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SALZBURG, Austria – The public has spoken.
Any fears at the Salzburg festival that conductor Theodor Currentzis’ presence there would spark boos or disruptive protests were allayed on Tuesday. Since the invasion of Ukraine began, he has sparked controversy over Russian state support for him and his MusicAeterna ensemble, as well as their silence on the war and ties to associates of that country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. But at the opening of a new double bill led by Currentzis and featuring members of the MusicAeterna choir, the audience responded with nothing but applause.
The festival itself was under scrutiny to stand next to Currentzis. Unlike, say, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which has taken a hard line against Russian artists linked to Putin, such as Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko, Salzburg is closely monitoring the European Union’s sanctions list and said in a statement, “We see no basis for artistic or economic collaboration with institutions or individuals who identify with this war, its instigators or their goals.’
Do Currentzis and MusicAeterna fall into this category? Based in St. Petersburg, they are primarily sponsored by VTB Bank, a Russian state institution that was sanctioned this year, and some prominent Russian officials sit on the board of the ensemble’s foundation. As a collective, it has no public position on the war, although organizations and critics mostly demand one from the safety of their Western perches.
At the very least, Curentzis seems to have fallen into careerist behavior. Since 2004, he has built MusicAeterna to the international reputation it enjoys, and as the ensemble went freelance in recent years, found Russian funding, which has since been revealed to be insolvent. To survive in the West without scandal, it needs a new home and new sponsors. And the longer this war continues, the more silence will become as impossible as the group’s current position.
In an interview Monday, Markus Hinterhauser, artistic director of the Salzburg festival, said that if people were looking for a statement from Currentzis, “the signs are there.” His work subtly condemns Russian state beliefs as well as the country’s troubled 20th-century history; and in 2017 he was outspoken about the arrest of director Kirill Serebrennikov, which was widely seen as punishment for his theater, which was critical of life under Putin.
The examples could go on in both directions. But outwardly Curentzis remains a mystery. If his past projects have offered signs of his beliefs, there were few if any policy revelations in Tuesday’s twin bill. All that remained to be judged was the creation of the art itself.
And it was something of a continuation of Currentzis’ collaboration with Castellucci last year: a setting of Mozart’s Don Giovanni here that stretched the score an hour beyond its usual running time, with a recitative delivered at the speed of snowmelt in the nearby Alps. I remember spending four hours in the Grosses Festspielhaus trying to understand why such an interpretation was necessary; I still do not have a response.
Both men are strong-willed, provocative authors. Individually, they were capable of inspiring work; together, they seem to mutually enable a tantalizing self-indulgence. Their Bartok and Orff, therefore, made for an uneven evening, as double bills can be – Bluebeard with the wrong tempo and dynamics but committed performances and the Comoedia, for all the work’s flaws, performed more convincingly by Herbert von An original recording by Karajan, in a characteristically monumental setting, but somewhat pompous.
The evening was again longer than it should have been. Each score contains about an hour of music; with an intermission, the double set lasted just over three and a half hours, partly because of the choice of tempo, but mostly because the Orff scenes were padded with new, atmospheric transition passages written by Currentzis. It lengthened a piece that few found enjoyable to begin with and for which Castellucci had little to say.
His greatest interpretive statement was in linking the two works, which did not seem to share much more than different scales of apocalyptic events. In Bluebeard, it’s intimate, the slow-burning drama of a wife who reveals the tormented world of her new husband, to their destruction. And in The Comedy, which premiered in Salzburg in 1973, it is cosmic, with an impersonal, aggressively Christian vision of the end of time.
Castellucci has the spoken prologue of “Bluebeard,” a cameo role called the Bard, given with a declamatory grandeur later matched by the musicalized speech of the “Comoedia.” (The bard is also played by Christian Reiner, who returns at the end of Orff as Lucifer.) And he connects the action of the first opera to the second: Bluebeard and his wife Judith, Castellucci suggests, are here an established couple grieving the loss of their child them and into a dreamy, dark void of only water and fire. Peace comes to them at the end of the “Comoedia,” where they return in an act of redemption that makes Judith a sort of Eve who brings universal salvation.
Elsewhere, visual motifs—masks, costumes, and even stains—recur in both works, which are otherwise aesthetically distinct. The problem is that these Easter eggs, along with the more overt gestures and stylized movements choreographed by Cindy Van Acker, exist more to justify the double bill than to elevate the meaning and, crucially, the emotional impact of the two works. Both Bartók and Orff come away feeling less operatic about it.
Not that emotion was missing from the performance. As Judith, soprano Ausrine Stundyte made a strange take on the character – constantly on the verge of self-immolation – at least compelling, with a ferocious humanity largely absent from the production. (Her counterpart, bass Mika Kares, was a resonant but wooden Bluebeard, a passive presence where he had to outdo her unraveling.) Gustav Mahler’s youthful orchestra played with organic unpredictability yet skillful precision, and brought an animal intensity to Orff.
Where they misstepped, they followed Kurentzi’s baton, which was less sure-footed than when he and the orchestra performed a moving, profound account of Shostakovich’s Babi Yar Symphony during the festival’s Ouverture Spirituelle last week. His reading of Bluebeard, an opera of accumulative power, was a reading of lush tempo and high emotional temperature, with nowhere to go but occasional crests that drowned out the singers, despite the power of Standith’s hair-raising voice.
Even so, Currentzis take on Orff – realized by the orchestra with a playful combination of the MusicAeterna choir, the Bachchor Salzburg and the Salzburger Festspiele und Theater Kinderchor – was a triumph that reveled in the work’s primitive, ritualistic nature and rose to tinkling clashes you could feel deeply in your ears.
In an evening of searching for cues in Currentzis’ work, it was hard to miss that his podium was empty during the final, pre-recorded moments of the “Comoedia” score. So he was nowhere to be seen as one sentence splashed across the title screens above the stage: Pater, peccavi. Father, I have sinned.
Bluebeard’s Castle and the comedy The End of Times
Until Aug 20 at Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at.
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