Opera Chic

Laura Aikin on Berg's Lulu: I'm Nothing Like Her in Real Life

 

American soprano Laura Aikin -- who locked & loaded the smoking barrel of her sawed-off shotgun as lead Lulu last night at Teatro alla Scala's premiere -- spoke to Milan-based daily, Corriere della Sera last week about singing the ferocious protagonist of Alban Berg's last opera (Opera Chic was there -- you weren't -- full review coming tomorrow).

In an article titled, "Ho l'energia di Lulu ma non le somiglio" ("I have the energy of Lulu but I'm not like her") Aikin spoke about the tragic heroine of Berg’s modern opera and Scala’s Peter Stein Lulu production that was conducted by Milanese Maestro, Daniele Gatti (despite the fact that his beloved Inter was simultaneously going head-2-head in a Champions League match with Moscow). 

For this staging, German theater and opera director Peter Stein imagined his Lulu like the epic protagonist of G.W. Pabst's films, (can't forget Pandora's Box): Louise Brooks with her iconic black bob, which Aikin affected onstage. All translations copyright Opera Chic k thnx!

On conductor Daniele Gatti and Berg’s composition: “I tremendously like his interpretation: romantic and passionate" […] “Berg always kept in mind the personalities of his characters -- lethal and destructive, innocent and corrupt – and his music is intrinsic to these contrasts, it's passionate and overwhelming.”

(Above: Aikin as Lulu. Photo from the 2009 Opéra de Lyon production.)

Is Lulu a symbol of a new and dangerous form of femininity?: "At this point it's already the fifth time I've sung Lulu and the character never ceases to amaze me. Lulu isn't the most beautiful woman in the world, but the men that she's with see it like that. She comes from nothing, born into poverty, she could have had it all, but she throws it all away. The bourgeois world doesn't interest her and a sense of normality even less. She wants to live dangerously, to carry the utter ruin to the people she's around...she likes sex, she uses it with the maximum freedom and aggressiveness, without consequences). Men she takes, leaves, and manipulates. But in the end she's the victim."

Is she an abstract archetype or real? "She's totally real. The readings of Peter Stein rigorous and intense, emphasize this depiction. Lulu is flesh and blood."

And have you ever tried to open Pandora's box? "Luckily I can do it on the stage. I'm not at all like Lulu in my real life. I've been married for sixteen years to a Milanese lawyer, Gianluca Pojaghi, and we have two gorgeous kids, Marcello and Virginia. Virginia's only five years old but she loves to come with me to the opera houses. She followed me to the Lulu rehearsals and sat on Stein's knee. To listen to Berg for her is normal, like a sweet song."

Olivier Py's Lulu in Geneva

(Above: Robert Wörle and Patricia Petibon)

Grand Théâtre de Genève's new Olivier Py production of Alban Berg's Lulu was already making news in the days before its premiere on Friday. It was rated by the theater as too daring for underage crowds, and carried a strict rating to bar those under 16 years old ("Nous déconseillons le spectacle aux personnes de moins de 16 ans."). The warning referenced an out-of-focus p0rno projection during the final scene of the opera as well as nudity and sexual pantomime. The opera debuted to a rousing success, the Swiss crowds warmed to Patricia Petibon's lead ("Petiboooo" got booed off the stage here in Milan under Scala's meanie loggione for her underwhelming Alcina).

Opera Chic has the photos, although shots of the controversial p0rno absent...they're still good! Click the link below to see!

Floats Like A Butterfly, Stings Like A Bee: Wozzeck @ La Scala (Please Excuse Us Maestro Berg)

Once upon a time in 1952, when Wozzeck was introduced for the first time in front of that famously embalmed audience of Teatro alla Scala, a posse blissfully 25 to 50 years late whenever it comes to appreciate music -- nothing safer than be an oldskool snob, after all -- the booing and whistling and plain yelling was so loud that Maestro Mitropolous, from the podium, with the patience and kindness that probably ended up breaking -- literally -- his heart eight years later, when he died on the podium at la Scala conducting a rehearsal of Mahler's III -- Mitropoulos asked the audience to let them finish, and then, only then, yell and boo as much as they wanted to.

Twenty -- and then twenty-five -- years later, of course, Claudio Abbado's memorable Wozzeck got a much warmer applause. The very production we saw tonight, directed by Juergen Flimm, was inaugurated here in 1997 under the baton of the great Giuseppe Sinopoli and, in a precious b00tleg version recorded then, it remains our favorite Wozzeck -- yes, better than Abbado's, deal with it. Better than, ahem, and we never thought we'd say this, Carlos Kleiber's cabaret piece and Boulez's autopsy. Even better than our dear James Levine's sharp-as-a-Japanese-sushi-chef's-knife version.

Sinopoli's deep, infinitely refined, monstrously intelligent analysis of the score is probably the definitive one, for us, the same way we think the definitive Wozzeck -- well, Woyzeck, technically -- has the scary mad wounded visage of Klaus Kinski, in the Herzog film (an obvious masterpiece -- if you have not seen it yet, you're uncool, so finish reading this review and then Netflix it or something).

But Daniele Gatti's reading of this score, a score that could blind you with his brilliance the way staring at the sun will make you blind (or go insane), comes to us right after Sinopoli's for its warmth, its beauty, and its rich sense of the drama behind each and every note.

There are some nights at the opera – despite being crammed into an auditorium that smells like a high school gymnasium and is almost as hot as the locker rooms, and despite overpriced tickets that either cost as much as a plane ticket to Paris or London or Amsterdam or for a slightly less shameful price offer obstructed views of the stage – where there is magic tangible in the (stuffy) air. Earlier tonight at la Scala, that spark of electricity was ignited, and everything came together in an incendiary blaze of art & music laid bare. Alban Berg’s Wozzeck was just that.

The merciless direction by Jürgen Flimm called for lucid characters that were not to be pitied. Flimm understands that directing this piece successfully is more about what you take out than what you leave in or, even worse, add. The poor were not exploited victims -- unlike the Hostel-like, Troma-inspired postapocalyptic version of this opera given by Calixto Bieito -- but completely in control of their own fate, existing in a set betwixt one of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, brushed in a burnished reddish-orange glow. The background went from a Mars landscape of barren post-war battlefields, to a final scene filled with what can only be described as the hoverboard lights from E.T.'s mothership. It was all very early Netherlandish painting inspired, almost from a Bosch triptych, but with less orgies, sodomy, bird-headed beasts, and flying fish (incidentally, we'd love to hire M. Night Shyamalan to take a crack at Wozzeck-as-ghost-story, but it's just us, we know).

Wozzeck was interpreted by Austrian baritone Georg Nigl. His downward spiral, especially the hair-raising moments before killing Marie (voiced by an excellent Evelyn Herlitzius even if we think that last year's Marie at Opera di Roma, Janice Baird, has an edge on Herlitzius), was acted superbly. Georg had excellent control...a spectrum he displayed from a whispering, delicate falsetto to an icy delusional rant. Everything from the seduction to the knife to the murder was excellence exemplified.

Although Berg's tonal and atonal composition have been discussed to death, Maestro Daniele Gatti must have had his ear attuned to every single debate since like, forever, because tonight he demonstrated to the few who doubt it that he belongs on that very small gentlemen's club, the dozen or so best conductors working today. Gatti pwned the orchestra like the Rubix's Cube, with no cheating (peeling off the stickers...we saw what u did thare!). Gatti managed to create unbearable suspense, truly agonizing and teasing, transforming Wozzeck into Stravinksy's Rite of Spring...like a Jaws or Psycho score of opera. After that amazing balancing act Maestro Gatti, at curtain call, received the most bravi, and not because he was conducting in his native Milan. He was rightfully deserving: managing to fuse together an apparent complete dichotomy of conducting, delicate and forceful, intense and waning -- the most subtle whispers of pianissimo giving way to jarring and shattering fortissimo. All in deference to Cassius Clay’s adage.   

Wozzeck @ la Scala: OC'll Be There And You Won't

Running out in a hurry -- in the middle of Fashion Week (with Roberto Bolle showing up this morning at Ferragamo in black jacket, open neck black shirt and tight charchoal slacks, men and women passing out in the blinding light of his hawtness) -- for tonight's prima of Wozzeck at la Scala, conducted by Daniele Gatti.

c ya l8r!

Rome's "Wozzeck" In Memory Of Rome's Victims Of The Shoah

On November 3, 1942, Alban Berg's Wozzeck, banned in Germany as degenerate art, had its Italian premiere at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma (then Teatro Reale). Rome's opera house has gracefully chosen to dedicate their recent season premiere -- another Wozzeck, this time staged by Giancarlo Del Monaco and conducted by maestro Gianluigi Gelmetti -- to the memory of the 1,024 Roman Jewish citizen who in October 1943 were kidnapped by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. Ticket prices for the performance had been heavily marked down to a very affordable 20-30 euros.

Corriere della Sera hailed the production's minimalist staging as a "genius" premise, Jean-Philippe Lafont's "impressive" "voice" and "charisma", Gelmetti's "natural" talent for conducting music written by very different composers; big props to Janice Baird's "musicalissima Marie", "most musical Marie".

(production photos courtesy of www.janicebaird.com)

Welser-Möst Comes Clean: My Berg Is Teh Suck

George Szell's ghost is all like, wtf:

Listeners aren't always aware of these discrepancies, but the Cleveland Orchestra's audience Thursday at Severance Hall was abuzz at intermission about the two interruptions during the last movement of Alban Berg's Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin and 13 Wind Instruments.

The piece was moving along when everything suddenly collapsed and music director Franz Welser-Möst uttered, "Sorry." He took the ensemble back a bunch of bars and tried again, to no better effect.

"You see how difficult this is," the conductor said to the audience. "It worked this morning."

Teh dog ate his score, too.