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Opera News |
STEPHEN HASTINGS |
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Wagner: Lohengrin, Teatro alla Scala, 18. Dezember 2012 |
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Lohengrin - MILAN - Teatro alla Scala
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Opinions vary on whether La Scala has maintained — or lost, or regained —
its artistic superiority to other Italian opera houses over the past decade.
There is no doubting, however, that under Daniel Barenboim's musical
direction it has become the best theater in Italy (and one of the best in
Europe) for Wagner, as this season's opening production of Lohengrin amply
demonstrated. At the first three performances, the originally-engaged
singers were not able to perform together owing to health problems, but they
were reunited as scheduled on December 18, when everyone in the pit and
onstage (including the chorus, magnificently prepared by Bruno Casoni)
seemed intent on exploring the full potential of Wagner's drama as a
powerful human and spiritual experience, in spite of the intermittent
perversities of Claus Guth's production.
The German director's
desire to present Lohengrin as a psychologically fragile character — a man
who tends to curl up in a fetal position or bend with anguished glances over
an upright piano whenever he's not involved in serious singing — was not
undermined by any resistance on the part of Jonas Kaufmann, who has always
found insecure characters highly congenial. But Guth's conception was
contradicted by the nature of the music, and by Kaufmann's own unflinching
respect for the score. Every time the tenor opened his mouth, the sheer
serenity of the music shone through, for Lohengrin is surely the least
neurotic character in all opera. And although Wagner, in A Communication to
My Friends, hinted that the mysterious knight was not entirely comfortable
with his god-like status, there is nothing in the score or in the composer's
writings to back up the almost comically schizophrenic effect of Guth's
"reading" of the character. Similarly, his heavy (and in this case hardly
original) emphasis on the traumatic after-effects of Elsa's childhood loss
of her brother might have risked alienating the audience if the role had
been assigned to a less winning singer than Anja Harteros.
These
willful eccentricities, which could have been curbed by the conductor or
artistic director, had a less compromising effect on the performance overall
than one might expect. This was true partly because the attractive
three-tiered set with its multiple exits, designed by Christian Schmidt and
skillfully lit by Olaf Winter, functioned very well in acoustical terms and
thereby naturally reinforced — thanks to the vivid projection of the sung
text — the meaning of the original dramaturgy. The decision to move the
action forward from the early Middle Ages to about the time of the opera's
composition (always an easy way out) was at least partly justified by an
extra degree of naturalistic spontaneity in the acting and an undeniable
correlation between the musical idiom and the visual settings. This
was true even of the "bedroom" scene in Act III, transferred, unusually, to
a reedy river bank, for Wagner's music always blends easily with a natural
setting, and Kaufmann and Harteros interacted in such a way as to highlight
every psychological nuance.
Kaufmann is unmatched
today as an interpreter of this music. It was particularly moving to hear
him sing it at La Scala with a sensitivity of dynamic shading and rhythmic
freedom that often recalled the filigreed elegance of
early-twentieth-century interpreters of the Italian school. And it is a
tribute to Barenboim and the Scala Orchestra that they allowed him all the
time and delicacy of accompaniment he needed to shape the opening solo in
Act I, and to deliver "In fernem Land" with a hushed beauty of unforgettable
intensity.
Harteros makes less of a feature of her
technique; it was refreshing to hear the role of Elsa sung with a voice of
lean beauty, free from any trace of self-regard. All one was aware of was
the emotional coloring of every word and the intriguing range of facial
expression and gesture that accompanied it. It is rare to come across such a
fully-integrated performer, although the apparent lack of a pure head voice
may cause her vocal problems in the future.
Guth's attention to
psychological detail paid dividends in the portrayal of Telramund and
Ortrud. And while he dispensed with Lohengrin's swan, he didn't make any
great effort to undermine Ortrud's belief in the pre-Christian deities. The
scene between husband and wife at the beginning of Act II came across with
devastating intimacy, and both Icelandic baritone Tómas Tómasson and German
soprano Evelyn Herlitzius conveyed an impressive range of expression as
singers and actors. No less striking were Željko Lucic, who proved an
ideally forthright Herald, and René Pape, in one of his rare Italian
engagements, as a commanding yet ever-sensitive Heinrich. The director in no
way interfered with this classic portrayal, in which the words were
delivered with the utmost eloquence and were bound together by an
underpinning legato, while the singer's face proved as emotionally revealing
when the character was listening to others as when he held the center of the
stage.
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