Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Mozart is lucky he's dead... Yes, he is. To never lived to see his opera performed like this was the greatest luck he never knew he had.

M22: ASCANIO IN ALBA (Salzburg Festival 2006)

This is such a repulsively inane staging of this rarely performed work that I have a hard time writing it up. The DVD is a part of the M22 Project from the 2006 Salzburg Summer Festival where all 22 operas written by Wolfgang Mozart were staged and taped for posterity. And I must say, the staging of this particular production of Ascanio in Alba is just SO BAD that I feel sorry for Mozart that it ever seen the light of day at all, let alone being preserved for posterity!

The original story of this 1771 opera (composed when Mozart was 15 yrs old to celebrate the wedding of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and Princess Beatrice Maria d’Este) is of Ascanio (the son of the Goddess Venus and Aeneas) and how he and his mom Venus conspire to test the fidelity of his fiancée Silvia in Alba, the realm that Venus had established especially for Ascanio to rule. Ascanio pretends to be a foreigner in order to see if Silvia will fall for him if she doesn’t know his true identity. The two lovers are guided (or misguided) by Fauno and the High Priest Aceste.

Sample a video clip from this production at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Y10CajnE4 (this is actually a high point, with Diana Damrau singing Fauno's 1st aria)

CAST:
Venus ::: Iris Kupke (soprano)
Ascanio ::: Sonia Prina (mezzo soprano)
Silvia ::: Marie-Belle Sandis (soprano)
Aceste ::: Charles Reid (tenor)
Fauno ::: Diana Damrau (soprano)
Conducted by Adam Fischer/ Orchestra and Choir of the Mannheim Theater
Stage Directed by David Hermann & Christof Hetzer

Originality is a quality I value very dearly... Yet in this production, it is a quality that is grossly abused. I have high tolerance for modernized staging of opera, as long as it tells the crux of the story well. This production; however, is nothing short of artistic vandalism! Hermann and Hetzer were handed a beautiful pastoral opera and they made it into something even more repulsive to watch than Barney the purple T-rex singing his idiotic drone song.

Not only did they chop off ALL the original Italian recitatives (sung speech accompanied by the cembalo that connect the songs) and replacing it with a most unimaginative German narration possible, they also thought it a bright idea to make an utterly uninspired (at least not by any artistically inclined muse) Sci-fi work out of it.

For Hermann to compare his work to a Brechtian theater work is an insult even to Brecht. All the spoken dialog are done by 2 actors playing “Voyager 1” and “Voyager 2”, sometimes voicing the main characters while the singers do miming job (usually consisting of some spasmodic actions/convulsions). And what kind of sensible dialog consists of thing like, 'Number 8, Fauno's aria, Si il labbro piu,' and so on and so forth? It does nothing to relate the story. Just added distraction to fill the stage while ruining your every attempt to decipher what the opera is all about!

The staging at Landestheater is severely short on inspiration and so opted to compensate by throwing all the materials in the stage directors' garage together and turning the whole thing into an incoherent mixed vegetable soup. There is no sense of the blissful pastoral setting that the original theme is based on. If anything, the set looks like a sterilized WW II era white and green prison yard with a wooden watch tower. The herd of ‘Shepherds’ (played and sung by the Chorus) are a bunch of cloned zombies who first enter resembling a walking troop of peeled potatoes trying to pass themselves off as eggplants by fluttering a purple ribbon about, occasionally breaking into convulsive dance moves. And when they are finally identified as “shepherds”, they show up carrying potted plant and drone around looking like a bunch of singing turnips. The choreography of the main characters aren’t much better (beside most looking like they were kidnaped extras from the set of ‘Star-Trek: The Next Generation.’

Is there anything good about this performance? Yeah, it has the legend to be German soprano Diana Damrau in it as a most engaging and vocally astounding Fauno imaginable... I nearly cry every time she leaves the stage!! It is a testament to Frau Damrau's dramatic ability to hold the audience's attention even with all the annoyingly distracting things Voyager1 does while she's singing.

Maestro Adam Fischer’s orchestral reading from the pit with the Mannheim Orchestra is also a high point. His orchestra is lively and delivers a wonderfully pastoral musical background. And the young Spanish mezzo Sonia Prina is vocally quite nice as Ascanio (though the convulsive choreography makes watching her a painful experience). She is remarkably secure in low singing passages and sounds more like a male alto than a female mezzo soprano. A singer worth keeping an eye on. The others are only satisfactory.

I used to be of the opinion that good singing can save any sinking ship of an opera production. Well, this ship sinks despite of the presence of the wonderful Diana Damrau. What a waste of her talents to have to appear in this stinky half-cooked gumbo of a production! I beg her pardon that even with her stellar showing, there is still no way in heck I would recommend this DVD even to die hard Mozart fans. No way!! The lone star rating is there for Damrau, Fischer and Prina. May they have the luck to never draw Hermann and Hetzer as their stage directors in any of their future engagement. Amen.


Don’t believe how off-putting a Mozart opera can be when directed by such a pair of cluelessly unmusical opera stage directors wannabes? Have a look at some photos from this production at: http://www.salzburgfestival.at/popup_fotoservice.php?lang=en&id=113,
then you can do yourself a favor and refrain from spending your hard-earned money on this thing. It is an expensive piece of abomination worth forgetting.

Other (a lot more watch/listen-able) Mozart opera recordings actually worth investing on:
Apollo et Hyacinthus (Salzburg 2006), Bastien und Bastienne/Der Schauspieldirektor (Salzburg 2006), La clemenza di Tito (Salzburg 2003), La clemenza di Tito (Zürich 2005), La clemenza di Tito (Munich 2006), La clemenza di Tito (JE Gardiner), Cosi fan tutte (Ponnelle film), Don Giovanni (Met 2000), Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Salzburg 1998), La finta giardiniera (Salzburg 2006), La finta semplice (Salzburg 2006), Idomeneo (Salzburg 2006), Idomeneo (Met 198-), Lucio Silla (Salzburg 2006), Mitridate (Salzburg 1997), Mitridate (Rousset), Le nozze di Figaro (live performance- SDO 2007), Die Zauberflöte (ROH 2001), Die Zauberflöte (Modena 2005), Die Zauberflöte (Zürich 1999)

CD: Mitridate (Salzburg 1997), Vesselina Kasarova: Mozart Arias, Edita Gruberova: Mozart Concert Arias

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older