"A mix of futurism à la 'Metropolis,' fantasy à la 'Batman' and quotes from
Piranesi's 'Carceri,' juxtaposed in the form of photo montages, enhanced
with ... robots, a helicopter, a shark and the winged vehicle of a pop star
Pope," effuses critic Marianne Zelger-Vogt (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). The
object of her rapture is not a Broadway musical but a French opera written
in the 1830s, Hector Berlioz's "Benvenuto Cellini. The absence of the work
in the operatic repertoire is certainly due in part to its musical
excesses: the work is so complex, richly detailed and prolifically
imaginative that Berlioz's contemporaries considered it unplayable and
unsingable.
This is resoundingly proven false in the 2007 Salzburg Festival production
of director Philipp Stölzl, conductor Valery Gergiev ("the wild man of
music") and a high-caliber cast accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic and
its chorus. Stölzl, above all, has poured his experience as director of
music videos (for Madonna, Mick Jagger and others), commercials and films
into this project, termed "science fiction for Grand Opera" (Süddeutsche
Zeitung), "breathtaking" (Der Standard), and "spectacularly successful"
(F.A.Z.)
Berlioz hips the action forward by disguising his hero, the celebrated
goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), as a monk and having
him attempt to elope with Teresa, the daughter of the papal treasurer,
during the night of the carnival. In the turmoil, a man is killed. Cellini
is accused of murder and can only be saved if he finishes a statue for the
Pope within a few hours. In a prodigious effort, he melts all his other
works to have enough metal and completes the statue - saving his life and
winning the hand of Teresa.
With its many vocal ensembes and massed choruses, the music sometimes
recalls Gounod and Offenbach. But the orchestration is typically
Berliozian: excesses of sound, razor-sharp contours, jagged breaks.
Conductor Valery Gergiev "pulled out all the stops. He whips the Vienna
Philharmonic into a delirium similar to that which possibly took hold of
the composer. The result was an unremittingly exalted atmosphere..."
(Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, Der Standard). Of vital importance to this
concept are the bravura performances of Burkhard Fritz as a supple,
temperamental Cellini and the 26-year-old Latvian soprano Maja Kovalevska
as Teresa, a "vocal delight" and "Salzburg discovery." Kovalevska, however,
is only one of countless discoveries to be made in this rousing production.
