2023-07-31 13:52:28
Anyone who likes it hot in old Hollywood films knows what the “Friends of Italian Opera” are all about. They are apparently making guest appearances in Salzburg and singing as Sopranos Mozart: I mean: Martin Kušej is having the opening opera premiere “Le nozze di Figaro” played there in the House for Mozart by the mafia clan Almaviva. That’s why they live in Italy instead of Seville – the opening picture shows them, each consuming their favorite drugs, as a dystopian family constellation in front of a Florence tapestry.
Three and a half hours later they are back, but until then it was extremely bland scenically. Not once did the trigger-happy Duca (finely rounded, but almost too nicely cultivated vocals: Andrè Schuen) kill his Capo Figaro, who stole his only real lover, his maid Susanna. So a lot of gun waving for nothing. Funnily enough, the Figaro of the colorless singing Krzysztof Bączyk looks like a permanently eaten Nicholas Ofczarek. And the Catholic Church in the form of priest Basilio (Manuel Günther) is also involved in murder.
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In terms of style and style, Kušej’s third Salzburg Mozart production could directly follow his famous “Don Giovanni” from 2002 (yes, the one with Netrebko). Only now, like so much of the program in the current festival summer, it seems old-fashioned: as a very fat, but hollow, tired macho gesture in the purple/petrol look of the Eighties. The count in his underpants, who commits a murder right at the beginning, later pays out a half-naked woman. The Countess (vocal surprise from Guatemala with a fruity, lush soprano: Adriana Gonzaléz) sings her first aria in a body-negating fur coat in front of the most famous vagina in art history, Courbet’s “Origin of the World”, while next door another naked woman happily dries herself as if she were in one Ingres seraglio.
fence post instead of sensuality
Yes, where has it gone, the blissfully suggestive Mozart sensuality? Here every hint from Kušej is one with the direction fence post. Plus annoying black fades with sound rumbling and another change of room – for example in the garbage and torture cellar. Apparently desecrated girls smear their blood on rain-soaked windows even during the chorus of homage to the count. Particularly embarrassing: yesterday’s disco-rocking wedding choir in the glitter mini on level minus 7 in the concrete multi-storey car park.
In the process, Sabine Devieilhe’s Susanna and Lea Desandres Cherubino in particular slipped away from the male-dominated directing in the complex maze of super-ugly bare rooms (sophisticated stage builder: Raimund Orfeo Vogt). One, a role debutant, initially sits bored in a sterile bar next to Figaro, who counts his empty shot glasses (43!) and steals the toilet paper from Marcellina (harsh: Kristiana Hammarström) in the house. Instead, she sings her great aria in Act 4 with original embellishments and a light, floating high note – far too beautiful for this Susanna, who is only presented here as an equally ungusty bitch. And the almost disembodied trembling Cherubino lets himself be lathered up by two women in the bare bathroom. Musically, one can only say: Bring on the two French women!
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The Devieilhe is carried by her husband Raffaël Pichon at the podium not only in the rose aria as on carnations of notes. In general, the tonal bright spots of the evening succeed. A great early music figure in France for a long time, Pichon has to assert himself against the unruly Vienna Philharmonic. At least this tone duel is extremely exciting. Because whipped cream is always seasoned with chilli, without causing any discomfort. This is a constant, shimmering change of tempo, between which Pedro Berisio strays not only in the imaginative recitatives (which are of course translated very freely and tendentiously) on the obbligato fortepiano. So this time the most exciting Mozart moments come from the Salzburg moat.
Nazi siren in front of neon sunbeams
You can’t say that about the second opera premiere in 2023, Verdi’s “Macbeth” again after twelve years. This is Giuseppe Verdi’s grandiose first Shakespearean opera ever, as a bloody burlesque dancing over corpses, sometimes in a sarcastic, sometimes in an abysmal pale sound robe as a parable of modern politics. But musically, Philippe Jordan is looking for balance in an Olafschholz-like manner with compressed energetic lips, sometimes noisy, sometimes grumpy, but rarely going to extremes; like the sharp-toothed Riccardo Muti managed to do here in 2011. The brutality, the loss of the world, the pain, but also the glare, the sly giggling of this opera above the abyss, it is always only mediocre.
Because the chorus is constantly clattering behind, especially the witches placed as a coffee party by golden girlies rather immobile on the side. Because the director Krzysztof Warlikowski, who is also well-known here and hardly stands for aesthetic surprises anymore, together with his wife Małgorzata Szczęśniak, who designed the set, once again conceptually pupated behind films (by Bertolucci and Pasolini) and the usual boxy-empty, this time royal blue and acoustically rather unfavorable unit room. He already staged this Verdi in Brussels in 2010, quite a bit was adopted, such as the childless Macbethens’ obsession with them.
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Right at the beginning – at first both of them are sitting alone on a huge bench as a couple who have lived apart – Lady M., dressed in 1930s chic, has to settle down on the gynecological chair, while her husband then suffocates poor Duncan in bed with a pillow. Children with old masked faces sit around at the banquet, where the lady then gives the singing Nazi siren in front of a neon sunbeam wreath, and her husband holds a balloon for the dead banco. Children dressed up as fine ladies populate the second, terribly silly witch scene. When the chorus of Scottish refugees comes in from outside, the mute extras wife of Jonathan Tetelman, who is imperturbably strong and sinewy in his Macduffo aria, kills himself and her 23 children magdagoebbels-like, who are then lined up lifeless on the ramp.
But is the unfulfilled wish for a child, the infertility of the lady who is not fit for a dynasty, really the trigger for the senseless murder? The staging doesn’t make that plausible, lets both of them frantically change their clothes while singing, wants to keep them human, but actually only makes them uninteresting. The singing of the sonorous but little nuanced Vladislav Sluminsky in the title role, who ends up as a doddering old man in a wheelchair, is also good and not very threatening. Tareq Nazmi also delivers his Banco aria with a flowing bass, but there isn’t much desperation.
And this is unfortunately also the problem of Asmik Grigorian, who is now the only female vocal star in Salzburg and who is permanently employed. She copes with the part, wins her over with far too bright vocal colors but little eloquence and nuances. The cutting dark brilliance of Netrebko is missing, the evil, negative, voluminous mezzo impression of Liudmyla Monastyrska. In her case, this centrally maestose Verdi role seems scurrying and underexposed, unfortunately also blurred – even in the mad scene at the end of which she is doomed to live on. Grigorian wants to lift Turandot in Vienna in December, and Isolde in the Salzburg summer of 2025. It makes you afraid…
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An enigmatically mumbo-jumbo “Macbeth” as a second infusion from Brussels, which seems self-sufficient in its solipsistic symbolism, but rarely reaches over the ramp in terms of sound and content. One imagines the festival somehow differently, at least sometimes innovative and courageous. Salzburg has so far relied too much on the tried and tested. But the audience, oddly enough, is currently nodding somewhat enthusiastically. Even when a baby of broccoli is served under the silver cloche at Macbeth’s during the break.
“Figaro” will be broadcast on Servus TV on August 10th, “Macbeth” is already available on Arte/concert
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