Tonight, Munich is playing opera unstaged
OperaFollowing last night’s fiasco in Florence, tonight the Bavarian State Opera has been forced by industrial action to perform Rossini’s Barber of Seville in front of the safety curtain.
It’s part of a state-wide ‘warning strike’ by trade unions over pay and conditions.
Unlike Florence, at least there will be an orchestra and chorus. The musicians will be in the pit and arrangements have been made to seat the chorus in surrounding boxes.
Further shades of Meeting Venus. I really must rewatch that film!
I expect it’s all the fault of Brexit.
20 years ago, I attended a production of “Don Giovanni” in Paris. A strike was continuing with the stagehands and lighting folks. The singers went ahead and performed with no sets and no lighting. They improvised the entire night. It was one of the best performances of the opera I’ve witnessed…without the restrictions and interpretation of a director and with ridiculous sets. The performance was left in the hands of the artists who were left to tell the story as it was written. Maybe it should happen more often…bring on the strikes.
Bravo!
It was actually a fantastic performance. I really felt for Sean Michael Plumb, whose debut in the role of Figaro it was. Despite the absence of a set, the singers appeared, as if actually staged to do so, in costume and make-up in front of the iron curtain, which was acoustically a real boon. Everyone sang and performed bríliantly. The Orchestra fizzed under Antonino Fogliani and Alessandro Praticò, a 26 year-old Italian Repetiteur at the Bayerische Staatsoper, was simply genius on the Hammerflügel in the recits. A well-deserved standing ovation from the large, if not full, house. (There is also a 24-hour strike on German Rail from this evening, so many intended performance-goers were able to return their tickets and did not attend) Bravi tutti!
What a lucky audience!
All the terrible productions with which Munich and most german theatres are trying to kill opera could be could be cancelled without any artistic damage.
Save opera, perform it unstaged!