Baden-Baden bei Wien

Unless you're familiar with both places, the title may need some explanation. Baden-Baden, Dostoyevsky's 'Roulettenburg' and I guess not awfully changed since then (more on that in the next post), nestles in a valley on the fringes of the Black Forest. Baden bei Wien is a rather sweeter, resolutely old fashioned spa town a tram ride from Vienna. And Vienna, of course, is the location for Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Der Rosenkavalier, not that you'd really have known it from Brigitte Fassbaender's production at Baden-Baden Festspielhaus. Erich Wonder's first backdrop, which I thought might be showing Dubai without the sea from a luxury penthouse, apparently references a view you can get from a high-rise hotel some way from Vienna's inner Ring.

We based a whole Easter jaunt to Germany around Freund Peter Rose's invitation - there he is above the morning after the show we saw at an outside table of Baden-Baden's Cafe König - to go and see his Ochs for the umpteenth time (always welcome, since he is now - fairly unarguably, I'd have thought - the world's best). With Anja Harteros and Anna Prohaska in the cast more of an enticement than Sir Simon Rattle, his Lady - Magdalena Kožená, improbably cast as Octavian - and the Berlin Phil, it sounded like a good opportunity. The idea was to continue with walking expeditions in the Black Forest, but an invitation from the Thuringia Bach Festival changed all that and turned it all into a very wonderful busman's holiday (fortunately the indulgent diplo-mate found it so too, despite initial misgivings).

Not that this Rosenkavalier, for all its many passing pleasures, was the highlight (Strauss yields to Bach done at the highest level). For a start, the Festspielhaus is a bit of a monster. Sure, Baden-Baden's main theatre, originally a thousand-seater with a too-small orchestra pit as Berlioz found when he inaugurated it conducting his specially-commissioned Béatrice et Bénédict in 1862 - would now be inadequate for many of the operas put on by the Festival (the theatre company was performing a version of Berlin Alexanderplatz there which I'd love to have seen had there been more time). But it's a much more attractive option.

The Festspielhaus, a 2500 seater swaggering as the biggest in Germany, opened in 1998 and funded by a club of 300 of Germany's richest citizens, has the facade of Baden-Baden's grand old station (the present one is way to the north). Sure, the station building itself is handsome and the ticket hall now functions with the same guichets that used to sell railways tickets.

But once you get into the theatre, you feel a million miles away from the action, and the singers, too, are dwarfed by the sheer height of the interior (second only to the ghastly Bastille home of the Paris Opera). We were in row 12 of the Parterre, with tons of leg room - always welcome - but felt detached from the action the minute the curtain rose. Even the Berlin Phil, which started with a horn blooper and ended Act One with a flat high note from the solo violin, didn't exactly sound opulent, though there was a certain fullness and the action music of Act Two seemed to come off best: Rattle's attention to detail paid off there. But the orchestra hasn't played this score since Karajan's time - which means most of them haven't played it at all before - and clearly needed more time on it. First of the production photos below shows the orchestra on stage. They're all, I think, by Monika Rittershaus, seemingly the official photographer; I applied to the press office for images but never heard back.

As in the last Royal Opera production, only the Ochs and the Sophie passed their tests with flying colours. Peter's characterisation, always beautifully sung especially in the upper register, has relaxed so much over the years, and casual dress seemed to put him even more at his ease. Anna Prohaska is another stage animal, proving - as have Marie Arnet, Lucy Crowe and Lisa Milne before her - that Sophie is no generic pushover. Here she is with Kožená in the duet following the trio.

I thought Harteros would be another great Marschallin of our times to set alongside Martina Serafin in Vienna and the most gracious lady of them all, Anne Schwanewilms, whom we saw in Dresden, also courtesy of Peter, and will never forget (can't bear Fleming's over-larded interpretation, never could; though it now sounds like I should see the wonderful Krasimira Stoyanova in the role - the DVD of Harry Kupfer's Salzburg production is now out).

Yet Harteros didn't seem to know what tone to adopt. Way too much hair-fiddling in the opening scene, nothing inward about the first monologue (apparently it was her idea to have the Notary with her for the start, since she thought she had to address 'Da geht er hin' to someone onstage). A gorgeous physical presence, of course, and how she opened up to golden tone, especially in the Trio - but then I (and J too) kind of wished we were hearing her Verdi again. This is possibly the only time I've not been remotely touched by the closing scene of Act One.

The other blames lie there with Rattle's uncertain tempo relations and above all with Kožená's young blade. Not nearly as grim as I was expecting, and her dreadful habit of throwing her head back for top notes that don't really come out very fully could be ascribed to the impetuousness and exaggeration of the young man. Yet it was so apparent that this is a voice not in the same league as those of Harteros, Prohaska and Rose, and the 'take my wife' thing has never seemed quite right to me*. Quality there undoubtedly was from Irmgard Vilsmaier's ever-striking Duenna, an unusually strapping Faninal in Clemens Unterreiner and of course from Laurence Brownlee's Italian tenor.

Excellent Valzacchi and Annina, too, from Stefan Margita (I thought he was more a Helden- than a light tenor) and Carole Wilson. Their visual gags were the funniest, among several which had to do more with the  wacky costume designer, Dietrich von Grebmer, than with Fassbaender, who claimed she had no concept at the start, and it showed: plenty of interesting ideas, but none of them properly followed through. Our intriguers started as cross dressers. Then for the 'Ecco!' scene they had swapped striped suit and old-lady pink, only to both appear as 'ladeez' for the Letter Scene. I did find that funny. And I loved the Leopold, Ochs's illegitimate son, as a teenager on rollerblades (again, von Grebmer's idea and again, he could have been developed by Fassbaender as far more of a character, though the gag of Ochs sending him off for takeaway pizza when our Baron rejected the inn's expensive fare was a good one).

The photos actually make it all look rather handsome; in the theatre, it seemed cheap and nasty. One spent far too much time working out what Wonder's projections were supposed to be or to mean, and the idea of people doing long entrances back and forth at the back messed up the privacies of Act One.

The Presentation of the Rose was blown by having us see Octavian raised on a pedestal before he makes his entrance among people who've been working on sewing-machines (Faninal wouldn't mess up business with show). Pointless business, too, with producing the silver rose from a bunch of real flowers.

In Act Three, quite apart from the fact that there were way too many people piling on stage (the chorus need be no more than a dozen), Peter was left repeating business to fill gaps where Fassbaender hadn't really thought of anything. And the stupid thing is that Hofmannsthal hands it to the director on a plate. If you throw most of his stage directions out, you have to find stuff that's equally convincing, as did Richard Jones at Glyndebourne. Above all, I kept wishing this was a Glyndebourne-sized experience instead of vacuity in a barn. Won't be going back to this Festspielhaus again, however extraordinary the cast. But still, we had a fun time in Baden-Baden the day after the show, cafe-hopping with Peter and Martin Snell (the Notary, interesting chap who lives in Lucerne).

It's been a driven week since our return, with way too much of me on The Arts Desk starting with the Bach festival writeup, hitting a dud of supposedly radical music-theatre on Tuesday and then soaring with Gypsy (the unsurpassable Imelda Staunton in one of Johan Persson's production shots above), Cheek by Jowl's harrowing Measure for Measure and Sasha Regan's hysterically funny but also very disciplined all-male The Pirates of Penzance (group shot below by Kay Young). And then yesterday we caught the tail-end of dearly beloved old rock and roller Paul Beecham's 70th birthday party, with the master at the turntable and many of his old cronies reunited.

Anyway, the London summer season is on a real roll now, with too many good things to resist. Back to school tomorrow with the first Opera in Depth class of the summer term, on Guillaume Tell. I've just read the Schiller play and it's a masterpiece - way better than the libretto for Rossini's opera. But that will furnish plenty of musical riches.

*Worse - she's going to sing the Angel in The Dream of Gerontius at the Proms, with Sir Si conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. How could he, when he's worked with Dame Janet? One to miss. 

A diva for Europe

It's Europe Day today, and with senses still reeling from Saturday's Don Carlo at the Royal Opera, I propose that as a German Greek, already legendary soprano Anja Harteros (photographed here by Catherine Ashmore for the Royal Opera) should sing a great hymn of reconciliation - probably by that other, self-styled German Greek by temperament rather than by blood Richard Strauss. We'll have four for the price of one to conclude.

This woman is phenomenal. Everything I wrote about her Covent Garden debut in 2008 still holds good: the spinto strength, the Desdemona-perfect floating of Verdi's more ethereal high lines, the grace and focus of the acting. I expressed my anguish then that she wasn't signed up on the spot for the role of Elisabetta di Valois in Verdi's most comprehensive operatic masterpiece. Until last week, we had to endure the very fitful, unsteady technique of Marina Poplavskaya in the role (alas, the first run of Hytner's production, which grows on me, was the one to be filmed*). At last, five years later, Harteros's Elisabetta joined Kaufmann's infante for what turned out to be one night only

as well as the top-notch Philip of Ferruccio Furlanetto and Marius Kwiecien's legato-miraculous Posa (actually looking at the nationalities of the principals - German, German-Greek, French, Polish, Italian, British - aligns well with today). That most attractive baritone seemed happy to put a Brokeback spin on the buddy relationship, and why not? Let's have a solo shot of Kwiecien too, since we can.

I'll add no more to what I wrote, trying to keep superlatives to a minimum, on The Arts Desk except to echo a commenter on the Royal Opera website who declared that the penultimate scene of Kaufmann's Carlo and Harteros's Elisabetta sitting on the monument of Carlo V rather like weary children, cautiously joining hands and almost whispering their final hopes of meeting in a better world, would remain with him forever.

Unfortunately the phenomenon is not to be repeated this run; after that precious evening came the announcement that Harteros had acute tonsillitis and would not be fulfilling her remaining two scheduled performances. She is not, alas, part of the Royal Opera's plans for the next five years.

I've already put the YouTube excerpts from Act V in the much less interesting Bavarian State Opera production up on The Arts Desk, but - this time skipping the aria, which is less perfect than it was on Saturday night - there's no harm in enshrining that great final duet here.

At the risk of repeating myself, I have to note that 'Ma lassù ci vedremo in un mondo migliore' usually makes me weep - even with Poplavskaya and Villazon - because when Mattila and Alagna sang it in the Bondy production, I was there in the company of my dear friend Trude Winik. She used her National Socialist Compensation Fund money from the Austrian government - a long overdue gesture to the loss of her family in Treblinka - to buy two boxes at the opera for her closest friends (the rest of the money went to Save the Children). It was her last outing; she died at the age of 87 some time afterwards.

I'm off this evening to a Hibernian-inspired potpourri celebrating the Irish Presidency of the EU, from Flotow and Wallace to Grainger's Molly on the Shore and Wagner's Liebestod, that last utterance of a wilde Irische magd. The classy visitors are the singers from the European Opera Centre and the European Union Youth Orchestra conducted by Laurent Pillot.

Which makes this a good place to point out that most of  the pleas to sign petitions I get from Avaaz and Greenpeace are to support European laws which the UK government constantly seeks to block - the latest being the move to veto pesticides which are held responsible for the dramatic decline of bee populations. The following is part of what James Sadri of Greenpeace wrote in his victory letter of 'the world's first continent-wide ban on these chemicals'. Text in bold is his doing.

'Someone who has nothing to be proud of is the UK environment minister Owen Paterson, who not only voted against the ban, but lobbied on behalf of chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer to try and stop it going through. Paterson in a private letter even promised Syngenta that his "efforts would intensify" in the run-up to the vote.

'Well, Mr Paterson, you lost. The bees won.

'We know the current UK government has a disastrous track record on protecting our world - from climate change to bees. That's why so much of our work on this campaign has focused on mainland Europe, where we managed to shift big countries like Germany who yesterday gave the ban their critical backing.'

Let's hope it holds good beyond the two-year moratorium. In the meantime, remember Teresa May wants us to be the only country other than BELARUS not to be part of the European Convention on Human Rights (I don't know what's happened to this, but I do know that the Queen's Speech yesterday included May's other proposal to restrict NHS access to migrants. Cameron's much-vaunted bill for same-sex marriage was nowhere to be found, a special pity since it would have been fun to hear the words fall from the old queen's lips).

Remember also that George Osborne stood alone against 26 other EU finance ministers who voted to cap bankers' bonuses. Remember the neo-Nazis and defecting BNP supporters behind the smug grinning face of Nigel Farage, who seems to charm the journos into thinking he's a Good Bloke (though they might recall this. UKIP probably think it shows statesmanship; I find it abusive and bullying).

Just remember. These are difficult, dangerous times, and it's all too easy to scapegoat the EU for sundry woes (actually, why not just try the bankers?) But I would recommend all protest voters - probably not readers of this blog - to look at the small print of what they might be getting instead.

But enough. Let's have that German Greek hymn of harmony from Harteros and Strauss. I was going to leave it at 'Frühling' from the Four Last Songs,  in consonance with this especially beautiful late spring/early summer we're having, and thought the final sunset might not be appropriate for Europe. Unfortunately the first song's not embeddable by itself, so be compelled by Harteros with Jansons conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and stay the course.

*which rules out a DVD this time round. But why not a CD set? Pappano has the clout with EMI, though it would be costly to take it into the studio. But by then Christine Rice might be well enough to have a shot at Eboli, as originally intended. I think, against the odds, she could actually be rather good.

Mellow fruitfulness

We all know it's a spectacular year for scrumping and fruiting - the warm, dry early summer followed by the rains has brought a profusion in the orchards and hedgerows. Quinces, for instance, in a Sandwich garden, with apples, plums and spiders' webs along the wall



and yet more on the fringes of Port Meadow, Oxford, which we walked around last Saturday, and about which I want to write more in due course



as well as fallen cookers in the Woodstock Road garden of friends Juliette and Rory:


Couldn't think of a better musical accompaniment than the second of Strauss's Four Last Songs, sung by the soprano I now listen to most in these desert-island pieces, Anja Harteros. I like her earlier recording with Fabio Luisi better than this, since Jansons doesn't support in quite the same ideal way, but it's still impressive. And bearing in mind Strauss's September would have been the equivalent of our October or even early November, it's not past its sell-by date.



You might need the Hermann Hesse text, since it's not subtitled in English above. Here's my own literal translation:

The garden mourns,
Cool sinks the rain into the flowers.
The summer shudders,
Silently meeting its end.

Leaf on leaf drops golden
From the high acacia tree,
Summer smiles, wondering and faint
In the dying gardendream.

Long by the roses
It lingers, yearning for peace.
Slowly it closes its [great]
Wearied eyes.