David and Goliath. I probably need not add that since the beginning, my sympathies have always been with the underdog. For years, I have had trouble appreciating the craftsmanship of Thielemann \u2013 an artist without doubt competent, but in my opinion derivative, drawing mindlessly upon the German conducting tradition of the mid-1950s. His interpretations have reminded me here of Furtw\u00e4ngler, there of Klemperer or Karajan; but they have been devoid of individuality \u2013 and, even more importantly, authentic experience, that peculiar tension that puts listeners in a trance and makes them indifferent to the \u2018inhuman\u2019 dimensions of Wagner\u2019s scores. About Michailidis\u2019 abilities, I knew nothing aside from the fact that the Crete-born conductor had studied at the Hochschule der K\u00fcnste Berlin, prepared Tristan und Isolde <\/em>two years ago in Athens, and is apparently about to mount a production of Der Ring des Nibelungen<\/em> in its entirety.<\/p>\n My Dresden prejudices lightened up already in the first few measures of the prelude to Act\u00a0I. The local Staatskapelle \u2013 in comparison with the ensemble of the theater on the Green Hill \u2013 plays with a brighter and softer sound, especially in the strings; aside from that, on account of the peculiar layout of the interior and the orchestra pit, the sound is more exposed and \u2018defenseless\u2019. Thielemann \u2013 compared with previous takes on Siegfried<\/em> from Bayreuth \u2013 conducted the orchestra at slightly more blistering tempi. He chiseled the texture down to the last detail, assembling it from masterfully shaped and polished slivers fitted into their places as if in an ancient mosaic. Today, Thielemann\u2019s Wagner is clean and clear, following all the rules of the art of building a convincing musical narrative. It contains sublimity and pathos; there are intense, but restrained emotions; there is no place for breaking discipline. To put it briefly, it is not my Wagner \u2013 the one that can overflow like an ocean under the baton of B\u00f6hm or Negus. A matter of taste. I am well aware that the Dresden ensemble\u2019s wonderful, well thought-out interpretations represent the very highest standard of Wagner performance. So if I complain that in the finale of Act\u00a0III, I missed that flaw on the surface of the jewel, that characteristic trait that would underline the momentousness of Brunnhilde and Siegfried\u2019s discovery of that most powerful and primitive emotion \u2013 fear \u2013 then it is only because in the Ring<\/em>, I am looking for somewhat different meanings from the overwhelming majority of \u2018Wagnerites\u2019.<\/p>\n Dresden Siegfried<\/em>. Gerhard Siegel (Mime) and Stephen Gould (title role). Photo: Klaus Gigga.<\/p>\n What I missed in Thielemann\u2019s interpretation, I was repaid with interest in the singing of nearly all of the soloists, chief among them the dependable Stephen Gould in the title role, who got better and better with each act. I find his Tristan wearisome; but his Siegfried \u2013 golden in tone, with superb intonation, evolving wonderfully from spoiled brat to passionate lover tormented by doubts \u2013 completely enchanted me. Another hero of the show turned out to be Gerhard Siegel (Mime), a phenomenal actor, vocally brilliant, confirming me in my certainty that this is a role not for a character singer, but rather for a distinguished tenor who has managed to pass through all the degrees of Wagnerian initiation. Nina Stemme is Brunnhilde incarnate, lived in every inch, though her beautiful dramatic soprano has now lost a bit of its previous brilliance and has taken on a too-wide vibrato. To this day, I have the heavenly song of the Waldvogel in my ears \u2013 the youthful Finnish artist Tuuli Takala breathed the entire freshness and precision of her Mozart coloratura into this role. Christa Mayer was in a class by herself in the role of Erda: a mezzo-soprano with contralto tessitura, ideally balanced in its registers, beautifully resonant at the bottom of the scale. The only one who disappointed me was Markus Marquardt (The Wanderer): yet another ruler of Valhalla lacking in divine authority and \u2013 compared with Renatus M\u00e9sz\u00e1r, heard recently in Karlsruhe \u2013 in the musicality essential to this role.<\/p>\n The now-legendary staging of Willy Decker (whose Dresden Ring <\/em>premi\u00e8red in 2001) has not aged even one iota, and proves the to some extent wasted potential of the German Regieoper<\/em>. Despite a few almost-overblown ideas \u2013 chief among them the giant teddy bear found in the forest by Siegfried \u2013 it is coherent, conceptually polished, economical and refined in visual terms (stage design by Wolfgang Gussmann) and, most importantly, faithful to the text. Decker deftly maneuvers among irony, pathos and mystery. He builds suggestive signs and images, set in context, that other stage directors have been mindlessly aping for the past 15\u00a0years or so. He makes wise allusions to tradition, for instance in Siegfried\u2019s breathtaking fight scene with a dragon comprised of black plywood boards painted with phosphorescent paint, animated by invisible supernumeraries. A similar illusion of three-dimensional reality, but featuring live mimes, was created by \u00c9tienne Decroux, one of the pioneers of physical theater, in his shows.<\/p>\n Three days after the Dresden Siegfried<\/em>, I landed in Athens, rather hoping for a sentimental return to the world of Antony McDonald\u2019s riotous imagination, than expecting great musical impressions \u2013 aside from Peter Wedd, the Lohengrin to this day inseparably connected with the Welsh National Opera\/Teatr Wielki \u2013 Polish National Opera coproduction. The Greek National Opera ensemble took the bull by the horns with indubitable enthusiasm, considerably greater than that of the Warsaw theater\u2019s musicians. The effects of their work are in certain respects impressive, though one could sense that Michailidis is only taking his first steps in the Wagnerian field. While the orchestral details were carefully polished, one could not see the forest beyond all those trees. The choir made every possible effort, but nevertheless was lost in the dense textures, which had its effect on both the intonation and the rhetoric of the message. To make the singers\u2019 task easier, the conductor pressed forth like a bat out of hell \u2013 at the expense of the narrative\u2019s coherence. I was at a performance featuring the second cast, in which Telramund (Valentin Vasiliu) was disappointing in every way; the beautiful, musical bass voice of Petros Magoulas (Heinrich der Vogler) had to outshout the orchestra in Act\u00a0III; and the experienced Romanian soprano Iulia Isaev (Elsa), whose phrasing is superb, was often under pitch in Act\u00a0I and basically never did entirely get into her role. Julia Souglakou, who was rewarded with a hurricane of applause, in my opinion created a caricature of Ortrud. While the singer does have a proper soprano falcon<\/em>, ideal for this part, she makes dubious use of it: stentorian, piercing high notes; low notes growled out from her very bowels; the quite peculiar approach to intonation issues all combined to create a flat, indeed operetta-like image of the nasty witch. And yet McDonald had made every effort for none of the protagonists of this Lohengrin <\/em>to turn out unambiguously as either a devil or an angel.<\/p>\n Athens Lohengrin. <\/em>Julia Souglakou (Ortrud), Peter Wedd (title role), Iulia Isaev (Elsa) and Petros Magoulas (Heinrich der Vogler). Photo: Vassilis Makris.<\/p>\n And that is how he handled the title character of this cruel fairytale from the beginning \u2013 instead of an indomitable knight in shining armor, trying to see in him a delicate being from another dimension, longing for ordinary love, losing everything in conflict with a heartless human intrigue to which he is, even so, not able to get to the bottom. Three years ago, Wedd was an ideal vehicle for such a concept. Since then, his voice has changed diametrically. The character who strode onstage was a proud warrior, the hope of Brabant, totally aware of his role as the savior of Elsa. He left the stage as an enraged demigod \u2013 with the feeling of a mission unaccomplished. The intimate farewell episode with the swan was lacking in tenderness; the duet in Act\u00a0III breathed an air of Northern cold. Wedd found himself fully only in the Gralserz\u00e4hlung<\/em>, one of the most beautiful \u2013 if not the most beautiful \u2013 that I have heard in my life. The calm, dignified \u2018In fernem Land, unnahbar euren Schritten\u2019, delivered in a voice of not even baritone, but indeed bass timbre; the mistily enchanted \u2018Allj\u00e4hrlich naht vom Himmel eine Taube\u2019; the enraged \u2018Sein Ritter ich\u2019, in which new wine almost burst the old wineskins \u2013 these are only some of the elements of this masterfully-shaped narrative, which would be a triumphant crown for not a few performances of Lohengrin<\/em> on the world\u2019s stages. In McDonald\u2019s poetic staging, marked by metaphysical sorrow, it sounded a bit out of place. Wedd has now outgrown it. And in the end, that is very good news, because it means that he is ready for every other possible staging.<\/p>\n Travel educates, and sometimes teaches us a lesson. Small is not always beautiful. Big does not necessarily mean oppressively weighty. As long as music is surprising, it is worth listening to. And drawing conclusions.<\/p>\n Translated by: Karol Thornton-Remiszewski<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have already proven not a few times \u2013 and that, not only on these pages \u2013 that I am perverse. When everyone else is heading north, I fly south. When they are enthusing about yet another premi\u00e8re at some famous theater, under a conductor who has won a lion\u2019s share of prestigious competition prizes, … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-mangusta","4":"post-1894","6":"format-standard","7":"category-posts-in-english","8":"category-wedrowki-operowe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1897,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1894\/revisions\/1897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atorod.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/atorod.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/csm_Siegfried_Szenenbild_c_Klaus_Gigga_819_8bd7e23dee.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n