Here’s a quartet of reviews of from the current edition of Opera News. (www.operanews.com)

How about taking the most meta-opera out there and making it even more self-referential? That’s the approach director Robert Carsen took when his vision of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos unfurled in February at Deutsche Oper Berlin (seen Feb. 19). This fascinating, frustrating, genre-bending work never seems quite certain about itself: the DOB transplant of this production, originally seen last year at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, boasted a cast that far outshone the staging.

Lithuanian soprano Violeta Urmana fit nicely into the shoes of the strutting diva of the title role. This is a role she has sung previously at the Met. At DOB, her performance was distinguished by crystalline clarity and effortless volume. Urmana’s bright-hued timbre gave way to darker shades as the evening progressed, making for a richer, more involved performance, a highlight of which was a full-throttle account of the gently ebbing “Es gibt ein Reich.”

Ruxandra Donose made an even stronger impression as the impetuous Composer, singing with undeniable ardor, an attractively thick texture and a velvety low range, as in her compelling account of “Sein wir wieder gut.” The Zerbinetta of Jane Archibald was alternately reverent and feisty, as in her quasi-love duet with the Composer. And even if the massive orchestral force occasionally drowned her out, she tore through her vocally punishing role with obvious relish and assurance, especially in the extensive coloratura writing. She nearly stole the show with her “Grossmächtige Prinzessin,” which was here elaborately choreographed with various paramours popping out of pianos that glided comically across the stage.

As in most Strauss, the men of Ariadne play a decidedly supporting role. That said, Roberto Saccà was indeed godlike as Bacchus, singing with Italianate grace (and a pinch of schmaltz) that made the opera’s close more fitting and dramatically convincing. Met veteran Lenus Carlson was in fine form as the levelheaded Music Teacher. And baritone Simon Pauly did solid work as Harlequin, particularly in the tuneful “Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen.”

Carsen, one of Europe’s busiest directors, is probably best known to U.S. audiences for his striking Met production of Eugene Onegin. In this Ariadne, he tried so constantly to break through the fourth wall that most of his attempts at abstraction ended up seeming bland.

The house lights stayed on for the better part of the Prologue, and various characters walked through the audience to make their entrances. The production, which featured sets by Peter Pabst and costumes by Falk Bauer, switched awkwardly between elegance and absurdity, an obvious mirror of the tension in the score between opera seria and commedia dell’arte. The self-referential elements — the large mirrors that reflected the audience, the exposed lighting and the completely bare stage that the Composer walked onto at the end of the opera, to be greeted by the applause of the cast — quickly grew tiresome. One bright spot was Marco Santi’s smart and edgy choreography, which livened things immeasurably, especially in the otherwise static Act II.

The evening’s maestro, Jacques Lacombe, had difficulty giving shape to the sinewy, often manic Prologue, the backstage drama that occupies the work’s first half. The directorial shenanigans did much to reinforce an impression of general havoc onstage and in the pit. Lacombe took much firmer command of his musicians with the opera within an opera, starting with a delicate account of the tortuous G-minor overture and not letting up until the glittering apotheosis of the closing bars.

Richard Strauss’s Salome is an opera as emotionally unhinged as it is daringly modern. So one was interested to see what Achim Freyer, the controversial visionary behind Los Angeles Opera’s new production of the Ring cycle, would do to Strauss’s debauched heroine when Deutsche Oper Berlin revived his 2003 production in early February. The production images available on the company’s website promised that the evening would have its share of strangeness, and they probably had something to do with the poor attendance (seen Feb. 1).

I too had my reservations about what a Freyer Salome would look like, especially after seeing his recent Eugene Onegin at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden — a visually dazzling production that quickly ran out of ideas. With Salome, I was afraid that Freyer’s extreme distancing techniques would preclude genuine involvement in the relentless drama of the music. But it was precisely this quality about Salome that enabled Freyer’s spin to work. The high drama and breathless pace of a score tailored to suit a preexisting play were well served by this oddball, kooky production. With a staging concerned more with interpretation than with mere illustration, this Salome did not waste time over details of decor —the color of the heroine’s veils, the verisimilitude of the severed head — and thus spoke for itself.

Freyer’s Salome left the music exposed and pure, placing more demands than usual on the soprano who dares to take on this killer role. For this revival, the ravishing Manuela Uhl took up the challenge. Uhl — who obviously had no intention of being erased by the abstract, cartoonish sensibilities of this revival — created a Salome who was raw, energetic and passionate. She has an exciting, powerful voice and enough stamina to make it to the end of this punishing role. Her singing was fresh and convincing, if not always the picture of accuracy. Uhl ducked some high notes and decided to forgo some of the coloratura ornamentation, but her biggest problems were a weak low range — she often resorted to speaking — and exposed passaggio. She also pounced on her lines with an eagerness that, though not always in synch with the music, made for thrilling drama. Despite the shortcomings of her performance, the bulk of Strauss’s searing music sounded wondrous and convincing in her mouth, and aside from rough patches, her voice rang out with incredible volume and clarity from start to finish.

Uhl was supported by highly capable colleagues. Foremost among them was American baritone Alan Titus, the intense, booming Jochanaan. Chris Merritt, a lyric tenor with a background in Rossini operas, made an unexpectedly great Herodes, bringing out his character’s buffoonery and perversion with occasional Italianate embellishments. As his cutthroat wife Herodias, Hanna Schwarz sang like an avenging fury. Clemens Bieber — a DOB ensemble member — was a sympathetic and convincing Narraboth, declaiming his soaring, urgent lines with both finesse and an appealing ruggedness. The remaining roles were perfectly cast, from the Page of Julia Benzinger on down to the two Nazarenes.

The staging was as baffling as it was entrancing. The set appeared to have materialized out of a David Lynch dream sequence and resembled some kind of industrial carnival funhouse, with its numbered yellow factory doors and circus-like stage area. Much of the acting consisted of heightened, repeated gestures that took on a ritualistic aspect. This was complemented by the extremely clownish Expressionist makeup. The costumes were likewise irreverent and colorful, consisting of hand-drawn pinstriped suits and incorporating a childish variety of props, such as balloons for breasts, funnels and sand buckets for hats. One of the best touches was to number each of the Jews “1″ through “5.” All this added a magical, nursery-like feel to the narrative. The one misstep was an underwhelming dance of the seven veils, which was so confused and pedestrian that one wondered whether Freyer meant it as a comment on the evidently weaker quality of that music in comparison to the rest of the score.

At the helm of the massive orchestral force was Ulf Schirmer, whose account of the score mounted steadily in intensity, from the opening clarinet scale to the bone-crushing chords that describe Salome’s execution. In between, he was sensitive to the profusion of motifs and the score’s shimmering, exotic detail.

With an extensive Strauss celebration underway at Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatsoper unter den Linden got in on the action in February with a sumptuously sung revival of Nicolas Brieger’s production of Der Rosenkavalier, conducted by Asher Fisch (seen Feb. 21).

The most compelling reason to see this revival was the role debut of Magdalena Kožená as Octavian. This is a character that fits the Czech mezzo like a glove: her performance was an all-around revelation. She delivered her opening lines, “Wie du warst, wie du bist!” in soft, luminous notes of heartbreaking beauty. She matched the impassioned horns effortlessly, which is no small feat. Her richly textured voice communicated a dramatic range from ardor to impetuousness to despair and devotion. Every phrase was carefully thought out, with an exciting deployment of rubato providing added force to the fluency of her singing, which was free of any breaks or gasps for air. This revival also capitalized on the androgynous aspect of Kožená’s beauty, which only added to the completeness of the incarnation.

Every bit as assured was the Marschallin of Angela Denoke, whose tragically noble performance reminded us that Princess Marie Thérèse is the most complex character in the opera. Denoke was here both more aristocratic and more nuanced than in her 2005 Rosenkavalier appearances at the Met, which marked her debut with that company. A pitch-perfect companion to Kozená, Denoke wavered between the earthy and the ethereal, placing equal value on the mellifluous and dramatic aspects of her performance. Her full yet silky voice contained both laughter and repressed sorrow.

Bass Peter Rose, another Met veteran, was vocally persuasive and perversely charming as Baron Ochs. He switched effortlessly among the duets, waltzes and arioso that this difficult character is required to pull off. All in all, he was so rudely charming that he threatened to tip the opera in his favor.

Sylvia Schwartz suffered from a problem common to most Sophies — being upstaged by the titanic forces of her costars. Her light, pretty voice was far from slight, but it was still obscured in her Act II duet with Octavian and in the transcendent Act III trio.

The supporting roles were judiciously cast, with Paul O’Neill making a memorable impression as the Italian Tenor. Curiously, O’Neill came out in a wheelchair to sing “Di rigori armato” with requisite lyricism and fervor that won him peals of spontaneous applause.

The audience was less kind to conductor Asher Fisch, who took his bow amid persistent boos. Apparently, Berlin felt cheated by a performance that consciously sacrificed much of the work’s Viennese elegance for a courser, darker interpretation. From the weighty, muscular tempo of the opening bars and the lusty strings and winds somewhat obscured by the horns, it was clear that Fisch was intent on taking things in a different direction.

Brieger’s elegant production matched the refinement and taste on display in the singing. The direct, striking design brought to mind both Ruth Berghaus and Gilbert Defloe. The versatile horseshoe-shaped set morphed ingeniously from the decaying elegance of the Marschallin’s bedroom to the bourgeois trappings of the Faninal residence to the seedy inn of the closing act. The only false note the production struck was in the jumbled chaos of the Baron’s aborted seduction.

A. J. GOLDMANN

I am forever being told by veteran opera-lovers, “They don’t sing like they used to.” Perhaps this explains why certain works in the repertoire have lost their places of prominence or have been eliminated altogether: we simply no longer have the voices required to do them justice. Gounod’s Faust is hardly an obscure work, but the rate at which it is staged today is paltry when compared to the popularity it enjoyed before World War II. So it was thrilling (and transporting) to see a Faust at the Berlin Staatsoper unter den Linden so expertly sung that one understood the seductive spell it cast over audiences in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (seen Feb. 22).

For its new production, the Staatsoper enlisted the talents of superb singers whose bravura performances cut through the dimmer inspirations of director Karsten Wiegand’s uneven staging.

Before the curtain went up, an announcement was made that two cast members, Charles Castronovo, the Faust, and Roman Trekel, the Valentin, would be singing despite colds. If anything, this inauspicious news only made the ensuing three and a half hours more impressive and thrilling. Castronovo, a New York-born lyric tenor, was somewhat throaty in the opening scene, with hesitant low notes. He was a bit off in the reprise of “A moi les plaisirs” with the devil, but he warmed up quickly. Before long, he was singing with heroic and darkly lacquered tones. He gasped certain phrases out suspensefully and projected others with an otherworldly quiver.

The sublime Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya, best known to New York audiences for her performance as Natasha in the 2007 Met revival of Prokofiev’s War and Peace, was cast in the punishing role of Marguerite: she sang with fierce determination and unrelenting brazenness. It was a sensational performance, but one also worried about the toll that singing like that might take on the young soprano’s voice. She delivered an expressive and bouncy “Il était un roi de Thule” in a clear, restrained manner, then made a fluid transition to a wildly coquettish “Je ris de me voir si belle,” with delicious coloratura technique and an abundance of expressive muscle. It was but one climax in a performance with too many to highlights to enumerate.

As Méphistophélès, Réne Pape was — forgive the sacrilegious locution — absolutely godlike. He snickered and jeered though this wonderfully wicked role and let his character’s evil seep through most effectively in the quieter moments. His voice sounded effortlessly big, smoothly seductive and appropriately serpentine.

Despite his cold, Trekel struck the right tone as Valentin, his complex, robust voice communicating his character’s brotherly concern — as in his deeply felt “Avant de quitter ces lieux” — but also encompassing the rage and venom of Act IV. Silvia de la Muela sang Siébel with appropriate ardor and conviction.

Wiegand, a young German stage director who made his debut at the Staatsoper in 2006 with Maria Stuarda, provided an infuriatingly garish and amateurish Act I, setting the action at a raucous casino/house party. The noisy thrashing around brought to mind the rave that Calixto Bieito choreographed for his atrocious 2006 production of Wozzeck in Barcelona.

The casino set was moved away for Act II, which unfolded on a bare stage surrounded by silver-leafed walls — minimal yet all-around exquisite setting for this act that made the work uncommonly fluid by eliminating the need for clunky transitions between various set pieces. During Marguerite’s ascension, the walls lifted majestically to reveal the chorus seated at a heavenly banquet attired in tuxedos and cocktail dresses.

The stomach-churning touches of Wiegand’s production — Marguerite dashed her newborn’s brains against the wall and, in the end, slashed her own throat with a brooch — provided a jolting dose of realism to the otherwise abstract staging.

The version used for this production made the traditional cuts of the ballet and the Walpurgisnacht scene but included sporadic dialogue. Alain Altinoglu’s conducting was sweeping and sensitive. He made some daring decisions, slowing down to an almost dangerous level during the more introspective arias and favoring an all-around expansive approach that added an extra twenty minutes to the show’s running time. But then again, it’s hard to have too much of a good thing.

Published in the May / June issue of Moment Magazine.
(http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/2009-06/200906-Books-German_Response_Kindly_Ones.html)

BERLIN, GERMANY — In Germany, the memory of the Holocaust is carefully guarded. From Berlin’s new memorial commemorating the gay victims of National Socialism to the wax sculpture of Hitler on display in the local Madame Tussaud’s, debate surrounds everything where remembrance and representation of the Shoah are concerned. So it should come as no surprise that the recent publication in Germany of Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones sparked an unprecedented blizzard of controversy.

The 1,000-page fictional memoir of a high-ranking SS officer, Maximilien Aue, The Kindly Ones was already a classic in France when it arrived in Germany last February. It had won both the 2006 Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman—France’s most prestigious literary awards—and had been compared to masterpieces like War and Peace, Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and even the Greek Oresteia. German critics, however, were less moved, competing to write the most scathing response.

In a review of the original French edition in 2006, Michael Mönninger, Paris correspondent for the influential German weekly Die Zeit, called Littell “a pornographer of violence.” This year, Iris Radisch, a literary editor at the same paper, excoriated the author for universalizing the crime of the Holocaust while individualizing the Nazi at the book’s center. “Why should we…read the work of an idiot who writes terribly, is saddled with sexual perversions, and who is disposed to elitist racial ideology and an ancient belief in destiny?” she wrote. “The nocturnal plants of French academic discourse haven’t done anything to contribute to the solution of the painful question: what made our grandfathers into murderers?”

The writing is impressive, confesses Micha Brumlik, a professor of education at the University of Frankfurt and a former director of the Fritz Bauer Institute for Holocaust Studies. But it “gives an absolutely wrong account about the Shoah.” The book portrays the Nazis as “sick” and “perverted” when “the contrary is the case. As we know, they were very normal people—neither sadistic nor masochistic.”

Brumlik attributes The Kindly Ones’ success in France to a fixation with evil that has persisted in French literature from the days of Baudelaire, the 19th century poet, to the present. Others argue that its extraordinary reception betrays the lack of French public awareness of the Holocaust. “The Holocaust as a panopticon of folly?” the social psychologist Harald Welzer wrote in Die Zeit. “Debate in this country progressed beyond this point long ago,” he scoffed. “Littell is way behind in his perpetrator research,” the historian Christoph Jahr remarked in Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

One of the novel’s few German defenders is Klaus Theweleit, a cultural analyst and the author of a two-volume tome entitled Male Fantasies. In a recent issue of New German Critique, a scholarly journal published by Duke University, he defends precisely those aspects of the novel that many found repellent. The pulp and kitsch, he claims, are not only intentional but necessary. Littell, he reasons, presents Aue not as a “barbarian but forever a human being. Man himself is what is monstrous,” he writes. “Littell’s achievement is not to disburden the Germans but to potentially burden us all.”

Writing in Welt am Sonntag, Bettina Bode offered a more introspective interpretation. “Littell was looking for a niche in the market and found it and then he presented the unsuspecting French with a horror novel about World War II with which he is now making millions. Littell won’t find the Germans so gullible,” she writes. “We Germans prefer to explain the Nazi period ourselves.”