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.
Nine Taiwanese nervously stand on an observation platform at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It’s 9:20am on March 27, 1968, and they are awaiting the arrival of Liu Wen-ching (柳文卿), who is about to be deported back to Taiwan where he faces possible execution for his independence activities. As he is removed from a minibus, a tenth activist, Dai Tian-chao (戴天昭), jumps out of his hiding place and attacks the immigration officials — the nine other activists in tow — while urging Liu to make a run for it. But he’s pinned to the ground. Amid the commotion, Liu tries to
A dozen excited 10-year-olds are bouncing in their chairs. The small classroom’s walls are lined with racks of wetsuits and water equipment, and decorated with posters of turtles. But the students’ eyes are trained on their teacher, Tseng Ching-ming, describing the currents and sea conditions at nearby Banana Bay, where they’ll soon be going. “Today you have one mission: to take off your equipment and float in the water,” he says. Some of the kids grin, nervously. They don’t know it, but the students from Kenting-Eluan elementary school on Taiwan’s southernmost point, are rare among their peers and predecessors. Despite most of
A pig’s head sits atop a shelf, tufts of blonde hair sprouting from its taut scalp. Opposite, its chalky, wrinkled heart glows red in a bubbling vat of liquid, locks of thick dark hair and teeth scattered below. A giant screen shows the pig draped in a hospital gown. Is it dead? A surgeon inserts human teeth implants, then hair implants — beautifying the horrifyingly human-like animal. Chang Chen-shen (張辰申) calls Incarnation Project: Deviation Lovers “a satirical self-criticism, a critique on the fact that throughout our lives we’ve been instilled with ideas and things that don’t belong to us.” Chang
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but