Photo from Giornale della Musica, Georg Anderhub(before reading this you might want to give the Verismo video a break, just press on pause ;-) As there is more music to be had in this post)
There have been so many extraordinary things that I have been able to experience musically over this past season that it gets almost too overwhelming to capture in words. I almost wish I was able to stretch time and create a gap around each of these to fully enjoy them. And basically when it is this good I just want to linger and hold on to the feeling for a while longer…
This Fidelio has certainly been one of those moments. I will forever remember it as the first time I saw and heard Abbado conduct live! It is something I wished for a long time and until I actually got on the train from the airport to Luzern I didn’t even allow myself to think about it. Sitting there and looking at the mountains surrounded by dark grey clouds it suddenly hit me! It was happening and I was only a few hours away :-)
Thank God I had heard the opera before, because I don’t think I would have been able to enjoy it quite as much otherwise. Because it certainly wasn’t like any Fidelio I had ever heard before! It in this case it made all the difference to be familiar with the general flow of things to let go of the same and just enjoy every single detail that came at you.
I’m glad there was nobody there to catch my face after the first few bars of music!!
I only ever had a somewhat similar experience, many years ago, when for the first time I heard a different orchestra in a different house than the one I grew up with. It was the first time I sat in the ROH and heard the orchestra play live. It’s a feeling you can’t explain, as if you had been deaf and suddenly were blessed with hearing! (*)
Except this in Luzern was on a much bigger and deeper level! I can’t put the word perfect to it, because it is cold and it would mean comparing it with things imperfect.. it was just sheer joy, happiness .. the one word that comes to my mind is the French “ivresse”! The sound that came from this orchestra was of such heavenly beauty that it cannot be described! It was so over whelming that I just would have wanted to time to stand still and just be able to let the sound in my ear sink in somehow…
And of course it has everything to do with Beethoven’s music!
This is not the perfect opera by any means. For one, there are those dialogues, which seem to induce directors to constantly play around with and try to improve upon. Ok, they are not that brilliant and sometimes may feel out of date. But I feel it’s not the words and phrases itself which are the problem, but the start and stop effect they create, especially during the first act. It probably creates a problem for the singers, to constantly have to switch between speech and singing, and it constantly interrupts the flow of music for the audience. You hardly get going, excited, you’re into it and then it stops. However, without them the plot is incomplete, so we do need them to fully follow the story. But the issue of the tension ebbing down and racking up with the stop and start of music comes also from the fact that singers generally don’t speak on stage or are no trained to do some with equal intensity. Usually as soon as they speak the volume drops significantly and since the music is gone you have to also fine-tune your own ear to catch what feels almost like whispers after the musical outbreaks.
In the Fidelio I saw two years ago in Paris, they overcame this by amplifying and prerecording some of the dialogues (which also were brand new and excessively long!). But it helped keep the tension up.
This was a semi-staged last minute staging in which the dialogue where lightly rewritten. But as these were just two performances it was not expected that singers would know them by heart, not would this be necessary for the libretto and score itself. This was always scheduled as a concert version performance of Fidelio and nobody was really expecting anything else. So the dialogues were read from script and were not really that audible (no worries this will not be a problem for the final recording as there were of course recoding microphones). Neither would they be delivered in any particularly emotional or effective way, but again this was not a staged performance. And to be perfectly honest I didn’t catch much of them, nor did I make a particular effort to since I was basically lingering in the music through them, like a breath of oxygen taking me through to the next bits of music.
I don’t mean to criticise in any way, or diminish their value of the completeness of the piece, but I kind of knew what they were saying and it’s not those bits that I went all the way there to listen :-) (I do hope though that when next I see Fidelio whoever directs the staging will find a way to keep the audience interested throughout them, as that is really necessary I think or could add even further to the experience).
But, as everyone there we came to heard the orchestra play, the chorus and singers sing and see Abbado conduct! I don’t thing generally the bits of staging added anything important, but I did appreciate some touches.
The lighting I found particularly sensitive and enjoyable. There were candles strewn around the stage among the musicians (which creates a major fire hazard, but looks sooo beautiful!). And there was a big while balloon anchored on the ground which lit up with light of warm shades of white and pale yellow, helping create a wonderfully intimate atmosphere. This allowed for the hall itself to be hidden away in darkness and there were moments when the orchestra played under the mysterious shades created by just the candles and the tiny lights on their scores… beautiful! I wish somebody had captured that on a photo! Candles and an image of the globe and a blinking eye were alternatively projected onto the balloon.
I also liked the choreography around the prisoners’ chorus a lot! They moved around the stage slowly when singing and hunched or lay down around , allowing for a real connection to the actual actions in the libretto to emerge naturally. Very very well done! Which is also a good place to say how unbelievable good they sang!!!! Rarely have a heard such beautiful voices and such heartfelt singing! (**) I remember saying with friends in the interval just that, that for the prisoners chorus alone it would have been worth making the trip!
This Fidelio has certainly been one of those moments. I will forever remember it as the first time I saw and heard Abbado conduct live! It is something I wished for a long time and until I actually got on the train from the airport to Luzern I didn’t even allow myself to think about it. Sitting there and looking at the mountains surrounded by dark grey clouds it suddenly hit me! It was happening and I was only a few hours away :-)
Thank God I had heard the opera before, because I don’t think I would have been able to enjoy it quite as much otherwise. Because it certainly wasn’t like any Fidelio I had ever heard before! It in this case it made all the difference to be familiar with the general flow of things to let go of the same and just enjoy every single detail that came at you.
I’m glad there was nobody there to catch my face after the first few bars of music!!
I only ever had a somewhat similar experience, many years ago, when for the first time I heard a different orchestra in a different house than the one I grew up with. It was the first time I sat in the ROH and heard the orchestra play live. It’s a feeling you can’t explain, as if you had been deaf and suddenly were blessed with hearing! (*)
Except this in Luzern was on a much bigger and deeper level! I can’t put the word perfect to it, because it is cold and it would mean comparing it with things imperfect.. it was just sheer joy, happiness .. the one word that comes to my mind is the French “ivresse”! The sound that came from this orchestra was of such heavenly beauty that it cannot be described! It was so over whelming that I just would have wanted to time to stand still and just be able to let the sound in my ear sink in somehow…
And of course it has everything to do with Beethoven’s music!
This is not the perfect opera by any means. For one, there are those dialogues, which seem to induce directors to constantly play around with and try to improve upon. Ok, they are not that brilliant and sometimes may feel out of date. But I feel it’s not the words and phrases itself which are the problem, but the start and stop effect they create, especially during the first act. It probably creates a problem for the singers, to constantly have to switch between speech and singing, and it constantly interrupts the flow of music for the audience. You hardly get going, excited, you’re into it and then it stops. However, without them the plot is incomplete, so we do need them to fully follow the story. But the issue of the tension ebbing down and racking up with the stop and start of music comes also from the fact that singers generally don’t speak on stage or are no trained to do some with equal intensity. Usually as soon as they speak the volume drops significantly and since the music is gone you have to also fine-tune your own ear to catch what feels almost like whispers after the musical outbreaks.
In the Fidelio I saw two years ago in Paris, they overcame this by amplifying and prerecording some of the dialogues (which also were brand new and excessively long!). But it helped keep the tension up.
This was a semi-staged last minute staging in which the dialogue where lightly rewritten. But as these were just two performances it was not expected that singers would know them by heart, not would this be necessary for the libretto and score itself. This was always scheduled as a concert version performance of Fidelio and nobody was really expecting anything else. So the dialogues were read from script and were not really that audible (no worries this will not be a problem for the final recording as there were of course recoding microphones). Neither would they be delivered in any particularly emotional or effective way, but again this was not a staged performance. And to be perfectly honest I didn’t catch much of them, nor did I make a particular effort to since I was basically lingering in the music through them, like a breath of oxygen taking me through to the next bits of music.
I don’t mean to criticise in any way, or diminish their value of the completeness of the piece, but I kind of knew what they were saying and it’s not those bits that I went all the way there to listen :-) (I do hope though that when next I see Fidelio whoever directs the staging will find a way to keep the audience interested throughout them, as that is really necessary I think or could add even further to the experience).
But, as everyone there we came to heard the orchestra play, the chorus and singers sing and see Abbado conduct! I don’t thing generally the bits of staging added anything important, but I did appreciate some touches.
The lighting I found particularly sensitive and enjoyable. There were candles strewn around the stage among the musicians (which creates a major fire hazard, but looks sooo beautiful!). And there was a big while balloon anchored on the ground which lit up with light of warm shades of white and pale yellow, helping create a wonderfully intimate atmosphere. This allowed for the hall itself to be hidden away in darkness and there were moments when the orchestra played under the mysterious shades created by just the candles and the tiny lights on their scores… beautiful! I wish somebody had captured that on a photo! Candles and an image of the globe and a blinking eye were alternatively projected onto the balloon.
I also liked the choreography around the prisoners’ chorus a lot! They moved around the stage slowly when singing and hunched or lay down around , allowing for a real connection to the actual actions in the libretto to emerge naturally. Very very well done! Which is also a good place to say how unbelievable good they sang!!!! Rarely have a heard such beautiful voices and such heartfelt singing! (**) I remember saying with friends in the interval just that, that for the prisoners chorus alone it would have been worth making the trip!
Photo Georg AnderhubAnd we still have the singers!!! An absolutely brilliant cast with a pairing of Leonore and Florestan I sooo longed to hear. No secret I looooove Nina Stemme since hearing her Isolde at the ROH and there is nobody today who sings Florestan like Jonas! Who knows what Beethoven thought when he wrote the score for the singers??? It feels almost as if he wrote it just like for any other instrument, you go from A to B to C and it will create these harmonies and it will sound like this. If only it were that easy ;-))))) But then again sometimes it seems to be, or at least that is how it largely sounded on Sunday in Luzern. As natural as any instrument, as elegant and fine tuned.
The placing of the singers behind the orchestra was not ideal for the hall, as it es a wonderful concert hall, but not appropriate for any staging. This put some of the singers sometimes at a bit of a disadvantage, like Christof Strehl who’s sweet lyrical voice packs somewhat less of a punch. And Falk Struckmann was also better audible on the more energetic outbursts , where he was truly menacing ( not quite as impressive though as I found Alan Held in Paris!) It was nice to hear Christof Fischesser again (after the Lohengrin in Munich) and to hear that he not only has beautiful diction and is such an accomplished singer, but also has a totally dark and warm speaking voice! And he also seems to know what to do with it not only while singing! Rachle Harnisch was a lively Marzeline and she made a very well received effort to act as well as sing her role :-)
Peter Mattei honestly had way to little time on stage!!!! His is a beautiful instrument and I have always admired his agility and warmth. A luxury cast for Don Ferrando indeed! (Can we please invite him to sing at the ROH?? Please? :-)
And then there were Leonore.. Florestan :-) If everyone was excellent, these two were something more! I suspect for Nina Stemma and Jonas Kaufmann it wouldn’t matter if they sang from outside or while doing a hand stand or something ;-) I’m exaggerating of course, but the way those two rode the sound from the orchestra, immersed themselves into it and emerged at the same time from amongst it is incredible! I don’t remember a Fidelio where the harmonies in the orchestra were so perfectly mirrored in the voices. This must truly by what Beethoven has wished for! The way they effortlessly spiralled into agile and ringing heights within the chorus towards the very end was something exquisite! (***)
Theirs is the O, namenlose Freude which I truly believed! They made every word sound true and indeed full of joy!
Before they started the duet Leonore and Florestan looked at each other and smiled and then held hands and when they sang I really heard for the first time what “namenlose Freude!”, “ubergrosse Lust” and “himmlisches Entzucken!” can mean! There was a radio broadcast of the Fidelio on the 12 and I simply can’t stop listening to their O, namenlose Freude!
I’ve always loved this duet, but this time it gave you a feeling of total total unlimted happiness which was only picked up and continued by the final chorus.
And what a finale that was! It fitted with the whole in as it didn’t crash down on your ear to squash you as is the case in most interpretations. Abbado’s Fidelio as from beginning to end intimate and delicate, intricate and detailed, with every single note lovingly spun by each instrument into a dizzying concoction. I loved the fact that it didn’t weigh down on you to crush you with its might and force. More than once it reminded me of that hearty joy once feels with Mozart, very human, offered to be absorbed and shared. Abbado made the music approcheable and so was the final chorus, a celebreation of love and hope and freedom, heartfelt and very very intense, but not forceful.
I remember feeling crushed almost in Paris at the end, as if it was almost a declaration of war on something. Here it felt like the celebration of enlightment.
And now I know why everyone loves Abbado so, while these musicians travel to Luzern every year for the chance to make music, together! He’s a quite charmer, but a very powerful one :-)
And all this was topped with waves of applause, a rain of flowers that came gently down on orchestra, chorus, singers and conductor and by one of the most beautiful images I have seen at the end of a concert, ever! On the final applause, as this was their last performance together I guess for this year members of the chorus and orchestra literally fell in each others arms and we witnessed the most wonderful symphony of hugs! What can be more fitting to an ending of Fidelio? :-)
Beethoven: Fidelio (Finale) - Abbado, Kaufmann, Stemme 12 August 2010
Thanks TheHumperdinck for the video!
So this was:
Beethovens „Fidelio op. 72“, in einer halbszenischen Aufführung
Textbuch von Joseph Sonnleithner, Stephan von Breuning und Georg
Friedrich Treitschke nach dem Libretto Léonore ou L’Amour conjugal
von Jean-Nicolas Bouilly
Gesprochene Dialoge neu eingerichtet von Tatjana Gürbaca
Mahler Chamber Orchestra
LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA
Arnold Schoenberg Chor Wien (Einstudierung Erwin Ortner)
Claudio Abbado, Dirigent
Peter Mattei: Don Fernando
Falk Struckmann: Don Pizarro
Jonas Kaufmann: Florestan
Nina Stemme: Leonore
Christof Fischesser: Rocco
Rachel Harnisch: Marzelline
Christoph Strehl: Jaquino
Juan Sebastian Acosta: Erster Gefangener
Levente Pall: Zweiter Gefangener
15. August 2010
Konzertsaal des KKL, Luzern
Don’t be to bothered about the awful pics from my ageing and exceedingly crappy camera and enjoy the music!!
(*) There is actually one more of these… in Edinburgh a few years ago I heard Tatjana Vassiljeva play the Prokofiev cello sonata on a Stradivarius cello.. I still get blurry eyed just when I think of it … I have been looking for a recording of hers of it ever since, but with no luck :-(
(**) Which reminds me that I still have to share mu thoughts about the Meistersinger in Cardiff and the absolutely amazing chorus of the WNO!
(***) I am still amazed at how Jonas' full and rich voice travels so easily above such orchestration and its capacity to sort of expand and fill space like this has increased tremendously these years, how he does it I have no idea but it certainly is an almost physical phenomenon. I sometimes almost wish I had some kind of x ray vision to see the particles start vibrating away from him , touching the next and setting the wave in motion :-) And it’s a darn pity I can’t bottle those high notes at the end of Fidelio and roll them into a tight foil and smack them over the head of some of the absolutely daft critics I have read! I’d love them to feel those bright, shiny notes ringing in their ears!
