The Man Who Gives Form to the Sprawling Salzburg Festival

The New York Times

By Anthony Tommasini

SALZBURG, Austria — Speaking to reporters about the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” one of its stars, the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, described the “incredible freedom” this prestigious festival provided the staging. Young dancers, Ms. Lindsey said, were “the heart of the show.”

“They worked intensively for three weeks before we showed up,” she added. “And we all warmed up together before every rehearsal. We don’t get that in many productions, if ever.”

Festivals provide a break from the routines that opera companies and orchestras contend with during the regular season. Salzburg has a budget of more than $72 million to support just six weeks of programming, which allows daring from its director, the pianist and impresario Markus Hinterhäuser, who took over last summer.

Asked to describe his job in an interview at his office here, Mr. Hinterhäuser emphasized that since the festival’s efficient operational structure needs little of his help, he can focus on “what we present, how we present it, and the kind of static we create.”

“Art isn’t art without form,” he added. Giving the festival form is his mission.

But form at Salzburg can take different, well, forms. Mr. Hinterhäuser’s taste seems to hark back to the tumultuous 1990s tenure of the impresario Gerard Mortier, who arrived with an agenda: to jolt a festival that, to his mind, had grown elitist and stultified during the long reign of the conductor Herbert von Karajan. Mortier presented in-your-face productions of staples like “Così Fan Tutte” and “Die Fledermaus,” commissioned a raft of new works, brought in guest orchestras to nudge the Vienna Philharmonic from its place of primacy and oversaw extensive programs of contemporary music.

Of course, there are givens at Salzburg that no director dares tamper with, like accommodating star performers. Plácido Domingo, a regular, chose this summer’s festival to introduce his 150th role: Zurga, in a concert performance of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers.” But Mr. Hinterhäuser is keen on encouraging artists to think beyond tradition.

“A musical score is not written in stone,” he said. Every performance should be a “re-look,” an interpretation. Re-examining repertory in the context of the “now and today,” as he put it, is central.

Mr. Hinterhäuser pointed to Lydia Steier, whose production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” inspired by the film “The Princess Bride,” framed the opera as a bedtime story told by the crinkle-eyed grandfather of a Viennese family just before World War I; his three young grandsons become, in their imaginations, Mozart’s three boys.

Ms. Steier was offering audiences an “interpretation,” Mr. Hinterhäuser said, and asking them simply to come along with her for a few hours as she retold the work. Mr. Hinterhäuser intends to revive the production, with some staging tweaks, in 2020. He considers Romeo Castellucci’s production of Richard Strauss’s “Salome” to be the most “radical” of this summer’s offerings, because the director dared to probe the murky psychological depths of this still-disturbing opera — even when the resulting stage imagery, however mesmerizing, was baffling.

Mr. Hinterhäuser’s most provocative comments, though, concerned the role of commissions. You would expect a daring artist to be eager to present new works. But he said that citing the number of premieres as “proof of artistic vision and daring” can be “a little bit too easy,” even “superficial.” He said it’s just as important, and maybe even more so, to reconsider slightly earlier works — especially, it would seem by his choices so far, a generation of composers active in the second half of the 20th century, like Claude Vivier, Giacinto Scelsi, Galina Ustvolskaya and Gérard Grisey.

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At Salzburg, an Unlikely Operatic Trio of Women Finding Their Way

The New York Times

By Anthony Tommasini

SALZBURG, Austria — Opera, again and again, shows us women trying to find their way in a world dominated by men. Do they connive a path to power? Do they self-destruct? Do they use their wiles to wink past those who try to stymie them? These were three courses of action presented by the Salzburg Festival here, in Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” Strauss’s “Salome” and Rossini’s “L’Italiana in Algeri.”

Monteverdi’s Poppea, a fiercely ambitious Roman noblewoman, uses sexual allure and ruthless power plays to become empress. With the soprano Sonya Yoncheva dramatically ferocious and vocally sensual in the role, the character came across, in this #MeToo moment, as strangely more sympathetic than in the past. After all, if a woman in her time wanted real political power, what other course did she have? Even the more extreme Salome, in Asmik Grigorian’s intense performance, came across as a woman coolly exploring the reach of her power in a rigidly patriarchal society.

Indeed, coolness was emphasized in Romeo Castellucci’s production, fixated on exploring the opera’s Jungian undercurrents, even if that resulted in some baffling stage imagery. At one point we see Salome sitting like a little girl in a pool of milk, washing her arms and legs. To attain purity? As a gesture of bitter irony? At the end of the opera, Salome stands in that same pool in sickening triumph, holding the head not of Jochanaan (John the Baptist, here the strong bass-baritone Gabor Bretz) but of a horse. Don’t ask me why.

Poppea and Salome may have come across with new nuances these days, but the sassy young Isabella of “L’Italiana in Algeri” surprised me by perhaps having the most to say to our current moment. The role is sung to perfection by Cecilia Bartoli in a staging that draws out surprising contemporary resonances from this 1813 comedy.

When we meet her, Isabella has come from Italy looking for her boyfriend, Lindoro, who may (or may not) have come to grief in Algiers. Most productions milk the tale for its clash-of-cultures farce. But this daffy staging by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, with colorful sets suggesting modern-day Algiers, finds amusing commonalities between the male-dominated Muslim and male-dominated Italian worlds. The conductor Jean-Christophe Spinosi, showing sensitivity to the intricacies and sparkle of Rossini’s score, led the excellent Ensemble Matheus in a beguiling performance.

Ms. Bartoli’s Isabella is a clever, independent woman with an adventurous streak. She appreciates men, savors romance and seems committed to her missing boyfriend (sung by Edgardo Rocha, a splendid young tenor). Manipulating male authority figures who have sex on their minds is just something she’s forced to do. (Poppea and Salome, you felt watching Ms. Bartoli, would understand.) And if putting absurdly puffed-up men in their place involves leading them on, well, at least Isabella has some fun with it and teaches them a lesson.

The story is driven by the marital crisis of Mustafà, the bey of Algiers (here the bass Ildar Abdrazakov, whose tall, stocky frame is fleshed out with a padded belly that makes him look like an Algerian Tony Soprano). Feeling that his sex life with his wife (the wonderful soprano Rebeca Olvera) needs a jolt, Mustafà orders his fixer to find him a feisty Italian girl.

A shipwreck brings some Italians to shore — including Isabella, who arrives on a camel. In the showpiece aria that follows, “Cruda sorte,” she bemoans her fate. All she wants is to find her lost lover and go home. Yet the way Ms. Bartoli shapes the supple phrases and dispatches the dazzling coloratura roulades, combined with the gleam in her observant eyes, suggests that Isabella will soon figure out how to handle the situation. Sure enough, once she notices how much attention her looks are attracting from the Algerian men, Ms. Bartoli’s Isabella smiles knowingly. Ah, they’re just like Italian men, she seems to be thinking. No problem.

Still, even though this is manifestly a comedy, it was a little disconcerting to watch in 2018. Isabella can handle herself and defuse male threats easily. But I was newly aware that she might have a sister, or female friends back home, who couldn’t.

Part of that sisterhood is a character I would never have thought to pair with Isabella: Salome. Mr. Castellucci’s surreal production made Salome’s weird fascination with Jochanaan seem, for once, psychologically plausible. In a world driven by domineering men (including God, the ultimate male authority figure for Salome), Jochanaan is not out for himself. Salome needs to figure out why. Ms. Grigorian sang Salome with a plaintive radiance that few sopranos summon. The conductor Franz Welser-Möst drew out every lushly lyrical strand of Strauss’s teeming and volatile score, played brilliantly by the Vienna Philharmonic.

In Mr. Castellucci’s boldest touch, Salome does not perform her famous Dance of the Seven Veils for her leering stepfather, King Herod (John Daszak). Instead, Ms. Grigorian, alone on stage and nearly naked, is tied by ropes to a stone platform for the entire 10-minute sequence. I’ve never seen a more mesmerizing rendering.

Aspects of Salzburg’s “Poppea” also touched on themes of power, ambition and sexism. But the frustrating production — designed, directed and choreographed by the artist Jan Lauwers — essentially turned the opera into a dance piece. Though the gifted young dancers created some magical sequences, during whole stretches crucial interactions between the singers in the cast got lost amid nonstop, often frenetic movement. Worst of all, throughout the opera — three hours of music — a tag team of dancers took turns spinning continually in place atop a round platform at the center of the stage. If the goal was to entrance the audience, it didn’t work. I found it annoying and pretentious.

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Is ‘The Bassarids’ an Operatic Masterpiece, or ‘Strauss Turned Sour’?

The New York Times

By Seth Colter Walls

It’s a strange, seductive story. A young man becomes king. The king becomes a bit overconfident, deciding to test his power against a charismatic stranger’s worshipers. This stranger — it turns out he’s the god of wine and dance — responds by ensorcelling members of the royal family. Eventually, the king loses his head: to his own mother, a follower of the new cult.

The composer Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) was approached with this streamlined adaptation of Euripides’s “The Bacchae” in 1963, and eventually created “The Bassarids,” which is getting a rare revival at the Salzburg Festival in Austria through Aug. 26.

When he first gave the subject serious thought, the 37-year-old Henze was already well known; his Fifth Symphony had just had its premiere with the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein. He had been writing operas for more than a decade, starting with his first full-length work for the stage, “Boulevard Solitude,” a jagged (and sometimes jazzy) take on the “Manon Lescaut” story.

But when Henze received the draft libretto for a Euripidean opera from the poets W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, he set it aside. In an essay later collected in his book “Music and Politics,” Henze wrote, “I was prevented from starting work on ‘The Bassarids’ straight away by the feeling that I still had to grow into it.”

Instead, he began work on a comic opera, “The Young Lord.” He also conducted; he later suggested that the experience of leading works by Schubert and Brahms seasoned him for the challenges of Auden and Kallman’s text. A year later, he felt he’d put in enough preparation, and began writing.

If the story of “The Bassarids” wasn’t a surprise, Henze’s music was. It had dodecaphonic (or atonal) elements but was not rigidly conceived in that language, the one preferred by Pierre Boulez and other titans of the post-World War II avant-garde. Nor was the sound a pure throwback that would delight Romantics weary of modernism. Instead, the score managed a rare balance of experimental and traditional effects. In his autobiography, “Bohemian Fifths,” Henze described himself as a Mahlerian, while also approvingly quoting a critic who called the opera “Strauss turned sour.”

This synthesis was not unanimously hailed at the opera’s premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 1966. Writing for The New York Times in 1974, Peter Heyworth recalled seeing the then-chair of London’s Royal Opera House leaping from his seat “like a scalded cat” at the curtain. But it was exactly what Auden, in particular, had wanted.

“I am convinced that Hans has written a masterpiece,” he wrote in a letter quoted in the complete edition of his librettos with Kallman.

The work soon found champions — most prominent among them Christoph von Dohnanyi, who not only conducted the premiere, but also campaigned for the work in the United States, presenting it in Cleveland and New York. Its return to Salzburg this month, in a staging by Krzysztof Warlikowski, is conducted by another of its supporters, Kent Nagano. In a phone interview between rehearsals, Mr. Nagano described “The Bassarids” as an opera that works “at the highest state of refinement.”

“It is based upon layered tonalities,” he said. “Sometimes you feel it’s a forerunner of what today we might call spectral music.”

Mr. Nagano said that when he led the opera in the 1980s, he felt Henze’s language to be progressive. But “now, from the perspective of 2018,” he added, “we see many of the dramatic gestures that Henze makes in ‘new music’ or even in popular music. The way that various elements of tonality will collide with each other — and, at the end, produce a resonance, upon which it makes room for a very lyric quality.”

Markus Hinterhäuser, a pianist and the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, described the orthodoxy of the mid-20th century. “There was Stockhausen, there was Nono, there was Boulez,” he said. “There was a very defined monopole about what contemporary music grammar could be. And Henze was apart from that.”

Mr. Hinterhäuser said he admires the work’s political dimensions: “It’s the incredible conflict between the ecstasy — the passion — and the reason. Who triumphs over this question?”

Pretty clearly Dionysius, right?

“Yeah, of course,” he replied. “This is the victory of the ecstasy. But you can also interpret it so that it’s the victory of the total hedonistic world. And now it becomes very political, the whole thing. Looking at our very specific situation, our lives. Where is it going, this world?”

Mr. Hinterhäuser declined to be pinned down about these contemporary resonances, especially before rehearsals for the new staging were complete. But Mr. Nagano offered one way of placing the Euripidean conflict in our time, noting that, “as we confront the new and rapid evolution of the technical world that we live in,” questions of what is rational and what is irrational have become “regular and dominant social topics.”

Henze’s oratorio “Das Floss der Medusa” was presented in its late-1990s revision earlier this year in Amsterdam.CreditMonika Rittersh

Auden, for his part, was wary of tidy summations of the work, or overtly allegorical analyses of it. Responding to Henze’s request for an essay that could be included in the program, Auden wrote, “I am very much against trying to state a myth in abstract logical terms, which rob it of all its resonance, e.g., if one starts talking about recent history, one will have fools saying that Dionysus is Hitler.”

And the opera itself changes its already ambiguous meaning depending on the version you encounter. At the Salzburg premiere in 1966, there was an Intermezzo that included some attractive music at the king’s expense. (Auden and Kallman have their Queen Agave editorialize about her son: “My dear, I thought he’d never end. ‘I am Pentheus, King of Thebes. Obey me. Answer.’ He may be King. He’ll never make a dancer.”) The creative team also created a myth-within-a-myth dream scene, “The Judgment of Calliope.”

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At Salzburg Festival, Two Bold Directors Claim Their Stages

The New York Times

By Anthony Tommasini

SALZBURG, Austria — The American director Lydia Steier was 9 years old when “The Princess Bride” was released. She pays homage to that popular 1987 Rob Reiner film in her charming, and mysterious, production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” here at the Salzburg Festival.

In the film a grandfather reads a bedtime story to his video-gaming grandson, who at first resists the tale of romance and adventure but becomes completely engrossed. Ms. Steier borrows that framing device for her staging of Mozart’s fairy-tale opera, presented at the main festival hall.

Here a grandfather, whom we first see at dinner with his prosperous family in a house that suggests Vienna just before World War I, reads “The Magic Flute,” a story he seems to know well, to his three grandsons. The grandfather’s engaging narrative, written by Ms. Steier and the dramaturge Ina Karr, is refashioned from the opera’s spoken dialogue, usually the most awkward element of any production. And the actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, no less, makes a touching grandfather.

In the multilevel set we see circus posters plastered to the walls of the boys’ bedroom and shelves crammed with toy soldiers. As the grandfather reads the story, the boys imagine it taking place in their home with people from their lives transformed into the characters. Three sullen servants become the Three Ladies who serve the Queen of the Night. The boys’ petulant mother becomes that forbidding Queen (the brilliant soprano Albina Shagimuratova). A jocular household employee becomes Papageno (the hearty bass-baritone Adam Plachetka).

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A Cri de Coeur in a Pool of Milk: Decoding ‘Salome’ in Salzburg

The New York Times

By Joshua Barone

SALZBURG, Austria — So much almost happens in Romeo Castellucci’s new production of Strauss’s “Salome,” playing at the Salzburg Festival through Aug. 27 and streaming online at medici.tv through Oct. 28.

In this staging, it’s as if desire were a dissonant chord torturously on the verge of resolution. King Herod wants a dance from Salome that never happens; Salome wants the head of Jochanaan, but it never comes; viewers want to make sense of Mr. Castellucci’s images, but they likely never will.

In place of the classic scenes audiences might expect, Mr. Castellucci delivers a stream of enigmas. During Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils, the entire cast leaves the stage except for her. She lies on Herod’s throne — a brass cube with the letters “saxa” (Latin for “stones”) carved in it — in a fetal position, until a stone cube descends from above and seems to swallow her.

In the final monologue, Salome — sung with shocking ferocity by the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Gregorian — delivers her cri de coeur while standing in a shallow pool of milk. With her are two objects: the head of a horse, which earlier had served as an avatar for Jochanaan, and the headless corpse of Jochanaan, sitting upright in a chair.

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Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra

The Economist 

THE birth of Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), in 1931, was modest, not to say eccentric. Milton Schwartz, a local violinist, later described being approached by a “seedy-looking person in an old coat” who announced: “I am here to form a symphony orchestra. I just heard you play and I like you very much.” 

The person was Hans Kindler, then the principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Kindler was well-respected, but his reputation—and those of several subsequent music directors, including the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich—never managed to elevate the NSO to the orchestral big league. The New York Philharmonic, the Boston and Chicago symphonies, and the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras are all considered superior, as are the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera and London ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). Until now, at least.

Last year the NSO hired Gianandrea Noseda, an Italian conductor, as its music director. In recent years he has revitalised Turin’s Teatro Regio; he is also principal guest conductor of the LSO. Improving an orchestra, Mr Noseda explains, is a less tangible business than turning around a company: “You have to make the musicians feel that they’re burning in their hearts and souls.” The players, however, cannot simply be instructed to ignite. As Mr Noseda points out, “you don’t get there through philosophy, but through rehearsals.”

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What’s on TV Wednesday: medici.tv

The New York Times

By Andrew Chow

VERBIER FESTIVAL on medici.tv. Elite classical musicians from around the world are currently gathered in the Alpine Swiss village of Verbier for a festival, which celebrates its 25th year. For 10 straight hours, the festival will be streamed online — with performances, interviews and archival footage. At 5 a.m., two young and virtuosic musicians — the Romanian cellist Andrei Ionita and the South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho — will play a recital of Beethoven, Schumann and more. The main gala concert will begin at noon, with a star-studded lineup that includes the pianists Evgeny Kissin and Yuja Wang; the violinists Lisa Batiashvili, Leonidas Kavakos and Pamela Frank; and the conductor and pianist Andras Schiff.

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Noseda to Replace Luisi as Zurich Opera music director

Associated Press

By Ronald Blum

Gianandrea Noseda will become general music director of the Zurich Opera in the 2021-22 season, adding to his position as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.

The 54-year-old conductor’s new post was announced Monday, 2½ months after he quit as music director of the Teatro Regio Torino in Italy following the hiring of a new superintendent, who canceled a planned 2019 U.S. tour.

As part of the agreement with Zurich, Noseda will conduct a new production of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs),” directed by Andreas Homoki, whose contact as artistic director the Zurich Opera was extended Monday by three years until 2025.

Noseda will replace Fabio Luisi, who will leave one season earlier than planned. Luisi agreed last month to become music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 2020-21.

“With the offer of the Ring Cycle, it was particularly difficult to say no,” Noseda said, “especially being asked by a German-speaking theater. I thought it was a nice opportunity for me to dig more inside the German culture.”

Noseda plans to spend four to five months annually in Zurich and conduct two new productions, two revivals and several symphonic concerts each season.

He will retain his post in Washington, which started last fall, and his other primary job as co-principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, which began in 2016-2017. He also is principal guest conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, principal conductor of the Orquestra de Cadaques in Spain and artistic director of the Stresa Festival in Italy.

Noseda conducted two productions in Zurich in the spring of 2017, a new staging of Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel” by Calixto Bieito and a revival of Verdi’s “Macbeth.” The Ring productions likely will start in 2022.

“I admire his energy and his passion,” Homoki said. “He always sees the bigger picture and is interested in theatrical issues, and he’s open for new interpretations. He’s a really a good partner for me, which also can inspire me and also push me.”

Homoki said Noseda topped recent annual polls of the orchestra on favorite conductors it worked with each season. Homoki had not expected Noseda to leave Turin.

“I was a little shocked,” he said.

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Zurich Opera names Gianandrea Noseda as new general music director

The Washington Post

By Anne Midgette

Gianandrea Noseda will be the next general music director of the Zurich Opera in the 2021-2022 season and will conduct his first “Ring” cycle there, directed by Andreas Homoki. The company made the announcement at a news conference in Zurich on Monday.

He replaces Fabio Luisi, who, the company also announced, will be leaving his post a year early. Luisi was recently announced as the next music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

The move is a result of the ongoing game of musical chairs in top posts of international classical music institutions. The initial announcement was to be that Homoki, Zurich’s general director, was extending his contract through 2025. But Luisi, Homoki says, came to him a few months ago and said that he had decided not to extend his own contract. As a result, Homoki and Luisi agreed that Luisi would leave a year earlier, in 2021, to give his successor four seasons to work with — and to give him room to plan the “Ring” that Homoki had long dreamed of doing.

Noseda was available because he resigned his longtime post at the Teatro Regio in Torino, Italy, in April.

“It was unexpected for me, too,” said Noseda, reached by phone in St. Petersburg, where he was conducting in the White Nights Festival. “After the situation in Torino, I had decided to leave the opera a little bit aside, take a little break” — apart, of course, from engagements at the Metropolitan Opera, where he will open a new production of “Adriana Lecouvreur” this year on New Year’s Eve. “Came this telephone call, ‘I want to do a “Ring” with you,’ Andreas Homoki. It was difficult to say no.”

Noseda has been doing more German repertoire in recent years, including “Tristan und Isolde” in Torino. This will be his first “Ring” — as well as Homoki’s. It will begin with “Das Rheingold” in the 2021-2022 season.

Homoki, reached by phone in Zurich, says he’s eager to work with Noseda. “He first conducted here two years ago,” he said, “and he then led ‘The Fiery Angel’ and a series of ‘Macbeth.’ He left a great impression. He was one of the top names I wanted to have here.” When Luisi told him that he had decided not to extend his contract, Homoki says, Noseda “was at the top of my very short shortlist.”

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A ‘Ring’ Lures the Conductor Gianandrea Noseda to Zurich

The New York Times

By Michael Cooper

July 2, 2018

Like many courtships, this one was sealed with a ring.

The Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, had left an operatic post this spring at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy, amid administrative and political upheaval. The Zurich Opera House came calling.

“I said, ‘Do you want to be my chief conductor?’” Andreas Homoki, the artistic director in Zurich, recalled recently. Then he offered Mr. Noseda the icing on the cake: “I said, ‘Do you wanted to do the ‘Ring’ with me?’”

Mr. Noseda thought it over, and decided that the chance to conduct Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle for the first time, in a new production, was impossible to refuse.

“It is difficult to resist when a new ‘Ring’ is on the table,” Mr. Noseda said in a telephone interview.

Within a few days he had agreed to take the job. Mr. Noseda will become the next general music director in Zurich in 2021, the company announced on Monday, and will begin a new “Ring,” directed by Mr. Homoki, in the spring of 2022.

Mr. Noseda will succeed Fabio Luisi, the former principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, who is leaving Zurich to become the next music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

It is the rare case of musical chairs in which everybody gets a seat. Mr. Homoki, whose Zurich contract runs through 2025, said that Mr. Noseda’s unexpected departure for Torino had come just at the right moment: “Normally all the good conductors are committed.”

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