My Favorite Intermissions

Book of Mormon

2012-01-07T12:26:00.000-05:00

The Music Man with AIDS jokes.

Oh hey thanks

2011-11-24T10:36:00.002-05:00

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

2011-11-15T09:41:00.003-05:00

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.

2011-11-14T16:24:00.002-05:00

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?

2011-11-09T10:23:00.002-05:00

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!

2011-11-04T13:16:00.002-05:00

Wait, what?!

2011-10-24T16:12:00.001-05:00

"[Wendy Wasserstein] wrote the libretto for the opera Best Friends, based on Claire Booth Luce's play The Women, but left it incomplete when she died. It was completed by Christopher Durang, set by Deborah Drattell, and is in development with Lauren Flanigan."

From Wikipedia, where it was just sitting, waiting to be perhaps known by me or you. I mean, did you know that?!

eRadicated

2011-01-16T15:55:00.002-05:00

RadCave: (n. geographical, contrast: Millo Pole) the downstairs bar area where Sondra Radvanovsky's militant fans meet to set the agenda for overthrow of world governments by means of entrance applause. Accessible only by a secret staircase. A not-so-secret staircase. Two not-so-secret staircases.

[Editor's Note: the author of this entry was found murdered, ears plugged with Met brownies as a warning to others, for revealing secrets of the Radvanovsky Cabal. Memorial services will be held at the Millo Pole.]

More of this, please.

2010-12-10T15:28:00.001-05:00

This by way of very tenuous tribute to Robin Byrd or something

2010-11-20T20:12:00.005-05:00

It's possible I've talked about this before.

[Oh hi. I'm back for a holiday posting, for sentimental reasons. It isn't much of a posting but it was an old tradition I liked so me voila, seule dans la Thanksgiving.]

I was watching the video above and trying to remember whether I liked Ildebrando d'Arcangelo much, which honestly I can't tell from the champagne aria. It's an ordeal, not an aria. I'm almost sure I heard him live at the 'politan and thought: I'm putting this guy off my list of people I'll sit through another [whatever opera] for, because I don't like his voice that much.

In this clip, I want to marry him.

Earlier, I was reading about Magda Olivero, which made me think of The Last Prima Donna, which I can't even remember if she's in it but my chains of association, well, if I'm still on your rss feed at this point, you are familiar with their less than compact nature. The Last Prima Donna, if you've never leafed through it, is basically a collection of people whingeing about why opera sucks now and is only getting worse. It's like the internet.

Its imaginary subtitle is Who Killed Opera? And they all come to pretty much the same conclusion. It was not the butler. It was not Mrs. Peacock. It was directors! Bad, bad directors!

This argument makes no sense, and is taken apart better than I can by La Cieca and her associates. But there's a particular part of it that's bugging me as I watch Don Giovanni and think about all those slightly pre-dead divas whingeing to Lanfranco Rasponi. And this is that their complaint is always that a focus on the visual has meant nobody does that thing anymore where...what was I reading lately where a singer said Caballe would come onto the stage and just stand there and sing and everyone bought it even though it was dramatically inert?

I think the regiphobes are making a false dichotomy. Because directors don't choose singers is the thing. Get mad at people in administration that make those choices, perhaps, but I am fairly certain Bartlett Sher wasn't like "get me Peter Mattei! He's really tall!" and even if he had been, everyone else wouldn't have been all "nuh-huh!" (Except that Peter Mattei is also the best baritone in the biz, so bad example.)

What I'm attempting to say is: you can have it all. So if you want everything to be stultifyingly traditional, be honest, say that, and attack every production that doesn't involve petticoats. But don't act like the fact that Mary Zimmerman still doesn't entirely get opera (and this many productions in, I will acknowledge, she should probably go back to other things) is responsible for the lack of great vocal artistry some perceive in our age.

Callas would have been Callas even if she'd been stuck in last season's absurd, inept Attila. (Not that she sang Odabella. I'm full of bad examples. I'm trying to write something else in another window.) Contrariwise, Ildebrando d'Arcangelo, if I'm remembering beyond the asthma-inducing champagne aria, is a little dull in traditional productions, maybe still a little dull (vocally) in light regie, but at least there's theater going on.

I mean, watch that clip. I'm not reacting groinally. Neither singer is my type. But they're actually interacting like two people, not like singing scenery. They're doing something surprising and convincing and, goddamn it, kind of interesting. There is motivation there beyond, as Terrence McNally would have it, "I'm going to sing a cabaletta!" This is not what made bad singing go away, if bad singing has indeed gone away.

I haven't gone to much this season by the way. Though I'm not sure I would have written about it if I had. I mean probably not, in fact.

(Don't google Robin Byrd if you are not from New York, by the way, and don't know who the hell she is. Not Safe For Work Or Much Of Anything Else is likely to pop up.)

Just for auld lang syne

2010-09-28T15:37:00.002-05:00

Robot 1...............................................Maury D'Annato

Robot 2..............................................Alex von Wellsung

Post-Production...............................Maury D'Annato

Paved with stars?

2010-03-25T16:56:00.003-05:00

Here is the obit I wrote for this blog just before Ariadne, though having taken a few months off, I'm wondering if my hesitation in posting it is a sign I shouldn't let it go quite yet. Anyway I love a valedictory, so put on Haydn's Farewell or Wotan's Farewell or any other you've got by the Brunswick, and if I end up posting tomorrow, you can't say you didn't have time to figure out that I'm flighty and inconsistent.

***

Five years is a long time to do anything.

Well it's not quite five years. Four and a half. But sometimes life hands you bookends. It appears the first thing I wrote up on here--no, wait, the first thing I blogged is what I typed first, and I don't see any reason to disavow the medium with all its idiocies and minor glories--was Ariadne. It was October, 2005 in the same beloved production with Urmana, Villars, and Damrau. "By the end of the best evenings at the opera, of course," this all began, "you feel as if you'd run a marathon."

The last thing I'm going to blog is also going to be Ariadne. [This did not turn out to be true exactly, though La Cieca posted a Wellsungian chat about it between me and the Squirrel.]

I'm not giving it up altogether. I've gotten too attached to it. But I've come to despair a little of writing another review of a production I already told you about a year ago and trying to make some little joke because it otherwise feels stale. And maybe more importantly, I think I need to be doing something else with my writing, but that's less for you to worry about.

So as far as My Favorite Intermissions is concerned, the gongs done gung as I am wont to say during actual intermissions. I'm hoping to write things elsewhere, if asked. But as far as this is concerned, in the form in which you have indulged it, I think the time has come.

Insofar as I leave you, it is with a few words from Onegin, always dear to me.

While all those cupids, devils, serpents,
Upon the stage still romp and roar,
And while the weary band of servants
Still sleeps on furs at carriage door;
And while the people still are tapping,
Still sniffling, coughing, hissing, clapping;
And while the lamps both in and out
Still glitter grandly all about;
And while the horses, bored at tether,
Still fidget, freezing, in the snow,
And coachmen by the fire's glow
Curse masters and beat palms togeher;
[D'Annato] now has left the scene
And driven home to change and preen.

This intermission is ending. Enjoy the opera.

With gratitude for your attention,
MD'

Next up: either a spring roundup or nothin'.

In which I am an idiot

2010-02-02T10:54:00.004-05:00

Um, yes. I wrote that entire review and did not say the name of the opera company. I have to have like ten hours of sleep or I'm not functional. It's very sad really.

dell'Arte Opera Ensemble. And, as an anonymous commenter helpfully adds, photos are available at the company's site. [www.dellarteopera.org, if that link isn't working, which for some reason it seems not to be.]

On with the show/Off with her head

2010-01-31T23:32:00.005-05:00

You know, If you'd told me I'd get my first opportunity to see Anna Bolena in a little theater with maybe twelve rows of seats in the East Village I'd have told you to pull the other one, but that's how it went down. I've listened to Bolena on recording for half an age and have been dying to see it. I s'pose you could call me Bo-curious. But you don't have to.

These tiny productions, like this and the Poppea at Poisson Rouge (which shared cast member Cherry Duke, interesting onstage in both) are not about note perfection, but often provide a kind of musico-theatrical satisfaction unavailable in a huge house. See it's actually more stirring when someone leaves the stage to be beheaded ten feet from you than when the same thing happens a hundred yards away. This is true. And I guess it's only in New York that a tiny company would put on Bolena instead of Barber of Seville, right?

So listen. I don't find myself inclined to review small company stuff the same way as stuff on a grillion dollar budget. Going detail by detail you might find things that are less than polished, and it isn't the point. There were weaker and stronger voices here, though I can't help but throw some verbiage in the direction of Jill Dewsnup, the bright voiced lyric whose star shone brightly enough for a larger house. (This isn't about volume--who can tell in a theater the size of a Dallas garage? She's just very good, and made much of the wonderful final scene.)

But meanwhile, the experience as a whole was utterly enjoyable. Particularly in ensembles, individual weaknesses seemed to cancel out, individual strengths to build on one another, and music usually heard from a balcony box to envelope one in the taut crescendi Donizetti, in his best work, manages to make stirring beyond the music's straightfoward materials.

I think this was opera put on with great affection, as if you and a bunch of your friends all decided to fix up the barn and put on a Tudor Queen or two, only somehow you magically became really good musicians, which presumably you mostly aren't. The artistic director notes (appropriately, in the Artistic Director's Note): "...we've tried not to worry too much about the historians and the purists. Instead we're just trying to create good sung-story-telling, being as true as possible to the style and tradition, and creating something that audeinces can appreciate." They have succeeded in this.

Oh, you know, I'm also going to throw a little extra praise to Matthew Anchel, our Enrico, who if my program math is right, has the vocal means of someone further along in his career.

For the hell of it, I will mention that I found myself wondering a little, as long as they were going with a spare approach scenically, if it might not have made sense to do that street clothes thing* that they do at BAM sometimes, see how it frees people up physically, though the costumes were made with evident care. The "Director's Note", to my amusement, contains a dig at the big R, the aesthetic we have all come to call Regie, so maybe I'm just being contrary.

Later in the year, it looks like they're putting on Konigskinder and, really, how often do you get a chance to see that? Put it on the calendar!

*ok I'm sure nobody wears what they'd wear to run to the bodega for cat litter and Little Debbies

FOUR WORDS

2010-01-29T16:15:00.002-05:00

LOS ANGELES
ZAJICK
ORTRUD

but since I never stop at four words: this makes me sad to live so far away, as someone who has often found Zajick a mix of staggering and a little bit mundane but who has on occasion thought "oh but I bet in Wagner...."

Anyway it's happening in December. In my fantasy world, it's an out-of-town tryout for an appearance in the Wilson Lohengrin (a piece you will admit is in some way we are too polite to specificy well-suited to Ms. Zajick's dramatic instincts) to star Jonas Kaufmann and Dorothea Roschmann. COME ON UNIVERSE MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Actual entry soon. I think.

!!!

2010-01-27T17:40:00.001-05:00

Friday, April 15, 2011 at 8 PM
CHICAGO SYMPHONY
ORCHESTRA
Riccardo Muti, Music Director and Conductor
Aleksandrs Antonenko, Tenor (Otello)
Krassimira Stoyanova, Soprano (Desdemona)
Nicola Alaimo, Baritone (Iago)
Barbara Di Castri, Mezzo-Soprano (Emilia)
Juan Francisco Gatell, Tenor (Cassio)
Antonello Ceron, Tenor (Roderigo)
Paolo Battaglia, Bass (Montano)
Eric Owens, Bass-Baritone (Lodovico)
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe, Director
VERDI Otello (concert performance)

Don't know from Alaimo but Antonenko and Stoyanova:

!!!

More on the Carnegie season.

Go West!

2010-01-20T12:21:00.002-05:00

Genuinely appealing seasons coming up in Toronto and San Francisco.

SF gets Mattila as Emilia Marty before the Met does, Hot Luca in Figaro, and a Ring cast that goes from strength to strength, Larisa Diadkova and Mark Delavan being two of those strengths. COC has a Carsen Orfeo, Jill Grove and the Radvan in Aida, and the splendid Ms. Bayrakdarian in a couple of roles. This is the time of year when Maury traditionally feels confirmed in his "travel is overrated" shtick. Not this year!

Plácido Domingo Announces Washington National Opera's 2010-11 Season‎

2010-01-12T13:14:00.002-05:00

Or so says google. 34 minutes ago. Can't get the link to work.

Ah, jeez. Ms. Midgette breaks it to us gently: "WNO's 2010-11 season to be filled with popular, less risky works."

Highlights include Racette as Iphigenie and Voigt as Salome. The rest--you got fingers, eh? Click like the wind!

Surprise!

2010-01-12T10:22:00.004-05:00

First things first: season announcements are upon us. Last year it seems to me it was Opera Tattler who pounced on them, so check there. Meanwhile, the nice folks at Spoleto emailed me (which I just now saw) about their season, now up on their site. Of particular interest to you lot, an opera called Flora:

"A wronged heiress, a faithful lover, a resourceful maid and, of course, an avaricious uncle play out their roles in the first opera ever performed in the American colonies. Flora swept the British Empire in the 18th century as one of the first ballad operas with lyrics written to the accompaniment of popular tunes of the time. In 1735, Flora reached Charleston and was such a success it was repeated the following year in the first purpose-built theatre in America, the Dock Street Theatre. Now 274 years later, Flora returns to the Dock Street as the theatre reopens after three years of renovation, in a delightful production that will thoroughly illuminate just why this was a theatrical staple throughout the 18th century."

What's not to like? I went to Spoleto twice as a teen, and it's divoon. Opera and chamber music in a historical, picturesque setting not far from the beach. It's like the next best thing to the Bermuda Couch Opera. Oh, wait, haven't gotten there yet.

***

Anyway, I crawled out of the hiatal cave to go to--of all things--Stiffelio last night. May be kind of dead-blogging it later with Squirrel, so only a word or two now, or maybe seven paragraphs.

You may know of the Bermuda Couch Opera, only probably you don't because it's an inside joke between me and J von Wellsung*. Anyway what you almost definitely don't know is that it is the BCO's policy not to perform any operas ending in -elio. To this bylaw was added a rider (I don't actually know what either of those words means) stating that in such operas as exclusively do not end in "-elio", no tenor shall be cast whose name terminates in "-ura."**

I had actually wondered for years about Jose Cura, because he made such a splash somehow with his early recordings, be that because of the color and phrasing that suggested a large, dramatic voice, or the pictures that made plenty of listeners want to sing beloved 19-century opera duets with him, as one not-much-used euphemism would have it. There are two disappointing facts for which, I assume, the reality of the opera house rather than the ravages of time are responsible. One is that the voice isn't really that big or even that present--some growling went on as the evening went by, but none of it made any impression at all. The other is that, for the entire first act, he sang with a kind of careless, maybe even sloppy musicality that won him no love from me or my klatsch.

God knows there was time to get around to any sort of commentary during the intermissions, which were as long as you've heard. My Least Favorite Intermissions, a line I'm surprised I haven't used before.

Notable also on this night, Andrzej Dobber who I heard nothing particularly kind about after his debut as Amonasro sounded solid and refined as...oh which character is which is this silly opera...Stankar? Not kidding as usual, that's an actual character's name. Michael Fabiano, in whom all of us at the auditions that year feel a kind of investment I'll wager, didn't have a lot of opportunities to knock anyone over with Raffaele's music, but was in swell voice and cuts a fine figure on stage.

Radvanovsky is a pet diva around here, so it won't surprise anyone when I agree with the enthusiastic opening night crowd. Opening night on a Monday, jeez. I'm going to start using the phrase "less fun than a Monday night Stiffelio" and see if it catches on. Let me know if you hear it like a year from now on a sitcom. Oh anyway right. I still feel like Radvanovsky is very strangely utilized at the Met, but I suppose Lina constituted a reasonable vehicle for her unique sound.

The thing is I get people's gripes about the voice. It's peculiar. The vibrato can sound grainy, if that's not too intersensory a description, and depending on whether you're me or someone else this strikes you as individual and interesting or weird, respectively, I guess. There's not a lot of mezzo-forte available. But the impact of it when she cranks it into overdrive remains utterly visceral for me, and the floaty pianos are not overused and awfully pretty, so if there's not a lot between two compelling extremes, I can't find much cause to kvetch. And hey, if her acting remains unsubtle, at least she's in an appropriate rep for it.

What I remembered last night is that the physical acting is secondary, as it might as well be in things with schlocky librettos. What she does, that I thought was what everyone wanted, is to find the pathos in the arch of a phrase, the "dying fall" if I'm clear on what Shakespeare meant by that. It's not a theatrical sense so much as a more broadly aesthetic one: this is not perhaps great drama, but as far as I'm concerned, it's great singing.

Domingo conducted and I don't really have to tell you what that means.

Next up: Bernarda Fink recital I'm not sure I'll blog because WTF do I know about lieder, and then dell'Arte's Anna Bolena. But before then look for the Maury & Squirrel show on like Friday.

*later inflated to a bit of internet weirdness by a third party altogether. Um, feel free to become a Friend of the Bermuda Couch Opera on facebook. Feel equally free not to.

**special dispensations may be made in the case of Anthony Laciura, but not Shura Gehrman, who I'm not sure-a was a tenor.

Yeah.

2010-01-08T11:12:00.000-05:00

Word.

Better yet

2010-01-04T23:16:00.008-05:00

Wish I could take credit. From the diabolical mind of Squirrel. Conceptualized by Stewball but then, er, executed by your favorite rodent.

(I tried embedding this about a hundred times and it wasn't working. Just trust me on this one.)

From the Funny/Disturbing File

2010-01-04T13:46:00.003-05:00

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

According to the site whence I am embedding: "An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you've ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it."

Interestingly, this is also the backstory of the writing of Vanessa.

Your auld lang what hurts again?

2009-12-31T19:55:00.002-05:00

With apologies for radio silence (save for one bout of kvetching) I bid you the happiest time on Maury's Secretly Favorite Holiday. (See, everyone always says aw jeez New Year's is always such a letdown, and you'd have to be kind of the opposite of a killjoy, more a forcejoy, and nobody likes those either, to say "no, as a matter of fact it's always wonderful." So I mope along* and then secretly love the shit out of New Year's Eve.)

Operatically not much going on. At some point I'll figure out how to post sound files and maybe post the thing I bought at Immortal Performances in Austin, or rather one track of it. Says I to Stewball, "I have a peculiar piece of Troyanos kitsch to send you. I wonder if you have it. I mean, you very likely have it." Says Stewball to me, startling me with his proximity since apparently he's been sitting in the dark balcony of my brain, "Is it the Pachelbel Canon or the Albinoni Adagio? Those I do have. Oh how I hope it's Rose's Turn from Gypsy." Sadly it is items 1 and 2, 3 being available only on a Mapleson cylinder. Mapleson being in this case Bogdan Mapleson, a janitor in Madame Troyanos' post-college walkup who taped her singing in the shower.

Anyway the Albinoni is particularly amusing. She sings it as if pouring it out of a cement truck.

In case you'd like to indulge in the New Year's tradition as is practiced where I whoop it up, or I guess I should use some anti-optative and say "if I may indulge it upon you," here is Madame Melba:

All the very best in this time of arbitrary but nonetheless viable new beginninging from the staff at MFI, which as you know is me and the cat.

*Oh, it's second nature anyhow. Mope springs eternal hereabouts.

Coming up: me trying to think about something to write about in January because I don't have a ticket in my name until February.

2009-12-25T09:53:00.002-05:00

Alas. It's my old tradition to post on holidays when everything is closed but I'm currently (oh, don't ask why) on a bus, trying to drown out R&B with Yo La Tengo as we wind our way along state roads. Right, and praying for death. That too. But I have nothing in my head that's fit to post. Happy whatever. "Happy day off," as a friend of mine says.

Look here, y'awl

2009-12-17T21:18:00.000-05:00

Lively discussion of the Met's Elektra.

Stepping up in class (or: My Life as a Parterrorist)

2009-12-11T12:14:00.003-05:00

Well if you're looking here for my semi-coherent musings about Elektra, I must redirect you. Being asked to pen a piece for Parterre when you are the resident scribbler of MFI, well it's sort of like the Paris Review called and said "you know those sonnets you wrote to your kitty? We simply must have them."

I will say this: it's a different experience writing something that may be widely read instead of doing some equivalent to sitting in your bathrobe talking about it. So perhaps I'll put down a few more thoughts in the house style (idiotic) back here when I'm caught up on sleep.

Jar of Eyeballs

2009-12-04T09:36:00.009-05:00

If you've ever lived south of Ohio, you are perhaps aware that the world is divided into two kinds of people; those who can never drink tequila again because of that one night senior year, and people who can never drink southern comfort again because etc. I was the third kind: people who could never listen to Tales of Hoffmann again because of a production in college that was, I guess, through no individual misdeed, the equivalent if a night of bedspins and praying for death on the bathroom floor.

As I sit here on the A train with Milton Cross whispering sweet nothings about Vina Bovy in my ear, I am a man transformed, renewed. I now recognize Tales of Hoffmann* as a work toward which I feel a mix of patient mockery and intermittent grudging admiration.

Oh, shush. I'm exaggerating of course. Who could not love the Venice act, other than maybe Ekaterina Gubanova, who sang it quite well but was tepidly received at curtain calls for reasons I haven't worked out. Who indeed?

Well Bartlett's Hair seems to like it, and get it. While I'm not delighted that last night's Hoffmann will now enter the cannon of critical cliches as this season's counterbalance to that Mean Nasty Tosca that Took Away Our Candlesticks, I can hardly hold that against the production. The Olympia and Giulietta acts, in particular, display a kind of ease with the operatic theatrical idiom that, for my money, Sher was visibly still learning in Barbiere.

The Antonia act has some regie clunkers. I am srsly not going as far off topic as you think, but did you ever read the Hitchhiker's Guide books**? Douglas Adams writes of mankind's general tendency toward unhappiness: "Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

I keep flashing on this, because at times I'm fairly certain Bartlett Sher thinks the stories of the great operas have more to do with the movement of large rectangular panels than I think they do. This happens in the Antonia act, and it's jarring, because the Olympia Act is pure devilish visual invention, in particular one scene I refuse to spoil for you but that I think will be much talked about, maybe the stage tableaux of the season were it not for the tonally antipodal coups of House of the Dead. (I'm never right about this stuff, by the way.) Also, please, if you are considering becoming a major director of opera at an international house, pretty please do not have a violin float down from Above when someone is about to sing "Vois, sous l'archet fremissant" because no. But I'm harping on small stuff that bugged me, and not the many things that went right.

Both of these acts, in any case, get some deluxe vocal characterization, though the second one starts out with Trebs' surprisingly blankish "Elle a fuit." I'm thinking if I were watching her do it from Seats Occupied By People Who Made Better Life Choices Than Maury (heretofore SOBPWMBLCTM should the topic ever arise again) it might have had some inspiration not visible from space, but I'm a little reluctant to invoke the whole visual/musical Gelb era debate, especially when speaking of Netrebko, who occupies a complicated place in that schema.

Certainly the physicality of her performance as the role grows more frenetic is unrestrained and (guiltily?) pleasurable. Likewise, the vocal engagement with character, though I don't think it's a moment of greatness for AT. The D, sorta greschreilich in rehearsal, was a bolt of aural pleasure in full-on performance, but it's not a style of singing that seems natural to her. (What is, you might ask, and I'd fish out my record player and my record strategically scratched to say "Pucccini" over and over. Or big Italian lyric stuff anyway.)

Hey have you heard people talking about the curse hanging over this production, by the way? Because of all the cast changes? It's worth taking a moment to think whether we have in fact lost much by the changes, right?

Calleja for Villazon, well, who knows. Villazon as a concept might have been more dashing in passages like "Oh Dieu! De quelle ivresse," but Villazon as an actual singer would have given us all a terrible case of nerves. Calleja, despite being thirty and not 100% at home in the role, did not. Perhaps he was tired by the end, but generally speaking, he doesn't sound out of his depth in the role. I went back and forth between enjoying the basic sound, marveling at how jussily he bjorls--I know, the caprino is a bit much for some--and wishing for a little more give, a little more (forgive me) swing. Maybe opening night nerves, maybe more. He's a fine singer and I'm happy to wait and see, though something tells me if we're talking about him in twenty years, it will be for other roles.

Kathleen Kim for 1/3 of Anna Netrebko is a pretty solid bargain. This would not have been a success; chez Mlle. Kim, it was a star turn despite here the smudge, there the hint of sharp. Good athletic vocalism, and an impressive ability to meet the role on its strange comic-but-not-actually-that-funny terms. I know already she's excellent as Madame Mao (Chicago Opera Theater, 2007ish) and now am curious if she'll find the shadow of regret that makes a Zerbinetta great or just go for the cute. Vocally, it's bound to work.

Garanca for Lindsey I can't say much about, never having heard the former. Ms. Lindsey has a fine instrument and moves well on the stage and I think I'm going to enjoy her a lot in a different sort of role. Alan Held for Pape I'm also not sure how to ring up, but maybe these comparisons are a little stupid anyway. Held was vivid if not mesmerizing in stuff like "Scintille, diamant" and...I just don't know the Four Assholes' music well enough to speak with even feigned authority about it, so I'll refer you to other reviewers for more.

I'm pretty sure Roberto Alagna was in attendance on account of this woman on the A Train Shuttle of Disappointment was talking fortissimo via cell to her father about having met him at an opera opening night, presumably the same. I couldn't actually hear her father's response, but I assume it was some combination of "how interesting" and "why are you calling me at 12:30 at night?"

Side notes: youtube seems to be particularly full of interesting Hoffmann clips including lots of Dessay doing her freakish, arc-welding*** thing and some more clips to make you go Why Isn't Robert Carsen a Fixture at the Met God Dammit? Maybe I should embed one of those since pure text entries don't really catch anyone's eye.

Next Up: ELEKTRA ELEKTRA ELEKTRA WHAT IS BETTER THAN ELEKTRA NOTHING IS, by Richard Strauss.

*I would very much like it if my phone would stop insisting on Goffmann for Hoffmann. It is making me imagine an opera called Tales of Guffman in which a bunch of yokels think Peter Gelb is going to attend their awful little production which is much like, well, see paragraph 1. But when you get back here, you can stop reading. You don't have to go in loops, forever.

**Embarrassing fact about your host: he cried at the death of Marvin the Robot when he was a little nerdling.

***If I explained it, it wouldn't be funny.

More holiday fun

2009-11-26T19:30:00.007-05:00

Let's maybe see how much blithering I can get in before I get tired of thumb-typing.

Recent outings have included In the Red and Brown Water, the cause celebrish play by Three Name Playwright, Something Something McRaney (nuh-huh, it's too much trouble to multitask on here) at the Public. Heralded in some quarters as an almost epoch-making work...well, I'm going to go all Margo Tenenbaum to Mr. McRaney's Eli Cash and say this is specifically not a work of genius, though it's high quality stagecraft done with fervor by an ace ensemble so it's an east mistake to make. Listen, the guy is 29. There's time.

Oh hey I'm on a real computer now. Where was I? I think where I was was emboldened by having seen the thumbnail review in the New Yorker to say more or less what an actual critic has said, which is that there's more vigour than rigour* but if you're just in it for a good ride, you could do a lot worse. It's involving and well-paced. I'm just not convinced it's awfully substantial and I am convinced it's not terribly new.

The Brechtian device of actors speaking the stage directions (paging the estate of Virgil Thompson!) never really earns its weight in distraction, but the language is piquant and the direction tuned in to the play's ideal momentum. And beyond the fine sense of ensemble, there's not a bad performance in the lot, though some are subtler than others, where subtelty is to be wrung from a script full of enormous gestures.

Oh, and if you go, and sit in the front rows, you may get audience-participationed, so be ready. I got terrorist-fist-jabbed by an actor (at which I made a face indicating "go easy on me with your complicated heterosexual handshakes. All I know I learned from Barack and Michelle." Yes, you have to have eyebrows of doom to convey all that in one grimaceous shrug.) and pulled into a high five of help-a-sister-out complicity on a funny exit line. So, y'know, caveat spectator if you're scaredy-cat about those things.

**

It's good to revisit a production a year later and evaluate it from a settled place of familiarity. Sher's Barbiere struck me as more facile and un-involving on second viewing, for instance, whereas Jack O'Brien's Trittico (alright, in my case, Il Bittico) seems to me a production that may later be thought of as the kind of thing the Gelb administration does exactly right.

And they've had the good fortune to get some casts that worked out really well. I still remember my delighted shock a year ago at the "why does this work?" Tabarro of Guleghina and Licitra, singers I thought of as past-prime who scored a real triumph in the piece. They're not, on balance, bettered by this year's exponents, but they're not shall we say worsed either. Ms. Racette would come back an hour later and sing a knockout Suor Angelica, but Giorgetta is something she doesn't have quite the right palette for. The style is good, and the acting can't be faulted. I think it's a matter of slancio, if I gotta be all Opera-L about things.

If you checked out the link a day or two ago, you know how I feel about her pal Aleksandrs Antonenko, though. For me, it's pure ecstasy to hear a tenor voice fearlessly hurled around as he does. There's really nothing else to say about it. I'm quite thrilled at the idea of him taking on some things that have been gingerly managed by Heppner or unidiomatically muscled through by Botha. Oh, excitement.

The way Lucic is used at the met mystifies me. On the evidence of his Germont, it's a sensitive lyric instrument of some quality, but every time they put him in dramatic stuff, it's just not great. I guess they're not drowning in dramatic singers but I hope they won't break Lucic by plugging him into this kind of thing.

Suor Angelica is Not My Favorite Thing, as I've doubtless made clear. I'm bored for half an hour then horrified to the point of disengagement for fifteen and then the last quarter hour is of course exquisite but it's like flowers from an abusive boyfriend. Still it's hard to resist when it's delivered unstintingly, as Racette served it forth. Yes, yes, she busted a flat at the veeeery last moment of Senza Mamma at the prima. You'd rather hear this role cautiously? Other than her riveting, truly more-than-solid/reliable Jenufa, this is the best thing I've heard her do. It's an honor to do the whole triple crown at the big M, and she proved herself worthy. Uh, and she was probably great in Schicchi, too, but I was having margaritas. You want complete reviews, read a real reviewer, bub.

Like the fellow who writes for the Post, for instance. I was interested to read that review, in part because it's become sort of a given that one will speak only praise of Stephanie Blythe, and Mr. Jorden (rarely one to throw a gratuitous punch, but never one to pull one) broke this rule. I mean I basically disagree, for once, about a lot of the plusses and minuses of this production, including Blythe who I have had my indifferent moments about and my fan moments (Orfeo!) but found pretty on-target as the least nuanced villain maybe in all of opera.

The curtain calls for Angelica are always a laugh because it's like "hooray, seventh person dressed as a nun!" I'm ashamed to admit that I have a friend in the production and was not 100% certain which nunly lines were hers since Angelica is not a work I've ever warmed to and so ever gotten to know in detail. Looking forward to hearing her later in the season in a role I know and love, that will be lovely in her voice and, well, she won't be surrounded by 40 people dressed exactly like her.

Ok there was something or other else but I'm all blug out. Next up is the Hoffmann final dress, which of course I will only comment on in the most discreet and politic way.

*I hardly know 'er, I hardly know 'er.

[ETA: Oh, obviously I was going to write about House of the Dead. Only I'm not. Monday, Monday, sometimes it just works out that way.]

The exact point of intersection between the terrible and the sublime

2009-11-26T05:36:00.003-05:00

Happy Turkey (Lurkey) Day, if such you celebrate.

I'm up at an unaccustomed hour--yes, Tallulah, there are TWO five o'clocks in the day--to catch a train. Brain not really functioning but I'm telling myself later on I'll post about a couple of things I've seen lately.

A wondrful tnor.

2009-11-24T23:19:00.001-05:00

Aleksandrs Antonenko, my new musical crush.

Yeah, I know. I'm not remarkably writish lately.

Placeholder

2009-11-12T23:58:00.004-05:00

Look, internets, if you're not going to cough up a photo of the exact moment from the prison drag pantomime I am after, how am I ever going to slip in the caption SURPRISE BUTTCZEKS?

Tags: only potentially funny if you like(/tolerate) Janacek AND LOLcats.

Two-fer

2009-11-11T14:01:00.006-05:00

Ok the blogging muse is not really with me lately but here's what I gots on two recent performances.

1.

So there I was in the downstairs gents' room at the Met (oh that is not where this is going, you beast! We are not that kind of blog!) when it suddenly and insistently popped into my head that perhaps if I started humming "a-amen a-a-a-a-a-a..." the next fellow would get a look of guilty complicity on his face and then pick up the tune and then, two urinals down...well, no. I didn't try it. I think maybe that kind of thing makes one look a tiny bit not right, as Southern parlance has it. (In the south you actually pronounce the italics when you say it.) You'd pretty much have to get to the urinal uh...bank? stand? just as a bunch of other giant raging geekosauri were answering the call.

Oh this was at Faust, if that wasn't clear. Sorry for starting the story in the middle except that there isn't that much story. A kind friend helped us get good seats; we had both liked the production a lot last year and wanted to see it with what was, on paper, a better cast. Well, sometimes things look good on paper for the excellent reason that they are good.

Ramon Vargas is 49. I don't know if this is a tenor's prime--really I'd expect it's past it, but he's in fact quietly sidestepping the idea of prime by finding the virtue in each era of his voice. Though he sang the ferocious Rosenkavalier aria earlier in the season without much problem, it no longer sound wholly comfortable when he sings in the heights. (Though if they cast him as Usnavi in In the Heights I would definitely go.) And indeed, he dodges the pair of C sharps in the duet here, but it was all around a more appropriate sound than Giordani made last year. The phrasing was elegant if more placid than passionate, and the voice itself healthy and sweet. Like bananas.

Borodina often strikes me as a singer who knows that her instrument is one that pavlovianally produces the word "opulence" in later descriptions and rests a little on her laurels. This is not a bad thing. Maybe I've never heard her entirely let loose, but I think of her Dalila, her Laura, and so forth with a nostalgic reverence that will be insufferable in about fifteen years. My first indelible memory of her is a radiant high whatever-note-ends-the-Inn-Scene-in-Boris-Godunov. Fortunately, this took place in a production of Boris Godunov. Unfortunately, I was rushing out the door to find the fabled Opera Quiz. Also a little unfortunately, that range hasn't really hung onto its lustre entirely since then--on dit that the chain smoking has not helped--but Marguerite is fairly safe territory for her voice, where it is now. I'm curious what rep she'll settle into over the next few years, and won't be at all disappointed if it's heavier, lower, Germaner.

Yeah, it was kind of giggle-inducing when her giant head first floated across the screens of this rather beautiful production, but the thing about LePage as opposed to a more traditional envisioner of stagecraft is that it isn't so disruptive if something's a little funny. It really does fuck things up some if you get a nervous laugh in the middle of a deeply literal production. Here, it passes, one of many moods. And the next one is awe, because she really...it's something about the phonetic placement of vowels in Russian vis-a-vis French, maybe, that makes for a frequent lack of perfectly idiomatic utterance but an extra edge in depth and pathos. And though I've said before she sometimes seems a little less than convinced by the material she's presenting (a slight edge of sarcasm in Gioconda sometimes maybe?) she never phones it in.

Ildar Abdrazakov had the stiffest competition in terms of last year's cast. John Relyea is at the very least extremely competent in this rep (I hear people say they find him uninspired; I can't say I do) but if I had to choose...I think I'd probably pick Ildar. Do you suppose when he and Olga started going out the Russian tabloids called them Ilga or Oldar? (Sometimes I like to imagine people in other countires give a fuck about opera.) He manages, by the verve of his singing, to make you almost forget that hat. That pen-hat combo. He sings the WTF out of the hat, I'm saying. It's an extremely comfortable fit vocally and characterologically.

This particular night we witnessed a slightly nerve-shattering tech fail, one of the many screens having a dramatic issue with authority, but it was near the end and didn't cause a great delay. It was jarring (and loud) but it was a total "on" night at the Met and I don't imagine it ruined the opera for anyone.

2.

Say, remember that time we all got together and improvised a fugue of "Why should I go to Turandot when the Met is having notable trouble assembling a worthwhile cast?" Well, I am improvising a countersubject to that fugue, and it goes a little like this: the Met has just assembled a fantastic cast for Turandot, fuck yeah! Right, I know, "fuck yeah" is not a line I can pull off.

I'd have to look to see if Lindstrom has any more in the run, and I'm sort of not having one of those days where an extra keystroke seems acceptable, but listen. If she is, go. Me, I did this whole Freudian parapraxis thing where I almost made myself late for the show because who wants to sit through a whole scant 1:45 of opera, even if it's like seven once the Met gets through with intermissions, when it's just going to be a rueful rehashing of the other casts they've gotten together for T'dot because somebody's gotta sing it?

I'm thrilled I did not. Reason #1 may be Giordani. I am finding lately that the radio accentuates the stuff about his voice that rubs me wrong (though the fact remains that his interpolated C at the end of Act II owes rather too much to a 1973 Buick trying to start in the winter of 2001.) In house it is strong, fearless, go-for-broke singing. Yes, I'd like him to have a few lessons with my roommate Abe from college* or maybe a drag queen about how to make more of a gesture out of gonging a gong, but I can find nothing else, besides that one C, to fault him with. Terrific stuff. Even oversang the irritating decision to place some brass in Score Desk at the end. Also, while I'm on the subject of tenors, I think we had a sorta pre-celebrity sighting, to wit: the terribly promising Michael Fabiano.

Maria Poplavskaya, as you have read elsewhere, has a voice that's strangely matched to Liu. Essentially a success in the role, and in its distance from complete success for me lay the suggestion that this voice may well be important to us in coming years in other roles. If memory serves, she's thought to be the replacement for Trebs in the Decker Traviata, when and if it comes to us, and I for one can't wait. A Friend of This Blog (well ok, just a friend of mine) once succinctly and mercilessly dismissed a certain soprano currently approaching ubiquity--alright, Diana Damrau--saying "you walk down the halls of a conservatory and hear exactly that sound coming from about a dozen practice rooms." Poplavskaya is the negative embodiment of that statement. It's a sound with face, with a certain built-in room for darkness and introspection. I'm very curious to hear more.

Lindstrom is a slightly more complicated case, I guess. It's hard to think what rep she's going to kill in, outside of Turandot, in which she's certainly quite exciting. The couple of growly utterances in the role, as earlier noted, are in an underdeveloped range, but it's tough to get too sad about it when the Turandot notes are so big and so bright, delivered with such a lack of the "oh shit am I gonna make it?" quality of basically everyone else I've ever heard sing it. (It isn't wholly the quality of the voice, you know, that makes the primary soprano in the run a poor choice. Some of it is the palpable deer-in-the-headlights-of-an-oncoming-orchestra effect, that could only add to the character of Turandot if you have a sort of Lars von Trier sensibility.) Anyway Lindstrom's bio notes that she sings some thing that might be really great and some I'm not so sure about, but whatever the case, she can certainly go around now telling anyone she chooses that she was at the center of a brilliant night of Puccini singing on this august stage.

It remains a privilege to hear the voice of Samuel Ramey, the moreso (do I totally overuse that construction? I think so. I'll shop around for an upgrade but not right now.) when he's singing a role where the sonic treadmarks of time are not only easily excused, but appropriate.

Next up: Z Mrtveho Domu!

*no shit, if he had a cigarette in his hand, turning on the light was like a whole scene out of Now, Voyager.

From the shallow end of the think tank

2009-11-02T11:03:00.006-05:00

I get these ideas lodged in my cranium and they won't go away.

So you know how singers do Tribute to [Extremely Dead Singer] albums? Dawn Upshaw's Jane Bathori thingy, Bartoli helling around with Maria Malibran, Joyce DiDonato's recent...

Wait stop there. Joyce DiDonato, you say? Me, I mean. You probably didn't say it unless you read out loud. Say, what if she were to do another tribute album where, well I'll give you hints and you can guess the theme.

1) She's wearing a white wig on the cover that follows the Texan maxim: the higher the hair, the closer to god.

2) She might also be wearing what one friend of the tribute-object termed "appalling American clothes" if she can be persuaded to doff her habitual good taste in favor of a gamine sense of kitsch.

3) Highlights of the disc might include (oh I'm just giving it away now) Berio's divoon folk song do-ups, a set including Pergolesi's "Ticket to Ride," and perhaps a bonus track of "Surabaya Johnny."

C'mon, you know it'd be great. I can't help it. It's my ipod's fault. You start going down a road of "mezzo...keen intellect...sense of adventure" and where does it get you?

[With all due apologies to the object of this game of vocal paperdolls, which we all like to play.]

Tosca II (Scarpia 0)

2009-10-30T14:58:00.002-05:00

Sequels are just never as good but I'll admit I'm curious...

A Boston Pilgrimage

2009-10-29T10:21:00.004-05:00

Not in the writiest of moods but sometimes I say that and then the tactile pleasure of typing takes over. And it does seem like a tease to post the Podles marquee and then not say anything. You might call it marquee sadism, if you were something awful. Anyway I thought it might be a lark to write a Podles review in which the word "cavernous" is, just this once, allowed to stay home in its bathrobe, so here's me doing that.

You know how I feel about EP, so I'll start elsewhere and you can skip the end if you're not in the mood for that kind of thing. For the rest of y'uns (is that a Boston regionalism or somewhere else? It sounds a little too rural, middle class and not Back Bay in any case) harken to the tale of Amanda Forsythe, a young soprano I'm eager to hear again, ideally in a context where she isn't done up to look like she's about to sing "The Grass is Always Greener" with Raquel Welch. Well now I'm just trying to be obscurely funny but truly, they were not going for glamour here.

Anyway she was pretty excellent as Amenaide, not excellent like "oh wow, Opera Boston must have spent a lot on Ewa Podles but it's nice they have some local talent to bask in her glow" but rather, impressive independent of other considerations. The voice is happy in the heights, effortless in fioratura, and, y'know, purdy. Good thing, because what you forget when you're a Podles fanatic is that Amenaide is a big role with lots of good music. In fact, me being me, I forgot that Tancredi is largely pleasurable throughout, containing a great deal of enjoyable music (here conducted so buoyantly, on top of that, by Gil Rose that I didn't catch Rossini Fatigue even once, which is rare. Gil Rose, CILMOW, for those of you who rely on MFI as the Tiger Beat of opera blogs. What, Conductor I'd Like to Make Out With. This was not obvious?)

You know how we go through periods where we have good voices in different categories, and I get all impatient because everyone's so busy shooting themselves because we don't have much by way of Wagner singers that they forget we have about a grillion fantastic lyric tenors? I am wondering if light high lyrics are now in ascendence, thinking of some of the swell coloraturism I have heard of late--one the bus back from Boston, for instance, I was reminded to do a nervous little dance at some point in expectation of Kathleen Kim's Zerbinetta as I listened yet again to Rusalka (she's one of the Hou Hou Hou girls.) Maybe not though. I tend to generalize in moments of what ought to be discrete satisfaction.

Generally the rest was well-cast also, though with here and there a misgiving. Yeghishe Manucharyan doesn't stand out in a world with Florez and Brownlee hogging the spotlight, but has many fine qualities of his own. Unlike those fellows, he shies away from Rossini money notes, but in the mortal range, sings a gratifyingly articulate line. Victoria Avetisyan has something of a jabby top few notes but sings with gravity and taste below them.

But I was there for Podles, as is known. I fear it may turn out to have been the last time I will hear her*, as her scrupulously maintained fan site lists nothing beyond a Wigmore Hall recital and, unless they finish the transatlantic highway by then, I'm probably skipping that one. I actually did the Eve Harrington thing after the performance and asked if she had anything coming up in New York or Boston and she was fairly shruggish about it.

She's not quite who you'd expect in person, by the way. She comes off as such a character in interviews and of course onstage, you irrationally expect her to be flamboyant even at the end of a long night of singing, and then in fact she is quietly friendly, reserved though also subtly funny. I gave her the booklet from the Italian Orfeo recording to sign (the French one is better but my copy disappeared five years ago and it's opportunistically priced when found used on Amazon) and she looked around for a good place to sign, eventually looking me in the eye to say in the world's best deadpan, "maybe on the breast?"

Shockingly, for someone who is rumored to have offered to make her Act III entrance in Gioconda by throwing herself down a staircase, she also looks a little frail nowadays. And, in contrast to her stage presence, which remains heroic, she has begun to sound a little frail. The head-wagging that in the last few years has become so pronounced and that apparently serves to fling the voice around her mutant oltrano range now accomplishes something like flinging, but slower. Flownging. Hrm, not so much. Anyway the notes are still all there, but the effort is greatly more evident and though she can get the top to blaze, for the early part of the evening it is sheathed, perhaps taking a while to warm up. This means in "di tanti palpiti," where you'd expect her to pop the most wheelies, she actually stays mostly on the ground.

But remember how she used to toss high B's around like she didn't care if it lasted forever? That it has not lasted forever is 100% compensated for by the memory of all that. (Phraseology intentional so you will know whether to try to take that away from me.) The commitment to go-for-broke dramatic gesture remains what it was, as does the rakish and frequent channeling of Alexander Kipnis. Oh, a little bit hilariously but mostly wonderfully, her entrance was staged in a way that, outside of an opera stage, suggested professional wrestling or an Iron Chef spinoff or something: a section of the back wall was raised slowly, the stage in darkness, Podles silhouetted by intense backlighting. Cheezy, but in the best way.

I just read Heidi Waleson's thing and am wondering if I've become that sort of devoted fan who doesn't notice glaring flaws, as she apparently found Podles to have all the presence of a hulking pot of kasha, but actually I don't agree with half of what she said so I guess it's just the usual matter of de gustibus a son gout. We both think Amanda Forsythe is a gem, though, as do the local reviewers I also just read, who tended to be more Rah Rah Podles.

Be all of that as it may, a certain kind of through-going glory hid behind the flaws and the shabbyness of this detail or that. My lovely friend who went with me is not an opera person, per se, loves Callas--as one does--and was persuaded by my nauseating enthusiasm to check out Mama P. Just as he shared my adoration for her, I share his appreciation for--and mind you, this isn't about camp or the queer fascination with the eternal feminine in extremis--greatness in its decadent phase. In the worn patches of this peculiar voice are the grooves and etchings of the moments of heedless generosity that made them and acknowledged, each in passing, the debt of bliss to impermanence.

And so I have heard, for perhaps the last time in the flesh, my iconic diva, this blog's muse. Many of you fans of other great figures of the vocal stage who will no longer sing to you (unmediated by our beloved but incomplete means of preserving what's gone) will know the melancholia of this moment. Of course it's 100% possible the Podles blog simply hasn't been updated and she's singing Annie Get Your Gun in Newark in July, but I can't help visiting the moment of sadness that may or may not happen because I'm like that. When a favorite is gone, there will be others, but none to occupy exactly the same space in one's inner life, eh?

***

Last night's broadcast of Turandot inspired a rather expected hateathon on the Parterre chat, but suggests to me that Lindstrom may be one of those freak voices that largely sits just right for Turandot. True, I have no notion of loudness from a broadcast, and yeah, there was something fishy about the "si, la speranza che delude sempre" outburst that raised questions about the availability of the low register, but I'm certainly looking forward with some excitement to November 10. And that's what's next up on my dance card.

*srsly I futzed with the tenses in this clause for a while and then gave up. I'm glad English has only the laziest of subjunctives or I'd be publishing this next month.

cold storage

2009-10-28T20:34:00.003-05:00

Last entry put in mothballs. Seems tacky to speak cheekily of the canceled.

Anyone in the publicity department taking notes?

2009-10-25T22:38:00.002-05:00

Or, as Nick of Trrill remarks: Laś Węgaś much?

Catch-all

2009-10-21T13:15:00.004-05:00

...as there are several things pawing to get out of my head.

Here's one:

I approach music that still gets called New Music, as I may have said, with a kind of hangdog "please just don't be too mean to me" expression on my, uh, soul or whatever. I try to like it, but I don't try very hard, and that's the truth. It's because part of the process of liking something is recognizing it, and though it's just the build of my own metaphorical ear, I know, I can't often find the voice or face or whatever half-apt concretization is least offensive here. This form of enjoyment is built partly on insecurity, no doubt: who wants to say "I love Medea Mei-Figner" when there's some possibility (admit it, there is) that at some later moment, a recording of Madame Mei-Figner will come on the jukebox and you'll go "what is this awful croaking" and someone will say "but I think you loooooved (with ironic iconic lengthening) Mei-Figner." I trust you have followed this imbecilic narrative and taken the point anyway: there has to be something to grab onto, some aural object permanence, or the music can't be your friend.

So I get especially happy when that does happen. There are two Bright Young Things that spring to mind whose voice I think I have happily made the tentative acquaintance, like that first coffee you have that's sort of an interview for a date. I posted a clip of Judd Greenstein some time back, because I found his "Hillula" interesting and knowable.

Now, because I am apparently the guy who is like "hey I just got an Atari have you heard of it?" I am introductorily onto the very talked-about Mr. Muhly. I felt like I should be is the honest truth of the matter. I had gotten past the slight resistance one sometimes has to causes-celebres and watched a clip on youtube which, yes, of course I'm about to make you watch, too.

Something of its mood was still with me when next I read his name, so I think we're off to a good start, me and his compositional oeuvre, and will maybe have a second date, traditionally an ethnic cuisine designed to show one's worldly appetites, ideally followed by one of the mints from by the cash register and then by making out. Except not as much when the talk is of music and not an actual second date.

Now that I've thoroughly worn out my welcome, I do think I should say a word or two about Rosenkavalier, but really, let's keep it brief, like a bad date where you sit in a cafe on Damen Avenue waiting enthusiastically for the rain to end so you can leave. Oh wait, you weren't there for that one. Fleming, as you have read elsewhere, has reined in a lot of the things about her Marschallin that are true of her Strauss-singing more generally and that have earned her a lot of fairly justifiable criticism. Gone is the fuss. Gone is the inscrutably-motivated constant dynamic change. This is all cause for celebration.

What is still lacking, for me, and I will say this is just not my favorite role for her, maybe especially in comparison to Rusalka which I've been addictively re-listening headphonically...what's still lacking is passion. I don't know why this never comes through, for me, in Fleming's reading, but it makes the opera tough to sit through, because there is enough about the Marschallin that's redolent of money and status that the unbegreiflich Herz that beats under the conventional persona must be glimpsed. Though I'm glad the cooing has gone AWOL (because in fact it never accomplished this, either) there remains a certain too-virginal quality in Fleming's Marschallin that seems to convey not passion contained by years of upscale socialization so much as passion contained as passion domesticated to the point of utter manageability, like flyaway hair happily responsive to conditioner. The moreso when her Oktavian is someone whose sense of poetry never makes it to my ear, either. In both cases, it almost feels like something [oh yeah, I'm gonna go there] that could be shaken up into something better with a production that wasn't so insistently traditional.

I'm not saying that's the only answer, but I do enthusiastically remember what seems to me to have been the greater sincerity of Fleming's body language in the more-or-less modern dress of Capriccio at last season's opener. There's just something so all-around corseted about these characters' interactions, at this moment, in this production, that feels stifling to me, and I feel almost certain it could be otherwise. Am I alone in this? Miah Persson, by the way, has exactly the right voice for Sophie, not too busy stretching toward a note to bloom, and aurally conveyable intelligence, to boot, but perhaps lacks that last degree of musical personality that would have rescued this for me and made it, ahem, a three-act Rosenkavalier rather than a two-acter. It was a good time, all in all, but it takes more than that nowadays to make me miss the last uptown express, some worknights, at least for an opera whose third act begins with several hours, experientially speaking, of tedium before twelve minutes of heaven. And a local train.

See, this is also where I could mention Regina Spektor at Radio City, but it's a bit much at this point. Suffice it to say I started to mention her above, because in some better world, pop singers, who often know how to connect bodily with their music, might be engaged to offer master classes in same at opera companies. It is, in some ways, a more powerful thing to watch someone perform her own compositions to a hall of people allowed to do more screaming than to watch people sing music with a lot of socioeonomically prescriptive baggage to a room with a lot of rules. There is more freedom, of course, and it's not fair to compare the two things. But watching what must have been a very emotional experience (play a huge, famous hall in your hometown, singing things you came up with to people shouting your fucking name!) it was impossible not to long for some transfusion of energy from this night of song to the other, in the opera house. Yes, well, and the ability to take one's alcoholic beverage into Radio City would not be such a terrible thing, either...

(On the topic of Perssons. Or Peoplle, I guess. Chain of association. Miah Persson->Nina Persson. Is everyone in Scandinavia blond and can I be Scandinavian next time?)

Oh great

2009-10-16T17:51:00.003-05:00

Is it all this good? Am I going to have to go through something on the scale of my Gencerjahr, skulking about in the dark corners of record stores looking for her single pirated aircheck of Praskovija di Broad Channel? Oh, Raina, my as-of-eight-minutes-ago Bulgar enchantress!

The mark of the true fan...

2009-10-13T18:15:00.001-05:00

...Ms. Baranski, is showing up not just for the red carpeted season opener, but for a Tuesday night Rosenkavalier prima!

Wallace Shawn on Art and Politics, More or Less

2009-10-07T10:48:00.006-05:00

Transcribed from introductory remarks at a signing/Q&A/screening of My Dinner with Andre at the Avon Theater in Stamford, Connecticut. Wallace Shawn, one of my intellectual heros (am I an asshole for using that phrase?), addresses the topic, more or less, of how his writing became political.

Well basically, and by the way, if you don’t care, I understand that. In other words, why should you, in a way, except for some reason you’ve chosen to come here and so the topic of me is, in a way, inevitable.

Basically after My Dinner With Andre...My Dinner With Andre was basically a success. A large number of people liked that movie, and I’d never done anything successful before and it was much more successful than anything I’ve done subsequently. So, I suppose the mere fact of having done something that was a little bit successful or well-liked maybe took a bit of the pressure off of me and led to the later thoughts that I had, in a certain way.

So I wrote a play* about five years later and it was being done in London. And the director was having a very hard time making the play work in rehearsal. And he basically said to me words to the effect that "I don’t think this is going to work. I think it’s going to be, well, terribly boring for the audience and basically unbearable." And I had a strange reaction to that.

I thought: hm. I guess I don’t have talent, but I wonder why I ever thought that I did. And I thought: well, I think that’s because my teachers in school always made a fuss over me. But if I had no special ability, why did they do that? Well, it must be because I went to a very nice private school and they were paid to flatter the students. And somehow that thought carried me down some kind of a path where I began questioning certain things about myself and my own cheerful complacency about life, and I had other thoughts about my childhood in my private school and the very privileged neighborhood that school was in.

And I realized that, well...I’d asked my parents when I’d seen a group of children in the park who weren’t dressed the way I was dressed, and they seemed dirty, and they looked sort of thin and blotchy. I sort of said who are those children? What’s their problem? What’s going on? And my parents said something to the effect of “well, I mean, they’re poor!” And I thought: oh, what is that, I wonder?

And I suppose that parents, if they are raising children in a privileged way and the child asks why are other children poor, I suppose the parent has to either say “well, it’s because the world is very, very unjust and people like us are unfairly advantaged, basically because, you know, our ancestors somehow managed to steal and we got to keep what they stole, and others are disadvantaged and oppressed,” or they can say, in effect, “well, some people are, you know, so terrific that they actually deserve a bit more and others have something a little bit wrong with them so they deserve a little bit less.” Because those are really the only two answers to that question, and of course most parents don’t want to go near it. And mine didn’t really answer me.

But the implicit answer was the second one, really. Because what else is a kid supposed to think? Unless he’s told that it’s a crime, and is unjust, he’s going to believe that probably he deserves it, and that must be because he’s a little bit superior and other people are a little bit inferior.

And now I don’t believe that anymore. And so I’ve gone in the direction of identifying with the people who are poor, crushed, less privileged. And I do think that the reason that I am privileged is basically because of theft, because I don’t really, I don’t actually believe in any of the justifications for inequality such as, you know, well, I worked harder.

Because I don’t say that I’ve never worked a day in my life, although some people could say that, in a way. Because writing and acting are quite enjoyable. But, I mean, compared to actual work, where you’re working in a coal mine or even in a bank...but, I know I don’t work any harder than somebody who does work in a coal mine and yet somehow it’s worked out so that I get paid more than the guy in the coal mine. And the people in the coal mines actually don’t think it’s fair. They might rebel, and so they’re kept in their place by force, violence, torture, what have you.

Anyway, this is the journey that I’ve taken that led me basically into writing my essays and those of you who belong to the tiny cult of people who follow theater, I also write plays, and some of my plays deal with these topics. And you can see weird roots of it in the movie. And Andre of course is encouraging me to, you know, not be so contented really.

*timing-wise, I'd say this would have to be Aunt Dan and Lemon which is from 1985.

Extra Credit: The internet has everything, as usual! Need a webpage listing scenes in movies where people eat soup? There's an app for that! Fortunately, no reference to the worst line in any opera libretto ever, which also involved soup. I guess HD moviecasts don't count. If you do can't guess how I got to this page, you are not a real Wallace Shawn fan and cannot be part of my fan club.

Myths of the Traditionalists, or: Being Offended Does Not Make You Right (A musical huff in five parts)

2009-09-23T13:32:00.006-05:00

1) Directors reënvisioning canonical works do not do so because they think the work isn't good enough to hold our interest. I'm particularly weary of the "what, Figaro isn't good enough for you?" cavil. It's either disingenuous or intellectually lazy.

2) Art that we don't fully understand is not meant to belittle us. I have never been able to make much sense of what's going on in that one bit of Act II of Nixon in China but I'm pretty sure Peter Sellars and Alice Goodman are not sitting in a bar somewhere laughing about me. Actually Alice Goodman is now a priest or something so maybe she is not allowed to drink in the first place. I don't really know the rules.

3) It is possible to have good ideas for directing opera without having a musicologist's understanding of the score or decades of experience in opera. Purely subjective example here, but Mark Morris is musically literate enough that he has conducted an orchestra, and if you ask me, his Orfeo shows no evidence of an aesthetic connection with the work outside of the dance sections and no evident feel for coherent stage pictures on the level of place as opposed to person. Whereas I don't believe Anthony Minghella was even a musician, and I'm fairly certain Butterfly was his first opera, and it remains the finest production perhaps of the decade, certainly of the Gelb era so far.

4) It is not a slippery slope from doing a radical restaging to rewriting your beloved opera. That is really not likely to happen. I'm sure someone did it somewhere, sometime...like gerbilling! That does not mean you need to hide at home lest someone sneak up on you with a rodent/a version of Andrea Chenier where the text has been replaced by Dadaist found poetry from the C section of the Pittsburgh phone book.

and of course

5) That old production you are so fond of is not the embodiment of the composer's wishes. Nothing is, and nothing should be. I have already bitched about this but I'll say a few words more: performed art is dynamic and involves interpretation. That old production of La Gioconda you love loses none of its creaky charm and will be fondly remembered even if someone decides maybe there are other ways Gioconda might look.

I get that this probably sounds preachy. If you feel preached at and are thus turned off and the more entrenched in your traditionalism, then this was a stupid thing to write. Fortunately, the seven people who read this tend to agree with me on this kind of thing, so I think no harm is done.

Candle shtick

2009-09-22T09:03:00.013-05:00

The thing is it's always a mistake not to dump everything out of the, uh, vast basin of my brain immediately upon returning to my palazzo, because the next day it's sort of like "right, so there were a few famous people and then everyone got vocally upset for reasons I don't wholly understand. The End." But here goes.

Remember that time the Met put on a not particularly reverent production of an Italian opera heartily beloved by the kind of opera fans who refer to 19th century art song singers by their first name and expect you to know who they're talking about and this production was recieved as shocking and insulting instead of what it actually was which was inept more than anything and the opera fans a few clauses back got up in the production team's grill insofar as that is possible from a great distance which basically meant howling their disapproval like somewhat less masculine football fans?

Because that happened again. But much, much louder, and earlier in onset. We knew there was trouble a-brewin' when there was scattered howling after Act II. Um, there was also scattered howling in Act II. More on that. But here I am going to be the worst opera blogger ever and, am I going to be this tiresome? I am. I'm gonna quote myself. Because things happen first at Parterre, naturally, and one of these was an exhaustive, or at least exahusting, discussion of whether or not it is kosher for directors to get all "oh yes I did" about what I'm going to go ahead and label "authorial intent" and then tilt my head in such a way that you know I am not a finger-quotes kind of gal but distancing myself from the idea nonetheless. Also in such a way that you can see my new haircut. Thanks, yeah, just some pomade. No, I like Mad Men ok but I'm not trying to look like him. Much.

See the problem here is that Tosca, like many operas, has some traditions you are not allowed to fuck with*. Don't fuck with the candles and don't fuck with the jump would be two good rules for not getting pelted with verbal tomatos when you're putting on Tosca. Luc Bondy fucked with both of these, as you have almost doubtless read. And a few more things, besides, but I think these were what you'd call the "top charge" if your day job involved reading people's rap sheets. Anyway I'm pretty sure these are the two that got him in trouble.

So how Act II ends is...actually, wait, how Act II begins is Scarpia is helling it up with some pretty hilarious silent-character hookers, and this part is lame in a dozen ways and could stand to be rethunk and edited out. They're part of the "a little from this era; a little from that era" aesthetic that even I find hard to make much sense of. I think they're wearing leg-warmers. Then the usual stuff happens--and I really do think it's worth noting the difference between taking liberties with details and taking liberties with substance, though I'd probably be fine with the latter in some cases. But it's a distinction that's jettisoned in this conversation quite often and it bugs me.

For instance how Act II ends is that Tosca, having dispatched Scarpia and yelled the name of a minor opera blogger, fails to engage in century-old candle schtick because there are no candles onstage (to judge by the other stuff onstage, this may be because Ikea wasn't making candlesticks that season.) Instead she goes to the window, visibly considers taking a header an act early and heading back to the hotel for some delicious Finnish food made with herring and umlauts, and once she's decided against that, she picks up Attavanti's fan and slowly fans herself in a rather "oh shit" manner. That's it. That's where it all turned into a giant slap in the face for some.

A sensible objection I heard voiced is that she should be getting the hell out of there since she just murdered the big guy, but I'm pretty sure the point of the entire way the scene is played is to give us a Tosca who is really derailed by what she's just done and not thinking straight, which is valid. It's not the standard read of the scene, of course. But here's where I start feeling like this is all a bunch of inchoate indignation, anger at this production standing in for other woes, well familiar now from the tempest in a teapot we put up our umbrellas for every few years. To those who find this Tosca wrong by virtue of being so radical I want to say:

[begin recycling text from tl;dr comments section argument!] It’s just such an obvious fallacy that there’s this platonic ideal of exactly how everything should go in a production that matches the composer’s infitely detailed intentions. Like it or not, we know some of what a composer intended and not the rest. Music and text tell us a good deal and also leave a good deal up to others to interpret. The rest of what people espouse when they get hot under the collar about authorial intent is largely a projection of what they want to see.

Look, performed arts are collaborative, and there’s no way around it. If you’re unable to cope with the idea of consuming art that is not one person’s unadulterated vision, go to a gallery or read a book (and try to forget that some ambiguity creeps in even there, because you may not percieve the work as the author intended it.)

The traditionalists here frame this in terms of right and wrong, which leads to the conclusion that, choosing an example already discussed, the crowds that sell out a house to see the once-reviled Wilson Lohengrin are wrong in what they like and want. This would be insulting if it weren’t so flimsily argued.

If I were to take issue with some of the productions of recent years, it might be that their vision is too much of a compromise. The Wilson Lohengrin succeeds because it has an unmistakeable point of view and the strength of its convictions. The Bondy Tosca is not wrong for being radical; it’s flawed (with some strenghts as well) for not having “face”–it could be a traditional production with stronger personregie or a more thorough rethinking that didn’t basically cleave to audience expectations. Either would be better, though it’s not awful as it is. [end recycling]

And in fact, on this viewing (having gone to the open rehearsal as well), I find the lack of vision more troubling than I did before. There isn't a lot going on here beyond one or two memorable tableaux. The changes that are made are either insubstantial or, in a couple of cases, clumsy and uninteresting (the problem with having Scarpia get to second base with the Virgin Mary isn't that it might shock good churchgoing folk. It's that it's king of an obvious idea and hard to stage in a way that isn't humorous.)

There isn't a lot of insight on display and one doesn't feel the singers were steered toward a good deal of psychological detail beyond their own instincts...Mattila is doing her usual thing that you either love or hate, Gagnidze puts a lot into his sung characterization and gamely goes through some formulaic "Scarpia's real gross" motions that bring nothing new, and Alvarez is a tenor. Maybe these deficiencies would be highlighted less on the familiar old comfy couch that is Zef's production instead of the mostly drab canvas of Bondy's physical setting. Me, I'm alright with it, if not enthusiastic. I'm preemptively bemused that, like last time with Sonnambula, this will make me look like the passionate champion of this production. Anyway, I liked a few of the bold gestures that were there and can live with the rest as long as the singing is good?

Say, Maury. Was the singing good?

The singing was good. In some cases it was extra special good. Starting with the most provisionally good...

There is no way around the fact that Tosca is not now and probably was never truly Mattila's role. The voice isn't shaped right, and all her intense musicality in the things she's great in just doesn't seem to translate into a genuine feel for how to shape a phrase of Italian opera. It's not a disaster on that count, but it's not a major achievement. And the chalky thing that goes on in the top few notes of her voice just does not work out in this material, even though it's only a real problem a couple of times. It's a piece of bad luck, I guess, but one of those times is the central vocal moment of the opera, the last phrase of "Vissi d'darte." You can scream the C in the cantata, and you can scream the C after Mario gets dragged off, and you can kind of scream the whatever-that-note-is when she's regaling Mario with the one about the time she killed Scarpia, but it is a big drag if you have to shout the end of the aria. By force of will, she made the notes happen, but they were not enjoyable listening. All that said, she made a certain amount of the role her own, chested the hell out of the chest parts, and created a coherent and distinctive character, by no stretch the generalized diva you often get. I have to score it as an interesting mistake with moments of real success in it.

It didn't help her that she was singing with/against Marcelo Alvarez, who suddenly deserves to be the house's go-to guy for Puccini. I don't remember being wholly convinced by his Manrico, though I liked it, but after a nervous start with some chopping away at the phrases of "Recondita armonia," Alvarez did pretty much everything right, including some sobbing tenorizing I have missed in recent years, but more prominently just a lot of punch in his phrasing and a big league large-lyric-or-hell-maybe-spinto sound. I guess I'm a German-opera queen at heart, because "E lucevan" tends to find me mentally alphabetizing the valkyries and things like that, but last night after a couple of phrases I was practically humming along. Like those people we wish would die in a fire.

George Gagnidze was, ok, actually my favorite. And not just because he was a humble cover, called upon to step into the deeply inadequate shoes of Juha Uusitalo, who withdrew on account of why did they hire him in the first place. Sitting in Fam Circ box because I'm just not that fancy, it was sometimes hard to hear him because of the orch/singer balance up there, but another balance was more felicitous, that of musical line and vocal characterization. Scarpia is tough on that count, right? You have to get it across that you're everything along the spectrum from morally irredeemable to icky without turning the role into Wozzeck on one hand or Benoît on the other. Gagnidze was, first of all, game for all the OTT chazzerei Bondy demanded of him as a physical actor, and at the same time conveyed the character's squickogenic nature with vocal shadings but without resorting to the barking you do sometimes hear. I hope he's signed up for more at the Met, and not just covering, as I'd love to hear him again. (I'm not terrifically optimistic about this, thinking about some covers who have seriously saved the Met's bacon in stuff like Tristan and Agyptische Helena and not exactly been handed the keys to the city.)

Levine continues to get a hero's welcome from the minute he steps out of that dark, mysterious hallway that turns out to come out somewhere near the cafeteria, so much for mystery. As well he should, having made the Met's orchestra what it is. But for the sake of nuance, it is worth admitting that there's stuff that doesn't constitute his A game, and I'd include Tosca on that list of stuff. The first act is, what...saggy, I'd say. The second is driven and rather dramatic, and the third is just too much of too much. This music is already pretty fromageous and Levine just draws it out to the point that that one really hot cellist has to play that one solo in a way that is rather shameless. A sense of restraint is sometimes the perfect garnish for schmaltz. One begins to want to sneak into James Levine's bathroom and add to the list of affirmations on his mirror, "Not Everything Is Parsifal."

Oh, by the way, as long as I'm somehow miraculously still typing, Bondy fucked with the jump, and I totally forgot to say that. Instead of singing her big diva line and hitting the road, Mattila got to hang around on the staircase for a bit, almost coquettishly taunting the Keystone Cops (srsly, what is up with having Spoletta keep falling on his ass?) before making the production's one real reference to Hitchcock, semi-diagetically, running into the turret dealio where (I am told) one of the go go girls from Act II, done up in her wig, got launched out halfway into space, presumably on some kind of harness for a brief freeze frame, rather arresting in my book but I guess appalling if you like your Tosca old-school. The rest of the act was left alone, I guess, normal e lucevan, normal mock-mock** execution, maybe a little extra crazy for Tosca while she's giving Cav the recap.

Next up: Barbiere w/ Banks + DiDonato, may or may not blog it.

A propos de rien, it is weirdly tempting to post a picture of me leaning against the ballustrade of the central staircase, trying like hell to look posh, because about 12% less of me went to the opera this season than last and I am feeling vain about it and you'd all, those of you who have not died of old age reading this far, be more or less obligated to make noises to the effect of "Lookin' good, Maur!" because you're nice people, well raised, and presumably competent liars when the need arises. Curse that wretched veil of secrecy!

CELEBRITY ADDENDUM: Not a highly starry year, it seemed to me. Martha Stewart was there as usual, looking swell as always, and gave some nice quotes about opera to the press. Albanese made an appearance and was cheered, which I like even though I can't listen to her recordings. Fleming, of course. Harvey Feirstein, yay. Leelee Sobieski,I have read, though I didn't see her. This woman got photographed a lot and I'm curious who she is but guessing only people ten years younger than me know. [eta: Chanel Iman, a model. eta again: nope, Joy Bryant.] I'm not sure who else, actually.

*unless you are. Let's say you're a frumpy soprano who is believed to carry on THE SACRED FLAME OF ITALIAN SINGING. In that case, you are allowed to ad lib all this unwritten "mea culpa" stuff in the same scene and are not ridiculed, except occasionally by me.

**Who's there?

Another show

2009-09-21T16:48:00.003-05:00

Perhaps a bit of liveblogging now that I'm an iPhone douchebag. This will depend on how much like dialup the network is acting. So far, one has only the sense things are scaled back a bit from last year.

5:53 have already heard the name Zinka Milanov invoked. Here we go with all this.

Ok liveblogging did not so much happen. More tomorrow. The headline is of course an audience reaction that
makes last year's Sonnambula snit look like a chorus of "Hello, Dolly!"

Last to get the joke

2009-09-14T09:46:00.004-05:00

Probably a billion people already said this but I finally realized what this

reminds me of.

Autocorrect Fail!

2009-09-05T16:59:00.002-05:00

My text message to Jonathan von Wellsung, hat tip to the programmers of iPhone autocorrect:

It is Latoya Mattila's birthday!

Pure fail, and yet pure win...

Soupcon!

2009-09-04T11:02:00.001-05:00

Someone we know of formidable musical intelligence (who has not specified the degree to which he wishes to be identified, so we'll stick with pronouns and descriptors here) has started a food blog that promises to be good reading!

Zombie Tosca

2009-09-02T18:19:00.000-05:00

RARRR!

Thud.

Ticket Porn

2009-08-28T23:42:00.002-05:00

(You should pardon the Tiny Seashells of Discretion.)

2009-08-28T18:23:00.000-05:00

Pluie, pluie, go away(ie.)

2009-08-28T09:57:00.000-05:00

One for the "why not here?!" files

2009-08-16T15:01:00.003-05:00

Elizabeth Connell in the Siegfried finale. MFI seal of enthusiastic approval goes here.

ETA: that's kind of the rhetorical "why" in the subject line, you will have gathered. She's not what you'd be forced, these days, to call "cinematic." On the other hand, Wagner sells out no matter what, or anyway the Ring and Tristan do, so it's not like any particular campaign need be waged to lure the young and unsuspecting into the opera house with the promise of great hair and abs...

Asked and answered

2009-08-08T21:41:00.002-05:00

I don't know, is it considered bad blogging to quote comments from elsewhere if they were totally excellent and I want everyone to read them?

So it starts with a revealing post with complex implications at Parterre about the fellow who is funding I guess the overhaul of the State Theater, who turns out to be a teabag toting wingnut. (Me, I've always said I'd go libertarian if I weren't so darn fond of roads, hospitals, public schools and universities, the post office &c. &c. &c. I've also been known to say libertarianism is just anarchism with so much hedging you can't even get a decent punk album out of it. That's my libertarianism set. I'll be here all week.)

Anylez...people quickly get up in arms because die Heilige Kunst shouldn't be sullied by mean, dirty politics, and I guess someone with the nom de blogge of javier said "Anyway, opera and politics don't mix," because Will, who we suppose to be Will of Designer Blog who also comments here knocked it out of the park, and I'm gonna make you read it:

When you get to heaven, javier, look up Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Kurt Weill, and Daniel Francois Esprit Auber, among many others, and mention your little fantasy to them.

Be prepared for gales of laughter.

Mozart deliberately conspired with da Ponte to put a play that had been banned in Paris the day after its premiere for its political content onto the opera stage in Vienna. Play and opera are both inflamatory political/social statements.

Verdi’s Risorgimento operas from early in his career ignited demonstrations and riots and were filled with coded references to the Austrian occupation of northern Italy. If you go to Atilla at the MET next season, listen for Ezio’s line “Avrai tu l’universo; resti l’Italia a me! which set off pandemonium in the theaters.

Wagner was an immensely political composer on and off stage–and I am NOT referring to what was done with his operas long after his death by Hitler and his gang. OK, with Weill I AM referring to Hitler and his gang, via Weill’s social and political protest in so many of his works.

And Auber, composer of what is arguably the first of the great French Grand Operas–what could possibly be political in his tale of a mute girl in love? Only that its run in Brussels caused riots that brought down the Belgian monarchy.

It’s amazing that people still insist that politics must NEVER be mixed with art, particularly “high and refined” arts like opera as if it pollutes them. All the arts are steeped in politics and have been. That’s why when Dictators seize countries, the arts are amont the first things they clamp down on.

Well, it doesn't get much more thorough than that.

It is a mess of a topic. Should we just be grateful of any money thrown at our pet art regardless of the source? I mean I don't think I'm on board with the commenter who said "NYC Opera and Ballet will not be getting a cent of my money," though I respect his conviction. It's worth talking about precisely because it's not straightforward, and precisely because there is some broad impulse not to talk about it. And yes, I also find it interesting to see the wingnuts coming out of the woodwork when something like this comes up. You assume that art broadens people. You are, it would seem, mistaken.

FWIW

2009-08-05T21:06:00.004-05:00

The increasingly afterthoughtish-feeling Glimmerglass Opera (of the neato performance space, physical environs out of a fucking 19th c. painting, palpable lack of relevance) has announced 2010. You're probably sitting down because you're at a computer, but you don't really need to be.

It can be a fun parlour game* to make up swell Glimmerglass seasons because there's something of a formula: 1 Baroque, 1 20th C. usually in English, 1 warhorse, and a wild card, maybe Mozart or a musical. (There should be a Maybe Mozart festival. You show up and they're like "Nah, we weren't in the mood for L'Oca del Cairo after all. Tonight's Harry Partch. I think they're doing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik across town at Partially Partch if you've got cab fare.")

One thing you can count on in recent years, due to unfortunate economic realities, is a production that can be staffed wholly with the pack of hungry young things that make up the Young American Artist Program. This year, that will be The Tender Land, which I guess was written for young singers, so that's convenient and all. I have to say I've never met anyone who lamented the infrequency with which The Tender Land pops up at opera companies but maybe it's just so musically satisfying it only has to be done once in a while. You never know.

To someone-or-other's credit, the world's most photographed production of Tosca is not being pulled out of the retirement one assumes it has, by default, kinda entered as the buzzards circle around City Opera, twittering at one another "Possible free meal in the west 60's #carrion." A new one will take its place, and it actually is intriguing to wonder what they'll do casting-wise there.

During the aforementioned Tosca, they hired a pretty, petite, young singer as Tosca, and everyone in the company did kind of a two-month long version of the old Soprano joke (Q: How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? A: One to change it and one to say "really it was too high for her," should she fall off the ladder) except in this case all they could do was talk about how she was going to break her medium-sized voice on Tosca. It's possible she did, actually...she was booked for some stuff like Salome and more Toscas and then for not much. She really put a lot into the performance, though, so it's always felt sort of sad to me. Anyway then they got this tall, menacing-looking Italian without so very much voice for Scarpia and a tenor with an absolute monster of a sound (one vocal agent present noted that the fellow was louder than Heppner, and indeed when he busted out his "Vittoria!" in early rehearsals, astonished glances flew about the high school auditorium as the walls very nearly shook), and all of it added up to something pretty compelling, but none of them sings a lot that I've seen, so whatever. Einmal ist nicht keinmal, and I still think back on it fondly.

Figaro is the third one up next year, and what is there to say about that? Figaro is always cause for some happiness and rarely cause for much.

Tolomeo rounds things off. Handel is just the kind of thing that works best at Glimmerglass, the kind of opera it's actually a shame to see in a larger house, and most houses are that. Countertenors don't have to push and on nights when they throw open the sides of the theater to the night air, there's an undeniable enchantment in the delicate intimacy in those arias, sung with the finesse the space affords. One wonders if the house style of Handel productions is still in full swing, for better and sometimes worse, full of imagery that puts a few toes across the border between whimsical and dumb.

*and yet I don't feel like doing it just now. Feel free to play along at home.

p.s. things I have bailed on this summer include Semiramide (it turned out they were doing the full Ramide and between that and the weather forecast, I envisioned a soggy slog through a few too many roulades) and Les Huguenots, which fell from my schedule due to concerns of distance and tedium.

p.p.s. Hey do you need some salt? Because here's a grain: I do think Glimmerglass is not very interesting these days, but I'd be an ass to write something overwhelmingly sour like this and not acknowledge that I had professional dealings there many years ago and met probably four of the top five worst people I've ever met anywhere in terms of, oh, everything (though I met some lovelies, too...it's just that they weren't running the company/in a position to sap my life force.) So while I'll, on the other hand, always have a certain misty remembrances you don't get to hear about, I can never be quite fair to Glimmerglass, the Little Company that Occasionally Could.

frank martin--->lulz

2009-07-18T22:00:00.004-05:00

Maury: poulenc + strauss/2=martin?
Maury: i think i mean mahler, not strauss
DSJ: maybe more Berg?
Maury: right on.
DSJ: he sprinkles his elegant neoclassicism with tone-rows.
Maury: it feels more immediately listener-friendly than berg
DSJ: yeah definitely
Maury: sorry, i actually really hate the game of "one hears echoes of puccini in the score." i am always turned off by reviews that do that.
DSJ: Well, you know, he's Swiss, so half French and half Austrian is about right
Maury: genau
Maury: great, i put "vin" and "herbe" in the search window and carla fucking bruni comes up
DSJ: Carla fucking Bruni fucking Sarkozy!
Maury: or vice versa
Maury: argh, it turns out i like her cover of "you belong to me." I am not sure how I feel about this.
DSJ: I wonder if... was it Nathan Gunn's??? Tom Waits cover is on YouTube
DSJ: lol HORRIBLE
Maury: what is this from?!
DSJ: his CROSSOVER ALBUM.
Maury: oh right
Maury: pass
DSJ: omgomgomg
DSJ: http://www.frankmartin.org/eng_s/eng_s_gastboek.html
DSJ: (WHAT?????)
Maury: hee hee hee hee hee
DSJ: DEAR MADAME MARTIN
Maury: “Please don't ask questions to which the answers can be found on this site.”
Maury: [redacted]: not on the site.
DSJ: SERIOUSLY
Maury: oh nevermind, it's under "concise biography"
DSJ: how can I not send obscene mail to Mme Martin
Maury: oh nevermind again, that says 12 tone

On not bothering to bring the mountain to Mohammed

2009-07-08T14:24:00.003-05:00

Fragment of a comment from "Pelleas", chez Parterre, regarding Rufus Wainwright's "bringing opera to people who normally wouldn’t consider listening to it,"

...except that I don’t believe his audience is going to listen to any opera other than his. He’s made no secret of his operaphilia over the years, and it’s made no difference so far, in much the way that his Judy concert didn’t really make Garland fans out of people who weren’t in the first place.

There's something not just correct but, I think, significant in this sentiment, and as soon as I work out what it is, you'll know. This is me thinking out loud.

Say, do other people known by their friends for being an opera fan get the question "what should I listen to if I want to get into opera?" a lot? Because I do. And, not wholly for the sake of being an asshole, what I sometimes say is, "if you're not into opera, there may be a very good reason." Which is to say: it's not for everyone.

What I'm questioning, I guess, is the very idea of "bringing audiences to opera"--whether it happens at all, and whether it's worth all the pontification that goes on around whether Rufus Wainwright/Andrea Bocelli/the Muppets/&c. &c. &c. will get people to like opera. I'm not sure it ever happens that way. From time to time some appealing face of opera pops up in broader culture, but it seems to be a self-contained thing.

If you liked the blue diva in The Fifth Element, chances are really not that awfully great that you'd be excited by the rest of Lucia. If you were inspired by Paul Potts singing "Nessun dorma," I might speculate while firmly refusing to discuss the merits of his performance that what you liked was largely backstory and novelty and, sure, you might love opera, but chances are good you wouldn't, and Paul Potts is not a good weathervane.

Think of the scene in The Last Picture Show where all an earnest teacher's love of Keats means nothing to his students, because the other parts of their lives aren't fertile soil for a love of poetry. Except take some of the condescension out of that, because a love of opera, like the love of poetry, does not make you a better person. Operaphilia in addition to the love of, say, Gene Autrey does make you a broader, more interesting person, but that's a two-way street, a clap that takes two hands.

None of this has much to do with RW's day-in-the-life-of-a-diva opera, on which I can't comment because I've only heard the excerpt played on Parterre. I didn't love or hate it, though I find Wainwright's crooning a little uncomfortable to witness when it's not in music written with croon in the blueprints (how can I hate on "Poses" when I listened to it obsessively for a year?) but then I'm thinking of his youtube-documented Berlioz, and not his opera, which may very well have built-in croon.

Oh but ok, so take the Berlioz. Someone hears those, thinks "what Rufus likes, I may like," and buys Steber's ravishing trip through those songs with Mitropoulos. Yet again, I think that's not going anywhere. It's just that music is not always a continuum of listener-suitability. Opera is really specific. Opera is discrete. (That does not mean it refuses to send its picture, certain gheis.)

All that's left to do, then, is for me to suggest how new audiences are to be found so opera doesn't die if Sheryl Crow singing "La ci darem la mano" with Pavarotti* (count the problems!) isn't going to do the trick. Obviously, I have no fucking clue.

But if the answer is that opera is on its way out, I'm not going to leap out the window, just hope it outlasts me. I read this book once, okay I read a chapter, about language death, and for anyone who loves languages and appreciates that each has things it can express that no other can (though this can never be more than a hunch), the idea of a language disappearing forever is really to dab your eyes about. But it's also completely inevitable and a part of the backdrop against which the languages that hang on, for now, live out their own interesting lives. Nothing is immortal and few things last very long at all.

Sorry, I'm totally killing time 'til I can get on a train for a long weekend, so it's getting a bit purple in here. (I never work blue. Except a few paragraphs up, for a second, and then only light blue.) But I think I'm not wrong about all of this. Please feel welcome to disagree politely, as it cheers a blogger up to see comments.

*awful but not reprehensible. This is an important distinction. Also, please admit there is a loveable screwball comedy in the part where...well this one friend of mine told me about a recital in High School where she couldn't remember the words to one of the "24 Rather Moldy Italian Art Songs" and had to start making up Italian words. I always wondered what that would look like, and now, to my delight, I know.

P.S. (!) while one is momentarily asserting one's presence in the blogosphere, one really ought to take a moment to congratulate La Cieca on being quite the It Girl, everywhere but the goddamn cover of Time lately!

Missing Link

2009-06-10T15:55:00.002-05:00

I'll let you try and figure out the elusive connection between these there videos. (Hint: there isn't one.)

Ok, fine. The connection is they all make me happy. Thanks to the people that posted them. The last one, yes, is bittersweet, in that it explains a certain amount about my love life: born too late to gaymarry Glenn Gould.

The Professor and Mary Ann

2009-06-03T14:52:00.003-05:00

Ok so I'm obviously not going to write about the rest in any detail. In the interest of some kind of misguided completism, thumbnail sketches of everything I can call to mind.

Billy Elliot: incoherent first act, musically and dramatically mixing up two themes (the personal and the political, in effect) that don't really make sense together until the much more enjoyable second act. Excellent class and gender politics for a B&T blockbuster, some clumsy cheap sentiment, set design that's busier than it needs to be and (outside of what is basically a socialist anthem) not much music you will remember half an hour later. Reminded me how wonderful Chaikovsky is (!) One "how did that make it past previews" scene involving nightmare-inducing giant dancing garments. Lovely showcase for some gallingly talented kids. Weird that Gregory Jbara and Carole Shelley are nominated in such uninteresting roles.

Norman Conquests: Only saw the Table Manners section. Deft ensemble stuff, genuinely amusing though as usual, hard to feel quite a part of the uproarious guffawing of the audience. Probably I've missed what makes it special as I saw only one, but is Alan Ayckbourn a bit gimmicky often or something? One hears the other parts are less comic and more introspective. On the basis of only one part, should win some acting trophies and not Best Revival.

Exit the King: like a draft of Beckett run long, but for all that, cumulatively troubling in a way that feels true. Geoffrey Rush, clownish, tireless, sometimes appropriately uncomfortable to watch. Andrea Martin I don't think has been mentioned much but she's strange and hilarious. Susan Sarandon YMMV, I find her dull in imperious mode (even in Enchanted, but there it was fine to be an inch from camp. Here, arguably less so.) Fantastic sound design, which I don't usually notice but I was sitting right behind the guy w/ trumpet & drums. Who is hot. But that's not why.

Next to Normal: Much more than the sum of its parts. Alice Ripley is the heart of the show, and this despite very significant, Behrens-in-the-late-90's vocal issues. Under a yell, she doesn't have the support to stay on pitch for more long at all; at a yell, she mostly does. And yet...she's good. She's Kunst. What she's working with has undergone a lot of revision, apparently used to be a lot more cutesy and a lot less dire. The only parts that feel off now are the remaining winks and nudges. It's not a happy show, but it claims a few honest, uplifting moments. The lyrics falter with some regularity, but the book and the music hold it together. Good supporting cast, Jennifer Damiano in particular. Hilariously needless shirtless scene for hot, reasonably talented Aaron Tveit presumably intended to rake in the queens by word of mouth.

Mary Stuart second viewing: still fucking splendid. Pity we won't get to see if it wins best revival, those of us at home, since apparently the broadcast has jettisoned a number of minor awards for such as the writer and director in favor of, I kid you not, excerpts from Jersey Boys and Mamma Fucking Mia, if the Post is to be believed. Jeez, why not Phantom? I'm sure there's still someone in Paramus who would see it and go "a Phantom?! At the opera?! Why that sounds too good to miss!"

33 Variations: Now closed. Fine star turn for Jane Fonda, backup band more hit or miss. I saw that Zach Grenier was playing Beethoven but flashed on Adrian Grenier, and at least it was less hilarious than that. The history lesson parts fit awkwardly with the parts about intellectual curiosity, the interpersonal expense of having lofty goals, and so on. And when I say they fit together badly, what I really mean is the latter is good and the former mostly not. You'll have to forgive me if I use the rotten descriptor "heartwarming" to describe the work of Susan Kellerman in her supporting role, but I think it's apt and the internal thesaurus seems to have snapped decisively shut for the evening.

Ok, I think that's surely enough. I saw a couple of other things but who cares, Edith? I read what Ben Brantley said today about Coraline and, Seagull review notwithstanding, I think he's a fair and intelligent critic, and I suspect I just am not the right audience for Coraline. God knows I could fill a page here mocking Neil Gaiman but this is not that kind of blog!

Next up: um? I dunno. Vague thoughts of attending Les Huguenots, Les Hugues to its friends, at Bard. Maybe some kvetchy liveblogging of despair during the Antoinette "My Career is Being Immortalized through Hourlong Commercials for Jukebox Abba Musicals? I'm Glad I'm Dead" Perry awards broadcast.

Quelle belle vie!

2009-05-27T23:26:00.002-05:00

I don't know if you ever saw this film Aria, I think curated (if that's the right word) by Ken Russell...most of it I recall as schlocky or tiresomely provocative, demonstrating no perceptible understanding of what we love about opera and how it would look if the little stage we each have in our head were projected outward, but this one segment popped into my head this evening for no reason I can figure. I find it exquisite. Hope you do, too. And yeah, that's pre-famous Tilda Swinton. Vocals by Madame Price.

The (passive-aggressive) revolution continues...

2009-05-21T09:41:00.006-05:00

Yep, still on the company clock, and so many shows left to have frivolous opinions about!

The one that keeps poking its nasty little snout in my ear, asking to be prattled about is God of Carnage, somehow the toast of the Great White Way*. Which is probably appropriate in some desperately grating way, because I think it's exactly the sort of thing that makes a certain segment of the populace you may or may not have any patience for exhale sharply and say "well I mean really isn't Broadway just a bunch of plays about white people's problems?" (and then they have to run along to Problems in Theory: Kristeva through My Hairdresser Who Has One About Everything, and so the discussion ends there.) Honestly, I don't mind if they do take that kind of shot, as the play doesn't stand up to much better. Mock profundity by means of flitting reference to existential concerns may seem to do when you're discussing a class of people nobody in the audience believes to have much of an inner life in the first place [in the adapted version, Cobble Hill stroller jockeys], but at times it seemed to me nobody would give this thing a second look if the cast weren't so game and able.

What it mostly is is** an easy and not especially novel potshot at the thin veneers of civilization marriage and child-rearing depend upon. What else it is is sure-handedly entertaining, here and there brutally funny and, again, gifted with a cast that has seemingly rolled up their sleeves and committed to a roll in the mud for four, in a way it's tough to find fault with even if it's not the very highest quality mud. Gandolfini manages to be a compelling brute without being You-Know-Who; Marcia Gay Harden flinches not once from being head-explodingly irritating; Jeff Daniels somehow manages to make a stock character of modern civilized villainy freshly loathesome and kind of hot; and Hope Davis (the least horrific of them all except that she gets to deliver the show's one rather-too-vile stage effect) maybe does just the opposite trick, slowly revealing that the best of them isn't so by much. But if I'm not wholly in the amen chorus for a play about how parenting has come to be the destroyer of people's ability and will to tame the id and connect, something has gone awry.

Nearby at the Broadhurst, Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter do quite the opposite trick, dusting the cobwebs off a play one feels certain would be edifying in the forehanded and backhanded senses of the word in lesser custody. Schiller's Maria Stuart, yep--the source of Donizetti's libretto, I believe, is not what I would have guessed would be the most exciting thing on Broadway but I'm in as much of a position to say so as I ever have been after a monthlong TDF binge, and I will say so. It's made of win, marinated in win, garnished with win. McTeer and Walter are riveting (I do think Walter's role is the harder in some sense; fewer opportunities for the acting equiv of a D flat in alt or a well inflicted glottal stop) and their single, apparently apocryphal confrontation lives up to any operatic reading of the same scene. Purists may find the Konzept--men in business suits, ladies in Ren Fair garb--distracting, but I was on board, emphatically so. It is, by the way, very frequently on TDF, so you can probably see it for $35 though good seats are not guaranteed.

Great, that only leaves like eight shows to write about, and then I'm going to Coraline tomorrow if I didn't mention. I'm like Lucy at the candy factory here, not that I'm complaining.

*if we are to go by where I ended up getting a ticket, which was in a weird little corner behind a railing. Because it's not like I walk around the theater district with a pad going "hey pardon me but what show is the talk of people like you, you big tourist?"

**is

Extremely Passive Resistance

2009-05-18T12:55:00.003-05:00

I like to think of it as a kind of civil disobedience, a violence against the tyranny of the 40-hour work week, undiminished over time by technology and efficiency to maximize profit, if I take the last half hour of today to spout copious hot air about the nearly-a-dozen plays I saw this month. I guess I'm exactly what the nefarious so-and-so's at the American Theater Wing want, a ready victim for their plot to pack people into seats by means of a petty pageant. Sign me up!

I'm actually going to have to consult my datebook for this roundup, and no, I don't have a palm or an iphone or a PDA (PDA? really you're going to call it that?) or anything and I'm not being a luddite but if I ever get that busy that I need one, I'm moving to Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic Ocean.*

Know what, this is going to go out of order, because where the fuck is my datebook. I do have some programs in my J. Peterman Counterfeit Mail Pouch**, so that's a starting point. On top of the stack is...my umbrella, because the weather in NYC the last week has not been notably better than I imagine it to be in Tristan da Cunha. [Things sometimes get posted rather a long time after they're written.] Beneath the umbrella, the first program to come to hand is 9 to 5, which is slightly regrettable. Not the show, I mean, though that too. But that being the first is regrettable because...

I don't remember how it started, but there was a discussion of god-knows-what in comments at Parterre, and I mentioned to someone or other that Lucia Popp is the only opera singer I'd never heard anyone in the mad swirling vortex of reflexive disdain that is opera fandom say anything bad about her. This was remedied in short order, naturally, but why's I mention it is that Dolly Parton is the Lucia Popp of the opera world in that sense, though probably no other. Nobody doesn't like Dolly Parton.

So it feels like kicking a puppy to say much that is honest about 9 to 5. There are positives. Megan Hilty sings country music idiomatically and does an imitation of La Parton that sends terrified phonemes fleeing her merciless grasp. That was supposed to mean it's accurate, but I have a feeling that is not at all clear. Stefanie Block has a right set of pipes, and Alison Janney an irresistible presence and infallible comic timing. And then there are the songs and the book. The book is the biggest mystery as to "why did this happen?" because there's nary a punchline that isn't in the movie, and I assume everyone remembers the movie clearly because it is, 20-whatever years later, a perfect frippery, and still iconic in its way. The songs are just lifeless, which is absolutely confounding given the vivacious talent that penned them. I don't know what happened. The show felt about 3 hours long. Even the classic theme song was somehow sapped for the stage. Alas.

Next program: Joe Turner's Come and Gone. My first August Wilson play, I will admit, and while there was enough deeply personal mythology in the work that I'd gladly explore more of the 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, it's a bit emotionally disjointed, I'd guess as much because of the piece as because of the production. An hour and a half of mostly dryish naturalism suddenly lurches into the realm of the spiritual and the abstract and the, well, somewhat-difficult-to-follow as the first act ends, and again as the play ends. The cast is uniformly fine, though nobody but Roger Robinson as Bynum Walker, a spiritually off-the-grid shamanic figure, had the certainty of artistic purpose we love to see and throw awards at. Happily, he's nominated to be thrown at.

Oh hey actually since I wrote all that a week or two ago, I'm going to go ahead and post it and pick up with some more stuff I saw when I'm feeling more writey. It's something to do during the four months in the opera desert stretching from here to September...

*where my dating life will remain much the same as it is now.
**No, they didn't make it up for Seinfeld. It was a real company, except now egli e spento and all. Except maybe not?

E la Nave Va

2009-05-03T16:56:00.003-05:00

Here's an opportunity to witness a number of frustrating things happening at once. The story itself is about Robert Wilson and some insane-sounding fashion people* doing a production of Freischutz which actually, now that I think about it, is maybe not frustrating but hilarious and wonderful. This may have to do with me giving precisely 3/8 of a damn about the opera in question and so not really caring what happens to it. Ok but then start reading the comments where it seems people have been waiting for an opportunity to continue, shall we say, ventilating affect over Sonnambula. Before it even comes up explicitly it is just so fucking clear where it's all going.

And then it's always a fairly short road to "why people gotta be mean to Verdi" i.e. the martyrdom of traditionalism vs. the encroaching evil of anything not faithful enough to The Composer's Intentions (as understood, of course, by whoever is moaning. By what process, oh do not ask.) Soon someone will use the word "Eurotrash." There might well be a corollary to Godwin's Law where for Hitler we substitute Bieito, unless he's been toppled from his iconicity of badness by Mary Zimmerman...

I'm torn, reading it, because I do hate it when people try and make themselves look however it is they're trying to make themselves look by saying "oh, I don't like opera! As if!" And then on the other hand, it still pisses me off that people take (for instance) Dessay's sort of snotty line on Sonnambula as a sign that she sits around at night rubbing her hands together, stroking her moustache of evil, trying to think how to destroy opera.

While I'm on about it, this is the reason I sometimes want to learn to love football and drop the whole opera thing (but ok, after 2012-2013 because Maria Stuarda, mmkay? obviously this will never work.) What I mean is, once upon a time, I found my crowd, people in Austin who thought opera was worth talking about and thinking about and who really seemed to love it. Only later would I discover that it serves some purpose for what would seem to be at least a large plurality of opera people that hovers between "proxy for less mediated modes of socialization" and something darker and more to be discussed in terms of object relations.

The best compliment anyone ever paid me on this shabby old blog was to say that I treated opera as though it were important without insisting on its nobility. I think I have the wording right. I took this to mean what I hoped it to mean: that it should be perfectly possible to discuss all this without the "naw, dude" posturing pointed out above, but also without sounding like the comic book guy on the Simpsons.

Hey that's all. I mostly just wanted to post the link and then I got to typing.

*It's true. I try to see the good in any project at whose heart is the beautification of life. But fashion just makes me sad and defensive.

Area Musician

2009-04-30T20:29:00.003-05:00

So I was on the A train and there was a subway musician which can be a headache (percussion groups! hi, this is a really small space!) or a delight (mariachis!) and as it turned out, she was swell. And I gave her like the world's most lousy subway musician tip because I didn't have change so I'm making up for it by making sure a couple more people see her. 'atsall.

[ETA: I didn't make the vid, btw. Just embedded it.]

Go, Hagen! Get the ring back!

2009-04-27T08:59:00.008-05:00

I have been noodged (never know how to spell that) to write a few syllables about Gotterdammerung. Since everyone has seen this production elevnty times, I won't go on and on about the visuals, only I must pause to recant. I've always bitched about the Schenk Walkuere, or at least since 1997 I have, but the minute everything went kablooey after that very long sit that comes two operas later, I thought, mortifyingly: gosh, it's too bad they're not keeping this around. Ah well, you don't come here for consistency, now do you? MFI is all about Berlinian hedgehoggery, in a (hedge)pig's eye. Except I totally got that backward.

If I begin to review post-curtain ovations, you may put me out to pasture*, but it's hard not to comment on the extra fervor that attends Ring curtain calls. Especially for Levine, of course. But all around, they're preposterously loud, and why shouldn't they be? Makes it feel as if there's a cult of the Ring, or perhaps a cult of Levine, and really I do think everyone deserves a cult at some point, or most people.

Am I making it up that the loudest of all, among the singers, was for Jon Tomlinson? Loudest anyway if you do some math involving inverse proportionality and a 1-to-10 scale of how big a putz the character is. Tomlinson's vocal estate was described to me at intermission as "post-vocal" and it's hard to work up many objections to this, but depending on your disposition toward everything-but-the-paper-fan-moustache** villainry, it's...I find it impossible to take my ears off him, you know? He has that old school vocal patina that just sounds right to me in Wagner. And I guess to some other people as well.

Hey should I ruin something for you forever? Would that be fun? It was also pointed out to me at selfsame intermission that there's this one part where it really sounds a lot like the chorus is singing "Go, Hagen! Go, Hagen! Get the ring back!" If you hear it now, it you will never unhear it.

If only Christian Franz had been given such a pep talk. Not to say he was a failure in the role or anything, but he had certain indisputable inadequacies. Everything was spent by Act III and of course Wagner, being something of a prick even if you don't count the whole holocaust thing***, wrote Siegfried's most lyrical music to be sung after three hours of basically beating his lungs against a rock. Still, some manage it better than Franz, whose recalling of the Forest Bird's music was, oh, moderately painful. There's a way to make this music work even if your voice is worn or ugly to begin with, viz: Bernd Aldenhoff in the Knappertsbusch Gotterdammerung I basically never shut up about. Franz seemed maybe to have given up by Act III, took a very cursory lunge at the (terribly unfairly scheduled) C, sang Siegfried's death like walking on a broken foot...it wasn't enough.

The thing about Dalayman is that if the whole voice were like the top fifth or so, she'd be so good that even the most intolerable opera queens would have to stop wailing for long enough to listen. It's big and solid and warm, and she throws it around with considerable emotion. It must be said, though, that it fades rapidly in some of the mid range that's always up against a squadron of trombones or something in Wagner. Anyway, taking into account this limitation, it was a satisfying account of the role and makes me wonder in a not very specific way about other roles she might be great in. Sadist that I occasionally am, I think immediately of the roles that frequently get croaked on top like maybe Elektra but that would have the same problems. Just i wish someone with an unhideous voice would sing it, right? Last time I heard it at the Met I think it was Schnaut. 'Nuff said.

And with that, though there are more singers who contributed importantly to a B+ afternoon of opera, I am basically out of commentary. And out of season, come to think of it. Over the summer there's bound to be something, though, unless there isn't. Glimmerglass can be so unalluring these days, though the Caramoor Semiramide is of some interest--not least because everyone keeps pointing out to me that Brownlee is an exceptional artist, and I keep missing him. I don't know. Feel free to suggest things. I can occasionally be coaxed out of the house.

*I know, why now? When I've reviewed everything down to the brownies, stopping short of critiquing the little paper cones from which one drinks water from the water fountains In Memorium Ezio Pinza. Which are rather difficult to detach from the stack.

**You must pay the rent on Valhalla! I can't pay the rent on Valhalla! You must pay the rent on Valhalla! I can't pay the rent on Valhalla!

***I am emphatically kidding. Antisemitism didn't begin with Wagner, and the much repeated fact that he was Hitler's favorite composer rises only to the level of trivia. Every bad person loves some good things. I'm sure W. had a favorite composer. Ok, bad example.

For Armer Jacquino, who certainly isn't required to like it, especially on account of it never happened

2009-04-23T07:40:00.003-05:00

The bit where everyone more or less collectively loses their shit isn't until the last four minutes or so. You'll know.

Third pass or so

2009-04-19T22:29:00.004-05:00

Rather than editing again, I'm going to add a couple of interesting details from the papers that came with the DVD. I'm going to call them the press kit because it makes me feel glamorous! Anyway I didn't look closely at it, at first, and it gives some more info on what's coming up for the singers.

Yes, ok, I'm harping on Michael Fabiano because he was my favorite. There. I've admitted it. Well according to this, he's in Stiffelio next season at the big M.

Amber Wagner won a Tucker Career Grant. That's actually not from the provided materials; rather from an email from the proverbial little bird.

Ryan McKinny is doing Oedipus Rex with the L.A. Phil and Figaro at the Aspen Music Festival.

Kiera Duffy is in Atlanta's Akhnaten. Which I think already happened and was completely sold out, so don't go having ideas about the south, ok?

Matthew Plenk sang Iopas in Toyens with the Boston Symphony what looks like last season. I mean, that is a seriously lovely aria, so go Matthew Plenk. And Boston Lyric has him as Don Ottavio.

Aright, anyway.

The Audition

2009-04-19T12:45:00.007-05:00

Maybe I'll do a little liveblogging of this screening copy of The Audition I was kindly sent.

Granted, I'm the ideal audience for this. The auditions are a highlight of my year, and the year documented in the film was probably the best I've attended.

Ok amusingly they just showed one of the singers, I didn't see which, reading The Power of Positive Thinking, because it is 1957. I'm not sure why that makes me laugh, but it's also an extra glimpse of how terrifying it must be to be 25 and see the house from the stage.

Some reasons to watch:

-attaching a face not only to singers you may remember watching in competition, but also to behind-the-scenes Met folks who serve as blank screens onto which crazy opera fans project their frustrations. Like oh hey, there's Peter Gelb and he's not rubbing his hands together going "Who's the skinniest?! I don't CARE who can sing!" as he apparently does in the collective feverish hallucination of many opera loons.

-attaching a non-long-distance face to singers I still recall hearing from fam circ, seeing how they sing in detail (wow Disella Larusdottir's lips shake when she sings high notes! Jesus, Alek Shrader doesn't just have a great headshot and really is that cute!) Getting to hear the traces of regional accents they haven't tamed is also fun.

-Oh, probably a great glimpse at the bowels of the Met if you live far away or just never had that autograph-hound moment in your life where you saw it in person. Also maybe a glimpse of, not to be a dick, that fakey thing singers do around each other where their niceness doesn't always cover their mutual mistrust. [ETA: which Fabiano just acknowledged. He actually spends the least energy of any of the pretending to care heaps and heaps about the others, based on this film, and he comes off a tiny bit unsympathetic for it, but perhaps his honesty ought to earn him some points. Anyway he's 22.]

-Getting to watch singers watch and react to each other's performances. The first time they show Alek Shrader singing the C's, they pan immediately to the other singers, which is hilarious.

It's sort of awful to watch Ryan Smith, of course. If you don't know, he died of lymphoma not too long ago.

Whoops, a Met dramatic coach just said "Opera is moving away from the idea that a voice is all that really matters...now that is not to say that voice is not (perhaps) the most important thing," and now the gnashing of teeth begins again. It is poignant, then, to watch Angela Meade, between clips of singing "Casta diva' and talking about her love of Callas and Caballe also acknowledging her own fear of the what are we calling it, new focus on visuals.

Did one female singer just say "go back to a drag bar and learn more"? Because that would make me laugh and maybe slightly want to buy her a drink. But I'm guessing that's not what she said.

Heh, I wonder if they should have done a little subtitle explaining lip trills. It's making me laugh. The first time I saw singers doing lip trills I was very WTF.

Ok they're completely saving "Pour mon ame" as the money shot, though some of that is just where it happened in the program. As much fun as it is to watch A.S. realize he is going to nail the Cs, it's also perhaps a little sad to see the documentary not focus at all on a couple of the other singers. Only so much time and all.

Total voyeurism to watch the judging.

And we get a "One Year Later" postlude, which is exactly what you don't get at the auditions or even after unless you're obsessive and track these folks. They're a little bit press-packety, but gratifying nonetheless. And of course by now they're another year old, leaving up to you and me and Google to figure out Where They Are Now.

You know, it would have made a lot more sense to post this yesterday. Because the theatrical presentation was today. But presumably it will be released on DVD. In which case, yeah, I recommend it.

Ok since this is the least substantial thing ever, I'll do a little of the footwork on Where Are They Now, how's that?

From the CAMI website, "The brilliant lyric tenor Alek Shrader made his San Francisco Opera mainstage debut this season, replacing an indisposed Ramon Vargas as Nemorino in two performances of L’Elisir d’Amore." From my neurotic skull: I wish he still had the floppy bangs no longer in evidence on his head shot.

From Laifer Artist Management, Michael Fabiano sang Rinnuccio at La Scala (as alluded to in the film), sang Rodolfo in Kansas City and Pinkerton in Colorado and Jesus Christ must be 24 now or 25. I don't like to play favorites at the auditions but I would really like to hear him. He impressed me a lot.

Angela Meade's website says she was scheduled to sing Elisabetta in Devereux in Dallas but I'm wondering if that happened since Dallas Opera's website lists Papian and I'm having trouble finding other reference to it. She's at Caramoor this summer in Semiramide and she did make her real Met debut in Ernani when, er, what was the story? Did Radvan cancel? "Our own" Hans Lick wrote it up as a fairly bumpy start but by the end, says he, "suddenly we’re across the border into Verdiland: a full-sized deep and even spinto of great beauty with good top and great passion."

Amber Wagner seems to be in Chicago's young artist program still? I'm having a little trouble telling. Her Myspace page has a "Tacea la notte" I think from Lyric's summer concert in Grant Park that reminds me what an impression her voice made at the auditions concert. It sounds like maybe she's going to be short on top and then she isn't. It's live and really quite good.

Hey doesn't Kiera Duffy remind you of the girl who calls Mena Suvari "a total prostitute" in American Beauty? Anyway she's with IMG which is kind of a big deal, right? And she seems to have done some interesting stuff like Boulez and Elliot Carter.

Matthew Plenk you heard from offstage if you went to Tristan last season. He's in Lindemann, and you know what? I think I am now crossing the line from "skimpy write-up" to "someone shut him up," so I'm going to trail off here. I'm sure the singers I skipped will somehow bear the ignominy of not being mentioned on My Favorite Intermissions. If you know something fabulous one of the singers has gone on to do, drop me a line. All I've got left to write about this season is Gotterdammerung.

Everything But the Boy

2009-04-18T20:18:00.003-05:00

You probably tuned in to this afternoon's Siegfried* on Sirius so I'm not breaking any good or bad news. Let's group things into surprising and not surprising.

-Surprising, to me, because I've never heard him and had to think to come up with any info about him (think he was in the Busoni thing?): Brubaker. Fantastic singing in a drag of a role. Lagniappe: from Balcony he looked like Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale, which really explains everything you ever needed to know about Act I of Siegfried.

-Somewhat surprising: Christian Frantz, who I had heard turn in a tireless, high quality Tristan in concert not that many years back, kind of got sung off the stage by See Above. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't very audible in Act I (which makes the forging song kind of a dud) though he sounded considerably warmed up in the next act. By the end, he was doing some shouting, I'm sorry to say. Maybe an off day, and in any case not a catastrophe. More points for physical characterization than vocal.

-Not particularly surprising, on the basis of youtube clips: Irene Theorin. The first thing I said to my long-suffering opera-going companion when the lights came up (well, shortly after "could you believe she kept unwrapping that food for that long?!") was that I have no regrets whatsoever about not hearing Brewer, though I was looking forward to Brewer as much as the next guy not named Schenk. It's a short, intense sing, and she was ravishing. I know it's a horribly overused joke, but for some reason I can't help myself--she had me at "Heil dir."

-Not in the least surprising: Jon Tomlinson=Wagner. The extra fun here was that Schenk's design for Fafner was actually wonderfully spooky to me (in that you can't tell where Fafner begins and where the forest ends, so he might be UNDER ALL OF OUR FEET) until I realized he was also kind of reminiscent of Mr. Snuffleupagus, at which point he became hilarious. Although still creepy in a way since who the hell would drive a sword into the heart of Mr. Snuffleupagus?

-Surprising only to me, and not entirely that: James Morris' utterly affecting Wanderer, as aurally resplendent as it was heartfelt. I've long been a naysayer, but once in a while, he blows me away, and this was one of those. Not for nothing, did I just witness his last Wotan ever? Because I was just discussing with someone the things we will taunt young opera queens with in twenty years and I need to know if this goes on the list.

Next up: the big G.

*or, as my friend BAD likes to call it, "Siegfried." Nevermind, doesn't work in print, but hopefully he'll laugh when he reads it.

Off Book

2009-04-14T06:38:00.002-05:00

Very briefly noted...Teatro Grattacielo seems perhaps to be run on pocket change and good will, so far be it from me to kick them when they're down, but I caught one of three acts of their Piccolo Marat last night. Either they ran out of cash like the rest of us, or someone did the math wrong: not enough printed libretti and no projected supertitles. This would be fine for Tosca, but for a work receiving (I believe the program noted) its North American premiere, it was a more than a little problematic. All I can tell you for certain is that "Il Piccolo Marat" turns out not to be Italian for "The Little Mermaid," and actually that's more of a hunch. I can mumble nice things in a generalized way about some of the singing, but there were apparently numerous cancellations and no program inserts (or, again, not enough) so I wouldn't know quite whom to praise other than the conductor. At intermission, i.e. after the show, we played a parlor game of trying to figure out who had sung what. We think the cute guy with the slightly too long hair and the wallop of voice on him matches up to the Israeli name in the program, but could not be certain. Yes, the music does sound worth further exploration, much more modernist than Mascagni's single* familiar work, but not as abstract art, I'm afraid...

*unless you're a big Magda fan in which case you probably know Iris backwards and forwards, and really Iris is divine, though in that case I always tried to read the libretto through my fingers.

You Really Ought to Give Iowa a Try!

2009-04-03T10:01:00.002-05:00

Trouble, indeed! Ok, yeah, I really wanted to post "Iowa Stubborn" but for some reason the versions that exist on youtube range from handheld footage of community college productions to this perplexing vid of two high school boys singing their own arrangement in gym clothes. (Maury D'Annato has been called many things, but "chicken hawk" is not among them.) Anyway, step to it, New York, lest it be writ in history that you trailed "flyover country" into the 21st century.

For B

2009-03-18T14:30:00.006-05:00

Did you know Ildar Abdrazakov has a brother named Askar Abdrazakov who is also on the Met's roster? There seems certain to be a limerick in this.

A second (bass) fiddle named Askar
Being Russian*, liked opera, not Nascar

˘ ˘ ¯˘ ˘ ¯
˘ ˘ ¯˘ ˘ ¯
˘ ˘ ¯˘ ˘ ¯˘ ˘ ¯ ¯

Ideally the last line should not involve references to a song by Tracy Chapman, tempting as it is, since it's not entirely kosher to rhyme "car" and "car" even if the morphology is a little different (car not being truly its own morpheme in Nascar, if you ask me.) References to large islands Southeast of Africa, however, are not only accepted but seemingly right somehow.

(In case you are thinking they did not exactly score big in the name lottery, know that there is an Uzbek name "Dildor" so things could be worse.)

*right, not exactly.

ETA: Here's where we are. Breaking news!

A second (bass) fiddle named Askar
Being Russian*, liked opera, not Nascar
Though his rival fraternal
Made sounds more supernal
(˘) ˘ ¯˘ ˘ ¯˘ ˘ ¯ ¯

ETA: JFMurray wins. Our condolences to him on this dubious honor.

A belated tip of the hat

2009-03-13T22:24:00.004-05:00

Well it does look like James Jorden is the regular opera reviewer for the New York Post. Two sparrows a spring do make, if you will. I'm not going adjective hunting--this is just great. Mind you I don't write this at the expense of the usual suspect--I am not one to join the Tommasini dogpile. Mr. Tommasini's obviously a smart man and a good writer (I know, I know, "strapping," but you try writing reviews on a regular basis and not developing a few tics*) and he cares about opera.

But a Times review is what it is, has developed a sort of formula where half or more is plot review, however nicely said. What this news means is the Post, of all entities, now has an opera reviewer who writes a review that will neither bore the the coronated opera queen nor mystify the casual tourist in our realm. These, as you know if you've been reading the Gay City News pieces, are reviews for anyone looking for a tight, immaculately-worded take on vocal events backed by a knowledge of the art form and its players you don't want to tangle with. Pardon me for reviewing a reviewer, but there it is.

Mr. Jorden, you know, is a known associate of La Cieca and rumored to have had something to do with the original Parterre Box publication, and for anyone who came to New York in the last so-many years because the opera is here, he is therefore largely responsible for shaping the entire gestalt of the New York opera fanatic.

So hats off to JJ, and many happy reviews, and now if someone catches you reading Page Six you can say you were merely thumbing through for New York's smartest opera review and everyone will think you're fancy.

*no, I refuse to give you an example of an opera writer's over-used rhetorical device. Oh.

Little Nixie Divey

2009-03-10T00:11:00.003-05:00

Current revival of Rusalka seems to me a must-see. In a way, since she's done it here before, least of it is that Fleming finds something in the role to sweep away the cobwebs of habit and mannerism (despite one uncanny vocal reference to her patented "Death to Maury" herky-jerky downward scale from "Je marche sur tous les chemins") and unleash her biggest and best voice, and what's more finds something mythical to connect with in the character to make us forget the perfume, the dessert, and the other trappings of diva-as-Diva. Act II was--despite above-referenced scale and a clunker high note from Sigmundsson--operatic excellence from start to finish. I'm puzzled by the lack of love for Goerke at calls, and gratified by the outpouring for Antonenko, both of whom sang with a brashness I haven't heard recently, encouraged in this by Belohlavek in the pit. Let me not leave out Stephanie Blythe, and forgive me for borrowing last year's internet slang. As Jezibaba, she is EPIC. More later? Eh, probably not. I'll add lastly that it's a profoundly traditional, pretty if dim production with nary a sarcastic dirndl in sight.

Can't quite let it go yet

2009-03-05T11:54:00.003-05:00

Funny how, when you're approximately the only person that liked something, you feel like its defender and champion even if you liked it in a decidedly tepid way.

Here's what I think happened, though I didn't come up with this entirely on my own: people read/heard/read about/heard about Dessay's dismissive remarks about Sonnambula and it colored their reaction to the entire piece, made them see satire and condescension where, by and large, it wasn't there (even if what was there wasn't exactly beauty or genius.) Central to this idea, for me, is the now much bemoaned piece of business in which Dessay makes her entrance to that enchanting orchestral bit just before singing "Ah, se una volta sola..." and walks up to the board on which has been written "Village Square" and all that, and dreamily writes "ARIA" in big letters.

Judging by the reaction, people find this to be a gigantic "fuck you" to Bellini, to the audience, to the stagehands, to Jesus, and pretty much everyone else. I kind of understand why, especially when I reach back and think of Mark Morris' kitschy-cute biz for Amor in his Orfeo, but I just think this reaction is mostly about things external to the moment. When I saw it, before the angry outpouring, I found it to be gently funny, albeit basically of a piece with the shallow self-referentiality that even I concede makes the Concept ultimately unworkable.

There is only one truly derisive gesture in the piece (coupled with one absolutely inexplicable one, the tearing of the scores and that whole hoedown before the first curtain) which is the aggressively dopey Swissing it up for "Ah, non giunge." Perhaps people are right to feel poked in the eye by that one. Since I don't love the opera itself, I found it funny, but this is (a little to my surprise, I'll admit) a minority opinion.

Listen, our forgiveness of ridiculous libretti is, I think, directly proportional to our love for the music. I guess I might get indignant about a production that seemed to mock La Gioconda even though it's asking for it. I pissed off a friend by calling Sonnambula nonsense: it's no more nonsensical than plenty of other things. I've just never found the music sufficiently wonderful to transport me to that land of suspended disbelief we ideally inhabit in the opera house when we need to.

The reaction at the prima still feels bitter and puritanical to me, but only in tenor and volume; I'm willing to grant that Ms. Zimmerman took a potshot at her audience (and by this I mean the people she should have considered her audience--the people who love the opera she chose to conceptualize) with the sarcastic folk-dancing, even if it felt more like a gentle nudge to me.

briefly noted

2009-03-04T12:03:00.002-05:00

Check 5BMF.org for details: March 20 @ 7:30, a recital by former (?) blogstress and very fine soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird et al.

ETA, sort of

2009-03-03T22:30:00.003-05:00

There's actually one thing I wrote that I just reread and felt like an asshole for saying, which is that people who love Sonnambula probably don't have adventurous tastes in theater, basically. I was take to task for a couple of things, but not this one for some reason. It's just not fair, and I wish to request those words on a plate with some sauce, k?

Another openin', another show

2009-03-02T23:58:00.006-05:00

So when I was studying some language or other, the professor, if you said something in a way that was viable but unlikely, would reach his right arm around the back of his head and grab his left ear [you should do this. it still won't necessarily make sense but I want to feel I have some influence in the world] and say "that's one way of saying it."

That's more or less my reaction to Mary Zimmerman's perfectly acceptable, occasionally charming new production of Vincenzo Bellini's perfectly acceptable, occasionally charming opera La Sonnambula. Because the re-imagining of La Sonnambula as...uh, let me see if I can get this right...mostly stuff that happens backstage during rehearsals for a production of La Sonnambula, except when it isn't quite that, leads one into a number of scenes that don't make sense unless we're suddenly exploring the liminal spaces between performance and reality, which frankly I just don't think we are. But...

Here's the thing. La Sonnambula is, but really, nonsense, and your two main options if you are saddled with the task of reviving it are 1) run with it, whoop it up, let the sweetly nostalgically ludicrous parts as opposed to the just plain dumb ones happen where they happen, give the core audience for La S the Swiss Miss commercial they are craving, or 2) fuck with it a little because maybe you'll hit some of the right notes, though if you're not perceived as having hit enough of them, you'll get violently boo'ed. Like seriously the only time I've ever heard anything like it was when Djokovic told 4,000 people "you don't like me anyway because I'm not Andy Roddick."*

Anyway, that's how it went down, because one thing I guess Mary Zimmerman or Peter Gelb might have thought of is that people who really think La Sonnambula is great are not usually the ones saying "did you catch that nutty new Hedda Gabler with the dwarves at BAM?" They are, however, the ones who tonight were heard to yell (in what might have devolved into violence) "Go back to Greenwich Village" in an argument right after the abbreviated curtain calls. This is the funniest insult ever for reasons I hope are obvious.

Now you will possibly exhume the corpse of Callas, the better to beat me with, and say if it's so goddamn stupid, Maur Bear*, why was it the best thing that ever happened on earth when Callas sang it? Which I won't answer because I wasn't born then, but my guess is it was a beacon of Kalageroupoliciousness in a sea of drivel, but I don't really know because not only was I not there, but I don't listen to it much. Actually, it's slightly interesting to imagine Callas in this production (I started to say "the instant offense" but that's just habit) because it never would have worked. On the basis of recordings and my own personal Callas mythology which may not be yours, how she put stuff like Amina over was some combination of a somewhat profound lack of critical intelligence that let her take such a story fairly seriously and the explosive creative genius we all agree on that rested upon an ability to somehow make any character** mythical in stature.

This is kind of the opposite of Dessay. Dessay goes at a character in a calculated way, and when the character isn't as smart as she is, as Jonathan von Wellsung points out, she sometimes makes great sport of, y'know, mocking the character a little. She and Mary Zimmerman must have ganged up on Amina that way (btw Amina is a fictional character and has no feelings, so please don't start feeling sorry for her even if I do have some old couch cushions sitting in my apartment because I can't put them on the curb when it's snowing. It's diff.) because the very last scene change, for "Ah, non giunge!" is absolutely in the same spirit. In it, Ms. Zimmerman seems to say: look, I could have given you Natalie Dessay in a fucking dirndl doing everything but yodeling, but I thought that would be dumb. Don't you agree? Because in fact the vaguely deliniated rehearsal-within-an-opera is over and JDF slaps on some Lederhosen and they all look like a bunch of idiots. I think this is what pissed people off to the point of almost violence. Well, this and my very favorite detail, which is what Dessay writes on the chalkboard just before "Ah! Non credea" which I won't spoil, but it made people laugh. Come on now--you know I'm pissy about overly laughy audiences, but I thought it was a funny-sweet moment and absolutely unoffensive.

The thing is it's all so harmless. It's the most superficial makeover imaginable, basically an excuse for modern dress, which I found vastly refreshing to see on the Met's stage. The only noteworthy sin of the production is that, as I think I started to say, the rehearsal/real life conceit makes almost everything having to do with count Rodolfo tough to fish any sense out of without excessive use of situational quotation marks. But you know me, I have trouble with the plot of Mary Tyler Moore episodes sometimes, so maybe I'm not the person to ask.

Certainly there are some other misfires sprinkled throughout. The stock diva stuff at Dessay's entrance, this and that. But there were also scattered lovelinesses, like the small redemption granted to Lisa at the last minute. I guess what I heard people reacting to most was the production making light of the material, and again, if you really love the material, that's kind of a fair charge. I really don't.

Oh but Dessay, right. Really I think in healthier voice here than in either Lucia or Fille, much as I liked her in both. She's obviously not doing as much vocal tearing-it-up as in Lucia, and it leaves her some room to breathe. The 93-year-old gent who sat beside us and who didn't love the updating but managed not to get hysterical about it said: she's perfect in this. And I think in fact she has become very good in this, despite a voice that isn't quite right for it. "Ah! Non credea" was very fine-grained but the line was firm, and though she busted loose a little more with her high notes at the dress, there was nothing to complain about. The ornamentation was, to my ear, inventive but idiomatic, the trill realish and the scales and arpeggios clean and unhesitant. Less than before I had the sense of hearing a too reedy voice trying to fill out music that wanted something fatter.

Our 93-year-old friend went on to say that he didn't think Florez was quite right for Bellini, better in purely flashy things where the fluidity and the top are all he needs, probably alluding to his indisputable success in Barbiere. He was probably basically right about this, too, though the second act aria and cabaletta were awfully convincing. He didn't express his thoughts, our pal, on Jane Bunnell but I was kind of happy to see her given a role that suited her nicely and not made to wear some dowdy wig.

Honestly, the rest of the singing I don't have strong opinions about, but I'm sure someone else will. Same goes for the conducting, though I was a little surprised at the total lack of rowdiness at the conductor's call. I think people were doing Lamaze exercises in preparation for their response to the production team.

By the way, once in a while it's good to pretend you're not an opera fan, for perspective, I mean not a hardcore one, and think: how would I be responding to this if I were not funny in the head? We did this accidentally by talking to this totally cute fellow in front of us during the chorus of disapproval. "Who are those people?" he asked, and we explained that they were the production team. He started laughing and eventually shouted "may god strike them all dead!' Yeah, exactly.

So basically if you love Sonnambula you shouldn't go see this because you're going to get your feelings hurt, and if you hate Sonnambula, you maybe shouldn't see it either because the production doesn't do sufficient violence to the material. It's sold out anyway, so either way you're in luck.

Next up: can't remember. It's late.

oh hey p.s. it's the next morning and I'm trying to do the "Am I a Hypocrite" test which is almost always worth doing. The case in point being my kvetching about Mark Morris', uh, fanciful reimagining of Gluck's Orfeo. I didn't boo, because I don't, but I probably shouldn't call people oversensitive when I felt pretty enraged at an assault on a thing I hold dear. So yes, looks like this is me being a hypocrite. Welp, that's the internet for ya, a forum for the parts of ourselves we would, in a perfect world, keep to ourselves.

*which was absolutely true, but not the sporting thing to point it out
**yeah, I grew a beard at the suggestion of my waistline
***except maybe Rosina. Ow. And that other Rossini role she recorded, Muffaletta or whatevs.

Best of the Best

2009-03-01T01:17:00.000-05:00

100% Stimm + 100% Kunst=Verrett

Hooray! (You want witty headlines? Try The Onion.)

2009-02-17T10:32:00.008-05:00

I don't know quite where to start in gabbing about how much I liked last night's Trovatore, and yes, that's your shot across the bow in case you listened (was it broadcast?), hated it, and are going to get the vapors if someone gets enthusiastic about it.

In fact, that's all that is, because I know exactly where to start: Sondra Radvanovsky! Who received quite an outpouring of audience love after D'amor, the only possible response to such an exquisite traversal. There are valid quibbles I don't happen to think were truly significant, yeah. The voice is utterly American; not Italian. It's lean, not Tebaldi plush. There is also the fact that her expression in phrasing tends more toward plain sincerity than abandon: on the Joan Scale she's further toward Fontaine than Crawford.* Some people need more thrashing about in their Verdi, so caveat auditor.

But to balance these, she's...just fucking great in this music is what she is, I daresay exciting. We all heard the run was going to be split with Fleming. Whatever she might have done in the role, her voice is about half the size of Radvanovsky's and her high notes, these days, not as secure, so that's a win. Ukh, the high notes. They're just massive, but also with a fancy fil-di-voce option, and not overused at that. And she did, if I'm not wrong, two verses of "di tale amor" as well as a passionate "tu vedrai," and some very game physical acting if Anna Netrebko hasn't completely worn us out on Jeritza-and-beyond singing in non-traditional positions.

The thing to remember is that for years, it almost hasn't mattered who sang Leonora, because whoever they were, they were going to get upstaged by the Azucena. I saw this happen with Diadkova and...I'm not certain who, and that's not a rhetorical forgetting. Timing-wise it may have been Crider. So take it as a sincere doffing of the cap to Radvanovsky when I say in no way was she sung off the stage by Zajick. Right, the Zajick who is an absolute monster (in the best way) in roles typified by Azucena.

Also the Zajick who is aging a little, but as with so many things, this has its advantages in with the bargain. For one thing, I think singing a wider variety of roles like Tammy Faye in American Tragedy has broadened what is generally an essentially nonexistent philosophy of acting. Zajick has found intermittent pathos here, viz: Ai nostri monti, utterly affecting with Mr. Alvarez. Meanwhile, she can tear you a new one with guttural lines like the almost George Crumb-ish dare to a mezzo that pops up twice in "Deh! rallentate, o barbari." An unwritten maybe C had to be rescued, but rescued it was. [ETA: well...salvaged. It didn't squeak to a stop and it didn't crack, but you couldn't say it was a good note.] The rest of the role she kinda stands there and sings like it's no fucking big deal. I have never been Zajick's #1 fan but in shit like this, c'mon.

Alvarez was not triumphant but, I think, successful. Not so much in convincing us he's a spinto now as in convincing us he can pull off a spinto role with some aplomb and no vocal mishaps. "Ah, si" was, sure, a touch cautious. Like any lyric flirting with spintery, he ain't got no trill, substituting an ornate little figure out of Couperin (with some very particular notation that looks like a fishing fly for catching trout) and the rest of the aria was similarly a little bit on eggshells, but then he went on to fare quite well in the barn-burner that follows, dropping out where it's traditional to do so and returning with a long, loud C with two syllables (even if they had the same vowel: al agua! I'm sure there is something deep in the psychic underworld of the libretto to explain his sudden urge to go swimming, if not his sudden change of nationality from libretto-Italian story-Spanish to Spanish through and through.) Okay or B if it was transposed. I'm not the person to ask. I think later in the run his often stylish way with a phrase is going to triumph over nerves. I hope to be there to find out. Also, whether you feel he's filling spinto shoes or not, he doesn't sound like he's beating his voice up, so at worst, we don't have to listen to him croaking stuff in five years he was booked for now.

Hvorostovsky needs little approval from me, house favorite that he is, and truth to tell, I had just slightly less approval to give than the rest of the house did. Obviously there were no major faults, because the man's a machine. He doesn't fuck up, or come close. Maybe here it was a matter of personality, too much Oneginly hautuer? Il Balen just didn't kill me, nevermind that I always think it's about whales. (Cetology joke, yo! What, I'm reading Moby Dick right now.)

Oh, you wanted to hear about the production? Well sure, I can do that, after a fashion. It's good news, lads and ladies. Neither radical nor ploddingly literal, it does what it needs to do. Makes some spatial sense of the world's least convincing case of mistaken identity, e.g. (It's so dark I thought you were a tenor! D'oh!) It, uh, needs a good healthy greasing of the loudly crunchy stage turntable, but then who doesn't love a production on a turntable? One thing the turntable does that I'm fond of is allow us to watch characters and supers whose act has ended exist for a moment more, giving something of a cinematic fade instead of curtain up, curtain down.

And yes, there's a fair amount of "I am grabbing your arm! Look in the other direction" bustling about, but certain crowd scenes work out well. As Will Berger's thoughtful essay-interview in the program points out, the production makes no foolish effort to pretend the anvil chorus is a naturalistic scene of great subtlety. It's the goddamn anvil chorus, so it's played for big, with wonderfully loud anvils whacked away at by some unapologetically cast slabs of man with all the stately grace of Olivia Newton John's video for "Physical." This is as it should be.

Shit, I almost left out Kwangchul Youn, because that aria always feels like, forgive me, the plot before the porn, but here as in Tristan, he's stylish and solid.

Seems like there was something else to say but if so I'll come back and edit. That's how I roll.

*For the record, 1 is Joan Sutherland and 10 is Joan of Arc as portrayed by Falconetti

Up next: Adriana, then the auditions.

One More Reason I Want to Gay Marry Regina Spektor

2009-02-16T00:03:00.000-05:00

...which is complicated, I realize.

To be watched with a handkerchief in one hand (for theatrically dabbing the tears) and a molotov cocktail in the other (fuck petitions!)

Not a rhetorical question, though you'll quicky wish it had been

2009-02-15T09:37:00.003-05:00

I don't think I typed about Onegin, but the main thing I wanted to do in any case was clone about 100 of me and have us stand arranged so that if you saw us from above, it spelled WTF. Not about Hampson, who had good moments and bad (the Russian displays a positively Puerto Rican relationship with the consonant kingdom, but he basically gets the character), nor certainly about Mattila, who sang the letter precisely as it is meant to be sung. Oh, not Beczala, either. Fine showing. I thought he sounded strained in Lucia last year but am beginning to suspect he's the Next Big Tenor Thing.

No, ladies and germs, my WTF is reserved for Mr. Richard Bernstein, the evening's Zaretzky, and tucked into its what-the-fuckish abbreviationality, it carries the condensed message: why on earth are you singing tiny roles, man?! This can only be an "I wanted my weekends free" raise-the-kids kind of lifestyle choice, it seems to me, because the voice is objectively of such fine quality. Also he looks like a Jewish fratboy all growed up, but in a good way. (I lived across the street from the SAM house in college. Only time I've ever had a fond thought about basketball, or, say, used binoculars to watch it.)

Well you know where I'm going? I'm marching straight over to his website to see if maybe he takes a bunch of gigs in some other city or something. Won't you come with? Oh, uh huh. See? This season it looks like he has covered a bunch of stuff, for one thing. I hear you can make a living that way and potentially never have to put a wig on. And then he did a shitload of Raimondos at Central City, which is almost certainly in one of those states with more outdoors than indoors where people choose to spend their summers even if they're not singing Raimondo, which most people aren't.

Well, as that great opera fan Chernyshevsky once asked, what's to be done? Either he sings tertiary roles at the Met because he wants to or he sings tertiary roles at the Met because someone's an idiot. I'm not in a position to change anyone's mind and god knows I get no say in the world's idiot count, though I have been accused of adding to it. And that, as the bard wrote, cleans up the matter.

Okay so there is ONE surprise

2009-02-11T00:30:00.004-05:00

At least I'm surprised, and as much as I tell myself it'd be more fun to learn of the new season all at once (as in olden days) I can't stop myself from looking into the crystal ball over the course of the season. What the crystal ball failed to mention that is faintly amusing is that next year will apparently be...your chance to hear Kiri te Kanawa bellow "he's on the BOBSLED TEAM!" I don't mean to be critical but she's not known for her irrepressible way with a punchline, is she?

You've read about the season elsewhere already. It sounds pretty good without being vastly exciting, right?

Also: This

2009-02-05T01:36:00.002-05:00

If I'd known earlier that this existed as a visual document, I might have led a happier and more productive life:

Eric the half-a-concert

2009-02-04T22:36:00.003-05:00

Awful to find oneself riffing on Monty Python when, in one's high school days, one associated Monty Python mostly with mortifying attempts to cobble together enough English accent to get through the parrot skit and, consequently, with bitter weariness. But I couldn't help it. It was just such an odd joy to plunk down $10 for a lousy seat in a hall where (aurally) there really are not lousy seats and strike a deal with oneself to go to the first 50 minutes of a concert and the guiltlessly go home. The second half (Strauss tone poem whatsitcalled) was most probably fab, but then so is getting home at ten to my blissfully overheated apartment.

Not a lot to say, enjoyed Ligeti's Atmospheres though I'll never quite have a place to tuck Ligeti away in my brain, i.e. don't wholly know what's special about him. For sure there are gripping effects in Atmospheres, but also...the section where all the string players are just doing layers and layers of harmonics? That is a bold, bracing musical gesture that not one person in the history of Suzuki lessons who realized how to play harmonics has not thought "oh hey what if a room full of people were doing this?" I'm not making the argument from "my third grader could paint a Jackson Pollack," because that's the oldest trick in the anti-intellectual's playbook, just saying when you watch the bass section sliding heir hands up and down the giant fingerboard, you might have a moment of wondering what separates originality from doodling, iconoclasm from mere fancy. Insofar as I can judge the performance of the avant-garde, it was crisply and convincingly laid out. People laughed at the part where the brass players blow notelessly through their instruments, but it seemed more like a "wow, that's diff" laugh than a nervous WTF giggle, so fine.

Predictably, I went mostly out of curiosity about Measha Brueggergosman, who has some interesting hype online, some good press in general, and a few worthwhile vids on youtube. It's a very pretty voice, and there seems to be plenty going on verbally, but I'm a little sorry to report that she had about half the vocal presence she needed to pull of the Wesendonck Lieder. Now listen, I'm not one of those. "I couldn't hear her in Row K," is the mating call of idiots on opera-L, almost invariably the sign of someone who has an axe to grind and a wit somewhat duller than the unground axe. But, c'mon. Wagner, Max. Why pick this when you're young and fresh but not fat of voice? Carnegie is very acoustically kind, and only in places did the voice strike its proper proportion with the orchestral environs. I do not think this is the conductor's fault. I look forward to hearing MB in something else. It seems certain she will be a delight.

Can't think what's next. Possibly Adriana?

A little bit of Youtube perfection

2009-01-27T20:50:00.001-05:00

As friends of mine used to say with reference to the Nilsson Salome LP cover, that's my kinda woman.

Second-hand News

2009-01-27T09:35:00.005-05:00

Very briefly noted: I was pretty sure I was hearing the end of Villazon's career last night. Act I he kind of barfed out the first big high note, futzed around with vowels some, left out the last high, and I think maybe took a note or two down. At the end of Act II he strangled horribly on the tenor's big note before the big concertato finish (am I using that right?) and actually stopped singing. He cleared his throat loudly, paused an unbearable couple of seconds, and tried it again, without improvement. It was just simply awful. The act finished. We were told his cover was going on (you know who you are!) and left. Well I'm told by a reliable source he not only went back on, but was "spectacular."

Trebs and Lucia, in my book, not a great match. She was a very gracious colleague to VR and she popped out some nice high notes, but it was largely just a mess in the ways you'd predict. Pitchy, not stylistically idiomatic (and yes, that's a range, but I don't think her singing fell within it), not enough there to be rescued by her presence alone. Kwiecen and Abdrazakov admirably solid. Another good Arturo in Colin Lee.

Also

2009-01-26T12:08:00.002-05:00

I'm not sure if reception line stories are considered entertainment. In any case, this is mine, which should be prefaced by the fact that I become rather mumbly and verbally inept in such situations, which is kind of embarrassing. But it went something like this.

MD: [in a prepared speech] That was intense!
JDiD: You're telling me!
MD: Oh, er, yes. Well. Good point. It must have been even worse for you.
[MD quietly internally hangs self for word choice, since "worse" connotes, well, "bad"]
MD: Oh, so I thought it would be minorly hilarious if you were to sign it to "Maury" which is my blog name.

Oh wait. Brief backtrack. Did I tell you the one where I was finding the italic font on YankeeDiva a bit eye-stomping in combination with the color scheme? And then I wrote a note to the author of same saying so? I think I was really tired or something, and my "Who the hell do you think you are?" filter was off, and the Yankee Diva not only did not go all Patti LuPwn on me, but actually changed the font. She mentioned that it had been a girlish caprice, the italic font, at which point I joined the ranks of those who crush the dreams of others, but she was not only gracious but (apparently characteristically) funny and nice about it. Aright, you're all caught up. Except for the part where I email her wondering if Dejanira is a cognate for "le dejeuner" and she has been touring around in the role of Breakfast. Upshot: my doddering incoherence was announced aforehand. Any singer at this point would be forgiven for saying "ah, uh-huh...To Maury, with all wishes for a speedy recovery from whatever it is that afflicts you." Instead

JDiD: [Complimentary things about blog!]
MD: Ahem, yes, well. Your singing is wonderful. More obviously. [Hangs self again.]
JDiD: Thanks, Maury! [Which is actually only the second time I've ever been called that aloud, in case I am seeming like the loser kid who goes by "D'Artagnan" in French class and then wants everyone to keep calling him that. I am that loser, too, but not in this instance.]

SCENE.

I have half a mind to scan in the CD insert because the inscription is pretty funny. After she wrote it, she said "I'm actually not sure what that means," which makes it all the better.

The internet, in its wisdom...

2009-01-25T13:36:00.003-05:00

has provided me at last with a response to Mark Morris' Orfeo production.

I did figure out a strategy for making lemonade (there is no such beverage as crapade so I'm not sure what you are supposed to do when life, or the Met, hands you etc.) which was to try to locate Burger King in the Standing Room of the Dead bleachers. He must be in there somewhere. Everyone is. A cleverer observer pointed out to me the kind of hilarious fact that all the dead people I could name standing up there (on what looks like this one scene from one of the Star Trek movies*) are not, in point of fact dead, at the time Orfeo is tooling around Thrace, on account of not having been born. Abe Lincoln, for instance: not dead back then.

But other than the bleachers full of pre-deadniks, Mr. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the opera? I'm glad you asked. Because I didn't enjoy it all that much, but this is not Stephanie Blythe's fault. She, indeed, gave the perfect Stimmdiva performance with gilded edges of Kunst (where does extremely well-judged ornamentation fall on that spectrum?) with the single exception of those few moments when Levine was busy proving you can be very, very good at some things and not have a clue about others. His pacing throughout was waterlogged, but "Che faro" was I guess the musical equiv of him taking a tire iron to Ms. Blythe's kneecaps. An assault, I think I mean. There was really nothing she could do. He frog-marched her through it at a vicious clip and all pathos was flattened underfoot. Elsewhen, however, she really lived up to the things people say about her that I have never 100% been on board with. No way to judge her physical performance from fam circ, and her saddled with a guitar and a gimmicky look to boot, but vocally it left nothing to be desire. Her chesty lows? A visceral pleasure.

Can't quite make up my mind about Heidi Grant Murphy, who for the better didn't sing Amore with bleached early music seriousness, but there's probably a happy medium I'd have liked better. I'm speaking of the vocal mannerisms, since the shtick is part of the production, and probably my very least favorite part at that. And without the lovely "Cet asile aimable et tranquille"--why this version of Orfeo, o Met???--I am finding myself without a very convicted opinion of De Niese, though it's a pretty voice.

Next up: Lucia, and then possibly the intriguing Measha Brueggergosman singing the Wesendoncks w/ Cleveland.

*Here is why blogging is bad. I have spent actual, non-figurative hours googling around to find this so I could insert a picture. All I have to show for my effort is he knowledge that the woman who played the whale scientist in what youtube reveals to be the horribly campy Star Trek IV went on to be the mom on Seventh Heaven, a swirling vortex of Bush era televisionary wholesomeness that...nevermind, I'm not going to finish that sentence. I'm going to take a minute to revel in the use of "Bush era" as a thing past and complete.

Alas a fanboi, I

2009-01-24T01:51:00.006-05:00

Yeah, it's true, the danger of blogging about someone like Joyce DiDonato after a recital such as she gave at Zankel just now is that you run the risk of sounding like a blithering fanboi. But hey, at this point that's a label I'm comfortable with. Part of the problem is that JDD has a blogospheric presence that's so fan-friendly that I'm pretty sure we all have a sort of "our Joyce" feeling about her to begin with, so you're starting at level of admiration that may require insulin to read about, and then if the singing is good, forget about it...

Speaking generally for a second about the love of singing, here is what's confusing: unless I'm overgeneralizing my own experience, you start out as an opera fan loving the beautiful voices (Kathleen Battle's Pleasures of Their Company hung the moon for me), and then after a few years you discover the appeal of flawed voices, and at some point this becomes a dichotomy. You suppose that the prettiest voices rest on their laurels and that the monstrous ones just work the harder and are the more to be entrusted with the work of serious artistry.

But so unless I'm devising an imaginary dichotomy here, JDD doesn't have the innate tragedy in her voice, the tonal sob of, to pick the most obvious example, Troyanos. It is a sunny-colored voice that goes with the face (ok, fine, as long as I'm having a mock-heterosexual moment, it's probably worth noting that the lady, in photographs possessed of an agreeable Midwestern prettiness, is in person fairly dazzling.) So I suppose she must work very hard indeed, because here is art, no doubt about it. No, let's make use of the shift key. Here is Art.

It doesn't look like work. I overheard a gentleman at intermission saying "she'd better not keep singing like that--balls out all the time," and it was sweet of him, I thought, to be concerned for a singer he likes (well and obviously we do all like to play If I Were a Vocal Coach once in a while), but I'm pretty sure he's wrong. The strain of a hard sing is not in evidence; in this selection of tortured scenes from Handel what is heard is not that the sounds pain the singer, but rather that the sentiment does. If La DiDo were singing recklessly, the second encore, the lyrical and un-furious "Dopo Notte," could not have sounded so, well, bouncy.

That's actually the best word I can think of for how you have to sing it for the the repetitive figures in that piece to sound like anything but a repeated poke in the ear--LHL knew this, too, as evidenced on record. And in fact, between vocal passages, the singer bounced on her feet perceptibly to the music. Hey remember that time I was in Zankel for four or six hours of Meredith Monk? And Bjork sang and I was all "whatever, Bjork" until she got out there and, hang on, gotta self-google here...sang Gotham Lullaby "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."

Right, that. The physical engagement in the scenes from Teseo was gratifying, the braced-for-battle stance somehow not impeding but perhaps somehow aiding the lengthy roulades. In the justly famous "Joyce DiDonato decompensates in front of you" scene from Hercules, it was what I can only happily call harrowing. I wonder if this is all about trusting that a curl of the lip that may not be seen even in a small hall may still be heard, and so doing it regardless of whether it is seen.

What I'm getting at is the gestures were generally not large. Which of course means that the ones that were something ferocious. So, for instance much of the "I'm fixin' to fall out" vibe of "Where shall I fly?" (apparently first performed at Carnegie by no less than the Heink--big shoes to fill, and you know what they say about a Contralto with big shoes, don't you? Neither do I) was put across by means of a mix of gestures small and large. By the time she ever so slightly messed up her hair, something chameleonic had occurred, and for a moment you might have felt she was standing up there looking a fright instead of still working a dashingly bazoomatic red frock.*

If I were better able to access the emotion in Handel, I assume my head would have exploded at some point, and then once I'd put it back together, I'd have more useful commentary for you. To my mostly post-baroque ear, in any case, this was a real Sternstunde, and certainly (with the exception of the two gentlemen in good seats who almost started whapping each other with programs over something or other...one is curious but will never know) the mistake of putting a concert that could have filled Stern in tiny Zankel did pay off in terms of its friendly, intimate feel. If you want to judge for yourself, there is, you know, a CD with a notably similar program.

Next up, probably a few sour words about the Orfeo production and a few happy ones about Blythe, this already seen and heard at the time of final mouseclick.

*Right, Parterre is the one where they coherently describe clothing. MFI: colors are about as detailed a description as you're going to get.

Broken News

2009-01-14T17:09:00.002-05:00

Tbe news done broke and we here at MFI played absolutely no role in breaking it: George Steel is the new director at City Opera. Mazel tov to The Little Opera Company that Occasionally Could, and we hope this works out well. It should, right? One has the impression it's like getting Mortier with much, much less baggage. You have to think they're probably feeling pretty sour in Dallas, though.

I go back to the opera, um, the day after tomorrow, and then some more after that. Despite my quite nearly violent dislike of Mark Morris' production of Orfeo, and my rather staid approval of Stephanie Blythe, the Sirius b'cast of opening night made me think this is going to be maybe something special.

sufficient champagne

2008-12-31T12:24:00.003-05:00

To a few people in particular I wish not even so much a happy new year as a moment of blissful relief watching the old one vanish. 2008 played rough and not particularly fair with a number of my own, so to 2008: begone already. Now is the time for a moment of optimism that will dry up in a week, so it really ought to be savored! Me, I've ironed my shirt and practiced my aria (Chaikovsky would really not wish to claim it as his own once I'm done with it) and am ready for the festivities. So if 2008 was a fine year for you, I wish you another, and if it was a horror, join me in thinking of it no more. To everyone, though: rest for the weary, fulfillment, inspiration, health...

Clip Show, or: What day is this?

2008-12-25T09:20:00.004-05:00

Well it's the 25th, of course, and Thursday, which means the Times puzzle is a worthy but defeatable opponent. We do try and stay open on the 25th here at MFI, just because nothing else is and we figure if you're one of those who isn't singing odd little songs about playing a drum for an infant (I'm surprised that one hasn't been suppressed in today's climate of petri dish parenting..."Little Skylar/Madison/Jesus isn't allowed to hear percussion. It isn't on the list of sounds that encourage later admission to Dartmouth." See also "Three middle aged guys are here to see my son? Quick, online! To the sex offender registry, hie!") you may well be bored.

Well I can't help with that personally, least not blogwise, as I haven't been to the opera in a fortnight. There is no leftover Chinese from Erev Christmas or I'd offer you some. I'm afraid what this is going to boil down to is me looking for Things You Just Have to See on youtube. I swear there was something I was meaning to show you.

Well, okay, not to totally ruin Christmas (oh, who am I kidding...that's totally what I'm here to do) by plunging you into melancholic reverie:

[If you're clicking around from that clip to related ones, check out Madame Seefried's Bridesmaid of Frankenstein do on her Zueignung.]

You know who I've always associated with Seefried because they were both on my first Figaro is Sena Jurinac.

Well and I guess I'll complete that nostalgic trio with this peculiar little clip.

With that I wish you a happy 25th of December, and a happy 26th after that.

Poulenc

2008-12-21T15:24:00.002-05:00

I find this lovely in every way (performance, document, film...)

Different Isn't Always Good

2008-12-18T16:07:00.011-05:00

Hello and good riddance to the unconscionable revival of The Seagull, a London import with a fine cast and savagely tone-deaf direction closing at the Walter Kerr soon, but not soon enough.

For once I'm not even looking in the program for the name of the director. The funny thing about Chekhov is you read it and it sounds foolproof, in your head. Apparently, some take this as a challenge. Mr. X's concept announces itself immediately: Medvedenko enters and delivers the first half of one of theater's best-known entrance lines--"Why do you always..." and Masha raises her hand to stop him, and doesn't let him finish ("wear black?") for a moment. I can think of two things that are going on with this, and both of them help to explain how awful this revival is.

#1: Work under the assumption that The Seagull is a boring old play and needs freshening up. Try anything. The worse the better, because worseness is unfamiliar, so it looks like you've done something. Continue this ethos of worseness by finding what is loathesome in every character, despite Chekhov's eternal sympathy for his creations, and amplify it to the point of farce.

#2: Notice that Chekhov's characters often are as unhappy as they are because they're unable to listen to one another. Amplify, again, to the point of farce, but this time from both ends: on the one hand, none of them really hears the others, rarely anyway. On the other, the characters so overbroadcast every emotion (cf: Kristen Scott Thomas' blood curdling scream, really only one shot in a barrage, though between ludicrous outbursts she is almost frustratingly exquisite) that the audience is left with no choice but to laugh at the apparent imbeciles parading before them. Add a laugh track, if desired, because what you have now is a sitcom.

The worst casualty of this approach is the scene where Arkadina changes her son's bandages. Mind, he has already entered with his head bandaged from a suicide attempt, and the audience is so clobbered by the aesthetic of this performance that they find this funny. I don't even think this is the "hey everyone, we paid for this so it'd better be fun" problem I've whined about; I think it was set up this way. Anyway the scene is unbreakably moving, and was so here, except that in the context of what was around it, it felt baffling and unprocessable.

Oh hang on, I'm going to back up. Even before the hijinx with the first line (which Masha, by the way, answers "I'm in mourning for my life," which is exactly where you get to decide whether to present her as an object for ridicule or a tart and often overdramatic character, troubled but basically sympathetic...three guesses how she was presented here) this production did that thing you're hearing a lot if you go to plays much, the sound design that telegraphs seriousness by means of echoes, a drone, and some harmonics. Hello, is this the Moratorium Department? Well, can you please connect me, then?

Konstantin, by the way, is played by Mackenzie Crook, perhaps known to you as Gareth in the original, British "The Office." It was actually an interesting idea, I think, to cast someone who with true genius portrayed one of the most annoying people ever born. Maybe he had some range, a way to make Konstantin worth caring about when the play gives us many chances not to like him--from the brief play within a play, an almost offhanded sketch of well-intentioned dramatic drivel. Or maybe he doesn't.

Most puzzling of all was Peter Sarsgaard, a fine film actor who I am still going to assume has acting chops that will carry over to the stage, but who here seemed to have some deeply complex, outwardly ungraspable idea about who Trigorin is, evidenced by a wandering accent and tortured prosody I've never heard the like of in human speech.

Nina was portrayed by, oh someone. The "let's fix up this old character" concept assigned to her appeared to be that Nina was unhinged from the beginning. I just don't know what to say about this. I guess it's possible, but it's so out of left field I honestly [hey, spoiler alert...stop reading if you don't know how The Seagull ends] wondered if they were going to pull something in the end where Yakov (who was made to lurch around menacingly at times) turns out to have murdered Konstantin, who in fact did not kill himself at all!!!!

Have I ever mentioned Vanya on 42nd Street in these moronic pages? I'm going to now, because it's a fine corrective to what I saw last night. Because the thing is, Chekhov sometimes presents his characters with rather mercurial changes of temperament and motivation, and if you watch the first act of VO42, you will see how this looks when it's done well. Julianne Moore, not an actress I love, works a kind of magic doing this, and it's one of the most magnetic performances I know of. I had to watch an act of it when I got home to reassure myself.

This is not to say that there's only one way to do Chekhov, but I did find myself thinking all 3 hours about what was going wrong. The only major thing I can think of that went right was the pacing...actually in contrast to the production at BAM last season, the one you could only get tickets to when it wasn't Ian McKellan, which is exactly what we did. That production was torpid and inert, though not actively wrong. In this one, the hours flew by like minutes; ah, but what lousy minutes!

Somehow, despite all this, the first half the last act was what Chekhov should be, a shaded, heightened version of a plausible human tableau. Oh and not for nothing, as long as I've spoiled, thanks to the sound team for once for making the shot from the other room a discreet thing. Like Mrs. Parker at Ibsen plays, I practically sit there with my fingers in my ears waiting for the inevitable. After 3 1/2 acts of this, I thought of the story of the world's worst production of the Diary of Anne Frank (you've heard this one. "She's under the stairs!" says an audience member) I wanted to write him a little note, maybe fold it into a paper airplane, about what gauge to use so as to finish the job.

Jesus: 1; Fun: 0

2008-12-09T01:11:00.005-05:00

Actually I take back the headline, maybe. Thing is, Thais is one of those things that flips around on you at the last moment. You know, like Dancer in the Dark, where you sit there for two hours going "this is fucking unbearable" until it finally dawns on you that it's a comedy. (Come on, anyone who can watch that little boy hand Bjork his broken glasses without laughing has a heart of stone.)

So that's also kind of true of Thais, yeah. I think so. I spent two and a half acts writhing in my seat at having to watch a pious denunciation of women, sex, living in the world, and having a nice place to live. And then suddenly it's the last scene and Thomas Hampson is jumping around like a puppy going "wait, wait, you can't die! I just realized you're hot!" and Renee Fleming is like "fuck it, you should have said something before you made me burn all my LaCroix. Ta ta, cruel world!" At that point it's so clear that the whole thing is virulently anti-clerical satire that it's hard to be upset.

Still, the Met's production is, it must be admitted, a bit joyless. I think this is actually a production that premiered in Chicago in 2002ish with the same principals, and one would be forgiven for wondering if the physical production showed up wrapped in a bow with a note that said "good luck with the staging!" Direction was not greatly in evidence, the crowd scene at the end of act whatever (tired. deal.) was one of those things where everyone's like "hey, stop her, she's getting away. Shit, there are pages of music left, and there is absolutely nothing to stop me from stopping her myself. Shit." For instance. The design itself is attractive in a dramatically quite generalized way. The "is it the desert or is it a dinosaur sized Ruffles potato chip?" effect is used to much greater effect in Santo Loquasto's Salome set, as my less-dour-than-I companion pointed out...

It seems to me the singing was all about what you'd expect, but a bit routine. Hampson sings this stuff well, if a bit woollily. There didn't seem to be toooo much Captain Kirking around, but it may be because the role is preposterous and impossible to overplay.

TH: So what's my motivation in this scene?
Imaginary absent director: You are a boring fucking zealot. Same as the last scene. And the next one.

His French I am temped to term a bit indistinct, but am also willing to be challenged on that, since my own is hardly expert. As always, he looks like a rollicking lay.

Fleming actually benefits a bit from the same impossible-to-overplay factor, perhaps, but the laugh-wait-sob at the end of Act I pushed the envelope. It's just that stylistically, Thais brings out some of her better tendencies, and this allows the glamor of her portrayal to seem organic rather than painted-on, as it can in some roles. The role goes higher than you think it's going to, and at this point it's not effortless for the big RF, but she doesn't hold back, and for that we're grateful. What came off best for both singers were low key moments like the duet in the desert and Fleming's less glitzy aria, the name of which I'm not going to google right now. Michael Schade assisted ably, but honestly I like his voice a lot more in Mozart, you know?

Someone is going to have to tell you about the fashion part, and it is not going to be me.

Think that's going to have to wrap it up, as it is late late late. Still intending to write about Tristan, and possibly the Sondheim show at the Public. (The one where the cub gets the twink, clearly a work of astringent realism...)

Remember that time I used to write opera reviews?

2008-12-04T22:46:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I sit and wonder, in my artless Mycenaean way, why is it that Elektra is so much better than anything else that happens, musical or otherwise. Sometimes, while I'm being all Hellenically inquisitive about things, I also wonder why the MTA would choose to piss on my evening by skipping three stops without announcing it. Me, if I were a subway conductor instead of a rage-obsessed daughter of a murdered king, I would announce that kind of thing. But then I don't run the subway or drive a train. Ah, you'll be thinking, but you also never saved an axe for years and years so you could murder your immediate family with it. Well, maybe, maybe not. On the internet, nobody knows you're an Argosian princess, as the old cartoon says.

It's not as if I'm home late, anyway. Elektra is an hour and three quarters soaking wet, and actually I know this from recent experience because that's about what it clocked in at with Lorin Maazel really laying it the fuck on. I heard (and failed to get) a joke about Lorin Maazel and a fan in an elevator, but we'll leave that for the second set, when the act goes blue, because even I can't find the relevance.

Anyway like a Berlinian hedgehog of conducting, Maazel made One Big Choice, and that was to lead everything at a lumbering pace that almost never varied. It wasn't unnuanced if I'm making it sound like that; on the contrary there were places where the breadth of things gave Strauss' grotesque little filigrees (like the tootling around before the big orchestral freak-out that begins Elektra's monologue...insert maybe apocryphal thing about Strauss/Mendelssohn/"fairy music") room to introduce themselves properly, in case you hadn't met. And, somewhat to my surprise, it made Klytamnestra's "oh shit, here she comes" music extraordinarily menacing rather than dulling its impact.

What it did do, however, was underline the few longeurs the score does have, like when they opened out the "Penthouse Forum" cut ("Dear Penthouse Forum: This one time, I told my sister how slim and supple her hips were, and then we had a pillow fight and killed our entire family.") it came to feel like a bit of a shaggy dog story, despite the fact it's really not that long. What else it did is throw some nasty demands the way of the singers. Not only did Chrysothemis' waltz lose its giddy despair, but Anne Schwanewilms had to yelp out a couple of top notes, notes that turned out to be pretty workable later on when she got to approach them a little more favorably.

Schwanewilms, truth to tell, was overparted, but uh...in a good way? It's like how Lisa della Casa is the more moving (with Mitropoulos, you know, on record) because she sounds a bit out of her depth, as is her character. She's a good actress, insofar as you can tell in concert, though she doesn't enter right after the double bar howling like a wounded animal, but you know who the hell does?

Jane Henschel, sorta. You remember that one Halloween we sat in the house playing Jean Madeira's hideous cackle from the Bohm recording? Oh, wait, you weren't there. You'll have to take my word for it. It's a highlight of the history of studio recordings, though, right? And her screams: also first rate. You basically don't get to hear that live. It just gets lost, if the mezzo in question does it at all.

The one time I actually had tears in my eyes during this performance, though, was at Jane Henschel's exit, because she made the most unhinged, embarrassing sounds. It was perfection. As were her screams, maybe--one was thrown momentarily off one's critical moorings by the fact that this effect came from up in the balcony. Actually it was fun to watch the lady in front of me keep looking nervously up there ever after, in case there might be more Murders in the Mezzanine.

Weird thing is, Henschel started off with no promise of what was to come. A few things I have always assumed Klytamnestren live for were thrown away like they didn't matter, most notably the line "sie redet wie ein Artzt" in which you just get to sound like an absolute car horn if you feel like it. There was another that baffled me, I think in the part about...uh....well the part that an online translator tells me goes like this:

I wish from my soul all hull
and replace the fan gentle air,
from where it will come up, admit as
the sick do if they cool the air,
Sitting on ponds, evening their bumps
and all their Eiterndes the cool air
disclose the evening, and nothing raquel think
as a relief to create.

Yessiree. I think you're supposed to replace the fan after 10,000 miles right? Or is that the air filter? But so then you get to "Darum bin ich so behangt mit Steinen" [Therefore, I hang out with Gloria Steinem] and all hell breaks loose, with the chest voice, and the basically growling, and my favorite line, the one about zefressen von den Motten, where everyone gets to pretend they're Martha Modl. Well that was all fine and dreadful. No complaints here. For fun, she is two feet shorter than her stage daughter, which adds some kind of dynamic I can't put my finger on.

Actually it was at the moment of the death screams that I remembered something. Which is that riiiight about when I was flirting with maybe liking Not Always Pretty Music, but not yet, I heard a broadcast of Elektra, and thought in that way that romantic comedy heroes and heroins hate one another when they meet: that is some nasty, fucked up shit. This was 1991, I think. Who knows, could even have been Polaski.

Polaski, you see, has been singing the role for goddamn ever. And the natural conclusions you will reach, correctly, are 1) that she is in some ways out of voice, and 2) that she probably knows what the hell to do about it because this is far from her first time at the rodeo. There are places where the sound is very, very frayed, but someone must have told her at some point that if you rev the engine a certain way, nobody will notice you're driving a rusty Pinto.

Here's what she uses: volume you can't argue with, a trick of crooning higher stuff for a second before slamming into it (a kind of "fake it 'til you make it" approach that loud German opera can be pretty forgiving of) and a knowledge of the score that lets her know where she can coast because you're not going to hear her no matter what. Oh and of course rock solid conviction, that thing that comes from within that nobody can teach you. She happens to have that. And it means she doesn't have to move around as much as she otherwise might have to, and that you think you can see her facial expressions even when you're in row KK. (One row behind practically everyone you know. Didn't it seem tout let tout was there? Maybe just my tout.)

Smaller roles (sorry to skip Orest...good voice, not a role I feel I can size a singer up in) were uniformly well cast. All I can think to comment on as I fade off to bed here is Janice Meyerson's pointy German diction, the generous yelling of Richard "I sang Bacchus at the Met really recently" Margison in a bit of luxury casting, just...everyone was good, ok? Hell, even the audience was good, very into it except for the few oldsters that clomped out upon discovering that, as my friend up on row JJ put it, Elektra sounds way different from his earlier work like The Blue Danube.

Potentially a lot coming up to blather about. Tristan for sure, Don G at some point, crazyweird concert at BAM I may or may not write about, Thais...

In which Youtube redeems the intertubes

2008-11-23T01:12:00.002-05:00

This is one of my things in any medium ever, and I had hoped I'd eventually find it on youtube.

I'll have the veal bastarda

2008-11-21T00:38:00.003-05:00

Really there's hardly anything better than that kind of surprise: a singer or two you don't particularly care about cranking out something riveting. I have always found Gruberova's voice hard on the ear and Baltsa I just never gave much thought to (her O Dawn Fatale takes things juuuust around the bend.) But check this:

NOTICE!

2008-11-14T15:21:00.001-05:00

Nick von Trrill writes:

It's a shame that Trrill's is just now getting off the ground again. I fear that since La Cieca and Maury and all those queens haven't posted it, it may not get noticed!

[ETA: Oh, I thought he meant that he was blogging. He means the silent Callas-Norma footage he posted.]

Recipe

2008-11-13T10:19:00.004-05:00

Reader and Friend of the Blog Christopher T.* has beaten me to the milk punch, if you will, suggesting a cleverer recipe for a Sabbatini than any I was going to come up with. It's one part gin to one part Manischewitz (though we are told Mr. Sabbatini's voice is in fact on the dry side, something nobody has ever said about Manischewitz.) Garnish with a slice of hard-boiled egg and serve with a sigh.

*Spotted at last night's depressingly polite collective huff at the Mormons. My protest sign, thanks for asking, said: I Can't Get a Date But I Demand the Right to Get Married.