Wednesday, March 07, 2012

How to be part of Rox's Love album

We had a high old time on Saturday at the London premiere of Roxanna Panufnik's Four World Seasons. It's a far-flung take on the Four Seasons concept, integrating folk styles from around the world with Rox's distinctive, often bitonal harmonic voice. It manages to be original, imaginative and listenable without sacrificing one jot of character; and while demanding for the performers, it also looks and sounds enjoyable for them to play. Written for Tasmin Little and the London Mozart Players, it suited them down to the ground, and the Fairfield Halls audience gave it a warm welcome.

"Autumn in Albania" is full of Balkan rhythmic quirks and delicious folksy-Gypsyish slides; "Tibetan Winter" is an icy landscape haunted by a Tibetan "singing bowl"; "Spring in Japan" wakes up the earth from deep-rooted double basses through to the Japanese bush warbler on the fiddle; and "Indian Summer" is colourful, catchy and clever, transforming pizzicati on low strings into the flowing rhythms of the tabla, and turning Tasmin's violin into a singer. A terrific concert piece to put alongside those other Seasons from Vivaldi and Piazzolla - it's for the same forces, give or take the Tibetan singing bowl - and if recorded pronto, it ought to do well on Classic FM. Three days left to hear its world premiere from Basingstoke last Friday on BBC Radio 3's Listen Again, here.

Rox's fans might like to be part of her next album, Love Abide, which is devoted to 12 choral works on the theme of spiritual love as expressed through an eclectic variety of faiths and traditions. Here's what she has to say about it.
'Each work has a particular mood or sentiment around the theme of love, expressed in a musical language that echoes the origin of the words. I’ve drawn on writings from different faiths, from the 15th century Zen Master Ikkyu¯ So¯yun to the well-loved 1 Corinthians 13; from the Christian mass setting to the 14th Century Sufi poet Rumi to the ancient Psalm 102. The CD encapsulates the very contemporary ethos of multicultural spiritual devotion, in a world which is populated by different faiths – all feeling, as deeply and as aesthetically, the compelling potency of music with love'. 
Every piece on the disc will be dedicated as a personal gift for - or perhaps in memory of - a loved one. Sponsors/dedicatees could have the opportunity to be present at the recording session, where said loved one's photo and name can be circulated among the musicians so that they can perform with that person in mind. A dedication will be printed in the CD booklet and sponsors receive a signed, framed first page of the score as well as a signed recording.

The recording will be made by a top team including the LMP (of which Roxanna is composer-in-association), the London Oratory School Choir, Heather Shipp (mezzo), Roderick Williams (baritone), the Colla Voce Singers, conductor Lee Ward and Kiku Day (Jinashi Shakuhachi).

It's worth noting that, as the designated website explains, these days many classical record companies will only agree to put out a CD if they are provided with the finished master first - ie, they won't pay for the actual recording to be made. In a way, this matches the concept of "artist-led" labels, for which musicians have to fund their own recordings; the results are then marketed and distributed under the reputable umbrella tag of a team that exercises expert quality control over who/what it accepts. Now, the artist-led labels let everyone know from the start that that's what they're doing. But in hard times, this model has quietly become more widespread. Rox has invented a way to raise the necessary funds while also giving the sponsors a real stake in the result. Something that Count Razumovsky would have approved of, I think. Or you could see it as crowd funding with a difference.

If you want to sponsor the recording, or just learn more about how it works, all the details are here: http://www.loveabide.com/

Monday, March 05, 2012

The Budapest Festival Orchestra, appealing on every level

Woke up to news today that someone in Japan has invented a way to make violin strings out of spider webs. These are said to give "a soft and profound timbre" compared to traditional metal or gut strings. They're also supposed to be super-strong. More here from the BBC - including a sample of the sound.

The violin sounds I was listening to last night, though, would take a lot of beating. The Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer were joined (at the Royal Festival Hall's Shell Classic International Series) by Renaud Capucon (right) in an ear-whirling, ceiling-raising account of a work that is rarely performed live because it's too damned difficult: Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole. This piece is to Paganini what a triple chocolate muffin is to a plain choc-chip job. You can't live with a violinist and not know it, but otherwise it's played so infrequently that even some eager concert-goers I met in the hall had never heard of it and wanted to know if Lalo is still alive and which part of Spain he came from. (Background here.)

Capucon is a diminutive figure armed with the solidity and presence of a premier-league footballer, a focused and dispassionate performance style a la Heifetz, a gigantic, scarlet tone and a Guarneri del Gesu that used to belong to his mentor, Isaac Stern. The opening notes were a bit wild, but in a way that was a relief: it means he's human. Thereafter nothing could have shaken his security. Fischer's sophisticated accompanying let the soloist shine out in this Olympian marathon of a concerto, while Lalo's rhythms bounced beneath, passed from group to group like soft rubber balls.

Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, under Fischer's super-charged baton, rose up as far more than a piece of 19th-century exoticism: this was musical storytelling at its most compelling, the second movement almost visible as a filmic battle scene for which no image could match the atmosphere of sound; and you could almost feel the spray of the storm in the finale as Sinbad's wrecked ship shudders towards the ocean bed. Fischer placed the harp at the front, opposite the leader (the eloquent Violetta Eckhardt), so that the solo moments, together with the BFO's unquakable clarinet and oboe, became almost a concertante group within the great romantic orchestra.

Details and articulation were wrought with narrative significance, the tonal palette a panorama of aural richness. The BFO's string tone does, when required, produce that heady, extraordinary, deep-dug, sock-it-to-em, Hungarian smoked paprika tone - but the key point is that it's reserved for the moments that need it, controlled by a Fischer who looked for all the world like Fokine's Kastschei from The Firebird (right - the Royal Ballet, photo by Patrick Baldwin), all magic fingers and broad, low, sweeping stance. Everything is thought through, then - yet the spontaneity of this orchestra's performance never suffers. The BFO breathes as one; they enter the flow (a phenomenon described by their fellow Hungarian, the philosopher Mihaly Czikszentmihaly) and fly together. If every orchestral concert were to be as vivid, alive and truly artistic as this, I'd be at one, voluntarily, every single night.

The BFO is not, however, an entirely happy place at present, and the presence of Brahms's Tragic Overture at the start of the programme felt like ominous commentary, even if it was not intended that way. The orchestra played it as if it were a matter of life and death. And it may be so. Funding cutbacks in Hungary are hitting the orchestra hard; at present, or so I'm told, they don't even know what their budget will be next season. I hope to bring you more details of their situation soon, but if you loved the concert as much as I did and you want to contribute to their continuation, you can help them by joining the Friends of the Budapest Festival Orchestra - there is a British Friends group and also an American one. In the UK contact: british.friends.bfo@gmail.com. The Hungarian government would have to be stark raving mad to let this orchestra go to the wall, but as things stand, anything could happen, so the BFO's international activities are becoming more vital than ever. If you love them, help them!

Friday, March 02, 2012

Girl Power

Hooray for music's powerful women! 

1. JUDITH WEIR AND EMMA BELL ON MISS FORTUNE


Judith Weir's latest full-length opera is heading for Covent Garden, opening on 12 March, and it's the first opera ever to finish (as far as I'm aware) with the heroine winning the lottery. Emma Bell is in the leading role of Tina, conquering a number of different stratospheres (left, Emma atop "the shape"). I talked to them both about creating what Bregenz Festival director David Pountney called "an opera for an entirely normal audience". See my feature in today's Independent, here.





2. DANIELLE DE NIESE TO STAR IN OPERA OF ANN PATCHETT's BEL CANTO


The Lyric Opera of Chicago has commissioned the young Peruvian composer Jimmy Lopez to write the work, which is scheduled for the 2015-16 season. Ann Patchett's novel describes a terrorist attack in a South American jungle in which a group of opera lovers, politicians and a singer, Roxanne Coss, are taken hostage: over the months, attackers and hostages form unexpected alliances. RENEE FLEMING, Lyric's creative consultant, chose the book as the perfect topic for the opera. The libretto is by playwright Nilo Cruz, the director is Stephen Wadworth and Sir Andrew Davis conducts. And Danni, who's much more than Glyndebourne's fabled Cleopatra, takes the lead as Roxanne. More here.

“It’s about terrorism on one level, but it’s also about what happens when people are forced to live together for a long time, and how art can raise their level of humanity as a group,” Fleming said. “Most of us crave a cathartic emotional experience when we’re at the theater, and I believe Bel Canto has the components to do that... I was struck by Jimmy Lopez's intelligence and the way he understands both the problems in bringing this piece to the stage, but also the possibilities that opera as a medium offers for illuminating a story. For example, the orchestra can accentuate the dramatic situation onstage, but it can also convey the underlying turmoil that one might not see. This is something that many composers miss and that Jimmy understands completely.” 


3. JD TO SPEAK AT CLASSICAL:NEXT


The new classical music trade fair Classical:Next, taking place in Munich from 30 May to 1 June, has announced its initial line-up of events and speakers, and I am happy to report that JD is to be on a panel discussing the future of music journalism, along with BBC Music Magazine editor Oliver Condy and the editor of the German magazine PIANONews, Carsten Durer. Classical:Next is a sister production to WOMEX, and if that event is anything to go by, we want to be there.

4. DON'T FORGET TAZ AND ROX's BIG NIGHT


Tonight at the Anvil, Basingstoke, and tomorrow night at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon, the London Mozart Players and TASMIN LITTLE (left) give the world premiere of the complete Four World Seasons by ROXANNA PANUFNIK. Having had a sneak peek for Classical Music magazine, I reckon Vivaldi wouldn't know what's hit him. Rox writes:
"In early 2008, the violinist Tasmin Little rang me to ask whether I’d write a series of short pieces for her, accompanied by chamber orchestra. Considering a world where global concern for climate change and seismic shifts in international political landscapes affect us all, we decided to take Antonio Vivaldi’s much-loved 1725 Four Seasons and give the concept a 21st-century twist, creating an entirely new work with each season (lasting approximately 5 minutes) influenced by a country that has become culturally associated with it."  Spring in Japan, an Indian Summer, Autumn in Albania and a Tibetan Winter form the music in this celebration of music across the world, reflecting the many cultures that descend on London for the 2012 Olympic Games." 


5. JUST FOR THE HECK OF IT, HERE'S DARCEY BUSSELL AS SYLVIA


Ahead of her time, Frederick Ashton's Sylvia was created for Margot Fonteyn in the 1950s. Diana's top nymph is not exactly your typical 1950s ideal housewife. I love the power, joy and freedom in Darcey Bussell's interpretation, filmed at the ROH in 2005. Girl Power if ever we saw it! Roberto Bolle is her lovestruck swain. Enjoy.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

SPECIAL OFFER FOR JDCMB READERS, from CLASSICAL MUSIC MAGAZINE


CLASSICAL MUSIC, the magazine of the music business, is offering JDCMB readers free access to its online digital edition until 31 August 2012.

The magazine, produced by Rhinegold Publishing, reports fortnightly on the latest news, views and events from around the musical world and is a must-read for everyone in the industry and beyond - packed with insights, interviews, notices, job ads, etc.

To take advantage of this offer, simply go to http://www.rhinegold.co.uk/cmdigital/ and sign up at "Register below to access the digital editions". Use the access code CMJD12 and add your email address and a password of your choice. The code works until 31 August, so if you sign up now you get six months of free reading - 14 issues of the magazine.

In the earlier February edition you can find, among other things, a biggish piece by JD about Roxanna Panufnik's new suite of pieces for violin and orchestra, Four World Seasons, which Tasmin Little and the London Mozart Players are performing complete for the first time tomorrow in Basingstoke and on Saturday at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon.




Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Director Sergio Morabito talks about THAT PRODUCTION of Rusalka

The Wieler-Morabito production of Rusalka at Covent Garden has proved a lot more controversial in terms of critical response than The Death of Klinghoffer at ENO. Some critics, including my Independent colleague Ed Seckerson, have given it just one star out of five - though often there's a proviso of four for the musical performance and universal plaudits for Yannick Nezet-Seguin. The Telegraph has turned it into a salacious "oo-er, opera set in brothel gets booed" story, which is on the front page of the paper's website (still, you'd more or less expect that from the Telly). Mark Berry, over at Boulezian, is a voice of strong approval. And the Financial Times gives it five stars. I guess that means it has "divided opinion"...

My article previewing the production last week was based on a wide-ranging interview with Sergio Morabito, one of its duo of directors, and revival director Samantha Seymour. I thought it might be interesting, in the light of all this fuss, to revisit the original transcript for more detail. It's longish, and Sergio's English is quite Germanic, so get yourself a cuppa...
(Images: Royal Opera House/Clive Barda)



JD: Sergio, how and why did you decide to give Rusalka this very modern type of production, full of symbols? 

SM: Jossi Wieler, my directing partner and I, always try not to impose something, not to force something – we try to develop the aesthetic of a production out of the interpretation of the written and the musical text. What was decisive for this experience was that we discover that we need to find a balance, to balance it very carefully and not neglect the fairytale moments, which of course are important. Everybody knows the Andersen tale of The Little Mermaid and we try to go with it and play with it. But we decided together with the stage designer not to have a naturalistic setting, but we try to evoke this summer night’s dream kind of atmosphere, which is part of the score that you can’t just overrule. So we have a simple space which can transform and as a second layer we have the video projections which are conveying much of this fairytale atmosphere. Even in the costumes we play with it with these moments – we went back to Andersen and Rusalka really has this fish tail and tries to get rid of it and turn it into human legs. I think everything lies in a certain playfulness. 

But it’s important to realise the opera is a very dark fin-de-siecle reworking of this ancient story. This is crucial: it’s really dark fairy tale. It’s really desperate – without any hope. The ending is one of the most hopeless endings until now in opera, because of what she’s experiencing. This incredible development of Rusalka from a young woman, almost a girl, who tries to break out and find her own way and leave her father, risking everything in order to live this love, but then gradually becoming aware that she cannot live in this cold human world: she’s fooled by the society, humiliated by them and betrayed by the prince of course. Then the third act is very desperate. It’s not so much about an intact natural world - but one of the first lines is  that Vodnik the water goblin says "You are selling yourself," bartering – like The Bartered Bride, in Czech it's the same word – so it is also about the violation of the natural world. Then she realises that the human kind of utopia she dreamed of discovering with her prince becomes a trap more and more. We end up – it’s sort of inspired element, very strange, maybe it has some fin-de-siecle elements, but it is really a brothel, with sofas and couches...
SS: An American brothel!
SM: We end up in a very sad situation where she has no escape any more and so she decides in our production to commit suicide - which is an important element of the Rusalka story. Pushkin wrote a drama which he didn’t complete and later Dargomyszky transformed it into an opera – it’s the East European Rusalka myth, about a woman or children also who were not baptised or were expelled from Christian society, so they had no burial and they are doomed to live not living, not being dead, expelled by this Christian world. In the Pushkin she commits suicide and transforms into a rusalka - she comes back as a kind of vampire and drags him to his death. This goes perfectly not only with the music but also the text of this opera. It’s a horror ending: the prince goes mad and crazy, begging she gives him the mortal kiss, so it's not a love reconciliation, but she’s really kissing him to death. She comes back from the dead and revenges herself. She knows that she never will be granted salvation because she’s been told from the very beginning 
SS: She can save the prince but she can’t save herself. 
SM: Her last words to him when she kills him are "May God be merciful to you," but she knows that she herself is doomed to haunt this place. 
SS: In this undead state 
SM: exactly. We tried to find the right balance, and it's very sophisticated and playful, but also a sophisticated game of the authors of the text. It has much to do with this fin de siècle melancholy and sadness.

JD: When Dvorak wrote the work, around 1900, Freud's work was already current and it strikes me that the Freudian symbolism is very clear - do you think that is a deliberate element in the opera?

SS: I think that was partly the spirit of the times – the decadence of turn-of-the-century Vienna. 
SM: It’s not so far away...it started around the same time. There's a strange structure to the story with the Foreign Princess: we don’t know what the relationship with the prince is, where does she suddenly come from – this very violent, destructive female character. And of course it’s also the madness of the prince at the end, he goes crazy.
SS: He really does despair - and he’s in a pretty rocky state at the beginning! 
SM: One can assume he tried to fall in love with Rusalka: already he’s trying to liberate himself from the spell from the foreign princess, it could be an explanation. Then he realises he can't cope with the other woman – the foreign princess is a bit much for him and he tries to conform to his society and their expectations when he meets Rusalka, but her idea of love is too different. He has not the strength to fight for it, in a way. He’s so fragile – and he is very brutal to Rusalka in the second act, when he falls completely under the power of the Foreign Princess.

JD: The story seems full of echoes of Giselle and Swan Lake... 

SM: Yes, the Wilis, the women who were abandoned before the wedding...it’s exactly this tradition. That’s what we have to make concrete, this journey by Rusalka...

JD: Will you make many changes from your original production in Salzburg? (This interview was on the first day of ROH rehearsals).
SM: Two of the main parts are the same singers – Camilla Nylund was crucial because she is so charming on the one side and has so many colours she can convey vocally and with her acting. She’s able to have this playfulness, but she faces also the catastrophes of this character and the final scene is really chilling. But of course we try to react, not just to fit in the new singers. We have to find it and adapt it and it’s a great chance to work over some details. 
SS: There's an element that involves the Austrian Empire - bringing the production to England, we have to make sure the wedding party wouldn’t be construed as being German because they’re in dirndls and lederhosen. It’s not about germany, it’s about Austria. If you just picked 30 people outside the Salzburg Festspielhaus they’d look like our chorus! 
SM: Of course the Habsburgs and Czechoslovakia was part of it - the national opera was a manifestation of the Czech identity. We have on stage a little fountain with the famous statue of the Little Mermaid, but she wears a sort of halo: she's a pagan being, but she dreams of having sanctity and being granted a soul and being safe. That’s the background of the folklore motifs: these gods, goddesses, wood nymphs and sea nymphs that were demonised under Christianity. It’s not that their existence is denied, but it was thought that the devil was behind these elemental spirits, so this plays a certain role that we see these fairytale characters – in a way, they are in exile. They don’t live in the Bohemian woods, but they've had to retreat. They got pushed out to the edges of society. What we try to have is space for imagination – in the third act you might have this association that it’s a brothel because you see how people are dressed and how they act, but its just one moment of the story. We didn’t want to define it in one way, but to leave it open to different interpretations.

JD: You're mixing the references to the late Habsburg Empire with something much more 21st-century...

SM: Yes, it’s not that you can say OK, we put it in the 1960s or 1980s – we are coming from different sources, so we have a very beautiful traditional Czech wedding dress for Rusalka. It’s an invented world on stage – if you have documentary realism it wouldn’t work. 

JD: What do you make of Jezibaba? 

SM: She’s terrifying. Rusalka addresses her really as an ancient goddess - maybe Hecate, who was a benign goddess thousands of years ago, but now she’s reduced to a very miserable existence and she’s frustrated, of course, because she lost her dignity and people forgot her and think she’s just the old witch. So we see an old woman who can hardly walk - but she has some skills. It’s a mixture, so we don’t have just a classical fairytale, but this is a woman like those you can see on the streets nowadays. A bag lady. But she has a very special cat, which she addresses in the text also – it’s a very frightening, big cat, played by a dancer. 

JD: (remembering with alarm what happened in the Glyndebourne production) It doesn’t get its paw chopped off when they make the potion, does it....?

SM: No, this is a bit more playful! The little Rusalka we see at the beginning has a toy cat and it’s funny this fishwoman loves this toy cat; and suddenly in the scene with the witch it transforms into a cruel monster. And this cat transforms her and gives her legs.
SS: It’s very ambivalent: it has sexual elements and it’s quite horrific, but at the same time Rusalka really wants this to happen to her. 
SM: Everybody wants her, but she’s relentless, she really fights for her dream and does everything...and at the very end, in the third act in this brothel situation, there is the cat of Madame Jezibaba, a real one, sitting next to her – it is privileged to sit next to the Madame – and that is when Rusalka realises she is really trapped and she commits suicide. She asks "How can I come back to my former existence?". Jezibaba says "You have to stab the prince," and gives her a knife. In Dvorak she’s supposed to throw the knife into the lake and in our production, with the same words - it makes perfect sense - she says "he shall be happy, whatever happens to me" and she kills herself. 
SS: The alternative is that the world of the nymphs is also the world of the brothel so if she decided to stay there, she’d become one of the girls.

JD: What do you say to people who say "but this is a fairytale and we want a mermaid"? 

SM: But we have one! We have also the nymphs! We have a giant cat! They are right – you shouldn’t negate this abstractly, but you also shouldn’t reduce the fairy story because it’s much more than that. 
SS: I think fairytales have got a bad name – a lot of them are very psychologically dark, not harmless little stories for children. We do have fairy tale elements and the video projections to create that kind of ambience. SM: I’ve often seen beautiful films which are also playing with fairy tales, transposing them to a more contemporary world of experience. Children, when they hear fairy tales, they have concrete associations, they connect it to their real world. They don’t analyse them, but I remember how you link to certain persons or certain objects - so, you try to understand through the symbols when you don’t know the real meaning of old words. 
SS: There’s a lot of cruelty in them. I once went to a children’s performance of Cinderella where the Ugly Sisters had their feet chopped off to fit into the slippers. A friend of mine who’s a kindergarten teacher said you have to have this because children have an innate sense of right and wrong and if the bad sisters aren’t punished fittingly then they go out with this sense that it was unjust! So the cruelty is justified. That was an interesting insight.

JD: This is the first time Rusalka has been done here. Is that maybe why people have fought shy of it, because it is so dark? 

SM: It’s hard to say, but it could be one reason. 
SS: There’s a sort of renaissance of it going on – since we did our production in Salzburg there’ve been several others that have been very successful. 
SM: Also the Czech language...Especially in Germany, we have this repertory sustem and it’s not so easy to fill the houses... I think it’s partly due to the language, which also affects the musical language in an interesting way. I could imagine for some people this makes it difficult. [Morabito is currently based in Stuttgart.]

JD: You work very much in tandem with another director, Jossi Wieler – this is interesting, because in my experience some directors tend to be a tad despotic? 

SM: We’ve done opera together since 1994 and it’s a collective art work per se. You are not free – you have to respond from moment to moment to so many decisions the composer made. When you stage a play you have carte blanche to give the text a new structure and make a collage, etc, to create an exciting and interesting production. But in opera you have to contend with the grid of the score. And so that’s what we try to do: for us it’s all about the common process between the two of us and also the designer and the singers We really believe that you have to free the singers, you have to coach them in the best possible way... You are not just reacting: there are many decisions to take in advance before the rehearsal process starts. But the most beautiful thing is when the singers take over more and more responsibility. We’re not directors who expect singers to fill the form we’re defining; we try to stimulate their own fantasy. 
SS: What you often do is tell the singers what the situation is and what you want them to communicate, but not how you want them to communicate it. I think that’s a big difference. 
SM: So often you see opera where everybody is trying to make a remake of the film that was already made in their head, whereas for us the great thing is when they become freer and freer and have their own life - it's not like being marionettes. You find so much more that you couldn’t anticipate. It’s a living process – we are trying to hand over our ideas and input and then see. It gives you the possibility to step back and discover new dimensions. We have this dialogue. invent these productions and involve every collaborator. It’s fun! And when you have singers like Camilla – singers can do so much nowadays, they are so keen, they want to know, they want to play, they want to be asked. 
Often in opera, because it's so hierachical, you have a huge responsibility - and maybe it makes it easier if there are two of you, because you can afford to rely on the other and we find out together how to go on. This takes away a lot of stress, because the institution assumes you know what you want and it can be a difficult dynamic in opera theatre. 
SS: A lot of people have a similar relationship with their set designer and consult them about what they think SM: The stage designer created a space from which this world can unfold. We take the risk, even if we don’t know how it will unfold – it’s about process and it’s much more productive when you don’t know from the very beginning what you want to see. You start and you have long discussions; it’s important to have very specific fixed points and start around those. It’s so beautiful when the conductor, the singers, everyone is really working together and it’s not this power game...

JD: Audiences in some European countries, especially Germany and Austria, have come to expect productions that shock and challenge, whereas Americans tend to prefer traditional narrative stagings. Do you worry about how this production is going to go over here in the UK, which is kind of in the middle? 

SM: It’s hard to say, but of course I hope that the audience will see that no one of the singers is forced to do something awkward, but that they really play with huge intensity. So even if it’s unexpected or even disturbing in some moments, my hope is that nobody can really resist the presence of the singers and the commitment that they have. 
SS: There's nothing gratuitous about it. 

JD: If you were speaking to someone who's never seen Rusalka before, how would you persuade them to come and see it? 

SM: It’s not the answer to your question, but we try to work in a way that everyone, even someone who doesn’t know anything about the opera or the story, is able to step in and understand it. So it's not that we are simplifying – on the contrary, the more colour and detail, the more concrete it is. We don’t like the idea that we are making abstract aesthetic statements and people must swallow it or die! We think and hope that people wouldn’t have preconceived expectations. One hopes one can seduce even people who know the opera in another production to experience it anew. I would say it’s a very sad, modern fairy tale with wonderful late-romantic music – not just the Song to the Moon which everyone knows but a lot of pieces everyone should know...It’s an incredibly colourful score, but permeated by this deep, deep sadness and all the folk elements – it brings together a lot of different musical styles. 

JD: It strikes me that there’s a lot of Wagner in there. 

SM: That’s true – Alberich and the Rhinemaidens and some of the sounds and styles are melded in Dvorak's own style.

JD: And here’s an opera where the heroine is mute for most of the 2nd act! 

SM: Yes, that’s funny! It's an amazing risk to take – she doesn’t sing for half an hour and then this amazing aria bursts out of her. But you’ll see how Camilla is moving this whole second act – it’s so touching. And in the first act we think we need the love duet, but it never happens, Rusalka doesn’t join in! That's quite daring.

JD: Do you like working with Yannick Nezet-Seguin?

SM: I’m very happy he is conducting. When we did this in 2008 in Salzburg, he was there conducting Romeo and Juliet, and it’s a nice coincidence we are brought together now in this opera.

JD: Is it possible to quantify why the working relationship is so strong between you and Jossi?

SM: He was already an established theatre director when then he was asked by the artistic manager of the Stuttgart Opera to direct opera. He hesitated, he loves classical music and opera, but he thought it’s not his profession – and so we came together and started to do our first production, I as dramaturg and he as director, and it developed its own dynamic. After our third production - it was Alcina by Handel, it was invited to the Edinbuirgh Festival for several performances around 2000 or 01 - we started to stage things together. I am coming more from the dramaturgical approach, but what we share is an analytical passion, so Jossi for the 'soul and being' and me for dramaturgy, text and literature. Of course we change, sometimes he is leading, sometimes I can take over and show a direction, but we can hardly say who had which idea. It comes out of the dialogue - but that’s his great quality, that he lets it be. It’s great serenity. We are now at the Stuttgart Opera and we had a wonderful La Sonnambula premiere last Sunday. It’s fantastic because normally in opera you can’t choose - you are asked whether or not you want to stage a particular opera - but now we can decide ourselves.