The performances.

Unless a new work is involved, or perhaps something of sensationalistic notoriety about a production that has set the press’s collective brain aflame, performance is normally the first critical consideration in the world of real opera. And with Tristan und Isolde and a few other operas, the efforts of the conductor and orchestra could well take first position among the performance elements being evaluated. But here we are not in the world of real opera, and so I am distressed by how little I have to tell you about the labors of these two prestigious conductors, Kirill Petrenko and Sir Simon Rattle, and their splendid ensembles, the Bayerischer Staatsorchester and the LSO. With the eye nearly always hogging the attention, that faculty gives us the following order of finish: Win—Production Surprises; Place—Singingacting; Show: Conducting and Playing. There is simply too much to keep track of. A hearing of an audio-only version, with all due concentration on the orchestra, or a restoration of the opera’s natural sensory balances in live performance, would enable a responsible description. But I won’t be doing that right now, so I can only offer the following, based on my notes and recollections:

Neither reading is of my favorite sort, growing out of a dark sonority that emerges from the lower strings and woodwinds and brass, and moving at measured pace through the structural arcs to fateful destinations of tremendous force, beauty, and finality. These are both brighter and more propulsive, though tightly controlled. Both are extremely well played. At the scattered moments when orchestral gestures succeed in taking charge, or of collaborating with a voice to create a compelling sonic event, I am more taken by the sweep of Petrenko’s phrasing than by Rattle’s. I am more conscious, too, of the Bavarian orchestra’s restraint on behalf of its soloists than of the LSO with its, but this may due in part to my awareness of the calibration of several of these voices from opera house experience. That’s about all I would trust myself to say, or would trust from anyone else’s report on the basis of the video event, where the orchestras and conductors are concerned.

Before comparing individual performers in pairs (Isolde/Isolde, etc.), I’ll make one general statement about the singing, and with some exceptions that I’ll mark as I proceed, it is this: there is a depressing lack of the kind of sustained vocal engagement that enables the singer to work off a centered, continuous line along which inflectional changes (loud/soft, bright/dark, closed/open) can be made without serious disruptions in vibrato, loss of dynamic control,  obvious manipulations of position and detours around patches of bad road. And in some cases, there is little evidence that an effort is being made along those lines. The flexes and balances associated with the combination of legato and the messa di voce—the bonding of the even line with the swell-and-diminish—make only occasional cameo appearances. Even when good-sounding tones are to be heard, they are seldom organized into firm, guided phrases with clear points of emphasis and finished endings. Both aesthetically and rhetorically, much is missing. To some specifics: