new opera – Likely Impossibilities

Written on Skin in NYC

August 18, 2015 3 Comments

Unusual for a new opera, George Benjamin’s Written on Skin arrived in New York with its reputation preceding it. It has been making the European rounds since 2012 and has been praised to the skies almost everywhere. Its three Lincoln Center Festival performances last week marked its untimely staged US debut.

And it’s hard to imagine that Written on Skin could have been developed and premiered by an American opera company. Certainly not, at least, by one of the behemoths. Martin Crimp’s libretto is a simple story which becomes complex in its telling; it doesn’t have a celebrity historical personality as its protagonist, isn’t based on a hit film or book, and makes no clear claim to cultural importance. The subject isn’t, like many American operas, aggressively checking off boxes like genres suggested by Netflix. (Cold Mountain? Hmmm, Literary Fiction Set in the Civil War With Strong Female Characters.)

Written on Skin is instead purposefully elliptical. It’s filled with symbols, fragmented narrative frames, and characters speaking in the third person. Its score is, though at times lyrical, rather thornier than the film music style which has become most popular in American premieres. It has also eclipsed most if not all of those works in its acclaim and popularity.

Review

Two Boys at the Met

October 27, 2013 No Comments

A young composer premieres an opera at the old Met about how young and old people don’t understand each other. There’s something poignant about it. Your reaction to Nico Muhly’s Two Boys is going to be inflected by your expectations of opera as an art form (or lack thereof), from musical structure to choice of subject to language. I sat, rather perfectly, between a hipster carrying his bike helmet and an older lady carrying a Chanel purse. But that doesn’t mean that all criticism is just a case of Well, You’re Just Listening Wrong. And Two Boys is, in many ways, an unsatisfying work.

Nico Muhly, Two Boys. Metropolitan Opera, 10/25/2013. Production directed by Bartlett Sher, sets by Michael Yeargan, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lights by Donald Holder, projections by 59 Productions, choreography by Hofesh Shechter. Cast: Paul Appleby (Brian), Alice Coote (Anne Strawson), Christopher Bolduc/Andrew Pulver (Jake as baritone-Jake as boy soprano), Caitlin Lynch (Cynthia), Jennifer Zetlan (Rebecca), Judith Frost (Anne’s mum), Sandra Piques Eddy (Fiona)

As you probably have already heard, the plot of Craig Lucas’s libretto concerns a violent crime in England in 2001 involving the titular two boys. They meet in a shadowy corner of the sketchy sketchy internet, the younger one ends up stabbed, and a detective has to unravel what happened. We see the events as she figures them out, which conveniently happens in chronological order. Brian, the older boy, seems to be drawn into a plot involving a sexy spy, a dangerous gardener, and more. But nothing is, as they say, as it may seems. (We see their online conversations in transcription on projections while the singers sing them and carefully avoid looking at each other.) A friend’s theory is that the whole thing is a gloss on The Turn of the Screw, which makes a good deal of sense–the characters even match up pretty clearly.

Muhly’s music is ghostly. Repetitive figures in the orchestra are overlaid with lyrical vocal arioso that proceeds at more or less the same tempo for the entire piece. The vocal writing is in basically the same style for every character. The music is often beautiful but it is rarely rhetorical or dramatic, seemingly unaffected by the intent of the scene or words. The most memorable moments are in the choruses depicting the chaos of the internet, whose layering of short motives owes something to John Adams, Britten, and, particularly in the first act’s church scene, Tallis. That church scene might be the best part of the whole score. It’s the first time we hear Jake, the younger boy, singing in a pure boy soprano (in several scenes he is sung by a baritone), and Muhly seems to be in his natural element.

Elsewhere, there seems to be a puzzling mismatch of libretto and music. Muhly’s static score places him squarely in the school of the presentational, post-dramatic opera of Glass and Adams, but the libretto’s Law & Order: SVU plot seems to demand chiaroscuro and tinta of a more directional and narrative sort of composition. (I don’t mean the libretto demands tonal organization–just look at Aribert Reimann.) The disparity of pacing between libretto and music produces a hazy, distancing effect. There’s something interesting about setting the thoughtless, headlong exclamations of hormonal teenagers in slow motion (these kids don’t even take the time to type whole words), but ultimately it only calls more attention to the libretto’s obviousness and implausibility as a crime drama. And much of the music feels rote.

The opera’s reluctance to get into its character’s heads ends up feeling like a dodge, at least to me. At least the singing was universally strong. As Brian, Paul Appleby sang with warm lyric tone and excellent control, and was about as convincing as a teenager as anyone around 30 could ever be, but the scenes with Jake (the unusually reliable boy soprano Andrew Pulver) were unavoidably awkward–I wondered if it would have been better to have worked in Christopher Bolduc’s baritone incarnation of Jake a little more. Jennifer Zetlan sounded youthful and bright as Brian’s older sister, Rebecca. The Met chorus also was in fine form, though my seat in the front of the house (I can rarely say that! thanks, ticket discounts!) did not allow for a good blend. David Robertson’s conducting was excellent.

Coote and Appleby

The only character who seems to be provided with any background is Detective Strawson, the investigator. Alice Coote is an incredibly honest singer and her substantial, dark mezzo was as impeccable as ever, but the writing is thoroughly misogynist: she’s a lonely middle-aged woman who can’t handle dealing with children ever since she gave up a baby years ago, and is hectored at length by her aging mother about her inability to dress like a lady and find a man. (Presumably if she had put on makeup and kept her baby, none of this would have happened, so thanks, Detective Strawson, for being career-minded and dowdy and giving us this opera!)

The setting is in the just-past where we can be very critical because most of us remember it. I recall my 2001 internet–when I was also a teenager–consisting mostly of AOL Instant Messenger with my friends and The Clarinet Pages. I guess it had fewer reputable uses back then, but the opera’s fears of constant connection and absorption seem more contemporary (witness Evgeny Mozorov’s essay in this week’s New Yorker, for example), which makes the more 2001-era elements seem a little hokey. Bartlet Sher’s production is gloomy and for the most part very good and smooth (shockingly so, for him–maybe all he needs is a near-contemporary setting to cure his case of the cutes). The only major misstep is the execrable dancing internet, a group of writhing dancers in the choruses.

Muhly’s opera is admirably less burdened by the sense of worthiness that has plagued many recent efforts at the Met. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to produce a huge national and cultural monument, for one thing. And he has a real compositional voice. But I’m not convinced he’s a dramatic composer, and I wonder if an oratorio or more abstract opera would suit him better than this (and his previous opera Dark Sisters’s) topicality and realism. Maybe he should call Bob Wilson or Peter Sellars?

Two Boys continues through November 14.
Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met

Review

Matsukaze at the Lincoln Center Festival

July 21, 2013 6 Comments

Remember me? I went to see Toshio Hosokawa’s Matsukaze at the Lincoln Center Festival and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.

Toshio Hosokawa’s opera Matsukaze
is in many ways a model of modern cross-cultural creation. Premièred in
Brussels in 2011, it sets a story from the traditional Japanese Noh
theater in a more or less Western operatic framework. And the text is in
German. But unlike some other recent efforts to merge Asian and
European traditions (such as Tan Dun’s The First Emperor), it
is a fully-formed and rewarding work of art rather than a self-conscious
experiment. Despite a pedestrian production, Lincoln Center Festival’s
presentation is a valuable opportunity to hear Hosokawa’s impressive
score.

You can read the whole thing here. I have been absent recently due to a) too much work and b) a certain absence of material. I have a few plans for August but things will be quiet for a while. I am sorry to have missed Michaels Reise um die Erde, also at the LCF, but it’s too bad they scheduled two of their most interesting events for the same three nights. I went to Matsukaze on the first of the three, and the other two I spent at a wedding.

One thing I didn’t mention was the casting of two Asian (Korean) singers in the roles of the sisters. Maybe this wasn’t intentional, there are lots of fine Asian and Asian-descent singers out there, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it. If it was intentional, it seems to me to be unnecessary and possibly problematic. If it wasn’t, well, I’m glad I didn’t mention it.

Also, I liked Paul Griffiths’s program notes. I wish certain other NYC opera groups would follow suit.

See you from the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Figaro, if not sooner.

Photo copyright Olivier Roset.

Review

The Tempest: Oh timid old world

October 26, 2012 4 Comments

Thomas Adès’s 2004 opera The Tempest arrives at the Met with a relatively lengthy pedigree of major productions around the world,* a score that is
recognizably modern but consonant and conventionally pretty enough to
play to a Met audience, and a libretto based on a familiar play.
Actually, it’s the Met’s second newish Tempest opera in as many years.
While it’s altogether more credible than the other one, and has some
lovely moments, it still never quite takes off, and remains undramatic
and timid. Robert Lepage’s random and cheesy production doesn’t help
either.

Adès, The Tempest. Libretto by Meredith Oakes after Shakespeare. Metropolitan Opera, 10/23/2012. New production premiere, first Met performance of this opera. Production by Robert Lepage, sets by Jasmine Catudal, costumes by Kym Barrett, lights by David Beaulieu. Conducted by Thomas Adès with Simon Keenlyside (Prospero), Isabel Leonard (Miranda), Audrey Luna (Ariel), Alan Oke (Caliban), Alek Shrader (Ferdinand [Debut]), Kevin Burdette (Stefano), Iestyn Davies (Trinculo), Toby Spence (Antonio), Christopher Feigum (Sebastian), John Del Carlo (Gonzalo), William Burden (King of Naples)

Unfortunately, most of the operas produced today are really old, and most are also, at least to a certain portion of their audience, really familiar. This means that the few new operas that happen inevitably end up being defined, at least in part, in relation to what is happening on all the other nights of the week. For a production of The Tempest, one that Robert Lepage has put in a theater-in-theater setting of Milan’s La Scala (a trick we have never, ever seen before, not once), this would seem to present provocative symbolic possibilities to tell The Tempest as an allegory for opera. Prospero’s magic happens on an island (opera house, isolated from the real world), informed by learning in old books (scores), and when the problems are resolved we have to return to reality outside the magic theater (la commedia è finita). But while some other directors might have pulled this off, Lepage’s succession of effects without causes or expression leaves the setting meaningless–and the story pretty much meaningless as well.

My friend wanted this to be ironic. Wishful thinking.

For all this metatheatrical stuff Adès is not a postmodernist at all but rather a straightforward, mild-mannered modernist who seems to have an agnostic view of operatic history. The production also includes a great deal of alarmingly kitschy images including a couple actually walking off into a beach sunset (video art by David Leclerc), the comically enormous court showing up in giant crinoline skirts and other vaguely 18th-century-ish (of the Slutty 18th Century variety) garb, and some downright embarrassing “tribal” dances choreographed by Crystal Pite (with costumes that feature, er, more bare ass than I expected–not that I have a problem with asses, but I prefer their context and representational baggage to be less, um, racist), making those of a certain recent Les Troyens look almost good. The various elements–music, libretto, theater setting, otherwise straight faced eigthteenth-century-set Tempest, never seem to be speaking to each other. It’s awkward at best and almost unwatchable at worst. I’m not even going to relate the purported coups-de-theatre but will say the best one is the first five minutes, see below.

Not the music and libretto are without faults. Personally I prefer my modernism gnarlier, but at least Adès’s music is a good cut above the sugary movie score-like commissions more common in the US. It’s a slightly prickly tonality but not particularly dense, ethereal and beautifully orchestrated. The best parts where Adès can get into a groove, such as Miranda and Ferdinand’s duet and a very brief lament for Alonzo. The problem is that the score often lacks variety, and ends up being rather undramatic. Adès doesn’t seem to have a good strategy for conversational, connecting passages, which pass incredibly slowly, and despite apparently wanting Stefano and Trinculo to be comic there is nothing funny about their music. The default Adès mode is meditative, distant, static, and very pretty. It would be nice to hear in a concert suite, but as storytelling it doesn’t do much to narrate. Each character has to some extent a characteristic style, but a fair amount of the writing is not at all vocally idiomatic, and ends up sounding more ungainly than expressive, with a bonus of much of the text rendered incomprehensible. As you can see in some of these pictures, there were literal subtitles on the edge of the stage.

The libretto is another issue. Meredith Oakes’s text preserves only hints of Shakespeare. It’s also not very good, as verse goes, tending to be mundane and vague. As my distinguished colleague resoundingly declaimed in the lobby during intermission:

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Hark! now I hear them,–Ding-dong, bell.”
WHY CHANGE THAT?”

That was Shakespeare. Here is Oakes’s version:
“Five fathoms deep
Your father lies
Those are pearls
That were his eyes
Nothing of him
That was mortal
Is the same
His bones are coral
He has suffered
A sea change
Into something
Rich and strange
Sea nymph hourly
Ring his kell
I can hear them
Ding dong bell.”

Here it is with Thomas Adès’s music, as sung in concert by Audrey Luna, the Ariel of this production:

I can appreciate that Shakespeare is thick stuff to be sung, but if it’s going to be as incomprehensible as most of Adès’s settings are, one could at least wish for more melodious titles to read. More seriously, I can appreciate that they wanted to reinvent the story but this version is more like an abridged, watered-down version than an interesting new one. Character development takes a hit, particularly Caliban. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid nasty racist stuff (the choreographer didn’t seem to get that memo), he has been rendered a harmless pathetic and his large amount of stage time seems kind of unnecessary. In general, the verbal style is so neutral and distant that the many characters and their emotions are never really defined, and it just seems like so much talking or vaguely nice singing.

“This look does nothing for me, dammit. I looked better as $#@*ing Wozzeck.“

The cast is more or less fine, though none really stand out. Simon Keenlyside as Prospero appeared in the premiere and uses the words most expressively (and articulates them with admirable clarity), but his voice sounds rough at times, and the production makes him more an eccentric tattooed uncle than a magician despite his considerable dignity. Mezzo Isabel Leonard and tenor Alek Shrader sing quite beautifully as Miranda and Ferdinand, and their duet is a musical highlight. The best tenor of the cast, however, is definitely William Burden as Ferdinand’s father Alonso, the king of Naples. It’s odd that Adès set both father and son as tenors, particularly when Burden’s incredibly sweet and warm tones radiate, in conventional opera semiotics, youthful ardor (belied by his Civil War general look). Fellow tenor Toby Spence had flair as Antonio, but the tessuitura is high for him. Audrey Luna floated and yelped Ariel’s stratospheric music on pitch very cleanly and displayed formidable technique, athleticism, and stamina, though I’m not sure I would recognize her voice in a lineup should she sing below a high G.** As Caliban, Alan Oke sounded awfully nasal.

There are shadows of something interesting and exceedingly modernist here: a hall of mirrors of representations (Oakes restates Shakespeare as Lepage reveals our opera house, all about Prospero’s magic). Unfortunately the suggestions of an opera about fragmentation and distance are evident only fitfully themselves, and that failure is not so much modernist as just sad.

The Tempest runs for a while longer.

Photos by Ken Howard, who seems to be using the wings’-eye view not seen by any audience members in the theater but endemic to the HD broadcasts. The Machines are taking over!

*Promoted as “the Met at its adventurous best!” I will not dispute that claim, but would like to note that if taking on something produced in London in 2004 and at many other opera houses since qualifies as their most adventurous venture, that says something.

**You know that thing about Isolde and/or Salome being women crushed by composers’ orchestras? Sometimes I think there’s a similar thing going on with post-WWII composers and coloratura sopranos, see also Die Soldaten, Lear, etc., etc. Either that or all their orchestration textbooks have reversed the section marked “soprano” with the one marked “piccolo.”

Review

Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysos in Amsterdam

June 22, 2011 No Comments

While in Amsterdam, I went to Wolfgang Rihm’s Dionysos and wrote about it for Bachtrack, and you can read it here.

This was tricky to write. It was a stellar performance of an excellent production of an opera with stunning music… and a libretto that I strongly disliked. I’m glad I saw it–I always like seeing something new to me, and the music really was good–but I personally had misgivings. Just not my style. And not just because I am suspicious of any work where the women consistently wear so much less clothing than the men. (That’s a bad indicator, though.)

The Gashouder, however, is a very impressive space. It’s a giant old gas storage tank located in the Westergasfabriek, a former factory complex in the northwest part of town that now hosts performance spaces, galleries, restaurants, that kind of thing. I wish I’d gotten a chance to look around a little more, but, as you can see, it was raining (this is a frequent problem in the Netherlands).

Production photo © Ruth Walz

Review

Anna Nicole: All power to boobs

March 1, 2011 11 Comments

That’s a quote from the libretto. There’s an aria about them. Boobs, I mean. Big fake ones.

As you may be aware, there’s an opera about the late not-so-merry (or was she?) widow Anna Nicole Smith playing at the Royal Opera House in London at present. I went and saw it, and found it fascinating, brilliant, and infuriating. Herein I will attempt to write about it. Not about how it relates to operatic history or what its media attention means for the world of opera. Because while we might have a publicity circus around this opera, what we’ve got onstage is a circus already.

Mark-Anthony Turnage–Richard Thomas. Anna Nicole. World premiere production, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 26 February 2011 (fourth performance). Production by Richard Jones with sets by Miriam Buether, costumes by Nicky Gillibrand, lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin and D.M. Wood, and choreogrpahy by Aletta Collins. Conducted by Antonio Pappano with Eva-Maria Westbroek (Anna Nicole), Susan Bickley (Virgie), Gerald Finley (The Lawyer Stern), Alan Oke (J. Howard Marshall II), Peter Hoare (Larry King).

This opera has been all over the news and blogosphere, so describing it feels a little superfluous, but here are the basics.

Anna Nicole in her young, semi-innocent days.

Possibly due to rumored legal threats, the opera presents Anna Nicole Smith’s life in documentary fashion. In Act 1, we see her early life through the reportage of a chorus of TV journalists. As events unfold, Anna Nicole’s family and friends comment on the action. In Act 2, things turn more personal as the reporters morph into sinister silent black figures with cameras for heads, the only allusion to Anna Nicole’s reality TV show. They observe her at every second, eager to know everything for reasons that are never clear. The sole voice of conscience is Anna Nicole’s mother, who occasionally interrupts to protest that “it so didn’t happen like that” and condemn the world to which her daughter has submitted–or that she is squeezing dry. Or both.

The plot, roughly speaking, moves from Anna Nicole’s miserable childhood in rural Texas, early marriage and motherhood, divorce, career change to stripper, career ascent as stripper via fake tits, marriage to an oil billionaire, his death, her decline into helpless drug addiction, dependence on a sleazy lawyer, her son’s death, and finally her own death at 39. We see her at her stripping job, we see her get her new boobs, and meet her decrepit consort, but increasingly, in Act 2, she disappears into her own isolated world.

Virgie, Anna Nicole’s mother

This is, more or less, a number opera, though the music flows continuously. The libretto is, like Anna Nicole herself, determinedly obscene. Thomas’s ear for American speech is good enough that the few mistakes stand out (we don’t say “car park”). It also is of a flashiness that, for the first act at least, largely eclipses the sparky, energetic music. It’s not that Turnage lacks a voice, and the jazzy, slightly dissonant, angular sounds are fun. But much of the time the score just doesn’t assert itself. In Act 2 things get more interesting, including a wonderful intermezzo just as the proceedings become more serious and eventually tragic (as Anna Nicole’s son dies, there is, I think, a Kindertotenlieder reference–oh no you didn’t). Anna Nicole delivers something like a lament at the end, before tiredly climbing into her own body bag.

He’s rich.

But the very obscenity is part of the reason why this work, for all its brilliance, is somehow unfulfilling. Simply put, there’s a shortage of dramatic conflict. The excesses of American culture are skewered at every opportunity. I’m OK with this, I realize we’re a big fat target. (Sometimes I wondered if the British audience realized how much of the “satire” was simply truth–y’all know that Wal-Mart really does have an obsession with smiley faces? They didn’t make all that shit up.) The problem is that Anna Nicole the character is set up as too much a product of her culture and not enough in opposition to it. The chorus pronounces her fabulous, but she seems like a passive object of the plot, with few moments of genuine autonomy. This makes her, as a heroine or as an anti-heroine, lacking.

The text’s perspective is relentlessly male, right down to the descriptions of domestic violence and rape. Anna Nicole, proclaimed for all her obvious dumbness to be somehow street smart, never has a real moment of self-insight, something equivalent to Carmen’s fortune-telling, Violetta’s “È strano!” or even Lulu’s instinctual self-perception, and we never get a good look inside her head, empty though it may be. In her brief final monologue, she condemns America as a “dirty whore,” but it’s too little, too late, and too male again. The libretto suggests a few times that she was both victim and master of American culture, manipulator and manipulated. But it’s only an occasional theme, mostly voiced by the poignant but unintegrated character of Anna Nicole’s mother. It seems like this is where the real substance and center of the story should lie.

Cameras are intruding

The libretto’s naughtiness aspires to subversive glee. But is that possible for a production as elaborate and accomplished with as many patriarchal roots as this one? It might have worked in a gay community center’s basement during some Fringe Festival, but on the stage of the Royal Opera House, written and directed by famous and sophisticated men, there’s an uncomfortable undercurrent of exploitation. Is this another group of the privileged taking advantage of Anna Nicole Smith yet again? The (as yet empty) threat of a lawsuit from self-avowed Anna Nicole babydaddy Larry Birkhead against the Royal Opera House is fitting, and suggests the opera has now become not just a telling of her sad life but itself another strange coda to it.

**
I suppose that sounds like a severe condemnation, but despite its disappointments I actually enjoyed it a lot. The stagecraft on display is dazzling and full of wit, even if making fun of Texas hicks is something like shooting fish in a barrel. (I’ve never been to Texas, by the way, though I’m from a rural area not too far from Appalachia, so I have the general idea. We make meth jokes too.) It’s not always too original. The opening scene, in which a row of reporters tells us they are going to present the story of Anna Nicole, repeatedly declaiming her name at top volume, is a blatant rip-off of the opening of Sweeney Todd, right down to the staging. Also, those uniform-ish reporters plus a little house on stage, well, Jones’s Bayerische Staatsoper Lohengrin, anybody?

The Lawyer Stern thinks he’s the dad

But as a show a lot of it is brilliant, action-packed, funny (sometimes awkward funny), full of panache, and every bit as tacky as the libretto. The orchestra under Pappano sounded, as far as I could tell, great, and the cast is all top-notch and can’t be faulted for their commitment (or for their English diction). The production is a fast-changing of colorful but minimal settings with garish detail, from a strip club (with acrobatic actual pole dancers) to a Wal-Mart to Anna Nicole’s tacky final living room, and the transitions are seamless and perfectly timed.

Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Texan accent swam in and out, but as Anna Nicole she gave a star performance, and she was never less than fabulously present–or appropriately out to lunch on Anna Nicole’s distant planet–and she gave the character more heart than the libretto ever did. Vocally, she doesn’t get too many chances to use the full force of her large voice, and I can image more lyric sopranos also succeeding in the role (especially considering the light amplification). But she sounded great; her sound is truly luminous. Gerald Finley’s lawyer–a role rumored to have been rewritten when his guilty verdict in Anna Nicole’s ~~wrongful death~~ giving Anna Nicole drugs was overturned last month (corrected–I was not a devoted follower of Anna Nicole Smith news, sorry)–is unfortunately something of a nothing role and a waste of his talents. Alan Oke as Anna Nicole’s aged second husband got better material, sung with verve. Susan Bickley as Virgie, the mother, was almost too poignant in an opera of caricatures.

Something of a disappointment compared to what it might have been, but an interesting one. I hope it gets picked up by another house, with revisions, because it has the polish of something big with the seeds of something far more poignant. Right now, despite the awkward bits, it’s still rampantly entertaining.

There are a few more performances, but it’s quite sold out. Queue early in the morning for day seats.

Video from CBS News–not an option you get with most operas, though it’s not embedding correctly:

Photos copyright by Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House.

Review

Il Postino: You’ve got mail

December 15, 2010 2 Comments

In Daniel Catán’s opera Il Postino, currently receiving its European premiere at the Theater an der Wien, the postman always rings… well, only once each time he visits, but you shall know him by the hazy seventh chords in the strings, lush and yet tastefully not too lush. This is perhaps underscored with some understated, vaguely Spanish-sounding dance rhythms. (It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that this opera’s island setting is actually in Italy. The text is in Spanish, I’ve never seen the movie, and I didn’t buy a program.) Aribert Reimann, Catán ain’t. And the libretto, also by Catán and based on the Italian film of the same title, isn’t Medea in terms of dramatic conflict. It’s pleasant and lovely and easy to listen to. Unfortunately, I also found it mind-numbingly dull.

But Plácido Domingo is in it, so, you know, there’s the main attraction.

Daniel Catán, Il Postino, Theater an der Wien, 12/14/2010. New production by Ron Daniels, sets and costumes by Riccardo Hernández, lights by Jennifer Tipton. Wiener Symphoniker and Arnold Schoenberg Chor conducted by Jesús López-Cobos with Plácido Domingo (Pablo Neruda), Israel Lozano (Mario), Amanda Squiltieri (Beatrice), Cristina Gallardo-Domas (Mathilde).

If you like your Puccini put through a Copland sieve, you’ll love Daniel Catán’s score. At first, it sounds rather nice. Actually, the whole thing sounds rather nice. It is extremely consonant and gentle, the vocal lines are, sorry, Puccini-esque. The lyricism is cut with a lightness, a slightly impressionistic, slightly Applachian Spring open fields/open stack of thirds quality that saves it from irredeemable sappiness. It has rhythmic swing, and a few good moments of found music (diegetically provided by a cutely dinky little onstage military band, and an accordionist). But after a little while, the lack of contrast becomes grating. Almost the entire opera hangs in a warm, slightly animated torpor of niceness. Puccini’s chiaroscuro is missing. It’s like listening to “Che il bel sogno di Doretta” over and over and over.

The libretto seems like a good idea in its basic outlines: young mailman Mario strikes up a friendship with avuncular local exiled Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, who gives him relationship advice via poetry lessons. He gets his girl, a lovely barmaid of no distinctive qualities, with minimal problems. In the second half, political events take over the plot. These developments had only been clumsily hinted at in the first half, and it feels tacked on. And I’m not sure why the libretto needs to tell of its most dramatic event, Mario’s tragic last poem, through the intermediary of a narrator. The music finally turns more dramatic, but not, to me, convincingly so (add an enigmatic sea incident with a healthy dose of Debussy, though).

The libretto is an effective mix of quasi-arias and larger ensembles. I don’t speak Spanish and can’t comment on its literary qualities, though the several inserted Neruda poems are very good as sung texts even when I was reading them in the German titles. However, I quickly tired of the libretto’s simplistic harping on the idea of a metaphor, particularly when illustrated by projections in a way that made me think of that classic of American pedagogical video, “Schoolhouse Rock.” Also, I have grown instantly suspicious of any opera staging that puts its love duet in the midst of a starry firmament. This is the second one I’ve seen this month to do so, and both times the effect was pure kitsch (I’m looking at you, Les Troyens).

For the most part, though, the production by Ron Daniels is relatively spare. The stage is covered in bright blue tiles, and many scenes take place in front of projections or a blank screen, or on small rolling set pieces center stage (which probably make this co-production easy to adapt to stages of different sizes). The very good lighting (by Jennifer Tipton) is a breath of fresh air after last weekend’s Don Giovanni fiasco. The whole thing is straightforward and not bad, though not particularly memorable, either. Sometimes the blocking turned static, but most of it is convincing, as these things go.

This opera exists more or less as a Plácido Domingo vehicle, and as that it works. The role of Neruda was clearly tailored to his current vocal estate, which is still remarkably good. The sound is still sizable, secure, and has a lot of tonal beauty, though smooth might not be the right word at this point. The wise old man role is a good one for him at this point, he can project authority while still being endearing in the Ask Grandpa Pablo sections. As the Postman, Israel Lozano sounded ardent but occasionally labored, yet was endearing. However, the character is underwritten, and I found his political sacrifice in Act 3 wholly implausible. Among the women, Amanda Squitieri has a warm, full soprano (which I initially identified as a high mezzo), occasionally tending flat, and was a charismatic presence in another underdefined role (she is a pretty barmaid who loves Mario and… that’s it). Cristina Gallardo-Domas’s voice has taken some beating, but she did her best as Neruda’s wife Matilde.

Unfortunately, the Wiener Symphoniker, conducted by Jesús López-Cobos, didn’t seem to be having the best night, and sounded out of tune and uncoordinated all evening.

It is a perfectly pleasant opera, and refreshingly lacking in grand pretensions, but its mushiness is beyond my tolerance, I’m afraid. You can hear it for yourself on ORF’s oe1 on Saturday.

Also, I have discovered the purpose of Twitter! And it is to trade Parsifal jokes in imaginary pidgin catspeak with prominent Heldentenoren. Just what I need, more ways to waste time. Join in here.

Edited to add: I unconsciously ripped off this post title from Mr. Out West Arts. He thought of it first, and I read his review of the opera’s LA incarnation and probably remembered it! Credit where it is due! It is such a very good title.

Photos copyright Armin Bardel/Theater an der Wien.
Video from the LA Opera premiere (same production, slightly different cast):

Review

Reimann’s Medea: Keeping it in the family

December 8, 2010 4 Comments

Aribert Reimann is not easy listening. His music is modernist with no trace of post-: dense, dissonant, non-tonal, and deadly serious. But his opera Medea was a surprise hit when it premiered at the Wiener Staatsoper last February, and in its first revival at the house it was not hard to see why. The libretto is clear as can be, the drama incredibly intense as well as emotionally accessible, and the music, despite its density, tells the story with a directness that is easy to hear even on the first time through.

Reimann, Medea. Wiener Staatsoper, 12/7/2010. Production by Marco Arturo Marelli, conducted by Michael Boder with Claudia Barainsky (Medea), Adrian Eröd (Jason), Michael Roider (Creon), Stephanie Houtzeel (Creusa), Elisabeth Kulman (Gora), Max Emanuel Cenic (Herold)

(FIRST a quick reminder if you are on the Twitter to follow me on the Twitter so my follower count isn’t pathetic.)

Reimann’s source material is not Euripides or Ovid or Seneca (or even Corneille) but rather the third part of Franz Grillparzer’s trilogy of plays The Golden Fleece (1822). Reimann adapted the text directly from Grillparzer without a librettist, Salome-style. This works well. The language and psychological world of the work feel remarkably modern, with complex characters who are all to some extent sympathetic. We begin as Medea and Jason seek refuge with King Creon in Corinth, and even many of the thematic concerns of the plot–Medea is a racial outsider who must discard her headscarf–feel all too relevant.

The set represents a hilly, rocky landscape that could be the surface of the moon (and that is how much comfort it seems to give the characters). An austerely bare modern room sits stage left, rising and falling, sometimes stage level and sometimes connected to the ground by stairs. This is the home of the “civilized” world of Creon, and he and his tribe wear pure white while Medea, her nurse Gora, and her children wear colorful, vaguely Middle Eastern robes in warm red and purple. Jason acquires white clothes once he has been brought back into his former home, and the children do as well once they are adopted by Creusa.

Reimann’s music is angular and violent, but each character does develop a distinctive voice. Orchestrally, there is a lot going on (particularly in the percussion section), but the balance is pretty good. Medea is one of those insane dramatic coloratura roles characteristic of post-war German opera, she is yet another suffering woman singing high Fs. (See also Die Soldaten, Simplicius Simpiccisimus, the ur-source Lulu, and almost anything else in the repertoire of Claudia Barainsky. Sometimes I wish Strauss had never opened Pandora’s coloratura box by composing my namesake.) Medea rages from high notes to low, skipping around everywhere in between. To my ear her music often sounded vaguely pentatonic, but this may have been my imagination used to pentatonic exotic characters. Jason’s music (lyric baritone) is no more stable but not as extreme in range. Creon is a muscular tenor of no great imagination or variety, and Creusa (lyric mezzo) gets the most memorable profile of all, a flurry of silly, bouncy coloratura showing her unknowing superficiality.

It’s an exciting score, and the tension barely lifts from the ghostly start until just before Medea’s (offstage) infanticide. Her solo scene leading up to her murder of her children is a tour de force, starting in haunting quiet and building to the rage she had shown throughout the opera. But the post-murder coda is full of astonishingly placid lyricism, a cathartic and beautiful end to a score that is otherwise very harsh. It’s a powerful piece of work, harrowing without the over-the-top, numbingly cruel misery of some modern opera, it’s tragic in the best sense. (Only in a period like this could a work in which a woman kills her own children be called restrained.)

The production is straightforward and effective. Jason forcibly leaving Medea in the ascending room stage left, she clinging to his hand, is a particularly memorable image. Medea’s magic disturbs the (volcanic-looking) rocks upstage–unfortunately as they roll down the hill their unlikely weightlessness is unmistakable. The blocking is impressively detailed for such complicated music (not to mention for a Wiener Staatsoper revival), and kept everything psychologically clear.

Putting on Reimann in a repertory house is a major challenge, of course. The singers in this production were the same as in the premiere, with the exception of Claudia Barainsky in the title role (premiere cast Marlis Petersen was to appear in this revival but is ill; Barainsky sang the work’s German premiere this fall) and Stephanie Houtzeel as Creusa. Note that all these photos show the premiere cast. But all the singers were spectacularly good with this impossibly difficult music. Barainsky has a narrow, focussed soprano with considerable power. She made an earthy, instinctual Medea; according to some other audience members, Petersen was more aloof. Adrian Eröd was a smoothly sung, dramatically conflicted Jason, and Houtzeel sang Creusa with flowing tone and skipped around like she was in a Mozart opera. There wasn’t a weak link in the whole cast, really, Elisabeth Kulman’s dramatic Gora, Michael Roider’s Herod-like Creon, and Max Emanuel Cencic’s forceful countertenor Herold were all strong.

Michael Boder did an excellent job balancing orchestra to singers. It’s hard to tell in this kind of score if everyone is together or not, but I did get the impression the orchestra was hanging on by the skin of their collective teeth at times. There were attacks that I believe were supposed to be together that were not. Passagework was dicey, and sections on opposite sides of the pit sounded questionably coordinated. But I’m not sure if I can really blame them for this.

This was the last performance of this opera this season. If you’re interested in seeing this work–and I hope you are–a DVD of the premiere is now available. (It’s available at the Staatsoper, at least, I can’t find it on Amazon yet.)

Next: Tomorrow night is the premiere of Il Postino at the Theater an der Wien, but I think I will be going next week. I’ll be at the premiere of the new Don Giovanni at the Staatsoper on Saturday for sure.

Bows. The fellow in the suit on the right is Reimann himself:

Production photos copyright Wiener Staatsoper.

Review

It’s a dog’s life

December 6, 2010 2 Comments

My unearned London vacation continued last Thursday with A Dog’s Heart at the English National Opera. It sounded intriguing: production with theater company Complicite, source material from Bulgakov. But the composer, Alexander Raskatov, was an unknown quantity to me. Turns out this was bad, because while this opera some things going for it, the score isn’t one of them, alas.

Alexander Raskatov, A Dog’s Heart. English National Opera, 2/12/2010. Production directed by Simon McBurney, conducted by Garry Walker with Steven Page (Professor Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky), Peter Hoare (Sharikov), Elena Vassilieva (Shaik’s unpleasant voice/Darya), Andrew Watts (Shark’s pleasant voice), Leigh Melrose (Bormenthal), Nancy Allen Lundy (Zina), Blund Summit Theatre (dog puppetry)

A Dog’s Heart was composed by Raskatov to a libretto by Cesare Mazzoni after the Bulgakov novella of the same title. The source material is wonderful for an opera, a tale of a mad doctor/professor who in an unwise decision transforms a good-natured stray dog into an exceptionally intemperate man via the transplant of some, uh, vital organs. Hijinks, as they say, ensue. The setting is 1920’s Russia, and the absurdism, Soviet twists (telltale obsession with real estate, committees, informants, etc.) and series of short, episodic scenes, as well as some elements of the musical style, are strongly reminiscent of Shostakovich’s The Nose. Like that work, the libretto is a “sung play” setting of the Dargomyzhsky sort, consisting of massive amounts of dialogue without many ensembles and only a few extended solo sections. (Think Les parapluies de Cherbourg, Russian style.) The similarities to The Nose loom large enough to maybe say that A Dog’s Heart is derivative.

Raskatov is best-known for his completion of Schnittke’s Symphony No. 9, and his own mixture of styles recalls Schnittke as well. Unfortunately, I could never grasp a unique voice under the collage of Soviet anthems, jazz, and Russian folk music. The music is maddeningly disjunct, hardly ever lyrical, and changes texture and mood so quickly that I felt I never had a grip on it, nor could I figure out the way the music related to the dramatic situations. Most of it is not tonal, though Raskatov has an odd tendency to turn straightforwardly tonal at the most dramatic climaxes. Things settle down a bit in Act 2 with a Shostakovich-ish passacaglia, but I still have no idea what Raskatov is about musically. If there is a characteristic sound to this opera it is, alas, the combination of a flexatone and a farting trombone. That makes it sound much more entertaining than it is, the music rarely picks up on the wit of the text.

I suspect the poor text setting was a major impediment. The original libretto was in Russian (though the premiere was at De Nederlandse Opera), and while Martin Pickard’s English translation is satisfyingly immediate and vulgar, the emphasis and rhythm of the text enjoy only a tenuous connection with that of the music. The text proceeds slowly, and the surtitles were much appreciated because it is not easy to understand. Few characters acquire a unique musical profile, and some of the music associated with one is recapitulated by another with no clear dramatic intent. The most distinctive voice is the obligatory screechy New Opera coloratura soprano, here a maid who is given a particularly punishingly stratospheric part (Nancy Allen Lundy sang with flair). She’s got a character, but someone write a new opera that doesn’t involve a lady hanging around solely above the staff, please!

The inventive and very precisely choreographed production, directed by Complicite director Simon McBurney is the best thing going here. The set combines projections of Soviet scenery on a backdrop (and sometimes also on a front scrim) with an otherwise mostly-bare stage. Sharik, pre-transformation, is represented by an endearing puppet dog from Blind Summit Theatre (you may remember them as Trouble in the Met’s Butterfly–that production originated at ENO). His “pleasant voice” is sung by a countertenor, Andrew Watts, his “unpleasant voice” by a mezzo, Elena Vassileva, barking and squealing through a megaphone. The two sound quite similar in timbre; the main difference is the megaphone and musical style rather than the voices themselves. As a foul-mouthed balalaika-playing man with a taste for vodka, Sharik becomes Sharikov and is sung by tenor Peter Hoare, who makes an outrageous, overpoweringly energetic character who shakes up the slow proceedings considerably.

Unfortunately the production is content to be merely absurd, and while I don’t mind that it keeps the symbolism open-ended, I wish it had done something more with the piece’s politics. Its view of the Soviet society of the Professor’s apartment committee and Sharikov’s employment is underdeveloped and vague, and prevents things from really acquiring consequence and gravity. The chorus mostly lingers stage left in a straight line, and the production never really creates a society beyond the setting of the professor’s apartment. Despite the tightness of the staging and some strong scenes–an intriguing beginning mixing the two voices of the dog, a parade of strange patients at the Professor’s office, and most of the scenes involving Sharikov the man–the evening tended to drag. Singing was good and the orchestra dealt handily with the asymmetry of Raskatov’s score and its strange sounds. It’s not like I could have heard if things had gotten off but it all sounded very confident. But without music I can enjoy, I’m afraid I can’t call this one a success with me.

Possibly the most amusing thing I heard all evening was this dialogue in the ladies’ room before the show:
“Tom was so disappointing. Jen said to expect a stunner.”
“The best I can say is that he has very good skin.”

Trailer: