The director, Hans Neuenfels, is a real piece of work. Don't know why a serious opera house would ever hire him. His schtick might go over better in one of those avant-garde playhouses.
>>The staging — by Hans Neuenfels, an exponent of the freewheeling, often deliberately outrageous directorial style referred to in German as "Regieoper" (and by many a grumpy Anglophone as "Eurotrash") — ends with an added scene in which King Idomeneo removes from a bloody sack the severed heads of the prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ, the Buddha and the Greek sea god Poseidon (the last being the only one of the four religious figures who actually features in the opera's plot).
playbillarts.com
>>We took the Cox/ROH Fledermaus slowly, and in tandem with the Neuenfels version for the Salzburg Festival - a major scandal, which led to court proceedings. People who felt they had parted with their money under false pretences took legal advice, having believed that they were going to see Strauss's charming operetta, with all the tunes they knew, beautifully sung as they had a right to expect at Salzburg's ticket prices. I doubt if there is any other DVD in which the producers fail to disguise, indeed relish, the booing which made good competition with applause throughout.
I found myself repelled, and yet fascinated and unable to be bored, by the notorious Neuenfels Fledermaus, since when that hardy annual can never be the same again. Musically it is fairly intact, the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg playing stylishly for Minkowski, who takes various indignities (e.g. the present of a stuffed canary) in his stride. But singers as famous as Olaf Bär appear vocally constrained by the circumstances, and bel canto was not for this night. Everything pretty was eliminated, costumes often bizarrely ugly, and many of the most popular melodies were given as caricature, especially by the revolting, raucous, dreadlocked junkie Orloff, a Prince who had gone down the road of drugs abuse, the role taken with awesome brilliance and anarchic destructiveness by David Moss, an American pop star who chokes and splutters his way through the songs in a mixture of high falsetto, growls and shrieks.
It is all heavily politicised, and often obscure beyond easy deciphering, but no doubt all the peculiarities are capable of explanation and, who knows, of spawning academic theses.
For me it held the attention as might a nature programme on TV, one of those in which you watch, appalled, whilst a boa constrictor swallows whole an animal which looks too large to devour, or another in which predatory lions strip a carcase to the bone!
musicalpointers.co.uk
>> This updated production cluttered the stage with bizarre props, including monster-size insects, and distracted attention from the singers with background videos, some of them erotic. When Ms. Mattila sang Fiordiligi's fiery aria, "Come Scoglio," in which she declares her constancy to be as unassailable as a fortress, she arrived onstage walking two men like dogs on leashes, both scantily clad in leather and chains, crawling on all fours. What was the point? There was none, Ms. Mattila said.
"It was one of the worst experiences I've had for a long time," she said. "I didn't believe in the production. Nobody understood what they were doing or why. I've done many crazy things, but there is also a line one cannot cross."
That production was especially unfortunate because Ms. Mattila had decided beforehand to retire this role, and she wanted her final performances to be meaningful. Such is the quandary of singers today who work hard to form interpretive ideas and then have no choice but to comply with a director's concept, however offensive.
"I was so depressed," she said. "I felt like a beaten dog after every performance." She was also deeply unhappy with the conductor, Lothar Zagrosek. She said the whole experience left her disappointed with Gérard Mortier, the festival's artistic director, who has made it a point of pride to bring radical stagings of Mozart operas to the composer's birthplace.
nytimes.com |
