Opera festivals have moved most of their programming online this year, but the offerings, such as Salzburg’s virtually viewable production of Strauss’s ‘Elektra,’ remain tempting.
By Heidi Waleson
Aug. 14, 2020
5:02 pm ET
Like so many other things, summer festivals and festival travel have mostly fallen victim to the coronavirus pandemic, but opera fans can still approximate the experience.
Some festivals in Europe are giving live performances under altered conditions. The Salzburg Festival, for example, is celebrating its 100th anniversary inside its theaters with a revised program, temperature checks, and socially distanced audiences. Six of the scheduled seven operas were postponed, but Strauss’s “Elektra,” in a new production by Krzysztof Warlikowski, went on as planned, and can be viewed for free for 30 days via medici.tv beginning on Aug. 16 (registration required). Mr. Warlikowski’s arresting modern-dress staging plumbs everybody’s trauma, starting with an interpolated spoken prologue in which Klytämnestra (the intense Tanja Ariane Baumgartner) explains why she murdered Agamemnon in the first place.
The whole household is a mess as a result—Mr. Warlikowski includes a mimed vignette of a naked woman being sacrificed to assuage Klytämnestra’s guilt. Ausrine Stundyte’s Elektra is fragile and unstable; her bright, crystalline soprano conveys vulnerability rather than stony fanaticism. Derek Welton’s Orest is a gentle soul maddened by the revenge murder he must commit. Unusually, Asmik Grigorian’s thrillingly sung Chrysothemis is the toughest of the siblings, and, it seems, the survivor. Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic is tensile and sumptuous by turns. We miss out by being unable to see at once the whole stage picture—which includes pantomimed scenes inside a plexiglass “house,” as well as video—but the character close-ups were compelling.
The festival’s history is examined in “Great World Theatre—The Salzburg Festival Centenary” at the Salzburg Museum. The website describes each exhibit room—one intriguing display, “Don Giovanni Buys a Pair of Lederhosen,” explores how Austrian traditional dress, or tracht, became a Salzburg style, symbolic of the perennial tension between conservatism and modernism in the festival. The exhibition is on through October 2021, so if Americans are able to travel to Europe next summer, they can see it—and the festival—for themselves.
In England, Glyndebourne took a more modest live performance route, presenting chamber concerts and an 18th-century opera in its gardens for small audiences. It is also offering free streams of archival performances on YouTube.
Through Aug. 23, you can catch another family murder fest—Brett Dean’s gripping “Hamlet,” commissioned by the company and given its premiere in 2017. With Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, deftly extracted from Shakespeare, and a dramatically varied score (electronic effects, a whispering chorus, an accordion, and a pair of twittering countertenors as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are only a few of its elements), this skillfully constructed piece places the listener inside Hamlet’s precipitous mental disintegration. The stellar cast includes tenor Allan Clayton, mesmerizing as the beleaguered Prince; Barbara Hannigan as an unhinged, but never pathetic, Ophelia; and John Tomlinson as the Ghost, Player One, and the Gravedigger. Vladimir Jurowski sculpts the London Philharmonic. Next, from Aug. 23 through 30, is “The Fairy Queen,” in Jonathan Kent’s playful production that combines Purcell’s masque with Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” conducted by William Christie.
There’s no live Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival this summer, but you can revel in its often eccentric productions and always superb orchestra and chorus through recent and archival video performances presented in a partnership with Deutsche Grammophon via the news page of the festival’s website. Each opera stream costs 4.90 euros (about $5.75), is available for 48 hours, and is introduced by artists connected with the production. The final two weeks of the series feature “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” directed by Barrie Kosky (Aug. 19), “Tannhäuser” directed by Tobias Kratzer (Aug. 20), and “Parsifal” directed by Uwe Eric Laufenberg (Aug. 28). The touchstone event is the legendary “Ring” cycle directed by Patrice Chéreau and conducted by Pierre Boulez; these performances were filmed at its last outing, in 1980 (Aug. 24-29). The Chéreau “Ring,” with its social critique and explicitly naturalistic acting, caused a scandal at its premiere in 1976, but is now recognized as a landmark in Wagner production style.
The Edinburgh Festival has gone digital with “My Light Shines On,” a series of specially commissioned films, created on location under socially distanced conditions. Lyric theater is represented by the Scottish Opera’s witty version of Menotti’s comic short piece “The Telephone,” with singers Soraya Mafi and Jonathan McGovern, which demonstrates that technology’s siren call is even more potent today than it was at the time of the opera’s premiere in 1947.
American summer festivals have imaginatively made use of the virtual sphere as well. The Glimmerglass Festival is posting a series of “Glimmerglass Glimpses,” featuring its bucolic upstate New York landscape and new content linked to its 2020 repertoire and artists. In a charming, on-site film, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny sings Schubert lieder on the theater’s darkened stage and while rowing on Otsego Lake. Another gem explores Glimmerglass’s new youth opera, “The Jungle Book”: Composer Kamala Sankaram and dancer Preeti Vasudevan perform one of its arias and explain its underlying Indian music and dance techniques.
Across the country, the Santa Fe Opera posted five “Songs From the Santa Fe Opera” on YouTube via its website, a video for each of what would have been the opening nights of its Festival productions. Hosted by various artists and administrators in the open-air theater, framed by glorious Santa Fe sunsets, the segments combine anecdotes about the Santa Fe experience, background on the operas from dramaturge Cori Ellison, Zoom conversations, and solo performances, both on site and remote. Most bittersweet is the final edition, a celebration of what would have been the world premiere of Huang Ruo’s “M. Butterfly,” including the haunting aria “Awoke as a Butterfly,” sung from Paris by countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim. We can only hope to someday be able to hear the whole thing.
— Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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