Couldn't wait for the physical cd, it's going to be in the shops in 10 days. So here's in AAC format the very new Sonnambula. It's more than a dream... La Bartoli with Juan Diego Flórez and Ildebrando D'Arcangelo... mmm...
5 hours ago
Friday, 31 October 2008
BURNING HOT!!
Couldn't wait for the physical cd, it's going to be in the shops in 10 days. So here's in AAC format the very new Sonnambula. It's more than a dream... La Bartoli with Juan Diego Flórez and Ildebrando D'Arcangelo... mmm...
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Elīna Garanča
Monday, 6 October 2008
J.S Bach and K. Szymanowski: What connects them?
Nothing really... I just had to keep a promise given and upload two items for some two friends of mine (Ice and Horacio). So, here's for Ice the newest interpretation of Bach's Brandenburg concertos by Trevor Pinnock (it even got this year's Gramophone award for Baroque instrumental recording) and for Horacio a live (BBC) recording of Szymanowksi's King Roger, live from this year's Edinburgh Festival.
About King Roger: What the critics said:
Kings and queens and shepherds
Aug 28th 2008 | EDINBURGH
From The Economist print edition
A difficult opera is given an exciting new production at the Edinburgh festival
IN A new production brought to the Scottish capital by Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Opera Company of St Petersburg, Karol Szymanowski’s philosophical opera, “Krol Roger”, proved one of the most exciting presentations at this year’s Edinburgh festival. Mariusz Trelinski, a young Polish director, has turned away from Szymanowski’s placing of the drama in King Roger II’s 12th-century Sicily, and focused instead on something more modern. He keeps to the text in setting the first act in a church, but the grey metallic walls, the queen’s black sequins and stilettos and the royal couple’s security detail dressed in shades provide a disquieting contemporary atmosphere. When the shepherd, Szymanowski’s symbol of rebellious individualism, makes his entrance, it is between two guards who drag him in by the armpits and flop him onto the floor.
With little plot, but a ferment of ideas, “Krol Roger” has traditionally been seen as a remake of Euripides’s “The Bacchae”, which pits the rationalism of classical Greece against the exoticism of the invaders from the east. But Mr Trelinski gives it overtones that are unmistakably political and erotic. In the second act the curtain rises to reveal an oligarch’s penthouse. Seated on its cushy sofas, the embattled king is fighting demons without and within. The established order is under threat; the shepherd is luring away the king’s followers with promises of freedom and fun. Queen Roxana, in flowing pea-green silk with a plunging neckline, looks forward to a new spring in the shepherd’s company. By the act’s end, the shepherd may still be in shackles, but it is Roger who is on trial. In the short final act Roxana is destroyed by the choices she makes, while Roger, having embraced some of the shepherd’s passionate spirit, emerges as a man transformed.
Mr Gergiev, fresh from conducting a Russian victory concert in the ruins of the capital of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, kept a firm hand on the Mariinsky’s orchestra and chorus of 130 to bring out the complexities of Szymanowski’s score, with its long passages for oboe, bassoon, horn and clarinet. But it was the evolution of the two main voices that really made the evening.
The shepherd, sung by the young Ukrainian tenor, Pavlo Tolstoy, who so impressed the demanding St Petersburg audience when the opera opened there last month, proved a light-hearted confident tease when he sang on his own and a thrilling foil in the duets with Elzbieta Szmytka’s Roxana. Meanwhile, Andrzej Dobber, the Polish baritone singing Roger, brought subtlety and power to the role of a ruler who journeys from brittle loneliness to strength and nobility.
Hedonistic ... King Roger
Homoeroticism in black and white is prominent at Edinburgh this year. First there was Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray with its man-on-man action between white-clad Dorian and black-clad Hallward. Now we have Mariusz Trelinski's production of Szymanowski's King Roger, a collaboration between Wroclaw Opera and the Mariinsky in St Petersburg. Less explicit than Bourne's ballet, it nevertheless shares the latter's colour scheme in its depiction of the relationship between repressed Roger (in black) and the attractive Shepherd (in white) who transforms his life.
Szymanowski is often compared to DH Lawrence, with whom he shares the view that life is most meaningful when most sensuous. King Roger transposes Euripides' Bacchae to 12th-century Sicily, where Szymanowski's Dionysiac Shepherd preaches a doctrine of desire in opposition to normative Christian values. There's no Euripidean bloodbath, however. Like Lawrence, Szymanowski believes we must accept the "dark gods" within ourselves. The opera ends with the reborn Roger greeting the dawn of a new age.
Trelinski, hauling the piece into dreary modernity, kicks things off in a soulless concrete cathedral, where Roger (Andrzej Dobber) and his wife Roxana (Elzbieta Szmytka), both got up in black haute couture, are conspicuous among the worshippers. The Shepherd (Pavlo Tolstoy), meanwhile, incarnates everyone's fantasies in turn, and things occasionally get pervy: he pours wine on to Roxana's crotch and she squirms in ecstasy. Roger reacts with fascinated alarm, meanwhile, as the Shepherd sprawls provocatively before him, touches him up when he least expects it and finally drags him off to an orgy. The designs, however, remain drably clinical throughout, in marked contrast to the hedonistic music. And the last act is messy: Roger, now dressed in white, watches his old self die in a hospital bed as bits of film reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey flicker on screens round him.
Musically, much of it is superb, though things are also far from faultless. Szmytka's tone is too metallic and cold, and the choral ensemble was ragged on opening night. Tolstoy, however, oozes vocal glamour, while Dobber is sensationally convincing as a man struggling to articulate emotions of which he is barely aware. Valery Gergiev's conducting is exceptional, too. Szymanowski's detractors have always argued that his music sprawls. Here, for once, not a note seems out of place. Tim Ashley The Guardian
The king and I - Valery Gergiev interview
Published Date: 03 August 2008 The Scotsman
Legendary conductor Valery Gergiev tells Sarah Urwin Jones why bringing the little-known opera Krol Roger to the global stage is a dream come true on several fronts
IN THE gilt and duck egg blue well of the auditorium at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg the lights are about to go down for the legendary opera house's latest premiere, Krol Roger, a little known work by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski that will headline the Edinburgh International Festival's Opera programme this year. The opera itself might have been given a contemporary stage makeover, but scanning the auditorium, this could be any first night in the Mariinsky's 150-year history – the scene, as the audience await the arrival of maestro Valery Gergiev, is like a re-enactment by some great opera chorus. Layers of balconies rise up, five high, teaming with bodies, hands hanging over the edge, voices chattering in myriad languages, tiny vignettes of human life playing out in every nook like some great Russian narrative painting in the city's famous Hermitage Museum.
The stalls boxes below are filled with American tourists off the cruise ships, packed 10 in a box where one might more realistically fit four. In the Gods, a man with binoculars surveys the scene, as terrifying blue-uniformed babushkas, like some relic of the Soviet era, direct audiences to their seats.
It's a far cry from the rather more demure tiers of the Edinburgh Festival Theatre where Krol (King) Roger will arrive next month. The Mariinsky last came to Edinburgh in 1995, when chief conductor and artistic director Gergiev gave blistering accounts of Rimsky-Korsakov's operas The Legend Of The Invisible City Of Kitezh and Sadko. More recently, Gergiev turned London on to the delights of Prokofiev's operas, but can he revive the fortunes of the less well-known Szymanowski who, despite becoming more of a household name in recent years for his violin concerto (played by Nicola Benedetti when she won Young Musician Of The Year), is nonetheless somewhat unfamiliar on the Western opera stage. "We have just had a residency by 92-year-old composer Henri Dutilleux," says Gergiev, of the idiosyncratic peer of Boulez and Messiaen, who attended the conductor's three-month long Stars Of The White Nights Festival. "Compared with him, Szymanowski is a picnic."
Gergiev and Edinburgh Festival director Jonathan Mills had been discussing Szymanowski projects for eight years, and the deal was cemented when Mills managed to produce wild kangaroos for Gergiev on a trip to the Melbourne Festival. Aware that the Mariinsky's Krol Roger needed a Polish milieu, Mills tracked down two Polish language productions of the opera set in 14th-century Sicily. Both productions were by respected director Mariusz Trelinski – one very traditionally set, one a contemporary reworking. Trelinski suggested the latter. "It had to mean something for contemporary Poland, with its series of corrupt regimes, where the Church still casts a long shadow," says Mills.
Certainly this new Mariinsky production marks a game stab at the opera's rather ambiguous and deeply psychological drama. On stage, telling the tale of 14th-century Sicilian King Roger, whose court descends into Dionysian chaos at the arrival of a 'heretic' Shepherd, Trelinski's contemporary production sidesteps the overt interpretations placed on the opera in the recent past – which have conjured allegories on everything from repressed homosexuality (Szymanowski struggled morally if not socially with his sexuality) to nefarious cults and the student revolts of 1968 – although still weighs heavy with the ghosts of Poland's, and by extension Russia's, Communist past.
Outside Gergiev's door, ominous heavies in plain clothes stand guard, filtering friend from foe. This native Ossetian, who now considers St Petersburg his home crowd, is rugged, smart if characteristically unshaven, and deeply pressed for time.
"Globalisation?" demurs the hard-working conductor, who also brings his London Symphony Orchestra to Edinburgh for a complete cycle of Prokofiev symphonies. "Ten years ago we went to open a new opera house in Shanghai and I read in The Financial Times that the Mariinsky were the first global orchestra because we covered all five continents.
"Interesting, but that was not the goal. We are not Coca Cola," he jokes. "We don't have to be present in 145 countries."
The Mariinsky, however, do share other similarities with Coca Cola. It's not just down to the effervescence and the long history. The Mariinsky are the ultimate aggressively expansive opera company. From the cramped corridors backstage piled high with battered tour cases stamped Berlin, New York, and London, to the fact that, from the singers amongst their 2,000-strong staff powerbase, they can cast the Ring three times simultaneously – "Four, if you force me!" says Gergiev. And there are no signs that the theatre will stop expanding. Over the canal, the theatre is currently building a second opera house, which will double the St Petersburg production output while maintaining simultaneous touring. It will also provide 21st-century facilities for contemporary productions, although one cannot help but hope that the Mariinsky will not lose all of its history in the drive towards modernisation.
Gergiev is proud of their ambition and of the fact that a record company executive told him 10 years ago that no recording company could keep up with the Mariinsky's output. His drive is deep-rooted, piqued by a need for recognition, perhaps, which was not always forthcoming. "When I was 25, there were certain opportunities I wanted which I was not given," he says. "There was a great orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, and I was never invited to conduct it. I won the Herbert Von Karajan Conductors Competition in Berlin in 1976, I conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, I was offered concerts all over the world. I thought, now they will invite me to the Leningrad Philharmonic podium. No! It was only when I became music director of the Mariinsky 10 years later."
Twenty years on, as the final strains of Szymanowski's intense Krol Roger fade into loud applause round the gilded auditorium of the Mariinsky, Gergiev can be rather more certain that he is a wanted man.
No one who heard this performance should be under any doubt that King Roger (or Król Roger, in Polish) is a masterpiece. I have seen a great deal of nonsense written about it, including the bizarre claim that there is nothing much in the way of plot. King Roger needs no excuses; what it needs is performances. Covent Garden, are you listening? Probably not, for nothing must interfere with the nth revival of Tosca or La Bohème. (Who actually goes to these things every season?!)
Having been severely disappointed, indeed disillusioned, with ‘Gergiev’s Mahler’, it was a delight to hear Valery Gergiev back on form. He proved himself just as fine a Szymanowskian as Sir Simon Rattle. And his Mariinsky forces were on superlative form too: sultry, seductive, yet precise where necessary too. Gergiev imparted an impeccable sense of forward momentum, without ever driving the music hard. We can all pick out the influences and/or parallels in Szymanowski’s music: Debussy above all here, but also Bartók, Strauss, Wagner, even early Schoenberg. Yet there is undoubtedly an individual voice too, a voice we heard clearly on this occasion. With the possible exception of Elzbieta Szmytka as Roxana, this was not a performance of truly outstanding vocal performances, but there were no weak links either and there was a real sense of a company on stage. Andrzej Dobber was a more than reliable Roger, faithfully served by Sergey Semishkur as Edrisi. After some slightly wayward intonation during the first act, Pavlo Tolstoy impressed as a charismatic Shepherd/Dionysus. Szmytka reminded us of her long pedigree in this music and acted well too.
Mariusz Treliński’s production seemed well considered on the whole. I was not entirely sure why the opera needed updating; it is not as if any of us can have been sated with ‘traditional’ productions. I was less concerned about the loss of the period than that of place, although I should not wish to exaggerate; it seemed a pity though. The sets were generally striking, although the church setting for the first act was uncompromisingly modernistic. Szymanowski’s music had to portray the exoticism all by itself. It could do that, but I did not quite see why a hint of the Byzantine would have been out of place. I was also somewhat at a loss to understand why all the clergy sported mitres. The mise en scène for the second act, however, seemed perfectly to capture the hothouse atmosphere that incites Roxana and eventually even Roger to follow the Shepherd. It is worth mentioning here the hugely beneficial role played throughout by Marc Heinz’s atmospheric and carefully targeted lighting, as well as Tomek Wygoda’s choreography in this particular scene, a fine portrayal of Dionysian erotic abandon. It seems that Treliński purposely downplayed the homoeroticism of this act, wishing the conflict within Roger’s soul ‘to be seen from a wider perspective, as a tale of self-discovery’. I am not sure that we are so overburdened with such material on the operatic stage that this was as necessary as the director seemed to think, although it did no especial harm either. I cared less for the hospital bed setting of the third act: a little bit clichéd perhaps, notwithstanding the justification of Roger’s illness? But the video projections worked well, as did the blinding light of the sun. Although I may have had doubts about some aspects of the production, they in no way detracted from the performance as a whole.
An innovative, multinational staging of Szymanowski's 'King Roger'
By George Loomis
Published: July 22, 2008, IHT
ST. PETERSBURG: The Maryinsky Opera Company will supply the bulk of the opera offerings at the Edinburgh International Festival next month, the company's first engagement in Britain since Wagner's "Ring" cycle in Wales two years ago. Three presentations are planned, of which Karol Szymanowski's "King Roger," the newest addition to the Maryinsky repertoire and a work long championed by a cult of admirers, will likely draw the greatest interest. It will be seen in a production shared with the opera company of Wroclaw, Poland, where it originated last year. St. Petersburg got its first glimpse of it last week, an occasion that also constituted the opera's Russian premiere.
First seen in Warsaw in 1926, "King Roger" is typical of the lush, late Romantic operas from between the wars that have found favor in the last couple of decades, more for the over-the-top richness of their music, one suspects, than for their sometimes murky psychological content. Its hero palpably undergoes a transformation, yet people understandably wrestle with what "King Roger" is all about. It is said to have a strong Nietzschean underpinning, and its mix of Byzantine, Oriental, Greco-Roman and Christian elements further thickens the brew, with the flowery language of Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's libretto tending to have an obfuscatory effect.
But "King Roger" can also be seen as a retelling of Euripides' "Bacchae," on which it is loosely based, with a happy ending, or at least an inconclusive one. Where in the Greek play the god Dionysus destroys Pentheus (Roger's prototype) and the House of Cadmus for their failure to recognize him and the sensuality he represents, here Roger emerges from his encounter with Dionysus a wiser man, to judge from the glorious burst of orchestral C major that accompanies his vision of the sun at the end of the opera. Szymanowski updates the action to Sicily in the 12th century - when Roger II was king - thereby adding Christianity to the side of morality and reason, against which Dionysus and his revelries are pitted.
The Christian element gives rise to some arresting choral writing in Act 1, set in a church. And while the chorus continues to be important thereafter, the musical heart of "King Roger" lies in the orchestra. Without even counting the Oriental touches - the orgiastic Act 2 dance could be first cousin to Salome's "Dance of the Seven Veils" - "King Roger" has a very cosmopolitan sound, incorporating as it does Germanic opulence typical of a Strauss or Mahler, Impressionistic elements from France, and the innovations of Scriabin in Russia. The vocal lines are instrumentally conceived but generally work well for the voices.
The arresting production is by the team of the director Mariusz Trelinski and the set designer Boris Kudlicka, whose staging of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" for Warsaw, Washington and St. Petersburg won widespread praise. Kudlicka's sets are especially effective, notwithstanding his choice of a modern living room for Act 2 and a hospital bed for Act 3 in lieu of the outdoor settings Szymanowski specified. The hospital room suggests the pressure Roger is under mentally, but by the end of the opera his wife, Queen Roxana, who falls under the Dionysian spell early, has apparently replaced him in the sickbed. It is one of several oddities involving Roxana in a staging that nevertheless captures the mood of the work. Another puzzlement is the flirtatious relationship she has with Roger's reasoned councilor Edrisi, her polar opposite in the opera.
Although the Maryinsky imported the distinguished Polish singers Andrzej Dobber and Elzbieta Szmytka for the production, which is sung in Polish, at the second of two St. Petersburg performances they were disappointingly replaced by Russians, in a typical Maryinsky effort to work a new opera into the repertory. Edem Umerov proved to be a powerful dramatic presence as King Roger, though his voice has a rough edge. Irina Vasilieva, rather blowsy of voice, was less successful: though she managed Roxana's beguiling song in Act 2 affectingly, Wojciech Dziedzic's costumes had her looking like a loose woman. The tenors Sergei Skorokhodov and Vasily Gorshkov gave assured performances as the Shepherd/Dionysus and Edrisi.
Much of the glory of the performance came from the Maryinsky's chorus, which sometimes sang from an upper balcony, and from its orchestra. The orchestral playing bespoke thorough preparation, and Valery Gergiev's deliberate pacing had keen dramatic pulse. I suspect that greater experience with the score will bring greater interpretive risks, but it is plenty satisfactory for now.
One final note: The troupe will be billed in Edinburgh without reference to its former name, Kirov, which was foisted on it following the assassination of the Leningrad Communist Party boss Sergei Kirov in the 1930s but given up in Russia shortly after the fall of Communism. According to a company spokesman, "Kirov" is now history.
Edinburgh festival: Valery Gergiev - a Tsar on the side of the masses
Conductor Valery Gergiev is on a mission to rediscover Russian opera. He tells Ismene Brown why
When Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills set this year's festival theme - that of shifting borders - he could not have imagined that a shifting border in the Caucasus mountains would become a bloody arena of 21st-century war as the festival opened, nor that two of his best attractions would be natives of that area.
As the Georgian Ballet leaves today, the charismatic conductor Valery Gergiev arrives, and his performances, always bonfires of excitement, may carry even more charge, given that he is a native North Ossetian.
Gergiev, 55, world traveller though he appears, is a deeply patriotic man, which drives his preoccupation with opening up what some Westerners categorise dismissively as "Soviet" music and showing it as simply Russian music. In Edinburgh, following a marathon Prokofiev retrospective of symphonies and string concertos this weekend, he will conduct four Slavic operas, all more or less obscure on the British stage but all likely to be given the kind of advocacy by his Mariinsky Opera that blows away ignorance or prejudice.
Or so Gergiev ardently hopes. I met him last month during the St Petersburg White Nights Festival, at 11.30pm, after he had conducted Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, with a night train to Moscow planned, then a flight to Britain to conduct Mahler at the Barbican with the LSO. In just a month he had done Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, three Rimsky-Korsakov operas, six Stravinsky and Shostakovich ballets, Bryn Terfel and Maria Guleghina galas, and rehearsals for all the operas we'll see here. It didn't seem quite human.
Though he was bone-tired, he talked fervently of his Edinburgh plans. Invited by Mills to perform the Polish masterpiece Król Roger (król means king) in full staging, he came up with a large Russian package of concert performances as well. "For me it was unthinkable to bring a very good Polish opera without bringing Russian ones, too," he says. "It was clear my work with the London Symphony Orchestra would limit my appearances with the Mariinsky in London, and my Mariinsky work, with unusual programmes, was quite liked in London, so I felt that going to Edinburgh would be a good thing."
The Slavic operas he has chosen all portray a man on an internal journey, whereas Italian and French 19th-century opera usually centres on romantic love. Szymanowski's magnificent 1926 Król Roger has a king unsettled morally, emotionally and sexually by a shepherd (Aug 25 and 27). In Rachmaninov's one-act 1893 Aleko, an upper-class lad runs off to join the gipsies, with tragic results; Gergiev pairs it (Aug 24) with the central act of Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko, a highly political 1940 story about a Bolshevik soldier's struggle to find domestic happiness. Rodion Shchedrin's 2002 opera The Enchanted Wanderer (Aug 26) shows another civilised man led astray by a gipsy, an excuse for rural instruments such as guslis and balalaikas in his score.
However, Gergiev was not governed by the stories' intriguing convergence. "It's true that the Russian operas are based on novels or romances by big writers - Pushkin, Leskov, Katayev - but for me it's the musical value of having young Rachmaninov or very mature Prokofiev or an opera from a new millennium. We wanted a group of operas that travels across time in music.
"I really don't know why Aleko isn't done more often - maybe you need a Tom Hampson or a Hvorostovsky to take it up and two big-name singers to be attracted to it. And Semyon Kotko is mature Prokofiev. It's very important to do it again, after we presented it in London in 2000. There will be 95 per cent of people who don't know how good this opera is, especially the third act, which is really phenomenal."
Król Roger's richly romantic style - with echoes of Richard Strauss and Scriabin - and its full staging makes it the most obvious public attraction, but Gergiev, though a longtime Szymanowski fan, is even more evangelical about the Shchedrin.
In the West, Shchedrin is broadly known for two things - for being married to the great Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and for the ballet Carmen Suite, a free reinvention of Bizet (Matthew Bourne used it for his contemporary dance production, Car Man). In post-Soviet Russia, Shchedrin's reputation suffered by comparison with Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Alfred Schnittke, and his recent 75th birthday celebration in Moscow, helmed by Gergiev, was greeted as an impressive rediscovery by home audiences.
Gergiev gets angry about the politicising of Russian composers' reputations. "I'm sure Shchedrin's opera will stand very confidently around the world. He is a master. He never created nonsense or left anything unclear. His language goes from the very complicated to the simple - he knows what he's doing. I love his composition for many things, especially the choral theme and individual singing.
"This other stuff is a product of those propaganda wars, those boring people who don't hear the music and look and try to see who was relatively close to political process. It's a non-starter. Like calling Semyon Kotko Prokofiev's 'Soviet' opera. Yes, it is not the Prokofiev who was a young man in Paris or Chicago, it was written after he came back to the country in which he was born. That is the music."
Recently Gergiev has exercised his enormous power at the Mariinsky to enthusiastically uncork an area that had seemed deadened by the loss of the vast Soviet theatre subsidies: new Russian opera. Shchedrin's was commissioned by Lorin Maazel for New York, but back home Gergiev has ordered up no fewer than five new Russian operas for the Mariinsky - a feat of commissioning on a Tsarist scale.
"It's what I promised. We'll bring them all to London [the Barbican] in 2009. They're waiting, already composed, most of them." In his Mahler season at the Barbican this season, Gergiev smartly shoe-horned compositions by Tishchenko and Karetnikov alongside the Austrian epics: "Something unusual from Russia again. Basically I felt that just doing Mahler symphonies in London might be interesting for me and my orchestras, but for the public there is no extra message."
For a man who strides so forcefully and unimpeded across the musical world, he talks about us joes, the humble audience, a lot, I say. His answer is not that of a Tsar: "Well, it's who we're working for."
Published Date: 03 August 2008 The Scotsman
Legendary conductor Valery Gergiev tells Sarah Urwin Jones why bringing the little-known opera Krol Roger to the global stage is a dream come true on several fronts
IN THE gilt and duck egg blue well of the auditorium at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg the lights are about to go down for the legendary opera house's latest premiere, Krol Roger, a little known work by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski that will headline the Edinburgh International Festival's Opera programme this year. The opera itself might have been given a contemporary stage makeover, but scanning the auditorium, this could be any first night in the Mariinsky's 150-year history – the scene, as the audience await the arrival of maestro Valery Gergiev, is like a re-enactment by some great opera chorus. Layers of balconies rise up, five high, teaming with bodies, hands hanging over the edge, voices chattering in myriad languages, tiny vignettes of human life playing out in every nook like some great Russian narrative painting in the city's famous Hermitage Museum.
The stalls boxes below are filled with American tourists off the cruise ships, packed 10 in a box where one might more realistically fit four. In the Gods, a man with binoculars surveys the scene, as terrifying blue-uniformed babushkas, like some relic of the Soviet era, direct audiences to their seats.
It's a far cry from the rather more demure tiers of the Edinburgh Festival Theatre where Krol (King) Roger will arrive next month. The Mariinsky last came to Edinburgh in 1995, when chief conductor and artistic director Gergiev gave blistering accounts of Rimsky-Korsakov's operas The Legend Of The Invisible City Of Kitezh and Sadko. More recently, Gergiev turned London on to the delights of Prokofiev's operas, but can he revive the fortunes of the less well-known Szymanowski who, despite becoming more of a household name in recent years for his violin concerto (played by Nicola Benedetti when she won Young Musician Of The Year), is nonetheless somewhat unfamiliar on the Western opera stage. "We have just had a residency by 92-year-old composer Henri Dutilleux," says Gergiev, of the idiosyncratic peer of Boulez and Messiaen, who attended the conductor's three-month long Stars Of The White Nights Festival. "Compared with him, Szymanowski is a picnic."
Gergiev and Edinburgh Festival director Jonathan Mills had been discussing Szymanowski projects for eight years, and the deal was cemented when Mills managed to produce wild kangaroos for Gergiev on a trip to the Melbourne Festival. Aware that the Mariinsky's Krol Roger needed a Polish milieu, Mills tracked down two Polish language productions of the opera set in 14th-century Sicily. Both productions were by respected director Mariusz Trelinski – one very traditionally set, one a contemporary reworking. Trelinski suggested the latter. "It had to mean something for contemporary Poland, with its series of corrupt regimes, where the Church still casts a long shadow," says Mills.
Certainly this new Mariinsky production marks a game stab at the opera's rather ambiguous and deeply psychological drama. On stage, telling the tale of 14th-century Sicilian King Roger, whose court descends into Dionysian chaos at the arrival of a 'heretic' Shepherd, Trelinski's contemporary production sidesteps the overt interpretations placed on the opera in the recent past – which have conjured allegories on everything from repressed homosexuality (Szymanowski struggled morally if not socially with his sexuality) to nefarious cults and the student revolts of 1968 – although still weighs heavy with the ghosts of Poland's, and by extension Russia's, Communist past.
Outside Gergiev's door, ominous heavies in plain clothes stand guard, filtering friend from foe. This native Ossetian, who now considers St Petersburg his home crowd, is rugged, smart if characteristically unshaven, and deeply pressed for time.
"Globalisation?" demurs the hard-working conductor, who also brings his London Symphony Orchestra to Edinburgh for a complete cycle of Prokofiev symphonies. "Ten years ago we went to open a new opera house in Shanghai and I read in The Financial Times that the Mariinsky were the first global orchestra because we covered all five continents.
"Interesting, but that was not the goal. We are not Coca Cola," he jokes. "We don't have to be present in 145 countries."
The Mariinsky, however, do share other similarities with Coca Cola. It's not just down to the effervescence and the long history. The Mariinsky are the ultimate aggressively expansive opera company. From the cramped corridors backstage piled high with battered tour cases stamped Berlin, New York, and London, to the fact that, from the singers amongst their 2,000-strong staff powerbase, they can cast the Ring three times simultaneously – "Four, if you force me!" says Gergiev. And there are no signs that the theatre will stop expanding. Over the canal, the theatre is currently building a second opera house, which will double the St Petersburg production output while maintaining simultaneous touring. It will also provide 21st-century facilities for contemporary productions, although one cannot help but hope that the Mariinsky will not lose all of its history in the drive towards modernisation.
Gergiev is proud of their ambition and of the fact that a record company executive told him 10 years ago that no recording company could keep up with the Mariinsky's output. His drive is deep-rooted, piqued by a need for recognition, perhaps, which was not always forthcoming. "When I was 25, there were certain opportunities I wanted which I was not given," he says. "There was a great orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, and I was never invited to conduct it. I won the Herbert Von Karajan Conductors Competition in Berlin in 1976, I conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, I was offered concerts all over the world. I thought, now they will invite me to the Leningrad Philharmonic podium. No! It was only when I became music director of the Mariinsky 10 years later."
Twenty years on, as the final strains of Szymanowski's intense Krol Roger fade into loud applause round the gilded auditorium of the Mariinsky, Gergiev can be rather more certain that he is a wanted man.
No one who heard this performance should be under any doubt that King Roger (or Król Roger, in Polish) is a masterpiece. I have seen a great deal of nonsense written about it, including the bizarre claim that there is nothing much in the way of plot. King Roger needs no excuses; what it needs is performances. Covent Garden, are you listening? Probably not, for nothing must interfere with the nth revival of Tosca or La Bohème. (Who actually goes to these things every season?!)
Having been severely disappointed, indeed disillusioned, with ‘Gergiev’s Mahler’, it was a delight to hear Valery Gergiev back on form. He proved himself just as fine a Szymanowskian as Sir Simon Rattle. And his Mariinsky forces were on superlative form too: sultry, seductive, yet precise where necessary too. Gergiev imparted an impeccable sense of forward momentum, without ever driving the music hard. We can all pick out the influences and/or parallels in Szymanowski’s music: Debussy above all here, but also Bartók, Strauss, Wagner, even early Schoenberg. Yet there is undoubtedly an individual voice too, a voice we heard clearly on this occasion. With the possible exception of Elzbieta Szmytka as Roxana, this was not a performance of truly outstanding vocal performances, but there were no weak links either and there was a real sense of a company on stage. Andrzej Dobber was a more than reliable Roger, faithfully served by Sergey Semishkur as Edrisi. After some slightly wayward intonation during the first act, Pavlo Tolstoy impressed as a charismatic Shepherd/Dionysus. Szmytka reminded us of her long pedigree in this music and acted well too.
Mariusz Treliński’s production seemed well considered on the whole. I was not entirely sure why the opera needed updating; it is not as if any of us can have been sated with ‘traditional’ productions. I was less concerned about the loss of the period than that of place, although I should not wish to exaggerate; it seemed a pity though. The sets were generally striking, although the church setting for the first act was uncompromisingly modernistic. Szymanowski’s music had to portray the exoticism all by itself. It could do that, but I did not quite see why a hint of the Byzantine would have been out of place. I was also somewhat at a loss to understand why all the clergy sported mitres. The mise en scène for the second act, however, seemed perfectly to capture the hothouse atmosphere that incites Roxana and eventually even Roger to follow the Shepherd. It is worth mentioning here the hugely beneficial role played throughout by Marc Heinz’s atmospheric and carefully targeted lighting, as well as Tomek Wygoda’s choreography in this particular scene, a fine portrayal of Dionysian erotic abandon. It seems that Treliński purposely downplayed the homoeroticism of this act, wishing the conflict within Roger’s soul ‘to be seen from a wider perspective, as a tale of self-discovery’. I am not sure that we are so overburdened with such material on the operatic stage that this was as necessary as the director seemed to think, although it did no especial harm either. I cared less for the hospital bed setting of the third act: a little bit clichéd perhaps, notwithstanding the justification of Roger’s illness? But the video projections worked well, as did the blinding light of the sun. Although I may have had doubts about some aspects of the production, they in no way detracted from the performance as a whole.
An innovative, multinational staging of Szymanowski's 'King Roger'
By George Loomis
Published: July 22, 2008, IHT
ST. PETERSBURG: The Maryinsky Opera Company will supply the bulk of the opera offerings at the Edinburgh International Festival next month, the company's first engagement in Britain since Wagner's "Ring" cycle in Wales two years ago. Three presentations are planned, of which Karol Szymanowski's "King Roger," the newest addition to the Maryinsky repertoire and a work long championed by a cult of admirers, will likely draw the greatest interest. It will be seen in a production shared with the opera company of Wroclaw, Poland, where it originated last year. St. Petersburg got its first glimpse of it last week, an occasion that also constituted the opera's Russian premiere.
First seen in Warsaw in 1926, "King Roger" is typical of the lush, late Romantic operas from between the wars that have found favor in the last couple of decades, more for the over-the-top richness of their music, one suspects, than for their sometimes murky psychological content. Its hero palpably undergoes a transformation, yet people understandably wrestle with what "King Roger" is all about. It is said to have a strong Nietzschean underpinning, and its mix of Byzantine, Oriental, Greco-Roman and Christian elements further thickens the brew, with the flowery language of Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's libretto tending to have an obfuscatory effect.
But "King Roger" can also be seen as a retelling of Euripides' "Bacchae," on which it is loosely based, with a happy ending, or at least an inconclusive one. Where in the Greek play the god Dionysus destroys Pentheus (Roger's prototype) and the House of Cadmus for their failure to recognize him and the sensuality he represents, here Roger emerges from his encounter with Dionysus a wiser man, to judge from the glorious burst of orchestral C major that accompanies his vision of the sun at the end of the opera. Szymanowski updates the action to Sicily in the 12th century - when Roger II was king - thereby adding Christianity to the side of morality and reason, against which Dionysus and his revelries are pitted.
The Christian element gives rise to some arresting choral writing in Act 1, set in a church. And while the chorus continues to be important thereafter, the musical heart of "King Roger" lies in the orchestra. Without even counting the Oriental touches - the orgiastic Act 2 dance could be first cousin to Salome's "Dance of the Seven Veils" - "King Roger" has a very cosmopolitan sound, incorporating as it does Germanic opulence typical of a Strauss or Mahler, Impressionistic elements from France, and the innovations of Scriabin in Russia. The vocal lines are instrumentally conceived but generally work well for the voices.
The arresting production is by the team of the director Mariusz Trelinski and the set designer Boris Kudlicka, whose staging of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" for Warsaw, Washington and St. Petersburg won widespread praise. Kudlicka's sets are especially effective, notwithstanding his choice of a modern living room for Act 2 and a hospital bed for Act 3 in lieu of the outdoor settings Szymanowski specified. The hospital room suggests the pressure Roger is under mentally, but by the end of the opera his wife, Queen Roxana, who falls under the Dionysian spell early, has apparently replaced him in the sickbed. It is one of several oddities involving Roxana in a staging that nevertheless captures the mood of the work. Another puzzlement is the flirtatious relationship she has with Roger's reasoned councilor Edrisi, her polar opposite in the opera.
Although the Maryinsky imported the distinguished Polish singers Andrzej Dobber and Elzbieta Szmytka for the production, which is sung in Polish, at the second of two St. Petersburg performances they were disappointingly replaced by Russians, in a typical Maryinsky effort to work a new opera into the repertory. Edem Umerov proved to be a powerful dramatic presence as King Roger, though his voice has a rough edge. Irina Vasilieva, rather blowsy of voice, was less successful: though she managed Roxana's beguiling song in Act 2 affectingly, Wojciech Dziedzic's costumes had her looking like a loose woman. The tenors Sergei Skorokhodov and Vasily Gorshkov gave assured performances as the Shepherd/Dionysus and Edrisi.
Much of the glory of the performance came from the Maryinsky's chorus, which sometimes sang from an upper balcony, and from its orchestra. The orchestral playing bespoke thorough preparation, and Valery Gergiev's deliberate pacing had keen dramatic pulse. I suspect that greater experience with the score will bring greater interpretive risks, but it is plenty satisfactory for now.
One final note: The troupe will be billed in Edinburgh without reference to its former name, Kirov, which was foisted on it following the assassination of the Leningrad Communist Party boss Sergei Kirov in the 1930s but given up in Russia shortly after the fall of Communism. According to a company spokesman, "Kirov" is now history.
Edinburgh festival: Valery Gergiev - a Tsar on the side of the masses
Conductor Valery Gergiev is on a mission to rediscover Russian opera. He tells Ismene Brown why
When Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills set this year's festival theme - that of shifting borders - he could not have imagined that a shifting border in the Caucasus mountains would become a bloody arena of 21st-century war as the festival opened, nor that two of his best attractions would be natives of that area.
As the Georgian Ballet leaves today, the charismatic conductor Valery Gergiev arrives, and his performances, always bonfires of excitement, may carry even more charge, given that he is a native North Ossetian.
Gergiev, 55, world traveller though he appears, is a deeply patriotic man, which drives his preoccupation with opening up what some Westerners categorise dismissively as "Soviet" music and showing it as simply Russian music. In Edinburgh, following a marathon Prokofiev retrospective of symphonies and string concertos this weekend, he will conduct four Slavic operas, all more or less obscure on the British stage but all likely to be given the kind of advocacy by his Mariinsky Opera that blows away ignorance or prejudice.
Or so Gergiev ardently hopes. I met him last month during the St Petersburg White Nights Festival, at 11.30pm, after he had conducted Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, with a night train to Moscow planned, then a flight to Britain to conduct Mahler at the Barbican with the LSO. In just a month he had done Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, three Rimsky-Korsakov operas, six Stravinsky and Shostakovich ballets, Bryn Terfel and Maria Guleghina galas, and rehearsals for all the operas we'll see here. It didn't seem quite human.
Though he was bone-tired, he talked fervently of his Edinburgh plans. Invited by Mills to perform the Polish masterpiece Król Roger (król means king) in full staging, he came up with a large Russian package of concert performances as well. "For me it was unthinkable to bring a very good Polish opera without bringing Russian ones, too," he says. "It was clear my work with the London Symphony Orchestra would limit my appearances with the Mariinsky in London, and my Mariinsky work, with unusual programmes, was quite liked in London, so I felt that going to Edinburgh would be a good thing."
The Slavic operas he has chosen all portray a man on an internal journey, whereas Italian and French 19th-century opera usually centres on romantic love. Szymanowski's magnificent 1926 Król Roger has a king unsettled morally, emotionally and sexually by a shepherd (Aug 25 and 27). In Rachmaninov's one-act 1893 Aleko, an upper-class lad runs off to join the gipsies, with tragic results; Gergiev pairs it (Aug 24) with the central act of Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko, a highly political 1940 story about a Bolshevik soldier's struggle to find domestic happiness. Rodion Shchedrin's 2002 opera The Enchanted Wanderer (Aug 26) shows another civilised man led astray by a gipsy, an excuse for rural instruments such as guslis and balalaikas in his score.
However, Gergiev was not governed by the stories' intriguing convergence. "It's true that the Russian operas are based on novels or romances by big writers - Pushkin, Leskov, Katayev - but for me it's the musical value of having young Rachmaninov or very mature Prokofiev or an opera from a new millennium. We wanted a group of operas that travels across time in music.
"I really don't know why Aleko isn't done more often - maybe you need a Tom Hampson or a Hvorostovsky to take it up and two big-name singers to be attracted to it. And Semyon Kotko is mature Prokofiev. It's very important to do it again, after we presented it in London in 2000. There will be 95 per cent of people who don't know how good this opera is, especially the third act, which is really phenomenal."
Król Roger's richly romantic style - with echoes of Richard Strauss and Scriabin - and its full staging makes it the most obvious public attraction, but Gergiev, though a longtime Szymanowski fan, is even more evangelical about the Shchedrin.
In the West, Shchedrin is broadly known for two things - for being married to the great Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and for the ballet Carmen Suite, a free reinvention of Bizet (Matthew Bourne used it for his contemporary dance production, Car Man). In post-Soviet Russia, Shchedrin's reputation suffered by comparison with Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Alfred Schnittke, and his recent 75th birthday celebration in Moscow, helmed by Gergiev, was greeted as an impressive rediscovery by home audiences.
Gergiev gets angry about the politicising of Russian composers' reputations. "I'm sure Shchedrin's opera will stand very confidently around the world. He is a master. He never created nonsense or left anything unclear. His language goes from the very complicated to the simple - he knows what he's doing. I love his composition for many things, especially the choral theme and individual singing.
"This other stuff is a product of those propaganda wars, those boring people who don't hear the music and look and try to see who was relatively close to political process. It's a non-starter. Like calling Semyon Kotko Prokofiev's 'Soviet' opera. Yes, it is not the Prokofiev who was a young man in Paris or Chicago, it was written after he came back to the country in which he was born. That is the music."
Recently Gergiev has exercised his enormous power at the Mariinsky to enthusiastically uncork an area that had seemed deadened by the loss of the vast Soviet theatre subsidies: new Russian opera. Shchedrin's was commissioned by Lorin Maazel for New York, but back home Gergiev has ordered up no fewer than five new Russian operas for the Mariinsky - a feat of commissioning on a Tsarist scale.
"It's what I promised. We'll bring them all to London [the Barbican] in 2009. They're waiting, already composed, most of them." In his Mahler season at the Barbican this season, Gergiev smartly shoe-horned compositions by Tishchenko and Karetnikov alongside the Austrian epics: "Something unusual from Russia again. Basically I felt that just doing Mahler symphonies in London might be interesting for me and my orchestras, but for the public there is no extra message."
For a man who strides so forcefully and unimpeded across the musical world, he talks about us joes, the humble audience, a lot, I say. His answer is not that of a Tsar: "Well, it's who we're working for."
Saturday, 4 October 2008
O. Messiaen "Des canyons aux étoiles...
So... here's (in Flac) the late Messiaen orchestral epic that outdoes the Turangalila Symphony in its breadth and colour. "Des Canyons aux étoiles" ('From the Canyons to the Stars) was intended to mark the bicentennial of the United States in 1976, and Messiaen's music links the land itself, the canyons of Utah - whose colourful layers reach back in geological time - with the stars sparkling in the clear-blue desert sky, their light emanating from long ago and far away. A sense of colour then, natural majesty, a palette of every shade of red and rich orange-brown; a timeless quality that reaches far back in time and human history...also a direct analogy with the American flag: the stars in the night sky and the geological stripes of the canyons. The variety of sounds is staggering, especially when you consider the forces Messiaen was using here; a standard symphonic wind section, to be sure, but only 13 solo strings, a wind-machine, thundersheet and the newly invented 'geophone' -lead shot rotated in a large flat drum to make a sound somewhere between water lapping on a beach, and shifting sands - plus a major percussion section. This isn't the orchestra of Turangalila, a mere 44 performers, yet the impact they're able to make through the kaleidoscope of colours and the subtle use of chamber-sized ensembles is immense - sometimes this feels like Messiaen's biggest orchestral work. Did I mention the birds? They're a vital part of the soundscape, almost another set of instruments again - the Mockingbird, the Wood Thrush, the White-Browed Robin - set against the 'Interstellar Call' of Jean-Jacques Justafré, whose solo horn-playing is superb. Special praise also for pianist Roger Muraro, who's a fine impersonator of winged wildlife. (Andrew McGregor, bbc.co.uk).
The scandalously underrated de Leeuw shows deeper sympathy for Messiaen's all-devouring aesthetic; the recording of From the Canyons to the Stars attains a degree of passion and intensity that you rarely find on disc. Three other cherished Messiaen recordings: Pierre-Laurent Aimard's Vingt Regards, Riccardo Chailly's Turangalîla, and Nagano's Saint Francis (Alex Ross, therestisnoise.com)
In my humble opinion, this one is the best recording of Des canyons...(all aother ones are exceptional as well, it's a "lucky" work)
Further listening propositions
Riccardo Chailly: Turangalîla Symphony
Ingo Metzmacher: Éclairs sur l'au-delà
Myung-Whun Chang: La Transfiguration
Kent Nagano: Saint François d'Assise
and for the courageous enough the Messiaen Edition on Warner Brothers records.
If you can find them on the net listen to Metzmacher in Saint François (from De Nederlanse Opera or from this years Proms festival) and the Turangalîla with Sir Simon Rattle, Pierre-Lauren Aimard, Tristan Muraro and the Berliner Philharmoniker live at this years Proms (Whoever has a tendency for these live recordings, please drop a note)...
Three Flac zip files and a PDF with the cover
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
La Renée returns to Strauss. Only a little bit late?
Here's Renée Flemings second attempt on Vier letzte Lieder on record. The first attempt was in 1995 with Christoph Essenbach (on RCA records). She had never sung them on stage before, her voice was so young back then... This time she's with Christian Thielemann, in Munich. I prefer the first attempt, even though, in my humble opinion, she never sung them better than with Claudio Abbado (never on disc)...
The critics said...
When Renée Fleming first recorded Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in 1995, she had never sung them in public. Thirteen years later, the glittering American soprano has countless public performances under her belt. Time enough for a second bite at this most luscious cherry — surely music’s most moving songs of farewell from a composer to his art, his public and life itself.
Made at live concerts in Strauss’s home town, Munich, this version stands out from all others. Christian Thielemann, conducting the Munich Philharmonic, has Strauss’s music in his blood, and his shaping of phrases and balancing of textures is gorgeously subtle. In a work in which Strauss keeps his orchestra singing almost as much as the soprano, it’s a delight to welcome a recording where tone and dynamics are so sympathetically balanced.
Personal preferences will dictate how you find Fleming’s interpretation. For those brought up on the patrician perfection of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s vintage recordings, or who recently fell for Soile Isokoski’s Scandinavian radiance, Fleming’s more openly expressive approach might sound a tad common. Some of her detailing is excessive. But I fell for her vibrant responses to each turn of music and text, projected in wonderful long breaths by a voice distinctive, warm and secure in every register.
What to fill the space with? Most distinguished Strauss recitals have partnered the Four Last Songs either with further orchestral songs or suitable scenes from his operas. Fleming has gone for both. Ariadne’s two monologues from Ariadne auf Naxos give her voice a particularly good workout; we also get Zweite Brautnacht from Die ägyptische Helena. The orchestral songs are old favourites, Zueignung and company.
Occasionally in these ancillaries the volume of Thielmann’s orchestra gets out of hand. But you’re still left with Fleming’s big attraction: that full-cream voice, on top form, at home with the composer she loves most of all.
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