Photo © Catherine Ashmore
Placido Domingo is set to star in a very special production of Rigoletto – filmed on location in the streets of Mantua, Italy, and broadcast live on the BBC over two nights, September 4th and 5th.
Verdi’s middle period masterpiece tells the tale of the eponymous court jester in his bid to save his daughter from the lascivious Duke of Mantua.
Instead of taking to the stage, director Vittorio Storaro is setting the action upon the city streets and amidst real buildings. Filming this way presents an extraordinary challenge, requiring some of the camera techniques he no doubt picked up as a director of feature films, such as Apocalypse Now.
This innovative approach to an opera that is 160 years old begs the question: what other opera productions have been tackled in ways either inspired or insane?
Photo © Ruth Walz
De Nederlandse Opera never shies away from a bold idea; its 2009 production of Cavalli’s Ercole Amante was nothing short of a surreal spectacle.
Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli’s opera buffa, or comic opera, was intended as a wedding present for Louis IV in 1660. The scale of the production meant the premiere was two years late. Almost 450 years later, the DNO production has valiantly upheld this opera’s tradition for ambition.
Director David Alden conspired with his team to produce a visually stunning opera bestowed with a giant baby, plunges into the underworld, rivers, fish, seahorses and the sun. The central figure is a larger-than-life Hercules made up of one part bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni and two parts paper mache muscles.
Photo © Betel Aleman
From the surreal to the deadly serious. Calixto Bieito’s vision of Alban Berg’s twentieth century opera Wozzeck caused controversy when it was performed in 2006. Berg’s modernist masterpiece exploring the exploitation of the poor is portrayed as an industrialised hell-on-earth, haunted by death and violence throughout.
Franz Hawlata sings the part of the beleaguered Wozzeck, on his inevitable path towards murder, in a startling production that cleaved the critics’ opinions.
Photo © Marco Borggreve
John Adam’s 2005 opera Doctor Atomic tells the story of the Manhattan Project, following physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues and wife in the run up to the test of the first atomic bomb.
Director Peter Sellars was responsible for a 2008 production, featuring those friends of the experimental, the DNO. One clue that this opera is a little different is that Sellars wrote the libretto for Adam’s score and was thus involved from the very start.
The innovations in this production are difficult to extricate from those of the opera itself. The warping of time in act two allows characters to express anxiety about testing the bomb by slowing the inevitable progress towards the event. The intense and complex emotional journey of the characters is underpinned throughout by close camera work and rapid editing, building a cinematic quality into the theatrical experience.
Photo © Marco Borggreve
Bellini’s beautiful 19th century opera Norma tells the tale of a druid high-priestess, approaching middle age, who discovers her partner intends to run away with a younger woman.
Guy Joosten’s vision of Norma retains the emotive core of the opera – the betrayal and bitterness felt by the titular character – and cleverly builds the plot around the concept of staging an opera production. Thus, Norma becomes the prima donna assoluta, whereas her love rival Adalgisa is cast as the seconda donna, and Pollione, the Roman consul and the father of Norma’s children, is here an impresario.
Hasmik Papian and Irini Tsirakidis take on the respective female roles, clearly relishing the novel direction as much as the illustrious score.
Photo © Roman Winding
Angela Gheorgiu and her husband Roberto Alagna star in Benoit Jacquot’s acclaimed film version of Tosca, Puccini’s dramatic opera from 1900. Unlike a stage performance committed to celluloid, Jacquot’s vision was mostly shot in a studio in Germany.
But the action flits from the story to scenes of the singers in a recording studio, laying down the vocals that they then subsequently perform to. Jacquot had wanted the singing to be live but budget restraints would not allow it. This set back nevertheless provided him with the studio footage that gives the film its strange, ‘making of’ quality – something which also helped elevate it to universal critical success.
