Doh, the forest is there. As a photo wallpaper. There is also a fox as a stuffed cuddly toy. Even antlers, shotguns, lederhosen and Seppl hats are used. Nevertheless, in the three hours of Kirill Serebrennikow’s Amsterdam production of “Freischütz” after the overture, there is not much left of German national feeling.
Not about the horrors of war, a rigid professional society, maiden wreaths, veiled clouds, chain dogs, venerable hermits with consecrated roses, devilish powers in the wolf’s gorge and not always happy hunting, which can also become a manhunt.
For the opening of the Holland Festival, Serebrennikov, in his first opera production since 2017, takes the right to narrate the German national opera in his own, rather radical way. Quite legitimate for someone who comes from a country without any weaver tradition. Although – even at Amsterdam’s Dutch National Opera, “Der Freischütz” has never been staged before Serebrennikow.
The original plot is unwound as a teaser in the style of a live silent film for the overture, while Patrick Hahn lets the pleasantly sounding Concertgebouw Orchestra play a little cautiously. Everything that follows is staged on stage by a shrill-colored fellow who just calls himself The Red One.
Odin Lund Biron, also Serebrennikov’s leading actor in his Cannes film “Tchaikovsky’s Wife”, speaks, sings, whispers, gurgles him with charismatic, glamorous relaxation. As a kind of emcee and playmaker, he leads through the sober standard rehearsal room of the opera, which Serebrennikow reproduces the real conditions.
The Red One does not allow any words from Friedrich Kind’s libretto beyond the sung texts. We hear English from Serebrennikow and Arseniy Fariatiev. Because the story about the diabolical doping of a despondent hunter in the German forest becomes a globalized story about fear of failure when singing, vocalist vanity, backstage superstition and suppression fight on the scene.
Benjamin Bruns as Max and Odin Lund Biron as The Red One
What: Bart Grietens
It’s quite funny, but it also drags on a bit. Especially since Serebrennikow also allows his Rote Rampensau two of Tom Waits’ “Black Rider” songs, which, like the shrill peasant waltz, are played on stage by a jazz band.
“Six hit, seven monkeys.” That doesn’t mean free bullets here, but sung tones. Because the sentence is not shouted out by evil as Samiel, it comes as a cynical comment straight from the conductor out of the ditch. Patrick Hahn, who at the age of 26 has been the youngest general music director in Europe since this season in Wuppertal, not only had to take over the podium for Riccardo Minasi, he also has to play along as the devil himself.
Just as he skilfully bundles the musical energy of the prestige orchestra without much personal signature, he is also the good and bad conscience of this music theater. Everything comes together for him, even when his acting character succumbs because Weber wanted a conventional opera ending, as The Red One states with disappointment.
That’s why his assistant Kaspar in particular (Günther Groissböck sings it playfully, but with a slightly ailing bass-baritone) repeatedly bugs the young master: the tall man crouches, the thin blonde with the baton arrogantly lets him do as he pleases. At the end, Groissböck also sings the hermit who storms out of the auditorium as an audience pars-pro-toto, who vehemently demands a happy ending.
That saves capacity, which is why the youthful Schützenfest winner Kilian (Michael Wilmering), who forces us to tell his erotic calamities when listening to women’s choirs, later gives Prince Ottokar, who sentences the forester’s boy Max to another year of probation before marriage.
Max, that’s the quiet tenoral Benjamin Bruns, alternately in a tuxedo and a hoodie, who almost throws it down here, doesn’t get his decisive tone out in the Wolfsschlucht and messes everything up. A pathetically singing piece of misery that wants to produce itself and at the same time has terrible stage fright.
Which the two women do not want to prevent either. Like everyone here, even the choir members, they constantly betray pseudo-privatissima to the audience about preparation rituals and professional phobias. And of course they are prima donnas who love their beautiful robes even if they sometimes turn into game nightmares jealous of each other. Of course, Ying Fang’s freshly triumphant Ännchen would like to snatch away the first lady of the current Agathe (Johanni van Oostrum – with an occasionally unsteady, clear soprano).
So this “Freischütz” unwinds almost completely without a Freischütz. And even if it was mostly done appropriately, it is not explained why it had to be this opera of all things in order to help the now rather flat singer decals to a new, non-Weber existence with its still powerful, effective musical numbers.
The Dutch audience enthusiastically applauds the freedom of the singers, who confidently and confidently play completely different roles than usual, and who don’t fade in comparison to the dazzling Red One. Serbrennikov has to take some boos, which are rare here, but they would certainly have been more vehement in Germany.