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Ticket alert: The Swell Season, a.k.a. Once, a.k.a. Hansard and Irglova
Published at 12:51pm
Video
From a musical perspective, this performance from the 2006 Salzburg Festival ranks among the best accounts of Mozart’s opera available. Ebony-voiced Ildebrando d’Arcangelo makes a dashing, idiomatic Figaro. The stunning Anna Netrebko, in her true element as a lyric soprano, is as wonderful as Susanna as she was at sea in the Met’s Puritani. Dorothea Röschmann creates an impassioned, sonorous Countess. Nikolaus Harnoncourt offers musically excellent, flexible tempi and a full text (including both oft-omitted Act IV arias); the orchestral playing is flawless.
Claus Guth’s somber black-and-white modernist staging stresses anomie, especially in Bo Skovhus’s neurasthenic Count—brilliantly acted, if nasally sung. Christine Schäefer, by contrast, looks downright frumpy as the adolescent Cherubino but sounds excellent for once. Well-filmed and often insightful, Guth’s work regrettably deploys Regietheater clichés: a gratuitous wheelchair (for Bartolo), Sellarsesque hand gestures and much groping and clutching. As the Almavivas evidently own no furniture, the characters all too often collapse on the floor. (This visual vocabulary already seems as dated as what it claimed to replace.)
Most annoying is the requisite Invented Extra Character: here, a mimed cherub (Uli Kirsch, a superannuated Tadzio) who spreads the “love bug” around the castle with apples and feathers, and whom Guth cannot bear to leave offstage for a single important scene. His presence seems intended to underscore the sexual tensions: Susanna and the Count, and to an extent Cherubino and the Countess, already seem to be lovers. Odd. Still, it’s pretty glorious to hear.
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