The great artists of the past mostly knew how to end their works, but these days we all too often witness creations that simply don’t know when, or how, to call a halt.
Choreographer Uwe Scholz’s The Great Mass, as performed in 2005 by Leipzig Ballet a few months after its creator’s death at the age of 45, is a case in point. The mass in question is Mozart’s in C Minor, and a generous selection of its music is interspersed with other Mozart items, less melodic music by, among others, Arvo Part, and poems by Paul Celan.
The ballet freely mixes traditional and modern styles, with stage patterns revealed by high camera-angles predominating. The vocal soloists, including soprano Eunyee You, also appear on screen. It’s impressive in its way, but would be far more so if Scholz could have decided how to finish it. Maybe he sensed that he was dying and was reluctant to stop adding more and more farewell statements.
Paradoxically the C Minor Mass is itself incomplete, with Mozart eventually opting to reuse sections in other compositions. Maybe this fact was in Scholz’s mind as well. In the end his dancers appear in their everyday clothes and simply sit on the stage listening to the music. In a way it’s a choreographer’s admission of defeat, something Scholz may well have been feeling himself by this stage.
For a quarter of a century it seemed as if Placido Domingo quite simply was Verdi’s embattled Otello. There are many DVDs and films of him in this great operatic role, the last, from La Scala, Milan, dating from December 2001. Leo Nucci sings Iago and Barbara Frittoli is Desdemona.
Unfortunately it cannot be seriously recommended, partly because Domingo’s earlier performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera under James Levine [reviewed in Taipei Times on March 28, 2004] was so spectacular. Here the weaknesses are everywhere. Verdi’s music in the opera is invariably superb, but this performance under Riccardo Muti fails to catch fire. Even the drinking song in Act One, which proves Cassio’s undoing, lacks the lilt and slithering alcoholic quality Verdi gave it, and the great dramatic moments that follow prove even less persuasive.
Domingo was also five years younger when the New York version was recorded (in 1996; the DVD came out in 2004) and vocally stronger. Here he seems tired, and Leo Nucci doesn’t have the subtlety James Morris gave Iago in New York either. Frittoli is a different Desdemona from most — intelligent rather than placid — but she still doesn’t make an impression comparable to Rene Fleming’s.
The costumes look burdensome, and there is none of the psychological immediacy of the superbly filmed, often breath-taking, New York rendition — not surprisingly under the control of the acclaimed video director Brian Large.
Deutsche Grammophon is doing everything it can to capitalize on the Karajan legacy. The latest item to emerge from its archives is his 1978 studio production of Wagner’s Rheingold with Thomas Stewart as Wotan, Brigitte Fassbaender as Frike and Peter Schreier as Loge. Karajan’s full Ring cycle on CD remains a treasure, but this first opera of the four was the only one that made it onto video, in 1981. Now it finally emerges on DVD.
It should be no one’s first choice. The visuals are ambitious, to be sure, but still appear clumsy, coming as they do from those pre-computer-assisted days. But at least you see the Rhinemaidens actually swimming, and at the end Loge, not content with being a god of fire, actually catches fire himself, as if anticipating the final conflagration that is to consume Valhalla 13 hours later in the cycle.
Musically there are many pluses. Schreier is outstanding, it’s fascinating to watch and hear the young Fassbaender, and Stewart, though in many ways a lightweight Wotan, certainly has his moments. Most of all, the Berlin Philharmonic plays superbly — but many Wagnerians will already have its version of this opera on CD. Chinese subtitles are included.
Lastly, the fifth and final film in All the Russias, from Well Go USA (Taiwan). Entitled Looking East, Looking West, it’s in a way the finest of them all. It argues that simultaneous fear and fascination have always characterized Russia’s view of its neighbors. Without natural frontiers, and invaded from both east and west — by the Tartars, Napoleon and Hitler among others — it has nonetheless in its music often displayed a love of the distant and the exotic.
The Caucasus looms large, with magnificent mountain scenery alongside claims that Georgia is a “paradise on earth.” It’s no surprise to learn, then, that Valery Gergiev, who conducts the extracts and gives much of the commentary, was himself brought up in a region loved by both Pushkin and Tolstoy.
This is a fitting conclusion to a marvelous series, over four hours of Russia’s history and music intertwined. The set as a whole remains the top recommendation of the summer.
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