La Scala’s Far West ‘Carmen’. Nearly every solution or off-the-mark innovation seemingly failed to captivate us as there was little sympathy for the personages as perceived, and they were surprisingly almost always projected through excessively old-fashioned stock mimic gesturing. This was especially so for the chorus who were never present in their prescribed roles, and were often asked to carry out bizarre, invented scenarios, unrelated to the main flow of action and with total regard to the words they were singing. In Carmen, they are essential characters inserted within the plot and must remain so.
Pelléas et Mélisande. Sara Blanch was a superb Mélisande, attempting a diverse role, one requiring stamina, a middle voice, and total immersion in a character on stage for almost all the opera. She seems to be the same person on the outside, but is the victim of changing moods, and thus so it is in the music that we discover her performance’s beauties.
Götterdämmerung. Hagen’s hunting party wanders across a bare stage of a forest, with a huge boar hung by its feet above the stage. Hagen’s spearing of Siegfreid is not credible as the hero hardly turns around enough to watch those Batman-caped ravens flying off to Valhalla. Then, we come to a most questionable staging of Siegfried’s ‘Funeral March,’ wherein Sieglinde and Siegmund returning from the beyond; she with a 20-foot-long white linen shroud used to symbolically embalm the son she last saw while giving birth. Then, for seemingly hours, the parents break into tears, their bodies shaking violently in emotion. Wotan the Wanderer also returns, broken spear in hand, approaching Siegfried’s corpse, then only to fall to the ground in shock upon discovering who has been killed. None of this was needed.
Siegfried. Alexander Soddy, heard again in bringing off the score with flair, offered a truly symphonic version – the big passages never hurried, measured stiffly, but colorful with variations. sprightly version of this chapter in the Ring saga.
Das Rheingold at La Scala. Overall, not a bad rendition of Wagner’s prelude to his Tetralogy. Lots of nice touches from McVicar, but also many ideas that were only able to satisfy the need to stage an episode, playing all straight out. Doing for the sake of doing. The weakness lay in the lack of an overall concept. True, better perhaps this version from those elsewhere that go astray, towards the ridiculous, towards what is estranged from Wagner himself. Perhaps, yes, the Ring is impossible to stage. Might there be a curse upon the ring?
Das Rheingold at La Scala. Overall, not a bad rendition of Wagner’s prelude to his Tetralogy. Lots of nice touches from McVicar, but also many ideas that were only able to satisfy the need to stage an episode, playing all straight out. Doing for the sake of doing. The weakness lay in the lack of an overall concept. True, better perhaps this version from those elsewhere that go astray, towards the ridiculous, towards what is estranged from Wagner himself. Perhaps, yes, the Ring is impossible to stage. Might there be a curse upon the ring?
Così fan tutte at La Scala For so many reasons, especially today, it is certainly more than a curiosity to ask ourselves what Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have thought of this Robert Carsen staging of Così fan tutte for La Scala. It would be slightly hazardous to believe that we might sense the composer’s reasoning powers or even imagine the demands he had put upon himself while creating any of his great works.
Lohengrin. Then, too, we have Lohengrin and Telramund fight their duel in the air, hanging by ropes. This is not because the costumes of all the characters portray them as moths attracted to the electric power plant’s kinetic energy, but because Sharon somehow finds Lohengrin as a Peter Pan archetype, a boy who wishes to never grow up
Norma. This ‘theater-within-a-theater’ structure was pre-announced by the stage director in his article for the La Scala program ‘Norma Revolutionary’, in which the personage Medea is mentioned seven times, almost as much as Norma, nine times. True, the theme of infanticide is a major theme linking the two operas, but it goes no further than that.
Eugene Onegin. It has been said that we all search for love in another so as to find ourselves through them. The characters in Tchaikovsky’s opera come to us with perhaps those very same prerequisites. One may ask themselves how much we identify ourselves with any of those characters. This is the challenge all theater presents us with.