Austria Salzburg Competition [4] – Strauss, Capriccio: Soloists, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra / Christian Thielemann (conductor). Grosses Festspielhaus, Salzburg, 26.7.2024. (MB)

Forged:
Flamand – Sebastian Kohlhepp
Olivier – Konstantin Krimmel
La Roche – Mika Kares
Countess Madeleine – Elsa Dreisig
Rely – Bo Skovhus
Clairon – Ève-Maud Hubeaux
Main-Domo – Torben Jürgens
Italian Soprano – Tuuli Takala
Italian Tenor – Josh Lovell
Servants – Kieran Carrel, Jonas Jud, Fabio Dorizzi, Ian Rucker, Christian Tschelebiew, Jan Petryka, Lucas van Lierop, Philipp Schöllhorn
Monsieur Taupe – Jörg Schneider

There’s a sure irony to the recognition of Capriccio in live performance efficiency. The final time the Royal Opera offered Richard Strauss’s valedictory opera – assuming we don’t depend Des Edels Schattens – it was additionally with out staging. Now, for causes unclear, it has appeared within the Salzburg Competition’s festival-within-a-festival of sacred music, ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’, handled as the primary ‘full-scale’ opera of the pageant, works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Luigi Dallapiccola however, attracting the standard complement of dignitaries for its premiere. Irony and Strauss aren’t a lot wonderful bedfellows as two sides of the identical musical coin, so there isn’t a drawback there. If the world of La Roche discovered itself considerably obscured on that event, the impresario impressed by Max Reinhardt remained current not solely onstage, nodding off in the course of the opening sextet, but additionally in honoured bust-form on the entrance to the Haus für Mozart subsequent door. Strauss himself, naturally, stays on the primary flooring of the Grosse(s) Festspielhaus itself. And if a live performance efficiency, maybe particularly with out interval, might not have been completely what a few of these invited have been anticipating, they, like the remainder of us, will certainly have loved discovering themselves frivolously satirised, elevated, and maybe even impressed by what unfolded.

Curiously, though no ‘live performance director’ or related was credited, a level of completed performing was concerned, as have been telling transformations in lighting (not least for the closing moonlight). Reality be informed, or at the very least one fact amongst many, little appeared to be misplaced. When the forged engaged so animatedly with each other, onstage when vital and offstage when not, the impression was not so very completely different from a ‘conventional’ manufacturing wherein they’d do the exact same, solely seated in an eighteenth-century salon. And Strauss’s query, Countess Madeleine’s too, is finally ‘Wort oder Ton?’ not ‘phrases, music, or gesture,’ nevertheless surprisingly that sits each with the conversations and the composer’s veneration for Wagner’s Opera and Drama (‘the guide of books about music’). If all of us finally know which is able to win in our hearts and minds, if not essentially within the Countess’s, then the competition was established with commendable even-handedness by these performing, balances of all form upheld and dramatically generative, even with no mise-en-scène or directorial Konzept.

Furthermore, if one may anticipate the conductor, presumably the orchestra too, to be favoured in such a situation, such was not the case. Christian Thielemann has usually proved to be at his greatest in Strauss. He led a unprecedented efficiency of Die Frau ohne Schatten on this identical corridor 13 years in the past, blighted but removed from obliterated by Christof Loy’s boastful dismissal of the work as director; the composer has lengthy proved central to his operatic work in Dresden, Vienna, and elsewhere. If his Dresden FroSch (evaluate right here) earlier this 12 months was spectacular but, to my thoughts, slightly on the valuable facet, this Capriccio unfolded with a heat, affection, and ease that spoke of a high-quality stability – that phrase once more – between preparation and familiarity. Restraint will not be fairly the phrase, however there was no grandstanding, nothing pressured. One was led to hear, maybe by way of music, but to phrases as a lot as their confrere-competitors. Quotations have been assumed into the orchestral cloth, by no means underlined. That may be the vulgar manner of some, however hardly Strauss’s. There have been passages of rapt orchestral magic; if the shut of the string sextet has sounded extra hushed, I’ve not heard it so. The Vienna Philharmonic clearly loves taking part in for Thielemann; it’s simply as clear that the love is mutual. And though that sextet was definitely carried out, it by no means sounded prefer it.

Sebastian Kohlhepp and Konstantin Krimmel made for a pair of finely forged, properly contrasted suitors as Flamand and Olivier respectively. If Flamand finally stole the center, that’s actually Strauss’s doing. Mika Kares lived as much as La Roche’s outsize guarantees in a efficiency that relished not solely his boastfulness but additionally his standing as dramatic lynchpin, leaving implicit unhappiness – or am I being sentimental? – to a different day. Ève-Maud Hubeaux was a splendid Clairon; earlier than I knew who she was, I actually sensed the ‘act’ of a French tragedienne. Such will not be reserved to a French singer, in fact, however there was a tang of just about Voltairean authenticity right here, with out sacrifice to crystal-clear German. Bo Skovhus marshalled his sources properly because the Rely. Torben Jürgens’s Main-Domo made a high-quality impression, as did an array of particular person servants, maybe the very best I’ve heard. They could have had a spin-off present of their very own; maybe in the future they’ll.

One particular person is lacking in that, in fact, and it was there that I discovered myself, seemingly in contrast to the viewers, considerably in two minds. Elsa Dreisig’s Countess was nicely sung, well-acted, typically had a lot to commend it, but by some means didn’t really feel fairly ‘proper’ to me. Was {that a} matter of getting an excessive amount of a sure interpretation or mode of interpretation in my head, to which others should conform? Fairly presumably, however what I heard got here throughout in tone and character as extra girlish, even Sophie-like, than a successor to the Marschallin, the true director of metatheatrical proceedings. I shall dwell on this no extra; all of us have our preconceptions and prejudices, and this will nicely have been mine. As everyone knows, no operatic efficiency is or may be excellent, not to mention appropriate. Music, phrases, and theatre (seen or invisible) are too human for that.

Mark Berry