Is it plagiarism if you're stealing your own lines?

To be filed under...I'm not sure what. Someone with a long memory and an even longer cache of saved emails* has sent me my reaction to Lohengrin in 1998. Rude awakening #1 is that I was all Mr. Literal-pants and didn't cotton to the production. Rude awakening #2 is that I'm stealing my own jokes, seven and a half years later, pretty much word for word.

For the hell of it, here goes:

Thus runs the timeline of movement-as-art in the twentieth century:

1913 - Nijinsky's Sacre du Printemps raises Parisian eyebrows
1984 - Synchronized swimming becomes an Olympic event
1997 - Robert Wilson's Lohengrin booed at the Metropolitan

Granted, I probably left a few things out. Also granted: the temporalpossibility of WIlson taking in the summer games proves nothing interms of causality or inspiration. The trend, nonetheless, is downward. It seems a shame, in any case, the R.W. didn't turn his talent for devastating tableaux to ballet or something else not explicitly textual, as the frequent contertextuality of his directing is by turns frustrating and hilarious, in opera.

Some examples: Ortrud and Elsa's Act II confrontation. Unavoidably,gripping drama. Unless they sort of skate around one another, Ortrudmaking a Vulcan salute, while Elsa answers "Live long and prosper"with what can only mean in a late 90s gestural lexicon: "Talk to thehand, cuz Elsa ain't listenin'!" Later Telramund perishes in opera's first death by voguing -- no sword, just attitude! But the best/worst may have been Lohengrin, singing to Elsa to give Gottfriedhis horn, ring, and sword, and proceeding to hand her what appears tobe either a Hallmark card or a paper airplane. Is the moral of this opera that it's the thought that counts?

Anyhow... it had its moments, and the singing (Ben Heppner, Karita Mattila, Deborah Polaski, René Pape) was uniformly solid. Everyone hadexciting moments, even. Levine got a screaming ovation from thethird-act survivors, (Thank god no-one loves Wagner; I heard the lastact from orchestra seats) though I've heard the Met orchestra soundbetter -- it's basically gradations of perfection.

And we're back to the present, for better or worse.

*ok wow. Correction. This was apparently an actual letter on that material they used to make from trees.

In other news, you know what would be lots of fun? A Robert Wilson Fledermaus, that's what.

Wann geht die nachste disembodied ving on veels?

First thing I must do is see a psychoanalyst for a few years and see if he can't cure me of the infernal urge to turn to withered old ladies in the august elevators of the Metropolitan and murmur, "Pardon me, madam, but...aren't you Frida Leider?" It's worst at Wagner operas.

I first caught the Met's Robert Wilson Lohengrin in its second season, when Mattila had already stepped in for Voigt and I think perhaps Pape had just joined the party. Robert Wilson, by the way, is from Waco, Texas. I don't know if you knew. I just find it sheds and interesting (bluish) light on things. Anyway the shock had at least to some extent worn off in '98 after what is reported to have been a scandalous opening, at least among les bourgeois epates, with the booing and the out-walking. At this point everyone had decided it was really awfully pretty, which it is. And now, I mean...I'll tell you a secret, which is that if you've never seen another Lohengrin production, it's actually rather difficult to imagine how some of the time is filled (for instance what the hell is Elsa doing as the herald asks her lengthily to answer for herself--combing her hair?) if not with crazy underwater vamping around.

Aright, Blogger has crashed my browser twice now, so here's a very skinny skinny and if I pull myself and my computer together later, I'll edit. [Which I did, but may do again. People are writing thoughtful and provocative things about this performance and here's Maury, cracking jokes.]

Mattila I've never heard in such good form. I realize it makes me a huge hypocrite to complain about her fidgety nature onstage after praising Netrebko's Norina so highly a few weeks ago, but I like the way RW's straightjacketed choreography stills her, and I'm very pleased about the way Elsa fits her vocally. Very very pleased. I can be a bit of an agnostic regarding her deity status, but I can find no fault with her here. Can we play gay slumber party games now and cast her in things we'd like to hear? Tentatively I'm going to run Ariadne up the flagpole and see who salutes. It's a role in which I've never been fully satisfied with any active singer. (I started to say "living singer" but decided to put aside my suspicions that Schwarzkopf is doing a Weekend at Bernie's thing. I always thought Boris Yeltsin was, and then he went and actually died, disproving my theory.) Anyway if you don't believe me, pull up a chair chez Jonathan von Wellsung and JSU. Oh and now Steve Smith of Night after Night. I am, as ever, cheered greatly by a warm audience response, and hers was a stomping ovation.

And at long last I have the sensation after last night of finally having heard Ben Heppner when he's not having an off night. There were a couple of cracks on notes right in the middle of his voice, sung mezzo forte, that were kind of inexplicable in the context of an unflinching march through the opera's estimable terrors of tessitura and volume. I suspect I'm never really going to warm to the color of the voice or awaken to unnoticed psychological detail in the singing, but there's no denying he was in fine form.

Now, Luana DeVol is a good kind of singer to have around these days, but of her kind she isn't quite what I'd hoped. She's actually quite expert at Robert Wilsoning around the stage and wringing grandure out of cruelly proscribed gesture, however that's done. She's also got the kind of loud, ugly voice I for one can't get enough of. It just isn't well put together, or perhaps has worn badly over the years--it's been pointed out elsewhere that though this is her Metropolitan debut, she's had a career already elsewhere. Lest one is tempted to make jokes of the form "The weebles called...", a moment must be taken to peruse the mental list of alternative Ortruden. DeVol is kind of fine for now, given what we have. It is not lost on me, by the way, that unless you were four years old pretty much exactly when I was, my weeble joke is going to look like gibberish. I'm filing Ms. DeVol under: not disappointing/not thrilling, to be reviewed at a later date.

The dude whose name I am blanking on who stepped in for an ailing Other Forgotten Name Dude as Telramund had a bit of an impasse with Mr. Wagner in the first act, but it was brief, and otherwise he sang with distinction. (Edit: the cover was for Pape as the King.)

I think for once I am totally, but for real, going to bow out on orchestral commentary, since others seem to have been paying more attention or perhaps gotten more sleep before writing their reviews.

Funniest part of production: (No, I don't think it's bad, but there are moments that teeter between awe inspiring and guffaw-inspiring. Sometimes those are my very favorite details.) when Lohengrin and Telramund have a voguing competition and Lohengrin throws more attitude, thereby voguing Telramund to death.

Next up, I think: Parsifal.

Who gets eaten, and who gets to eat

I think it's probably really good to be Patti LuPone. I just get that impression.

I'm a little out of my depth discussing the current revival of Sweeney Todd (which seems, by the way, to have inspired a movement, or the beginning of one: the upcoming revival of Company is also done in the DIY, company=orchestra format.) I know opera people are obsessive about their rep, but seriously, queens that know their Sondheim know their Sondheim. And though I like him lots, I'm pretty much limited to having seen a live production or two and worn the Len Cariou version of A Little Night Music down to a scratched plastic coaster. So this is I suppose today's caveat lector: your mileage may vary, as the young folk say.

I did in fact see Lyric Opera of Chicago's big, confused musical-qua-opera staging of Sweeney a few years ago, so I've got that to compare to, but they're so different it's almost laughable to compare them. Terfel sang the role in a way Michael Cerveris simply can't, and on the other hand played it rather generically...I've never really been able to hop on board the Terfelwagon, and unlike so many, I dread the idea of his Wotan. It's quite a voice, but I've never been able to warm up to his "best kid in the drama club" characterizations. Also in Chicago, Judith Christin did a creditable job of what I have it on good word from a more versed Sondheimer every Mrs. Lovett until LuPone has done: a really passable stab at being Angela Lansbury, the UrLovett. There are many worse people to be, and it's not really anyone's fault that her portrayal is an immortal moment in theater. It takes guts to try something totally different and (in addition, I suspect, to smart direction) guts are a strong suit chez LuPone. And she looks fantastic, by the way.

The production itself is radically spare and at the same time looks like an ingenious act of trickery. The cost, I think, of wrenching Sweeney out of the rut that is the heritage of a fanatically beloved first production, is a certain lack of fun here. Nuh huh, I know it's about murder and stuff, but Lansbury and Cariou don't gild the tuberose: they are sinister and Mephistophelean, but in the way of 19th century Mephistopheleses(eseses), evil with a glint in its eye. That glint is dead in the current staging. Which sounds like a diss, but it's not. Going to this Sweeney is, opera-wise, more like going to Elektra than Don Giovanni, if that metaphor does anyone any good. It's about people doing bad things because they're human wreckage.

Cerveris plays Sweeney as a walking corpse, and as for LuPone...I think there's something quite complex about her portrayal really. It's dire, but it's also a little bit Lotte Lenya, a little bit Marjorie Main. (I realize that's a bit far out, but listen to a couple of the no-bull line readings...maybe I'm wrong.) By the same token that her character's fit with that of Cerveris takes away some of the fun in numbers like "A Little Priest" where a darkly funny, game sense of collaboration between the two is replaced by a bloody deal well made and sealed, and perhaps also takes away a bit of the pathos--Lupone singing "By the sea" is just creepy--I think there's an urgency, a macabre radiance here that the original pairing didn't so much have.

Certain gestures in the staging (the pouring of buckets of blood, Mr. Todd walking around with the coffin lid on his shoulder) wear out their welcome a little, but on the whole the economy of the thing is almost shocking. The singing other than that of LuPone is all around B+ material. As Alex has noted, the arrangements, while not sumptuous, do a very neat trompe-l'oreille thing and let you forget quite often that there's a kind of compromise going on.

Lots of empty seats in balcony, so I'm thinking if you want to catch this, you should consider stepping on it.

Periodic Not Opera Posting

Under the flimsy rubric of "Hey, this is a culture blog," I must pause from not reviewing all the opera I'm not seeing these few weeks to urge you out of your houses, should you happen to live in a major coastal city with art houses that premiere relatively small indie flix, to go see Brick. It's...well, it's a high school film noir. In a formulation I think we've all grown to hate, I suppose you could say it's Heathers meets The Big Sleep, only no, something better than The Big Sleep...maybe Double Indemnity. The film takes up this ridiculous task of genre-fuck and does not blink. Some performances are more assured than others, but all within the range of making it work. A special Maury Thinks you're Swell and maybe kind of wants to Do You award* goes to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a sitcom star made very good, in fact seemingly destined for indie royalty status. [Edit: story about JGL being offered the role in Dazed and Confused deleted when MD realizes he has things backward ad probably it's that Wiley Wiggins was offered/turned down Third Rock. It's a funhouse of mistakes, folks!]

I couldn't ruin the plot for you if I wanted to, because really they did take a page from The Big Sleep, in terms of almost un-navigable complexity. But it occasions all manner of sly talk, occasionally also oblique to the point of incomprehension, but quite nearly musical in composition. And interspersed with hilarious trivialities of teenage life. Gordon-Levitt, most of all, manages to put over the poetry of an idiom that died out decades before his birth. The whole thing reminded me a little of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, so comparably, thoroughly vanished is the language used. In both films, some of the young actors sound a little like they're reading lines phonetically, but in Brick the majority seem to have done their homework, to have gotten the rhythm of things worked sufficiently into muscle memory that they can deliver with spontaneity and embellish with nuance. Meagan Good and Noah Segan, playing stock types (the drama club vixen and the stoner who talks a good game) shine particularly in this.

And it's all put together with considerable visual flair and the kind of indelible sense of place that the great noir films had. Highly recommended. Go see it if you can.

*Oh, put down the phone. He's 25.

This Just In

Updates substantial and insubstantial from the opera blogosphere:

Parterre is the new Opera-L, by the look of it. Entries are logging up to 60 responses--holy cow! And, like Opera-L postings, some of them are long and informative, some are wildly irrelevant but interesting, and some merely meshuggeneh. We're wondering what La Cieca thought of Don P, but suspect her silence indicates that editor JJ is dishing it up at Gay City News.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...I don't think I'm going to anything for a while, probably 'til Lohengrin. If I blog at all, I suppose it's going to have to be gabbing about recordings, which I sometimes suspect is not that gripping. I did, after literally years of eyeing it at academy, finally plunk down for the 1962 Bohm Iphegenie with the amazing lineup of Borkh, Ludwig, and Berry. So far I'd say it's good blood&guts non PEP (oh wait, I mean HIP. PEP is post-exposure prophylaxis) Gluck, something to make the John Elliot Gardeners of the world go back to...gardening, I guess. Ewa Podles, in one interview, referred to early music conductors hilariously but not quite sensically as "pharmacists." Back to Rite-Aid with the lot of ye! I mean, yeah, you have your Minkowskis and your Jean(ne) Lamons [side note: there are definitely references to this musician as both Jean and Jeanne. Is this a transgender thing or just a de-Gallicization?] but there are also plenty of hangovers from the bloodless aesthetic of the 90's and who wants to sit through a Medea where nobody's allowed to emote?

With a silent 21 gun salute, I have taken the Chicago Canadienne out of the sidebar, as she has moved on from the 'sphere. And ACB of the concert is on a long-sounding hiatus--what's up with the mad attrition? Are we all burning out from the peculiar experience of having strangers look into our heads?

If it's really such a Namelose Freude, could you maybe shut the hell up about it?

And for the record I have no real opinion on Sunnegardh because I can't tolerate Fideedly-doodlio and was mostly not listening. I mean, is there any uglier writing for the human voice than the two big arias in this opera?

Happy Ending

E.V.E.N.T.

Some nights are; some nights aren't. Last night was, and there's no way around it.

The strangest piece of commentary I have to offer on the Met's new Don Pasquale, unveiled to roaring approval last night, goes something like this: Anna Netrebko is now, in the way of Margo Channing, a Star. She will never again be anything else. Her natural charm and comic flair on the boards of the Metropolitan were so great, so conquered was I by them, that I will go see pretty much anything else she's in. Not since Bartoli's staged opera debut in Houston in what I'm remembering as 1993 have I seen such natural comedy and joie de chanter. Her voice fills Sybil's Barn with gratifying ease. And I still don't like her singing.

What's an opera queen to do? I'm happy enough to live with contradictions. I really do want to go see her in almost anything (I keep qualifying because she's on for Romeo et Juliette next season and I really don't think I'm up for that particular trudge again.) I was a little in love with her by final curtain. But the voice itself remains, to my ear, ugly, and its production still a little unsubtle. I can't think of another singer I've felt this way about: I can imagine attending her career for the next may-it-be-many years and never wanting a recorded souvenir. I'm sure I'm in the minority and I don't begrudge anyone their more total enjoyment of her. My heart lept up at her mid-act applause after "So anch'io la virtu magica" and stayed with her the whole evening.

It's not even a matter just of being funny, though it's a pleasure to hear a full house laugh rather than giggling on cue [oh, there's the punchline. must produce laughter.] I think what it is above all else is the privilege of watching someone capable of producing deeply convincing spontaneity onstage. Or watching someone who acts with apparent affection for/generosity toward her colleagues. Or watching someone who can act with her feet. Or even just someone who wears clothes that fucking well. Anna Netrebko could bring out the vicarious drag queen in anyone.

I mentioned her chemistry with her colleagues, and it is only moral to mention that each and every one of them responded with what surely was his own estimable best. If I've seen a production where the average level of performance was so high, I can't think of it. My warmest approval goes to Barry Banks. If you haven't read another write-up already, you're thinking: Maury is hitting the bottle again. Barry Banks was not scheduled even up to the last minute. In fact, up to the last scene. Before his services were required, Juan Diego Florez gave a performance of such vocal radiance I had to stuff tiny metaphorical sunglasses in my goddamn ears. I don't know Don Pasquale particularly well, but I kept hoping for the scene where Ernesto and Norina would interact more, because the thought of that pooled wonderfulness was intoxicating. It didn't really happen.

Several people left as soon as the words "Juan Diego Florez has had an allergic reaction" were out of Joe Volpe's mouth. Imbeciles. I was in a good mood anyway from the rest of the opera, plus I had a positive association with the name Barry Banks from somewhere (was he on that jaw-dropping clip from Ermione La Cieca posted a while back? With Pendatchanska @ NYCO?) and had a hunch this might not be a bad thing. Well, I'm not just patting the underdog on the back here. Ernesto's last act aria and the duet with Norina that follows were a triumph of vocal security and loveliness by the brilliant Barry Banks. He sings with an ounce less sweetness than Florez, but a marvellous plangency and, at risk of leaping head first into judgement after a short sing, artistry of the first order. I really may go stand for his one-off later in the month. Bear in mind a week or so ago the best I could come up with to say about Don Pasquale was "it's shite!"

I guess I don't have as much to say about Simone Alaimo and Marius Kwiecien or else I'm afraid of sounding like I was on ecstasy last night and am just a fount of indiscriminate praise. Alaimo was quite funny and idiomatically very connected to this music, perhaps a little moreso than Kwiecien who nonetheless was extraordinarily appealing. At the end of their duet, they stood, back to back, at the edge of the stage, pumping out rapid-fire Italian patter. It was just wonderful is all. I'm sorry to be such a sap.

The production itself was a realist Otto Schenk affair, heaps sunnier and better than the other Schenk productions at the Met. I don't feel I ave anything particularly enligthening to say about it, so I won't.

Ridiculous as it is, I'm going to mark my last comment with a spoiler alert, because the thing I want to describe, the thing that sealed the deal on Netrebko for me, looked so spontaneous I hate to ruin it for you if you go, even though we all know it wasn't an act of invention by Trebs. So stop reading if you want to be delighted by it without forewarning. This was I guess right at the end of the opera, and it was just a little trick of staging: what she did was she came all the way forward, almost to the very edge, and then crouched on the prompter's box to sing the end of the scene. Sounds inconsequential. Go see it and tell me if you agree.

Oh and p.s. April Fool's, they all sucked.
And p.p.s. no of course they didn't; could I fake that kind of enthusiasm? Answer: I could not.

Edit, added later: I've only read a couple of reviews by others in the blogosphere/opera-l-osphere and it appears I may be alone, or in any case alone plus the thousands of people screaming their fool heads off last night. Strange feeling.

Looking back, just for kicks

Addendum, last year's favorites, excerpted/edited with kind permission from Trrill :

"To my tastes, though, only two sang in a way that said 'get out of my way and hand over the mantel of greatness.' That one of these was 21-year-old Lisette Oropesa only goes to show sometimes you just got it, and time will only (we hope) make what is good better. This young chicky could sing us some fine vulnerable Mozart ladies or maybe a Lakmé or two at the Met or anywhere else, providing vocal loveliness and frightening accuracy for those who lap it up and fodder for the kind of people who love nothing more than to say 'her voice isn't big enough for the Met' to grumble at each other all the way home to put on their records of Zinka and cry. Just between you, me, and the ten-foot-tall autographed poster of Ghena Dimitrova on the wall here at the Palazzo D'annato, your friend Maury loves the thrill of a big voice as much as anyone, but some flavors don't come in extra large, and this is one. It's audible, it's beautiful, and nobody's asking her to sing Ortrud. For the record, her pieces here were 'Ruhe sanft' and 'Una voce poco fa.' The former was so appropriately, unobtrusively pretty that nobody got all that rowdy about it. The latter was actually funny, which is something of a feat, and the fiorature were beyond reproach, her pitch better than anyone else in the competition."

Ms. Oropesa's Lindemann Recital debut will be Tuesday, April 4.

"The other standout, it seems to us, was self-described-in-bio 'character tenor' Rodell Aure Rosel, who is more or less guaranteed a career. The Hoffmann aria, arteesteecally speaking, teetered on the brink of pandering, but the voce was all there, so really it seems ignoble to complain. The "Song of the Worm" (from Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles) gets points just for chutzpah in programming and yet more points for having the goods to back it up. This lad (and let me shed a tear here, moved as I am always by the success of fellow Children-of-a-Lesser-Height) knows what his career is going to be about and knows exactly how it's done. Never thought we'd utter this one but: move over, Gerhard Stolze!"

Ghosts of Versailles is on for 2010 or whenever...Peter Gelb, meet Rodell.

...it looks like there were actually three I liked a lot, though, as I wrote:

"Also ridiculously young, bass Jordan Bisch pulled fast one by singing an aria from Aleko, an opera nobody has ever heard. Ever. The lowest notes ring true, he's bothered to learn good Russian diction (wise move for a bass, eh?) and the climactic note of the piece was held so long the poor fellow was gasping for breath, as were some in the audience. We approve of a singer who isn't afraid to look a little beat up after a good workout. At least it's not the bored look they seem to be teaching in conservatories everywhere."

...and that wraps up the "quoting myself because I'm just that self-absorbed" edition of MFI. Next up: Don Pasquale. Yeah, I know what I said.

Metropolitan Opera National Council Grand Finals Concert

Writing up the Met Council is a rather different assignment, I think, than opera reviewing. Assignment, he says, as if he were Roz Russell and Cary Grant had just said, "Hildy, that Metropolitan Opera has story written all over it!" Anyway I certainly don't go in with my poison pen in hand; everyone that's made it to this stage is an accomplished singer in one way or another, though some will be more succesful than others, and that's the way things go. I find it poignant that this may be what some remember as their moment in the spotlight, and I don't find myself in the world's most critical mood. I will say that this year's slate of singers were more about potential for me than present excitement, compared with last year's singers some of whom seemed a bit more...finished. It occurs to me I wrote about them folks under an entirely different operanym and maybe will try and wrest that text from Nikk over at Trill and print it here.

The concert is really about showing up with friends, comparing notes on who you think should win, affecting some air of shock if they don't, and enjoying the casual air of the event. I guess if I went and thought someone was truly awful, I'd just not mention their particular performance*, and nobody was awful or even bad, so can I please stop hedging now and write about the damned thing?

1. Nikki Einfeld of Canada
Selection I preferred and what I thought about it: The Willow Song from Baby Doe. Warm and distinctive tone, natural stage presence without movements born of nervous agitation.
What I'd like to hear her in: probably Mozart. Maybe more 20th century music.
What I think would add to the Nikki Einfeld Experience: a little clearer diction in English would solidify my impression of a singer very interested in the character behind the notes.

2. Paul Corona of Illinois
Preferred selection: La Calunnia. Nice heft in the middle, youthful comic energy. If he sounds this good at 22, the best is yet to come.
What I'd like to hear him in: More Rossini for now, and there's time to grow into things like Verdi.
What would add to the Paul Corona Experience: Time, and beefing up the lower part of the voice.

3. Holli Harrison of Tennesee
Preferred selection: L'atra notte from Mefistofele. I shall unabashedly call the top "thrilling" because the word popped into my head while she was singing. Sounds like she could be convinced to cut loose and give us some demented.
What I'd like to hear her in: Verismo.
What would add to the Holli Harrison Experience: I'd like to know if there's more dynamic variation available, especially on the high notes.

4. Seth Keeton of Georgia
Preferred selection: hard to choose, because Claggart's aria fit the voice better but it was just such a treat that he chose "Wie schoen ist doch die Musik" from Schweigsame Frau for one of his offerings. "Thoughtful" is a word that came to mind for his delivery, and I hope I don't need to say that's a big deal.
What I'd like to hear him in: lieder, Britten in a jewelbox house like Glimmerglass.
What would add to the Seth Keeton Experience: A hall better matched to the size of the voice.

5. Donovan Singletary of Florida
Preferred selection: Sorge infausta una procella from Orlando. Impeccable articulation without the tinny early music voice that frequently accompanies it. Incidentally, rather striking headshot, I can't help but say.
What I'd like to hear him in: more Handel, please. Bellini?
What would add to the Donovan Singletary Experience: A more introverted approach to things like Figaro that can go a little over the top if you're not careful.

6. Katherine Jolly of California
Preferred selection: Durch Zaertlichkeit from Abduction/Seraglio. No fear or hesitation in the highest range, which is solid and precise in intonation.
What I'd like to hear her in: I'm thinking we might have a very funny and accurate Cunegonde here.
What would add to the Katherine Jolly Experience: a bit more trust in the voice to convey charm without quite so much frenetic physicality.

7. John Michael Moore of Iowa
Preferred selection: Ein Madchen oder Weibchen, which is a shock since normally it makes me want to run screaming from the theater. The little bit of staging at the very end was actually hilarious. If you were there, you'll know what I'm talking about, but it doesn't retell well. Sonically, a well schooled voice in the mold of Nathan Gunn.
What I'd like to hear him in: Less annoying Mozart. I'm betting Guiglielmo would be a dream, funny and vocally suave.
What would add to the John Michael Moore experience: A bit more punch to the voice; don't know if this was a matter of nerves or the basic quality of it.

8. Marjorie Owens of Virginia
Preferred selection: D'oreste, D'ajace from Idomeneo. Sung with guts at no cost to the Mozart line.
What I'd like to hear her in: Donna Anna for sure, possibly Strauss as the voice has some real muscle.
What would add to the Marjorie Owens experience: A bit of abandon, the courage to hurl the more declamatory lines in the Consul aria out a little less prettily.

Hopefully these don't seem cursory. I was a bit of a wreck when I got in.

Simon O'Neill and Margaret Jane Wray did the halftime show. She's got an enviable instrument but I sometimes think what the hell can you do with Dich Teure Halle. And (we all have bad days) she fumbled on the climactic note. He sounded excellent in "In Fernem Land." JSU, who seems to be back from hiatus, speculates that he's covering Lohengrin, and as I am never able to get very revved about Heppner though I kind of recognize objectively he's a high quality tenor, I have to say I wouldn't mind if Hep had a cold one night.

*unfortunately I was riding my bronco back from the Wild West Ring that wasn't and missed Jonathan Beyer, so I can't write about him, but I heard he was one of the best of the bunch, actually. I couldn't really have judged well anyway, since I tend to find Papageno's suicide aria puts ideas in my head.

Winged Toasters of the Gods

Like anyone, I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be an opera director. Like anyone mentally ill, I suppose I should say. Some of it sounds fun, and some it sounds daunting, and I think the worst thing might be knowing that things that look one way in your head...well, let's take the kookier scenes of a Wagner opera. Somebody has to turn into a snake, for instance. Why, that's no big deal says Director You. It's no longer the 19th century and we have all kinds of technology. And that loud rushing sound you hear is the flushing of the toilet of history, and caught in the unforgiving vortex are the people who think technology is automatically going to help anything.

I'm not a very visual person. I can't picture the characters in books and if there are geographical descriptions, forget it. So I can well imagine not having any idea what it might look like if I had someone turn into a snake by
1) having them put a gold lame kerchief on their head (because contrary to what you've heard, this is not the Native American themed Ring; It's the drag themed Ring. I kid. It's neither. We'll get there)
2) having something explode stage left so they can quickly run offstage right, which is known I think as misdirection in the card trick biz, but unfortunately if you do it twice, the second time everyone's going to be all, hey, I'm watching Alberich when the thing explodes. Oh, there, I've gone and ruined the abstract quality of this little scenario. It was about Alberich all along.
3) having a big, and I mean massive projection of a snake head kind of poke down out of the flies, and then project a bunch more snakes squiggling around. Avoid outright hilarity and pandemonium only by not using any airplane imagery, thereby escaping the possibility the audience will shout en masse, "Snakes on a plane!!!", thump each other on the back, and promptly leave to have a beer and laugh about it.

Bonus points: having Alberich turn into a frog, after misdirection explosion #2, by replacing him with what appears to be a really adorably cute big wind-up frog. [Rather important tangential lesson: you don't want Wagner and cute on the same stage.] I'm just saying "...got the biggest laugh of the evening" was not a phrase I was expecting to use in a Rheingold review.

A day or so ago I wrote that I'm no fan of stultifyingly conservative productions/happy enough with crazy revisionist staging, and I am. But, just..they can't suck is all. I'll try and elaborate, but what it's going to boil down to is that my problem with the talk-of-the-town Zambello American Rheingold is not the lack or horned helmets or even the baffling presence, after the whole thing turned out not to be so Native American as we had heard, of Erda-hontas and other weird cultural mash-ups. Knock yourself out, FZ; put 'em all in white linen suits. Memorial Day is just around the corner, isn't it? The problem is that, unlike many fine Zambello productions, it is just fucking dumb. Clumsy. Sloppy.

I should pause to dole out vocal kudos where due. As far as I'm concerned, honors go to Gordon Hawkins for his well-crafted if not conceptually lived-in Alberich and Elizabeth Bishop for an echt Wagnerienne turn as Fricka. (In long Island you could plug this name in, it occurs to me, to the old joke: Fricka? I hard know 'uh!) The rest of the cast was uniformly at risk of damnation with faint praise, capable but not special. Though I think I should exempt the Froh of Cory Evan Watz, which rose a good bit above good enough; and really all three Rhein maidens (JeeYoung Lee, Frederique Vezina, and Jennifer Hines) for excelling in music that doesn't tend to make or break the opera, but can go quite badly and instead went well. Robert Hale got through the evening fine, but I can't say his performance was particularly gripping, and I don't know that I'd care to hear him in the longer Wotans.

A pretty enthusiastic nod goes to conductor Heinz Fricke, not to be confused with Fricka, or I suppose Heinz 57 Sauce for that matter. His architectural sense of the score was firm. He delivered the goods in climactic moments, ready also to speed along the occasional longeurs of this shortest Ring score. I mean, the bickering in Scene II? That shit can last for hours. It did seem that Fricke met with some orchestral lack of preparation, unless I'm simply that spoiled by the Met. And for some reason the entry of the gods into Valhalla came off as a bit flaccid...perhaps in part because of the "when's this cruise leave for Bermuda" staging and also (small point, but not) because it was not puncuated in the middle by the expected resounding CLANK; rather, the silent and inexplicable image of Donner thrusting that damned architectural t-square he'd been toting around all evening into the ground, as if to say: the next time a bunch of farshtunkeneh dieties ask me to build them a weekend place, I'm upgrading to computer drafting. As well he should, if we're not being all hoity toity about time periods.

Behind, above, and all around these singers was some of the lamest crap. A special nod in this category, the lameness award (a golden crutch) to Mark McCullough, another person whose work I'm sure I've enjoyed elsewhere. I think at Glimmerglass, actually, so you'll know I'm not just being pro forma with the snark-mitigation. The ploddingly literal use of color, from the froggy green of the tarnhelm scene to the stop-sign red for Erda, was [pep talk: ok, Maury. What are the chances someone being written about here will read this? Obviously not that great. Go ahead and be cunty.] embarassing. Only slightly less so: the giant digital graphics projected on a scrim during each orchestral interlude and the riveting opening bars of the opera. No fooling around, can you remember the early days of screen savers with the one where stars were coming at you? Because that was one of them. Don't get me wrong; they were all pretty. They were also reminiscent of a deadly awful Tales of Hoffman I saw as an undergraduate, put on by a department that had just purchased a $10,000 laser and figured they had damn well better use it. As I recall, all it would do was it would spell out the words "Tales of Hoffman" every once in a while, as if wielded by kid who has learned only one trick. Well, it had better be a good trick and not too reminiscent of Koyanisqaatsi, a video game, or (god forfend) a meditation video.

I'm sort of tripping over myself to mention all that was wrong. Because, truly, I'd be remiss in not asking: what in the name of all that is good were the Fafner and Froh costumes about? More presumably unintended visual references here, this time to Freddy Kreuger. Freddy Krueger with huge feet. Please stand and join me in a chorus of "huh?!" I guess it's true what they say about guys with big feet: they build big celestial mansions, and then abduct your sister. And the murder of Fasolt went for nothing, choreographed with all the assurance of a high school play. A middle school play. A Christmas pageant in Fort Stockton, Texas.

I am trying to imagine what went wrong. Zambello was responsible for, among other things I've liked, the Met's enthralling new Troyens a few years back. Perhaps someone was very taken with the idea of an American Ring, and didn't think through what is clearly not a good fit, like how everyone says "Rheingold!" a lot, and no matter what's going on lately with American public education, someone in the audience is bound to recall that an interesting thing about the Rhein is that it's pretty much just not in America. So your supertitles can say "Pure gold!" if you think that's an intellectually honest approach to translation, but if you ask me, they might just as well say "Russ Feingold!" or "Hermione Gingold!"

But as usual, I wasn't consulted. I'm not even going to carp about the clearly audible brouhaha backstage as the sets were changed. Me, I'm just not going back for seconds next year when Walkure two-steps its way onstage.

Next up, today's Met Council National Auditions. Meanwhile, here's a link to a review from someone who liked the above a lot more than I did.

Requiescat;Deer/Antelope

Well, I'm just going to have to admit that I sort of assumed Sarah Caldwell died years ago.

On the agenda: Das Rheingold on the Range, tomorrow night. Relevant query: is there some reason Elena Zaremba gets hired for contralto roles with important companies?

Maury flips randomly through the latest Opera News for your doubtless uncontainable amusement

Ok so now for instance this Salome in Innsbruck, directed by Brigitte "Das L-Wort" Fassbaender? It sounds unstintingly moronic and abgefuckt, and yet I'd love to have been there. Firstly because the soprano was supposedly good, but also, isn't an interesting failure more fun these days than a totally non-embarassing retread of something we've seen forty times? I know--the horse is dead; I can put down the stick.

The whole Judith Blegen story really is awfully sad, though I can't say I know her singing. Maybe I should add her to the roster for the ol' daydream where a celebrity decides you're they're best pal. She seems like she'd be a totally sharp conversationalist but also bake you cookies possibly.

Aright, the cover photo of Trebs I think establishes that she is not merely Opera Hot but in fact rather stunning. As someone or other, ostensibly drag queens, used to say in the '90s: Love your Hair! Hope it wins! So then she gets to explain about the e flat on opening night that was extra special flat, just for you, and how she didn't want to do it in the first place but everyone was like in one of those afterschool specials about peer pressure..."c'mon man...it's just an e flat...everyone else is singin' acuti..." and then the slow mo sets in and the claustrophobic distorted audio of everyone chanting "do it! do it! do it!" and first thing you know, she's out there singing what she very gamely admits was basically a D, and then it's just the gateway note, and she's lunging at mid-phrase high f's for no reason, but in the end all her friends gather around and hug her and she admits she has a problem. I actually once saw a pre-edit text of an interview with Gheorghiu and ever since, it's fun to imagine what these things looked like before they were edited for crazy and edited for non-native.

Totally skipped the article on opera reviewers. It was just going to be too devastating when they were asked for their role models and didn't mention me. So since I didn't read it, it's possible they did mention me--the article exists in a kind of Maury-indeterminate state. It's Schrodinger's puff piece.

Speaking of nothing, since there is absolutely no theme or (let's be honest) point to this posting, will someone try to explain the Scotto thing to me? Because I've never gotten it. I realize most of the time these things can't be explained, but on the other hand it's fun to watch people get really red in the face over their faves. I was just watching the Scotto thing on Parterre, and I know La Cieca is hugely pro-Scotto...whatevs, just if there's some recording I should know that will make the little cartoon lightbulb appear over my head, tell me, and tell me why. Oh but wait, Trebs mentions Scotto. Retroactive relevance.

The Kate Aldrich photo makes me laugh. Think for two seconds about sitting in that position. Nobody would ever, for any reason sit in that position, unless to make the statement "Hey I'm not fat."

It goes without saying I am not reading the article about how Don Elisir du Regiment is a great opera.

Is it just me or does Luana Devol come off a little bit, I dunno, high in her mini-interview?

So, right. I haven't been to the opera in absolute aeons, or anyway like a week and a half, but it seems like I'm going to something or other next week. And I promise to have opinions, and to blather on like a drunken socialite. For today I'm off on a convalescent trip to the country, or something like that, and won't even hear the broadcast, helas!

Odds and Ends

Heavens. James Jorden liked Forza even less than the rest of us.

Meanwhile, we'd say Luisa Miller is imploding, except as it happens, cover Eduardo Villa is a more than competent Verdian.

Query: to see Don Pasquale or not so much?
Argument in favor: everyone coming in waves over Juan Diego Florez, and not just that he's Opera Cute. (I think this is a distinct category from Opera Hot.)
Argument against: it is shite.
Argument in favor: Gilda didn't feel like the perfect Trebs role, and we'd like to give her another shot to knock our socks off.
Argument against: knock knock. who's there? shite.
Argument in favor: Suspense of whether James Levine will in fact fall apart in several pieces on the podium.
Argument against: Slightly tired of opera right now, if that's possible. Oh and p.s. shite.

Not Lost in Translation

A quick note of apology to whoever googled "In Time which Made a Monkey of us All" perhaps looking for the full text of the story by Grace Paley, she whose literary garment I am not fit to kiss the hem of, and ended up here of all places. Does it make your flesh crawl just a bit that I can see what google threads lead to MFI? Well nevermind, it doesn't give me your phone number or anything.

A lovely lad we'll just call Boris gave me a Gala Barbiere di Siviglia (that is in fact a Barbier von Sevilla, geh weiss) after seeing me pick it up and put it down about a hundred and twenty times at Academy. I'm sure I've made my feelings on opera in translation clear--read: known to even the dead--but the cast got the better of me, as happens to all of us I'll wager*. I mean, it'd be silly to turn up one's nose at Wunderlich, Koth, and Prey (oh and Hotter!?!) just because things aren't sonically Mediterranean enough.

Ok, but let's step back for a moment into Maury's World of Negativity. Opera in translation always sounds to me like it's being put on for school children. I just had to say that, and if you agree, stomp your foot or something. And now I'm done with the hatin'. I guess I'll just listen and comment incoherently. If it were coherence you were after, you'd have stopped reading. Oh...hm.

Well this is fascinating to report: the annoying trick of upshifting straight into falsetto on the last "Figaro!" in everyone's favorite cartoon moment is apparently no newer than 1959, and forgivable here only because of the overall charm and suavity of Prey's singing. Note to all other baritones: if a measure of girly voice is the only fun trick in your bag of shtick, just shut up and sing. I wonder if I need an acronym for that, like Dan Savage and his DTMFA: SUAS.

He was a funny looking guy, that Hermann Prey. Seriously large forehead.

Minor note to...producer or someone: if you're doing a bonus track with Reri Grist, why pick a part of the opera that hardly has her in it? Well nevermind. We're not really concerned with Reri Grist here. So am I correct in thinking that Erika Koth's vibrato is so fast and intrusive that I'm the only person in the world capable of liking her voice? I think I'll feel better if someone else likes her, thought it's always fun feeling one's tastes are rarefied I suppose, in a teenage "nobody understands me" sort of way. That's actually a line in Onegin, by the way. Nikto menia ne ponimaet. And yet Tatiana doesn't come off as an unbearable ninny. Koth's ornaments, aright, are a little uber the top, but holy fuck, was that a G? My guitar thinks it was. I'd blow the pipe on her but I don't have one at present. I know, I know, what kind of opera queen...

Considering he's 30 years into a career of Wagner singing by this point, I'd say Hans Hotter makes...still something of a disburbing Rossinian.

[this is how boring the Oscars are: they're on, and I'm watching out of one eye as I listen to disc 2 and continue to write. This is fit treatment for Seventh Heaven but a sad standard for the big gold guy. ed.:and now you know I started this a few nights ago]

I think they left out Berta's aria. Probably she was sung by 75 year old Hildegard von Blutfliessendevondenohren and someone at Gala thought: maybe not. Also seemingly absent, the lesson aria, although perhaps what's missing is my ability to translate German track names into Italian via English. (One would end up with something out of "English as She is Spoke," the phrasebook that spawned phrases such as "to craunch a marmoset," which I encourage you to use when possible.) Oh wait. Best actor. I heart Ph. Seymour Hoffman but that was a boring damn speech.

Wunderlich is like puppies or something: so universally liked that it's just incredibly boring to say anything about him, because it's just going to amount to "yeah, me too." Would that have been funnier if instead of "puppies" I'd said "oral sex," do you suppose? That's one reliable thing about Maury, he always shows his work. For the record, Fritz sounds like he could have sung it standing on his Kopf. Juggling. Knives.

I cannot help but note that Keilberth does not blow in Rossini, a surprise after many years of hating his recordings of German rep. And having so noted, cannot help but wonder if reviews of random recordings are in the least entertaining. And on that note of insecurity I still my keyboard for now, though I just got a couple of other swell ones (and a DVD of Simionato et al in Aida, on the visual end of things.)

*and today what do I do? I go and stumble upon the absolutely rotten, absolutely wonderful fact that Mazeppa was recorded in the 50's at the Florence May Festival with Olivero, Christoff, and Bastiannini. My keen intuition tells me Olivero probably did not enroll in Berlitz for the pleasure of one memorable Mazurka with Chaikovsky.

I just met a boy named Mazeppa

Mazeppa, Mazeppa, Mazeppa...say it once and there's music playing. Oh. There actually is music playing. Nevermind.

I have to really crank this out because I refuse to be beaten to the punchline on one hilarious moment in an otherwise pretty beautiful production of a rather riveting opera. See the thing is...did you listen to the opera quiz I guess it was last week? They were talking about names that got changed in for instance German productions of Butterfly, where apparently Pinkerton would be [if I'm reading between the lines correctly] like the equivalent of being named Benjamin Franklin "Penis" Wankerboy. And not that anyone ever puts on Mazeppa, because they're busy putting on crap like Forza instead, but if they did, I'd like to suggest they make up a title if possible, but eliminate from their Met Titles the word "hetman." It just gets funnier each time it pops up on that little screen. "I once was hetman," said one screen, calling to mind some kind of imaginary ex-straight ministry's rewriting of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

So anyway a New York audience gave a warm though not altogether rapturous reception to the Metropolitan Opera's premiere of Chaikovsky's Mazeppa, if you hadn't gathered already that was what I was going to write about. Bear in mind this was a Monday night performance without the courtesy of a 7:30 curtain and perhaps this accounts for the lack of hysteria.

I'm a tiny bit reluctant to judge voices from side orch "I have Friends Under 30 Who are Willing to Score me these Seats" seats, as one is in a sort of echo chamber. Naturally, the preceeding sentence is purely formulaic language, and I'm going to judge them all to hell and gone.

But first the production, which I hear got some boos from the schmancy seats. I think the thing about George Tsypin is he has this knockout combination of a dark, crazy, out of control side combined with a childlike sense of wonder. Now, bear in mind, there's nothing I find so distasteful and generally emetic as a childlike sense of wonder, except when you combine that with the other part, it all works out. The tableau at the end of the second act is for my betters to describe. All I can say is it was like you were playing a Ukrainian history themed pinball machine and you hit the ball in the little hole all the way up top and got 100,000 points.

It didn't hurt that in the foreground, Olga Guryakova was running around in circles with a severed head in her hands, while Larissa Diadkova fainted, stage left. Larissa Diadkova is a virtuoso fainter, and that's the truth. She's also, as you know if you saw her Azucena or Fricka, an all around fine actress with a voice that isn't quite luxuriant on its purely sonic merits, but is always wielded intelligently, sometimes daringly. It's strange to think what a cypher she was as Herodias, when everything else I've heard her sing has been uniformly top drawer. I wonder what that was about. Eh. Don't care.

Her Act II scena with Guryakova must surely have been the vocal highlight of the evening. Guryakova is an extremely game and appealing singer with a top that sounds to me like by no means a sure bet, but when it gets there, you know it. The vocal production is unabashedly Slavic, and I for one couldn't be happier about it. And I suspect she's Opera Khot, though I left my binocs back at the palazzo.

Oh wait but back to the production. Can I be king of the world for a minute and make a new rule where I get a dollar for every minute the fucking scrim is down? Generally, this is distracting. Here it was actually very actively a problem in places--you couldn't see, for instance, that Kochubei's head was covered in blood from a long day of torture until about fifteen minutes after Lyubov more or less had kittens about it. And you couldn't see her rather gorgeous opalescent purple dress until the curtain call. It's Kochubei, right? I keep wanting to type Kochujang, but that's actually a fermented red pepper paste indispensible in Korean cuisine. Delicious, seriously, but not relevant even by my standards.

The fantastic costumes were designed by one Tatiana Noginova, herself working a sort of Bettie Boop look, at her curtain call. At the Millo Pole, Dawn Fatale was heard to remark of Noginova's get-ups for the ballet in the first act how lovely it was that they got their costumes at Fredericks of Vladivostok. Why Dawn doesn't blog is a mystery to me, helpless as I always am rendered by her wit.

Wait, there were boys in this opera.

Putilin makes the logical first choice of subject; it's just that I haven't made up my mind about him. It's a long, tough sing and he poured himself into it, even doing an "Anything Karita Mattila can do, I can do lower" number where he sang, flat on his back, with his head hanging backward over a step, just like KM did in her Salome. Points were awarded. Still, there were mishaps, the voice losing its lustre at climactic moments and also in soft ones. It's not like I have a lot of Mazzep to compare him to, but I can hear, in that center of my brain that is assigned to "fantasy football" in straight guys, a baritone I'd like better. He sounds like the love child of Tita Ruffo and Pavel Lisitsian.

The venerable Paata Burchuladze, I had heard from reliable sources, is sounding sometimes lousy these days, but not here. You wouldn't mistake him for a young singer, but the goods are still there, which is a phrase I'm afraid I'm overusing lately. It is after all nice being a bass: the important part of your voice ages but generally doesn't break. Depending on your tolerance for wobble, your mileage may vary, but I didn't find myself lunging for the dramamine.

The only real weakness in this cast was Balashov as Andrei and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day. (Did you have that book as a kid? That boy had nothing on our Andrei.) Balashov's strengths don't justify his weaknesses, I'm afraid: if the voice were one of those Galuzinoid monsters, we'd forgive the sliding up to pitch and the sliding almost up to pitch and such. It ain't/we don't.

Really I ought to say something about the score, since it's so unfamiliar to most of us, but for the most part I'd like to leave that to folks like Alex Ross, both Aleces in fact (it pluralizes like matrix, I'm assuming) who know what the hell they're talking about. All I can offer are vague impressions of surprise and delight that the composer whose operatic output I had imagined to be typified by Evgenii Onegin, a wonderful but relatively polite work, has a much darker range on his palette. Onegin is, yes, also a lot tighter, but Mazeppa succeeds on different territory altogether. It's tempting now to think of Chaikovski/Pushkin as one of those Mozart/DaPonte, Strauss/von Hoffmansthal pairings, albeit not a living collaboration. Hang on, though. I'm forgetting about Pikovaia Dama, whose libretto is a total abortion. Anyway the point is Chaikovsky's range of expression is perhaps equal to Pushkin's own.

So, yeah, this is pretty much another run-don't-walk though I think my companions were even more enthusiastic. I'm not kidding--I'm a deeply negative person, ask anyone. I'm just finding a lot to recommend this season.

Next up: actually I have no idea. You'll know when I know.

p.s. thanks to "linguitte3" who linked me on a NY Times discussion forum. Really, though, linguitte3, I am excited; I just have a way of talking, I'm afraid! I don't visibly lose my shit unless...well, cf. my Podles review.

Market Correction

Hey, serious question for you: didn't Juan Pons suck for a while? Because he totally doesn't right now; quite the opposite. And that's the best news I have from last night's Forza.

Really, after the last few things I've attended, I think it's fair play on the part of the universe to take it down a notch. And I knew what I was getting into...Forza is a show that finds me furiously reading the plot synopsis, looking for shortcuts. Plus I'd probably seen this clunker of a production on tv--wasn't this the one telecast with Sharon Sweet, or was that a uniquely boring nightmare I had?

Rataplan rataplan rataplan! See, it's no more charming or in fact bearable when I do it. I'd have to diagnose Ildiko Komlosi, who I'd be surprised if the Met is rataplanning to invite back much, as not conspicuously talented, perfectly adequate and rather pretty.

But ok, Voigt was in really nice form. I'm almost tired of praising her singing, and tempted instead to say: Deb, sugar, you are looking super. But I'll pull myself together and comment instead that the mildly shouty quality of last year's Ballo is gone, the messa di voce is working, and she connected with Verdi stylistically in a way I wouldn't have guessed she would from her Aidas. I don't think anyone will remember this as one of her great roles, but it's a feather in her cap nonetheless. And she looks hilarious as a boy. There is no denying this.

Delavan is a singer who (in Parsifal, in Chicago, for example) has knocked the wind out of me, but he didn't at all last night, for whatever reason. There was something hollow about the sound he was producing that I hope is not chronic.

I'm going to admit something. I'm having a rotten time writing about this goddamn Forza. I did get to watch a hilariously concise set of gestures from one box patron to another that managed to encapsulate with remarkable economy: 1) stop rustling that godforsaken paper 2) because it's getting in the way of me listening to this intensely boring opera so 3) sorry, not trying to be overly cunty, but 4) STOPIT STOPIT STOPIT. Oh and I hear someone had, to say the least, severe indigestion in Family Circle, about which: ew. But it's something to write about. Which the production itself isn't, nor is Licitra really. Pretty voice; nothing going on.

So with that, I throw in the towel or the cowl or something. Monday is Mazeppa and at the very least I can act all knowledgeable because I am with the speaking of the Russian.

Oh wait, though. I'd like to take a second to dedicate a song to Samuel Ramey, and that song is "I will Always Love You." Not the sweet, guileless Dolly Parton original, but rather the big hideous Whitney Houston cover, I think. He looks 90 if a day, but he's still an Artist.

In the Jinx Department: Alex von Wellsung delivers a more measured meh.

Omnia Vincit Ewa

Well the good news is most people either love Ewa Podles or think she's a big honking foghorn, so the gentle art of persuasion can rest unused in its tissue-stuffed crate for the length of this writing. And the other good news is that the former crowd was out in force on Sunday, not enough so to fill the upper reaches of Avery but you'd never know it by the noise. And the other good news is that, while i Podliani are not utterly unlike Millo fans in their creepy devotion, I think I'm being a tiny bit objective when I say she really earned each precious decibel. God knows she puts out about as many as she takes in over the course of an evening.

Madame Podles, you see, was the featured soloist at the Moscow Chamber Orchestra's matinee concert, though I think it is safe to say the majority of the crowd would have remained in their seats had a bad batch of borsch called for a last minute substition of the PS 153 marching band on backup. This is not to denigrate the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, except for the first violin section. It is to denigrate them just a little, as their pitch issues are something jarring in a world class ensemble, pretty solo playing of the concertmaster notwithstanding. But an opening band can tell when you're waiting for Led Zeppelin, I suspect. (yeah, no idea. I hate Led Zeppelin.)

Meanwhile, they played the Haydn "Pasione" symphony with great gusto and Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives [Rus.: Mimoletnosti] were marked by considerable nimbleness and wit. Shostakovich's chamber symphony was, if memory serves, and it usually doesn't around here, actually arranged for them from the 8th quartet, though I think it's safe to say none of those members are around any longer. And it had gravitas and soul, and we all just wanted Podles to get her besequined ass out there and yell at us some more.

Alright. "Yell" is not the best choice of words. But for the record, this was some exquisitely loud singing, and in the last of the Songs and Dances of Death, the middle register note on the word smert' (death) roughed me up as no note has done in recent memory. And, vulgarian though I may be for saying so, loud does go a long way with me. It's the rugby element of opera.

Meanwhile, there was everything else. Podles' first number was Rossini's Joan of Arc cantata for solo contralto. Podles is no longer 35 (try flipping the digits around a little and you'll get there...I actually only know this because Tommasini did his homework), and she does a crazy-looking sort of calisthenics to catch all the notes in this kind of music, but unless you require your soloists to look like Kiri te Kanawa or the Buddha at all times, it's worth it. Personally I find it kind of fun to watch. And the bravura, the sheer balls of the singing...I think most anyone who was there will tell you this was a unique moment of delirium in this season. In almost anyone else's concerts, you wait for the high notes. And there are good high notes in a Podles concert, but fewer than there used to be [and in the spirit of full disclosure, the high note in the second encore was a good save rather than an easy triumph]. But really you wait for the low notes. To some listeners, they're discordant with the rest of the voice. To these listeners I say: blow me. But in a jokey tone of voice, so we're all still friends.

EP acts her way through even concert pieces, which is also great fun. It's silent movie acting, but it's from the gut. And what's better still is the non-narrative physicality of her singing--some of it from effort, sure, but the majority I think from a brand of whole body engagement with the music I imagine Leider and Garden must have had. Certainly it finds a happy home in Mussorgsky's fairy tale told by a goth drama queen, Pesni i Pliaski Smerti. La P's Russian is a damn sight clearer than her Romance languages, which tend toward the Polynesian, ecole de Sutherland, which also helped out in her two encores, the Nevsky and Moscow Cantata pieces to be heard on her superb Russian disc. (I'm only sad she didn't sing Varvara's Limericks from Schedrin's "Not Only Love" with its slithery portamenti ending in a sort of queasy grunt. Good stuff.) These were followed by much stomping and European clapping-in-time, even, that went on until our game but weary soloist drew a finger dramatically across her throat, the bum's rush as an international gesture.

Would I love Podles as much in subtler material? Gluck's Orfeo can go either way: quiet nobility or gestures on the scale of Marie Falconetti, and hers is resoundingly the latter. I was meant to hear her in Das Lied the year she broke her arm and heard the lovely Susan Platts instead. I'm not sure how much it matters when there's great rep in her range that works the cinematic scale of her art. Certainly I'm beside myself waiting for this summer's Tancredi ([-subtle]...little notational joke for any linguists in the crowd. Thanks, I'll be here all week!) and can hardly type about the Toronto Klytamnestra without fainting, so I'd better sign off, since nothing's less attractive than me passed out at the keyboard.

Up next: Forza. Which is tonight. p.s. not to put too fine a point on it, but did anyone take home a sonic souvenir of this concert, not that any of us moral paragons would do such a thing?

Two Bits

It's time to pull my metaphorical dancing shoes out of the Ikea metaphorical-shoe-holder thingy and hit the streets. By which I mean, in my fashion, it's time to reiterate that this Met season which for some reason had certain dud-like qualities on paper, has instead been a source of consistent satisfaction, and mutter a quiet, quasi-religious word of thanks to the likes of Olga Borodina and Clifton Forbis, a pair anyone would be happy to hear again. And by "anyone" I mean me, but maybe you, too.

Hours away from going to hear my very favorite low-voiced lady sing at Avery, I must take a minute to eat some crow over my long-held indifference to Ms. Borodina. It's not that I didn't like her, but more that I kind of didn't entirely get it. I heard her first as Marina in a Boris I was standing for, and only ever again as Polina or Praskovija or Pippi or whatever the throwaway sister in Pikovaia Dama answers to. In fact I heard all but the last note of her Marina, as I was in upstairs standing, had never been to the quiz, and thought it would be sufficiently fun to merit bolting from the upper reaches as the act was ending. I thought she had a wonderful strength in her voice but not as much kunst as I was craving. I have resisted the horrible temptation to say "kraving" and you may thank me. And as Dalila, she sounded much as I recalled. Well, listeners are allowed to mature as well as singers, no? Borodina is in fact a bit like Podles in that her approach to roles is based on luxury of sound and grand gestures. Borodina, of course, does more of a Simionato thing, producing equally unshakeable sound up and down her range without the punchy contralto chest notes. Neither one radiates canny intellectual smarts (illusory though this may well be) the way say Lisa Saffer or, to give an obvious example, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson does. It is certainly enough, and maybe a matter of matching of talent. Dalila need not come off as particularly deep. The standardized scorecard for this opera requests a letter grade for the act-ending cry of "lache!" and I, red grading pen in hand, have given an A without much hesitation.

Clifton Forbis should have been a big name years ago and I hope he will be now, though I can't guess how well his voice took to the airwaves. You may recall his excellent turn in Wozzeck recently, and if you're from Texas (as am I and, it would seem, as is Jean Phillipe-Lafont, judging by the hook 'em horns element of his get-up in Samson...NYCOF will know what I'm talking about, if no-one else does: orange paint all over your face and a little white longhorn on your forehead? I mean c'mon, the season's over, I think. Football's the one with the horses and the swimming pool, right? Anyway pack up the tailgate party, Lafont.) you may also remember him in a gem of a Kat'a K with the riveting but vanished Elena Prokina. I'd like to think we're going to hear him in Wagner at the Met--beyond being compelling and having a basically pleasing sound, the voice is absolutely Met sized. I will say I was taken aback upon his opening lines, as he produces the least tenory sounding tenor I think I've ever heard. It's like the beginning of the Ozawa Gurrelieder when McCracken opens his mouth and Hans Hotter falls out.

Lafont, to my tastes, was a little dull and wooly, but not show-killingly so. I'm trying (very unstrenuously...I mean, the Met database is two clicks away) to remember who else has sung the high priest in this production. Surely someone could bring a bit more brio to the proceedings, you'd think. At least he kind of worked his costume, has some inner RuPaul going on. James Courtney as Abimelech looked for all the world like a fratboy in drag on a dare, trying feebly to work those humangous fingernails without ever tapping into their potential for campy gestures of slightly dandyish villainry. Nu, it would have been so hard to queue up The Crying Game on Netflix? (As in everything since Paradise Lost, if not before, though, it was pretty clear if you had to choose to spend next Saturday with the good guys or the bad guys, you'd probably already be on the b's on your speed dial. This despite some conducting, especially during the Bacchanale, that lacked Elvis, as I think we used to say during the Clinton years.) Yes, I'm commenting on his fingernail flicking skills, because really he does the same thing in this as in Rigoletto, turning out late career comprimario sounds that at least have a feel of being well earned.

Am I alone in basically admiring the look of this production but wishing the destruction of the temple looked a little less like a radical redecorating scheme and more like something going boom?

Podles shall be blogged later in the week.

Another Toothless Blind Item: what opera photographer and bon vivant turns out to do a surprisingly riotous imitation of Licia Albanese clearing her throat?

Faute de mieu

Latest purchase: (With What Money??)

1) I Troiani. That's right, not Les Troyens. Highlights disc, actually, but it has the parts one is curious to hear. I'm trying to remember my Mario del Monaco timeline and whether 1960 is after his car wreck/goiter/whatever but I would guess not. I mean he ditches the C in "inutiles regrets" and we all hate that, but the final B (?) is so long and fearless as to make up for it. The crowd agrees. Simionato as Didone isn't quite what I imagined...I think the grandeur of her big scena is all tied up in its Frenchness and even an artist of her caliber can't really make it sound right in translation. I'm trying to imagine Janet Baker doing it in English, which seems likely to have happened. It just doesn't make me want to rev up the time machine. I haven't given Nell Rankin's Cassandra a fair listen; cursorily I'd say the goods are there.

2) Cebotari Sings This and That in Really Good Sound. Can someone clear up for me whether she was or was not Hitler's little darling? I'd swear I read it somewhere but it's hard to wrap my head around since she's from Kishinev, ancestral home of the D'annato family and so many other shtetl Jews. Anyway if she was in fact the songbird of Sobibor maybe I'd actually rather not know it, because she made some irresistable records. While we're on her, che-bo-TA-ri? Because it's a semi-made up name anyway, from Cebutaru. And while I have no idea what a "c" represents in Romanian, it's not impossible she was aiming for something with more of an Italian ring to it like, y'know, Rossellini or Buccatini or, oh, Millo. Herein are featured excerpts from Puccini, Verdi, etc and Cebotari's second to none Es Gibt ein Reich, complete with Ferrieresque mythology that she knew she was dying when she sang it. It could be true.


Honestly, I haven't stopped going to the opera. I'm bound to go to Forza sooner or later, especially since I got an intriguing text message about it from JSU. Go click on his page until he's forced to review it. (Actually I haven't checked today--he may have done so already. All I've seen lately though was Walk the Line, which I secretly suspect was just the negatives from last year's Ray.

Over at The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross outlines a Ring set in an American high school, which made me laugh, in part because I have at times daydreamed about other operas set in high schools (they being the last place it is socially acceptable to indulge in high drama/operatically sized emotion all the livelong day.) Is the Duke of Mantua really just the captain of the football team? Is Der Komponist really just the faggiest kid in the drama club? Watch your back, Calixto Bieito--here I come!

Abject Disclaimer of Any Objective Merit as a Review

When I was in college I had a t-shirt silk-screened with a page from Brahms' German Requiem on it. Someone once asked me, "can you play that?" and (thinking myself quite the wit) I responded, "No, I don't play the orchestra." Nobody plays the orchestra, get it, get it?

Alarm Will Sound gave a sort of mash-up themed concert at Zankel this evening, pairing "odd couples" of composers whose stories intersect in one way or another. Seriously, for once, I'm going to try to be brief, because I mean, I'm a Wagner-Strauss sort--I'm from Philadelphia*; we believe in God...** If things get any less instinctually graspable than Wozzeck, I have to fight not to fade into the rabble of middle American anti-intellectualism, turning into your Uncle Cletus who resorts to highly rigorous criticism of the form "my four year old coulda composed that aleatory and highly performative fantasia on sound and meaning." I do think I have a certain ear for virtuosity, but as AWS concerts go, a relatively small part of the evening was devoted to pieces that could stand on the staggering technique of ensemble alone. And I'm afraid I'm particularly out of water trying to wring the musical worth of things like Varese into words, though in fact Varese is by some random chance one of the post-Schoenberg composers I do get on some gut level. Integrales was given a showy staging that stood unafraid on the precipice whence artful looks down on silly. The placement of players in the theater can look like a stunt if you can't back it up with unfailing chops and unblinking conviction.

That said, with a ready hand on the delete key in case of impending cold feet, I'm going to say something a little critical of a concert given by a bunch of people I think highly of, some of whom I know personally: I just don't see how, as an audience member, one can not feel a little bit condescended to when 4'33" or its pal 0'0" is programmed. It amounts to an undergraduate lecture, an aural but non-aural conspiratorial wink, something I think works better as a historical event than a present one in the post-Sprockets age. But, as I've said so many times, I'm something of a half-wit, so more's my loss for not getting a seminal (the seminal?) piece of music after modernism. Maybe it's just harder to countenance now that we're all painfully aware now that those five minutes of cheeky neo-dada pile up to about fifteen bucks in the pocket of some Carnegie stagehand.

There, I'm done. Now back to the task of trying not to overuse the word "virtuosic." Go hear them next time and you'll see why this is an issue. Really the pieces that showed off the group at its best, according to me, were: Will Sound, commissioned for them from Wolfgang Rihm, not something written in language I can parse much but a swell platform for the always astonishing musical sense of conductor Alan Pierson; and...which one was it that featured Courtney Orlando adding the accordion to the long list of instruments she plays? I stand corrected on one thing. It seems very possible that Ms. Orlando plays the orchestra. (In case you didn't read your Chekhov, if there's a t-shirt in the first paragraph it has to go off in the fourth. Suddenly it seems I'm writing about burlesque.)

It becomes something of a nightmare to single out individuals for praise when everyone is so sure-footed, but for the hell of it I'm going to toss out random props to percussionist Dennis DeSantis, partly for his gripping John Cale arrangement, and percussionist Payton MacDonald and...Jesus, if you'd told me in high school orchestra that I would ever have anything nice to say about percussionists I'd have told you to light up another one. The Cale selections, from his music for Warhol's Kiss were performed with clips of that film projected behind/above the players, and of the pieces I've seen AWS do that call for a spatially motivated, quasi-theatrical staging, I think this one worked best.

Least informative review ever. I'll leave it for others to comment on such as Woma's Gyil Mambo which I enjoyed but not in any very specific way or Bermel's Three Rivers which I didn't enjoy, but not in any very specific way. [Conveniently, smarter listeners than I am have provided links to more informed opinions from those who really get this kind of music.] A small, heartbreaking note: those metal detectors that caused such a backup getting to the will call window? They're not permanent; just deemed necessary for a performance by the Israel Philharmonic. Once in a while one is reminded in a mundane way of the fact that, while monotheistic religions are clearly a big mistake in general, monotheistic religions with a concept of martyrdom really take the cake in the disaster bake sale.

*Not true.
**Even less true. I'm just making a movie reference for the amusement of exactly two people.

And yeah, I'm kind of glad it's not Taymor

So now the questios is: what does anyone know about Robert Lepage. Right? Not sure what I'm blogging next. Probably Podles if the concert isn't called off.

A grus in der heim,
(which is Yiddish for Word to your Mother),
Chairman Mau

Well, dog my cats!

DOGME 2006 Manifesto of Opera Blogging

1) I shall not describe voices in terms of food, unless in a spirit of blatant absurdism. "Ms. Mentzer's mezzo is a heady mix of starfruit and bliny, her top redolent of ham hocks and Big Red soda." Yeah, no idea why I picked Mentzer except in mentioning her name I get to think about her singing.

2) I shall not describe voices in terms of jewelry, precious metals, semi-precious stones. Nobody sounds like diamonds set in steel any more than she sounds like orthoclase set in ruthenium. It occurs to me I read "diamonds set in steel" somewhere recently so if it's yours, sorry for the potshot.

ETA: I begin to think the reason people read me in such, ehm, medium-sized numbers is to watch me be humorously wrong, sort of like why we watch the State of the Union Address only without the body count. The apologies here are due to Stephen Holden, and the phrase is "diamonds set in silver."

3) I shall not confuse an exacting, quasi-religious epistemology of fach for having something to say about a voice. One of you out there knows exactly what example I'm going to use in my theoretical non-DOGME-compliant review: "Norman should not have sung the role of Salome even on record, as she is not a jugendlich-dramatisch but quite obviously a Falcon."

Oh gosh, that's all I've come up with so far. Am I leaving out any clunkers? We've all seen the threads on opera-l about staging trends that must die--if memory serves, some deservedly popular choices were staging the overture, sopranos spinning around as they pop out a high note, and my own contribution: Big Tall Menacing Shadows. So I'm just saying there are some reviewing trends that make me a little nutsy. That's all. If anyone needs me, I'll be in my room.

Oh but before I go, have you checked out the little sister to Unnatural Acts of Opera? Our hostess sports yet another operanym I find awfully funny in its excess: Stella Maria Krazelberg von und zu Brabant, and the latest podcast is here. Meanwhile did you read Alex's rather gratifying tirade against the "let's dress it up as pop music and see if anyone comes" trend that looks likely to dominate the first years of the Gelb regime?

Little bits of big news tossed in as afterthoughts

A Mattila Tosca, eh? Color me daft but I can't say I saw that pairing of singer and role coming down the pike. Think she'll play it barefoot?

Talk about discouraging

After spending 20 years asleep, it seems possible, in a ring of fire, Terrence Malick has awakened to show us what happens when greatness goes unused. Right, in fact he made The Thin Red Line seven years ago, but I didn't see it so I can't very well write about it. And I'm not going to write much about The New World except to say that the three playings of the entire world-being-born-in-e-flat-major extravaganza from Rheingold are pretty much the only good things that happen. No, that's not fair. There are quite a few arresting images including one I would deem unforgettable, but somehow the man who gave us the soul-wringing narrative that runs behind each museum-worthy tableau of Days of Heaven has turned out an endless, tedious piece of dreck I have a hard time imagining anyone enjoying. The Wagner may be all that kept me in the theater, though the performances, one suspects, were good. It is hard to know--buried, as they were, in crap. Folks, this is the man who gave us the mean, lean Badlands. What the hell happened?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: I keep hearing rumors of this Threepenny Opera with the potentially brilliant casting of Cyndi Lauper and Nellie McKay. I haven't gone mad, have I?* I've seen nothing official about it. In a way it's too bad because I have this little dream that Patti LuPone could get tired of doing Mrs. Lovett in the now long running do-it-yourself Sweeney Todd everyone's been so nutty about, and Ms. Lauper could somehow be persuaded to step in. You may or may not know this, but the woman has an impressive set of pipes. (I have been known to put "I'm Gonna be Strong" on opera mix cd's for reasons that one listening should explain with no room for back-talk.) It would involve some suspension of geographical disbelief, since I doubt that Queens honk is going anywhere, but then if the telecast with LuPone was any evidence, her British accent is sporadic to say the least.

All snowed in here at Palazzo D'Annato. Perhaps it's the ideal time to watch the rest of that old Elektra with Marton and Studer and just generally make things worse.

*"No, Maury," say the happy little voices. "You're as sane as...as...a really sane thing." It's so official it's got a website. And the translation is by Wallace Shawn, a man whose genius is largely unknown to the public due to the fact that he makes a really good visual punchline.

See, that's actually a hilarious idea for blogfodder. Presupposing some imaginary dreamland in which I'm not instantly creeped out by the idea of very liberally giving out my phone number, I publish it en blogge and then you all text message me reviews from whatever you're seeing. Whereupon I take inexcusable liberties with your words and publish them for all to see. All fourteen or so to see. Yes. So not gonna happen.

Maybe it's time to expand the blogroll a bit, as I've stumbled upon some amusing ones. Merely linking for now: the opera yenta tells us "How Internet Opera makes me a better Jew..."; the solidly written, rather serious and daringly named Opera Blog; and because anyone who likes Bruckner and Boulez must be, well...smarter than me, The Penitent Wagnerite. Enough for now. Click in good health.

More reviews from my vast network of cellular informants

A reader who dissed my last limerick
Informs me by means of Sony-Eric-
sson text message Gruber's
more "gruesome" than super
(though Olga is "awesome" wie immer) ick!

I really, really do not have the knack. In other news that I was given confidentially but now may disclose because it's more or less public (well, if you're a subscriber it is) Alexandrina Pendatchanska returns to City Opera next season as Elena in La Donna del Lago. Must shop for bells, on with which there to be.

Hooker with a Voice of...well, you know

You know, it's a little difficult to get up the steam to write an opera review when this guy, by contrast, has used his blog to do a real and substantial service.

But I'm gonna anyway. You knew that.

All else aside, it's Traviata, probably the first opera I ever loved. If you'll pardon me while I vaseline the lens a little, Papa D'Annato used to load us in the jalopy and take us to Cincinnati Opera and I remember thinking during Manon Lescaut, at age 12 or something: please, please, please die already. That was what my reviews would have sounded like back then, yup. If we'd had blogs. "Um, so like this lady? She wouldn't stop singing?" etc. And then a few years later we went to Traviata, and it became immediately clear I would never, ever like football. One day I'll indulge my nostalgia and figure out if anyone in that cast was someone I heard later.

So the thing about an opera that plays that kind of role in your life is there's a good chance you'll listen to it way too much and not be able to hear it anymore, which is pretty precisely what I did. I'm always tempted to lunge for my undergraduate understanding of critical theory in discussing this because famed Russian mieskeit Roman Jakobson and his Ikettes, the Formalists, described this all very well: things become routinized, and good art must shock us out of our perceptual habits. I do think parts of La Traviata are lost to me forever. I can judge a good "Sempre Libera" but never again will it totally grab me by the balls, right?

Not entirely right.

I'm not about to crown Angela Gheorghiu the queen of the lyric stage, because that would be corny and premature. I will say, though, that I was very taken with her performance and at times very much moved, and there's not a long list of singers that really move me, whatever their other merits. See, Gheorghiu kind of does the Callas thing. Not a tic-by-tic phonetic masquerade ecole de Tiziana Fabbricini or Lucia Aliberti. Rather she has what I'm just going to go ahead and call a marvellous kind of negative capability. She doesn't flail about after gestures. She just has a good old school knack for physical and vocal melodrama. I never believed the stuff about Callas being Callas because she studied the scores word by word--singing is not geometry and critical intelligence is very, but very different from creative intelligence. What it means to be a creature of the stage is, for instance, to know as Gheorghiu does (instinctively, I suspect) when to slow your movements down and when to speed them up.

This is why, when she started condensing her gestures and walking so slowly as to fit in to a Robert Wilson production, it really launched her "Amami Alfredo" straight into my heart, or my gut, or somewhere signifying a happy reception of good singing. This and the fact that it was luscious. It should be mentioned, by the way, that some of us had misgivings at the beginning of the opera that her Violetta was going to be undervoiced. The first few minutes were remarkably quiet. In the final analysis, nobody would complain if the voice were a size larger, but I do tend to think kvetching about the size of voices is about half the time the last refuge of he who has nothing else to say.

A few weeks ago in this space I whined most gratingly about how the Met puts on Lucia but never Bolena or the other, far more enjoyable Donizetti. I didn't have any definite idea at the time about who should sing them, but now I do. It occurs to me that Gheorghiu put "Al dolce guidami" on her early recital album, the same one where you can hear her and Mr. Gheorghiu do a delightfully dreadful "Tonight!" from West Side Story. I liked it at the time and, lack of notes above C notwithstanding, I'd like to take my turn in the great tradition of Bloggers Futilely Adressing the Universe about Casting. Gheorghiu=Bolena.

Act III was dramatically dead on (except for maybe the "You can hear me but nobody else can!" spotlight...and come to think of it the entire physical production, not least the Dancing Cow Convention. That the headliners overcame this is much to their credit. Yes, I'm going to extend this parenthesis as long as I damn well please, and while I'm on the staging, is clapping-for-the-furniture making a slightly unwelcome comeback? I've heard it said that when the new house opened, people clapped for the chandeliers as they made their 7:59 ascent. We all like clapping, but let's be reasonable.) and the letter and [spoiler alert!!] death scene were riveting. And occasioned a stomping ovation which for some reason they quashed early on by means of the house lights.

Speaking of absolutely nothing, I swear there's a riff at the beginning of Act III that Philip Glass quotes in Koyanisqaatsi. I'm high, right?

Kaufman's success and equally enthusiastic reception was not a surprise to me. You know how a bunch of us heard Sondra Radvanovsky backstage singing The High and Highly Repetetive Priestess in Aida in what must have been 1998 and knew she was eventually going to knock everyone else aside for the spotlight? I think I had this same thing happen at the famously uneven Heppner Otellos in Chicago, thinking: who's that Cassio, and why on earth is he Cassio? It's a shock, but the good kind, to hear a voice with such a low center of gravity in this role. I find food metaphors irritating but red meat does kind of irresistibly spring to mind. And no, the C in the cabaletta didn't quite plug in, but my reaction a lot of the rest of the time was what a lot of you, apparently, experienced hearing Filianoti. That is to say gratitude that someone was making the right sounds and vocal gestures. I'm guessing Susan Graham was feeling some gratitude of her own, if she happened to take in any of these Traviatas, since Mr. Kaufmann has kindly displaced her in this season's Worst Wig competition. (Ms. G's wigs were much better, though I'll have to admit the act II one made me think of Alanis Morisette*. It's possible she'd look good in any wig. Not to belabor the obvious and much noted, but girlfriend is a knockout.)

ETA: an anonymous reader informs me that those ain't wigs. The problem with posting in a public forum is being publicly wrong. Anyway I'm hoping the Alfredo do is a styling choice by someone at the Met, because he does not need to be walking around the streets with that hair.

Anthony Michaels-Moore sang with admirable conviction, though if I had a magic wand he probably would have traded roles with John Hancock. Who may actually be younger than Gheorghiu but is also perhaps literally seven feet tall, so I think we can all feel comfortable calling him daddy.** Gallons of voice, from what I can tell having heard him in a couple of thankless roles. Germont's aria is another thing I've listened into a flavorless pulp, and even sung in the shower much to the horror of my soap I can only assume. It's almost an argument against listening to the likes of Tibbett, because I sort of casually assume nobody's going to do that ever again, which is not something a fair or sane person would hold against today's Germonts. But there it is, nonetheless, this little nagging voice in the mind's ear, and the sometimes clunky way Michaels-Moore's voice gets from one note to another did nothing to appease it, though I must reiterate that the role assumption was on balance a success.

You'll hear it Saturday, nu, and you'll tell me if I'm wrong.

*A year and a half later I removed the link to this picture where Alanis looks exactly like A.G. I kept getting hits from it and thinking "these people don't want to see my opera blog."

**It's moments like these when one is grateful there is little danger of the subject reading the review. To wit, statements of distaste or, well, compliments nobody's going to put in their press materials. "Maury D'Annato of blogspot.com says, 'this is one tenor I'd like to roll around in a vat of passionfruit Jello with, and his use of voix mixe is also tastefully stylistic.'"

p.s. as noted by Alex there does seem to be a February slump going around, as if there were some transcendental blog oversoul. Why we're all having crises of purpose at the same time is anyone's guess.

The Truth about Cats and Dogs

Groucho Marx is said to have reviewed a performance by tenor Guido Nazzo saying "Guido Nazzo is nazzo guido." You don't get a chance like that in every lifetime, folks. So I was sort of hoping a few of you would be drunk and not notice if I tried to pawn off "Barasorda is sorda bad-a" on you, but as things turned out, I don't have to, because he was perfectly alright, and got a nice ovation for surviving the world's meanest sentence in a review.*

I mean, it's a shopworn voice, apparently the worse for many years of use, and did I think wistfully about Domingo, a singer I hold in high esteem but do not dote on? Of course I did. I'd like to hear him do it and am the more curious whether he'll get on his pogo stick and hop to it for the broadcast. If not, I've promised to start nasty rumors about vocal crisis among those half-wits on opera-l and usenet who start salivating at the mention of his name, cutting and pasting old posts about how he's never sung a C in his career. Where was I? Barasorda was not Domingo and that's that. I'm not disappointed I heard and saw his take on the role, though it wasn't world class.

Meanwhile, on the same stage, Sondra Radvanovsky made a case for the immediate Fedexing of Joe Volpe's soul to hell for putting her only in three performances of this and then that high school musical about the birds and the bees and the Viennese, and as far as I can tell from the Met Futures page, nothing next season, or was there an Ernani or something? Let's pause a moment for moral outrage. If there were an Oscar for best high note, she could go ahead and thank the academy because that baby was out of the ballpark. (And the Oscar for most egregiously mixed metaphor...) This being only the olive in the martini, really: I won't pretend to know the role at all but I'm having a hard time imagining a better run through it. If I got to design voices, there would be lots like hers, and the thing that knocked me out in the last act is that it's so present down around where you'd think it might fade from hearing.

I'd have a hard time going into much detail about the other singers, who were all dressed as Burger King. It was a little confusing. The set, though, I rather liked. Yes, it falls into that sort of watery category of not entirely traditional but not particularly daring. I just found it thoughtful and consistent and so I suppose stopped worrying about where to file it.

And the work itself? Delightful, conspicuously so: it's a mystery to me why it's not done more often, really. Well paced, imaginative though conservative in its language, maybe better written for the orchestra than the voice. But I had a short, frank talk with Mr. Gelb and any time someone suggests putting on, say, Tales of Hoffman he has been instructed to program this instead.

And then Maury woke up and it had all been a dream.


*"For with all respect, no one wanted him there." and yes, there's more positive context there but I'd still hate to read that about myself. And no, I'm not really jumping into the Tomassini Wars; I read his reviews, find them more or less helpful, and am not really in any position to correct him on things, being something of a dullard.

p.s. I thought so, but I had to google it after I got home: there is a certain adolescent humor in having a character named DeGuiche prancing around your opera, because in America a guiche is also the name of a body piercing in a pretty hilarious/agonizing place.