Like Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, Deutsche Grammophon is celebrating its 111th birthday. The company claims it’s a significant statistic because Beethoven’s final piano sonata was his Opus 111. It sounds more like a PR man’s bright idea to me, but the box of 13 DVDs they have come up with is superb value nevertheless, even though all the recordings have long been available separately. At just over US$70 for 22 hours of music and spectacle, it will prove hard to resist.
I watched four of the performances — Furtwangler conducting Don Giovanni in 1954, Fonteyn and Nureyev dancing Swan Lake in 1966, Bernstein recording West Side Story in 1985, and Netrebko and Villazon singing La Traviata in 2005.
The Furtwangler is of great historic interest, though the acting is wooden by modern standards. What is less understandable is the mediocre sound quality — many other products from the 1950s have no such shortcomings. In this case it’s presumably because of its being a live recording. The DVD’s major value is the presence of Lisa Della Casa as Donna Elvira.
I don’t much enjoy the conventions of classical ballet, but it’s always good to see something done as well as it can be. This was largely true of Fonteyn and Nureyev’s Swan Lake, with music from the Vienna Philharmonic, and supporting dancers also from Vienna, even though Nureyev’s tinkerings with the score, plus his own androgynous on-stage persona, have had their critics.
The recording sessions of West Side Story are fascinating, and more. Bernstein opted to use opera singers, and then make sure they sang in an idiomatic New York style. Carreras, for instance, talks about being the only Spaniard in the cast (as Tony), yet having to sound like a New Yorker. It’s astonishing to watch tension rising as Bernstein rebukes someone for giving Carreras elocution lessons over the microphone, Carreras’s unsmiling face in close-up, then the inevitable crisis. This is hugely watchable stuff.
“The pleasures of love are brief, like a flower that blooms and dies.” So sing the lovers early in La Traviata, and to stress the fact the only thing on stage is a huge clock set at two minutes to twelve. Slightly simplistic, you might think. But the orchestral playing by the Vienna Philharmonic is very strong, and Netrebko and Villazon, though not in the class of Callas or Pavarotti, make a seductively young and charismatic pair. Thomas Hampson is a predictably sturdy Germont.
The other items included, all top examples in their respective categories, are Carmen with Vickers, Mutter playing Mozart, Carlos Kleiber’s Rosenkavalier, the Boulez/Chereau Die Walkure, Pollini and Bohm in Beethoven, Verdi’s Requiem conducted by Karajan in 1967 with the young Pavarotti (not to be confused with his 1984 version with Carreras), and Peter and the Wolf narrated by Sting, with the UK’s Spitting Image puppets.
All in all, this collection constitutes a once-in-a-lifetime bargain that isn’t to be missed.
When the curtain rose in January last year on the Metropolitan Opera’s Stiffelio, it was Placido Domingo who conducted. Singers all have to make provision for the days when their voices are no longer what they were, and Domingo already heads both the Washington National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera. But his return to the Met to conduct what used to be called Verdi’s “lost” opera had an extra significance. When it was last seen there it was he who was on stage in the title role. And in 2007 a very welcome DVD was issued of that performance, filmed when the production was first launched in 1993.
Stiffelio was indeed all but lost for a long time. Verdi wrote it in 1850, just before Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata, but it ran into censorship problems. Unusually for Verdi, it was about Protestants — a pastor in Germany who discovers that his wife has been having an affair. The concept of a minister of religion being married at all was incomprehensible to most Italians, and from the beginning cuts were demanded. In addition, the northeast of Italy was at the time under Austrian control and, at a time when the movement for Italian unification was gaining strength, marital infidelity involving a German-speaking pastor could easily be read as a politically inspired insult to the region’s overlords. The opera’s troubled premiere took place, significantly in the northeast, in Trieste.
Stiffelio was in effect strangled at birth. The score was never published, and was long thought to have been lost; Verdi responded by incorporating much of the music into a new opera, Aroldo, set in the conveniently remote Middle Ages. But then in 1960s a copy of the score was discovered in Naples. Before long opera companies round the world began to express an interest in staging it, an enthusiasm that was stoked by a second discovery, that of Verdi’s original manuscript, in the early 1990s. The magnificent Met production seen on this 2007 DVD was actually the first ever modern production, in its original form, of what many were soon to be calling one of Verdi’s middle-period masterpieces.
The staging is sumptuous, with little sign of Puritan restraint. Luxurious interiors of polished wood carved in the Gothic style vie with interior windows through which other rooms, containing people doing other things, can be seen. The whole effect, costumes included, is one of black, brown and gleaming silver.
Domingo is in superlative form, with the seriousness of the character matching his own personality. Sharon Sweet is powerful as his wife Lina, and Vladimir Chernov is outstanding as her father. James Levine conducts the whole magnificent undertaking.
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