Opera

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Lea Desandre Gives a Modern Voice to Early Music

      by

      The mezzo-soprano will sing with the Jupiter Ensemble in a concert of 17th-century Italian compositions at the Salzburg Festival.The mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, a member of the Jupiter Ensemble, does not distinguish between the Baroque era and the age of rock ’n’ roll.“We grew up with this music,” she said by video call from Montreal. “Just like we grew up with the Beatles and Amy Winehouse.”The 28-year-old has established herself as one of today’s most exciting voices in early-music performance. She also cultivates 18th- and 19th-century operatic repertoire from Mozart to Meyerbeer, at prominent houses such as Zurich Opera and the Paris Opera.The singer has appeared annually at the Salzburg Festival, on both the opera and concert stages, since 2018. On Saturday, she and musicians of Jupiter arrive at the Stiftung Mozarteum with the program “Lettres amoureuses” (“Love Letters”). The concert of 17th-century Italian music — which the group has thus far performed in France and the Netherlands — juxtaposes arias and instrumental music from well-known composers such as Monteverdi and Handel with exciting discoveries such as Tarquinio Merula and Andrea Falconieri.Ms. Desandre has sung at prominent houses on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Paris Opera to Carnegie Hall, above, where she took the stage with the Jupiter Ensemble. Jennifer TaylorMs. Desandre enjoys something of a symbiotic relationship with the ensemble, which was founded by the lute player Thomas Dunford in 2018. They joined forces last year for her first solo album, “Amazone,” exploring French and Italian repertoire written about the female warriors of Greek myth known as Amazons. Their next recording, scheduled for release this fall, is a lineup of numbers from Handel oratorios titled “Eternal Heaven.”Mr. Dunford, 34, promotes a democratic spirit, taking suggestions from members of the ensemble in the curation of programs. “It’s a bit like a jazz group in that way,” he said by phone from Montreal, where he and Ms. Desandre were on tour with the ensemble Les Arts Florissants (the two met performing with that group in 2015 and maintain a close relationship with its founder, William Christie). “It’s people who love spending time together and working on the music.”For Jupiter’s first album, “Vivaldi,” the members started a poll on Facebook asking about friends’ favorite arias. In another surprising twist, each of Jupiter’s albums ends with a newly composed surprise track: For “Amazone,” Mr. Dunford contributed “Amazones,” a song that addresses the importance of environmental consciousness.Mr. Dunford, a French native with American roots, cited Jordi Savall, a player of the viola da gamba (with whom both his parents studied), and Mr. Christie as among the trailblazers who set the stage for today’s generation of players. “The best lesson we can learn is to be authentic and passionate,” he said. “Because we don’t really know what Vivaldi sounded like [in his time] — we can just understand his music in a logical way and put our personalities into it.”Ms. Desandre contributes a particular affinity for Italian Baroque music. The singer, who is of French-Italian heritage, left the conservatory track to study with the contralto Sara Mingardo in Venice, who had access to unpublished manuscripts by Vivaldi, along with works by rarely heard composers.Spiritual songs by Tarquinio Merula quickly became a starting point for “Lettres amoureuses.” In “Hor ch’è tempo di dormire” (“Now That It’s Time to Sleep”), the text hovers between tenderness and violence as the Virgin Mary has a vision of Jesus’ crucifixion while rocking him as a baby.Ms. Desandre, who debuted at the Salzburg Festival in 2018, has particularly strong memories of singing the role of Despina in the 2020 production of “Così Fan Tutte,” above.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Desandre compared the music to “a beating of the heart” or a kind of spiral. “She says ‘sleep peacefully,’ but she knows that something tragic is going to happen,” she explained.Her studies with Ms. Mingardo were based on a holistic, rather than technical, approach to vocal studies. At a certain point, Ms. Desandre said, she was advised to “go out and have a good time, find a boyfriend and live — so that you can transmit this experience onstage.”Further singer-mentors include Natalie Dessay (who inspired Ms. Desandre to enter the profession when she saw her on television at age 12), Vivica Genaux, Véronique Gens and Cecilia Bartoli. The latter two singers perform on “Amazone”; Mr. Christie also joins for an instrumental work by French composer Louis Couperin.“The album is a kind of homage to key people in my life,” Ms. Desandre said. The singer also personally chose the photographer, Julien Benhamou, who works with dancers at the Paris Opera, to create the cover art.This is also a nod to Ms. Desandre’s training as a ballerina, which she says allows her to let go physically onstage. “It is one of the best ingredients for singing,” she said. “To be anchored and not become mentally stressed.”For her Salzburg Festival debut in 2018, the director Jan Lauwers gave her full artistic freedom to dance onstage while singing the comprimario roles of Amore and Valletto in Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea.” The singer said that, if Paris was the city in which she was born and raised, Salzburg had become a “city of the heart, because I found a kind of family there — people who are willing to take risks with me.”A lover of nature, she also pointed to the city’s inspiring landscape. “To leave rehearsals and find oneself in front of a mountain and surrounded by greenery in five minutes is extremely nourishing,” she said. “These are moments of communion which allow us to connect with our energy, center ourselves and be very focused.”Singing the role of Despina in a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” that took place at a scaled-down Salzburg Festival in August 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, remains a particularly strong memory. “There was an intensity during rehearsals,” she recalled. “Of remembering why we love to make music and be together.”A similar spirit drives the Jupiter Ensemble. The group’s members take the time to work on a program until it comes to full maturation, and they always live in the moment.“There are also the experiences we share offstage,” Ms. Desandre said. “Which means that when we perform, we take confidence in each other, we listen to each other, we adore each other. We want to share this happiness with the audience.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: An Opera’s Exquisite Brutality Arrives in America

      by

      George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Lessons in Love and Violence” is a masterly follow-up to their acclaimed “Written on Skin.”LENOX, Mass. — The problem with “Lessons in Love and Violence” has always been that it is not “Written on Skin.”“Skin,” George Benjamin’s unflinchingly savage second opera with the librettist Martin Crimp, was hailed as a landmark at its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2012. Its stature has only grown since, and it’s a routine choice as one of the great operas of the century so far.Benjamin and Crimp stuck to their template for the gruesome “Lessons,” the successor piece that was more coolly received after its debut in London in 2018 and that received its American premiere on Monday night at Ozawa Hall here, with the composer leading the youngsters of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in dagger-sharp support of an incisive cast of current and past Tanglewood vocal fellows.Like “Skin,” “Lessons” has a dense, historically contrived libretto, offering a callous plot that hacks away at any sentimentality you might have left about power or love. There is music that seethes and soothes — its every last, creepy twang of a cimbalom or bludgeon of brass conceived and executed with flawless clarity of gesture and precision of timbre.Yet somehow this jewel-studded, velvet-wrapped mace of a score never once feels too deliberately methodical or sounds anything but fully alive. Its imposing rigor scalds in the heat of the murderous moment.Listen to it, and you might ask yourself which of these two unsparing operas is supposed to be Benjamin’s masterpiece. For if “Skin” disappeared, “Lessons” would be sufficient to anoint its composer all on its own.The operas are similar, but “Lessons” is no mere reproduction of its predecessor. It abandons the metahistorical flourishes of the earlier work, focusing on the story at hand rather than creating a superstructure of characters to drag it into the present. Despite the medieval setting, the core conceit of a prince receiving (dubious, shall we say) instruction in governance from the machinations of his parents — the King and his wife, Isabel — and their scheming courtier-lovers, Gaveston and Mortimer, has a Machiavellian timelessness to it.“Don’t bore me with the price of bread,” the King sings when Mortimer confronts him with the ruin that his favor for Gaveston has unleashed on the body politic. “There is no connection between our music and your labor,” Isabel assures the impoverished supplicants who demand an end to entertainments whose costs could pay their wages for a year. Not for nothing did the concert performance here, instinctively acted behind music stands though it was, take on the morality tale feel of an oratorio.However revealing the unstaged approach might be, it’s regrettable that “Lessons” had its premiere like this. How is it possible, one has to ask, that the first American performance of such a major work should be entrusted to a group of summer-school attendees for one sparsely attended night only — a Monday, no less — in the Berkshires?The Lyric Opera of Chicago is one of seven co-commissioners of “Lessons,” but there is still no sign of it mounting Katie Mitchell’s original staging, which it had to postpone in 2020. In the absence of a major house taking up “Skin,” the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, at its bravest, gave that work its staged premiere in 2015, but that festival is no more.It is to Tanglewood’s immense credit that it has taken the initiative, pushing its fellows to their limit at the end of the annual Festival of Contemporary Music and building on the long, close relationship that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has enjoyed with Benjamin, who led “Skin” in its quickly mounted American debut here in 2013 and followed it with a song cycle, “Dream of the Song,” in 2016.And you would be glad, though gladdening this opera is not, to hear a performance as strong as Monday’s in any major house. Three of the main parts were taken by recent graduates of Tanglewood’s vocal program; greater testament to its worth would be hard to imagine. Nathaniel Sullivan sang the King — Edward II, as imagined by Christopher Marlowe then reimagined by Crimp — with sniveling command, the monarch’s weakness to the fore. Daniel McGrew was eerily believable portraying the soldier-technocrat Mortimer’s earnest association of orderly progress with the necessity of killing, while Dominik Belavy gave Gaveston a deliciously unhinged air.Surely no soprano takes on a role written for Barbara Hannigan without fear, but the current Tanglewood fellow Elizabeth Polese made it seem as if she had as the haughty Isabel. She excelled just as Edmond Rodriguez brought frightening dignity to the Boy who learns his lessons all too well, chillingly scheduling the execution of Mortimer after the general has installed him on the throne. Meredith Wohlgemuth, Claire McCahan and Jack Canfield acquitted themselves well in smaller roles.But the orchestra was the star. Benjamin conducted it with his customary, graceful efficiency. Short of Alban Berg, few composers have been able to make abject brutality sound so exquisite, even so tender as Benjamin does here, his use of silence as intentional as his careful etching of textures around the voices.There is an unerring flow to “Lessons”: Several of its seven short scenes echo one another; interludes link them, commenting on and even extending the action; and the odd leitmotif pokes through, most noticeably the braying trombones that announce the King and that reappear, with mutes, when his son assumes the throne.Yet it is Benjamin’s merciless ability to hunt down the most specific of sounds that makes him such a potent dramatist. A desperately longing solo horn, fraught with desire, plays as Gaveston relates how the King likes to hold his hand over a flame; pawing woodwinds surround a Madman who fatally insists to the Boy that he is the real king, based on testimony from a cat.Gaveston gets the grisliest death of all, nothing like the horrifying tower of dissonance that accompanies the killing of the King, but one that we have to imagine in absentia, as the powerless ruler reads the details of his lover’s death from a letter while a percussionist taps out a rhythm on the rim of a side drum.You might hear in that the loneliness of Gaveston, or the dread of a King confronting the passage of time before his own, sure murder. I heard cockroaches, scurrying around the dead. Either way, what in any other composer’s hands could be predictable, Benjamin makes magical.Lessons in Love and ViolencePerformed on Monday at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Review: A New ‘Ring’ at Bayreuth Does Wagner Without Magic

      by

      Valentin Schwarz’s production of the four-opera epic presents human characters with relations even more tangled than usual.BAYREUTH, Germany — About 150 years ago, in a megalomaniac’s coup, Richard Wagner built a theater on a hilltop here in northern Bavaria.His immense, complex, innovative operas had never been presented as he imagined them. If he wanted them done right, he concluded, he would have to do them himself.But when the Bayreuth Festival Theater opened in 1876, with the premiere of his full “Ring of the Nibelung” — a four-opera, 15-hour mythic tale about nature and power with a cast of gods, warriors, dwarves, giants, talking birds and spitting dragons — Wagner was still unsatisfied.Among the most intractable (and inadvertently laugh-inducing) problems were the magical effects he called for: girls frolicking in the depths of a river; transformations into serpents; Valkyries riding through the air on horseback. Even now, with 21st-century stage technology, what Wagner makes musically persuasive has struggled to be visually and dramatically so.In his intriguing, insightful new production of the “Ring” at the Bayreuth Festival, the young director Valentin Schwarz has dealt with those problems by sidestepping them entirely.Schwarz’s acidic, passionately performed, contemporary-dress version is a “Ring” without magic or nature, in which all the characters are human, their relations even more tangled than usual, and all the events take place on a single estate.While in the libretto, the dwarf Alberich briefly turns himself into a lowly toad, that is here just a metaphor; it’s mentioned in the text, but nothing happens. The mighty Valkyries don’t fly through the sky, but bray around a waiting room in spike heels, flame-colored nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages. Siegfried, the flawed hero, is given a sword — or at least a shard that resembles one — but it does nothing supernatural. (The weapons here are mostly handguns.)In Valentin Schwarz’s staging of “Die Walküre,” the mythic Valkyries are instead women in spike heels, nouveau riche outfits and cosmetic surgery bandages.Enrico NawrathThis is all of a piece with the demythologizing trend in Wagner stagings over the past 50 years, especially in Europe. The most influential ones over that period have been made in the shadow of George Bernard Shaw’s interpretation of the “Ring” as an allegory of anticapitalism, with the action set more or less in the present and the gods depicted as members of the modern upper classes, the characters’ nobility and valor as mostly sham.That was also the case with the last Bayreuth “Ring,” by Frank Castorf, which ran from 2013 to 2017. But compared with Castorf’s gleefully baffling staging, which often abandoned coherent storytelling altogether, Schwarz’s is fairly straightforward in its account of the codependence and acrimony running through a family. There are whiffs of daytime soaps in the harsh vividness of the visuals and acting, and a bit of “Succession,” too.If the “Ring” is an allegory — a reach for some conservative operagoers, but a given for many directors — the conceptual anchor of a production is the nature of the gold, the theft of which from the Rhine, in the opening minutes, is the sin that sets the epic plot in motion.The gold — and the powerful, toxic ring it’s molded into — symbolizes the commodity that the onstage world values most. For Castorf, it was oil, corroding political and social relations as it circulated through the globalized economy. For Schwarz, picking up on the magic apples the libretto says the gods require to retain their freshness, it is youth, innocence, children.His “Ring” is full of adults obsessed with appearing younger — through exercise, plastic surgery, absurd attempts at hip clothing — even as, more than in most stagings, they visibly age over the cycle.In Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the stolen gold is a young boy (Erik Scheele) whose abduction by Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.Enrico NawrathThis obsession tips over into ominous hints of child trafficking and abuse; the slaves of Nibelheim are here a roomful of identically dressed blonde girls drawing at tables. (The girls aren’t overtly hurt, but they’re clearly being hoarded.) The dwarf Mime’s workshop is a creepy tea party and puppet theater for raggedy homemade dolls. And in Schwarz’s most original and inspired idea, the gold is not a bit of metal, but an actual young boy whose abduction embodies a society curdled by its attempts to outrun death.The life cycle is the focus from the beginning. The libretto sets the start of the “Ring” beneath the flowing waters of the Rhine, but Schwarz instead shows us an animated projection of a womb, in which twin fetuses are frozen in a gesture somewhere between love and combat.That image of a family’s foundational claustrophobia is a key to all that follows, as the action plays out in and around the gods’ home, Valhalla. (The forbiddingly sleek, spare sets are by Andrea Cozzi, the evocatively changing light by Reinhard Traub, and the fiercely trashy costumes by Andy Besuch.) The giants who, in the libretto, have been conned into constructing the lair are here chic architects of a glassy expansion. Alberich now isn’t of a different race than Wotan, the king of the gods, but is his less successful brother.Michael Kupfer-Radecky, left, and Stephen Gould (who was replaced last week by Clay Hilley) in “Götterdämmerung,” in which the family property is now inhabited by even more depraved people.Enrico NawrathThe all-knowing Erda and the brutal Hunding are part of the estate’s omnipresent, watchful servant underclass, which shines the silver as the main characters suffer. Later, Mime and the dissipated Gibichungs, Gutrune and Gunther, are ever more depraved inhabitants of parts of the property, long after the gods have passed on.The role of Wotan, his hands ever pawing at women at their most vulnerable, is shared by the sturdy Egils Silins (in “Das Rheingold”) and the brooding Tomasz Konieczny (“Die Walküre” and “Siegfried”). In the second act of “Walküre” last week, Konieczny had an appropriately bourgeois accident — the back of his Eames lounge chair broke off, and he tumbled to the floor — so he sat out the third act, giving Michael Kupfer-Radecky the opportunity to jump in, superbly, a few nights before his manic turn as Gunther.In “Siegfried,” the title character was sung by the tirelessly secure Andreas Schager, subtly unfolding the lovable side of a drunken degenerate. In “Götterdämmerung,” Clay Hilley was a last-minute replacement as Siegfried, and he would have been impressive even under less dramatic circumstances.“Die Walküre” was notable for Klaus Florian Vogt’s pure, rapt Siegmund and Lise Davidsen’s tender, surging Sieglinde, by far the most vocally resplendent performance of the week. Daniela Köhler sang brightly in the short but daunting Brünnhilde part in “Siegfried”; in the much longer “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” Iréne Theorin acted with intense commitment to the staging, but her sizable voice wobbled under pressure.Lise Davidsen, left, gave the most vocally resplendent performance of the week alongside Klaus Florian Vogt in “Die Walküre.”Enrico NawrathStepping into the production just a few weeks ago to replace a sick colleague, the conductor Cornelius Meister led a solid, sensibly paced, somewhat faceless reading of the sprawling score.For all that is clear, even blatant, about Schwarz’s staging, there is much that is memorably, lyrically ambiguous. Appearing periodically throughout his “Ring” is a small, glowing white pyramid in a glass cube. Characters occasionally carry it, and it sometimes sits next to furniture or in the corner, but it’s never explained or dwelled on. It is whatever you think it is: a model of the pyramidal addition to Valhalla; a stylized sword or spear tip; purity; energy; antiquity; aspirations before and beyond the complications of reality. It is, in essence, a line of poetry, enigmatic and evocative.Similarly, drawings of stereotypically Wagnerian faces with winged helmets keep popping up — they’re what the girls are making in Nibelheim — before taking form as the red masks carried by the sinister crowd of vassals in “Götterdämmerung.” Do they represent the stultifying weight of tradition in presenting the “Ring”? The dark side of German nationalism?Thankfully, it’s not specified — nor is the meaning of the omnipresent horse figurines and toys. The most important horse in the cycle, Brünnhilde’s Grane, is, like the gold, here a real person: a tall, dependable, silent aide with an equine mane and beard.Enigmatic images abound in the staging, including red masks with stereotypically Wagnerian faces.Enrico NawrathThere were indelible images throughout the week: the giant Fafner (Wilhelm Schwinghammer) moldering at home on his deathbed; Alberich (Olafur Sigurdarson) and Hagen (Albert Dohmen) confronting each other on a palely lit stage, empty but for a punching bag that Hagen attacks, then forlornly embraces; Hagen’s slow, mournful dance as he leaves, waving Alberich’s leather jacket like a bullfighter.And at the end of “Die Walküre,” we don’t see Brünnhilde asleep in a ring of fire, but rather the final attempt of Fricka (Christa Mayer) to reconcile with Wotan, her husband. He walks away, leaving a single candle burning as the curtain closes, a nod toward the libretto’s fire that captures the emotions of the music and the moment in a fresh light.But while the abandonment of enchantment is often illuminating, occasionally it ties Schwarz in knots. Since there is no potion to cause Siegfried to forget — and cruelly betray — his love for Brünnhilde, their ecstatic duet earlier in “Götterdämmerung” needs to be staged, unconvincingly, as a fight to give motivation for his bitterness. And both Theorin and the staging run a bit out of steam in the closing, apocalyptic Immolation Scene, with Brünnhilde wandering aimlessly, then cradling Grane’s decapitated head as she lies down next to the murdered Siegfried at the bottom of the estate’s drained, dirty pool.Instead, the real coup of “Götterdämmerung” is the realization, earlier on, that the kidnapped Rheingold-boy has grown up to become the embittered, ambivalent Hagen. Painfully, in Schwarz’s staging, we see him treat Brünnhilde and Siegfried’s young child (an addition to the libretto) as callously as he was — the wheel of fear and abuse continuing to turn.And the production’s final image is a reprise of its first: again, twin fetuses, but this time in seemingly peaceful embrace. Is that peace lasting? Or will birth inevitably bring about a renewal of resentment, betrayal and violence? With admirable restraint, Schwarz doesn’t define whether he thinks a sick world is capable of change.Der Ring des NibelungenThrough Aug. 30 at the Bayreuth Festival, Germany; bayreuther-festspiele.de. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      The Composer Huang Ruo on Illusion and Betrayal in ‘M. Butterfly’

      by

      Huang, who wrote the music for the operatic adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s play, says its exploration of race, gender and power still resonates today.The question from the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo came out of the blue: Would David Henry Hwang, the American playwright, consider adapting his Broadway hit “M. Butterfly” for the opera stage?It was 2013, and Huang, who had worked with Hwang on an Off Broadway revival of “The Dance and the Railroad,” was eager to collaborate again. The playwright agreed, and in late July, almost a decade after their first conversation, “M. Butterfly” had its premiere at Santa Fe Opera.Like the play, the opera tells the story of René Gallimard, a civil servant at the French embassy in Beijing, who falls in love with Song Liling, a Chinese opera singer who seems to be the ideal woman. Gallimard eventually discovers that Song has been a man — and a spy — all along.“M. Butterfly” upends Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” which tells the story of Cio-Cio-San, a betrayed young geisha, waiting in vain for the return of Pinkerton, her American husband. It gives power to Asian characters instead of Westerners, and the fluidity in gender roles counters sexist tropes in Puccini’s opera.Kangmin Justin Kim as Song Liling in the Santa Fe Opera production of “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaIn an interview from Santa Fe, Huang said the discussions of race, gender and power in “M. Butterfly,” which runs through Aug. 24, spoke to the present moment, more than three decades after the play’s premiere. He also talked about his early immersion in Chinese opera, the impact of the pandemic on the production and Asian representation in the arts. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me about your first encounter with the play “M. Butterfly.”When I was at Oberlin, in my college days, the first play that I saw in America was “M. Butterfly.” It left a very deep impact. I knew Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” the opera, but I did not know “M. Butterfly.” I thought it was a misspelling. I went in expecting to see “Madama Butterfly” but walked out with a totally opposite and different story.Why turn the play, which was successful on Broadway and inspired a 1993 movie, into an opera?I saw several versions of the play, and I often felt it needed to be told in musical form because it was so related to Puccini and to the reversal of “Madama Butterfly.” I felt in opera I could freely integrate — to twist and to turn, to create all the drama with the music. Some plays should never be touched or turned into opera, but I felt this was one of the rare cases where it could work.You grew up on Hainan island, the southernmost edge of China, immersed in traditional Chinese opera and other music. What was that like?In every village in Hainan, there is a communal open-air space, like a square. People would bring their clothes during the day to dry under the burning sun or put the rice out to dry. At night, people would sit there, the guys would take their shirts off, to get cool and to fall asleep.Occasionally there were Hainanese opera troupes that came to the village to perform. And at that moment, the open square became an improvised theater. Every family would bring their own food and chairs. And my grandmother would take me to sit there, to see opera.How did those early experiences inform your artistic philosophy?My grandmother was never sent to school because her family was poor and she was a woman. But she got her education through watching opera. Opera was for everybody: men and women, the elderly and the young. She learned all these stories and moral lessons, and she taught me those as well.Kim, left, and Mark Stone as René Gallimard in “M. Butterfly.”Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe OperaHow did the story of “Madama Butterfly” influence your approach?Puccini’s opera shows a submissive, young Asian woman who will do everything — even change her faith — to be put in a cage, to serve as someone’s wife and even bear a child. And it shows her foolishly wanting him to come back, only to be abandoned and to have her only child, her only hope, brutally taken away. Pinkerton was portrayed by Puccini as this white man who doesn’t know or respect Eastern traditions or culture, and just abuses Cio-Cio-San, and takes advantage of her, both physically and psychologically.The big picture is this kind of imbalance between East and West, and the smaller picture is the interplay of male and female, and Asians being treated as subhuman. That is entirely reversed in “M. Butterfly.”Can you give an example of how Puccini’s music influenced the score of “M. Butterfly”?The overture of “Madama Butterfly” is very fast and energetic, in a minor key, that sounds very Western. I turned the overture upside down. I used the Puccini motif, and I reversed it. I made it quasi-pentatonic, to make it more Eastern. And then I have an opera gong, crash cymbal and all these instruments go along with it. So it’s quite unrecognizable if you don’t know the Puccini well, but I felt that in that way it’s related to the Puccini, and it also became new, just like “M. Butterfly” itself.The premiere of “M. Butterfly” was delayed for two years because of the pandemic. How does it feel to open in this moment?It’s even more timely now, because of the pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian hate. Asian Americans are again being treated with subhuman stereotypes and racial hate. They’re being treated as others, not as equals. With “M. Butterfly,” we are showing people this is the history of humanity — that this is not just an exotic story happening in the past.What has it been like witnessing the spike in hate directed toward Asians in the United States, particularly in New York City, your longtime home?You just don’t know when and where you might get attacked. For example, I took my kids out biking after the severe attack on a Filipino woman in Times Square last year. I basically disguised them, and disguised myself, so we all had masks, and they had helmets on, and I had a hat, so we all looked less Asian. That was the first time I felt I had to disguise myself in America.Normally Asians and Asian Americans want to be seen and heard. We have been complaining for a long time that we are invisible. But that was the moment that I wanted to be invisible. I did not want to be seen or identified. Is that normal? Is that real? I don’t think that’s normal, but that felt so real at that moment.What do you want audiences to take away from “M. Butterfly”?I want people to understand the story, but also to ask questions. That, to me, is the best opera can do: Not to provide answers, but to provoke questions. And to leave the audience asking questions about their own background, their own journey. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘M. Butterfly’ Metamorphoses Again, as an Opera

      by

      David Henry Hwang has returned to his Tony-winning play with a libretto for Huang Ruo’s new work. But can its story change with the times?SANTA FE, N.M. — “M. Butterfly” has been a Broadway hit, a watershed in Asian American representation, a film, and recently a revised version of the original play.Now, with the premiere on Saturday here at Santa Fe Opera of an adaptation by the composer Huang Ruo, with a libretto by David Henry Hwang, the play’s author, the butterfly has returned to its operatic chrysalis.It was inevitable, really. Hwang’s Tony Award-winning script, from 1988, came to him when he saw that he could use the Orientalist stereotypes of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” as a mirror to explore how, for two decades, the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot (renamed Rene Gallimard in the play) carried on an affair with the Chinese opera singer and spy Shi Pei Pu (renamed Song Liling), only to discover, amid a lurid espionage case, that “she” had been a “he” all along.Hwang’s smash exposé of empire and race, gender and domination, could always be read as a reflection on the Puccini and the biases it still perpetuates as well as a gloss on the real-life tale. Find the right composer who could blend its elements with metatheatrical flair while maintaining the elusive quality that so marks the play, and the opportunity was obvious.Huang, a Chinese-born professor at the Mannes School of Music, whose works have often integrated Eastern and Western influences into a distinctive personal style, was almost certainly the best bet to be that composer.But the opportunity is missed.“M. Butterfly” had plenty of potential to fly at Santa Fe. Delayed for two years on account of the pandemic, James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, by Greg Emetaz, and moving easily between the personal and the geopolitical, as Gallimard’s fate entwines with that of the imperial pretensions of the French and Americans in Vietnam, and Song’s shifts with that of the Chinese Communist Party. Carolyn Kuan conducts with empathy, if not the rhythmic precision that the thudding score needs.James Robinson’s production is simple but telling, making clean use of sensible projections, our critic writes.Curtis BrownThe cast is an exemplary one, too. Mark Stone makes for a suitably worn, confused Gallimard, and he sings his thorny vocal lines with impressive shape. The more minor parts are neatly delivered, especially Hongni Wu’s amused Comrade Chin and Kevin Burdette’s connivingly bureaucratic ambassador to China.All must bow to Kangmin Justin Kim, whose drag performances as Kimchilia Bartoli must have helped him portray Song with the extraordinary conviction he displays here. More than credible singing Cio-Cio-San’s “Un bel dì” and other soprano excerpts from the Puccini, this astonishing countertenor’s alluring, ringing tone, and the sensitivity as an actor that he shows in toying with Gallimard’s delusions and exploring Song’s own sexuality, announced an artist to watch closely.The problem with “M. Butterfly” is a deeper one, and it’s the same difficulty that Hwang grappled with when he rewrote the script for its return to Broadway in 2017: As times change, can “M. Butterfly” change with them and still be true to itself?That’s not to say that Hwang’s earlier themes are irrelevant now; far from it. Violence against women of Asian descent remains outrageously persistent, and there is still considerable value in confronting the Butterfly stereotypes that sustain it, especially in an opera world that remains stubbornly — no, offensively — reluctant to reckon with its many racisms, including in “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot.”But the play itself helped to expose related intricacies of sexism, racism and imperialism that have since become familiar, and the story has worn. Gender norms, for one thing, have shifted dramatically enough that the old question of whether Gallimard knew that Song was a man is barely titillating at all. By now we should also know that Gallimard’s desires are problematic; if we don’t, “M. Butterfly” still achieves its goal of showing us that we should. Either way, it’s hard to engage much with the bumbling, repressed central character, and the opera barely asks us to.Stone, left, and Kim in the opera, which has a distance from the original material, with a knowingly analytical air.Curtis BrownSo what is left? “M. Butterfly,” the play, always had ambiguity and illusion at its core, and this operatic version tries to break down binaries still further, especially through Song’s character. Fluidity washes; power blurs as East meets West; metaphor piles onto metaphor. There is a distance from the original material here, and the opera takes on a kind of knowingly analytical air.It’s more of a disquisition than a drama, and nowhere is that more apparent than in a big third-act aria for Song, “Awoke as a Butterfly.” She sings it as the Party tries to send her to France to spy on a lover she thinks has long forgotten her, and as the stage turns to black, you hope that her motivations are at last about to become more than dimly apparent. Is she just a Party stooge? Is she in love? What does she want from him?“I pretend to know, pretend to know the truth,” she sings. “I know the truth and so I pretend.”Alas, no luck.Huang Ruo’s music offers few such subtleties, though unlike in his earlier opera for Santa Fe, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” it declines to weave Chinese instruments into the orchestra. The intrigue here lies in how he deals with the musical legacy of “Madama Butterfly,” and, wisely, he has been careful with it.There’s no sense of pastiche, no resort to parody; direct quotation is limited to the few moments when Song is performing as Cio-Cio-San. When there are references, they are oblique or distorted, and they tend to follow Hwang’s story in inverting the original material, asking us who the Butterfly in the story really is. There’s a humming chorus, for instance, or at least a chorus that hums, but it intends to evoke Gallimard’s memories, not those of his lover.But much of the score otherwise tires as its pounding chords and thumping cross-rhythms alternate and overlap with more static, suspended passages. If there is plenty of tension, there is little variety, and this arid music rarely gives us insights that the words do not. It needed to; for without them, this Butterfly is lost.M. ButterflyThrough Aug. 24 at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico; santafeopera.org. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Review: A ‘Tristan und Isolde’ Plays Out in Shadows and Light

      by

      At Santa Fe Opera, Wagner’s work is being presented for the first time, in a striking, modest staging that makes space for the music.SANTA FE, N.M. — The play of light has always been part of the show at the Santa Fe Opera: its majestic, open-sided theater in the foothills making drama out of the darkening of the sky and the brightening of the stars, even the flash of a hopefully distant storm.But in Santa Fe’s admirably understated, lovingly faithful new “Tristan und Isolde,” the summer house’s first Wagner for more than 30 years and its only foray thus far into the composer’s dramas beyond “The Flying Dutchman,” light moves center stage.Day and night lie at the heart of “Tristan,” the former representing the glaring, intrusive reality from which Tristan and Isolde struggle to escape in their love, the latter their “wondrous realm,” as Tristan sings of it, of freedom, of passion and ultimately of oblivion.There was a time when that metaphor was treated as at least somewhat expendable; in deference to singers’ stamina, Wagner’s longest disquisition on the philosophical metaphor, in Act II, was traditionally cut.But the incompatibility of the worlds of light and dark are taken as an organizing principle in Santa Fe’s “Tristan,” with subtle projections by Greg Emetaz that build on smart lighting by John Torres. Co-directed by the hotshots Lisenka Heijboer Castañón and Zack Winokur, it contrasts bright white with pitch black, and often dwells in the shades in between.The result is filled with striking, poignant images. We meet Tristan as a towering silhouette, for instance, a projection onto which Isolde can fix her grievances; that image finds its echo hours later, as the shadow of absent Isolde paces the walls of Tristan’s hallucinating mind.Much of the first act takes place in a cramped box of light, as Isolde is entrapped on her voyage to wed King Marke. When she narrates her failure to kill Tristan earlier, to avenge his murder of Morold, her fiancé, spotlights track her as she explores the encroaching murk. Tristan, when he finally deigns to see her, is already in the shadow of night. No potion is necessary for them to fall in love — only to reveal what they both already know.Wilson, left, with Simon O’Neill as Tristan in the production, which features scenic design by the firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero and costumes by Carlos J. Soto.Curtis Brown/Santa Fe OperaThese kinds of touches are gently allusive, suggesting more of an atmosphere than pretending to some grand interpretation. But that’s the point. Heijboer Castañón, a Dutch-Peruvian director whose credits include assisting Pierre Audi on this opera in Amsterdam, and Winokur, gaining renown as the artistic director of the insurgent American Modern Opera Company, offer something of a welcome to a work that is often treated warily or, ironically, or rendered illegible in impenetrable symbolism.Heijboer Castañón and Winokur offer no drastic interventions in the plot, just a delicate understanding of it as a tale of intimacies, friendly and erotic alike. What few props exist are lightly used. The spare set, from blueprints by the architecture and design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero, consists of four angled walls of mottled gray — cutouts evoking a castle tower, say, but no more than evoking it. Carlos J. Soto’s costumes hint at abstraction, rather than declaim distance as a goal.There is a refreshing feeling of trust to it all, a sensible desire not to get in the way of what clearly remains to these young collaborators a basically human story — and a willingness, perhaps above all, to make space for the music.And why not?James Gaffigan, typically lively on the podium for what is his first run of a full Wagner opera, sparked up a feisty intensity that supplied the energy the staging tended to resist, pushing the drama hard but not harshly. His was a take on the score both muscular and swift, blessedly so for a show that ended well after midnight.Greater experience might bring more deliberate harmonic and thematic direction, perhaps more purpose to transitions and more of a willingness to linger, just as making Wagner a habit rather than an exception here might, in time, sand down some of the rougher edges of the orchestra’s playing. Either way, the signs are promising for Gaffigan, who takes charge of the Komische Oper in Berlin next year.Never mind the future when it comes to the soprano Tamara Wilson. Renowned as a Verdian, she is slated to sing Elsa in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Lohengrin” next spring and Sieglinde in Vienna shortly thereafter; this Isolde, amply powerful yet ideally precise with the text, confirmed her as quite the Wagnerian already.Jamie Barton as Brangäne, a portrayal our critic describes as “magnificent.”Curtis Brown/Santa Fe OperaCornered, angry, spiteful, fearful, anxious, excited, enraptured, serene, each in turn — Wilson’s portrayal, like that of Jamie Barton’s magnificent Brangäne, was as authoritatively acted as it was movingly sung, an embodiment of the role in a production that fixed relentless attention on its principals.Simon O’Neill, a ponderous stage presence, suffered from that unsparing focus in the first two acts; in his third he surpassed himself, but the sharp, compressed quality of his voice still seemed less suited to Tristan than to some of the roles he has taken on in service to Wagner.The unstinting loudness of Nicholas Brownlee, otherwise a fine Kurwenal and the Dutchman in a David Alden production scheduled for next season here, made O’Neill’s frequent trouble slicing through the orchestra all the more plain; the affecting ease of Eric Owens’s King Marke likewise pointed up the tenor’s stilted, self-conscious delivery.But with Wilson dominating it by force of voice and clarity of personality, this is a “Tristan” that anyway seems rightly to imply — for it insists on nothing — that it should be “Isolde” to which we shorten the name of this singular work. And it is to Isolde that the final coup is reserved; as the music of her transfiguration resolves, the set’s walls open for Wilson to stride calmly to the back of the theater, and into the night.Tristan und IsoldeThrough Aug. 23 at Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico; santafeopera.org. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      ‘A Stone in the Mosaic’: A Director Enters the House of Wagner

      by

      At 33, Valentin Schwarz is taking on the monumental “Ring” cycle at the theater Wagner built for it in Bayreuth, Germany.New productions of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, a 16-hour epic taking place over four evenings, are always a highly anticipated event, and even more so when they take place at the annual Bayreuth Festival.Opera houses most often roll out stagings of the four “Ring” works — “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre,” “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” — over multiple years. But Bayreuth, which is still managed by the descendants of the composer himself, presents the entire cycle all at once. And its newest production, by the Austrian director Valentin Schwarz, opens July 31.Since World War II, there have only been nine Bayreuth productions of the “Ring” — among them Patrice Chéreau’s storied 1976 staging, which introduced critical, political dramaturgy to the piece, and the most recent one, a divisive 2013 interpretation by the Marxist firebrand Frank Castorf.A new “Ring” had been scheduled to premiere there in 2020, taken on by a team of surprisingly fresh faces: Schwarz, 33, and the Finnish conductor Pietari Inkinen, 42. The pandemic delayed the project, and last week, Inkinen fell ill with Covid-19 and had to miss crucial rehearsals. He was replaced by Cornelius Meister, who had originally been engaged to lead “Tristan und Isolde.”In between recent rehearsals, Schwarz discussed his vision for the “Ring” in a video interview. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How are you holding up in the heat?Well, the coolest place in Bayreuth is on the stage. The audience generates the heat.And the building sort of cooks all afternoon, right, when people are about to take their uncomfortable seats?Yes, and I think this kind of torture has to have its reward — especially a “Ring,” which is basically one week of torture. You should get one big plot, one tale, one big story that you enjoy each evening and have the feeling that you want to know how it’s going to turn out in the next piece.What is your approach to the cycle?It’s long and there’s an Everest-like quality to it, but, in fact, it’s not so many characters for these 15 hours of music. It’s 30 or 40 people. It reminds me very much of the typical stories of today — TV series, big novels — where you can dive in and experience getting to know the characters in a way that is not only one-dimensional.We follow Wotan, we follow Brünnhilde, we follow Siegfried, and never get just one impression that one is a hero and the other is purely evil. Instead, we get to know the scratching, the deep dive into unconscious motivations. The “Ring” is mainly about one big family. We take this tale through different generations, through children and grandchildren, and this long stretch of history within the people and this family.There are guests — wanted and unwanted — who interfere in this family story. The basic conflicts are Greek conflicts. Motivations of anger, of hatred, of love, the will to power. This stays within this family, and that informs my, you could say, Nietzschean approach. What is the thing that motivates every person in the piece? It’s knowing the end: that they will die, that it will end, that time ends. All of them are trying to find a solution for this.This summer’s production will have many singers switch roles between productions instead of, for example, casting one single Wotan and Brünnhilde throughout the entire cycle. Is this related to that generational approach, or is it a more prosaic choice?Like most things in a theater, there’s the basic mundane thing, which is that we have not so many Wagner singers, and they are reducing in number every year. There’s maybe five people in the world who can sing Wotan. Bayreuth gives those singers a chance for singers to evolve within the pieces. Over time, someone can sing Fasolt and go on and sing Wotan afterward, for example.For the casting, I was of course very involved with Katharina Wagner. In many cases, it’s interesting to show how the role, the character changes between pieces. Irene Theorin, for example, sings Brünnhilde in “Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” and in between, in “Siegfried,” it’s Daniela Köhler. To make this big transition, it was great to see — at the end of Walküre, Irene Theorin is trapped on the cliffs by Wotan behind the magic fire, but this person is changing.When you talk about approaching the work as a TV series or film, is this something that at least partly comes from the filmic quality of Wagner’s music?Most modern medieval movies and TV series are unthinkable without that Wagnerian aspect. Even in “Game of Thrones,” as soon as it’s medieval, it has to sound like Wagner. What you describe as filmic is for me more about Wagner being a very practical man of theater. He knew about filmic effects long before movies existed. He built the Festspielhaus here at Bayreuth precisely for this work. It’s democratic. You can see the same stage from every seat. The invisible orchestra. He wanted to have this approach — you could call if filmic — from a visual perspective as well.From the structural side, it’s even more interesting, because of the leitmotifs. He figured out how to construct this piece as a collage. I’ll take this idea from the Eddas, I’ll take this from the “Nibelungenlied,” I’ll invent something there. It’s not a myth; it’s a myth of other myths. And to make it not just a car crash but something which fits together well, also musically, over a 30-year creation time with a long break from composing, there’s this narrative structure in which the orchestra, through its use of the different musical motives, is an all-knowing storyteller. It’s not a logical thing about knowing all the motives before you enter but something that comes from an unconscious layer of enormous emotionality, which makes it approachable for everybody.That all-knowing storyteller quality might clash with the immediacy of storytelling in a TV series, no? So much of the piece isn’t action but people describing things that have happened or will happen.Of course it has to be psychologically gripping. I have to know why this person is telling us the thing that happened half an hour ago. Wagner didn’t think we were so stupid we would forget. In most cases, the interest is that it’s not a monologue where someone stands onstage and sings into a mirror, but someone who is communicating to someone else. Psychologically speaking, this act of speaking is the first step in therapy. In many of these monologues, the characters give their own approach to the thing that has happened, and their position changes within the monologue.The second thing is that it has to do with the relationship of the characters to the myth. Everyone in the piece knows about the ring, has their imagination of what it does. But knowledge of different things in the piece moves like a telescope; it shifts position and zooms out and in. We explore this three-dimensional sphere of the myth and the story. It grips me that these moments, when they tell us things that have happened, are creating the past itself.You’re directing this work in the house that was built for it. What is that like?You arrive, and you are baffled. You sit down in the audience for the beginning of “Rheingold,” and the sound comes out of nowhere. This experience is singular. To come to this place is also to come to the history of this place. We know that there were very dark hours in the history of the festival. They have done a good job in the last years of reflecting on these: to hire Jewish directors like Barrie Kosky, to process the past and try to create something new.It’s enormous, in this place, how the common knowledge of Wagner still exists, in every orchestral musician, in every stage technician. They remember that this is where Wolfgang Wagner wanted the curtain to rise or fall. And the audience, which is the most advanced Wagner audience in the world — they know everything about the reception history of this repertoire. So it’s not my job to tell them the story that Wagner has written, but instead it forces us to have a new vision and approach every time.In the last few years, I realized that the intrinsic feature at Bayreuth — where the works cycle and nothing lasts forever — means I don’t have to make the “Ring” production for all time. I am making something for this moment, not something that lasts. A stone in the mosaic of the big picture of the history of Wagner. This makes me humble, feel down to earth, reminds me of what small insignificant pieces of stardust we all are in the end. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: Salzburg Festival Opens With Operatic Apocalypses

      by

      Romeo Castellucci directs, and Teodor Currentzis conducts, an unusual double bill of a Bartok classic and an Orff rarity at the Salzburg Festival.SALZBURG, Austria — The public has spoken.Any fears the Salzburg Festival had over whether the conductor Teodor Currentzis’ presence there would attract boos or disruptive protests were dispelled on Tuesday. Since the invasion of Ukraine began, he has attracted controversy over his and his ensemble MusicAeterna’s Russian state support, as well as their silence on the war and ties to associates of that country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. But at the opening of a new double bill led by Currentzis and featuring members of the MusicAeterna choir, the audience responded only with applause.Whether the evening — a pretentious, overlong yet occasionally illuminating marriage of Bela Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and the Carl Orff rarity “De Temporum Fine Comoedia,” directed by Romeo Castellucci at the expansive Felsenreitschule — could have been divisive on artistic grounds is one thing. Politically, however, it was extremely complicated, worthy of neither cheers nor boos but rather more of a “hmm.”The festival itself was under scrutiny for standing by Currentzis. Unlike, say, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which has taken a hard line on Russian artists with links to Putin, such as Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko, Salzburg has kept a close eye on the European Union’s sanctions list and said in a statement, “We see no foundation for artistic or economic collaboration with institutions or individuals who identify with this war, its instigators or their goals.”Do Currentzis and MusicAeterna fall into that category? Based in St. Petersburg, they are primarily sponsored by VTB Bank, a Russian state institution that was sanctioned this year, and some prominent Russian officials sit on the board of the ensemble’s foundation. As a collective, it doesn’t have any public stance on the war, though organizations and critics have mostly demanded one from the safety of their Western perches.At the very least, Currentzis seems to have fallen into careerist behavior. Since 2004, he has been building MusicAeterna toward the international standing it enjoys, and as the ensemble went freelance in recent years, it found Russian funding that has since been revealed as untenable. To survive in the West without scandal, it needs a new home, and new sponsors. And the longer this war goes on, the more silence will become as impossible as the group’s current position.Teodor Currentzis leading a rehearsal with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, the pit ensemble for the production.Alexandra MuravyevaIn an interview on Monday, Markus Hinterhäuser, the Salzburg Festival’s artistic director, said that if people are looking for a statement from Currentzis, “the signs are there.” His work has subtly condemned Russian state beliefs, as well as the country’s troubled 20th-century history; and in 2017 he was outspoken about the arrest of the director Kirill Serebrennikov, which was widely seen as punishment for his theater that was critical of life under Putin.The examples could go on in either direction. But outwardly, Currentzis remains a mystery. If his previous projects have offered signs of his beliefs, there were few if any political revelations in the double bill on Tuesday. All that was left to judge was the art-making itself.And that was something of a sequel to Currentzis’ collaboration with Castellucci last year: a staging of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” here that stretched the score an hour beyond its typical running time, with recitative delivered at the speed of snow melting in the nearby Alps. I remember spending four hours inside the Grosses Festspielhaus trying to understand why an interpretation like this was necessary; I still don’t have an answer.Both men are strong-willed, provocative auteurs. Separately, they have been capable of awe-inspiring work; together, they seem to mutually enable an exasperating self-indulgence. Their Bartok and Orff, then, made for an uneven night, as double bills can be — a “Bluebeard” of misguided tempos and dynamics but committed performances and a “Comoedia,” for all the work’s flaws, more persuasively executed than on Herbert von Karajan’s original recording, in a staging characteristically monumental yet somewhat pompous.Once again, the evening was longer than it needed to be. Each score contains about an hour of music; with an intermission, the double bill ran a little over three and a half hours, in part because of tempo choices, but mostly because the scenes in the Orff were padded with new, atmospheric transitional passages written by Currentzis. This prolonged a piece that few find enjoyable to begin with, and that Castellucci didn’t have much to say about.Members of the MusicAeterna choir and the Bachchor Salzburg in Carl Orff’s “De Temporum Fine Comoedia.”Monika RittershausHis biggest interpretive statement was in bridging the two works, which wouldn’t appear to share much beyond different scales of apocalyptic events. In “Bluebeard,” it’s intimate — the slow-burning drama of a wife unveiling her new husband’s pained world, to the destruction of them both. And in the “Comeodia,” which premiered at Salzburg in 1973, it’s cosmic, with an impersonal, aggressively Christian vision for the end of time.Castellucci has the spoken prologue of “Bluebeard,” a cameo role called the Bard, given with a declamatory grandeur that later matches the musicalized speech of the “Comoedia.” (The Bard is also played by Christian Reiner, who returns at the end of the Orff as Lucifer.) And he threads the action of the first opera with the second: Bluebeard and his wife Judith, Castellucci suggests, are here an established couple in grief over the loss of their child, and in a dreamy, dark void of just water and fire. Peace comes for them at the end of the “Comoedia,” where they return in an act of redemption that renders Judith as a sort of Eve bringing about universal salvation.Elsewhere, visual motifs — masks, costumes and even stains — recur throughout both works, which are otherwise aesthetically distinct. The trouble is that these Easter eggs, along with the more explicit gestures, and stylized movement choreographed by Cindy Van Acker, exist more to justify the double bill than elevate the meaning, and, crucially, the emotional impact of either work. Both the Bartok and the Orff come out feeling less operatic for it.Ausrine Stundyte brought a compelling, fierce humanity to her Judith.Monika RittershausNot that emotion was absent from the performance. As Judith, the soprano Ausrine Stundyte made a bizarre treatment of the character — constantly on the verge of self-immolation — at least compelling, with a fierce humanity largely absent in the staging. (Her counterpart, the bass Mika Kares, was a resonant but wooden Bluebeard, a passive presence where he should have outdone her unraveling.) The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra played with organic unpredictability yet skilled precision, and brought animalistic intensity to the Orff.Where they took a wrong step, they were following Currentzis’ baton, which was less reliable than when he and the orchestra performed a moving, sweeping account of Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony during the festival’s Ouverture Spirituelle last week. His reading of “Bluebeard,” an opera of accumulative power, was one of luxuriant tempos and high emotional temperature with nowhere to go but occasional crests that drowned out the singers, despite the hair-raising power of Stundyte’s voice.Currentzis’ take on the Orff, though — realized by the orchestra with a game combination of the MusicAeterna choir, the Bachchor Salzburg and the Salzburger Festspiele und Theater Kinderchor — was a triumph that reveled in the primitive, ritualistic nature of the work and rose to rattling clashes that you could feel deep within your ears.In an evening of looking for signs in Currentzis’ work, it was difficult to miss that his podium sat empty during the final, prerecorded moments of the “Comoedia” score. So he was nowhere to be seen as a single sentence spread over supertitle screens above the stage: Pater, peccavi. Father, I have sinned.Bluebeard’s Castle and De Temporum Fine ComoediaThrough Aug. 20 at the Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More