Slava Tchaikovsky !
Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier direct The Queen of Spades in Baden-Baden ****½
Author : Jos Hermans
It is a rather mediocre staging with which the directing duo Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier have opened the Easter Festival in Baden-Baden. If the performance rises to festival level it is because of the high musical level of the singers, orchestra and chorus. With Arsen Soghomonyan and Elena Stikhina, Baden-Baden has cast a perfect couple in the leading roles. Kirill Petrenko and the Berliner Philharmoniker provide for the rest. Admittedly a little too noisy at times.
As a director, you can't ignore the fact that Hermann is a tragic hero and that he enjoys the sympathy of the composer. In the finale, after Hermann's death, such an incredible tristesse can be heard in the orchestra that it is almost certain that the composer identified with Hermann. In his diary entry of March 2, 1890, we read: "Weeping bitterly as Hermann drew his last breath. The result of exhaustion or perhaps because it is really good". Count on the latter to apply. The class interests of the society that sideline him as an impecunious officer cause Hermann to develop the delusion of the three cards. It is not a pathological pursuit of wealth that drives him but his ill-fated love for Liza. Only in the hour of his death will he realize his tragic mistake. The final bars of the piece are among the most excruciating, devastating moments in all of opera literature. Provided, then, that the director has taught you to love Hermann. It doesn't matter then whether the secret of the three cards is fake news as Leiser/Caurier seem to suggest. Essential to the character of Hermann is also the fact that he is regarded as an outsider by his friends from the outset. By misleading him with fake news, they become guilty of his tragic downfall. It can only increase the sympathy for Hermann aspired to by Tchaikovsky but it does make the finale more cynical.
The Berliner Philharmoniker immediately seduces with the silken sound of the strings, even before the first thunderclaps fall in the orchestra. Hermann drowns his frustrated love with a bottle of vodka. "We are here to fight the enemies of Russia" the child soldiers sing as they bully Hermann, the video wall showing a photograph of a Tsar-era Russian family being slowly consumed by devastating flames. It looks like a last-minute addition to bring current events into the play. But with the opening scene, Leiser/Caurier make it clear that they want to make Hermann the focal point of the play, and that is as it should be.
The barracks have a low ceiling in this opening scene. It will be revealed later that there is also a second floor with more intimate rooms. Acoustic support did not seem to be provided by this scenographic option. Often the singers were up against the orchestra, Hermann as well as Tomski. Arsen Soghomonyan's tenor possesses a slightly baritonal timbre. He uses it to sing the most convincing Hermann I have ever seen in a theater. He seems to understand all the essential moments that demand attention from him as a performer. His challenging après-storm aria was very good but the orchestra pushed him away too much. It's a moment where the soloist should have the upper hand. I would have liked to see that balance problem solved by a gangway across the orchestra that would have allowed the soloist to fling his defiant words, addressed to the gods, into the auditorium more effectively. There will be more balance problems and with the fairly unimportant, patriotic children's chorus, which incidentally is often deleted, there were some distracting decals.
When even the intoxicating quintet at the first meeting of Hermann and Lisa overwhelms then you know the evening can't go wrong. Good performances could also be noted from the start from Yevgeny Akimov as Chekalinsky and Anatoli Sivko as Surin in the small roles. The backdrop disappears in whole or in part for the two choral scenes of the walkers in the summer garden of St. Petersburg, first to bewail the sun, later to curse the storm in the pouring rain.
Lisa does not find peace at the thought of marrying her dream prince. She is looking for a greater passion, for a more irrepressible seduction. And she finds this in the strange figure of Hermann. For the directors, this is insufficient as a justification. "It is an arranged marriage," they believe. "She is sold as a courtesan." And so we see courtesans in belle epoque corsages singing songs in an extremely well-behaved brothel scene amid Louis Quinze armchairs. In the process, Polina seems to have a lesbian relationship with Lisa. Their duet is excellent and Aigul Akhmetshina emerges as an outright discovery during her melancholic favorite song. She possesses a deep mezzo and to me she really does seem ready for larger roles !
The Philharmonic Chorus from Slovakia is fantastic. In the second act they come completely into their own, their faces hidden behind Venetian masks. Five female dancers, masked as sheep and wearing black socks that make their feet look like goat's feet, liven things up in Beate Vollacks stylish choreography. Lisa and Polina also take the parts of the two shepherdesses in the pastoral interlude.
The dream prince sings his great song "Ia vas lioubliou" in the boudoir of his fiancée while he ties her to the bed at gunpoint. This looks like a rather gratuitous way for the directors to create friction with the libretto and to force an excuse for Lisa's defection. The arrival of the Czarina is contrived as a joke by the bystanders : the Countess has herself dressed up as the Czarina which does not seem improper at all knowing her nostalgia for her former status as the Venus of Moscow.
Suspense is palpable in the bedroom scene as tremolos take possession of the strings and the six double basses provide for a blanket of exciting primal sounds from the orchestra pit. Doris Soffel sings her monologue initially in a broken voice; then again, she sings the French part of her Gretry aria very coolly and with sufficient charismatic stage presence. She whispers the secret of the three cards in Hermann's ear while holding him in a vice-like grip as ghosts are accustomed to doing. Lisa does not sing her farewell aria on the banks of the Neva but in dialogue with Polina. After the unfortunate confrontation with Hermann, she sinks down dead in her bathtub.
In stead of gaming tables the final scene develops along a long table of drunken students. That should not be a problem when the male chorus is singing with such breathtaking precision. Mouse silence ensued during the heartbreaking finale leaving behind a devastated Polina and a beaten Prince. When it takes the audience 15 seconds to react after the last note has sounded, you know the game was won.
Elena Stikhina was the star of the 2018 Easter Festival as Senta in Valery Gergiev's Fliegende Holländer. "A star is born," I wrote at that point. The great international career soon became a reality. She has the best projecting voice of the evening and everything she sings is just perfect. No intonation problems, flawless register transitions, beautiful timbre, total control of vibrato, dynamically differentiated phrasing, top-notch musicality with real spinto outbursts that never get her in trouble. The fact that she burst into tears during the curtain call was certainly also related to the pressure that Russian performers have had to experience in recent weeks. Next season she will sing Elsa at the Metropolitan in François Girard's new production of Lohengrin.
Boris Pinkhasovich as the Prince once again could not quite convince me with his timbre which for me lacks a certain clarity. Vladislav Sulimsky lent his solid cultured baritone to Tomski but remained a second-rate character due to the outstanding performances of the leads.
Under the baton of Kirill Petrenko, the piece never risked of becoming dramatically undernourished. The soloistic moments that gave extra color to this score were to be savoured: the antics of the clarinet in the two bedroom scenes, the flutes and piccolos in the storm scene, the temple bells during Lisa's farewell scene. Dynamically this was quite an extreme reading which in the explosive forte passages with muscular brass and noisy timpani occasionally led to a less transparent sound from the pit. I would attribute this to the acoustics of the orchestra pit, as I would not be hearing this the next day during the gala concert with the orchestra on stage.