Graz Opera - some ‘off season activities’
Graz Opera, June 11-12, 2024
In between four operas in Vienna we managed a couple of nights in Graz’s very beautiful opera house. It was the end of the opera season but Graz Opera sees itself as very much part of the community and has a wide range of different events for the community. We managed two of them - a ballet and a rare production of Kurt Weill’s musical ‘Tom Sawyer’.
The Edinburgh Music Review doesn’t normally review ballet apart from our excellent Highland reviewer Mary-Ann Connolly who is of course an ex-dancer. But this ballet was difficult to resist as it was based on the music of Bach, indeed some of his greatest music including from the cello suites, the Toccata and Fugue and choruses from the St Mathew Passion. Ballet Graz had assembled an excellent team of international dancers choreographed by three eminent international choreographers, Anne Jung, Pablo Girolami and Andonis Foniodakis. As often with ballet the music was produced from tape but was of a decent quality and gave a lovely background to the excellent dancing on the stage. The ballets were relatively abstract in their modern dance interpretations but the dancers were of a very high standard and indeed wouldn’t be out of place at Covent Garden, it made for a very pleasant evening in a lovely opera house.
The next morning we joined around a thousand very excited school children from Graz to view ‘Tom Sawyer’ by Kurt Weill. This is a great idea by Graz Opera to bring children in to the opera house and hopefully develop them into opera goers. (We noticed that the Vienna State Opera did something similar with Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro’ the following week.) Kurt Weill was of course based in America for many years and wrote several successful musicals for Broadway. Just before he died he wrote five songs for a prospective musical based on the life of Huckleberry Finn with book and lyrics supplied by Maxwell Anderson. After Weill’s death John Von Duffel wrote a stage version using Weill’s music and this was the version we saw at Graz and it was produced by the Komische Opera in Berlin where it was premiered in 2023.
Despite Weill’s radical background in Germany, and the presence of Barry Kosky at the Komische Opera, this is a fairly conventional musical both in musicality and in production. Set around the Mississippi it tells the story of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. With nice backdrops and costumes it creates the atmosphere well. I found the music underwhelming – like much of Weill’s American output –and although the singing was fine it didn’t grip me as a musical. Graz Opera orchestra were as usual excellent and our young audience seemed engaged and well behaved, with some very competent teachers suitably attired for an afternoon at the opera!
