Two years ago LAPhil created the project by
playing an act of the great Wagnerian romance each night coupled with other music that in some
way related to Wagner, finally performing a complete presentation of the three-act masterpiece.
This year the complementary composer was Debussy, and after three one act evenings at The
Disney Concert Hall (and at Avery Fisher Hall in New York the following week), two full
performances were played, under the musical direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. Your observer was
at the second Los Angeles presentation, April 24.
These were concert performances, the so-called “project” elements being a semi-staging by
director Peter Sellars supported by Bill Viola’s visual projections seen on a huge screen above
and behind the orchestra, while singers were in their usual places next to the conductor, though
they occasionally appeared in other locations in the hall for certain scenes. For example, the
beginning of the Liebesnacht (Act II) had Isolde in a balcony on one side of the hall, Tristan
opposite; gradually the singers merged onto the stage for the final moments of the duet.
Brangaene sang her warnings from an uppermost balcony above and behind the stage. It was not
as radical or innovative as LAPhil seemed to think, or advertise, and at times Sellars’ efforts
proved to be more distracting than elucidating of Wagner’s drama.
Most puzzling were Viola’s projections. They were hardly high art, and I found they did little to
support the music or action of Tristan und Isolde. For the most part they were of great specificity,
too great: when the sea was mentioned in Wagner’s text, the screen showed sea; when the
thwarted passion of Tristan and Isolde was referred to in Act I, Viola presented two actors filmed
in a slow-motion strip finally standing entirely nude (some members of the audience departed at
that point), and then dissolved into streams of water pouring over their hands, and so on, for three
long acts. In the passionate Liebesnacht duet of Act II, Viola filled the screen with a huge
conflagration of orange flames, as if Wagner’s music and text had not already made the point. I
ultimately paid little attention to the visuals, which simply became clichÈd backdrops for, in fact,
the singers were acting on their own and often quite effectively. I was impressed that the
presenters were trying to spoon-feed Wagner to audiences that were presumably unfamiliar with
the material. Nothing could have been more pointless; the Los Angeles audience that I saw was
mature, sophisticated, and knew what they were hearing.
What they heard was a vocally ravishing presentation by Christine Brewer (Isolde) and Anne
Sophie von Otter (Brangaene), and instrumentalists of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, of
Wagner’s seminal score of passion, driven but unfulfilled, ultimately resolved in the Liebestod
when death closed all wounds. Conductor Salonen and his musicians contributed a clean and
clear, if uneventful, reading and the two leading sopranos could hardly have been bettered in any
opera house of the world.
The locus of these performances is important, not only because Disney Hall is the home of the
splendid Los Angeles Philharmonic, but also because it is a singularly eccentric room, one that
does not seem particularly well suited to a presentation of big vocal music in such a manner. As
is well known, Disney Hall was the brain child of Salonen working with architect Frank Gehry,
and it proved of long gestation and difficult birth, with many delays and cost overruns during its
design and construction. When Disney finally opened in 2003, what we found was a
medium-sized hall shaped more-or-less like an old style bath tub, all grandly made of wood and
beautifully decorated, with the orchestra space occupying about half the main floor. The rest of
that floor is for audience, and several tiered terraces that run entirely around the arena-like room
comprise the balance of the seating. Thus, music emanates from about the center of the room,
and in the midst of the audience. The acoustical effect seemed, in the Tristan presentation, to be
that of ‘surround-sound;’ the sound source seemed generalized, lacking in point and origin. One
feels he is sitting in the middle of it all, at times not exactly certain whence the musical stream is
coming. Odd as this sounds, the arrangement can work well for the orchestra and for
instrumental music. The hall is acoustically well balanced, perhaps with a slight prominence to
bass frequencies, and has a fine ability to blend sound. Salonen and his players are now
accustomed to making music there and they do so elegantly. Yet, ironically, with the
commanding voices of Brewer, von Otter and the other singers, there was in the acoustic a
certain lack of ‘presence.’ The voices were generally audible, and crisp top notes would ring and
resound in the hall; yet, the over-all tonal effect of the singing was a bit diffuse, even dim,
especially for audience members located behind the singers and orchestra, which comprised quite
a few. In a conventional proscenium hall, I expect the vocal experience would have been more
satisfying, more in keeping with the nature of Wagner’s opera. LAPhil deserves high marks for
trying to be innovative with this repertory piece, but the efforts of Messrs. Sellars, Viola and
Salonen did not quite come off.
American soprano Christine Brewer is a unique singer. She calls herself a “big lyric soprano,”
and I think that is a fair description. This is not a hard or piercing, laser-like voice of classic
Wagnerians such as Birgit Nilsson or Gwyneth Jones; far from it. Brewer’s tones are soft-edged,
often floated in mellowness and a wonderful variety of color. Her singing of Isolde’s love music
in Act II was exquisitely modulated, and with light orchestration under it, floated hauntingly
through the hall. The powerful singing required in Act I was also there, but it did not bowl one
over through sheer volume. Brewer is well versed in the role, having sung it for a half dozen
years, her German text and musical moods are convincing and apt, and her pitch in this difficult
chromatic score was rock solid. She is a large handsome woman with great energy and musical
integrity; when it comes time to hear her concept of Isolde in a favorable hall (such as the
Metropolitan Opera) she could make Wagnerian musical history.
The Swedish mezzo soprano, Anne Sophie von Otter, famed for her Mozart and Strauss opera
and lieder performances, was essaying Brangaene for the first time. Her bright appealing voice
was entirely up to the task and her textual reading superlative.
LAPhil’s male singers were considerably less impressive. The experienced German tenor
Christian Franz had good routine in his title part and represented Tristan’s emotions and agonies
with effective body language. It was a pleasure to hear his idiomatic German, and to witness his
command of the role’s drama. Alas, his voice was often inaudible, and when heard was afflicted
with roughness and, when he was not shouting out his top, a shallow, sometimes under-pitched
tone. In the response to King Mark’s address in Act I, Franz used a near-parlando to get his
words across, and he found a measure of sympathetic appeal. I wish I could say this was an
adequate vocal performance, but it was not. John Relyea worked hard to portray the angry King
Mark, but he seemed young in the role and his fine bass voice a bit labored. The Finnish
bass-baritone Jukka Rasilainen played Tristan’s companion Kurwenal with assurance if not with
much beauty of voice or dignity of action. Other parts were taken by Thomas Rolf Truhitte as
Melot, Michael Slattery as the Sailor’s Voice and Shepherd and Jinyoung Jang as the Steersman.
Men of the Los Angeles Master Chorale were reliable and precise under the strong direction of
Grant Gershon. They managed to end Act I with considerable excitement.
I have saved Esa-Pekka Salonen for last, for in Wagner the conductor is most often of the
greatest importance, the first among equals. While the New Yorker magazine reports, in an
article titled “The Anti-Maestro” [April 30], on these performances that Salonen “was precise in
rhythm and rich in timbre; few conductors give as clean a beat or have so acute an ear for
combinations of sounds,” indeed I found those qualities, but not much more — and there it lots
more to conducting Wagner. There was also mention of “an unchecked heat in the playing” of the
Los Angeles Philharmonic. Such heat as I heard was generated by Mme. Brewer and some of the
other singers. I had to conclude, based on this hearing, that Salonen is not much the Wagnerian.
He reminded me of Pierre Boulez in this repertory, just let the music play itself and don’t do
much. Sometimes that’s not a bad idea. But Salonen had minimal feel for shaping the Wagnerian
phrase or the play and accents of dynamics. The big effects were in place; the nuances were not,
and the sinuous eroticism of the love duet never took hold. From the first opening chords of the
Vorspiel the Wagnerian mysterioso was absent. By the resolution of the ‘Tristan chord’ at the
close of the Liebestod, we knew we’d heard an eventful Tristan, but one in which some of the parts
were decidedly more interesting than the whole.
© J. A. Van Sant 2007
image=http://www.operatoday.com/Tristan_Isolde_Waterhouse.png
image_description=Tristan and Isolde with the Potion by William Waterhouse (1916)
product=yes
product_title=Above: Tristan and Isolde with the Potion by William Waterhouse (1916)