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Financial Times, December 29, 2013 |
By Shirley Apthorp |
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Verdi: La forza del destino, München, 22. Dezember 2013 |
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La forza del destino, Bavarian State Opera, Nationaltheater, Munich |
Martin Kušej’s production faces the challenges of Verdi’s opera
head-on |
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Drinking, whoring, revenge and religious hypocrisy – all are there in
Verdi’s La forza del destino. Martin Kušej’s new production for the Bavarian
State Opera shows all of them in their naturally blunt unloveliness.
It is a Pharisaical brand of faith that governs the Calatrava family in this
Munich staging; even the security guard prays with the Marchese at
dinnertime. Naturally the long-haired, jeans-clad Alvaro is not welcome in
this world. But the fatal consequences of his unwitting gunshot blow more
than just this domestic piety apart.
Verdi’s plot, with its tangle of
disguises, implausible coincidences, gung-ho soldiers and drive towards
retribution, is a difficult one for any modern stage director. Kušej faces
the challenges head-on, translating the German-Italian war to today’s world
of terror, reprisal and mendacity. In Martin Zehetgruber’s imposing sets,
the narrow confines of a rich family’s dining-room give way to the smoking
ruins of a large bomb explosion. The dazed, dusty citizens who wander
through the ruins will later give way to half-crazed soldiers, bloodied and
high, letting off tension by torturing suspects. Preziosilla, as the “gypsy”
inciting them to further violence, has high boots, skimpy shorts and a whip.
The monastery in which Leonora hides is a mutation of the family home,
and Padre Guardiano is the Marchese, largely unaltered, born again into a
cult of white-clad Baptists. For the final scene, the room is filled with
oversized white crosses, piled on one another like a funeral pyre, a stark
symbol for the cold oppression of a society that uses the idea of propriety
to crush its members.
Predictably enough, Kušej and his team were
heftily booed at the premiere, but the singers were received with rapture.
As Don Alvaro in a long-haired wig, Jonas Kaufmann looks a little too sweet,
like Legolas trying to be Bruce Willis. But his singing is dashing, heroic,
melting and easy. Still, it is Anja Harteros as the doomed Donna Leonora who
wins the loudest cheers, for a towering performance as a figure who evolves
from terror and hope through desperation to tragedy. Dudovic Tézier as the
vengeance-obsessed Carlo di Vargas is also formidable, while Vitalkj
Kowaljow’s spooky, sonorous Marchese/Padre Guardiano is chillingly
effective.
In Asher Fisch’s hands, the score is less brutish than it
often sounds; Fisch finds soft edges to the harsh rhythms, keeps the organic
lines of human breath in all his phrases and finds surprises where so many
of his peers would merely thrash through to a climax.
This is very
fine Verdi indeed, a proud achievement for the house.
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