Devilish music-drama in Zurich and Lucerne

Catching Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer at Zurich Opera with the greatest living interpreter of the title role was serendipity, a bonus preface to my days at the Lucerne Easter Festival,

and I wasn't expecting an optional extra in Lucerne, the resident opera company's site-specific experiment with Schumann's Faust-Szenen, to have such an impact.

None of us present will ever forget the Zurich concert performance of Dutchman at the Royal Festival Hall. There Anja Kampe (pictured below with Terfel in production photos of the first run - no new ones were taken for this cast, sadly) and Matti Salminen were very much Bryn's equals in holding the stage. This time Steven Humes was, as they used to say, merely faxing it in as Daland; though if Camilla Nylund's more-lyric-than-usual Senta kept something in check in Act 2, it was worth it for the final transfixing commitment before the abrupt end of the tragedy (Zurich's version sticks to the brutal Dresden original, without the Tristanish epilogue in Overture and finale). There was huge intensity and interest in Marco Jentzsch's imposingly psychotic Erik, and promise for that role and other Wagnerian tenor parts from Omer Kobeljak's Steuermann.

If Bryn has suffered some of the vocal wear and tear inevitable in singing Wagner round the world across the four-plus years since his first Zurich Dutchman, he is still totally compelling. The colour and inflexion are there from the very first phrase ('Die Frist ist um,' spine-tingling), and the hyper-flexible, sensitive conducting of  Markus Poschner enabled him to hover just that little bit longer in mid-phrase. Besides, he only has to stand there - or even, in one effective instance, sit to the left of the stage with his back to chorus and audience - to command the stage with his undeniable charisma. Irrelevant to the performance, perhaps, but a chorus member who told me that he was always solicitous in helping her find her way in the wings without her spectacles signalled that he's still the same team player whom I first encountered in person making tea for everyone in the Dundee recording sessions for Mendelssohn's Elijah.

The original photos of 2012 had made me keen to see Zurich Intendant Andreas Homoki's production. The concept is handsome in Wolfgang Gussmann's design: it all takes place in a 19th century merchant's headquarters, but seascapes hang on the walls and in one instance the red ship bobs across turbulent waves as the central painting comes to life. The chorus are very hard-worked and onstage for much longer than usual; they play some of it for comedy, though I wasn't quite convinced by the colonial statement made in the crucial choral Act 3 confrontation between what should be two ships' crews. The expanded map of Africa with settlements marked catches fire - fine, up to a point - and a black, be-fez-zed servant turns into a warrior, rather cheesy.

Some overacting though no cheesiness bedevilled the Lucerne Scenes from Faust, but the impression it's left is far bigger than that. At 9pm on my last evening in town, I'd made my way straight from Mariss Jansons' first, unstintingly impressive Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra concert in the KKL - more on that in my forthcoming Arts Desk piece - and stood outside the Jesuit Church witnessing hollow-eyed, bleeding-from-the-mouth kids holding up religious placards as the scattered chorus began a Lutheran chorale. Then the doors of the church were flung open and Schumann's Overture began from the excellent orchestra under young conductor Clemens Heil.

Forbidden to sit and listen, kept at the sides, we then moved quickly to the theatre where Part One and two-thirds of Part Two were played out in near-darkness, the stage in the tiny auditorium built out so that we were very much involved in Faust's fantasies, the orchestra relayed from the church through speakers. Plausibly, the Gretchen scenes were played out as phantasms of the protagonist in (one presumed, though fortunately there were no props or set to underline it) an asylum. A parallel with Schumann's madness, but not a contrived one; director Benedikt von Peter gauged his alternative psychodrama very sensitively. As in a remarkable production I've seen of Ibsen's Peer Gynt - many parallels there with Goethe's Faust - the narrative running through a tormented man's head made the supernatural dimension more, not less, convincing, with spirit voices unseen from upstairs and only a couple of video projections to detract from the Faust-Gretchen-Mephisto dynamic, plus a mesmerising descending light-bulb which gradually became the artificial sun of Faust 'out in the world'.

Baritone Sebastian Geyer had a hard task keeping the constant state of anxiety and horror going, but he carried it off, sang well and was plausible when still; and I bought the general idea, Rebecca Krynski Cox's heroine as lily-carrying Madonna wafting across the stage and then spectral distressed, pregnant girl wiping blood over the hallucinating Faust.

Bass Vuyani Mlinde, familiar from his days with the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, was quite a brooding presence. The dynamic between Faust's negative force, the essence of his madness, and the beset inmate reached its climax in the scene of Faust's death outside in the Theaterplatz - Mlinde declaiming from an upstairs window of the theatre across to Geyer on the roof of a wooden construction beside the church.

To the sounds of Schumann's magnificent brass chorus - I'm completely in love with this music, which like the Beethoven Mass in C earlier in the evening I've never heard live before - we were escorted back inside the Jesuitenkirche.

I was anxious - did the clergy know what they were in for when they gave permission (especially as we know the Catholics are less happy about profane events in their ecclesiastical buildings)? The quasi-religious 'Journey to Heaven' continued to be stage-managed by Mephisto with mockery from adult and childrens' choruses.

But the giant Madonna-Gretchen on a screen was contradicted by the real human being, perhaps the girl who had lost her man to the asylum.

The ending was very moving - a now completely still and blank Faust approached by an elderly person from the street who took off coat and became helper, guiding him to the west door. And so, nearly five hours after the first work in the KKL concert had struck up, a remarkable evening came to an end. Quite an alternative Passion for Easter. I can't wait to hear the music again - must get Britten's recording with Fischer-Dieskau. Even outside the less obviously inspired and fantastical moments - the garden scene, the Ariel music, certain choruses in the final journey, which Schumann treats in quite a different way to Mahler in his Eighth Symphony - the idiom now feels right to me, thanks to John Eliot Gardiner's recent journey of rediscovery.

Lucky Lucerners: I hope that anyone with an interest in theatre will rush to this. Needless to say, the surfeit of great events precluded catching the new Holliger opera with Christoph Gerhaher in Zurich the following afternoon; we spent it recuperating in the warm spring sunshine in the Rietberg Park with Lottie and friends. More on the al fresco side of the trip anon; I need to catch up on my Arctic experience first. Meanwhile, a full report on the Lucerne Easter Festival experience, with more succinct words of praise for the Faust-Szenen is now up and running on The Arts Desk.

Production photo credits: for Dutchman, T + T Fotografie / Toni Suter + Tanja Dorendorf; for Scenes from Faust,  Ingo Höhn

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.

Hoffmann loses the plot

He usually does, owing to the labyrinth of plans and alternatives for Offenbach's problematic Venetian act. I count myself lucky to have heard the Kaye/Keck 2005 performing version live for the first time in Zurich last Thursday, and with three very fine singers (two of them, the Hoffmann of Vittorio Grigolo and Michelle Breedt's Nicklausse/Muse, pictured above by Suzanne Schwiertz, who also took the two Opernhaus Zurich photos below).

Yet the show was not what it might have been, owing to the kind of musical chairs I've only come across at the Met. The original director pulled out at an early stage, leaving house director Grischa Asagaroff to fill in the gaps; and then, following the final rehearsal, Elena Mosuc - whom it would have been quite a treat to see and hear as all four of Hoffmann's loves - developed a throat infection. Three ladies of varying abilities were flown in to plug the gaps.

More problematic than any of the above was the Zurich Opera debut of Tonhalle principal conductor David Zinman. We like his Mahler and adore some of his Strauss tone poems, but he showed not the slightest instinct for co-ordinating between pit and stage - did he once hold up his baton for the singers? - going his own way with often sluggish tempi that were the opposite of what this, of all works, needs: opera-comique buoyancy.

Under the circumstances, there was still much to enjoy. I've no idea what half the symbolism in Bernhard Kleber's sets was supposed to mean, but the stylish theatre-bar for the first scene looked good, and what went on behind the ugly sub-de-Chirico panels surrounding each tale could be interesting. The chorus, though, seemed under-directed both as stiff, unrowdy, tuxedoed 'students' in the Prologue and as the pallid, quite unsensual decadents of Giulietta's entourage. They came into their own in the a cappella musings and the magnificent Muse-led curtain which really should be the only possible ending to the opera.

Grigolo is a real stage animal, sexy and very expressive with his hands. A brilliant director might do much with him, but here he suggested none of Domingo's rivetingly portrayed decline from wide-eyed youth to shattered drunk. The voice has ping and elan, but he's essentially a lighter, Donizetti tenor and came under cruel pressure in 'Ah dieu, de quelle ivresse' and the shadow-duet. Dominating the stage in the right way was another singer with real sex-appeal, Laurent Naouri. A better four-in-one-villain I don't expect to see, and unlike Grigolo he never overdid it (except for a justified touch of humorous melodrama when Coppelius threatens 'je vais tuer quelqu'un').


Of course he doesn't get the Diamond Aria we all know and love, a pinch from another Offenbach work, singing a weaker original to similar words, but Naouri, Grigolo and Breedt made the trio before the central Olympia shenanigans work well. Here are all three in the act's tragicomic denouement.


That trio is one of several rediscoveries which have to become fixtures of any 21st century Hoffmann. Most ravishing of all is Nicklausse's ode to music in the Antonia act. I fell in love with it on Garanca's arias disc, and if Breedt - a fine if unglammy Octavian and Composer - wasn't quite the match there, she acted almost as deftly as Naouri and shone in the final apotheosis.

The loves? Well, passons - or, rather, let me be brief. Sen Guo did the doll stuff perfectly mechanically, which was fine; Raffaela Angeletti, though with a none too attractive basic tone and a tendency to sing sharp, carried off some of Antonia's pathos; Riki Guy should never have been singing Giulietta - and in any case, what a dud is the reinstated finale. I still think we need the interpolated septet and a quick curtain, whatever an ailing Offenbach may originally have thought best.

Anyway, it was all an amiable curtain-raiser to the real jewels ahead: the Simon Bolivar Orchestra at the Lucerne Easter Festival with Abbado - a dream come true to so many of us - and then with Dudamel, and then in a family concert with the usual Latin American fiesta plums. I'll have more to say about those privileged hours on the Arts Desk, and - if there's time in the next chaotic few days - I'll add something here too.


Suffice it to say that the upbeat and the plunge into Prokofiev's Scythian chaos made for the most exciting start to any concert, the throb of twelve double basses at the end of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique the most sobering of any conclusions. You'll get to see it, eventually, on DVD, and you'll be amazed: though I suppose nothing should surprise us from the man who is, for me, so many musicians and all the Venezuelans, the world's greatest living conductor.