You take a portrait of composer Carl Maria von Weber and chalk devil horns on it with a red felt-tip pen: look there Der Freischütz by Dutch National Opera in a nutshell. The performance, fitting for the opening night of the Holland Festival, was irreverent, sometimes too corny, but also infectiously enthusiastic and admirably resourceful.
In Germany Der Freischütz core repertoire; in the Netherlands we really only know the popular overture† The music is good, the communis opinio says, but yes, that story: old-fashioned hunting and forest folklore, told in sluggish spoken dialogues that go on for far too long, and that with a bad nationalistic odor. Reason for director Kirill Serebrennikov (last month in Cannes with his biopic Tchaikovsky’s wife to make a big guess: his production is about an opera company that Der Freischütz rehearses.
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Sounds artificial, and such a pontifical direction often creates friction. But it worked: the insecure fighter Max, who has to hit the mark to win Agatha’s hand and therefore sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a magic bullet, became singer Max (tenor Benjamin Bruns) who is terrified to hit the right notes. to miss. Serebrennikov completely deleted the German dialogues and already revealed the entire intrigue during the overture in a witty silent film that was filmed live on the stage.
Serebrennikov thus created space for ‘The Red One’ (actor Odin Biron), a diabolical ringmaster with a tomato-red outfit and a cowboy hat. This voice-over annex intriguer, charming and dirty, chatted in gnawing American about the opera company, about the singers and their fears and ambitions, with the opera gradually turning into one big metaphor. You didn’t look at the cardboard Freischütz characters, you looked at flesh-and-blood singers who had to interpret those characters, while they were battling their own demons, about which they spoke to the audience. Diva Agatha (soprano Johanni van Oostrum) despised all her colleagues, but was over her head herself; frisky soprano Ännchen (Ying Fang), former admirer, hated Agatha ardently; weeping flower Max brooded with his evaporated confidence.
Although the theater magic was systematically ironized and painted off, the singers had to really sing. And they did a fantastic job – the wonderfully boozy baritone Michael Wilmering even standing on his hands. Actor Biron sang with surprising falsetto three variety songs from the Freischütz remake The Black Rider (1990) from Tom Waits and Robert Wilson: Weber lost his voice when he accidentally drank nitric acid and it rhymed nicely with Waits’ gritty vocals.
Günther Groissböck was phenomenal as a baritone hunk with a masochistic reverence for the maestro who once gave him his first solo role. However, his worst nightmare comes true: when he goes to hell as the evil hunter Kaspar, he himself is swallowed again by the (great) choir. The maestro for whom the imposing Groissböck shuddered with comic effect was the very young Patrick Hahn. A lot happened that distracted from his pure sound beauty, but the formidable Concertgebouw Orchestra played under his leadership as you would expect. On Friday, the KCO will finally announce its new chief conductor: that could well be the precocious sensation Klaus Mäkelä.
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