Yes

...and by that I mean just yes. Yes, you should go. And this despite many reservations, that in the end don't matter. I'd like to state for the record that I'm not an entirely jaded opera-goer. I love the Met most nights, even if the rep is conservative and they don't have a real Puccini soprano or Heldentenor to their name. But I do maintain that it's only every few or several seasons they have a production that comes from that place of absolute artistic certainty, you know the kind I mean? The last one I saw was Wernicke's Frau Ohne Schatten, until tonight. The latest now is very certainly Anthony Minghella's Madama Butterfly, consistently dazzling and intermittently devastating.

By the way, you know who can really wear a dress? Lee Radziwill! There she was, smoking her cigarette five feet from me. I mean, I wouldn't know her if she bit me, had to ask a paparazzo who the glamor gal was [embarassingly, but not really, I actually asked "Oh is thatLicia Albanese?" because I don't know what she looks like either and she's d'une certaine age and always at stuff.] But that's who it was, sewed into that thing and looking like a million and a half. Ten feet the other direction was Rufus Wainwright, and for fun I imagined he was utterly peeved that the flashbulbs weren't aimed at him. Everyone else was there too, but you've read about it. Kind of exciting. Very buzzy evening.

You're going to have to go, if you can, and you're going to have to do it despite some of the singing. In fact I may just write about that and not ruin any of the visual surprises, which is fine anyway considering my bumbling way with descriptions of the visual. It's pretty late, anyhow. For now: the colors are ravishing, the design is consistent with what I remember of Michael Levine's striking work in Carsen's Onegin, and the way characters make their entrances is quite enthralling. You'll never see a curtain call like this one again. Christina Gallardo-Domas could have sung a thoroughly mediocre Butterfly and gotten a screaming ovation, the way her curtain call is designed/choreographed.

Which is exactly what happened. Do you remember her Met broadcast debut? Because I do, in that way I remember Woody Allen movies from the late 90's and the last couple seasons of Melrose Place and things like that. They happened, and if I thought about it really hard, I could recall a few details beyond being unimpressed. So the question was: why have they picked her for this phenomenally well-hyped season opener in a new Met regime that's going to stir things up or die trying. I don't have an answer. By "tutu, piccolo, idiot" she had warmed up into a kind of plummy sound, and then she disemboweled herself so there wasn't much time to enjoy it. Up to that point, she was tentative and a bit squally with a tendency to lose support at very key moments. Um, yeah, like the last note of The One Aria Everyone Knows. And I guess we all have our unreasonable demands, and I guess one of mine is the c# in Butterfly's entrance. Not there, neither in the house nor in the video they were showing on the Panoperacon in the plaza with all the rehearsal footage. Anyway it kind of drives like a Puccini voice, but without meaning to be nasty, it really isn't one.

God, you know, Butterfly is kind of an awful opera, well not through and through but such banality next to such sublimity. And of corse the libretto, offensive from pretty much every vantage. Hell, even the culinary--do you know what's in milk punch? Half-and-half and bourbon, among other things. Who the hell drinks that? Then the humming chorus starts and I'm like any other sentimentalist, dabbing at my eye with a handkerchief embroidered with the likeness of Toti dal Monte.

New feature: you can get your Met Titles in German. I checked to see if they'd change Pinkerton to Linkerton but I guess that's dated or something. I think I'm putting off talking about Marcello Giordani because someone whose opinions I respect is a big fan and I just...my ear is tuned to find the basic quality of his voice a little tight and strangled. Ok, not a little. The bulk of it is gratifying, though, and he sings with fervor if not with abandon. I guess I don't have a better Butterfly cast in mind and, perhaps more to the point, I don't run an opera house. I'm not 100% clear on where it lies in terms of weight anyway, the role of Pinkerton. I think of it as spinto but I suppose Pavarooty went around singing it and wasn't it the definitively spinto territory of Don Carlo that he wiped out on? Ver. I think I promised way back when not to indulge in all that fach-alchemy. Next topic.

Dwayne Croft had a mixed night of it, if you ask me. I have been quite the fan at times, but the voice lacks a certain core I'm fairly certain it used to have. He had his moments last night, but nothing like the late 90's when there were equal parts ease and virility. Suzuki must be the role the word "thankless" was coined to describe, but Maria Zifchak made the big success, insofar as any Suzuki can. And since I don't care much for Butterfly itself I'm not going to weigh in on Levine's management of it, though it sounded fine and idiomatic to me. Someone else will know. The joy of being a minor opera blogger is you can defer and delegate.

The real hero, other than Meg Ryan of course, for getting into that little black dress, was Anthony Minghella. I'm not kidding, though: if all I can muster for the singing is this resounding "meh," you have to ask yourself why I'm so certain you'd like the production. I really can't imagine you wouldn't. Without a sassy sign-off, I'm just going to leave it there.

Meanwhile, across the plaza

Give me a medal. All night at NYCO's gala I somehow resisted the wicked temptation to channel Renata Scotto's creepy heckler and cry out "Brava, Metropolitan Opera!" I did.

As JSU has pointed out, it's a little bit of a drag to read a bullet-pointed round-up of these galas, so I'll forego that option and just tell you what you need to know. And the first thing you need to know is that Carol Vaness bears the most uncanny resemblance, in terms of the placement of her speaking voice and her speech cadences, to Shelly Long in the role of Diane Chambers on Cheers. I mean, that's pretty important, right? Also, she seems high.

For some reason it was about 45 minutes sitting in that there State Theater at yon gala for an opera company before anyone sang. There was an overture, and some speeches in which Madame Sills was sort of charming and Paul Kellogg made absolutely no attempt to sound like he was doing anything other than reading off a teleprompter. Which was huge and at the back of the house and you could turn around and see how closely he was sticking to the script. And then there was singing, and it was Carol Vaness and Vinson Cole and for some reason they chose Mozart. I'm sure they're very nice people. No, I kid. It was fine. Just...me, I'd steer clear of Mozart if I'd been singing much heavier stuff for 15 years. I know, I know: I said I like big clunky early music better than wheedly tinny early music. (We're counting the classical period.) But that's about style more than vocal estate.

Shit, it looks like I'm doing a run-down after all. I can never resist. I shall resist. Getting back to the Important Parts: the voices that excited me most were, hmm...James Valenti and Beth Clayton, I think. Valenti is a-fucking-nother young, handsome, very well schooled and promising tenor. He sang the Pearl Fishers duet with a baritone I couldn't hear so much because of stage positions. In twenty years when all these young things want to make some money, if they've kept themselves up, they will have The Ten Tenors concerts or something, in stadia. Seriously, I think we're now fixed for lyric tenors the way we were suddenly flooded with lyric mezzos in the late '90s. Without much effort, I can think of at least 8 I'd be happy to hear any evening or matinee.

Clayton sang in the Rosenkavalier trio/duet (d'you know, I realize we're all supposed to get all mopey about the trio, but I've always liked the duet better) and though she wasn't ideally positioned for me to hear her, I couldn't take my ears off her. I get the impression it's an imperfect voice and that she's the kind of unhomogenized singer that often wields that kind of voice. The kind that doesn't sound mass produced. Certainly she's a very striking figure, and I think she's also openly Sapphic, so hooray for that. If I figure out that I'm mixing her up with someone else, I'll edit like the wind. [ETA: tip of the hat to Gert, who informs me that Ms. Clayton and Patricia Racette are opera's newest love couple. Picture it: a marketing campaign like the Gheorghius got from their record label or like platonic pals/onstage amours Villatrebazonko currently enjoy. Yeah, not gonna happen.]

Vivica Genaux wins the Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg Prize for bizarre facial movements during peformance, by the way. Either she's singing with an incredibly loose jaw or she's chewing her coloratura, but it's rivetingly weird to watch. Meanwhile, though, (as predicted) I liked her much better in Rossini than Handel. The Cenerentola rondo was a triumph. One strange details is that from time to time she'd back herself into breathing in the middle of a word, but mostly she sang bellows-in-the-back long phrases. Her ornamentation was way over the top, which is a valid choice.

Lots of jaw-wagging of the usual sort about how New York City Opera invented sliced bread went on. And a few unsubtle jabs at, well, the rest of the world for claiming NYCO-bred singers as their own. And then, like, Carol Vaness would suddenly be on body mic commenting on the greats she remembers singing with, and one couldn't help but notice that the list, well, it went something like this: June Anderson, Jerry Hadley, Rockwell Blake...I dunno, draw your own inferences. I'm being difficult, but I guess the facts as I see them from my somewhat ignorant perspective are: City Opera has had its moments of glory and a real golden age with Treigle and Sills, but let's not get loopy about it.

In keeping with my usual habit, I'm going to interrupt myself in the midst of a basically well-intentioned mocking of Carol Vaness to recall a performance of hers I wholly dug, that being Norma in Houston in the mid '90s (with Mentzer.) I wasn't a rabid bel canto enthsiast but I do remember finding her singing and stage comportment equally worthy of praise.

Oh, at one point they showed a film with Placido Domingo talking about how great City Opera was. It was a film because he couldn't be there that night. Or any other night since the 1960's.

There were also film clips from various productions over the years. The most enticing was Regina Resnik singing "Liaisons" from A Little Night Music. She forgot to read in the decrepit diva handbook where you're supposed to croak this particular song with leathery tone and approximate pitch, finessing the whole thing by virtue of age and attitude. If this exists as a whole, I'd love to see it.

What drove the crowd most vociferously bonkers was also my favorite item: Lauren Flanigan dressed in a rather outrageous get-up singing the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth with such delicious melodrama you'd think she was trying to remind the opera companies of North America of her existence. Listen, on dit that she's not the world's most pleasant colleague, and it seems like it miiiiight have something to do with her long absence from City Opera. Since I don't have to work with her, I wish to say: HIRE HER.

My Date with Zeus: A Tell-All Memoir

I swear to god there's a review in here somewhere (he said, fumbling around in his prefrontal cortex.)

Why don't we just say this, as far as the production is concerned...We are talking of Semele, by the way, at The Little Company that Usually Could. So here's my grand pronouncement on the remarkaby consistent aesthetic they have going on in their Handel department: I get and am even grateful for the impulse to flood the stage with arresting, kookily lyrical tableaux. I guess I'd just be glad of a little less wink and a lot less nudge. But hang on. I've just stumbled upon a much more intelligible version of what I'm trying to say, so my unwitting guest columnist for the day is "boringwhitegirl" from the peanut gallery at Parterre. She wrote:

...for every one great bit of stage busines...there are 3 or 4 meaningless bits that seem to have no purpose except to distract you from the fact that, no matter what you do, they're going to take that damned da capo again.

Personal to bwg: if you're mortified at being quoted, I'll cease and desist; I just decided I couldn't put it better.

You know, maybe this is just the illusion one has that the first time I saw something was the first time it was done, but I inevitably think back to Francisco Negrin's production of Partenope at Glimmerglass and it seems the whole routine was so much fresher back then: strip the thing of all the columns and overstated garb of antiquity, dress everyone well, dream up some striking, motivated but not obvious stage images, and call it an opera. Long about when the rose petals or whatever-they-weres started pouring through the roof of the bedroom on wheels, I lost my patience. Pretty, but so are a lot of things, and you have to choose which ones you put onstage or it comes apart at the seams, stops being theater.

Rant over, I guess. You'll want to know about the singing, and everyone succeeded on one level or another. Sanford Sylvan most of all, for me, but then I've always been a devoted fan, really from the moment I pulled the car over to dash into a building on the University of Texas campus, having just heard his Ungeduld from Mullerin on KMFA and called them on a pay phone (yes, little Sally, they were phones that stayed in one place and you put quarters in them) to ask who the singer was. His absolute evenness of tone has not left him, nor his aristocratic vocal bearing. I wish he'd sing Chou En Lai in one of these revivals, and I am still kind of kicking myself for missing his Wotan in EOS's scaled down ringlet.

Genaux has gotten heaps of good press in the last five years or so but I'd never heard her in house, just on some baroque album full of marvellously long lines. I'm not sure why I was merely pleased and not blown away...she's not missing much on any checklist, and "Iris, hence away" approached the spectacular. Maybe she just wasn't quite what I thought she was going to be and I had some trouble adjustin. One did hear the name Horne bandied about when people were discussing Genaux, and she's really more about an impeccable baroque line and less about gutsy aural machismo. I like her, no doubt about it. I think I'll like her more later.

Robert Breault I was surprisingly into, considering the voice is rather more Mascagni than Messiah. The deal is lately I'm so not invested in HIP or period performance, whatever the kids are calling it, that unless it's supremely well done, I'd just as soon hear something else entirely. Not for nothing my new favorite Monteverdi Orfeo (as opposed to my old favorite which was none, because I could never get into it much) is the one from La Scala in the 1930's. It's not the most florid part, as Handel goes, and someone like Kurt Streit would be twiddling his vocal cords the whole time. "Wherever you Walk" (with its lyrics that always strike me as funny, calling to mind some frightened soul being followed around by a crowd of tip-toeing Dutch elms) came out downright virile. I'm all for that. I guess it's time to lay my hands on that ridiculous old Hercules where Corelli put on thick soled boots so he'd be taller than Jerome Hines. Or isn't there--no joke--a Poppea with Gwyneth Jones?

I have this hunch they must have cut some/lots of Matthew White's music. My ear is a little out of practice with countertenors, I think. The palette can be a bit more narrow and you listen for other things. But he was certainly capable and stylistically on point. Not such a rich sound as we've gotten spoiled on by Daniels and Mehta, and not wildly inventive with phrasing, but then it's hardly the world's best role.

It's going to be hard for me to be very fair about Futral, honestly. Since Handel is so much not my bread and butter, I must have kind of imprinted hard on the first singer who made Handel sound fascinating to me, and everyone is judged by her likeness to Lisa Saffer. Elizabeth Futral's voice is in the same range of color, but baroque music sounds a bit like vocal tourism for her. A good deal of the music was finely sung, but it lacked that last layer of finish. God knows the breakneck pace of her final aria was a feat, a real accomplishment, but it also involved some fioratorical fudgding, and her high notes pop out of the line a little too much. I'm sorry I missed her Daphne. It just feels so far across the plaza some seasons.

So nu, my shaynkeits and meeskeits, the seasons just about to bust wide open, and I'm going to be honest with you: I'm buying the hype hook, line, and [system failure on sports metaphor.] I'm stoked. And unless James Gandolfini has any objections, I'll be writing about opening night when next I post.

Things I left out and am adding later, lazily not bothering to integrate:
1) Props to Pat Collins on the lighting, but for heaven's sake get a strobe light that doesn't make bug zapper noises if you're going to use one.
2) Um, oh yeah, everyone was dressed as Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O and stuff. I guess that's more or less the defining feature of the production. To what can we attribute my complete failure to mention this? Denial, most likely. Everyone looked great, but see above. These directorial ideas that seem great at first, does anyone think them through to the end of the opera? Because Marilyn Monroe, for instance, didn't die because Kennedy came to her in his godly form, or at least I assume not. (I wasn't there.) Really not trying to be picayune, just...

This is what Christmas Eve is like for goyim, right?

Can't resist joining in the fun of speculating/making wish lists about what they'll release. The central theme of my broadcastlust is Steber--I just took a stroll around the ol' database and she was in quite a lot of broadcasts, and I don't think that many of them are things I've seen even on Naxos or Bensar. Otello in '52 with Vinay and Warren? I'd take that. Wozzeck? Lay it on me.

Out of curiosity I'd love to hear Traubel in The Man Without a Country. It's kind of a stand-in fantasy for The King's Henchmen, which was too early for broadcasts. (Don't ask me why the one subs for the other...American operas that fizzled but featured a big star, I guess. King's Henchmen had Tibbett, and a libretto by Millay, by the way.)

There's some Thill including a partial Faust with Rethberg, and a Boris G that's probably not in Russian despite the presence of Kipnis--it's 1943 after all. And that one has Thorborg.

And of course there are some things with pet singers of mine, El Amor Brujo among other things with Jean Madeira, at least a couple of 'casts with John Alexander (unless it's another Alexander)and so on and so forth.

Met Maniac's Lost Broadcasts page features some partially extant broadcasts that are the stuff of dreams, some largely irretrievable Leider and Melchoir, zum Beispiel.

In which the vaults are opened

Yegods. Read the Times. Trust me, you'll know which article. I feel quite faint.

Later edit, under the rubric of "Maury's really good at finding the dark cloud behind the silver lining": I have to admit it's been fun having to hunt for Met broadcast recordings. And maybe am a tiny bit preemptively nostalgic about the days (i.e. now) when it's a big deal that I have some of the stuff I do. I remember finding the Corelli/Farrell Gioconda at the used record store in Denton, Texas and feeling like I'd really scored. I drove back to Dallas with the adrenaline rush of transporting contraband. (Had to be the opera. Dallas does not so much provoke reactions of happiness, and I say this as a loyal Texan, loyal despite everything.) So while I'm delirious with joy thinking about some of the 40's and 50's bounty perhaps soon to be grasped like low-hanging fruit, I'm also...well, I don't want to sound like one of those old school homosexuals who's nostalgic for the days when you had to know where the bars were, but yeah, I'll miss the hunt a little.

I think we're all getting a little tired of these.

You'll have read elsewhere by now that Astrid Varnay has died at age 88. A singer I was just discovering, oddly, but a name the people who taught me opera always invoked with great respect. Someone else with solid cred calls her memoirs "one of the few modern singer's bios worth reading." I do think I'll read them. Varnay was the sort of go-for-broke singer whose vocalism is an athletic act; on most lists, one of the great Wagneriennes of the last century though the last of her performances I listened to (with the Wellsungs) was an Elektra. The role was on its way out of her voice but through towering self-assurance and a primal sense for all the triumph and tragedy of Sophocles and Hoffmansthal, she pulled it off. Now can we please take a long break from this funeral procession of vocal eminences?

Caro BWAAAAH!

When I tell you that the Met's summer parks performances are fun for the whole family, I trust you won't need your decoder ring to catch my drift. See, the marvellous thing about the series is it's a little bit like a picnic...rules are loosened up, everyone likes that. Heavens to Besty, I'd be elated if I could eat dinner at things I go to at the Met just because there's nothing on tv, cough Fledermaus cough. So with no-one too worried about what sets us apart from the animal kingdom, we are presented with a golden opportunity to rediscover children's love of opera. Not completely incidentally, children don't love opera. Don't even like it, and why should they? They fidget and fuss and occasionally scream during opera, especially in an age of such innovative schools of parenting as the "Everything You Do is Automatically Precious Because You Came out of my Vagina" school. The main rule of EYDAPBYCOMV mommying is you never, ever correct any behavior, and if everyone around you wants to murder you for prioritizing the little ones over every other breathing thing in the universe, just mow 'em down with the stroller for being such bad sports.

The Met's Rigoletto in Central Park this evening was, from my vantage, a little like those toddler+Carribean nanny+guitarist who somehow resists suicide Raffi sing-alongs at Tea Lounge in Brooklyn, if for some reason there were a recording of Verdi playing softly, forlornly, helplessly in the background. We stayed until all the "addio! addio!" business and then could not refrain from a little addio of our own. I had just finished my picnic dinner of $5 hummus from fucking Gristede's eaten with what turned out to be apple cinnammon flavored crackers, and was not feeing patient with the universe. Nora Amsellem sounded DADDY WHO PLANTED ALL THIS GRASS, while Mark Delavan remains NO NOT ORANGE JUICE I WANT APPLE JUICE NO THE OTHER KIND although slightly less so than I recall in years past, making some allowances for mics. Roberto Aronica, a new name to me, was more or less WHY IS THE LADY SCREAMING EVERYTHING AT THE FAT MAN. I'm sorry if you couldn't hear that, but hey, there are several more performances left if you'd like to find out for yourself. If you go, bring pesticide.

Ambizioso spirto

What's the etiquette on linking to stuff someone posted on youtube? Eh, no idea. Also not sure I'm doing it right...we'll see. God only knows what's going on with the reading of the letter by some disembodied mopey sounding Italian dude, but once you get past it, it's worth it.



This makes me think Verrett should have been one of the stars.

Mordant wit, if you will

Look who's back in the opera bloggin' game...

Da geht die alte Furstin Resi

I was talking to a goyish friend of mine (albeit with an estimable Yiddish vocabulary) yesterday and found out something interesting about the gentiles: when you turn 33, you're supposed to furrow your brow and say something like, "Look at everything Jesus did by 33, and what the hell have I made of my life?" I suspect rather few of you do this, in fact, and "you" might be a hasty choice of pronoun anyway considering my regular semi-conscious efforts to alienate the devout. 33, said my friend, is your Christ year.

It just occured to me what the opera queen's analogous crisis must be: as of half an hour ago, I am older than the Marschallin. Die Marschallin Furstin Werdenberg, Resi to her friends, was described by Hoffmansthal, as no older than 32--I think that's how he phrased it. One does at certain moments feel ganz alt, but thank god for Oktavian. Thus ends my Marschallin year.

Belated...

Birthday greetings to Manprano, very nearly my twin.

Bonus Tracks

You know, I think this isn't the first time I've bought a CD and been disappointed and wanted to hit rewind right to the moment where I'm at Academy wondering whether the Callas Vespri is in acceptable sound and decide instead to go with the Beecham Elektra. Which I know is going to be in primitive sound, but some Callas stuff is in a particular kind of reel-to-reel-under-a-heavy-wool-coat sound that really does ruin the fun. Hey actually I didn't finish my thought up there. The thought got too long and the last clause kind of snapped off. So: not the first time I've bought, been disappointed, but THEN felt the bonus tracks made up for the sorry state of things.

Erna Schluter as Elektra: there's nothing terrible about her...in the debit column, she takes "der jauchzt" down a hefty interval--high notes aren't everything but it is the climax of the first half of the opera; in the credit column, she sings with real lyricism in the recognition duet, perhaps inspired by Schoffler? The main thing is she sounds like she's reading the role from a score. Perhaps Beecham wanted no effects--there is no laughter from Klytamnestra when she is told that Orest ist tod, none from Elektra at the suggestion that Aegisth is ein Mann, etc. It makes the whole thing decidedly drama-free, despite Beecham's happily heavy-handed orchestral gestures. This crushes the life out of Hongen's perfectly respectable Klytamnestra as well, and nearly does the same for the uncrushable Ljuba Welitsch.

Ok but then there are bonus tracks. I actually haven't listened to the Siegfried tracks yet because I have this unshakeable hunch the tenor is going to blow, but the Tristan!!! Hang on, let me run down to the corner for more punctuation. Ok, back. The Tristan, conducted by Furtwangler, is heartstoppingly beautiful, and I hope you know I hate phrases like that. Suthaus really is the only acceptable consolation prize we have after it became clear that Melchior would never happen again. Klose makes Brangaene's "Einsam Wachend in der Nacht" practically the centerpiece of the scene, and Schluter here is golden. !!! There, I've gone and used them all again. Isoldes Tod, which I'm not calling the Liebestod (or even the Love-Frog as some of us like to) in case any purists are reading, is rapturous, Wagner as we long to hear him; Wagner in the mode guys like Barenboim and Eschenbach shoot for sometimes with great success and sounding sometimes like an imitation.

I'd love it if anyone could tell me if it's from a complete Tristan, actually.

Comment

Sure, Schwarzkopf meant enough to me as a dewy opera kitten it seems I should say something on her passing, I think now confirmed. Needless to say, her death is not going to provoke the kind of outpourings of some recent losses; she was notoriously tough and perhaps even cold, her heyday ended long ago, and we never end up knowing these things, but much was asked and said about her politics, which may have been of the very worst.

Well, when I was 19 and just past my initial mystification that one singer could be told from another, hers was a voice (the second, after Callas) I could clock right out of the gate. Everyone likes to feel knowledgeable. I bought the Karajan Figaro, senza secco, because it was on two discs and cheap, maybe my first complete or quasi-complete opera recording. I liked that it didn't have the chatter, which I couldn't see the music in, just the meat and no bones. I liked Irmgard Seefried (still do). But really I guess I was, yeah, very taken with the quavery, regretful sound of Schwarzkopf's countess. I have mixed feelings these days, maybe preferring a little more lushness.

Later that year, I spent my first summer in Bloomington, and bought myself a birthday present of Karajan's Ariadne, 100% unfamiliar with the piece. It took me a while to warm up to--much of the prologue felt like bones. I remember falling asleep in the heat and awful humidity with the endless closing duet on like a fever dream in the background. What I immediately took to, though, was Schwarzkopf's full-soul plunge into "Es Gibt ein Reich." It remains perhaps my favorite reading of any aria. She never sang it onstage, right? But she sings it like she's absolutely ecstatic about the idea of dying, and pretty much nobody else does that.

So it's odd I am not very moved by her death, but then it would be odd to be moved by it too, in a way (I start to sound like a broken record about the death of people we've never met: not ours, not ours.) I guess for the past X years I've been less moved, in many roles, by what I remember reading of as her "interventionist" style. I'm not sure why Ariadne is exempt: to me it puts everyone else's Ariadne in black and white. Her four last, though, seem academic. Her Capriccio Countess doesn't break my heart, really even a little. Lately it's a style I associate with the terrible decline of Fleming, so maybe there's that on top of it all.

Well, how many times can we say it's the end of an era? It really does feel historical, though, or am I alone on that? Who else from that particular time is still with us? Maybe instead of putting on her Ariadne tonight I'll put on the Figaro, if I can even still find it, and think of that era in singing and its grace: Schwarzkopf, Seefried, Jurinac, Kunz, all sounding to me like photographs of my family from the 50's look, irretrievably steeped in another way of living.

Tancredible! (And other desperate compromises in the art of the subject line)

...and then my browser crashed, taking with it my entire Podliad. Which is fine, really, considering especially that nobody likes a broken record. Here are fragments, rescued like the works of Sappho, minus the poetry, the historical significance, and the love of a good softball game.

First pararaph entirely gone. Blah blah have heard her in better voice blah. Wait, no. That's not where I started. Probably something about how not dying on the flooded Sawmill Parkway was the first thrill of the evening. Not dying: always a treat. You probably don't want to hear about the picnic in a car in a parking lot in Pleasantville, New York, where one may exit from the Sawmill in order not to perish. It has little to do with the music and there's no such thing as a vicarious picnic.

After much stomping through the mud, we Podled. Imagine here reconstructed some faint concern about lost agility and a top that sounds about as sure as tech stocks, at least compared to its former stentor, mitigated by the usual awe about the way she plunges right on through it nonetheless. Nothing tentative, nothing cut or cut short. Just a little quaver, a few thicky constructed but/and muscular runs going up or down.

So, some of her Tancredi was the stuff of greatness as usual and some of it worried me a little, but on the whole, am I going to complain? I am not. As noted by Alex on the ride home, she was having none of this semi-staged business and fretted and strutted her hour upon the stage, making her wonderful silent movie sized gestures from her entrance to her death in a folding chair. (What a death has Tancredi: scarcely time to breath his last before the chord resolves.)

Still I wish she were offered more Erdas and Lied von der Erdas I mean Erdes and Klytamnestras and you know I just downloaded some clips of the Verdi outings and they're weird but fascinating. The Azucena, to my surprise, is an unqualified success. Anyway I just don’t know why she’s been singing largely the same tune in the same gold sequins for such a long while. I saw her Orfeo in 2001 and again in 2005. I’d see it again in 2009 if she did it, maybe go every four years instead of the World Cup (which does not interest me, for I have no passion for golf or tennis or polo or whatever it is everyone was screaming about the last few months.) It’s just that she’s not, I’d like the opera world to acknowledge, a one-trick Polack. [Hey, it’s one of those insider words you’re allowed to use if you are one. And when the D’annatos were wandering around the Pale of Settlement dodging cossack bullets like the Jewish peasant James Bonds we doubtless were, some of us settled in Poland. Ewa P is my paisan.]

A brief aside: one doesn't know quite how to feel about the world's bluntest blind item--which I nonetheless didn't get, because I'm like that sometimes--in which La Cieca revealed to us all what is also disclosed over at Vilaine Fille: that Podles will make a very overdue return to the Metropolitan...in a comprimaria role, essentially. Or so it seems to me, who only ever listens to disc 1 of Gioconda.

High quality colleagues never hurt, even on cult diva abends. Georgia Jarman I'm filing next to Sills, Beverly. Not that she sounds like her so much as I need a category for singers who (not quite in Anna Russell's great artistry/no voice fach) have a sort of ordinary sound but deploy it with not only excellent technique, but flair. I note with Satisfaction that she will be Cinncinati's Madame Mao, a role that sits right where Jarman's voice blooms. I won't try to evaluate her acting from this viewing, though she's awfully pretty for what that's worth. Daniel Mobbs put in another good bid to be the next hot young baritone, though he had less music to work with than two weeks ago.

I'm increasingly excited about City Opera's mounting of La Donna del Lago, in which he will sing alongside Pendatchanska, Banks, and Laura Vlasak Nolen who I am now glad I reserved judgment about in Puritani, because she had a few more notes here than there to show off a nice shimmery instrument. Yeghishe Manucharyan was not entirely my cup of tenor, but I think if I hadn't heard so many incredible tenors in the last year I might feel otherwise. The high notes are shocking, certainly. I just don't find his singing deeply musical, so maybe I'm lying about if I hadn't heard the other tenors. It's hard to get past a pedestrian sensibility about how the notes go together.

A good time was had by all, especially annoying people, who seem to be well represented at Caramoor. Oh, or maybe Podles' fans are just nuts, but I hate to admit it. Cult followings don't tend to be quite who you'd want to hang out with outside the kool-aid tent, now do they?

I'm fresh out of fodder unti the Met fires up its engines, but maybe I'll write about some of these recordings I've bought in moments of financial recklessness...

Tales from the Shed

And why, while I'm on it, is it called The Shed? Isn't the shed where you keep the tractor? Anyway it puts me in mind of the Beverly Hillbillies is all I'm really saying.

So here's Elektra, abridged. This scarcely rises above the level of rec.music.opera but I have a nasty headache, so if you can pretend it's hilarious, we'll all get along.

Maids: ZOMG, WTF is w/ Elektra? [Exeunt]
[Text redacted for your aesthetic wellbeing]
Elektra: Thud. [She is teh dead.]

And I suppose it didn't feel too much longer than that with James "Skinny" Levine at the helm on Saturday. It actually stirs up a bit of cognitive dissonance to see him conducting on-book, so under his skin is the score of Elektra. If you'd told me the orchestra that played anemic back-up to La Voigt's Salome on her birthday in 2002 was the same band that was going to produce the raucous, wonderful noise we heard last night, I'd have stood there blinking at you while I hit the panic button under the desk. Credit must be due Levine. This is a changed orchestra, and anyone who doesn't get quite what a conductor does should hear a before/after reel.

On the whole, Levine was no more or less than primus inter pares, joined by the starry lineup of Lisa Gasteen, Felicity Palmer, Christine Brewer, and Alan Held. Brewer and Levine had last worked together, by the way, twenty four hours earlier in a rare mounting of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. Although is it really so rare these days? BSO put it on earlier in the year with Mattila and LHL, and I hope to god someone recorded the Wood Dove's scene. In any case, you don't see it every damn day, because the forces are so huge ("Architecture in tone on a vaaahst scale," Toscanini termed it. And by Toscanini I mean Stokowski. Thanks to a reader who pointed out the mistake o' the day.) and the solo bits are a big sing, not simple to cast.

It's perfect for Tanglewood on one hand because The Shed, which seats about 25% more people than the Met (seriously!) is rather vaaahst itself, which lends things the air of a festival of bigness. In practice, though, the piece is tough enough to balance ina more normal acoustic setting. Take away the walls, and it's anybody's ballgame. Exhibit A: Friday's line-up of big voices. Brewer, Botha, Meier. (Klaus Narr was the wonderful, thankfully returned Matthew Polenzani, fresh-voiced as ever, but the orchestration isn't as brutal in his section.) All of them got swallowed up at some point, Botha and Brewer for a hefty portion of the first half of the piece. Both sounded awfully shiny when you could hear them, but the climaxes for voice tend to coincide with orchestral orgasms and so for instance Tove's exit was absolutely overwhelming musically but the stunning soprano ascent to C was all but lost. Meier fared better, lacking only the extra degree of lyricism that the likes of Troyanos brought to likes like, " Weit flog ich, Klage sucht' ich" and she probably got the stompingest ovation.

But back to Elektra, and Brewer. Who was more audible in the Strauss, but unfortunately the poised pretty-ness that worked out so well in the rapturous but never frenzied Gurrelieder made for a somewhat workmanlike Chrysothemis. There was never an instant's fear about how she'd get through the role, and every note had spin and wattage...it's just that I expect to feel something for the girl when she sings, "Nein, ich bin ein Weib, und will ein Weiberschicksal," beyond a wish that someone put her in touch with Gloria Steinem. I'm thinking nostalgically of that great Elektra in Houston in 1993 where Jo Barstow looked intensely verklempt the whole time--yes, it was said that she didn't know the part when she showed up and was told to learn it pronto or hit the road, but this was acting. I remember how she swayed as she sang some of the high-lying lines...Lisa Gasteen did a bit of stomping around in this unstaged production, and in fact by the end was taking every opportunity she could to chug water from a bottle and mop her forehead, but Brewer never broke a sweat, and that seemed to be the problem. I'd happily go hear her again, but preferably in something like Gurrelieder that doesn't call for too much drama.

Between trips to the corner of the ring, Gasteen won round after round against the scariest role in opera. It's hard for me to figure what she'd be like in a staged Elektra; maybe the vocal acting isn't quite Borkhian, but the goods are there and there was no audible decline over the course of the very short, very long evening. In fairness, we'll never know if she got the role's second C, because the orchestra was at that point deafening, but there are other things in life to worry about. The sound is...plainspoken, I want to say. Headache+adjectives=nevermind. I look forward to her Met Brunnhildes, announced in her bio, which I guess answers the question of who's taking over for Voigt now that she's dropped the role. Something about the solidity of tone made her a convincing sibling for the granite-voiced Alan Held, her partner in crime.

And a convincing rival for the brilliant, intense, adjective, adjective, adjective Felicity Palmer. No qualifications on this one. Palmer moved in to the role, put up drapes and pictures on the wall; made it elegant where it needed to be and batshit loony where that was appropriate. At 62, she cuts no corners, and seems to be enjoying herself greatly in one of Strauss' most diva-ready roles. The all-important hysterical laughter right at the middle of the opera (for a definitive reading of this non-musical line, please see Jean Madeira chez Bohm) was delivered with exactly the right amount of madness, it bears noting.

Toss in a solid set of maids, Jennifer Check doing full justice to the plummy little pre-star turn of #5, and Siegfried Jerusalem making as much as you can of Aegisth and I have no complaints except that I don't own a cute little place in the Berkshires, and that's really nobody's fault but my own.

Next up, do you really want to hear me get all stupid over Podles? Because that's what's going to happen.

Campari and cantilena

JSU stood me a "not good enough for NPR" consolation cocktail Thursday at that "Opera on Tap" thing a few people have posted about. Seemed like good fun, though the back room at Freddy's, a charming Prospect Heights spot that has a date with Ratner's wrecking ball, is uncomfortably hot in the weather we're having. I stuck it out for a little while and caught a spirited run-through of the Count/Suanna duet, a pretty high quality Hamlet aria, and other amusements served up to a crowd of extremely enthusiastic hipsters. (No, I know, hipsters are never enthusiastic--it's in the rule book--but I don't have a term for what hipsters become when they move to Cobble Hill and lighten the fuck up a little.) Catch it later on at Park Slope's wonderful Barbés* and I think some other places. You've got strong fingers; get googling!

*clap for me: I typed a diacritic. As it happens, the wrong diacritic. Life is hard. Ok, hèrè we gò. Barbès.

More soon on Gurrelieder, then Elektra.

Open Source

A note to anyone who may have navigated this way after hearing Radio Open Source: the entry that follows this and preceeds the one I understand they're going to read on air is a return to fluffy, occasionally foul-mouthed opera-blogging of variable quality* after the somber interlude of the loss of LHL. I'm afraid the rest of the blog is rather more like this than my little piece on Lieberson. I don't want anyone to stumble upon this and leave aghast, so I thought I'd give a heads up.


*Seriously. The Puritani review is one of my least favorites, for example. Accident of timing. For a representative sampling of what this blog is about most of the time, caveat lector, check out:
one
of
these.

Thanks for stopping by.
MD'

ETA: Cutting room floor for me, it seems.

Or as you might translate it: The Republicans

Caramoor, in case you've never been (as I hadn't until last night) is a rather grand estate in Katonah, New York, about an hour from the city. The surrounding country may not be quite as ravishing as that of Glimmerglass, if we are speaking of summer festivals, but the grounds themselves are exquisite. Don't miss the large metal pineapples! No, seriously! It's worth taking a picnic basket, and if you don't, you can benefit from the fact that someone forgot to pass the memo around Katonah way dictating that sandwiches served in the proximity of classical music must indicate by their price that they in fact contain slices of endangered species. I realize this is odd to point out in an opera review, but it made me happy, so there it is.*

Caramoor is also the summer stomping grounds of Will Crutchfield, who likes opera as much as you and I do, apparently. Primary difference being he is capable of causing it to occur. Perhaps you are, too, when you haven't lately made with the Risperdal, but I'm not, so I'm grateful to Mr. Crutchfield. Probably if I could conjure opera, the percentage of bel canto works would be smaller, but as long as we're in the tweedly realm, it's nice to have an expert guide. Something like Puritani falls into the wrong hands, and you have....well...something even worse than I Puritani in the right hands. Don't get me wrong--I love it as a few concert pieces, but Bellini apparently wrote a bunch of music to go in between those concert pieces, and that music came with a story, and that story didn't come with the giant bottle of aspirin that should've accompanied it, and that's that.

The thing you have to keep in mind at Caramoor, by the by, is that people are for whatever reason holding to rather slovenly standards of concert etiquette, and so when for instance the old man beside you actually starts HUMMING along with "Qui la Voce," there's nothing to be done about it but to think of it as a duet. The ushers wander in and out, the birds in the trees bird around noisily which you can't really blame them for...basically what I'm trying to say is you have to put up with a fair amount of distraction. I swear I heard a bunch of people dropping typewriters in the middle of the opera. Ok, they probably weren't typewriters, but what was all that crashing?

I just checked and Alex told you all you need to know about the singing. I'll just corroborate. With the exception of the F in "credeasi misera" which should probably always be left out since nobody can sing it without sounding like he's kidding, Banks was stellar from the get go. I think it's a D he has to hit and hold twice in the duet, and each iteration was lengthy and superb. High notes aside, he sang with remarkable style and energy. Truthily, he is the equal of Florez, it's just that he's kind of cuddly while JDF looks like he's waiting for an opera about a pizza boy who really needs that tip.

Um, is it making me look like a creep to start back in with shtick like that right after the LHL entry? I just don't know quite what else to do. What I write here tends to be a little silly, not to say lunatic, and not always in immaculate taste, and it's not much good trying to tinge that with a sadness still felt but filed separately. So, moving right along...

Sumi Jo sings largely as she always has, in a lot of really good and not so good ways. She still sometimes pulls the vibrato lever halfway through a note, and the very top sounds like an act of will, but did it ever not? It looks like it costs her more to tug the voice around the turns than one imagines it used to, but if you close your eyes and ignore the little dances, it's pretty remarkable what she accomplishes, easy or not. And of course the cloudless timbre of the voice itself, completely untarnished, is nothing to complain about. I do wonder if Crutchfield had anything to say about her ornaments, which were so ungepotchket as to leave you wondering if she'd find her way back to the page. They were a fun, trip, though, so no complaints.

On the bass and bass baritone, I'm basically just nodding along with Alex. Daniel Mobbs was a very happy surprise indeed, real old school stuff despite his apparent youth, and Weston Hurt was something of a cypher, first rate voice and fabulous name notwithstanding. Laura Vlasak Nolen, in the role of The Worst Plot Device Ever, sounded not quite in her element, and I'd rather appraise her promise in something else.

Next up is Tanglewood's well cast Elektra, and I guess I might also subject Gurrelieder to a bit of my typing, too.

*In the interest of full disclosure, my sandwich was also largely subsidized by Wellsung, Inc. Thanks A--I'll hit you back.

Gone

We've lost something irreplaceable, all of us to whom opera means something. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson is gone. I'm sorry if I'm not feeling very articulate about it. It's easy now to feel the sting of performances of hers we missed, but instead I'd like to dwell on the one time I did witness the act of will, honesty, and something that looked like humility that was her Didon. If you weren't there (and I don't say this to make the experience more mine) nothing I can say will take you there. If you were, you will remember, I think, the little insecurity at her entrance that grew meaningless as the evening wore on, the plangent tone of voice and impersonation, the haunted way her exit conveyed through some impossible act of expression by her gait and somehow the posture of her back turned to the audience a boundless sadness and resignation. You may even remember, and I think it's not disrespectful, how magnificent she looked in her gown. Alright, I hope you saw her in more things than I did, and have your own reminiscences. She is not, I am wont to add, mine to mourn. She was a person, had friends and favorite places and moods and reasons, and it's a worse day than you or I can know for the people who were really with her. But you and I have lost something, too, and for what it's worth, I'm sorry for the both of us.

Maury D'annato, Out and Intermittently Proud

Intentionally or not, the Free for All series at Town Hall celebrated Gay Pride (or, in my case, just another weekend of profound ambivalence) with an appearance by out homosexual lesbian female dyke-arino Sharon Isbin and friend-to-the-community Susanne Menzter. Or I kind of assume she is, anyway...she used to put on benefits for Bonaventure House, an HIV related social service agency in Chicago. The funny gay footnote--and as you know, I'm a footnote fetishist--is that as Isbin gave a little biographical sketch of Garcia Lorca, one of the composers on the program, she omitted the fact that one source of trouble for the poet under Franco was his gay homosexual faggotry, though she did focus on his death, and that of about six other people she talked about. Really, it was like an evening with Edward Gorey. Oh the other funny thing is I had happened to watch the episode of The L Word on which she had a totally gratuitous cameo the night before. Shut up, it's totally great.

In any case, Isbin and Mentzer put on an enjoyable and at times gripping show focusing largely on Espana. If you'd like to teach me to type a tilde on blogger, you're more than welcome to. Very little of this was rep tailored to Mentzer's particular areas of wonderfulness, if you ask me, though she did shine in the last two or three of the Seven Popular Songs of Falla. And though there were so many of them as to appear at times gratuitous, each floaty pianissimo was a master class, a very very quiet master class. The first time I remember hearing someone sing pianissimi you could magically hear throughout the house was Michel Senechal as M. Triquet in the Met's Onegin. It's a trick I'll sure as hell never figure out, but thankfully for all of us, I do not sing in front of the public. Mentzer's Spanish is attentively produced with a "ceta" in regionally appropriate songs and just the right muting of certain consonants so as not to sound like a language lab tape.

For the record, my pissyness about Mentzer being long absent at the Met turns out to be pure paranoia. The decision, as we found out during an intermission interview, was Mentzer's--she largely took time off from opera to deal with having (how sharper than a serpent's tooth!) a teenage son. And now that he's packed safely off to college, I hope she'll be back for more than just the Tan Dun next year. My loopy fantasy is that she's covering for LHL in next year's run of Orfeos, which the L seems at this point almost certain to cancel. [Later edit: News had just spread that Lieberson had canceled the remainder of her engagements for 2006 when I wrote this. In light of the next entry, this comes off as callous to say the least, but I didn't know, and this is what I wrote.] I don't think Mentzer has sung the role but it seems like it would work out and for my money she's about the only one of the large flock of excellent mezzos we have who matches Hunt Lieberson in raw sincerity of expression.

Isbin performed several solo numbers between the song sets, including one written for her by Leo Brouwer that I found melodically rather plodding. Casting my lot with the lowbrows, I was more delighted with her performance of a number of chestnuts of the rep we know as Spanish guitar music, though it's all arranged I guess. Isbin's readings of these very familiar pieces were dynamically nuanced almost to the point of being fussy, with the overall effect I think of coming off with less swagger than we're used to, but having instead a heightened introversion. Asturias sounded less likely than usual to result in string breakage and was the more fascinating for it. Recuerdos de la Alhambra was fine grained and sentimental, in an extremely appealing way.

So anyway, thought I'd poke my head out from the cave where I'm hibernating until Caramoor. (Where "me"=Maury, anyway. The man behind the name unfortunately has to work for a living--no rest for the wicked, I think they say.)

Not Outrageously Special Tony Award Edition

I mean, I'd only seen two of the nominated shows: Sweeney Todd and Souvenir, both strewn with adverbs and such in these pages. So I didn't have a lot of emotional investment in the proceedings. I suppose I was sorry that Patti LuPone didn't pick up a statuette for her dirty work, but for all I know La Chanze (who I hope will be provided with a last name as part of her prize) actually brought things to the role of Celie that Angela Lansbury simply didn't have in the original production. Oh, wait...

So all I really want to say is I guess people should stop writing musicals now that they're giving top honors to musicals where the important process was photocopying. Yes, I have a giant chip on my shoulder about jukebox musicals, never having seen one. That's just because the whole idea is so goddamn stupid. I'm just terribly afraid in fifty years the choices on broadway are going to be "Toxic! The Musical" and "Glitter, the Mariah Carey Story." That sound you hear coming from Mount Olympus is Euterpe, the lyric muse, chugging (nay--shotgunning) a bottle of Drano.

For a much more thorough round-up, please see manprano.

Ring, etc.

When you're an opera fiend, and this fact is known, people who are opera-curious or even opera fans but not yet mentally ill about it are bound to ask you, "which Ring should I buy?" My shorthand answer is "[until you have problematically specific tastes] buy the Solti." My snooty answer is, "develop problematically specific tastes and then mix and match. My ideal goes something like: famous big deal Kna Gotterdammerung w/ Varnay etc or maybe in fact Solti, impossible to find Flagstad/Melchior Met Siegfried* or recently released bazillion dollar Windgassen/Varnay thing, Leinsdorf Walkuere with Vickers, Brouwenstijn, young Nilssen, and I don't really care what Rheingold because I hate Das Rheingold." By this point most people have fled. Anyway La Cieca has, I believe, taken it one step further and is going act by act, which should be fun. Check it out over at Unnatural Acts.

Come to type of Wagner, I couldn't help myself this afternoon and bought a used Gala set of Bernstein and Farrell doing bleeding chunks. Get home and put it on only to find it is very late in the game for Farrell and recorded in an unflattering acoustic, the Dawn Duet anyway. Looks like the main or only draw is going to be the considerably earlier Immolation under de Sabata, a bonus track. I suppose the Tristan and Walkuere stuff could be better, but it's around the same year as the d.d. in which she sounds, and I just can't think of a more apt way to put it than the hipster locution: like ass. [Edit to add: I think it's the recording acoustic as much as her vocal estate. The Sieglinde from two years earlier sounds rather a lot better.]


*seriously, I stumbled upon it used in Chicago, then some asshole borrowed and never returned mine, and now I'd have to order it from overseas

Nixon

Bit of a half-assed write-up of Nixon in China in Chicago, I think. Vacation from work=vacation from blog? Apparently not. Blog springs eternal.

One of my sources/correspondents opines that Nixon, with its several upcoming productions, should be liberated from all influences of Sellars, and step on it. Still, I'd like to see the video of the Houston premiere production [I am positive I saw a video of it in, um, well, high school, but it must have been one of those things on Great Performances that was banished to outer space, because I've never seen any mention of it since...] because I'm dying to know if the third act makes a whit of sense in a more literal production, which I believe Houston/Sellars was.

I know NiC primarily from the highlights disc, which is wonderful, but apparently also not really representative. The tracks on there give it a feel of being poetic but not impenetrably abstract. And unless there are just some stage directions that got tossed out the window by an ambitious director, that's not the case. This is closer kin to Gertrude Stein than to Giancarlo Menotti. And yeah, I guess I'm coming from a somewhat conservative place vis a vis narrative in my art, for better or worse. I'm the guy who thinks Vanessa is a perfect libretto. I mean, jeez.

So the second and third acts--literal sense seemed less and less important as the evening wore on--was a long scratching of the head, but vocally pretty satisfying. Word is it was amplified, right? Puzzling, since Robert Orth still sounded lacklustre down low, the only truly weak part of an overall strong run through the role (which he repeats in Cinci and Houston, as do several of his colleagues.) Maria Kanyova was very much his equal as Pat, in an unfussy performance that lost little dignity during some of the more clueless directorial moments. One awaits her Glimmerglass Jenufa with heightened interest. I think, in fact, all the principals created viable characters, worthy of later reflection, but thanks to Alice Goodman mostly, only in a sidelong fashion.

As on the recording, the most distinguished reading was that of Chou En Lai (there: the wonderful Sanford Sylvan; here: the calmly enthralling Chen Ye Yuan) Chou gets some of the most quietly wunderbar music in the piece, and Chen, like Sylvan, decants it aristocratically.

Of course I think we were all waiting for the well hyped Kathleen Kim in the ball-breaking role of Qiang Qing, the wife of Mao. To hear her aria "I am the Wife of Mao Tse Tung" is to go around humming it for 72 hours or so until you bust yourself smartly over the head with a curling stone in despair. Really a masterpiece not just of 20th century op lit but the whole damn shindig. Ms. Kim did not shrink from it until the end, where she skipped the final trips into the ionosphere for lower options, and it would be idiotic to complain, as 98% of the rest of it was solid stuff. When I listen to the aria next I'm sure I'll see her in my head, standing surely under 5 feet (my compatriot in stature) with an uzi* in hand, looking just about ready to use it. The amplification and her tiny, tremulous vibrato makes it hard to judge quite what's going on with the voice, but LOC is lately much in the habit of turning out killer voices, so I'll be watching to see where she goes.

Mao, too, is a cruelly written role, and I'm not sure how to judge Mark Duffin on it. His tone was no day at the beach, but he was persuasive and quite comprehensible over an orchestra that wasn't doing anyone any favors.

Moments of the production were certainly a success--Pat Nixon's whole scene in Act II conveyed character without too much concrete to go on--but the overall feel was one of adolescent striving, a concept piece that's just a little too high maintenance. Two of the things that serve as warnings to me turned up early on: a mute but Clearly Very Meaningful character meandering about, doing things like sprinkling snow from above (an activity endorsed by the Clearly Very Meaningful Mute Characters' Union) and a bunch of television screens. In the end, I couldn't much say that either really merited its inclusion.

At intermission I ran into my friend who used to write as Enzo Bordello, one of the folks whose opera-writing back in r.m.o. days taught me opera. Now there's someone whose blogging we'd all like to read, but alas, his work eats up all his time, I think.

*Uzi? I think uzi. Try not to perish from the shock of it when I say I wasn't one of the kids who sat around drawing artillery in middle school.

Next up: lordy, not so much. Potentially naught 'til Caramoor.

Second verse, same as the first

...and so we all walked around and said hello to the people we usually say hello to, heard Barbara Walters was there, heard Giuliani was not. Had refreshments, flexed the ol' sitzfleisch, and dug in for the second course.

I'm trying now to remember "Trouser Roles"--the piece Ben Moore wrote for a Sue Graham recital tour or album. Because if it was really clever, then maybe this time they simply held a gun to his head and said "Write songs about how great Volpe is or you'll disappear in the night like Esenin." (yes, the whole thing is somehow more fun if we imagine it to have taken place under the watchful eyes of a tyrant regime, am I wrong?) And that's why these two weren't really that memorable, because nobody likes to write under threat of a whipping, except maybe Sondheim. But if it's just the original Voigt Wagner roles song that really gets a laugh, then that one's the one-off and we can all go back to disliking novelty songs.

"The Audience Song," as you will have gathered, was a little forced. I mean, not awful, and god knows I couldn't write a funny song, or an anything song, to save my life. Graham delivered it cutely, and you know, I think it actually merits mention that this little song made mention both coy and explicit of the inumerable fags who make opera opera, apostrophizing the audience thusly:

For you are young and old
And gay and straight
And left and right

[yes and you, missy, sang at the Bush inauguration and have some 'splainin' to do, but nothing rhymes with inauguration except "impeachment" and that's sort of a slant rhyme. I digress more than usual.]

You see, amazing as it is, I'm told the opera world is rather conservative about sexuality, and I suppose it stands to reason--outside of the countertenor range, can you name one out male singer? (There was an old joke about the comparative difficulties of being gay and being black, and the punchline is you don't have to tell your parents you're black. Or a countertenor.) And the few on the Sapphic side of the aisle came out in the last few years.

Blah blah Lohengrin prelude, blah blah annoying Grande-Duchesse aria. Yeah, Blythe has a classy instrument, but I never hear her sing much interesting, so I'm not fully in the fan club. Licitra: cancelled. Shucks!

Ramey is an artist I've heard be so wonderful and so goddamn consistent I'm just going to forgive the fact there's not much left. "Vous qui faites l'endormie" was creaky but top notch in its way, and I'm not exactly sitting around wishing they'd hire him for his old roles, but once he retires altogether the loss will be felt. Ramey was the one thing in SFO's dinner theater caliber Louise in '99 that made the opera seem like anything other than life's bleak little three hour joke on anyone who just wanted to hear Depuis le Jour.

So, hm, perhaps it was a blood sugar thing, but I don't remember anything about Alagna in the Cyrano piece, and I was really looking forward to it because 1) I heard the hapless Barasorda sing the role this season, and 2) Alagna in French can be really fine and stylish. I hope you heard his Faust.

At this point I must issue a no bitchiness warning because the next few things were all great, and I can't find a single rotten tomato to lob at the artists. And in the case of Hvorostovsky there's sometimes not much to say even when it's great: his is a quiet perfection, not flashy, and I'm never sure what to say except keep on keepin' on, DH. Onegin next seez should be a very polished thing, though you could wish for a bit more extroverted takes on the role, as I'm recalling his recorded turn in the role. He doesn't seem like someone a bookish, sheltered, country girl would get all crazy mad for letter-writing over, unless she just liked his hair that much.

Oh god, and then Rene Pape. I almost feel like skipping over this entirely because this is a tawdry little blog full of silly jokes and the like, and not the place necessarily to discuss something so downright religious as what Pape did to Verdi. I guess I do nothing to diminish its splendor by slathering a few more words on it, though...it's just that I love "Ella giammai m'amo" rather passionately, and sometimes even daydream about how I would sing it if I had the voice to match the ideal version I hear in my head. Well I'm done with all that, as I've heard it out loud. He pulled all the stops, from hearbreakingly wrecked to solid and virile, but not for show. I suppose for me this was the highlight of the gala.

I have had some pointed things to say about Dolora Zajick in the past but some nights, in some rep, she's on fire and there's no two ways about it. "O mon Fernand" actually calls up an even worse SFO memory (naturally enough, La Favorita, done in Italian I think, but I've suppressed all recall of the event, and now what's left of it in my unconscious is expressed as hysterical hiccuping on occasion, if at all) but then on the other hand, dismissing the dreck that it comes wrapped in, it's a pretty piece that puts one in mind of pleasant evenings by the victrola. Once, when I was 21 and knew everything, I told someone in a minor rec.music.opera knock-down-drag-out that Zajick was a dramatic soprano and if she continued to sing as a mezzo, she would be remembered only as a footnote. Being wrong really is an art of sorts. Mostly, though, I mention it because why is the Met having Gruber do Macbeth when they have some swell fach-jumpers like Urmana and Zajick that could really rip it up? It's hard to tell how reliable the top is but it burns like bad whiskey and I like it.

Two numbers from Cosi: Te Kanawa and von Stade in the Act I duet and Fleming/Graham/Hampson in the beloved trio. I was actually just wondering the other day what it would do to the dynamic of the piece if some nutty regisseur decided that Dordiligi and Guigliando should be 45ish and somewhat the wiser. Because I sit around thinking about things like that. One wit was heard to call Kiri and Flicka's take "Cosi Fan Golden Girls" and it was an interesting glimpse into my little Walter Mitty opera fantasy. It found them both quite up to the task, including that one endless phrase they both get, and cutely mischievous. The Cosi trio went for nothing, as I'm afraid it must out of context, in a gala, in fetching frocks.

Oh wait. I skipped the other Meier number. Eh.

Mattila in operetta: Why?

You know what? This is really long. And the rest of the gala was for me, for the most part, a series of shrugs. It was a blast being there and I was still glowing from Pape and Dessay, but...I'm just going to barrel through it. Graham sang Clemenza, and it's something she's good at. Vargas sang Elisir, and it's something he used to be good at. Still pretty, but for the twentieth time, weird choice. Why not some of the slightly heavier stuff he has grown into beautifully? Freni babbled like a loon and sang a very tiny snippet of Boheme under her breath. I guess she was charming, but I wasn't really there for her career, and without the filter of nostalgia, it was like listening to a Tiger Beat article that had been translated into and then back out of Thai. For closers, a bunch of people sang the last few pages of Fi-diddly-eye-oh, which is the height of jubilation if you're German and in a nursing home. And yes, Virginia, there was an encore. Someone sat Volpe down on a stool and made him listen to Fleming singing light music ("When I have sung my songs") as if to say: look what you did to this perfectly good singer.

And that is that.

Hope you're hungry!

Well then. There's really just no good way to go about this other than go down the list I think, just pour it all out and print it and edit when someone says "but Maury, you dear, doddering old thing, nobody dies in Die Fledermaus." Actually it's true: very little editing goes on here at My Favorite Intermissions. Well act surprised. Raise your eyebrows or something. Anyway if this becomes interminable, though I guess I'll skip orchestral and choral numbers, I encourage you to scan down the page for the names you're interested in. I mean, let's be honest: I'm not gonna know.

Last night the Metropolitan Opera threw its big five hour fete for outgoing boss Joseph Volpe, only as parties go it was in some ways rather staid--the only person who appeared to be drunk, even, was Mirella Freni. People sang, and people spoke, and there was a big sentimental film about the Volpe era/regime (depends upon who you are I guess) in which a retired chorus member said Franco Zefirelli "just about fell out" when Volpe did something or other. I forget what because the idea of FZ falling out was just too grand. If you're from the south, you'll get it, ok?

The two original numbers written for the gala were tittery and in the spirit of very gentle roasts and, I'd have to say, not really as clever as "Wagner Roles," the song Mr. Moore wrote for Deborah Voigt many seasons back. Her number, "We're Very Concerned" had a by now somewhat expected "I lost lots of weight" reference (and here we pause to note how nice she looked) and a rather jaw-dropping potshot at Kathleen Battle. Not to overstate things...he didn't accuse her of sorcery or anything. Maybe it's that people were speculating on whether she might be a surprise guest a few weeks ago, but it just struck me as a little shocking, though funny, that a song for a huge, expensive gala took a very specific swipe at a person who will no doubt hear of it. Voigt was armed with a microphone and her customary game and articulate way with light music.

Juan Diego Florez followed with "La speranza piu soava" from Semiramide sung in very long breaths and with undiminished sweetness. The high notes were such as anyone would envy. After this, more Rossini on the Olga and Ildar show, and here's where the truly lamentable programming began. I would find myself wondering as the evening went on if the artists chose their numbers themselves. If so, someone please have a talk with Olga and Ildar. The Italiana duet was an awful fit, like one of those nights on American Idol (which I've watched about thrice, I'm serious) where some 18 year old cheerleader from Plano dukes it out with Rogers & Hart. It sounded like Simionato and Pinza or whoever that was, only this was "Anything you can sing, I can sing less idiomatically." No you can't, yes I can, yeah you're right.

Placido Domingo proved he speaks Spanish in case you thought the ethnic thing was an act. Frederica von Stade proved that some people age better than...I started to say better than others but why not get one last barb in and say "some people age better than Aprile Millo." I think I will. I think I did. Ruth Ann Swenson proved that she really was sick and not just playing hooky from the afternoon's Elisir. Say, who was her cover, and how did she do? Bill Irwin flounced inexplicably around the stage to the Onegin Polonaise.

And a strange thing happened to me during the next number. I spent all of the recit ("Ah, se una volta sola...") and most of the aria ("Ah! Non credea mirarti") wondering if the pinchy quality about Dessay's voice is forever going to keep me from enjoying her singing despite its obvious craft and quality. In that way that the past wrecks things for us sometimes, I always think she's about to have the effortless spin of Mesple, but that's just not her sound. And then, from the first instant of the cabaletta ("Ah! I begin all my utterances with 'Ah!' and by the way, non giunge!") that thing happened that only happens maybe twice a season. It feels like electricity entering through my feet and crawling up my spine. I wonder if maybe I have an idea what it was like, now, to hear the young Sutherland--different sounds, obviously, but that same daredevil sense of "fuck you, I can sing anything." The house shared my pleasure.

The same house gave a surprising, markedly cold shoulder to Dwayne Croft. Wonder what that's about. He didn't really own the Count's Aria as in olden days, but he didn't suck.

So then on sails Denyce Graves dressed, apparently, as a mermaid and sings "Can't Help Mispronouncin' dem Pronouns of Mine." This could not have been her idea. I do think Showboat is a masterpiece, but, um...yeah. Her diction throughout was puzzlingly non-native, her famous commitment and her vocal unevenness equally in evidence, and the audience gasped en masse as she ended the piece on a low Z or something. It's not for me to know whether this was a gasp of admiration or aesthetic bewilderment. Or, hell, who knows, some of those folks in Orchestra may simply never have seen a black person.

Say, do you remember the time when I was all "Renee Fleming in Verdi will be something to cheer about!"? Can we pretend that conversation didn't happen? Thing is, she in fact made much less of an expressionist masterpiece out of "Tacea la notte" than she has made lately of Manon, to name the most grave offense. If it was not on par with Radvanovsky, it was at least pretty. But also at most pretty, I'm afraid. I don't know where this Fleming train is headed is what I'm getting at. I have to admit in the cabaletta I could think only of the standard criticism of the Fleming bashers: there was, as they say, no note produced at a single volume. Each one was a tiny "pace, mio dio!" And that's just too much. I guess the jury's still out, but I'm not what you'd call optimistic.

James Morris sang "Bill Frist ist um" (you know--from The Flying Right Wing Nutjob) and erased some unfond memories of his Scarpia.

I, for one, was rather excited to see that Meier was singing the death of Didon, but it didn't really pan out, I'm sincerely sorry to say. I'm thinking Waltraud maybe just doesn't translate. The gestures were grand and her choice of gowns triggered a certain existential nausea that was interesting in its way, but the specter of LHL stood there impatienty, tapping its spectral foot. Phonetically and stylistically, a bit of an abortion; dramatically, neither fleischig nor milchig, with here and there a declamatory wallop. Did I say how much I liked her Kundry? [Listen, I'm sorry this is turning into such a laundry list, devoid of narrative flow. I was serious, though: hit control F and scan for Mirella Freni if that's what you're after. Not for nothing, it's also almost 1:30 again and this time a school night, so this is looking like a two parter.] Meier's partner of a few nights ago, the occasionally wonderful Ben Heppner, trotted out the Meistersinger prize song in excellent voice.

I really couldn't disagree when La Cieca dubbed Kiri Te Kanawa "the world's highest paid church soprano" many years ago. And yet, in certain rep the simplicity of her singing works out to something quite moving. I still recall the way the air went out of my lungs when this singer I thought of as bloodless sang "Madeleine! Madeleine!" into her mirror in that one Capriccio broadcast. Marietta's Lied in the gala had a little of this quality, and maybe the wear on the voice lent a little pathos. God knows it's not in bad shape--Te Kanawa left the opera stage before any real decline happened, and at its best the voice was like...like what Fleming would sound like if she'd shut up and sing. That good.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wished, upon seeing Stratas' brief, warm tribute in the film segment, that she had been the surprise guest. (Not to keep you guessing, there was no surprise guest, except Mirella Freni's senile dementia.) It was the same feeling of nostalgia and regret, I'm afraid, that Voigt's reading of Sieglinde's aria provoked. Once a vocal marvel that felt aimed individually at you as you sat in your cheap seats, her Du Bist der Lenz is still radiant but on a much smaller scale. Over the course of the past season I've grown less and less confident that the new, reduced Voigt is quite the voice we knew before.

To close the first half, Domingo sang "Granada." Agustin Lara is a wonderful song writer who penned such gems as "Despues" and "Piensa en mi," but Granada is more a snowglobe in music, a little, local bit of kitsch. I seriously can't fathom what was going on when they planned this.

Alright, go mill around in the lobby now, and have a cup of coffee. Maury's gonna hit the sack and finish this later.

INTERMISSION

And now the season is really, truly over.

Holy jebus was that a lot of opera.

I'm obviously blogging it later. It's 1:30.

Talk about your out of town tryouts!

Didn't I say she'd be great in this rep?

Next year Sandra Radvanovsky sings her first Lucrezia Borgia...in the Canary Islands!

Whereupon Maury might should look into Witness Protection programs

I've heard it said that when Magda made her Met debut at age 104, as Tosca, apparently with the same delicious lack of subtlety onstage that marks her recordings, all the queens could say to each other at intermission was, "and then she saw the knife!" You can imagine the mix of adoration and ridicule, I think. Tosca, as a piece of theater, as a brilliant piece of crap, presupposes laughably outsize gestures. If you ask me, the one from last night that's going to get the most play is unquestionably the moment when Millo, having screwed her courage to the sticking place with a supersized swig of chianti, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and shook it dry like a quarterback chugging gatorade. Certainly for me this was the biggest laugh, and I saw a number of sort of vicious imitations of it after the fact. One wit added, bewilderingly but rather devastatingly, "like she just finished a goddamn pot of matzoh brei."

Well, I'm neither slain in the spirit nor wholly unconvinced, which is more than a little disappointing. I can't really trash Millo entirely or discount the enormous ovation she got, on account of she mostly didn't suck and did have moments of glory. The voice, at this stage of the game, is a rather ugly one with a few fascinating features I imagine have always been there and are the reason for all the to-do. The big, rich Tebaldi register is, I am forced to concede, quite unique on the opera stage these days, as far as I know. And as far as Italianate phrasing, when she's on, she's on, and I'm grateful to hear it. And when she's off, she sings like the rotting corpse of Maria Caniglia, to wit: much of Act I.

And the crazy thing about Villa is that he's a perfect tenor version of Millo. The top is loud and frayed and hints at unreliability but mostly makes it. The phrasing has its old school moments, very gratifying. I can't argue with his "e lucevan," though the rest of the evening his tone was wearying, like a long argument. Here perhaps I've overreached and the similarity ends...whereas his acting chops are a bit coarse, her basic manner of inhabiting a character is, in this opera about a bunch of Catholics, vulgar in a way I'd always associated more with Southern Baptism. And then she sings the beginning of the big aria with an exquisite line and I forgive her. And then (yes I know I'm going out of order--think of it as a postmodern narrative) she sings "egli vedi ch'io pianga" and though it's absolutely nothing special and owes much of the breadth of the "vedi" to the large breath before "ch'io pianga", her fans begin to applaud mid-scene with the inevitability of death and taxes, and I unforgive her. At least at this one, they didn't shoosh ovations for other singers, as I witnessed at the (vocally much more succesful) Fanciulla at OONY, where the overall concentration of mouthbreathers is for some reason always higher, a year ago.

I think the reason I never give the Millo a break is that her fans seem not to forgive her faults so much as to cognitively suppress them. In an OONY benefit concert in '99 at Alice Tully, Millo sang "Pace, mio dio" sort of well and ended it quite flat (as, in fact, she ended Vissi d'arte--the final note was, in horseshoes and hand grenades terms, close enough, but the one before it was...actually the same note, which it ain't supposed to be.) But then she made that gesture of snatching something out of the air which is international sign language for "applaud or I break your face" and the house exploded. Someone else has an off night, they get a slightly diminished ovation, you know? It happened to Heppner, quite recently. And while there was no snatching of invisible handkerchiefs out of the air tonight, there was so much swanning about with arms outstretched, at times I thought she might be about to pick a fight with Luana DeVol.

I'm done picking on Morris I guess, except to say RETIRE RETIRE RETIRE DAMMIT RETIRE. And if you're going to sing like that, try not to do it within fifteen minutes of Kyle Ketelsen, whose comparative freshness and solidity carry a doubltess unintentional subext of: RETIRE, BITCH. Tonight was actually better than the prima, but I despair of forever seeing the world's best entrance music lavished on someone who can't run with it.

And with that, except for a special event that's really its own self contained big deal, the Met season is over for Maury. My first season as a blower of hot air, a blogstress, a reviewer if to say so isn't grandiose. I've never had such a season, truly. I think I went to every production but two (Aida, Elisir), many on opening night with pen at least imaginarily in hand, some of them twice. There was filth and there was dementia, as Dickens once wrote, only I promise not to launch into a teary retrospective on you...

Next up and probably last for a while, though there is Caramoor over the summer: Volpedammerung.

An imaginary Parsifal you won't want to miss [...and other loose ends from my brain]

The nice thing about sitemeter is you can see what odd queries brought people to your blog (well, most of them actually aren't odd. To be honest, most of them are the names of Met Council Audition finalists. Dear Holli Harrison, thanks for all the hits! xo, Maury) and then you can see what other stuff came up on the same searches. Which landed me at this really funny Parsifal coming soon to a theater near you, or more likely not. Ok, usually, the word "this" would be a clicky link, only blogger.com and my computer are having a fight, so I'll just show you the URL:

http://micaelabaranello.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-i-direct-parsifal.html

This in particular kind of killed me:

The Holy Spring will be on stage. Preferably, a deep pool with a small waterfall. Whenever anyone is baptized, they will be dumped into it. None of this "few drops of imaginary water on the top of the head" crap. In Act I, the trainee knights dump Amfortas right off his litter and into it as well. All must make a reappearance a few bars later, soaking wet and gasping for air.

I've been back on a Gencer bender, me. In my spare time. And also grooving on Lisitsian, yesiree Bob. And I stumbled upon a cheap-enough-I-couldn't-not copy of the Cigna/Olivero/Merli Turandot at Academy. I'd always wanted to hear it. In fact, it's...flawed but compelling. What's with Cigna anyway? I knew her first from a "Suicidio!" from I believe sometime around the same year as the Turandot, only she sounds rock solid there. In the Norma I have, she's a bit of a spaz, likewise the Turandot. Not unenjoyably so, but I wish it sounded more like the Suicidio. Ah well. Also just downloaded Neko Case's "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" but that's neither here nor opera.

Or: Never attend Five Hour Operas on Five Hours of Sleep

Fetch me a bib, Eunice! I'm fixin' to eat my words.

What I'd like to say right off the bat is Ben Heppner just gave a very fine performance in Parsifal, full of fire and music; one that is certainly making me rethink my proclamation that he's an essentially lyric tenor who's always going to fail in big boy roles. I'm still not sure what I think about this whole Siegfried notion, but in any case it's causing me substantial cognitive dissonance that the singer I heard tonight was the same one I heard on the broadcast two weeks ago as a very troubled Lohengrin. This was solid, fearless, and fairly loud.

I wonder if the tessitura is simply a happier place for him or whether perhaps he needs to be able to move about spontaneously to produce a healthy sound. I know when I took my semester or two of largely fruitless voice lessons in college, my teacher would sometimes downgrade the sound from strangled to merely pinched by tossing a ball back and forth with me. So, not to buy into Domingo's whole "Robert Wilson made me sick," mythos, but some singers more than others may in fact find their voices don't flow so freely when they're doing underwater yoga. Whatever happened, this was really good, really non-nerve-wracking singing, and I wonder what all the cancellation talk was about. Anyway, let it not be said that I'm dogmatic in my judgments of singer, though just to firm up my reputation for being a deeply negative person, I do suppose it bears mention that his acting continues to run the gamut from Gilligan to Skipper.

Listen, by the way, I slept through a certain portion of this evening's performance, so maybe I shouldn't even be talking. I'm deeply ashamed (as is evidenced by my public announcement of the fact)--I've only ever fallen asleep at the opera one other time, that being in Houston in the 90's when someone had just dusted off that week's Totally, Not Kidding This Time, Definitive Version of Boris Godunov. Anyone would have fallen asleep, trust me. Until they dig up a version with a big torchy Act I closer and some really sassy backup singers for BG, I'm busy that night.

I don't know what to say except it was a really long week. Act I is achingly beautiful music, and I am going to aesthetic hell for what I did.

But let's talk about Waltraud Meier. Did you ever get off on the wrong foot with a singer and then discover later she's utterly divoon? Exhibit A: that French Don Carlos from like ten years ago. Meier's contribution I recall as ghastly beyond words. Well tonight, kids, she brought the demented. Sure, we all get a bit skeptical when a mezzo decides she's going to fach up, as they say in certain parts. Y'know: how many sopranos does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three; one to screw it in, one to put the ladder out from under her, and a third to murmur through a very tight smile, "well reallydarling, it was to high for her."

Meier is many years into this one and the top is absolutely surgical. Act II was sung with great poise and real commitment. I feel like she goes around singing Kundry at any opera house, high school, or nursing home that's putting on Parsifal, but she hasn't routinized it or put it on autopilot in any perceptible way. "Ich sah das Kind" was produced with the sort of musicality that makes it sound like far more accessible music than it is, like Puccini or something. It was almost enough to make me forget what mystical crap the libretto is, and that takes some doing.

I can't get too enthusiastic or on the other hand too bitter about the conducting. I'd say it lacked some of the grandeur and pacing of the Lohengrin run, but I'd say it softly and hope nobody much heard, and then wait for someone who's more keenly tuned in to conducting to give you the real skinny.

It's getting really hard to say anything about Rene Pape that doesn't sound somehow like saying, "Puppies are really cute. No, I mean seriously cute. Hot damn are they cute." Unless you're trying to be the most controversial kid in the fourth grade, you're just kind of stuck being part of the amen chorus, because at least in Wagner, there's never going to be anything negative or even lukewarm to say about him. I will simply venture to comment that Gurnemanz is all the more an accomplishment for being an absolutely endless sing. For god's sake, he doesn't even have the good sense to know that singers with such beautiful voices are usually boring.

I didn't end up having much of an opinion on Tommy Hairdo, nor even much snarky to say. There remains an element of late period Jessye Norman to the delivery, something pedantic, but it's not overwhelming, and while I don't think the voice has a real Wagnerian steel in it, it was very pretty and always where it needed to be.

Next up, I brave the Millo Tosca (with the Wellsungs--safety in numbers) waiting either to be reborn as a Millatic or say truly rotten things after.

Just for the hell of it, a second look

Well I mean I was hardly going to miss Vogt's Lohengrin after the things people were saying online, right? And so I did not.

A short report, then. First of all Mattila just keeps getting better as Elsa. I've never been a hardcore Mattilist, often find there's a disconnect between the frenetic physical acting style and the voice, which has a smallish palette if you ask me. So either I haven't been giving her enough credit, or Esla is just a role that calls for exactly what she's got to give. She makes the Robert Wilson thing look like an obvious choice (though I'm going to have to paste in an image later that may ruin the production for you) and is so vocally ping-y the tiny casting agent in the mind makes little paper dolls of her and puts on Isolde costumes and such, just for fun, when no-one's looking. DeVol continues to work out in the role despite a certain vocal curdle that just isn't going anywhere. She had a few slips on high notes, forgivable at the end of the evening at the end of the run, and also really nothing compared to the unfortunately well documented Heppner mishaps. Her closing night clearance sale vamping was a special treat. Did that sound sarcastic? Because it so wasn't.

Pape is another singer I hadn't fully signed on with until last night. His turn in last season's unexpectedly mediocre Faust was solid but to my ear rather joyless. You can have all the technique in the books in that role, but if you lack a certain swagger, you are toast. French toast. Maybe with carmelized bananas, like they make at Marseilles in Hell's Kitchen. Note to Maury: don't blog when hungry, or everything turns to brunch. So anyway as the King, Pape is a mile high stack of raspberry pancakes with tons of butter. Listen, just be glad I didn't go in for a bagel metaphor or we might have ended up with a Pape schmear. Thanks, I'll be here all week.

So who's that leave? Right, Klaus Florian Vogt. Do you pronounce the g at all? Does it like totally vanish or is it more of a guttural thing, pronounced like the ghghghghghg in "Heighghghghghgl dir, Elsa!"? It took me most of the evening to figure out what I thought about Herr Vogt, because the sounds was so thoroughly disorienting. The color doesn't go with the size, it''s like Anton Dermota was suddenly singing Otello. Really, truly, it sounds amplified. There are negatives, in particular a marked lack of legato, but the big picture is exciting, for sure. It's just confoundingly difficult to think exactly what rep he's cut out for. I'm a champ at dream casting and haven't a clue. When the first adjective that springs to mind to describe your Wagner tenor is "limpid", you know you're off the grid. For Lohengrin it makes for a rather spectacular success, though. It throws off the aesthetic balance of things if Lohengrin sounds prettier than Elsa, but in an interesting way. I have heard clips of Gedda and Pertile singing the big aria, but this was even more pronounced. Ok, you know what? I haven't figured out what I think of Vogt after all. Judging by his reception, though, I should have ample opportunity to do so.

It bears mention that the swan was out of order in Act I but Mr. Vogt made no reference to Leo Slezak. The nice thing about a Robert Wilson production is if you hadn't seen it before you'd probably just assume it was part of the whole abstract minimalism extravaganza. They called in a swan mechanic before the third act, thereby avoiding the crisis of a little boy covered in white paint having to cool his heels in his little Gap Kids loincloth upstage for half an hour before it was time for Lohengrin to pull him out of a hat.

Tune in next week for reviews of Thomas Hampson's hair in Parsifal. Tune in to Wellsung, where I'm expecting some opinions on Vogt any moment.

A little note about a favorite voice

If you've been reading for a while, you probably know by my incessant harping that Susanne Mentzer is one of a few singers I consider truly out of the ordinary, and artist and not just a pretty voice. I notice on Chicago Opera Theater's site that she is joining the faculty at Rice after years at DePaul. Lyric, it seems to me, never made much use of her. I wonder if she will now be gracing the stage of Houston Grand Opera, in many ways my home company, the first place I saw a real operatic star turn (Bartoli's US opera debut as Rosina) and the first place I heard Mentzer, as Octavian in 1993. Lucky Houston, if so.

Possente amor

Far be it from me to fan the flames of opera faggotry*, but y'all are gonna wet your pants over this one. I mean, everyone's already kind of having kittens about Stephen Costello, but I think I just joined up, myself. Check the link. Mr. Costello, who really is infuriatingly good looking on top of the rest of the sundae, sings the big Rigoletto scena 'til it begs for mercy. For my money, the performance lacks only Villazon's nervous energy. Meanwhile, someone with a score or a pitchpipe tell me what the high note is, k? My guitar thought it was an e flat, but my guitar has not been tuned to an external source in quite a while. And I mean, it couldn't be an e-flat, because that just wouldn't be fair.

[Almost forgot to tip the hat to Nick von Trrill who put me onto it.]

*The lies we tell, really.

You were expecting, maybe, a Rodelinda review? Aw, heck, I just cannot get up the steam to go see it. I think I've already spilled a few words too many about Fleming la belle and Fleming la bete, but without further dissertation, Fleming in Handel makes my teeth hurt. I'm absolutely thrilled, on the other hand, that she's singing Tacea la Notte at the Volpedammerung. If she goes that direction in the next few years, I'm quite prepared to become her cheerleader once again, pom-poms and all. Gimme an R!

Crisatunity

The thing that frustrates me is that a year from now, he'll sing something without any croaking, and people will say (as they did last time this happened, and the time before), "Heppner really seems to have come through his vocal crisis. I guess his technique is all patched up now." And the Rhein will overflow its banks, and we'll be righ back where we started, with apologies to Anna Russell. Evidence of what I'm talking about over at Parterre. And, yes, he sounded much better than this the night I went, but a musicologist friend informs me that very very strange musicology eminance Carolyn Abbate is actually writing these days about the effect Ben Heppner's cracks have on our listening experience. Speaking only for me and anyone who will sign my petition, I'd describe these effects as: wishing (hopefully without becoming one of those people) that someone would turn up another Melchior, or Vickers, or even Windgassen. Jeez, I don't hate his singing or anything, and he seems really nice, but it's getting to be like certain wines: odd years are fine; even years, let's just go see some nice Mozart.

Edit: Ok, this sounds unreasonable to me, re-reading. Heppner is a good singer. I guess I just wish we could stop referring to something so clockwork-regular as a crisis. Let's review: Heppner is a good singer. Heppner has a pretty, large, lyric voice. Heppner is going to fuck up in certain roles that require more than that, and if I don't feel like bracing myself for a lot of phlegmy sounds, I can always just skip those when he sings them, except I probably won't because there's no stellar alternative right now and I don't want to forego these operas altogether. The announced Siegfried in Aix sounds like a big mistake, but fortunately for everyone involved, I have a fear of flying matched only in intensity by my lack of funds for opera-going jaunts in Europe, so I will not be there, smacking my head, saying: it's not a vocal crisis, and he's not going to fix it. If this were the McLaughlin Group, and McLaughlin had just asked for everyone's predictions, I'd say: Heppner will sing Siegfried in Aix and then drop the role. And then I'd propose (platonic) marriage to Eleanor Clift for being so excellent. Anyway I'm probably wrong. I am not infrequently, it may be noted, wrong.