Salzburg Easter Festival: “Rhine Gold” and “Creation” | EUROtoday

For Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic, the Rhine is a wholesome physique of water: properly ventilated, wealthy in species and with totally different speeds of the present layers. Anyone who’s skilled as a listener can comply with precisely how, from bar 21 in Richard Wagner’s prelude to “Rheingold”, the eight horns steadily divide into unbiased voices all the way down to the person gamers and make the identical up and down motion with a part shift, together with the exaggeration by doubling the notice values, as Wagner makes use of the identical or comparable materials in all places – from dotted three-pound notes to effervescent ones Sixteenth sextuplets – superimposed on one another, additionally in countermovement.

The Berlin Philharmonic is an orchestra the place you may truly hear what you concentrate on musically whenever you watch. Here, within the pit of the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg, they show that this high quality shouldn’t be a location benefit of their wonderful corridor in Berlin. You can even do it elsewhere.

Kirill Petrenko’s artwork, which might hardly be overestimated, is to not resolve unilaterally for one and towards the opposite within the battle of various musical parameters. As quickly because the three Rhinemaidens begin singing, dotted Siciliano rhythms additionally discover their approach into the music, rocking patterns of swaying accelerated into barcaroles, which Petrenko makes significantly vivid with a lightweight staccato on the final notice of every group of three. But the sculptural element doesn’t achieve dominance over the panorama; the circulate of motion does not cease. The unconscious motion of the autonomic nervous system in music and the layers linked to language and consciousness operate equally. Nothing is suppressed by Petrenko, however the whole lot is introduced right into a energetic, thrilling stability.

Wagner wrote “Quiet, cheerful movement” over the rating as a efficiency instruction. With Petrenko the main focus is clearly on “cheerful” within the sense of “brisk”. The three playful Rhinemaidens – Louise Foor, Yajie Zhang and Jess Dandy – deal with this excellently. Rarely do you perceive humorous strains like this so clearly: “Ugh, you hairy, humped dude! Black, calloused sulfur dwarf!”

However, Leigh Melrose’s Alberich, who was bullied on this approach by Wellgunde, has difficulties with this excessive tempo. In the primary picture, he breathlessly rushes by means of the six-eighth time, lifting particular person, tonally discolored vowels out of the context of the phrase with swelling dynamics, in order that hardly any linguistically comprehensible that means emerges. Only within the final image, when he curses the ring stolen by Wotan and Loge, can he act happier.

The Berlin Philharmonic is returning to the Salzburg Easter Festival with the “Rheingold” after having carried out the identical in Baden-Baden for 13 years. The Easter Festival in Salzburg, based by Herbert von Karajan in 1967, additionally started with a “Ring of the Nibelung”. Nikolaus Bachler, now its inventive director, now needs to forge a brand new “Ring”, supplemented by Arnold Schönberg’s “Moses and Aron”. And as a result of renovation work on the Great Festival Hall is predicted from 2028, the choice was made to make use of the Felsenreitschule, which has neither a revolving stage nor cable pulls.

Kirill Serebrennikov, as director and designer within the “Rheingold”, copes very properly with the house. Coal-black ridges like cooled lava cowl the bottom. Pillars wedged into it may be supplemented with picket panels to kind walkways: the Valhalla fortress of the gods is prepared! Videos from Yurii Karikh complement the surroundings. They present a unadorned, battered one who resembles Alberich within the panorama of Iceland, the place the oldest custom of the Nibelungen saga comes from.

Serebrennikov works with a promising setting of 4 poles: scorching towards chilly, white towards black. The lava is scorching and its embers additionally characterize the splendor of Valhalla. The glacier ice is chilly, the block of which stands for the “Rheingold” within the first image. White are the White Albs, the gods round Wotan, who rule and characterize the world order with their legal guidelines, their universalistic rights.

Black is the world of the Nibelungs, the Black Alves, the slave labor, the indigenous cultures, which Serebrennikov represents with ritual costumes from East Asia in addition to with dancers from Congo, Mali and different African international locations. Destruction of nature, local weather change, colonialism, white authorized universalism and cultural appropriation of particular identities – all of the questions of our time are raised and on the identical time transported into the archaic, timeless and legendary. Not a nasty begin for a “ring”!

Of course, it’s much less understood why Christian Gerhaher agreed to sing Wotan. He would have been a great Beckmesser in Wagner’s “Meistersinger”, however as Wotan he’s making an attempt to win competitions in a weight class that’s above his personal. Even when he praises Valhalla at first with the phrases “holy, magnificent building” and has to sing a tenth of a leap from the D flat to the excessive F, he seems like an overwhelmed boss who needs to lie about his failure to turn out to be successful. His baritone lacks the fullness and energy for the superior joviality with which Wotan deceives himself and others. Although Gerhaher makes use of all of his simple intelligence to get by means of the function musically, in his nervous irritability he can not cover the truth that different components would swimsuit him higher.

This “Rheingold” provides a sensible, elegant field with Brenton Ryan, who can whisper the textual content clearly at exact pitches. Patrick Guetti sings a formidable Fafner with a bass like a booming barrel vault. As Fricka, Catriona Morison shouldn’t be a quarrelsome megara, however a loving, enticing lady. Le Bu because the vocally highly effective and delicate big Fasolt and Jasmin White because the sensually radiant Erda have been awarded the Herbert von Karajan Prize.

One of the brand new Karajan Prize winners is the baritone Konstantin Krimmel, who might be heard the subsequent day along with the delicately cooing Louise Alder, the angelically mild Andrew Staples and the polyphonically magnificent Bayerischer Rundfunk choir in Joseph Haydn’s “Creation”, performed by Daniel Harding. Rather a lot nonetheless must be written about Krimmel’s monumental artwork, which above all represents a brand new blessing for German track. Here, as Archangel Raphael, he proves in a immobile tone what it means to must sing concerning the thriller of the start earlier than all creation. And with sturdy colours and pleasurable articulation, he paints the world of animals from lions to tigers to worms, making Haydn’s catalog of creatures additionally a dictionary of music. It’s a celebration to listen to that!