Flórez, Vargas and Cura Star in the New Season of the Teatro alla Scala

EFE

20 November 2014

[Excerpt]

Rome, November 20 (EFE) .- Three of the greatest voices in the world of opera Juan Diego Flórez, Ramón Vargas and José Cura will star in the upcoming opera season at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, which opens with Maestro Daniel Barenboim conducting  Fidelio by Ludwig Van Beethoven, as reported in a statement made by the institution.

The Teatro alla Scala in Milan season beings on December 7 with Fidelio conducted by Barenboim.  It continues through the beginning July 4, 2015 when the public can enjoy listening to the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, who, along with the other two tenors Gregory Kunde and Edgardi Rocha, will perform in Gioachino Rossini’s Otello.

But the new season will be full of familiar names and classics like Carmen by Georges Bizet, with the Argentine tenor José Cura and the Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca in the leading roles.

It will be August 19 when Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel takes the leadership of the National Youth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Simon Bolivar of Venezuela to direct La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini.  In the play, which was first shown in 1896, will involve first-order voices like Vargas, but also the Italian soprano Maria Agresta or (alternate) Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo.
 

Carmen Bleeds but Passions Die

Random Thoughts / BravoCura

A contradiction at La Scala:  Carmen, an opera that explodes with passionate music, provocative women, and testosterone-fueled men remained stubbornly listless with a production that inundated the stage with red but remained curiously bloodless.  Emma Dante’s directorial concepts were ill-conceived and implemented with such heavy-hand that they both overwhelmed and undermined Bizet’s slender drama.  Not even the formidable talents of José Cura and Elina Garanca were able to salvage the evening.    

Carmen is not the story of the Catholic Church stalking a deviant spirit who threatens the conservative teaching of the institution, driving the gypsy to suicide and ending with a smug, congratulatory procession; this is pure invention by Dante. To introduce original elements to a work requires the director find a way to form visceral connections and create the cause and effect that illuminate the plot; that was missing in Dante’s retelling.  Instead, we had inconsequential busywork filling the stage at inappropriate times, gratuitous violence and passionless passion. The tragedy of Carmen and Don José is superseded by the triumph of the Church.

Carmen is not a feminist manifesto, and feminism is not an excuse for women on women violence or men on women violence—such activity is never a cause for levity.  Act I featured a fight between women which concluded in near slapstick hair pulling, wild, bizarrely exaggerated faces, choreographed flips to display panties and enough blood to mark the stage floor for the rest of the opera, followed by male guards brutalizing a prone woman.  Nor does feminism function as a means to introduce pre-pubescent girls into prostitution, which this Carmen appears to do. 

Carmen is not about the emasculation of men; Carmen’s excess does not depend on Don José’s constraint. In truth, Carmen is a self-centered character who dominates with catchy music and provocative lifestyle but her pursuit of freedom covers an adolescent refusal to accept responsibility wrapped inside a shroud of 'destiny.'  In most productions, her superficiality is compensated with exploitive sexuality but in Milan even that aspect was blunted: this Carmen was more flirt than vixen, more tease than temptress, more innuendo than heat. And Dante’s Don José, the character with the most complicated music and the most persuasive developmental line in the opera, was turned into a cipher, leaning passively against a wall or sitting passively against a stone for swatches of time.  He was never allowed to generate the prerequisite carnal heat usually associated with the character's motivation:  in Act II, after release from prison, his initial sexual encounter with Carmen consisted of taking off his jacket and slowly rolling up his shirt sleeves--certainly not the actions of a man in need of sexual release.  Cura did manage to reclaim some dynamic control by killing Carmen rather than allowing her to commit suicide (as dictated by Director Dante in her notes) but the impact of his desperate act is immediately lost in the distraction of the Catholic procession which, unfortunately, left Don José once more passively off to the side.

In short, the director reinterpreted Carmen and created a fatal imbalance between opera and director, between storytelling and ego, between Carmen and Don José.   Nothing the two leads could do could undo the director’s conceit.  How much better the evening would have been had Dante simply stuck to libretto and trusted the instincts of her stars.

Act I

Low voltage Carmen in Emma Dante's return to La Scala

 

Bachtrack

James Imam

 30 March 2015

This is the year of Milan's Expo - the international Summer exhibition on everyone's lips - for which La Scala have extended their season and pulled some old productions out of the wardrobe. Emma Dante's Carmen received a famously mixed reception at 2009's season-opening performance from press and public alike. Barenboim assured it would become "a legend production", whilst traditionalist opera director Franco Zeffirelli claimed that it had caused him to see the devil.

This year's version remains largely intact, though the original star-studded cast has received an overhaul. There was often a lack of chemistry between tonight's leading roles this time around. Elīna Garanča's blonde Carmen possesses an innocent streak, and her cheery "Habanera" lacked the necessary sass to get our pulses racing. José Cura's Don José is world-weary and seemingly old enough to be Carmen's father - impassible and often immobile, he hardly flinched when Micaëla relayed news from his dying mother, sweetly conveyed by Elena Mosuc as this was. Such a low voltage rapport between the main characters made it difficult to buy into the plot's tragic developments or the various directorial quirks. In a reversal to conventional practice, Carmen rather than José plunged the dagger into her heart at the work's climax, which was a somewhat implausible feature when there had been so little in the way of a dramatic buildup.

But in spite of these weaknesses, there were moments where the characters' relationships started to kindle. Carmen ensnared her captor José with a hazy "Tra la la", entangling him in the suspended ropes that bound her arms, and the tension bubbled in a candelabra littered Lillia Pastia's, with José tormented and Carmen burning with resentment at his refusal to desert the army. There is by now some wobble to Cura's voice, but he is capable of shifting cleanly through the gears to find an emotive range.

Massimo Zanetti, a dapper silver fox of a conductor, overflowed with energy, and we might have wanted him to steal through the texture more often to provide some oomph. The prelude to Act III had utter poise, whilst that to Act IV brimmed with joie de vivre and all the zest of Seville oranges: smouldering strings, lippy brass and rapping tambourine. And there were also heart-warming contributions from gypsy swashbucklers Frasquita and Mercédès, charmingly conveyed by Hanna Hipp and Sofia Mchedlishvili respectively. There is impressive depth and sheen to Mchedlishvili's voice who, like her fast-rising compatriot Anita Rachvelishvili, is a product of the La Scala Academy.

A much bigger problem in this production than casting or individual performances was posed by the direction and scenography. Dante shares with Zeffirelli his penchant for buzzing, bustling sets, which was easy on the eye in the case of Act I's heaving piazza with marching children, trinket flashing gypsies and a woman giving birth. But incongruities between the sets cause disorientation when we switch to a geometric blankness for Act III's mountains, or to Act II's Lillia Pastia's Inn in an underground lair, borrowed from a James Bond villain perhaps, where a slowly descending dumb waiter didn't allow Escamillo the most imposing entry. Without grounding in time, place or a coherent aesthetic, the narrative is left to flap helplessly in the wind.

In particular, Dante has the tendency to clog the drama with cloying symbolism. Religious imagery abounds, for example with a hearse crossing the stage to spell out Carmen's imminent death from the off. When factory girls dressed as nuns disrobe to nightdresses before frolicking in a steam-filled fountain, we are unsure whether we are supposed to feel aroused or amused. Far from sharpening our focus, the symbolism tends towards the obscure, and it is often gratuitously nauseating, so that watching bloodied factory girls kicked into the air by raving soldiers made for an uncomfortable sitting. It was surely no coincidence that moments of dramatic clarity coincided with respite in the stream of allegory.

About La Scala

Note that this is an expression of our experiences and may not reflect the experiences of anyone else on planet earth. 

The performances in this production, despite the directorial overreach, were world class and probably in any other theater in the world the singers would have been celebrated with standing ovations and unending applause. In Milan, everyone got booed (some more than others).  The bulk of the disruption came from the ‘cheap seats’ [loggia] where a group of folks gather to boo—that is all they do and all they come to do.  Depending on where you sit, you hear them as overwhelmingly loud or not at all; sadly the artists on stage hear them all too well. The booing has nothing at all to do with the quality of the performance but the mentality of a small group of La Scala regulars. It should be a huge source of embarrassment for the theater and they should move to limit or reduce the nuisance booer (and those who are paid to do so) but on some level we sensed management encourages it and may even take some pride in it.   

La Scala is the typical horseshoe auditorium. Orchestra stalls are fine and recommended if you can afford them; they at least allow good sight lines. The boxes on the side walls are narrow and deep: if you go, do anything you can to avoid any seat in the boxes on the side except front row (boxes more toward the back may have better options).  Anything else is an expensive ticket for standing room only.  I was in third balcony, third box first row seat, stage right.  My knees were jammed into the partition and the lady in the front row seat beside me kept asking for more room—there was no more to give.  From my perch I could see half of the stage—and that was craning over the body of the lady in box 2 next to me who was lying across the railing and obscuring a lot of stage with head and shoulders (she was just trying to see as well). The two people behind the front row had to stand the entire opera and lean over those of us in the first row, making the box even more hot and stuffy than it already was.  It was not a pleasant experience and both music and body suffered as a result.

But at least I had it better than Kira, who was in box 5 in balcony 2, stage right.  She was in the second row (the theater sold out for this performance within ten minutes so we took the seats we could.)  Although she was lower down and further back, from her seat she had absolutely no sightline to the stage.  At best, she could see the first balcony on the other side and a glimpse of the curtain, stage left.  The theater is obviously aware this is a completely blind seat because in a four seat box they added a fifth, behind the other second row person.  By standing  or kneeling on that fifth seat and dodging the bobbing head of the standing woman in front of her, Kira could see less than half of the stage some of the time. 

Which brings us to sound.  La Scala has an international reputation as an opera house so one assumes the sound quality would be spectacular.  We had one performance in the orchestra stalls and the sound was fine—certainly not spectacular but we were close to the front so perhaps the sound didn't have time to 'bloom..'   Once we got to the boxes, however, that changed.  Certainly front row was satisfactory but the back row in box five was so far back in a narrow space that sound was muffled and muddy;  not only did it have to find its way back to the ears but it had to survive the heavy paneling of the walls.  That we were paying high price for what turned out to be a dead zone (visually and aurally) was a huge disappointment.

La Scala programs for each performance are quite expensive (15 Euros per book, compared to 5 Euros at most other theaters) and the photos contained in the programs weren’t even from the current production.

Bathroom facilities are limited and rather than expand stalls the theater introduced unisex stalls.  A solution but perhaps not the best.

Despite the quality of the performance, we were disappointed in our first, and perhaps only, trip to this famous theater.  The facilities are below average, the acoustics are no more than average, and even with an excellent production with extraordinary singers, the people in the balconies who live to boo ruined the experience.  We would rate the experience as horrible if not for the wonderful effort of the musicians who deserve combat pay for enduring their stay in Milan. 

Act III

“Carmen is frightening.  She frightens everyone: the Church, society…” -- Emma Dante, Director

I like logical consistency. I crave connections. I want images that grow with the characters, motifs that develop from bits and pieces into statements made clearly and boldly. I don’t like breadcrumbs that lead to dead ends: let them guide us to something strong and courageous. Innovate by audaciously expanding the space that exists within the original work; don’t cram unrelated content into it from the outside. In the beginning is the source. It has stood the test of time and it is good. Trust it. Respect it.

Unfortunately, director Emma Dante doesn’t do either. Her production of Carmen never coalesced into a compelling narrative, never integrated disjointed, fragmentary ideas into a cohesive plotline, never captured the desperate darkness that ultimately suffocates both Carmen and Don José.  Dante failed to create characters who touched us enough to care what happened to them. 

Dante’s declaration that Carmen “frightens everyone” sets the storyline spinning in a direction that neither libretto nor music support and which eventually chills the tragedy: this feminist manifesto requires that Carmen’s life of carefree abandon jeopardize the status quo and undermine the control of the conservative Church. The approach fundamentally alters the opera: Carmen isn’t a self-absorbed, pleasure seeking gypsy and part-time thief that Bizet envisioned but a prototype of the multi-tasking career woman who can’t be tied to one man. Dante’s Carmen isn’t killed by Don José, not really; she is killed by the repressed society who views the free-wheeling, free-thinking, free-loving gal as an existential threat. 

Dante’s vision of Carmen as forerunner of modern females requires she soften Carmen to make her more sympathetic while marginalizing the leading man to lessen his importance. She poses Don José against walls, sits him off to the side, has him stand or lie with his back to the audience, keeps him from physically interacting too often with Carmen and generally minimizes his existence. This is cramming, shoving, and squeezing unrelated content, indeed, to impose a Carmen-centric reading.

Bizet’s Carmen was a capricious and amoral schemer countered by a much more complex and darker character, Don José.  This character is pulled apart by competing loyalties; he develops and that development is reflected in the most complicated music and most evolving musical line—without the deepening psychosis of Don José, Bizet’s Carmen would live long and happily.  But Dante ignores Bizet’s story to present a Carmen as a brave and fearless “angel” who dares take on both God and man. Dante’s focus on Carmen’s bubbling cauldrons of emotions unhappily ignores the 'emotional desert' Don José, the man whose disintegration drives the narrative. 

As a result, José Cura, one of the world’s finest singing actors, a performer whose charismatic presence electrifies the audience and who dominates the stage even when his character is not the center of action, too often gets lost in Dante’s staging.  And that is a pity, not only because of the magic Cura brings with him but because the director’s contrived constraint of Don José imbalances the work.

And so we have a production in which Bizet’s Carmen becomes backdrop to the director’s concept. What is this tale of tantalizing seduction, illicit love, raging jealousy and violent death if passion is muted?