Festival Various venues
'To Strauss the composer, I take off my hat. To Strauss the man, I put it on again,' was maestro Toscanini's response to Richard Strauss's supposed fellow-travelling with the Nazis. But the truth remains more equivocal, with one or two bold if sidelong protests highlighting an impossible attempt to remain apolitical at the height of the Second World War.
Especially if you had Jewish relatives. Strauss's daughter-in-law was menacingly harassed, while he was writing his last opera, Capriccio, in 1940-1. A meditation on opera itself, on the primacy of words or music, it is often interpreted as containing covert protests about the context in which it was written. For a German company to ignore that, even 65 years later, might be seen as equally unforgivable.
So I was less discomfited than some of my purist colleagues by Christian von Gotz's imposition of a Nazi framework on his staging for Cologne Opera at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. On the front-cloth, the iris of a giant eye reflected the Wehrmacht marching through Paris, no matter that the work is set there in the 1770s. During the opening sextet papers were ominously shuffled, before the bulk of the piece took place in 18th-century flashback, with sinister Gestapo figures lurking in the wings whenever Strauss's music grew uneasy. At the close, after the Countess's sublime meditation on the impossibility of choosing an ending to the opera-within-an-opera, suitcases symbolised her transportation to a supper elsewhere.
'Neither the one nor the other,' she sings. 'Choice would mean loss.' If this is Strauss standing apart from the fray, lamenting the havoc it was wreaking on civilised values, these are points needing to be made to generations born after that conflict. If the Countess reels with shock at stolen Jewish treasures, or her brother fiddles fretfully with a cyanide capsule, let us not forget that Goebbels himself attended the opera's premiere in Munich in 1942, as Holocaust victims were being transported to nearby Dachau.
In the debate at the heart of the work, music is symbolised by the composer Flamand, words by the poet Olivier, both of whom are in love with the Countess. In this production Hauke Moller's composer was a periwigged 18th-century fop, Johannes Beck's poet a ginger-topped Bohemian thug. Neither was up to the vocal requirements of their roles - wherein lay the downfall of this interpretation.
Of all the aspects of opera discussed in Strauss's 'conversation-piece' - music, words, dance, acting, direction - the missing link is the quality of the singing, without which no production of any opera can even begin to pass muster. The failure of Gabriele Fontana's supposedly youthful Countess to sustain Strauss's soaring vocal lines, to scale some of his serene top notes, was symbolic of the miscasting that undid von Gotz's stagecraft. Of the principals, only Ashley Holland's sturdy Count and Michael Eder's resonant La Roche were equal to their tasks, as Markus Stenz conjured ravishing playing from the Gurzenich Orchestra. So the evening proved something of an endurance test, suggesting the need for wholesale recasting before its revival in Cologne in 2009.
Orchestrally, the San Francisco Symphony under the laid-back Michael Tilson Thomas largely maintained the high standards heard at the Usher Hall throughout this year's Festival. In the first of two concerts part-repeated at this weekend's Proms, an American fanfare consisting of Copland, John Adams and Ruth Crawford Seeger (yes, since you ask, stepmother of Pete) preceded two works reflecting Tilson Thomas's own Russian ancestry, Prokofiev's third piano concerto and Tchaikovsky's first symphony.
Such was the dazzling dexterity and deftness of soloist Yefim Bronfman in the notoriously demanding Prokofiev that the orchestra seemed at times to be cruising, merely along for the ride. But the subtleties of the early Tchaikovsky brought out its true strengths, as did the weightier fare on offer the following evening. By which I do not mean American soprano Deborah Voigt, transformed by a gastric bypass operation since her public tiff with Covent Garden. The seasoned Straussian's voice remains far from insubstantial, even though she was often inaudible, drowned out by the orchestra, in the final scene from Salome. What we could hear, however, remained an object lesson to La Fontana in purity and passion.
The San Franciscans excelled in the filigree details of the three 'night pieces' at the heart of Mahler's seventh symphony, while making often heavy weather of those intractable outer movements. The vast, rambling work scarcely cohered. All but fundamentalist Mahlerians at tonight's Prom repeat should gird their loins for a languid performance not without its longueurs, nearer 90 minutes than the advertised 77.
At the morning recitals in the Queen's Hall, Italian madrigal group La Venexiana showed there was more to their princely Renaissance compatriot Carlo Gesualdo than his infamous murder of his wife and her ducal lover. Such was the remorse of this depressive nobleman that his songs of love and death, with their quirky chromatic shifts and dissonant harmonies, primarily evoke unrelieved gloom. However robustly performed by the five-strong group, under counter-tenor Claudio Cavina, a cycle as short as 60 minutes proved relentlessly dispiriting.
Almost as dispiriting as the threat of Festival director Jonathan Mills to resign, after just one year in charge, unless the Scottish executive and Edinburgh's local council increase their investment next year. At £3.7m (compared with Salzburg's £17m), current funding enables Mills only to import overseas productions, he says, rather than commissioning new ones. If this year's two operatic examples are anything to go by, Mills is right to suggest that Edinburgh's international reputation for excellence is under urgent threat.