[From the Archives] A Wonderland of Possibilities: Unsuk Chin’s First Opera Premiered in Munich

Originally published on WETA 90.9's blog,Sunday, 8.5.07

“If there’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we need not try to find any.”

This quote from the King in Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” might well describe the general listener’s absolution from the trouble of actively engaging with modern music.

Unsuk Chin, Alice in Wonderland K.Nagano / BStOp / Sally Matthews et al. Unitel DVD

Any music that is so dense, academic, or inaccessible that the listener cannot find to it without first reading a small book about the work becomes a remote and abstract art. Ultimately, that creates a sense of distance from the broader public and the art-form that leads to the ivory-tower syndrome: A certain music becomes the prerogative of musicologists and composers, a rarefied elitist pursuit, perhaps an intellectual feather in the cultural hat of a country, but not part of the substance that forms or defines its culture. Horrifying as it may seem to those who cherish and defend the “fine arts”, (even) the fine arts need to be popular to a significant degree if they are to remain meaningful in the cultural life of a society.

Korean born composer Unsuk Chin from Berlin, to where she moved 1988 after studies with György Ligeti in Hamburg, says that she does not want music that needs to be explained. At least not for her first opera “Alice in Wonderland” that received its world premiere in Munich under Kent Nagano on Saturday, June 30th after more than a year of preparations. For a composer who had started out as a Darmstadt-school serialist, thoroughly influenced by Stockhausen & Co., that’s a bold statement and comes in part due to Ligeti’s thorough re-poling of her compositional outlook.

These moments of recognizability and comfort (even plain C-major makes an appearance in this opera, well possibly a novelty in 21st-century opera) are kept together by Chin’s sound world that placed near-impossible demands on the Staatsoper’s pit. Large enough to hold any Meistersinger and Elektra orchestra, for Alice the seating plan had to be arranged anew and re-arranged again to squeeze in every player. And still, the percussion batteries overflowed into the director’s boxes to both sides of the stage. It is not the least of achievements that Chin’s music, despite the quantity of exotic instruments used, never calls attention to these instrumental ‘special effects’ like the rather more crass works of Ramírez, Sierra, Goljiov, and even Higdon or Schwantner. Harmonica and harpsichord, celesta and glockenspiel, Jew’s harp and little toy-pipes make their appearances, but to fine, never gratuitous effect; always appropriately in context to the extent that can be said at all about such an absurdist piece of work as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”.And sure enough, there are moments in Ms. Chin’s music that need little explanation and are enjoyable to the broadest selection of ears. For one, Ms. Chin is fond of quoting, half mockingly, traditional opera in Alice, or, during the caterpillar‘s bass clarinet solo, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, or baroque elements during the tea ceremony.

Chin’s music, a tapestry of influences and ideas, is difficult to describe – not the least because it is difficult to remember much of it in precise ways. There were, however, a few moments where I thought: “This sure is better than Nicholas Maw’sSophie’s Choice“. It reminded of Sophie, which had its US premiere in Washington last season, while proving far less monotonous and same-ish, not pushing on ever so hard, and less tiring. Maybe the libretto lends itself to greater frivolousness or variety when you compose for words like “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, how I wonder what you’re at…” than Holocaust, barbed wire, and “massive intakes of iron”.

The music of Alice remains a fairly difficult music, but it’s also imaginative, witty, well crafted, and – beyond the quotations – with moments of unsuspected beauty, never tiring, rarely taxing. And it certainly scores on every account against a recent Western-Asian Operatic premiere, namely The First Emperor, Tan Dun’s unbearable kitschy mix of second-rate Puccini with (in-and-of-itself interesting) Chinese percussion and string sounds.

But if the music was not as memorable as expected or desired, it was in some part the fault – or rather: achievement – of the staging. Brecht-student, painter, set-, costume designer, and stage director Achim Freyer, who staged the first performance of the Philip Glass trilogySatyagraha in Stuttgart (1981) and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Macbeth in New York, concocted a bizarre, fantastical set that dominated the performance to a degree that may have made Unsuk Chin feel uncomfortable. (Her support for the staging was – mildly put – shy of enthusiastic in several interviews given prior to the premiere.)

In front of steep stage, raked at 51 degrees (!) and nearly reaching the top of the visible part of the 90 feet high stage of the Staatsoper, stood lined up the eight singers (only their heads visible) who, in addition to Alice and the Queen, made up the cast’s different figures. All in the same makeup and wigs, operating detached white hands from behind a little barrier in front of them, they sang the parts that were then acted out by performance artists on the stage – floating (suspended from above), jumping, and gesticulating about in their oversized and colorful costumes. The croquet game (with rules resembling Calvinball), for example, was like a vast underwater ping-pong game with a likeness of Alice’s head serving as the ball. Frog and Dormouse (“You might just as well say that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”), March Hare and White Rabbit, and of course the ever-present, ever metamorphizing Cheshire Cat pop up and do their wily things on stage.

Colorful strings divide the stage into sections that are at times filled out with color (depicting the house in which Alice grows to enormous size) or sheer light, as in the final dream sequence that, like the sequence that serves as the prelude to the opera, are not actually from Lewis Carrol’s book but represent reoccurring dreams of Unsuk Chin about fatalism and faith. When Alice grows after eating the cake and cries herself a lake of tears, the 20-some feet tall Alice’s tears (one performer lifted into the air with the upper part, another at the bottom for the feet) are blue strips of fabric that endlessly gush from her eyes and fill the lower stage along with superimposed splatter of rain.

Regular Alice runs around in an oversized mask that has her appear childlike and surreal at once – to take that mask off only at the very end when she has put an end to the hokus-pokus of Wonderland by calling the shenanigans of the Queen of Hearts by their name. The Mock Turtle (“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from”) appears in a big Campell’s Soup can, except it’s “Caroll’s [false] Turtle Soup” and plays the harmonica hauntingly – in between weeping helplessly. When Dame Gwyneth Jones appears as the Queen of Hearts, she is piercingly perfect, shrill and deliciously wacky, wobble-free – and, of course, a much-beloved favorite of the Munich audience, many of which still remember her legendary Marschallin.

Alice in Wonderland had originally been planned for the LA opera (where Kent Nagano has turned down Plácido Domingo’s offer for the role as Music Directorship but did agree to become Principal Conductor), but financial concerns scuppered the plans. Financial concerns are not much of a problem for Munich (one of the most generously subsidized opera houses in the world) where Nagano succeeded Zubin Mehta as Music Director in 2006. Alice became a Munich project and more ambitious in scope still.

The audience, conservative but open-minded, seemed to be plenty excited about the world premiere of Alice. Well over 100 audience members of all ages stood in line to secure a seat for an introductory talk, an hour before the second performance. But if Alice, sung in English and shown with German subtitles, was more than just a curiously interesting example of high art – gladly suffered in the name of being an audience that appreciates high art – remains questionable. The German audience, for one, has little experience with the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And to the extent the story is known, it’s through Walt Disney’s film, not the original book – a book that could easily be seen in a line with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, or Luis Buñuel films like La Voie lactée and Le fantôme de la liberté. The translation, shown as sub- and supertitles, tried its best, but was invariably cut and left to choose between a literal translation and finding its own plays on words that didn’t always relate to the scene. Even an innocent pun like the Doormouse’s “Long tale, indeed”, while proudly wiggling around its long tail, remained obscure to most. That (lack of) perception presumably allowed for the staging to overpower music and story in the way it did… though whether that was good or bad can’t quite be said with a staging so imaginative and wonder-full as Achim Freyer.

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On Forbes: Kirill Petrenko remains at the Bavarian State Opera

Kirill Petrenko Remains At The Bavarian State Opera

arlier today it was announced that Kirill Petrenko, the coming chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, has renewed his current contract as music director of the Bavarian State Opera by three years until 2021.

The Bavarian State Minister for Culture, Dr. Ludwig Spaenle, signed the new contracts with him and the Bavarian State Opera’s Intendant Nikolaus Bachler who brought Petrenko to the house in 2010, after a tetchy relationship with the previous music director, Kent Nagano. Bachler had all but married himself to Petrenko’s remaining in Munich, after it was clear that Petrenko would become the designated head honcho of the Berlin Philharmonic. Keeping Petrenko was thought to be...

Full review on Forbes.com.

Ionarts-at-Large: End-of-the-World-Music in Vienna

Within a few days, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian State Orchestra (the opera’s orchestra) pitched their tents at the Musikverein in Vienna. I caught the second of those two concerts, with the Opera’s orchestra under their music director Kirill Petrenko, because I had to! It featured Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, but that wasn’t the reason. It opened with Ravel’s La Valse (Poème chorégraphique pour Orchestre), but that wasn’t the reason either. But in the middle lured a tremendous work: Gesangsszene to words from “Sodom and Gomorrha” by Jean Giraudoux for Baritone and Orchestra by Karl Amadeus Hartmann. (More Hartmann on ionarts here.) Not only that, but with the best possible baritone in that repertoire, too: namely Christian Gerhaher (More Gerhaher on ionarts here). That’s unmissable in my book – and everything else is mere bonus.

La Valse was a fine such bonus to start with: As the first low notes emerged, the upper strings just barely broke through to the surface, which made the work—buzzing, droning, pulsating—all the more strange than it already is. It was woodwind eeriness, and the harmlessness of the waltz theme was hard to trust. When the strings finally got there, and came to the fore at last, along with the battery of four harps, they didn’t revert to a pastoral naïveté, either: With transparency  and foreshadowing and every timpani burst ever more threatening, the orchestra inexorably waltzed along to the ensuing final, perplexing stage… fooling no one along the way. Typical Kirill Petrenko, one might say, and a nicely disturbing opening.

Hartmann was the student of Anton Webern, an admirer of Arnold Schoenberg, and a liberal quoter from Alban Berg, but he was anything but a mindless disciple of the 12-tone cult: “Those who compose slavishly in acquiescent dependency on tone rows can certainly crank their bits out at a nice clip. But… you cannot just skirt the burden of tradition by replacing old forms with new ones. We have to accept that our path has become more difficult than that of our great idols before us.” Hartmann consequently developed a musical voice that makes him one of great if lamentably unsung composers of the 20th century.

K.A.Hartmann, Gesangsszene et al., K.A.Rickenbacher, Bamberger Symphoniker, S.Nimsgern Koch H.Berlioz et al., Symphonie Fantastique, M.Jansons, BRSO BR Klassik

Hartmann wrote his very last, unfinished work—the deeply pessimistic, apocalyptic Gesangsszene—for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. It was premiered a year after Hartmann died in 1963. It is uncomfortable listening, disturbing and stirring, relentless, but with glimpses even of conventional beauty amid the ruins. Fischer-Dieskau remained loyal to Hartman’s swansong and, between the premiere and 1987, performed it twenty times all over Europe. The premiere performance under Dean Dixon never made it from LP to CD, but recordings with the Bavarian and Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestras led by Rafael Kubelik (Wergo) and Lothar Zagrosek (Orfeo) respectively let us eavesdrop on this bitter parting gift of Hartmann’s for which Fischer-Dieskau’s controlled urgency is apt.

If the performance with Petrenko and Gerhaher sounded very, very different from Dieskau’s attempt (especially with Kubelik), it’s because Gerhaher, unlike the albeit poignant Dieskau, opted to sing the work as written, not just an approximation thereof. The review of the concert in Munich promised much. In fact, Egbert Tholl of the Süddeutsche Zeitung was so destroyed afterwards, he had to leave at intermission (and communicated this in the review). The clarinet and flute pre-lament, to get us set up properly. Then one becomes witness to the colorfully illustrated Sprechgesang/singing, always at the edge of what is either just still or already no longer comfortable Sew-saw, sew-saw… as through bone with a surgeons’ saw... followed by impotent exclamation marks. Silence. Gerhaher amidst this like a pale horse. And then the flute again, piping up as if to see if things might not have turned around. They have not. This is End-of-the-World-Music! It even says so. The last words are: “It is the End of the World. The saddest possible of them all!” Indeed. Tholl called Gerhaher’s role in this that of the “Evangelist of Doom”, and it’s right-on. Then Tholl went out into the night, alone. As I might have, even though I was missing a bit of that solemn focus I had expected and hoped for… either a product of my lacking concentration or the less than perfectly concentrated, incomprehensive surroundings in the Goldener Saal.

I stayed. But what can you play, after hearing Hartmann? Nothing, if you take it seriously… if you really took it in, if you made it your own. Anything, of course, if it was just music… more or less impressive, to be listened to, more or less, and then dutifully applauded; a prosecco at intermission, a chat with the Feldhubingers and, oh look, Dr. Waldner is here; we haven’t seen the Gugler’s in weeks, and Hello Herr Professor Doktor Geigerl, Frau Professor Doktor Geigerl. How was the week at Lake Hallstatt? Why, then it’s no problem at all continuing with Berlioz’ self-indulgent tone poem of many ownders… the showy, effective, and not universally loved Symphonie fantastique.

The performance: Amazing details, finely traced and with great dynamic control and dramatic execution thereof and playing that you’d expect from an AAA concert-orchestra on a good day, but not not necessarily from an A opera-orchestra like the Bavarian State Orchestra, Munich’s nominal No.3 (after the obvious No.1 BRSO and the fluctuation our-concerts-are-like-a-box-of-chocolate No.2 Munich Philharmonic). So far, so good. But the performance was also detailed to the point of disconnect and incoherence. Maybe “AAA”, but not my cup of tea. In any case, it was entirely nixed by a squeaking double-bass chair that would not stop adding its gruesome, unwanted sound to the mix. Strange that Petrenko didn’t stop after the first movement, to remedy the ill. But disconnect and squeak aside, the Symphonie fantastique is also a frightfully self-important work (even if Petrenko wanted to downplay exactly that aspect), and the contrast to the earnest humility of the Hartmann reveals this mercilessly. It’s not my favorite work to begin with (although the BRSO recording from last year got me very excited), and once one isn’t in the mood for this Symphony, it gets annoying and tedious really fast, however impressive the circumstances. No matter: No one can take the gloomy delight of Hartmann away from me. 

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A Job Well Done: Zeisl's Hiob Premieres in Munich

Eric(h) Zeisl’s unfinished opera Job had languished unperformed for 55 years. Now, as part of the Munich Opera Festival, it was revived by the Orchestra Jakobsplatz in collaboration with the Bavarian State Opera. To that end, the opera commissioned Jan Duszyńsky to finish the work by providing acts 3 and 4—the “America” bit of the Jewish-life-and-exile-saga based on Josef Roth’s play of the same name.

In amateurish hands—as can be seen in excerpts in Herbert Krill’s documentary Eric(h) Zeisl - An Unfinished Life, where Viennese students butcher some scenes—Job sounds terrible and Hans Kafka’s libretto makes the affair feel like a highfalutin production of Fiddler on the Roof gone wrong. Under the highly professional guidance of the State Opera, performed in the old military Riding Arena in Munich, and played by the Orchestra Jakobsplatz—in as large a formation as I’ve ever seen them and in good form under their founding conductor Daniel Grossmann—the result was very considerably more pleasing.

E.Zeisl et al., Requiem Ebraico, OSESP / J.Neschling BIS E.Zeisl, Piano Concerto; Pierrot, G.Wallisch / RSO Wien / J.Wildner cpo

Judging upon first and only hearing bears its pitfalls, but for all the enthusiasm to have seen this work performed at last, I reckon it isn’t Zeisl’s strongest. Had he lived to finish the work and revise it again, the inclined listener can’t help to think he would have turned around and made significant cuts in the score: There are too many repetitive elements in the music. The libretto, thus treated, drags on. Still, much can be had from hunting down goodies amid the largesse. The first one is easy: After a meta-prelude (in which adult-Menuchim-cum-The-Composer sings, haltingly: “I. have. been. asked. to. finish. an. opera…”), Zeisl’s bitter-sweet overture rang out in the riding hall and it’s primo late Viennese romanticism, charming and enchanting. Completion of the first two (of four projected) acts took Zeisl, on and off, ten years, and the music seems to reflect his artistic change. Increasingly the music becomes more consciously Jewish. As his daughter, Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg said: “Forced to leave his beloved Austria, [Zeisl] felt that he was no longer an Austrian, and also, in 1939 and the early forties, when the composition of Hiob was first conceived, he did not feel like an American, nor ‘belonged’ to America… That is why in America his music took on a more Hebraic mode.”

Apart from the overture, a few musical highlights stuck out. A few duets throughout, but especially the chorus that prepares Mendel’s family’s departure to America—executed by the two well-trained choruses, kids and regulars—and the parting lullaby for Menuchim (a splendidly acting little boy!) by his mother Deborah (the strong and regal-voiced Christa Ratzenböck). Then Jan Duszyńsky’s music takes over, set to remnants of the libretto vigorously altered by the composer and director Miron Hakenbeck to suit their dramatic line.

When Duszyńsky was approached with the task of finishing the opera, he didn’t know

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Ionarts-at-Large: Sex, Drinks, and Leotards

The Bavarian State Opera’s David Alden production of La Calisto constitutes the three shortest hours I’ve enjoyed anywhere in an opera house. The wild story about Jupiter's lust for the nymph Calisto, who is eventually turned into a bear by his jealous wife, Juno (and then into the big dipper) is such a romp and such pure entertainment, it’s like going to the movies. All the signature items of an Alden production are there: loud colors, creative costumes, polished floors, zebra-striped walls and curved laminated wood paneling—courtesy Paul Steinberg’s set and Buki Shiff's wildly diverse costumes, which range from a Tin Woodman-business suit for Mercury to a beautifully realistic Chameleon-butler to a salaciously detailed faun costume for Satirino, a creature half goat, half counter tenor Domique Visse (who has played the part in every of the now four runs of La Calisto).

Only the plastic machine gun of Giove’s was new to this revival, and pathetic, as every

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David Alden's La Calisto at the Bavarian State Opera: A Dreamboat Production

Picture courtesy Bavarian State opera, © Wilfried Hösl

See also my 2007 review of this production.

The Bavarian State Opera’s David Alden production of La Calisto are the three shortest hours I’ve enjoyed anywhere in an opera house. The wild story about Jupiter's lust for the nymph Calisto, who is eventually turned into a bear by his jealous wife, Juno (and then into the big dipper) is such a romp and such pure entertainment, it’s like going to the movies. All the signature items of an Alden production are there: loud colors, creative costumes, polished floors, zebra-striped walls and curved laminated wood paneling—courtesy Paul Steinberg’s set and Buki Shiff's wildly diverse costumes, which range from a Tin Woodman-business suit for Mercury to a beautifully realistic Chameleon-butler to a salaciously detailed faun costume for Satirino, a creature half goat, half countertenor Dominique Visse (who has played the part in every of the now four runs of La Calisto).

Francesco Cavalli, La Calisto PERFORMERS LABEL

Only the plastic machine gun of Giove’s was new to this revival and pathetic as every fake machine gun on stage must invariably be. That prop has never worked and won’t likely ever will. That’s annoying, as are the fake smoking of fake cigarettes and drinking from empty plastic glasses. I might expect such cheap cardinal sins of staging from more provincial houses, but not the Bavarian State Opera. Pet peeves of mine though those are, what can they matter when compared to the saucy joviality of the work, and the beguiling music of Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni (1602-1676), better known as Francesco Cavalli.

The best of Alden’s productions are acts of light genius, ever straddling the fence between high camp and cleverness, and always coming down on the right side. That’s certainly true for this one, and his deft touches show everywhere. One example: When Giove (Luca Tittoto, dashing between bravado, bluster, and meekness) impersonates Diana (to get Calisto, the chaste follower of Diana into the sack) Anna Bonitatibus’s sings from the darkened pit in front of the stage while Tittoto acts and lip-syncs with aplomb on stage, flimsily disguised as Diana. There is one exception: Giove sings his part in falsetto when conversing with Karina Gauvin’s Giunone when he clings to his disguise even though his act is obviously up.

Nikolay Borchev’s Mercurio—Giove’s Leporello of sorts—started a little congested but came through in stalwart manner. Anna Bonitatibus, as Diana (on and off stage) championed a fruity mezzo with vibrato and volume to fit a performance that played everything up. For comedic effect, she would channel an Erika-Köth-memorial-vibrato that challenged the goat bleating of Dominique Visse, but as Diana she went back to a plainer gorgeousness. In the love-quest sideshow, maybe-not-so-chaste-Diana-after-all falls hard for her tall dark stranger Endimione who convinced vocally and visually with rare boyish-yet-manly countertenor charm and sonority.

Sally Matthew created the role of Calisto for Alden and so threw herself into her part, that it seemed impossible to repeat the success with subsequent casts. I was proven wrong by a fine second cast some years ago, and again on January 15^th, when Danielle de Niese and her colleagues on stage showed that this production will make any good singing actor shine. De Niese is a brilliant young operatic plaything who wiggles and struggles like Penelope (Pepe le Pew’s love interest in the Warner Brothers cartoons) while making big innocent eyes that would put Bugs Bunny to shame. It’s a different kind of act than Matthew’s: more visceral, with a warm, pretty, and slightly forgettable voice, but she certainly filled Calisto’s leotard with aplomb.

Ivor Bolton, the linchpin of Munich's Baroque revivals, uses a specially created edition of the score by Álvaro Torrente which applies much appreciated and very prudent cuts. The band, which performed entirely on period instruments for the first time when this La Calisto was first shown in 2005, was in fine fettle and just a little kick and jolt shy of a perfect night. Let’s hope the set gets a good shine and another few revivals.

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January 2014

Cast list:

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Ionarts-at-Large: The Petrenko Debut without Shadows

All pictures courtesy Bavarian State Opera, © Wilfried Hösl. Details, click for full picture.

The 50^th anniversary of the re-opening of Munich’s National Theater was celebrated with a production—then as now—of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten. On November 21^{st t}he town, or at least the part of it interested in the Bavarian State Opera,was atwitter about the new production as it had not been

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Ionarts-at-Large: A Damrau Liederabend to Harp On

A Liederabend in Munich’s National Theater is normally a compromised proposition: few singers have the voice—and fewer still the courage—to look into the vast round and still sing Lied-appropriately: light and naturally. Christian Gerhaher can do it, and I’ve heard Thomas Quasthoff do a Müllerin there in an I-can’t-be-bothered-kind-of-way that was at once insulting and splendid. But most singers flip into opera-mode and shout. Even superb (but Lieder-inexperienced) ones like Anja Harteros, who floundered at a Liederabend during one of the last Munich Opera Festivals. And Lieder shouted, no matter who does the shouting, are awful.

Diana Damrau is one of the few who have the voice, the wherewithal, the experience, and the confidence to pull it off… which made this Liederabend—full of promising Richard Strauss—one of the more attractive offerings of this year’s Munich Opera Festival. That it didn’t turn out that way was not primarily her fault, but it probably still had something to do with the choice (not her choice) of venue. It was primarily a matter of Xavier de Maistre’s harp accompaniment, which didn’t take well to the Strauss nor the venue.

Bereft of an acoustic in which its sound could nicely reverberate, the harp just pling-planged into nothingness; notes falling like dead raindrops on the floor. Above it Mme. Damrau cut through the space with her voice, but even that sounded a little harsh at first, and at least very much unsupported. Whether because of the acoustic or form that night, they never sounded together; there was no sense of unity, no sense of her voice being carried by the music, as it would be in these works’ orchestral guise or with the piano accompaniment (presuming an excellent pianist). For at least the eleven Strauss songs, Mme. Damrau was left alone, and de Maistre’s hard work amounted to little more than mildly annoying background jingle-jangle. In the third song, “Leises Lied”, Damrau developed the vocal warmth one expects in her sublime Strauss, and in “Die Verschwiegenen” operatic spunk, plenty dynamic—but surprisingly little expressive—nuance, which fit the overall acoustic (and ultimately emotional) dullness.

Recital, D.Damrau, X.DeMaistre + Documentary "Diva Divina" Virgin DVD

A little harp interlude separated the first two sets of Strauss, in part to pretend that there was some egality among the performers when of course exactly no one had come to the National Theater to hear Liszt transcribed for harp. The audience was well-behaved, though, and they humored Xavier de Maistre’s admittedly amazing Le Rossignol by showing their appreciation for this little divertissement before the main act was back on stage. A diva would have used the time to change dresses, but Damrau (who could pull it off) is thankfully above gimmicks (not counting the harp-accompaniment as such). Singer and harpist continued to subtract from each other, instead of adding… most notable in “Winterweihe”, which was a shadow of its orchestral self in this version. This lasted until after intermission, when three songs from Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d'Auvergne (sung in French, while the program helpfully offered the Occitan text, which caused many a confused look among the audience) worked much better for this voice-harp combination.

This was over too soon, giving way to another solo harp interlude, this time a transcription of The Moldau from Smetana’s Má vlast… a proud river, reduced to a trickle of treacle. The undeniable element of awesomeness in mastering such a difficult transcription—even if Xavier de Maistre showed neither the technical panache of his student Emmanuel Ceysson or the musical touch of Anneleen Lenaerts—is a bit like admiring someone for carving a turkey perfectly with a nail clipper. Amazing, with overtones of daftness. It was in any case overtaken by Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs (now the program offered a very different German translation from what Damrau sang), which were not the last word in idiomatic Bohemian folk-ness, but very beautifully done—especially the evergreen “Songs My Mother Taught Me”. Then Damrau announced updates on the state of the royal baby and context-matched Strauss songs as encores, goading the audience into a self-celebratory frenzy with the “Wiegenlied”, “Morgen”, “Nichts”, and the acrobatic Eva Dell'Acqua “J'ai vu passer l'hirondelle” (from Villanelle).

Not a night to remember, but I’m looking forward to catching the program in the much more intimate and appropriate setting of the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg.

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