Austria Salzburg Competition [4] – Strauss, Capriccio: Soloists, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Christian Thielemann (conductor). Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg, 26.7.2024. (MB)
Forged:
Flamand – Sebastian Kohlhepp
Olivier – Konstantin Krimmel
La Roche – Mika Kares
Countess Madeleine – Elsa Dreisig
Depend – Bo Skovhus
Clairon – Ève-Maud Hubeaux
Main-Domo – Torben Jürgens
Italian Soprano – Tuuli Takala
Italian Tenor – Josh Lovell
Servants – Kieran Carrel, Jonas Jud, Fabio Dorizzi, Ian Rucker, Christian Tschelebiew, Jan Petryka, Lucas van Lierop, Philipp Schöllhorn
Monsieur Taupe – Jörg Schneider
There’s a sure irony to the recognition of Capriccio in live performance efficiency. The final time the Royal Opera offered Richard Strauss’s valedictory opera – assuming we don’t rely Des Edels Schattens – it was additionally with out staging. Now, for causes unclear, it has appeared within the Salzburg Competition’s festival-within-a-festival of sacred music, ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’, handled as the primary ‘full-scale’ opera of the competition, works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Luigi Dallapiccola however, attracting the normal complement of dignitaries for its premiere. Irony and Strauss aren’t a lot glorious bedfellows as two sides of the identical musical coin, so there isn’t any drawback there. If the world of La Roche discovered itself considerably obscured on that event, the impresario impressed by Max Reinhardt remained current not solely onstage, nodding off throughout the opening sextet, but additionally in honoured bust-form on the entrance to the Haus für Mozart subsequent door. Strauss himself, naturally, stays on the primary flooring of the Grosse(s) Festspielhaus itself. And if a live performance efficiency, maybe particularly with out interval, might not have been completely what a few of these invited had been anticipating, they, like the remainder of us, will certainly have loved discovering themselves evenly satirised, elevated, and maybe even impressed by what unfolded.
Apparently, though no ‘live performance director’ or comparable was credited, a level of completed appearing was concerned, as had been telling transformations in lighting (not least for the closing moonlight). Fact be instructed, or at the least one reality amongst many, little gave the impression to be misplaced. When the forged engaged so animatedly with each other, onstage when vital and offstage when not, the impression was not so very completely different from a ‘conventional’ manufacturing through which they might do the exact same, solely seated in an eighteenth-century salon. And Strauss’s query, Countess Madeleine’s too, is in the end ‘Wort oder Ton?’ not ‘phrases, music, or gesture,’ nonetheless unusually that sits each with the conversations and the composer’s veneration for Wagner’s Opera and Drama (‘the guide of books about music’). If all of us in the end know which is able to win in our hearts and minds, if not essentially within the Countess’s, then the competition was established with commendable even-handedness by these performing, balances of all form upheld and dramatically generative, even and not using a mise-en-scène or directorial Konzept.
Furthermore, if one may count on the conductor, presumably the orchestra too, to be favoured in such a situation, such was not the case. Christian Thielemann has usually proved to be at his greatest in Strauss. He led a rare efficiency of Die Frau ohne Schatten on this identical corridor 13 years in the past, blighted but removed from obliterated by Christof Loy’s smug dismissal of the work as director; the composer has lengthy proved central to his operatic work in Dresden, Vienna, and elsewhere. If his Dresden FroSch (overview right here) earlier this 12 months was spectacular but, to my thoughts, a bit on the valuable facet, this Capriccio unfolded with a heat, affection, and ease that spoke of a fantastic stability – that phrase once more – between preparation and familiarity. Restraint just isn’t fairly the phrase, however there was no grandstanding, nothing pressured. One was led to hear, maybe through music, but to phrases as a lot as their confrere-competitors. Quotations had been assumed into the orchestral material, by no means underlined. That may be the vulgar manner of some, however hardly Strauss’s. There have been passages of rapt orchestral magic; if the shut of the string sextet has sounded extra hushed, I’ve not heard it so. The Vienna Philharmonic clearly loves enjoying for Thielemann; it’s simply as clear that the love is mutual. And though that sextet was definitely performed, it by no means sounded prefer it.
Sebastian Kohlhepp and Konstantin Krimmel made for a pair of finely forged, properly contrasted suitors as Flamand and Olivier respectively. If Flamand in the end stole the center, that’s actually Strauss’s doing. Mika Kares lived as much as La Roche’s outsize guarantees in a efficiency that relished not solely his boastfulness but additionally his standing as dramatic lynchpin, leaving implicit unhappiness – or am I being sentimental? – to a different day. Ève-Maud Hubeaux was a splendid Clairon; earlier than I knew who she was, I actually sensed the ‘act’ of a French tragedienne. Such just isn’t reserved to a French singer, after all, however there was a tang of just about Voltairean authenticity right here, with out sacrifice to crystal-clear German. Bo Skovhus marshalled his assets properly because the Depend. Torben Jürgens’s Main-Domo made a fantastic impression, as did an array of particular person servants, maybe the very best I’ve heard. They could have had a spin-off present of their very own; maybe at some point they may.
One individual is lacking in that, after all, and it was there that I discovered myself, seemingly not like the viewers, considerably in two minds. Elsa Dreisig’s Countess was effectively sung, well-acted, basically had a lot to commend it, but someway didn’t really feel fairly ‘proper’ to me. Was {that a} matter of getting an excessive amount of a sure interpretation or mode of interpretation in my head, to which others should conform? Fairly presumably, however what I heard got here throughout in tone and character as extra girlish, even Sophie-like, than a successor to the Marschallin, the true director of metatheatrical proceedings. I shall dwell on this no extra; all of us have our preconceptions and prejudices, and this may increasingly effectively have been mine. As everyone knows, no operatic efficiency is or might be good, not to mention appropriate. Music, phrases, and theatre (seen or invisible) are too human for that.
Mark Berry
