The German Opera Project: “Wagner’s Dream” (VIFF 2012)

It’s nice to know that in parts of North America, high culture can still be a big deal. In the fall of 2010, New York was in a furor when the legendary Metropolitan Opera debuted Robert LePage’s staging of Wagner’s Der Ring das Nibelungen. Opening night drew out high society, in addition to the notorious “Ring nuts”, and luminaries such as André Leon Talley attended. Outside Lincoln Center, hundreds sat on plastic chairs in the rain to watch the opening performance for free in as it was projected on giant screens, which was also simulcast in Times Square. Despite being so close to the Jersey “shore”, high culture can still command an audience.

The production of the most noteworthy Ring Cycle in recent years is the subject of Wagner’s Dream. Directed by noted Quebecois stage and film director Robert LePage, the massive undertaking involved a 90,000 pound (45 ton) stage, hydraulics, zip lines, a frequent fear that the stage would injure the performers, and assembled talent such as famed conductor James Levine. Director Susan Froemke had free rein to follow every aspect of the production, much like last year’s little-seen Wagner documentary The Singing City, a document on the staging of Parsifal in Stuttgart at around the same time.

LePage is known for unconventional productions. He staged Peter Gabriel’s masterful Secret World Tour from 1994, made the award-winning film Le Confessionnel in 1995, directed numerous operas and oversaw the Cirque du Soleil shows Ka and Totem. The Met had wanted to instill new life into a shrinking subscriber base as opera was becoming more expensive, and their prior productions had not been well-received. A production of the Ring Cycle in LA in the spring of 2010 cost an astounding $31 million and failed to turn a profit, not to mention having been criticized for its avant-garde staging, and with lawsuits stemming from workplace injuries. Taking a chance on LePage meant they wanted something fresh and exciting, and potentially ground-breaking. And they got it in spades.

The Rhine maidens, suspended in performance

LePage’s stage for the Met’s Ring Cycle consisted of one giant piece. It is a set of overwhelmingly large planks spinning 360 degrees on a long rod that ran the length of the stage. The planks moved independently of each other and, with the right lighting, were able to stand in for the River Rhine, the forests, the great palace of Valhalla, underworld caves and all manner of hinterlands in between. The Rhine maidens were lifted on harnesses and sang the challenging libretto while suspended in mid-air, adjusting so that the safety wear did not prevent their diaphragms from being able to fully project. We see the initial rehearsals where the sopranos worked with technicians to ensure that they were positioned so that they could sing, and learning how not to get caught in the set or plunge below should a harness snap. (And you thought you had occupational hazards.)

Voigt, as Brunnhilde 

We follow LePage and other production heads as they negotiate the set and reassure the performers that they will be safe. We meet charming Deborah Voigt, the dazzling soprano who was famously dismissed from a 2004 production of Ariadne auf Naxos at the Royal Opera House for being too fat for the title role, as she prepares mightily, only to suffer an embarrassing fall on the set on opening night of Die Walküre. Brünnhilde is considered the ultimate test for sopranos and for many is the role of a lifetime. We also learn that famed tenor Gary Lehrman bowed out of the production four days before opening night of Siegfried and was replaced by Jay Hunter Morris on short notice. And then there is the sudden exit of conductor James Levine due to ongoing health issues. On top of this, that darn stage appears to have a mind of its own and continues to be a potential safety hazard.

Nevertheless, Froemke’s assured hand as a director ensures that we see the top players in the industry work their way through the difficult material, breathing new life and vision into the work. This is a film not just for Ring nuts or classical music lovers, it is an accessible story of collaboration on a project everyone believes in. You will not find any diva tantrums, All About Eve-style backstage back-stabbing or petty squabbles here. We also see the perspective of the New York Wagner Society, who traverse the world seeing different versions of the Ring Cycle and warn the opera directors that the production should not overwhelm or get in the way of the score. An usher tells us that purists want to see the same play performed in the same way, time after time, without deviation or. That Froemke’s camera is able to get behind the scenes and capture the perspective of the vanguard who is the gatekeeper of the canonical work shows that she understands the cultural value and interest in getting the Ring Cycle done just right. (Those purists would no doubt have hated last year’s San Francisco production, which combined industrial art deco production design with Jay Gatsby’s wardrobe.) They all know they’re embarking on a daunting and slightly mad venture, but everyone respects the journey and take it seriously.

Wagner’s original composition in the 1870s could not have been staged the way he wanted it, and he expressed unhappiness with the original production at Bayreuth, declaring “next year we’ll do it differently”. In an age when technology has finally caught up with the infinity of imagination, LePage was able to realize Wagner’s dream.

Wagner’s Dream played at the Vancouver International Film Festival and enjoyed a successful art house run in Los Angeles and New York. The entire Metropolitan 2010-2012 Ring Cycle played on PBS and screened in cinemas in HD. For more information on Metropolitan Opera productions in HD, head over to their site.

VIFF 2011: “The Singing City”

Those of you who have been following my blog know that I have a major preoccupation with German opera. In particular, the long and difficult works of Wagner have been known to keep me rapt for the many, many hours that they last. So it was with much anticipation that I saw The Singing City (Die Singende Stadt), a documentary on the Stuttgart Opera’s 2010 production of Wagner’s opus Parsifal.

This mighty opera is not for the faint of heart or the impatient. A long meditation on King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail, the opera features a cast of hundreds at any given performance and requires considerable endurance from the performers, the orchestra and the audience. In 2010, Vadim Jendreyko was given unprecedented access to the Stuttgart Opera’s unusual post-Apocalyptic mounting of Parsifal, complete with gas masks, scuba gear, nudity and shrunken baby-doll heads worn as headdresses. Jendreyko followed the company for the entire length of the pre-production, covering every aspect of the play. We see how props and sets are built from scratch, and cleaned up after dress rehearsal.

Shot using HD cameras and featuring a magnificent sound recording, the film allows us unprecedented access to the production. We observe the Spanish-speaking costume designer, who doesn’t speak German, as she attempts to balance the director’s design instructions with the logistical impossibilities of singing opera in her designs. We delight in the American tenor attempting to master his pronunciation of the word “unrevealed” in German, to the unending patience and amusement from his dialect coach. The director clashes with the cast, the make-up artists meticulously weave wigs on prop corpses that the audience will barely see, the lighting designer works complicated spreadsheets to ensure that he computes and calibrates the lights just the way the director wants, and the orchestra has to contend with the prop blood spilling out from the urine bags tied to corpses onstage into the orchestra pit. The Opera has an international cast, and at any given time you can hear English, German and Spanish being spoken in the course of rehearsals.

What The Singing City conveys most vividly is the meticulous manpower and efforts of literally a thousand people attempting to bring the director’s avant-garde interpretation of one of the most controversial, complicated operas in history to life for a discerning, cultured audience. Jendreyko forgoes the standard narration and title cards that accompany most behind-the-scenes documentaries and instead plants his cameras at rehearsals, workshops and meetings to give us the sense that we are there. The effect is that rather than having a narrative guide to the proceedings, we view the work as it organically takes shape, lending the documentary a greater immediacy than most other non-fiction features. What’s most exciting is that the film shows us the dignity and joy in work, and in creating art. Every member of the production, from the child chorus to the make-up artist to the sound engineer, is given an opportunity to be seen and heard in the film. Although The Singing City might be a misleading title, it makes sense in the context that everything in the Stuttgart Opera’s building operates within the context of its own rules and governance, much like a city itself. My only quibble is that we do not get to see a snippet of the finished work, but one can easily find these clips on YouTube (the clip is slightly NSFW, but the nudity is used tastefully and not for exploitation or titillation purposes).

The Singing City is playing at the Vancouver International Film Festival, with one final performance on Thursday, October 13. For ticket information, click here, and you can view the trailer here. If you’re interested in more information on the Stuttgart Opera, click here. The film is presented in German, Spanish and in English, with English subtitles, and runs a lightning-fast 92 minutes.

The German Opera Project: the Bregenz Festival

Much can be said of stripped-down theatrical productions that do not diminish the power of the work. I once saw a production of The Laramie Project presented in the small theatre at the back of a Cuban restaurant, staged by Fighting Chance Productions. It in no way minimized the work’s message and reduced me and my companions to blubbering, quivering, weeping masses. It’s times like that when I love intimate theatre.

And then there’s the Bregenz Festival. 

What is the Bregenz Festival?

Think of opera. Now think of the phrase “go big or go home”, apply it to the staging, then multiply that to an absurd scale. You have the Bregenz Festival. Or just look at the picture to the left. That, folks, is a big-ass stage.

A competitor to the popular Bayreuth Festival in Germany, this uniquely Austrian opera company takes place every summer on the shores of Lake Constanza, located at the northern foot of the Rhine River. The first Bregenz Festival took place in 1946, a year after the war. Although the town itself did not even contain a theatre or outdoor performance space, the troupe still put together a production on two adjoining bridges and were backed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, who have been supporting and playing at the festival ever since. The Festival contains a number of concurrent performances including outdoor ballet, giving you the option of seeing Swan Lake not only in an outdoor theatre, but on an actual lake.

Over the years, permanent structures were put into place to house the orchestra pit as well as concurrent productions on different stages. Should the weather suddenly turn bad, the performances can move from the Festival Hall to the adjoining Seebuehne hall and house approximately 1,700 attendees, meaning that the performance would not be cancelled that evening and with only part of the audience members being furnished refunds in the event of rain. Now that is some outdoor planning. By 1985, some operas would run at least two seasons and stage structures were solidified so that the formerly outdoor festival would be able to run almost year-round.

What distinguishes the Bregenz Festival’s productions from your usual opera is the sheer audacity of the scale. The dazzling Lake productions are the ones that take place on mammoth outdoor stages that dwarfs the performers, reducing them to the size of ants. The concept of the staging is daring on a literally epic scale, with the floating stage by the lake towering several stories into the sky. Take for instance the picture to the left of the skeleton reading an oversized book the size of a small arena for the 1999/2000 production of A Masked Ball. Also observe the beheaded Statue of Liberty floating above the stage in a modernized version of Aida. You may recognize the giant “Tosca eye” from the James Bond film Quantum of Solace: that’s the opera Bond attends where there’s a chase sequence through the opera hall edifice. 

Random Acts of Culture, #1

Tovey and the VSO (source: The Georgia Straight)

It’s often said, at least in North America, that the higher arts are inaccessible to the public due to high ticket prices and the esoteric nature of the material. While the Blogger easily sees the former being a barrier to access, he believes the latter is indefensible. Although many clearly don’t have any affinity for culture, and that’s all well and good, decrying it as being obscure and pouring money into the latest big-budget seizure-inducing Hollywood enterprise or pop star’s juggernaut concert tour while claiming to enjoy “the arts” reeks of sheer laziness.

The Blogger was thrilled yesterday to take part in the City of Vancouver’s 125th anniversary celebrations this past weekend. There were numerous outdoor events such as concerts and public performances meant to collect our citizens together in celebration of our glittering city of glass, still smarting from the ugly Stanley Cup riots of last month. Over the weekend, thousands of people gathered to peacefully partake in public events with minimal or no damage to civic or private property. Citizens were orderly, picked up after themselves at picnics, were generally polite on their cell phones, and there was little to no shoving, pushing, or unruly cattle herd-like behaviour. Who says we’re an unruly mob?

New York City free public concert in Central Park:
most of this, please. Lots more.

In particular, I was thrilled to see tens of thousands of people gathered in Stanley Park’s Brockton Oval to take in a free classical concert performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Just when I thought higher culture had all but committed seppuku. Led by Grammy Award-winning conductor and composer Bramwell Tovey, the VSO performed to a rousing but orderly crowd under immaculate blue skies and a blazing yet beautiful sun. This is not unlike the free public concerts that are popular all over Europe, particularly in Vienna, and in the summertime in New York City. Why can’t we have more of these, please? In Vienna, they have free public concerts every weekend in the late spring and summer months. They support their arts enthusiastically. Even if you can’t afford a ticket to see certain plays, the opera house, culture exhibition halls and public parks are equipped with giant video screens in piazzas so that like-minded citizens and tourists can have picnics while watching the performances outdoors, live. And they don’t destroy it afterward, unlike the spoiled brats who defaced the downtown core during the hockey riots. That is how you make culture accessible.

Yesterday’s playlist was filled with instantly recognizable classics:

·     Rossini - William Tell: Overture

·     Strauss - Blue Danube Waltz

·     Baker - Through the Lion's Gate: Mountains

·     Wagner - Ride of the Valkyries

·     Haydn - Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major: I. Moderato

·     Borodin - Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances

·     Mascagni - Cavalleria Rusticana: Intermezzo

·     Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture

The VSO also snuck in a piece by Canadian composer Michael Conway Baker, whose ode to our very own Lion’s Gate Bridge was far more ethereal and sublime than traffic on that bridge ever was or will be. The crowds peacefully took in the immaculate sounds and were transported to a world away, where people could literally waltz to the Blue Danube along the water. In fact, given that there was a large public space to do so, several couples got up and actually waltzed through Strauss’s The Blue Danube, and we were mere feet away from the ocean. Bliss. Given my obsession with German opera, I was thrilled to hear Wagner live.

The German Opera Project: Wagner's Ring in San Francisco

Achtung, Ring nuts!

It would be remiss of the Blogger not to advise all of you who have been following my self-directed German Opera Project, which you can read here and here, that the San Francisco Opera’s production of Wagner’s giant economy sized magnum opus Der Ring das Nibelungen has commenced performances very recently.

Scheduled to run from May 29 to July 3, director Francesca Zambello’s staging of the lengthy opera will be presented in three cycles that will allow opera fans to see the Ring in the intended chronological order. These cycles will play from June 14 to 19, June 21 to 26, and June 28 to July 3. The production, said to cost $4.6 million, will play a full length of 17 hours per cycle. The early reviews have been nothing short of phenomenal, and without the nasty backlash that accompanied the troubled LA Opera production that lost millions last year.

Off to play tennis with F. Scott Fitgerald.

Following in the grand tradition of modernist readings of the play, this new production is visually styled to capture the looks of the twentieth century. The look can best be described as a cross of the Titanic and The Great Gatsby. In other words, nary a Viking helmet or a spear will be seen, although it will be less visually experimental than the LA Opera’s Cirque du Soleil-go-on-an-acid-trip milieu. The gods in Valhalla are dressed as if they are out to go for tennis with F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.

Rough day at the office.

The look is heavily industrial and has a heavy Art Deco slant, but as the chronology unfolds, the looks evolve as well. The giants are dressed like construction workers dangling on a scaffold over Manhattan. Brunnhilde (played by Nina Stemme, the famed Swedish soprano who has drawn raves for her performances) appears in full business gear when not dressed in her Aviator-inspired armour, and would have undoubtedly rocked a board meeting or two. The result would have made Alexander McQueen proud and would look only mildly out of place on Project Runway (although one has yet to see Heidi Klum embrace her Teutonic roots on the show by appearing in full Viking gear). Much has been made of Chereau’s centennial Bayreuth production as a critique on modern capitalism 30 years ago. The implications are considerably more explicit here, as the art direction strongly recalls the Eurythmics’ seminal “Sweet Dreams” video, with a touch of Ayn Rand’s living room for good measure. 

This is not to say that the production is catered only to dedicated Wagnerites and opera fans. The SF Opera has launched a number of initiatives in order to make the Ring Cycle more accessible to the public, including a public symposium, online interviews and previews, and even an online learning course. 

PURSEuasion: A Vancouver Opera Society Fundraiser

Any day that begins with a Jane Austen reference is a great day.

The Blogger was pleasantly surprised to find out recently about a forthcoming fund-raiser for the Vancouver Opera Society, named not-so-incidentally after a Jane Austen novel. Fresh off its triumphant production of Verdi’s La Traviata, the VOS has planned a number of exciting new productions for the 2011/2012 season, and opens with West Side Story in October. In the meantime, they’re staging their third annual purse party fund-raising party on June 2, PURSEuasion.

What is a purse party?

Some readers may recall the 2003 episode of Sex & the City where the ladies attend a party staged by a friend to support her new career as a purse designer, and to show off her designs. The VOS have been staging a similar event for the past three years, but in a twist, their event is not a party but a fun lunchtime auction.

Some designers whose works have gone on auction included one-of-a-kind and rare designs by Chanel, Marc Jacobs, Salvatore Ferragamo, Boboli and Ports 1961. Past auctions have also featured the works of designers such as Tina Wilson, Haida Princess Totes, and of course John Fluevog.

This is an event sure to bring out Vancouver fashionistas (particularly if you haven’t been able to get to the Anthropologie opening). The inaugural auction in 2008 raised an impressive $47,000.00 and this year they intend to raise more than ever. The event has been held in the past at Yaletown’s Goldfish Pacific Kitchen in 2009, and last year at the recently-shuttered Bistro Moderne. This year’s function is downtown at The Vancouver Club, to ensure that busy professionals don’t have to travel far from the office to get to the event. Since champagne is included at the buffet luncheon served at the event, it will help that fashionistas can simply walk to PURSEuasion from their offices in the downtown core.

Verdi, Verdi Good

Although this blog is dedicated to the finer things in life, and opera is one of them, this writer finds it deliciously, comically ironic that arguably the most famous aria in La Traviata is a drinking song.

That is precisely the spirit of one of Verdi’s finest, most-beloved works, which is currently being staged by the Vancouver Opera Society. The so-called “drinking song” is a defiant celebration of one woman’s indefatigable spirit and refusal but to enjoy life in the moment, for “life is a folly” according to her worldview, without any cares for tomorrow. This is because she is one of those consumptive types in nineteenth century Paris who somehow remains full of voice and prone to fainting spells in overcrowded ballrooms. The play’s title literally means “the fallen woman”, and Violetta succeeds beautifully on this. In the opera’s first act, Violetta throws a lavish party to celebrate her recovery from a long illness, where she ends up ditching her current rich lover for a younger plaything. Fast-forward to several months later, when Violetta and the young man, Alfredo, have moved in together, akin to social suicide in those days. Like many a party girl no matter what the era, her reputation precedes her and threatens her social standing and future prospects. And since I mentioned that Violetta is consumptive, I wouldn’t spoil anything by saying that the play does not end well.

The German Opera Project: Maiden Voyage

I made it through part one. How was my first experience?

My first question, if you recall from my first post, was: where were the Viking helmets?

When I first settled in to watch Das Rheingold (literally "Gold of the Rhine River") and couldn't spot any, I knew I was in for some trouble, or at least make peace with the fact that this is a postmodern interpretation that may be beyond me and require a brush-up of my contemporary literary theory lectures from college. Keep in mind that this is the controversial, much-discussed and now-legendary centennial production at the Bayreuth Opera House, which ran from 1976 to 1980.

German opera is like German food: it's heavy, it's rich in texture, it's altogether satisfying, but it is a large undertaking and chasing it with a light aperitif is required to wash it all down. A glass of red wine in a twilit room, as my Wagnerite friend K said, is perfect, and she was right.

The German Opera Project: Go Big Or Go Home

Hyper Smash

As a child, I saw the classic Looney Tunes animated short “What’s Opera, Doc?” It was my first introduction to high culture, albeit via popular culture, as “Ride of the Valkyries” played throughout the short. In it, Bugs Bunny runs from Elmer Fudd by dressing as a fetching Nordic soprano with a horned Viking helmet and breastplate. (As I was informed at the time that the helmet was German or Norse, I assumed for years that everyone in Germany or Scandinavia wore them not only as a national costume, but also in daily life. That is another story.) The most telling line in the short was when Bugs “died” at the end and is carried off to Valhalla by Elmer. In the very last frame, while Elmer weeps, Bugs comes to life, turns to the camera and says, “Well what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?”

It was not until I got to high school that I learned the proper reference to the opera. It was Wagner’s mammoth Ring Cycle, a piece that plays anywhere from 15 to 20 hours over four evenings and is considered a towering icon of Teutonic culture. Since I could not stomach the idea of even 1.5 to 2.0 minutes of solid opera, I could not fathom how people would willingly subject themselves and sacrifice their evenings to an event that was 100 times the size. It also did not help that for a long time, having lived overseas, my concept of opera was limited to Chinese opera, which consists of hysterical high-pitched caterwauling (to the untrained ear) punctuated randomly by a gong, and only then after interminable stretches. (Curiously, the cross-dressing by Bugs in the short and the convention of men assuming female roles in opera did not make me blink.)