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Handel - Rinaldo / Bicket, Daniels, York, Prinzregententheater MunichRating:
Release Date: 11 November, 2003 Retail Price: $29.95 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $2.96! Cast: |
Handel - Rinaldo / Bicket, Daniels, York, Prinzregententheater Munich Reviews
Watch with a blindfold for best enjoyment
Oh dear...
Is there some sort of rule in Director School that states "Do not stage in period. Wherever possible, be tasteless, be vulgar, ensure that your staging has nothing to do with the music, and above all, make the singers do very stupid things"?
I suspect many modern directors live in deadly fear of not being avant-garde. They must wake in terrible fear in the middle of the night, having suffered a nightmare of having produced a "traditional" opera. Oh shame, shame, shame... What a horror to avoid, because after all, it would prove nothing but that the director's mind is unoriginal and that he cannot be piquant and daring, brave and contemporary... right?
Hmm. Is it not time for directors to realise that they are NOT being original in creating a visual mess like the one presented in this DVD? Every second director is doing it - so where is the originality? The audiences must be seeing through the lack of scholarly thought involved in a "just make it vulgar" setting.
This setting is nothing short of an insult to Handel's glorious music. It looks like a combination of a Las Vegas wedding chapel and a cheap Chinese hotel-by-the-hour - all flash and plastic, no substance.
The poor Almirena is forced into a hideous pair of granny glasses with equally hideous dress and pious expression, clutching a Bible and leaping into a nun's habit just before being abducted. In her "Lascia, ch'io pianga" aria, sung while she is held in the power of the sorceress, she looks like a lavender moth squashed against the glass. It's not her fault... and I think the horrid production adversely affected Deborah York's singing. She is otherwise quite nice to hear - it's only in that ravishing aria that the poor soprano doesn't really have the chance to let her voice spin the music.
David Daniels is always a delight to hear, and he does his best in the role of Rinaldo. But as he is dressed up as a gangster, for no conceivable reason, one cannot think of him as a Christian knight, or indeed as anything in particular. What a waste of his fine voice and beautiful ability to ravish us with his voice.
Daniel Taylor, another beautiful countertenor, also does his best with his role, and he too wears a gangster-style suit - again, one is at a loss to explain why.
The Armida, another soprano, isn't quite what I'd have wanted to hear as far as timbre goes, although she is a suitably attractive woman. But her outfits do nothing but make her look like a cabaret singer who's inadvertently strayed into an opera by mistake.
For the most part, the singers are fine - and the instrumental playing is gorgeous.
The plot simply does not make sense in this setting. It's silly, but worse than silly - it seems as though the director didn't have a clue what this opera was about. Did he think it was a tongue-in-cheek joke? Did he think Handel cannot be enjoyed except with men groping inside their flies, plastic statues exposing themselves, and women either tartily sexy or as solemn as nuns in a "Carry on" film?
The silly staging DOES affect the singing. I can hear the singers trying to make it sound "funny" - no doubt on instruction from the director.
Had the staging not been so silly, this would have been a 4 and a half star performance. As it is, it's something I can simply NOT watch with enjoyment, and I doubt I will be watching it again. I'm not even tempted to LISTEN to it in preference to watching, because I have perfectly wonderful CDs of "Rinaldo" - two absolutely gorgeous ones, and one that's only there as a historical relic.
I'm sorry... most of the singers are terrific, but the setting utterly ruins this DVD. And unfortunately, so far there's no other version available. I shall have to keep looking...
Do your homework FIRST, and then. . . .
This over the top production reads like an inside joke from beginning to end: if you
don't already know what's going on, you'll NEVER figure it out from this production. I
usually hate these modern dress Euro-trash productions, but I actually found this one
clever. There are more male sopranos that you can shake a stick at, but Daniels is
of course, the stand out. David Walker is no slouch either. There are too many inside
jokes to even list, but my favorite is the costuming of the Mago as a New Orleans
style voo doo conjure man: he seems to have escaped from a never written Tennessee
Williams play. Noemi Nadelmann is a knock out as Armida: sexy as all get out and sings up a storm, as does Egils Sinins as Argante. This must be one of the first instances of the evil sexy couple vs. the good
clean (and sort of sexy) couple in opera: I kept thinking Mimi/Rudolfo:Marcello/Musetta for some reason.
This all said, the one thing that gets a little left out of the picture with this production is the MUSIC: the cast is encumbered with all manner of strange and
funny stage business. Everyone sings well, but you sometimes forget to LISTEN, so
odd are the things the singers are called upon to do, especially Almirena's cheerleading/chicken wing bits. Whereas this is interesting if you ALREADY know the story,
if this were your intro to Rinaldo, you would leave the viewing completely confused. I kept wondering what MUST have been going through the minds of the singers, too,
as they valiantly sing killer coloratura while acting supremely silly.
I can recommend this DVD like I would recommend a vodka martini to one who already loves the gin variety . . .VERY different, and you just might like it.
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