Monteverdi’s rendition of the story of Orpheus is a milestone in the evolution of opera, one of the first works that definitely crossed the barrier of the oratorio into a fully defined stage representation. It includes remarkable musical moments, arias and recitatives with fine instrumental backing, it has a clear story line and a duration that makes it fit to modern representations. No wonder it has been part of the repertory of big opera houses for many years, as one of the most representative and most popular pieces of the early baroque style.
The version that I have recently seen on the Mezzo TV chain was put on stage at the Theatre de la Monnaie – the opera theater in Bruxelles which has a fascinating history of its own. I hope to have the time to write about it separately in a separate piece on the blog. The musical direction belongs to Rene Jacobs and the main role was sung by Simon Keenlydeside.
It is however the stage direction which is remarkable in this representation. Theatre de la Monnaie has a long tradition of supporting innovative ballet. Maurice Bejart was a ballet master here from 1959 to 1992, and I have seen one remarkable work of the ballet troupe in Tel Aviv a few years ago. This version of the L’orpheo is directed by Trisha Brown, one of the remarkable American choreographer of our times, and the result is as it can be expected a wonderful combination of music and movement, which fills in the recitative and instrumental parts with dance and acrobatics. It’s not an easy task for the performers, as the solo and chorus singers are required to sing and dance to fulfill the vision of a complete performance. Here is one example of the scene where Orpheus tries to cross the gates of the underworld.
Luckily I also found on youTube the final scene, with Simon Keenlydeside – the overall concept of music, dance, sets and lights can be well enjoyed in this sequence.
The last evening of the opera season brought us yesterday to the staging of ‘Pique Dame’ the beautiful creation of Tchaikovsky based on the novella by Pushkin – a story of passion and obsession, which gives the opportunity of great performances to the singers of the principal roles, but also offers beautiful arias and moments of charm and drama to the singers in the supporting roles. The complex story and the staging close to the court of empress Ekaterina allows for Tchaikovsky to include an opera in opera fragment, as well as a glory chorus for the empress, with quotes and bows to the music of the 18th century. The libretto itself written by Tchaikovsky brother and based on Pushkin’s text has many memorable moments with the ‘Life’s a Game’ area in the final scene poignant by both music and words.
Bringing to stage Russian operas comes natural for the team at the New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv. Many of the singers and musicians are born, studied and worked in the former Soviet Union, or belong to families coming from that part of the globe, they are familiar and feel well the Russian music and tradition. The staging here belongs to Theatre Wielki National Opera in Warshaw directed by Mariusz Trelinski. Splendid sets dominated by black and red were created by Boris Kudlicka, and the usage of video projects is inspired and gives the scenes a lyric atmosphere. Ukrainian tenor Viktor Lutsiuk was a good Herman, a role that he brought to Israel already with the opera Marinskiy. Ira Bertman was a beautiful and dignified Lisa, and she gets close to the pick of her career, and to the position of local diva in Tel Aviv. As in many other cases the presence of the young singers coming from the Opera Studio brought freshness and quality to the stage – with Shira Raz and Shira Shafir making the best of the musical opportunities in the roles of the Governess and of Masha.
‘Pique Dame’ ended a season I was a little bit concerned about as it was the season after the anniversary of the renewal of the opera activity in Tel Aviv. It was a good one however – in its second quarter of century of existence the New Israeli Opera shows both maturity as well as allows for the influx of young singers and musicians to express themselves providing innovation and quality.
Last night’s performance at the New Israeli Opera was one of the first in the series of performances that brings here the Stanislavski Opera from Moscow. It was a fine performance in my opinion, although quite a different one than the usual kind of operas the Israeli audience is accustomed with.
source http://www.israel-opera.co.il/
This is one of the operas written by Prokofiev after his return to the Soviet Union in 1935, and the only one that does not have a Russian and patriotic theme. Actually the subject resembles more the operas that Propkofiev composed earlier abroad. The libretto written by the composer and his wife Mira Mendelson is based on an 18th century play by Sheridan that inspired several operas, kind of a comedy of errors and situations, with comedia dell’arte morals and frenzy, very much in the spirit of Goldoni and Beaumarchais. The music on the other hand belongs much more to the more mature and settled period of the late Prokofiev creation – it lacks the surprises and experiments of the earlier works, but has maturity and dramatic continuity, is full and interesting all over. If the subject is rather minor, the music is one of the best in the late operas of Prokofiev.
source http://www.israel-opera.co.il/
The performance brought to Tel Aviv (directed by Alexander Ttiel and Ludmila Naletova) takes the action almost completely out of the historical context. If there is one such context, it is rather the one of the era and place where the composer lived and created. The freedom was certainly limited for Prokofiev at that time when he found himself under the scrutiny of censorship, but the use of comedia dell’arte clowns for all the background characters gave him the opportunity to make in movement and mime what he could not express in words. I am not sure how much of the irony about the demagogic propaganda and pseudo-heroes of the communist regime made it to the Israeli public, but at least the scene movement was expressive, and the costumes expressive and colourful. The set designed by Valentin Arefiev with bars of huge ventilators moving around the scenic space gave a feeling of openness and the occasion for a few gags, but failed to connect to the music. The singers were good almost without exception, I had the feeling that if I knew Russian I could understand any word (so stop blaming the acoustics when the singers are un-intelligible!), they acted like a team in an opera that includes a lot of interaction, duets and multiple dialogs rather than spectacular areas, and the orchestra directed Wolf Gorelik sounded much better than usually.
I have found a couple of clips from two different performances of the opera – one is the overture directed by Valery Gergiev, and the second catches the fabulous Anna Netrebko in one of the duets in the first act of the opera.
I doubt that the applause at the end of ‘La Juive’ can sound so strong and enthusiastic any place in the world but in Tel Aviv. The last act of this opera recovered from the 19th century repertoire of Grand Opera stages a powerful drama than resonates strongly with the Jewish identity epic. The year is 1414 and the Jew Eleazar and his daughter Rachel are condemned to die because of the forbidden love of Rachel with the Christian prince Leopold. She can save herself if she converts, and her father, a believer Jew asks her whether she is ready to renounce the faith of their ancestors. She refuses and is led to the gallows. The judge and cardinal Brogni asks Eleazar one last secret before he goes to his own death – where is the cardinal’s daughter, lost many years ago when Rome was plundered, and apparently saved by a Jew, is she living? ‘There she is’ Eleazar answers pointing to the flames that are engulfing Rachel’s body and revealing with the last accords of the musical score the hidden secret that triggered the whole tragedy.
source http://www.israel-opera.co.il/
The libretto of the opera belongs to Eugene Scribe, and at its first staging in 1835 ‘La Juive’ sent a strong message against racial and national prejudice in a France that was building a state and a society based on the principles of the French Revolution, but was far from having overcome all its demons, a fact that will be proved by the Dreyfuss case several decades later. It is the best known opera of the 36 composed by Fromental Halevy, a composer who played a big role in the development of the Grand Opera genre. The characters of Eleazar, the rich Jew who faces a hostile society and of his beautiful daughter Rachel who fails for the treacherous prince Leopold are direct descendants from Shakespeare’s Shylock and Jessica. The dilemma of the Middle Ages Jew whose faith puts him in mortal danger, the need to protect his daughter, symbol of Jewish purity and continuity from the temptations of the outer non-Jewish world but especially from the passions of love, even the stereotype of the rich Jew holding the financial power and using it with thirst of revenge, all these remind too strongly ‘The Merchant of Venice’ to be just a coincidence.
The Israeli New Opera took over a production of the Zurich Opera directed by David Pountney. The British director renounced the original setting of the opera at the beginning of the 15th century and worked on a concept that places the action in the century and the country where the opera was created – France’s 19th century. The excellent set designed by Robert Israel with a rotating stage with two deep spaces and two frontal panels is fluid and expressive. To enhance the 19th century Grand Opera feeling Pountney brings in the set dancers dressed as Degas ballerinas (another building block of the Grand Opera experience) but also uses some of the anti-Semitic caricatures of Degas to illustrate the atmosphere of prejudice and repression that surrounds the Jewish community and heroes in the opera, as well as hinting to the continuity of racial and religious prejudice in history.
source http://www.israel-opera.co.il/
The concept works pretty well. ‘La Juive’ speaks in an articulated manner to the post-Holocaust audiences, and the moral dilemmas of the heroes resonate well with a mostly Jewish audience in Tel Aviv. However, the music is (and always was) a challenge for the modern representations of such pieces of the genre. ‘La Juive’ has a few remarkable musical moments, and at least two dramatic scenes of high quality that put it on the best place in the world repertoire (the final act I described and the Seder night scene in the second act), but also a lot of flat musical moments, uninspired dancing interludes (which Pountney tried to fill in with grotesque costumes and dancing style) and most than all is very, very, very long – three hours and 45 minutes. Adding this to the fact that the singers are not best inspired (or at least they were not in yesterday’s performance, with the exception of Jessica Pratt’s Eudoxe, the wife of Leopold the rest were quite mediocre) – the overall experience was mixed. One may still want to catch one of the performances in the next couple of weeks especially for the opportunity of seeing David Oren directing – we missed him yesterday as he was feeling sick, but even directed by his assistant the orchestra sounded better than in most other representations we heard in the last years.
There is no filmed moment or recording from this performance that I could find on YouTube, so I went looking for some of the available recordings with big performers from the past and present. I found two versions of the beautiful area of Eleazar ‘Rachel, quand du Seigneur’. The first one is part of the last session of recordings of Caruso in Camden 14th September 1920, the second belongs to Roberto Alagna from 1997.
The second performance this year in the New Israeli Opera subscription was Gounod’s ‘Faust’. It is my preferred work by Gounod, the very typical example of the French Grand Opera at its best. It’s a story of contrast and absence and the title may be mistaken. The libretto inspired by Goethe does not place Faust in the center of the story, and actually all the reward and penitence drama is cut short to make out of Marguerite the principal heroine, one of the greatest tragical feminine characters in the history of opera. Faust’s tenor part although not deprived of a few great musical moments is only one point in musical triangle which offers space for the Margeurite’s soprano and Mephistopheles’ bass parts to conduct the principal musical dialog in the drama. It also is one of the better and most coherent stories in the grand opera history. Despite of its five acts and more than three hours ‘Faust’ is very well built dramatically, has almost no dead or repetitive moments, and leads the audience to the redeeming finale. It’s a moralistic ending were death and tragedy also mean salvation. While the Devil is almost permanently present on stage for the duration of the story, it is the invisible God that has eventually the upper hand.
The current staging is directed by Paul-Emile Fourny, the general and artistic director of the Opera of Nice, and the result is more than satisfying. With help from set designer Poppi Ranchetti, Fourny localizes the action of the timeless story in the European landscape of the end of the 19th century, so that the wars connotation and the ambiguous French and German balance receive an very exact political and historical connotation, in a dark post-Gothic and almost mono-chromatic atmosphere. The cast of singers is extremely well balanced, maybe the best balanced cast that I have seen on the stage of the NIO in many years. Paata Burchuladze is a favorite of the Israeli audiences who love him and whom he loves, and the chemistry between him and the public compensates for the slightly fading vocal capabilities. The Swiss soprano Noemi Nadelmann who was a sensible and impressive Margueritte, has a very pleasant and well rounded voice that fit well in the dimensions of the character. American tenor Scott Piper sang a fair Faust, while Israeli Shira Raz and Georgian Stella Grigorian had smaller but just to the point performances that made us wish to hear them more and in more extensive roles. The young conductor Omer Welber who at the age of less than 30 became house director of the opera orchestra (and Rishon LeZion symphony orchestra) led well the musical part in one of the good opera evenings of the season.
I do not want to let too much time pass before I write something about a performance that I enjoyed at the Cameri Theatre put on stage in collaboration with the new Israeli Opera. The name of the representation is ‘Lauf MeCan’ which translates literaly as ‘Fly Away from Here’ although in the show program the ‘official translation’ is ‘Flying Lessons’.
The legend says that the Jewish community of Djerba – an island out of the Tunisian coast – holds the secret of the door of the Temple in Jerusalem brought here by Jews that arrived here after the destruction of temple, Jews who hold the secret of flying. This is the premise of the opera whose music is composed by Ella Milch-Sheriff on a libretto by Nava Semel.
The action happens in the early 50s Israel, perceived as a time of innocence for the young and idealistic society that was gathering at that time refugees of the Holocaust in Europe meeting with the Oriental Jews whose majority did not go through the historical horror of the Holocaust, and the sabras born in Israel, apparently sure of their identity but missing the roots and not spared themselves from loss and tragedy. The coming of age of the society is symbolized by the coming of age of the hero of the story, a teenage girl who meets a surviving Jew from Djerba, one of the few places in North Africa whose Jews suffered the tragedy of the Holocaust. While trying to catch the ancient secret of flying, she will learn that the true power resides inside, that the flight is not necessarily towards a point in the sky but more towards inner self-understanding and power of dreaming.
The program calls the show a ‘chamber opera’ and this almost discouraged me from using two of my subscription tickets to see it. The music is first of all very accessible and I am not sure if ‘chamber operetta’ or ‘chamber musical’ would not have been better descriptions of what we hear. I actually never understood exactly what is the difference between a musical and an opera or operetta. Then the performance is directed by Yael Ronen who is one of the best directors of the Israeli theater nowadays, I have seen her Plonter a couple of years ago at the same theater, one of the best political plays seen in years on an Israeli stage. Here she uses a well inspired sets designed by Anat Sternschuss in a naive manner reminding the kids TV shows of the 70s and combines them with a Far East style of shadows theater. The result is simple, expressive and fit to the target.
Last but certainly not least it’s an opera, so the quality of the singing is determinant. The singers are just great. Einat Aronstein is one of the many young sopranos in a generation of Israeli talents that seems too rich to have just one place to produce themselves, so they need other opportunities than the ones offered by the big neighboring stage of the New Israeli Opera. Gabi Sadeh is one of the most experienced Israeli tenors. he may be beyond the pick of his career but the role of the old refugee Monsieur Maurice from the island of Djerba fits him perfectly, and his performance is superb not only musically but also from an acting perspective.
The performance that I attended last Saturday was supposed to be the last in a series of ten and only ten performances. The theatre was full, and I see on the Web site of the Theatre that another series of performances is planned starting with the end of April. Whoever is around, do not miss it.
The life of composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his relationship with the soviet regime and with dictator Stalin was already the subject of ‘Testimony’ where Ben Kingsley played the lead role. As a human being he was intimidated and oppressed, often criticized by the regime, and Stalin himself kept an eye on his creation. He chose to compromise in order to save his life and his power of creation, but the splendid music he composed reflects the torments, the pride and the soul of the Russian people confronted with some of the hardest years in its history. Now, this docudrama incorporating an opera in film deals with one specific episode and them in Shostakovich’s life – the writing of the opera ‘The Violin of Rothschild’ and his relation to the Jewish culture and music.
The story takes us back to the years before the second world war, when Shostakovitch befriends one of his students, the Jewish musician Benjamin Fleischmann. When the young disciple proposes a plan of an opera based on a story by Chekhov with a Jewish theme and featuring Jewish-inspired music Shostakovitch encourages him, Moreover, as the student goes to war and falls defending the city of Leningrad under blockade, the master takes over the work and finishes it. It was however very late that it could be put on scene, many years after Stalin’s death, and only for one time during the Soviet regime. The night after the premiere it was again forbidden. In the Soviet Union where the Jewish revival started immediately after the Six Days War and was to be followed by the mass emigration to Israel the opera written almost two decades before on a libretto inspired by Chekhov was considered ‘Zionist propaganda’.
The film deals quite efficiently with the characters and their fight for intellectual and artistic survival. The opera in film is quite good, probably the best part.
I found on youTube a version of the opera for yourselves to judge (not the same as in the film).
