New Tannhaeuser from Munich

[lennygoran]

This trailer caught my eye--wonder how it compares with the one from the Met sometime ago which I didn't go for. Regards, Len

[lennygoran]

This trailer caught my eye

Then there's the thoughts presented on behind how Venus is shown--I sure haven't seen her look like that before. Regards, Len

[John F]

This trailer caught my eye--wonder how it compares with the one from the Met sometime ago which I didn't go for.

That's Otto Schenk's production in his romantic-realist style, which you like. What's not to like about his "Tannhäuser"? Maybe it's Wagner's opera you have a problem with?

As for Castellucci's production, he says: "If you read the libretto closely, you see that Venus doesn't represent beauty and pleasure but the disgust and horror of the flesh." Utter nonsense. That's Castellucci's private neurosis, nothing to do with Tannhäuser and Venus.

[lennygoran]

That's Otto Schenk's production in his romantic-realist style, which you like. What's not to like about his "Tannhäuser"? Maybe it's Wagner's opera you have a problem with?

As for Castellucci's production, he says: "If you read the libretto closely, you see that Venus doesn't represent beauty and pleasure but the disgust and horror of the flesh." Utter nonsense. That's Castellucci's private neurosis, nothing to do with Tannhäuser and Venus.

John thanks for your comments-I love that Schenk production and saw it last season:
Metropolitan Opera House
October 12, 2015


TANNHÄUSER {473}
Richard Wagner--Richard Wagner

Tannhäuser..............Johan Botha
Elisabeth...............Eva-Maria Westbroek
Wolfram.................Peter Mattei
Venus...................Michelle DeYoung
Hermann.................Günther Groissböck
Walther.................Noah Baetge
Heinrich................Adam Klein
Biterolf................Ryan McKinny
Reinmar.................Ricardo Lugo
Shepherd................Ying Fang

Pages: Daniel Katzman, Connor Tsui, Michael Graham, Gabriel Nichols, Ruby Gilmore, Emma Kramer, Andre Gulick, Brandon Harnett

Three Graces: Marybeth Hansohn, Ana Luiza Luizi, Sarah Weber Gallo

Conductor...............James Levine
Production..............Otto Schenk
Set designer............Günther Schneider-Siemssen

Someone I know suggested looking at the Munich production clip of this opera and as I watched I was thoroughly astounded-even more so by looking at the explanation on Venus-I'm so glad that someone with so much knowledge on Wagner has confirmed my thoughts! Again thanks for taking the time on this. Regards, Len

[John F]

But you just said you didn't "go for" "the one for the Met some time ago." I don't understand.

[lennygoran]

But you just said you didn't "go for" "the one for the Met some time ago." I don't understand.

Wow, you're right-I'm slipping badly-I can't for a second figure out why I typed that. Regards, Len

Here's what I wrote right after we saw it. Regards, Len

tonight`s tannhauser

Post by lennygoran » Tue Oct 13, 2015 12:39 am
Wonderful evening-the old beautiful set-very good singing-I couldn`t believe botha-he made it look effortless and just kept the beautiful notes coming at you all evening long! Len

[John F]

No problem, I was just confused.

[lennygoran]

No problem, I was just confused.

Thanks, you had a right to be confused-I wonder if I momentarily thought about the last Parsifal when I wrote that-there's one I didn't like-of course it has nothing to do with the Met's Tannhauser. Regards, Len

[lennygoran]

Thanks, you had a right to be confused-I wonder if I momentarily thought about the last Parsifal when I wrote that-there's one I didn't like-of course it has nothing to do with the Met's Tannhauser. Regards, Len

Now the NY Times has weighed in. Regards, Len



Review: Opera Lovers, Make a Pilgrimage to Munich for ‘Tannhäuser’

By ZACHARY WOOLFE MAY 23, 2017


MUNICH — “Nach Rom!” the cast of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” cries at the end of that opera’s second act, pressing the title character to make the Catholic pilgrimage to Rome and save his troubled soul.

I’d give it a new spin: “Nach München!” Opera lovers, get thee to Munich. Listening to “Tannhäuser,” which opened at the Bavarian State Opera here on Sunday, in a new production directed and designed by the provocative theater artist Romeo Castellucci, will convince you that you’ve verily been saved. I can’t say whether hearing this performance — and I mean hearing it, since the staging adds little to the purely musical experience — will secure your place in heaven, but I guarantee your faith in opera’s vitality will be renewed.

No better cast is possible in this work today, and the high priest of the podium for this production, scheduled to be webcast live at staatsoper.de on July 9, is the dazzling Kirill Petrenko. “Tannhäuser” is no easy feat to conduct: Revised again and again by Wagner — whose wife reported, three weeks before he died, that he said he “still owes the world a ‘Tannhäuser’” — it is a sometimes awkward amalgam of that master’s early and late styles.

The Bavarian State Opera’s music director and the next chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Mr. Petrenko embraces the awkwardness, and blazes through it. At the start, Tannhäuser, a chronically dissatisfied medieval knight and troubadour, has abandoned both his home and the virginal (O.K., perhaps a bit boring) Elisabeth for the sensual pleasures of Venus. The rushing lushness of the opening bacchanal music here had the complex, dizzying fervor of “Parsifal,” Wagner’s final completed opera.


But in that second-act finale — when Tannhäuser, back at court in Wartburg but disgraced once his venture to Venus’ lair has been revealed, resolves to travel to Rome — Mr. Petrenko builds the scene with a steadiness and patience that shows the music’s debt to the early 19th century and the grand finales of Rossini and Bellini.

What unites these two sides of Wagner, the early and late, here is Mr. Petrenko’s unshowy energy, which emerges from the root of the orchestra: Listen closely, and there’s always warm, full, rounded precision in the low brasses and low strings. The music down there may not be the tune you end up whistling, but it’s the scaffolding of that tune that gives intensity and purpose to the melodic lines layered on top of it.

Mr. Petrenko brings fresh vigor to this score — not the superficial verve of loudness or fastness, but a more elusive grandeur and dignity — and his cast does, too, including the earthy Elena Pankratova (Venus) and authoritative Georg Zeppenfeld (Hermann, Elisabeth’s uncle).

As Wolfram, the stable, upstanding counterweight to Tannhäuser’s tortured confusion, Christian Gerhaher faded the end of his great “Hymn to the Evening Star” almost beyond audibility. Yet his scrupulous attention to the text kept the line vividly present, a ghost whose contours you could somehow see and feel.

A serene, queenly presence as Elisabeth, Anja Harteros focused her emotions in her attractively unsettled voice, practically vibrating with feeling. Her choices of tone color constantly surprised: Describing Tannhäuser’s disappearance, her sound palpably grayed; later, a single word, “jähen,” was a memorably sour sneer as she told how his betrayal had destroyed her. Klaus Florian Vogt, singing the title role for the first time, united his pure, boyish tone with heldentenor weight.

What convinced me to make my own Munich pilgrimage was the promise of these peerless musical forces being set in motion by Mr. Castellucci, whose enigmatic, elegant, calmly brutal theater works have brought him avant-garde acclaim since the 1980s.


Who, on paper, would take to “Tannhäuser” better than this practiced guide to dark nights of the soul? (His “Divine Comedy,” from 2008, reflected on Dante in moody, indelible images, like that of an elderly woman gnawing on a basketball.) Who could enact a more striking battle between Venusberg and Wartburg than this purveyor of gorgeous visual responses to spiritual conflict? (His 2016 staging of Bach’s “Matthew Passion” was an eerily poignant pageant of blood, bodies, nature and science, conducted in a clinic-white box.)

This time, the result is disappointingly bland. No one wants or expects clear answers from a Castellucci production, but I wanted more suggestive images, a more charged mood.

There are ideas, particularly in the first act. During the overture, a troupe of bare-breasted Amazons shoots arrows toward a gigantic image of an eye looming at the back of the stage. (Much is made of the similar construction of an archery bow and Tannhäuser’s harp.) The eye is later replaced by a slowly rotating circular panel; when a thin stream of blood leaks onto it, it becomes a mesmerizing exercise in slow-motion spin art. Venus’s realm is a platform full of lethargically, primordially pulsing heaps of flesh — sensuality’s nightmarish overkill.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/arts ... front&_r=0

[John F]

Woolfe says no better cast for "Tannhäuser" is possible today. Did he attend the Met's performances 18 months ago, with a strong cast and James Levine conducting the Met orchestra and chorus? I have to wonder what range of experience Woolfe brings to such a judgment. Of course Johan Botha is no longer available, but then, Claus Florian Vogt would seem to be a lightweight for the role, the heaviest for a tenor before Siegfried and Tristan. Obviously Woolfe just got carried away. I'm not saying the performance wasn't up to what he says; I can't, I wasn't there. But there's reason to doubt it.

[lennygoran]

Obviously Woolfe just got carried away. I'm not saying the performance wasn't up to what he says; I can't, I wasn't there. But there's reason to doubt it.

That's right-he himself has some bad things to say about the production-meantime I saw the Met Tannhauser which was thoroughly enjoyable--as for the Venus of Munich-phooey! Regards, Len