Richard Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (Christian Thielemann, Renée Fleming) [2009]

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Richard Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (Christian Thielemann, Renée Fleming) [2009]

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The controversial 1995 Salzburg/Paris co-production of Der Rosenkavalier received a well-deserved revival at the Baden-Baden Festival in 2009. Now on DVD, Herbert Wernicke’s 15-year-old approach turns out to be curiously middle-of-the-road.
Wernicke’s fascination with mirrors proves fruitful here, creating a giant Rorschach test, fractured and multiplied on a vast scale, to provide a riveting visual framing of the artifice and actuality of the work, interweaving drama and comedy, male and female, youth and maturity, pretence and reality, that makes it all appear indissolubly tied together.
Against vast mirrored walls, characters are duplicated into infinity to magnify the intense tangle of relationships, while accentuating the passage of time, and, ultimately, encircling both audience and conductor – who appears at moments as a fleeting participant in the on-stage proceedings. At the end, music and mirrors seem to make time stand still as the whole artifice becomes reality. Bittersweet and, certainly, inspiring.
Unquestionably, in conductor Christian Thielemann’s words, a “galactic cast”, top honors go to Renée Fleming’s Marschallin, finally on DVD. Vocally sublime, her meticulous and aristocratic portrait clearly benefits from her years in the role, making her an illustrious successor to Lisa Della Casa and Sena Jurinac. Diana Damrau’s delectably antique-accented appearance – one that calls to mind a porcelain German doll from the 1930s – adds to her immaculate Sophie an irresistible aura of college student, while gallant French mezzo Sophie Koch is hilarious as the disguised Mariandel and a passionately youthful, if at times uneven, Octavian.
Baron Ochs is intelligently sung by Franz Hawlata, and if veteran Franz Grundheber is luxury casting as Faninal, the same applies to Jonas Kaufmann’s Singer. Wernicke dares to replace the servant Mohammed with a Pierrot (Uli Kirsch) who adds sweet irony and a dollop of kitsch to the Viennese masquerade to remind us that we are closer to the Roaring Twenties than to Maria Theresa baroque filigree. Last, but not least, making their opera debut, the Munich Philharmonic, venerable exponents of Strauss, gives a performance for the ages.
For American audiences, traditional productions of this “Comedy for Music”, like the classic 1961 Paul Czinner film from Salzburg with Schwarzkopf/Jurinac/Karajan (Kultur) still work the best. More adventurous are Welser-Möst/Bechtolf from Zurich with a nostalgic Nina Stemme (EMI, 2005) and the spectacularly staged, also updated – it ends with the events prior to the First World War – Robert Carsen account from Salzburg in 2004 (TDK).
But will the Metropolitan Opera release the recent superb Fleming/Graham account in its HD [High Definition] series? It would make an excellent tribute to Graham’s last Octavian and to Fleming’s sovereignty as the Marschallin in both traditional productions, or, like this recommendable one from Baden-Baden, in modern settings.

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Richard Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (Christian Thielemann, Renée Fleming) [2009]

Close