Author : Jos Hermans
Sometimes the directorial concept of a performance is so incoherent and confusing that it does not pay to try to make sense of it. The Lohengrin with which the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden opened the season is a veritable nightmare. Worse, it is also aesthetically unattractive and it also fails to convince musically, neither in the orchestra nor in the chorus, and only moderately in the performances of the soloists.
There is no war atmosphere in Henriette Hörnigk's reading of the piece. The director avoids any suggestion that King Heinrich is mobilizing an army against the Hungarians. Consequently, the entire action falls into a vacuum. As a result, the characters, especially the king, are given hardly any profile. He sits in a wheelchair and is handed an oxygen mask. How to make sense of the images of skyscrapers during the overture? As the curtain rises, we look onto a grandstand where the chorus dressed in Maoist uniforms and wearing ugly, cartoonish black wigs has taken up position in booths. Later, we see them in equally ugly knit sweaters and debardeurs at work! In their hands they hold coiled tubing that refers both to the king's respirator and to the swan that descends from the stage tower like a wire model of blue glowing tubing. You can't imagine it ! A pendulum swings from the stage tower like a stress gauge. Lohengrin, in feather suit, steps onto the stage and stops the pendulum. The duel is a joke : the mental strength of Lohengrin deflects Telramund's knife to his own stomach region. The chorus sings dynamically undifferentiated. It has two modes of expression : loud and very loud. The orchestra led by Michael Güttler is almost always too loud. Often the poetry evaporates from the piece as a result; the orchestra sometimes sounds rough, the blaring brass (trumpets especially) hurts the ears. The noisy finale of the first act was a lackluster wall of sound.
With Telramund and Ortrud's duet, the balance improves. But why are the chorus members now wearing animal masks? At times there is a tank on the video wall or an anti-war poster like that famous sketch by John Heartfield or the skyline of Frankfurt. What is the point of all this nonsense ? For "Gesegnet soll sie schreiten," the chorus poses to take a picture. Christopher Bolduc's Heerrufer is a kind of conference performer in a purple suit, and he does his best to entertain us from time to time. For example, he will drape tulle fabrics on the metal frame of the wedding bed and fold some towels into an origami swan. The orchestra keeps a low profile during the duet in the bridal chamber. After the forbidden question, the pendulum begins to swing again. Do the four Brabant nobles have the traits of the Fab Four, in the finale we get to see all sorts of colorful people of rank and file, along with icons like Audrey Hepburn and Margret Thatcher.
Marco Jentzsch still has a tenor with a fine timbre and at times he manages to captivate as a result but large parts of the part sound rather rough and uncontrolled. Heather Engebretson could have charmed me as Salome in Basel but here she was rather unbalanced in her delivery, often with a unsteady vibrato. She seems to be trying to be someone she is not, particularly a dramatic soprano. Khatuna Mikaberidze as Ortrud could deliver dramatically without vibrato problems but the rest of her delivery was rather unbalanced. Anton Keremietchiev, last minute substitute for Thomas de Vries sang a rather impressive Telramund, well articulated and with good accents. Young Doo Park is a Korean powerhouse, that is : great projection but insufficient feeling for the prosody of the German language. The way he hurled "Mein Herr und Gott" into the auditorium one hardly ever hears it with such power.