Photo by Wilfried Hösl
The next live and free streaming in the Bavarian State Opera's series of transmissions will bring Olivier Py’s new production of Verdi's Il Trovatore, with Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Harteros.
This big, colorful, and controversial setting of the work has opened this summer's Munich Opera Festival. (The two stars were also featured in the televised 2009 festival-opening Lohengrin.)
The performance begins at 7 p.m. local time, 1 p.m. EDT, and 10 a.m on the West Coast, the press office still calling it Pacific Standard Time, even after repeated notices that we are on Daylight Time. It's 10 anyway enough time to get there after waking up from the revels of the Fourth.
Besides Kaufmann's role debut as Manrico and Harteros' Leonora, the Munich cast includes Elena Manistina (Azucena) and Alexey Markov (Count di Luna). Paolo Carignani conducts.
The Bayerische Staatsoper's unprecedented series of eight opera productions and two ballet performances streamed live and free will conclude on July 26, with Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, directed by — heaven help us! — Calixto Bieito.
Die Presse's review of Py's Trovatore mentioned the steady presence of Azucena's mother as a ghost (that makes sense), "black-clad extras as messengers of the dead, the chorus in Ku Klux Klan robes" (huh?), and lots of bling one minute, "unadorned set bathed in pale light" the next.
The Associated Press' Mike Silverman reports:
Parodied by everyone from Gilbert and Sullivan to the Marx Brothers, Verdi's Trovatore is often dismissed as an absurd story about ridiculous characters redeemed by its glorious music. ... All those qualities and more are certainly brought to the fore in the wild new production by Olivier Py that opened the company's annual Munich Opera Festival. It's a non-stop barrage of nightmarish images mixing styles and periods that assault the audience at lightning speed on a multitiered revolving set.For starters, there's a blind heroine, a burning cross, a baby plucked from its mother's womb, clergy wearing conical white hats suggesting the Inquisition, a stage-within-the-stage, spinning mechanical gears and doubles who enact their own back stories in pantomime.
Just remember the redeeming glorious music and singing ...