Part II of a Very Limited Series

In the ongoing series of Pictures of Francophone Tenors of a Bygone Era Who Like[d] Cats....

A very happy 105 to Hugues Ceunod. I don't really know his stuff, so I'll let you wax enthusiastic, if you adore him. My hat is simply off to him for landing a boyfriend who's like forty years younger than him. Not that I'd want to date someone who's negative seven years old, mind you. It just seems like an accomplishment.

Not for the faint of heart

Scant days ago I was telling someone this trio is among the very highlights of the operatic literature, and here it is in all its...in all its...uh, I can't find quite the right word.

In C, on Cornelia Street

So we're traipsing around the Village last night, trying to kill an hour because Mary's Fish Camp? It takes like a fucking fortnight to get a space at the flingin' flangin' bar. Anyway, we are as far afield from our promised treif repast as Cornelia Street, fortunately a good while before the rain, and we randomly stumble upon dozens of musicians in the middle of the street performing Terry Riley's In C, with many more standing around enjoying or WTFing. It wasn't something I'd want to stick around for much of, but the fact of it happening there gave me an odd rush of pride in my current adopted hometown.

(Happy Anniversary to me and New York next Tuesday. Three years is the leather anniversary: somewhat appropriate since you have to be a little bit of a bondage bottom to live here. "Please sir jack my rent up again sir! Ow! Thank you sir!")

Touched by an Angel, but not in a good way

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens...how does the rest of that go? Oh, but nevermind. Can I tell you about one of my least favorite things?

So, I wasn't going to write anything about The Second Tosca. And I'm sort of still not, except tangentially, because both reviews I've read commented enthusiastically on the performance of two-time Tony nominee Vivian Reed as a larger than life diva-in-decline. I did enjoy this, in a way. She did 100% of what the script asked her to do. Thing is, and I'm not casting aspersions on the play as a whole, which was funny and well-paced...but when do we get to retire the archetype of the Black Woman Who Will Tell It To You Straight? And then maybe slam a door. It's sort of the verso of the very funny Mad T.V. sketch you may have seen floating around on youtube mocking the yearly ritual of an execrable movie about a Nice White Lady who teaches the kids at an inner city school not only to write/dance/juggle/play canasta, but [gulp, gulp, gulp, taking my anti-emetic] to LIVE.

I know this is a play in which everyone is to some extent a type. But this particular type is a wearying fetish, embarassing for everyone on either end of the equation, particularly when coupled in a sort of hybrid with The Sassy Black Woman Who Always Gets The Last Word (Oh No She Di-glottal stop-unt! Sass-amplifying Finger Wag!) The only opportunity they missed was having her cook for the whole family and dispense earthy wisdom. Even the horny, catty, gay character felt less problematic, maybe because he had a bit more of a story in him. It's not lost on me that a white guy critiquing portrayals of black characters is an iffy enterprise, by the way. Anyway, um, it was a pleasure to see a play about opera, and Rachel de Benedet was terrific, and I think I meant this to be about a sentence long but this medium-deeply pisses me off. Do I need to just take a fucking valium, or does this bug anyone else a lot?

The Ring, Announced

Casting for the Kirov/Gergiev/Tsypin Ring is now announced.

A week ago, anyhow, so maybe this is news only in my world. Valery Gergiev is Ossetian? I don't know whether you knew that – I mean, did you know that?

The highish number of unfamiliar names I find oddly cheering. It's exciting to think one of them may break out of the pack and be this year's find. I'm hoping it's Leonid Zakazhaev because we need one of those most. Or Victor Lutsuk, who needs a stage name. It just rhymes with too much.

Olga Sergeeva seems like a piece of good news. She acquitted herself admirably in the stand-alone Walkuere some 2-3 seasons back, though I don't remember being dumbstruck by her. She's young, yet.

p.s. yes I'm going, to part of it.

Tony vs. Tony

Just time for a quick entry before I have to run off and have myself cloned so one of me can watch the Sopranos swansong while the other watches the Tony Awards. Perhaps I should have a spare made that actually goes out and does things, but three's a crowd, I think I've heard.

Well the ur-Maury, the one who exists now and is primarily occupied with typing, was outdoors long enough to score halfsies for Spring Awakening because studies show the Tony Awards* are most fun when you have a few horses in the race. Somehow the season went by and I saw almost nothing until the bitter end. Maaaaybe because I was somewhere else most of the time, somewhere that starts with M and rhymes with "Petropolitan Opera." I'm not naming names. [I have the faint sense of perhaps having made that crack before. Me and my senile dementia offer our apologies.]

My impressions, in list form:

1) Fuck me running! $59 is a half price ticket these days?! I'm not exactly in my dotage and I have a feeling my first Broadway show cost less than that at full price. (This is pure speculation since the D'Annato family shall we say rarely pays full price.) Well, I had my chance. I think before they lugged it to Broadway, the thing was playing in an elementary school gym or something, but I was too busy seeing my 29th Aida no doubt. Tak oshibsja, tak nakazan, as Onegin might say, lamenting his failure to see, I dunno, Cats.**

2) That said, it was thoroughly enjoyable, and p.s. what does it take in this town to be financially secure enough that one needn't think of EVERYTHING in terms of how much it costs? The answer, I suspect, is the theme of my alternate viewing option. Look for a spinoff blog about my new career in Waste Management.

3) Thoroughly enjoyable, but oh my god, the lyrics. Like: how the hell did this make it from off to Broadway without someone saying, "Um...guys? About the lyrics?" Top notch song-writing if you're a native of Zambia and can't understand what anyone is singing.*** One friend says, and I tentatively agree pending further review of the soundtrack, that "We've all got our junk, and my junk is you," wins the abomination award. But I'm pretty sure the Act II finale contained the phrase...let me stop and compose myself before saying this..."a child will lead the way." If not that, something a lot like it.

4) Good performances. That should probably not win Tony Awards, because they were mostly of the variety that inspires phrases like "fresh, spirited young cast." They were super enthusiastic and, for the most part, a little green. Actually the guy who's up for "featured" maybe should win. But if it's that Groff fellow (cute, nice ass, totally decent singing voice) versus Raul Esparza, whose Bobby in Company yea verily seared my soul, there is an objective right answer. Somewhat tucked away in the cast is a gal with a not quite standard issue Broadway voice that made me sit up and take notice. Retrieving program from bathroom (what, like you read Ulysses on the goddamn toilet) so I can tell you her name is...Lauren Pritchard.

5) I can't decide whether to take half-hearted umbrage at the way the tiny gay subplot was played for laughs while everything else was so angstily serious, albeit occasionally laced with an underlying hipster irony. It doesn't really seem worth the effort. No thank you, no umbrage for me. I'm on a diet.

In other Tony races, well...I do think Christine Ebersole should win. All else aside, if Audra MacDonald gets any more Tony Statuettes, she's going to be able to play chess with them. But no, she should win mostly because of the uncanny thing she did up there: half acting, half seance. Same goes for Mary Louise Wilson, I think, though maybe I mostly want her to win because I'm so fucking tired of actors with one name, and think they should be discouraged when possible. In the same spirit of teaching by punitive example, Legally Blonde must win nothing so people will write fewer musicals based on pop culture detritus, which is so tiresome, except for Xanadu which I really want to see before it closes, presumably on opening night.

Other than that, I guess I'm out of opinions.

Next up: pictures of my cat, or something equally fascinating.

*no, I can't quite bring myself to pluralize the word Tony. Tonys, Tony's, Tonies. They all make me squint.

**Seriously, though, the only time I've ever seen Jesus Christ Superstar (I can tolerate religion in the context of showtunes, apparently) was in Russian. Funny thing is I'm sure musicals and anything else lyrical involve massive re-writing since things in Russian tend to have way more syllables.

***Great, I go and pull a country out of the hat and it turns out the official language is English. At least this time I did a preemptive mistake google and avoided huffy emails from my heretofore silent Zambian readership with this footnote! Please amend to "native of Zambia who by circumstances too elaborate to outline here, is a monolingual speaker of Wendish."

Kindly Accept Substitutes: Tony Edition

The season's in the rearview, so it's going to be nothing but lunatic ramblings about Inge Borkh, catblogging, and the occasional theater review for a while. And what better time for theater reviews? This Sunday is a total nervous breakdown for some of us: miss the last Sopranos and risk reading spoilers before seeing it, or miss an hour of the Tony awards? I find awards shows to be sort of like sporting events in that the idea of watching them anything but live is weirdly disappointing---don't you? So it's Tony Vs. Tony, for better or worse. As it happens, I've done a bit of theater-going lately. (You remember theater. It's the one where people speak their lines instead of singing them.)

A visit from the folks a few weeks ago, for instance, led to the requisite D'Annato family TKTS marathon. Aright, not a marathon like the time we spent all day at Long Day's Journey and then--no, I'm serious--went to Take Me Out. Let me take this opportunity to recommend not going to Take Me Out with your family, if it's ever an option, unless you're weirdly comfortable with your family. Anyhow, this time it was one play a day, chosen by the elder D'Annati: first Inherit the Wind, then A Moon for the Misbegotten.

The former, ok, is simply a rotten play. Morally neatly schematic, not particularly clever in its use of language, and at this juncture, in this setting, it's just a bunch of New York liberal back-patting. Not that I have a huge problem with that, per se, but it's not what I want in a night at the theater.

Brian Dennehy was surprisingly dull (or not surprising to me since I know next to nothing about him and had the vague idea he had been in a famous action movie, but everyone seemed to be throwing up from excitement about his participation) in a role that--again, at this point in history, in this place--amounts to so much moustache-twirling. Christopher Plummer was on the other hand kind of a treat, oh and hey the guy who played the not even 1 dimensional role of the teacher was someone I met at a Golden Globes party once. Get me! Fancy me! The gal who played his um, gal, was an actress of the school whose main drama is generated by the urgency of the question "what on earth do I do with my HANDS?"

Maybe the best thing going for the production is the old timey gospel ensemble (think Carter Family, I guess--not quite so country, but there's a zither and all) that pops up at the beginning of the show and at intermission, lending a sort of flavor the rest of the proceedings didn't so much have. The set, by the probably deservedly ubiquitous Santo Loquasto, was big and detailed and somber and unfortunately featured rows of seating for a chunk of audience. Yeah, onstage. If I may partially inappropriately quote a John Guare line that sometimes pops into my head, Silver Beaver: Why??*

Oh, and if I may spoilerize what I had assumed was a directorial clunker until [see comments], the thing ended with Plummer packing up his books, taking a long, meaningful look at Dennehy's bible and another at the teacher's volume of Darwin, then putting them, side by side into his bag. Just before the scene went dim, I'm pretty sure I heard the ghost of Clarence Darrow and that of William Jennings Bryan singing a sarcastic verse or two of "Ebony and Ivory."

Now, Moon. I am fundamentally not set up to appreciate the plays of Eugene O'Neill. I know Catholics and Jews are supposed to have a good deal in common, but our neuroses come in somewhat different flavors, and watching this or even Long, Long, Long Day's Journey into Night, I just can't quite grasp what much of the fuss is about. On some level, please understand, my ideal playwright is Chekhov. So O'Neill just feels so damned bloated. Anyway, it is what it is, and obviously the deficiency is mine rather than that of a canonical playwright. As with certain operas I don't adore, I can at least enjoy the performance and leave the text for others to love.

So it was a jolly enough time, in its fashion (as I believe one character says, putting me inevitably in mind of Cole Porter) though not without its issues. Mama D'annato termed it "a little too loud," and I can't argue--some of this surely could have been done with a lower incidence of shouting. The complaint that is being most widely made (and the charge leveled by Papa D'Annato) is that the script spends a good long time hammering home the fact that Josie is, in so many words, a big fat horrible ugly unattractive ten-foot-pole-requiring...I think they call her a cow a few times. Not subtle, and you know for what it's worth, it's not that hard to google O'Neill and see for yourself that he was not exactly the stuff porn is made of. There, I've gone and done the work for you, see up top and try not to let your libido run amok. Anyway Eve Best is strikingly distinctive I guess, but basically conventially pretty and not particularly big. Put it this way: if I were bisexual and stuck on an island with Eugene O'Neill and Eve Best, I'm pretty sure I know who I'd want under my palm tree at night. Didn't matter much because she gave this extraordinarily energetic, provocative, brutally physical performance. There was that rare and cherished appearance of spontanaeity to it I assume we all wait for.

Kevin Spacey was by no means her equal, but perhaps he was devoting his energy to keeping his wrist level, haw haw. He was fine at times and overly fussy at times. I guess I'm just not that keen on him, and the role is a beast anyway, full-on nervous breakdowns to be had. His desperation was the more tiring for the want of nuance, though. O'Neill without some serious actorial invention is awfully emphatic.

The strangest thing is they had all this slide guitar in the fairly obtrusive score and fluffy clouds and sort of deeply blue lighting, and despite the fact that I found the set pretty excellent, it kept bugging me that they seemed to have located Connecticut next to Arizona.

And tomorrow or the next day I'll try and blab about Spring Awakening, and Who I Want to Win What.

*Mr. Guare, it is safe to say, would have clutched his head in consternation over the working water pump in the Moon set. But I'm not him, and I thought it was neat.

I am defeated by Antonietta Stella

And the answers have been revealed over yonder at Parterre. And I feel awfully smug about having nailed 1-5. And the last one was...Antonietta Stella!?!? I could have guessed for days and I'd never have gotten there.

Meta-Blogging

Hey are you guys taking the Tosca Challenge (it's like the Pepsi Challenge, only without blindfolds. Or soft drinks.) over at Parterre? I figure I may as well blerg about it since at worst I'm telling you my right answers which I already sent in, and at (likely) best, I'm misleading you with my wild guesses, mwar har har!

1: You know, I'm pretty sure this is...no, wait, I do feel like I'm giving away something, despite all my prodigous self-doubt. soooooo instead I'm going to be so cryptic as to obviate any need to read the rest of this posting. Ok. I'm pretty sure this is someone who sang Tosca not only at the Met, but in San Francisco. A very long time ago, dig? Puccini was surprisingly hard for me to find my way into when I was but an opera kitten, and I have the same memory of her recording of Vissi as I do of learning to read, a sudden "I get how this works," because and aria I had always found meandering seemed to have a shape when it was shown to me by an expert guide.

2: If this is who I think it is, she has two studio recordings, and I've never associated her much with Tosca because on the one I heard first (and last), her "Questo e il baccio" had an unmistakeable Minnie Mouse quality to it. By "muori, dannato!" I'd taken the damn thing off. Not fair, but first impressions are hard to shake. Anyway I feel increasingly certain of this one, which will make it all the more poignant when I'm wrong, wrong, wrong.

3: Well, I mean she has to be in here somewhere, though the only reason I listen to her Tosca usually is to hear Corelli sing the "o" in "Vittoria!" until everyone else on stage dies of hunger or old age. No, in truth I'm not at all sure it's her. I just thought the "perche" had that...quality. Went back and listened to a record of the lady in question in early years and was quite unsure. Some have said this selection might be the voice of a Parterre favorite and MFI punching bag, but unless La Cieca has pulled the old "Nilsson on a cylinder" trick from Opera Quiz lore, the sound quality suggests to me that it is not. Who did you think it was? Say so in comments. I won't tell anyone.

4: No idea, so I took a wild, screaming, random guess...and vent home.

5: I had help on this one, though I'd like to think I might have gotten it on my own. After all, who else does the trick of not breathing between the climactic note and the, uh, anticlimatic? note. Who else could, if they wanted to? At least without making horrible gasping noises afterward, I mean I could do that.

6: I have no idea. I punted, thinking maybe it could be her, another inevitable exponent, in late, not so healthy years--isn't there one from Paris or something, or is that a Norma? I don't go in for necrophilia, so I try to stick to prime or shortly past.

Well it's been a pleasure half-misleading you, at best. I'm afraid there's nothing else to do for a while unless you're absolutely salivating at the thought of hearing what I think of the old Hvorostovsky disc I snagged for $3.99 at Academy (so old he has brown hair. Are things allowed to have happened 15 years ago at this point? Oh vecchiaia maledetta ! Son da tutti disprezzata!) but I'm bored enough for both of us imagining that posting, so this is looking like a summer lull at least until Caramoor (or perhaps slightly earlier if the heavens should grant me a seat at the Kirov Ring.) I do enjoy the thought of making a voice ID quiz of my own, though without the delightful incentive of a prize, but I'm dragging my feet on figuring out how to host sound files, not to mention editing them together as La Cieca has done.

IM IN UR OPERA SINGIN UR NOTEZ

Georges Thill loved cats, it seems. This is only one reason to adore him.

Hat tips to Greg, who finds these things in places you and I would not be likely to look.

Aw, man!

The Manprano blog has left the building. Bloghalla giveth, and bloghalla taketh away.

I wonder...

Pleased as I am to hear that the Met movie-casts are a success, I find myself wondering if the immediate expansion of the program isn't jumping the gun a little. You have to factor in the novelty of it, I think, and give it some time to settle, no? I'm wary of what happens if turnout next season is disappointing--do they can the whole thing, as it's evidently quite expensive? Hopefully I am dead wrong and what is in fact happening is some kind of opera youthquake and soon all the kids' MySpace pages will have pictures of Jarmila Novotna and Richard Crooks on them (unless in fact MySpace is very ten minutes ago already and I am as usual genus: Fuddy, species: Duddy.)

A better way to end the season

It wouldn't have done to have the season sputter out with two acts of Turandot or a a misbegotten Orfeo, though everyone's sincere love for the latter is beginning to make me wonder if I'm guilty of excessive fuddy-duddery. Be that as it may, the season should end on a note of mad opera-lust, or what's to get us through the summer, other than the sincere desire to stay home for a few evenings in a row or occasionally breathe the air of the outdoors?

Anyway, the question is now an academic one, as I did in fact leave the auditorium for the last time this season with that unique sensation of having been pounded with a meat tenderizer then doused in Listerine that comes so rare. And who do you think was weilding said kitchen implement? I'll give you a hint: I've expressed ambivalence about her before, in particular when she was trussed up in regal garb and making out with Johan Botha.

That's right, it's Patricia Racette. We've had a long journey, she and I, not that she is aware of this fact. We are now pals. She's not aware of that either. Nay, not pals, rather I bow my head in the presence of she who may no longer be regarded as only a singer. Patricia Racette is an artist, which lots of you apparently already knew. Jenufa is something she's sung a lot, and familiarity in this case has bred foremost an absolute dramatic commitment to the role.

Now, there is no reason to compare Racette's Jenufa to Mattila's, at least not in that scorecard way. I will say, though, that Racette's is in no way a lesser achievement, and as you can probably guess from my having heard Mattila sing it five times, that's a compliment. Much as I've loved on the Met production, Racette had the advantage of singing her Jenufa surrounded by a more character-driven one, that of David Alden for ENO. It's bleak and shrill and nearly perfect, though I remain agnostic about the staging of the "Let's Get Jenufa!" scene in the last act with everyone breaking in the windows.

Hey, guess what happened. Nah, I'll tell you. I sort of forgot the rest of what I was going to say because first we had to drive back and then I got the most vicious flu and then suddenly it was today (no more suddenly than usual, I guess) and who can remember anything they were going to say for more than a day or so? It doubtless had something to do with Malfitano and my high level of satisfaction therewith. In a different way than Silja, she ate up the stage, and was in good voice besides. I'm beginning to think the Regina from Lyric a few years ago, where I thought she'd reached the end of the line, was just an off night.

Oh, you're probably used to me doing this, this bit where I imagine what some idiotic directorial idea would look like, but just for sport, what if Kostelnicka forewent (is that a word?) her stern black wardrobe in some production and instead was a sort of hot older gal, a FILF if you will (Fostermother I'd Like to...you know the rest)? I'm not saying anyone should do it, just it popped into my head, and generally when that happens, you're subjected to it. Besides which someone probably has done it.

So that's my season. If there were a weepy film montage right here, it would probably feature the love duet from Minghella's Butterfly (um, with audio from some other production), Florez singing "Cessa di piu resistere," the Tristan Project with me standing outside looking sad, one of each Jenufa, Podlektra, DV's "Zweite Brautnacht," Dmitri telling Renee thanks but no thanks, and doubtless a couple of things I loved but can't think of just now. I think the end of the season also merits a tip of the hat to La Juntwait, whose intermission interviews were done in just the right way.

There will be things to write about over the summer, I assume.

I screen, you screen...

The good word on National Opera's Macbeth, which opened this evening, is that it's not the kind of pallid, 98-pound Verdi some of us have come to dread. (I remember once in a PhD program in a kingdom far away, a t.a. with bad boundaries suggested to me "you might want to try using your whole ass next time." That's what a lot of Verdi productions have made me feel like saying in the last few seasons.) The conducting is full-blooded and Italianate, and the singing, whose glories and belly-flops I'll get around to in a sec, is never less than balls-out.

The bad word is, unless you poke your eyes out, you have to watch it, too. The designer of the thing, whose name I resolutely decline to look up in the program, has a vocabulary whose richness is matched only by the Smurfs. Now, if we've talked at all, you and I, you probably know that high on the list of things I think should reassign someone's profession from director/designer to perhaps lead usher is the overuse of scrims. Through a haze of scantly diminished fury, I recall a Chicago Dutchman which took place I believe 100% behind scrims, and they didn't do a thing to contain the sound of Malfitano's voice*, so really I never figured out what they were there for.

If I thought long and hard, I could come up with isolated uses of a scrim that worked out well. But you don't want to wait while I do that, so let's just say generally I find them to be a lazy lunge at an effect that automatically diminishes my enjoyment of what I'm watching. Now, just as Mrs. Parker was able to think of something that could write worse than a Theodore Dreiser**, I have just been helped to come up with what I like less than an entire opera behind scrims.

That would be an entire opera behind scrims onto which inscrutable, frequently unintentionally funny images are projected, almost throughout. Absolutely headache-inducing. Subtle, also--I may be wrong, but my feminine intuition tells me the incessant use of red might bear some kind of semiotically complex relation to blood. I don't know. Don't quote me. The program makes mention of "new media," which is a scream, since the media implicated would seem to be 1) computer design, which ain't that new, 2) projection, whose newness would be a shock to Alban Berg among others, and 3) thoughtless, schematic story-telling. Maybe that last one is the innovation. Stupid is the new smart, isn't it?

I'm dwelling on this because it stinks, and because it at times diminished my enjoyment of Verdi's most richly characterized score. (Really do think so. Can't back it up.) What saved it was a lot of good music-making of different kinds. It wasn't, vocally, the strongest cast you could come up with, in fact. Other than Vitaly Kowaljow, whose Banquo was beyond reproach, a mixed bag.

Paoletta Marrocu is banking on a number of things, I think. She has a pretty powerful voice, she's a good actress in a way that's low-key but not afraid of a few campy gestures, and she's willing to put it on the line. A good example of all of this was her sleepwalking scene, nuanced throughout and physically well played, vocally ragged here and there, worst of all a shout of a c#, the note you should probably just leave out if you don't really have it, but never tentative and overall convincing. Vocally, La Luce Language worked out better--it ends at B and doesn't ask you to dip into chest as much. But it was the sleepwalking scene that affected my heart-rate. Her technique sounds a little crazy and I'm not sure she won't blow it out, but if she doesn't, I look forward to hearing more of her.

Lado Ataneli feels like someone I go back a long way with, if only because I heard him before his Met career began, in Cincinnati singing Nabucco to Flanigan's off-the-hook Abby (at the time I termed it "extravagantly dykey," which I kind of still like.) There's no way around it: he's a singer of uneven quality. Some things work, and some don't. There was a bit of an ugly crack tonight that he caught quickly, and a lot of over-taxed sounding singing in "Pieta, Rispetto, Amore, and other abstract Italian nouns," though it warranted the most noise this fairly quiet audience made in response to anything.

You know why nobody does Macbeth much, don't you? It's not because it's bad luck. It's because the tenor part is so negligible. John Matz sounded nervous but stylistically dead-on as MacDuff. So but the overall deal is that everyone had some flaws, and the big picture was an exciting, worthy reading of let me tell you again how much I love Macbeth, which I love. Really there was nothing wrong with the whole evening that a long ladder and an exacto knife couldn't cut down to size. All eyes (well, all of mine) are on the Met next season, wondering what the new production will be like, whether Zeljko Lucic who made a decent impression in Gioconda wil shine, and what the hell Gruber is going to do with the part of the role that lies in the curdly part of her voice. Time will tell.

Believe it or not, at 2 tomorrow, I will duck into Kennedy Center again, for Jenny, Jenny, I got your number (867-5309)...

*Customary snark mitigation: her Kundry? Loved it, with no reservations. She was my first Lady Macbeth as well, and was riveting. Oh and tomorrow I'm hearing her Kostelnicka, and look forward to it. Senta was just the wrong idea.

**Two Theodore Dreisers

See? See?

Well at least I'm not completely alone in my distaste for this production.

Not exactly a bang, but not quite a wimper, either

Well, it's a little sad. With the end of the riddle scene this evening, the season drew to a close for me (that's right, notably the season I left after more second acts than ever before...sometimes I think my love for opera is tightening in some way. It's harder to sit through something I never felt even a little bit giddy anticipating.)

Yes, I love the Met's Turandot. Shit like that is why Zefirelli will coast to the grave on rehashings, because once he dazzled us. The big "Holy Fuck!" set on which the opera's best music is delivered remains, I'm sorry, the biggest visual wallop I've ever been on the business end of; not just an overload but a real thrill.

I'd love it even more if the singing more often really matched the wallpaper. Tonight was actually fine. I was pleasantly surprised in a number of ways, the biggest of which was that Margison, who over the radio sounds like what you'd scrape into the sink, has a lot left in-house. The act II interpolated C, it is true, absolutely must go. I'm neither joking nor exaggerating when I say it sounds for all the world like a 1983 Chrysler on a January morn in Chicago, and you should really only pull that note out of your holster if you're planning on killing with it. Up to that point, though, the guy just sounds remarkably solid. It's what I remember about his Bacchus: the sweet relief of no worries.

Hey I'm going to write a version of Turandot from the point of view of Ping, Pang and Pong. It'll be just like Wicked, only with a higher suicide rate among the audience I guess. Don't Ping, Pang, and Pong kind of make you want to end it? Anyway it'll be called Pwng, and nobody will know how to pronounce it.

Actually, know what the other nice surprise was? It was an unsurprising surprise, because basically any time someone starts singing these days in a small role and you think to yourself "why isn't he in a much bigger role?" it's Patrick Carfizzi. I'm giving him his own paragraph, that's how much I like him, and it was a bit of a blind tasting because I didn't look at the program to see who was going to be singing the Mandarin. (Who does?) For once I'm not playing "Let's Pretend We're Agents" and don't have roles in mind. I just think he's underused.

Liping "Lizards" Zhang didn't make a huge impression on me but I've never gotten as weepy about Liu as a lot of folks. If you can float a b flat, you do it, and everyone puts a checkmark in the blank. The rest is about trying to make us believe that pathetic devotion to a guy who's really no prize is a romantic virtue. It might make sense for some not particularly sentimental director some day to stage Turandot with the corpse of Liu left onstage for the remainder of the opera for everyone to step over since for Pete's sake, she killed herself ten minutes ago and you, Calaf, you big brute, are already halfway through the love duet, such as it is. Anyway she sounded pretty, despite an "almost" at the beginning of said b-flat, and that's all I have prepared on that topic.

And so, with that...oh, the Turandot, you say? That would be Erika Sunnegardh, she of the healthy top and almost nothing else, I'm genuinely sorry to say. Still, it's a pleasure to hear someone not struggle with the riddles, albeit a limited pleasure.

I hate to end on that note, so I'll probably review the weekend's DC excursion and pretend it happened here. So,

Next Up: Macbeth

Dispiriting, to say the least

Can't bring myself to write a typical M.D' 90-page gab about the Met's...well-intentioned Orfeo. It just felt like bad decision after bad decision, to the extent that the overwhelming wrongness drowned out a couple of moments of bright, shiny joy, notably in the dance at the end of the opera. Yes, I think we all enjoyed seeing dance with a pulse on the old stage, but as for the rest, I will be lazy and borrow from Twain on Fenimore-Cooper: out of a possible 115 musico-theatrical offenses, it committed 114.

Chief among these was the decision to put Levine at the helm for music he is very, very, very ill-suited to. Repeating an intensifier--that's lousy writing. That's all I can muster. Orfeo can go in a couple of directions: bloodless early music/HIP approach, happy medium of pathos with some lightness, or Brahmsian dirge, which is what Levine served up. Gluck, and we may as well face it, runs the risk of being dull, and as if driven by a lacklustre sort of sadism, Levine underlined this in almost every phrase. Long pauses between scenes and immediately after the orchestral prelude were awkward. Please bear in mind my general esteem for this dedicated and accomplished conductor when I tell you how hard he sucks ass in Gluck.

Next in line was probably the casting of the very fine artist who is David Daniels. I get the feeling a countertenor in the Met has to spend all his energy being heard, and on top of that, as has been pointed out here and there, the role is low for him. And yes, I know I've been conditioned to a contralto sound in the role by my blithering Podles idolatry, but there just does have to be some chest there and Daniels is sparing with it these days. I was playfully chided by someone who knows a hell of a lot more about music than I do, for wanting a very narrow thing from my protagonist. "You're a Wagnerian!" she said, and indeed, I want my Orfeo to weep and wail. Despite my objection to Levine's heavy reading, in the singing I want something on a grand scale. It may well go over the top, but it has to aspire to the mythic and the Greek.* I don't think these needs are necessarily contradictory; think of Maureen Forrester with Mackerras: there is restraint and there is grief. Daniels' approach was one of eloquent simplicity that I suspect I could live with in a different production in a different house. Here it was a cypher. "Che faro?" was just a question.

Anyway, the rest...Kovalevska was fine. I hear she's pretty from those in the care. I wished like hell they were doing the Berlioz with its lovely scene for Eurydice, not to speak of the sparklers and batons aria for the big O. Heidi Grant Murphy sounded really very lovely--I liked her better in this than in anything I've heard her in, despite some wacky stylistic choices toward the end of Amore's aria that seemed maybe to spring from Levine's death march through the score. But (he said in a high pitched, testy voice) she sounded really very lovely in a pink Izod shirt with plushie angel wings. I hear Mark Morris is a warm and thoughtful human being, so I'd feel awful knowing that if I ran into him and had to slug him. [Okay, that sounds like I've turned into one of those humorless opera queens. Substitute "and had to be politely ironic and raise my eyebrows at him."] If you don't get why this kind of cutesy ootsy humor makes me livid, I'm not going to be able to explain. Pretend you really love this opera and take it a little bit seriously for a minute, and you might get there.

What else...uh...chorus of dead famous people (no, seriously. keep an eye out for Abe Lincoln. He's the one with the hat, the beard, and the vanished dignity), ostentatious and pointless use of Met's stage resources, overuse of murky lighting. Folks, I'm sorry. I hated this.

ETA: Everyone else appears to have loved it. Ah well, a stick in the mud I remain.

*Ok, for the hell of it, Orpheus was perhaps Bulgarian. I think it's stated somewhere that he was from the Rhodope mountains in Trakia aka Thrace.

Exciting Week in Opera

This week is the Orfeo premiere, about which I assume we're all a little giddy. The Straussmonster has hilariously pointed out that the poster on the plaza makes David Daniels look a bit like Johnny Cash, of all people, and also that Gluck would probably approve of the Man in Black's directness of expression. It's hard to understand why they scheduled so few performances--I realize it's not the world's most popular opera, but they had to know that the opera plus Mark Morris plus Isaac Mizrahi combo was going to pull in basically anyone above a Kinsey 1.5 in New York.

All levity aside, I think we'll all enjoy it through a certain sadness for what are now historical reasons. I have no doubt Mr. Daniels will do honor to the memory of the intended protagonist.

Also this week, the Tristan Project. I find "Project" to be a hilarious title, since anything they have the balls to charge that much for had damn well better be a finished product. I'd go but I'm staying home and rolling around in hundred dollar bills shouting "money! I have so much money!" instead.

Il Hittico!

Oh god, that's even worse.

People do seem to love it, though, and not without reason.

Last night was, for me, a few things. It was the first time I heard ACB at the Met (um, yes, her debut was last Friday and I was AWOL) and that by itself was a thrill, especially in that she sounded de-lovely. It was a fascinating lesson in casting to the strengths of singers who at times don't seem to have any, about which more in a minute. It was also, and this isn't necessarily of interest to anyone who doesn't live in my head, where I discovered which Puccini opera is my favorite and which is my least.

The least, I'll just end the suspense here, is Suor Angelica. For me, a painfully treacly exercise, this one. Makes my teeth hurt. I once read in liner notes somewhere the opinion that the first act of Samson et Dalila is like watching asparagus grow. Same goes for the first half hour of Angelica, as far as I'm concerned, and in this production actually...well I decided to watch without reading my Met titles and can tell you now: it's about nuns gardening. Maybe they're growing asparagus. No, of course not. It's actually about how religion inherently ruins people's lives, but then I think a lot of things are about that. The cast was without a weak link, though I felt like I might enjoy a slightly heftier voice in the title role, and the set was the best kind of purely representational stagecraft: realistic but not kitchen-sinky, though the mule could go, cute as it was. Say did you ever stop and wonder, when she's signing over her fortune to la Zia Principessa (a villain of dumbfounding banality) what name she's signing? Because, like, it must be her real name. Her whole name. I like to think it was Rivka Rosenblatt, because it makes the whole story just a leetle more complicated. Maybe just more comic. My friend Michelle in high school insisted that certain works--I think her example was Jane Eyre--became tolerable only when you thought of them as comedies. Certainly a Vera Galupe-Borzkh Angelica would be good fun; is there one?

But yeah, my new fave Puccini, the one that gets to go around wearing a sash that says "Maury's Favorite Puccini Opera," is Il Tabarro, just for being so very lean and unsentimental both lyrically and libretto-wise. This one was the miracle of casting. Guleghina, whose Norma I'm dreading like everyone else, sounded like a dream, and of course her dramatic commitment has never been in question, so she was fun to watch. Juan Pons who has given me some great nights (Pagliacci years ago) and some headaches (can't remember, blocked it out), well, Michele fit into his voice just as whatsername, Murgatroid?, did for Guleghina. Flaws erased, strengths underlined. Above all, Salvatore Licitra was like a completely different singer than I remember pissing all over various Verdi scores. Virile is a good word, and "in tune"--that's two very good words.

I know I should be saying more about Stephanie Blythe. There is absolutely no question she is a top notch singer. I bet, if you think about it, you have a singer everybody really loves that you think is just fine. That's pretty much Stephanie Blythe for me. I have absolutely no idea why she doesn't set off fireworks for me. There's really nothing missing. I guess I liked her most as Zita in Gianni Schicchi because I think she's a fun comedienne, and the whimsical spirit of Jack O'Brien's very updated Schicchi made nice use of that. Yeah, the hijinks are a bit senior playish in a way the libretto makes unavoidable, but it's gentle and the sets (plural, yep, well hello Mr. Stage Elevator! How've you been since Aida?) are, at risk of damning with pastel praise, really pretty, and it's hard not to like. Good ensemble cast with some soloists I feel I didn't get to size up properly.

Up next: Cesare on Friday, but you've already heard all about that, and besides, I'm dealing with a minor case of blog burnout.

Context

I think my original attempt at posting about Elektra was devoured by my laptop. So here's take II.

Context: I am not right in the head about Elektra. In Houston, with Behrens and the grand ruins of Rysanek, it was the first time music made my heart beat as if I'd just run a block. (Mm hm, that's my version of "run a marathon." Hi, I'm Maury, and I'm a sedentary blob of out-of-shapeness.) It was before I'd found my bravo, if you happen to have read that entry, so at the end, after Eschenbach pulled the final bars out so long you thought you'd scream or at least have a birthday waiting for the resolution, I was all pent-up excitement. That was a Serban production, and I remember it as not overly inventive but very tuned in to the exuberant rage that is Elektra. Barstow, it was rumored, had shown up not knowing the role and was told, "learn it or hit the road." I wouldn't be completely surprised if this were true, given the deliriously nervous character of her reading.

Since then, I have seen it at the Met where Voigt was the lone beacon of delight, saddled with a combo I remember through a haze of blah as Schnaut and maybe Hannah Schwarz; and in concert at Tanglewood with the generally excellent Lisa Gasteen and Hurricane Palmer as her moms, about which I have spil't ink already. It's an opera I had to take a break from because I had listened the juice out of it, usually in one of the many Borkh outings. It is a work that produces in me that gratifying feeling of "this is a thing I could never, with any amount of training, have thought up myself," like standing at the base of the pyramids, I'd imagine--and at the same time it's so deeply familiar to my soul it feels, I might say, were I a mad Greek on the verge of collapse instead of a nebbishy opera blogger, as if the music came from me.

So what the hell can I tell you that's going to be at all objective? You already know how I feel about Podles, unless you are illiterate, in which case what are you doing reading this? Go back to watching Wife Swap and voting republican. Actually that may be a point of entry, though, my nigh autistic worship of perhaps the animating obsession of these pages: Podles in most things one sees her in is a little like Voigt up in the previous paragraph, surrounded by capable, even good singers whose highest notes but taste the glory of EP's lowest. The Wizard of Oz metaphor is tired but, for me, inescapable: she puts everyone else in black and white.

I'm pleased to report, maybe surprisingly, that Ewa Podles in the Canadian Opera Company's Elektra is in context. I didn't come away feeling like I had heard her and some other incidentals. In a negligible way, it felt sad not to be uniquely blown away by her, but the payoff was a consistently taut and heart-rending sing from basically everyone. Not on purely Stimm-based merits, you understand, but in roundly gesamstkunstwerklich terms.

Susan Bullock I know previously only from a Houston Butterfly whose sonic form has vanished utterly from my mental files. I was not expecting much. It is a voice that has had a kind of greatness beaten into it, on evidence of the prima. The top spreads and will never be pretty, but the middle has lingering warmth that lends itself better to the recognition scene than most who can soldier through the role. Ok, it's not a terrific instrument, but (after a tentative first few minutes) it is deployed with a ragged dementia I have not recently seen on an opera stage, something that takes me back to Behrens in fact. Much rocking and uncontrollable weeping, stuff along those lines that we live for. Elektra, you know, is not where you want a whole lot of restraint and good taste.

Which brings us naturally enough to Madame Podles. In an interview before the opening our hero says to a reporter for the Toronto Star, ""Ah, Strauss. It's like a good piece of steak. There's blood inside." [Interstingly, in this interview, she goes on to totally harsh on her stepdaughter/accompanist, and it's sliiightly hard to tell if she's kidding.] If you've heard her sing anything, you know she always ends up with blood on her teeth, and this was no exception. The staging of her entrance was ingenious (I was fond of the production as a whole, despite a few touches like the-past-as-pantomime that can go horribly wrong) and from there, she just pretty much did her thing, chesting what needs to be chested, pulling faces that could be seen in Kansas, but with that aesthetic grounding and consistency that makes for catharsis rather than parody. From "ich habe keine gute Nachter" on, she evinced an understanding of what makes Klytamnestra a compelling villain, the grandeur under the decay; her singing embodied both. It was the exact midpoint between the unhinged harpy school of Klytamnestren, cf.: Fassbaender, and the dignified, well sung version put forth by such as Blanche Thebom.

Alwyn Mellor, unfortunately costumed, refused us the howl of a wild animal that's supposed to come just before "Orest ist tod!" but otherwise was as ready for a romp through the carnage as the rest of them. Funny voice, hers...it's pretty round and well-behaved throughout until you get to the top few notes which are, how to say, wiry or something, but large and clear. They do their own thing. I guess a wild top never did Ms. Rysanek any harm, I'm just sayin' is all. I wish the director had let her laufen an die Tür des Hauses, as the libretto states, and schlagen daran. For some reason I've never seen that happen, and it seems like it would be so satisfying, I mean really schlagen the hell out of the Tür, because the very end of Elektra is even less the time for restraint than the rest. I bet Mattila schlagte the damn thing schwarz and blau.

My only quibble was the conducting, I guess, and it's half a quibble, more of a quiblet--it's a very good orchestra, and I suppose I could see how the score came out as a deliberate thing: every jagged edge was sanded down to an interesting smoothness: come see the softer side of Strauss! A little slowness here and there, some narrowing of dynamic ranges, the whole thing comes off as deco and diaphanous, maybe as Mendelsohnnian "fairy music," as Strauss is said to have requested. Only he can't have been serious, cuz honey, this is Elektra. It is about steak and blood, as certain people know. It kind of ruined the monologue for me, to be honest, and pissed me off in a couple of other places, though as you have gathered, the whole product was immensely exciting. Kudos to the conductor, whose name I don't have right here, for opening up at least one large traditional cut, y'know, the whole "hot girl-on-(related)-girl action" bit a little while after the CD break.

Wait, can I talk about the production again for a sec? Because I just read Ken Winters' review in The Globe and Mail and it reminded me of some stuff. I have to agree with Mr. Winters, by the way, that there was something about Ms. Bullock's costume and affect that called to mind Judi Dench's similarly crazy-and-then-some turn in this year's Notes on a Scandal. Anyway what I started to say is I think the reason I'm so content with the odd convention of portraying the House of Atreus (here I mean the actual physical dwelling, as in "open no doors in this house!") as little white monopoly house in the middle of the stage is that attempts to make it represent all the misery that have made Elektra what she is overlook the fact that it's probably nothing all that grand. The libretto doesn't say much about it, but let's not forget it's the people who should be draped in expressionist gloom, if anyone. A blank, white house suggests that the House of Atreus (now the family) is only interesting and distinct from, let's say, the families on Wife Swap in that they're the primal fucked up family, one we can project everything onto. Am I full of shit? I didn't get all that much sleep last night. Don't you kind of hate how that's always my excuse? Oh well, the proper response is to become my blogpatron, then I'll quit my day job and be well rested and coherent always.

Incidentally, the company's new house is a wonderful space. I hope to return there next time I feel recharged and equal to the creepy once-over you get crossing the border back. Try telling a butch number with a handgun and a lot of arbitrary authority you left the country for 24 hours to see an opera sometime and see what he makes of it.

Next up: Il Trittico. Not to ruin anything but if I hate it I may refer to it as "Il Shittico." Oh, my rapier wit!

p.s. Wife Swap is a really good show.