Evidence is there's heavy withdrawal after SF Opera's sensational Summer Season, and, opera fans, this is why God made recordings. As usual, the industry inaugurates the European summer-festival season with videos of last year's biggies; this year, almost uncannily, the two most prominent ones feature perennial opera newsboy Christian Thielemann, grand wizard of the Bayreuth Festival and European opera's bully-in-chief.
But first some good news from free-to-view gay-opera central. One of the most recent offerings on Opera Platform, where international productions can be viewed for free for six months, is the Dutch National Opera's The Queen of Spades, theoperaplatform.eu/en/opera/tchaikovsky-queen-spades. It's a new production by Stefan Herheim, one of the Continent's leading directors. With Tchaikovsky the most famously gay of front-rank composers, Herheim adds (he only ever adds) the composer's interest in men as an element in his Queen.
Thielemann's reputation as a conductor is secure enough to permit asking an old question: Can a compromised person, politically and otherwise, make great music? The jury's out on whether he is a great interpreter of the central European concert repertoire, but most people are happy with him in the opera pit, where it helps that you see so little of him, and at Bayreuth nothing at all. Rule of thumb: If you liked Herbert von Karajan, you'll probably love Thielemann, bearing in mind that, at the end of his tenure, the Berlin Philharmonic threw Karajan out on his ear, and the present-day Philharmonikers voted politically far-right Thielemann out of the music director challenge on the first ballot.
It's said that what Thielemann envies most about Karajan is his predecessor's two Nazi Party cards. To watch Thielemann at his intimidating best, look no farther than his brittle performance of Strauss' Four Last Songs with born-to-sing-them soprano Anja Harteros (C-Major DVD); see creamy-voiced Harteros sing as nervously as if these were in fact the last four songs she'd ever sing, before the firing squad enters.
Thielemann holds roughly the same sway over the Salzburg Festival as Karajan did, the results similarly varying from the brilliant to the inflated, with little in-between. He's at his best in the 2015 Salzburg Easter Festival Cav-Pag (Sony). You'd think Italian verismo would be anathema to Thielemann, but he takes to Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci as if his wet nurse were from Sicily. He doesn't just serve up the red meat, he concentrates on the sauces, yielding some meltingly beautiful orchestral playing and choral singing. I thought I was done with both of these pieces, but have watched this set over and over.
It doesn't hurt that his Turridu and Canio are Jonas Kaufmann, in one of the most gripping, vocally glorious performances of his career. Like Placido Domingo before him, Kaufmann is the consummate ensemble performer, seeking to outshine no one else but making everyone around him reach. A bad production (e.g., the Met's Ring) can lick even him as an actor, but in both of these performances he marshals the physical dexterity of Charlie Chaplin with, in Pagliacci, the smoldering, volcanic menace of a Pacino. At full cry he banishes memory of anyone else in these roles, centerpieces of the tenor repertoire sung fresh.
Philipp Stoelzl's two-tiered, six-paneled production eats up every square centimeter of the enormous Grosses Festspielhaus stage, but uses all of it shrewdly. The ever-so-slightly jittery chorus could use a dose of Peter Sellars' direction, but they sing so gorgeously you beam like adoring parents. Liudmyla Monastryska's roof-raising Santuzza perfectly balances the seemingly ageless Stefania Toczyska's unyielding Mama Lucia in her Maggie-the-Cat glasses. Dimitri Platanias' monstrously malevolent Tonio in Pagliacci would steal the show if the lit fuse of Kaufmann's Canio weren't sparking away so inescapably.
Kaufmann's extraordinary run of Italian roles lately has deflected some of the mania for his yet-to-be-announced first Tristan (first, his Otello), but you can bet that it won't be under Thielemann's stick. DG has just released the maestro's televised Wagner Tristan und Isolde from last summer's Bayreuth Festival, almost simultaneously with the latest Thielemann scandal. A month before the opening of this summer's festival-opening new Parsifal �" rumored to have "an Islamic theme," which should calm everyone down �" its scheduled conductor, Andris Nelsons, fled the Green Hill over "various [artistic] differences," and particularly heavy interference by Thielemann, who has yet to bag a decent Parsifal (Nelsons has, in concert) and has nothing like the Latvian's collegiality.
Last summer, dangerously late, Thielemann dismissed the Isolde, Anja Kampe, from that Tristan over "differences," possibly her being the amour of Kirill Petrenko, who beat Thielemann out of the Berlin job, yet who was, at that very time, saving Thielemann's bacon, taking the helm of Bayreuth's disastrous Frank Castorf Ring, in which Kampe sang a triumphant Sieglinde. In the event, feisty Evelyn Herlitzius, a spitfire Heldensopran who knows her way around Thielemann, stepped in with an uncommonly focused if predictably fire-breathing Isolde, giving the Festspielhaus audience every shredded fiber of her being and the television audience her complete dental history.
When Wagner issued his famous (if ambiguous) call, "Children, make something new," he probably hadn't foreseen what his great-grandchildren might produce. After previous productions on the Green Hill that many thought vandalized The Master's work, Festival co-director and stage director Katharina Wagner calmed the troops with a merely mystifying Tristan set in a nuthouse (European directorial cliche of the season) on a hyperkinetic Jungle Jim only Bayreuth's state-of-the-art theater could operate. Stephen Gould's in-every-way huge Tristan matched Herlitzius' sexy Isolde cannily. Once upon a time, it was high praise to say that you weren't even aware of a great Wagner conductor. There's no getting around Christian.