I had a great time at a number of cultural events in Amsterdam, though the entire time I was adjusting to the time. First and most importantly, I saw the Concertgebouw, perhaps the greatest orchestra in the world. The maestro, Daniele Gatti, is an extraordinary master of tempi, dynamics, and phrasing, though for all that, I found his performance of Beethoven’s second symphony to be marked by restraint with the significant caveat that at the end of the first movement, he added a glaring accelerando that I have never heard in any other performance or recording. Other than that, he gave the distinct impression of being able to force the players to read his mind. Despite being quite short, he often barely moved at all—though, given the amount of rehearsals I expect they had, this is to be expected. Players in any professional orchestra should be able to play loud when they see a “forte” on the page, whether or not the man in the front jumps up and down waving his stick with great energy.
The Wagner was harder for me to enjoy. The playing itself was magnificent—other than a couple of brass squeaks. Brass instruments are exceedingly difficult to play, however, and I was spoiled coming of age with the Chicago Symphony as a weekly indulgence. Its brass—and Berlin’s—exceed every other by a wide margin, including, apparently, Amsterdam. The problem was the programming. Now, most people are not the Wagner nut that I am. Fine. The problem that I found, now that I am familiar with the Ring (having just seen it twice), is that the music is so closely associated with the drama that it is jarring to hear it decontextualized, without words and stage action. It is, however, physically painful to hear Donner conjure the rainbow bridge, and then the record skip ahead a few grooves to the god’s entrance to valhalla without transition. The cut from forest murmurs in Siegfried to the end of the act was equally difficult to stomach. Most hilarious, though, was the fact that Gatti waved the audience quiet after the march into Valhalla. It’s the end of the opera! Wagner meant the audience to clap after it! But no, it wasn’t the end of his collection of excerpts, so the audience must receive it silently. Ditto Act 2 of Siegfried. I was mystified and unsettled by being jerked through the ring, and would prefer that it be excerpted in long, untouched excerpts. Say, Walkure from Ein Schwert to the end of the act, Wotan’s farewell, the forging scene, Siegmund Sieh auf mich to the end of the act, that Rheingold excerpt just mentioned.
Saturday I saw a ballet performance showcase that let young choreographers loose on their fellow company dancers. It was good, though I didn’t really pay attention to the girls. That night, I saw Tristan + Isolde, a 2015 ballet score that tells the same story, though beginning earlier: at Marke’s speech to his court that they should invade Ireland and kidnap Isolde for him. The massacre in Ireland was, though highly abstracted and stylized, incommunicably sad to watch (perhaps more so than the final death scene). The first act displayed economy; the second act was padded by an overlong wedding scene (we get it, she marries Marke) and a weird and unnecessary scene with soldiers kind of just doing their thing. The ending carried a punch though. Everybody was quite talented.
Hoffman, on Sunday, had a large “dollhouse” structure with different “rooms” for the action to take place in. The conceit of the opera is that Hoffmann relives various loves that he has had—Olympia, Antonia, and Giulietta—and he ends the opera realizing that they are not separate loves but three elements of the same love. It is a bit mysterious, and the soprano that plays his friend in the present is implied to be the woman he desires. The production was whimsical: the storytelling frame was quite contemporary; the large central room in the dollhouse set Hoffmann’s current apartment in Kreuzberg or Williamsburg or some such artistic neighborhood. Olympia’s manufacturer gave the impression of being from nineteenth-century London, as did Antonia’s father. The third act, likewise, was in some urban underbelly of a hundred odd years ago. I’m comfortable calling it the best French opera I’ve seen—because it has a text that treats love with skepticism, rather than as a panacea ala the Italians (e.g., the relationship is working! We’re so happy! / The relationship isn’t working. We’re very sad.) I haven’t seen the Debussy opera yet, but I think that’s one of the few as interesting—before you get into the twentieth century too far with the likes of Messiaen.
The next event was Monday’s trio of ballets by the Staatsballett. Doda, Goecke, and Duato were the three choreographers, and only Goecke used a piece in the repertoire—Pierrot Lunaire. The first two acts were extremely experimental. The action threw out all the conventional vocabulary of ballet and exchanged it for movements that barely seemed human. Writing, jerking, twitching, and other highly precise, synchronized movement evoked undersea creatures or insects more than human beings. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it was haunting and deeply weird. In any case, it blew the dust off my experience of ballet and gave me a perspective on what technically advanced dancers are capable of with a sufficiently imaginative choreographer. The third act used what sounded like seventeenth century Spanish instrumental music, and was basically traditional, though extremely engaging despite that. It was broken up into movements several minutes long, and each act ran about 40 minutes in total.
Last night I saw the War Requiem at the recently renovated Staatsoper—the most famous, though smallest, of the three opera houses in Berlin (the others are the Komische Oper, where I saw the ballet, and the Deutsche Oper, where I will see Il Viaggio a Reims on Saturday). I didn’t really get the piece, but my god, the acoustics are black magic. The tenor (Ian Bostridge) has a light, supple voice that is rather attractive. I sat on the second balcony, far right. Despite that, the sound was apparently caressed so lovingly that it came at me from all sides, and even though I could see him very much to my left, was enveloped by his voice to a shocking, even disorienting degree. Though the views from many of the seats are abysmal (I couldn’t see half the stage), the acoustic was the best I had ever heard. The Concertgebouw, a much larger hall, has a long, broad reverberation, but the Staatsoper has a quickness a management of the sound that makes it a joy to be in.
I will be at the Apollosaal tonight for a lied concert. Die Nase tomorrow!
