It is no mean feat for a small provincial town to mount the first
four European performances of Tchaikovsky's last opera, Iolanta,
with a star cast, Rachmaninov's first opera Aleko, and crown it all
with five brilliant evenings of Shostakovich symphonies with the
Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev.
The logistic demands alone of moving the entire stage production, chorus and orchestra and cast from St. Petersburg , the task of accommodating and catering for such numbers during a luxurously long rehearsal period, would have strained not only the capacity of great metropolitan centres - it would also have been unlikely to gather large enough paying audiences for nine performances in a hall seating 2500.
And yet this is what the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Gergiev's favourite venue outside his Mariinsky home fortress, managed in its short Summer Season. Apart from the artistic significance of such a major event, one could, or even should, muse over the fact that 2600 tickets in the astronomically highly priced category were sold, and more than 16,000 visitors attended the nine performances.
Many of the more objective reviews raised the question of whether without
Anna Netrebko's so blatantly commercialised star qualities, the
performances of Iolanta would have been sold out so early, even
after it became known that Rolando Villazon would have to withdraw
from appearing. The unfair aspect of this equation of somewhat sour taste is that
Netrebko has qualities as a singer, as a superbly charismatic
stage presence, as a highly winning and natural personality and as
a musician still willing and able to learn and submit to advice from
her peers, that would be hers even without the worldwide adulation -
hype to which she is subjected.
Be that as it may, even if lured by her presence, nine almost full
houses for demanding performances in a provincial town, hold some
promise for the future of popular interest in classical music, so
often claimed to be on a dangerously downward trend. And if it takes
arena performances, galas, and the commercial exploitation of the
stars, and the need for profits for the recording industry to
achieve this, so be it.
With the best of will and respect for Rachmaninov' s genius, Aleko,
his early one act opera, offered before Iolanta, is not likely to
make the heart beat faster of any admirer of verismo. He was barely
17, a student and protegee of Arensky, when he composed the work in
only 17 days and submitted it as an examination piece demanded by
his teacher. Winning the highly significant Gold Medal at such a
tender age was the beginning of his meteoric carreer, yet to the end
of his life struggling with emotional problems of choosing between
freedom and conformity with an ossified society and obsessive
selfcriticism, so much colouring all his compositions. The roots of
his masterly orchestrating technique and his so easily flowing
melodic torrent are already shown in Aleko.
1892 and 93 were annos mirabiles in the history of opera - one more
reason why Aleko never made the grade. In those two years there
was a virtual explosion of masterpieces, still with us. La Wally by
Catalani, Pagliacci by Leoncavallo, Khovanshchina by Moussorgsky,
Iolanta and The Nutcracker performed on the same day in the State
Opera and in the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Manon Lescaut by
Puccini, Falstaff by Verdi, Hansel and Gretel by Humperdinck, and
Cavalleria Rusticana appeared just two years earlier.
Iolanta is one of the few operas by Tchaikovsky with a happy
ending. An innocent and pliant daughter of a king, born blind , is
not allowed to become aware of what blindness means, but she is to to
become an erotically charged and gloriously happy woman through
physical love giving back her eyesight.
The Iolanta offered Ana Netrebko a role to display her ability
to display both by acting and the subtlety of her voice-colouring
the entire gamut of credible impersonation of the development of
a timid and innocent young girl into a fully grown up radiant and
beautiful woman. There are many allusions by analysts to Tchaikovsky's
complex emotional life so shortly before his death. The opera was one
of his last works and during the Soviet era the heroine's recovery
which resulted also in ecstatic and obsessive religious manifestations,
glorified by the composer's most lush orchestration and brilliant
use of choral singing, was frowned upon. Sporadic performances were
allowed only without this happy ending.
In todays Russia, such scenes, glorifying renewed power and
influence of the majesty of the Orthodox Clergy, enjoy great
popularity and conscious support by social engineering. The staging
of Boris Godunov showing the joyful submission of the populace to a
murderous tyrant, are given a central importance in sumptious
staging. One can take it for granted, that the apparently still
delayed re-building of the Bolshoi Theatre will open one day with a
Boris never ever seen with such pomp and circumstance in the opening
scene.
The choice of works in Gergiev's programmes often have political
significance. In Aleko Rachmaninov tried to express his longing for
an existence unfettered by the stifling social atmosphere, and he
thought finding relief by integrating himself into a gipsy social
environment, where he hoped to be free at last. The more intensely he
integrates himself, the more the unbridgeable dichotomy between
two worlds become blatantly apparent and he murdering his lover and a
rival out of jealousy, acting in conformity with what he feels is
what is expected from him, tragically becomes an outcast in both
worlds.
Aleko happened to be performed in Germany just a few days before
the annual Remembrance Day to commemorate the mass executions
resulting in the virtually total extinction of 500,000 victims from
the Gipsy and Sinti communities.
In this context, Gergiev's choice of the most political works of
Shostakovich is also significant. Although no composition by him lacks
a rich underground flora of his passionate hostility to an inhuman
and tyrannic regime, in no other work than in his 13th Symphony, the Babii Yaar, dedicated to the memory of the murder of 33000 Ukranian
Jews, largely carried out by Ukranian Militia and a mob, but
initiated, armed and supervised by the Wehrmacht, did he dare so
blatantly and courageously give went to his shame and outrage about
Soviet efforts to keep either silent abut this terrible event, or
their spurious effort to describe its victims not as Jews, but
simply as Soviet Citizens killed by the Wehrmacht.
Antisemitism is deeply ingrained in the social fabric of Russia, and
Shostakovich despised and fought against it throughout his troubled
life.
Its first public performance was shielded by police cordons, ignored
by the press and even Mrawinsky, the great conductor balked at
conducting it. It was only Kyrill Kondrashin who dared to face the
wrath of the Establishment.
Performances of this work in the Russia of today, and particularly in
Germany, still have
a dark undertone, although coloured from two different aspects. In
Germany, the performance of that work is always used by the leading
media to put deep an accusing finger in their own still open
wounds. In today's Russia , history is now being re-written and many
of the wounds of the past are no longer so openly probed.
The five symphony concerts gave a wonderful panorama of some of the
most significant and best loved Russian orchestral works. In the view
of respected German music critics Georgiev's mastery, restraint
combined with unleashing powers of so specially Russian character,
his soloists, Alexei Volodin in the Rachmaninov Second and Third Concertos,
Denis Mateuev (piano) and Timur Martynov solo Trumpet (in the First
Piano Concerto) and Sergey Khachatryan in the First Violin Concerto,
all submitting their extraordinary virtuosity to Gergiev's unmatched
knowledge of these scores, gave a real festival atmosphere to these
events.
One can only marvel how a large orchestra, and Gergiev at their
head, day by day without a single break, managed to show themselves
on top form, and still being able to answer the demands of
enthusiastic audiences with brilliant and demanding orchestral and
solistic encores.
There was some dignified speculation in the critical assessment of
Anna Netrebko's
re-appearance after her baby-pause. The shared impression of
perceptive critics was, that while not losing her superb piano
control in her highest levels, that area had became perceptibly thinner,
her voice tending to become more deeply coloured in the mezzo
regions. While she responds to the demands of the PR Operations
making her the most famous living Russian woman, or a diva assoluta
in sold out Arena or Gala performances, she does this in a responsible
and dignified manner. She seems to be wishing slowly to leave behind
her Mimi and Violetta period. She already retired from the planned
transfer of her Salzburg Violetta to the Metropolitan. She may be
aiming at last to sing Lucia di Lammermoor in the planned production
in 2010/11 of the Berlin State Opera.
The replacement of Rolando Villazon by the Polish tenor Piotr
Beczala satisfied the critical opinion, and, indeed, while
Villazon's irresistible charm was bound to escape Beczala, he was
not outshone by Netrebko, but by his sheer physical presence and
colourfully
powerful voice, managed to create a different chemistry from the
one we all came to love between Villazon and her, and in which she
was no longer the dominant , somewhat comforting partner.
The couple have already appeared many times together and there is mutual
respect and understanding between them, even if without that by now
almost legendary loving and yet pure bond between Villazon and her.
Most serious critics agreed that updating the action of this fairytale
into the drab thirties, letting Iolanta vegetate in a hospital-nightshirt in a black-and-white doll's house, with the King appearing in
a black stormtrooper uniform and her suitor just coming from a
tennisparty, dressed in white, completely spoiled the atmosphere of
this gently starting and gradually shimmeringly beguiling soundpicture.
Iolanta already has brilliant interpreters, a conductor born to the
task of directing it, but it still waits for a sensitive producer, who
can put this fairytale in an imaginative frame, using impenetrable
darkness and slowly emerging radiant light to match what the composer
had in mind, and what the cast already so well understood.
Deutsche Grammophon, I think rightly, decided not to use this
production for a DVD recording.
After a summer break, the Festspielhaus plans 120 performances for
the next season, studded with some quite sensational ones, and so
will maintain its place as a vital musical centre in the heart of
Europe.
By Francis Shelton
Photo credits: Andrea Kremper
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