No Hum-Ta-Ta!

Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Alzira" is a rarity. Marcus Bosch makes it an event at the opera festival in Heidenheim through his conducting.

When Marcus Bosch calls, people come: the handpicked musicians of his Cappella Aquileia, founded in 2011, including the solo cellist from Palermo and the solo trumpeter from Ukraine. And the audience, which blindly trusts Bosch. The cosmopolitan conductor, with a residence and vineyard in Mallorca, a professorship in Munich, and a chief position with the North German Philharmonic Rostock, also chairman of the GMD conference, is passionate about the opera festival in his hometown of Heidenheim. They were founded sixty years ago, and since 2010 they have been under Bosch's artistic responsibility and have developed into a "must go" of the German summer festivals. Glamour plays no role here. Instead, there's a workload that Giuseppe Verdi would have categorised under "galley years". Only Bosch, after rehearsals during the day and performances in the evening, stands lively at the hotel bar, talking to everyone.

Firmly by his side is the flautist of the Cappella, Matthias Jochner, who also works as a cultural officer in Heidenheim. Together, they accomplish what cannot be done in regular operations: the chronological performance of all early Verdi operas, starting with the first "Oberto" (1839). Now, with number eight, they have reached perhaps his least known stage work, "Alzira" from 1845, a love triangle involving the Inca princess Alzira during the Spanish conquest. Why this "tragedia lirica" in a prologue and two acts, based on a play by Voltaire, has fallen into such obscurity - having only been shown in Germany shortly before the turn of the millennium in Passau - becomes incomprehensible after its revival in Heidenheim: every bar glows with Verdi, the choruses are powerful, the vocal parts are bravura numbers, the instrumentation even experimental: peripheral instruments like the viola, double basses, and cimbasso (bass trombone) "become the main thing," explains Bosch. Additionally, the solo clarinet acts as the soul bearer of the Inca leader Zamoro - a spinto role, perfectly suited for the high-altitude acrobat Sung Kyu Park. A quivering on the border of audibility, as later in "La Traviata," a cello solo in the finale like a matrix for Philip's great aria in the later "Don Carlo".

The enthusiasm came with the rehearsals, Bosch says, and it transfers to the audience. All reservations about Verdi's early works disappear with the precise reading of the score: "Do what is written" is Bosch's maxim, which means nothing more than reproducing the text "against the performance tradition". Often, traditions have to do with technical weaknesses that are then elevated to stylistic devices, explains Bosch. And young singers often need to rethink, so they follow the score and not the teacher's instructions. The view "That doesn't work" has no place with Bosch. With this interpretative care, every note in the recitatives of "Alzira", following the word gestures, ideally has a different character, and Verdi's often ridiculed hum-ta-ta is blown away because Bosch rhythmically differentiates even such stereotypes.

Even scenically, the crude conquest story in the context of religion can hold up today if understood with Bosch as a "gesture of reversal". Gusmano, the Spanish governor of Peru and Zamoro's opponent, pays for his fight over Alzira with his life, but forgives his murderer and even blesses the couple. Marian Pop embodied him with baritonal assertiveness. Director Andreas Baesler and costume designer Tanja Hofmann suggest the historical context on the wide stage of the Heidenheim Congress Center with sparse but effective means - ruff collars for the Spaniards, red ponchos and fringes for the Incas - and refer to the geographical location in Peru with projections. Andean peaks, the sun disk from the Inca capital Cusco, and a real cornfield enliven the dark stage.

The fabulous Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno also contributes dramatically, turning from actors into spectators, sometimes discreetly turning around when Father Ataliba (Gabriel Fortunas) visits his daughter Alzira. Ania Jeruc stands at the centre in every way: vocally in her single, murderous aria in the first act and the magnificent, ever more furious ensemble scenes, as well as an identification figure. She agrees to marry Gusmano only to save Zamoro.

The motto of this year's festival is "Strange Worlds," and after the Inca opera, the Cappella Aquileia concluded with a North American concert program. Dvořák's Symphony "From the New World" was a feast for the English horn player from Regensburg. It was preceded by the overture to "Girl Crazy" and the Concerto in F by George Gershwin, featuring the unbeatable pianist Frank Dupree, whose vitality ignited both orchestra and audience and continued in the encore of Duke Ellington's standard "Caravan". Dupree, himself a trained percussionist, had prepared it with three percussionists and a double bassist from the Cappella and improvised on piano and bongo.

Actually, the Heidenheim Opera Festival is an open-air event in the open knight's hall of Hellenstein Castle. But this summer had no understanding for it, so the second production, "Madame Butterfly" by Giacomo Puccini with the Stuttgart Philharmonic, also had to take place in the Congress Center. If Bosch reacts allergically to entrenched performance traditions with Verdi, then even more so with Puccini, from whom he eliminated all sentimentality and frothiness in favour of a characterological exploration with a psychopathological aim.

This was reflected in Rosetta Cucchi's production as a chamber play: One does not often see this opera in such a relentless disillusionment of a woman. Cio-Cio-San lives as a child-woman in a shell created by stage designer Tassilo Tesche, pushed around by all men - the marriage broker Goro (Musa Nkuna), Uncle Bonze (Alexander Teliga) - and caught in a delusion that Pinkerton loves her. Olga Busuioc exhausted herself in an almost frightening role transformation, between cries of lust and whispers, dream visions and loss of sanity. Héctor Sandoval, in a Hawaiian shirt with a whiskey bottle, is an American scoundrel, unfortunately not a dream man vocally either, while Gerrit Illenberger as consul Sharpless represents a perfect diplomat - a saviour of the American image

By Lotte Thaler

Photo © Franca Wrage