Paved with stars?

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

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

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

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.

!!!

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!

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

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!

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.

Word.

Better yet

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

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?

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.

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

Lively discussion of the Met's Elektra.

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

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

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

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

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.

Aleksandrs Antonenko, my new musical crush.



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

Placeholder

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.