Everything but a basketball hoop

Here I am typing at 12:30 a.m. on a weeknight. What on earth compels me to such behavior? Pardon me for a moment while I cut off my hands and avoid further troubles of this nature.

There, all better. No more pesky hands. Anyway.

Not fair, but something drove me to wonder:

If I spoke no German (which is almost true), and weren't reading my Met titles (which is utterly true), and didn't know The Magic Flute (which is regrettably false) what would I think this was about? I am rotten to the core for thinking it, because there are many fine productions that don't go in for, oh, y'know, representational schemes of action. But just for fun I tried it.

And I'm pretty sure after the first act, I would think it was about this goth kid who got abducted by aliens who took him to the fanciest store in the mall during a Star Trek convention.

I think any review of this Magic Flute is just bound to be production-centered, because for better or for worse, the production is absolutely overwhelming. I'm about 30/70 on the for better or for worse question. It seemed to me a production concieved with an audience in mind who didn't find The Magic Flute very interesting and needed a shitload of (extremely imaginative) distractions. And then I thought this over and decided it couldn't be right because of course I don't find The Magic Flute very interesting and the kitchen-sinkiness of things gave me a little bit of a headache so clearly I wasn't the target demo. Perhaps it's for people who don't find opera in general all that interesting? I don't mean to be needlessly negative here. I could be way off base. It's just that at several points I found myself suddenly unaware of the singing because there was so much other mishegoss, ranging from cutesy mishegoss to awe-inspiring mishegoss, to digest.

I suspect this possibility occured to me right around the time the gi-normous bears, which were a perfectly bewitching bit of stagecraft, roared in some unpleasantly amplified fashion. Almost as bewitching were they, I think, as the is-it-set or is-it-costume? winglike dealios wielded by the Sternflammende Konigin [here translated because someone finally got a clue as "Star-shimmering queen." I mean, you just can't get away with "flaming" and "queen" together at the opera without everyone getting a horrible case of the giggles.] So you see, there was much, much I liked in this Magic Flute, only it just was excessive in a way that made me want to stomp on my eyes after a while. There were enough visual chimera for four operas, including I hope one or two I like.

Of everyone, Nathan Gunn looked most comfortable in these surroundings. I'm really not in love with his singing (though for god's sake, the man is still handsome dressed as a flingin' flangin' parakeet) but I don't think he's bad either. Just a little undervoiced, especially in this solid cast, and somewhat bland as a stage presence, but very pleasant if not inspired, and in this ungepotchket* landscape, sort of cute and funny.

Who was not undervoiced is Eric Cutler, that's who. We all know the Met is rolling in excellent lyric mezzos, but I think we can maybe add Mozart tenors now to the category of voices we're not running low on. This instrument doesn't round the bends as fleetly as Polenzani's, but it has this confounding quality of undiminished softness across its considerable dynamic range. Dramatically, he looked a bit lost, but then it's possible he assumed from his costume he was making his role debut as Nanki-Poo, so anyone would be confused.

I'd like to say nicer things about Mary Dunleavy. I feel like I've heard she's reliable and hardworking and other things we like. I guess I just wasn't in the mood for this kind of voice in Pamina. A little unruly in what apparently is a deceptively grueling role--does anyone remember the Opera News interview in which Cheryl Studer and some other sopranos said they'd rather sing any number of Der Holle Raches than a single run through the g minor aria?--and not of the youthful color that makes me excuse the gal for being such a bore.

Morris Robinson has by virtue of the glorious color and presence of his voice stepped permanently into the spotlight, no? The very bottom isn't booming, but the solidity makes for pure aural gratification. And Erika Miklosa might call for a second spotlight if everything she sings is as good as her Astrafiammante. The last note of O Zittre Nicht was iffy; the rest was perfection. The measures leading up to the not so secure F (high note experts? F? F#?), the ones that make it clear Mozart was high or joking, included every single cotton-pickin' note, and the triplets in the vengeance aria were equally jaw-dropping.

You know, back in September I looked at this season as announced and thought, "What a dud!" And I'm happy to say I was wrong. It hasn't been wall to wall excitement, but it's been studded with here and there the extremely winning performance and many strong ones in between.

As a parting shot and call to arms, where is the mighty cult of Podles, and why was I able to pick, by letter, the row of my tickets with her Avery Fisher concert a month away? Come forth, you admirers of Ewa, and make this thing not get cancelled, y'hear?

*ask your bubbe what it means, and if you don't got one, ask your friend with the name what ends in -stein.

PG-13

An attentive reader brings the following items from the Times' corrections column to our notice:

A film review in Weekend on Friday about "Le Pont des Arts" misspelled a word in the title of a Monteverdi madrigal that a character sings on a recording. It is "Lamento della ninfa," not "ninja."

Is this the kind of thing Gelb has in mind to bring in younger audiences, do you suppose?

In another department....With a tip of my hat to Victor Borge, whose account of Wagner's early attempts at theater rendered me absolutely helpless with laughter when I was 17 (ou sont les neiges indeed) I am leaving the world of toy department, title-wise.

Meanwhile in the world of limericks we have been asked to contribute our limping wit to the following:

A young man from Bashkortostan
Whose wife was a Mezzosopran...

how about:

A young man from Bashkortostan
Whose wife was a Mezzosopran
Worked mostly when she did-
She was the more feted-
So he may never sing Gurneman(z)

Um, because she's not likely to sing Kundry. Get it? Well, I gave it a shot. The comments section is open and the bar has not been set very high if you're feeling in the spirit for a little lyric cage match.

An earnest kvetch: I want my Spem TV!

< andyrooney> Have you noticed how if something is under 10 minutes you can buy it for 99 cents on itunes and if it's over, it's album only? This is sort of reasonable, I guess, except it starts seemig weird when for instance recordings of Spem in Alium range from 9:46 to 12:19 (which is a little shocking in itself) and the 9 minute one (The Sixteen under Harry Christophers, only here perhaps they are The Forty or does that sound too much like malt liquor?) is 99 cents, which is fine if you like it best, and not fine if the one with the most compelling snippet belongs to Chapelle du Roi under Alistair Dixon which clocks in at 10:07 and therefore carries a "view album" tag, like the "seasonal price" line in a menu that tells us, "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." View album isn't a price, it's a command, one would say if one talked to software. Isn't there a way, one would say if one pleaded with software, for me to buy the extra 8 seconds that put this bad boy over the top? Again, this is understandable: if a track takes up a quarter of an album, they're losing money to sell it for a buck. But, eh, why not sell it for two bucks maybe? There are limited instances in which you can buy works within cd's, but mostly if they're a set of short tracks and one longer one that's not for individual sale I think, like the "vier letzte Lieder" (retail value: $4.46! I feel like Bob Barker.) But in the case of Spem in Alium and I suspect many other things, you're on your own. I WANT SPEM and if you go quoting me around town on that, please type carefully. < /andyrooney, only I guess he wasn't so much with the sperm jokes>

In which Maury is kind of a stick in the mud

Cannot listen to Met b'cast because I'm going to Zauberfloete on Tuesday and I have so little liking for the opera itself I'll be sick of it if I listen today. Plus it'll ruin the fun element of surprise with a cast full of people I've never heard/not heard much of. They say this Miklosa is top drawer. So hey it looked like someone was re-casting that Schreker thing I liked so much a few weeks ago and that, after I run out for cheap luncheon resources, is probably what I shall listen to today. If anyone reading is listening, feel free to drop comments about how it is so I'll know whether to be half-heartedly excited or wearily resigned.

Brand Name Recognition

I'm feeling a little guilty about the number of searches I see that lead someone to this tarty little blog that clearly was looking for a Fisher Price toy. So I think I may change the title, though I remain ever yours,
Maury

That wasn't me actually signing off. It just started sounding like the closing of a letter is all. In any case I came up with the name of the blog in thirty seconds because I was on a park bench with my laptop bumming someone's wireless. It's a long story involving Vermont, Medicaid fraud, and Romance languages. Yeah.

Someone who statively prefers to remain nameless played me the most soul-wrenching thing last night in the form of an Arabella conducted by Kraus and of course given voice by the stupefyingly awful Viorica Ursuleac. She's long enough dead I'm not softening that one up. So anyway you get a kind of aesthetic whiplash listening to it because she sounds about 80 though she was 46 when she recorded it, but behind her is the most nuanced, emotionally fraught orchestra playing courtesy of Kraus. The kind of playing that suddenly makes other readings sound black and white. We must have listened to four recordings of the duet, really the only part of the opera it requires no special effort to love.

Meanwhile for any of you that are on itunes, they still have that whole Guiglelmo Tell w/ Pav and Freni on sale for $9.99. I read about this courtesy of Mr. Chalkenteros in the comments section over at Wellsung, and couldn't resist. Surely someone will notice, so rush over there if you want it. I'm not a card carrying LP fan but he sure as hell shines in the big last act scena.

textual healing, or: There's More than One Opera Fan with a Cell Phone in the Greater Seattle Area

Our intrepid correspondent in Seattle [who is NOT the person whose words you will find if you follow this link] says, using only his thumbs, in 90 characters or less:

Shock!Shock!Shock! Eaglen is geuinely funny in fledermaus! Yes really.

Time passes.

Ok. So we had heard that she would interpolate the liebestod into act 2 - i guess that was only opening night, because it didn't happen. Blessing or curse?

If we did not have ultimate faith in our intrepid correspondent, we would be checking his arms for track marks right about now, especially after his earlier reports that her Ortrud was genuinely frightening.

Addendum

L.A. has posted as well, but other than Manon starring Villatrebazonko, it's nothing to blog home about.

Now what about Houston, I wonder?

As threatened

I think maybe it'll be more entertaining if I do this from memory, because I am sort of famously un-detail-oriented and I'll get all kinds of things wrong and you'll be all "but Maury, you moronic fuck, Voigt is not either singing her first Papageno," and we'll all have a good laugh.

So. Things I want to see in the coming season after all these mouth-watering press releases of the last week or so only I probably won't because in the words of Hedwig, travel exhausts me, plus anyway who's got the greenbacks?

[Please note, two of the links are to pdf files, so if that crashes your browser or anything...]

Book I
Reasons to go to Chicago:

1) Voigt disproving my assertion that on August 4, 2001 (DV's birthday; hoped everyone would spontaneously burst into "Happy Birthday" during curtain calls but my vision was apparently not shared) I was hearing her one and only Salome. She sings it in Chicago, lookin' all fit, in a staged production with the often enjoyably gutsy Judith Forst as mumsy and Alan Held as pops. Zambello and Tsypin ought to dream up something worthy of the occasion. Seriously, you know what the great thing about Voigt and Salome is, as evidenced by her readings of the final scene in concert more than her somewhat nervous semi-staged role performance? For once she's not playing wronged nobility, and I think she's gonna run with it.

2) Mark Delavan and Paul Groves addressing the bear community's charges that Iphegenie has too often been cast with twinks. [um, link is not especially worksafe.]

3) Oh hey wouldn't it be great if major companies would stage challenging works of subtle, subversive beauty like Die Fledermaus?

4) Lyric has an excellent young artist program, so when LHL cancels her Mere Marie, you'll probably get someone really good as a cover. (I kid because I love.) Meanwhile, Isabel Bayrakdarian and the ageless although surely at this point rather aged Felicity Palmer light up the marquee pretty well themselves. p.s. It's a Robert Carsen production, which in my limited experience is cause for rejoicing. p.p.s. yeah I'm not doing this from memory anymore.

5) You've read her blog, now hear what I'm thinking is her big role mainstage debut in this house. "Thinking wrongly," he edited, "very wrongly indeed, as she has sung the little tiny comprimaria roles of Donna Anna, Pamina, and Marguerite." Jeez, D'Annato, do your homework.

6) Galuzin belts Calaf. Me, I like that kind of thing.

Book II
Reasons to go to Seattle:

1) Well you've got to be curious how Vaness is sounding these days. (Customary snark mitigator: the acting is bound to be sure-footed, and besides, we're still kind of laughing with-not-at her after that weird interview in Opera News many years ago in which, out of left field, she vehemently but not hatefully denied all those rumors of lesbianism we have to admit we'd never heard in the first place. Good times.)

2) Dana Beth Miller in Don Giovanni. It's been long enough since I vaguely knew her that I think I can fairly say I'm not shilling when I describe her as a young singer to look out for. Plush, purdy voice.

3) Podles is Giulio Cesare. Man, this is almost enough to get plane-averse MD' to cross the country. Sets by Paul Steinberg. [ok, minor shout out. forgive me.]

Book III
Reasons to go to San Francisco:

1) The press materials about "San Francisco Opera Unveils New Visual Identity" are kind of hilariously overstated. Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of: an opera company!

2) Admit it, you kind of want to do David Gockley. Oh, that's just me? Hey it's really quiet in here.

3) "Hey, I heard they're doing Die Fledermaus in Chicago but I'm stuck on the west coast. Fuck! How am I ever going to hear this neglected masterpiece?!?!"

4) Ok, ok. I'll stop picking on San Francisco. The City by the Baaaaay. Um, Rosenkavalier cast could work out pretty well. Yeah, I was 100% perplexed by Isokoski's mess of a Marguerite, but am hanging on to the idea that her glorious 4 last recording means there's good Strauss in there.

5) More Carsen, more Iphegenie. Rigoletto costumes by Constance Hoffman. Really good sushi. I don't know, don't ask me--I don't go that far west...

Heaven is a place on earth

Belinda Carlisle isn't gonna sue me for the subject line, do you think?

I am speaking, if it need be said, of Academy Records. Have just continued my streak of buying delightful operatic feed for the ipod at less than the cost of the two piece meal at Popeye's. You have to get up on one of those undignified stepladders and take a few gambles, but I'm not kidding, there are some finds to be fund up in that shit.

Exhibit A: Zurab Sotkilava Wears Funny Hats. [not actual title] [Actual Title: Zurab Sotkilava Glares Suspiciously At You While Sitting on What Appear to be the Palace Curtains] Now, this one was a total crapshoot, and the main thing that made me buy it was the Marina-Dmitri scene with none other than Makvala Kasrashvili. She's singing in the "Stars of the Bolshoi" evening at Carnegie next week that I probably won't go to, so for some reason that seemed like a really good reason to buy the cd. Also her name is really fun to say. Georgian is stress-initial, if you want to try it at home.

I've actually listened to less of this one, but my meaningless snap judgment review is that once you get past the Iolanta aria that constitutes the first track and is unhappily nasal in tone, the man sings better than he has much right to at 60, which is what I reckon he was when the thing was recorded. Lenski's aria has a real authenticity about it; though he's Georgian, and I think I just heard a little Georgian-specific phonetic mistake, the style is right. He also sings a few Russian folk songs including one called "Oh Nastasia" that I am really nervous will turn out to be a Russian translation of Rufus Wainwright's "Oh Natasha." Whatever, it's goin' on the pod. That's, like, as close as I have to a Ebert/Guy-Who-Isn't-Siskel thumb system.

Goin' on the pod. Not goin' on the pod. As if I dropped my participial g's.

Exhibit B: Ok, Alexandrina Pendatchanska's agent really should have told her to change her name to something that doesn't have nine syllables, something that trips more easily off western tongues, like "Whitney Houston." So much is true. Meanwhile, oh my god. Personal to B: you called this one. So, I've decided when they outlaw everything but going to church in this country, I'm packing my bags and moving to Bulgaria. I know, I know. Not everyone there is Ghena Dimitrova or, um, Whitney Houston, but they do have a lovely musical culture, or did at some point. I hope it hasn't gone the way of many folk musical cultures. Anyway.

Super high quality voice, very bright but chesty where it needs to be, and this was recorded when she was 24. That's just nuts. She's got some tricks down a lot of singers don't learn 'til a lot later, if at all. I listened to part of it last night at like 2:45 am but I'm pretty sure I heard a good trill, and the florid technique in the Traviata scena gives me no cause to doubt it. The e flat is there, and it's cake. So for the real test now I'm revving up "Ah non credea" and taking it for a drive. Trill: check. Gooey Bellinian Legato: check. Cabaletta: Check (!), although what is the conductor smoking (?) because I do not believe these are in fact dotted rhythms in Ah, non Giunge, are they? What the ending is reminding me of as much as anything is the the ending of "Oh Luce di Quest'anima!" on that first Naxos recital Organosova put out before kind of vanishing; in particular, the joyous shout of a trill at the end. A triumphant dash of singerly brio. So here's hoping Whitney will return to our shores and still sounds this good, and that's all I have to say on the matter.

Next up: in want of anything to review, Maury shoots the shit about all these season announcements. Expect little of substance!

Time, which made a monkey of us all

[Entry hesitantly reinstated. I get neurotic about whether things are worth saying.]

Where to file, emotionally speaking, the death of an artist who never truly made you weep or laugh or gasp for breath?

One is sad of course because any death is sad, and maybe also because there's such a weight of belovedness around a singer like Nilsson that one can't help and mourn along a little, and hope it's not somehow a cheap or hypocritical thing to be feeling. When I read the news I felt deeply moved and then immediately like a fraud because, well, she wasn't mine to mourn.

I loved her Brunnhilde, especially in the dawn duet, and admired much of her other singing, but never felt that bond of boy and diva. It is a mark of adulthood to be able to appreciate what you don't especially like, isn't it? Her voice, as recorded, never got under my skin, though I got that it was unique, important, a sort of treasure. And yet...maybe it's that she seemed like such a good sport, a game gal, coming out of retirement for a few moments in her 80's to sing a brief salute to James Levine nobody has forgotten. And in The Ring Resounding, my recollection is that she comes off as someone you'd like to know.

And a certain age of singing, without engaging in too much breast-beating about it, is indisputably closing with each year, and that's a little hard to take even if you love this age, too. Other than that one war cry at 80-something, I could never have heard her in house (was young, lived in the wrong places), and now that she's gone, I think even more of the day when current loves will retire and die and I'll say to some young opera queenlet, if they're still making them, "I heard her Didon," and know that no-one who wasn't there can know what I heard (as I was always told of Nilsson.)

I'm sorry this is a little ponderous (and maybe, around the edges, just a little purple.) My thoughts, however briefly, and however little it means, are with those she left and those who never knew her, and loved her.

Firsthand account

From the diaries of Dawn Powell, a true New Yorker though born in the midwest:

March 8: [1936] Flagstad in Fidelio. What difference is there between a good voice and a magic voice? Sometimes no difference in tone, placing, or quality, but Flagstad's simple great voice flowers, soars, fills the ascending tiers--one voice enough to charm and fill with joy 10,000 hearts. It rose and grew (the great hall was not big enough), flowed through the orderly rows of light-struck EXIT signs, roamed the halls, consorted with old echoes in shadowed corners, visited the old caged attendat in the Ladies Check Room, floated kindly over her proud book of autographs--Sembrich, Schuman-Heink, Tetrazzini, Caruso, Jeritza, Adelina Patti--and was reined in again by silence, a splendid echno left warm and unforgotten on the air.

This would have been a performance the afternoon before with Rene Maison, Ludwig Hofman, and Emanuel List, conducted by Bodanzky. It was broadcast, in fact, though I have no idea if it's extant/hard to find or simply lost to history. Not something I'd move mountains to find, but I was a little enchanted by the mention of it anyway. It's like the glimpse of Christine Nilsson in Faust at the beginning of House of Mirth: a trusted voice reviving an otherwise irretrievable moment in music.

Interestingly B.H. Haggin in the Brooklyn Eagle wrote:

There were one or two minor accidents in stage business, there was a major accident in Kirsten Flagstad's lapse of memory in the Allegro portion of her first act aria-only a momentary lapse, but one that left her insecure and tentative in the climax that called for the utmost assurance and intensity. Until then, however, she had sung with characteristic loveliness of tone and richness of feeling; and once she had recovered from the accident her singing rose to breathtaking heights of tonal splendor.

Of course perfection isn't always the hallmark of a great performance.

p.s. Sorry, I have no idea what's going on with the font.

Much Flap over Fairly Little

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is what were her encores? Which is the quickest answer of all because there weren't any. No Summertime, not even a paltry two minute Zueignung. So there, that's out of the way.*

The next thing you might want to know would be stuff about her gown, a sparkly purple something or other thingy in the form of a, uh, dress. The forces of gayness apparently determined that I didn't need the fashion gene to complement my overdeveloped opera gene, so I can't tell you a damn thing. Besides which I was in the second worst seat in the house. Truly. I am reasonably certain she was clothed, but I may have been looking at the concertmeister.

I'm sounding grumpy, I think. It's just I hemmed and hawed over this, decided not to buy a balcony seat from a kind reader, was about 34th in line for 30 cheap seats, and eventually said yeah, what the hell, I'll wait around for the rest of the afternoon and blow a few hours' wages on a return in row Q (and that's not a fanciful bit of hyperbole) in the balcony. Three guesses, all you alphabet afficionados out there, how far the rows in Carnegie go.

And this for a concert I feel safe in calling an instant non-classic. Now let's get oriented for a moment. I was a big Fleming fan in the early 90's, and over the last few years have become something a good deal more ambivalent. I recently spoke of her Desdemona as one of a very few perfect role readings I've had the pleasure to witness, and Arabella in 1998 wasn't too far off that mark. But then there's Manon, and Irma or Shirley or whatever the name of the heroin in the one about the pirates is.

How does the nursery rhyme go?

There once was a girl
With a strawberry curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good,
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad, it was usually in some revival of 19th century crap we didn't really give a good goddamn about anyway, but increasingly it was also in Strauss which is not ok.

You had your nursery rhymes; I had mine. The point is I'm not in the business of trashing her for kicks.

Actually, i don't know...I think this was more mixed than truly disappointing, and so in fact disappointing from an artist of often high and consistent caliber. Tatiana's letter was pretty but underpowered. I posted earlier this year that her Manon sounded a little small-voiced compared to my last memory of her singing...is this fair? Her Russian is correct but not terribly clear, which is to say if you knew the text, it was quite comprehensible and I think also idiomatic on a phrase level, and she didn't make any of the phonetic mistakes you'd expect other than a dropped palatalization here or there. I think this shows a passion for detail that is not a minor deal. I can't entirely decide if she's going to be a good Tatiana--the voice and the manner speak more of the glamour of the post-Queer-Eye Tatiana of the last scene than the bookish girl who falls for the bad boy, and the big teen drama that closes the opera is louder stuff than the letter.

I'm sort of kicking myself for not having known the Altenberg lieder even slightly, both because they're sort of riveting and because it's hard to judge a performance of a work you're not familiar with. She made some very excellent sounds, but otherwise I'm not sure what to think. I have a hunch this was the highlight of the concert but I'm not going to bullshit you.

The Capriccio scene was hardest to file. It wasn't outrageously swoopy in the style of her Manon, say, and the high notes were stunning even in Row Q, but, eh. Overall, not a thought-provoking reading. Me, I was a little thrown by the fact that they billed Julien Robbins then skipped directly from the Mondscheinmusick to "Morgen mittag um elf!" Someone, presumably Robbins, did sing the Haushofmeister's single line at the end of the scene, so what? Was he in the bathroom? If anyone figures out what was up with that, I'd love to know. Anyway maybe the main point, if there is one, is that this music is not what I want she seems to do better than anyone anymore. I still harbor these peculiar fantasies of hearing her in a lot more Italian rep. Well, excepting Il Pirata.

Maybe what's bothering me is just that Fleming concerts are approaching OONY in terms of the number of people you see talking to themselves, rocking gently back and forth, and generally betraying a level of internal preoccupation that makes me wonder if I'm hanging with the right crowd. Maybe it wasn't Fleming at all, but my seat and the expense and the whole air of head injury ward field trip. This isn't an entirely fair review, I fear.

Incidentally, always your Closing Night Clara, I did show up for the very last Fledermaus. I actually went the other night as well, on the kind invitation of a charming fellow in turn invited by a cast member, which is why I did't blog it--reviewing something you're attending as a gift strikes me as bad karma indeed, even if the inviter turned out to be perhaps the strongest link of the cast (or I thought so, but to each his own. Well fuck me, I couldn't stop myself from throwing in a little hint.) So anyway there's not a hell of a lot to tell about this production except maybe could we just assume everyone knows the story or doesn't care and skip the dialogue? It's not a piece I find ideal for siizing up singers, at least not beyond their capacity for zany hijinks. I'm still profoundly and immediately delighted by the very sound of Radvanovsky's voice, though I'm a little worried by the weird way her very top notes don't hold a vibrato very well, or didn't Friday.

p.s. yeah, there was orchestral stuff. This is an opera blog. Rest assured you would't want to read the words I could muster to describe an orchestral performance.

And now I really, honestly don't think I'm going to anything for two weeks or so. The Met is dark, and just for laughs I have decided to see what happens when I spend my money on food and shelter. Because the single drawback of the Metropolitan is that they won't let you sleep there, and the restaurant is only open for dinner.


*Yeah yeah don't yell at me. Encores are a privilege, not a right.

Minutes from the Jews for Wagner Society's first (and only) meeting

Quel week.

One day I'll learn my lesson and go to the prima if I'm going to write things up, but as far as Wozzeck is concerned, I'm afraid I went to the ultima and can only basically stand around pointing enthusiastically at my betters and yelping, "what (s)he said, and then some!" I mean for instance it's certainly what the French call de trop at this point to let you in on the secret that Levine conducts Berg like a master, or even to add my recollection early in the evening of Strauss' demand that Elektra be played (as this score was) "like fairy music." So perhaps I should forego holding my hands out sooooo wide and waggling my eyebrows around a lot and just confine my critique to the words "holy shit!" and claim my rightful place beside Shaw in the annals of music writing. Perhaps there's one too many n's in that.

And, you know, the Wellsungs have already done a bang-up job of knocking the physical production, and I can only add my delight in knowing that Ikea has a branch in purgatory, should I ever be stuck there with a little time for shopping.

I'm almost as stymied by the overall excellence of last night's Wozzeck as I was by the middlebrowishness of the Lucia, you know what I mean? Can I get an amen? Well that's alright, I didn't really want one anyway. It could be asked that Dalayman sing this stuff a little more fear and lust, and I did find myself wondering what Steber (in English, alas) sounded like, but in the interest of not being one of those operatic necrophiliacs that would sleep with the corpse of Mary Garden if they could find a shovel and a big plastic bag, I'd like to move on with my life and applaud her for a rock solid Marie that has no reason not to become something more.

By the same token, though Wozzeck's monologue in the first scene has probably been ruined for me forever by Matthias Goerne's recording of it (detailed in a way some singers save for Mahler) I can't see letting that fact deflate my appreciation of Alan Held's urgent, thoroughly shattered but vocally quite refined Wozzeck. The physicality of his realization was, in the estimation of one of my companions, overdone perhaps to the point of parody, but I think I'm comfortable with that in this rep as long as there's something motivated and specific about it, as there was.

Oh. Before I go on. (This is structurally a propos, it is not lost on me.) There’s something richly cinematic about bluntly dropping the scrim between each scene, but if I were king, they’d fucking stop it right now anyway. Because as we all kow without reading Pavlov, when you drop a curtain, a scrim or a hat, audiences immediately contract galloping bronchitis, recall a sudden need to tell Aunt Rivka they like her dress, and generally go about the business of stomping mercilessly on any dramatic tension that may have built up like so many grapes in an I Love Lucy episode. I’m sure I’m turing into a regular librarian about things, but unless the interruption is an Italianate eruption of audience approval or ire, I’d just as soon eliminate the ringing bell that brings it on. (Now, the decision to play the thing without intermission is, on the other hand, very welcome.)

I'm not sure what those links were about. You must forgive me. Sometimes I just get giggly about Emma Goldman.

Graham Clark is of course a genius and you don't need me to tell you so. Even if there were a dozen tenors specializing in the "ew! ew! must take shower!" subfach, I think we'd all have to pinch ourselves occasionally for joy that someone does it so forcefully and with such precision. How excellent, then, to have found his bass clef counterpart in the meticulous pitchblende-voiced Walter Fink, whose doctor tipped the needle on the creep-o-meter to a reading of "Dick Cheney."

Time to change gears if I'm going to listen to the broacast of that opera about the sleeping potion. What's that you say? It's a love potion? I guess I always assumed otherwise for obvious reasons.

Nein! (see also under: Ja!)

Somehow this Met Orchestra thing slipped in under my radar, and now it looks to be sold out. Curses! In the end, probably a good thing for me, financially speaking.

On a more felicitous note, another blogger and I (he didn't say whether he'd care to be named so I'll go with no and let him post otherwise) were pleased to find audio selections linked by the proprietress of The Concert, and more pleased yet when the Grossmachtige Prinzessin--naturally what we lunged at first--turned out to be most enjoyable indeed. Props to the owner and caretaker of a fine and distinctive voice.

I feel-ya-not (i), take II

So did you ever have that thing happen where you leave after Act II of Lucia too dispirited to even attempt a wee hatchet job on all those implicated? I guess that's rather specific. If you ever had that happen, we are kindred spirits indeed.

Anyway I still don't want to write one of those wretched tantrum-y postings, but I thought it right to be a bit less...oblique, having made my basic pouty disdain relatively clear. What's the opposite of oblique, anyway? In drafting, it's isometric. So here's my isometric take on Lucia:

Dissing a "silver cast" production is a little like dissing a cover. It just seems like bad sportsmanship. So please understand that I am absolutely sincere in saying that Youngok Shin must have had a rather delicious voice once. Sunny in coloration, not at all small for its type. I'm not saying it just to set up the "but." But...it sounds as if it were held together with scotch tape and pipe cleaners at this point. A wand'ring minstrel, she (a thing of shreds and patches.) Phrases worked. They did. Yes, I put my head down on the ol' standing room railing in anticipation of the high notes she seemed to have no intention of dodging.

But you know what, here's how I'll cut her some slack: Lucia is perhaps the first opera recording I ever listened to. Callas, Karajan, you know the rest. It was on one of those cd's where you have to listen one time through with the left speaker on and then again with the right one. I listened to it fairly obsessively, unaware that this dread opera thing wasn't going to be a phase. I think the reason I now basically hate Lucia, other than that it sucks [when did the Met, please, last put on any of the unoverstatably superior Three Queens operas?] and that I listened it into some kind of structuralist paradigm of rote aesthetic experience is that it's only an interesting role if the soprano has absolutely everything.

It helps if the tenor has a lot going on, of course. And this is why I went, having heard that he did. And by gum, I'm not writing a review of the form I Am Right And Everyone Else is a Tin-Eared Lowbrow. Y'know, the ones on opera-l that either end with the statement "The emperor has no clothes!" or a simple cry of "vergogna!" (Coincidentally, both end with me shooting myself.) But, yeah, I'm pretty baffled. What I heard, moi-meme, was a pedestrian performance from a tenor of average quality with a couple of grating tics. And a few let's call them Tuckerisms that (and again, this is just me, just little Maury) I think come off a lot better if you're actually Richard Tucker or something very like. Sobs and growls, in my book, are something you get to do once you've got everything else solidly nailed into place. Else you risk being called, by me, Guelfi on 45 rpm. And god knows nobody would voluntarily endure the slings and arrows that are my formulaic insults. I will certainly give him another shot, but in contrast to howevermany years ago when I left a Swenson/Vargas Lucia at second intermission out of sheer exhaustion, I just don't have heap many regrets about having missed the mad scene or the big tenor scena.

And so, on with the second half of the season say I. Up next at the plate: Katarina Dalayman and Alan Held in Berg's mean little masterpiece.

Not feelin' it.

The Metropolitan Opera presented its last-but-one Lucia for the season. Several people sang. There were sets. A fellow named Muller told the orchestra how fast or not fast to play the notes. The roles of Lucia and Edgardo were taken by Youngok Shin and Giuseppe Filianoti. Respectively.

...but first

Ok, I have been posting pure fluff for weeks (the Hebraically inclined among you may now start chanting "ma nishtanah ha lailah hazeh...") and am thinking it'd be a good time for a wee hiatus, at least until Wozzeck. Er, unless I go to Lucia and have to eat my words about Villazon because according to pretty much everyone, Filianoti is actually more, better, faster...anyway that's on Friday. Surely I can muster more of a hiatus than that.

First, though, Ariadne Obnoxious has tagged me for her meme. How can I say no?

Four people currently living most likely to produce an interesting & stageable brand new opera plot & libretto (ie, you would go to see it!):

1. Lorrie Moore. She loves opera and references it in her stories. She's free of the stuffiness that can drag a libretto howling to the depths of boredom. And of course she's just a stupefyingly good writer.
2. Tom Stoppard, fer fuck's sake. I mean, c'mon.
3. Richard Greenberg, maybe? The Violet Hour had a certain operatic quality. And of course Take Me Out fairly cries out for Zambello/Gunn/Burden. Two words: shower scene. And the baseball/democracy speech was really pretty much an aria without music.
4. Wes Anderson, though I can't imagine he'd have the least interest. Maybe I'd just like to see him direct a production, not write one.

Four books you could buy at a regular bookseller's like Borders, Barnes & Noble or on Amazon, that, if re-worked, would be most likely to produce an interesting & stageable opera libretto, (ie, you would go to see it):

[Okay I semi-wilfully misread and did not pick exclusively books. Borders sells dvd's as well, right?]

1. last season's brilliant slap in the face, The Pillow Man. I assume one can buy the script. The role of the brother pretty much screams for A.D. Griffey to start warming up and giving T.M.I. interviews to the Times. Katurian could be maybe John Relyea or someone, though I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with an operatic equiv for Jeff Goldblum.
2. Edna Millay's Conversation at Midnight, heavily cut. I am definitely cheating, as it is long out of print. Oddly both of my suggestions are basically all male, though there could be a trouser role in the Millay.
3. Alice. Flo could be played by Sue Ellen Kuzma of the Sellars/Mozart/DaPonte stagings, and her aria "Mel, Kiss my grits!" would be a winning audition piece for sure. Vera would be kind of Lily Pons role. This actually is not in bookstores, not on DVD, vergogna! But in any case I'm kidding. I'll pick a real one. Oh wait but how about Sanford Sylvan, if he could be convinced to shed his customary quiet dignity, as Mel? Or no, get James Maddalena! He'll do it. He's like the Mikey-from-the-Life-Cereal-Commercial of opera. He'll try anything! He was in the Harvey Milk opera for the love of god. Voigt might could play Flo as well, finally getting to show the world her comic chops. Ok seriously, I'll shut up.
3. Do you think Catcher in the Rye would make a good opera if Salinger weren't hiding in a shack in Connecticut eating cardboard and suing people for thinking about adapting his works or whatever he's doing? No? Ok, it was just a suggestion.
3. Say, would there be any way to stage Hitchcock? Vertigo, starring LHL who is the only soul haunted enough to be Madeleine. Or Kozena, maybe. Jimmy Stewart is also hard to operatize.
4. The Last Picture Show? I don't know, at this point I'm just picking favorite films because I'm not the world's biggest novel reader. Anyway, near as I can tell, I've worn this one out...

Operameme

Well they do them all the time on LJ. So I'll run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.

Name or Nom de Blogge: Maurizio "Maury" D'Annato. Which is, yes, a big lie.
Age: 32. I swear this is not me riffing on The Consul. Papers! Papers! No, seriously. I'm 32. [Note upon googling: she's 33 anyway.]
Locale: New York, baby!
Raison de blogre: Get the words out of my head
Intended tone of blog: Halfway between Addison DeWitt and an eight-year-old girl talking about ponies. Plus occasional references to sodomy.
Voice type (real): lyric baritone that peters out around e.
Voice type (in yer dreams): dramatic soprano
Arias sung in the shower: "Il Balen," Onegin's aria "Kogda by zhizn'" "Un aura Amoroso" down a fifth or so.
Arias of other gender sung in shower: "O Don Fatale," "E Amore un Ladroncello"
First opera seen: probably Magic Flute, Cincinnati
First opera to elicit madly queeny reaction of obsession and dedication to a lifetime at the opera: Traviata, Cincinnati, don't actually know the cast
Uberdiva, living: Ewa Podles
Uberdiva of the past: Callas goes without saying, so my unter-uberdiva is probably Borkh*. Honorary mention to Lucia Popp, my uberstimmdiva
Fave singer you never hear anyone else enthuse about: Rose Pauly
Favorite line from a libretto: " Ach, solcher wüsten Inseln sind unzählige auch mitten unter Menschen, ich - ich selber ich habe ihrer mehrere bewohnt und habe nicht gelernt, die Männer zu verfluchen."
Opera you'd rather eat thumbtacks than sit through ever again: Fidelio
"Why won't the Met/my local company put on...": more Janacek? Like every season?
"A perfect role assumption I have seen was...": Fleming's Desdemona. Seriously.
"If I had a time machine...": Mexico City, 1951. Aida: Callas, del Monaco, Dominguez

cut, paste, modify if you're entertained by such foolishness

*...who isn't dead, by the way, so perhaps active/inactive would be a better distinction. Any time Madame Borkh wants to come out of retirement, I shall be first in line to buy tickets.

Acquired tastes, and how to acquire them

My winter holiday gift to myself this year (yeah, I do, fuck off!) because I have generally been living high on the hog, cost $2.99. A CD of a singer I don't generally like but so many other people do I figure there must be something there worth reconsidering. [Hi NYC Opera Fanatic!] So I spent a chunk of xmas in Tower Records, with some guilt, because Tower is evil in that they make people work on such holidays and then add the insult of giving them double pay and, as a wise man once observed, two times shit is still shit. Tower is evil in other ways too, I'm sure, though we'll miss them when they're gone. Said a customer to a clerk, "so how much longer do you figure you guys will be here?" Said the clerk, "I'd give it about another year."

For my gal pal who was having me over for din I got Lucinda Williams' magnificent, tight, clean, adjective, adjective Ramblin', and for me, a marked-down-from-its-already-teeny-price Laserlight CD of Regine Crespin: Ses Plus Grand Roles. There's some really good (Faure's Penelope which I guarantee I never would have listened to otherwise) some pretty bad (Mozart, 'nuff said) and some remarkable indeed: Crespin and Corelli singing the Ballo duet. I have listened to it four or five times now. Actually 60/40 percent because of Corelli, but that's ok. Being 2/3 as ear-popping as Corelli at his best, and this is his capital b Best, like in Gli Ugonotti maybe, is a form of greatness.

The Marschallin scene, jarringly cut/spliced together with the end of the act, shows how enchantingly she could make a huge voice do little-voice tricks; her "silberne ros'n" is a clydesdale on a tightrope, suddenly more nimble than physics should allow. The second Cosi aria, in French, shows that there are limits to everything. I'm betting the Abscheulicher is good and butch, but I'm in touch with the folks at Guinness about a possible new record for "least times listened to Fidelio in lifetime," so I can't tell you.

If I had gotten my act together and asked someone about 1) psoting sound files and 2) the extent to which you can do this before someone writes you a nasty letter threatening legal action, there would be a bit more point to this other than encouragement for the Crespin-curious. Alas, I was busy sleeping 'til ridiculous hours and eating. Maybe I'll come 'round to this christmas thing after all.

Current soundtrack: Parsifal Act I Transformation Music, Bayreuth/Muck 1927.

Orest!

Did we know there was at least an excerpt of Flagstad in Elektra? If someone knows if there’s more than just the beginning of the recognition scene, for the sake of the war on Christmas, email me! I mean…I’m actually about to give it another listen and see what I think about it. Just between you, me, and the people who say “between you and I,” (so they can learn their lesson) I’m not the world’s biggest fan of KF. (A dear eccentric friend in Austin refers to her exclusively as “KF” and to Furtwangler as “god.” He’ll say to people “have you heard the Siegfried with KF and god?” and then stare them down as if to say, “no you’re nuts.” I miss Austin eccentrics.) But there’s a kind of roundness and solidity, as opposed to the taut solidity of Nilsson for instance, that’s the reason I always kind of wanted Voigt to sing Elektra and the reason KF could be terribly gratifying in the role. A round, plummy tone (though we hate food metaphors for singing...what the hell is chocolatey?) is a luxury, though-solidity is the sine qua non. Any fragility must be the province of Chrysothemis: della Casa sounds lost in her I believe one-off of the role, and it's what makes her so touching. Sometime around 1995 when Voigt for one thing was the first diva with a website and for another didn’t have a bajillion fans, she answered emails personally and told me she wasn’t seriously considering it which I think was how a charming, polite midwesterner says “hells naw.” Ok, sounds like a concert ending. No more KF Elektra I’ll wager. Rather a loss.

Current soundtrack: Golijov; The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Kronos Quartet w/ David Krakauer

Barely funny even to me

Maybe I'll call her Anna Ne-Ochen'-Trebko. There is a .00005% chance that will make you laugh if you speak any Russian. I'm not even sure it would make sense to a native speaker. Morphology humor. Good times.

Current Sountrack: Salome (1947) Cebotari, Rothmuller, Hongen, Patzak, C. Krauss dir.

Sol Invictus

Have recieved smashing operatic gifts for the holidays that accompany the lengthening of the days:

1) huge box of 78's for my table model Brunswick. Highlights include Gadski, Tibbett, and apparently one of the first recordings of the Macbeth sleepwalking scene which opera, I suppose, had fallen out of fashion early in the recording era. Oh and Das Lied with Kullman and Thorborg. Das Lied on 78 is a fine thing.

2) Tristan bleeding chunks (in the truest sense--they just sort of stop and start wherever) from the 1933 Broadcast with Leider, Melchior, Olszewska. Had no idea this existed. Still curious why it's in such pieces. Ok sound though.

3) 1940 Broadcast of Lakme with Pons, Tokatyan, and Pinza in slap-my-face-and-call-me-Inge good form. The Bell Song is pretty much nonpareil. Crowd does not lose its collective mind and begin screaming, which is puzzling to say the least.

Jesus died for my listening pleasure.

I sometimes buy a little holiday gift pour moi-meme but don't have my eye on much in particular. Suggestions?

More sausage

Always a pleasure to discover sites worth reading/linking by being linked by them. Today I add Felsenmusick (whose author won my heart with the phrase "Cassandra-like wailing" w/r/t Norman Lebrecht) and Sounds and Fury (who charges Lebrecht, with equally rapier phraseology, with "lunatic effusion.")

Like a Bird

You're going to have to take my word for my sincerity when I say that Souvenir at the Lyceum has convinced me that I simply must revisit the work of Florence Foster Jenkins. It's not that it's a particularly good play, though it's not awful or even bad exactly. It's just that Judy Kaye, singing in the style of FFJ (thank god the era of everyone being some variant on J-Lo is over and we don't have to call her Flo Fo Jo) most of the time misses that ineffable quality that keeps us listening sixty years on. Yeah, I know. You're thinking "that quality is known as sucking." Only as my charming theater-going companion reminded me, The Glory??? of the Human Voice is usually filled out with a Foster-Jenkensian reading of Faust not including the lady herself, marked by full-throttle suckage, and I know no-one that dotes on it as we all, I assume, dote on FFJ. There's something else going on with her singing, it does seem. It's dreadful and then something else, something very likeable and a little bit addictive. Back in the days of cassette tapes, lads and lassies, I used to have a program I had taped off of the classical station in which the announcer, for yuks, had promised to play an immortal recording of "Der Holle Rache," and followed through with Foster Jenkins, and then immediately after with the searing Edda Moser. I miss the pairing, truly.

Judy Kaye, whose bio informs us she has sung with the Santa Fe Opera--and we're not talking the Countess of Krakenthorp; Eurydice and Musetta are listed--does indeed make rather an athletic spectacle of going after the almost aleatory aesthetic of Madame J's vocal style. It's not easy singing like that, as I particularly noticed during a scene when Kaye is additionally called upon to march in place completely out of time both to the piano and to what she is singing. In a performance writ a few points too large, I thought this was a little coup de theatre. During the Bach-Gounod Ave Maria, she does hit upon the real sound as we hear it on record, and so some of its pathetic, unhinged sincerity. Much of the time, however, as in the initial affront of Caro Nome, she seems to gild the lily. Do I even need to type this next sentence? Florence Foster Jenkins doesn't really need embellishing.

As a small note of no real significance, even less than usual I should say, I'm a little curious why they told the story of Jenkins' cab accident and left out the funniest line of FFJ lore, wherein she marvels at how she now can sing "higher an f than ever before." It's apocryphal, but so's the whole play.

Lilygilding is I suppose the guiding aesthetic in this production. Donald Corren, as Cosme McMoon does his fair share of pulling faces and playing to the folks on 43rd street, and then at other moments he displays a real finesse. It's tough to see how a play that has him reminiscing about a soldier he gave an extra ticket to and tossing off the little bit of heartbreak, "I wondered what life had got in store to temper his enthusiasm," can play like a sandbox bully for so much of the evening. But what I think most makes an intermittently frustrating trifle out of a subject with all kinds of possibilities is the jumping about and yipping of Judy Kaye. FFJ comes out a sort of hyperactive Hyacinth Bucket, and in combination with the singing and despite the contrast of a few quiet scenes played relatively deftly for pathos, it makes her hard to like or loathe, to have any substantial feelings about. Maybe it's a theater-going pecadillo of my own, but I find this kind of broad, schematic idea-world deeply uninvolving.

The Carnegie Hall scene itself got lots of laughs, or I think it did. Someone made the decision to pipe in sound footage of people laughing and applauding, so it got hard to say what was real and what was Memorex. Probably a great way, all told, to make people think they'd experience great hilarity. I'm reminded of a story from someone I used to know that now that he had been subjected to Mama Mia! with visiting relatives, he realized that the press about people dancing in the aisles failed to mention the actors storming said aisles and commanding people to dance. And I must say the moment of cinematic expressionism that ended the recital scene rubbed me entirely wrong, struck me as tonally wildly out of place.

The play ends with McMoon asking us to imagine the music, the lovely music, that Madame J hears in her head while howling at us like a stuck pig. And then, and I keep going back and forth over whether this was a mistake, Ms. Kaye comes onstage and sings the Ave Maria, this time straight. It's actually a pretty good performance (with just a hint of a late Sills bleat) but maybe not enough so to prop up the sentimental little paean to self-expression it follows. Without a moment of true transcendence, too many questions about money, delusion, dependence, and the like hang out by the theater door, poke at us as we pick up our hats and coats, and ask why they weren't invited onstage.

I don't feel entirely at ease turning up my nose at a play about opera that actually made it to broadway, but bearing in mind the vast influence of my blog, I think I'll sleep ok just the same. In a late scene of the play following the legendary Carnegie Hall recital, Kaye/Jenkins speaks of the past and of the lost joy of anticipation, saying "until today I had this in front of me." I couldn't help but think of a famous rebuke to a review:

I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.

Diminutives

Everyone keeps calling her Anya on the b'cast. I'm not sure if they know this is a nickname. It's not, like...bad per se, but I doubt they'd talk about Jim Levine. I think I shall take to referring to her as Niusia, which is like a diminutive of the diminutive of the diminutive, basically calling her "ooooh who's a cute little Annie-pookums!?"
I missed most of the 'cast, but it's ok, I've already spillt a good many words over it. And yet, I didn't even really look to see what else was on.
One quartet, coming up.

Bloodsport

Well, so, the broadcast season begins Saturday. This is less of a calendar entry on par with arbor day and the equinoxes if you live in New York, but worth shouting about in any case. I think they should do an all blogger edition of the opera quiz, don't you? Wouldn't it be kind of brutally funny and wrong? Considering we all cling to some degree or other of anonymity (ok and considering the likelihood of them asking) I suppose I don't really mean it, but I'm picturing something like the classic Parterre sketch in which someone ends up calling a thinly veiled Father Owen Lee a "superannuated faggot." Not gentle comic fare, but still pretty riotous these years later.

(Speaking of, I have for the first and only time scooped Parterre with casting news of Brokeback, the Opera. Get me!)

I think we're all wondering just a little whether Villazon will rejoin us for Saturday's broadcast. A discontented soul in standing room was heard to mutter Tuesday that perhaps the big V was saving his voice for an audience of millions, though I think that's the voice of disappointment rather than reasonable suspicion. I do have a hunch the radio may magnify some of the less ideal aspects of the singing in this production.

Un-especially but still Partially Kartvelian Ring!

Wait, am I the only one that didn't know there's to be a Kirov Ring at Lincoln Center next summer? The press release says the production is based on Russian, Causasian and in a phrase that for no knowable reason amuses me, "especially Scythian" folklore/mythology. Ah, the Caucasus. Georgia=love as the kids are saying, or maybe aren't anymore. Fly away, bitter months until non-Met-production Ring!

For this I missed the Gilmore Girls?

I think my despondent 9:30 text message will have to suffice:

Trebs still out of tune. Zon fucking canceled. Cover, poor soul, was booed and not without reason tho' I'd never. Going home. Lassu or no lassu.

Salient details: Cover=Raul Melo. Nice enough voice, mellow tone (forgive pun), produced quite clumsily, possibly owing to nerves. James Courtney's wobble bothered me more, AT's tone quality and acting wowed me more, vendetta e-flat nixed in favor of big warm, what, b-flat? But am I high or is she sharp all over the place? Reaction to Guelfi remains lukewarm. Some nights, though, you can just feel the "off" in the air.

Say goodnight, Graziela

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Two operas too late, what's in a name?

I'm getting the feeling everyone but me is liking-not-loving Villazon and loving-not-liking whom the Wellsungs have begun calling Trebs. A name I find rather handy, actually, because...how to explain this...if we're producing a sentence in English and a foreign name comes in the middle of it, what a lot of us do is say the foreign name with the closest available sounds in English. Only for reasons I can't imagine anyone wanting a detailed version of, the closest available sounds in Netrebko sound, taken all together, grotesquely unlike Netrebko. It's like how the president [sic] says Putin. It makes my eardrums raw.

Blind Tasting

I auditioned several headlines for this, and liked, "Blind Item" best but then I was afraid you'd get your hopes up that I had some good dirt--which wholesome looking baritone fresh from success in a new American opera was seen making out with which prolix and occasionally too vulgar opera blogger under the Ponselle portrait at second intermission or something like that. (I suppose that would be less blind and more near-sighted, in need of a good squint.)

Well. My tickets, bought at the very end of the mad rush when there were a few left, were for Tuesday night. And then I started getting all tied up in knots about consistently having blug things after all the other lads and lasses blag them. The things I do for you kids. All, uh, twelve or thirteen of you, I'm guessing. I bought a score desk ticket. What that means is you go aaaaaall the way up like you were going to Family Circle, and then you go down the side where the family circle tickets that are slightly cheaper because the view sucks are, and then you wave hello at that person whose view sucks, cast a furtive look of envy and despair at him, and sit at a little desk beside him where the view? She done gone. Like, entirely. You have a little desk with a light in case you are the rare scholar that bought score desk because he wanted to follow the rich counterpoint of the Capriccio sextet, and then what you do, having put your coat on the score desk, is more or less the equivalent of listening to an exceptionally well mic'd live recording. (Oh, hey! Blind item! What purveyor of live recordings whose company has the funniest habit of changing names a lot was seen in Fam Circle last night, leading us to believe that a souvenir of this event will be coming soon to a website near you?)

It's actually a very peculiar sensation which is why I'm glad the fellow in the Lousy But Existent View seat in front of me went and found a less lousy seat at first intermission. And the guy beside me found one for the first scene until he was kicked out of it by people with a lot of gall and, yeah, tickets to sit there, so I basically only missed the scene at Rigoletto's house. Did it ever occur to anyone that Rigoletto goes in the list of characters whose names we never learn? Because I'm pretty sure Rigoletto isn't really his name. I'm just saying.

So first I can see: hello, trusty old hideous Otto Schenk Met Rigoletto! How's the drab, unimaginative eyesore business? Why, I haven't seen you since Vargas and Rost were respectively champagne and chloroform on your well worn boards. And Villazon makes his entrance and, old fashioned that I am, I'm hoping for entrance applause but it doesn't happen. (I get that it disrupts the music. I sort of feel like in Verdi and other stoppable/startable lego-like operas, this is not such a huge crime.) Villazon's voice, in the last negative comment I will make about him, is maybe a size smaller than I was expecting, damn the studio. The Duke doesn't have opening lines that tell you much, and Eduardo Valdes as Borsa actually does have kind of a meaty voice, so it was a moment of doubt. "Questa o quella," came off as a job interview, a good pitch but a little bit tentative. Fortunately the crowd went tenor-assuringly bonkers anyway and next time Villazon had a big scena, the jitters were gone, and by the time he got to "Possente amor," he tossed it off with the swagger of the guy who knows he got the job.

I give credit for swagger alone, but in this case I don't have to. Pretty much everything that was promised in the recital discs is there in the house. The voice is aural cake, and the technique suggests there's enough for everyone. Did I seriously just write that? I'm just flailing around for something more interesting to say than: go! Go hear him now! He's just what we all wanted! But I think he may be. There's stimm and kunst, messa di voce and punch-me-in-the-stomach-and-see-if-I-stop-singing high notes, a few weepy glottal attacks and a few syrupy portamenti but not too many. He moves well, he's less funny-looking than in some photos. I. Am. A. Fan.

Anyway his first scene ends and my row-mate returns, having fallen prey to the ushers, and I am plunged into darkness. So my first impression of Netrebko is 100% aural. Which is kind of ironic in the Morrisettian sense of not actually ironic but sort of annoying. Because, maybe you've heard? She's pretty. And, as I will find out later on, quite a compelling stage presence. The voice itself has presence in spades and several other suites. Much, much fuller and pingier than I was expecting, probably because of the way she looks. It's also weirdly covered in places, extraordinarily solid at bottom, and deployed from time to time with a certain insouciance about pitch. If you're hearing mixed feelings, you're hearing right. I found her Gilda overall quite exciting, but not without worries. She pulled off the trick of making Gilda tragic instead of just infuriating. She beguiled in Caro Nome. This is all good. She also went for the e flat we all love in the vengeance duet, and in her enthusiasm, added just a leeeetle extra flat to the e. At which point she put the unwritten high notes in the garage for the evening, not to appear for the quartet (ruined by jerky conducting, by the way) which I'll admit is one place I get all disappointed at the lower option. So the short version of this is: I'm still making up my mind for myself, but last night certainly had the feel of a Sternstunde.

We're all used to the fact that the title character in Rigoletto is most often an afterthought these days, so it shouldn't disappoint anyone horribly that Guelfi was basically ok, big voice, lots of lurching around. You know, though, the one time I heard it sung, but sung, the big guy given some vocal class courtesy of Mark Delavan, the whole show worked better as a theater work one could care about. Guelfi's reading was just a little too woolly and reliant on occasional shouting for me. [Edit: having read the Wellsung review I am wondering if I've been too uncharitable. I'll decide on Tuesday.]

Eric Halfvarson is a very high quality Sparafucile, and it suddenly occured to me I never hear anyone talk about him much. James Courtney was not always audible, but Monterrone's scene is one conductors love to bulldoze, and what you could hear was good and solid.

Blind item: what amateur reviewer is at this point not going to anything new until, like, Wozzeck unless maybe, maybe to catch the last Fillianoti-abend or Feldermaus if he can bear it?

The Wait is Over

Tergete il ciglio, and dust off your dancing shoes.

Rolando Villazon is the next tenor we will wait eagerly to hear in each new role. Rolando Villazon will be the next automatic cause for dreadful 6 o'clocks in the basement of the Met waiting for standing room because the house is sold out flat. Licitra and Giordani will sing what they sing, but Rolando Villazon is the next great lyric tenor.

Yes, yes, these are statements we make at 1:30 in the a.m. having just stumbled in, and then feel silly about the next morning, only I'm betting I won't. More tomorrow.

Incapable of brevity, or: come back to the ranch, Huck honey

I can't help but sprinkle a few (hundred) words over the only event these few weeks that has had the buzz of the Villazon/Netrebko Rigoletto: Brokeback Mountain.

You know what? I think I may confine myself to writing about the music because my feelings about the work itself are very mixed, and still sorting themselves out. But my feelings about the music are of a piece. The general tenor is disapproval. The charge goes something like: Ang Lee, girl, spend some time in the flyover states before you take a stab at what they sound like. And then I spend three seconds on IMDB and realize 1) he's straight, 2) he's 5'7" which isn't relevant but adds him to my mental file of short celebs, and 3) he went to Urbana-Champaign, so there's no excuse for what I'm tempted to call an orientalist approach to the sound of life in emptier places, with my apologies to Edward Said for my cavalier use of his word.

What I mean by this is, for instance, the spliced-in-sounding three second overlays of slide guitar during the otherwise somewhat bleached-out sonic wallpaper of a guitar playing a bunch of tenths without much melodic direction. It's something like a game of telephone between John Fahey and John Williams with twenty people in between so everything is lost. And what's the excuse, in an visually very attentive period flick, for dressing a scene in a bar with a jukebox playing a Steve Earle song from quite a few years later? The excuse, I'm afraid, is that all that exotic twingy-twangy music sounds pretty much alike. For me, though, the groan-inducingest moment of musical pandering came in the final credits with the inclusion of a song by ubiquitous gay songster Rufus Wainwright. Don't get me wrong--I listened to Poses practically on tape loop for about a year, but here he sticks out like a tiara in a kicker bar.

Alright, I'm tiptoeing off the soundtrack for a moment to say that I think the exoticizing impulse toward rural manliness is the main problem with the movie. I'm going to avoid spoilers here if I can, but the opening scene, for me, played like parody, an effete fantasia of What Real Men Are Like. It is almost put over by Heath Ledger's astonishing, flawless role reading. (I never say this kind of shit but seriously, dude, just give the man the statuette and be done with it.)

Unintentional real-life tie-in: since QXR's webcast has been relegated to some AOL system that (surprise!) doesn't seem to work, I'm listening to the first bars of the NPR World of Opera/Houston Grand Opera b'cast of Trovatore thanks to a connection to Yellowstone Public Radio.

So, listen, I won't go on and on* but in bemoaning the mythos of a distant land where men like men but arent like men who like men, can I whine about the obvious way in whichHollywood that thinks very differently about women's bodies and men's? Much was made, much, of how explicit this was going to be. And [minor spoiler alert] yeah, it will be a very new moment for America to realize that Jake Gyllenhall is in fact the bottom, so it's not a sex scene that fades away at the, uh, tent-flap. But isn't it droll to put this in the basest terms and realize at the end that the count of girl parts seen (because, yes, Western culture has sexualized female breasts and not male ones--we're starting from there) is, um, four, which is to say two girls worth of parts, and the count of boy parts seen remains at zero, pretty much in line with all of cinematic history? I'm not counting a scene where they jump, naked, into a lake, from a great distance, though I'm sure some techie geniuses out there are already working with screen-freezes and the magnify tool. And I hope they have my email address.

As long as I'm going on about bodies, though, thank god they had the honesty to show Ledger after what I assume may have been an enforced period of not working out, with an only mildly idealized version of the body issued to 99% of humanity. I kind of wonder if the reason we didn't see as much of Jake Gyllenhaal was that he was sticking to a Hollywood Hunk regimen and was too cut to be a country guy who does hard labor that doesn't take place at the David Barton in Chelsea.

No, seriously, I'm going to shut up now. All else aside, my feelings about what we used to call the story would I think involve major spoilage.

Meanwhile, back in opera land, Radvanovsky is doing her thing. Her thing, since you asked, is singing "Tacea la notte" with a sobbing rubato that makes me want to slam my hand in a door to stop the endorphins before I run out. Actually, it's looking like Bruno Caproni's di Luna may stand in quite nicely for that door...

[always a later edit. Damn me for not having a program to record streaming b'casts! She even did "Tu vedrai" which for some reason I adore. I think the florid passages are not an unqualified success, so I'm no longer praying to the pagan gods to make her the next Norma, which I think was JSU's idea, but I do wish she were in something more enticing at the Met this year. I feel I ought to add something about Mishura except she's not rubbing me the wrong way or the right way. She's fine, and I don't mean that as quite the damnation it sounds.]

*totally kidding, of course I will.

Everyone else is doing it...

Somewhat in the vein of those old Opera-L threads where we all cast the opera versions of, I don't know, Brokeback Mountain (which would obviously involve the male leads from American Tragedy while I'm on the topic) and with a tip of the hat to Nick and the Wellsungs, I present the following.
JSU: i was kicking around the idea of an all-russian cast of this
Maury: ha
JSU: 'an unamerican tragedy'
Maury: diadkova=mom?
JSU: of course!
JSU: starring hvoro, of course
Maury: he's too old
JSU: doesn't matter
JSU: pretty
Maury: sort of.
JSU: he's a similar combo to gunn
JSU: not very loud, good looking
JSU: good sound
JSU: though hvoro has better breath, etc
Maury: gunn has better pecs, so it's a draw.
JSU: evseeva as roberta
Maury: borodina is inevitable as sondra i guess.
JSU: yes....
JSU: not sure about the light tenor
Maury: yeah neither am i
JSU: for the uncle, galooooosin
Maury: galuzin* as the father i guess.
Maury: hee
JSU: and
Maury: uncle, whatever
JSU: netrebko!
JSU: as the cousin
Maury: oh, in the upshaw role?
JSU: yes
Maury: jesus, that was easy casting.
JSU: yes
JSU: maybe guryakova for evseeva if you want to go all-kirov
JSU : Guryakova has a not-huge voice but good dramatically...was v. good in Mazeppa
Maury: i've never heard either
Maury: oh no no no Prokina
JSU: oh?
JSU: what was she in?
Maury: i saw her a hundred years ago in kat'a in dallas. intense. only problem is she's perhaps not plain enough.
JSU: hee

*de-Gallicizing the transliteration of his name is a tic of mine. Sue me.

Nothing to sniff at

Note to the ladies in row DD: no, you are not allowed to talk just because nobody's singing.

Alright, that's out of the way.

Well, boys and girls, though mostly boys, I was in simply the rottenest funk about going to An American Tragedy. Said I to my dinner companion: you know what the last thing in the world I feel like doing is? Attending a new American opera. I hate to get all "mes cheres!" about things, but ah my friends and oh my foes, was I ever wrong.* Cutting to the chase, it was great. Not exactly wet my pants great, or even run around in little circles shrieking great, but if I may frame things ever so egocentrically, anyone who can write an opera that ends with a little boy singing about Jesus and does not end with me swinging from the rafters has done a neat trick. (Three of my least favorite things: organized religion, children, and children singing. Here at FPMFOB, we aim to alienate.)

Truly, this was satisfying on all levels, as stagecraft, as song. The score itself, with its off kilter nostalgic Americana (in the breathtaking hymn, for instance) flavored everywhere with palatable mid-century film score modernism, the utterly non-embarassing libretto--and we all know that's an achievement--both erased memories of some much duller recent premieres. The production, though it looked better in motion than at rest when it got where it was going, ran aesthetic rings around last week's Shakespeare romp. Yes, it looked like a gigantic "memory" game (where did I see the other drowning girl? over in that corner, I think) or one of those grids where you push the numbers around. But, and how can I explain this?, in a good way.

Statistically unlikely as it is, I'd actually never heard Patricia Racette in house. She does have an air of utility diva about her, but I'm happy to see she can be rather more. True, in lyrical scenes there's a mildly generic quality to the instrument, but emotional climaxes apparently put the girl on her mettle. Her death was quite gripping. Also filed under happy surprises, Nathan Gunn it turns out is more than just a great rack. Heretofore I had seen him only as Billy Budd, and anyone who tells you they remember the sonic element of that bit of one-handed listening is lying, lying, lying. As it turns out, he's a masterly steward of his voice, though I do think...well, let's just call him the male Mattila, ok? Calendar cute, no vocal worries, and a certain disconnect between the physical performance and an intermittent instrumental/non-dramatic quality to the singing. [Edit: I remembered later what struck me as I was listening, that this was not entirely Gunn's fault. His arias really aren't the most memorable music, not by a longshot the best things in the score.]

Susan Graham is something of a whipping boy around these parts, but I mostly have to hand it to her. Did you ever read the story about the kids who live on a planet where it rains for seven years and then there's one sunny day and they all lock this one kid in a closet so he misses the sunny day? No? Well the one time in seven years Susan Graham gets to dress as a girl, I do think it's a bit mean spirited to make her wear that wig is all. She didn't always set me on fire but the aria about being changed by New York was a fine moment for her, and she sank her teeth into the role of Sondra Finchley and chewed. There were moments of real vocal class.

The only real ovation went to Dolora Zajick. Mine is not to reason why. Now, don't think that the fact that I recently quoted Mrs. Parker is going to keep me from doing so again, oh no. Writing about Dawn, Mrs. P says:

One can but revise a none-too-hot dialectic of childhood; ask, in rhetorical aggressiveness, "What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser?"--loudly crow the answer "Two Theodore Dreisers"

It does at times seem on the decibel evidence there are two Dolora Zajicks, not to draw any parallels. If there were a shred of artistry in her phrasing, she'd be the best goddamn singer ever. Husbanded as they are, her vocal riches make me someting between whistful and irritated.

In some smaller but equally well drawn roles...William Burden was also a one-off for me until tonight, previously familiar only from the World's Ugliest Entfuhring (hereafter WUE excepting I don't intend to speak of it again. Ever.) And he was solid in that and even better in this, his acting perhaps the best of the bunch. JSU called this one: Jennifer Aylmer = Dawn Upshaw + Clairol Winsome Wheat Blonde, in mostly good ways. Richard Bernstein has gotten very little attention but I think quietly turned in a very praiseworthy reading of Orville Mason, the district attorney, who presumably also pops a mean corn.

I have this feeling I just did more picking than praising. Other than my generally negative nature, I'm not sure why. I pretty heartily recommend this, if you're on the fence. Ok or even if you're just daydreaming about bringing your binocs and try and look up Nathan Gunn's dowdy bathing garment. (Doesn't work. I tried, kids.)

Now, do I wait for Tuesday's Rigoletto or try and get score desk for the prima? Would that be totally pathetic or what?


*Great. Channeling Edna Millay. That's the way to turn it down a notch.

Temporary lack of tragedy

Ach, the rest of the world is blogging up American Tragedy, but I don't go 'til Monday.

Tonight though I went to Miller Theater's Composer Portraits series, in this instance John Adams. There was very little singing, and what singing there was could hardly be damned with the label "opera," so I'm of two minds whether to write about it here. Suffice it to say--no, don't suffice it just yet. Let me first do the full disclosure routine and mention that I'm pals with someone involved. But you know what, I think this opinion is just shy of universal, so I'm going to assume it's not loyalty speaking when I say what a ruthlessly precise killing machine they are. Somewhere on the way to being a weirdly worded compliment, that took a left turn, but you get it.

The opera-but-not-opera portion of the evening was the apparently rather uncategorizable work "I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky." It's...really not that satisfying. I think it suffers from fish nor fowl syndrome, maybe.* If you like broadway, it's going to strike you as stuffy and not so very tuneful. If you like opera (everybody now: and I know you do!!) or downtown art music, whatever the hell that is, the broadway vocal mannerisms involved may drive you up a tree. It's like what would happen if somebody had the newsreal-as-opera idea that brought us Nixon in China without the genius-level clarity of vision that makes it more or less the only opera from the last 25 years anyone gives a fuck about.

Still it was easy enough to dig into the virtuosity of absolutely everything else. I'm continually blown away by their protean violinist, Courtney Orlando, who in this concert played keyboards and sang a small role in Ceiling/Sky with more vocal assurance than the soloist (which is not really fair of me because she only had a few lines) all as a warmup to the murderous violin part in the Chamber Symphony. There were bowstrings everywhere, I'm telling you. My friend in the ensemble and I joke that my vestigial four heterosexual brain cells have quite the crush on her. If so, last night's no-sweat-broken performance didn't help any, nor did that devastating pair of boots. Oh there. I'm a big fag again.

Many of the rest of them evince a similar sense of being able to do anything, backwards, in heels. There's a certain sadness to watching musicians like this because you can't [I can't] pretend that even if I'd started early and worked hard, I could ever do what they do.

Other works featured were the quirky, intermittently grating Scratchband , a piano transcription of Short Ride in a Fast Machine matched only by last concert's Ligeti etude for sheer shock value (Mr. Adams, after intermission, jokingly compared this to the Horowitz transcription of Stars and Stripes) and Gnarly Buttons, a vivid pastiche requiring the clarinettist, here one dauntless Elisabeth Stimpert, to borrow the pair of bellows Caballe wears on her back.

Ok. It's official. I'm quite unable to write about anything but singing. Well it was a fine concert, and I gave it a shot.

*I'll have the veal.

A day late

A moment of solemn humming of highlights from Norma to observe the anniversary of the birth of opera, I mean Callas. Except I missed it by a day. Well, alright: utilize your favorite ego defense in honor of the anniversary of the birth of Anna Freud?

There's this insane batch of good opera online today. I actually passed on the Podles Tancredi because I have the Naxos one somewhere, even if live is always better, and 1) I'm presumably going to see her do it...isn't she doing it at Caramoor or somewhere? and 2) Dalayman's Salome tempted me away. Girlfriend has a voice on her, but apparently the only thing as big is her fee, because the only reason I can think of for this Jokanaan is there was no money left and they had to get someone's uncle Ingvar to do it. You remember Ingvar, he used to sing the little song about the farmer's daughter that made us all laugh so hard. Sorry, I really got into being Swedish for a second there.

Edit: as whichever Baldwin it is says after a car crash in State and Main, "Well, that happened." The last twenty minutes of Salome verged on somnolent, though pretty. But then a very good thing happened, in that instead of opting for Knjaz' Igor on the basis of "it should be going for a good while longer" I took a little gamble on Die Gezeichnete because The Straussmonster was joking about the ridiculousness of Schreker's plots the other night. An instant convert to Schreker am I. And Schwanenwilms, little black dress grudges notwithstanding.

Maury D'annato Can't Catch a Break

It had to be about three minutes into Romeo & Juliette that I figured out why I had let four performances go by while all the cool kids were already blogging it. The explanation requires subtlety, intricate logic, and a fine grasp of the Kleinian concept of the depressive position: I hate Gounod. For the lenght of one '78, he's great. Then I go into sort of a trance and find myself (for example, throughout act II) hearing the voice of Mrs. Parker saying:

Although I work, and seldom cease,
At Dumas pere and Dumas fils,
Alas I cannot make me care
For Dumas fils and Dumas pere.

So what I'm basically telling you is I have no review because you just can't say much worth reading about something you dislike a priori. (Get Maury with the Latin and the italics and shit!)

Except I paid twenty five smackers for my age-inappropriate student ticket, and I'm damn well going to write about it.

The production seems to be the first thing leaping to everyone's finger tips. I won't buck convention. It's...it's fine is what it is. It's not shockingly avant garde, nor is it an artifact from Otto Schenk dustbunny hell. I would say for all the bells and whistles, one basically never feels from one act to the next one has gone anywhere new, except for the justly ballyhoo'ed floatin' bed, an image so pretty as to recall ...one's first kiss? One's first Met b'cast? [Mine was Rosenkavalier, I'm pretty sure. In the immortal words of Patty Bouvier: there went the last lingering shred of my heterosexuality.] The weather forecast in the back did get a bit ponderous, but I'll admit that the giant moon made me smile. Laughing with/laughing at will not here be debated.

And I kind of think avant garde design should go with some attempt at quirky staging, otherwise you have all these people milling around acting normal despite the fact they're in La Serva Padrona set in a strip mall, or what have you. This is why I'm stoked for the return of the Bob Wilson Lohengrin, despite the fact it's, well, preposterous. Well or worse than acting normal is when they're clumsily staged. I'm afraid the swordplay conformed uncomfortably to tristoogean aesthetics for me (which is to say it cleaved to the teachings of Larry, Curly and...right, that's what I was after.)

And nobody, nobody, looks good in purple velour.

I'm really going on about the staging. There's a reason for that. We'll get there. But, wrapping up, if the main piece of stage business that sticks in my head from the production is the cute little pantomime Dessay and Vargas did during the applause for the Waltz, I should probably have stayed home and read a book. [Jesus was it cute though. Her little mask took a bow, his little mask clapped for her, both little masks kind of hopped toward each other and I think made out or something. It's not impossible I dreamed this part.] I really do believe Dessay sees the silliness in this opera. In one scene she made stock soprano gestures that could only be interpreted as self-mockery or a kind of mean imitation of Aprile Millo.

Alright. I'm backed into a corner. Cards on the table time. I put off talking about the singing because I have practically nothing to say about it. Vargas was I think maybe nervous about ye olde falling bedde because he sounded tentative until the damn thing was on the ground and then great like I remembered him. When he's singing quietly, he's in a league of his own. When he's not, he does a bit more gear-shifting than I imagine to be part of ideal French singing. Having heard Alvarez lately, I miss the splash of bad taste Diana Vreeland (as quoted by The Mother of us All for years in his opera-l signature) recommends. Dessay's voice has a nice ping and her diction seemed swell to me but my French is rotten. [Franklin Pierce Adams or someone round tably like that is reputed to have noted that once you step off the plane, you quickly realize nobody speaks Intermediate French.] I'm sorry to say her voice always makes me think of recordings of Mady Mesple and wish I'd been born earlier, and in France. It gets around the bends pretty flashily, but it just isn't love. I wouldn't not go hear her again (say, I bet that would be tricky in French what with the double negatives) but...

I agree with everyone about Tybalt and Mercutio: they're fab. I'd like to hear them sing other things, things that don't make me consider the sacrilege of leaving before curtain calls. Theodora Hanslowe's timbre reminded me in some insubstantial way of von Stade, but her scene is so short it's hard to size her up.

And with that, forgive me, I'm out of ink.

Oh, but no. One other thing. Why is Juliette's calling card that we all know and, depending who we are, trot out at auditions, when in fact her little "I'm so nuts I just may drink this drano" number has actual dramatic content, more moods, and a greater variety of musical ideas?

Next: I try to drag myself to An American Tragedy, having learned no lessons.