Oh hey thanks

Grnkh, I totally meant to do a Thanksgiving post this year, and then forgot to think of anything to write about. I am thankful that Anna Netrebko is moving into repertory she's going to kill in, but that's sort of boring, and anyway recitations of gratitude are a little numbing.

Oh, a youtube link. That's just the thing. Because actually the door is on the way to being walked out of by us, so...what would be good? Maybe a nice Sena Jurinac clip in memoriam. I'll post something I didn't associate with her, something I've never heard, in hopes it's new to you, too. Something a bit mournful? Here we go.



Well shit, that is just a snippet. I am not thankful for that. Here's something else, but in the interest of the door being got out of, I'm just going with Mozart, in which she was beloved. (I knew her first from the recitless Figaro from Vienna. Some people can't stand that it's been filet'd, but I'll always love it.) Here she is, having moved up in social rank. There's a delicacy in the first bars that's quite heartbreaking, but anyway, listen for yourself of course.




Happy holidays, if these are your holidays.

Oh, brother

The story at Parterre, though this is of course an ongoing thing.

I can't help but mock this. Changing the text, as I've argued*, is a very different thing from reimagining the work through radical restagings, and Not Okay. I mean it's fine...it doesn't actually hurt anyone, least of all dead authors and composers, but I think it's, eh, dumb.

Somehow it's particularly galling when the driving impulse is to indulgently correct for the political consciousness of people from another time. I know I sound like a hypocrite if you're anti-regie, but I still believe this is not what most haute regie productions do.

But maybe I understand the indignance of traditionalists better now. Like them, I want to ask "what next?" Antipsychotics for Wozzeck and marriage counseling with Marie? (This is a good example, in fact, because Wozzeck documents things about mental illness in a way nobody would mistake for some kind of approval of their treatment in the past the way Diane Paulus seems to think Porgy's creators knowingly or unknowingly did. And even this sidesteps the question of whether viewing something makes us complicit in oh never mind this is too far off track

Oh, how about a new final scene for Aida in which Radames posts "ZOMG am under HUMUNGOLOID rock" on fb** from his iPhone and his friends show up and there's a big final chorus about teamwork? Or like Dr. Grenvil is like "gurl, you just need some Cipro!" and it's kind of an important public service message about getting proper medical care etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.

*yeah, I know, this makes it sound like I've written it up in scholarly journals...
**faraonebook

ETA: Orlando Furioso puts it succinctly and well:

If one finds it problematic, leave it unperformed. If one finds it powerful-but-flawed… well, live with the imperfections and enjoy the rest, as we do with so many good-but-flawed works.

But don’t create a new work, built on your favorite bits of what the original authors did, and then forge their names to the result.

Funny in the rearview etc.

Yeah, sometimes I go back and read the blog I wrote. Sometimes I even laugh at the jokes. Narcissism: it's what the blogosphere is made of. Anyway I was reading this thing on traditional vs. nontraditional stagings and read this in comments from someone posting as "Ernani Involami"

You know, and I'm not just saying this because you made the Dada comment, but I really want to replace the "Giusto Ciel!" monologue in Adriana with sound poetry.

I had no idea how funny this was, because I was about 90% unfamiliar with Adriana at the time. This is very, very funny to imagine.

Other thing: people who know where to look for such things, you owe it to your crazy opera-loving self to track down Christine Goerke's recent Elektra from Madrid, and then you owe it to me to write crazy-ass letters to Peter Gelb telling him to cast her in the next revival. First I typed "her to cast him," which is slightly amusing to think about.

Anyway if my ears (and technology) do not deceived me, what she is, La Goerke, is perhaps the best Elektra of the last twenty years, like the best since Behrens let's say. The intensity of Polaski with easy Cs and perhaps a more distinctive timbre. Yekh, I hate scoring one singer off another, and I adore Polaski. I'm just trying to convey my excitement upon hearing this.

Riveting as the Foreign Princess in Rusalka, one of my 3-4 best nights at the Met, Goerke really should move off the cover section of the roster. This is prime time stuff.

Ignorance is bliss?

Sometimes what I'm most grateful for is the fact that I've only been listening to opera in the way that deserves a DSM listing for twenty years, and apparently have no critical faculties whatsoever.

I've been reading in Parterre comments about how last night's OONY Adriana was a fucking shonde, a dark chapter in the annals of singing. Well, fine. Good to know. In my beatific dullardry, what I experienced was something like this: an excellent night of singing with, if you can imagine, a few flaws.

Yes, Kaufmann sometimes croons. It isn't my favorite sound, but it's about 1% of what he does. I suspect it isn't going to bother us much in the roles that will be his greatest; it certainly didn't make any appearance that I can recall in his Siegmund. His enormous program bio (OONY is generous--they all get like two pages and are not, let us say, edited for hyperbole) notes an upcoming Bacchus, in which I guess he'll croon where everyone else does, but it fits in differently there.

When he puts the pedal to the metal, more importantly, the sound is just glorious. I think there's a tendency in very slightly staged concert operas to receive singers' performances as fussy, because the fact that they indulge in some acting gestures means we can't quite forgive the futzing with the stubborn water bottle cap, and this extends somehow to vocal acting. The overly turned phrase that might go well with an overstuffed fainting couch can come of as tacky on a very well lit stage with everyone in tuxes.

Anyway, to my ear what he does in Adriana is basically very stylish and his delivery evinces a good deal of verismatic abandon, if not the ultimate degree. It isn't Corelli, but it's that kind of thing, and I don't say that lightly. He was the star of the evening, as far as I'm concerned, and gave a memorable performance, even a great one. The covered quality some note in his voice seems to me to be a thing that either goes away as he warms up or you stop noticing it. Its main effect may be that you think "my god, he's a fucking baritone--where are those high notes going to come from?" And then when they turn up after all, and are like a giant hammer of clobber-y-ness, there is a happy element of shock.

There are singers you love to hate, of course, but Gheorghiu for me has turned into a singer I hate to love. I don't find her scheduling caprices piquant, and I'm not interested in her love life and how it fucks with whether I'm going to hear her or not. For a while, when it was less constant, it lent a certain feeling of "oh, now I know how Stratas fans felt" but in fact, this is nothing to be nostalgic about.

But I wouldn't care, is the thing, if she weren't all the things she is: riveting; glamorous in a meaningful sense that has little to do with her intermission hairstyle change but still something, ok, to so with her intermission hairstyle change; and as we were reminded last night, a singer of extraordinary gifts, if not quite the ones we might have predicted at the beginning of her career. This last is to say: I haven't forgotten how small she sounded in, ugh, whatever run of Traviatas was the last one she didn't cancel.

Great news, though: when she decides to let 'er rip, she delivers. I'll put some of it down to good seats and the acoustics of Carnegie, but I do think this was a different sound from those Traviatas. Luxurious at times. And even when not, filled with the same plangent tone as before, moved around by the same finely calibrated dynamic sense. The intelligence--if that's the right word--of the musicality is, yeah, at odds with the somewhat idiotic public persona. This is fine by me, as we're not likely to be at the same parties.

Again, dramatically an awkward hybrid. I think it's not so long ago she did a staged run of Adriana, but I'll venture to say she didn't do a lot of brushing up, and if I'd been asked to guess at the plot just from watching, I'd say the main thing that happens is that Adriana is afraid Maurizio is going to leave her for the Princess, and Maurizio is afraid Adriana is going to leave him for her music stand. There was a little too much genuine comedy in the quick embraces punctuated by furious page-turning. But isn't that sort of the defining aesthetic of OONY?

The Phaedre scene was deliciously over the top. L'umille Ancella was an easy home run, and the death of Adriana was the kind of thing that's obviously camp but secretly a little bit moving at the same time. Best of all were moments of unison singing with Kaufmann, because both of them tore into it. (I remember from my shall we say not-for-Carnegie forays into singing that you can do things when someone else is singing with you that seemed difficult when you were singing alone.)

Anita Rachvelisvhili suffered from the same thing anyone but Simionato might about the Princess of Bouillon*, which is to say how are you supposed to march onto the stage and sing "Acerba Volutta" cold? Warmed up, she sounds like a major voice, and she has an interesting face. I missed the Carmen but hopefully won't miss her again. Ambrogio Maestri is a walking wall of voice, and also, one would venture, a solid artist, so really my impression of the whole evening is that it was whatever comes after a trifecta.

Adriana itself I'll put back on the shelf for a while, not out of indifference exactly but...it's like La Gioconda if La Gioconda were 3/4 as much fun as it actually is. There are parts I love and will tool around youtube looking for fun performance of, and there are even scenes that, divorced from actual stage action, strike me as dramatically interesting and strange. I'm not dismissing it as schlocky verismo, because schlocky verismo is obviously great or we wouldn't listen to it.

The thing is I don't need to hear it sung again until I can hear it sung as well as it was last night, and that seems like it won't happen soon. (Except of course that singers are good in direct proportion to how long they've been dead and last night was a fiasco et cetera ad nauseum ad mortem sacro fuoco Renata frickin Tebaldi.)


*famous for her tin-foil-covered soup cubes, and so beloved to the OONY weirdos who get both a meal and a hat out of the deal.

The internet has one of everything!