Trovatore - Munich Festival 2013

© Bayerische Staatsoper

This year the opening of the Munich Opera Festival is consecrated to Verdi celebrating his 200 birthday with a new production of Il Trovatore directed by the French  Olivier Py. As expected we had a lot of action or better movement on stage. Everything is turning - the whole stage with monstrous building of no clear significance, small metal constructions being turned by stage workers and single wheels hanging around. All is black fitting to the dark content of the story. Sometimes bright white corners appear for intimate scenes of Manrico and Aazucena in a kind of hospital cell or the sleeping room for Manrico and Eleonore. She actually is blind and needs guiding in her life. Olivier Py intends to put on scene everything what is part of the story and sung. So we have a series of single scenes but we got no clear picture of the story. All gets weird and inhomogenous on stage - apart from the singing. The cast is best class and brilliantly matching. We see Jonas Kaufmann (role debut) and Anja Harteros a perfect match by look, appearance and singing. His voice impresses more and more by the soft, warm sound and voluminous timbre and achieves height timidly demonstrated by the stretta. Anja Harteros, forgotten by the director, can beautiful explore the potentials of her voice. Soft, easy and safe she conducts her voice through the evening. She gives her singing a lot of emotion, expression and artistic flavour. Elena Manistina joins them as a powerful Azucena both in singing and appearence with her young and fresh mezzo. Alexey Markov as Count Luna shows well the potential in his voice. He is another example of young Russian voices with lighter Italian styled timbre and elasticity.

Kwanyoun Chul is a safe bet as Ferrando.Paolo Carignani heads the orchestra. He is luckily not affected by the confusion and hectic on stage. He guides the orchestra and the singers smoothly through the dark story, gives them all room for emotionand expression. He combines nicely the erotic lovestory next to the battlefield environment and creates a very italian driven Verdi sound. The audience is thrilled by the singers and orchestra but did not accept the directors team´s interpretation.