The Italian Tenor (Caspar Singh) and the Italian Soprano (Nika Goric) center, in Tobias Hoheisel's set with paneling from an 18th-century room at its heart. Johan Persson
Tobias Hoheisel’s set consists of a modernist, Mies van der Rohe-style house with the paneling from an 18th-century room at its center, like a collected object. The rear wall is glazed and looks out onto a terrace. At Santa Fe, this gave a view of the hills beyond the opera house, but in Garsington, this is simply evoked with lighting.
Costumes are loosely 1940s, with Miah Persson wearing a pair of extremely striking outfits, which seem somewhat later in date than the rest of the costuming.
Premiering in Munich in 1942, Strauss’s final opera completely avoids any sense of the war and the troubles that lay behind life at the time. It can seem a somewhat sweet confection, with a group of aristocrats arguing about music, words, and art. But for Strauss, this was a subject that really mattered, and for the opera to work, we have to believe that these people really do care intently about art, that it is one of the most important things in their life.
The opera is very wordy, very conversational, and there is always a limiting factor when hearing it in German with surtitles. Like intermezzo, there is a good argument for performing opera in the language of the audience.
But Albery’s very physical production has the virtue of making us believe that these people really do care that what goes on in this room matters. All concerned were highly involved, and there was a strong sense of competitive dialogue.
Miah Persson, in one of her stylish gowns. Johan Persson
Strauss filled the opera with jokes, often musical ones. Though we do not always laugh at its performances nowadays, this one is funny, in the right way. At times, the performance veers toward physical comedy, especially in the scene where Olivier and Flamand gang up on La Roche and try to decry his old-fashioned ideas for staging opera. This physical aspect of the performance, combined with Douglas Boyd and the Garsington Opera Orchestra in the pit, creates a robustness to the music that pushes the opera from the conversational to the more conventionally operatic. The big moments tended to flower as dramatic, operatic moments rather than flow as pure conversation. Yet, the result was to convince us that these people really mean what they say.
The Star: Miah Persson
The big plus for the production was Miah Persson’s Countess: elegant, stylish, and completely at ease with the sheer wordiness of the role. The Countess might have one of Strauss’s most ravishing scenes in the closing pages of the opera, but to get there the singer must cope with two hours of complex dialogue. Persson makes it all seem natural and elegantly intense, as she showed a vivid sense of the words and the dialogue going on around her.
