The Bregenz Festival on Lake Constance is best known for its spectacular stage, situated in the lake itself, with bleachers on the shore to hold 7000 audience members to watch on. Every year they put on one opera on that stage – usually one of the popular warhorses, with an elaborate, impressive set. This year, it was Giacomo Puccini Turdanot’s turn.
I had never been, so when a former boss, mentor, and friend suggested it was on his European itinerary this year, I figured the time had come to experience what that event was all about and set out to the eastern-most part of Austria, an athletic stone’s throw from the borders of Germany, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein.
Turandot set from the birds view / Seebuehne aus der Luft gefilmt pic.twitter.com/DDGNoG6D4e
— Bregenzer Festspiele (@bregenzfestival) July 28, 2015
Hoffman Focus
While Turandot (and the like) is the big ticket event at the Bregenz Festival, closer inspection reveals a much more nuanced classical music festival with a focus, this year, on Jacques Offenbach. The festival always puts on a second opera, performed inside the festival house, which is the ‘serious’ work and production. In 2011 it was Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger, for example, which became a critical hit of a production that has since traveled the world over and served as a main launching point for the resuscitation of Weinberg’s long-thwarted, relative fame. Granted Jacques Offenbach is not in need the same boost, but he’s still a neglected composer, especially in his native Germany. And if the Tales of Hoffman is his most popular work – and that’s what the Festival put on this year – it served only as a lure to immerse the ears in even more, considerably less exposed Hoffman. And the kicker was, of course, that the production came courtesy Stefan Herheim, the Norwegian director whom serious critics (but also myself) can successfully argue is the most intriguing opera director of our time.
I would have done well to read the festival’s program beforehand, and not stopped at Tales of Hoffman, with my eyes glazing over slightly, as I ignorantly elected not to go to Hoffmann and Turandot in the same day. After all, I would normally do anything, short of felony, to get to see another Herheim production.
Fortunately there was still time before Turandot to catch a bit of consolation-Offenbach in the form of a cello recital by Jérôme Pernoo (cello) and Jérôme Ducros (piano), who picked an assembly of the finest cello-and-piano gems from Offenbach’s output. Dramaturg Olaf A. Schmitt enlivened the recital with short excerpts recited from Offenbach’s biography… although “enlivened” is decidedly the wrong word. Not that those excerpts weren’t entertaining and well read, it’s just that there is scarcely anything more enlivening than Offenbach’s wild’n’wacky music itself. Apparently the man was to the cello sort of what Franz Liszt was to the piano: a virtuoso master with skill to spare… and accordingly he composed neck-breaking, fun-loving, outrageous, eye-twinkling stuff that’s too much fun and too darn enjoyable to be taken very seriously by stern-browed classical audiences. I recall a performance of his rediscovered cello concerto – also with Pernoo at the wheels – where the wild show of a first movement elicited (horror of horrors!) spontaneous between-the-movements-applause. Of course the Vigilant Applause Police™ was right there, to hush the grossly unwashed into orderly submission. And then, uniquely in my concert-going experience, there went a collective, rebellious streak through the audience: after a minor lull, the applause came back more determined, knowing, and enthusiastic. The music and the performances had demanded applause, and the unintimidated music lovers were darn well going to oblige. (Pernoo was to perform said concerto the following night at the Festival.)
The recital was along those lines, and Pernoo being a joy-cellist, devoid of airs, got a ton of life out of the four selections, testing the limits of his instrument’s physical abilities in the process. One got the impression that if no cellos are harmed in the process of an Offenbach recital, the cellist wasn’t trying hard enough… an accusation that no one could hurl at Pernoo (who looks like 2/3 Christopher Reeve and 1/3 Stephen Fry). The following Cello Sonata by Francis Poulenc– another composer who can be very witty – was performed with equal panache, putting joie de vivre left, right, and center, while neither Pernoo nor his pianist partner Jérôme Ducros ignored the gorgeous lyrical streak Poulenc strews in, even if he – Poulenc – will invariably end up hopping right back onto the topsy-turvy stuff: serious in one moment and under-age puppy the next. The encore, composed by Ducros himself, was a riot in line with Hoffman.
Singing in the Rain: Turandot
It might merit confessing that I’m not all that hot about Puccini and that I suffer from a general deficiency in appreciating Italian opera. That said, I consider Turandot the best compromise as far as quality and popularity is concerned. Granted, I think that if it weren’t for Nessun dorma and one or two other greatest-hits moments and the ensuing grand popularity, nothing near the throngs of people would go sit through Turandot, as they might realize it’s actually a fairly modern opera, worthy of its 1925 composition date, and audibly aware of, say Alban Berg’s work.
But there it is, Turandot, associated more with Paul Potts than Alban Berg, and drawing millions. Even in the rain… for rain it did that night, which had the audiences darting for the €1,- plastic capes, which make for a highly undignified looking and suggest a high risk of auto-operatic asphyxiation during the process. And since July 26th wasn’t one of those warm, balmy days, and since where the rain doesn’t get you from the outside, the cape-condensation will, from the inside, it was a perfectly miserable experience worth having made only for the story of survival to tell afterwards. That we didn’t leave early goes some way in complimenting the production, which was a as much a circus act than an opera production, with martial arts and martialing fire, with majestically unfurling banners and decapitated bodies being dumped into Lake Constance, a Terracotta Army replica, a tumbling Great Wall, and floating junks (the ship). In short, shy of a fortune cookie, no Chinese cliché was left unturned. A delightful impromptu addition was a lime-light hogging family of ducks that paddled in and out of view at the more dramatic moments.
While most characters were more or less what one might expect (except for Calaf, who doubled as a composer when he wasn’t answering questions – which I took as a nod to Hoffman and no more), the characterization of Ping, Pong, and Peng – the three lackeys of dubious racial sensitivity – was quite clever, showing them in quasi story-subchapters as head-filing clerks (as opposed to head filing-clerks), placing the craniums of the previous quiz-losers into jars of formaldehyde and doing the accounting.
All the singers which, heavily amplified, aren’t so much opera singers but willing and operatically-inclined musical singers with tons of heart and grit, deserved maximum kudos for singing and acting at full capacity all awhile being drenched in two hours of variously drizzle and downpour, on a raked, seaborne stage, perilously close to slipping overboard at all times. Across the loudspeakers it’s impossible to judge a voice, except on pitch… and that was ‘on’, with all but two singers for most of the duration of the show.
Set and direction are by Marco Arturo Marelli, costumes by Constance Hoffman, and one of three Italian conductors waved before the soundly playing Vienna Symphony Orchestra – safe, much like the Prague Philharmonic Chorus and the Bregenz Festival Chorus, from the weather, sitting (and standing) inside the festival hall and being projected onto two big screens left and right of the arena-style seating. More production photos can be found here.
Perhaps not exactly my thing, this operatic hoopla, but I’m glad I didn’t take a rain check. (Not that one was offered.)
