Thu, Aug 24, 2006 page14

• Classical DVD Review

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  LOHENGRIN
  

  Domingo, Lloyd, Studer etc.
  

  Director: Wolfgang Weber
  

  Well Go USA WD164
  

  Lohengrin is the most beautiful of Wagner's early operas, and the 1990 production with Placido Domingo, released on DVD this year by Well Go USA, does it ample justice. Its greatest strength is that it evokes a northern medieval world so credibly. The action takes place in 10th-century Brabant (today partly in Belgium, partly in Holland), and this clouded world with its proud chieftains holding their emblazoned shields strikes you from the very first moment. This is no shivering modern populace clutching its gaudy holiday brochures and cursing the unreliable summers, but proud patriots who love their native turf — its fruits, its flowers, its dialects, and even its weather.

  The music, too, is enormously nostalgic. It's the old German Romanticism, so dreamy, so gilded, with its harps and trombones, its sweeping arpeggios and lovingly extended melodies. The story of Grail-legend romance should ideally be experienced in an ancient theater with faded upholstery, mottled mirrors and gas lights. But this new DVD isn't a bad substitute. The Vienna State Opera, where it was filmed, isn't over-large as opera houses go, and Claudio Abbado conducts with great refinement. Cheryl Studer sings Elsa — the doomed maiden who falls in love with a mysterious knight whose name she must never ask and who arrives on a boat drawn by a swan — with appropriately puzzled resolve. Placido Domingo is a forceful Lohengrin and Robert Lloyd is in magnificent voice as King Henry the Fowler. An especially strong Ortrud, the scheming temptress in contact with the old pre-Christian gods, comes from Dinja Vejzovic. On two DVDs, and currently selling in Taiwan at some NT$365, this is astonishingly good value.

  LA BOHEME
  

  Gallardo-Domas, Hong, Alvarez etc.
  

  Director: Franco Zeffirelli
  

  JINGO JDV311036
  

  Franco Zeffirelli's decades-old production of La Boheme has been much praised, and now we see it resurrected once again in a staging at Milan's Teatro degli Archimboldi in 2003. A Bonus shows the veteran director giving his views on opera production, likening great works to paintings that you might have inherited. Your duty is to preserve them, hang them in the right sort of light, and not let anyone interfere with them unduly.

  What this means for operas is that experimental productions are out, and that once you've hit on a creditable staging nothing needs to be done over the years to change it. The problem with this view is that, for reasons that are in essence mysterious, productions date. This is the basic explanation for the unsatisfactoriness of the new DVD from Taiwan's otherwise admirable distribution company, Jingo (www.jingo.com.tw). The cast of relatively young singers appears to find the old scenery and costumes unchallenging, and it's impossible not to note that the greatest international soloists are no longer performing in these antique sets. The world, for better or worse, has to move on. Thus it is that Marcelo Alvarez (Rodolfo), Cristina Gallardo-Domas (Mimi), Hei-kyung Hong (Musetta) and the rest by and large fail to move. This might be a perfectly acceptable version of Boheme for people who've never seen another — and Act Three, the best act, is especially striking visually. Musically, however, this is not a top-ranking performance, and one has a sneaking suspicion that this is something to do with the lack of challenge presented by the old production.

  WAGNER GALA 1994
  

  Conductor: Claudio Abbado
  

  Studer, Meier, Jerusalem etc.
  

  Deutsche Grammophon 073 214-2
  

  Wagner in concert is no substitute for the incomparable experience the works in the opera house can offer. On a new DVD from Deutsche Grammophon Abbado again conducts, this time a New Year's Eve Concert with the Berlin Philharmonic, no less. But even so the effect is dreadfully disappointing. The overture to Tannhauser is given, considering what it can be made to sound like, a manifestly sedated performance. The soloists are stellar names — Cheryl Studer, Waltraut Meier, Siegfried Jerusalem and Bryn Terfel (this last less than stellar, in my view) — but nothing can by-pass the essential absurdity of modern people dressed up to the nines singing this kind of music out of its theatrical context. Here DVD offers nothing — if anything, the image actually distracts. If you want to hear Wagner sung as it should be, then listen to the CD of Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehemann in Act One of Die Walkure, recorded, astonishingly, in 1935 (EMI CDH 7 61020 2). After that you won't, I think, feel in need of anything very much else.

  ARTUR RUBINSTEIN
  

  Piano Concertos
  

  Conductor: Andre Previn
  

  Deutsche Grammophon 073 4195
  

  Polish-born Artur Rubinstein was one of the 20th century's greatest pianists. On a newly-released DVD from Deutsche Grammophon you see him play Grieg's Piano Concerto plus the second piano concertos of Chopin and Saint-Saens. The recordings were made in the Fairfield Hall, Croyden UK, in 1975. It's all wonderful, and there's not much else to be said about it. Rubinstein is celebrated for his inspired matter-of-factness, his lack of affectation and the strength that flowed from it.

  You must judge for yourself from these recordings. Don't, however, miss the 29-minute interview with Rubinstein at 90, recorded in his home in Paris in 1977 and included as a Bonus track. He praises his Jewish forebears for holding on to their religion for 2,000 years, and shrugs off any suggestion of his own uniqueness. “Nothing in art is the best,” he says. “It's only different.” Listening recently to Japan's stunning neo-punk line-up The Savas (www.peoplesrecords.net), I couldn't agree more.
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