Korngold Das Wunder der Heliane

[Alan Howe]

I should never have brought up Domingo in the German repertoire. I suppose my love of his singing voice - its golden tone and perfect voice production - has always blinded me to his poor German. Having said that, who has sung this repertoire (or similar) so well in the final quarter of the last century? Probably only Heppner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs5-bN0MqbY
Jerusalem was fine, but too light. Vickers was Vickers, i.e. great, but sui generis. James King was sturdiness personified, but none too interesting. Jess Thomas started well and then wobbled. Kollo? Moser? Nope. Gould? Do me a favour!

Today, there's Kaufmann, but I don't know whether he can really sing this stuff. And that leaves us with Skelton whom I take to be a truly great singer.

Oh, for a Melchior. Or even a Lorenz. Or even a Carl Günther...

[adriano]

Well, Kaufmann...
In his early years he was an occasional guest at the Zurich opera, a very sympathetic and modest person. Great performances in Paër's "Leonore", Verdi's "Don Carlo" and Humperdinck's "Königskinder" etc.
In the meantime he has become big star and a Knödler, but there are divine moments when he displays his Kopfstimme or when he does not press his voice too much. And he should not always try to darken his timbre - he has enough a masculine radiation :-)
He is considered the greatest tenor of our days - even though lacking a high C (or its preceding B) - which he can only produce with Kopfstimme...
I would rather consider him a capped high baritone...
These are, of course, only my very personal opinions.
But I will never forgive him for singing Wagner's "Wesendonck-Lieder", whose score clearly indicates "für eine Frauenstimme..." and both parts of Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde"!

[Alan Howe]

Looking forward to hearing more from you, Adriano, on Mauceri's Heliane...

[adriano]

Back from the 2nd act of Mauceri's "Heliane" :-)
Now Korngold's over-active Celesta is reduced to just few interventions... Anyway, I find the music in this act more interesting and (after its Prelude, which is Korngold film music in advance) more diversified. I particularly like the sections preceding Heliane's entrance, in which Korngold takes a more dark and "newer" tone in his orchestration. In here the music is also more rhytmic and stronger defined.
But what follows is a really overloaden and fatiguing thing. Was it really necessary to use such a heavy and loud orchestration to support those poor singers? Strauss and Schreker also used large orchestral forces, but in a more cleverly balanced way...
As far as this recording is concerned, its cast is well-chosen and excellent. They are all cultivated singers knowing what they are singing. That Hartmut Welker sounds occasionally overstrained is surely because of a tight recording schedule, not because of bad technique (I know from own recording experience what it means for a singer having to finish a session no way how he feels - and with no possibility of redoing takes). I find Anna Tomowa-Sintow and John David de Haan great. Reinhild Runkle is the right voice for the more characteristic part of the Messenger and - last but not least - my profound respect for the 67 years old Nicolai Gedda feeling in such wonderful shape!
And, again, the orchestra and conductor are super!

[Alan Howe]

That's really interesting, Adriano - thanks! Sounds to me as though it's hardly worth considering Albrecht/Naxos if one already has Mauceri/Decca.

[adriano]

Well, since I never heard/seen the Albrecht one, I feel too partial. I consider Albrecht an excellent conductor and suppose the cast he is working with is excellent too... I've just readvarious reviews - and they are all extremely positive. Seems having been a triumphal success in Berlin. As a CD release I would perhaps buy it - but, on the other hand, it would be better buying other operas I don't know yet - or (to remain in the same epoch) continue buying alternate recordings of operas by Schreker, whose music I really love. Last but not least, my musical opinion on "Heliane" is all other than an enthusiastic one.
I am being told that the Naxos recording of "Heliane" is equally excellent and very recommendable. Reviewers just complain about the absence of a libretto, but the Decca/Mauceri reissue also none. Its original release had a sumptuous 230-page libretto...
Bollon is another opera conductor I admire. Incidentally, a "Gramophone" reviewer still finds Mauceri's recording better, but he wrote that before the Albrecht had been released.

[hyperdanny]

@hadrianus: are you aware that Die tote Stadt is currently at La Scala conducted by Alan Gilbert , directed by Graham Vick?
I thought you might be interested.

[adriano]

Yes I am, thanks hyperdanny. But I don't travel for opera performances anymore... In a way, after so many years of working at the Zurich opera, I have become saturated by this business, in which music mostly comes in the last place...
We had, in 2003, a genius-stroke staging by Sven Eric Bechtolf of "Die Tote Stadt" in Zurich, which I will never forget. Welser-Möst wasn't too exciting, but Emily Magee, Norbert Schmittberg and Olaf Bäre were great. Bechtolf has done in Zürich also a magnificent "Lulu" (available on DVD) and a very original "Pelléas". I also liked his Mozart operas interpretations. Unfortunately, his "Otello" was not successful.

[Alan Howe]

...and I too have become extremely wary of opera productions. You just don't know what rubbish the directors are going to subject you to these days.

[hyperdanny]

Alan you're of course right....If I see another Handel opera in Nazi garb, or such idiocy, I'm going to scream!

[adriano]

Another much used location in opera staging is a psychiatric institution, where the singers are lying in their beds or on the floor in their nightgowns or underwear...

[Alan Howe]

Or psychological states of mind projected onto the walls of the set. I mean, isn't it up to the performers to convey such matters to the audience? Who needs these things to be triple-underlined in such a crass fashion?

[adriano]

With sensational or even sexually-oriented optical effects they fear that ortherwise audiences would fall asleep :-)

[Alan Howe]

That's an insult to the audience, isn't it?

[adriano]

Well, in an interview an opera manager once said that one must use "more modern" and "more effective" ways, in order to have younger people becoming interested in opera... And this would also cause controversy and discussion - diffreently than in the case of traditional stagings.
In a symposium on opera staging I once said that in this case it would be like having Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" exhibited into a pop art frame - or have an Andy Warhol version of it exposed at the Louvre instead. And leave the original in the vaults.
I have nothing against intelligent and "plausible" modern stagings (like, for example, those Bechtolf Zurich productions I mentioned earlier) - in which the concept and the plot was being 100% respected. One could notice that Bechtolf knew his pieces very well: during stage rehearsals he never used a piano score, but could explain to a singer what was the music doing at that very instant they were working on, like: "Right now you hear a clarinet solo, and before the harp joins in, you must land at the bottom of these stairs". Sometimes I suspected that he knew a score even better than a certain conductor - and he was uspet the latter had not informed him about his tempi etc. before staging rehearsals would begin. During five weeks I was there conducting with a piano coach, so we got used to our/my own tempi - and when the conductor showed up for orchestra rehearsals during the last week, it could happen that everybody concerned would find himself in new situations... Sometimes I felt flattered, since that conductor used to say to me before rehearsals' start: "I trust you, you will do right". And often we were not too far away... But when sometimes it came out that the conductor had not prepared the score seriously, once could really despair. During performances I was in the prompter's box giving all cues - or conducting when catastrophes happened, and that was not very funny. That was because some conductors were too preoccupied to hold the orchestra together. After one particular performance under one particular unserious conductor, which made practically all singers following me all the time, Thomas Hampson dragged me out from the prompter's box on stage during the final applause, so I got an applause too...
I witnessed celebrated stage directors setting up crazy and, apparently "original" concepts before they had studied a score seriously. These ideas had to be squeezed into the pieces at all costs (sceneries and costumes were already there) - and so 5 weeks of staging rehersals looked like a "work in progress" affair, during which the director was actually learning the piece - and singers or assistants sometimes had to correct him, saying that this or that would not be possible in this situation - or that, for example, a couplet had one more strophe than he thought. I have worked with quite a few famous stage directors holding in their hand a CD booklet instead of a vocal score.
In the last (year's) Zurich production of "Die Gezeichneten" (staged by Barrie Kosky - who had no idea about the piece), in a crucial painting study scene, Carlotta - before starting to make a portrait of her (future) lover Alviano - describes her work as a painter ("ich male" etc.). The (Zurich) audience witnessed her sitting on a small potter's wheel, trying to form a vase with her hands... That's opera for you. An intelligent newspaper review's title was "Let's mould an opera".
Not to speak about the fact that Schreker's music was clumsily mutilated and cut. The first days of scenic rehearsals all the singers showed up, they had all learned their parts, but a group of of smaller parts were sent home, because they had ben "cut" too - and nobody had told them this before learning. They just had been cast according to the vocal score's list! At the premiere's final applause, Barry Kosky showed up wearing a printed T-shirt, with a big portrait of Stalin.
That's opera today for you!
(I hope not having posted a similar text already earlier - but one cannot report such "events" frequently enough...)