Ticket Porn

(You should pardon the Tiny Seashells of Discretion.)

Pluie, pluie, go away(ie.)

One for the "why not here?!" files

Elizabeth Connell in the Siegfried finale. MFI seal of enthusiastic approval goes here.

ETA: that's kind of the rhetorical "why" in the subject line, you will have gathered. She's not what you'd be forced, these days, to call "cinematic." On the other hand, Wagner sells out no matter what, or anyway the Ring and Tristan do, so it's not like any particular campaign need be waged to lure the young and unsuspecting into the opera house with the promise of great hair and abs...

Asked and answered

I don't know, is it considered bad blogging to quote comments from elsewhere if they were totally excellent and I want everyone to read them?

So it starts with a revealing post with complex implications at Parterre about the fellow who is funding I guess the overhaul of the State Theater, who turns out to be a teabag toting wingnut. (Me, I've always said I'd go libertarian if I weren't so darn fond of roads, hospitals, public schools and universities, the post office &c. &c. &c. I've also been known to say libertarianism is just anarchism with so much hedging you can't even get a decent punk album out of it. That's my libertarianism set. I'll be here all week.)

Anylez...people quickly get up in arms because die Heilige Kunst shouldn't be sullied by mean, dirty politics, and I guess someone with the nom de blogge of javier said "Anyway, opera and politics don't mix," because Will, who we suppose to be Will of Designer Blog who also comments here knocked it out of the park, and I'm gonna make you read it:

When you get to heaven, javier, look up Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, Kurt Weill, and Daniel Francois Esprit Auber, among many others, and mention your little fantasy to them.

Be prepared for gales of laughter.

Mozart deliberately conspired with da Ponte to put a play that had been banned in Paris the day after its premiere for its political content onto the opera stage in Vienna. Play and opera are both inflamatory political/social statements.

Verdi’s Risorgimento operas from early in his career ignited demonstrations and riots and were filled with coded references to the Austrian occupation of northern Italy. If you go to Atilla at the MET next season, listen for Ezio’s line “Avrai tu l’universo; resti l’Italia a me! which set off pandemonium in the theaters.

Wagner was an immensely political composer on and off stage–and I am NOT referring to what was done with his operas long after his death by Hitler and his gang. OK, with Weill I AM referring to Hitler and his gang, via Weill’s social and political protest in so many of his works.

And Auber, composer of what is arguably the first of the great French Grand Operas–what could possibly be political in his tale of a mute girl in love? Only that its run in Brussels caused riots that brought down the Belgian monarchy.

It’s amazing that people still insist that politics must NEVER be mixed with art, particularly “high and refined” arts like opera as if it pollutes them. All the arts are steeped in politics and have been. That’s why when Dictators seize countries, the arts are amont the first things they clamp down on.

Well, it doesn't get much more thorough than that.

It is a mess of a topic. Should we just be grateful of any money thrown at our pet art regardless of the source? I mean I don't think I'm on board with the commenter who said "NYC Opera and Ballet will not be getting a cent of my money," though I respect his conviction. It's worth talking about precisely because it's not straightforward, and precisely because there is some broad impulse not to talk about it. And yes, I also find it interesting to see the wingnuts coming out of the woodwork when something like this comes up. You assume that art broadens people. You are, it would seem, mistaken.

FWIW

The increasingly afterthoughtish-feeling Glimmerglass Opera (of the neato performance space, physical environs out of a fucking 19th c. painting, palpable lack of relevance) has announced 2010. You're probably sitting down because you're at a computer, but you don't really need to be.

It can be a fun parlour game* to make up swell Glimmerglass seasons because there's something of a formula: 1 Baroque, 1 20th C. usually in English, 1 warhorse, and a wild card, maybe Mozart or a musical. (There should be a Maybe Mozart festival. You show up and they're like "Nah, we weren't in the mood for L'Oca del Cairo after all. Tonight's Harry Partch. I think they're doing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik across town at Partially Partch if you've got cab fare.")

One thing you can count on in recent years, due to unfortunate economic realities, is a production that can be staffed wholly with the pack of hungry young things that make up the Young American Artist Program. This year, that will be The Tender Land, which I guess was written for young singers, so that's convenient and all. I have to say I've never met anyone who lamented the infrequency with which The Tender Land pops up at opera companies but maybe it's just so musically satisfying it only has to be done once in a while. You never know.

To someone-or-other's credit, the world's most photographed production of Tosca is not being pulled out of the retirement one assumes it has, by default, kinda entered as the buzzards circle around City Opera, twittering at one another "Possible free meal in the west 60's #carrion." A new one will take its place, and it actually is intriguing to wonder what they'll do casting-wise there.

During the aforementioned Tosca, they hired a pretty, petite, young singer as Tosca, and everyone in the company did kind of a two-month long version of the old Soprano joke (Q: How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? A: One to change it and one to say "really it was too high for her," should she fall off the ladder) except in this case all they could do was talk about how she was going to break her medium-sized voice on Tosca. It's possible she did, actually...she was booked for some stuff like Salome and more Toscas and then for not much. She really put a lot into the performance, though, so it's always felt sort of sad to me. Anyway then they got this tall, menacing-looking Italian without so very much voice for Scarpia and a tenor with an absolute monster of a sound (one vocal agent present noted that the fellow was louder than Heppner, and indeed when he busted out his "Vittoria!" in early rehearsals, astonished glances flew about the high school auditorium as the walls very nearly shook), and all of it added up to something pretty compelling, but none of them sings a lot that I've seen, so whatever. Einmal ist nicht keinmal, and I still think back on it fondly.

Figaro is the third one up next year, and what is there to say about that? Figaro is always cause for some happiness and rarely cause for much.

Tolomeo rounds things off. Handel is just the kind of thing that works best at Glimmerglass, the kind of opera it's actually a shame to see in a larger house, and most houses are that. Countertenors don't have to push and on nights when they throw open the sides of the theater to the night air, there's an undeniable enchantment in the delicate intimacy in those arias, sung with the finesse the space affords. One wonders if the house style of Handel productions is still in full swing, for better and sometimes worse, full of imagery that puts a few toes across the border between whimsical and dumb.

*and yet I don't feel like doing it just now. Feel free to play along at home.

p.s. things I have bailed on this summer include Semiramide (it turned out they were doing the full Ramide and between that and the weather forecast, I envisioned a soggy slog through a few too many roulades) and Les Huguenots, which fell from my schedule due to concerns of distance and tedium.

p.p.s. Hey do you need some salt? Because here's a grain: I do think Glimmerglass is not very interesting these days, but I'd be an ass to write something overwhelmingly sour like this and not acknowledge that I had professional dealings there many years ago and met probably four of the top five worst people I've ever met anywhere in terms of, oh, everything (though I met some lovelies, too...it's just that they weren't running the company/in a position to sap my life force.) So while I'll, on the other hand, always have a certain misty remembrances you don't get to hear about, I can never be quite fair to Glimmerglass, the Little Company that Occasionally Could.

frank martin--->lulz

Maury: poulenc + strauss/2=martin?
Maury: i think i mean mahler, not strauss
DSJ: maybe more Berg?
Maury: right on.
DSJ: he sprinkles his elegant neoclassicism with tone-rows.
Maury: it feels more immediately listener-friendly than berg
DSJ: yeah definitely
Maury: sorry, i actually really hate the game of "one hears echoes of puccini in the score." i am always turned off by reviews that do that.
DSJ: Well, you know, he's Swiss, so half French and half Austrian is about right
Maury: genau
Maury: great, i put "vin" and "herbe" in the search window and carla fucking bruni comes up
DSJ: Carla fucking Bruni fucking Sarkozy!
Maury: or vice versa
Maury: argh, it turns out i like her cover of "you belong to me." I am not sure how I feel about this.
DSJ: I wonder if... was it Nathan Gunn's??? Tom Waits cover is on YouTube
DSJ: lol HORRIBLE
Maury: what is this from?!
DSJ: his CROSSOVER ALBUM.
Maury: oh right
Maury: pass
DSJ: omgomgomg
DSJ: http://www.frankmartin.org/eng_s/eng_s_gastboek.html
DSJ: (WHAT?????)
Maury: hee hee hee hee hee
DSJ: DEAR MADAME MARTIN
Maury: “Please don't ask questions to which the answers can be found on this site.”
Maury: [redacted]: not on the site.
DSJ: SERIOUSLY
Maury: oh nevermind, it's under "concise biography"
DSJ: how can I not send obscene mail to Mme Martin
Maury: oh nevermind again, that says 12 tone

On not bothering to bring the mountain to Mohammed

Fragment of a comment from "Pelleas", chez Parterre, regarding Rufus Wainwright's "bringing opera to people who normally wouldn’t consider listening to it,"

...except that I don’t believe his audience is going to listen to any opera other than his. He’s made no secret of his operaphilia over the years, and it’s made no difference so far, in much the way that his Judy concert didn’t really make Garland fans out of people who weren’t in the first place.

There's something not just correct but, I think, significant in this sentiment, and as soon as I work out what it is, you'll know. This is me thinking out loud.

Say, do other people known by their friends for being an opera fan get the question "what should I listen to if I want to get into opera?" a lot? Because I do. And, not wholly for the sake of being an asshole, what I sometimes say is, "if you're not into opera, there may be a very good reason." Which is to say: it's not for everyone.

What I'm questioning, I guess, is the very idea of "bringing audiences to opera"--whether it happens at all, and whether it's worth all the pontification that goes on around whether Rufus Wainwright/Andrea Bocelli/the Muppets/&c. &c. &c. will get people to like opera. I'm not sure it ever happens that way. From time to time some appealing face of opera pops up in broader culture, but it seems to be a self-contained thing.

If you liked the blue diva in The Fifth Element, chances are really not that awfully great that you'd be excited by the rest of Lucia. If you were inspired by Paul Potts singing "Nessun dorma," I might speculate while firmly refusing to discuss the merits of his performance that what you liked was largely backstory and novelty and, sure, you might love opera, but chances are good you wouldn't, and Paul Potts is not a good weathervane.

Think of the scene in The Last Picture Show where all an earnest teacher's love of Keats means nothing to his students, because the other parts of their lives aren't fertile soil for a love of poetry. Except take some of the condescension out of that, because a love of opera, like the love of poetry, does not make you a better person. Operaphilia in addition to the love of, say, Gene Autrey does make you a broader, more interesting person, but that's a two-way street, a clap that takes two hands.

None of this has much to do with RW's day-in-the-life-of-a-diva opera, on which I can't comment because I've only heard the excerpt played on Parterre. I didn't love or hate it, though I find Wainwright's crooning a little uncomfortable to witness when it's not in music written with croon in the blueprints (how can I hate on "Poses" when I listened to it obsessively for a year?) but then I'm thinking of his youtube-documented Berlioz, and not his opera, which may very well have built-in croon.

Oh but ok, so take the Berlioz. Someone hears those, thinks "what Rufus likes, I may like," and buys Steber's ravishing trip through those songs with Mitropoulos. Yet again, I think that's not going anywhere. It's just that music is not always a continuum of listener-suitability. Opera is really specific. Opera is discrete. (That does not mean it refuses to send its picture, certain gheis.)

All that's left to do, then, is for me to suggest how new audiences are to be found so opera doesn't die if Sheryl Crow singing "La ci darem la mano" with Pavarotti* (count the problems!) isn't going to do the trick. Obviously, I have no fucking clue.

But if the answer is that opera is on its way out, I'm not going to leap out the window, just hope it outlasts me. I read this book once, okay I read a chapter, about language death, and for anyone who loves languages and appreciates that each has things it can express that no other can (though this can never be more than a hunch), the idea of a language disappearing forever is really to dab your eyes about. But it's also completely inevitable and a part of the backdrop against which the languages that hang on, for now, live out their own interesting lives. Nothing is immortal and few things last very long at all.

Sorry, I'm totally killing time 'til I can get on a train for a long weekend, so it's getting a bit purple in here. (I never work blue. Except a few paragraphs up, for a second, and then only light blue.) But I think I'm not wrong about all of this. Please feel welcome to disagree politely, as it cheers a blogger up to see comments.

*awful but not reprehensible. This is an important distinction. Also, please admit there is a loveable screwball comedy in the part where...well this one friend of mine told me about a recital in High School where she couldn't remember the words to one of the "24 Rather Moldy Italian Art Songs" and had to start making up Italian words. I always wondered what that would look like, and now, to my delight, I know.

P.S. (!) while one is momentarily asserting one's presence in the blogosphere, one really ought to take a moment to congratulate La Cieca on being quite the It Girl, everywhere but the goddamn cover of Time lately!

Missing Link

I'll let you try and figure out the elusive connection between these there videos. (Hint: there isn't one.)







Ok, fine. The connection is they all make me happy. Thanks to the people that posted them. The last one, yes, is bittersweet, in that it explains a certain amount about my love life: born too late to gaymarry Glenn Gould.

The Professor and Mary Ann

Ok so I'm obviously not going to write about the rest in any detail. In the interest of some kind of misguided completism, thumbnail sketches of everything I can call to mind.

Billy Elliot: incoherent first act, musically and dramatically mixing up two themes (the personal and the political, in effect) that don't really make sense together until the much more enjoyable second act. Excellent class and gender politics for a B&T blockbuster, some clumsy cheap sentiment, set design that's busier than it needs to be and (outside of what is basically a socialist anthem) not much music you will remember half an hour later. Reminded me how wonderful Chaikovsky is (!) One "how did that make it past previews" scene involving nightmare-inducing giant dancing garments. Lovely showcase for some gallingly talented kids. Weird that Gregory Jbara and Carole Shelley are nominated in such uninteresting roles.

Norman Conquests: Only saw the Table Manners section. Deft ensemble stuff, genuinely amusing though as usual, hard to feel quite a part of the uproarious guffawing of the audience. Probably I've missed what makes it special as I saw only one, but is Alan Ayckbourn a bit gimmicky often or something? One hears the other parts are less comic and more introspective. On the basis of only one part, should win some acting trophies and not Best Revival.

Exit the King: like a draft of Beckett run long, but for all that, cumulatively troubling in a way that feels true. Geoffrey Rush, clownish, tireless, sometimes appropriately uncomfortable to watch. Andrea Martin I don't think has been mentioned much but she's strange and hilarious. Susan Sarandon YMMV, I find her dull in imperious mode (even in Enchanted, but there it was fine to be an inch from camp. Here, arguably less so.) Fantastic sound design, which I don't usually notice but I was sitting right behind the guy w/ trumpet & drums. Who is hot. But that's not why.

Next to Normal: Much more than the sum of its parts. Alice Ripley is the heart of the show, and this despite very significant, Behrens-in-the-late-90's vocal issues. Under a yell, she doesn't have the support to stay on pitch for more long at all; at a yell, she mostly does. And yet...she's good. She's Kunst. What she's working with has undergone a lot of revision, apparently used to be a lot more cutesy and a lot less dire. The only parts that feel off now are the remaining winks and nudges. It's not a happy show, but it claims a few honest, uplifting moments. The lyrics falter with some regularity, but the book and the music hold it together. Good supporting cast, Jennifer Damiano in particular. Hilariously needless shirtless scene for hot, reasonably talented Aaron Tveit presumably intended to rake in the queens by word of mouth.

Mary Stuart second viewing: still fucking splendid. Pity we won't get to see if it wins best revival, those of us at home, since apparently the broadcast has jettisoned a number of minor awards for such as the writer and director in favor of, I kid you not, excerpts from Jersey Boys and Mamma Fucking Mia, if the Post is to be believed. Jeez, why not Phantom? I'm sure there's still someone in Paramus who would see it and go "a Phantom?! At the opera?! Why that sounds too good to miss!"

33 Variations: Now closed. Fine star turn for Jane Fonda, backup band more hit or miss. I saw that Zach Grenier was playing Beethoven but flashed on Adrian Grenier, and at least it was less hilarious than that. The history lesson parts fit awkwardly with the parts about intellectual curiosity, the interpersonal expense of having lofty goals, and so on. And when I say they fit together badly, what I really mean is the latter is good and the former mostly not. You'll have to forgive me if I use the rotten descriptor "heartwarming" to describe the work of Susan Kellerman in her supporting role, but I think it's apt and the internal thesaurus seems to have snapped decisively shut for the evening.

Ok, I think that's surely enough. I saw a couple of other things but who cares, Edith? I read what Ben Brantley said today about Coraline and, Seagull review notwithstanding, I think he's a fair and intelligent critic, and I suspect I just am not the right audience for Coraline. God knows I could fill a page here mocking Neil Gaiman but this is not that kind of blog!

Next up: um? I dunno. Vague thoughts of attending Les Huguenots, Les Hugues to its friends, at Bard. Maybe some kvetchy liveblogging of despair during the Antoinette "My Career is Being Immortalized through Hourlong Commercials for Jukebox Abba Musicals? I'm Glad I'm Dead" Perry awards broadcast.

Quelle belle vie!

I don't know if you ever saw this film Aria, I think curated (if that's the right word) by Ken Russell...most of it I recall as schlocky or tiresomely provocative, demonstrating no perceptible understanding of what we love about opera and how it would look if the little stage we each have in our head were projected outward, but this one segment popped into my head this evening for no reason I can figure. I find it exquisite. Hope you do, too. And yeah, that's pre-famous Tilda Swinton. Vocals by Madame Price.

The (passive-aggressive) revolution continues...

Yep, still on the company clock, and so many shows left to have frivolous opinions about!

The one that keeps poking its nasty little snout in my ear, asking to be prattled about is God of Carnage, somehow the toast of the Great White Way*. Which is probably appropriate in some desperately grating way, because I think it's exactly the sort of thing that makes a certain segment of the populace you may or may not have any patience for exhale sharply and say "well I mean really isn't Broadway just a bunch of plays about white people's problems?" (and then they have to run along to Problems in Theory: Kristeva through My Hairdresser Who Has One About Everything, and so the discussion ends there.) Honestly, I don't mind if they do take that kind of shot, as the play doesn't stand up to much better. Mock profundity by means of flitting reference to existential concerns may seem to do when you're discussing a class of people nobody in the audience believes to have much of an inner life in the first place [in the adapted version, Cobble Hill stroller jockeys], but at times it seemed to me nobody would give this thing a second look if the cast weren't so game and able.

What it mostly is is** an easy and not especially novel potshot at the thin veneers of civilization marriage and child-rearing depend upon. What else it is is sure-handedly entertaining, here and there brutally funny and, again, gifted with a cast that has seemingly rolled up their sleeves and committed to a roll in the mud for four, in a way it's tough to find fault with even if it's not the very highest quality mud. Gandolfini manages to be a compelling brute without being You-Know-Who; Marcia Gay Harden flinches not once from being head-explodingly irritating; Jeff Daniels somehow manages to make a stock character of modern civilized villainy freshly loathesome and kind of hot; and Hope Davis (the least horrific of them all except that she gets to deliver the show's one rather-too-vile stage effect) maybe does just the opposite trick, slowly revealing that the best of them isn't so by much. But if I'm not wholly in the amen chorus for a play about how parenting has come to be the destroyer of people's ability and will to tame the id and connect, something has gone awry.

Nearby at the Broadhurst, Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter do quite the opposite trick, dusting the cobwebs off a play one feels certain would be edifying in the forehanded and backhanded senses of the word in lesser custody. Schiller's Maria Stuart, yep--the source of Donizetti's libretto, I believe, is not what I would have guessed would be the most exciting thing on Broadway but I'm in as much of a position to say so as I ever have been after a monthlong TDF binge, and I will say so. It's made of win, marinated in win, garnished with win. McTeer and Walter are riveting (I do think Walter's role is the harder in some sense; fewer opportunities for the acting equiv of a D flat in alt or a well inflicted glottal stop) and their single, apparently apocryphal confrontation lives up to any operatic reading of the same scene. Purists may find the Konzept--men in business suits, ladies in Ren Fair garb--distracting, but I was on board, emphatically so. It is, by the way, very frequently on TDF, so you can probably see it for $35 though good seats are not guaranteed.

Great, that only leaves like eight shows to write about, and then I'm going to Coraline tomorrow if I didn't mention. I'm like Lucy at the candy factory here, not that I'm complaining.

*if we are to go by where I ended up getting a ticket, which was in a weird little corner behind a railing. Because it's not like I walk around the theater district with a pad going "hey pardon me but what show is the talk of people like you, you big tourist?"

**is

Extremely Passive Resistance

I like to think of it as a kind of civil disobedience, a violence against the tyranny of the 40-hour work week, undiminished over time by technology and efficiency to maximize profit, if I take the last half hour of today to spout copious hot air about the nearly-a-dozen plays I saw this month. I guess I'm exactly what the nefarious so-and-so's at the American Theater Wing want, a ready victim for their plot to pack people into seats by means of a petty pageant. Sign me up!

I'm actually going to have to consult my datebook for this roundup, and no, I don't have a palm or an iphone or a PDA (PDA? really you're going to call it that?) or anything and I'm not being a luddite but if I ever get that busy that I need one, I'm moving to Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic Ocean.*

Know what, this is going to go out of order, because where the fuck is my datebook. I do have some programs in my J. Peterman Counterfeit Mail Pouch**, so that's a starting point. On top of the stack is...my umbrella, because the weather in NYC the last week has not been notably better than I imagine it to be in Tristan da Cunha. [Things sometimes get posted rather a long time after they're written.] Beneath the umbrella, the first program to come to hand is 9 to 5, which is slightly regrettable. Not the show, I mean, though that too. But that being the first is regrettable because...

I don't remember how it started, but there was a discussion of god-knows-what in comments at Parterre, and I mentioned to someone or other that Lucia Popp is the only opera singer I'd never heard anyone in the mad swirling vortex of reflexive disdain that is opera fandom say anything bad about her. This was remedied in short order, naturally, but why's I mention it is that Dolly Parton is the Lucia Popp of the opera world in that sense, though probably no other. Nobody doesn't like Dolly Parton.

So it feels like kicking a puppy to say much that is honest about 9 to 5. There are positives. Megan Hilty sings country music idiomatically and does an imitation of La Parton that sends terrified phonemes fleeing her merciless grasp. That was supposed to mean it's accurate, but I have a feeling that is not at all clear. Stefanie Block has a right set of pipes, and Alison Janney an irresistible presence and infallible comic timing. And then there are the songs and the book. The book is the biggest mystery as to "why did this happen?" because there's nary a punchline that isn't in the movie, and I assume everyone remembers the movie clearly because it is, 20-whatever years later, a perfect frippery, and still iconic in its way. The songs are just lifeless, which is absolutely confounding given the vivacious talent that penned them. I don't know what happened. The show felt about 3 hours long. Even the classic theme song was somehow sapped for the stage. Alas.

Next program: Joe Turner's Come and Gone. My first August Wilson play, I will admit, and while there was enough deeply personal mythology in the work that I'd gladly explore more of the 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, it's a bit emotionally disjointed, I'd guess as much because of the piece as because of the production. An hour and a half of mostly dryish naturalism suddenly lurches into the realm of the spiritual and the abstract and the, well, somewhat-difficult-to-follow as the first act ends, and again as the play ends. The cast is uniformly fine, though nobody but Roger Robinson as Bynum Walker, a spiritually off-the-grid shamanic figure, had the certainty of artistic purpose we love to see and throw awards at. Happily, he's nominated to be thrown at.

Oh hey actually since I wrote all that a week or two ago, I'm going to go ahead and post it and pick up with some more stuff I saw when I'm feeling more writey. It's something to do during the four months in the opera desert stretching from here to September...

*where my dating life will remain much the same as it is now.
**No, they didn't make it up for Seinfeld. It was a real company, except now egli e spento and all. Except maybe not?

E la Nave Va

Here's an opportunity to witness a number of frustrating things happening at once. The story itself is about Robert Wilson and some insane-sounding fashion people* doing a production of Freischutz which actually, now that I think about it, is maybe not frustrating but hilarious and wonderful. This may have to do with me giving precisely 3/8 of a damn about the opera in question and so not really caring what happens to it. Ok but then start reading the comments where it seems people have been waiting for an opportunity to continue, shall we say, ventilating affect over Sonnambula. Before it even comes up explicitly it is just so fucking clear where it's all going.

And then it's always a fairly short road to "why people gotta be mean to Verdi" i.e. the martyrdom of traditionalism vs. the encroaching evil of anything not faithful enough to The Composer's Intentions (as understood, of course, by whoever is moaning. By what process, oh do not ask.) Soon someone will use the word "Eurotrash." There might well be a corollary to Godwin's Law where for Hitler we substitute Bieito, unless he's been toppled from his iconicity of badness by Mary Zimmerman...

I'm torn, reading it, because I do hate it when people try and make themselves look however it is they're trying to make themselves look by saying "oh, I don't like opera! As if!" And then on the other hand, it still pisses me off that people take (for instance) Dessay's sort of snotty line on Sonnambula as a sign that she sits around at night rubbing her hands together, stroking her moustache of evil, trying to think how to destroy opera.

While I'm on about it, this is the reason I sometimes want to learn to love football and drop the whole opera thing (but ok, after 2012-2013 because Maria Stuarda, mmkay? obviously this will never work.) What I mean is, once upon a time, I found my crowd, people in Austin who thought opera was worth talking about and thinking about and who really seemed to love it. Only later would I discover that it serves some purpose for what would seem to be at least a large plurality of opera people that hovers between "proxy for less mediated modes of socialization" and something darker and more to be discussed in terms of object relations.

The best compliment anyone ever paid me on this shabby old blog was to say that I treated opera as though it were important without insisting on its nobility. I think I have the wording right. I took this to mean what I hoped it to mean: that it should be perfectly possible to discuss all this without the "naw, dude" posturing pointed out above, but also without sounding like the comic book guy on the Simpsons.

Hey that's all. I mostly just wanted to post the link and then I got to typing.

*It's true. I try to see the good in any project at whose heart is the beautification of life. But fashion just makes me sad and defensive.

Area Musician

So I was on the A train and there was a subway musician which can be a headache (percussion groups! hi, this is a really small space!) or a delight (mariachis!) and as it turned out, she was swell. And I gave her like the world's most lousy subway musician tip because I didn't have change so I'm making up for it by making sure a couple more people see her. 'atsall.



[ETA: I didn't make the vid, btw. Just embedded it.]

Go, Hagen! Get the ring back!

I have been noodged (never know how to spell that) to write a few syllables about Gotterdammerung. Since everyone has seen this production elevnty times, I won't go on and on about the visuals, only I must pause to recant. I've always bitched about the Schenk Walkuere, or at least since 1997 I have, but the minute everything went kablooey after that very long sit that comes two operas later, I thought, mortifyingly: gosh, it's too bad they're not keeping this around. Ah well, you don't come here for consistency, now do you? MFI is all about Berlinian hedgehoggery, in a (hedge)pig's eye. Except I totally got that backward.

If I begin to review post-curtain ovations, you may put me out to pasture*, but it's hard not to comment on the extra fervor that attends Ring curtain calls. Especially for Levine, of course. But all around, they're preposterously loud, and why shouldn't they be? Makes it feel as if there's a cult of the Ring, or perhaps a cult of Levine, and really I do think everyone deserves a cult at some point, or most people.

Am I making it up that the loudest of all, among the singers, was for Jon Tomlinson? Loudest anyway if you do some math involving inverse proportionality and a 1-to-10 scale of how big a putz the character is. Tomlinson's vocal estate was described to me at intermission as "post-vocal" and it's hard to work up many objections to this, but depending on your disposition toward everything-but-the-paper-fan-moustache** villainry, it's...I find it impossible to take my ears off him, you know? He has that old school vocal patina that just sounds right to me in Wagner. And I guess to some other people as well.

Hey should I ruin something for you forever? Would that be fun? It was also pointed out to me at selfsame intermission that there's this one part where it really sounds a lot like the chorus is singing "Go, Hagen! Go, Hagen! Get the ring back!" If you hear it now, it you will never unhear it.

If only Christian Franz had been given such a pep talk. Not to say he was a failure in the role or anything, but he had certain indisputable inadequacies. Everything was spent by Act III and of course Wagner, being something of a prick even if you don't count the whole holocaust thing***, wrote Siegfried's most lyrical music to be sung after three hours of basically beating his lungs against a rock. Still, some manage it better than Franz, whose recalling of the Forest Bird's music was, oh, moderately painful. There's a way to make this music work even if your voice is worn or ugly to begin with, viz: Bernd Aldenhoff in the Knappertsbusch Gotterdammerung I basically never shut up about. Franz seemed maybe to have given up by Act III, took a very cursory lunge at the (terribly unfairly scheduled) C, sang Siegfried's death like walking on a broken foot...it wasn't enough.

The thing about Dalayman is that if the whole voice were like the top fifth or so, she'd be so good that even the most intolerable opera queens would have to stop wailing for long enough to listen. It's big and solid and warm, and she throws it around with considerable emotion. It must be said, though, that it fades rapidly in some of the mid range that's always up against a squadron of trombones or something in Wagner. Anyway, taking into account this limitation, it was a satisfying account of the role and makes me wonder in a not very specific way about other roles she might be great in. Sadist that I occasionally am, I think immediately of the roles that frequently get croaked on top like maybe Elektra but that would have the same problems. Just i wish someone with an unhideous voice would sing it, right? Last time I heard it at the Met I think it was Schnaut. 'Nuff said.

And with that, though there are more singers who contributed importantly to a B+ afternoon of opera, I am basically out of commentary. And out of season, come to think of it. Over the summer there's bound to be something, though, unless there isn't. Glimmerglass can be so unalluring these days, though the Caramoor Semiramide is of some interest--not least because everyone keeps pointing out to me that Brownlee is an exceptional artist, and I keep missing him. I don't know. Feel free to suggest things. I can occasionally be coaxed out of the house.



*I know, why now? When I've reviewed everything down to the brownies, stopping short of critiquing the little paper cones from which one drinks water from the water fountains In Memorium Ezio Pinza. Which are rather difficult to detach from the stack.

**You must pay the rent on Valhalla! I can't pay the rent on Valhalla! You must pay the rent on Valhalla! I can't pay the rent on Valhalla!

***I am emphatically kidding. Antisemitism didn't begin with Wagner, and the much repeated fact that he was Hitler's favorite composer rises only to the level of trivia. Every bad person loves some good things. I'm sure W. had a favorite composer. Ok, bad example.

For Armer Jacquino, who certainly isn't required to like it, especially on account of it never happened

The bit where everyone more or less collectively loses their shit isn't until the last four minutes or so. You'll know.

Third pass or so

Rather than editing again, I'm going to add a couple of interesting details from the papers that came with the DVD. I'm going to call them the press kit because it makes me feel glamorous! Anyway I didn't look closely at it, at first, and it gives some more info on what's coming up for the singers.

Yes, ok, I'm harping on Michael Fabiano because he was my favorite. There. I've admitted it. Well according to this, he's in Stiffelio next season at the big M.

Amber Wagner won a Tucker Career Grant. That's actually not from the provided materials; rather from an email from the proverbial little bird.

Ryan McKinny is doing Oedipus Rex with the L.A. Phil and Figaro at the Aspen Music Festival.

Kiera Duffy is in Atlanta's Akhnaten. Which I think already happened and was completely sold out, so don't go having ideas about the south, ok?

Matthew Plenk sang Iopas in Toyens with the Boston Symphony what looks like last season. I mean, that is a seriously lovely aria, so go Matthew Plenk. And Boston Lyric has him as Don Ottavio.

Aright, anyway.

The Audition

Maybe I'll do a little liveblogging of this screening copy of The Audition I was kindly sent.

Granted, I'm the ideal audience for this. The auditions are a highlight of my year, and the year documented in the film was probably the best I've attended.

Ok amusingly they just showed one of the singers, I didn't see which, reading The Power of Positive Thinking, because it is 1957. I'm not sure why that makes me laugh, but it's also an extra glimpse of how terrifying it must be to be 25 and see the house from the stage.

Some reasons to watch:

-attaching a face not only to singers you may remember watching in competition, but also to behind-the-scenes Met folks who serve as blank screens onto which crazy opera fans project their frustrations. Like oh hey, there's Peter Gelb and he's not rubbing his hands together going "Who's the skinniest?! I don't CARE who can sing!" as he apparently does in the collective feverish hallucination of many opera loons.

-attaching a non-long-distance face to singers I still recall hearing from fam circ, seeing how they sing in detail (wow Disella Larusdottir's lips shake when she sings high notes! Jesus, Alek Shrader doesn't just have a great headshot and really is that cute!) Getting to hear the traces of regional accents they haven't tamed is also fun.

-Oh, probably a great glimpse at the bowels of the Met if you live far away or just never had that autograph-hound moment in your life where you saw it in person. Also maybe a glimpse of, not to be a dick, that fakey thing singers do around each other where their niceness doesn't always cover their mutual mistrust. [ETA: which Fabiano just acknowledged. He actually spends the least energy of any of the pretending to care heaps and heaps about the others, based on this film, and he comes off a tiny bit unsympathetic for it, but perhaps his honesty ought to earn him some points. Anyway he's 22.]

-Getting to watch singers watch and react to each other's performances. The first time they show Alek Shrader singing the C's, they pan immediately to the other singers, which is hilarious.

It's sort of awful to watch Ryan Smith, of course. If you don't know, he died of lymphoma not too long ago.

Whoops, a Met dramatic coach just said "Opera is moving away from the idea that a voice is all that really matters...now that is not to say that voice is not (perhaps) the most important thing," and now the gnashing of teeth begins again. It is poignant, then, to watch Angela Meade, between clips of singing "Casta diva' and talking about her love of Callas and Caballe also acknowledging her own fear of the what are we calling it, new focus on visuals.

Did one female singer just say "go back to a drag bar and learn more"? Because that would make me laugh and maybe slightly want to buy her a drink. But I'm guessing that's not what she said.

Heh, I wonder if they should have done a little subtitle explaining lip trills. It's making me laugh. The first time I saw singers doing lip trills I was very WTF.

Ok they're completely saving "Pour mon ame" as the money shot, though some of that is just where it happened in the program. As much fun as it is to watch A.S. realize he is going to nail the Cs, it's also perhaps a little sad to see the documentary not focus at all on a couple of the other singers. Only so much time and all.

Total voyeurism to watch the judging.

And we get a "One Year Later" postlude, which is exactly what you don't get at the auditions or even after unless you're obsessive and track these folks. They're a little bit press-packety, but gratifying nonetheless. And of course by now they're another year old, leaving up to you and me and Google to figure out Where They Are Now.

You know, it would have made a lot more sense to post this yesterday. Because the theatrical presentation was today. But presumably it will be released on DVD. In which case, yeah, I recommend it.

Ok since this is the least substantial thing ever, I'll do a little of the footwork on Where Are They Now, how's that?

From the CAMI website, "The brilliant lyric tenor Alek Shrader made his San Francisco Opera mainstage debut this season, replacing an indisposed Ramon Vargas as Nemorino in two performances of L’Elisir d’Amore." From my neurotic skull: I wish he still had the floppy bangs no longer in evidence on his head shot.



From Laifer Artist Management, Michael Fabiano sang Rinnuccio at La Scala (as alluded to in the film), sang Rodolfo in Kansas City and Pinkerton in Colorado and Jesus Christ must be 24 now or 25. I don't like to play favorites at the auditions but I would really like to hear him. He impressed me a lot.



Angela Meade's website says she was scheduled to sing Elisabetta in Devereux in Dallas but I'm wondering if that happened since Dallas Opera's website lists Papian and I'm having trouble finding other reference to it. She's at Caramoor this summer in Semiramide and she did make her real Met debut in Ernani when, er, what was the story? Did Radvan cancel? "Our own" Hans Lick wrote it up as a fairly bumpy start but by the end, says he, "suddenly we’re across the border into Verdiland: a full-sized deep and even spinto of great beauty with good top and great passion."

Amber Wagner seems to be in Chicago's young artist program still? I'm having a little trouble telling. Her Myspace page has a "Tacea la notte" I think from Lyric's summer concert in Grant Park that reminds me what an impression her voice made at the auditions concert. It sounds like maybe she's going to be short on top and then she isn't. It's live and really quite good.

Hey doesn't Kiera Duffy remind you of the girl who calls Mena Suvari "a total prostitute" in American Beauty? Anyway she's with IMG which is kind of a big deal, right? And she seems to have done some interesting stuff like Boulez and Elliot Carter.

Matthew Plenk you heard from offstage if you went to Tristan last season. He's in Lindemann, and you know what? I think I am now crossing the line from "skimpy write-up" to "someone shut him up," so I'm going to trail off here. I'm sure the singers I skipped will somehow bear the ignominy of not being mentioned on My Favorite Intermissions. If you know something fabulous one of the singers has gone on to do, drop me a line. All I've got left to write about this season is Gotterdammerung.

Everything But the Boy

You probably tuned in to this afternoon's Siegfried* on Sirius so I'm not breaking any good or bad news. Let's group things into surprising and not surprising.

-Surprising, to me, because I've never heard him and had to think to come up with any info about him (think he was in the Busoni thing?): Brubaker. Fantastic singing in a drag of a role. Lagniappe: from Balcony he looked like Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale, which really explains everything you ever needed to know about Act I of Siegfried.

-Somewhat surprising: Christian Frantz, who I had heard turn in a tireless, high quality Tristan in concert not that many years back, kind of got sung off the stage by See Above. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't very audible in Act I (which makes the forging song kind of a dud) though he sounded considerably warmed up in the next act. By the end, he was doing some shouting, I'm sorry to say. Maybe an off day, and in any case not a catastrophe. More points for physical characterization than vocal.

-Not particularly surprising, on the basis of youtube clips: Irene Theorin. The first thing I said to my long-suffering opera-going companion when the lights came up (well, shortly after "could you believe she kept unwrapping that food for that long?!") was that I have no regrets whatsoever about not hearing Brewer, though I was looking forward to Brewer as much as the next guy not named Schenk. It's a short, intense sing, and she was ravishing. I know it's a horribly overused joke, but for some reason I can't help myself--she had me at "Heil dir."

-Not in the least surprising: Jon Tomlinson=Wagner. The extra fun here was that Schenk's design for Fafner was actually wonderfully spooky to me (in that you can't tell where Fafner begins and where the forest ends, so he might be UNDER ALL OF OUR FEET) until I realized he was also kind of reminiscent of Mr. Snuffleupagus, at which point he became hilarious. Although still creepy in a way since who the hell would drive a sword into the heart of Mr. Snuffleupagus?

-Surprising only to me, and not entirely that: James Morris' utterly affecting Wanderer, as aurally resplendent as it was heartfelt. I've long been a naysayer, but once in a while, he blows me away, and this was one of those. Not for nothing, did I just witness his last Wotan ever? Because I was just discussing with someone the things we will taunt young opera queens with in twenty years and I need to know if this goes on the list.

Next up: the big G.

*or, as my friend BAD likes to call it, "Siegfried." Nevermind, doesn't work in print, but hopefully he'll laugh when he reads it.