Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier  Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Asher Fisch, dir. Dieter Kaegi, designer Bruno Schwengl,  Marion Oliver Mc Caw Hall, Seattle, 12.08.2006 (BJ)

 

 

“Life: Consider the alternative,” urged a celebrated advertising slogan some years ago for a certain American news magazine. When that matchless pianist-polemicist Glenn Gould, in a 1962 essay titled An Argument for Richard Strauss, described the composer as “quite simply . . . the greatest musical figure who has lived in this century,” he provoked a number of usually decorous commentators into vociferous disagreement. Yet, when you come to think about it, the other choices are again not exactly overwhelming.

In various circles, and in various quarters of the globe, Stravinsky and Bartók would have their supporters for the championship title, as would Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and Hindemith, and Nielsen and Sibelius, and Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten, and a handful of more recent figures that it would be invidious to single out here from their colleagues. Nor should it be forgotten that Mahler, Puccini, and Rachmaninoff all lived, and did a fair proportion of their creative work, in the century Gould was speaking of. But when all these are named, it is still by no means certain that Strauss must take a back seat to anyone for sheer irresistible musical invention. He may on occasion have taken wrong turnings in his creative–as in his political–life; he may, being humanly fond of the material advantages that derived from his art, have compromised sometimes in what idealists see as a reprehensible fashion; but he produces for many listeners, at least as strongly as any of his contemporaries or successors, the inescapable feeling that music was in his very bones.

That feeling was powerfully evoked by Seattle Opera’s revival this season of its 1997 production of Der Rosenkavalier, staged by Dieter Kaegi with sets and costumes by Bruno Schwengl. You could say that Strauss was a throwback. Here he was, writing opulently tonal music, at a time when the cumulative effect of innovations by composers from Wagner and Liszt to Mahler and Schoenberg was calling the viability of such a method seriously in question. Still, when in the last act Seattle’s Octavian, abashed by the Marschallin’s kindness, addressed “Marie Theres’,” in a little phrase rising from supertonic to subdominant, all the rich mix of love, tenderness, admiration, and embarrassment implicit in the situation made its unmistakable impact heard in Strauss’ music and in Alice Coote’s voice, demonstrating yet again the resilient survival of tonality, in the face of competition from other musical techniques, as an incomparable expressive as well as formal resource.

Ah, yes–Alice Coote. It is high time I turned to the specifics of this performance and left such general observations to germinate in your mind as they may. One of two English principals in the cast, Ms. Coote was making her company debut, and she adorned the role of Octavian gloriously from start to finish, both with her vivid acting and with her extraordinarily sumptuous voice. I have previously had occasion to admire her work in reviewing a recording of Handel’s Choice of Hercules, and her triumph now in this very different music served to underline her status as one of the finest young mezzos to be heard anywhere today. Her compatriot Peter Rose is already a known and admired quantity in Seattle, where he has previously been seen and heard in Tristan und Isolde and Rusalka. His sonorous bass, impressive even though he was apparently feeling less than well on this particular evening, and commanding presence made a formidable figure of Baron Ochs, his lecherous cynicism proof against every rebuff until the comprehensive comeuppance he suffers in the last act. As Sophie, Julianne Gearhart was promoted from understudy when the singer originally announced for the role became indisposed, and she seized her opportunity to brilliant effect, fully matching the efforts of her more experienced colleagues. Last season, when she sang Bach’s cantata Jauchzet Gott with the Seattle Symphony, I described her as “a young singer with a sweet and flexible voice [who] demonstrated musicality and technique enough to hold out promise of a considerable talent in the making.” A few short months later, that talent has been substantially realized. She has strengthened her line without sacrificing any of the lightness and charm of her vocal production; her portrayal of a wide-eyed ingénue who yet possesses deep potential reserves of character was compelling; and she looks lovely, which is no bad thing in a Sophie.

In the other crucial role, Carol Vaness was appearing for the first time as the Marschallin. In dramatic terms, this was an exhaustively thought-out, thoroughly convincing, and infallibly touching assumption. She too, in the different style of the part, looked lovely, and she created a totally convincing picture of a woman not yet middle-aged, yet painfully conscious of the passing years: “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar’ Ding”–“Time is a strange thing.” It was in the passage just after that observation, when the Marschallin confesses to Octavian, “Often I get up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks,” that Ms. Vaness achieved her finest singing, fining her tone down to a still, small filament to conjure up a moving aural image of approaching desolation. For the rest–though I hesitate to say it, for I admire her so much, and she presents so utterly sympathetic a figure on stage that I wanted to love everything she did–her vocal command was not yet that of a great Marschallin. The tone was as beautiful as ever, but there were too many phrases that sounded less than fully supported or quite purposeful in shaping. There can be little doubt, nevertheless, that if she can put such matters right, Carol Vaness could be a Marschallin among the greatest.

Among the less central roles, Wolfgang Holzmair, as Faninal, made his company debut. This was luxury casting indeed. It was a pleasure to hear a singer associated more particularly with German Lieder filling the opera house with his splendid tones, though the nobility of the sound was slightly incongruous coming from so venal a character as Sophie’s snobbish father–the effect was somewhat reminiscent of the vocally majestic Hans Hotter’s attempts at impersonating villains. Vinson Cole offered a suitably over-the-top version of the score’s satirized Italian Tenor, Graciela Araya and Doug Jones made an appropriately dangerous pair as the two spies, Annina and Valzacchi, and Barry Johnson, Mary McLaughlin, William Saetre, and Andrew Greenan contributed effective cameos as the Notary, the Duenna Marianne, the Innkeeper, and the Police Commissioner.

Dieter Kaegi’s production, presumably the same in physical terms as when it was first seen nine years ago, strikes an excellent balance between grandeur and intimacy, and between humor and sentiment. I thought the darkening of the stage and the flashing of strobe-lights to mark the Rose Knight’s arrival in Act II a trivial and unnecessary touch, and I missed the candle or lantern with which the page Mohammed traditionally looks for Sophie’s dropped handkerchief in the last scene of all, but in every major respect this was a worthy and indeed delightful staging of Strauss’ great work. Bruno Schwengl’s sets were attractive and unfussily functional–the third act being set, unconventionally but very successfully, not in the inn itself but in its garden. And Asher Fish’s conducting covered himself and the company’s superb orchestra with glory. I have encountered few opera orchestras anywhere capable of realizing the brilliance, warmth, and luminosity of Strauss’ writing so bewitchingly. There is an old statement of preference that goes, “If Richard, Wagner; if Strauss, Johann.” Well, speaking for myself, I should be delighted if Speight Jenkins’s substantially Wagner-oriented company could see its way to shifting its emphasis rather more toward Richard the Second.

 

 

Bernard Jacobson