Monday, February 13, 2017

Peter Grimes - review

3/5stars

Royal Opera House, London

ben heppner peter grimes — Neurotic … Ben Heppner as Peter Grimes. Photograph: Clive Barda

First seen in Brussels in 1994, and taken into the Royal Opera's repertory a decade later, Willy Decker's production of Peter Grimes is an expressionist take on Britten's first great examination of the relationship between the outsider and society. It drains the work of overt Englishness and aspires to something more self-consciously universal, which tips detailed social realism into a semi-abstract world of slanted planes and chiaroscuro lighting.

The production is at its best in evoking the mass hysteria attendant in puritan rigidity and religious fundamentalism. At the beginning of the first act, the inhabitants of the borough sit in rows as if in church, singing the opening chorus from hymn sheets. Later, as they prepare to hunt Grimes down, the dead apprentice's jumper is emotively tied to a processional cross, wielded by the local rector. The central tragedy is as much Ellen's as Grimes's: after his suicide, she finally submits to the normative values of the society that has broken them both.

Yet there are lapses, musically and dramatically. The immediate establishment both of Ben Heppner's Grimes as a psychopath, and the villagers as a lynch mob, sets the emotional tone too high too soon, leaving little space for development. Heppner sounds convincingly neurotic, but is also plagued by intonation problems when singing softly. Amanda Roocroft's wonderfully acted Ellen has comparable moments of stridency above the stave, while Andrew Davis's conducting, though clean and clear, is at times detached. Jonathan Summers, Roderick Williams and Jane Henschel give their all as Balstrode, Ned Keene and Mrs Sedley respectively, but overall this does not rank among the great performances of the work.

Friday, February 10, 2017

Das Lied von der Erde

Mahler at Severance Hall: a conversation with mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung

February 6, 2017

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by Daniel Hathaway

Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung will return to Severance Hall this weekend to sing Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde with tenor Paul Groves, guest conductor Donald Runnicles, and The Cleveland Orchestra.

DeYoung’s previous appearances with the Orchestra have included Giuseppi Verdi’s Requiem under Robert Porco in May 2012, and a concert honoring Pierre Boulez on his 90th birthday in January 2015, when she replaced Anne Schwanewilms in three excerpts from Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Another area appearance was in May 2011, when the Baldwin Wallace Art Song Festival presented DeYoung in a solo recital, the occasion for an extensive interview published on ClevelandClassical.com.

I spoke with Michelle DeYoung by telephone at her home in Evergreen, Colorado to chat about Mahler. I began by asking her about her recent activities.

Michelle De Young: I had an incredibly busy fall singing all over the place. I was in Melbourne for the second act of Parsifal, I went to Paris and Vienna for Bluebeard’s Castle, and to Brazil for the Verdi Requiem. When the second week of December got here, I was just exhausted, but it was all wonderful.

DH: This seems to be “Das Lied von der Erde” month for you. You’ll be singing it in Cleveland, then later with the Kansas City Symphony — where, interestingly, it’s also being paired with Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.

MDY: It’s funny — the next couple of months are all Mahler and Bartók. I think Das Lied and Bluebeard are a bit odd following one another. I feel that the Bartók should come first, then the Mahler, but I didn’t plan it, so…

DH: There’s been a change of conductor for your performance of the Mahler here in Cleveland — Christoph von Dohnányi withdrew and is being replaced by Donald Runnicles. Have you worked with Runnicles before?

MDY: Yes. I really, really like him, and I was so happy when I heard. I like working with him personally, but I also admire his work in general. I think he’s top-notch, so it’s very exciting.

DH: Das Lied von der Erde is an enormous piece, a song cycle on a symphonic scale. The last movement, “Abschied,” is almost as long as the other five movements combined — and you have that long goodbye all to yourself. What does it feel like to sing this work?

MDY: That’s hard to put into words. It’s almost ethereal. That’s a cliché, but it really is. Just on a human level, it’s a huge honor to sing it. The journey that it takes you on is so wonderful. I’ve sung it throughout my career, and it’s interesting that the emotional journey you go on is so different every time, because it depends on what you’re actually going through yourself. I think Mahler gives us a huge gift — that we are allowed to go on that journey.

The last movement is definitely about eternity and farewells. Mahler is so good at text-painting. Everything is in the music and you just go along on this emotional ride. There are two sections to the “Abschied” from two different Chinese poems. The first one talks more about the earth and beauty. Sadness begins to creep in, but it’s not quite there yet. The second section really says, ‘I’m waiting for my friend for a final farewell.’ In working on it for these concerts, I was thinking about all the different journeys that I have been on. You have different experiences through it, which is such a gift for the singer — and hopefully a gift for the audience as well.

DH: Between those two sections of the ‘Farewell,’ there’s an extended orchestral interlude, one of Mahler’s famous funeral marches. What goes through your mind during that long stretch of music as you’re waiting to sing the final section?

MDY: I just allow it to take me wherever it’s going to take me. Again, with Mahler everything is in the music. There’s a point where you hear the footprints, you hear the owl, you hear a scary animal — you don’t have to think about anything. I don’t pre-plan how I’m going to sing the rest of the movement. Of course, every conductor is going to do it differently. I sang it recently with a conductor who took that section really fast. That isn’t how I would do it, but it was an interesting interpretation, and it gave me a different experience of what was happening.

DH: You recorded Das Lied in 1999 with Eiji Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra. How has your view or interpretation of the piece changed since that time?

MDY: I’ve grown up. That recording was almost 20 years ago, and I’m a different woman now. A lot of the emotions are different, but also the way that I react to the music and the way that I sing it. Although there would be a huge difference in my interpretation between then and now, the piece is also different from performance to performance.

DH: I’ve asked you about some of your past performances. Are there some roles or projects you’d like to try out or take on in the future that you haven’t explored yet?

MDY: I can tell you that I’m scheduled to sing Marie in Wozzeck, I just can’t tell you where! I’m very intrigued by Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. It’s become the trend to use lyric voices for Ariadne. The role is more difficult than I had imagined, but I’d really like to try that. And I’m looking at some other roles that I’m not willing to put in print at this point! We’re talking, but there’s nothing scheduled yet.

Published on ClevelandClassical.com February 6, 2017.

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Monday, January 9, 2017

Romeo and Juliet

A New Take on Romeo and Juliet’s Ball, Balcony, Bed and Tomb

By ZACHARY WOOLFEDEC. 29, 2016

A scene from Bartlett Sher’s new production of Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette.” This is from a performance at La Scala. CreditBrescia/Amisano

It might seem like impertinence, not to say blasphemy, to suggest that Shakespeare could ever be bettered. But Bartlett Sher, the director of a new production of Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” that opens at the Metropolitan Opera on New Year’s Eve, is willing to go there.

“The opera avoids problems of the play,” he said in a recent interview. “The letter, how they miss each other, how they get to the tomb: Those don’t seem to be relevant in the opera.”

For all the adjustments and abridgments Gounod and his librettists made to turn “Romeo” into “Roméo,” they maintained the key scenes that move the wrenching plot forward: ball, balcony, bed and tomb. (As far as four-word summaries go, you could do worse.)

While Mr. Sher and the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, prepared for the Met production, which stars Diana Damrau and Vittorio Grigolo as the star-crossed lovers, they spoke to The New York Times about their approach to those four sequences. We’ve edited excerpts from their conversation.

The Ball

BARTLETT SHER The opera is incredibly interesting for its compression of plot. It compresses a lot into the ball scene to get a lot accomplished, taking the approach of a party for Juliette to push together the plot of the first act and a half of Shakespeare.

GIANANDREA NOSEDA You have to create a situation where you cannot imagine what is going to happen. So everything should be light, a lot of happiness. I don’t want to give the impression to the audience that the party is going to take the story in a dramatic direction. It should be like a comedy.

SHER It’s very smart and elegant how it does it, and really quite movielike, because you don’t have to change location. You can go from epic scenes of dancing to the Queen Mab speech, and it all seems to weave in and out of this party scene. And that’s definitely not the play, that’s compressing the first third of the play into one scene.

NOSEDA The music in Gounod is speaking in a very — how can I say? — frank way. A lot of enthusiasm. When Juliette comes in with “Je veux vivre,” it’s a depiction of the joy in the life of a teenager.

SHER I do it in a single space. There’s nothing more annoying in an opera than stopping to change the set. So here you almost never stop. You’re in this dream space, without stopping.

NOSEDA The first act should be joyful. Some tensions, but not so important. It’s a very fast waltz that I keep according to the tempo. It’s not a gentle version. It’s a caricature of a waltz.

Vittorio Grigolo and Diana Damrau as the title characters in “Roméo et Juliette.” CreditKen Howard/Metropolitan Opera

The Balcony

NOSEDA What’s magic for me is what’s happening just before the balcony scene, when Juliette goes inside her home. Gounod is depicting the very warm night, summertime in Italy, this kind of atmosphere when you can smell the jasmine. There are these slow triplets, and the strings should never cover this. Very transparent, very delicate.

SHER I do think that the Gounod balcony scene is as moving and as effective as the other one. It has a great aria to introduce you to Roméo alone; then you see her; then there’s the kind of longing to reach each other; then she comes in below; and then they’re interrupted by a chorus. It’s good rhythmically that that comes about, because it cleans the slate and creates anticipation for the next event.

NOSEDA You should keep it very youthful, not to make a love scene between a 35-year-old lady and a 38-year-old man.

SHER They declare their love in the first section and they make a plan in the second section. And halfway through the plan, you get another interruption, which ups the tension again. I do use a physical balcony. I like the physical obstacle, which gives some sense of the stakes between the Montagues and the Capulets.

The Bed

SHER I don’t have a, quote, “bed.” I just drape the deck with a cloth, so it’s the whole platform. When I first approached the opera, I moved the fight scene to after the intermission rather than right before, so Roméo runs into her arms having just killed Tybalt, and it increases the tension. But Diana had seen the production in Salzburg, and when we were starting the scene, she said, “Can we try it a different way?” She felt it was very important that they had just had sex, that they were postcoital. She challenged me to look at it differently.

NOSEDA You expect it to be erotic. We have four duets, and the bed is the third between these two teenagers. The temperature should increase accordingly. You think the bed scene is the climax of eroticism in the opera, and there is an element of drama that Juliette knows that Tybalt has been killed by Roméo. But the last duet, the one in the tomb, is even more sensual and erotic.

SHER The other way was quite thrilling when it came to pure stakes, and her having to wash him and him being full of guilt. Now the musical intro is long enough that as it goes on, he can get to the point of having a kind of PTSD reflection on earlier in the day.

Mr. Grigolo and Ms. Damrau at the opera’s conclusion. CreditKen Howard/Metropolitan Opera

The Tomb

NOSEDA He [Gounod] quotes music from the previous acts, but now when he quotes it, you are in a completely different environment. It’s like when you see yourself in a deforming mirror. You recognize yourself, but your legs are too long, or your head is too small. The music is the same, but he gives it to different instruments. Or instead of doing the same way of phrasing, say, four bars plus four bars, he just makes it three bars plus one.

SHER It’s different from the play, in that they [Roméo and Juliette] actually talk to each other. Which is smart, because then they can sing together. And it’s even more interesting that, given the effect of the poison, he comes in and discovers her, and she wakes up, and it’s slow-acting enough that when she wakes up, he’s filled with joy. And then when they break for the door, he’s seized by the poison.

NOSEDA When Juliette awakes, and Roméo has already taken the poison, the music little by little increases speed. At the beginning, the Roméo music is pretty fast. When he takes the poison, his slows down, and the music of Juliette does the opposite.

SHER It’s very heartbreaking, because it forces them into a decision. You sort of see the double suicide. In this production, she gives him the knife and then they put it in her together. It has a sensuality to it, and a mutuality to it.

NOSEDA The tomb scene is the most incredible love duet, not because they make love, but because they find a way to be together to the death.

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A New Take on Romeo and Juliet’s Ball, Balcony, Bed and Tomb

By ZACHARY WOOLFEDEC. 29, 2016

“The opera avoids problems of the play,” he said in a recent interview. “The letter, how they miss each other, how they get to the tomb: Those don’t seem to be relevant in the opera.”