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DVD Series: Mozart 22
When Peter Ruzicka, the Salzburg Festival’s Artistic Director, announced that all 22 of the great composer’s operas would be staged during the Mozart year there was huge excitement. His plan promised not only a world record but also one of the most exciting musical projects in the history of Mozart performance.
The finest directors, conductors and singers in the world have joined forces for this celebration of Mozart’s genius.
Mozart 22 appears on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, produced by Unitel and BFMI in cooperation with the Salzburg Festival, Austrian Radio (ORF), Bavarian Radio (BR), 3sat and Classica. Some of the most inspired directors of the present day have worked on Mozart 22, creating what is probably the largest audio-visual Mozart project of all time – 51 hours of music! In addition, there will be background reports, artist interviews and rehearsal excerpts.
Over a period of less than two months, up to three opera performances were given each day. Directors such as Stefan Aglassinger, Karina Fibich, Thomas Grimm, Brian Large, Peter Schönhofer, Tomáš Šimerda and Christian Kurt Weiss chose the best takes from three recordings that employed up to twelve camera angles. Each Mozart 22 opera was then processed in High Definition and 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound.
When commissioning new productions, Salzburg did not attempt to sculpt a single, unilateral Mozart image but instead aimed deliberately for variety: each performance constitutes a statement in its own right about the composer’s significance. Following the individual musical and theatrical readings and their realization as individual interpretations becomes an adventure.
What emerges from the diversity serves as proof that Mozart is our contemporary: his humanity, his understanding of the human condition and his acute observations on man’s fallibility are startlingly modern.
The interpretations were enthusiastically received. Critics rhapsodized over Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Le Nozze di Figaro with Anna Netrebko, Ildebrando D’Arcangelo and Christine Schäfer. Die Welt raved about the Russian soprano’s appearance in this production by Claus Guth: “Characterization – bliss; vocal style: stunning.”
Further excitement was generated by Riccardo Muti’s conducting of Die Zauberflöte and Diana Damrau’s appearance as the Queen of Night. Le Figaro had glowing words: “The Wiener Philharmoniker reacted to every nuance of the conductor and walked with him through worlds of fire and water.” Also part of Mozart 22 are director Martin Kušej’s revolutionary production of Don Giovanni and Stefan Herheim’s controversial staging of Die Entführung aus dem Serail.
The luxurious DVD boxset will also contain Mozart rarities, many of which are now appearing for the very first time on DVD. With the release of 14 lesser-known stage works, such as Il Re Pastore, Ascanio in Alba and Il Sogno di Scipione, Deutsche Grammophon completes their DVD discography of Mozart operas. On one magical DVD, director Thomas Reichert not only offers both Der Schauspieldirektor and Bastien und Bastienne, he also seduces his audience into the world of puppet theater. Jürgen Flimm, by contrast, presents Lucio Silla as an operatic spectacle, while Günter Krämer together with conductor Marc Minkowski plays Mitridate on a breathtaking mirrored stage.
Mozart’s operas can also simply be pure pleasure, as Pierre Audi and Karel Appel demonstrate in their production of Die Zauberflöte. Likewise the Herrmanns in Così fan Tutte. Joachim Schlömer shows in his trilogy Irrfahrten (“Odysseys”) that even Mozart’s fragments evince a powerful connection with the here and now. The Salzburger Nachrichten wrote about this ambitious project: “One could become addicted to these ethereal sounds.”
The conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt is a prophet of musical performance practice. For decades he’s been seeking the right sound for Mozart. Although his fast-paced performances have set new standards in the past, this new Figaro plays in slow motion – Harnoncourt conducts this opera of erotic love’s aberrations as a Strindbergian nightmare in which every single note has its significance. “Mozart was a revolutionary,” says the conductor, “because he always anchored politics in humanity.” Harnoncourt realizes this interpretation through his conducting, investing the explosive power of private politics with a distinctly contemporary resonance.
Directors Martin Kušej, Stefan Herheim and Claus Guth are Freudian in their reading of Mozart, with their productions showing human frailties as actual virtues.
Mozart 22 is more than a long overdue audio-visual documentation of all the composer’s operas. The project, in its comprehensiveness, illuminates every aspect of his genius.
Due to the sheer number of operas, it was almost impossible to attend all these productions in Salzburg, but now the epoch-making Mozart 22 DVD box makes it possible for audiences worldwide to share this remarkable artistic achievement.
