Strauss opera collaboration is talk of musical world

Published on Friday 31 August 2007 17:05

WHICH is more important, words or music? That is the question posed at the Festival Theatre tomorrow, when Markus Stenz conducts the final performance of Capriccio - the opera Richard Strauss subtitled A Conversation Piece for Music.

Directed by Christian von Gotz, this new co-production from the Edinburgh International Festival and Oper Kln is sung in German with English subtitles.

Although Capriccio has a reputation for being an insider's opera ("an opera about opera for opera buffs"), von Gotz believes his new take on the piece is more easily accessed by a wider audience.

"Capriccio is a late work by Richard Strauss that is not only of extremely high aesthetic value but also, when viewed within its historical context, of enormous contemporary interest," he explains.

"It is primarily, however, a highly enjoyable, musically comedic look at 'our little universe' - the opera. Personally, I find the work is a typically misunderstood masterpiece.

"It is our task to rivet the audience from the first moments of the piece that Strauss considered his legacy with the effective use of irony and well-crafted scenic situations."

For those unfamiliar with the piece, Capriccio like all great opera is a tale of love, passion and power.

In a castle near Paris, a Count and his Countess worship the arts. When the couple play host to a poet and a composer, they find their time spent in endless conversation as the Countess tries to decide which she prefers - the poet and his sonnets or the composer and his music.

Both men want to be her lover, and perhaps an opera written by both together could solve the conflict?

Add to this scenario a pretentious actress from the city who is the Count's lover, a theatre director who knows how much 'art' his audience can take, a young female dancer, an Italian tenor, a hungry maidservant and a sleepy prompter with visions, and you have a recipe for the perfect comic opera.

"Capriccio is also a back-stage comedy and a superb piece of ironic theatre" adds von Gotz. "There is hardly a sentence in this remarkably 'unwritten' work that cannot be interpreted ironically and barely a single emotional music phrase in which the composer has not permitted himself a joke. The characters are human; sometimes sensitive and other times foolish, but none is superficial or one-dimensional."

Capriccio was the last opera to be written by the German composer who was appointed president of the Reichsmusik-kammer (the State Music Bureau), in November 1933 by Joseph Goebbels - a post he accepted while insisting he remain apolitical.

Premiered at the National-theater Mnchen on October 28, 1942, seven years before the composer's death, Capriccio was written (with librettist Clemens Krauss) against the backdrop of World War Two and the rigours of life in Nazi Germany.

"In this opera, Richard Strauss made himself and music - his own ivory tower - the central theme," explains von Gotz. "On one hand, it concerns opera as a grand work of art and observes the way music refines poetry and vice versa. On the other hand, it demonstrates that in hard times, art is, or at least can be, a form of refuge.

"In other words, Capriccio is, among other things, a work about finding one's inner self.

"The castle in which the story takes place is a meta-phor for this refuge, a place of longing. The chateau is simultaneously the destin-ation for escapist journeys by our art-obsessed rococo characters, modelled on the authors Strauss and Krauss who lived in Munich at the time the work was composed.

"The characters are forced to behave so capriciously and to involve themselves so intensely with art in order to psychologically survive their internalised exile.

"The aesthetic questions of producing an opera take on a life-and-death importance for them. Naturally, however, the opera has nothing at all to do with the ideas or politics of the so-called Third Reich.

"It is a sometimes very comedic reflection on that absurd thing known as the opera, that very much profits from the references to the events occurring when it was composed and thereby gains a new psychological depth."

• Capriccio, Festival Theatre, Nicolson Street, tomorrow, 7.15pm, 10-60, 0131-473 2000

T'ang Quartet offer feast of the senses

THE expression multi-media art takes on a new meaning at the Royal Lyceum from tonight, when Theatre Cryptic and the T'ang Quartet - Ng Yu-Ying (first violin), Ang Chek-Meng (second violin), Lionel Tan (viola) and Leslie Tan (cello) - present the European premiere of Optical Identity.

Featuring sculptural sets by internationally acclaimed furniture designer Jason Ong, costumes created by Singapore fashion designer Baylene, digital art live by Swiss digital artist Jasch, and live performance by the T'ang Quartet, Optical Identity promises to take audiences on a sensory world of escape.

Commissioned and premiered at the Singapore Arts Festival in June, Optical Identity is the first co-presentation between Singapore Arts Festival and Edinburgh International Festival and has been described as "a daring work that combines a chamber music repertoire with new music and interactive technologies and visuals, to create music to be looked at, not just listened to."

Performed to a sound-track of contemporary music, which includes Kevin Volans' South African-influenced White Man Sleeps; Franghiz Ali Zadeh's Mugam Sayagi, which focuses on a secret 16th century Islamic language; Rolf Wallin's Phonotop, an exploration of biotopic objects with a Chinese twist; and Joby Talbot's - best known for his work with The Divine Comedy, Jack Black and The White Stripes - Manual Override, the piece is the creation of director Cathie Boyd and inspired by her research into synaesthesia - an extraordinary condition in which the five senses mingle.

The EIF's Sophie Hodges explains, "Optical Identity first came about in 2005, after Cathie Boyd spent three years as a National Endowment of Science, Technology And The Arts (NESTA) fellow investigating synaesthesia - the combination of the senses.

"She was invited to visit Singapore and present her research into the visual staging of music and it was there that she met the T'ang Quartet and the project began.

"Essentially, Optical Identity is a string quartet staged visually. It takes four individual pieces of music and presents them very differently to enhance the music through visual. One of the four pieces features close- up projections of the T'ang Quartet's intense muscles while they play the music".

Optical Identity, it appears, promises to be a workout for the senses in more ways than one.

• Optical Identity, Royal Lyceum, Grindlay Street, tonight and tomorrow, 8pm, 10-25, 0131-473 2000