Do You Want to Sell Tickets or Not? - A Rant
In my fourth season of regular attendance at the Paris Opera, I've recently had some, ah, interesting experiences buying tickets. I bought a fairly last minute seat, at the box office, to a performance of Salome on September 14. I asked whether there were any discounts for regular customers but was told no, so I paid rather more than I wanted to just to satisfy my curiosity about the soprano (scroll down to read my post from 10/19/11). The show wasn't a complete disaster, but on the whole I wish I'd saved my money. On October 10 in New York I received a letter from customer relations, dated August 30, offering a 20% discount on tickets in the top three categories, meaning that I probably could have paid less money for a better seat.
I thought this had to be a fluke, but then it happened again. On February 6 I saw Pique Dame, an electrifying performance conducted by Dmitri Jurowski, with Vladimir Galouzine as Ghermann. On February 13 in New York I got a letter, postmarked December 23, again offering discounts to the show I'd just seen.
This seemed worth a note to the CR office, so I searched the website for an e-mail address. Guess what: there is no way for the general public to contact the Opera de Paris without paying for the privilege. Without a published e-mail address (unless you want to reserve group visits or to join the Friends organization, AROP), you're left to choose among a 0.34€/minute local phone charge for reservations, the price of a postage stamp, or the cost of transportation to visit the box office. What century are we in again? (I suppose metered phone calls are an efficient way to transfer the burden of CSR through-put onto the customer, especially in a culture where business transactions tend to be loquacious.). But e-mails offers sent from a do-not-reply address, requiring ID to redeem an offer, would surely save money over a postal letter that arrives late and angers a customer.
Cerise sur le gateau, as the French say: yesterday I hustled to be online early to order tickets for the upcoming Arabella (with Renee Fleming) and Hyppolyte et Aricie (conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm), both sure to go fast. After a 45 minute wait in the virtual cue (great idea for avoiding server overloads, by the way, unless you somehow get bumped from your place and have to start over), I tried to log on, and for the first time in over three years of regularly using the site it wouldn't recognize my user name and account number. I requested a reminder by e-mail, which arrived quickly, but it still didn't work. The e-mail didn't appear to have been generated automatically, so I wrote back, explaining that the ID combination didn't seem to work on the site and could they suggest a solution? A human wrote back, with the suggestion that I wait till the opening of telephone sales (10 weeks in the future) and call in my order. For a hot show? No, sorry, that's not a solution--when log-in worked with a different browser the next day, I found that the dates I need were already sold out. I have bounced Madame's answer back with a request to forward my mail to tech support. If they even have tech support. Stay tuned for updates.
It's not that the Opera de Paris is completely behind the times: there's an iPhone app (free) that's worth downloading just for the gorgeous slide show of the Palais Garnier. It's possible to order tickets online in French, English, German, and Spanish, but with the major caveat you can't choose your seat from a seat map, a feature adopted by most theaters these days. This online "lottery" yielded such an uncomfortable seat for September's Clemenza di Tito that a month later I actually had trouble remembering which opera I had seen (it was a really good performance, too) because my discomfort and frustration were so acute.
With an official Facebook presence (just under 20,000 "likes") and a 5-month-old Twitter feed (almost 2000 followers, not quite 200 Tweets), Opera de Paris has ventured into social media. Yet they don't seem to understand that social media are not merely free advertising platforms but opportunities for conversation, and a useful channel for resolution of issues. I tweeted about my problems, with minimal expectations.
For all that performing arts venues talk about outreach, customer service still appears to challenge arts administrators. In this area Carnegie Hall sets the gold standard, in my experience. The website is informative and easy to use, although I can't speak from experience about response to technical issues. The ushers are generally pleasant: firm without being aggressive, patronizing, or hostile, they seem proud to work at Carnegie. The telemarketing team is the best in the business: knowledgeable about the programs they're selling (or furnished with really good scripts), informed about the customer's preferences, and always polite and friendly. Despite certain quirks, I always feel that management respects their audiences and recognizes the value of happy customers. The Opera de Paris appears to operate under a different business model, shall we say.
I have further complaints about capricious ticket pricing and the uneven quality of recent productions, but those will have to wait. Bottom line: a declining price-quality ratio combined with the increasing annoyance factor at Opera de Paris have me skipping many shows that I'd like to see there. This isn't entirely a bad thing, as I'm now discovering many smaller venues around Paris which present adventurous and high-quality performances. And Europe is small: award-winning La Monnaie (Brussels) is just over an hour away by train, and I've seen terrific shows at Oper-Frankfurt and in surrounding towns, like Wiesbaden and Mainz, where opera draws audiences from all walks of life, and ticket prices are reasonable.
Have you had similar issues with Opera de Paris or other theaters displaying a similar bunker mentality? Tweet comments to me @Susan_Brodie
NY City Opera presents Prima Donna at BAM
You've probably heard: Canadian folk-rocker and opera fan Rufus Wainwright wrote an opera. Prima Donna opened its third run in New York City Opera's production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Sunday (February 19). It's better than I expected but still a mixed bag.
It's the story of a reclusive semi-retired diva's attempted comeback in the commissioned opera which, confusingly, was both her greatest triumph and her downfall, as she lost her voice during its single performance (which, however, was recorded). Régine Saint-Laurent is attended by a shy new chambermaid, Marie, and an overbearing butler, Philippe, determined to protect her from a worshipful young journalist, André, who also just happens to be a conservatory-trained tenor who arrives for their interview carrying the score, which he knows by heart. Music is sung, sparks fly, the diva collapses...and the first act curtain falls as they embrace. Act two resolves the diva's indecision and delivers a dazzling coloratura aria for the maid, a fantasy scene with ravishing duet, a mad scene, several confrontations, and a denouement with a major debt to Der Rosenkavalier. Wainwright does know his operatic conventions, though writing the diva a mad scene without singing is problematic.
(The synopsis on BAM's website contains more action than what we saw onstage, suggesting major cuts since earlier runs in the UK and Toronto)
There's some lovely music, with beautiful, gauzily-orchestrated interludes reminiscent of Debussy, and an occasional energetic burst that recalls Janacek. When harmonies stray from the frequently saccharin tonality they can be quite interesting, and Wainwright clearly wrote with great care. Unfortunately, much of the vocal writing is drab, generic, and repetitive, which only serves to highlight the painful banality of the libretto (co-written by Wainwright and Bernadette Colomine), inexplicably decided written in French (the French and the English translation are equally turgid). Wainwright's inexperience with writing for trained voices shows, as he mostly confines the singers to a few pitches in the lower middle part of their voices, where they slowly intone their texts, the better to understand the words (alas) (the tenor also gets lots of high passages). This works least well for the chambermaid, who is granted a single aria, a rangy folk-like reminiscence about life and love in Picardie, notable for the rhyming of tresses and fesses.
The rare joke only points out how terribly seriously the piece takes itself, and how monotonous most of the pacing is. Repetition is a big problem: each meaningful utterance is sung at least three times, and the critical but unmemorable duet and aria from the diva's comback vehicle are drilled over and over. The story alternates between predictable cliches and whiplash improbabilities. Camp is forgivable if it delivers lyric thrills, but Wainwright hasn't yet earned how to do that.
Wainwright deserves credit for undertaking the project, which qualifies as a true opera, if a not very good one. The luscious-voiced Melody Moore as Régine, Kathrine Guthrie Demos as Marie, Taylor Stayton (another talented AVA grad) as André, and Randal Turner as Philippe sing unamplified. Antony McDonald's literal representation of the diva's Paris apartment, with fly-up front and back walls, is handsome and serviceable, and his costumes are appropriate, especially the little black meet-the-press dress that evokes Callas in retirement. Thomas Hase's lighting focuses the attention effectively.
During a normal City Opera season this would have been a fun deviation from more usual NYCO fare. But it's not clear that this is a direction that will save the company. Slow ticket sales picked up when a donation enabled sale of all remaining seats for $25, though at this writing two of the three remaining performances (out of four) still have seats available. I wish Wainwright luck, but I wish NYCO even more luck.
Sleepers of 2011
The expectations we carry into a performance inevitably influence our response to that event. In 2011 I spent many wonderful evenings in concert halls and theaters, but sometimes the show felt perhaps not as special as I wanted, simply because I expected so much. However, I had a number of happy surprises, when I dragged into a concert or opera almost reluctantly and the evening turned out to be quite special. So instead of a Top 10, here in chronological order are ten "sleepers": performances that I attended with little or no expectations that proved unexpectedly rewarding.
The year's first pleasant surprise came in late January: Ô mon bel inconnu at Paris's Opéra-Comique, with music by Renaldo Hahn, book by Sasha Guitry. Part of the Poulenc Festival around Les Mamelles de Teresias, it was a charming and effervescent French musical comedy from 1933, showing another side to a composer I knew for his perfumed parlor melodies. A brisk, sophisticated comedy worthy of Frank Capra is leavened with ingratiating melodies and sprightly ensemble music. Here's a synthesizer performance of the entire score. The sound is gratingly ugly but the transparent sonorities make it easy to appreciate how deftly the music is constructed. And here is a clip of the title song recorded in the early 30s by the delicious Leïa ben Sédira; her style and impeccable diction suggest the meticulous training undergone by these young performers (though the Paris Conservatory's musical comedy class was discontinued sometime in the 1960s or 70s).
In March I bought a last minute ticket to Katya Kabanova at Opera de Paris (Garnier), with Angela Denoke, production by Christoph Marthaler. I remain on the fence about this singer, but she sang beautifully and was a luminous and heartwrenching Katia, in one of Marthaler's more effective realizations of his dystopic world view.
Wozzeck at the Met: always a stunning show; Alan Held must be one of the finest off-the-radar baritones around, and Waltraud Meier invariably lends luster and intensity to an evening. What I didn't know at the time was that this may have been my last chance to see James Levine at the podium.
In May, Jon Gillock's inaugural recital on the Manton Memorial Organ at NYC's Church of the Ascension reminded me of the visceral pleasure of French organ music in general, and of Messaien in particular. The church building is a bit too small to realize the full sonic potential of this magnificent instrument, especially in the repertoire meant for the grand Cavaillé-Coll instruments found in the luckiest French churches, but Gillock's choice of registration made the most of the music and the instrument (I heard only the big organ; builder Pascal Quoirin also constructed a small baroque-style organ as part of the commission).
September's sleeper was Le Jardin de Monsieur Lully, a concert by the participants in Les Arts Florissants's 2011 training academy for young singers, who also participated in the touring revival of Lully's Atys at Brooklyn Academy of Music. I had seen the opera in May at the Opéra-Comique, and it was nearly as splendid at BAM, but that was no surprise. This delightful showcase for William Christie's hand-picked talents presented the young singers in a wide range of baroque styles in a concert pasticcio. The evening was unexpectedly moving: at the end, Christie's tender and paternal gaze at his brood, whom we had come to know musically, seemed to foreshadow his own retirement from active concert life. After launching the French baroque revival 40 years ago he won't be around forever.
Barbiere di Siviglia. In early October I dragged myself to yet another to hear the young Mexican tenor Javier Camarena in his first Met role, and was rewarded by an unexpectedly delightful evening, conducted by Maurizio Benini with supple energy. The chemistry and comic timing were magical; new to me was Maurizio Muraro, an expert Italian buffo bass. How did they achieve such synergy on the minimal rehearsal time normally allotted to revivals?
Camarena, whom I first heard sing Rossini in Zurich in 2009, was very well received; to my ear this is not a tenor di grazia but I look forward to hearing him sing Verdi in a few years. Here's a YouTube clip of his final aria that evening, posted by Camarena; the cabaletta begins around 5'30".
Oedipe (George Enescu) at La Monnaie: I had other plans for the last Sunday afternoon in October: a pair of architectural tours during the Brussels Art Nouveau Biennial. But when I spotted the poster I instead raced to La Monnaie to catch the second performance of this rarity. Enescu's retelling of the Greek tragedy can be ponderous in the manner of a 1960s Hollywood epic (Enescu's music would have done well in the film industry) but the Alex Ollé (La Fura dels Baus) production combined enough, pageantry, showmanship, and coherence to make the music sound better than it was. I shouldn't have been surprised: La Monnaie was named Europe's best opera company 2011 by Opernwelt, and I've been very impressed with the half-dozen productions I've seen there.
Turandot: Wiesbaden, just 45 minutes from Frankfurt, was unknown to me, but the prospect of a new production by Cesare Lievi, the director of an interestingly surreal Cenerentola at the Met, was intriguing. The payoff was a chance to experience Puccini as modern music, performed in a jewel box theater by an ensemble with musical values that would do a much larger company proud. (more on this in a separate note to come)
Satyagraha at the Met. Last year's sell-out of the production by Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch of the Philip Glass bio of Ghandi's early years wasn't as popular in revival, but the show was just as powerful as on first viewing. Creative use of projections and puppets conjured from found objects created visual magic and made three and a half hours fly. I was surprised that this was even more mesmerizing on second view. An unexpected bonus was exiting the theater to encounter an Occupy demonstration on the sidewalk just beyond Lincoln Center. Glass himself addressed the crowd, reading an excerpt from the libretto, and broadcast via the so-called People's Mike, with the message delivered in short phrases and then repeated in unison by everyone close enough to hear. It's a way around restrictions on sound equipment.
Edited to add: I had stopped here, but remembered that one of the most thrilling performances of October was Opera Orchestra of New York's Adriana Lecouvreur, with a starry cast that included Angela Gheorghiu, Jonas Kaufmann, and Anita Rachiashvilli. Anticipation was high, but the excitement generated onstage exceeded expectations. It was one of those nights when everyone was "on" and inspired one another to a very high level. A real night to remember.
Happy New Year!
Siegfried at Oper Frankfurt
The final Sunday performance (Nov. 27) of Siegfried at Oper Frankfurt was delayed by about 10 minutes because of "technical difficulties". Amid the politely agitated buzz that greeted the announcement I wondered whether the Met's machine ills (see previous post) were contagious. No worries--the show actually did begin within a few minutes and ran without noticeable mishap. The updated production plays with contemporary references while avoiding the gratuitously outrageous conceits.
Jens Killian's unit set for Vera Nemirova's ongoing Ring production features a large disc articulated into 5 concentric rings, like a shrunken Saturn. The clever contraption serves as stage surface, projection screen, and, in its various configurations, definer of interior spaces. As the rings rotate together or at variable angles to the stage and to one another they suggest mountain peaks, caves, and dragons' lairs. And in the final scene, the core ring becomes Brünnhilde's rock, surrounded by a circlet of real fire which magically floated into the flies after Siegfried breached the barrier to approach the slumbering figure.
But this production focused on characters rather than the machine: direction was specific and any modernization served to help modern audiences connect with Wagner's mythic archetypes. The younger-than-usual Mime sported hoodie and oversized glasses, hair flopping into his eyes, evoking the nerdy loner you avoided in high school. Alberich and the Wanderer, in matching black do-rags--the hoods you avoided for other reasons--were dressed as members of the same tribe. The fierce and voluptuous Erda was an astonishing big-breasted furball, somehow evoking an eternal femininity, wisdom, and, on this occasion, elemental rage at her blustering and uncomprehending consort. The opera's theme of teaching and learning was made concrete by a chalkboard: Siegfried's queries about his origins became a Q&A blackboard lesson, and the same device was used in the scene between Mime and the Wanderer. No chalkboard was needed when Siegfried, having finally learned fear, turned the tables to become Brünnhilde's teacher about love.
The dragon was understated but effective: at the first rumbles of the Fafner motif in the second act a minute rotation of the middle ring revealed a cleft between rings glowing fiery red, from which emerged the creature's sleepy voice. When Siegfried woke the slumbering dragon, the fiery cavern opened to discharge Fafner from its infernal depths, a human anatomical illustration made flesh, burly and skinless, all blood vessels and sinew. Wearing a loincloth and draped with gold chains, this was man stripped to raw greed, the monster that lurks within. It made sense that the strapping youth could overcome this man-sized Fafner without fear.
One original and delightful touch was the Forest Bird, mimed by a male dancer (Alan Barnes) in a brown body stocking with long feathers extending his fingers. He darted, quivered, wordlessly cajoled, and reacted to both Siegfried's actions and to details of the music--you couldn't watch anything else.
The singers all sounded at least decent, but it's hard to comment meaningfully because all wore body mikes. [EDITED TO ADD: I have since learned that the mikes were in use only for commercial recording: Oehm Classics has already issued Das Rheingold and Die Walküre on CD. Sound samples of Die Walküre reveal a pleasing balance between singers and orchestra and minimal enhancement of ambient sound.] The singers on that stage have all proven themselves in Frankfurt's middling-sized auditorium, and I've heard many of them in larger theaters without acoustic enhancement. Was this a compromise allowing greater dynamic latitude to music director Sebastien Weigle, whose tempi were often on the slow side? That said, Lance Ryan's Siegfried sounded quite good, even at the end of his long sing. Terje Stensvold's Wanderer sounded resonant and perfectly portrayed a Master of the Universe losing his power. When Meredith Arwady as Erda launched her powerful contralto against the increasingly hapless Wanderer, everyone quaked. Why isn't this woman singing everywhere?
The takeaway: the Ring doesn't require excessive gimmickry to be powerful and evocative. The tradition calls for a few good bits of stagecraft--an imaginatively scary dragon, magic fire--and Frankfurt provided enough enchantment to please, ideas to provoke thought, and enough familiar elements to satisfy the most diehard traditionalist without being stuffy--all held together with glorious music making.
[Götterdämmerung premieres on January 29, 2012, with six sold-out performances before the two full Ring cycles in June-July.]
Burning Love: Siegfried at the Met
Flames weren't meant to rage for the entire final scene of the Met's new Siegfried, but during the scenic transition from forest to mountain, as Siegfried was about to climb through the inferno to find his well rested Brunnhilde, Robert Lepage's infamous stage machine halted mid-rotation with a tremendous crash. And there it stayed, girders criss-crossed, serving as a screen for projected flames, like a giant Yule log video. Instead of being revealed asleep in a raised clearing, Deborah Voigt finally had to walk out and lie down on the stage. Jay Hunter Morris mimed cutting off her armor, and the two improvised their blocking. Standing on a level and sound-reflective stage undoubtedly made it easier to sing -- they both sounded better than on opening night, as broadcast over the internet. But it was clear that something was amiss.
Static as it was, the steady image wasn't entirely infelicitous, as it turns out: the flaming background underlined the erotic underpinnings of the scene, which is about Siegfried's quest to overcome Brunnhilde's virginal timidity. And it was a relief not to have a noisy, hulking structure distracting from the intimate dialog. Still, it would have been interesting to see how (or whether) Lepage's set mirrored Brunnhilde's transformation from chaste warrior maiden to passionate woman.
Even with the high-tech wizardry, this remains an entirely traditional Ring, all forest primeval and medieval costumes, Much of the audience seemed very relieved and happy about this; I'm less delighted. There's nothing wrong with a literal staging, but after seeing a few Ring cycles I'm looking for a little more intellectual meat to the experience. Lepage doesn't even hint at the subtext often encountered today, of man's despoiling the environment. Granted, the Ring is a rich narrative that doesn't need reinterpretation. Yet Wagner's magnum opus is so rich and complex that the repeat attendee--this one, anyway--wants to explore new ways of thinking about and experiencing the score. Personally, I'd prefer an experience of Wagner that doesn't incorporate the excess noise and occasional moments of terror delivered by the all too hazardous machine.
Bryn Terfel as the Wanderer sounded wonderful, no longer overpowered by Alberich as he was in Das Rheingold (though I can't wait to hear Eric Owens as Wotan). Gerhard Siegel delivered his well-honed Mime with evil glee and physical nimbleness as well as vocal acuity. Mojka Erdmann was the ideal voice for the forest bird, wonderfully rendered in 3D projection. Met Assistant Conductor Derek Inoue, standing in for Fabio Luisi, led a briskly paced performance that took time to savor the score's beauties. The orchestra sounded terrific.
If only the staging were as successful. Will the tech staff be able to tame the beast (and I don't mean Fafner, a disappointing dragon) in time for the HD broadcast on Saturday (the final performance before the complete cycles in the spring)?
Opera de Paris -- La Rentree
Opéra de Paris has done some clean-up over the summer. At the Palais Garnier a restaurant has opened in the back of the building, facing the Apple Store across the street. The controversial design features walls of undulating white marble, red upholstery, and vast expanses of glass that somehow met the approval of the historic monuments people. Food and service have pleased the critics somewhat less, though it seems to be crowded whenever I walk by. More pleasingly, the Chagall gracing the ceiling of the auditorium appears to have been cleaned, with brighter colors increasing the sparkle of the grand space.
Onstage the revival of Willy Decker's 1997 production of La Clemenza di Tito was stylish and satisfying in the hands of conductor Adam Fischer. Titus is a character who simply seems too good to be true, but Decker's production made some sense of the man. He's first shown as a reluctant ruler; during the course of the drama he learns to find his way as a leader, but he ends up utterly alone. Titus's inner evolution was reflected by the large block of stone that dominated the simple set: as the ruler matured, the block progressively took shape as an outsized bust of the Emperor.
Klaus Florian Vogt is no Mozart stylist, but his clear, strong voice and innocent demeanor were perfect for the too-good-to-be-true Titus, and other than the coloratura he managed the punishing part with ease. Stephanie d'Oustrac, in her first major Paris Opera role, was boyishly ardent and vocally sumptuous as Sesto. Another non-Mozartian, Hibla Gerzmava as Vitellia was nonetheless a revelation, despite insufficient contrast between her plush timbre and that of Sesto. Amel Brahim-Djelloui was delightful as Servilia. Best of all, Fischer breathed life and eloquence into the orchestral gestures. A very good evening.
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Across town at Bastille the Opéra has claimed back the grand staircase from the guitar players and winos, allowing (able-bodied) patrons already holding tickets to enter the orchestra level directly. Standees have now been banished to the top side galleries, and the old downstairs standing-room area has been fitted with seats.
And onstage, another old production has been dug out of storage, Andre Engel's 1997 production of Salome. Set in a Strauss-era Turkish interior, stone latticework admitted only filtered light while spotlights trained on the intimate interactions. A few western travelers are on hand to witness the depravity as guests of the Tetrarch. Careful restaging made for blocking responsive to musical details, vividly brought out by Pinchas Steinberg's fine conducting.
I originally had intended to skip this show because Angela Denoke, wonderful as she was in last year's Katya Kabanova, didn't strike me as the voice for Salome, an instinct confirmed by her performance. She managed her resources with terrific skill and never quite came to vocal grief, but the sound was far from sumptuous, even difficult to hear towards the back of the orchestra section (though that was partly Steinberg's fault). Her alluring and pathologically spoiled teenager was quite persuasive, however, and she looked and moved marvelously, even in one of the sillier Dances I've ever witnessed (really, would this teenager actually waltz with her creepy stepfather?). Juha Uusitalo was a bit generic in his angry zeal, but was far more audible than when heard previously on this stage singing Wagner. Stig Andersen played Herod as a harried bureaucrat who didn't quite understand how to deal with his unexpected lust for his wife's alluring but monstrous daughter. Isabelle Druet as the page sounded lush if a bit too mature; s/he pulled off a coup de theatre as Salome's self-appointed executioner, grabbing a dagger to slit her throat.
It's a great score, and the music was played well, but this wasn't a must-see performance.
La Vie Boheme: Tannhauser at Paris Opera
My intention for this season was to move away from straight reviews, but finally I've seen a production that inspires a few words. The revival of Robert Carsen's production of Tannhäuser currently playing at Opera de Paris is that rare beast: an updating which reveals new meaning without being ridiculous.
Tannhäuser is a painter, Venus is his inspiration, and his studo, Venusberg, overflows with the fruits of his creativity--the stage is empty but for a bed, which sees plenty of action, an easel, and dozens of canvases leaning against the walls. The Warburg song hall appears as an art gallery, with velvet ropes removed for the well-attended vernissage of a group show on the theme of love. Tannhäuser, stained and scruffy among the trendily-attired young artists, ignores the procedings to sketch his beloved Elisabeth, but has lost his mojo in this stuffy setting. Act Three returns to the atelier; the canvases are gone, and the returning pilgrims, all dressed like Tannhäuser, carry bare stretcher frames. The miracle of Tannhäuser's redemption translates as the acceptance of his previously rejected portrait of Elisabeth, as, in a final coup de theatre, the back wall lifts to reveal a gallery of great nude portraiture.
Carson's master stroke is to soften the libretto's misogyny by exploring the tension between the erotic and the spiritual as a source of artistic inspiration. By the end, Elisabeth and Venus appear in tandem, dressed alike and shadowing each other in soft, dreamy movements. Tannhäuser, reaching out to both at once, has resolved his inner conflict, and his nude portrait of Elisabeth will hang in the hall of greats (though we never actually see any of his paintings).
Christopher Ventris was a rough-hewn but effective Tannhäuser; Nina Stemme, in her Paris Opera debut, sang with gleaming, sumptuous tone. Stephane Degout was splendid as Wolfram; he's moved beyond his young lyric stage without losing any beauty of tone. Christoph Fischesser, another welcome Paris newcomer, was a wonderful Hermann--one of the best bass voices I've heard in a long time. Sophie Koch sounded at her limits as Venus (or was that an artifact of the sound system? I had to watch the first act on a screen in the lobby) but was musically and dramatically effective. Sir Mark Elder drew rich colors from the orchestra and generally kept things moving, though, even apart from some appropriate grand pauses, I thought some long passages needed more drive.
Overall, une très belle soirée.
Trivia: according to the program book, the rehearsal period for Istvan Szabo's 1984 Paris production was so contentious that the director later turned the saga into a film starring Glen Close as Elisabeth, Meeting Venus. Kitschy fun.
Il postino by Daniel Catan at Theatre du Chatelet, Paris
This gloss on the charming 1994 film by Michael Radford about an imagined friendship between Chilean poet Pablo Neruda exiled in Italy and the young postman who delivers his mail fit perfectly into the Châtelet's current trend toward lighter lyric programming, straddling as it does the bounderies between opera and musical theater. The third incarnation of the Los Angeles/Vienna/Châtelet production was a perfect summer interlude, chiefly as a chance to hear Placido Domingo in good voice (June 27).
Like so many contemporary operas, this is based on a story that doesn't scale well for the stage. Opera is about large passions and grand gestures; this is a sequence of small, intimate scenes, with little in the way of conflict and resolution--perfect for camera close-ups but less effective from the second balcony. The only large action, Mario's death, takes place between acts and is told in retrospect -- this is a short story comprising a series of vignettes, not a grand drama. But as directed by Ron Daniels the spare, attractive settings by Ricardo Hernandez, nicely lit by Jennifer Tipton and enhanced by Philip Bussmann's projections, moved as smoothly between the brief scenes as a camera fade-out, making for uninterrupted narrative flow. No 10-minute scene changes here!
Catan's music is largely tonal, Verismo Lite as film score (I've always considered verismo the precursor to movie music). Intimations of Mascagni and whiffs of Ravel support vocal lines that are more sing-song than melodic, generally outlining the interval of a third, with occasional wider leaps to convey stronger emotion. The structure, curiously, reminded me of the earliest Italian operas, with their predominantly arioso vocal lines and main action (here, the death of the title character) taking place offstage. The orchestra was huge but carefully scored so that the voices were never covered. The most memorable arias (using the term loosely) were Neruda's love song to Matilde at the very beginning, and Beatrice's account of Mario's death.
Most of the principals had performed in the work's 2010 premiere run in Los Angeles, so the show ran without a hitch. Placido Domingo as Neruda was generous as well as vocally masterful, showing his younger colleague how to deliver ringing high notes, just as the older poet helped the ardent but inarticulate young man find his inner poet and win his lady. Current San Francisco Adler Fellow Daniel Montenegro, reprising the role of Mario Ruoppolo (in alternance with Charles Castronovo) was an appealing young postman. Despite an alarming wobble Cristina Gallardo-Domas brought warmth and comeliness to the part of Matilde, Neruda's wife, which she created in Los Angeles. Amanda Squitieri, another original cast member, sang and acted prettily as Beatrice though straining at her high notes. Secondary characters and the ensemble contributed to a good performance.
Overall it was a decent but unexciting evening. The show flowed nicely, the music was pleasant but without much interest. The cast was talented and effective but this wasn't an ideal showcase for any of them, other than the astonishing Placido Domingo. While it was a bit shocking to see him play an old man (though during the time frame of Neruda's exile the poet would have been in his 50s), his charisma remains undimmed, and his voice was strong, clear, and ardent. I suspect Il postino will see few, if any, revivals. But there are certainly worse ways to spend a sultry summer evening--especially when the theater is air conditioned.
The Bird Stays in the Picture
(c) Susan Brodie 2007http://www.opera-comique.com/fr/les-brigands/les-brigands.html
Obviously not the chicken in the show -- much too shy!
The chicken didn't rate top billing--nor any program mention, for that matter. But it came close to upstaging the rest of the cast during the second act of Les Brigands, currently playing at Opéra Comique during the third of seventh performances (seen on June 26). This was no mean feat, considering the frenetic bustle of activity generated by one of the funniest ensemble casts I've seen in this theater.
Jacques Offenbach's final opéra bouffe (a satiric genre, distinct from the broader opéra comique) from 1869 relates the unlikely tale of a band of brigands that reforms its thieving ways after a series of events that include an innocent farmer joining their ranks for love of the chieftain's daughter. Before their conversion the band takes over of the Duke of Mantua's household planning to intercept the 3 million franc dowery brought by the Princess of Granada to their arranged marriage, a plan that of course comes to naught. Despite the familiar plot elements the parody predates Bizet's Carmen by six years: Schiller's 1781 Die Raüber, with its nascent revolutionary Robin Hood sympathies, inspired librettists from Scribe to Maffei (I masnadieri), to Offenbach and Bizet's collaborators Meilhac and Halévy, and even Brecht. Les Brigands makes light of the evergreen theme of wealth and its inequities, playing on popular themes and mocking stereotypes in broad comic schtick executed with gleeful abandon by a large and skillful cast of comedians.
The funny business is apparent even before the first notes, as a doddering conductor is led into the pit (arranged as in Offenbach's day, with winds behind the conductor's back) -- and begins the overture to Carmen. The music quickly succumbs to audience outcry before the real chef steps onto the podium and launches the real score. Distinctively French melodies, catchy if mostly unmemorable, alternate with dialog and plenty of slapstick stage business, including a collection of silly walks worthy of Monty Python. Concerns over political correctness evaporate--personally I was too busy laughing at the goofy portrayal of the Princess of Granada and her lisping Castillian entourage and at the G-&-S-worthy Carabiners (who always arrive too late).
There's often a hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-show quality about Opéra Comique's productions. Sometimes it's annoyingly amateurish; this time it felt endearing and genuine, perhaps because the parody was so affectionate and the performers so engaged. The theater's small size magnified the clumsiness of the many elaborate costumes and the vaguely cartoonish sets, but the company's comic timing was impeccable and the energy unflagging. And the score is musically more sophisticated than many of Offenbach's contemporaries, using musical language that recalls his swan song, Les Contes d'Hoffman.
I always find Opéra Comique's largely francophone casts a revelation in terms of French style; this time the vocal level was overall quite strong on anyone's terms. The only singer I recognized going in was Julie Boulianne in the pants role of Fragoletto. This fine young Canadian* mezzo (the program listed her as a soprano but her bio lists more young mezzo roles) has matured vocally and developed ample stage energy since her not-so-distant Juilliard days; she was funny and physically dynamic onstage, and sang with healthy tone. Her love interest, Daphné Touchais as the ingenue Fiorella, was appealing onstage and her light, attractive voice lacked the stringent quality often heard in French sopranos. The charismatic head bandit, Falsacappa, was Eric Huchet, an able comedian and sturdy tenor. Among the many amusing secondary characters the sweet-voiced tenor Loic Félix, as the duke's wastrel cashier, was particularly captivating. Francois-Xavier Roth led an energetic and stylish reading, notwithstanding occasional scrappy ensemble work and less-than perfect intonation from his modern-and-period-instrument orchestra, Les Siècles.
About that chicken: from the moment of its Act II appearance with three other birds in the kitchen of the Duke of Mantua it rarely left the front of the stage, plucking at crumbs and dodging plenty of hyperactive pratfalls. It cemented its vaudevillian bona fides by improvising a scene by positioning itself in front of the falling curtain. The audience remained in the stuffy auditorium to applaud the stage-struck bird's capture by one of the bandits. (other animals included 3 more chickens, a mule, a basset hound, and an authentic-looking moose head that poked from behind a boulder for a few moments, plus countless freshly shot game animals--stuffed--that fell from the sky at strategic moments. I suppose you could also include in that count the different animal calls heard at the beginning of the piece).
*Opéra Comique has been making good use of her compatriots as well--I've heard mezzo Michele Losier and tenor Joseph Kaiser in recent seasons
The Making of Americans
Oakland ex-pat in Paris Gertrude Stein is the woman of the moment here in San Francisco, with two exhibitions in town devoted to her and her artistic milieu, so I couldn't resist cribbing her title for a discussion of Francesca Zambello's production of the Ring Cycle. In its original (and partial) incarnation at Washington's National Opera it was dubbed "A Ring for America". Now three-quarters of the way through the Cycle (which I'll be covering more fully elsewhere) I wanted to muse about just what makes this production American.
The most obvious ways are visual: the production features a hodgepodge of American vistas, especially those of the West. Projections evoke the redwood forests, Red Rocks, the over-industrialized southern Lake Michigan skyline. Wagner's Edda characters appear as gold rush miners, San Francisco Diggers, a 1940s hausfrau, a gospel singer, a radical survivalist/terrorist, Gay 90s girls, even just-plain-guys sitting around a dilapidated Airstream trailer drinking Coke and Reingold beer. Hunding's house is a clapboard cabin in the woods, its main room graced with stuffed deer heads, firearms, and a hunting scene painted on velvet.
But it seems to me that the most distinctively American aspect is the emotional transparency of Wagner's characters. Zambello places an emphasis on detailed personal relationships, which of course are the means and cause of Wotan's progressive loss of divine power and Brunnhilde's path to redemption of the world. This is by far the most touchy-feely Ring I've ever seen: in a drama based on intimate scenes, human touch, whether loving or aggressive, is a common element to most encounters. The Rhinemaidens teasingly caress Alberich; Wotan and Fricka are more physically affectionate than regally dignified, and Freia returns from her stay with the giants lovingly entwined with Fasolt. In Die Walkure, Hunding menaces Seigfried via face-offs in his personal space, and Wotan expresses frustration by refusing Fricka's conciliatory touch. Beyond physical contact, the direction and conducting underline the most vulnerable emotional moments, like Siegfried gathering his courage to kiss the sleeping Brunnhilde. Zambello's specific direction is partly inspired by feminist themes, but it seems to me that this also reflects and American informality and lack of a priori [ital] barriers in America's (supposedly) egalitarian culture.
I recently saw a concert version of Handel's Ariodante in Paris (Theatre des Champs-Elysees, May 23, conducted by Alan Curtis) featuring three wonderful North American divas. Mezzo Marie-Nicole Lemieux and soprano Karina Gauvin are francophone Canadians with careers primarily in Europe. Kansas-born Joyce DiDonato, today's "It" girl among lyric mezzos, has an exploding international career but remains the "Yankee Diva". Her Canadian co-stars relished their front-and-center star turns -- delicious and perfectly appropriate for the theatricality of a Handel opera. In contrast, DiDonato gave a explosive but also introspective and modest performance, emotions playing across her face before she even took center stage to sing. Her superbly sung arias were technically dazzling and tonally beautiful, but I believe that what brought the audience cheering to their feet was her openness. "Scherza infida", which she recorded in a sorrow-drenched version for her FURORE album, took on an entirely new tone as she risked a stinging new reading. When she returned for the triumphant "Doppo notte", her impeccable fireworks expressed relief, lust, and joy -- and humility. Her her naturalness and lack of posturing and preening strike me as a particularly Yankee characteristic.
Coming back to San Francisco and Wagner, I cite Stein as one who discovered her national roots as an expat in Europe. Francesca Zambello has used a quintessential German work to make a distinctively American statement.
Lully's Atys, by Les Arts Florissants, cond. William Christie, at Opera Comique
Just a short note about Atys, as I'll be covering this show in print when Les Arts Florissants come to Brooklyn in September. Arriving with only a 6€ "sans visibilité" ticket in hand for the May 12 opening night of the Opéra Comique revival, I was thrilled to find a subscriber with an extra ticket dead center in the third balcony. It was well worth the extra investment--this is a beautiful production to see as well as hear. The theater as usual was uncomfortably stuffy and severe jet lag threatened to undermine alertness, but the music, the singing, lots of baroque dance, and the gorgeous playing kept me wide awake.
My memories of the original production (by Jean-Marie Villégier) from over 20 years ago are hazy at best, but the gentleman sitting next to me remembered it well. He found it "as handsome as the first time" but reflected that the staging, with its lightly stylized 18th century sets (Carlo Tommasi) and costumes (Patrice Cauchetier) seemed almost old-fashioned. Curious choice of words to describe a period production, but it underlined the fact that even with the scrupulous adherence to historical performance practice by period instrument ensembles, baroque opera is theater and as such is treated as a living art, especially in Paris, where you can see a different baroque opera most every week. I was most struck by the careful realization of Quinault's formal verses as a vivid story full of strong emotion. Baroque gestures used by all the singers never got in the way of understanding exactly what was happening and what each character was feeling. The dramatically static divertissements were enlivened with wonderful baroque dance, recreated from choreography by the late Francine Lancelot.
I will mention mezzo Stéphanie D'Oustrac, as she will not be making the trip to New York (she'll be busy singing Sesto in La Clemenza di Tito at the Opéra Garnier). Since I first heard her as a very young artist with Christie she's been singing everything from Rameau to Schoenberg. D'Oustrac provided a real diva turn as Cybèle, the goddess whose thwarted love for the eponymous mortal hero propels her to tragic revenge. I did hear a few worrisome moments of pressure on the voice, but her singing was very stylish and her assumption of the character, a cross between Norma and Armida, was mesmerizing.
Noted with interest: principal soloists were designated by modern names for their voice types (sopranos, mezzo, tenor, etc.) but soloists for the divertissements and choristers were identified as dessus, haute-contre, taille, and basse. The listing for the string section of the orchestra bore similar designations. Soloists for the divertissements were participants in the current edition of Le Jardin des Voix,.
Tickets are already on sale for September performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Don't wait too long to order seats: this is a delightful chance to see baroque opéra à la française.
The Kids are All Right: Young People's Chorus of New York City at 92nd Street Y
Transient Glory Tenth Anniversary Concert, May 6, 2011
I first encountered these wonderful young musicians on assignment a few years ago, and I've since enjoyed their contributions to events like the 2008 Bang on A Can All Stars Marathon and the 2010 Terry Riley In C Anniversary concert in Carnegie Hall. The touchingly pure sound of young voices is irresistible to begin with; this ensemble's fearless performances of impressively difficult contemporary music is astonishing. So this isn't exactly an unbiased report.
Founded by Artistic Director and conductor Francisco J. Nuñez in 1988, the group provides applied music education to over 1300 children aged 7-18 in after school programs, mostly in New York City. The youngest participants receive basic musical and vocal training, and as they mature they progress through five levels of choirs. The top performing ensembles have performed in New York's most prestigious venues. YPC (everyone connected with the group seems to use the acronym) has made a number of CDs and has toured in the U.S. and internationally, including three trips to Japan. The organization also hosts seminars for young singers and for music teachers.
The group's pride and joy is Transient Glory, a unique initiative for commissioning, performing, and publishing new music for youth choirs. John Schaefer, host of New Sounds, a local Public Radio show devoted to contemporary music, best expressed how unusual this project is: when Nuñez first told him that he'd invited composers like Michael Torke and John Corigliano to write music for his chorus and how would he, John, like to host the first concert, Schaefer blurted, "You did WHAT??" Some composers at first hesitated, warning that they only wrote "difficult music". But Nuñez and his singers conquered the challenges, at first with trepidation over the music's difficulty, and progressively with more confidence as the choristers learned to approach new music without fear. Ten years later, with close to 60 new works to their credit, YPC's accomplishments have earned respect in the musical establishment and, judging from the audience's whoops and cheers, an enthusiastic following. Shaefer's introductions created a relaxed ambiance and gave the diverse audience a wedge for approaching the varied and sophisticated program.
With YPC's extensive commissioned repertoire it must have been tough to cherry-pick pieces for this anniversary concert. The evening opened strongly with Michael Torke's Song of Ezekiel (2001, one of the very first commissions) a lyrically homophonic setting of the Biblical verse over a pulsing piano accompaniment, played by YPC pianist Jon Holden, with voices taking up the rhythm when the piano went into more lyrical figuration.
For me the highlight of the evening came next in Paquito D'Rivera's Tembandumba (2009, premiered June 2010), a jazzy, genre-crossing celebration of Puerto Rican street life. Choristers sang, recited, and danced up a storm, both solo and together, anchored by Payton MacDonald's Latin percussion accompaniment. The wistful lyricism of John Corigliano's One Sweet Morning (2006) on an anti-war poem by Yip Harburg introduced a calmer note, and was followed by Meredith Monk's fascinating and hypnotic layered a capella vocalisms (Things Heaven and Hell, from Three Heavens and Hells, 2007). David Del Tredici's grandiose and slyly ironic Four Heartfelt Anthems (2003), with Jon Holden on piano and soprano Courtney Budd, provided substantial settings infor an eclectic selection of texts, written in conventional choral textures.
After intermission and a brief panel discussion, Michael Harrison's Hijaz received its world premiere as the latest Transient Glory commission. Cellist Maya Beiser, percussionist Payton MacDonald on tablas, and Michael Harrison, playing a piano tuned in just intonation, contributed a Middle Eastern flavor. I didn't hear much difference in the choir's tuning--their intonation is always superb--with the introduction of the non-tempered piano. The piece didn't make the strongest impression of the evening, but it should settle in after a few more outings.
Recently I heard a glorious concert performance of Verdi's Otello by the Chicago Symphony and soloists at Carnegie Hall under Riccardo Muti. One of the pleasures of the evening was the brief second act contribution by the excellent Chicago Children's Choir, a similar organization (though twice as large, founded in 1956 "during the Civil Rights Movement"). The Chicago youngsters sang beautifully, with an enthusiasm as touching as their sweet voices. But I missed the moxie and ownership of the music shown by the New York kids. Beyond the familiarity of being on home turf--granting the Chicago kids the awe factor of singing in Carnegie--the YPCers perform with a more distinctive personality.
After a recent streak of curmudgeonly postings here I have to throw in a carp or two: despite a robust history of centuries of choral music Nuñez programs almost exclusively music of our time. From the evidence of YouTube, YPC's performance of renaissance music, a mainstay of the choral repertoire, falls short of their excellence in contemporary material, lacking the crystalline precision needed to bring out the counterpoint with clarity.
But my main complaint--really, more a rant about the lowly status of the arts in the U.S.--is that this extraordinary opportunity is available to so few kids. Over 1,300 children aged 7 to 18 participate in YPC's programs in New York and beyond--but with over a million students in the New York City public schools system, that's not much. The Chicago Children's Choir has twice as many participants, but such scattershot initiatives are meager compensation for the widespread elimination of such "frills" from the schools.
With the shortsighted elimination of music education from public schools, most kids' exposure to music is through the earbuds of their mp3 players. The highly produced extravaganzas of Lady Gaga, Kanye West and their contemporaries are more about erotic or violent glamour than music, and create a extremely narrow notion of the art's potential expressive power and beauty. Venezuela's El Systema has proven the value to individuals and to society of teaching musical skills to children, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds. YPC's literature states: "100% of YPC graduates finish high school on time and enroll in college." And I'll mention only in passing the elephant in the room: classical music's dwindling audiences, which will continue to shrink as children grow up never hearing this music. The American musical landscape would be immeasurably different if even a tenth of the country's young people had access to a program like YPC.
Beyond the important contributions to choral repertoire, YPC's greatest achievement is the transformation of young people who, while making music at a very high level, learn life lessons like discipline and persistence in the face of challenge along with a love of music. Some will be tomorrow's music makers; more of them will be tomorrow's audiences. But all will be tomorrow's citizens, prepared beyond the urban classroom for life's challenges. To quote a haiku-like entry on the YPC blog: "City kids singing together. Lives changed."
Oy-yo-to-ho: Die Walkure at the Met
Every perplexing updated opera production offers an "ah-ha" moment which gives a clue to the director's original inspiration. For the Met's new Die Walküre (seen on April 28 and May 2) it's at the beginning of the third act, when the eight eponymous warrior maidens ride the undulating girders of Robert Lepage's infamous Machine, bucking like a chorus line of mechanical bulls. For the rest of the evening, the $45 million contraption leads a rambunctious and noisy life of its own, creating oversized settings that overwhelm the intimate scenes played out onstage at the expense of character direction and anything else that would support the narrative.
The much-ballyhooed hgh tech contraption bucks, rotates, rises, and hovers over or looms behind the singers, dwarfing them and distracting the audience from the dramatic moment, which most often consists of human confrontation rather than external action. It made me think of a Broadway musical called Big River that played for several months back in the 80s, thanks primarily to a novel set element, an articulated treadmill with wooden slats, like a moving boardwalk, representing the Mississippi. As the music swelled the river started to roll and clatter, with Huck Finn and company singing and dancing or navigating a barge atop its boards. This was a few years before Miss Saigon's extravagant onstage helicopter landing and well before the current Spiderman, which has been selling out previews to audiences hoping to witness the latest tech disaster. Unfortunately, given the mishaps at most performances so far, this Ring Cycle may be remembered for similar reasons.
A French blogger who attended the premiere amused himself with the observation that company management certainly knew its audience when it commissioned the machine, since American audiences are so conditioned to spectacles like Star Wars. While arguably offbase in a number of ways, the comment does raise the disquieting question of what this says about Peter Gelb's vision of his desired audience. Few of the acquaintances I polled had much good to say about the machine; the announcement of Lepage's involvement in the Ring raised apprehension in the wake of his gimmicky Damnation of Faust (more effective than this, I thought). Why dumb down one of the most complex masterpieces of the repertoire?
Oh, the music making? In spite of it all, it's really quite fine. Jonas Kaufmann's voice is a bit undersized for Siegmund but he sounds wonderful and delivers a detailed and believable portrayal of the rash and passionate Walsung. He shared great chemistry with Eva-Maria Westbroeck, a good if not yet definitive Sieglinde. Hans-Peter König's resonant Hunding gained menace between April 28 and May 2, and Bryn Terfel's already persuasive Wotan is becoming vocally stronger and dramatically deeper. Despite rumblings of Deborah Voigt's unsuitability as Brünnhilde, she overcame some opening night shakiness (as heard via internet) and sounded very strong by May 2, though she still needs some direction. Stephanie Blythe as Fricka sang with enough power to raise the notion that as the gods' dominance wanes, one woman (Fricka) seizes control and eventually hands it over to another (Brünnhilde). The Walküre sisterhood sang robustly without shrieking and handled their physical challenges with admirable aplomb. Saving the best for last, James Levine has found the strength to lead the excellent Met orchestra in a fresh and revelatory reading of the score, though the May 2 performance flagged a bit in energy.
The main frustration is that the machine seems to have gotten all the budget and directorial attention. François St-Aubin's costumes look cheap and unimaginative--why not hire, say, a Belgian designer to do something both modern and historically evocative, instead of the dumpy, vaguely medieval garb executed in faux chain mail and polyester draping? The lighting alternates between excessive--why the shadow puppets during Siegmund's monologue?--or squintably dark. To be fair, some of the projections, like the opening storm that morphs into a forest and the final tableau of the mountain aflame, are striking. But the most nagging deficit is direction. Characters too often flail around like singers thrown into a third-generation revival with nearly no rehearsal and little idea of how to fill the space. We get singers fearful of falling (if they don't actually fall, like Brünnhilde did opening night, and Siegrune in the third performance). We get park-and-bark. Why is this acceptable in 2001? How can the most expensive Walkure ever produced possibly be so...dull?
For this they mortgaged the Chagalls?
When good concerts fall on deaf ears
In late January I was invited to a concert at Bargemusic, Olga Bloom's delightful floating concert hall anchored on the Brooklyn side of the East River. Mirror Visions Ensemble performed two recent song cycles, Russell Platt's From Noon to Starry Night: A Walt Whitman Cantata and Tom Cipullo's A Visit with Emily. The trek out to Brooklyn yielded many rewards, not the least of which was the enchanting venue, but I also found myself revisiting a vague question raised in the first post of this blog: why should we care?
Like so many of the countless fine New York-based performers and groups I've never heard of, Mirror Visions Ensemble boasts an impressive resume. In 1992 soprano Tobé Malawista, now artistic director of the group, co-founded a vocal trio to present "back-to-back performances of multiple settings of a single text". Today the trio's original tenor, Scott Murphree, joined by the lustrous-voiced soprano Vira Slywotzky and sturdy baritone Jesse Blumberg, continue the mission of presenting music inspired by texts of favorite writers. Concerts have grown beyond compare-and-contrast programming to platforms for new works. The group boasts over 70 commissions to its credit, among them the commissions by Platt and Cipullo given on on January 29.
Arriving only in time for the second song (note to self: avoid HopStop directions), I heard excellent, serious musicians giving poised and engaged performances of Platt's song cycle on Whitman texts, an ambitious and (mostly) serious collection. No wonder: the Ensemble has recorded the cantata and performed it many times. These are terrific singers, with appealing voices, impeccable diction, and personality--I'd be happy to hear any of them again, as well as the intrepid pianist Alan Darling. But--despite the talent and commitment on display I wasn't feeling the spirit. The cantata, written in an elaborate musical language well matched to Whitman's florid and expansive poetry, felt too heavy for my state of attention. The scope was ambitious (and the scale perhaps too expansive for the room), the writing skillful and appealing; yet both the density and the episodic character of each song left me laboring to enter into the spirit of the piece. Perhaps the balance between the grand scale of the writing and the intimacy of the chamber setting felt "off"? I admired the expertise but had a hard time feeling connected to the music.
The Cipullo songs after intermission were a different matter. A Visit With Emily imagines a small and poignant drama crafted from poems by Emily Dickinson as well as letters exchanged by the Belle of Amherst with her friend T. W. Higginson. The 21 short pieces form a more unified cycle, with the three singers reflecting varied states of mind, separately or in ensembles of deft "quodlibets" of three independent songs performed simultaneously. The account of the reclusive poet's acquaintance with and visits from Higginson make for a touching account of the rise and fall of hope and disappointment, and the deceptively simple musical language places focus on the words over the music. After No. 20, Hymn, and the recap of No. 1, Cavatina, the cycle felt complete, but Cipullo chose to add an Epilogue for tenor, a setting of Dickinson's lovely Nature -- the Gentlest Mother is. A pleasant pendant, but for me the emotional trajectory had already been reached.
Why did I enjoy one piece more than the other? I want to be moved--by sheer tonal pleasure, by the beauty or elegant order of the music, or by the poetry in the case of vocal music; the first set tickled my ears and aroused my admiration without touching me. Perhaps it was a question of needing to warm up to listen with engagement on this particular evening--after a very full Saturday I followed bad directions to the venue and arrived late and disgruntled--but for my money the second song cycle had a clarity of structure and meaning that struck me more forcefully than did the first piece, at least on this particular evening. And it's also true that I prefer Dickinson's contained and elegant brevity to Whitman's expansive flamboyance. For all their discursive freedom the Whitman settings came across as more intellectual, while the Dickinson conveyed more emotion. Another variable beyond my personal taste is program order: would the slightly less dense Cipullo songs have provided a better setup for Platt's work?
Ultimately the concert-going experience is subjective; a listener is an active participant in the moment and should be primed for the event. I certainly did not arrive in prime condition to listen to music, which is hardly fair to the musicians. Yet a powerful performance can overcome all kinds of adverse conditions. Case in point: many summers ago I attended a chamber music concert in an old church. The temperature hovered around 90F and the pew seats were hard, and I was distracted and too tired to want to be there. Yet somewhere in the middle of the second movement my wandering mind was drawn to magic on the platform: two musicians creating the ineffable, a tender dialogue between violin and harpsichord more eloquent than speech. Thirty years later that moment remains a touchstone for my concert going, and I rarely blame myself for remaining unmoved by an obviously competent performance. Perhaps seated closer to the performers I might have fallen under their spell (and been less distracted by the periodic bobbing of the boat), but for me the spirit didn't reach the last row at Bargemusic.
I should add that after that long-ago sublime Mozart duo, when I turned to my companion to gush about the performance, his noncommittal answer made it clear that his experience had been different than mine. As the kids say, YMMV -- your mileage may vary.
A(nother) Night at the Museum: Monet Retrospective at the Grand Palais
(c) Susan Brodie
Eager crowds waited hours for the chance to see this astounding show
Demand to see the blockbuster Monet show at Paris's Grand Palais was so great that when I tried to reserve a ticket at the end of November, the only times that remained were in the wee hours of the final weekend of the exhibit. So late Sunday night I took the latest possible metro to be in time for my 1:30 a.m. January 24 viewing slot. I had plenty of company: of the 913,000 visitors to the exhibit (more than any exhibit since King Tut in 1967), an estimated 40,000 came on the final weekend.
Arriving at the Rond Point des Champs-Elysees I found hundreds of people waiting patiently in the misty night. I was happy to join the shorter line of ticket holders, as the much longer line of those without reservations, mostly groups of young people, promised waits were estimated of 2-3 hours. People didn't really seem to mind--it was just another form of night life! Crowd control was unusually well-handled and provided a bit of theater as, over and over, guards patiently directed people into the appropriate holding area and deftly deflected attempts to win dispensation from joining the back of the line. Every so often women wearing chef hats and aprons over their winter woolies distributed packaged madeleines. A clarinetist with a boom box, completely indifferent to niceties of meter and phrasing, cheerfully butchered Vivaldi concertos.
Once inside, armed with an Acoustiguide I found the exhibit rough going for the first half-hour. Galleries were absolutely packed, as viewers squeezed their way through the dense crowds to catch a glimpse of an early seascape or read an biographical note. But the body-checking tapered off as visitors slowed down, stopped to savor a particular canvas, and developed a gentler technique of slipping through spaces with grace. The late hour and the self-selected crowd contributed to the mood--it takes a certain amount of purpose to visit a museum in the middle of the night. Strangely, though I usually tire quickly at museums, the late hour and the sense of calm made it easier to focus on the paintings.
Visually the show was overwhelming, assembling some 200 paintings from over 50 museums and private collections worldwide (the Musee d'Orsay lent a significant number of of paintings, though the Musee Marmottan, repository of the important collection donated by Monet's younger son, declined to participate). The masses of paintings, along with thoughtful notes posted in each gallery, provided a biography as eloquent as any monograph. Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted steadily for over 60 years, despite an array of setbacks. His experiments with painting light began early, though he produced plenty of commercially accessible figurative paintings -- even some of the portraits and domestic landscapes painted during his 20s, while conforming to the tastes of the times, have a flat, abstract quality that reminded me of Alex Katz not quite a century later. Early rejection from the annual establishment art show created both financial crisis and creative opportunity: money woes led to frequent relocation, which in turn gave him new visual stimulation. Haystacks and railroad trestles became subject matter as alluring as mountains or seascapes.
Later in his life, with more financial stability, he visited and painted distant locales, and was able to establish a permanent home at Giverny, where he spent the second half of his life, creating, tending, and painting his beloved gardens. But his enduring obsession was light: he famously set up multiple easels in front of a subject, like the Rouen Cathedral, so he could capture impressions from different times of day. Only in such a comprehensive exhibit is it possible to grasp the trajectory of a lifetime. I came away with a much expanded impression (as it were) of the man behind the art.
I spent over two hours hypnotized by images and atmosphere. It was hard to tear myself away, but at 3:45 I stumbled out into the misty night air, energized enough to walk the mile and a half walk home through deserted streets.
Giulio Cesare, ossia, A Night At the Museum
Giulio Cesare
Georg Frederic Handel
Libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym, after Giacomo Francesco Bussani
Paris, Opéra Garnier
Conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm
Production by Laurent Pelly (director & costumes), Chantal Thomas (sets), Joël Adam (lighting), Agathe Mélinand (dramaturg & assistant director)
With: Lawrence Zazzo (Cesare), Varduhi Abrahamyan (Cornelia), Isabel Leonard (Sesto), Natalie Dessay (Cleopatra), Christophe Dumieux (Tolomeo), Nathan Berg (Achilla), Dominique Visse (Nireno), Aimery Lefevre (Curio)
Orchestre du Concert de l'Astree, Choeurs de l'Opéra de Paris
Giulio Cesare is one of the few Handel operas to have been widely performed before the Baroque revival of the last quarter of the 20th century. The juicy roles written for castrati proved irresistible to adventurous mezzos like Janet Baker and Marilyn Horne, but apart from the beauty of the arias the productions tended to be problematic, let's say. In recent years Handel's operas have been taken out of mothballs and restored to operatic stages as the popular entertainments they originally were. London's favorite composer offered long evenings of brilliant vocalism, visual coups de theatre, titillation, comic interludes, all based on historical or mythological material with little danger of offending the powers that be. Handel's revisionist version of an episode in the life of Julius Caesar ramped up the amusement factor by emphasizing humor, sex, spectacle, and stage business along with the pathos of Cornelia's plight; this production never loses sight of those all-important entertainment values.
Laurent Pelly immediately invokes a melancholy sense of nostalgia by setting the action in the store rooms of a museum. As the curtain rises mid-overture a bevy of workers are meticulously dusting a statue of Julius Caesar; they slide a storage rack of classical busts center stage, and the busts on the shelf burst into song, with articulating mouths (fortunately that's the worst of the sight gags). Amid the bustle of curatorial work Cesare appears unnoticed until he begins to sing. He is apparently an invisible ghost, as the workers distractingly move crates and display cases around him. Two worlds occupy the same space, and sometimes the dance overwhelms the drama--especially given the small scale of the voices--though this imbalance becomes less noticeable and distracting over the evening.
So it proceeds all evening; curators and characters in a delicate choreography, the dramatis personae using props conveniently provided by the workmen. Costumes range from street clothing of modern Parisian workers to generic ancient Roman and Egyptian costumes, generalized for the men, filmy and seductive for the women, with extremely good body suits allowing Cleopatra to appear "topless" in her seduction scene. The second act, set in the painting store room, puts Cleopatra, the female extras, and the banda in 18th century gowns--someone's idea of Handel's notion of the earthly paradise where Cleopatra seduced Caesar. The third act is set in the carpet store room, with workmen mending a rug stage right while stage left Tolomeo enjoys the pleasures of the harem. The two parallel worlds come closest to interacting when the workmen return to the room and react to finding the rugs Achilla has flung around the room during his vengeance aria.
The star of the evening was the orchestra. After Haïm's rocky introduction to the Opéra de Paris (hired to conduct Idomeneo last season, she was replaced after reported difficulties working with the orchestra) she was invited to bring her own band, Le Concert d'Astrée, to the pit of the Palais Garnier. It was a wise choice: the ensemble knows this repertory cold (they appear frequently in the Theatre des Champs-Elysées's cycle of Handel operas) and knows how to work with Haïm's idiosyncrasies. She's a very high-energy presence, a leader who indicates gestures more than beats, sometimes conducting with her head as she plays harpsichord. In her hands orchestral voices become eloquent virtual cast members. Particularly notable were the meltingly beautiful solo cello in Cornelia's first act lament, and the superb natural horn work in Cesare's "Va tacito".
The singers: Lawrence Zazzo was an imperiously confident Caesar but his sort-grained voice lacked presence. Varduhi Abrahamyan as Cornelia wielded ample physical and vocal glamor; while persuasive as the beautiful young widow her acting needs to be more specific. Isabel Leonard as Sesto provided her usual well-schooled and attractive voice and stage presence and was very well received. Countertenor Christophe Dumieux as Tolomeo was deliciously vain and manipulative; his voice had the point and power that Caesar's lacked. Audience favorite Natalie Dessay vamped nonstop from her first entrance atop a supine 20-foot Egyptian phaoroh sculpture. She radiated star power as Cleopatra; vocally she acquitted herself well, though this role calls for a fresher voice, and she did struggle with the penultimate aria, "fra tempeste", completely dropping the octave leaps. I took exception to her kittenish crooning in some of the recitatives, but the audience loved her. [Jane Archibald takes over the role later in the run and should be a nice addition to the cast] Veteran countertenor Dominique Visse stole his scenes as the Egyptian confidant Nireno. Nathan Berg as Achilla blustered entertainingly as Achilla but vocally fell short of his colleagues' level.
All in all, a very nice evening: first-rate musical values and excellent ensemble work, some very fine arias and duets, good and less good casting choices, a clever "concept" that occasionally gets in the way yet amuses without either offending or illuminating. Very little booing from the first-night audience. I don't know whether there are plans to tour the show but it would do well on the festival circuit.
Top 10 for 2010
Every winter when the season programs are announced I spot a few absolutely-must-sees, a number of things that appeal, and great numbers of performances that don't interest me at all. But fine music-making endures, and inevitably many of the best evenings come as a complete surprise. Here are ten of them, more or less.
In January I was bowled over by La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein in a most original production by Christoph Marthaler at the Stadtsteater Basel. Anne-Sofie von Otter towered, literally and figuratively, over the sometimes gimmicky updating, which interpolated pratfalls, American jazz piano, Bach and Handel arias, and a barbershop quartet looping the opening measures of the Brahms Requiem. But the post-apocalyptic vision was unexpectedly moving, and the performances very fine.
In February, tenor Jonas Kaufmann was extraordinary as the Prince in the Humperdinck rarity Koenigskinder at the Zurich opera. The somewhat rambling and mawkish fairy tale libretto would seem to be the main barrier to wider popularity of this gorgeous piece, Wagnerian in sweep. Conductor Ingo Metzmacher is a worthy champion of this music, and the fabulous Kaufmann shines brightly in the German repertoire.
What a difference the right style can make! Chabrier's L'Etoile at New York City Opera, given in March, was as irresistible with a francophone cast headed by Julie Boulianne and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt as it had been tedious with performers who simply didn't get it.
In May Fabio Luisi led the first Lulu I've attended without falling asleep: I invariably tune out the parade of low-lifes in Act II, but Luisi propelled the drama forward with taut conducting. His increased presence augurs good things for the Met's future. Two nights later, Peter Mattei was first among equals in a heartbreaking performance of Billy Budd at Oper Frankfurt.
June brought many treats. I finally saw the dazzling Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova in Don Quixote. With her endless ballon and irrepressible sparkle this prodigious talent was born to dance Kitri. Later in the month I saw the second installment of Gunter Krämer's new Ring Cycle at Paris Opera. The production could be called gimmicky (the Ride of the Walkures featured nurses bathing naked corpses while gas-masked soldiers marched in formation behind them) and so far Philippe Jordan's Wagner is too deconstructionist for my taste, but the intriguing production haunts me still.
Mark Morris's L'Allegro, il penseroso, ed il moderato brightened August in New York. This evergreen remains one of the most delightfully fresh and musical of Morris's choreographies.
September's Eugene Onegin at Opera Bastille introduced me to the extraordinary conducting of Vassily Petrenko.
October brought the Met's new production of Boris Godunov -- in the hands of Valery Gergiev the time flew. Why had I never before fallen in love with this extraordinary score?
In November I was transfixed by Mathias Goerne in the title role of Hindemith's Mathis der Mahler, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach, at Opera Bastille. The most stunning production of an opera I will never go out of my way to see again.
The biggest surprise came In December, when Leif-Ove Andsnes brought performers from the Risør chamber music festival to Carnegie Hall. Among them was the electrifying young clarinetist Martin Fröst, who wowed the audience with his vivid interpretation of Aaron Copland's jazzy Clarinet Concerto. Leaving the hall a young woman told her companion that he was the closest thing to a rock star she'd ever experienced in classical music. That about summed it up.
That's more than 10, but with so many goodies it was easy to lose count, and these are simply the ones that stick in memory right now. I stint an entire roster of superb (mostly) young conductors: Alain Altinoglu, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Hartmut Haenchen, Sebastien Weigle. I have luxuriated in the sounds of the Met, Berlin, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Vienna, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland. Then there were the smaller-scale concerts...but I'll stop here. Despite all the middling performances I sat through, 2010 was indeed a very good year.
Holiday treat: Ariadne auf Naxos in Paris
Laurent Pelly's 2003 production of Ariadne auf Naxos has returned to Opera Bastille for eight performances this December. I was on hand to enjoy the show on opening night, December 11.
It's a typically quirky Pelly production, with the first act set in a grand and vaguely 30s-era salon dominated by a stairway and balcony downstage left, with falling snow visible beyond an upstage row of columns; the second act takes place in an abandoned construction site, with Ariadne asleep among concrete, rebar, and rubble (ignore that Gustav Klimt painting on the website). Lots of onstage vehicular traffic, with limos in the first act--met by servants in dirndl and lederhosen--and a VW bus appearing on the desert isle to disgorge Zerbinetta's Commedia troupe dressed for the beach.
The revival cast was in mostly fine form: from his first entrance the unflappable and hilarious Franz Mazura (86 years old!) stole the show in the speaking part of the Major Domo. Sophie Koch was the most persuasively boyish Composer I've ever seen, and her singing sounded rich and free. Martin Gantner had matters firmly under control as the Music Master. Paris Opera debutant Edwin Crossley-Mercer (such an English name for a Frenchman!) gave Harlequin a bumptious presence and plenty of voice. Naiad (Elena Tsallagova), Dryad (Diana Axentii), and Echo (Yun Jung Choi) blended mellifluously. No complaints about the rest of the secondary roles.
Instead of Diana Damrau, originally announced as Zerbinetta, we had Jane Archibald, a Canadian soprano who more than acquitted herself in her Paris Opera debut. Her stratospheric coloratura was impeccable and in tune, she moved well and looked nice in her bikini, but I wanted a bit more presence, more mischievous edge for the character. Tenor Stefan Vinke didn't do much acting, but his singing was solid--after hearing others struggle with Bacchus's stentorian lines it was a pleasure not to worry about whether he would make it through the punishing sing without cracking (though he did receive a few loud boos). Ricarda Merbeth sang a decent Ariadne but her acting, in weird contrast to Bacchus, was more appropriate to Elektra, all pacing, thrashing, and collapsing in heaps. I preferred her Paris Sieglinde last spring.
As restaged by Agathe Melinande the blocking needed more time to settle in--during both acts there was too much aimless walking across the stage; especially in the second act the wide Bastille stage seemed a great distance to traverse for no apparent reason. Bacchus especially could have used more direction than "walk slowly forward, sing, fade backwards into the shadows", though really there's not much one can do with the part. Had the poor Composer been subjected to a Broadway out-of-town tryout for his magnum opus, changes certainly would have been imposed by the producers. But it's hard to know what to do with Ariadne, so determinedly bipolar, mixing high art and low humor, the intimate with the infinite. I would like to see this production in the smaller Palais Garnier, where it was originally staged. And while I'm speculating, why not a production with two directors collaborating, one for each act, say Pelly and Robert Wilson? (Ok, maybe not...)
I enjoyed Philippe Jordan's Strauss more than the Wagner and Puccini I've heard him conduct in the last year. He's excellent at highlighting details, which was just right for the score's cabaret side, and he alternated between sweep and suspension in the grander passages. For all its oddities, Ariadne is a wonderful score, with gorgeous music and two career-making parts (Zerbinetta and The Composer), which Paris delivered at a very high level.
La dame d'Andre
Before the November 12 George London recital at the Morgan Library I had a few minutes to peruse a heart-stopping exhibit, "Anne Morgan's War: Rebuilding Devastated France 1917-1924". The daughter of industrialist Pierpont Morgan, Anne Morgan found her life's purpose in mobilizing aid for the dispossessed of northeastern France. The Great War's unprecedented and shocking destruction, which reduced Picardy to rubble and the country folk to a life of unimaginable hardship, is vividly documented in photographs, video, and written accounts. Gazing at heartbreaking pictures of children among the rubble of their ruined homes, I revised my previous dismissive opinion of Claude Debussy's sentimental 1915 song, Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maisons. As a Baby Boomer I'd always found World War I historically remote and felt no connection with its viscissitudes. These artifacts clarified the shock of the conflict which more than decimated the French population and changed the national psyche forever.
With these charged images fresh in mind I attended the season's first George London recital, which featured former Foundation winners Elizabeth Futral, soprano, and Kyle Kettelson, bass-baritone singing French music as well as operatic excerpts. Futral, accompanied by pianist Philip Lasser, opened with four late songs by Gabriel Fauré. Lasser, who has a long association with French musical life (he runs a summer music school in Fontainebleau), established good Gallic style with refined pianism, though Futral's voice overwhelmed the 225-seat hall and her French wasn't the clearest. Kyle Kettelson, accompanied by the estimable Ken Noda, was more successful in scaling down his operatic voice to mélodie with Ravel's three songs of Don Quichotte à Dulcinée; there was more core to his tone and the French more idiomatic. Nonetheless, his remaining material, arias from Tchaikovsky's Iolanta and Gounod's Faust, seemed better suited to his big voice and the scale of characterization he brought to the music.
The main reason I wanted to hear the concert was to hear Futral sing the rarely performed Fiançailles pour rire. Years ago I had studied singing with with Geneviève Touraine, the soprano who premiered the work in 1942, and I could still hear her proud and wistful demonstrations of these songs that were so important to her. Poulenc had written the cycle, he said, as an excuse to think of his dear friend Louise de Vilmorin, author of the poetry. who had just moved to Hungary with her second husband.
A digression about de Vilmorin, as I'm in the middle of reading her rather juicy biography: A generation younger than Anne Morgan, Louise lived an equally privileged but comparatively constrained life, home schooled (along with her 5 siblings) in the family chateau outside of Paris and bedridden for two teen years with bone tuberculosis that left her with a permanent limp. But the intelligent and fascinating Louise attracted many prominent and powerful admirers, among them Antoine de St.-Exupéry, André Malraux, and Jean Cocteau (who wanted to marry her!). Briefly married to an American investor (the founder of Las Vegas) and later to a Hungarian count, she left her mark on French letters (with the encouragement of several close from the world of letters) with a quantity of poetry and several successful novels -- Max Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame de... was based on her 1951 eponymous novel.
Poulenc's cycle gains resonance with a bit of knowledge of de Vilmorin's life, as the texts are typically (for Poulenc) enigmatic, but Vilmorin's fanciful charm informs these very feminine, delicate, and often ironic sketches from a woman's life (one could almost put names to the subject of each song). The mélodies reflect her characteristic gaiety but at the same time suggest a private melancholy behind de Vilmorin's fanciful surrealism. Futral's reading was perhaps a bit more girlish than womanly, but she performed with a generous lyricism too often missing from the performance of mélodie.
Futral also sang four songs from Lasser's les Visages de l'Amour, composed for the soprano and heard here for the first time. These songs lie firmly in the French art song tradition, with a neoclassical and largely tonal musical language that reminded me most of Fauré. The songs are written with deep understanding of the voice, and the texts (including a sonnet written by the very young Lasser) were always easy to understand. They suited Futral very well and she clearly connected to the words.
An extended duet from Lucia di Lammermoor gave the audience a succulent operatic dessert. I'm not a fan of excerpts performed to piano accompaniment but appreciated hearing these two voices in their ideal fach, even as the voices overwhelmed the tiny hall.
The next George London Foundation recital, on December 12, will present tenor Marcello Giordani and soprano Julianna Di Giacomo, accompanied by Craig Rutenberg, performing Italian songs and arias. Miss Di Giacomo will sing the premiere of a new song cycle by Thomas Pasatieri.
Telling Tales
When did it become de rigueur to stage the fanciful and flamboyant Les Contes d'Hoffmann in a black box, like the three versions I've seen in the past year in New York, Paris, and Frankfurt? It's bad enough to have such a colorful tale rendered noir, but Oper Frankfurt's new production, directed by Dale Duesing, eliminated not only light and color (other than Arno Bremers's jewel-tone modern costumes and the back-lighting on the unit set, a bar) but at least a third of the music and several characters. Those who survived the downsizing spent the evening perched on bar stools, nursing cocktails, periodically snickering at Hoffmann's alcoholic delusions and waiting for their scenes, which were played downstage. The score was trimmed to just under three hours--and Roland Böer's tempi were far from sprightly. So much of the music, narration, and even minor characters were cut that the story, which already demands suspension of disbelief, made even less sense than usual.
Granted the score is problematic: Offenbach died four months before the 1881 premiere, and the first production eliminated the Giulietta act entirely. Most productions today use a combination of editions, incorporating into the traditional 1904 edition music from a controversial 1970's edition in which the Muse/Niklausse becomes a major player, the catalyst for Hoffmann's creativity. Frankfurt's production relies on the newer score but seems to have dropped much of the restored music, including the pants role's three major arias, which demoted Niklausse to mere drinking buddy. The non-speaking but pivotal role of Stella, Hoffmann's feminine ideal, was gone altogether, eliminating the keystone of the dramatic arc. Strophic arias were shortened--amputated--to a single verse. The prologue and epilogue were trimmed by half, and the Giulietta act was severely truncated. The result was a hatchet job, more Highlights from Hoffmann, robbed of flavor, structure, and sense. It was all very baffling and frustrating.
The performers really did their best, given what they had to work with. Alfred Kim, currently singing Manrico at the Met, was a hyperactive but not terribly persuasive Hoffmann (diction was a problem). Giorgio Surian as the Four Villains seemed more interested in getting back to his drink. Peter Marsh as the Four Servants had almost nothing to do, being granted only a single verse for his lone aria.
Better news came from the women. While the fine mezzo Jenny Carlstedt was sadly underutilized as the Muse/Niklausse, she sang an appealing "Une Poupée aux yeux d'émail" and had excellent presence. Brenda Rae as Olympia gamely executed choreography inspired by Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" during her showpiece arias. Not wanting to review an acquaintance's performance I'll simply note the ecstatic ovation she received. Elza van den Heever sang the first Antonia I have ever cared about. All too often a vapid lyric showpiece, this time the role was infused with poignancy from the first notes. Her voice is sumptuous, freely produced, and beautiful, and I can't wait to hear her again (her season schedule includes Elsa, Leonora, The Composer, and Fiordiligi!).
It's hard to judge Claudia Mahnke's Giulietta fairly because by this point I was struggling to stay awake, so perhaps I shouldn't complain that most of the cuts came in the last act. Barcarole, "Scintille Diamant", the sextet, a bit with the mirror, and time for adieu. That's it?? Possibly the most exciting moment in the act came at the very end, when Schlemil (Florian Plock), shot by Hoffmann, tumbled head first halfway down a flight of stairs and lay supine as the stairs disappeared slowly into the ceiling. So much was cut from this act it might just as well have been eliminated altogether--a decision not without precedent. There is a point at which stripping down to essentials becomes reductio ad absurdum.
After seeing half a dozen operas at Oper Frankfurt I've been mostly very impressed with production values, even if I didn't care for a particular regie. This one was, unfortunately, in a class of its own.
The Joys of Television, and Praise for Janacek
(c) Susan Brodie
Alcatraz, a maximum security prison from the same era as Janacek's masterpiece
After living without a TV for most of my adult life I've recently become quite addicted to the Tube. An American who doesn't follow sports, I still don't own a set at home, but in France I turn the thing on as soon as the alarm goes off. TF2's morning show, Telematin, helps me start each day in French, and to fill in time between weather and news bulletins the program runs segments that clue me in to cultural goings on in Paris and elsewhere in the Hexagon. After Telematin and before Days of Our Lives (dubbed into French, naturally) there's a short book review segment. Book reviews on daytime TV! And I love the commercials: where else do you get dancing salamis and pitches for three different brands of foie gras before 8:00, at least during the holiday season?
In the evening, among the wasteland of dubbed American series, circus/cabaret/variety shows with bad singers, and "reality" shows about the love lives of lonely farmers and home cooks in competition, the national broadcast channels present cultural programming, including a surprising number of concert and opera transmissions. Thanks to the heads-up postings on a couple of French music blogs (second link in English) I've been able to plan my viewing (and exasperate my friends) in advance.
Last night's offering was particularly enticing: the French-German ARTE culture channel showed Janácek's 1927 opera From the House of the Dead, conducted by Pierre Boulez in Patrice Chéreau's production from the 2007 Aix-en-Provence festival. I had seen this production at the Met last spring, but on a night I was too jet-lagged to keep my eyes open, even though the music did penetrate through the fatigue. So I was glad to have the chance to see the much-discussed coups de theatre that I had missed live.
Even with those naked men in the shower scene and the load of garbage crashing onto the stage (raising clouds of dust that no singer should have to breathe), it was the music that made the biggest impact last night. Janácek wrote verismo opera about life in the early gray days of European Communism using a unique musical language that mashes dissonance and cacophony into neo-tonality like a sudden hailstorm on a field of wheat. But the music is always powerful and piquant, energetic and emotional, and filled with an irrepressible joy that defies the grimmest libretto. From the gray mass of prisoners emerged poignant stories of individuals driven to extreme action by inexorable passions, and the men's efforts to humanize their ugly situation were heartbreaking. The fine ensemble cast, among them tenor Stefan Margita and baritone Olaf Baer, enjoyed solid support from the excellent Arnold Schonberg Choir, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and a cadre of brave non-speaking and singing performers--hard to call them "extras".
There's no question that an opera seen on a 13-inch TV with poor-quality sound is far removed from the original experience. This was brought home by last summer's PBS broadcast of SOUTH PACIFIC, even watched on a state-of-the-art home theater. But at least I had a chance to see what I never managed in two years to see live, and it made me vow to get to the theater for the next great event. And in contrast to radio or recordings, a spectacle like Chereau's staging is impossible to ignore, even though I did (guiltily) indulge in the occasional text message during the program.
Next on the small screen: the revival of Giorgio Strehler's production of Le Nozze di Figaro, a time-delayed live broadcast from Opéra de Paris Nov 3 on TF3. Unfortunately I don't have the ability to time-shift here, because Figaro is followed at 02:50 by a rebroadcast of Rameau's Les Paladins recorded at the Théatre du Chatelet in 2004 (another show I "saw" in 2006, between and over the two heads that flanked a column directly in front of my not-cheap seat at the Chatelet....another advantage to video: no partial-view seats).
Le Triptych at Opera de Paris
Il Trittico just completed its first run in Paris since 1987, and its very first appearance at Opéra Nationale de Paris, in Luca Ronconi's coproduction from La Scala. I thought it a mixed success: the spare, semi-abstract staging, lacked Puccini's signal specificity of place and looked even cheaper in the opera house than it did in La Scala's cinema broadcast. But it was a rare opportunity for Parisian audiences to see the trilogy, and some felicitous casting redeemed a not-so-exciting evening.
Il Tabarro is textbook verismo: the first two thirds of the opera depicts turn-of-the-20th-century French stevedore life, complete with background foghorns and car klaxons, and an eccentric Seine-side ragpicker. Once the plot, comprising disappointment, betrayal, suspicion, and murder, kicks into gear, it unfolds with inexorable efficiency; Philippe Jordan generated edge-of-the-seat suspense in the score's final stretch. Georgetta, as sung by talented young Ukrainian soprano Oxana Dycka, soared without screeching; tenor Marco Berti had a very good night as the not-quite-dashing but passionate Luigi. It's always a pleasure to see and hear veteran Juan Pons, who persuasively conveyed Michele's weariness, anguish, and rage as he is driven to revenge despite honorable intentions.
The problem child of the trio is Suor Angelica, a work that Puccini considered his finest despite an enduring lack of popular approval. The aristocratic Angelica, banished to a convent 7 years earlier for bearing a child out of wedlock, longs for news of her son. Her heartless aunt, come to demand Angelica's abdication of her inheritance, admits that the boy died two years earlier. Angelica yields to despair and poisons herself, receiving as she dies a sign of divine grace. Swell orchestra. A mostly static and saccharine score amplifies the sentimentality of the libretto. Staged this literally the story feels dated, and unfortunately the story's annoyances were not redeemed by the cast, mostly younger artists virtually disguised by voluminous nun's habits. Apart from Luciana d'Intino as a frighteningly imperious Zia Principessa, most brought little distinction to the work's vocal demands.
Pass to Gianni Schicchi, a tried-and-true crowd pleaser and, thankfully, a big improvement over the previous act. The ensemble brought just the right degree of over-the-top commedia dell'arte caricature to Dante's tale from Purgatory. Juan Pons (alone costumed in Renaissance doublet and tights, with everyone else in 20th century dress) returned as a winningly droll, sly con man. Ekaterina Siurina was irresistible as his lovesick daughter, bringing sweet timbre and tongue-in-cheek lyricism to her aria. Her sunny Rinuccio, tenor Saimir Pirgu, pushing only a little, cut a fine figure physically and vocally. Everyone else filled the bill just fine--the ensemble created a Fellini-esque romp that sent the audience out on a high note.
The Met's new Das Rheingold
I'm a bit late weighing in on Das Rheingold at the Met, but after all the brouhaha over the new $45 million high-tech Ring production, it seems that Robert LePage and company have delivered an utterly traditional First Festival Evening in every way that matters. The saga is presented without heavy subtext, other than the PR for the unit set whose weight required costly reinforcement to the Met stage. The rotating girders and interactive projections (the latter used by Le Page to more dramatic effect in last season's Damnation of Faust) create handsome stage pictures, but except for the Escher-esque stairs configured for the descent into Nibelheim, and the dazzling rainbow bridge, scenic effects are relatively unspectacular. Most of Francois St-Aubin's costumes could have been designed 100 years ago. The machinery seems to have received more attention from the director than the performers, who often seemed to flounder in their characterizations. But the Met Orchestra under James Levine is splendid, and the cast promises (and so far delivers) some top-notch vocal performances.
Eric Owens has the makings of a definitive Alberich: the voice is magnificent and the man had enough presence to dominate the the stage in his scenes with Wotan. With time I hope he'll develop a more pointed and complex characterization. Poor Bryn Terfel: as Wotan he was handicapped by a ridiculous Tiny Tim wig covering half his face (instead of an eyepatch) and by direction which cast the cocky young head god as passive, making him stand motionless and near-expressionless much of the time and dimming his usual vocal glamour. The fabulous Stephanie Blythe was a Fricka who dithered in a vague way over her distracted and fickle husband. Wendy Bryn Harmer was a lush-voiced Freia. Other characters were good, particularly Adam Diegel (Froh), a young tenor to watch.
Richard Croft's Loge (reportedly booed--oddly--at the HD performance), ever-so-slightly underpowered vocally compared to the rest of the cast (though he was quite audible in Family Circle), was probably the most mesmerizing character onstage, after Alberich. By the next run he should lose that anxious look when he has to walk backwards up the wall in harness, as the staging so often requires him to do.
After all the pre-production hype I felt a bit let down by what I saw on stage, but I'll consider this Rheingold a work in progress. I do look forward to a splendid dragon in Siegfried.
Next Wagner: an HD screening of Götterdämerung from Valencia, and Die Walkure in Frankfurt (live) in three weeks.
Eugene Onegin at Opera Bastille
What is Nicolas Joel up to? Opéra de Paris's 2010-11 season features some intriguing new productions, repertoire rareties, and new works, but Bastille's first two shows are both Willy Decker revivals from the last century. Twice in just over a week I saw sparse unit sets decorated with a few sticks of furniture, with sweeping 19th century score and narrative shoehorned into a narrow physical and psychological framework. Decker's interiorizing approach restores something of Pushkin's original epistolary format, with Lenski and Onegin's big arias staged as letter scenes. It's an interesting take but detracted from Tatyana's Letter Scene, I thought. Thankfully, fine vocal performances leavened the claustrophobia and gloom, and I encountered a terrific new (to me) conductor.
Vassily Petrenko was the night's real discovery. The 34-year-old Russian was named Classical Brit Male Artist for 2010; since cutting his teeth in St. Petersburg he's been active (very active!) throughout Europe but especially in Britain, where he was named Music Director of the Liverpool Philharmonic in 2006. His conducting reminded me a bit of Valery Gergiev, with his kinetic and fluttery left hand leavening a laser-precise beat. He carressed telling details of the score, conveying a sense of the leisurely pace of country life and letting the orchestra become part of the conversation. Yet he whipped the orchestra into a thrilling frenzy in the confrontation leading to the tragedy.
This was a great night for Joseph Kaiser. The young Canadian tenor made a nice showing last season as Fortunio at the Opera Comique, and I thought that he had found a nice niche. But he's ripened wonderfully in ten months: his physical and especially his vocal presence enlivened Bastille's cavernous auditorium. Kaiser sang with beautiful and exciting tone and embodied the passionate, impulsive young poet with persuasive specificity. He was the driving force behind the thrilling confrontation at the birthday party, pacing his character's emotional arc.
Ludovic Tézier's Onegin was as mellifluous and musical as expected, but he wasn't entirely persuasive as the pretentious young blade (and an ill-fitting costume detracted from his swoonability factor). Olga Guryakova sang lusciously and looked the part of Tatyana to perfection, though her acting was rather one-dimensional (I blame the second-hand revival direction). Alisa Kolosova charmed as Olga, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt duly stole his scene as Triquet, and Gleb Nikolski, once warmed up, melted hearts as Gremin.
All in all, an old-fashioned night at the opera, musically satisfying but feeling a bit tame, a bit dated. A backlash to the edgy Mortier regime? Thank goodness musical values remain strong.
New Season, New Blog
I walk into a musical event filled with hope and anticipation: for a performance that catches fire, the discovery of a wonderful new artist, a veteran's finest hour, a peak experience. Reality rarely lives up to that exalted fantasy, but my assumption is that the artists will make their best effort to honor the music and share it with the audience. So, toi toi toi: I want them to have a good night, for the listener's sake and for their own. Thus I am not a "gotcha" critic, and I can forgive many faults in a performance if spirit is present. Cynicism, indifference, wayward directorial arrogance (as I see it) raise my ire.
I usually write about concert music, but opera has seized my imagination in the years since I stopped singing and I now attend performances as often as I can. I'm based in New York City, but personal obligations take me frequently to Paris. The opportunity to sample productions in la Ville Lumière and beyond--including a gratifying number of broadcasts on French television and in movie theaters--has allowed me to experience not only a range of theaters and directorial approaches, but also of different audiences, the consumers and unsung participants in this art form.
Opera was invented as a potent amalgam of music and speech, more powerful together than either mode of expression. To this add other multi-dimensional elements: the visual impact of scenery, projections, choreography. It's fascinating to track Opera World's developing response to new technology and the breaking down of taboos, though the results are not always happy. La Traviata scandalized the 19th century public and censors; today depictions of sin in all its guises are de rigueur, while directorial excesses and amplification of singers' voices raise a greater hue and cry than gratuitous nudity. Changing audiences--especially in less-subsidized U.S. houses--also have their role in what makes it to the stage. What makes us care about a performance today? What compromises can be made without threatening the art form?
There are many enticing things coming up this season including plenty of Wagner: individual Ring operas in New York, Paris, and Frankfurt as those companies construct new Cycles, and San Francisco's new Ring next June. After years of avoiding Wagner (O misspent youth!), I have developed an addiction to this hypnotic music and look forward especially to writing about these productions. I'll also be writing about individual singers, especially up-and-coming talent.
Bah! Another opera blog? We'll see.
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The Opéra de Paris opened its 2010-11 season on Thursday with a revival of Willy Decker's 2000 production of Der Fliegende Hollander. Dutchman was my first Wagner opera; I approached this titan reluctantly after substantial experience with Baroque opera. It was the perfect entry-level Wagner, not overly long, with catchy tunes leavening the power of the composer's voice. Now, with a number of Ring Cycles behind me I hear in this early work the last gasp of Romanticism; the tuneful four-square set pieces remain appealing but lack the hypnotic flow that pulls me back to the later operas.
Wolfman Gussman's spare but handsome unit set--a room with a large door and a painting of an ocean storm--created a sense of claustrophobia and focused the drama on the young girl's obsession with saving, through the purity of her love, the sea captain condemned to sail for eternity. Decker portrays Senta as a fantasy-filled dreamer with a weakness for losers, like her suitor, the "lonely marginal" (Decker's description) Erik, and the Dutchman, eternally damned, whom she's never even seen. Funny, I thought the opera was about the Dutchman, who already embodies themes that haunt Wagner's work through Parsifal: women's purity (or lack thereof) the inescapable curse. And the omnipresent ocean reduced to a flat image on the wall conflicts with the sweeping power of the music. For me the shift in focus didn't make much sense, but the production looked attractive enough and benefitted from tight direction. Hans Toelstede's lighting was both atmospheric and detailed.
One strange moment: about halfway through the second scene, as the newly acquainted and betrothed Dutchman and Senta sang passionately of their future life together, I suddenly had the impression of watching a Truffaut film: a man and a woman, all talk and no action. Is it coincidence that Dutchman was written in Paris?
Performances: Paris debutant Adrienne Pieczonka sang Senta with a lustrous timbre that recalled the younger Deborah Voigt in the role. Matti Salminen's sonorous Daland was luxury casting. James Morris as the Dutchman sounded fresher than his recent final Met Wotans (thought the poor man had to wear a distractingly ugly wig). Paris newcomer Klaus Florian Vogt, who surprised Met audiences with his 2006 Lohengrins, has a fascinating voice, evoking a really loud Tamino--apparently he's known as a "heldencrooner". He sounded bright and powerful as Erik, as did Bernard Richter, the Steersman, despite a weak lower register. The chorus sounded magnificent, and the ensemble was ably led by Peter Schneider. His approach is a bit more deconstructionist than I like, but the detailed approach wasn't problematic in this piece. There was a certain tentativeness to the performances which should disappear after a couple more evenings. (opening nights are rarely peak performances)
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