Not feelin' it.

The Metropolitan Opera presented its last-but-one Lucia for the season. Several people sang. There were sets. A fellow named Muller told the orchestra how fast or not fast to play the notes. The roles of Lucia and Edgardo were taken by Youngok Shin and Giuseppe Filianoti. Respectively.

...but first

Ok, I have been posting pure fluff for weeks (the Hebraically inclined among you may now start chanting "ma nishtanah ha lailah hazeh...") and am thinking it'd be a good time for a wee hiatus, at least until Wozzeck. Er, unless I go to Lucia and have to eat my words about Villazon because according to pretty much everyone, Filianoti is actually more, better, faster...anyway that's on Friday. Surely I can muster more of a hiatus than that.

First, though, Ariadne Obnoxious has tagged me for her meme. How can I say no?

Four people currently living most likely to produce an interesting & stageable brand new opera plot & libretto (ie, you would go to see it!):

1. Lorrie Moore. She loves opera and references it in her stories. She's free of the stuffiness that can drag a libretto howling to the depths of boredom. And of course she's just a stupefyingly good writer.
2. Tom Stoppard, fer fuck's sake. I mean, c'mon.
3. Richard Greenberg, maybe? The Violet Hour had a certain operatic quality. And of course Take Me Out fairly cries out for Zambello/Gunn/Burden. Two words: shower scene. And the baseball/democracy speech was really pretty much an aria without music.
4. Wes Anderson, though I can't imagine he'd have the least interest. Maybe I'd just like to see him direct a production, not write one.

Four books you could buy at a regular bookseller's like Borders, Barnes & Noble or on Amazon, that, if re-worked, would be most likely to produce an interesting & stageable opera libretto, (ie, you would go to see it):

[Okay I semi-wilfully misread and did not pick exclusively books. Borders sells dvd's as well, right?]

1. last season's brilliant slap in the face, The Pillow Man. I assume one can buy the script. The role of the brother pretty much screams for A.D. Griffey to start warming up and giving T.M.I. interviews to the Times. Katurian could be maybe John Relyea or someone, though I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with an operatic equiv for Jeff Goldblum.
2. Edna Millay's Conversation at Midnight, heavily cut. I am definitely cheating, as it is long out of print. Oddly both of my suggestions are basically all male, though there could be a trouser role in the Millay.
3. Alice. Flo could be played by Sue Ellen Kuzma of the Sellars/Mozart/DaPonte stagings, and her aria "Mel, Kiss my grits!" would be a winning audition piece for sure. Vera would be kind of Lily Pons role. This actually is not in bookstores, not on DVD, vergogna! But in any case I'm kidding. I'll pick a real one. Oh wait but how about Sanford Sylvan, if he could be convinced to shed his customary quiet dignity, as Mel? Or no, get James Maddalena! He'll do it. He's like the Mikey-from-the-Life-Cereal-Commercial of opera. He'll try anything! He was in the Harvey Milk opera for the love of god. Voigt might could play Flo as well, finally getting to show the world her comic chops. Ok seriously, I'll shut up.
3. Do you think Catcher in the Rye would make a good opera if Salinger weren't hiding in a shack in Connecticut eating cardboard and suing people for thinking about adapting his works or whatever he's doing? No? Ok, it was just a suggestion.
3. Say, would there be any way to stage Hitchcock? Vertigo, starring LHL who is the only soul haunted enough to be Madeleine. Or Kozena, maybe. Jimmy Stewart is also hard to operatize.
4. The Last Picture Show? I don't know, at this point I'm just picking favorite films because I'm not the world's biggest novel reader. Anyway, near as I can tell, I've worn this one out...

Operameme

Well they do them all the time on LJ. So I'll run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

Name or Nom de Blogge: Maurizio "Maury" D'Annato. Which is, yes, a big lie.
Age: 32. I swear this is not me riffing on The Consul. Papers! Papers! No, seriously. I'm 32. [Note upon googling: she's 33 anyway.]
Locale: New York, baby!
Raison de blogre: Get the words out of my head
Intended tone of blog: Halfway between Addison DeWitt and an eight-year-old girl talking about ponies. Plus occasional references to sodomy.
Voice type (real): lyric baritone that peters out around e.
Voice type (in yer dreams): dramatic soprano
Arias sung in the shower: "Il Balen," Onegin's aria "Kogda by zhizn'" "Un aura Amoroso" down a fifth or so.
Arias of other gender sung in shower: "O Don Fatale," "E Amore un Ladroncello"
First opera seen: probably Magic Flute, Cincinnati
First opera to elicit madly queeny reaction of obsession and dedication to a lifetime at the opera: Traviata, Cincinnati, don't actually know the cast
Uberdiva, living: Ewa Podles
Uberdiva of the past: Callas goes without saying, so my unter-uberdiva is probably Borkh*. Honorary mention to Lucia Popp, my uberstimmdiva
Fave singer you never hear anyone else enthuse about: Rose Pauly
Favorite line from a libretto: " Ach, solcher wüsten Inseln sind unzählige auch mitten unter Menschen, ich - ich selber ich habe ihrer mehrere bewohnt und habe nicht gelernt, die Männer zu verfluchen."
Opera you'd rather eat thumbtacks than sit through ever again: Fidelio
"Why won't the Met/my local company put on...": more Janacek? Like every season?
"A perfect role assumption I have seen was...": Fleming's Desdemona. Seriously.
"If I had a time machine...": Mexico City, 1951. Aida: Callas, del Monaco, Dominguez

cut, paste, modify if you're entertained by such foolishness

*...who isn't dead, by the way, so perhaps active/inactive would be a better distinction. Any time Madame Borkh wants to come out of retirement, I shall be first in line to buy tickets.

Acquired tastes, and how to acquire them

My winter holiday gift to myself this year (yeah, I do, fuck off!) because I have generally been living high on the hog, cost $2.99. A CD of a singer I don't generally like but so many other people do I figure there must be something there worth reconsidering. [Hi NYC Opera Fanatic!] So I spent a chunk of xmas in Tower Records, with some guilt, because Tower is evil in that they make people work on such holidays and then add the insult of giving them double pay and, as a wise man once observed, two times shit is still shit. Tower is evil in other ways too, I'm sure, though we'll miss them when they're gone. Said a customer to a clerk, "so how much longer do you figure you guys will be here?" Said the clerk, "I'd give it about another year."

For my gal pal who was having me over for din I got Lucinda Williams' magnificent, tight, clean, adjective, adjective Ramblin', and for me, a marked-down-from-its-already-teeny-price Laserlight CD of Regine Crespin: Ses Plus Grand Roles. There's some really good (Faure's Penelope which I guarantee I never would have listened to otherwise) some pretty bad (Mozart, 'nuff said) and some remarkable indeed: Crespin and Corelli singing the Ballo duet. I have listened to it four or five times now. Actually 60/40 percent because of Corelli, but that's ok. Being 2/3 as ear-popping as Corelli at his best, and this is his capital b Best, like in Gli Ugonotti maybe, is a form of greatness.

The Marschallin scene, jarringly cut/spliced together with the end of the act, shows how enchantingly she could make a huge voice do little-voice tricks; her "silberne ros'n" is a clydesdale on a tightrope, suddenly more nimble than physics should allow. The second Cosi aria, in French, shows that there are limits to everything. I'm betting the Abscheulicher is good and butch, but I'm in touch with the folks at Guinness about a possible new record for "least times listened to Fidelio in lifetime," so I can't tell you.

If I had gotten my act together and asked someone about 1) psoting sound files and 2) the extent to which you can do this before someone writes you a nasty letter threatening legal action, there would be a bit more point to this other than encouragement for the Crespin-curious. Alas, I was busy sleeping 'til ridiculous hours and eating. Maybe I'll come 'round to this christmas thing after all.

Current soundtrack: Parsifal Act I Transformation Music, Bayreuth/Muck 1927.

Orest!

Did we know there was at least an excerpt of Flagstad in Elektra? If someone knows if there’s more than just the beginning of the recognition scene, for the sake of the war on Christmas, email me! I mean…I’m actually about to give it another listen and see what I think about it. Just between you, me, and the people who say “between you and I,” (so they can learn their lesson) I’m not the world’s biggest fan of KF. (A dear eccentric friend in Austin refers to her exclusively as “KF” and to Furtwangler as “god.” He’ll say to people “have you heard the Siegfried with KF and god?” and then stare them down as if to say, “no you’re nuts.” I miss Austin eccentrics.) But there’s a kind of roundness and solidity, as opposed to the taut solidity of Nilsson for instance, that’s the reason I always kind of wanted Voigt to sing Elektra and the reason KF could be terribly gratifying in the role. A round, plummy tone (though we hate food metaphors for singing...what the hell is chocolatey?) is a luxury, though-solidity is the sine qua non. Any fragility must be the province of Chrysothemis: della Casa sounds lost in her I believe one-off of the role, and it's what makes her so touching. Sometime around 1995 when Voigt for one thing was the first diva with a website and for another didn’t have a bajillion fans, she answered emails personally and told me she wasn’t seriously considering it which I think was how a charming, polite midwesterner says “hells naw.” Ok, sounds like a concert ending. No more KF Elektra I’ll wager. Rather a loss.

Current soundtrack: Golijov; The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Kronos Quartet w/ David Krakauer

Barely funny even to me

Maybe I'll call her Anna Ne-Ochen'-Trebko. There is a .00005% chance that will make you laugh if you speak any Russian. I'm not even sure it would make sense to a native speaker. Morphology humor. Good times.

Current Sountrack: Salome (1947) Cebotari, Rothmuller, Hongen, Patzak, C. Krauss dir.

Sol Invictus

Have recieved smashing operatic gifts for the holidays that accompany the lengthening of the days:

1) huge box of 78's for my table model Brunswick. Highlights include Gadski, Tibbett, and apparently one of the first recordings of the Macbeth sleepwalking scene which opera, I suppose, had fallen out of fashion early in the recording era. Oh and Das Lied with Kullman and Thorborg. Das Lied on 78 is a fine thing.

2) Tristan bleeding chunks (in the truest sense--they just sort of stop and start wherever) from the 1933 Broadcast with Leider, Melchior, Olszewska. Had no idea this existed. Still curious why it's in such pieces. Ok sound though.

3) 1940 Broadcast of Lakme with Pons, Tokatyan, and Pinza in slap-my-face-and-call-me-Inge good form. The Bell Song is pretty much nonpareil. Crowd does not lose its collective mind and begin screaming, which is puzzling to say the least.

Jesus died for my listening pleasure.

I sometimes buy a little holiday gift pour moi-meme but don't have my eye on much in particular. Suggestions?

More sausage

Always a pleasure to discover sites worth reading/linking by being linked by them. Today I add Felsenmusick (whose author won my heart with the phrase "Cassandra-like wailing" w/r/t Norman Lebrecht) and Sounds and Fury (who charges Lebrecht, with equally rapier phraseology, with "lunatic effusion.")

Like a Bird

You're going to have to take my word for my sincerity when I say that Souvenir at the Lyceum has convinced me that I simply must revisit the work of Florence Foster Jenkins. It's not that it's a particularly good play, though it's not awful or even bad exactly. It's just that Judy Kaye, singing in the style of FFJ (thank god the era of everyone being some variant on J-Lo is over and we don't have to call her Flo Fo Jo) most of the time misses that ineffable quality that keeps us listening sixty years on. Yeah, I know. You're thinking "that quality is known as sucking." Only as my charming theater-going companion reminded me, The Glory??? of the Human Voice is usually filled out with a Foster-Jenkensian reading of Faust not including the lady herself, marked by full-throttle suckage, and I know no-one that dotes on it as we all, I assume, dote on FFJ. There's something else going on with her singing, it does seem. It's dreadful and then something else, something very likeable and a little bit addictive. Back in the days of cassette tapes, lads and lassies, I used to have a program I had taped off of the classical station in which the announcer, for yuks, had promised to play an immortal recording of "Der Holle Rache," and followed through with Foster Jenkins, and then immediately after with the searing Edda Moser. I miss the pairing, truly.

Judy Kaye, whose bio informs us she has sung with the Santa Fe Opera--and we're not talking the Countess of Krakenthorp; Eurydice and Musetta are listed--does indeed make rather an athletic spectacle of going after the almost aleatory aesthetic of Madame J's vocal style. It's not easy singing like that, as I particularly noticed during a scene when Kaye is additionally called upon to march in place completely out of time both to the piano and to what she is singing. In a performance writ a few points too large, I thought this was a little coup de theatre. During the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, she does hit upon the real sound as we hear it on record, and so some of its pathetic, unhinged sincerity. Much of the time, however, as in the initial affront of Caro Nome, she seems to gild the lily. Do I even need to type this next sentence? Florence Foster Jenkins doesn't really need embellishing.

As a small note of no real significance, even less than usual I should say, I'm a little curious why they told the story of Jenkins' cab accident and left out the funniest line of FFJ lore, wherein she marvels at how she now can sing "higher an f than ever before." It's apocryphal, but so's the whole play.

Lilygilding is I suppose the guiding aesthetic in this production. Donald Corren, as Cosme McMoon does his fair share of pulling faces and playing to the folks on 43rd street, and then at other moments he displays a real finesse. It's tough to see how a play that has him reminiscing about a soldier he gave an extra ticket to and tossing off the little bit of heartbreak, "I wondered what life had got in store to temper his enthusiasm," can play like a sandbox bully for so much of the evening. But what I think most makes an intermittently frustrating trifle out of a subject with all kinds of possibilities is the jumping about and yipping of Judy Kaye. FFJ comes out a sort of hyperactive Hyacinth Bucket, and in combination with the singing and despite the contrast of a few quiet scenes played relatively deftly for pathos, it makes her hard to like or loathe, to have any substantial feelings about. Maybe it's a theater-going pecadillo of my own, but I find this kind of broad, schematic idea-world deeply uninvolving.

The Carnegie Hall scene itself got lots of laughs, or I think it did. Someone made the decision to pipe in sound footage of people laughing and applauding, so it got hard to say what was real and what was Memorex. Probably a great way, all told, to make people think they'd experience great hilarity. I'm reminded of a story from someone I used to know that now that he had been subjected to Mama Mia! with visiting relatives, he realized that the press about people dancing in the aisles failed to mention the actors storming said aisles and commanding people to dance. And I must say the moment of cinematic expressionism that ended the recital scene rubbed me entirely wrong, struck me as tonally wildly out of place.

The play ends with McMoon asking us to imagine the music, the lovely music, that Madame J hears in her head while howling at us like a stuck pig. And then, and I keep going back and forth over whether this was a mistake, Ms. Kaye comes onstage and sings the Ave Maria, this time straight. It's actually a pretty good performance (with just a hint of a late Sills bleat) but maybe not enough so to prop up the sentimental little paean to self-expression it follows. Without a moment of true transcendence, too many questions about money, delusion, dependence, and the like hang out by the theater door, poke at us as we pick up our hats and coats, and ask why they weren't invited onstage.

I don't feel entirely at ease turning up my nose at a play about opera that actually made it to broadway, but bearing in mind the vast influence of my blog, I think I'll sleep ok just the same. In a late scene of the play following the legendary Carnegie Hall recital, Kaye/Jenkins speaks of the past and of the lost joy of anticipation, saying "until today I had this in front of me." I couldn't help but think of a famous rebuke to a review:

I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.

Diminutives

Everyone keeps calling her Anya on the b'cast. I'm not sure if they know this is a nickname. It's not, like...bad per se, but I doubt they'd talk about Jim Levine. I think I shall take to referring to her as Niusia, which is like a diminutive of the diminutive of the diminutive, basically calling her "ooooh who's a cute little Annie-pookums!?"
I missed most of the 'cast, but it's ok, I've already spillt a good many words over it. And yet, I didn't even really look to see what else was on.
One quartet, coming up.

Bloodsport

Well, so, the broadcast season begins Saturday. This is less of a calendar entry on par with arbor day and the equinoxes if you live in New York, but worth shouting about in any case. I think they should do an all blogger edition of the opera quiz, don't you? Wouldn't it be kind of brutally funny and wrong? Considering we all cling to some degree or other of anonymity (ok and considering the likelihood of them asking) I suppose I don't really mean it, but I'm picturing something like the classic Parterre sketch in which someone ends up calling a thinly veiled Father Owen Lee a "superannuated faggot." Not gentle comic fare, but still pretty riotous these years later.

(Speaking of, I have for the first and only time scooped Parterre with casting news of Brokeback, the Opera. Get me!)

I think we're all wondering just a little whether Villazon will rejoin us for Saturday's broadcast. A discontented soul in standing room was heard to mutter Tuesday that perhaps the big V was saving his voice for an audience of millions, though I think that's the voice of disappointment rather than reasonable suspicion. I do have a hunch the radio may magnify some of the less ideal aspects of the singing in this production.

Un-especially but still Partially Kartvelian Ring!

Wait, am I the only one that didn't know there's to be a Kirov Ring at Lincoln Center next summer? The press release says the production is based on Russian, Causasian and in a phrase that for no knowable reason amuses me, "especially Scythian" folklore/mythology. Ah, the Caucasus. Georgia=love as the kids are saying, or maybe aren't anymore. Fly away, bitter months until non-Met-production Ring!

For this I missed the Gilmore Girls?

I think my despondent 9:30 text message will have to suffice:

Trebs still out of tune. Zon fucking canceled. Cover, poor soul, was booed and not without reason tho' I'd never. Going home. Lassu or no lassu.

Salient details: Cover=Raul Melo. Nice enough voice, mellow tone (forgive pun), produced quite clumsily, possibly owing to nerves. James Courtney's wobble bothered me more, AT's tone quality and acting wowed me more, vendetta e-flat nixed in favor of big warm, what, b-flat? But am I high or is she sharp all over the place? Reaction to Guelfi remains lukewarm. Some nights, though, you can just feel the "off" in the air.

Say goodnight, Graziela

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Two operas too late, what's in a name?

I'm getting the feeling everyone but me is liking-not-loving Villazon and loving-not-liking whom the Wellsungs have begun calling Trebs. A name I find rather handy, actually, because...how to explain this...if we're producing a sentence in English and a foreign name comes in the middle of it, what a lot of us do is say the foreign name with the closest available sounds in English. Only for reasons I can't imagine anyone wanting a detailed version of, the closest available sounds in Netrebko sound, taken all together, grotesquely unlike Netrebko. It's like how the president [sic] says Putin. It makes my eardrums raw.

Blind Tasting

I auditioned several headlines for this, and liked, "Blind Item" best but then I was afraid you'd get your hopes up that I had some good dirt--which wholesome looking baritone fresh from success in a new American opera was seen making out with which prolix and occasionally too vulgar opera blogger under the Ponselle portrait at second intermission or something like that. (I suppose that would be less blind and more near-sighted, in need of a good squint.)

Well. My tickets, bought at the very end of the mad rush when there were a few left, were for Tuesday night. And then I started getting all tied up in knots about consistently having blug things after all the other lads and lasses blag them. The things I do for you kids. All, uh, twelve or thirteen of you, I'm guessing. I bought a score desk ticket. What that means is you go aaaaaall the way up like you were going to Family Circle, and then you go down the side where the family circle tickets that are slightly cheaper because the view sucks are, and then you wave hello at that person whose view sucks, cast a furtive look of envy and despair at him, and sit at a little desk beside him where the view? She done gone. Like, entirely. You have a little desk with a light in case you are the rare scholar that bought score desk because he wanted to follow the rich counterpoint of the Capriccio sextet, and then what you do, having put your coat on the score desk, is more or less the equivalent of listening to an exceptionally well mic'd live recording. (Oh, hey! Blind item! What purveyor of live recordings whose company has the funniest habit of changing names a lot was seen in Fam Circle last night, leading us to believe that a souvenir of this event will be coming soon to a website near you?)

It's actually a very peculiar sensation which is why I'm glad the fellow in the Lousy But Existent View seat in front of me went and found a less lousy seat at first intermission. And the guy beside me found one for the first scene until he was kicked out of it by people with a lot of gall and, yeah, tickets to sit there, so I basically only missed the scene at Rigoletto's house. Did it ever occur to anyone that Rigoletto goes in the list of characters whose names we never learn? Because I'm pretty sure Rigoletto isn't really his name. I'm just saying.

So first I can see: hello, trusty old hideous Otto Schenk Met Rigoletto! How's the drab, unimaginative eyesore business? Why, I haven't seen you since Vargas and Rost were respectively champagne and chloroform on your well worn boards. And Villazon makes his entrance and, old fashioned that I am, I'm hoping for entrance applause but it doesn't happen. (I get that it disrupts the music. I sort of feel like in Verdi and other stoppable/startable lego-like operas, this is not such a huge crime.) Villazon's voice, in the last negative comment I will make about him, is maybe a size smaller than I was expecting, damn the studio. The Duke doesn't have opening lines that tell you much, and Eduardo Valdes as Borsa actually does have kind of a meaty voice, so it was a moment of doubt. "Questa o quella," came off as a job interview, a good pitch but a little bit tentative. Fortunately the crowd went tenor-assuringly bonkers anyway and next time Villazon had a big scena, the jitters were gone, and by the time he got to "Possente amor," he tossed it off with the swagger of the guy who knows he got the job.

I give credit for swagger alone, but in this case I don't have to. Pretty much everything that was promised in the recital discs is there in the house. The voice is aural cake, and the technique suggests there's enough for everyone. Did I seriously just write that? I'm just flailing around for something more interesting to say than: go! Go hear him now! He's just what we all wanted! But I think he may be. There's stimm and kunst, messa di voce and punch-me-in-the-stomach-and-see-if-I-stop-singing high notes, a few weepy glottal attacks and a few syrupy portamenti but not too many. He moves well, he's less funny-looking than in some photos. I. Am. A. Fan.

Anyway his first scene ends and my row-mate returns, having fallen prey to the ushers, and I am plunged into darkness. So my first impression of Netrebko is 100% aural. Which is kind of ironic in the Morrisettian sense of not actually ironic but sort of annoying. Because, maybe you've heard? She's pretty. And, as I will find out later on, quite a compelling stage presence. The voice itself has presence in spades and several other suites. Much, much fuller and pingier than I was expecting, probably because of the way she looks. It's also weirdly covered in places, extraordinarily solid at bottom, and deployed from time to time with a certain insouciance about pitch. If you're hearing mixed feelings, you're hearing right. I found her Gilda overall quite exciting, but not without worries. She pulled off the trick of making Gilda tragic instead of just infuriating. She beguiled in Caro Nome. This is all good. She also went for the e flat we all love in the vengeance duet, and in her enthusiasm, added just a leeeetle extra flat to the e. At which point she put the unwritten high notes in the garage for the evening, not to appear for the quartet (ruined by jerky conducting, by the way) which I'll admit is one place I get all disappointed at the lower option. So the short version of this is: I'm still making up my mind for myself, but last night certainly had the feel of a Sternstunde.

We're all used to the fact that the title character in Rigoletto is most often an afterthought these days, so it shouldn't disappoint anyone horribly that Guelfi was basically ok, big voice, lots of lurching around. You know, though, the one time I heard it sung, but sung, the big guy given some vocal class courtesy of Mark Delavan, the whole show worked better as a theater work one could care about. Guelfi's reading was just a little too woolly and reliant on occasional shouting for me. [Edit: having read the Wellsung review I am wondering if I've been too uncharitable. I'll decide on Tuesday.]

Eric Halfvarson is a very high quality Sparafucile, and it suddenly occured to me I never hear anyone talk about him much. James Courtney was not always audible, but Monterrone's scene is one conductors love to bulldoze, and what you could hear was good and solid.

Blind item: what amateur reviewer is at this point not going to anything new until, like, Wozzeck unless maybe, maybe to catch the last Fillianoti-abend or Feldermaus if he can bear it?

The Wait is Over

Tergete il ciglio, and dust off your dancing shoes.

Rolando Villazon is the next tenor we will wait eagerly to hear in each new role. Rolando Villazon will be the next automatic cause for dreadful 6 o'clocks in the basement of the Met waiting for standing room because the house is sold out flat. Licitra and Giordani will sing what they sing, but Rolando Villazon is the next great lyric tenor.

Yes, yes, these are statements we make at 1:30 in the a.m. having just stumbled in, and then feel silly about the next morning, only I'm betting I won't. More tomorrow.

Incapable of brevity, or: come back to the ranch, Huck honey

I can't help but sprinkle a few (hundred) words over the only event these few weeks that has had the buzz of the Villazon/Netrebko Rigoletto: Brokeback Mountain.

You know what? I think I may confine myself to writing about the music because my feelings about the work itself are very mixed, and still sorting themselves out. But my feelings about the music are of a piece. The general tenor is disapproval. The charge goes something like: Ang Lee, girl, spend some time in the flyover states before you take a stab at what they sound like. And then I spend three seconds on IMDB and realize 1) he's straight, 2) he's 5'7" which isn't relevant but adds him to my mental file of short celebs, and 3) he went to Urbana-Champaign, so there's no excuse for what I'm tempted to call an orientalist approach to the sound of life in emptier places, with my apologies to Edward Said for my cavalier use of his word.

What I mean by this is, for instance, the spliced-in-sounding three second overlays of slide guitar during the otherwise somewhat bleached-out sonic wallpaper of a guitar playing a bunch of tenths without much melodic direction. It's something like a game of telephone between John Fahey and John Williams with twenty people in between so everything is lost. And what's the excuse, in an visually very attentive period flick, for dressing a scene in a bar with a jukebox playing a Steve Earle song from quite a few years later? The excuse, I'm afraid, is that all that exotic twingy-twangy music sounds pretty much alike. For me, though, the groan-inducingest moment of musical pandering came in the final credits with the inclusion of a song by ubiquitous gay songster Rufus Wainwright. Don't get me wrong--I listened to Poses practically on tape loop for about a year, but here he sticks out like a tiara in a kicker bar.

Alright, I'm tiptoeing off the soundtrack for a moment to say that I think the exoticizing impulse toward rural manliness is the main problem with the movie. I'm going to avoid spoilers here if I can, but the opening scene, for me, played like parody, an effete fantasia of What Real Men Are Like. It is almost put over by Heath Ledger's astonishing, flawless role reading. (I never say this kind of shit but seriously, dude, just give the man the statuette and be done with it.)

Unintentional real-life tie-in: since QXR's webcast has been relegated to some AOL system that (surprise!) doesn't seem to work, I'm listening to the first bars of the NPR World of Opera/Houston Grand Opera b'cast of Trovatore thanks to a connection to Yellowstone Public Radio.

So, listen, I won't go on and on* but in bemoaning the mythos of a distant land where men like men but arent like men who like men, can I whine about the obvious way in whichHollywood that thinks very differently about women's bodies and men's? Much was made, much, of how explicit this was going to be. And [minor spoiler alert] yeah, it will be a very new moment for America to realize that Jake Gyllenhall is in fact the bottom, so it's not a sex scene that fades away at the, uh, tent-flap. But isn't it droll to put this in the basest terms and realize at the end that the count of girl parts seen (because, yes, Western culture has sexualized female breasts and not male ones--we're starting from there) is, um, four, which is to say two girls worth of parts, and the count of boy parts seen remains at zero, pretty much in line with all of cinematic history? I'm not counting a scene where they jump, naked, into a lake, from a great distance, though I'm sure some techie geniuses out there are already working with screen-freezes and the magnify tool. And I hope they have my email address.

As long as I'm going on about bodies, though, thank god they had the honesty to show Ledger after what I assume may have been an enforced period of not working out, with an only mildly idealized version of the body issued to 99% of humanity. I kind of wonder if the reason we didn't see as much of Jake Gyllenhaal was that he was sticking to a Hollywood Hunk regimen and was too cut to be a country guy who does hard labor that doesn't take place at the David Barton in Chelsea.

No, seriously, I'm going to shut up now. All else aside, my feelings about what we used to call the story would I think involve major spoilage.

Meanwhile, back in opera land, Radvanovsky is doing her thing. Her thing, since you asked, is singing "Tacea la notte" with a sobbing rubato that makes me want to slam my hand in a door to stop the endorphins before I run out. Actually, it's looking like Bruno Caproni's di Luna may stand in quite nicely for that door...

[always a later edit. Damn me for not having a program to record streaming b'casts! She even did "Tu vedrai" which for some reason I adore. I think the florid passages are not an unqualified success, so I'm no longer praying to the pagan gods to make her the next Norma, which I think was JSU's idea, but I do wish she were in something more enticing at the Met this year. I feel I ought to add something about Mishura except she's not rubbing me the wrong way or the right way. She's fine, and I don't mean that as quite the damnation it sounds.]

*totally kidding, of course I will.

Everyone else is doing it...

Somewhat in the vein of those old Opera-L threads where we all cast the opera versions of, I don't know, Brokeback Mountain (which would obviously involve the male leads from American Tragedy while I'm on the topic) and with a tip of the hat to Nick and the Wellsungs, I present the following.
JSU: i was kicking around the idea of an all-russian cast of this
Maury: ha
JSU: 'an unamerican tragedy'
Maury: diadkova=mom?
JSU: of course!
JSU: starring hvoro, of course
Maury: he's too old
JSU: doesn't matter
JSU: pretty
Maury: sort of.
JSU: he's a similar combo to gunn
JSU: not very loud, good looking
JSU: good sound
JSU: though hvoro has better breath, etc
Maury: gunn has better pecs, so it's a draw.
JSU: evseeva as roberta
Maury: borodina is inevitable as sondra i guess.
JSU: yes....
JSU: not sure about the light tenor
Maury: yeah neither am i
JSU: for the uncle, galooooosin
Maury: galuzin* as the father i guess.
Maury: hee
JSU: and
Maury: uncle, whatever
JSU: netrebko!
JSU: as the cousin
Maury: oh, in the upshaw role?
JSU: yes
Maury: jesus, that was easy casting.
JSU: yes
JSU: maybe guryakova for evseeva if you want to go all-kirov
JSU : Guryakova has a not-huge voice but good dramatically...was v. good in Mazeppa
Maury: i've never heard either
Maury: oh no no no Prokina
JSU: oh?
JSU: what was she in?
Maury: i saw her a hundred years ago in kat'a in dallas. intense. only problem is she's perhaps not plain enough.
JSU: hee

*de-Gallicizing the transliteration of his name is a tic of mine. Sue me.

Nothing to sniff at

Note to the ladies in row DD: no, you are not allowed to talk just because nobody's singing.

Alright, that's out of the way.

Well, boys and girls, though mostly boys, I was in simply the rottenest funk about going to An American Tragedy. Said I to my dinner companion: you know what the last thing in the world I feel like doing is? Attending a new American opera. I hate to get all "mes cheres!" about things, but ah my friends and oh my foes, was I ever wrong.* Cutting to the chase, it was great. Not exactly wet my pants great, or even run around in little circles shrieking great, but if I may frame things ever so egocentrically, anyone who can write an opera that ends with a little boy singing about Jesus and does not end with me swinging from the rafters has done a neat trick. (Three of my least favorite things: organized religion, children, and children singing. Here at FPMFOB, we aim to alienate.)

Truly, this was satisfying on all levels, as stagecraft, as song. The score itself, with its off kilter nostalgic Americana (in the breathtaking hymn, for instance) flavored everywhere with palatable mid-century film score modernism, the utterly non-embarassing libretto--and we all know that's an achievement--both erased memories of some much duller recent premieres. The production, though it looked better in motion than at rest when it got where it was going, ran aesthetic rings around last week's Shakespeare romp. Yes, it looked like a gigantic "memory" game (where did I see the other drowning girl? over in that corner, I think) or one of those grids where you push the numbers around. But, and how can I explain this?, in a good way.

Statistically unlikely as it is, I'd actually never heard Patricia Racette in house. She does have an air of utility diva about her, but I'm happy to see she can be rather more. True, in lyrical scenes there's a mildly generic quality to the instrument, but emotional climaxes apparently put the girl on her mettle. Her death was quite gripping. Also filed under happy surprises, Nathan Gunn it turns out is more than just a great rack. Heretofore I had seen him only as Billy Budd, and anyone who tells you they remember the sonic element of that bit of one-handed listening is lying, lying, lying. As it turns out, he's a masterly steward of his voice, though I do think...well, let's just call him the male Mattila, ok? Calendar cute, no vocal worries, and a certain disconnect between the physical performance and an intermittent instrumental/non-dramatic quality to the singing. [Edit: I remembered later what struck me as I was listening, that this was not entirely Gunn's fault. His arias really aren't the most memorable music, not by a longshot the best things in the score.]

Susan Graham is something of a whipping boy around these parts, but I mostly have to hand it to her. Did you ever read the story about the kids who live on a planet where it rains for seven years and then there's one sunny day and they all lock this one kid in a closet so he misses the sunny day? No? Well the one time in seven years Susan Graham gets to dress as a girl, I do think it's a bit mean spirited to make her wear that wig is all. She didn't always set me on fire but the aria about being changed by New York was a fine moment for her, and she sank her teeth into the role of Sondra Finchley and chewed. There were moments of real vocal class.

The only real ovation went to Dolora Zajick. Mine is not to reason why. Now, don't think that the fact that I recently quoted Mrs. Parker is going to keep me from doing so again, oh no. Writing about Dawn, Mrs. P says:

One can but revise a none-too-hot dialectic of childhood; ask, in rhetorical aggressiveness, "What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser?"--loudly crow the answer "Two Theodore Dreisers"

It does at times seem on the decibel evidence there are two Dolora Zajicks, not to draw any parallels. If there were a shred of artistry in her phrasing, she'd be the best goddamn singer ever. Husbanded as they are, her vocal riches make me someting between whistful and irritated.

In some smaller but equally well drawn roles...William Burden was also a one-off for me until tonight, previously familiar only from the World's Ugliest Entfuhring (hereafter WUE excepting I don't intend to speak of it again. Ever.) And he was solid in that and even better in this, his acting perhaps the best of the bunch. JSU called this one: Jennifer Aylmer = Dawn Upshaw + Clairol Winsome Wheat Blonde, in mostly good ways. Richard Bernstein has gotten very little attention but I think quietly turned in a very praiseworthy reading of Orville Mason, the district attorney, who presumably also pops a mean corn.

I have this feeling I just did more picking than praising. Other than my generally negative nature, I'm not sure why. I pretty heartily recommend this, if you're on the fence. Ok or even if you're just daydreaming about bringing your binocs and try and look up Nathan Gunn's dowdy bathing garment. (Doesn't work. I tried, kids.)

Now, do I wait for Tuesday's Rigoletto or try and get score desk for the prima? Would that be totally pathetic or what?


*Great. Channeling Edna Millay. That's the way to turn it down a notch.

Temporary lack of tragedy

Ach, the rest of the world is blogging up American Tragedy, but I don't go 'til Monday.

Tonight though I went to Miller Theater's Composer Portraits series, in this instance John Adams. There was very little singing, and what singing there was could hardly be damned with the label "opera," so I'm of two minds whether to write about it here. Suffice it to say--no, don't suffice it just yet. Let me first do the full disclosure routine and mention that I'm pals with someone involved. But you know what, I think this opinion is just shy of universal, so I'm going to assume it's not loyalty speaking when I say what a ruthlessly precise killing machine they are. Somewhere on the way to being a weirdly worded compliment, that took a left turn, but you get it.

The opera-but-not-opera portion of the evening was the apparently rather uncategorizable work "I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky." It's...really not that satisfying. I think it suffers from fish nor fowl syndrome, maybe.* If you like broadway, it's going to strike you as stuffy and not so very tuneful. If you like opera (everybody now: and I know you do!!) or downtown art music, whatever the hell that is, the broadway vocal mannerisms involved may drive you up a tree. It's like what would happen if somebody had the newsreal-as-opera idea that brought us Nixon in China without the genius-level clarity of vision that makes it more or less the only opera from the last 25 years anyone gives a fuck about.

Still it was easy enough to dig into the virtuosity of absolutely everything else. I'm continually blown away by their protean violinist, Courtney Orlando, who in this concert played keyboards and sang a small role in Ceiling/Sky with more vocal assurance than the soloist (which is not really fair of me because she only had a few lines) all as a warmup to the murderous violin part in the Chamber Symphony. There were bowstrings everywhere, I'm telling you. My friend in the ensemble and I joke that my vestigial four heterosexual brain cells have quite the crush on her. If so, last night's no-sweat-broken performance didn't help any, nor did that devastating pair of boots. Oh there. I'm a big fag again.

Many of the rest of them evince a similar sense of being able to do anything, backwards, in heels. There's a certain sadness to watching musicians like this because you can't [I can't] pretend that even if I'd started early and worked hard, I could ever do what they do.

Other works featured were the quirky, intermittently grating Scratchband , a piano transcription of Short Ride in a Fast Machine matched only by last concert's Ligeti etude for sheer shock value (Mr. Adams, after intermission, jokingly compared this to the Horowitz transcription of Stars and Stripes) and Gnarly Buttons, a vivid pastiche requiring the clarinettist, here one dauntless Elisabeth Stimpert, to borrow the pair of bellows Caballe wears on her back.

Ok. It's official. I'm quite unable to write about anything but singing. Well it was a fine concert, and I gave it a shot.

*I'll have the veal.

A day late

A moment of solemn humming of highlights from Norma to observe the anniversary of the birth of opera, I mean Callas. Except I missed it by a day. Well, alright: utilize your favorite ego defense in honor of the anniversary of the birth of Anna Freud?

There's this insane batch of good opera online today. I actually passed on the Podles Tancredi because I have the Naxos one somewhere, even if live is always better, and 1) I'm presumably going to see her do it...isn't she doing it at Caramoor or somewhere? and 2) Dalayman's Salome tempted me away. Girlfriend has a voice on her, but apparently the only thing as big is her fee, because the only reason I can think of for this Jokanaan is there was no money left and they had to get someone's uncle Ingvar to do it. You remember Ingvar, he used to sing the little song about the farmer's daughter that made us all laugh so hard. Sorry, I really got into being Swedish for a second there.

Edit: as whichever Baldwin it is says after a car crash in State and Main, "Well, that happened." The last twenty minutes of Salome verged on somnolent, though pretty. But then a very good thing happened, in that instead of opting for Knjaz' Igor on the basis of "it should be going for a good while longer" I took a little gamble on Die Gezeichnete because The Straussmonster was joking about the ridiculousness of Schreker's plots the other night. An instant convert to Schreker am I. And Schwanenwilms, little black dress grudges notwithstanding.

Maury D'annato Can't Catch a Break

It had to be about three minutes into Romeo & Juliette that I figured out why I had let four performances go by while all the cool kids were already blogging it. The explanation requires subtlety, intricate logic, and a fine grasp of the Kleinian concept of the depressive position: I hate Gounod. For the lenght of one '78, he's great. Then I go into sort of a trance and find myself (for example, throughout act II) hearing the voice of Mrs. Parker saying:

Although I work, and seldom cease,
At Dumas pere and Dumas fils,
Alas I cannot make me care
For Dumas fils and Dumas pere.

So what I'm basically telling you is I have no review because you just can't say much worth reading about something you dislike a priori. (Get Maury with the Latin and the italics and shit!)

Except I paid twenty five smackers for my age-inappropriate student ticket, and I'm damn well going to write about it.

The production seems to be the first thing leaping to everyone's finger tips. I won't buck convention. It's...it's fine is what it is. It's not shockingly avant garde, nor is it an artifact from Otto Schenk dustbunny hell. I would say for all the bells and whistles, one basically never feels from one act to the next one has gone anywhere new, except for the justly ballyhoo'ed floatin' bed, an image so pretty as to recall ...one's first kiss? One's first Met b'cast? [Mine was Rosenkavalier, I'm pretty sure. In the immortal words of Patty Bouvier: there went the last lingering shred of my heterosexuality.] The weather forecast in the back did get a bit ponderous, but I'll admit that the giant moon made me smile. Laughing with/laughing at will not here be debated.

And I kind of think avant garde design should go with some attempt at quirky staging, otherwise you have all these people milling around acting normal despite the fact they're in La Serva Padrona set in a strip mall, or what have you. This is why I'm stoked for the return of the Bob Wilson Lohengrin, despite the fact it's, well, preposterous. Well or worse than acting normal is when they're clumsily staged. I'm afraid the swordplay conformed uncomfortably to tristoogean aesthetics for me (which is to say it cleaved to the teachings of Larry, Curly and...right, that's what I was after.)

And nobody, nobody, looks good in purple velour.

I'm really going on about the staging. There's a reason for that. We'll get there. But, wrapping up, if the main piece of stage business that sticks in my head from the production is the cute little pantomime Dessay and Vargas did during the applause for the Waltz, I should probably have stayed home and read a book. [Jesus was it cute though. Her little mask took a bow, his little mask clapped for her, both little masks kind of hopped toward each other and I think made out or something. It's not impossible I dreamed this part.] I really do believe Dessay sees the silliness in this opera. In one scene she made stock soprano gestures that could only be interpreted as self-mockery or a kind of mean imitation of Aprile Millo.

Alright. I'm backed into a corner. Cards on the table time. I put off talking about the singing because I have practically nothing to say about it. Vargas was I think maybe nervous about ye olde falling bedde because he sounded tentative until the damn thing was on the ground and then great like I remembered him. When he's singing quietly, he's in a league of his own. When he's not, he does a bit more gear-shifting than I imagine to be part of ideal French singing. Having heard Alvarez lately, I miss the splash of bad taste Diana Vreeland (as quoted by The Mother of us All for years in his opera-l signature) recommends. Dessay's voice has a nice ping and her diction seemed swell to me but my French is rotten. [Franklin Pierce Adams or someone round tably like that is reputed to have noted that once you step off the plane, you quickly realize nobody speaks Intermediate French.] I'm sorry to say her voice always makes me think of recordings of Mady Mesple and wish I'd been born earlier, and in France. It gets around the bends pretty flashily, but it just isn't love. I wouldn't not go hear her again (say, I bet that would be tricky in French what with the double negatives) but...

I agree with everyone about Tybalt and Mercutio: they're fab. I'd like to hear them sing other things, things that don't make me consider the sacrilege of leaving before curtain calls. Theodora Hanslowe's timbre reminded me in some insubstantial way of von Stade, but her scene is so short it's hard to size her up.

And with that, forgive me, I'm out of ink.

Oh, but no. One other thing. Why is Juliette's calling card that we all know and, depending who we are, trot out at auditions, when in fact her little "I'm so nuts I just may drink this drano" number has actual dramatic content, more moods, and a greater variety of musical ideas?

Next: I try to drag myself to An American Tragedy, having learned no lessons.

Hiatus? They hardly KNOW us!

Alright, my weeks of going to nothing are about to come to an end. Romeo & Rigoletto: purchased.

Thing is, spending a reported $40 for the obstructed-view seats to hear LHL sing a couple of songs by a composer whose stuff I don't if I dig was more of a bet than I felt like placing. Had Roschmann not canceled, I probably would have gone. No major slight meant toward Three Name Soubrette*, you understand. It's just that there are artists whose names get me out of the house to hear a program I'm iffy about and those that don't. And Mahler 4 is (because we're all so crazy mad for ranking) about my fourth fave Mahler with the symphonies coming in behind the song cycles at that.

Now, do I want to catch one of these Carmens or not? Carmen is on the short list of operas I can't honestly say I care if I ever hear again, and the Met's production is beastly. Or one of these Bohemes, since Swenson is making a nice thing of this transition to lower lying ladies? Or the last Filianoti Lucia despite the fact that Young Ok Shin is Korean for Three Name Soubrette? I mean I am now officially the only kid on the block that didn't hear Filianoti. I just don't have the knees for standing as much as I used to, and don't you DARE voice that comment about kneeling that's floating above your head in a cartoon bubble.


*one of those well established categories like Hyphenated British-Tenor. JSU tells me this phrase is one of his. Hm. I dispute this, but not very emphatically.

When there's a craze for fims of actual operas, let me know

The Maury d'Annato Prize for Underrated Singer of the Year goes to...Heinz Rehfuss, because I was listening to him on my ipod last night and thought: why is there so little of his stuff to be found, and why don't I know anyone else that has tender feelings about him?

Not quiiiite about opera: the movie of Rent is, overall, a resounding disappointment. The first hour is jaw-droppingly badly paced and captures not an ounce of the electricity of the stage show. (Yeah, I have my reservations about the material itself but it was a hell of a spectacle when I saw it...the crowd seemed to be full of screaming teenage girls with a huge thing for drag queens. For some reason I find that cheering.) What's interesting is that the thing I thought would bug me most, namely the fact that they're all ten years older than they're supposed to be, doesn't really get in the way much. Alright, perhaps because I'm ten years older, too.

What instead bugs me most is the detail sloppiness, I think, e.g. if it's 1989 and you're on AZT and heroin, you do not have a six pack like Rosario Dawson's, speaking of whom? Not such a singer. Although better than she was in the painful Shakespeare in the Park John Guare thingy. Ok and the heavy-handedness where the musical just sort of (I can't believe I'm going to use this phrase) rocks straight through the parts that risk death by treacle. In purely musical terms, it also lacks some of the punch, makes me wonder how the folks that made Chicago did it so much better other than plain old greenbacks. What I'm talking about specifically now is making voices that aren't that great (e.g. Ms. Zellweger/Ms. Dawson) or haven't aged entirely gracefully (Adam Pascal who, by the way, could someone give him my phone number and adjust his sexuality if needed?) sound right anyway. I suspect it's partly a matter of arranging and partly a matter of studio tinkering.

Current listening: Busoni's Turandot, which I ended up having to buy for stupid reasons, about which I am retroactively happy because it turns out to be rather zesty.

The Gench, etc. (in which I still haven't gone to anything in ages)

So first I find out (I guess I should have known this) that if you buy a Family Circle ticket online because, oh, let's say that's all that's fucking left, you will be charged about 20% of the ticket price over again in fees. Same goes for phone.
I am you-know-not-how-cheap. Largely because I make you-know-not-how-little money. And then there's the matter of living sola, abbandonata, in questo popoloso deserto che appellano Brooklyn where the cotton, I mean the rent, is high. So I was all kinds of not into the fees, dragged my carcass into town at the crack of noon through untold service changes. I mean, for god's sake, I rode the Q train. Did you know there was a Q train? There is.
And then I shelled out the greenbacks and got seats that are apparently in the very heavens. So if the tone of my Rigoletto review is a little heady, you'll know it was the altitude sickness.
On the endless subway ride of death, I Genched it up on ipod, Leyla sings Maria Stuarda. Now, my eyes cross when I hear a certain breed of queen go on about how Nobody Sings Like Nordica Anymore...but the final scene? I'm listening to it again. I'd love to hear there's some kid out there with a trust fund that does not require that her career last long, and she sings like Leyla, but I'm not holding my breath.

in vino, well...

At JSU's instigation, an evening of drinking and arguing about Toti dal Monte. I was sent home with a super early Tebaldi recital on loan because, sweet fancy Moses, she was good back then. Anyone who compares Millo to Tebaldi will be assigned to listen to the recital in question, once at bedtime, once in the morning for a year.

Opera AWOL

Maledizione, I'm not going to get to see the reportedly gasp-worthy visual effect of the new Serban-or-whoever R&J at the Met, because according to the opera world's Dolly Dupuyster last night something broke and all that art unceremoniously sent Dessay and Vargas hurtling to the ground. This blog is rapidly turning into Great Moments I Skipped. I hereby pledge to attend Figaro tomorrow. Unless I don't.

in which I am pushy and not a little sentimental

So here's what I command you to do.

(Because we're such close friends and all.)

What I command you to do is go get a recording you haven't listened to in five years or so and give it a spin.

What has inspired me to such heights of chutzpah? Callas' studio Norma for EMI, that's what. (You asked, or rather, more accurately, you didn't.) The one from some year rather too late to be prime Callas. Which is probably why I haven't listened to it many times since I got my hands on it probably late in high school.* There has always been the thought: why listen to Callas in '61 when there's the Scala w/ del Monaco and Simionato, my overall fave hands down. (Yeah I guess if the Trieste existed in better form I might be into that. It's been so long since I heard it at all I'm not sure.) And really for the last four or five years I've always turned up my nose at studio if there's live to be had. Can I get an amen?

Also I've never been the ardent Ludwig fan everyone else with any taste is, though certain roles are almost unarguably fine. Such as Adalgisa, I must say. (Don't start with me, JSU. There are plenty of perfectly stellar mezzo Adalgise.) But I mean, who knew? A great Ariadne is hardly where you look for your Adalgisa. But there she is, caught on record, singing an exemplary turn in a not wholly grateful role. It's full bodied, distinctive in its plangent tone, reaches the highs and the lows. You'll pardon me while I hope in a time machine and give the 18 year old me a good thorough shake for not getting it.

Corelli, of course, is godhead. I'm not very objective about him, but here in particular, in the recording that made me like dramatic tenor singing, he is peerless.

I haven't listened to the Callas bits yet, really. I'm afraid the microphone may have been particularly unkind to her at this stage in the game, in one of those recordings that seats the listener somewhere around her soft palate. I'm neither afraid of an ugly voice, though, nor a total Callas necrophiliac, sending out bounty hunters to find the "Stormy Weather" from Elsa Maxwell's party. I'll get to her tracks eventually.

So off with you. Go pick up that Olivero Iris that's gathering dust because you could no longer stomach the tenors that squandered the honor of singing with her. Break out the old Czech Jenufa with the hilariously translated libretto but uniformly idiomatic singing that was naturally enough eclipsed by Soderstrom's. You loved them once, and in the words of Pushkin, love may still be there, not quite extinguished in your heart.

*Modesty prevents me from saying what year that was.

More Times

JSU the unamplified points me to an article I missed on Dessay. This is what I liked most:

"The English baritone Simon Keenlyside, who took the title role, says he regards Ms. Dessay as 'one of those artists that it is sort of unnecessary to deconstruct.'"

Maybe I'm punch-drunk but that strikes me as a wittily offbeat thing to say about one's fellow singer.

I think I have a minor attitude problem regarding Dessay because she's canceled on me twice, and we lunatics that haunt the opera take these kinds of things unreasonably personally. I can't remember what the second was, but the first was Ariadne that year that Lubov Petrova took over ably but not brilliantly, and ever since, a certain friend of mine at any mention of Ariadne taunts me, "ah, but you didn't hear Dessay..." I like to think Damrau was of similar stature in the part, but I'll never know, since Dessay I assume has dropped it.

[Edit: and she's canceled tonight.]

Whither the Traubels of yesteryear?

"Ms. Jansen, who took part in prestigious programs like the Glimmerglass Opera's and Merola, described Glimmerglass as both 'artistically a wonderful experience' and an 'opera boot camp.'"

This from a not deeply interesting piece* in the Times yesterday from the quill of Ann Midgette, but it made me laugh. The Young American Artist Program at Glimmerglass is pretty intense, but it's also about the prettiest boot camp you could imagine.

The article is about why conservatories aren't turning out big voices anymore, and unless I skimmed too lightly, it ignores a pretty simple point that could be made about the role of amplification in this.

Meanwhile, I have discovered the unsettling phenomenon of feeling I should attend the Romeo prima, not because I have much desire to hear Dessay's spin on "Je veux vivre" (which I don't much) or that I haven't heard Vargas sing in years and miss his voice (which I haven't, and do, but not with any real urgency) but because I need something to blog about. More unsettling still, now that we are so many, I'm going to be glancing around Family Circle--no, not looking for Dolly & Billy--sizing everyone up for bloggishness.

This feeling didn't compell me to any of the last week's three big events, of course. No Deb/Ben, no Tell (don't ask!), no Millo pep rally. Wanna make something of it?

*really, I'm not being gratuitously catty. I often like her reviews. And as usual, the point should be made: who's writing for The Paper of Record and who's essentially yammering on a virtual street corner?

Elektra it ain't, or: Pauly, you're in the wrong opera!

Ok. Hypothetical. It's 1973 and you get the neat idea to record Arabella with Caballe. Do you a) ruin it by having Oliviera Miljakovic howl her way through Zdenka, or b) no, get someone good; it's 1973, maybe Helen Donath is sitting around somewhere singing with flawless beauty of tone and could use some cash.
B, you say? Well where the hell were you?

a word of explanation, redux

Take II:
Before, it was: why I'm not linked to Parterre.
Now it's: why I wasn't linked to Parterre. Because I was convinced that my reasoning was lacking.
The first reason was that, well, tout but tout le monde knows where it is without my saying so, or at least le monde that's going to be reading this. But that's silly, because I linked The Rest is Noise immediately and the same is true.
The second reason was that I just don't write the same kind of blog. I have no dish to dish and I'm rarely handy with a devastating one-liner. Una piccola Cieca, non sono.
A certain trrillarina told me these were not reasons at all. Maybe I was just having an imaginary Oedipal/Elektrical conflict with the mother of us all. (Dostoevsky is said to have remarked on Russian writers: we all came out of Gogol's Overcoat. I always thought it would have sounded snappier if it had been The Nose Dostoevsky admired so. We'll not extend this conceit further, vis a vis La C, I think.)
So, my latest link: Parterre. Perhaps you've heard of it?

par avion

My favorite opera queen has just sent me, by post from abroad, "Notes on the interpretation of Donizetti's Queens" by Ms. Leyla Gencer, translated (from Italian? Turkish? Polish?) by one Stephen Hastings. It seems to be a talk she delivered at the Donizetti Society. I'm making myself not read it just quite yet. She is for now Schrodinger's Spinto: maybe insightful, maybe inarticulate. We'll see.

Why, we could fix up this old barn and put on Rienzi!

Ok, somebody please post about "The Debbie & Ben Show" and put me out of my misery. All I have to go on at present is two short text message reviews. I feel like I probably missed a buzz laden event, it just...didn't sound like that much fun. I figured if I did go, I'd enjoy one or two things and feel like a chump for blowing the cash; and I didn't go, I'd hear later on that they'd done the Dawn Duet and Act II scene ii from Turandot as encores and I'd have to put my head in the oven.

Items of varying consequence

Night after Night points us to a very disconcerting article about LHL's health. Yes, I think we'd all been wondering (and we still are, but if the Times is doing a story on it, it can't be a good sign.) Think thoughts of health in her direction, for her sake and ours! On the selfish side of this, the Met Futures Page has for a long while had her in a new production next season of Gluck's Orfeo, choreographed by Mark Morris. Can you imagine anything better? So good health to her and good Gluck to us.

Trying to talk myself into going to "The Debbie and Ben Show." They're calling it that, not me. Surprisingly difficult, this. The Siegfried scene at the end is the only part I'm really sure will be good. Voigt was the reason for my first pilgrimage to New York when I was a budding opera whatever, and I have quasi-religious feelings about the sound of her voice, but when it comes down to plunking down the greenage for a ticket, I must remind myself she's fached herself out of stuff like Dich Teure Halle, hasn't she, a little? And Weber and Beethoven, alas, I find powerfully soporific. What I'm really revved up about is for some reason her run of Toscas in the Spring. [Edit: It occurs to me on further consideration that a not insubstantial part of the "eh..." factor is the ugliness of Avery Fisher Hall.]

I have linked trrill, to which I once contributed pseudonymously, ok even more pseudonymously, what I liked to flatter myself was a peppy little hatchet job on one of thoes OONY evenings when they let Millo's fans indoors long enough (as Margo Channing would say) to take in a Puccini opera. Trrill isn't usually about opera these days, but the author's sensibility is--oh, my dear, if you're reading you know I mean it in a nice way--inescapably operatic.

every day a little blog

Oh, I'm liking this new (to me) opera blog: well sung.

Meanwhile, in the case of Filianoti or not-i, I can only think of the words of Dawn Fatale some years ago: I'm tired of going to Aida, quoth he, for the Amneris.

Now, I've only seen Futral in Partenope, and Partenope is not Lucia, but the fact is I find Lucia pretty dull and so find myself avoiding it until someone who rather sets me on fire comes along to tweet it at me. Futral was kind of disappointing in Partenope, so what are the chances she'll come bearing matches in Lucia?
So yeah, I guess until Rigoletto or maaaaybe Romeo, it's just me and the victrola.

un-post

Attended three hours or so of a 4.5 hour Meredith Monkathon at Zankel. No kidding. It was an accident that I missed the first hour+ but...not a deeply lamented one. Not entirely bloggable as opera, maybe not at all, except to say that Bjork (of whom I'm going to come out as not a big fan, before saying anything more) gave a corker of a performance in a short piece called Gotham Lullaby which I think she may also have put on one of her albums. [Yeah, I'm dating myself...everything's an album to me. The 78 will rise again!] If kunst and stimm there be in pop, Bjork Whatsitsdottir is in my book all kunst--the range of vocal effect seems to me, and this may be blasphemy, to focus now on whisper, now on growl and not much between 'em.

So anyway that all worked out nicely with her singing downtown art music, got up in a fairly conservative and completely flattering pink frock and little red boots she took off (surely a bit gesturally--why wear them for the fifteen steps from the side of the stage?) She gave a brief and moving, if automatically so, account of having sung the song spontaneoulsy in concert on September 11, 2001 after hearing of the events of the day, and then, accompanied by harp, delivered in the kind of tightly coiled, in-the-moment performance I'd like to see more on opera stages, wringing her hands and pacing with a little dance in her step--pacing not from lack of things to do, but apparently from inner reaction to the music that required kinetic expression.

Moron that I am, I didn't bring any kind of recording device (shocking revelation: I don't own one) or I should not be posting here for making my fortune on ebay! [Personal to Carnegie Hall types: note counterfactual nature of posting.]

Of the rest, insofar as I heard, Dolmen Music was the closest thing to opera. Regrettably, I missed the excerpts rom Atlas, her one opera as such. But Dolmen Music, without having words, has a lot of peculiarily enthralling interaction and vocal doings that stand in just fine for narrative events, especially to someone like me who at times prefers to ignore the libretto. Very accomplished and athletic singing from Ms. Monk's troup and the composer herself. The audience laughed a fair amount, as audiences do at everything lately*, because the effects are at times so outside what we're told to think of as singing as to be disconcerting and hard to know quite how to react to. It'd be easy to make fun of...fish in a barrel like Phillip Glass to the Simpsons. But they're sounds worth making and worth rehearing.

Meanwhile, I've been linked on two sites written by people far better versed than I: The Rest is Noise, and in a piece on Parterre by the Londonist's dauntingly erudite musicperson--both of which made me jump up and down just a little. But also made me think: dear god, I may have to edit the crap I'm spouting.

*seriously, I'm thinking of going only to the most unambiguously tragic theatrical events so as to avoid one day being dragged out of the theater screaming, "Why are you all LAUGHING!! Glengarry Glenn Ross is NOT FUNNY!"

Cosi.

Cori Ellison's program notes for the Met's Cosi fan Tutte, which I'm going to admit right now I didn't make it through (the notes, not the opera) began, as all program notes for Cosi must by law, with a discussion of that darned title. So hard to translate! CE offers up two possibilities: All Women Act Like That and So Do They All or something superficially more literal like that. And then she writes about how it's either a loopy comedy or--and actually at this point I sort of hooted with laughter, possibly causing some consternation among my row-mates--"a proto-Freudian nightmare." CE knows a hell of a lot more about opera than I do, but I mean, in all seriousness...

I'm gonna make a little suggestion to solve both problems. Directors who think it is one of those two things should pick which and bill the opera accordingly, and I'll let you match the title to the mise-en-scene, as either "Knock knock! Who's There?" or "Fuck!!! Fuck!!! We're all fucking Fucked!!!" Because I don't see how you could really go to the opera expecting either extreme and have a nice time or be remotely satisfied. It's just not hilarious now, if it ever was, and unless you were born in 1850, its commentary on human nature is hardly going to make you wake up screaming. Ok so annd then, if there's a director who's a grown-up, he can put the whole thing together a bit less simple-mindedly and call it Cosi fan Tutte and let the audience take the trouble to look up three goddamn words of Italian. Actually, Peter Sellars did a famously weird but also I think happily complicated rendering of the whole thing, and his suggestion was Women are Bathmats.

A couple of the singers last night fell squarely into the knock-knock school, to my way of thinking. Well, mostly Nuccia Focile. She sang nicely and put on a cute comic performance. The notary shtick was no more excruciating than usual. I have no real complaints but, yeah, I kept sort of wishing for someone else, something more. At least someone with a voice you can bite into and chew, aurally speaking. Marius Kwieczen, too, was a bit buffo for my tastes, but it was harder to get worked up about it because his voice is so rich and healthy, it's a pleasure just to soak in it. That said, the difference between a heartbreaking "Il Core vi dono" and a throwaway version is just that, just what he doesn't really have.

I think I should say, by the way, that I'm in the process of being critical about all but one voice, oh and one conductor, but really you could only consider the evening a triumph of ensemble and an overall resounding success.

You know, the audience seemed to love Frittoli most of all, and I'm not 100% sure why. The voice is there, and she's fun to watch, but if we're going to be horrible, picky opera people, the triplets in Come Scoglio weren't there, the low-lying stuff that makes it a bitch of a role were iffy, and what the hell is someone so young doing with a beat in the voice up top?

It's a pleasure, perhaps even an honor to hear Thomas Allen, a real artist by any account I'd reckon, and a definitively lovely voice, though it's dried up in places.

And I've saved the best for last. I don't have a lot to say about Matthew Polenzani except that at times he sang so sweetly I thought I'd die from it. Levine, too, I will dote on briefly: I didn't realize he had such effervescent Mozart in him, and was delighfully surprised.* Magdalena Kozena, on the other hand, I have a lot to say about.

Magdalena Kozena: Hot Mezzo. Yep, no doubt about it, she's cute, and I am notably not the very first to notice les belles femmes. So I at some point began assuming she'd be mediocre, a sort of Bo Skovhus with tits. [I hope in voicing doubts about purdy singers I have not offended La Canadienne, whom I have not heard in person but whom reviews confirm is rather more than just a looker!] Then I heard the disc where she sings in about six languages and was intrigued but not bewitched. Then I heard her Varvara in Kat'a and thought: aright, aright, she's got the goods. Then I heard her Dorabella and almost had to leave halfway through to have her face tattoo'ed upon my bicep. Not really.

She's for sure a dugazon, not a red-velvet-cake-voiced borderline contralto. But the voice has face, a distinctive vibrato. And technique to burn, it would seem to me. And she's an artist, a real one. "E Amore un Ladroncello" is the test--it's not an inherently gripping aria. In fact, at the mercy of most of its exponents, it's a trifle. Put someone like Kozena in it, however, and it is a spellbinding three minute story about love, the kind of material for grownups I started to go on about earlier. I think the key is you have to sound a little bit nuts, but not annoyingly so, like that friend most of us have who's just a bit too intense about things but once in a while you catch on that she's half laughing about it herself. Kozena as Dorabella actually reminded me of a real live friend of mine, and I find it's a rare enough occasion that an opera portrayal is specific enough to do so that I think I'm going to have to go and see her in whatever else she and the Met agree she's going to sing in New York.

Well, this has gotten out-of-hand verbose. Perhaps its a good thing I'm probably not seeing anything else until...well, maybe I'll go to Romeo et Juliette.

*Oh also I don't know whether to credit the fanciful but tasteful [what an awful word...all I mean is non-ostentateous, several notches in clunky kooky-ness below let's say the old Leinsdorf set] ornamentation to the singers of Maestro L.

Cosi?

Well clearly I didn't go to Aida. I managed to get too old to stand without an income to match my decrepitude. It's not like I can't stand for four hours but doing so and enjoying myself don't so much happen simultaneously anymore.

And now the decision is whether to go lean on the old velvet what-you-may-call-it for the duration of Cosi. I am told Tuesday is the last A-cast Cosi, and really I have come to like Kozena (once I got over my suspicions of singers who are that hot.) Plus all I know of Deshorties is that one nightmarish broadcast of The Best Little Whorehouse in Ankara. I've since heard she's better in other rep, but Fiordiligi isn't exactly other rep. Less florid, no d's, and yet...it really was the most aggressively awful singing I've heard from that august stage.

In far more exciting news, I was emailed not the expected Podles Cieca scena, but instead the Seattle Siegfried Erda. The vocal majesty of it is not something I feel up to describing right now.

Saturday at the (virtual) opera

How rude is it to say to people, "yeah, this isn't really the TALKY part of the library..."?

The library is where I get my internet, at present.

And so where I am listening to Werther from the Vienna State Opera. Actually, this sounds like it may be a studio recording, only I didn't think there was one with Alvarez. Maybe it's just really good sound. Alvarez notwithstanding, this was my third choice, but WQXR is now webcasting through some AOL dealio that doesn't, as it happens, work very well. So no Villazon/Netrebko Traviata for me. And the Beeb's website sent me some infuriating message about how I don't have realplayer, which I do, and so would not be listening to their Siegfried.

Werther is slippery, for me. It contains some music I like but overall I find it a bit unengaging. My in house experience of it is limited to the revival of the baritone version for Mr. Hampson. As some said at the time, it's like going to a rehearsal where the tenor is leaving out the high notes. Did not work for me. Nor did Graham's robust Charlotte.

Maybe it would have been more fun if they had hired, like, Podles to sing Charlotte and taken a really slow tempo for the whole damn thing and pretended the whole thing was being played on a victrola that was winding down. How's that for high concept?

Alvarez has just past the first tiny test, the leap of I guess a fourth on "paradis" in the lead-up to "O Nature." To sound idiomatic, it must be done with real finesse, and it was. The thing about Alvarez that makes one want to jump up and down and perhaps squeal like a little girl is that he combines the kind of legato and precision in dynamics to make that moment work, but can bust out the big guns he'll need for much of the rest of the opera.

Charlotte is one Elina Garanca about whom I know not even if she's a mezzo or soprano Charlotte. [Time lapse.] She's a mezzo. And perhaps intriguingly unpasteurized. Let's see how this goes. [More time lapse.] Yeah she's getting a B+ hereabouts. Good raw materials, deploys them with some chutzpah. Alvarez meanwhile remains highly wunderbar, especially in soft passages. Meanwhile, this being MY virtual opera house, I'm walking out after Pourquoi and and seeing if I can get Siegfried to work now.

God, it IS pretty, wintry music.

more links

And I've added Standing Room, which I stumbled upon via Trrill (which I guess I'm not linking because it's not really about opera anymore.) Lately Standing Room looks to be much about Doctor Atomic, which makes Maury just a wee bit jealous*, as there's nothing new and out there to blog about here that I can think of offhand. Ariane probably would have been interesting that way [No, I know it's not new, but it had that certain buzz on it] but it takes a lot to drag me to the State Theater, and honestly though we hear good things these days, Renate Behle was an early cypher in my opera-going career, a Fidelio about which all I can remember is she didn't fill the hall so very well.

La Cieca's intros for Unnatural Acts are hilarious lately. I'm trying to think what it was that made me laugh out loud today, but I'll have to wait until Ms. Behrens is done having her bad dream to go back and listen. See now, Behrens. That's a singer who can sound desperate, haunted, etc. The things I want a lot of the time. And no, it's not that I require a craggy, screamy voice for these--my gold standard in the scene is Steber...

Ok, what was so funny: describing the three brothers in FrOSch as "the one eyed, the one-armed, and the....lactose intolerant."

I just put a picture from DV's website of her in the Carsen production of FrOSch. That's not, like, illegal, right? I know fuck-all about intellectual property law, so note to people who own things: please do not be with the suing. Gimme a holler if I've posted something I shouldn't have and it'll vanish.

*though, truth to tell, it's not certain I would have gone, if I lived on the other coast. The disappointment of LHL cancelling might have kept me away. On the other hand, a certain ex-boyfriend probably would have strangled me had I skipped it, in this hypothetical other universe wherein I live in California.

sausage (canzonetta della salcice?)

Well then, I've gone ahead and created some links, led through the dark of technology by my friend with the unamplified voice. I'm happy to link to anyone who's linked to me, if I know you've linked to me. I also of course linked to "The Rest is Noise" as pretty much anyone of taste would. (Oh c'mon, that's not ass-kissing; I mean how likely is he to stumble on this mess of words?) And the Chicago Canadienne, who posts about life upon the wicked stage. And a few more. And more to come, it can be assumed.

Taking Out the Middleman

La Cieca has posted a FrOSch over on Unnatural Acts that reminds me that Hildegard Behrens has to be one of the most outstanding examples ever of a singer overcoming a deeply ugly voice by singing like it goddamn well matters. p.s. who knew she could pop out a c# if she needed to!?

It has been suggested I might use hard returns. I'm not sure if this means hitting return when I reach the end of the little frame here or putting an empty space between paragraphs. How's this?

Just to prove a point, probably only to me, I'm about to do something totally absurd. I'm going to write a review of tomorrow night's Aida before I go. (I'm celebrating a new job, but unti paychecks come sauntering my way, I'm a standee again I think.) And then I'll write one after. And if they're exactly the same I probably need to take a break from the opera gig, wouldn't you say?

There was some temptation to go to a later Aida with Ataneli and Burchuladze just because Go Georgia, rah rah! but I think it had Farina or something, and my latest Met Aida with Farina (have I mentioned I have seen this production like 7 times? thanks be to jebus that I like it) was not really an aural experience I'm chomping at the bit to replicate. Plus I'm curious about Licitra and hearing a new singer is always better than hearing a known singer unless the known singer is also adored. I wish I had an accent grave for "adored."

So yes. Review in advance. Zajick remains a bit of a natural disaster, awesome to behold but with no more musicality than last time I heard her in the role, which must have been 1998. The judgment scene, well, see my recent entry on the judgment scene. Something of a 100 yard dash with some precise and ear-shattering singing. An Amneris not to make you weep but to make you run home and sign up for voice lessons in a fit of envy. And yes, I do go straight for the cookies in reviewing Aida. I've never seen a production in which Amneris wasn't the more interesting character. And yes I know the opera urban legend of [insert African American soprano with an air of grandeur] responding to a similar statement on the part of the mezzo, saying "I am about to go out there and show you why the opera is called Aida," and sailing onstage to do just that.

Crider, who I'm thinking hasn't been heard her for several+ years (did she take time off singing, I wonder?) retains her slightly peculiar technique that doesn't sound like she's going to reach the highs but usually does. It's not an extraordinary voice, but it's not a bad one, and she's basically endearing onstage. No complaints, you understand, but I don't find myself running out the door with my shirt untucked to hear her.

Ataneli [I just checked and I'm wrong...it's a later perf with Delavan that has Farina. This one IS the double dose of Georgia. Have I managed to go on about Georgia and its fine culture of singing, much like that of Wales?] doesn't always sing on pitch but the voice is gratifyingly meaty.

Ok I think that's as far as I can go with this exercise in sillyness. I've never heard Licitra except on his debut recital disc during the Post-Pav marketing blitz of a few years back. Now let's see if I actually feel like going tomorrow. Otherwise we can all play like I went and this is my review.

Caught a few moments of the Liceu (I think) Gioconda as webcast. Actually my timing was horrendous and what I mostly caught was about two hours of intermission features as I waited first for the second act of the Covent Garden Fanciulla. Then I noticed the Gioconda was on, and switched over to that, cathing about thirty seconds of singing that informed me I had missed some of the best music. And then another forty five minutes of intermission features. For what it's worth, consolation-wise, I am told that "The Note" did not work out all that happily for Voigt, who nonetheless sounded swell in the screaming match with Laura. It's a bit hard to know, though. Broadcasts don't give an entirely fair picture of how a soprano whose many glories do not include a booming chest register ("totenreich!" was always a little bit of a compromise) is doing with a lowish role. Mostly, of course, I was reduced to gnashing my teeth over having missed "Voce di Donna," the Italian text of which translates to: I am Ewa Podles and I am yet again stealing the goddamn show in a five minute role. You'll note a certain similarity if you read my singing translation of Rheingold's Erda scene, but what of it? Anyway I'm promised a gigantor email containing said scene, so for the moment you can picture me pacing about like some internet-addled version of Amneris, long about the judgment scene. I suppose in some updated version she's perfectly likely to keep googling "Radames" to see if the Drudge Report has any advanced word on his sentence, instead of the whole "the stage director told me to look anguished and I am going to lose some weight while I do it" routine.
Meahwhile, the Laura, who at first impressed me as a bit loud, as the act wore on began to seem rather exemplary. I think her name was Fiorello. Wonder who's to sing it when Urmana takes her turn at the Metropolitan. Urmana has what sounds like a really healthy technique, to me, and ought to make good work of The Note, though I'm not sure she has a wrenching Suicidio in her yet, in terms of acting.
I mean to create some links soon to people who are actually knowledgeable and not just blowing smoke like me. My friend with the unamplified voice (see auv at this same site) has given me a bit of advice on how to do this.

more mucking about in the past because I have nothing to go to for a long while

One had always ignored the older Mitropoulos Elektra because Konetzni is said to be past her prime. Konetzni is, yuh, past her prime, but there's a certain grandeur to the voice. Moreover, oh my god. Between Modl in one of about three recorded years you could really say she was in good voice and Mitropoulos being as usual a fucking genius the very least that can be said about it is it has the prettiest Klytamenstra scene ever. No, I'm not stoned. Only by virtue of being a true contralto and not a whatever-the-hell-Modl was, which involves in part not having yet developed her low register entirely since she hasn't murdered the high one yet, is Madiera a superior Mommie Dearest. Well and perhaps Modl also hasn't learned the true art of hystrionic screaming, again because she didn't have to when her voice was this (yeah, I said it) luscious. So I am left petulant and bereft when what I can only designate as The End of Disc One goes by without shrieking, hellish laughter.