A startling new CD and an extraordinary old film now on DVD are the objects of scrutiny this month.
Is it possible for music to be over-recorded? You’re certainly tempted to think so when listening to the new CD from Deutsche Grammophon containing Chopin’s two piano concertos played by Rafal Blechacz. Whatever its other merits, it would be the ideal vehicle with which to demonstrate the quality of your sound system.
The orchestra’s instruments are rendered more vividly than any live audience could possibly hear. Whether this is an adverse criticism or simply yet another advantage of the hi-tech world is for the listener to decide. But the performances themselves, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Jerzy Semkow, are almost as dazzling as the recording technique.
Next year is the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth and this CD is clearly only going to be one of many issued for the occasion. Chopin wrote these concertos before he was 20 and they express a youthful happiness and optimism that Blechacz catches wonderfully. The “velvet” sound sometimes attributed to this particular orchestra may be one of the reasons why the technicians opted to highlight it so dramatically, especially in the studio-recorded F Minor concerto.
Blechacz was the popular local winner of Warsaw’s five-yearly International Chopin Piano Competition in 2005. A DVD of the event was reviewed in this column on April 5, 2007.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Richard Strauss’ devastating, ear-splitting, but also magnificent opera Elektra, a study in hysteria and sexual obsession if ever there was one. To celebrate the occasion, I want to consider a film made long ago, but which in many ways remains unsurpassed even today.
Historically, Elektra marked the convergence of two trends. One was a change in the view of the ancient Greeks. Victorian writers such as Matthew Arnold had seen them as representing sweetness and light, a sane, rational people from whom his moralizing, hypocritical contemporaries could learn much. The new view, strongly influencing Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal, was that they were also often irrational, brutal, and routinely addicted to superstition and blood feuds.
The second new trend concerned 20th century artists. In all media they began to reject gentle feeling and nostalgia, and to embrace instead the primitive and the savage. Painters like Picasso eagerly copied African masks and relished bullfights, while in music Stravinsky shocked his audiences with The Rite of Spring (1913, but being worked on from 1910, a year after Elektra).
Strauss, today sometimes seen as representing voluptuous and domestic bourgeois taste, was in his youth an enfant terrible, and Elektra and Salome (1905) marked the high points of his raw modernism in opera. The Strauss of these operas is like Picasso in his cubist period — all jagged edges, with the aesthetics of shattered glass.
It’s usual to recommend the 1980 version of Elektra from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, with Birgitt Nilsson as Elektra and Leonie Rysanek as her sister Chrysothemis, as first choice for this opera on DVD (DGM 073-4111). But the film version made in 1982, released on DVD in 2005 and widely available in Taiwan, is staggeringly impressive. It appropriately focuses on the work’s brutality and blood-soaked eroticism, with an effectiveness that would be hard to match in a recording of a stage performance. One writer dubbed it “Fear and loathing in Mycenae.”
Leonie Rysanek here finally graduates to the role of Elektra, and the only possible reaction is, “Why did she have to wait so long?” She is utterly superb, and as fine an actor as she is a singer. Even more over-the-top is Astrid Varnay as her murderous mother Klytamnestra. Her first appearance, with her face grotesquely filling the whole frame, is one of the visual high points of this visually explosive rendition.
Musically the entire enterprise is flawless. It was the final achievement of veteran conductor Karl Bohm (who was friends with Strauss), and he chose to bring out more of the music’s sonorous richness, and even lyricism, than he had in his abrasive CD recording, with Inge Borkh as Elektra, 20 years earlier (DGM 431 739-2).
A 90-minute bonus DVD accompanies the film. You see the frail Bohm, accompanied by a nurse, being driven through Vienna to the recording studio. You watch the preparations for the filming in a disused factory, and hear the film’s director, Gotz Friedrich, discuss a fascinating idea. This is that Klytamnestra perhaps represents an ancient matriarchy, seizing control back from the men by murdering her former husband Agamemnon. Thus when Oreste kills her (and her lover Aegisth) in revenge he is in fact clawing back male supremacy, and this is confirmed by his neglect at the end of the opera of his sister Elektra. She will be put in a “tower” (in other words a psychiatric clinic, says Friedrich), and her final death is at least in part because she has no viable role in the new order.
With the Vienna Philharmonic, Rysanek, Varnay, Catarina Ligendza as Chrysothemis and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Oreste, this is an almost unimprovable version of one of the greatest masterworks of the modern era, before that era became submerged in unartistic mathematics and a cacophony that had very few admirers.
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