction to what is in front of them. No criticism to them – it wasn’t what they were asked to do at the time of learning their trade. But it has to change. (“Opera in crisis: leaders warn sector issues go beyond funding woes” The Stage, 7 May 2024)

I hope to speak with various critics in the future about this issue, and explore their ideas on risk and live presentation; it would be good to have their takes on the role of criticism in 2024. I want to have faith that there’s value in its continued practice –even as arts criticism quickly vanishes, everywhere – so again: stay tuned.

“Freude, schöner Götterfunken!”

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Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.

Speaking of expressions of faith: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony celebrated the 200th anniversary of its premiere on 7 May 1824. An assortment of German music publishers posted fascinating histories, including photos of the original score. The birthday of the symphony has also inspired various documentaries – one by German broadcaster DW (in English), and another by Canadian filmmaker Larry Weinstein (Beethoven’s Nine: Ode To Humanity), recently screened at the Toronto-based Hot Docs film festival. A recreation of the first concert in which the Ninth Symphony was performed took place in Wuppertal (with period instruments), and there are more concerts on the horizon including performances by Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in London and Paris, with a performance of the Ninth Symphony on the 29th of this month at St Martin-in-the-Fields, where they’ll be joined by the Monteverdi Choir & Chorus.

Amongst the many essays and articles which have appeared recently is one from Gramophone magazine (“Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: the greatest recordings“, Richard Osborne, 7 May) outlining important aspects of the work, including Schiller’s famous text, and (hurrah) giving equal attention to all four of its movements. Osborne examines interpretations of the symphony by a range of conductors including Otto Klemperer, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Wilhelm Furtwängler, and includes concomitant sound clips for each. Like many articles, Osborne also mentions Leonard Bernstein famously replacing the word “freedom” (Freiheit) for “joy” (Freude) in Friedrich Schiller’s text at a concert in Berlin in late 1989, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whether or not one agrees with that replacement, Bernstein’s gesture was entirely in keeping with the mood of the times, a symbol of the way in which the work has been presented throughout various epochs.

Conductor Vladimir Jurowski references Bernstein  in a recent written feature for BR Klassik, exploring the work’s links to historic events as well as personal memories, some of which are tied, quite touchingly, to portions of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He also shares his thoughts on initially tackling Beethoven’s Ninth as an artist (“der Mythos um diese Symphonie herum kann einen auch erzittern lassen” – “the myth surrounding this symphony can also make you tremble”) and his decision to program the works of 20th and 21st century composers prior and sometimes even between movements. This approach to such a famous work brings to mind something he said to Hamburger Abendblatt journalist Joachim Mischke (in a podcast from earlier this month) about “Ökologie des akustischen Raums und seine emotionale und geistige Wirkung auf auf die Menschen” (“the ecology of acoustic space and its emotional and spiritual impact on people”). The idea of “seelenökologie” (soul ecology), especially within programming and live presentation in 2024, is one well worth considering, because of course it requires embracing experiences which move past the expected pushing of little emotional buttons – an experience that might be uncomfortable to some.

The first symphony concert I ever attended was a performance of a Beethoven’s Fifth led by Sir Andrew Davis. Roughly a decade after that, I experienced my very first live Beethoven’s Ninth, and by that point, I had formed opinions on how things should sound, and which emotional buttons I expected to be pushed. The performance happened to coincide with the night of my high school prom, but being a perennial outsider, I had no one to go with and I wasn’t too terribly interested anyway (or at least I told myself that at the time). Aside from the discomfort of a heavy velvet dress unsuited to a warm June evening, the most powerful memory from that time is of my hot teenaged fury at the tempos taken through a good portion of the performance; they were faster than what I was expecting, and they came as a total shock. How dare the orchestra not push my little emotional buttons! The whole experience was highly uncomfortable… but: my hate eventually withered and bloomed into real appreciation, dare I say love of this approach, though it took study, maturity, patience. Thank goodness for the local library in aiding with the bloom.

Big Reach

My first formal job, in fact, was at a library –retrieving, sorting, and reshelving books. Library services have expanded considerably since then, but essential purposes remain: the exercise of curiosity, and easy access to the results of that exercise. Cue those elements within a classical-viewing context now, thanks to a partnership between broadcaster Medici TV (who specialize in classical content and stream more than 150 live events annually) and Hoopla (an online borrowing system not dissimilar to Kanopy). Medici’s collection is now accessible to libraries in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. You just need a library card – and yes, the medici.tv/hoopla borrowing system works in Canada.

Another form of easy access comes courtesy of Wigmore Hall in London, which has a long history of presenting livestream broadcasts. Soprano Ermonela Jaho is set to perform live from Wigmore Hall on May 23rd as part of Opera Rara’s second ‘Donizetti & Friends‘ recital. Jaho, who is Artist Ambassador for the organization (dedicated to presenting little-heard operatic works from the 19th and 20th centuries), will be joined by its Artistic Director, conductor Carlo Rizzi, and his brother, violinist Marco Rizzi. The concert will be livestreamed on Opera Rara’s Youtube Channel and will be available for viewing for 30 days.

Space & Time

Speaking of viewing: the work of Alexander Calder is enjoying a special exhibition in Switzerland. Calder: Sculpting Time includes over thirty works which were made between 1930 and 1960 and explores what host MASI Lugano calls “the fourth dimension of time into art with his legendary mobiles.” Many of the pieces on display include items from the artist’s Constellations series, which he began in 1943. Calder won the grand prize for sculpture at the 1952 Venice Biennale and went on to be awarded the Legion of Honor in France and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the US; he worked across a variety of media, creating not only sculpture and mobiles but set and costumes designs, jewelry, and immense public installations. The MASI show seems a little more intimate, but the imagery at the website also conveys Calder’s signature knack for spatial integration: the epic and the intimate; the intellectual and the sensuous. There is a certain joy (Schiller’s Freude, maybe) in all of it, and particularly through the live experience.

woman, man, opera, performing arts, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce.

Referencing that live experience, and as promised: my godfather enjoyed his very first opera just after his 87th birthday. He passed away at the end of March. Lately I’ve been thinking back on our times together, that 2017 visit to the opera very much included. Those who knew about our connection (and that opera visit) have asked me what we saw (Tosca) and more specifically what he thought of it all (he liked but didn’t love it, though did express interest in German-language works, specifically Die Fledermaus). He was mostly happy to finally be experiencing the thing my mother (with whom he had been very close) possessed such a passion for, and he was grateful for my initiative in taking him.

At his passing my godfather had been in Canada for seven decades but he never forgot his Swiss roots, and made a point of playing folk music (complete with yodels) on his stereo system during our visits. “It isn’t opera,” he would say, sipping brandy, “but it’s a little bit of home.”

Top photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.
André Barbe, Renaud Doucet, designer, director, dramaturg, opera, production, artists, performing arts, culture

Barbe & Doucet: “Opera Is Entirely About Collaboration”

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On April 27, 2024

In Canada, classical, Europe, interviews, music, opera, production, theatre

“Powerhouse” is a term often used within the opera world, applicable to the artists performing on the stage as to much as to those creating off of it. In the case of André Barbe and Renaud Doucet, the term not only multiplies but broadens considerably. The creators of over forty new opera productions,  the busy duo (and real-life couple) meticulously plan, design, direct, dramaturg, and offer their own precise, all-encompassing vision for works from French, Italian, German operatic and operetta repertoires. Their highly imaginative if deeply studious approach over the past two-plus decades has won them critical praise as well as legions of international fans.

Director and choreographer Renaud Doucet and set and costume designer André Barbe began their creative journeys in Quebec in the worlds of theatre, opera, dance, and television, before becoming a formal brand (‘Barbe and Doucet’) in 2000 and working as a team. Puccini, Rossini, Mozart, Massenet, Donizetti, Debussy, Offenbach, Berlioz, Bizet, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, and Dvořák – all composers whose works have enjoyed the Barbe and Doucet treatment, with stagings across famed houses including Staatsoper Hamburg, Opera de Toulouse, l’Opéra National du Rhin, l’Opéra de Marseille, Teatro La Fenice (Venice), Teatro Regio di Parma, Oper Köln, Volksoper Wien, Kungliga Operan (Stockholm), Opera Philadelphia, Seattle Opera, Vancouver Opera, and L’Opéra de Montréal, to name a few. In 2013 Barbe and Doucet staged critically-acclaimed production of Wagner’s first opera, Die Feen (The Faeries), for Oper Leipzig, a co-production with the Bayreuther Festspiel, marking the composer’s 200th birthday. Their colourful 2018 production of Saverio Mercadante’s Il Bravo for Wexford Festival Opera went on to win The Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Opera Production.

What’s especially notable about Barbe and Doucet is their ability to combine what might be termed the fun and the smart; their presentations  offer a very complete vision of a very specific, occasionally identifiable world, or more often, multiple worlds. One’s imagination is engaged, often delighted, together with intellect; there is a seamless dance at work, and one barely notices until later contemplations – a head tilt; a bend of the collar; a slight pause between words. Nothing in the world of Barbe and Doucet is accidental. Both Die Feen and Il Bravo played with various levels of reality and perception, utilizing metadramatic situations and time shifts to highlight subtexts within respective librettos and scores, resulting in thoughtful if highly entertaining avenues of entry for newcomers. That instinct is especially noticeable in their 2019 production of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) for Glyndebourne Festival Opera wherein the historical figure of hotelier Anna Sacher was used as a foundation for a fascinating exploration of family, opportunity, independence, and intergenerational rifts – elements that were brought out with a zesty mix of whimsy and intelligence.

Those elements are equally noticeable in their 2014 staging of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale currently running now through May 18th in Toronto. First staged by Scottish Opera and presented earlier this year by Vancouver Opera, the presentation marks the duo’s company debut with the Canadian Opera Company (COC). The action of Donizetti’s 1843 opera is here presented in a vibrant and colourful 1960s Rome complete with leopard prints, a bold colour palette, and big bouffant hairdos. Pasquale runs a shabby terracotta-toned pensione overstuffed with knick-knacks, including a litany of lime-green, feline-shaped tchotchkes; the title character, in Barbe and Doucet’s staging, loves cats but can’t have any owing to pesky allergies. The opera’s plot-rich story – involving comical machinations by others who hope to gain control of his fortune – is presented with humour, pathos, and even tenderness, its designs a thoughtful reflection of Pasquale’s wartime-influenced ideas of abundance, and the inevitable ways those ideas bump up against a rapidly changing world.

Money was the very thing that opened our recent exchange, which took place in the pair’s dressing room a few days prior to Pasquale‘s official COC opening.

Misha Kiria, Don Pasquale, Canadian Opera Company, Donizetti, COC, opera, performance, Barbe, Doucet, Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, music, live, ensemble, Simone Osborne

Misha Kiria as Don Pasquale (sitting) and Simone Osborne as Norina in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Don Pasquale, 2024. Photo: Michael Cooper

Do budget cuts to opera mean changes to your work?

RD No it’s not that – companies will just cut new productions. There’s fewer of them that will actually be done.

AB When you look at big companies, it’s not that their budgets were always so enormous; it’s just that they had, and often do have, their own workshops. They can do their own thing. The companies have the manpower, yes, but it’s the supplies that have gone up: the price of lumber, the heating costs, the electricity costs; the war in Ukraine is a factor as well.

RD My first concern for the two of us is that we are working for the audience; we are working to reach an audience and making sure that when they leave the theatre they want to come back. I’m not not working for five critics; I’m not working for egos. When you have a theatre where the public come, where people are happy and they want to come back, this is the best publicity. But we’ve been through years of seeing performances where there were just 40 people in the audience, and oh my God, it was so fantastic – of course the opposite is also nice! When we did Die Feen in Leipzig – we were asked to do this production as a gift for Richard Wagner’s 200th anniversary; it was co-produced with Bayreuth – they said, “You know guys don’t be afraid and don’t be worried if there’s nobody.” And so we said, “Okay, well, we’ll do our best.” They were so surprised because the show wound up selling incredibly well – it was very popular. The same thing happened when we had shows in Hamburg – our shows there tend to sell out. There’s a reason for that.

Which is… ?

RD We work for the audience. This is the most important thing. It’s not so much about money as it is about time – people who dedicate themselves to what they do. The decision makers of the art form very often do not have a clue what the art form is about; boards don’t have a real clue about what we do; politicians certainly don’t have a clue about what we do and they never have. Companies hire most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time, people who are sometimes good with numbers and technology, but those are… objects. It’s about the audience.

Tall Poppies?

Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, auditorium, orchestra pit, stage, seating, opera house, Diamond Schmitt, tiers, COC, Canadian Opera Company

The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. Photo: Lucia Graca

Why did it take so long for you to work with the Canadian Opera Company – especially since you’re Canadian?

RD I think a lot of people in the opera business do not know where to put us; we do not fit in a box.

AB Also we don’t live in Montreal now, and really, we’re not very social people. We are not the type of people who go spend their days schmoozing and trying to seduce. We’re mostly two like those two grumpy old guys (Statler and Waldorf) on The Muppet Show. Really, we are just two grumpy old guys who just want to do one thing: work.

RD Put me in a studio with singers; put André working on designs. We are both people who love to work. And we can be difficult people as well because we don’t take crap. Absolutely not.

So maybe a little bit of Tall Poppy Syndrome?

RD Yes, maybe. There is definitely a lot of that kind of thing in the opera world. I think also… I love something Speight Jenkins at Seattle Opera told us when we worked on Turandot: “For years I never wanted to hire you because everybody was telling me how problematic you are – you are not problematic, but you show instantly what the problems are and people who can and cannot solve them.” The issue – and he said this also – is that we need to work with people who know what they do well and are confident, which is why we work with the same companies, like Staatsoper Hamburg, for example Then there are companies who look at us like, “Oh my God, there are the two monsters.” But if I don’t direct things in a specific way people will say they cannot understand, so I’d rather be clear. When I create a new production that I create a (staging) score indicating every entrance, every intention, all the light cues, the exact placement of props – I give companies this information more than one year in advance, and they look at me and they say, “No, that can never happen with so many people.” And then they discover that, “Yes it can.” When we did a new Cenerentola at the Latvian National Opera, the company made a copy of our score for their National Library and said at the time, “We had never seen anything like this.”

AB We’re not doing all this for ourselves; everything we do, we do for the sake of the show.

RD If a singer arrives extremely prepared, there’s not going to be any improvisation because when the staging is known, it’s known. Sometimes colleagues will arrive at a house for rehearsals and say, “Okay, we’re doing this new production, let’s improvise and see what I want to take out of it.” If it works for them, that’s fine and bravo, but we’re not like this.

AB Every detail you see onstage has been discussed at home, every costume; every movement. We talk a lot about it beforehand.

RD Also we are hired to have a point of view on the production – mostly in Europe, that’s what they tell us: “If you do The Magic Flute, you have to have a point of view.” When we did it at Glyndebourne – Sebastian Schwarz was the Artistic Director at the time – we asked, “What do you want to do?” Because we’ve been asked many times to do this opera, and we always said no. We couldn’t say no to Glyndebourne of course, but we said, “What do you expect?” He said, “I would like to create a production where the grandparents come with their grandchildren and build memories.” Well, that’s a good start, isn’t it?

That production, with its references to Anna Sacher, Rosa Lewis, and the exclusive world of chefs, was staged in the early 20th century but felt incredibly current.

RD Well as you know from when we spoke about it before, some aspects of its score are problematic. When they asked us to do it, I said “Oh God, we’re going to have to deal with these things” and then they were telling us. “You know if you want to change the text or cut it out…” and I said no way, I would never dare to cut the text; I need to find solutions, not compromise. And this is a thing in this business which happens too often; that kind of compromise is a point when everybody loses. You give up a little, you give up a little more; we give up a little, then even more. That kind of compromise is not a good solution. We need to find creative solutions that work best within the parameters. And so we did.

AB Something similar happened when we worked with Scottish Opera. The budget was small, there were difficulties, and we offered the director, Alex Reedijk, the idea to build the costumes in Budapest, because we knew a shop over there that would save on costs. And he said, “No – the funding for this is from Scotland; I need to provide workers with jobs.” So again, we needed to find solutions within the existing parameters. We understood what was needed to build the production and we worked to make it happen.

RD He was, and still is, there to serve the people of Scotland – he knows that when the money is coming from the government, he needs to give jobs back to the people. It was a parameter that made me so willing to find solutions with them. It’s the teamwork that is so important. Opera is entirely about collaboration. We need to work together.

Precision & Freedom

André Barbe, Renaud Doucet, designer, director, dramaturg, opera, production, artists, performing arts, culture

Photo via IMG Artists

Is this why you place such importance on the rehearsal time?

RD Yes. When I work with (conductor) Jacques (Lacombe) it’s so fun; he’ll be the one giving the notes on the staging and I’ll be giving the musical notes. There’s a feeling we’re all working together.That’s why it’s very frustrating when you arrive in some rehearsals on the first day and you learn a singer has decided that they will come in three days or whatever, and releases are given to them. Some companies say, “Well, they know the role; they sang it before.” Yes, they know the music, but they don’t know the staging or maybe even the actual stage; they don’t know the intentions; they don’t know this exact world, in all senses. And you need to know these things in order to feel them.

We were doing Cenerentola in Toulouse (2024) and one of the singers had seen our staging of La bohème (2022) – she saw how precisely we were working, how every little thing is so detailed, and she said, “Oh my God, now I understand the amount of work that Bohème took! It looked so easy, so flawless” – but that’s the whole point, you work in rehearsals so that everything seems effortless. We rehearse breath, body, even a little movement of the finger – everything. So when that singer then arrives in front of the orchestra in the house they don’t have to worry about the staging because it is within their body, their muscle memory – they know precisely what to do, and they can concentrate on the music and on the conductor. They need to feel confident in the people around them, confident in the staging, confident in the maestro, confident in the monitors, confident in their dressers; confident that they can do their job to the best of their abilities.

Do you sense a sharpening divide in understandings with regards to the role theatre in opera presentation?

RD We have a problem now because many companies don’t want to hire opera directors; they want people from film, from television, from circus presentations. They don’t want to hire a real set designer who designs and knows about sets for the actual theatre either; they want to hire artists who don’t know about things like vanishing lines or scale. That’s okay if you want to try something new once in a while, but it’s a problem if you only rely on people who don’t know and understand theatre, and don’t read music and work mostly in film. When I’m staging a show, I read the orchestra score, I look at where the clarinet is placed, because then what is the sound compared to the voice? What is happening here? Then what is the space in which we hear this? We have four people here in this particular set piece so what is that about with this particular passage of music? Then you need to think, “Okay monitor here, monitor there” and “Be careful on this line, the soprano needs to take a support here” and “How do I bring her to do this difficult passage in the best condition?” and “How do I motivate that singer dramatically so that she doesn’t have to think about the special effect?” The thing I say to every singer, and I ask them not to crucify me before the end of my sentence, is, opera music does not exist in the production; you create the music. The music comes from you. I’m not sure all film directors understand this.

So would you say a more theatrical approach is needed now?

RD Yes. Singers will say, “Oh, here I’m singing legato here, and there I’m singing another way; that way it all gives a good effect.” And I say, think in terms of cause: what is the dramatic cause that creates the effect? And if you think in terms of cause and in terms of character, the effect comes naturally. That’s theatre. You can create specific sounds that creates specific emotions, but you take a point of view. Then after, you know, people like it or do not like it. It’s like food; I don’t want anybody to say it was not well cooked; you can say it’s not to your taste, but you can still know it’s been done well.

The Subtle Art Of Being Funny

Misha Kiria, Don Pasquale, Canadian Opera Company, Donizetti, COC, opera, performance, Barbe, Doucet, Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, music, live, ensemble, Simone Osborne

Simone Osborne as Norina and Misha Kiria as Don Pasquale in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Don Pasquale, 2024. Photo: Michael Cooper

So how does your approach differ between operas like Don Pasquale and Pelléas et Mélisande, for instance – is it always the same process?

AB It’s always the same. Whatever the piece is we need to give it our full dedication – and comedies are sometimes much more difficult than drama; they demand an even greater level of precision.

RD Always be serious in comedy. Always. Some people arrive to rehearsals and say, “Oh, I’m playing a comedy so I’ll be funny now” And you know what? That’s not funny! You just have to be very sincere. And if you’re very true to the text and very sincere, the comic situation will happen by itself. To be sincere on stage means to be open, and that is difficult – it’s scary, but opening yourself is much easier if you can use a mask. When you have to be sincere in things like Pasquale, it’s very different, because there are moments where it’s really dramatic.

I’ve always felt Don Pasquale was this look into the lives of these four rather awful but very familiar people… 

RD I don’t think they’re awful; I think they’re lovable!

Really?

RD For me it’s a conflict of generations; I think they don’t understand each other. The first thing I said to our Norina here (Simone Osborne) in rehearsals was, “Don’t be a bitch – you are not that; you have a goal and yes, things happen, but you need to know why they happen.”

So would you call it an opera buffa?

RD No, it’s not an opera buffa – Donizetti wrote it as a dramma giocoso; it’s written in the original score. There are some moments where you go, “Oh sh*t!” as well – it can be quite dramatic, and the people are sincere and lovable. You can understand, sometimes, why they do things and why sometimes they regret having done those things.

AB Also, you know, when you’re young and you see old people and you say,”Oh, they don’t understand anything.” And when you become old and you see young people and you say, “Oh, that’s not the way it used to be in my good old days” – this is something everybody experiences.

RD We all have an uncle who’s a Don Pasquale. He’s supposed to be a wealthy guy, but there’s different ways of being wealthy. What does it mean to have worth? To be rich? We set our production in Rome in the early 1960s and imagined that Pasquale (Misha Kiria) probably made money during WW2 on the black market. And he bought this little pensione and along the way got these odd jobs for people – the porter who was one of his friends; for the cook; for the maid – and they’ve been together for roughly 30 years. As a background story we also imagined that Pasquale is absolutely in love with cats – as you know there are cats everywhere in Rome – but he’s allergic to them, so this is why Dr. Malatesta (Joshua Hopkins) comes to treat him, although Pasquale is also a hoarder.

Misha Kiria, Don Pasquale, Canadian Opera Company, Donizetti, COC, opera, performance, Barbe, Doucet, Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, music, live

Misha Kiria as Don Pasquale in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Don Pasquale, 2024. Photo: Michael Cooper

That’s a very clever subversion of the old “old single lady cat lady” cliché…

RD Yes, Pasquale is the cat gentleman! He’s also a hoarder, and he has money, but you’d never know from the way he lives. So when Sofronia spends his money, he’s panicking because she changed the furniture – but of course she did. What is actually really terrible for him is the change, that he’s being forced to break out of his old habits.

AB He’s an old guy and he wants to be in front of his TV, drinking coffee, and looking through his old issues of Cat Fancy magazine; he’s very happy that way. He likes the familiar comforts, it’s the familiarity, the predictability. But that’s what’s funny about this – we love to be in bed by nine o’clock too!

Early nights are wonderful… 

RD They are wonderful. I’m not going to blame Pasquale, really – I don’t need anyone to come and change my habits either.

AB As I said, we’re the old guys from The Muppets!

Top photo via IMG Artists
Louis Langrée, conductor, France, Paris, Opéra Comique, director, opera, classical

Louis Langrée’s “Larger View” At Opéra Comique

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On March 4, 2024

In classical, Europe, history, interviews, music, opera, preview, programming, Stravinsky, theatre

Most people know Opéra Comique in connection with Carmen, but there’s so much more to the famed Paris house than Bizet’s famous opera. Conductor and General Director Louis Langrée is clearly in love with the “jewel of a theatre” that has hosted premieres by a who’s-who of French classical greats, including Debussy, Delibes, Massenet, Méhul, Offenbach, Poulenc, Lalo, Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Thomas, as well as Italian Gaetano Donizetti; the theatre also hosted the French premiere of Puccini’s Tosca in 1903.

Appointed director of the Opéra Comique in November 2021 by President Emmanuel Macron, Langrée came with ideas – lots of them – though it’s clear he also possesses a wider awareness of the practicalities required to bring them to fruition. Langrée’s name is known on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to his work in New York and Cincinnati as well as his native France. Beginning his studies at Strasbourg Conservatory, Langrée went on to becoming vocal coach and assistant at the Opéra National de Lyon in the mid 1980s. From there he worked as assistant conductor at Aix-en-Provence Festival and music director with Glyndebourne Touring Opera. He made his North American debut at the Spoleto Festival in 1991. But it was his time in New York that so many North Americans may know him for, as Music Director of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Centre, a position he began in 2003 and would hold for the next two decades. In 2011 led the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) for the first time in a guest capacity; he became its Music Director in 2013. He’ll be concluding his time there at the end of this season.

An award-winning discography comes naturally with so many varied experiences. It includes work with the Camerata Salzburg, l’Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon, Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège, and Baroque ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée, covering an array of composers (Liszt, Franck, Chausson, Ravel, Schulhoff, Mozart, Weber, Rossini). In Cincinnati  Langrée has recorded commissions by Sebastian Currier, Thierry Escaich, and Zhou Tian. The 2020 recording Transatlantic (Fanfare Cincinnati) with the CSO illustrates what could be an artistic ethos for the conductor in its intelligent transcending of borders and strict definitions. Langrée’s third album with the orchestra features shimmering, gorgeously vibrant readings of Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (1938-1940), the original 1922 version of Varèse’s Amériques, and the world premiere recording of original unabridged version of Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Music writer Jari Kallio wrote at its release that “Be it the ravishing colours, the ever-enchanting melodies or those uplifting rhythms, these performances of American in Paris are nothing short of an epiphany” and called the Grammy-nominated album “one of the most important releases of the year.” Yet opera isn’t a side-job for Langrée, but close to a raison d’être; the conductor has been involved in numerous opera productions across Europe – at the Wiener Staatsoper, Teatro Alla Scala (Milan), Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Opéra national de Paris, as well as the Glyndebourne and Aix, and The Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he has led stagings of Iphigenia in Tauris, Dialogues of the Carmelites, Carmen and Hamlet, one of his favorite works.

Notably open about the siloed nature of conducting and the classical world in general, the Alsatian artist made it clear in a recent conversation that his administrative demands have actually strengthened his artistic output. Notes, phrasing, orchestration – any conductor can talk about those things; Langrée is just as interested in pondering resources, labour costs, world realities. The role of education is just as paramount, and the conductor is keen to strengthen and expand the connection between artistic institutions and learning for young people who may have only cliched ideas about the opera. Offering tantalizing morsels relating to a new work (an intriguing-sounding multilingual commission), Langrée enthused on his more immediate project, the upcoming double-bill of Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, which opens at Opéra Comique on March 9th.

The pairing feels like a highly symbolic choice for an artist who seems perfectly at ease with his audience, whether near or far. We began by discussing why he chose these works, and what French actor/director/writer Guillaume Gallienne brings to the stage of the Opéra Comique.

Why pair L’Heure Espagnole and Pulcinella as one programme?

There’s an amazing repertoire of works which were commissioned and premiered by the Opéra Comique, of course the most famous is Carmen, but there’s also Pelléas et Melisande (1902), La voix humaine (1959), Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947), Les Contes d’Hoffmann (1881), La damnation de Faust (1846), Manon (1884), Cendrillon (1899), Lakmé (1883), all of them were premiered here, along with L’Heure Espagnole (1911). Pulcinella was not premiered at Opéra Comique and it isn’t an opera but a ballet. L’Heure Espagnole is short, it’s one-act opera, or as Ravel said, a comédie-musicale; at the time it was premiered, it was paired with Thérèse from Massenet, which is a very moral story in which a lady abandons her lover to go to the guillotine with her husband. It could have been possible to show the contrast between the two pieces, but generally L’Heure Espagnole is presented with Ravel’s other operatic work, L’enfant et les sortilèges. They are two lyrical pieces that Ravel wrote but they have nothing to do with each other.

So I wondered, what could we present? I thought of an evening with contrasting subjects and arts; when you come to the foyer of the house here, you see les quartiers allégories (the four allegories) de Opéra Comique: la comédie, le chant, la musique, et le ballet (play-acting, singing, music, ballet). I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose ballet and opera. But which subjects? With these two works we have two contrasting subjects: Pulcinella is this man who is so attractive, an irresistible sex symbol for women, and the woman in L’Heure Espagnole can’t be satisfied by any of her men.

What’s the connection in terms of musical language?

It’s a case of contrasts. Stravinsky said he had an epiphany in discovering the music of Pergolesi, it was a way for him to go further; with Ravel, we have the sound of his beginning with L’Heure Espagnole. It is just amazing, these sounds that mix music and effects: a metronome, the sound of a rooster crowing, the soldier, with sounds that are very militaristic. The orchestration Stravinsky uses in Pulcinella, however, is like black-and-white: there is no clarinet, for instance, or any kind of a sound that might give some shimmering effect. It’s oboes, horns, trumpets, trombones, this concerto grosso-type orchestration with soloists and the tutti, whereas L’Heure Espagnole is much closer to The Nightingale or The Firebird in terms of its orchestration.

Does this reflect the connection between composers?

Ravel and Stravinsky were friends – they met at the premiere of The Firebird. Diaghilev had asked them to orchestrate bits of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. They were using “vous” and not “tu”, but then they began letter-writing, and would open with “mon vieux” or ‘you old guy’ – it was a term of affection. (Conductor) Manuel Rosenthal told this story that on the day Ravel died (December 28, 1937) Rosenthal was conducting L’Enfant Sortileges; at the end of the evening he saw Stravinsky looking really upset, because he had lost his friend. Stravinsky went to Ravel’s funeral along with Poulenc and Milhaud – there were not many people, but Stravinsky was there.

How did Guillaume Gallienne become part of this project?

Guillaume is an immense French actor, stage director, and film director. I don’t know if you saw his film, Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table – it was so successful in France and rightly so. He has his own language, his own world, and he knows how to transmit it. He’s also gifted in how he inspires singers. The characters in both pieces here are not romantic, but they do want to be loved. Even the muscle-man in L’Heure – one is touched by his naivete. You need to accept them for what they are. It’s very difficult for singers with these works because normally they want to interpret a personage, to incarnate a person as a person, but there is none of that here, otherwise it would become a cheap piece. It’s amazing to see how Guillaume works, with his precision. Funny, because Stravinsky called Ravel “l’horloger suisse” (the Swiss watchmaker) there is this perfection in the details, as Ravel was fascinated by mechanical objects. With his opera, you don’t need to incarnate a person, you just have to sing and allow yourself to be placed in situations which are nonsense, a nonsense that makes you laugh, cry, smile, think, feel – that’s something special. Guillaume understands this perfectly. Every rehearsal with him is a masterclass.

What’s it like to return to Paris and lead a theatre so rich in cultural history?

I have a double life, the life of a conductor and life of a General Manager. When you’re in the pit, you don’t think, “My God, this place!” or “So much history!” but rather, “I should not take this phrase too fast” or “I should help the singer move on here.” You’re with very practical things. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, then you’re not doing your job.

What kind of responsibility do you feel to that history in terms of programming?

I do feel the DNA of this theatre, and everything that comes with presenting both new productions as well as works that everybody knows. You can have traditional houses, or houses where there is innovation, experimentation, trying to find new ways to do things, and generally the two are opposed, but actually the tradition of the Opéra Comique – our history – is to create, to innovate, to experiment. So even with old pieces like Pulcinella and L’Heure, juxtaposing an opera, comédie-musicale, and a ballet is a very unusual thing, but it is also symbolic of my mission. And of course we are going to continue to premiere new pieces, to give world premieres, to give Paris premieres also. But it’s one thing to create and to do the world premiere, and another to be confronted with different audiences, and have the work be interpreted by different singers, directors, conductors, orchestras.

Where do you see Opéra Comique being part of the ecosystem in the post-pandemic landscape then?

Today in the new economic situation we must have corporate users, which means that when you present a piece, either a new production or a new work, you have to find partners. For instance, after Paris L’Heure/Pulcinella is going to Dijon. When L’Autre Voyage opened here earlier this year, there were several festivals and opera managers and house directors who came to see it, and of course we hope that the piece will be presented in different places. We have also commissioned works with various outlets in Germany – and those commissions take into account traditions the Opéra Comique have always embraced in terms of languages. Gluck composed Orfeo ed Euridice in an Italian version (1762) and a French version (1774); Cherubini’s Medée had multiple translations from the French into German and Italian. So we are planning to do a new work with Matthias Pintscher now, in both German and French.

Also, and this is quite important, and maybe the main reason I wanted to come and lead the Opéra Comique, is the production and the transmission sides. We have the Maîtrise Populaire, which involves young people from 8 to 25 years old, they have part of a scholarship, morning is general studies and afternoon is for dance, singing, staging, acting. Many of these kids come from places in the suburbs of Paris where there is absolutely no contact with opera at all. Their dream might only be to become a soccer star, not an opera singer or any kind of an artist, and through this program they discover a new world – and it changes their lives. They learn that when you sing together, you must have concentration and discipline; you have to know that your partner counts on you and you can count on them, and that’s something wonderful. We are a theatre nationale, de la republique, so this is all part of our message: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Where does this mandate toward education and development fit within your greater vision?

I arrived at an age where I feel that I must transit, I must help the new generation, I must pass the baton, and develop the image and the identity of this house and its public perception. This title, “opéra comique”, what does the “comique” part mean? People think it means operetta, but no, it’s from the same etymology as “comédie” or speaking; in opera you sing, in comedy you speak. It’s much clearer in German: “singspiel”. Opera, as an art form in the old sense, was a representation of royal power, onstage; at Opéra Comique it is the opposite, it’s the representation of ourselves as ourselves…

“Volksoper”…

Genau! That’s why The Magic Flute is a singspiel, it’s an opéra comique! And Carmen is not a princess, Manon is not a princess, Melisande – well, we don’t really know…

Your quote to the New York Times last year comes to mind:“When you have to read these Excel things and have to balance budgets and work with subsidies from the government — now, I feel like I’ve been plunged into real life. And that’s hard” – but from what you’ve said it seems as if these real-life details have made you a better artist.

Absolutely. I realize now as a conductor I was really in a silo. I used to feel an opera was the score, the dream of the composer together with voices and visuals – but now that I’m the General Manager of the house, there are so many things to think about: props, stagehands, electricians, costume designers, seamstresses. You have a larger view of the entire thing. And that awareness makes you think differently.

To what extent does that translate to your audiences?

What matters now is to understand the importance and role of philanthropy and sponsorship in relation to audiences – something I learned in the US – which is developing in its own way very quickly here in France and all of Europe. It’s especially relevant with inflation and the raising of electricity rates, in building sets and understanding raised wood prices because of the war in Ukraine. You can’t ignore all of that. And of course being on a constant budget, when you have inflation, you’re hyper-aware of salaries too. So what is reduced is the production budget, which is quite difficult, therefore we need to continue searching in terms of partners, corporate users, sponsors, philanthropists, and doing so with a lot of determination and energy.

So that’s where creativity comes in?

Entirely. I mean, a set that costs ten times more will not necessarily be ten times better. The realities force us to be imaginative. In terms of programming, there are at least three other houses in Paris – Châtelet, Champs-Elysées, Opéra national de Paris – and it wouldn’t make sense if we presented Tosca here, even though that opera did premiere in France at the Opéra Comique, and that’s only because the General Director at the time was a friend of Puccini’s. But when we present Carmen here,  for instance, we present it with the dialogues, not the recits. We’ll do the same for various presentations next season. That way we don’t compete with other houses. Also a small theatre is a great advantage; there’s an intimacy here, you can whisper and have it be heard, it gives a different relationship to the stage and the music. I remember conducting Hamlet (in 2o22) and (soprano) Sabine Devieilhe was whispering during parts of the mad aria – you could hear every word. It was incredible.

Is it right to say that intimacy is part of the Opéra Comique brand?

Yes, this place is a hidden gem. My office here, the office of the General Director, is close to everything. It’s often the case that the offices of house directors are on top floors, with beautiful and impressive view of their cities, but here, I have people above me, below me, next to me, and if I leave my office… <carries laptop> in three seconds, I am on stage…. voila! <shows auditorium on camera> This proximity really says everything.

Top photo: Chris Lee
Amphitheatre Olivier Messiaen, Opera Bastille, Paris, auditorium, performance, space

Review: Ligeti, Crumb, and Gelin in Paris

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On March 3, 2024

In classical, Europe, music, Paris, Reviews, writing

György Ligeti is not a name one associates with fables – unless one knows his oeuvre, and his broader life story. The composer, who died in 2006 in Vienna, spent a long and illustrious career in Germany and Austria perfecting his angular, detail-driven work. Perhaps best-known for his  Atmosphères (1961), which utilized a micro-polyphonic technique, and his so-called “anti-anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre (1977), he was a master of atmospheric, dense textures which combined elements of 20th century absurdism with polyrhythmic layering. Born in Transylvania in 1923 to Hungarian Jewish parents, Ligeti was often prevented from pursuing his passions in his native Hungary because of his Jewish background as well as his passion for the avant-garde. He fled to Austria following the 1956 Soviet invasion. A recent chamber concert by musicians of the l’Orchestre de L’Opéra national de Paris, specifically named after a movement from one of his works, effectively evoked a strange, otherworldly, fable-like world of which the composer would have surely approved.

A tribute to the composer to mark his musical centenary, the concert also featured the music of American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) and a new work by French composer Françoise Gelin (b. 1980). Heavy on percussion, the well-attended evening at the Amphithéâtre Olivier Messiaen (located in the Opéra Bastille) was a showcase of skill, musicality, and innate communication between artists, particularly orchestra percussionists Christophe Vella, Sylvie Dukaez, Jérémie Cresta, and Charles Gillet, Mezzo soprano Hilary Summers, fresh off the opening of The Exterminating Angel on the mainstage, opened the evening with Ligeti’s Három Weöres-dal (Three Weöres songs) for voice and piano (1946-1947). Based on the poetry of celebrated Hungarian writer Sándor Weöres (1913-1989) whose work Ligeti set throughout various projects, the songs blend the casual and the classy in a way that can be difficult to translate into other languages. Weöres’ writing is notable for employing what musicologist Amy Bauer characterized in a 2008 paper as “an exploration of sound symbolism, novel metric structures and absurd juxtapositions”, qualities Ligeti sought to reflect and expand on. Three Songs blends descriptions of nature with fairytale-like tableaux settings that contain hints of menace, particularly in the third setting, ““Kalmár jött nagy madarakka” (A merchant has come with giant birds), with its closing lines, “The princess is pale, and as quiet as always In her heart great birds are shrieking.” Summers captured this suggestiveness perfectly, hanging on certain syllables, with shapely phrasing and pointed consonants. Crumb’s “The Sleeper” (based on the 1831 poem by Edgar Allan Poe) has its own creepy poetry which ponders the deceased subject’s “length of tress / And this all-solemn silentness!”. Summers’ delivery softened but was no less gripping. her maple syrup tones winding around the work’s lyrical leaps and moody melodic line to create a unique transcultural bridge between mythologies.

That connection was especially present in Bolliakis’ performances, which included three extracts from Ligeti’s Musica ricercata (1951-1953) and two from Etudes (1985-2001). The former, according to musicologist Donald Gislason, has a double meaning inherent within its title, saluting the formal compositional style known as the ricercare (a work with one or more melodic lines) while simultaneously embracing the Italian meaning (wanted; sought). Boliakis performed the first three movements of the work, each building from the last, with the first movement (consisting of just the note A), performed with genuine conviction, underlining the “seeking” quality of the composer himself, a ‘seeking’ which was echoed in Gelin’s (… texte manquant”) pour quatre percussionnistes. Dedicated to Jérémie Cresta, one of the work’s interpreters, Gelin also used the poetry of Weöres as inspiration, though one might be forgiven for thinking of Claude Vivier in the theatrical mix of percussive lines and talky textures and the gamelan-like sounds evoked within and through their interplay.

The notion of ‘the fable’ expanded with George Crumb’s An Idyll for the Misbegotten (1985) for amplified flute and percussion. The composer himself wrote of the work that “flute and percussion are the instruments that most powerfully evoke the voice of nature. Ideally (if impractically), my Idyll should be heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” A rainy March evening in Paris wasn’t quite the setting Crumb had envisioned, and yet flautist Sabrina Maaroufi’s performance captured the work’s startling purity. Her performance of lines by eighth-century Chinese poet Su-K’ung Shu, spoken while simultaneously breathing into her instrument (“The moon goes down; there are shivering birds and withering grasses”) was a keen reminder of the ways innocence and experience are often grimly joined within the world of fables and fairytales.

The closing work, Ligeti’s song cycle Sippal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel (With bagpipes, drums, violin) for mezzo-soprano and four percussionists (2000), expanded on this uncomfortable paradox, though the performance was shot through with wit and intense visual communication between the musicians, who were arranged around and behind Summers. Comprised largely of whimsical, often nonsensical language, the work is a fusion of Ligeti’s interest in the folk sounds of his homeland and the avant-garde sound world he helped develop. The cycle’s first song, “Fabula” (“Fable”) depicts a pack of wolves terrified of two unmovable mountains, and is a gripping call-and-response between voice and percussion section. The work uses a huge array of percussion instruments (marimba, tam-tam, log drum, bass drum, gong, vibraphone, tubular bells, to name just a few) which work in dialogue with the soloist. Its seven movements shifts between dance rhythms and meditative poetry, though the encore was less meditative – it was a repeat of the final, bouncy seventh movement – than brave, with Summers heartily tackling its fiendish rhythms one more time and thus proving that fables, while seemingly easy on the surface, can be difficult, knotty things, if also loads of fun.

Top photo: Simon Chaput
tree, winter, sky, branches, moody, field

February: Links, Gratitude, Daring Fairytale Stagings

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On February 12, 2024

In Berlin, classical, Europe, inspiration, music, opera, remembrance, Stravinsky, writing

There’s plenty going on in both the orchestral and opera worlds right now. Everyone is busy – including yours truly – and feeling somewhat worn-down, but it seems important, amidst the chaos and concomitant tiredness, to keep interested, inspired, and reminded of the existence of good things and people, and to make the effort to recognize accordingly. It matters more than ever.

Thank you Ozawa!

The Japanese conductor, whose passing was announced this past Friday, was truly a powerhouse of passion for music, in all its expressions. My formal obituary for The Globe and Mail is here (paywall).

Ozawa truly changed the centre of classical gravity and the way it was perceived more broadly, by the public and aspiring musicians. “It’s hard to be a pioneer, but he did it with grace,” noted cellist Yo-Yo Ma in a moving video clip released by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Ozawa was the organization’s very long-serving Music Director (1973-2002) and was known as much for his dynamic performances as for his love of the Red Sox. He was also committed to music education, particularly in his later years. Well before his time in Boston, Ozawa was Music Director of the Toronto Symphony orchestra, and led the orchestra in the opening of City Hall in 1965. My music-mad mother recalled seeing Ozawa and the TSO at their then-regular digs (Massey Hall) many times and I clearly remember how she praised the maestro’s attention to detail and expressive physicality; she also noted the famous mop of hair, like so many.

Hair aside, Ozawa had a sizeable live performance track record and an immense  discography, although he wasn’t quite so well-known for his opera as for orchestral renderings, coming late (as he admitted) to the opera world. Still, everyone has favourites, and some of my own Ozawa treasures include opera, among them Messiaen’s Saint Françoise d’Assise, which Ozawa premiered at Opéra national de Paris in 1983 (at the composer’s personal request); Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, presented at Wiener Staatsoper in 2002 (when Ozawa was their Music Director); and Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus, from the Saito Kinen Festival in 1992, the same year Ozawa co-created the festival and related orchestra. The poetic production featured Philip Langridge and Jessye Norman in a Japanese-influenced staging by Julie Taymor.

Speaking of Oedipus…

Update 18 February: The planned production of Jocasta’s Line (information below) has changed. Director/choreographer Wayne McGregor and actor Ben Whishaw have had to withdraw from the project. Now called Oedipus Rex/Antigone, the work will be directed by Mart van Berckel and Nanine Linning, respectively. Moussa’s Antigone is a co-commission with the annual Québécois Festival de Lanaudière.

Original: Actor Ben Whishaw is set to appear as the Speaker in an intriguing new presentation of the work to be presented next month at Dutch National Opera. Called Jocasta’s Line, Stravinsky is here being paired with 2023’s Antigone by Canadian composer Samy Moussa. With direction and choreography by Wayne McGregor, the work features tenor Sean Panikkar as Oedipus and mezzo soprano Dame Sarah Connolly as his doomed mother, as well as dancers from the Dutch National Ballet. Fascinerend!

Still in The Netherlands: the Dutch National Opera Academy recently finished a run of Conrad Susa’s spicy chamber opera Transformations. The 1973 work features texts by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton and subverts the archetype of the fairytale in a very unique, sometimes even disturbing (hurrah!) ways. The two-act work is a very adult re-telling of ten famous Grimm stories, including Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Snow White. Susa’s work was widely performed in the US following its premiere, but only had its continental European premiere in 2006 in Lausanne and was later presented at the 2006 Wexford Festival Opera. I do wish this work was done more, especially since fairytales seems to play such a large if unconscious role within modern aesthetics and design.

… and Rusalka

Indeed, the timeliness of presentations that contrast long-cherished fairytale-related art is noteworthy, what with their unmissable corollary to contemporary digital imagery and its over-Photoshopped Insta-friendly narratives. But hostility to such cliché-breaking is abundant, and that hostility been underlined in the opera world with angry reactions to the new production of Rusalka at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin. Dvořák 1901 work, which shares various elements with The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, is here stripped of its familiar long-haired-doe-eyed-fair-slim-water-maiden imagery. Director Kornél Mundruczó, together with designer Monika Pormale, presents something far more provocative –though to my mind, it shouldn’t be provocative at all. Such presentations are sorely needed, especially within the current cultural landscape.

Mundruczó isn’t the first to dare to strip the opera of its traditional aesthetic. Sergio Morabito, who staged the opera with Jossi Wieler in 2008, described Rusalka to Jessica Duchen in 2012 as a “really dark fairy tale. It’s really desperate – without any hope.” Part of this bleakness is linked to the main character’s muteness, though that narrative device has been presented in a variety of ways through the years. From a personal standpoint, robbing a girl of her voice for the sake of some idea of humanity connected to “romance” (and soft-focus tragedy) is nightmarish – dress it up any way you want; it’s still horrific. Reading comments about the Berlin production lately I was reminded of past Rusalkas, especially unconventional ones like those by Morabito/Wieler as well as the grimy (if great) 2012 Stefan Hernheim production; both kicked against the soft-focus aesthetic but in so doing attracted incredible vitriol. That a Rusalka might go against some set-in-stone image is bad enough (Kosky’s infamous Carmen arguably did the same), but that it should dare to present a title character who, likewise, doesn’t conform to a deeply conservative image of “the mythical (or mysterious) feminine” is unforgivable.

Is there value in upsetting the traditional aesthetic connected to certain operas? To paraphrase a recent conversation with a friend on just this topic: even if you don’t agree with every little choice in a production (especially the presentation of the main character), you can at least recognize the work’s place more broadly within the sphere of modern presentation. For reference: I have reservations about various aspects of  the updated productions of both Strauss’s Daphne at Staatsoper Unter den Linden and Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus at Bayerische Staatsoper, but I wholly support them being done. It’s important to try these things! As Morabito also noted in his interview with Duchen in 2012: “We don’t like the idea that we are making abstract aesthetic statements and people must swallow it or die! We think and hope that people wouldn’t have preconceived expectations.”

Classical writer Gianmarco Segato recently saw the very first presentation of Rusalka by the Hungarian State Opera and staged by director János Szikora. In his review for La Scena Musicale Segato cleverly notes the extent to which its designs were influenced by early 20th century Czech artist Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau more broadly, especially with relation to the opera’s titular character and her cohorts. In Berlin, reactions to Mundruczó’s far less imagistically romantic production have been divisive. Albrecht Selge covered the opening for Van Magazine (auf Deutsch) recently, describing soprano Christiane Karg in the titular role and arguably capturing its whole essence: “Denn Karg gestaltet ihre Nixe agil, zornig, aufbegehrend gegen die vorgegebene Opferrolle.” (“Karg makes her mermaid agile, angry and rebellious against the predetermined role of victim.”) It’s important to try these things – especially, I would argue in the age of Instagram!

Professor Pfefferkorn auf Insta

Speaking of the ubiquitous, ever-evolving, image-obsessed platform: music publisher Breitkopf and Hartel has an entertaining, intelligent weekly Insta-series that dives into the nitty-gritty of their work and broader realities for the industry. The format is simple, along with the aesthetic: head honcho Nick Pfefferkorn addresses viewer questions in quick if informative talks from his desk. (Special thanks to whoever thought to include the English subtitles.) Pfefferkorn, who founded his own independent publishing house in 1996, became publishing director of the Wiesbaden-based Breitkopf and Hartel in 2015. His narration style is equal parts tweedy professor and watchful butcher; he’s detailed in discussing the finer points of just how the music-score-sausage is made at this particular publisher.

These videos are helpful in demystifying what can be an intimidating part of deeper music engagement. I feel a bit less daunted at re-examining the various ingredients of scores in my own collection through watching Pfefferkorn’s detailed if direct explanations. Last week’s episode focuses on how the publisher indicates page turns, for which section, and why some indications differ from others; he starts with something more fashion-oriented. Vielen dank, B&H!

On Emigré

Deutsche Grammophon recently announced the upcoming release of Emigré, a 90-minute new oratorio by Emmy Award-winning composer Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell and songwriter Brock Walsh. The work details a  little-known piece of 20th century history, when the people of Shanghai welcomed Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe in the 1930s. Emigré examines this history through the lense of a story about two brothers and their respective journeys. Premiered in Shanghai last November, the work will receive its North American premiere in a semi-staged production at Lincoln Center at the end of this month, and is scheduled to be presented by the Deutsches-Sinfonie Orchester in Berlin at an as-yet-unannounced future date.

Emigré was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and the Shanghai Symphony, as well as its Music Director and conductor Long Yu, who was called “the real hero” of the project in a recent panel discussion hosted by classical NPR station WQXR. The upcoming New York staging will feature tenors Matthew White and Arnold Livingston Geis in the lead roles, together with sopranos Meigui Zhang and Diana White, mezzo-soprano Huiling Zhu, and bass-baritone Shenyang, a former BBC Cardiff Singer of the World.

The project comes at a time when the classical world is realizing that it’s good to express a greater cultural awareness; my cynical (read: observant) self says this is also good marketing and optics for an industry that still has such a long way to go. But it is equally true that classical organizations and labels are being silently expected to step in and offer the history lessons that many educational systems sorely lack. So if Emigré aids in raising awareness and opening conversations, so much the better. It is disheartening to note the lack of Canadian dates for performances of Emigré, but hopefully that will change.

Finally, who says Beethoven and belly-dancing can’t be combined? Here’s “Für Elise” like you’ve probably never heard it:

Like music journalist Axel Brüggemann says, “halten Sie die Ohren steif” and remember: the c-word is context. 😀

Top photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.
Alexander Neef, OnP, Opera de Paris, General Director

Alexander Neef: “The Essence Of Theatre Is To Engage In A Dialogue”

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On December 29, 2023

In Europe, interviewing, interviews, music, opera, programming, theatre

History can be many things, but mostly, and especially within the classical arts, it is heavy. Alexander Neef, General Director of the Opéra national de Paris (OnP), is aware of this weight, yet he views it as a rich inspiration. The German administrator, who was the company’s Casting Director from 2004 to 2008 before becoming General Director of the Canadian Opera Company for twelve years, came to his current position in autumn 2020, much earlier than planned and smack in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. It proved the first of many adversities managing one of the opera world’s most celebrated and storied institutions, one which has been known as much for its variety of names as for its trials and tribulations in the distant and not-so-distant past.

Those challenges, particularly since 2020, are very real: financial pressures, strikes, accusations of racism, the sudden resignation of Music Director Gustavo Dudamel. Where there is strife, however, there is also hope. This past March saw French-Senegalese OnP ballet dancer Guillaume Diop join the company’s coveted “Etoile” (star) category; he is the first Black artist to achieve the top rank. In 2020 Diop had co-authored a manifesto (“On The Racial Question in Opera”) which criticized discrimination within the organization. Neef, as you’ll read, took these concerns seriously, and met them with his own initiatives. A report commissioned by the company in February 2021 stated that diversity was seriously lacking, with Diversity Referent Myriam Mazouzi (who is also Director of the OnP Academy, a training ground for young artists) underlining the need for the company to “get out of our walls” and “open up our recruitment channels, otherwise we always have the same profiles and we become poorer.” To facilitate this opening, the company embarked on an ambitious initiative in French Guyana in 2022 to encourage and promote local talent. L’Opéra en Guyane works in close collaboration with Guyanese cultural institutions and includes all training in voice and dance as well as set design and makeup. The program ran this past October and November, and will return to Guyana again in March 2024, with its development being chronicled in a documentary series on POP (Paris Opera Play), the company’s dedicated streaming platform.

POP itself is impressive, hosting an immense and ever-updated archive of anytime-is-a-good-time (read: audience-friendly) viewing which includes all aspects of OnP’s considerable output: ballet, orchestral concerts, and opera (with subtitles available in English and French), as well as backstage documentaries, masterclasses, and artist interviews. The platform is the realization of the company’s earlier foray into video streaming, l’Opéra chez soi, launched just after Neef’s arrival in December 2020, and elegantly demonstrates a commitment to something beyond sexy opera branding, an overused aspect within the current classical-marketing landscape which mostly involves substance-free clickbait and/or posts (whether on social media or websites proper) with plenty of seemingly intellectual finery but ultimately bereft of the humanity and depth their subjects demand. POP runs counter to this trend; a thoughtful and accessible platform, its user-friendly design and wide range of subject matter implies a trust to let its users decide for themselves what is sexy – or intriguing, provocative, challenging, entertaining, engaging.

The platform’s launch happened almost concurrently to news of OnP joining forces with behemothic streaming giant Apple Music Classical. Along with playlists and previews, the channel features two special sections, curated by José Martinez, Director of Dance, and Neef, respectively. As noted in Van Magazine this past August, OnP has proven remarkably adept at attracting the ever-important young audiences, with all of these initiatives demonstrating a deeply intelligent stance in attracting younger people (although €10 tickets can’t hurt either). ADO (Apprentissage De l’Orchestre) takes things one step further. The company’s first French young lyric orchestra works in direct partnership with eleven different French conservatoires and provides opportunities for apprenticeships and performances on the main stage of the Bastille, the more modern of the company’s two spaces, the other being the famed Garnier. Each space comes, of course, with its own particular set of heavy histories.

Amidst all this – whither music? Gluck, Lully, Rameau, Cherubini, Gounod, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Berlioz, Thomas, Halévy, Stravinsky, Messiaen: a partial list of composers who have enjoyed historic premieres with the Opéra and a veritable who’s who of classical music history, albeit a lineup some may perceive as creaky in 2023. Those names, however, sit comfortably beside contemporary ones including Adams, Adés, Saariaho, Kurtág, as well as acclaimed modern directors like Lydia Steier, Kirill Serebrennikov, Wajdi Mouawad, and Barrie Kosky. Ballet is an equally intriguing mix of traditional (Nureyev, Ashton) and modern (Pina Bausch, Jiří Kylián). Navigating the shifting classical landscape of the 21st century, particularly in a post-pandemic landscape, is scary business for any house, requiring a good deal of confidence in both institution and audiences, and a willingness to push the expectations and boundaries of both. The ambitiousness of Neef’s plans combined with an ever-smart approach to programming and production means audiences can expect slightly more than polite visions of familiar (or even unfamiliar) territory.

In our last exchange in 2020, conducted when he was still in Toronto, Neef emphasized a need for the new; in 2023 Paris, there is a broader if no less compelling view. Nothing quite new, as Roman statesman Cicero noted in Brutus, is perfect. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted, particularly at a time when the opera world feels more divided than ever, as much by geographies and money as by ideologies and history. But history is, like the future, only heavy without the muscles  – and the brains – to bear it; Alexander Neef has both, and then some.

When we last spoke you mused on the role of so-called “safe” repertoire and audience fatigue; has time in Paris altered your views?

I don’t think so. One of the things that’s come out of the pandemic is to consider the thinking process around what do we do here. We are called the Paris National Opera; we have an obligation for specificity in the planning and programming, but also we have to ask what is our identity and how do we express via our programming? I think there are some very simple principles that have come from that question, and they are referenced in our programming now. First we have to take care of our own repertoire , which is a very large repertoire and includes all the pieces created at the Paris Opera and predecessor organizations over the centuries. That’s why you’ll find one or two productions which represent our house repertoire , if you want – Charpentier’s Médée, for instance. There’s a very rich variety to choose from. The other aspect is pieces which we have not premiered here specifically but which are part of French repertoire – works which are not in our repertoire currently which we are bringing back, like what we’ve done with Cendrillon, Faust, Romeo et Juliet, also Massenet’s Don Quichotte which we are presenting later this season. We are one of the biggest companies in the world, so yes, there is a standard repertoire.

The last part of this, which is also important for identity, is 20th and 21st century repertoire. The priority is not necessarily commissioning – as you know it takes time for those pieces to be developed – but to look at successful pieces of the very recent past and bring them to the Paris Opera, like Kurtág’s Fin de partie in the 21-22 season, or The Exterminating Angel, which we’ll do later this season. With Angel it’s also the first new production after the world premiere that we’ll be doing. All that is a very deliberate attempt to bring those pieces to the repertoire by presenting them often, which means if someone has created something great and we think it’s great, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t present it here just because we haven’t commissioned it. We have a couple co-commissions coming up; one we did with Festival D’Aix is coming to us soon; another, a substantial piece at La Scala, will be presented in Italian there and then come here later in French.

So to circle back to your original question, when we do the revivals of the standard or even the new productions, we try to bring people to the company who hadn’t sung here before and create a relationship of trust with the audience; even though they might not know all the names on the playbill, they can expect it will be a quality proposal. We just had Tamara Wilson onstage here – she had sung Turandot in Toronto in 2019. It was highlighted (in Paris) because Sondra (Radvanovsky) had to cancel the run and Tammy was slotted into the opening. People were like, “Who is this Turandot I’ve never heard of?” – but now everybody knows who Tamara Wilson is. Sometimes we have to have the confidence and trust to just do the things we feel are right.

House identity is something I’ve considered a lot this year. You told the New York Times in 2021 that when you were hiring a diversity officer that you wanted to put on “opera and ballet by 21st century artists for 21st century audiences” – what role has that diversity initiative played in house identity?

We’re lucky in Paris, the debate around diversity is much less charged than in North America. I say that without criticism of what’s going on in America, but it does create an opportunity here to get things done more quickly because we’re not in conflict but in a spirit of working together. One of the things that happened concurrent to BLM (Black Lives Matter), I was still in Toronto, confined in my kitchen then, but already appointed to take over in Paris, was that we decided to commission a diversity report for my arrival. At the same time a group of artists and other employees of colour in the company reached out and said, “We want to talk to you, we want to know how you feel about this issue.” They wrote a manifesto which was published in August 2020, when I was almost there – though I wasn’t supposed to be, I was supposed to arrive a year later – but at that time we had an initiative coming from the incoming leadership and the employees. There was a base of discussion which was almost immediate because we did not need to get over a steep mountain of conflict. We now have an advisory committee who meet regularly with staff but also with people from outside the opera, where we discuss all issues related to our repertoire and performances, as well as recruitment practices and so on. The discussions are all evolving.

We also started a big education outreach project in French Guyana with two main purposes, one of them to just run one of our established outreach programs for young people there but also to find talent, mostly for dance, but also for singing and instruments in the long run, people can be trained to reach the levels of excellence we would have to expect of the artists who perform here.

“If I want society to buy into what we do then we need artists from all kinds of backgrounds, people who want to do it, and can do it.”


What role does the newly-created ADO (Apprentissage De l’Orchestre – Learning the Orchestra) play in all this?

It’s too early to say yet, it’s just started; we’ve had two or three weekends when they’ve been together so far. But I think it’s in the same spirit. Today in France most musicians are the sons and daughters of other musicians – they get into the field or some form of arts environment early on and there are few obstacles if they want to learn to sing or play an instrument. Our challenge is to open up the pipeline, to create a larger pipeline, different pipelines, because one of the crucial issues of recruitment is that if you always look in the same spots and at the same people you’ll always find the same thing. The moment you open up and look at things a bit more broadly, there will be different talent. And all of this is not part of any ideology, but it’s more if I can say, the perennial nature of our art form: yes, what we do is opera and ballet for 21st century artists by 21st century artists. If I want society to buy into what we do then we need artists from all kinds of backgrounds, people who want to do it, and can do it. The imminent challenge for the repertoire is obviously finding people who are trained to perform it at our level, and who may also say, “We still want to sing Don Giovanni or Don Carlo, or dance Swan Lake or Giselle.” It’s for everybody to find themselves in what we do, on the performers’ side just as much as the audience’s side.

Alexandra Wilson recently wrote at The Critic that “It is not opera’s job to do social work.” I wonder what you make of that with relation to your various initiatives.

I think what we benefit from and use to our advantage, since we have a strong critical mass for culture in France but especially in Paris, is that we use our cultural weight to be heard, to be seen. What I’ve discovered being here is that whatever we do there is a lot of attention; when I commissioned the diversity report it was like a signal. We can put the subject on the map. So we try to do that quite deliberately now, to choose the subjects we want to talk about in order to get them the visibility we can, in our position, provide.

La Vestale, with Lydia Steier directing, may or may not make the world a better place, but it does seem like an interesting symbol of where the company is at now.

That’s fair, but like I said before: if we want to do the repertoire which has a reputation of being difficult to realize onstage, then we will tell it our way. La Vestale has certain formalisms the audiences of today are not quite familiar with today, so it’s vital to find not only one artist but a group of artists to say, “We want to defend this repertoire for an audience of today and we actually want to tell a story.” Whatever we do, whether it’s more or less traditional – even though one doesn’t know what that exactly is – or completely out-there avant-garde, it’s a reading of a piece, because we cannot not offer readings of pieces. We have to hire a cast, a director, and a conductor to read the piece for us; it’s not all there in the score and they just have to do what’s written. It would be an oversimplification to think that. We need people who actually do it. Otherwise we can sit with the score and read it, which is a more personal and private thing, but there is no unalterable truth that will always be the same. That’s why we still keep working on repertoire both recent and old – things like Médée, which we’re doing since the first time we created it in 1693.

Does that history feel heavy at points?

I find it rather exhilarating, I have to say, because there is a richness and also a high responsibility for this repertoire – but also an incredible richness. I find it really quite wonderful there’s that depth to draw from.

“The thing about going to the theatre, not only opera, is that it’s an individual and collective experience, in one.”


There were very polarized reactions to Robert Wilson’s staging of Turandot in Paris recently; do you find yourself having to explain or justify your choices to your audience?

First of all there’s no such thing as The Audience, anywhere. Secondly, and I said it at the COC that we had 2000 people every night; here at the Bastille we have 2700, and a different audience. The thing about going to the theatre, not only opera, is that it’s an individual and collective experience, in one. You are part of the collective who sits there but you also experience it all for yourself. So of course there will always be audiences who are more conservative and others who are more avant-garde, and then everything in-between. And in the end it’s very simply, “I like / don’t like what I see onstage” – that’s fine. But if we maintain there is not solely one truth in the pieces we present, then there can’t be one opinion, no matter how we present them. Ultimately it’s not about liking or not-liking something but being able to talk about it. The essence of theatre is to engage in a dialogue about what we’ve experienced together onstage. That dialogue is something that’s big in everyday life here, and it can be made richer because of people having a deep cultural routine. I found it was more restricted in Toronto – there I found that even with the variety of choices, people stick to the offers of one cultural organization. I would meet people at cocktail parties and they’d say, “I’m a ballet person” – fine, good, there’s no discrimination – but in Paris there’s a much stronger overall cultural routine which has been in place since early childhood. People don’t feel the need to choose between the ballet or the opera or the museum or the symphony. What keeps fascinating me, and it’s so different culturally, is that they bring kids to the theatre, young kids, on weekdays when there’s school the next day…

My mother did that…

Exactly! People do it because they feel it’s important their child sees this or that. It’s not the last thing you do, but the first thing you do. And I think that regularity with culture changes a person, it sets up a cultural routine. And if it’s diverse it can bring a lot to audiences and people in general. So to go back to your quote about opera’s job, we are not making the world a better place – but maybe through our work we can get people to think about how to make the world a better place.

“It’s not going to be a list of 25”


Finally: I have to ask you about your GMD search.

It’s going slowly but surely. Since Gustavo left earlier than he was supposed to, I decided not to jump to fast conclusions because I thought it would be better to use the time, mostly with the musicians of the orchestra, to engage in a real dialogue. That’s something that had been done the last few years but which had been quite disturbed because of the pandemic. Who are the conductors we really like? Who are the people who debuted during covid, maybe not under ideal conditions? Who are people who’ve come once that we want to see again? Who are people we’ve never met but want to meet? So over time let’s say maybe over the course of the season, we come to, or by default, a small list of people we’re interested in – it’s not going to be a list of 25 – between the people who have declared themselves candidates and the people we want to be candidates. Without necessarily formalizing that or having it in the public sphere, I think between the musicians and us, we will have more in-depth discussions about what we want, for the company, for the orchestra; what kind of profile does that person have, the one who comes closest to the ideal? All of which is to say: it’s an ongoing process.

Top photo: Elena Bauer / OnP
Bayerische Staatsorchester, Bayerische Staatsoper, BSOrec, orchestra, classical, opera, recordings

Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings: “A Microscopic View Into The Orchestra”

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On September 23, 2023

In art, classical, Europe, interviews, music, new music, opera, tour

History looms large when you’re 500 years old. The Bayerisches Staatsorchester might know a thing or two about the weight of such a history – but in-house record label Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings renders the present, as much as the present and future, profound, polished, and yes, portable.

The orchestra of the famed Bayerische Staatsoper began life in 1523, when regularized performances started at the Bavarian court. Its musicians became famous following the 1563 appointment of composer Orlande de Lassus, though their output was reoriented with the start of opera performances in the mid 17th century in Munich. Mozart himself led the orchestra in the world premiere of Idomeneo in 1781, which was also written in the city. But it was 1811 when, crucially, members of the Bavarian court orchestra found the Musikalische Akademie e. V. association; that decision led to the creation of Munich’s first public concert series, known as Akademiekonzerte. The orchestra gained particular fame in the latter half of the 19th century in their hosting the first performances of numerous Wagner operas, including Tristan und Isolde (premiered at the National Theatre in 1865)  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), Das Rheingold (1869), and Die Walküre (1870). One of the institution’s most famous General Music Directors (GMDs) was composer Richard Strauss, whose father Franz was a noted principal horn player with the orchestra, then known as the Court Opera. But Strauss Jr. was far from the only famous music figure in the position; subsequent leaders have included a who’s who in classical history, including Bruno Walter, Clemens Krauss, Georg Solti, and more recently, Zubin Mehta, Kirill Petrenko, and currently Vladimir Jurowski, who led acclaimed productions of Prokofiev’s War and Peace and Brett Dean’s Hamlet last season. Whether either will see their way to formal releases remains to be seen.

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BSOrec CD releases. Photo: mine; please contact me to reuse.

Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings (or BSOrec), run in-house, will be the label to make it happen. The independent announced itself in 2021 in a rather unique fashion, not with a splashy opera production but via big symphony – Mahler’s immense Seventh Symphony, to be precise. Captured live in 2018 and led by contemporaneous GMD Petrenko, the recording – and indeed label – generated big buzz across the classical world, with many music writers noting the orchestra’s responsiveness to the material. In a review for Gramophone at its release in 2021, Edward Seckerson wrote that “I really thought I knew this work – every facet of it. But Kirill Petrenko has a way of hearing deep into textures and harmonies that is at times really quite startling. He gives us X-ray ears.” The label quickly followed the Mahler release with a DVD of the acclaimed 2019 staging of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt featuring tenor Jonas Kaufmann and soprano Marlis Petersen. In his assessment at Adventures In Music, classical blogger Jari Kallio praised Video Director Myriam Hoyer while noting that “the orchestral lines are drawn with acute intensity and tremendous sonic beauty.” In early 2022 the label released a DVD of The Snow Queen by composer Hans Abrahamsen and conducted by Cornelius Meister. Based on a fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, the presentation features Barbara Hannigan and was recorded in late 2019-early 2020. All three releases went on to achieve significant accolades within the classical world, including four big wins at the 2022 Gramophone Awards. It was the first time in the history of the prestigious British organization that a Recording of the Year was won by an audio-visual title; it was also only the second time an orchestra won both the Orchestral and Opera categories. Quite the achievement for a young label.

DVDs, recordings, video, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerische Staatsorchester, BSOrec, classical, opera, visual

BSOrec DVD releases. Photo: mine; please contact me to reuse.

BSOrec marched on, releasing DVDs of  a combined ensemble production of Stravinsky’s Mavra and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta (released in 2022) and Andrea Chénier (released last month) again featuring Jonas Kaufmann and led by Marco Armiliato. It’s a curious if inspired selection, with an even more curious choice of design; in place of cover photos is bold silver lettering, with not one name larger than the other, set within sturdy holders, each in solid, rainbow-like colours. The eye-catching design, originally by Mirko Borsch, sends a clear message across both audio and video titles, along with the many thoughtful essays and interviews contained within, the majority penned by talented dramaturg Malte Krasting, who knows a thing or two about the role of context.

The first BSOrec release with current General Music Director Jurowski (from 2022) pairs Brett Dean’s Testament and Beethoven’s Second Symphony, and includes Krasting’s thoughtful interview with the Russian maestro in its liner notes. Releases (all of which enjoy distribution via Naxos) this year have marked the 500th birthday of the Bayerisches Staatsorchester though they also highlight the unique talents of individual sections. Original Grooves by Opercussion, and Voyager by the Munich Opera Horns, both released earlier this year, are a showcase of creative thinking within the recording paradigm. Original Grooves features a creative mix of classical, Latin, and jazz (Bach, Astor Piazzolla, Dizzy Gillespie) in original arrangements by ensemble members. Voyager offers music by Strauss, Dubois, Reicha, and Franz alongside compositions by contemporary composers Urs Vierlinger, Hans-Jürg Sommer, and Konstantia Gourzi. Such interlacing of sounds, with a keen eye on drama, was also realized via the the release of contemporary children’s piece Der Mondbär: Ein Hörspiel mit Musik für Kinder, with music by Richard Whilds/ libretto by Sarah Scherer, and based on the popular German books and animated series. BSOrec’s upcoming audio release is a firm nod to its storied history, if also an ambitious wave to the future. Mendelssohn’s Elias was captured in July 1984 and features a dream team of soloists (Dame Margaret Price, Brigitte Fassbaender, Peter Schreier, Dieter Fischer-Diskau) and choir (Chor des Städtischen Musikvereins zu Düsseldorf), led by celebrated conductor (and former company leader) Wolfgang Sawallisch.

conductor, classical, orchestra, music, Hamburg, Kent Nagano, tour

Conductor and former Bayerische Staatsoper GMD Kent Nagano meets with Bayerisches Staatsorchester in Hamburg September 10, 2023. Photo: Geoffroy Shied

Such an auspicious combination of elements (past/present; theatricality; dramaturgy; passion) could be experienced through recent concerts given as part of the orchestra’s recent European tour, which included stops in London, Paris, and Berlin. Tour repertoire was chosen thoughtfully, a true reflection of not only composer connections to Bayerische Staatsoper (Wagner, Strauss) but to the orchestra’s home city as well (Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was premiered in Munich in late 1901). Past and present mixed in certain programmes, with Ukrainian composer Victoria Vita Poleva’s Symphonie Nr.3 White Internment opening select concerts, and soloists ran the gamut between generations, with violinist Vilde Frang, pianist Yefim Bronfman, and sopranos Louise Alder and Elsa Dreisig. The orchestra’s stop in Hamburg included a visit with conductor and former GMD Kent Nagano; on their home turf in Munich they entertained over 10,000 spectators who had gathered in Marstallplatz as part of an “Oper für Alle” event which featured the music of Schumann and Strauss. Earlier in the month in Lucerne, the orchestra’s performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was interrupted by climate activists whose presence was acknowledged with utmost diplomacy by conductor Jurowski; it was a moment of elegant humanism, a quality deep within the orchestra’s DNA and palpable throughout BSOrec’s output, and its small if highly dedicated team, led by Managing Director Guido Gärtner.

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BSOrec’s Guido Gärtner. Photo: Frank Hanewacker

Gärtner joined the Bayerisches Staatsorchester in 2008 as a violinist, a position he continues concurrent to BSOrec duties. He and I enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation in late summer, which touched on a myriad of topics, including that fashionable thing discussed so often within classical circles now, brand identity. I was also curious to know what advantages perceives Gärtner within the in-house label paradigm – Bayerische Staatsoper certainly isn’t the first big organization to do it (the Berlin Philharmonic is another notable example) but the challenges of the recording industry (and the weight of being 500 years old) are no small thing. What role does (or should) an independent label play in a decidedly difficult classical landscape? How to choose archives? What about new work? Whither relevance (another word so frequently thrown around in the classical world)? And what’s with the BSOrec design? Gärtner has the answers, and then some.

Why have an in-house label?

People might look at the orchestra solely within the context of musical theatre, so for us, being in charge of our own musical well-being, and our own concert performances, is a very strong and vital thing. We don’t just play because it’s fun – that’s a big part – but we want to be seen, and we want people to know what we stand for and why we do what we do. The key is to be accessible and visible; we don’t always travel, but the media travels for us.

With the Mahler 7 release, it was a stunt to start – we are an opera label but we made our introduction with a big symphony. We showed the world that the Bayerisches Staatsorchester is not just an opera orchestra but one of the finest orchestras in the world. By doing that, and doing it successfully, we really made a point, and it worked out really well.

So for the Mahler CD and the Die Tote Stadt DVD we had two real gems, especially with Kirill Petrenko being one of the greatest of his art, and the orchestra under him being on top also. We knew that together there was something worth sharing and exploring. We always aim to show how much is happening in one house, so the recordings recognize the versatility of the orchestra but also the entire system in our house, and how deep and broad it all actually is. We knew from the beginning it wouldn’t be just operas, or just concerts we would release, but everything this house produces, which is why we decided to release ensemble work as well.

Marstallplatz, Munich, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, music, live, outside, classical, Oper fur Alle, Muenchen

Bayerische Staatsoper’s Oper für Alle concert featuring Bayerisches Staatsorchester performing at Munich’s Marstallplatz, September 16, 2023. Photo: Wilfred Hösl

How does that label change or influence your position within the classical ecosystem of Munich?

It’s amazing – we have this relatively small city with this extremely large amount of fantastic musical institutions and ensembles like the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic. At the BSO we are always telling a story; I always say, it’s stopping the heart. A C# minor chord is never just a chord but a statement, part of a larger story. That goes for onstage work as much as recordings. What makes the orchestra so special is not that it’s the oldest one in Munich but it’s actually an orchestra whose DNA derives from theatre music: there’s spontaneity; there’s agility. But every orchestra stands for itself, and there’s enough space for all of them, especially in a city like Munich, which has so much music, and more widely in the state of Bavaria. We are very happy where we are. The Bayerisches Staatsorchester is identified as a theatre orchestra, as an opera orchestra, and we’re not trying to get away from that, but the point we’re making is we have even more to offer.

In terms of strategy and artistic development, it’s important to develop this awareness – if you want to survive as an orchestra I think it’s very important everyone knows why you exist. The education programs; the concerts and chamber concerts; the children’s pieces; things done within the community; the recordings: if you have all of these things to offer, it’s difficult to say you’re irrelevant. Relevance is everything to an orchestra.

Relevance seems very connected to BSOrec’s brand – what was the thinking behind its cultivation?

Being your own brand is powerful. Our in-house label gives us the freedom to choose which repertoire we want to release, because we genuinely like it. But more importantly, this choice gives us the possibility to influence how we are being perceived, not only as a label, but also as an artistic institution. As opposed to a major label, in our case the institution and the label are the same brand. That is an absolutely important element that gives us a lot of freedom.

How does this sense of freedom help to attract audiences, especially those new to the art form or those who know you exclusively for opera?

We can show what’s actually in the orchestra –who we are, what we do and where we come from.  We can of course show what incredible musicians we have. There are so many different people with so many different interests and styles. There’s also the possibility for that thing I mentioned before, storytelling: we tell stories about Strauss’s father, who was a horn player; we tell stories about various aspects of contemporary music; we offer tales on new aspects to well-known music that has been here for a long time. The label offers a microscopic view into the orchestra. The first archived recording being released is also a very important block in the overall idea of the label and tells its own story.

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Wolfgang Sawallisch in rehearsal. Photo: Sabine Toepffer

How do you find new approaches for archived recordings?

It’s an interesting question. For this latest release, Mendelssohn’s Elias, the statement is: it isn’t an opera; it isn’t a symphonic work; it’s an oratorio. It shows the versatility of the orchestra but first and foremost it shows the excellence. The cast and the orchestra are a dream team. It’s not that they just convened for this one thing and took off to various places when it was finished; all of these singers were often guests in the National Theatre back in those days. It’s not just one moment in the history of the house but shows the general level that was here in 1984. Also, this piece was premiered for both the Münchner Opernfestspiele and the 88th German Katholikentag (Catholic Convention). It’s music composed by someone with a Jewish background who converted to Protestantism. Sawallisch was also making his own statement on unity and religious beliefs.

When I first listened to the recording, it didn’t take me long to realize this is something we have to publish, because it was a moment, because there was so much energy in the room, and you can really hear it. In so many ways it felt like the perfect way to start the archived releases for the label.

conductor, Bayerische Staatsoper, Bayerische Staatsorchester, General Music Director, Vladimir Jurowski, composer, Ukrainian, Victoria Vita Poleva, tour, classical, performance, stage, talking, discussion, art

Conductor and Bayerische Staatsoper GMD Vladimir Jurowski speaks with composer Victoria Vita Poleva before Bayerisches Staatsorchester’s performance in Berlin, September 11, 2023. Photo: Wilfred Hösl

What is the role of new compositions then?

The idea was always to give contemporary music a real platform. We started with Mahler, yes, then released Die Tote Stadt; we knew those two would have momentum and be successful. They would give the label a good entrance into the world and get everyone interested in the next release. The next release after them was a contemporary opera, Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen, a project not many labels would have taken on. The other thing we released was Beethoven 2 – by the way that was the main piece played in 1811 at the inaugural Akademie concert – and that symphony was combined with a contemporary piece by Brett Dean. His “Testament” relates to the Beethoven immediately and also showcases Vladimir Jurowski’s approach to music and programming, which I find highly interesting.

For the Voyager release there was a contemporary work by Konstantia Gourzi, who wrote it specifically for the Munich Opera Horns. The entire album circles around her “Voyager 2”, which I find very strong, and which was chosen by the musicians themselves, as was the contents on the whole album. We didn’t intervene, because I like to think musicians have fantastic ideas when it comes to this kind of a project.

I like the idea of the Trojan Horse: as was seen with the Beethoven release, it’s good to combine the big great old repertoire with something brave and new, something that speaks to our time, and gets attention because of the combination. It’s an approach Jurowski uses a lot, and it works when you do it well. You have to find a good balance between everything and I’m sure the label will try to keep going in that direction.

To what extent does BSOrec’s package design reflect this balance?

When you see releases from other labels, you see the piece in big letters, or more often these days the singers, and in small letters you see the institution – the house isn’t the main thing. If you put those productions from all these labels in a row, everything looks different and what you recognize is the piece. But if you now put all the BSOrec releases together, it’s very clear which institution is behind it. It’s clear. The idea is, it isn’t about pictures, it’s about institution, and many different repertoire styles; it also signals a certain quality, and a certain idea or concept, all within one house. The door you open to all of that looks the same. I won’t tell you which colours are next – that’s the magic trick! But it’s always nice that people ask about that particular thing.

Interesting the DVD features Jonas Kaufmann and Marlis Petersen in what was a very acclaimed production but their photos aren’t on the cover – that’s a brave choice!

It equalizes. Some love it, some hate it. Whenever you see it it sticks out, and that of course is the oldest trick in the branding book: recognizing a logo or a certain style. And that style has to match the idea, and have the quality of the physical in terms of how the products feel when you touch them. All of this is important, but all of it, entirely, has to precisely match the musical content, the production content, but also, the written content. This is why I’m so grateful to have Malte on the team. The booklet, the music, the style, the sound, the way it feels in your hand – it all has to be one experience and it has to be a fine, subtle, and beautiful combination to give you one beautiful experience.

orchestra, classical, performance, stage, art, culture, music, Bayerisches Staatsorchester, tour

Bayerisches Staatsorchester performs under the baton of  Bayerische Staatsoper GMD Vladimir Jurowski in London on September 19, 2023. Photo: Geoffroy Shied

Top photo: Bayerisches Staatsorchester on the stage of the National Theatre, Bayerische Staatsoper. Photo: Nikolaj Lund.
Originally published 9 September 2023.
Edited and republished 23 September 2023.

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