It was a very useful thing to see these two productions back to back, especially for young Tanayut, the Thai violin student who has been with me on and off here. At the Staatsoper we saw a production with amazing orchestral playing, singers who were never less than extremely good, and a consistent and relevant interpretation. The Staatsoper's production of Simon Boccanegra was conservative in terms of costume and staging — the setting wasn't moved to a Nazi concentration camp and the blocking was quite basic and mostly of the "stand and sing" variety. But I don't mind that; it's how I grew up with opera and it can be distracting to have to sit through the masturbatory fantasies of a stage director who isn't attuned to the musical core of an opera. Myung Wun-Chung didn't exactly go all out in terms of Italianate phrasing but the orchestral playing was idiomatic and sensitive and always technically perfect.
Bratislava's Aida was a pretty wild performance. There was a fair amount of spectacle, and an American soprano in blackface playing the lead (I think ...). The choreography was frequent and pseudo-Egyptian. There were a lot of people on stage. It wasn't the greatest Aida I've ever seen, but it had many good points. Of particular interest to me was the choreographer's bizarre notion of Egyptian dancing.


The tenor who sang Radamès in Bratislava's Aida wasn't that dreadful; he was just out of his depth, running out of energy by the end of the first act; he could only get through the entire opera by really pushing. But unless you have a Herculean tenor in your stable, the role will just kill your leading man off. Even world class tenors have been defeated by Radames. One could name quite a few, but one doesn't like to speak ill of the dead. Also, the Amneris was striking, and beautfiful as well.
It might have been a jolt to go from the world's finest opera house with the world's finest orchestra to your typical European opera house in a mid-sized metropolis. But the Slovak National Opera is great value for money. The most expensive seats are 30 euros and I noticed that the place was absolutely crammed with German speakers. Apparently they drive down from Vienna for the opera all the time and indeed for most of the history of Austria-Hungary, Bratislava was a suburb of Vienna (they're something like 30 miles apart, so it's like L.A. and Palmdale.) For most of the history we study in school, Bratislava was Preßburg, a German-speaking city with a huge Hungarian population and only a tiny Slovak one; it was even the capital of Hungary at one stage. It has really only become a Slovak city within living memory; after some populations drifted away and others were forcibly expelled after the WWII.
Today is a day of calm where I'm able to catch up on some paperwork; tomorrow the Bratislava competition begins seriously.
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