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cahn4/5. I bought this basically on the strength of seeing Kaufmann talk about his thoughts on Carlo on YouTube, and also the auto-da-fe scene shown in this link (at around 13:40) where Hampson's Rodrigo is all but trying to telepathically yell to Carlo DON'T DO IT!! And it is great, although I definitely imprinted really heavily on the Met 2011 Alagna/Poplavskaya/Keenlyside/Furlanetto so that it took me a while to warm to it sometimes.
Kaufmann and Hampson as Carlo and Rodrigo are both brilliant and they are brilliant actors and singers. They also play the Carlo/Rodrigo friendship as extremely, er, hands-on, though with plausible deniability -- no specific moment where the slashy subtext becomes relatively explicit as it was in Keenlyside's Met 2011 Rodrigo -- but, I mean, on the other hand, Rodrigo literally dies in Carlo's arms, you know? There's at the same time also definitely a distinct vibe of Hampson being older and taller, and thus also having a mentor/big-brother cast to him -- and Hampson's Rodrigo is a very intelligent one; you can always see him thinking really hard about all the events unfolding in front of him.
Now Rodrigo/Philip has a lot more, umm, subtext to it in this production. In Keenlyside/Furlanetto's scene, there wasn't any hint of it anything but a straightforward and imo extremely powerful lord/vassal relationship, whereas in this one, Salminen keeps touching Hampson during this scene -- I mean, just on the shoulder and such, but whenever he does, Hampson makes the most hilariously unsettled faces of "Help, does the Spanish Court have HR I can talk to?" (It is particularly hilarious because he and Kaufmann are way more touchy with each other.) ...This scene maay have made me ship it in an extremely dubcon kind of way. (Well, not completely, because poor Elisabetta -- I love Elisabetta a lot and can't deal with the idea of Posa betraying her -- but I could kinda imagine it where none of the characters really consider it infidelity and Elisabetta feels a kinship for Rodrigo rather than betrayed by him.)
(One thing I adored about the staging was that in the auto-da-fe scene, Hampson and Harteros say their asides to each other (rather than being separated and both just kind of saying them as spoken thoughts, as in Met 2011) -- one of these is visible at the above link. I just really love the thought of the Rodrigo and Elisabetta relationship, how they're both united in their dedication to Carlos and in general just being the awesome people in this opera. <3 )
Speaking of Elisabetta, Harteros was great, although with a tendency to sharp, although I did get imprinted by Poplavskaya's very strong Elisabetta so it took me a while to realize that Harteros was intentionally playing it a bit more emotionally and that both of these are consistent with the libretto :) (Schiller's Elisabeth is also stronger than opera!Elisabeth, which is also affecting my opinions on this.)
Salminen in general did not strike me as nearly as powerful as Furlanetto, although he did get to sing the Lachrymosa with Kaufmann after Rodrigo's death, which is phenomenal and amazing and I feel that all peformances should have this! (I guess it's based on reconstruction of different versions and isn't really in most scores?) I would totally trade the Fontainbleu Act I for this :) I have a lot of feelings about the Rodrigo&Filippo relationship anyway, which this just served to sharpen :)
Kaufmann and Hampson as Carlo and Rodrigo are both brilliant and they are brilliant actors and singers. They also play the Carlo/Rodrigo friendship as extremely, er, hands-on, though with plausible deniability -- no specific moment where the slashy subtext becomes relatively explicit as it was in Keenlyside's Met 2011 Rodrigo -- but, I mean, on the other hand, Rodrigo literally dies in Carlo's arms, you know? There's at the same time also definitely a distinct vibe of Hampson being older and taller, and thus also having a mentor/big-brother cast to him -- and Hampson's Rodrigo is a very intelligent one; you can always see him thinking really hard about all the events unfolding in front of him.
Now Rodrigo/Philip has a lot more, umm, subtext to it in this production. In Keenlyside/Furlanetto's scene, there wasn't any hint of it anything but a straightforward and imo extremely powerful lord/vassal relationship, whereas in this one, Salminen keeps touching Hampson during this scene -- I mean, just on the shoulder and such, but whenever he does, Hampson makes the most hilariously unsettled faces of "Help, does the Spanish Court have HR I can talk to?" (It is particularly hilarious because he and Kaufmann are way more touchy with each other.) ...This scene maay have made me ship it in an extremely dubcon kind of way. (Well, not completely, because poor Elisabetta -- I love Elisabetta a lot and can't deal with the idea of Posa betraying her -- but I could kinda imagine it where none of the characters really consider it infidelity and Elisabetta feels a kinship for Rodrigo rather than betrayed by him.)
(One thing I adored about the staging was that in the auto-da-fe scene, Hampson and Harteros say their asides to each other (rather than being separated and both just kind of saying them as spoken thoughts, as in Met 2011) -- one of these is visible at the above link. I just really love the thought of the Rodrigo and Elisabetta relationship, how they're both united in their dedication to Carlos and in general just being the awesome people in this opera. <3 )
Speaking of Elisabetta, Harteros was great, although with a tendency to sharp, although I did get imprinted by Poplavskaya's very strong Elisabetta so it took me a while to realize that Harteros was intentionally playing it a bit more emotionally and that both of these are consistent with the libretto :) (Schiller's Elisabeth is also stronger than opera!Elisabeth, which is also affecting my opinions on this.)
Salminen in general did not strike me as nearly as powerful as Furlanetto, although he did get to sing the Lachrymosa with Kaufmann after Rodrigo's death, which is phenomenal and amazing and I feel that all peformances should have this! (I guess it's based on reconstruction of different versions and isn't really in most scores?) I would totally trade the Fontainbleu Act I for this :) I have a lot of feelings about the Rodrigo&Filippo relationship anyway, which this just served to sharpen :)
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Date: 2018-06-01 11:42 pm (UTC)I'm happy that Hampson's Germont got you into Verdi, but I think those particular performances (Macbeth/Traviata) are probably not my thing. (I don't like most "concept" productions and modern updates of classic opera.) If I recall correctly, I watched one of the Traviatas on Youtube a while back -- it was the one with all the extra symbolism, like the personification of Time(?) (I think?) wandering through and a giant clock face and I forget what else. I remember liking the singing, but the staging was really distracting to me (to the extent that I couldn't really focus on the other aspects of the performance). I'm glad you enjoyed them! But probably not for me.
Back to Kaufmann's Carlo: Like, I see how you can get his interpretation from the libretto (especially if you look at the historical Don Carlo, who was mostly kind of pathetic). But it isn't fun for me (and I think it's going against what the music conveys). If Carlo is immature and useless, then it makes Rodrigo seem deluded and it makes the whole opera much bleaker. Rodrigo talks about how Carlo will bring Spain a new Golden Age, and he probably is idealizing Carlo somewhat, but I want Carlo to be a character who is worthy of Rodrigo's devotion. And I want to be able to see why Elizabeth (and Eboli) love him. As for Carlo's rashness and his pursuing of a woman who's told him to back off, I guess his behavior falls within the range of what I'm used to in operatic tenor roles. :P Like, I don't expect a tenor character to act sensibly or rationally, and I treat it as a convention of the genre. :P The way Kaufmann's Carlo is constantly gesturing and in motion I think also detracts from the staging of some scenes (such as some moments during the auto-da-fe), because it calls attention to him at times when he's not necessarily supposed to be the focus, and it makes the stage motion more frenetic at times when the music is more slow and intense. So basically, I respect that Kaufmann was doing this deliberately and with thought put into it, but I don't like it.
I did see that Met on Demand production, years ago (I saw it in the movie theatre on the big screen, which was great). I'd forgotten that particular moment between Rodrigo and Philip in the video that you linked. Wow, that's intense! I see what you mean about being frightened for Rodrigo there. And it underlines his courage, the way he's willing to stand up to Philip's absolute power and to speak the truth to him.
It looks like I wrote a couple of LJ entries about seeing that production, back in 2011: this one about the performance in general (like you, I loved Furlanetto's Philip) and then another draft that I never finished and saved as a private entry -- but I'm willing to unprivate it, since I was talking exactly about why Keenlyside was a good Rodrigo but not "my" Rodrigo as I imagined him. (Again, this was something I never finished and I would probably have edited it a bit, but here it is.)
It is interesting how people come to these operas from different directions/different contexts! You imprinted on Keenlyside's Rodrigo (and I can see why), and if you're using him as the benchmark then even Hampson's Rodrigo does seem more courtly. But I imprinted on a totally different version/style of Rodrigo. :) And neither is objectively right or wrong, but if you want to know where I'm coming from:
I've been obsessed with Don Carlo for at least fifteen or twenty years now, so I can't remember for sure where I first developed my interpretations of the characters. But the Rodrigo and Carlo I first imprinted on was a lot more like this one with Placido Domingo and Sherrill Milnes; Carlo melancholy but always dignified, and Rodrigo's affect more "nobleman" than "soldier".
https://youtu.be/Gfp3cI2UVn0
I don't think I saw those videos/live performances at the time, but my parents had an LP of Don Carlo with Sherrill Milnes on the cover looking something like this:
http://sherrillmilnes.com/wp-content/fancygallery/1/3/Rodrigo-in-Don-Carlo.jpg
So he was my visual image for Rodrigo, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was my audio image of Rodrigo (and the way he sings Rodrigo comes across as more courtly and smooth to me, though also passionate and intense).
And then also, when I first heard the opera, to me Don Carlo was all of one piece with The Three Musketeers and Ivanhoe and Sir Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake" and Cyrano de Bergerac and swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies and all the romantic-chivalry stuff I'd been steeped in from childhood -- the courtly loyal nobleman/knight. So that's the background I had, and that's where "my" version of Rodrigo comes out of.
(I will hopefully come back and try to answer the rest of your comment later, if I haven't been babbling too much already.)
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Date: 2018-06-03 03:27 am (UTC)*nods* What you say about Rodrigo and Carlo makes perfect sense! I'm still in the first flush of having discovered this opera, so I'm still imprinting on what the characters mean to me :) And I clearly imprinted a lot on the Met 2011, so as you know I'm doing a lot of using that as a reference and comparing everything to that -- ha, maybe I should have watched Milnes first! Met on Demand does have a production with him and (of course) I just looked at some of the Rodrigo scenes :) Milnes is marvelous of course, and the Carlo (Vasile Moldoveanu? never heard of him) is also wonderful -- much more on the dignified side, as you prefer :)
Here's a youtube video of their duet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-z80x9Zl_0
--gosh, I love it -- Rodrigo, there, really speaks to me of what you quote in your post from the Book of the Courtier, where this Rodrigo is assisting his Prince to the good <3
Though, I mean, there are some parts of the libretto that do give me pause with regard to Carlo being a bit unstable... I really adore the auto-da-fe scene, but, well, I got totally imprinted by the scene in The Warrior's Apprentice where Vordrozda pulls the needler in front of the Emperor and he's not even aiming at Gregor but it's a Very Very Big Deal -- so Carlo drawing a sword on the King shocked me. (And it's very different in Schiller, which -- oh, that's going to have to be a whole other comment or possibly post.)
I think — given that I'm still new to this and still forming my headcanon :) -- I'm totally up for a courtier Rodrigo or for a more soldierly one — but what I do absolutely need is for Rodrigo's relationship with Carlos, and with Flanders, to be legitimately loving and honest — I don't think I would react well at all to a truly manipulative or zealot Rodrigo. (Which I did not get from Keenlyside, even if he thinks that's what he was portraying. :P :) )
You know, the interesting thing about that scary moment in the Met 2011 Keenlyside/Furlanetto is that it's super played in that one as Filippo menacing Rodrigo, but in the two other scenes of that I've now watched (Hampson/Salminen and I just looked at the Milnes/Plishka) the terrible shout of the music is actually describing the impact of Rodrigo's statement on Filippo. I love both interpretations — I think the second one is probably more consonant with what is intended, but I can't help loving the first as well.
Ah, I get that about the modern productions — and although as you know I adored bigclock!Traviata it's definitely a personal taste thing, and I thought the Macbeth was a total mess of a production :) I'll have to see whether Hampson has done any other good period productions… (I do have another canon-era Hampson Traviata you can borrow, if you like. :D )