39 Óperas de Vida ;-)D)

Best of 2009

Dvd

Ópera









Recital / Concerto Lírico







Jazz







nota: esta lista comprrende as obras que, pessoalmente, se destacaram em 2009. Parte delas data de anos anteriores.

From the House of the Dead - Met Opera House

(From the House of the Dead - Met Opera House, Dezembro de 2009)

Enfim, a mítica encenação de Chéreau de From the House of the Dead (Janacek) viu a luz do dia no Met. Uma estreia a três níveis: da própria ópera (e respectiva mise-en-scène, claro está) e de Patrice Chéreau, o excelso encenador francês, tão amplamente referenciado neste blog.

O leitor atento terá dado por referências (aqui e aqui) a esta extraordinária encenação, também neste espaço, por ocasião da sua comercialização.

«Mr. Chéreau’s staging is set entirely among three towering concrete walls, the work of Richard Perduzzi (the set designer of the Bondy “Tosca”). It seemed so linked to the arresting musical performance Mr. Salonen drew from the brilliant Met orchestra that it is hard to discuss them separately.

So to start with the opera itself — Janacek’s last, which had its premiere in 1930, two years after his death at 74 — it was a wild idea to make such a version of Dostoyevsky’s unwieldy novel in the first place. The book is a first-person narrative with observations so detailed that the writing reads like reportage. The narrator is a nobleman, Alexander Petrovich Gorianchikov. In the opera he has a small but crucial role. Janacek takes on most of the narrator’s job, using his orchestra to propel and comment on the story.

In composing voice parts for his characters, Janacek obsessively mimicked the rhythms and contours of the Czech language. Much of the vocal writing, sung here in the original Czech, sounds like pitched speech. To provide impetus and continuity, the orchestra churns away constantly beneath the vocal lines. Fragments of melody and rhythmic licks are fashioned into a collagelike orchestral fabric. Ostinato figures are repeated endlessly.

On one level, the repetition conveys the drudgery and routine of prison life. Yet in another way — especially as conducted by Mr. Salonen with such visceral character and pungent textures — the repetitive riffs evoke the thoughts that get stuck in the minds of the prisoners: resentments, violent fantasies, feelings of betrayal, isolation and yearning.

The inhabitants of this house of the dead are anything but comatose. Forced to live together, they form a complex community rife with rivalries and dependencies, fueled by a black market of traded goods. In the opera, as in the novel, the prisoners spend much time telling the stories of their lives. “From the House of the Dead” is the ultimate ensemble opera.

Still, three characters stand out, and each tells a long, involved story of how he wound up in prison. The other inmates pay attention or do not. But the implication is that these stories are recycled again and again.

In Act II, for example, the prisoner Skuratov, a soldier, tells of having fallen for a German washerwoman, who was forced by her family to marry a rich relative. So he murdered his rival. The orchestral music buttressing his story has hints of Slavic folk songs and melodic turns that spin in cyclic patterns. You can almost hear the orchestra, on behalf of the other prisoners, saying, “There he goes again.”

Yet Skuratov’s fellow prisoners mostly listen, except for one drunk, who shouts, incongruously, “Lies, all lies.” The surprising uplift in this bitter opera comes through in pitiable scenes like this.

There is no real plot and not much action. Still, Mr. Chéreau’s production captures the volatile mix of restless tension and crushing boredom within this oppressed environment. That the prisoners wear no uniforms, just ragtag garments, lends humdrum individuality to each member.

Mr. Chéreau has added 20 actors to the roster of vocal soloists and choristers to fill the stage with people and activity. The prisoners even put on entertainments, including a campy Don Juan play in drag. In one scene, prisoners arrive fresh from baths, looking scrubbed and bedraggled, some in underwear, some naked and embarrassed. That even in this prison they cling to a shred of privacy was a poignant touch in the staging.»

Edição disocgráfica e transformação: a Vitalidade

Este artigo do The Guardian constitui uma notável lição, extensível a muitos outros domínios da natureza humana. Contra o pessimismo e catastrofismo – tão mundano e (hélas) tão luso –, Andrew Clements realiza uma cuidada análise da evolução do mercado editorial discográfico, desde finais do século passado, quando Norman Lebrecht – qual profeta da desgraça – previu o final da edição discográfica.

Evidentemente, a edição discográfica prossegue, tendo apenas operado algumas transformações e adaptações à realidade actual, senão vejamos:

«It is 12 years since the music writer Norman Lebrecht first donned his Cassandra costume and predicted the demise of the classical recording industry in the early years of the new century. He has reaffirmed his dire prophesies several times since, but so far they have proved considerably less accurate than those of his Trojan counterpart. Classical CDs are still very much with us and, to judge from the quantity, variety and provenance of the new releases that continue to tumble through my letter box each month, they are more diverse and often more enterprising than ever before.

Yet it's undeniable that the profile of the industry has changed significantly over the last 10 years.

(…)

More and more historical tapes have been finding their way on to disc, too, and while the quality of some of those documentary recordings has sometimes been questionable the best have been truly revelatory. The release on Testament, for instance, of the Ring cycle conducted by Joseph Keilberth and recorded in stereo by Decca engineers at the Bayreuth festival in 1955, was unquestionably one of the most important of the last 10 years, a Wagner document of outstanding importance and arguably the greatest of all Rings to be made available on disc. In Britain both the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and Glyndebourne have established their own labels, raiding their own archives and those of other enthusiasts to perpetuate performances that genuinely deserve to be called historic, such as the ROH's Don Carlo from 1958, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini with Jon Vickers in the title role, and the Glyndebourne Pelléas et Mélisande from 1963, with Michel Roux and Denise Duval.

But the establishment of in-house labels hasn't been confined to British opera houses. Right across the world, from the San Francisco Symphony (whose Mahler cycle with their music director Michael Tilson Thomas has been widely admired, particularly for the exceptional quality of the recorded sound) to the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, which launched its own label earlier this year with an outstanding version of Shostakovich's opera The Nose, conducted by Valery Gergiev, orchestras and opera companies have set up their own brands, over which they are able to exert complete artistic control.

Though they have since been followed by others here such as the Hallé, London Philharmonic and Philharmonia, the orchestra that led the way here was the London Symphony, which cannily played to its built-in strengths from the very start, by releasing a whole Berlioz cycle with its principal conductor for much of the decade, Colin Davis, that complemented and in some respects surpassed the series of Berlioz studio recordings that Davis had made for Philips a quarter of a century earlier, including an outstanding set of The Trojans. Compared with making studio recordings, the financial savings in creating a commercial disc from a run of live performances (and maybe one patching session in the same concert hall) are hugely significant, and the inevitable imperfections are a small price to pay alongside the gain in immediacy that a live performance brings.

(…)

All this increased specialism – in the last few years especially, new recordings of the core orchestral repertory have become rarer and rarer – would seem perfectly suited to being made available as downloads. So far, though, serious classical disc buyers have proved remarkably resistant to the digital revolution. While 25 years ago collectors embraced compact discs very quickly, just as soon as their convenience and superiority compared with vinyl LPs had been demonstrated, they have been far more reluctant to abandon their silver discs in favour of MP3 files. Classical releases can be downloaded from sites like ITunes, but it's still only the more popular repertoire and glitzy performers that are made available in that way, though a few labels, notably Chandos in this country, routinely make all their releases available as MP3 files.»

FELIZ ANO NOVO!

Enquanto degusto as minhas últimas pérolas, que serão objecto de crítica, e adio o best of 2009, FAÇO VOTOS DE UM EXCELENTE ANO NOVO DE 2010!

Férias - Em degustação...

«A música é sempre neutra»

(Alex Ross)

Alex Ross dixit.

A não perder a entrevista do autor de The Rest is Noise, o crítico do The New Yorker e editor do blog homónimo.

«Hubo un momento en que la armonía se rompió. La música ya no la necesitaba para definir el mundo. Sonaba mejor el caos…

Aquel viaje comenzó lleno de incertidumbres, como una caída al vacío sin red y sin agua en la que flotar. El público no lo entendía. Todavía hoy muchos se resisten a hacerlo. El placer, la emoción, se transformaban en angustia. Pero ¿qué podía hacer sino el arte? ¿Seguir proporcionando bálsamos o definir una época, como el siglo XX, que atravesó el Holocausto y coqueteó desde Hiroshima hasta hoy con la autodestrucción?

La música como lenguaje del mundo es lo que nos cuenta Alex Ross en un libro fundamental, apasionante, titulado El ruido eterno (Seix Barral). Se trata de uno de esos extraños ensayos en principio dirigidos a minorías que conquistan a una gran mayoría. Quien se mete en él descubre rápidamente por qué. El crítico musical de la revista The New Yorker ha recorrido la etapa más convulsa de la historia reciente a través de los compositores que nos han producido escalofríos en la edad contemporánea. Hombres de su tiempo con historias épicas, dramáticas y desesperadas. Artistas en conflicto permanente por sus relaciones con el poder, el amor y la muerte, que aplicaban a la vida un ritmo continuo y fascinante.

Todo empezó con Wagner. En los primeros acordes de Tristán e Isolda, concretamente. Aquel silbido invitó a muchos a transitar por el camino del riesgo y la incertidumbre. Le siguió Richard Strauss asomándose al precipicio con su Salomé, su Electra. Pero fueron después los inquietos y salvajes integradores de la Escuela de Viena, con Arnold Schoenberg a la cabeza, quienes lo llevaron a sus últimas consecuencias.

A partir de ahí, todo resultó válido. Se cerraron varias puertas, pero se abrieron muchas más: los caminos más excitantes de la vanguardia que después se han ampliado con el jazz, el rock o la música electrónica. Lo hicieron en mitad de la incomprensión y el apoyo. Entre la tensión y el peligro de muerte. Sorteando las embestidas de Hitler y Stalin, adaptándose a la guerra fría y a la poderosa irrupción de la música pop. Formando matrimonios fascinantes y alianzas que llevaban a pactar a The Beatles con Stockhausen en canciones como A day in the life del mítico Sgt. Pepper’s, a los músicos de jazz con el dodecafonismo, a la ópera con el musical, a la ultravanguardia con el cine…

Todo era posible en mitad de una gran orgía ecléctica. La que ha servido a Ross para armar un relato global, un estudio, una novela y un gran reportaje al tiempo que nos cuenta los triunfos, incomprensiones y padecimientos de Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Debussy, Strauss, Stravinski, Messiaen, Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten… Los arquitectos del sonido que nos hace comprender ahora tantas cosas.»

Anna di Lammermoor

(Anna Netrbko como Lucia - Lucia di Lammermoor, Met 2009)

Sugiro que o fiel leitor avalie a prestação de Anna Netrebko, como protagonista de Lucia di Lammermoor, na récita a que aqui aludi (e aqui) - Met, 2009. Mais: sugiro que substitua o preconceito (para não falar de narcisismo destrutivo) por uma atenta avaliação ;-)

Pessoalmente, creio haver espaço para muitas Lucia's: Callas (a dramática), Sutherland (a pirotécnica), Gruberova (a mais-que-pirotécnica), Dessay (a belcantista) e Netrebko (a fémea, actriz, intérprete, cantora and so on). À côté, há ainda Scotto e Anderson (a excelsa).

Termino com uma sugestão: que se desidealizem as pretéritas! Respeite-mo-las e aprecie-mo-las, sem esquecer que existem outras, actuais, diferentes, mas igualmente magnéticas e brilhantes! Se assim não for, tornar-nos-emos escravos do mundo "pretérito, perfeito e idílico", que apenas existe nas depressivas mentes (doentes).

Agora, é tempo de degustar a cena da Loucura e o seu final (Spargi d'amore pianto).
Bom proveito!

Lucia... Lucia... finalmente siamo insieme

Dramática, elegante, louca e linda - a mais bela boca que a lírica jamais viu. Que mais se quer?

O autêntico Hoffmann (?)

(Joseph Calleja e Kate Lindsey em Les Contes de Hoffmann - Met Opera House, 2009)

Retorno à nova produção de Os Contos de Hoffmann, estreada no Met esta temporada. Desta feita, a polémica (!) centra-se na autenticidade da versão em cena. Polémica relevante e interessante, esta!

«In a news release for the Met’s new production, Mr. Levine stated that in the absence of an “authentic, fully realized original version,” companies must make their own choices. The score he has assembled for the Met, though loosely based on the old Choudens version, uses “a great deal of the information that has come to light over the years,” Mr. Levine wrote.

“Balderdash,” Mr. Kaye responded in an open e-mail message sent to numerous music critics. He wrote that he greatly regretted that Met audiences were not hearing some of the most recently discovered original music. Further, he reported that a new edition of the opera that he had completed with Jean-Christophe Keck, with the latest sources and discoveries, was soon to be published.

I am no expert on the conflicting versions of “Hoffmann,” which present the work variously with different arias, dialogue, orchestrations and even story twists.

Still, it is hard to dispute Mr. Levine’s observation that there will never be a definitive score for the work. Offenbach lovers who object to the Met’s choices regarding editions have to understand the world in which the composer, a savvy man of the theater, operated.

Were he to rise from the dead and learn that the Met was eager to put on “Hoffmann,” Offenbach would probably never say, “Ah, at last, a chance to hear my opera as I intended it!”

He would almost surely pose a list of questions to Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, and Mr. Levine: “Great. So, who is the tenor in the title role? How big will the orchestra be? Should we spruce up the orchestration? Do you need other changes? Are you going to perform it in English? I would assume so. It makes sense for a New York audience.”

It is hard to imagine that Offenbach would have conceived of a definitive version of one of his works, even an opera that meant as much to him as “Hoffmann.” This was not the way things occurred in the professional opera world of his time.»