I Know What Boys Like

From an MSN article entitled "5 Dates No Guy Wants to Go On," one of those profound ruminations you see when you log out of hotmail, it would seem that Peter Gelb has not yet convinced the masses that Opera Is Fun:

Opera
If given the choice of how to spend a Friday or Saturday night, what guy wouldn’t vote for putting on some uncomfortable formal clothing after spending a couple of hundred dollars for tickets, then another hefty chunk for parking, all to hear overly-costumed and overly-made-up folks belting out tunes that don’t have a beat and don’t rhyme, in a language only U.N. translators can understand? Exactly. And yet we still get the evil look from girlfriends when we try to stay awake during Madame Butterfly by playing a video game on our cell phones.

If we must do something cultural and uplifting, at least make it ballet, where the women are in shape, wearing form-revealing clothing and moving their bodies in ways that cause us to imagine them with us in a variety of other non-dance situations. It ain’t Dancing With the Stars, but it sure beats counting down the seconds ’til it’s over when the fat lady sings.

Well, so, I guess that answers...some question I didn't really have.

Handbag ariettes

To the best of my knowledge, what she has sung:

-Che faro senza Eurydice
-Caro mio ben
-Hojotoho!
-Pour mon ame
-Der Holle Rache [hat tip: Rysanekfreak]

What else?

Sparsely, like parsley

Yeah, I haven't been blogging up a storm lately. I just haven't been feeling bloggy. This is not exactly me throwing in the towel, but I think the summer is going to be lean times, word-wise.

For the record it looks like the end of the season for me will have been last night's Fille, in which everyone was loosened up as if it were closing night, which I am told it wasn't. Madame Palmer chose "Pour mon ame" as her surprise for the little improvised scene. This scene was actually funnier when it didn't go on quite so long, but the immediate impact of hearing her sing the tenor aria was good for a laugh from the gut; the improvised line following, "C'est bien, Madame, mais mieux avec un tenor," good for an amused smirk and self-inflicted pat on the back for understanding that much French. One performance left--I'm rooting for Klytamnestra's nightmare monologue, though it has been suggested that "I am the Wife of Mao Tse Tung" would be a daring choice as well.

Barry Banks, in for his scheduled cover's-one-off, proved once again that he is more or less the equal of the flashier presence for whom he waits, poorly bewigged, in the wings. Seriously the wig was bad, or so it looked from standing room (for there I was, as if a younger man.) Anyway maybe the voice is a notch quieter than Florez, and his French probably the same little bit off. But to my ear, he sings with an extra soupcon d'elegance, an extra dash of dash. If I were one for having a private snit in public, I might say for all the controversy over singers and their weight, there is none over singers and their height. A short tenor simply doesn't get the starring spot, so there's no controversy to be had. But then Florez is no giant, so maybe I'm barking up the wrong sycamore. Whatever the case, he was given a star's welcome by the assembled public.

Dessay sounded tired, but not seriously diminished. My god, the unhealthy fantasies I begin to have about that woman, no not that kind, but of hearing her sing Tatiana or Violetta, things that might break her in the big hall, just because she is of all our sopranos the most alert, mercurial, dare I say smart.

I have a few drafts sitting patiently on their hands, something half-baked about Terfel, &c. And I still might go to Hazmikbeth even though the Lady in question did not overwhelm, Siriusly speaking. The trouble is there's very little to throw one's hat in the air about this summer. Krol Roger at Bard might be an interesting novelty, but there it sits on my desktop, unbelistened, despite the kindness of him who sent it for sending it. Glimmerglass is a bit of a wash, and so on, and so on. Anyway I'm supposed to be working on this miniseries about Germaine Lubin.

Also Gencer has passed from among us so what, really, is there left to say?

Beware of metaphors

...especially outside of your native language. Funny bit from the Times article about Muti stepping up to the podium in Chicago:

"When I left La Scala, I thought it was time for me to be absolutely free, like the birds in the air," he said. "Birds go around and they enjoy their happiness, their freedom. But sometimes it can happen they find a tree and they like to stop on a tree, and they didn't know about the tree before. It doesn't mean one tree is better than another tree. It just happens at the right moment in life."

Wait I got lost in there. You didn't know about Chicago before? Or are we actually talking about plants now? I hear eucalyptus trees are nice. I will say it is brave of Muti to take on the conducting gig if I am reading this altogether wrong and he has, in fact, become a bird.

Still hoping to go to Macbeth though I think it may be fairly well sold...

Recommended reading

If you have any interest in music outside of opera (hey, some of us do; some of us don't) I urge you to pick up this week's issue of The New Yorker and read Burkhard Bilger's piece on the unearthing and preserving of American folk music. Fascinating and a marvellous piece of writing.

"I'd say ample for a regiment!"

There are two ways, at least, of looking at the kind of ovation that followed Juan Diego Florez's's' first jaunt through "Pour mon ame" in last night's opening of La Fille du Regiment at the whatsitcalled on the Upper West. Well, two ways of looking at the fact that it isn't, these days, atypical. The more cynical is that something in the audience has changed, and we're more likely to yell our fool heads off, the implication being that our standards are wearied and worn away. The other, no more convincing as an absolute, is that the Met has just gotten so consistently wonderful that it's all we can do to keep from leaping off the balconies to land on the stage. You know, in my head, that sounded like an expression of enthusiasm but now's I read it, I guess it's just a symptom of severe depression.

The point, such as it is, is that a number of things inform the newly vociferous audiences--I'm not making this up, right? My memory of performances in the Volpe era is that the reception was rarely so rowdy--for a number of reasons, some of them kind of intangible. Gelb has made a lot of changes, and cumulatively they have made Sybil's Barn a more exciting place to be, have not they?

Two people I spoke with after the performance expressed the same...I think we'd call it a concern. Which is that the rerun of the aria might become a reflex, as it did with "Va, Pensiero" that one season. And indeed, M. Armiliato was doing what in Charades might mean "turn the page back" pretty quickly on the heels of the last "militaire!" Not for nothing, the decibel level of the roar of the crowd did compress what might be considered the requisite wait for an encore; an ovation can surely be sized up by intensity rather than length.

To me, though, it did have the feel of something more set-up than spontaneous, which isn't a terrible thing, and the fact remains it was exciting singing, as was the rest of JDF's Tonio. My reaction may be tempered a little by the fact that, for my groschen, it was almost measurably less exciting than his reading of "Cessa di piu resistere," a year and a half ago. The Fille aria proves only one thing about a singer. The Fille aria, to be a little blasphemous, was delivered just as convincingly by a Met auditioner two years back, one Alek Shrader*. Could he have delivered the rest of the role with such charm, have sung "Pour me rapprocher de Marie" with such finesse? I haven't heard him since, so I can't say. But the aria on its own, well, for me it was a nice trick, and not the real measure of the tenor. I think it was a moment that had to happen--Fille now has baggage, albeit pleasant baggage, and you give it to a tenor with weighty expectations.

Part of what I'm struggling to say, if the point hasn't already been made too much elsewhere, is that Juan Diego Florez isn't The New Pavarotti, nor should we care that he isn't. What's so great about him is his own combination of strengths, not least his presence. The singers we love are the singers we feel we know; seeing them onstage is (in the least creepy-stalkery way) like seeing a friend. Florez, his physical energy, slightly nervous, his gait, his boyish eagerness and warmth, these are a part of why we carry on for him.

An older friend is Natalie Dessay. Well familiar to us, her intensity, her ability to find a dramatically logical physical flourish to go with a vocal one, her sense of fun at curtain calls, her spontanaeity. All on display here, to great effect. What I wasn't expecting was how much freer her voice sounds in this score than in Lucia, though her top isn't available nonstop like water from a tap like it used to be. Some will find her comic sensibility over the top, but it's an opera that begs for it. I think I've never seen anything so funny on an operatic stage as her brief piano solo during "Salut a la France." Also, she wins the Teresa Stratas Prize for being able to sing a high Q while being toted around or doing something that looked like moshing. It's a little bit of a shame that what they're taking out of the crate for her next season is something as dramatically stillborn as Sonnambula but then a Greek lady once made something of it, and wasn't it the Sonnambula scene in which she was so on fire at the Volpe gala?

Felicity Palmer remains a great asset to the company in whatever she does. I'm dying to know if she was singing anything in particular during her most comic moment (a good deal of the humor made use of the piano) or just improvising wildly, and I think she gets a prize as well for accompanying Dessay in the beginning of the trio. Marian Seldes, given sort of odd lines in an updated script, did a lot by means of her inherently expressive bearing.

Now the production I don't know quite what to do with. As you can see, I thought a good deal of it was funny, but there was some amount of WTFery going on, too, some clunky, unamusing staging for the regiment and other groups of chorus/supers, business I'd have to describe with a word like "zany" or some descriptor with a little self-destruct built in like that. The postcards that descend from the flies I find mystifying, and all the undergarments in the first act, cute at first but maybe overused. Overused underwear, great, didn't mean to leave you with quite that image early in the day, but..."Il faut partir," is not a comic number--it should be, while not grand tragedy, sweetly sad, and the audience giggled, as anyone might, when Dessay began it trudging across a stage, trailing a phalanx of soldierly underpants. On the whole it brought me neither delight nor fury, but I did wonder that it had been such a hit in London, unless that was just about the singers themselves, I suppose. The production team recieved a friendly but not raucous ovation, and it seemed about right.

My god, did anyone else notice that the season is drawing to a close?

Next up: maybe a Macbeth with the notably more intriguing cast

*JSU dissents, and I concede that I am at least to an extent making a point. Which is that the requirements of the aria are steep but narrow, and do not engage what I like best about the singer in question, his astonishing florid technique. And for some reason the staccato attack on the first of each pair of c's I find a tiny bit jarring.

18

Bis of "Ah, mes amis" at the prima!

More tomorrow.

[eta: duh, I mean "Pour mon ame"]

We could fix up this old comment thread and make a post of it!

Would it be tiresome of me to take a thread from comments that I found interesting and write about it? It just seemed like there was more to say, on my part and perhaps on yours, if this thing is on.

The setup is that the Met had their open house, open dress, and some of us in the 'sphere went, and then some of us wrote about it. I wrote very little; others gave a more detailed report. Someone in comments gave me a thumbs up for not violating the unspoken rule that most of us know: you don't review a rehearsal. (Sort of like you don't boo a cover. I thought that bore repeating.) Our doyenne weighed in somewhat to the contrary, however, noting the difference between a review and a report. (Italics hers. She lent them to me.) La Cieca went on to say:

After all, if a company welcomes the public to a rehearsal, then surely it is expected that there will be talk afterward. If the Met really wants to keep a lid on a show, they have the option of closing the final dress...

And the point is well taken. I think one thing that's important and a little hard to put a finger on here is where blogging falls on the continuum between conversation and, not to be grandiose, journalism. The deal with reviewing a rehearsal, it would seem, is that you're critiquing something not yet fully on display because it's not fully finished, and if you do that between friends, it's just ungracious, whereas if you do that on a front page, it's really quite unfair, and if you have an audience closer to a crowd than a flock (as I do not), you could even affect whether people put the event on their calendar or stay home that night to touch up their highlights.

I mentioned, in comments, my own history with this: once upon a time, at an opera house moderately far away, I went to an open dress for a rather blood-and-guts piece starring a mezzo famed for shaking the walls. She marked almost the whole time, and her cover sang the big number, and not giving it much thought, I sniffed about it on another forum in a manner I'd now call petulant. I believe I specifically made reference to the spelling of the singer's name, said that the "c" was silent, and huffed that so were a good many other notes. Well. They like to ran me out of town, and not wholly without reason.

I think it was said to me that criticizing a free preview was like being invited to someone's house for dinner and mocking their fricasee. But what I felt back then, and still do to some extent, bolstered a little by what La C has said, is that the company in question invited a passel of folks to come hear, and by doing so, changed the nature of the event in a substantial way. The difference now is not between a closed part of the rehearsal process and a finished public spectacle but merely between a performance you were given free access to and one you had to pay for. And that makes it less clear whether you can, in good faith, be critical.

I did, that day, feel I was going to the opera. I took time out of my busy schedule of, well, frankly, sitting around wondering why I was in graduate school, but that's not the point. I think it's the norm now for a rehearsal to be more of a performance than a run-through, and because of this, yes, it's probably a little bit open to scrutiny. I wouldn't have gone to the above anonymized performance if I had known it was mostly for blocking and publicity photos. I'm not really interested in how Madame Silent C gets from point A to point B. I wouldn't have gone to Fille either, and I think the way the Met publicized their open house shows that they knew people were coming with some expectations.

Yes, there were differences...the intermission was extremely short; there were cameras swooping around, the audience was slightly chattier though generally still well-behaved. None of us minded that, I shouldn't think. And indeed, I do still err on the side, as I've said, of not pissing anyone off, because it doesn't seem important enough to make a big deal of. But in principle, I think the people who did write, insofar as they stayed within the bounds of giving a generalized sneak preview, did no disservice to anyone.

I'm interested to know if this is fair. Singers, in particular, I'd imagine might feel protective of the final dress. But that's my ten cents. (Now where's my dance?)