Well,
it was expensive. It’s ugly. I
wouldn’t say it’s elitist; it has about the same proportion of black tie/smart
casual/tourists in runners as Sydney. It’s awkward. To enter the foyer you must
walk up a ‘grand staircase’ from the outside of the building; there is an
internal staircase for when it’s raining, but it’s tricky to find. The foyer is
huge, and good for socializing and seeing people. The auditorium is cavernous,
the décor reminiscent of the stations on the Chatswood-Epping line. The toilets
are ridiculously scarce; almost twice the audience of the Opera Theatre in
Sydney with one-eighth of the toilets! French audiences must have incredible
powers of concentration. (You think about these things when the production
doesn’t grab your attention.) So: expensive, ugly, awkward, dated, cavernous.
But it’s not the Deutsche Oper Berlin, our ‘awful opera house’ benchmark.
The curtain is up when the audience enters the theatre. Servants and bellboys are removing furniture and other objects. It is the hotel room of Count Waldner (Kurt Rydl). He has lost all the family money through investments and gambling, and has come to Vienna to marry off his elder daughter, Arabella, to the wealthiest option. But he still plays cards, and can’t pay his bills, so piece by piece the stage empties.
As
the action starts, the walls of the set move. They are flats that pivot to allow
furniture and people to enter and move offstage again on a revolve. We see Waldner’s
wife Adelaide (Doris Soffel), as airheaded as her husband but far more venal.
The younger daughter Zdenka (Julia Kleiter) is dressed as a young man, because
the family can’t afford to send two daughters into society. She desperately loves
Matteo (Joseph Kaiser), a melancholic, impetuous soldier who is in love with
Arabella (Renee Fleming). Both Kleiter and Kaiser have strong voices, but they
cannot compete with the orchestra. To make themselves heard they have to sacrifice
subtlety for volume, so while they can be heard there isn’t the sense of
intimacy this music needs.
Renee
Fleming also has to fight the orchestra; her lower register is almost submerged
by it, which ruined the beginning of her Act I duet with Zdenka. But only the
beginning; if there was anything Strauss loved more than the sound of the
soprano voice, it was the sound of two soprano voices, and together Fleming and
Kleiter were beautiful.
Arabella’s
fate (and that of her father’s fortunes) lies in the hands of Mandryka (Michale
Volle), a proud and slightly bogan Wallachian nobleman. Volle can pull off the naïveté
and dignity and is quite believable.
Act
II, the cab drivers’ ball, doesn’t really work. Not just because it takes place
on the same set as Act I, but because there are very few chorus involved. A ball
needs a crowd, or it looks like a club early in the night when all the sad
people are there. Mandryka meets Arabella. In one of the best scenes Strauss
ever wrote, Mandryka proposes and Arabella says yes – the sort of music I could
listen to for hours. Arabella asks for an hour to say goodbye to her many suitors
and to enjoy the last hours of her girlhood. But it gets complicated. Zdenka
gives Matteo the key to a hotel room and tells him that Arabella will be waiting
for him there in fifteen minutes. Of course it won’t be Arabella; but Mandryka doesn’t
know that, and when he overhears the conversation he thinks the worst and
behaves very badly, getting drunk, picking fights and flirting with the
Fiakermilli (Iride Martinez), the Queen of the Ball, who really has no other
purpose in the opera than to sing some great coloratura.
Act
III sees us in the foyer of the hotel. Same set, with a stair case added. All
the characters enter, much confusion, threats of duels, etc, until all is
resolved, Zdenka and Matteo are engaged, Mandryka apologises, and Arabella forgives
him and accepts him. Fleming was perfect in the ‘glass of water’ scene (don’t ask
– one of many problems with the libretto which may have been fixed if the
author hadn’t died before completing it). Again, the finale is some of Strauss’
most beautiful music, slow and dignified with long phrases that are ravishing
with a creamy voice like Fleming’s.
An
awkward production, but gorgeous music, played well under the baton of Philippe
Jordan. (Did you know that the French for baton
is baguette? The comic possibilities…)
It was a great opportunity to see exactly why Renee is one of the superstars of
opera today. Mind you, I wish she would stop singing Handel – she’s rubbish at
it.
(Above,
in blue gown, Renee Fleming, whose Strauss and Massenet sounds like cream and her baroque coloratura like mud.)
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