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Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Brilliant rewrite of Shakey: Hamlet, at Buxton Opera House, reviewed
'There is good music, bad music, and music by Ambroise Thomas,' said Emmanuel Chabrier, but then, Chabrier said a lot of things. I adore Chabrier – who couldn't love the man who wrote España and turned Tristan und Isolde into a jaunty quadrille? – but it doesn't do to take him too literally. Thomas ended his career as a notoriously crusty director of the Paris Conservatoire, and when the French musical establishment puts you on a pedestal younger composers invariably start hurling the merde. Scraps of Thomas's music survive in all sorts of odd corners (a snippet from his opera Mignon crops up in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). I've always found it rather appealing. The Buxton International Festival's production of Thomas's 1868 tragedy Hamlet confirms that it is, indeed, extremely listenable. The libretto is based on Alexandre Dumas's version of Shakespeare, and it's calculated to turn Bard-worshippers puce. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are cut and Polonius and Horatio are barely walk-on parts. Brilliantly, Thomas and his librettists Carré and Barbier also rewrite the ending so the Ghost gatecrashes Ophelia's funeral like the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, while Hamlet survives to be acclaimed King. And if you think that's sacrilege, you can't have been to Stratford-upon-Avon recently. In any case, Thomas's score, which can feel a little polite on disc (think Gounod and soda), is actually very effective in the theatre. With Adrian Kelly conducting the orchestra of Opera North it's trim, it's passionate, and you still get all of old Shakey's juiciest bits: the gravediggers, the play-within-the-play and a stonking coloratura mad scene for Ophelia – sorry, Ophélie (Yewon Han). At one point in the Buxton production Hamlet – sorry, 'Amlet (Gregory Feldmann) – even addresses himself to a skull, and the fact that the director, Jack Furness, manages this without self-consciousness speaks volumes. Furness engages with Thomas's opera on its own terms, and plays it for what it is. So it's updated – suits and evening wear – but you barely notice, with the chorus gliding around like predatory caterers. Sami Fendall's set designs are minimalist (not much more than a flight of steps) but they're so skilfully lit (by Jake Wiltshire) that they evoke the whole noir-ish, shifting world of Elsinore: shadows, corridors and blasted wastes. The appearance of the Ghost (Per Bach Nissen), meanwhile, is a real coup de théâtre. The atmosphere is as compelling as it is oppressive, and with Hamlet as a sort of tormented hipster amid the upscale couture of the court, Furness lands hit after palpable dramatic hit. Certainly, Feldmann and Han seemed to be giving their all, in a pair of enormously extended and taxing leading roles. Feldmann conveys Hamlet's seesawing naivety and angst as vividly as anything you'll see at the RSC, but he's got vocal stamina too, sounding nearly as fresh at the start of the final scene as he had three hours previously. The same goes for Han's touching Ophélie. Her voice had a shaded, poignant undertow that added multiple layers to her huge, virtuosic final aria – which was received in icy silence by the Buxton audience. They're hard to please in the High Peak. Alastair Miles was a proud, oaky-sounding Claudius and Allison Cook, as Gertrude, found powerful reserves of nuance and pathos. Like everything about this production, they delivered more than the sum of their parts. The singing and the playing are also the thing in Opera Holland Park's new staging of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Cecilia Stinton's meat-and-two-veg production doesn't spring any particular surprises, but if you like BBC period dramas you'll enjoy the tailcoats and stovepipe hats (Stinton has updated the action to the era of Walter Scott). Three graves dominate the front of the stage, to remind you that this is not – despite the evidence of the costumes – a revival of Oliver!. OHP does have one killer card to play. This company has always excelled at casting, and pretty much everyone here is the genuine bel canto article, pouring out those long aching melodies at fever heat. In fact for large parts of the evening Morgan Pearse, as the heartless Enrico, sounds even sexier and more lustrous than Jose de Eca (as a Heathcliff-like Edgardo) – though when Eca hits his full-throated stride, it's more than worth the wait. The big news, though, is Jennifer France's role debut as Lucia. It's dangerous for a critic to have too many preconceptions, so take it as you will when I say that the hushed intensity of her singing in the quiet passages and her absolute control in the mad scene exceeded my (high) expectations. The rest of the cast (and indeed the City of London Sinfonia under Michael Papadopoulos) were audibly inspired by France's singing, and her final scenes – bloodied, bedraggled and caked in mud – are the kind of theatre that stays with you.
San Francisco Chronicle
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Nina Stemme says farewell to Isolde after 126 performances
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Nina Stemme tilted back her head after the final notes of her 126th and last Isolde performance, and her eyes filled with tears. She was hugged by tenor Stuart Skelton and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill as the audience in Marian Anderson Hall stood and applauded Sunday evening. A few days earlier, Stemme thought back to April 2000, when Glyndebourne Festival general director Nicholas Snowman and opera director Nikolaus Lehnhoff walked into her dressing room in Antwerp, Belgium, asking her to sing in the English company's first-ever performance of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." 'I really did think they were joking,' she recalled. 'My colleague, Christopher Ventris, said, 'No. No. They're not joking. You have to be careful.'" Stemme went home to Sweden, considered the offer with vocal coach Richard Trimborn and made her Isolde debut on May 19, 2003, at the Glyndebourne Festival with Robert Gambill as Tristan and Jiří Bělohlávek conducting. She chose to sing her final two Isoldes 22 years later with the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who conducted the opera for the first time on June 1 and coaxed a luminous rendition from a premier orchestra at its peak. 'I'm 62 now. I gave it to my 60s to sing these big roles and now I've dropped Elektra and Brünnhilde, and Isolde is the last daughter on stage that I'm singing," Stemme said. "I decided this years ago. This is how it works and every year that I was able to sing Isolde feels like a bonus and a privilege.' Stemme was friends with Birgit Nilsson, one of the greatest Isoldes and Brünnhildes, who died in 2005 at age 87. 'I was on the verge to go down to her in south Sweden to study Isolde but of course me as a young singer with little kids at home, I never felt ready," Stemme said. 'At that time when we got to know each other, I was singing mostly a lyric repertoire.' Skelton sang with Stemme in Wagner's 'Der Fliegende Holländer' at the Vienna State Opera in 2004 and his Tristan was paired with Stemme's Isolde in New York, Munich and Naples, Italy. 'It's as radiant now as it was when I first heard her sing it in Glyndebourne way back in the day,' he said. 'No one knew really who Nina Stemme was to a certain extent. Certainly I don't think anyone was ready for what she brought to Isolde even then.' A conductor learning from the singer Nézet-Séguin first worked with Stemme in a performance of Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, didn't collaborate again until performances of Strauss' 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' at the Met last fall. 'The breadth of her experience with the role is just guiding all of us, me, but also the orchestra, who is playing it for the first time in understanding the flow of the piece, understanding their shades and the colors, and that is invaluable," Nézet-Séguin said of Stemme's Isolde. "It was wonderful for me to benefit from it." Singers were on a platform above and behind the orchestra, with LED lights below setting a mood: red in the first act, dark blue in the second and light blue in the third. Stemme wore a dark gown in the first and third acts and a shimmering silver dress in the second, while Skelton, baritone Brian Mulligan (Kurwenal), bass Tareq Nazmi (King Marke) and tenor Freddie Ballentine (Melot) were largely in black, and Cargill (Brangäne) in a lighter-colored costume. Showing sets and complicated directions weren't necessary, she conveyed Isolde's emptions with her eyes, smiles and nods. During the great second-act love duet, Stemme and Skelton clinked water canisters. 'Twenty-two years ago I could act the young princess that was in love or hated her love for Tristan,' she said. 'I have other colors to my voice now and I'm older so of course this interpretation will change. I feel more at home in the middle range and with age, of course, the top notes are not as gleaming as they used to be, but I can make up for that in other ways hopefully — on a good day.' Stemme's future schedule includes less-taxing roles, such as Klytämnestra in Strauss' 'Elektra' and Waltraute in Wagner's 'Götterdämmerung.' She leaves behind an outstanding recording of her Isolde, made from November 2004 through January 2005 at London's Abbey Road Studios with tenor Plácido Domingo and conductor Antonio Pappano. Lise Davidsen makes her Isolde debut next year Anticipation is building for the next great Isolde. Lise Davidsen is scheduled to make her role debut on Jan. 12 at Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu and then open a new production at New York's Metropolitan Opera on March 9 with Nézet-Séguin. 'She said how happy she is to in a way symbolically pass this role, pass it on to her, in a way through me,' Nézet-Séguin said of Stemme. 'That is almost like a torch that has been carried.' 'At heart," she said, "I'm still Madama Butterfly or Mimì.'
Winnipeg Free Press
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Nina Stemme says farewell to Isolde after 126 performances
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Nina Stemme tilted back her head after the final notes of her 126th and last Isolde performance, and her eyes filled with tears. She was hugged by tenor Stuart Skelton and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill as the audience in Marian Anderson Hall stood and applauded Sunday evening. A few days earlier, Stemme thought back to April 2000, when Glyndebourne Festival general director Nicholas Snowman and opera director Nikolaus Lehnhoff walked into her dressing room in Antwerp, Belgium, asking her to sing in the English company's first-ever performance of Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde.' 'I really did think they were joking,' she recalled. 'My colleague, Christopher Ventris, said, 'No. No. They're not joking. You have to be careful.'' Stemme went home to Sweden, considered the offer with vocal coach Richard Trimborn and made her Isolde debut on May 19, 2003, at the Glyndebourne Festival with Robert Gambill as Tristan and Jiří Bělohlávek conducting. She chose to sing her final two Isoldes 22 years later with the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who conducted the opera for the first time on June 1 and coaxed a luminous rendition from a premier orchestra at its peak. 'I'm 62 now. I gave it to my 60s to sing these big roles and now I've dropped Elektra and Brünnhilde, and Isolde is the last daughter on stage that I'm singing,' Stemme said. 'I decided this years ago. This is how it works and every year that I was able to sing Isolde feels like a bonus and a privilege.' Connection to Birgit Nilsson Stemme was friends with Birgit Nilsson, one of the greatest Isoldes and Brünnhildes, who died in 2005 at age 87. 'I was on the verge to go down to her in south Sweden to study Isolde but of course me as a young singer with little kids at home, I never felt ready,' Stemme said. 'At that time when we got to know each other, I was singing mostly a lyric repertoire.' Skelton sang with Stemme in Wagner's 'Der Fliegende Holländer' at the Vienna State Opera in 2004 and his Tristan was paired with Stemme's Isolde in New York, Munich and Naples, Italy. 'It's as radiant now as it was when I first heard her sing it in Glyndebourne way back in the day,' he said. 'No one knew really who Nina Stemme was to a certain extent. Certainly I don't think anyone was ready for what she brought to Isolde even then.' A conductor learning from the singer Nézet-Séguin first worked with Stemme in a performance of Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in 2007, didn't collaborate again until performances of Strauss' 'Die Frau ohne Schatten' at the Met last fall. 'The breadth of her experience with the role is just guiding all of us, me, but also the orchestra, who is playing it for the first time in understanding the flow of the piece, understanding their shades and the colors, and that is invaluable,' Nézet-Séguin said of Stemme's Isolde. 'It was wonderful for me to benefit from it.' Singers were on a platform above and behind the orchestra, with LED lights below setting a mood: red in the first act, dark blue in the second and light blue in the third. Stemme wore a dark gown in the first and third acts and a shimmering silver dress in the second, while Skelton, baritone Brian Mulligan (Kurwenal), bass Tareq Nazmi (King Marke) and tenor Freddie Ballentine (Melot) were largely in black, and Cargill (Brangäne) in a lighter-colored costume. Showing sets and complicated directions weren't necessary, she conveyed Isolde's emptions with her eyes, smiles and nods. During the great second-act love duet, Stemme and Skelton clinked water canisters. 'Twenty-two years ago I could act the young princess that was in love or hated her love for Tristan,' she said. 'I have other colors to my voice now and I'm older so of course this interpretation will change. I feel more at home in the middle range and with age, of course, the top notes are not as gleaming as they used to be, but I can make up for that in other ways hopefully — on a good day.' Stemme's future schedule includes less-taxing roles, such as Klytämnestra in Strauss' 'Elektra' and Waltraute in Wagner's 'Götterdämmerung.' She leaves behind an outstanding recording of her Isolde, made from November 2004 through January 2005 at London's Abbey Road Studios with tenor Plácido Domingo and conductor Antonio Pappano. Lise Davidsen makes her Isolde debut next year Anticipation is building for the next great Isolde. Lise Davidsen is scheduled to make her role debut on Jan. 12 at Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu and then open a new production at New York's Metropolitan Opera on March 9 with Nézet-Séguin. 'She said how happy she is to in a way symbolically pass this role, pass it on to her, in a way through me,' Nézet-Séguin said of Stemme. 'That is almost like a torch that has been carried.' After all those Isoldes, Stemme feels more a Puccini heroine than a Wagnerian star. 'At heart,' she said, 'I'm still Madama Butterfly or Mimì.'
Spectator
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The glorious elitism of Glyndebourne
There is nowhere in May more beautiful than England with the hawthorn out, the clear light and a thousand shades of green. And there is nowhere more beautiful in England than Glyndebourne, the Sussex opera house between the Downs and the coast. Every visit to the ancestral pile of the Christie family brings joy and we lucky folk who caught the new production of Parsifal were granted double rations. Wagner's final music drama is a first for Glyndebourne and completes a triptych of the Master's late work, following productions of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As Larkin wrote of Sidney Bechet: 'Oh play that thing!' Music-lovers have been coming to this blessed plot of land outside Lewes since 1934 when John Christie invited three refugees from Germany to establish a shrine to Mozart.
The Guardian
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Morally questionable': inside the epic Lars von Trier exhibition in Copenhagen
I am not even inside the building but a creeping sense of foreboding has already set in. As I try to find the entrance to Nikolaj Kunsthal, a gothic-style former church in Copenhagen, I hear the lamenting strings of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde – the soundtrack to Lars von Trier's 2011 end-of-the-world film Melancholia. Inside, I take a seat in a tent-like structure, similar to the one in the film, and watch as a planet hurtles towards Earth, Wagner still blasting away. Nearby lies a long table, covered in white linen and laid out for the celebration of a lifetime – but clearly abandoned midway, and now adorned with dead flowers and burnt-out candelabras. Upstairs, black and white projections – a ticking clock, trains moving through postwar Germany, scenes of sex and drowning – play as the ominous male voice that features in Von Trier's 1991 film Europa does a countdown. 'On every breath you take, you go deeper,' he says. 'On the mental count of 10, you will be in Europa.' With the world still reeling from the arrival of Trump 2.0, and Europe at war amid increasing polarisation, looming AI takeover and the escalating climate emergency, the experience feels strangely current, even though it is intended to take viewers back to the visual world of the notorious Danish film-maker, and immerse them in it. 'It is almost a new paradigm,' says Helene Nyborg Bay, artistic director of this arts venue, as she takes me round Breaking Darkness, the Von Trier exhibition she has curated. 'We had this belief in one united country or the United Nations after the second world war. Now we see there are new thoughts coming through, unfortunately. Lars von Trier shows some of these.' But in other very important ways, Von Trier is deeply irrelevant in 2025. As well as attracting criticism for the treatment of women in his films, he has been involved in multiple scandals. In 2011, while promoting Melancholia, he told the world's press at the Cannes film festival that he was a Nazi and 'understood' Adolf Hitler, after which he was banned. He later apologised, saying: 'I am not antisemitic or racially prejudiced in any way, nor am I a Nazi.' Six years later, amid the rise of the #MeToo movement, musician and actor Björk, who starred in his 2000 musical film Dancer in the Dark, said he sexually harassed her during its making, claims he has denied. But despite this, the exhibition has attracted unprecedented interest, with record numbers at the opening – 2,000 in three hours – including younger generations. Why? 'Lars von Trier is such a strong film-maker with such a strong aesthetic sense that he could be a visual artist,' says Bay who, despite the controversies, believes that Von Trier's work and its themes – love and despair, good and evil, faith and human choice – have a lot to offer contemporary audiences. 'We live in new times,' she says. 'On the other hand – he might have been ahead of his.' Personally, this longtime Von Trier fan says she 'was never offended by his way of looking at women', although she concedes that some younger women have been. Rather than avoiding the subject, she says: 'It's interesting to have this dialogue.' Clips from the films have been combined with designs and installations – even incorporating the architecture of the building – to recreate the themes and moods of five films made between 1991 and 2011: Melancholia, Europa, Dancer in the Dark, Breaking the Waves and Dogville. There are a few props dotted around, including a fur coat worn by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, and the wedding dress worn by Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia, which is displayed entwined in roots that climb the walls. But film memorabilia is by no means the focus of the show. The exhibition doesn't just fill the space, it also spills up into the clock tower which, via steep stairs, visitors are led up to by a white line, like the ones that represent the set in Dogville, all to a soundtrack of Vivaldi. Although probably the most site-specific of the installations, this feels the least immersive of the five, because it does not have the same emotional power as, say, the Melancholia installation – which is entirely captivating. But absent of moving image, it serves as an effective contrast to the others. Bay invited young designers to interpret the 'universe of Lars von Trier' in such a way as to create an experience that does not depend on the viewer having seen his films – including the generations for whom she believes he has been 'abandoned'. Her inspiration for the show came from an exhibition of photos of Von Trier's work at the Perrotin gallery in Paris. She is particularly interested in seeing how the under-30s who visit her exhibition 'adapt into his universe'. She says: 'It's more like a feeling or an atmosphere. And it is also a subconscious way of understanding some topics in life – or trying to.' Von Trier, who has Parkinson's disease and is now in a care centre, has not been directly involved, but he has given the exhibition his blessing. He attended the opening night on FaceTime with the help of his ex-wife. And, during this launch, Bay noticed a group of producers from Zentropa, his production company, sitting in the shelter in front of the oncoming planet. Unusually, the exhibition also features a critique of the film-maker and his work, by Sofie Riise Nors, a Danish feminist satirical graphic novelist, who has accused him of romanticising and fetishising femicide, while criticising his artist-muse relationships. In a comic strip piece about Von Trier, created for the exhibition, Riise Nors appears as a radio host doing a phone-in about the director and explaining her problems with him. She questions the notion that he creates 'strong female characters' and accuses him of using women's lives as a 'kind of currency'. She also mentions Björk's #MeToo accusations. 'His characters,' this host says, 'seem more like a mirror for his own fantasies about women than they are a mirror for female identification.' She describes Melancholia – which has an 'iconic' scene showing Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg being pulverised by a planetary collision – as an example of 'Von Trier's penchant for staging women's deaths in an artistic and aesthetic way'. She also cites Björk's Dancer in the Dark character Selma, who bursts into song at her execution. It is also worth reminding ourselves that Nicole Kidman gets chained to a giant metal wheel in Dogville, while Gainsbourg cuts off her own clitoris in Antichrist. Could this two-pronged approach, celebration and criticism, provide a model for dealing with the work of more cancelled artists whose work is still deemed worthy of appreciation? Bay says that, even though Von Trier and Riise Nors have wildly different opinions, they share a capacity for self-reflection. 'In that way, it's also a starting point for talk and for conversation.' Riise Nors isn't so sure. 'The fact that we are still creating celebratory exhibitions about Lars von Trier is testimony to the fact that he was never really cancelled – at least not in Denmark.' She thinks the country holds on to such a 'morally questionable' figure because of his huge international success and would have liked to have seen more critical contributions in the exhibition. 'You can still be a great artist,' she adds, 'and very problematic at the same time.' Breaking Darkness is at Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, until 27 July
