The festival organisers have been crowing about a sellout, but, given that Il trovatore is one of the most popular operas ever written, and its Bieitofication was getting only a single performance, that is no marketing miracle. Musically, the performance represented an all-time low in my experience, and an operatic trough in the McMaster era matched only by the Sino-Japanese Turandot of 1999.
To be fair, the Hanover company, a modestly funded house, can hardly field Caruso’s prescription of “the four greatest singers in the world” at a time when grand international theatres such as La Scala, Covent Garden and the New York Met can barely muster half-decent Trovatore casts. Most of Hanover’s voices are robust enough for Verdi’s grandest mid-period opera, but, apart from Francesca Scaini, whose good intentions as Leonora were not always underpinned by secure technical foundations, they are coarse and unstylish, often out of sync with the orchestra.
As for Bieito, well, Edinburgh has seen it all before, though perhaps not in such bludgeoning excess. In the opening scene, a man is doused in petrol, then set alight. And on it goes: anal sex, naked men and women being tortured, a “snuff” wrestling match, endless sexual abuse of Azucena — here a brothel madam in fur coat and tiara, pimping for Manrico wearing a skirt while being sodomised by other gypsies — and Leonora’s “confidante”, Ines. If any of this sounds vaguely interesting or titillating on paper, I can assure you it soon becomes a tiresome bore in the theatre.
The festival brochure warned patrons in advance that some “may be upset” by such graphic scenes. In retrospect, that smacks of a cynical sales ploy. As far as I could see, there were no walkouts, hardly anyone booed and nobody in my vicinity seemed remotely upset. In other words, abject failure by German opera standards. Indeed, the couple next to me chuckled merrily as simulated atrocity piled on simulated atrocity. Some cheered at the end, but many more applauded tepidly. The only mildly shocking aspect of the performance was that such provincial, third-rate tat could reach the stage at an “international” festival.
The Hanover Pelléas et Mélisande — given twice and also sold out — is as indifferently sung by all but the Mélisande of the Ukrainian soprano Alla Kravchuk, and almost as wearisome, but for different reasons. Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, with their set designer, Kazuko Watanabe, transport the neomedieval action and location to our old friend the modern psychiatric ward, a lazy, oft-recycled directorial conceit, and a cop-out, in that the text can be supplanted by an “anything goes in the madhouse” scenario, as the characters are nearly all basket cases doing irrational things. The directors hint at child abuse — Golaud molests both his childlike bride and his son — which gives them an excuse for turning Yniold into a cantankerous little monster, throwing tantrums and aggressively touting militar istic toys. In Richard Jones’s Opera North production, the isolation of the little boy at the close is gut-wrenching. Here, as played by Sunhae Im, the petite Korean soprano, he was the horrid result of “spare the rod, spoil the child” disciplinary laxity. If you come out of Pelléas a champion of corporal punishment for minors, Debussy’s opera has failed miserably.
Advertisement
At the Usher Hall, in concert, there was a welcome return to world-class standards: Violeta Urmana’s recital of songs by Poulenc, Liszt, Rachmaninov and Richard Strauss showed the former mezzo blossoming into the most thrilling dramatic soprano. Her cries of Adonis in Frühlingsfeier, the rapturous paean to spring, sounded like a foretaste of Elektra’s evocation of Agamemnon in Strauss’s opera. And she gave a sneak preview of her concert assumption of Ponchielli’s Gio-conda at Covent Garden in just over a week’s time, with a sumptuous account of the heroine’s suicide aria as one of four encores. Book now.
In Strauss’s Capriccio, the first Countess Madeleine of Soile Isokoski was no less auspicious. The exquisite Finnish soprano has almost the perfect voice for this music, Schwarzkopf-like in its silvery lustre, and when she is firmly inside the skin of the part — her eyes were glued to the score — she will be world-beating. With luxury support from Anne Sofie von Otter’s outrageously scene-stealing Clairon, Jonas Kaufmann, the dashing young German tenor of the moment, as the composer Flamand, the veteran Siegfried Vogel as the impresario La Roche and Leopold Hager, the stylish, sympathetic conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, this was as satisfying a Capriccio as one could hope to hear today. It will be broadcast on Radio 3 on September 18.