Review

Two Boys at the Met

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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

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Review

A trip to Baden Baden with the Gotham Chamber Opera

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Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse

Out of all the smaller opera companies in New York, Gotham Chamber Opera stands the best chance to fill in the gap left by (RIP) New York City Opera. Their new production, Baden-Baden 1927 recreates a quadruple bill that premiered at the titular music festival–four one-act operas by composers Darius Milhaud, Ernst Toch, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill. It’s a great idea and a good opportunity to discover these scores. The production is visually striking. Unfortunately, it’s stronger in concept than execution. Much like their production of Eliogabalo last March, Baden-Baden 1927 features spotty musicianship and a “bold” production that doesn’t make a nuanced case for these interesting pieces.


Baden-Baden 1927. Operas by Milhaud, Toch, Hindemith, and Weill. Gotham Chamber Opera at the Lynch Theater (new production premiere). Production by Paul Curran, sets by Georg Baselitz, sets and costumes by Court Watson, lighting by Paul Hackenmueller, projections by Discoll Otto.

These operas fall under the umbrella of Zeitoper, a Weimar-era genre of operas dealing with current socio-political issues, often in a dry, anti-romantic musical style (the canonical example is Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf). Appropriately enough, Paul Curran’s Baden-Baden 1927 production attempts to update the concerns of these operas for modern times. Many of the sets include bright paintings by Georg Baselitz. (The co-set designer is Court Watson.)

The most successful of these is the first, Milhaud’s L’enlèvement d’Europe (The Abduction of Europa) set in an art gallery. A number of black-dressed chorus members fail to grasp the aim of a big, colorful expressionist painting (the only of the paintings that feels important to the action). Europa, wearing a long red dress, gets it, and is then abducted by Jupiter, whose painted suit identifies him with the painting. Modernist art kills off her fiancé Pergamon. Simple enough. Maeve Höglund sang Europa smoothly if vaguely, Daniel Montenegro sounded strong as Jupiter. As in most of the pieces, the chamber orchestra under music director Neal Goren sounded underrehearsed, and coordination was rough.

L’enlèvement d’Europe

In between operas, the cast banters with the audience. Their spiels repeatedly feature the rhetorical question “what is art?” and combine audience participation with some poorly chosen and questionable historical context. I think the idea is to make us reflect on the experience, but it’s rather painfully oversimplified and condescending. Honestly, if people are going to sign up for a performance that recreates an avant-garde opera program from 1927, you can challenge them with a little more intellectual substance. Rather than describe Baden-Baden as a weird place, you could explain that this event was a continuation of the important Donaueschingen festival. And I have no idea why one would introduce a piece by Weill and Brecht with a Clif’s Note introduction to Dada.*

Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse

The second opera is Ernst Toch’s Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse, The Princess and the Pea, which is a delightful piece with some fun characterizations and lively music. The characters include the indifferent prince, a spoiled princess, and most memorably the family’s dictatorial queen, who wants to set her son up with a princess at any cost. Curran’s production is set in a Kardashian-like reality TV show. It’s main attraction is Helen Donath’s scream of a performance as the matriarch. She knows how to make the words count. While her soprano is not large, it’s sure. Höglund is better here as the princess, funny and using her clear upper register to advantage. As the Minister, Matthew Tuell does a fine Pete Campbell impersonation. Jennifer Rivera is forceful as the Nurse.

While the cameras and hovering production staff give us plenty to watch, the production doesn’t make much sense. The plot’s whole point is that social hierarchy is very important for the prince’s family. The instant fame of reality TV explodes that entire concept. I also have to point out that there is something far more provocative and serious about this piece. It’s by an Austrian Jewish composer, and about a genealogical purity test. Written in 1927. Making if about cheap fame seems to be, er, missing a rather obvious allegory.

Hin und zurück

After intermission, we turned to Paul Hindemith’s Hin und zurück (There and Back), an opera most notable for its palindromic structure (which seems borrowed from
silent film and cartoons). We see a tragic love triangle unfold
disconcertingly quickly, then, after a short monologue proclaims that
nothing matters. The events then repeat themselves in reverse. Compared
to the first half, the production is straightforward and direct, its
biggest laughs being people walking backwards.

Mahagonny Songspiel

Curran also seems short on ideas for the final piece, the Mahagonny Songspiel. This was a study for Weill and Brecht’s full opera, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, six isolated songs on the miserable state of the world. The centerpiece of the production is a bunch of treadmills, whose symbolism is obvious but whose aesthetic presence is somewhat lacking. I’m not sure why a man in his underwear wanders through. (Maybe it’s the Dada. But in Brecht? Really???) Donath and Rivera are effectively smoky in the Alabama-Song and Benares-Song, but the men could use some rebalancing in their quartets.

I’m very sorry this evening fell short, because Gotham has an admirable mission and this was a promising production. Zeitoper’s mission to bring topical concerns to opera is hardly outdated–just witness Anna Nicole. But Zeitoper isn’t just about making opera part of pop culture. Its iconoclastic role seems to have been lost: both Anna Nicole and Baden-Baden 1927 seem to view their primary mission to entertain, with any socio-political commentary taking a decidedly subsidiary position. While both succeed to some degree as amusements, this goal is itself disappointingly meek. In 1927, the composers were not nearly so shy.

Photos by Richard Termine

*This may be predictable coming from me but I have to wonder if the addition of a production dramaturg could have made this commentary somewhat better researched and more intelligent.

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Review

Of chaste divas and broken legato

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I went to see Norma at the Met on Thursday in part because, I confess, I had never seen Norma. This was not due to lack of opportunity but rather because I kept hearing about how Diva X couldn’t sing the title role to save her life and was committing a crime against the memory of Maria Callas/Claudia Muzio/Giuditta Pasta, because we all remember exactly what Pasta sounded like. Honestly, I should have just gone, because I have never quite understood why Norma  is supposed to be so special. From my admittedly fairly superficial knowledge of the piece, the role’s demands don’t seem radically different from those of some other formidable bel canto heroines—La sonnambula or Lucrezia Borgia for example—whose operas are not given such status. I wonder if, in part, it is because we need some role to serve as a summit of achievement. (Personally, I can appreciate Bellini’s way with a melody but I think Lucrezia is way more fun.) Does this have to do with twentieth-century performance history more than it does with the music? But I digress. Anyway, I finally ended up seeing it at the Met on Thursday.

Sondra Radvanovsky made an impressive stab at Norma, but she’s not quite there yet. Sometimes everything fell into place and it was great, and sometimes it was a work in progress. She’s got a very big voice with a highly distinctive color, a reedy dark quality with a fast and wide vibrato. At her best moments, she sang with urgency and conviction fitting the character, but sometimes the technical demands of the singing seemed to occupy her full attention and the drama and music slipped away. The opening of “Casta diva” was really lovely; she can sing the long phrases with real intent, but the vocalises at the ending seemed to lack any purpose. Technically, she can manage it, though a few high pianissimos were tenuous and the coloratura of the cabalettas was at times too careful to have any drive.

Of course the circumstances of this performance were against her, and there might be a different explanation for her unevenness. Riccardo Frizza’s conducting was sympathetic, but neither production nor supporting cast was any help. John Copley’s production mixes ancient stones and smooth modern curves with all the individual character of an investment bank lobby. The costumes are sparkly and jingly (Radvanovsky looked great in Ballo last season, but everything is horribly unflattering here), and the choral direction is non-existent. Nor does the staging seem to give the cast anything substantive to work with, character-wise. Let’s not talk about this production any more.

previous revival, but same set

As for the other singers, Aleksandrs Antonenko as Pollione has a powerful, dark voice and is rather exciting in his upper register. But this music exposed a shortage of finesse and variation in color that is less evident in more verismic repertoire. Kate Aldrich as Adalgisa did not have a good evening, sounding badly stretched and strained by the size of the house. She was thoroughly drowned out in her duets with Radvanovsky. I heard her sing a moderately-sized but enjoyable Carmen at the Met a few years ago and kind of wonder what happened. Similarly, I was saddened to see that the wobbly and undersized bass singing Oroveso was James Morris; this is not a happy way to end a distinguished career.

If you’re someone who believes Norma should only be put on as a special event, this performance will not satisfy you. But Radvanovsky is worth seeing, if you don’t mind the afterthought quality of the rest of it.

Note that some later performances will feature Angela Meade as Norma and the fantastic Jamie Barton as Adalgisa.


Bellini, Norma. Metropolitan Opera, 10/13/2013. Production by John Copley (revival), conducted by Riccardo Frizza with Sondra Radvanovsky (Norma), Aleksandrs Antonenko (Pollione), Kate Aldrich (Adalgisa), James Morris (Oroveso)

First photo copyright Marty Sohl/Met
Second photo copyright Beatriz Schiller/Met

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Review

Celebrating the Verdi Anniversary

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This Sunday, I will be speaking about blogging and the Verdi anniversary on a panel at Verdi’s Third Century, a conference put on by the American Institute for Verdi Studies (at New York University). In the spirit of blogging, this discussion wouldn’t be complete without your thoughts! I would like to talk about how the Verdi anniversary has been recognized outside academia, and would love to hear your thoughts, recent Verdi experiences, and so on (comment at the bottom of this post!).

(I am also giving a formal paper about ritual and repetition in Verdi production. Sorry, you can’t contribute to that one unless you show up to ask a question afterwards.)

I asked around on Twitter a few days ago and got some interesting thoughts. Many immediately confirmed my initial suspicion: Verdi Year mostly means seeing more Verdi. Verdi is at the core of most modern opera houses, and a few more Traviatas and maybe a Stiffelio tend to sneak into people’s schedules without a major fuss.

First: a lesson on social media. I put this question up around 8:30 in the morning, before I started work. No one responded. A few hours later I wondered out loud if that meant no one cared, and it turned out I was just too early, and suddenly everyone wanted to chat (this explains the tweet everyone is responding to below). Thanks to a retweet from the Royal Opera House, I got a lot of British responses.

As Lucy put it,

For some people this was not entirely welcome:

There’s also the 800-pound gorilla: Wagner. Verdi had competition, and seems to have been the less recognized of the two.

 I suspect there’s a different kind of engagement between Wagner and Verdi audiences. Wagner audiences form societies and go to conferences (I went to a Wagner conference in January that had a handful of non-academics who flew to South Carolina just to hear papers about Wagner), while Verdi audiences tend to just go to operas. I liked Ruth’s theory on this:

 This was backed up by some of the other responses:

What has Verdi done for you recently? Please leave a comment or email me at likelyimpossibilities at gmail.com.

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Review

All the ladies are doing it

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I rolled my eyes a little bit when James Levine was recently described in the Times as “somebody who may be the greatest opera conductor in history.” But after last night’s Così, the fourth performance in his triumphant return to the Met, I can at least understand the thinking behind it (though I still don’t agree). He’s an institution here, and Mozart at the Met hasn’t sounded anywhere near this good in years. It was impeccably clear, energetic, and paced, imbued with an air and light that no one else gets out of the Met orchestra. Everything is phrased and shaped, and yet it all sounds spontaneous and fresh.

The rest of the performance bore the signature of some of the less happy legacies of the Levine era: a boring production and singing that was fine but not quite star quality. The production is particularly egregious. Leslie Koenig’s 1996 staging is cartoonish, unsubtle, and offers much unfunny comic business, making a very poor contrast to the sublimity of the music. It flattens this ambiguous, intense libretto to its lowest common rom-com denominator. (Such a seemingly low opinion of the libretto has a venerable history in Così reception, but this sort of staging seems to proceed from an a priori assumption of triviality, and never constructs a coherent relationship with the overqualified score.)

It’s also just bad theater. The look is traditional, and the blocking in the first act frequently mirrors both the sisters and the men–problematic, I think, for a production already short on dramatic differentiation. Its brand of comedy involves having the Albanians spend an awful lot of time twirling their robes around. One great thing about Da Ponte’s libretti is how they always begin in media res. But while the men are obviously in the midst of a heated conversation when the curtain rises, here they lounge still and wordless for the whole introduction.

(I’m sorry to sound like a broken record here, but you have 70-some days left to watch the Michael Haneke production of Così on the Arte website, and if you haven’t yet, go do it now because you owe it to yourself. It’s a brutal and chilly take on an opera that I’ve (as you may have surmised) never found very funny.)

The cast offered some lovely moments, but none overshadowed the conducting, quite. Fiordiligi is a fiendishly difficult role and Susanna Philips handled many of the technical challenges with aplomb and a silvery soprano. But she isn’t a natural comedian or a big personality, and lacks the bravura to make “Come scoglio” really take off. Where she excelled was “Per pietà” and onwards, where she traced Fiordiligi’s descent with simplicity and honesty. Maybe she’s just more of a Mimì type. As her sister, Isabel Leonard was not impressive, sounding rather vinegary and showing little in the way of stage presence.

As Despina, Danielle De Niese had the most acting sparkle in the cast, but didn’t have much to play off against, and the performance ended up seeming a bit effortful. Her singing tended towards the raw and more Mozartean elegance would have been nice, but Despina’s music isn’t “Dove sono.” She was certainly a brighter presence than Maurizio Muraro was as Don Alfonso, who started off as a low energy Dulcamara and went downhill from there. This is a plum role and not difficult to cast, why not find someone with a little more wit?

The other men were much better. Matthew Polenzani remains a superb Mozart tenor with sweet tone and great musicality, and did the most glamorous singing of the evening. He can actually make “Ah! lo veggio” sound like the walk in the park that, in the libretto, it literally is. Rodion Pogorossov was a fine Gugliemo and almost funny, though this role always seems to have drawn the short straw.

Despite great unevenness, the conducting alone was enough to make this a gratifying performance, and I recommend you go if you can.


Mozart, Così fan tutte, Metropolitan Opera, 10/5/2013.

Photos copyright Marty Sohl/Met.

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Review

Weekend diversions

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You have two choices for your weekend internet opera-watching: fun or… not fun. Guess which is which in the pictures above!

First up is Puccini’s La fanciulla del West from the Wiener Staatsoper with Nina Stemme and Jonas Kaufmann, premiering tomorrow. Intermezzo has the details on how you can listen to or watch it, plus many “Dick Johnson” jokes. Or rather Dick Johnson “jokes.”

On a slightly less entertaining note, Wozzeck. The Bayerische Staatsoper will be streaming their production on Sunday at 19:00 Munich time. It’s a cliché to describe Wozzeck as devastating–has there ever been a production of it that was not devastating?–but this one is really astonishingly good, one of the best productions I’ve seen of anything. Cast includes Simon Keenlyside and Angela Denoke and Lothar Koenigs conducts. Highly recommended. The usual Bay Staats restriction applies: no archived viewing.

As for me, I’ll be at the Met for Così on Saturday night.

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