I came to Houston this weekend to see a new production of the opera Siegfried by the Houston Grand Opera. It was stunning – breathtaking – especially the final act, when Brunnhilde (Christine Goerke) is awakened by Siegfried (Jay Hunter Morris).
I have written before about my fascination with Wagner’s fascination with the subjugation of women (Musings on Love and Freedom in the Ring Cycle; Hail, Isolde). It comes up again and again in the Ring Cycle and Tristan und Isolde: women are forced to marry men against their will, resulting in the repeated rape and slavery of the woman.
I don’t see any social commentary in this – these are tales of Norse gods and Celtic healer-princesses, not radio talk show hosts – and I don’t see anything of interest on the more general topic of free will. This obsession with female subjugation is more in line with Wagner’s [lesser] interest in incest (twins; an aunt and her nephew). It seems to be emerging from some moral ambiguity in Wagner’s psyche, and as I’ve written before, it feels like an itch he has to keep scratching.
In the production I saw tonight, Goerke’s voice was so inhumanly glorious that I lost myself in it for a while: I entered a state of concentration where I absorbed everything and can remember it perfectly, but at the time I had no conscious thought. When I emerged, I had the clearest sense that this was a woman who was desperately trying to stop a man from having sex with her. (And her last line in the opera, as she succumbs to Siegfried's sexual advances, is, “Laughter in death!”)
I don’t want to do some analysis based on rereading the libretto; what I’m writing about is an emotional reaction.
In bad productions of Siegfried, the final act can drag terribly. There must be 45 minutes of Brunnhilde waking up and meeting Siegfried. In most productions I’ve seen, Brunnhilde is coquettish, or needs some time to make up her mind. In this production, she is fighting him off. But I’d like to see a production that dealt with the matter even more blatantly: Wotan has magically forced her to become the slave of any man who can break through the fire that surrounds her. She fights against that, appealing to Siegfried to not force her. When he refuses, she must succumb. This should be a brutal scene: he should manhandle her; he should, against her will, remove enough of her clothing to be disturbing; she should become humiliated; and her final acceptance should be Stepford-wifish, or something along those lines.
That would make Gotterdammerung make more sense. Brunnhilde cheated in her subjugation: she knew that her nephew Siegfried would be the one to find her, and welcomed it. So when she succumbed to loving Siegfried, Siegfried quickly set off on a new quest, leaving her alone, and later was tricked into transferring the subjugation to another man who she truly loathed.
I don’t particularly like Wagner’s repeated plot lines of female subjugation, but I’d like to see a production that handles it head-on - that does it justice.
Correction: This is not a new production. It was first performed in 2007-2008 for the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain.
Showing posts with label opera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opera. Show all posts
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Hail, Isolde
After Richard Wagner had been working on the Ring Cycle for about ten years, he took a break for two years to write Tristan und Isolde. With Tristan, he did something that seems unbelievable: he took the plot of his unfinished magnum opus (the libretto of the Ring Cycle was finished, but it would take him 15 more years to complete the music) and he ripped it off.
What he repeated was the love story between Siegfried and Brunnhilde. In both operas, the man is a great hero, and the woman is equally heroic: Brunnhilde the goddess warrior queen, Isolde the Irish healer princess. Both women are proud and regal, with high status. Yet in both stories the hero gives the woman to another man, with the result that the woman is humiliated and brought to the brink of sexual subjugation. In both stories, a love potion deprives the hero of free will. In both stories, the hero is slain and the woman chooses to follow him in death.
In the Ring Cycle Wagner wrote a libretto that is the equal of the best of Shakespeare, and it is an enormous, complicated epic. Tristan und Isolde is the opposite: a splendid opera, but despite its length it is a very simple story. It has just two of themes, and they are hammered home with a heavy hand. Those themes are light/day (worldly ambition, falsity) and night (sex, death, the womb). The two extremes suggest (but don't quite admit to having) religious overtones.
In a libretto that is barely 10,000 words (in the English translation), there is a heavy repetition of the day/night themes. “Day” appears 63 times; for example, envious day, importunate daylight, spiteful day, the noonday sun of worldly fame, slave of day, day’s false glare, day’s deceiving light, spiteful day, the lies of daylight honour and fame, day’s empty fancies, lying day, phantoms of day, accursed day, night casts me back to day so that the sun can forever feast its sight upon my suffering.
What he repeated was the love story between Siegfried and Brunnhilde. In both operas, the man is a great hero, and the woman is equally heroic: Brunnhilde the goddess warrior queen, Isolde the Irish healer princess. Both women are proud and regal, with high status. Yet in both stories the hero gives the woman to another man, with the result that the woman is humiliated and brought to the brink of sexual subjugation. In both stories, a love potion deprives the hero of free will. In both stories, the hero is slain and the woman chooses to follow him in death.
In the Ring Cycle Wagner wrote a libretto that is the equal of the best of Shakespeare, and it is an enormous, complicated epic. Tristan und Isolde is the opposite: a splendid opera, but despite its length it is a very simple story. It has just two of themes, and they are hammered home with a heavy hand. Those themes are light/day (worldly ambition, falsity) and night (sex, death, the womb). The two extremes suggest (but don't quite admit to having) religious overtones.
In a libretto that is barely 10,000 words (in the English translation), there is a heavy repetition of the day/night themes. “Day” appears 63 times; for example, envious day, importunate daylight, spiteful day, the noonday sun of worldly fame, slave of day, day’s false glare, day’s deceiving light, spiteful day, the lies of daylight honour and fame, day’s empty fancies, lying day, phantoms of day, accursed day, night casts me back to day so that the sun can forever feast its sight upon my suffering.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Robert Lepage Wrecked the Ring Cycle
He had help.
Costumes
Throughout, the costumes were an unfortunate distraction. They didn't enhance the characterization or help to set a tone or place. They were unflattering. Poor Waltraud Meier, who played a thrilling Waltraute in Gotterdammerung, had a bodice about three inches too low for her age, and the typically over-close Met HD camera work never let us look away from her huge cleavage wrinkles. I don't even want to remember Wotan's giant leather pants or the faux-leather codpiece-bedecked gods in Das Rheingold.
Lighting
At times, the harsh white lighting made the filming look like a 1970s era sitcom. I'm a fan of well-lit operas (the Toronto Ring was so dark that I couldn't see whole chunks from my seat at the back of Ring 3), but this production was at times ridiculous.
Cinematography
Good god, when will the Met HD get it together in the filming department?
There were a lot of geniuses in the cast, but in Met performances you expect them all to be great: great singers and great actors. This Ring had too many weak links. At its center, Deborah Voigt's middle register is not pleasant to listen to: it has a strained sharpness. In addition, she mugged and aped without creating a believable Brunnhilde. The problem with her acting could have been one of scale; she was acting for the back row and it didn't work on the big screen. But surely the director should have figured that out. This was Voigt's first Brunnhilde and she clearly wasn't ready.
The other main characters were superb, as you'd expect, but there were problems with some of the small parts. Patricia Bardon was an embarrassment as Erda in Siegfried (and you had to wonder if her dress threw her off: it clung tightly to her full body including her hands and was covered with sharp-edged pieces of broken mirror). In the broadcast of Gotterdammerung, Iain Paterson as Gunther was very uneven: his acting was wonderful but his voice was at times warbly and weird. There were little glitches like that throughout, and that just shouldn't happen in a Met Ring Cycle.
Special effects
Siegfried establishes himself as a hero by killing the terrifying dragon (and giant) Fafner. Lepage's dragon looked like a big, silly muppet. It was hands down the worst special effect I have seen in a Ring cycle - and this from Lepage, the supposed master of FX. When special effects failed (as also happened with the horse and on several occasions with The Machine), I kept suspecting that what we saw was an incomplete idea or a last-minute substitution.
And then, of course there was The Machine, which dominated every single goddamn scene - that's four operas: 15 hours of looking at a giant xylaphone. It had its advantages: it served as a screen for some good animation; it was nice that there was never any need for scene changes; and some scenes worked. But ultimately it was a failure. It was there all the time, and three-quarters of the time it shouldn't have been. It was a distraction from the opera. It forced the singers to do most of their performing on a thin strip at the front of the stage. And we spent half the opera staring at the castors on the end of the planks - how I came to hate those castors!
After all the deficiencies and flaws in the four operas, the really unforgiving thing about Lepage's Ring Cycle was the ending. Or should I say non-ending. The ending of the Ring Cycle is paramount. After all the emotional highs of the series of operas, the ending should be a great emotional release. The final bars of the score are the lietmotif of humanity: the coming of a new era after the age of the gods. What did Lepage show us, after Brunnhilde sat on a fake horse and rolled towards an underwhelming funeral pyre? --Some statue heads exploded and then there was nothing for the last several moments: just the ugly xylaphone. It meant nothing and it emoted nothing, except disappointment.
I'm a huge Lepage fan, having seen several other operas he's directed (Damnation of Faust, Erwartung, Bluebeard's Castle, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables). In a 2009 post I reviewed his 9 hour play Lipsynch. I'm a huge Ring Cycle fan, having seen the 2006 Toronto production, Otto Schenk's previous Met production, Francesca Zambello's 2011 San Francisco Opera production, and others. In fact, I'm hard to disappoint on either count, but Lepage did it... and I think that calls into question his approach of theater as experimentation. It's one thing to create a play like Lipsynch in an iterative process over several years. It's another thing to present a half-assed, unfinished Ring Cycle at Lincoln Center.
Update: This post was quoted in Macleans. Update 2: I went to New York to see this production remounted in 2019. The problems with is were all resolved to my satisfaction--or at least there were fewer so I didn't mind them--and it was fabulous.
Costumes
Throughout, the costumes were an unfortunate distraction. They didn't enhance the characterization or help to set a tone or place. They were unflattering. Poor Waltraud Meier, who played a thrilling Waltraute in Gotterdammerung, had a bodice about three inches too low for her age, and the typically over-close Met HD camera work never let us look away from her huge cleavage wrinkles. I don't even want to remember Wotan's giant leather pants or the faux-leather codpiece-bedecked gods in Das Rheingold.
Lighting
At times, the harsh white lighting made the filming look like a 1970s era sitcom. I'm a fan of well-lit operas (the Toronto Ring was so dark that I couldn't see whole chunks from my seat at the back of Ring 3), but this production was at times ridiculous.
Cinematography
Good god, when will the Met HD get it together in the filming department?
- In Valkyrie, Jonas Kaufmann was brilliant as Siegmund, but the poor man drools, and the camera relentlessly zoomed in on those great gobs of drool falling out of his mouth, down his chin, and off in gobby strands to the floor. It was icky and embarrassing and completely unnecessary - he didn't drool continuously, and they could have changed to a long shot when he did.
- In Gotterdammerung, Deborah Voigt wore running shoes under her long dress, and kudos to her for doing that: she's on stage for the better part of six hours, after all. Nobody needed to ever see those running shoes, but the Met HD cinematography department made sure we saw them several times.
- The Ring is a grandiose piece of art describing the destruction of the gods, but it is built around intimate, one-on-one moments. When two people are interacting, it removes the effectiveness to focus on only one face at a time. The cinema has a huge screen: they don't need to zoom in on people so much.
There were a lot of geniuses in the cast, but in Met performances you expect them all to be great: great singers and great actors. This Ring had too many weak links. At its center, Deborah Voigt's middle register is not pleasant to listen to: it has a strained sharpness. In addition, she mugged and aped without creating a believable Brunnhilde. The problem with her acting could have been one of scale; she was acting for the back row and it didn't work on the big screen. But surely the director should have figured that out. This was Voigt's first Brunnhilde and she clearly wasn't ready.
The other main characters were superb, as you'd expect, but there were problems with some of the small parts. Patricia Bardon was an embarrassment as Erda in Siegfried (and you had to wonder if her dress threw her off: it clung tightly to her full body including her hands and was covered with sharp-edged pieces of broken mirror). In the broadcast of Gotterdammerung, Iain Paterson as Gunther was very uneven: his acting was wonderful but his voice was at times warbly and weird. There were little glitches like that throughout, and that just shouldn't happen in a Met Ring Cycle.
Special effects
Siegfried establishes himself as a hero by killing the terrifying dragon (and giant) Fafner. Lepage's dragon looked like a big, silly muppet. It was hands down the worst special effect I have seen in a Ring cycle - and this from Lepage, the supposed master of FX. When special effects failed (as also happened with the horse and on several occasions with The Machine), I kept suspecting that what we saw was an incomplete idea or a last-minute substitution.
And then, of course there was The Machine, which dominated every single goddamn scene - that's four operas: 15 hours of looking at a giant xylaphone. It had its advantages: it served as a screen for some good animation; it was nice that there was never any need for scene changes; and some scenes worked. But ultimately it was a failure. It was there all the time, and three-quarters of the time it shouldn't have been. It was a distraction from the opera. It forced the singers to do most of their performing on a thin strip at the front of the stage. And we spent half the opera staring at the castors on the end of the planks - how I came to hate those castors!
After all the deficiencies and flaws in the four operas, the really unforgiving thing about Lepage's Ring Cycle was the ending. Or should I say non-ending. The ending of the Ring Cycle is paramount. After all the emotional highs of the series of operas, the ending should be a great emotional release. The final bars of the score are the lietmotif of humanity: the coming of a new era after the age of the gods. What did Lepage show us, after Brunnhilde sat on a fake horse and rolled towards an underwhelming funeral pyre? --Some statue heads exploded and then there was nothing for the last several moments: just the ugly xylaphone. It meant nothing and it emoted nothing, except disappointment. I'm a huge Lepage fan, having seen several other operas he's directed (Damnation of Faust, Erwartung, Bluebeard's Castle, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables). In a 2009 post I reviewed his 9 hour play Lipsynch. I'm a huge Ring Cycle fan, having seen the 2006 Toronto production, Otto Schenk's previous Met production, Francesca Zambello's 2011 San Francisco Opera production, and others. In fact, I'm hard to disappoint on either count, but Lepage did it... and I think that calls into question his approach of theater as experimentation. It's one thing to create a play like Lipsynch in an iterative process over several years. It's another thing to present a half-assed, unfinished Ring Cycle at Lincoln Center.
Update: This post was quoted in Macleans. Update 2: I went to New York to see this production remounted in 2019. The problems with is were all resolved to my satisfaction--or at least there were fewer so I didn't mind them--and it was fabulous.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Ending Wagner
At the very end of the Ring Cycle there is a brief moment when we see that the age of the gods is over and the age of humanity is beginning. It only lasts a couple of minutes but it is of vital importance to the piece - all the fighting of the gods leads to this, the making of humanity. After 17+ hours, the audience can finally exhale. The leitmotif that plays at the end makes this very clear. A production that doesn't recognize it makes a big mistake. I know - I saw one once: it was a deflating experience.
At the end of The Flying Dutchman, when the young woman Senta is shot dead, the music suddenly changes from dark and menacing to romantic and optimistic. It only lasts a moment, but that music ends the opera. It is clear that Wagner intends that Senta and the flying Dutchman are both saved by her death: he has been cursed to immortal life on the sea, and can only be saved by a woman who promises and delivers on loving him until her death. She promised him her love, and continued loving him until her death.
It is unfortunate that the COC production of The Flying Dutchman, mounted in 2000 and currently being revived at the Four Seasons Center, misses the ending - either misses it, or handles it so subtlely that the audience misses it. Senta just falls down dead, and the Dutchman walks up a staircase holding her wedding veil, but that's it.
I can see that it's difficult to do justice to these brief but monumental Wagner endings, but opera productions must.
###
At the end of The Flying Dutchman, when the young woman Senta is shot dead, the music suddenly changes from dark and menacing to romantic and optimistic. It only lasts a moment, but that music ends the opera. It is clear that Wagner intends that Senta and the flying Dutchman are both saved by her death: he has been cursed to immortal life on the sea, and can only be saved by a woman who promises and delivers on loving him until her death. She promised him her love, and continued loving him until her death.
It is unfortunate that the COC production of The Flying Dutchman, mounted in 2000 and currently being revived at the Four Seasons Center, misses the ending - either misses it, or handles it so subtlely that the audience misses it. Senta just falls down dead, and the Dutchman walks up a staircase holding her wedding veil, but that's it.
I can see that it's difficult to do justice to these brief but monumental Wagner endings, but opera productions must.
Friday, May 01, 2009
The Ring Thing
A really characteristic thing about the Ring Cycle is seeing men in black suits standing around at intermission eating bananas. (They must carry them in their pockets.) Actually, everyone seems to eat at all the intervals. Concert halls that put on the Ring usually set up restaurants or sell picnic lunches in Ring intervals - at Lincoln Center they have caviar and toast points and multi-course meals. People carry in coolers and picnic baskets. I saw a man last night wolfing down a large packet of saltine crackers as if his life depended on it. It's true that the performances are mostly quite long (they generally start at 6 and end after 11), but they're really not so long as to require major refuelling.
Then there's the drinking. The entire audience seems to be buoyed along by endless flutes of champagne. At a break last night a woman barrelled over me to get to the aisle before the crowd got to their feet, and a few minutes later I saw her at the bar eagerly gulping a glass of bubbly. I myself was regrettably hung over after the previous evening of reuniting with Reuters colleagues (and drank a quintuple espresso at the first interval and a double espresso at the second), but I couldn't find anywhere in Lincoln Center that sold coffee at all, so had to resort to the Starbucks across the street.
That's another thing about the Ring: really long breaks. The first opera in the four-opera cycle has no intermission, and after that we make up for it by breaking twice a night - for as long as 45 minutes each time. Of course Wagner wanted the Ring Cycle to be populist entertainment, a change from some of the stodgy conventional opera that preceded him. The Ring has giants and dwarves, a dragon and a bear, incest and murder, romance (sister with brother, aunt with nephew), and more plot than a dozen normal operas - so it's fitting that we get a real entertaining evening out of it.
The audience at the Ring differs from other operas in ways I appreciate. It is what you'd call a mixed crowd. Everyone has paid an arm and a leg for their seats (mine were C$2,000 for one person for the four operas in the cycle) but we represent a wide strata of income. You have your designer ball gown types and then you have your hippie blue jean types. There is a nice mix of sneakers and stilleto heels. Unlike other operas, you never hear anyone snoring in the Ring: we are a united crowd in that we love this thing - and most of us have seen it many times, travelling long distances to do so.
My quibble (and it's a big one) at Lincoln Center is the people who buy cheap standing-room tickets and then move down into the main seats. Hector the mafioso usher seems to direct the operation, not only finding seats for the standing room crowd but keeping an eye out for better seats for them. That's not too bad, but there's a never-ending distraction of people filling in seats they think are empty and then refusing to move when the ticket-holder comes back - with arguments continuing even after the music has started.
The Met Ring I'm seeing this week is a 20 year old production that they're mounting for the last time. I would be sad to see it go except the next production, currently in development and scheduled some years hence, will be directed by Robert Lepage - and I am confident it will be the most exciting musical event of the 21st century.
Previous Rings I have seen have been modern, and have brought out Jungian themes and themes of pagan gods... this Met Ring is naturalistic in the best sense, especially given the amazing budget and resources of the Metropolitan Opera. We don't just have painted backdrops - we have huge soaring cliffs of (seemingly) natural rock, forests of giant trees, mammoth caves. When Brunhilde is surrounded by a ring of fire we have realistic flames and even cinders falling on the stage. The dragon is so big that it's eyes are nearly the size of the hero who slays it.
I never wanted to admit that the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto was not first flight, but now I must. When I heard Placido Domingo singing Siegmund in Die Walkurie I cried at the beauty. The intelligence in his creation of the character is not something I'm used to seeing at the opera. His Siegmund was so lonely and anguished - Domingo is 60-something but fully came across as a 20 year old, both in movement and voice. And the voice! Domingo retrained his voice some years ago, moving from Italian tenor to Helden tenor, and next year is going to sing his first baritone role in Simon Boccaneggra. (Update: The acting and singing of Katarina Dalayman as Brunnhilde in Gotterdamerung was equally spell-binding.)
All the singers, I'd say, are giving it their all in a way I'm not used to. Last night Siegfried moved from brute to lout with great gusto. The orchestra under the great James Levine seems to let loose also, rattling the rafters. It's awe-inspiring to witness the greatest artists in the world pulling out all the stops, especially when seated amongst 3,000 knowledgeable concert-goers who appreciate every second of it.
###
Then there's the drinking. The entire audience seems to be buoyed along by endless flutes of champagne. At a break last night a woman barrelled over me to get to the aisle before the crowd got to their feet, and a few minutes later I saw her at the bar eagerly gulping a glass of bubbly. I myself was regrettably hung over after the previous evening of reuniting with Reuters colleagues (and drank a quintuple espresso at the first interval and a double espresso at the second), but I couldn't find anywhere in Lincoln Center that sold coffee at all, so had to resort to the Starbucks across the street.
That's another thing about the Ring: really long breaks. The first opera in the four-opera cycle has no intermission, and after that we make up for it by breaking twice a night - for as long as 45 minutes each time. Of course Wagner wanted the Ring Cycle to be populist entertainment, a change from some of the stodgy conventional opera that preceded him. The Ring has giants and dwarves, a dragon and a bear, incest and murder, romance (sister with brother, aunt with nephew), and more plot than a dozen normal operas - so it's fitting that we get a real entertaining evening out of it.
The audience at the Ring differs from other operas in ways I appreciate. It is what you'd call a mixed crowd. Everyone has paid an arm and a leg for their seats (mine were C$2,000 for one person for the four operas in the cycle) but we represent a wide strata of income. You have your designer ball gown types and then you have your hippie blue jean types. There is a nice mix of sneakers and stilleto heels. Unlike other operas, you never hear anyone snoring in the Ring: we are a united crowd in that we love this thing - and most of us have seen it many times, travelling long distances to do so.
My quibble (and it's a big one) at Lincoln Center is the people who buy cheap standing-room tickets and then move down into the main seats. Hector the mafioso usher seems to direct the operation, not only finding seats for the standing room crowd but keeping an eye out for better seats for them. That's not too bad, but there's a never-ending distraction of people filling in seats they think are empty and then refusing to move when the ticket-holder comes back - with arguments continuing even after the music has started.
The Met Ring I'm seeing this week is a 20 year old production that they're mounting for the last time. I would be sad to see it go except the next production, currently in development and scheduled some years hence, will be directed by Robert Lepage - and I am confident it will be the most exciting musical event of the 21st century.
Previous Rings I have seen have been modern, and have brought out Jungian themes and themes of pagan gods... this Met Ring is naturalistic in the best sense, especially given the amazing budget and resources of the Metropolitan Opera. We don't just have painted backdrops - we have huge soaring cliffs of (seemingly) natural rock, forests of giant trees, mammoth caves. When Brunhilde is surrounded by a ring of fire we have realistic flames and even cinders falling on the stage. The dragon is so big that it's eyes are nearly the size of the hero who slays it.
I never wanted to admit that the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto was not first flight, but now I must. When I heard Placido Domingo singing Siegmund in Die Walkurie I cried at the beauty. The intelligence in his creation of the character is not something I'm used to seeing at the opera. His Siegmund was so lonely and anguished - Domingo is 60-something but fully came across as a 20 year old, both in movement and voice. And the voice! Domingo retrained his voice some years ago, moving from Italian tenor to Helden tenor, and next year is going to sing his first baritone role in Simon Boccaneggra. (Update: The acting and singing of Katarina Dalayman as Brunnhilde in Gotterdamerung was equally spell-binding.)
All the singers, I'd say, are giving it their all in a way I'm not used to. Last night Siegfried moved from brute to lout with great gusto. The orchestra under the great James Levine seems to let loose also, rattling the rafters. It's awe-inspiring to witness the greatest artists in the world pulling out all the stops, especially when seated amongst 3,000 knowledgeable concert-goers who appreciate every second of it.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Tale of Two Divas
What are the synonyms for opposite? ...antipodal, antithetical, contrary, counter, counterpole, diametrically opposed, different, differing, dissimilar, diverse, polar, unalike, unsimilar. None quite captures the range of difference between two sopranos I saw last weekend.
First, Diva1. The Metropolitan Opera's production of Thais was all about a diva at the height of her career. Renee Fleming's voice is incredible. She's young and slender and fit. The Met PR machine has made Fleming into an opera supersuperstar: last year they made her the host of their Met HD program and featured her in Met ads; this year she was the centerpiece of the opening gala; and finally the Met hyped this production to the hilt, making it clear to the world that it reserves Thais for the greats. (They last mounted it 30 years ago with Beverly Sills in the leading role.) They hired a couture designer to make a series of magnificent gowns for Fleming, and they created magnificent blond wigs for her - normally a handsome woman, in Thais she is glamorous and beautiful. The direction was all about her. They cut a few corners in the plot to keep the attention firmly on the diva. They even threw in a few extra flourishes: at one point she raced up a flight of stairs, struck a pose, belted out a couple of high Cs and raced back down; in the final death scene, instead of being in the narrow convent bed that the plot calls for she is inexplicably ensconced on a throne raised above the stage.
To put all this in context, companies that attempt to mount Thais have a lot to live up to. As Lawrence Gilman wrote in a review of a 1939 production, "[Thais] has never lived again with the kindling veracity that Miss [Mary] Garden gave her [in a 1907 production]. But what would you? There has been only one Mary, and there never will be another. On that November night in 1907 when she first appeared upon a New York stage, lithe, slender, dazzling, indescribably vital and magnetic, as she entered, with long and sweeping strides, the presence of the adoring crowd, flinging her roses among them and greeting rapturously her waiting lover, she transformed the papier-mâché figure of Massenet and his librettist into a creation that will always haunt the minds of those who were present to observe it. This was one of the great entrances in the history of the stage. And this was Thais, authentic in grace, fascination, and reality. Since then Thais has walked among us, but she has never wholly come to life."
In the Met performance, La Fleming did not disappoint. Her voice is magnificent, particularly in the middle range, and most of all when she is half-swallowing the notes. Her character's religious conversion brought tears to the eyes of this cynical old atheist.
I could have skipped the parts that most sopranos apparently can't sing. Fleming has a lovely voice, but the high notes are not as special as the middle ones. It is supposed to be very difficult for sopranos to emit the harsh laughter called for in the score, but the harsh laughter didn't sound good and it added little to the plot. Maybe it just seemed out of place in the diva showcase revue that this opera has become.
That was Diva1. In my opera adventures last weekend, Diva2 was so bad that I won't even say who she was or where I saw her. I'll tell you that it wasn't in Toronto. Diva2 was young, but seemed to have been trained in the 1930s: she had a warble that could vibrate tarnish off a spoon. I don't know that any amount of proper training could have made her voice appealing. I described it as a "whistle"; my companion thought a better word was "strained". Her volume was a problem. Plus, she didn't hit all the notes. She braved it out in the title role of Traviata, and I would have admired her chutzpah if I didn't suspect that she doesn't realize how truly, truly awful she is.
Unlike the Met performance, Diva2's production was on the cheap. It was billed as opera in concert but at the last minute they threw in surtitles, put a couch on the stage and tried to act it out, the result being the crappiest production in operatic history. I'm a big fan of opera in concert as it lets you concentrate differently; this production I saw last Sunday was truly the worst of all worlds. The orchestra was on the stage with a chorus standing behind, and the principal singers tried to act out the story in the couple of feet at the front of the stage. Apparently nobody had coordinated costumes: at one point Diva2 was dressed in a plain sweater and skirt while the singer playing her maid was all dolled up in a cocktail dress with high heels. When I'm at opera and something's off, I try to concentrate on something else. But there really was nothing redeeming about this performance: the fellow singing Giorgio had an upper-range caterwaul that was the worst noise ever emitted in a professional performance; there was an out-of-tune violin during the first half; one of the tenors in the chorus was singing to a different tempo; and so it went.
As often happens these days, when the pathetic horror finally came to end people immediately screamed "Brava" and gave it a standing ovation. The local paper, ever supportive of the arts, said that Diva2 had a "commanding vibrato" and called it an "impressive show." (On the other hand, they once reviewed Swiss Chalet and said it had excellent service and outstanding ambience.)
Both performances left me unsatisfied. The second was so bad that it gives a bad name to the art form. But the first wasn't quite right either. I'm all for great tour de force performances - I was enchanted with Renee Fleming in this year's Met opening gala, in which she sang excerpts from three operas that highlilghted her great talent. But when you mount an entire opera the production shouldn't be so much a star vehicle, no matter how great the star. For example, I don't like it when the audience continually interrupts an opera to applaud individual performances, and that's because to me an opera is a play with extra dimensions. Can you imagine applauding the actor playing Hamlet after each soliloquy? Treating it as a concert of songs is just wrong, and takes away much of the emotional punch. The same is true of making the entire production a frame for a star.
###
First, Diva1. The Metropolitan Opera's production of Thais was all about a diva at the height of her career. Renee Fleming's voice is incredible. She's young and slender and fit. The Met PR machine has made Fleming into an opera supersuperstar: last year they made her the host of their Met HD program and featured her in Met ads; this year she was the centerpiece of the opening gala; and finally the Met hyped this production to the hilt, making it clear to the world that it reserves Thais for the greats. (They last mounted it 30 years ago with Beverly Sills in the leading role.) They hired a couture designer to make a series of magnificent gowns for Fleming, and they created magnificent blond wigs for her - normally a handsome woman, in Thais she is glamorous and beautiful. The direction was all about her. They cut a few corners in the plot to keep the attention firmly on the diva. They even threw in a few extra flourishes: at one point she raced up a flight of stairs, struck a pose, belted out a couple of high Cs and raced back down; in the final death scene, instead of being in the narrow convent bed that the plot calls for she is inexplicably ensconced on a throne raised above the stage.
To put all this in context, companies that attempt to mount Thais have a lot to live up to. As Lawrence Gilman wrote in a review of a 1939 production, "[Thais] has never lived again with the kindling veracity that Miss [Mary] Garden gave her [in a 1907 production]. But what would you? There has been only one Mary, and there never will be another. On that November night in 1907 when she first appeared upon a New York stage, lithe, slender, dazzling, indescribably vital and magnetic, as she entered, with long and sweeping strides, the presence of the adoring crowd, flinging her roses among them and greeting rapturously her waiting lover, she transformed the papier-mâché figure of Massenet and his librettist into a creation that will always haunt the minds of those who were present to observe it. This was one of the great entrances in the history of the stage. And this was Thais, authentic in grace, fascination, and reality. Since then Thais has walked among us, but she has never wholly come to life."
In the Met performance, La Fleming did not disappoint. Her voice is magnificent, particularly in the middle range, and most of all when she is half-swallowing the notes. Her character's religious conversion brought tears to the eyes of this cynical old atheist.
I could have skipped the parts that most sopranos apparently can't sing. Fleming has a lovely voice, but the high notes are not as special as the middle ones. It is supposed to be very difficult for sopranos to emit the harsh laughter called for in the score, but the harsh laughter didn't sound good and it added little to the plot. Maybe it just seemed out of place in the diva showcase revue that this opera has become.
That was Diva1. In my opera adventures last weekend, Diva2 was so bad that I won't even say who she was or where I saw her. I'll tell you that it wasn't in Toronto. Diva2 was young, but seemed to have been trained in the 1930s: she had a warble that could vibrate tarnish off a spoon. I don't know that any amount of proper training could have made her voice appealing. I described it as a "whistle"; my companion thought a better word was "strained". Her volume was a problem. Plus, she didn't hit all the notes. She braved it out in the title role of Traviata, and I would have admired her chutzpah if I didn't suspect that she doesn't realize how truly, truly awful she is.
Unlike the Met performance, Diva2's production was on the cheap. It was billed as opera in concert but at the last minute they threw in surtitles, put a couch on the stage and tried to act it out, the result being the crappiest production in operatic history. I'm a big fan of opera in concert as it lets you concentrate differently; this production I saw last Sunday was truly the worst of all worlds. The orchestra was on the stage with a chorus standing behind, and the principal singers tried to act out the story in the couple of feet at the front of the stage. Apparently nobody had coordinated costumes: at one point Diva2 was dressed in a plain sweater and skirt while the singer playing her maid was all dolled up in a cocktail dress with high heels. When I'm at opera and something's off, I try to concentrate on something else. But there really was nothing redeeming about this performance: the fellow singing Giorgio had an upper-range caterwaul that was the worst noise ever emitted in a professional performance; there was an out-of-tune violin during the first half; one of the tenors in the chorus was singing to a different tempo; and so it went.
As often happens these days, when the pathetic horror finally came to end people immediately screamed "Brava" and gave it a standing ovation. The local paper, ever supportive of the arts, said that Diva2 had a "commanding vibrato" and called it an "impressive show." (On the other hand, they once reviewed Swiss Chalet and said it had excellent service and outstanding ambience.)
Both performances left me unsatisfied. The second was so bad that it gives a bad name to the art form. But the first wasn't quite right either. I'm all for great tour de force performances - I was enchanted with Renee Fleming in this year's Met opening gala, in which she sang excerpts from three operas that highlilghted her great talent. But when you mount an entire opera the production shouldn't be so much a star vehicle, no matter how great the star. For example, I don't like it when the audience continually interrupts an opera to applaud individual performances, and that's because to me an opera is a play with extra dimensions. Can you imagine applauding the actor playing Hamlet after each soliloquy? Treating it as a concert of songs is just wrong, and takes away much of the emotional punch. The same is true of making the entire production a frame for a star.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Experiencing Opera
The simple part of learning to experience opera is learning to open your senses to a blast of complex inputs. It's not all that easy, at least for me.
First, you have to avoid getting distracted, because sometimes in a lengthy piece there's a tendency to daydream, get miffed at people coughing, or whatever. (I hear that some people, egad, even doze off.) It's important to be well rested, have no alcohol and only moderate carbohydrates before the show, not be hungry or thirsty, and be dressed in light comfortable clothing. It's also best not to plan any events for afterwards that might absorb your attention.
You also can't let yourself get distracted by the surtitles: it's important to read them in little bursts and sometimes just ignore them altogether. It helps me to sit in the balcony so I don't have to look up, away from the stage, at the surtitles. An ideal situation is to attend an opera you know well enough that you don't need the surtitles. I particularly like attending the encore performance of the Met HD program because the production is clear in mind from the first viewing.
Likewise, it's easy to focus too much on the singers and the visuals, and not pay adequate attention to the orchestra - occasionally I forget to listen to the orchestra, and I always get mad at myself when I do that. In some operas, like the Ring Cycle, I partciularly focus on the orchestra (it's not really possible to miss the singing or the action, in any event).
It's also important to me that I don't focus on the mistakes, but absorb it as a whole, uncritically. I can think critically later. This might separate me from people who are musically trained or more knowledgable about the music.
How much you know about the opera is a less definitive area. Opera can be enjoyed on many levels. For me, the decades-long process of understanding opera has been a gradual increase in awareness that deepens my understanding, and lately I've been speeding up that process, attending lectures and reading web sites and books. I'm getting more out of opera now, but I don't know that the emotional punch was any less when I was less knowledgable. I was lucky that my mother started me off on very accessible operas. My first was Maureen Forrester in Menotti's The Medium, which is not only very short but also really a play with words - and it was engrossing and spine-tingling. As I learned more my understanding deepened and my experience became richer. It took me until my 30s or 40s to like Wagner, although I was an early convert to Janacek.
For me, both the requirement and the reward is the high level of concentration required by opera, but there's more, and that's not overthinking the experience. The whole point of opera is the emotional impact, so you have to make yourself open to that. My dad once said that a game of golf is like living a lifetime, with emotional highs and lows - I think opera is for me what golf is for him. To a certain extent, you have to free yourself to ride the emotional rollercoaster, unhinge from the world and yourself. You have to be able to be caught up in the moment.
The difference between opera and a play or a book is that the emotional impact is not mostly the story. When I cry in an opera, it's almost always because of sublime music, not the plot. There are exceptions, such as the end of Gotterdammerung, when the final lietmotif heralding the era of man is almost overwhelmingly emotional on all levels. I've never been brought to tears by sublime music at the symphony - it's something about voice that is so powerful. And for me, the music has to be live... I'm not very enthusiastic about recordings, and can only watch videos in certain circumstances (Met HD productions I've seen before, and mostly, the Chereau-Boulez Ring Cycle).
All this is sort of dancing around my central interest in writing about opera: why does it affect me the way it does? That's a developing topic. I want to understand it in a way that will heighten the experience, rather than lessen it by externalizing a deeply felt experience.
I met someone recently who attends upwards of 100 operas a year, and it dawned on me that there is an addictive high to the experience, in much the way that joggers say they get addicted to an endorphin rush from extreme exercise. I guess I'm not an addictive personality... I'm happy with two or three dozen a year...
###
First, you have to avoid getting distracted, because sometimes in a lengthy piece there's a tendency to daydream, get miffed at people coughing, or whatever. (I hear that some people, egad, even doze off.) It's important to be well rested, have no alcohol and only moderate carbohydrates before the show, not be hungry or thirsty, and be dressed in light comfortable clothing. It's also best not to plan any events for afterwards that might absorb your attention.
You also can't let yourself get distracted by the surtitles: it's important to read them in little bursts and sometimes just ignore them altogether. It helps me to sit in the balcony so I don't have to look up, away from the stage, at the surtitles. An ideal situation is to attend an opera you know well enough that you don't need the surtitles. I particularly like attending the encore performance of the Met HD program because the production is clear in mind from the first viewing.
Likewise, it's easy to focus too much on the singers and the visuals, and not pay adequate attention to the orchestra - occasionally I forget to listen to the orchestra, and I always get mad at myself when I do that. In some operas, like the Ring Cycle, I partciularly focus on the orchestra (it's not really possible to miss the singing or the action, in any event).
It's also important to me that I don't focus on the mistakes, but absorb it as a whole, uncritically. I can think critically later. This might separate me from people who are musically trained or more knowledgable about the music.
How much you know about the opera is a less definitive area. Opera can be enjoyed on many levels. For me, the decades-long process of understanding opera has been a gradual increase in awareness that deepens my understanding, and lately I've been speeding up that process, attending lectures and reading web sites and books. I'm getting more out of opera now, but I don't know that the emotional punch was any less when I was less knowledgable. I was lucky that my mother started me off on very accessible operas. My first was Maureen Forrester in Menotti's The Medium, which is not only very short but also really a play with words - and it was engrossing and spine-tingling. As I learned more my understanding deepened and my experience became richer. It took me until my 30s or 40s to like Wagner, although I was an early convert to Janacek.
For me, both the requirement and the reward is the high level of concentration required by opera, but there's more, and that's not overthinking the experience. The whole point of opera is the emotional impact, so you have to make yourself open to that. My dad once said that a game of golf is like living a lifetime, with emotional highs and lows - I think opera is for me what golf is for him. To a certain extent, you have to free yourself to ride the emotional rollercoaster, unhinge from the world and yourself. You have to be able to be caught up in the moment.
The difference between opera and a play or a book is that the emotional impact is not mostly the story. When I cry in an opera, it's almost always because of sublime music, not the plot. There are exceptions, such as the end of Gotterdammerung, when the final lietmotif heralding the era of man is almost overwhelmingly emotional on all levels. I've never been brought to tears by sublime music at the symphony - it's something about voice that is so powerful. And for me, the music has to be live... I'm not very enthusiastic about recordings, and can only watch videos in certain circumstances (Met HD productions I've seen before, and mostly, the Chereau-Boulez Ring Cycle).
All this is sort of dancing around my central interest in writing about opera: why does it affect me the way it does? That's a developing topic. I want to understand it in a way that will heighten the experience, rather than lessen it by externalizing a deeply felt experience.
I met someone recently who attends upwards of 100 operas a year, and it dawned on me that there is an addictive high to the experience, in much the way that joggers say they get addicted to an endorphin rush from extreme exercise. I guess I'm not an addictive personality... I'm happy with two or three dozen a year...
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Is Barbara Willis Sweete Destroying the Met HD Program?
Barbara Willis Sweete, Transmission Director for the Met HD program, has repeatedly bungled the transmission of Met operas. I have already written about last season's disastrous filming of Tristan und Isolde. This year's Damnation of Faust is another disaster.
Berlioz's Faust is an odd, episodic opera - really poor structurally, but with wonderful music. The Met brought in Robert Lepage to design the production and he made the opera work. It was full of wows - well, at least we presume they were wows, as Sweete did all she could to destroy the effects Lepage worked so hard to produce.
Lepage made great use of ropes (with harnesses hidden under clothing). At one point a row of soldiers march up the gridwork on stage, mime dying, and are lowered into the laps of women below, only to revive, march up the wall again, and repeat. It was a moving and jaw-dropping effect - I think. We mostly saw close-ups.
Sweete and the rest of the videography team over-use close-ups. Singers tend to sweat, and a giant screen filled with a close-up of their face is not always a pleasant image. There is also much too much camera movement, zooming in, panning, pulling back, changing cameras. It is all very distracting, and very little of it is effective. It's as if Sweete is trying to compete with Lepage in artiness... but the videography should aim to enhance the production, not compete with it.
We are now in the third season of the Metropolitan Opera's Met HD series. I don't recall the first season having these video problems. In particular, I recall thinking during Il Trittico that the film experience was like hovering above the fifth row - better than the best seat in the house. That's what the transmission director should aim for.
The experience of opera is about a state of concentration that opera makes possible. The orchestration, singing, plot, iconography, set, costumes, lighting and personalities all hit the senses of the audience is a way that is unique to opera. To achieve the optimum concentration, I like to attend operas in an unstressed, well-rested frame of mind; I don't drink alchohol beforehand; and I eat a light, low-carb meal followed by an espresso. When fully engaged I can attain that wonderful state, even in cinema transmissions... But not when filtered through distracting faux-arty video direction.
###
Berlioz's Faust is an odd, episodic opera - really poor structurally, but with wonderful music. The Met brought in Robert Lepage to design the production and he made the opera work. It was full of wows - well, at least we presume they were wows, as Sweete did all she could to destroy the effects Lepage worked so hard to produce.
Lepage made great use of ropes (with harnesses hidden under clothing). At one point a row of soldiers march up the gridwork on stage, mime dying, and are lowered into the laps of women below, only to revive, march up the wall again, and repeat. It was a moving and jaw-dropping effect - I think. We mostly saw close-ups.
Sweete and the rest of the videography team over-use close-ups. Singers tend to sweat, and a giant screen filled with a close-up of their face is not always a pleasant image. There is also much too much camera movement, zooming in, panning, pulling back, changing cameras. It is all very distracting, and very little of it is effective. It's as if Sweete is trying to compete with Lepage in artiness... but the videography should aim to enhance the production, not compete with it.
We are now in the third season of the Metropolitan Opera's Met HD series. I don't recall the first season having these video problems. In particular, I recall thinking during Il Trittico that the film experience was like hovering above the fifth row - better than the best seat in the house. That's what the transmission director should aim for.
The experience of opera is about a state of concentration that opera makes possible. The orchestration, singing, plot, iconography, set, costumes, lighting and personalities all hit the senses of the audience is a way that is unique to opera. To achieve the optimum concentration, I like to attend operas in an unstressed, well-rested frame of mind; I don't drink alchohol beforehand; and I eat a light, low-carb meal followed by an espresso. When fully engaged I can attain that wonderful state, even in cinema transmissions... But not when filtered through distracting faux-arty video direction.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Opera Kitchener a Smashing Success
Back in the bad old days (up to 15 years ago?), the Canadian Opera Company was not always a first class company. Even when they had good principals, sometimes the secondary singers caused a lot of wincing. A lot of hard work brought the quality up, and John Bradshaw sealed the deal.
The problem was that back when the COC wasn't always so hot, it still had the pretensions of a great company. The audience was dominated by society folks in their tuxes and furs, and that somehow made the whole thing a bit pathetic. I knew more than one wealthy businessman whose favorite opera was La Boheme - which (not coincidentally) was produced at the COC with three intermissions, resulting in a great upswing in liquor sales in the lobby.
Five or ten years ago opera was briefly trendy and the young trendoids started showing up at the COC. Although the quality of the operas was much better little else had changed: like Old Society the trendoids dressed up and they liked to tipple. The new twist was that they walked out in droves during the first act. From my cheap subscriber seat on the aisle of the back row I felt the wind of their flooding past, half an hour into a production. Apparently it was enough to have showed up in $200 seats; they didn't have to sit through the whole thing.
Opera Kitchener, which mounted its first production last Saturday, is not having a society problem or a trendiness problem. The best seats cost about 25 bucks and the audience seems to be there for all the right reasons. Opera Kitchener is operating on the slenderest of shoestrings (it doesn't yet have a board or charitable status, or any donors) but it is exhibiting all the best of a promising young company.
Saturday's Marriage of Figaro was delightful. The orchestra was small but fine. The singers were all very good. There was one great performance, which stole the show: Karen Bojti in the role of the Marcellina. It was a small production and the direction enhanced that: the performers directly engaged the audience, at one point even stepping out into the seats. We laughed - loudly - over and over. It was high quality, it was charming, and it was wonderfully entertaining. I'd say that Opera Kitchener founders (and currently the whote enchilada) Emilio and Jennifer Fina are doing this just right. Center-in-the-Square has 2,000 seats, and they sold nearly half, so their fledgling outing must be deemed a success. The pity is that they only sold 200 subscriptions for the season. I hope they can do as well for the rest of the season. This is a company that deserves an audience.
###
The problem was that back when the COC wasn't always so hot, it still had the pretensions of a great company. The audience was dominated by society folks in their tuxes and furs, and that somehow made the whole thing a bit pathetic. I knew more than one wealthy businessman whose favorite opera was La Boheme - which (not coincidentally) was produced at the COC with three intermissions, resulting in a great upswing in liquor sales in the lobby.
Five or ten years ago opera was briefly trendy and the young trendoids started showing up at the COC. Although the quality of the operas was much better little else had changed: like Old Society the trendoids dressed up and they liked to tipple. The new twist was that they walked out in droves during the first act. From my cheap subscriber seat on the aisle of the back row I felt the wind of their flooding past, half an hour into a production. Apparently it was enough to have showed up in $200 seats; they didn't have to sit through the whole thing.
Opera Kitchener, which mounted its first production last Saturday, is not having a society problem or a trendiness problem. The best seats cost about 25 bucks and the audience seems to be there for all the right reasons. Opera Kitchener is operating on the slenderest of shoestrings (it doesn't yet have a board or charitable status, or any donors) but it is exhibiting all the best of a promising young company.
Saturday's Marriage of Figaro was delightful. The orchestra was small but fine. The singers were all very good. There was one great performance, which stole the show: Karen Bojti in the role of the Marcellina. It was a small production and the direction enhanced that: the performers directly engaged the audience, at one point even stepping out into the seats. We laughed - loudly - over and over. It was high quality, it was charming, and it was wonderfully entertaining. I'd say that Opera Kitchener founders (and currently the whote enchilada) Emilio and Jennifer Fina are doing this just right. Center-in-the-Square has 2,000 seats, and they sold nearly half, so their fledgling outing must be deemed a success. The pity is that they only sold 200 subscriptions for the season. I hope they can do as well for the rest of the season. This is a company that deserves an audience.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Salome (review)
The Metropolitan Opera's production of Salome, shown in cinemas under the Met HD program, had - for the most part - great singing and orchestration. And yet it didn't work. It failed on casting, lighting, direction, costumes, set design and above all, film direction. The result was a performance that lacked emotional punch. And emotional punch is what Salome is all about.
The story goes like this: Princess Salome lives in Judea at the time of Christ. Her mother the Queen is a famous decadent. Her mother's current husband, Salome's stepfather, lusts after Salome. One night during a party Salome wanders outside and discovers the pit where the prophet John the Baptist is being held a prisoner. She has him brought up and falls in love with him, but he is repelled by her. She has him returned to his pit. Salome's stepfather comes by and asks Salome to do an erotic dance for him. She says she will, but only if he swears to give her anything she asks. He agrees, and she strips for him. She then demands the head of John the Baptist. Horrified, he finally has to agree, and the last 20 minutes of the opera is Salome with the severed head - she kisses it, sings to it, and generally descends into full-blown madness, until her stepfather orders her killed.
Dramatically, the opera has two major scenes: Salome's dance and Salome's time with the head. They take about the same amount of time. Both leave the audience uneasy. It's creepy to watch a daughter dance erotically for her father, and watching an opera singer get naked seems voyeuristic and inappropriate. At the same time, the dance and the music of the dance is beautiful. The combination of attraction and repellence create a dissonance in the watcher and before we recover from it, we're hit with the gross, shocking appearance of the severed head and are then drawn into a long, insane scene of Salome with the head. It's brilliant emotional manipulation. The opera is one act and barely an hour and a half long, but it's a draining experience to sit through.
Or it should be. In this year's Met production, Salome is played by Karita Mattila, who is pushing 50 and looks like an older, heavier version of Nurse Ratched. In addition, Juha Uusitalo, who plays John the Baptist, is very fat; when Salome sang "I love your body" people around me laughed nervously as if they weren't sure if it was a joke. Salome's white dress emphasized the thickness of Mattila's waist and there was something wrong with the halter top: she kept trying to adjust it while she was singing. The camera work was relentlessly close-up, emphasizing every flaw and negating any poignancy that the set might have provided. The lighting had one setting (bright) and gave the production a cheapo, made-for-TV quality.
The striptease was just plain awful. Any choreography in it was reminiscent of a really low class strip club, and Matilla did two lap dances during it. It made me wince, and I don't think that's the reaction that composer Richard Strauss was looking for.
The set wasn't all bad, but it didn't make any sense. It looked like a 1970s disco with a glass floor and spiral staircases, but the libretto makes it clear they're supposed to be outside the palace ("Let's go inside" and "The wind is chill" and so on).
Mattila and Uusitalo have wonderful voices. The Salome role has a huge range and Mattila was perfection moving from soaring romantic vocals to harsh ugly sounds and avante garde bleakness. Uusitalo was especially effective when singing in the pit, and the echoy, off-stage effect worked surprisingly well in the cinema.
The reason I felt compelled to write about this performance (since I only review about one in fifty operas I see) is that the badness of the production helped clarify for me what a successful production would do. Salome needs to develop from vulnerable to damaged to beyond repair. The events in the opera unfold in real time, so we need to see how someone could lose their mind in an hour and a half. In the beginning the young girl is teetering between the decadent power of her parents and the innocent goodness that causes her to love a holy man. Stripping for her stepfather breaks something in Salome, but her essential goodness causes her descent to decadence to drive her mad.
This opera, like most operas, is all about scoring emotional hits - it's visceral, archetypal. The opera deals with innocence vs experience and spiritual longing vs forbidden lust. It raises the possibility of redemption: in the middle of a decadent party, Salome stumbles on a man of great holiness. It's about breaking taboos: along with incest, the most shocking aspect of the opera is that Christ's prophet is murdered. (Even Salome's stepfather is horrified by that.)
All the aspects of the production must work together so that the music and story and visuals all move the audience to understand something about human possibility and the range of our own souls. Done properly, we will all feel that we are Salome, losing our innocence but, in a way, finding redemption in being unable to remain sane without our natural goodness. Like all great tragic opera, Salome should be a cathartic experience.
The casting of an older woman as Salome was a disaster not because Matilla couldn't appear believable as an object of lust, but because she couldn't bring us, the audience, into the journey from innocence to depravity.
The story goes like this: Princess Salome lives in Judea at the time of Christ. Her mother the Queen is a famous decadent. Her mother's current husband, Salome's stepfather, lusts after Salome. One night during a party Salome wanders outside and discovers the pit where the prophet John the Baptist is being held a prisoner. She has him brought up and falls in love with him, but he is repelled by her. She has him returned to his pit. Salome's stepfather comes by and asks Salome to do an erotic dance for him. She says she will, but only if he swears to give her anything she asks. He agrees, and she strips for him. She then demands the head of John the Baptist. Horrified, he finally has to agree, and the last 20 minutes of the opera is Salome with the severed head - she kisses it, sings to it, and generally descends into full-blown madness, until her stepfather orders her killed.
Dramatically, the opera has two major scenes: Salome's dance and Salome's time with the head. They take about the same amount of time. Both leave the audience uneasy. It's creepy to watch a daughter dance erotically for her father, and watching an opera singer get naked seems voyeuristic and inappropriate. At the same time, the dance and the music of the dance is beautiful. The combination of attraction and repellence create a dissonance in the watcher and before we recover from it, we're hit with the gross, shocking appearance of the severed head and are then drawn into a long, insane scene of Salome with the head. It's brilliant emotional manipulation. The opera is one act and barely an hour and a half long, but it's a draining experience to sit through.
Or it should be. In this year's Met production, Salome is played by Karita Mattila, who is pushing 50 and looks like an older, heavier version of Nurse Ratched. In addition, Juha Uusitalo, who plays John the Baptist, is very fat; when Salome sang "I love your body" people around me laughed nervously as if they weren't sure if it was a joke. Salome's white dress emphasized the thickness of Mattila's waist and there was something wrong with the halter top: she kept trying to adjust it while she was singing. The camera work was relentlessly close-up, emphasizing every flaw and negating any poignancy that the set might have provided. The lighting had one setting (bright) and gave the production a cheapo, made-for-TV quality.
The striptease was just plain awful. Any choreography in it was reminiscent of a really low class strip club, and Matilla did two lap dances during it. It made me wince, and I don't think that's the reaction that composer Richard Strauss was looking for.
The set wasn't all bad, but it didn't make any sense. It looked like a 1970s disco with a glass floor and spiral staircases, but the libretto makes it clear they're supposed to be outside the palace ("Let's go inside" and "The wind is chill" and so on).
Mattila and Uusitalo have wonderful voices. The Salome role has a huge range and Mattila was perfection moving from soaring romantic vocals to harsh ugly sounds and avante garde bleakness. Uusitalo was especially effective when singing in the pit, and the echoy, off-stage effect worked surprisingly well in the cinema.
The reason I felt compelled to write about this performance (since I only review about one in fifty operas I see) is that the badness of the production helped clarify for me what a successful production would do. Salome needs to develop from vulnerable to damaged to beyond repair. The events in the opera unfold in real time, so we need to see how someone could lose their mind in an hour and a half. In the beginning the young girl is teetering between the decadent power of her parents and the innocent goodness that causes her to love a holy man. Stripping for her stepfather breaks something in Salome, but her essential goodness causes her descent to decadence to drive her mad.
This opera, like most operas, is all about scoring emotional hits - it's visceral, archetypal. The opera deals with innocence vs experience and spiritual longing vs forbidden lust. It raises the possibility of redemption: in the middle of a decadent party, Salome stumbles on a man of great holiness. It's about breaking taboos: along with incest, the most shocking aspect of the opera is that Christ's prophet is murdered. (Even Salome's stepfather is horrified by that.)
All the aspects of the production must work together so that the music and story and visuals all move the audience to understand something about human possibility and the range of our own souls. Done properly, we will all feel that we are Salome, losing our innocence but, in a way, finding redemption in being unable to remain sane without our natural goodness. Like all great tragic opera, Salome should be a cathartic experience.
The casting of an older woman as Salome was a disaster not because Matilla couldn't appear believable as an object of lust, but because she couldn't bring us, the audience, into the journey from innocence to depravity.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
War and Peace (review of COC production)
Tolstoy spent six years writing the novel War and Peace, followed by ten years releasing revised editions. Prokofiev spent 12 years writing the opera based on the novel.
Both the novel and the opera were shaped by political repression. Tolstoy wanted to set the novel in the 1825 Decembrist uprising against the czars, but would not have been able to publish in the Romanov era (he wrote the novel in the 1860s) and so changed the setting several times, finally settling on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in the early years of the 19th century.
Prokofiev was commissioned to write an opera based on War and Peace by the Soviet Committee on Arts Affairs, and then he was dogged by them for 17 years to make it suit their ideological requirements. Started in 1941 - a couple of months before the German invasion of Russia - it was originally to be a patriotic call to arms. After the war the committee added other purposes: a glorification of peasants, denunciation of decadent Russian royalty, and paean to the motherland. The committee nitpicked over individual notes. They wanted less conversation and characterization, and more declamation on patriotic themes. One argument over three measures (a few seconds of music) lasted three weeks. Prokofiev initially put up a fight, but increasingly ill health and political pressure caused him to give in.
It wasn't just the committee that picked at Prokofiev's masterpiece. When he tried to mount the opera the conductors who took it on required numerous modifications. Such were the presures of the Stalinist era that an unsuccessful opening could doom a career, and one conductor threatened to call in sick on opening night if certain changes weren't made. The sublimely beautiful death scene of Prince Andrei, backed by an offstage chorus providing music that evokes his feverish state, was thus almost cut because someone thought the audience would find the use of nonsense words unintentionally funny.
The current COC production of War and Peace is a reprise of the recent English National Opera production, and it works. The casting of the main characters couldn't have been better. Russell Braun is the ideal Prince Andrei. His lyric baritone, sensitive phrasing and strong good looks make him an ideal doomed romantic lead. His death scene was everything that opera should be; in the language of Tolstoy's "What is Art", Braun's performance caused an "emotional infection to spontaneously occur in the listener."
Elena Semenova as Natasha and Mikhail Agafonov as Pierre were also perfect. But for me, the chorus stole the show. Not in the initial epigraph - while they sang it well, that piece of music just doesn't work for me. The dissonance in the music and the overuse of percussion ends up sounding like a tinny broadcast to my ears. But after that, War and Peace has sublime choral music, especially for the men, and it couldn't have been performed more perfectly.
The orchestra, under guest conductor Johannes Debus, sounded better than I've heard it since, well, Bradshaw. Here's hoping Debus will join us on a permanent basis. In case he does, here's how he pronounces his name (I attended a symposium he was at on Saturday): Yoh-HAHN-us DAY-boose.
The strength of the ENO production is in the second half, which depicts war. The backdrops and costumes were so evocative in the second half that I was simultaneously on the edge of my seat and on the edge of tears. When Pierre is rescued from his French captors the Russian partisans rise from the snow banks in white capes and slit the throats of the French. I felt I was "there" in a way I seldom do in movies.
It helps to have read the book, as the opera is more a montage of scenes than a reproduction of the plot. Prokofiev and librettist Mira Mendelson do a better job capturing the war part of the book than the peace (peace, in this sense, means romance). This might be explained by the limitations of reproducing a 1,400-page novel and the distortions caused by numerous rewrites, but it might also have been due to the difference in circumstances between Tolstoy and Prokofiev when each worked on their version. Tolstoy wrote the novel while living in comfort on his estate, marrying the love of his life and then raising his family. In the first years that he worked on the opera, Prokofiev was also starting a new and lasting relationship (with librettist Mira Mendelson), but they were evacuees, moving from city to city while the German invasion grew, worrying over his children who stayed behind in Moscow.
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Monday, May 12, 2008
Pelleas et Melisande (review)
As Debussy's 1902 opera opens, a kingdom is engulfed in a long war and is suffering a famine. The king sends his grandson, Golaud, to marry the daughter of the neighboring king and so end the war. But en route Golaud gets off his ship to hunt in a forest, and trailing a boar he gets lost deep in a pathless area. He meets a lovely woman weeping by a pool. She won't say what happened to her - just that she has escaped from something awful.
We know from Maeterlinck's play Arianne and Bluebeard (on which the opera is based) that Melisande has escaped from Bluebeard - a mass murderer who let his wives live as long as they were strictly obedient, after which he slaughtered them and stored their bodies in a room in his castle. Other than that we have only tiny hints about Melisande's past. Golaud sees a golden crown in the pool and she says she has thrown it away; when he offers to retrieve it she has hysterics.
Instead of achieving his destination, marrying the princess and ending the troubles that beset his kingdom, Golaud marries Melisande. The famine continues: scenes of starving peasants appear throughout the rest of the story.
When Golaud takes Melisande home to his castle she recoils from the place. She has no specific complaints but seems to instinctively feel that it is rotten. Despite her revulsion, Melisande forms deep connections with two people in her new home: her husband's grandfather (the king), and her husband's half-brother, Pelleas. As the latter friendship deepens, Golaud can't decide if the relationship is adulterous or not. He goes back and forth between believing they are deceiving him and believing that their friendship is that of children. There is a history to his fears: he and Pelleas are half-brothers because when Golaud's father died, his mother married her husband's brother. Is history repeating itself?
As Golaud increasingly tends towards jealousy he treats Melisande with greater barbarity, forcing her to her knees and dragging her by her hair.
The enigmatic symbols in the play are largely locational: the forest, the sea and clear pools of water appear over and over, reinforcing the sense that we're in a fairy tale that is heavy with symbolism. Another recurring fairy tale symbol is Melisande's long hair.
It is strange that the recent Canadian Opera Company production of Pelleas et Melisande did not use the set for any effect but logistic functionality. The set was ugly - all beige, black and white, with an upper level that looked like a dock and a lower level that was covered in cheap-looking clear plastic sheets (resembling water, but used as dry land in the action). The music has a melancholy bleakness that could have been enhanced by colorful lighting and a beautiful set; the enigmatic qualities of the opera could have been intriguing and mysterious, but instead veered towards pointless and boring. Some audience members around me left at the interval.
Musically, the production was very good. The title roles can be sung by a tenor or baritone and a soprano or mezzo-soprano, respectively. Russell Braun, as a baritone with a high range (and one of my all-time favorite singers), is the perfect Pelleas. His interpretation was both complex and naturalistic. (It's no wonder he has sung Pelleas at Salzburg, La Scala, Glyndebourne and Hamburg.) His clothing hampered his interpretation: he didn't really work as a romantic hero until he lost the skullcap, and he was dressed too much like Golaud for those of us in the cheap seats.
Isabel Bayrakdarian is also one of my favorite singers, and she did an admirable job, but her clear pretty voice didn't add much to the role. I could imagine a mezzo singing the role, or a soprano with a darker voice - like Anna Netrebko. There were no spine-tingling moments in Bayrakdarian's performance and no air of disturbing mystery. Melisande seemed bored and unhappy, but she should have a much more fundamental, if enigmatic, role. Melisande could be a cursed woman who is plagued by rot or an evil woman who is the source of rot, but she shouldn't be an idle bystander who just drifts along as bad things happen to her.
The libretto positions the setting as a castle that rises between the forest and the sea. Golaud looks towards the forest and sees wolves. Pelleas and Melisande look towards the ocean and see the sun. The COC production ignored this completely.
The three pools in the opera are so prominent that the production couldn't ignore them, but it certainly didn't make anything of them. The first pool, in the forest, is clear enough that Golaud and Melisande can see her golden crown glinting at the bottom. The second pool, in a grotto near the sea, is again clear enough that Pelleas and Melisande can see Melisande's gold wedding ring glinting from the bottom after she carelessly drops it in. I think of those two pools as Melisande's and Pelleas's, respectively. The third pool is definitely Golaud's. It is murky and has a nauseating smell of rotting flesh. When Golaud shows Pelleas this pool it seems his intent is murderous, but he stops himself at the last moment.
Pelleas et Melisande is an opera that requires interpretation. It must probably always be ambiguous, and it could be interpreted in many ways: to show the clash of male and female principles; the barbarity that lurks hidden in some individuals; the consequences of passing up a chance at salvation. Melisande could be a temptress who bewitched both Golaud and Pelleas or a fatally damaged soul who lives but is dead inside or the last hope for national salvation; a canker or a rose. There is so much that could be done with this opera, but the COC - frustratingly - didn't even seem to try.
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We know from Maeterlinck's play Arianne and Bluebeard (on which the opera is based) that Melisande has escaped from Bluebeard - a mass murderer who let his wives live as long as they were strictly obedient, after which he slaughtered them and stored their bodies in a room in his castle. Other than that we have only tiny hints about Melisande's past. Golaud sees a golden crown in the pool and she says she has thrown it away; when he offers to retrieve it she has hysterics.
Instead of achieving his destination, marrying the princess and ending the troubles that beset his kingdom, Golaud marries Melisande. The famine continues: scenes of starving peasants appear throughout the rest of the story.
When Golaud takes Melisande home to his castle she recoils from the place. She has no specific complaints but seems to instinctively feel that it is rotten. Despite her revulsion, Melisande forms deep connections with two people in her new home: her husband's grandfather (the king), and her husband's half-brother, Pelleas. As the latter friendship deepens, Golaud can't decide if the relationship is adulterous or not. He goes back and forth between believing they are deceiving him and believing that their friendship is that of children. There is a history to his fears: he and Pelleas are half-brothers because when Golaud's father died, his mother married her husband's brother. Is history repeating itself?
As Golaud increasingly tends towards jealousy he treats Melisande with greater barbarity, forcing her to her knees and dragging her by her hair.
The enigmatic symbols in the play are largely locational: the forest, the sea and clear pools of water appear over and over, reinforcing the sense that we're in a fairy tale that is heavy with symbolism. Another recurring fairy tale symbol is Melisande's long hair.
It is strange that the recent Canadian Opera Company production of Pelleas et Melisande did not use the set for any effect but logistic functionality. The set was ugly - all beige, black and white, with an upper level that looked like a dock and a lower level that was covered in cheap-looking clear plastic sheets (resembling water, but used as dry land in the action). The music has a melancholy bleakness that could have been enhanced by colorful lighting and a beautiful set; the enigmatic qualities of the opera could have been intriguing and mysterious, but instead veered towards pointless and boring. Some audience members around me left at the interval.
Musically, the production was very good. The title roles can be sung by a tenor or baritone and a soprano or mezzo-soprano, respectively. Russell Braun, as a baritone with a high range (and one of my all-time favorite singers), is the perfect Pelleas. His interpretation was both complex and naturalistic. (It's no wonder he has sung Pelleas at Salzburg, La Scala, Glyndebourne and Hamburg.) His clothing hampered his interpretation: he didn't really work as a romantic hero until he lost the skullcap, and he was dressed too much like Golaud for those of us in the cheap seats.
Isabel Bayrakdarian is also one of my favorite singers, and she did an admirable job, but her clear pretty voice didn't add much to the role. I could imagine a mezzo singing the role, or a soprano with a darker voice - like Anna Netrebko. There were no spine-tingling moments in Bayrakdarian's performance and no air of disturbing mystery. Melisande seemed bored and unhappy, but she should have a much more fundamental, if enigmatic, role. Melisande could be a cursed woman who is plagued by rot or an evil woman who is the source of rot, but she shouldn't be an idle bystander who just drifts along as bad things happen to her.
The libretto positions the setting as a castle that rises between the forest and the sea. Golaud looks towards the forest and sees wolves. Pelleas and Melisande look towards the ocean and see the sun. The COC production ignored this completely.
The three pools in the opera are so prominent that the production couldn't ignore them, but it certainly didn't make anything of them. The first pool, in the forest, is clear enough that Golaud and Melisande can see her golden crown glinting at the bottom. The second pool, in a grotto near the sea, is again clear enough that Pelleas and Melisande can see Melisande's gold wedding ring glinting from the bottom after she carelessly drops it in. I think of those two pools as Melisande's and Pelleas's, respectively. The third pool is definitely Golaud's. It is murky and has a nauseating smell of rotting flesh. When Golaud shows Pelleas this pool it seems his intent is murderous, but he stops himself at the last moment.
Pelleas et Melisande is an opera that requires interpretation. It must probably always be ambiguous, and it could be interpreted in many ways: to show the clash of male and female principles; the barbarity that lurks hidden in some individuals; the consequences of passing up a chance at salvation. Melisande could be a temptress who bewitched both Golaud and Pelleas or a fatally damaged soul who lives but is dead inside or the last hope for national salvation; a canker or a rose. There is so much that could be done with this opera, but the COC - frustratingly - didn't even seem to try.
Monday, March 24, 2008
The Met's HD Transmission Fails Tristan und Isolde
Barbara Willis Sweete was the transmission director for the live HD production of the Metropolitan Opera's Tristan und Isolde, which aired Saturday afternoon. We know she has the chops because she directed the transmission of Hansel and Gretel in January, and it was lovely. But for the Wagner she decided to get fancy. In an interview during the intermission with Met General Manager Peter Gelb, Sweete said that she was making the opera interactive for theater viewers: we could choose to look at the action in a variety of ways - different camera angles, short shots and long shots all shown at once on the screen in separate boxes.
At its worst, the effect was reminiscent of Hollywood Squares, and brought on the giggles. (And believe me, no-one should giggle during Wagner.) At its best it was annoying and distracting. When the boxes starting appearing, moving around and changing zoom during the performance, there were widespread groans in the audience. The box effect distracted from the music and from the visuals. It was hard to watch. I actually had to shut my eyes during several sections (and miss the sub-titles). It was a disaster.
During the interview, Sweete said that at one point she used zooming to show the audience that the boat was traveling a mile across the ocean. I had absolutely no idea that that was why the camera was zooming in on the boat. To me, it just looked stupid. The effect was completely ineffective. It was also unnecessary as the entire first act takes place on the boat, and the boat is supposedly moving most of the time.
A woman I was talking to during the intermission said the worst part of it for her was that she wanted a theater-like experience, and the framing effects made the opera feel more like a movie. I think she has a good point. But for me, the biggest problem was the distraction. You can try frillly high-tech special effects on a car race or a music video, but for god's sake, not Wagner.
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At its worst, the effect was reminiscent of Hollywood Squares, and brought on the giggles. (And believe me, no-one should giggle during Wagner.) At its best it was annoying and distracting. When the boxes starting appearing, moving around and changing zoom during the performance, there were widespread groans in the audience. The box effect distracted from the music and from the visuals. It was hard to watch. I actually had to shut my eyes during several sections (and miss the sub-titles). It was a disaster.
During the interview, Sweete said that at one point she used zooming to show the audience that the boat was traveling a mile across the ocean. I had absolutely no idea that that was why the camera was zooming in on the boat. To me, it just looked stupid. The effect was completely ineffective. It was also unnecessary as the entire first act takes place on the boat, and the boat is supposedly moving most of the time.
A woman I was talking to during the intermission said the worst part of it for her was that she wanted a theater-like experience, and the framing effects made the opera feel more like a movie. I think she has a good point. But for me, the biggest problem was the distraction. You can try frillly high-tech special effects on a car race or a music video, but for god's sake, not Wagner.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Hail, Tristan
On the boat to England to marry the king, the Irish princess Isolde describes the English knight Tristan as "the hero who killed my beloved and sent me his head in a box."
I love that line.
This being Wagner's version of the tale, it gets weirder. We learn that when Tristan killed Isolde's fiance he was mortally wounded himself and was taken to her to be healed. She saved his life but then demanded revenge. She held his sword to his breast, but she couldn't go through with it.
Tristan is heir to the king of Cornwall, a childless old widower who does not want to remarry. After he killed her lover, Tristan convinced the king to marry Isolde. (This would almost surely lead to his disinheritance when Isolde bore a son, and would be hell for Isolde, so it was both an attempt at atonement - giving his power to her children - and an act of mutual destruction.)
As Tristan takes Isolde to England to marry the king, she is wearing around her neck the fragment of his sword that she found embedded in her lover's severed head. Her mother sent along a love potion to help ease the horror of marrying the old man. For the same purpose, Isolde brought poison.
The atmosphere on the boat is pretty hostile. Isolde demands that Tristan let her kill him. He gives her his sword and bares his breast but again she can't bring herself to do it. She takes her maid aside and tells her to fill a cup with poison, and she asks Tristan to drink a toast to peace. Tristan understands that the cup contains poison. They both drink.
But the maid switched the poison for love potion, so instead of mutual suicide they fall into a grand passion.
Almost immediately after the potion is drunk the maid wails, "You chose a swift painless death but I gave you a shameful and painful one." They're not listening. In the second act they sing love songs. In the third act they die.
I recount the plot of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because it so perfectly captures why I love opera. It's the iconic nature of the stories that resonate in the universal unconscious, mixed with soul-melting music for an emotional double whammy. The effect is heightened when shared in the dark with a couple of thousand people.
How can a suicide pact between enemies lead to tragic love? Or turn that around: how can it not? There is a connection between hate and love that's difficult to pin down, which perhaps is why Wagner takes five hours to describe it to us.
###
I love that line.
This being Wagner's version of the tale, it gets weirder. We learn that when Tristan killed Isolde's fiance he was mortally wounded himself and was taken to her to be healed. She saved his life but then demanded revenge. She held his sword to his breast, but she couldn't go through with it.
Tristan is heir to the king of Cornwall, a childless old widower who does not want to remarry. After he killed her lover, Tristan convinced the king to marry Isolde. (This would almost surely lead to his disinheritance when Isolde bore a son, and would be hell for Isolde, so it was both an attempt at atonement - giving his power to her children - and an act of mutual destruction.)
As Tristan takes Isolde to England to marry the king, she is wearing around her neck the fragment of his sword that she found embedded in her lover's severed head. Her mother sent along a love potion to help ease the horror of marrying the old man. For the same purpose, Isolde brought poison.
The atmosphere on the boat is pretty hostile. Isolde demands that Tristan let her kill him. He gives her his sword and bares his breast but again she can't bring herself to do it. She takes her maid aside and tells her to fill a cup with poison, and she asks Tristan to drink a toast to peace. Tristan understands that the cup contains poison. They both drink.
But the maid switched the poison for love potion, so instead of mutual suicide they fall into a grand passion.
Almost immediately after the potion is drunk the maid wails, "You chose a swift painless death but I gave you a shameful and painful one." They're not listening. In the second act they sing love songs. In the third act they die.
I recount the plot of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde because it so perfectly captures why I love opera. It's the iconic nature of the stories that resonate in the universal unconscious, mixed with soul-melting music for an emotional double whammy. The effect is heightened when shared in the dark with a couple of thousand people.
How can a suicide pact between enemies lead to tragic love? Or turn that around: how can it not? There is a connection between hate and love that's difficult to pin down, which perhaps is why Wagner takes five hours to describe it to us.
Monday, February 11, 2008
From the House of the Dead (Review)
Czech composer Leos Janacek left a manuscript on his desk when he died in 1928. The opera, based on Dostoyevsky's semi-autobiographical novel about his time in a Siberian prison camp, was so weird that Janacek's students, examining it after his death, believed it to be unfinished. They "finished" it (reorchestrated it to make it more conventional and changed the ending to make it more upbeat) and the revised version was performed sporadically. Decades later some musicologists, including noted Janacekophile and maestro Charles Mackerras, decided that there had been a terrible error: Janacek had indeed completed the piece. They were able to reinstate the original opera, but it has been sparsely performed since.
Enter the Canadian Opera Company and the vision of General Director Richard Bradshaw. With the aid of set and costume designer Astrid Janson, Bradshaw started a process to mount Janacek's original version of From the House of the Dead. Bradshaw died before he could conduct the piece, so the Australian conductor Alexander Briger was hired. Briger happens to be the nephew of Mackerras and a next-generation Janacek expert.
The opera, currently being performed by the COC at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, is a short sharp shock: 90 minutes of uninterrupted power. Bradshaw told Janson that the only time he'd seen the opera he'd fallen asleep, so they, along with director Dmitri Bertman, ensured that there was no boredom in this version. The set contains three levels: a lower level of cramped cages that hold the 75 prisoners at the start of the opera; a middle level that serves as the commandant's dining hall and later the prison hospital and has ramps on which the prisoners walk in shuffling circles; and an upper level where guards watch security cameras. Janson says that after studying Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and modern prison fiction, the themes that she and Bradshaw wanted to convey were over-crowding, social hierarchies and violence, with sub-themes of substance abuse, despair, and the spark of humanity. To this end, there are no entrances or exits: all 75 members of the cast mill around on the stage throughout the opera, the effectiveness of which is heightened by this opera having no stars but many soloists, with a lot of important music for the chorus.
Janacek's orchestration is decidedly different, but always beautiful and engaging. Briger says that Janacek's favorite key is A flat minor - "a key used so seldom that many musicians don't bother to practice it". He adds, "his music is full of double flats, double sharps. He'll use D double flat not C major." Briger says that "for the orchestra, this is the hardest opera ever written." In one infamous anecdote, a conductor who tried to perform this opera was so shaken by the experience that he gave up conducting forever.
Not only is From the House of the Dead not in most musician's repertoire, but most have never heard it and they have trouble conceptualizing what it should sound like. The rhythm changes frequently in odd ways. In addition, Janacek stretches the use of instruments: according to Briger, he calls for "extremely low notes from the trombones and tuba, along with screaming high piccolos." It takes many rehearsals to get the music right. Globe & Mail reviewer Robert Everett-Green apparently found that perfection was not reached by opening night; in his review he wrote, "It must be a challenge to play all those jagged unisons, which did not always come off cleanly in an otherwise shapely performance." If that's true, the orchestra had worked out the kinks by the time I saw the opera on February 10.
The singers also face challenges with From the House of the Dead. Singers come in with brief snatches of song and disappear: it is enormously difficult for them to know when to sing, especially with 75 men jostling on the stage. (At an opera symposium on Saturday, tenor Robert Kunzli said that during a performance last week he suddenly realized that it was time for him to sing and he didn't even have time to take a breath; conductor Alexander Briger, sitting next to him, looked genuinely shocked and upset by the revelation.) For parts of this production the chorus points towards the back of the stage and takes direction from Briger via monitor. This must be difficult for all concerned, but creates a wonderful echo-y sound.
The first act is the most challenging for audiences, with a lot of clanging sounds. Janacek's orchestration conveys a sense of despair through the omission of a middle range, relying often on very high sounds played with very low sounds. The second and third acts become more accessible. You might think of Puccini or even Aaron Copland in some of the music. It's not so much that the beautiful music creates a contrast for the brutal stories being told, but that they show the humanity that exists in everyone; as one character sings, everyone has a mother. The music seems to reflect Dostoyevsky's Christian socialist utopianism and Janacek's humanism.
The history of Russian prison camps goes back to Ivan the Terrible in the mid-sixteenth century. As Russia started to build an empire by expanding east into Siberia it confronted the challenge of how to populate its new territories; the solution was to send criminals and dissidents there. By the nineteenth century Russia was sending hundreds of thousands of citizens to Siberia, a practice famously continued by Stalin. Some were sent for periods of exile and some were sent to labor camps. Depending on a person's degree of influence and privilege, the experiences could be very different; for example, Stalin was sent to a harsh sentence in northern Siberia, while Lenin was sent to a relatively cushy sentence in southern Siberia, near a railway so his mother could visit and send packages, with his colleagues and fiancee nearby.
The characters in From the House of the Dead also have different experiences. The political prisoner Petrovic Gorjancikov, who enters the camp at the beginning of the opera, obviously comes from a wealthy family. Everyone else is doomed to stay in the camp forever, or nearly. They lament, Will I ever see my home again? or Will I ever see my children? with a real sense of hopelessness.
The opera ends with the release of Gorjancikov (presumably because someone bribed the commandant), and simultaneously with the release of an eagle (played in Toronto by a trained Harris hawk) that has been nursed back to health by the prisoners. That's the opera as Janacek wrote it, but I prefer the original Dostoyevsky version: the eagle still has a broken wing and so is released to certain death in the wild. It seems wrong to say Okay, off you go - sorry for the beatings and all that; and then presume that the person (and society) is not irretrievably altered by the brutality of the experience.
From the House of the Dead is not a popular opera, so I was able to upgrade my season's tickets to prime seats on the floor. Once again I was disappointed by the sound there: the mix of orchestra and voice is too much in the favor of the orchestra, drowning out some singers. In a piece like this that is mostly about the orchestra, that wasn't a big problem, but still, I think I would have preferred to see it from my usual cheap seats in Ring Three.
###
Enter the Canadian Opera Company and the vision of General Director Richard Bradshaw. With the aid of set and costume designer Astrid Janson, Bradshaw started a process to mount Janacek's original version of From the House of the Dead. Bradshaw died before he could conduct the piece, so the Australian conductor Alexander Briger was hired. Briger happens to be the nephew of Mackerras and a next-generation Janacek expert.
The opera, currently being performed by the COC at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, is a short sharp shock: 90 minutes of uninterrupted power. Bradshaw told Janson that the only time he'd seen the opera he'd fallen asleep, so they, along with director Dmitri Bertman, ensured that there was no boredom in this version. The set contains three levels: a lower level of cramped cages that hold the 75 prisoners at the start of the opera; a middle level that serves as the commandant's dining hall and later the prison hospital and has ramps on which the prisoners walk in shuffling circles; and an upper level where guards watch security cameras. Janson says that after studying Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and modern prison fiction, the themes that she and Bradshaw wanted to convey were over-crowding, social hierarchies and violence, with sub-themes of substance abuse, despair, and the spark of humanity. To this end, there are no entrances or exits: all 75 members of the cast mill around on the stage throughout the opera, the effectiveness of which is heightened by this opera having no stars but many soloists, with a lot of important music for the chorus.
Janacek's orchestration is decidedly different, but always beautiful and engaging. Briger says that Janacek's favorite key is A flat minor - "a key used so seldom that many musicians don't bother to practice it". He adds, "his music is full of double flats, double sharps. He'll use D double flat not C major." Briger says that "for the orchestra, this is the hardest opera ever written." In one infamous anecdote, a conductor who tried to perform this opera was so shaken by the experience that he gave up conducting forever.
Not only is From the House of the Dead not in most musician's repertoire, but most have never heard it and they have trouble conceptualizing what it should sound like. The rhythm changes frequently in odd ways. In addition, Janacek stretches the use of instruments: according to Briger, he calls for "extremely low notes from the trombones and tuba, along with screaming high piccolos." It takes many rehearsals to get the music right. Globe & Mail reviewer Robert Everett-Green apparently found that perfection was not reached by opening night; in his review he wrote, "It must be a challenge to play all those jagged unisons, which did not always come off cleanly in an otherwise shapely performance." If that's true, the orchestra had worked out the kinks by the time I saw the opera on February 10.
The singers also face challenges with From the House of the Dead. Singers come in with brief snatches of song and disappear: it is enormously difficult for them to know when to sing, especially with 75 men jostling on the stage. (At an opera symposium on Saturday, tenor Robert Kunzli said that during a performance last week he suddenly realized that it was time for him to sing and he didn't even have time to take a breath; conductor Alexander Briger, sitting next to him, looked genuinely shocked and upset by the revelation.) For parts of this production the chorus points towards the back of the stage and takes direction from Briger via monitor. This must be difficult for all concerned, but creates a wonderful echo-y sound.
The first act is the most challenging for audiences, with a lot of clanging sounds. Janacek's orchestration conveys a sense of despair through the omission of a middle range, relying often on very high sounds played with very low sounds. The second and third acts become more accessible. You might think of Puccini or even Aaron Copland in some of the music. It's not so much that the beautiful music creates a contrast for the brutal stories being told, but that they show the humanity that exists in everyone; as one character sings, everyone has a mother. The music seems to reflect Dostoyevsky's Christian socialist utopianism and Janacek's humanism.
The history of Russian prison camps goes back to Ivan the Terrible in the mid-sixteenth century. As Russia started to build an empire by expanding east into Siberia it confronted the challenge of how to populate its new territories; the solution was to send criminals and dissidents there. By the nineteenth century Russia was sending hundreds of thousands of citizens to Siberia, a practice famously continued by Stalin. Some were sent for periods of exile and some were sent to labor camps. Depending on a person's degree of influence and privilege, the experiences could be very different; for example, Stalin was sent to a harsh sentence in northern Siberia, while Lenin was sent to a relatively cushy sentence in southern Siberia, near a railway so his mother could visit and send packages, with his colleagues and fiancee nearby.
The characters in From the House of the Dead also have different experiences. The political prisoner Petrovic Gorjancikov, who enters the camp at the beginning of the opera, obviously comes from a wealthy family. Everyone else is doomed to stay in the camp forever, or nearly. They lament, Will I ever see my home again? or Will I ever see my children? with a real sense of hopelessness.
The opera ends with the release of Gorjancikov (presumably because someone bribed the commandant), and simultaneously with the release of an eagle (played in Toronto by a trained Harris hawk) that has been nursed back to health by the prisoners. That's the opera as Janacek wrote it, but I prefer the original Dostoyevsky version: the eagle still has a broken wing and so is released to certain death in the wild. It seems wrong to say Okay, off you go - sorry for the beatings and all that; and then presume that the person (and society) is not irretrievably altered by the brutality of the experience.
From the House of the Dead is not a popular opera, so I was able to upgrade my season's tickets to prime seats on the floor. Once again I was disappointed by the sound there: the mix of orchestra and voice is too much in the favor of the orchestra, drowning out some singers. In a piece like this that is mostly about the orchestra, that wasn't a big problem, but still, I think I would have preferred to see it from my usual cheap seats in Ring Three.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
The New World of Opera
Opera may attract a lot of rich old people and tickets may cost the earth, but it still requires a hefty subsidy from the state as well as a constant flow of private donations. Nobody is getting rock star-rich: an opera production requires dozens of talented musicians and production staff. Even when people pay up to $500 a ticket, ticket sales don't pay the whole way.
That is starting to change. The New York Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting eight operas this year, live, to over 600 cinemas around the world (with an encore presentation of each opera a few weeks after the first date) in a series they call HD Live. That's a whack of dough.
The Met was always richer than most other opera companies. Prices are higher and the hall seats 4,000 people, which is exactly twice as many as Toronto's Four Seasons opera center.
The Four Seasons is a far better place to enjoy opera. No seat is further than 90 feet from the stage, and all seats have not only great views but also glorious sound. I recently had a conflict with a performance in my season's ticket and had to take a replacement seat in the fifth (top) tier - it was great. I could see perfectly and the sound was in some ways better than the ground floor, where the orchestra slightly overpowers the male singers. (Never the females: a classically trained soprano is the loudest thing produced in nature.) Also, there are decently priced seats at the Four Seasons (my ticket in the fifth tier was $35), whereas at the Met the only cheap seats are the three rows of standing room at the back of the orchestra and first balcony, which are truly crappy ways to see an opera, and which cause problems for the people who purchased the $200 seats at the back of the ground floor, because the standing room people regularly pour into seats they think might be empty, causing late-returners to have to call the usher and make a fuss.
Cinemas in Canada charge $23 to see a performance of the Met. The performances in my home town are so popular that the Conestoga Mall Galaxy theater sometimes opens up a second cinema for them. If there were an average of 200 people at each performance, that's 23x200x600 = $2,760,000 per performance. Compare that to what they pull in at the opera hall: at an average price of $200/ticket, a performance grosses 200x4000 = $800,000. For the season, the cinemas bring in 16x2,760K = $44,160,000. That's gross of course, and would be offset by the cinema's cut and by production costs. But still - it's a whole new world. I hope the musicians and staff are seeing some of it.
The first time I saw a Met performance in the cinema it took me a little while to get used to the lack of directionality of sound. The sound quality was fantastic but live operas aren't miked, so when someone sings you can hear the voice coming from their body. After half an hour I got used to the lack of directionality, and it hasn't bothered me at subsequent performances.
In some ways the cinema version is better. The Met uses eight cameras, so the visuals are far better than you could get in the best seats - which, even if I could afford them, have been permanently reserved by season ticket holders. The quality of the Met productions is nonpareil. They have the best directors, set designers, singers, and so on. Not that small companies can't be just as good, but the Met is consistently mind-blowingingly good.
My local opera company (variously called Opera Ontario, Kitchener-Waterloo Opera and Opera Hamilton, and currently on hiatus because of financial difficulties) put on a production of Gounod's Romeo & Juliet a couple of years ago that is an example of a small company doing extremely well. Juliet was sung by up and coming Canadian soprano Laura Whalen. In the early, happy part of the opera she literally bounced with joy as she sang. Everyone in the audience watched her with a huge smile on their face, riveted. Her voice was high and pure, perfectly suiting a young woman in love.
Today's Met performance of Romeo & Juliet had a very different feel. Anna Netrebko as Juliette is almost a mezzo: her voice has an older, darker sound and a lower register. At first I thought she was poorly cast, but quickly I began to see that the casting was brilliant. Her voice evoked angst and pathos in a way that explained the action. The whole production was mesmerizing and I won't miss the encore presentation on January 5.
The Met isn't the only opera company that is expanding into cinema. The Princess Twin, an independent cinema in my town, has inaugurated an opera series this year they call "any company but the Met". Their operas aren't live and the filming/editing isn't quite as top notch, but they're also shown in High Definition and the sound is also phenomenal. Plus, it gives us a look into opera houses around the world.
As to who attends the cinema operas, they look like the same people I see at live opera only they're not as dressed up. Another difference is that nobody coughs. In the production today, I could hear people in New York coughing, but not a single person in the cinema audience. The great freeing thing about the cinema version is that I am not required to clap - I loathe clapping - and when the singers are taking their bows, I can get up and go without offending them. I like to leave an opera with the music in my ears, which 15 minutes of curtain calls messes up.
The next step in cinematic opera should be Wagner's Ring Cycle. The Met is rumored to be planning one last production of its classic rendition of the Ring Cycle, and they should offer it to the world in cinema format. The world might never be the same.
###
That is starting to change. The New York Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting eight operas this year, live, to over 600 cinemas around the world (with an encore presentation of each opera a few weeks after the first date) in a series they call HD Live. That's a whack of dough.
The Met was always richer than most other opera companies. Prices are higher and the hall seats 4,000 people, which is exactly twice as many as Toronto's Four Seasons opera center.
The Four Seasons is a far better place to enjoy opera. No seat is further than 90 feet from the stage, and all seats have not only great views but also glorious sound. I recently had a conflict with a performance in my season's ticket and had to take a replacement seat in the fifth (top) tier - it was great. I could see perfectly and the sound was in some ways better than the ground floor, where the orchestra slightly overpowers the male singers. (Never the females: a classically trained soprano is the loudest thing produced in nature.) Also, there are decently priced seats at the Four Seasons (my ticket in the fifth tier was $35), whereas at the Met the only cheap seats are the three rows of standing room at the back of the orchestra and first balcony, which are truly crappy ways to see an opera, and which cause problems for the people who purchased the $200 seats at the back of the ground floor, because the standing room people regularly pour into seats they think might be empty, causing late-returners to have to call the usher and make a fuss.
Cinemas in Canada charge $23 to see a performance of the Met. The performances in my home town are so popular that the Conestoga Mall Galaxy theater sometimes opens up a second cinema for them. If there were an average of 200 people at each performance, that's 23x200x600 = $2,760,000 per performance. Compare that to what they pull in at the opera hall: at an average price of $200/ticket, a performance grosses 200x4000 = $800,000. For the season, the cinemas bring in 16x2,760K = $44,160,000. That's gross of course, and would be offset by the cinema's cut and by production costs. But still - it's a whole new world. I hope the musicians and staff are seeing some of it.
The first time I saw a Met performance in the cinema it took me a little while to get used to the lack of directionality of sound. The sound quality was fantastic but live operas aren't miked, so when someone sings you can hear the voice coming from their body. After half an hour I got used to the lack of directionality, and it hasn't bothered me at subsequent performances.
In some ways the cinema version is better. The Met uses eight cameras, so the visuals are far better than you could get in the best seats - which, even if I could afford them, have been permanently reserved by season ticket holders. The quality of the Met productions is nonpareil. They have the best directors, set designers, singers, and so on. Not that small companies can't be just as good, but the Met is consistently mind-blowingingly good.
My local opera company (variously called Opera Ontario, Kitchener-Waterloo Opera and Opera Hamilton, and currently on hiatus because of financial difficulties) put on a production of Gounod's Romeo & Juliet a couple of years ago that is an example of a small company doing extremely well. Juliet was sung by up and coming Canadian soprano Laura Whalen. In the early, happy part of the opera she literally bounced with joy as she sang. Everyone in the audience watched her with a huge smile on their face, riveted. Her voice was high and pure, perfectly suiting a young woman in love.
Today's Met performance of Romeo & Juliet had a very different feel. Anna Netrebko as Juliette is almost a mezzo: her voice has an older, darker sound and a lower register. At first I thought she was poorly cast, but quickly I began to see that the casting was brilliant. Her voice evoked angst and pathos in a way that explained the action. The whole production was mesmerizing and I won't miss the encore presentation on January 5.
The Met isn't the only opera company that is expanding into cinema. The Princess Twin, an independent cinema in my town, has inaugurated an opera series this year they call "any company but the Met". Their operas aren't live and the filming/editing isn't quite as top notch, but they're also shown in High Definition and the sound is also phenomenal. Plus, it gives us a look into opera houses around the world.
As to who attends the cinema operas, they look like the same people I see at live opera only they're not as dressed up. Another difference is that nobody coughs. In the production today, I could hear people in New York coughing, but not a single person in the cinema audience. The great freeing thing about the cinema version is that I am not required to clap - I loathe clapping - and when the singers are taking their bows, I can get up and go without offending them. I like to leave an opera with the music in my ears, which 15 minutes of curtain calls messes up.
The next step in cinematic opera should be Wagner's Ring Cycle. The Met is rumored to be planning one last production of its classic rendition of the Ring Cycle, and they should offer it to the world in cinema format. The world might never be the same.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Are you sleeping, Hagen my son?
I'm a big fan of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and if I had to pick one moment in the 17-hour, four opera marathon to call my favorite, it would be the weird, creepy conversation between Alberich and his son Hagen in the final opera, Gotterdammerung.
Alberich (a powerful dwarf from deep in the earth) and Wotan (the chief of the Norse gods) are in a multi-generational battle to obtain the Ring of the Nibelung and gain ultimate power. They have both sired off-spring to unwittingly act as their agents. Alberich's son is Hagen, and one night while Hagen is sleeping Alberich creeps up to him to give him instructions. Hagen is not in a natural sleep. He answers Alberich, and in his sleep he promises to steal the ring for his father. Several times during the conversation Alberich asks, "Are you sleeping, Hagen my son?" (Schlafst du, Hagen mein Sohn?)
The father-son conversation (with beautiful bass/baritone singing) has a languorous, almost lullabye aspect, except that the father is making his unconscious son swear to do monstrous acts. (Lack of free will is a recurring theme in Wagner, and in this case Alberich can beat Wotan because Alberich has the free will to make his son the tool of his bidding, while Wotan is constrained to let his offspring act freely.)
In the Ring Cycle, Wotan's agent (his grandson Siegfried) is powerful because he is fearless. But Alberich's agent, his son Hagen, is powerful because of his hatred. In the end hatred beats fearlessness, but hatred also kills itself. Hagen literally stabs Siegfried in the back, but the result is that the ring is lost to Alberich forever. in addition Valhalla burns and there are no gods left to replace it, so the next era of history begins.
I was thinking of all this while reading James Benjamin over at Left End of the Dial v2.0; he has written a series of posts about Dolchstosslegende as practiced by supporters of the Bush government. The Dolchstosslegende propaganda technique was used in Germany during its two world wars and deliberately references the legends Wagner based the Ring Cycle on. It blames failure in war on a populace that is insufficiently patriotic: it implies that the government, like the hero Siegfried, has been stabbed in the back by factions that questioned government policies for their own ends.
I think we're all aware that Dolchstosslegende has been a big part of the Bush spin about the US invasion of Iraq. There has been nothing subtle about it. (Benjamin's posts are still well worth reading.) The Bush government feels that it has been stabbed in the back by Democrats who have questioned its policies. It alleges that the troops have been stabbed in the back by anti-war protestors. Debate is reduced to the unproductive question: Who is a patriot and who is a traitor?
Dolchstosslegende propaganda can only reference the legends Wagner based his tale on, and not the Ring Cycle itself, because Wagner (for whom the term "moral ambiguity" was coined) paints a much less black-and-white picture of the back-stabbers and the back-stabbed. None of that directly applies to the Bush use of the propaganda technique... except in that Bush is unwittingly referencing the end of World War 2 and the new world that never would have emerged without it, and similarly is referencing the result of the fall of Valhalla - the rise of humanity. The Wagnerian conclusion may be that our only hope is the fall of Superpower-America and the beginning of the next era.
###
Alberich (a powerful dwarf from deep in the earth) and Wotan (the chief of the Norse gods) are in a multi-generational battle to obtain the Ring of the Nibelung and gain ultimate power. They have both sired off-spring to unwittingly act as their agents. Alberich's son is Hagen, and one night while Hagen is sleeping Alberich creeps up to him to give him instructions. Hagen is not in a natural sleep. He answers Alberich, and in his sleep he promises to steal the ring for his father. Several times during the conversation Alberich asks, "Are you sleeping, Hagen my son?" (Schlafst du, Hagen mein Sohn?)
The father-son conversation (with beautiful bass/baritone singing) has a languorous, almost lullabye aspect, except that the father is making his unconscious son swear to do monstrous acts. (Lack of free will is a recurring theme in Wagner, and in this case Alberich can beat Wotan because Alberich has the free will to make his son the tool of his bidding, while Wotan is constrained to let his offspring act freely.)
In the Ring Cycle, Wotan's agent (his grandson Siegfried) is powerful because he is fearless. But Alberich's agent, his son Hagen, is powerful because of his hatred. In the end hatred beats fearlessness, but hatred also kills itself. Hagen literally stabs Siegfried in the back, but the result is that the ring is lost to Alberich forever. in addition Valhalla burns and there are no gods left to replace it, so the next era of history begins.
I was thinking of all this while reading James Benjamin over at Left End of the Dial v2.0; he has written a series of posts about Dolchstosslegende as practiced by supporters of the Bush government. The Dolchstosslegende propaganda technique was used in Germany during its two world wars and deliberately references the legends Wagner based the Ring Cycle on. It blames failure in war on a populace that is insufficiently patriotic: it implies that the government, like the hero Siegfried, has been stabbed in the back by factions that questioned government policies for their own ends.
I think we're all aware that Dolchstosslegende has been a big part of the Bush spin about the US invasion of Iraq. There has been nothing subtle about it. (Benjamin's posts are still well worth reading.) The Bush government feels that it has been stabbed in the back by Democrats who have questioned its policies. It alleges that the troops have been stabbed in the back by anti-war protestors. Debate is reduced to the unproductive question: Who is a patriot and who is a traitor?
Dolchstosslegende propaganda can only reference the legends Wagner based his tale on, and not the Ring Cycle itself, because Wagner (for whom the term "moral ambiguity" was coined) paints a much less black-and-white picture of the back-stabbers and the back-stabbed. None of that directly applies to the Bush use of the propaganda technique... except in that Bush is unwittingly referencing the end of World War 2 and the new world that never would have emerged without it, and similarly is referencing the result of the fall of Valhalla - the rise of humanity. The Wagnerian conclusion may be that our only hope is the fall of Superpower-America and the beginning of the next era.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Russell Braun (Review)
I fell in love with the lyric baritone of Russell Braun after hearing his Papageno in the Magic Flute at Opera Atelier in Toronto. That was in the early '90s. Soon after he moved on to the Canadian Opera Company and then to world opera stages, but he still holds recitals with his wife and accompanist, Carolyn Maule, in southern Ontario.
I have heard Braun sing recitals a few times and have always been bowled over. Tonight I heard him again in recital at the Elora Festival, singing with Noel Edison's Elora Festival Singers in the Gambrel Barn.
Braun is a master of technique, making sounds that sometimes seem impossible to make - impossible to do the breathing, impossible to have the range from light tenorish highs down down down to baritone, impossible to evoke the poignant tone, impossible to sing so softly, impossible to project so powerfully.
And yet the magic of his singing isn't really about technique - it's about the intelligence behind the words and the sensitivity of his phrasing. He brings lyrics to life in a way that most people just can't do. Tonight a highlight for me was his rendition of The Brown Girl (also a highlight of Carolyn Maule's beautiful piano playing). Here are the words that I found online, and I'm not sure that they're exactly what Braun sang. The sad regret in the last verse permeated his rendition.
The Brown Girl
When first to this country I came as a stranger
I placed my affection on a handsome young girl
She being young and tender, her waist slim and slender
She appeared like an angel or some gypsy queen.
On the banks of the river where first I beheld her
She appeared like an angel or some Grecian queen.
Her eyes shone like diamonds, her hair gently waving
Her cheeks bloomed like roses or blood on the snow.
It was your cruel father who caused this disturbance
He said you were of a higher degree.
But I am determined now all for to gain you
Though he says I belong to a low family.
She cries "Charming Johnny, don't be melancholy
There is never no other my favor will gain
There's no other creature will e'er gain my favor
On the banks of the Burborne, I'll wander with thee."
Since I have gained you, my bride I will make you
I'll put rings on your fingers and drops in your ears.
With diamonds and pearls I'll deck my brown girl
With all sorts of grandeur, I'll deck you my dear.
My name is Delaney, no blemish can shame me
I might have had riches had I stayed at home.
But drinking and gambling, night walking and courting
Was the cause of my ruin and absence from home.
###
I have heard Braun sing recitals a few times and have always been bowled over. Tonight I heard him again in recital at the Elora Festival, singing with Noel Edison's Elora Festival Singers in the Gambrel Barn.
Braun is a master of technique, making sounds that sometimes seem impossible to make - impossible to do the breathing, impossible to have the range from light tenorish highs down down down to baritone, impossible to evoke the poignant tone, impossible to sing so softly, impossible to project so powerfully.
And yet the magic of his singing isn't really about technique - it's about the intelligence behind the words and the sensitivity of his phrasing. He brings lyrics to life in a way that most people just can't do. Tonight a highlight for me was his rendition of The Brown Girl (also a highlight of Carolyn Maule's beautiful piano playing). Here are the words that I found online, and I'm not sure that they're exactly what Braun sang. The sad regret in the last verse permeated his rendition.
The Brown Girl
When first to this country I came as a stranger
I placed my affection on a handsome young girl
She being young and tender, her waist slim and slender
She appeared like an angel or some gypsy queen.
On the banks of the river where first I beheld her
She appeared like an angel or some Grecian queen.
Her eyes shone like diamonds, her hair gently waving
Her cheeks bloomed like roses or blood on the snow.
It was your cruel father who caused this disturbance
He said you were of a higher degree.
But I am determined now all for to gain you
Though he says I belong to a low family.
She cries "Charming Johnny, don't be melancholy
There is never no other my favor will gain
There's no other creature will e'er gain my favor
On the banks of the Burborne, I'll wander with thee."
Since I have gained you, my bride I will make you
I'll put rings on your fingers and drops in your ears.
With diamonds and pearls I'll deck my brown girl
With all sorts of grandeur, I'll deck you my dear.
My name is Delaney, no blemish can shame me
I might have had riches had I stayed at home.
But drinking and gambling, night walking and courting
Was the cause of my ruin and absence from home.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Review of Isabel Bayrakdarian (Waterloo Entertainment Center, Nov 23 2006)
Canadian Soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian performed with her accompaniest husband, Serouj Kradjian, at the new Waterloo Entertainment Center on Thursday night. As part of a program to pair opera stars with young up-and-coming singers, mezzo-soprano Erin Lawson appeared in the second half.
Ms. Bayrakdarian's choice of music was inspired. Although she has made her name as a Mozart singer, in this concert she sang a series of little songs, mostly by little-known composers. The program included the English translations and the house lights were left up so we could read the lyrics. As well as a pure, beautiful voice, Ms. Bayrakdarian has an expressive style and a wide vocal range; this format showed off her considerable talents.
I was charmed throughout, but the ending went to new heights, from the two women singing Sull'aria... Che soave zeffiretto from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro through Rossini's Cat Duet (done with hilarious hamminess) and the famous Flower Duet from Delibes' Lakme.
Here's one of the songs she sang, a Spanish folksong by Fernando Obradors:
Chiquitita la novia
Chiquitita la novia
Chiquitito el novio,
Chiquitita la sala
Y er dormitorio,
Por eso you quiero
Chiquitita la cama
Y er mosquitero.
which is translated as:
Teeny-tiny the bride
Teeny-tiny the bride,
Teeny-tiny the groom,
Teeny-tiny the parlor,
And the bedroom;
For this reason I want
A teeny-tiny bed
And a mosquito net.
Review in KW Record
Profile of Isabel Bayrakdarian in Waterloo Chronicle
###
Ms. Bayrakdarian's choice of music was inspired. Although she has made her name as a Mozart singer, in this concert she sang a series of little songs, mostly by little-known composers. The program included the English translations and the house lights were left up so we could read the lyrics. As well as a pure, beautiful voice, Ms. Bayrakdarian has an expressive style and a wide vocal range; this format showed off her considerable talents.
I was charmed throughout, but the ending went to new heights, from the two women singing Sull'aria... Che soave zeffiretto from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro through Rossini's Cat Duet (done with hilarious hamminess) and the famous Flower Duet from Delibes' Lakme.
Here's one of the songs she sang, a Spanish folksong by Fernando Obradors:
Chiquitita la novia
Chiquitita la novia
Chiquitito el novio,
Chiquitita la sala
Y er dormitorio,
Por eso you quiero
Chiquitita la cama
Y er mosquitero.
which is translated as:
Teeny-tiny the bride
Teeny-tiny the bride,
Teeny-tiny the groom,
Teeny-tiny the parlor,
And the bedroom;
For this reason I want
A teeny-tiny bed
And a mosquito net.
Review in KW Record
Profile of Isabel Bayrakdarian in Waterloo Chronicle
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