10 days in Berlin for the Edinburgh Music Review
Seven operas, two concerts and a little art and architecture!
This was the sum of the visit to Berlin by the editors of the Edinburgh Music Review. It was a busy but a rewarding experience.
The new production of Wagner’s Ring was the major reason for the visit. This had been planned for some years by the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin by its musical director Daniel Barenboim. Delayed by Covid, when it finally got under way in October, Barenboim was sadly too ill to conduct and Christian Thielemann, currently chief conductor at Staatskapelle Dresden, was a very able substitute in the first and third cycles. The EMR got review tickets for the second cycle of the Ring, also very ably conducted, this time by Barenboim’s young assistant and Kapellmeister at the Staatsoper, Thomas Guggeis. The Berlin Staatskapelle was excellent throughout and the singers were on the whole very good. Sadly, the production under the direction of Dmitri Tcherniakov was in my view very disappointing, as you will see in our reviews of the operas in the EMR. This Ring Cycle suffered from the operatic disease of “Regietheater” (director’s theatre), which allows the director to ignore the plot, the libretto and sometimes even the music in their attempt to “modernise” the opera. Germany is particularly prone to this operatic disease and the production team was met by loud boos in the first week of the Ring, - as one of my fellow opera-goers said on my first night at ‘Das Rheingold’, “we Germans don’t feel we get our money’s worth unless we can boo the production”!
If proof were needed (and it was after the first two operas of The Ring) the Staatsoper showed that it can produce high quality opera, when it slipped in on vacant nights between the Ring operas a few performances of ‘Il Trovatore’. It was excellent, well staged with great choreography and chorus singing and some very fine individual singing. We haven’t reviewed it as it was a late addition to our schedule and we paid for our tickets! Christine also saw a “modernised” ‘Falstaff’ at the Komische Oper, directed by Australian director Barrie Kosky, one of the earliest and most successful exponents of “Regietheater”. I remember vividly his ‘Carmen’ at Covent Garden where the only set was a staircase and where Carmen after being assassinated got up, dusted herself down and walked off the stage, as if to say, “it’s only an opera you know”!
Finally we saw Rossini’s ‘Semiramide’ at the Deutsche Oper, the other big opera house in Berlin. Sadly, they are rebuilding the opera house stage, so we saw a semi-staged version in the nearby Haus der Berliner Festspiele. It was well done and gratifyingly the star of the evening was Scottish mezzo soprano Beth Taylor who has featured regularly in the EMR in recent years. In addition we saw two excellent concerts in the Berlin Philharmonic which are reviewed in the EMR. Finally we had great visits to the Neue Nationalgalerie on Potsdamerstraβe, the newly re-opened Museum of Classical Modernism in a stunning building designed by Mies van der Rohe, of Bauhaus fame and opened for the first time in 1968. The New National Gallery had a little musical item in the shape of a piano with a hole in it, and a pianist who played Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ backwards as she walked the piano round the gallery! Despite this, gallery and its collection is superb. Finally we had breakfast in Norman Foster’s Reichstag Dome, feeling quite at home since Norman Foster designed the Quartermile, Edinburgh’s new ‘city’, which is where the headquarters of the EMR are!
