WAHNFRIED (Avner Dorman) Karlsruhe 2017 Matthias Wohlbrecht, Christina Niessen, Barbara Dobrzanska, Andrew Watts
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Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Wahnfried
- Composer: Dorman Avner
- Libretto: Lutz Hübner, Sarah Nemitz Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Germany
- Recorded: January 28, 2017
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: Matthias Wohlbrecht, Christina Niessen, Barbara Dobrzanska, Andrew Watts, Ina Schlingensiepen, Agnieszka Tomaszewska, Armin Kolarczyk, Eleazar Rodriguez, Renatus Meszar, Jaco Venter, Konstantin Gorny, Irina Simmes
- Conductor: Justin Brown
- Orchestra: Badische Staatskapelle
- Chorus: Badisches Staatsorchester
- Chorus Master: Ulrich Wagner
Information about the Recording
- Format: DVD
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- This Recording is NOT AVAILABLE from a proper commercial or public source
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
The Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe brought the story of the Wagner clan to the stage as a brilliant spectacle. The contrasting and dazzling music comes from the Israeli-American composer Avner Dorman.
WAHNFRIED – BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND TRAUMATIC MOMENTS
Hermann Levi soon appears on stage, a friendly, forgiving gentleman who has to deal with characters like Cosima and Richard who are rather skeptical of him and who also suffers from vehement self-hatred. Levi joins the extensive cast, which includes various Wagners such as Konstantin Gorny – who plays the revolutionary Bakunin with real and vocal fireworks – and Eleazar Rodriguez as the magnificently dark “master disciple” Hitler.
The librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz want to tell a lot, the spectrum ranges from biographical details and conflicts in the clan to traumatic moments – such as Siegfried Wagner’s suffering because of his homosexuality. People are upset about an early form of lying press, vulgo: bad reporting, and fight for success, reputation, artistic truth. Again and again, the subjects and motifs condense into one figure: no, not in the original German total work of art Wagner, but in the British Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who left his first wife Anna for Richard’s daughter Eva and otherwise spread predominantly right-wing ideas. The dominance of the Aryan race was a given for him, and director Keith Warner shows his fanatical desire to become German, to be German, in moments that get under your skin.
BETWEEN BAYREUTH FESTIVAL HALL AND VILLA WAHNFRIED
Warner sets the action on the stage of the Bayreuth Festival Hall. When the famous, idiosyncratically gathered curtain rises, you are sometimes looked at by spectators, sometimes by choral extras, and then suddenly by participants in a “Meistersinger” production. The seating and design of the hall are somewhere in the middle between the Festspielhaus and Villa Wahnfried, Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth retreat in the city. What sounds a bit crude actually fits together wonderfully. Keith Warner has a knack for the surprising bang effect as well as the delicate, he effortlessly combines the concrete and the surreal. After initially feeling at ease with Christina Nissen as Cosima and Agnieszka Tomaszewska as Eva, Matthias Wohlbrecht as the viciously sonorous Chamberlain finds himself increasingly confronted with a “Wagner demon” who causes unrest after the master’s death.
Quoted from BR-Klassik