Zurich Opera: mixed hand

It was a happy coincidence that ever-stylish director/designer Robert Carsen's new production of Tchaikovsky's Pikovaya Dama happened to be running at our old haunt the Zurich Opera following on from the not-too-hard-work Basel stint of my latest Swiss trip (which you can read all about over on The Arts Desk - though I have more to add on the city and the dreamlike Fondation Beyeler). Andrea Chénier was an optional extra, one to tick off as I've not seen it on stage before. Trouble is, it put me off Giordano's very sub-sub Puccini manner so badly that I probably won't want to see even Jonas Kaufmann in the title role this coming Royal Opera season.

Both evenings offered outstanding and not so good in equal measure. Carsen's concept was very austere and a little hard-worked in its insistence on keeping the whole thing green, black and white in entirely indoor settings. It's also the first Queen of Spades I've seen to shed some of the dramatically peripheral but musically accomplished Imperial padding - not least the opening chorus with the delightful post-Carmen boys'-army routine and the long divertissement of the faithful shepherdess which Richard Jones made work so brilliantly as sinister puppet-show in his Welsh National Opera production.

We see the final tableau at the start, as if it were inevitable fate (all Queen of Spades images by Monika Rittershaus) - the same happened on Saturday in Yoshi Oida's also very mixed Lyon Opera production of Peter Grimes - and Carsen exchanges a sunny day overshadowed by storm in St Petersburg's Summer Gardens for the gambling tables. The stage is cleared for Lisa's bedroom - the ladies simply take off their shoes and frolic in petticoats - while the Countess's chamber has an enormous green bed and a dressing table, though this crucial scene lacked most of its tension given Doris Soffel's still too-young and anything but pathos-filled Countess. Perhaps the point was that Hermann woos the older woman in the same key as he does her ward, and sometimes confuses the two.

Best was the funeral/barracks sequel: the variable Zurich Chorus, overworked at present, sounded magnificent and mysterious with their backs to the audience, while Hermann wheels the Countess's coffin forward for the conflict with the ghost.

We drew the wrong card with our Hermann, it seems. Misha Didyk had been off sick, replaced at first by the vocally resplendent Latvian heroic tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko (one of the best Otellos I've heard, if not seen). But Didyk, it seems, insisted on coming back for several performances, and so we got a tenor who certainly couldn't act and who was so vocally in trouble that he didn't even try some of the top notes. Lucky I worked this out and checked, because there was nothing in the programme to suggest we weren't getting Antonenko.

Forcibly raising Didyk's game in the 'canal scene' was Tatiana Monogarova's Lisa. A wonderful, truthful and heart-rending actress, she's one soprano size too small for this treacherous role, but went for bust in the aria and duet, making both the most lacerating I've ever witnessed on stage. There were a typically stiff, vocally secure Yeletsky from Brian Mulligan, and an excellent Tomsky from Alexey Markov, secure and vivid throughout the range. Good though it was to see Jiří Bělohlávek in action again, he got variable results from the resident Philharmonia Zurich, not up to scratch in brass and wind departments; some scenes burned, others seemed too middle-of-the-road. Happy to have seen it again, as if I needed reminding of Tchaikovsky's genius in every sphere of the extended drama.

Genius Giordano was not: I'm amazed Andréa Chenier and the even tawdrier Fedora remain in the rep, but I suppose it's a singers' market. Well, the composer got the vulgarity he deserved from the revived production of Zurich regular Grischa Asagaroff, whose Cav and Pag I saw here back in 2009: very conventional direction in a would-be-regie casing, hideously designed by Reinhard von der Thannen (production image by Suzanne Schwiertz).

As far as I'm concerned, there are only two things worth reviving about the score: heroine Maddalena's 'La mamma morta', immortalised not only by Callas's stunning recording but also by how Tom Hanks reacts to it in the film Philadelphia, and the final duet as she and poet Chénier go to the guillotine. Without a doubt we had a touch of the Corellis from Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee, who makes an amazingly idiomatic heavyweight-Italian-tenor sound even if it wasn't a pretty sight to watch him brace for the high notes. I've not seen so total a stand-and-deliver performance ever before: Didyk looked like Olivier compared to this.

But then, ah, then there was the sublime Martina Serafin, whose Marschallin in Vienna had seemed Crespin-worthy to me some years back. Such bearing, such handsomeness, and more colour in the middle range than I think I've ever heard from any other soprano. I kick myself for missing her Tosca at Covent Garden but hope we'll see more of her in the great Verdi and Puccini roles, for only the slightly lighter Harteros is a match for her in such Italian repertoire. Alas, there are no production images of the revival, so I've stuck to portrait shots.

The rest was good to poor: a stalwart Gérard from Lucio Gallo, no-one else really able to make anything out of the excessive number of characterless smaller parts, and veteran (85 year old) Nello Santi in the pit, conducting with expected style but perhaps not able to hear too well since the orchestra was relentlessly loud. Anyway, we certainly had our share of A grade stars in those two performances, so that's one respect in which respect I feel blessed.

Nicht wiedersehen, Rosalinde

The death of German lyric soprano Anneliese Rothenberger at the age of 83 prompted memories of the first opera set I ever bought with my own pocket money (illustrated above, still in good nick; Rothenberger, of course, is leading lady Rosalinde). Maybe it's the only time I've truly enjoyed Die Fledermaus in any shape or form, and you couldn't get much more idiomatic than Willi Boskovsky conducting - though shame it wasn't the Vienna Phil rather than the second-fiddle Symphony - or a better cast than this one. There, too, are Fischer-Dieskau (with whom Rothenberger's biography in the booklet claims she shares equal fame abroad, ahem), Gedda, Fassbaender as a bull-dyke Orlofsky and the charming Renate Holm as Adele. The dialogue sparkles, the waltzes swoon.

Talking of which, here's Rothenberger playing Sophie to Sena Jurinac's Octavian in Paul Czinner's 1960 film of the later Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier conducted by Karajan. Few Sophies float 'Wie himmlische, nicht irdische' better (though of course the film is dubbed to a very fine soundtrack). One plus of focusing on the Rose Presentation and the excitement leading up to it is that you don't have to put up with Schwarzkopf's ueber-arch Marschallin.



Other than that, I dimly remember Rothenberger's recording with Previn of the Four Last Songs and a clip of her celebrated Lulu on a compilation EMI called The Enjoyment of Opera, but Rosenkav and Fledermaus, plus a mixed bag of operettas, perhaps remain the classic performances. Take a look at the Times obituary.

Been hearing a lot of hoary operatic classics, including a new-look Pearl Fishers at the Coli last night(photograph below of Hanan Alattar's Leila dreaming of Alfie Boe's Nadir by Catherine Ashmore) which I've just written up for The Arts Desk following a hugely pleasurable Chelsea Opera Guillaume Tell, all told more riveting throughout than the Glyndebourne Billy Budd. Vocally the Bizet was remarkable chiefly for the 'discovery' of Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey.


I also had a pleasurable wade through the latest batch of 20 Sony Opera House sets for the BBC Music Magazine. It was nice to have a hunch confirmed. The old Pagliacci has a great cast led by Domingo, Milnes and Caballe, but it was the panache of Nello Santi's conducting which took me by surprise. And there I was, backstage at the CBSO last Thursday, chatting with veteran ex-LPO, LSO and Royal Opera cellist Robert Truman who was guesting in Birmingham and had come to the talk; he confirmed that Santi was tops, equal only in his opinion to Tennstedt. This is a man who played Shostakovich 15 with the composer present at rehearsals and in the first UK performance of the Second Cello Concerto with Rostropovich. Robert also got under the feet of Fonteyn and Nureyev as well as the voices of Sutherland, Callas and Christoff. So he ought to know a thing or two.

Finally, apropos of nothing except a growing sense of horror and helplessness, up-to-the-minute bulletins on the Gaza peace flotilla outrage can be found here (this is a fridge note to myself as much as a notice to any readers). The bombing of the UNRWA warehouse which we saw dramatised only last week repeats itself, with what will surely be longer-term repercussions. And who knows where they'll end this time?