Review

The Tempest: Oh timid old world

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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.”

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Review

Il trovatore: Cecily, how could you have ever doubted that I had a brother?

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The old canard is that all you need for Trovatore is the four best singers in the world. That’s stupid on a number of levels, one of which was illustrated in this Met revival, which is super excellent despite being a rep night with only one known name. It was the best of what you can expect from a non-Event performance: an old favorite (Dolora Zajick’s Azucena) with an exciting newcomer (Guanqun Yu as Leonora) and a few more workman-like performances that nonetheless had much to enjoy. Even Daniele Callegari’s conducting was pretty good! However, this production is so bland that you almost wish David McVicar had made a frame narrative about the singers we are seeing this evening. Nah, not really.

Verdi, Il trovatore. Met Opera, 10/17/2012. Production by David McVicar (revival), conducted by Daniele Callegari with Guanqun Yu (Leonora), Dolora Zajick (Azucena), Gwyn Hughes Jones (Manrico), Angel Òdena (Conte di Luna), Morris Robinson (Ferrando).

Il trovatore’s lusty embrace of melodrama provided Verdi plenty of chances to write exciting music for so-called “extreme situations.” But today, when that opera is considered part of our cultural pantheon and operatic characters are conventionally analyzed in psychological terms, no one is sure as to how seriously we should take it. Contemporary opera-goers tend to be a rather literal-minded bunch who want to follow the plot and identify with the characters’ plights, and with Trovatore they can find their credibility awkwardly tested. Even after you untangle the complicated back story, you are left with plot devices like baby-swapping, gypsy curses, infants thrown in fires, and a very sketchily drawn political situation, plus a few points where the motivations of the characters are, shall we say, obscure.

David McVicar’s Met production takes the friendliest path out of this mess by telling the story in as straightforward and easy to follow a way as possible, making the characters lively and sympathetic when applicable, and keeping the action moving with his turntable stage. The early nineteenth-century costumes and looming walls of set are fine and not over the top without doing much of anything. What distinguished the first run was McVicar’s personal touch with the singers, who gave fairly nuanced interpretations based on their personal standards. It doesn’t look like he directed this revival (some of the anvil-hitting guys were wearing shirts–a dead giveaway), and the blocking is more schematic this time around. When Ferrando goes up the stairs, it looks like he’s doing it so he’ll sing out from above the chorus, not because he wants to go anywhere.

It’s still an effective-enough staging that gets the job done without too many egregious clichés, but I would like to see something that has a stronger perspective and doesn’t seem to want to put the mellow in melodrama. For a red meat sort of opera this thing seems pretty mild-mannered in its earnest (and, granted, mostly successful) attempts to avoid unintentional comedy. Everyone’s measured reactions give the impression of logic and rationality, but is Trovatore happening in a rational, reasonable sort of place? I don’t think so. McVicar’s concern seems to be ironing out a problem opera into something no one can really object to (except on grounds of boredom). For a more inspired director with a more adventurous audience, the opera’s unusual aspects might present not a liability but an opportunity to do something interesting and distinctive.* Oh well.

But this kind of affair lends itself easily to changing casts, making it an asset to a repertory house like the Met. The highlight here was very young Chinese soprano Guanqun Yu as Leonora, making a super Met debut with this run. She’s got a beautiful, sweet, creamy lyric soprano that fills the house well except for something of a loss of power at the bottom end. Her stage presence is a naturally sympathetic and she infuses her singing with both outstanding musicality and details of character. This was an unusually convincing and complete, integrated performance, particularly for someone at a very early point in her career. (She recently came in second at Operalia. I do hope she goes and spends some quality time with Donna Anna, Mimì, Marguerite, Violetta, etc. instead of killing herself with too many really monstrous roles so early, even though she has the technique to handle them.)

Making his house debut this performance was baritone Angel Òdena as the Conte di Luna. His instrument is formidable, a gravelly, imposing, somewhat dry baritone that has real Verdi quality. Unfortunately his sense of rhythm and pitch tended to be vague, particularly in the big aria, and his sense of character more mustache-twirling than anything else. Still, considering he was the cover and got virtually no rehearsals, an impressive effort. Also impressive if not entirely satisfying was Gwyn Hughes Jones as Manrico. He is an honorable performer with a bright, ably used tenor, and sings with consistent taste and style. Unfortunately the voice is a little on the small side for this role at the Met, and lacks power at the top, where his narrow vibrato turns towards a bleat. While an OK actor he didn’t make an enormous impression, character-wise. Morris Robinson was a vocally smooth and sonorous if less than dramatically imposing Ferrando.

I have left Dolora Zajick for last because her Azucena is a legendarily known quantity. She was announced as ill but sounded as mighty as usual (high notes were a little short). She showed some signs of remembering McVicar’s direction (she was in the premiere cast of this production), but her main appeal remains her ability to sing louder and more excitingly than anyone else. She does that, and inarguably knows her way around this music. It’s a classic portrayal, and still thrilling.

Conductor Daniele Callegari’s goal seemed to be to go as fast as possible, but excitement isn’t amiss in this opera. Over than the speediness, it was competent and usually flexible when it needed to be. Sometimes Òdena didn’t seem entirely with him, but the orchestra was fine.

If you need some satisfying operatic protein in your diet, consider this revival, which has two performances left this fall and will return in the spring with the same conductor and an entirely different cast.

*For more interesting Trovatori I recommend considering Dmitri Tcherniakov’s dark Brussels effort (not yet on DVD but streamed on the internet this summer, so hopefully coming). I am also curious as to what Olivier Py’s Munich production will bring next summer, considering his Lulu was extreme enough as to almost melt my eyeballs.

Guanqun Yu sings “Tacea la notte,” then follow some photos of previous casts.

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Review

Are you not honest, Otello?

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When the subject of opera and blackface comes up among non-opera fanatics, I end up mumbling something wishy-washy about people of color being woefully underrepresented among classical singers, about Otello being a major role that dramatic tenors want to sing, about Moors not being sub-Saharan Africans. Then I feel terrible, because that’s a superficial answer to a complex, important question.

But have no fear, this Met revival exists in that alternate operatic universe where these things don’t matter. (Not uncommon. Last season only the chance casting of an Asian Pinkerton and a white Cio-Cio-San let any reality into Butterfly.) It deploys the semiotics of operatic drama—the singers waving their arms and stepping downstage, or fainting; the chorus looking collectively shocked; the stage elevator doing its thing—while hardly ever creating the resonance that makes actual theater. It’s a simulacrum that’s less convincing than Iago’s case for Desdemona being the Sluttiest Slut of Cyprus.

Verdi, Otello. Met Opera, 10/13/2012. Production by Elijah Moshinsky (revival), conducted by Semyon Bychkov with Avgust Amonov (Otello), Renée Fleming (Desdemona), Falk Struckmann (Jago), Michael Fabiano (Cassio), Renée Tatum (Emilia)

To be fair, Otello is a difficult opera to pull off. Verdi’s late masterwork is a mighty but chilly affair, its slippery score containing few big tunes and rarely letting us inside the heads of its characters. The thing moves vertiginously fast, with little exposition or time for introductions, and we spend a disconcertingly large amount of time with the chorus. So a production has to establish some perspective on the characters very quickly, and find a dramatic function for that chorus.

Elijah Moshinsky’s cluttered Met production does just about the opposite. It stages the thing as a grand opera full of spectacle and effects, filling the stage with large sets and characters that lack any kind of dramatic focus. There’s a large amount of very lame and very purposeless dancing, seemingly just to take up space with the signifiers of spectacle. The principals parked and barked, and sometimes walked over somewhere else and barked some more. The block-like approach, heavy fabrics and relentless ornamentation proclaim the opera’s status as a luxury product, and are so unknowingly at odds with this lean, mean work that you wonder if the designers thought they were actually staging a Meyerbeer opera.

I don’t doubt that Semyon Bychkov has something to say about this score: there’s interest in the pulsing rhythms of the accompaniments, in the monumentality of some of the larger bits. But much of this was lost in a kind of scrupulous slow motion that sounded like a practice tempo, where you are trying hard to get everything just right. The orchestra was, for the most part, very good, and coordination was OK too, but it completely lacked the edge-of-your-seat quality that is absolutely essential in this opera.

Johan Botha was sick and our Alternotello was Russian Avgust Amonov. (These photos show Botha.) Einspringer in this role are usually bad news because most of the good singers in this sparsely populated fach are out singing, not understudying. Amonov began with a gargled “Esultate!” sounding like one of those Chinese houses that has a decorative third story. The program said tenor, but there aren’t any stairs going up to the top floor. Things improved gradually, and he found some of his upper register, if not all of it. He’s got a substantial voice but its thick, leathery quality is not attractive, and there was precious little music in this singing, nor was there any real character onstage. His intonation was often flat. I guess he’s more mobile than Botha, though maybe not that much more expressive. For a sub, could have been worse. I in fact have seen worse—imagine an Otello where both your Otello and Desdemona are sick, and not only are the replacements vocally dire but they also have no idea how to find their way around a very complex Regietheater production that involves inflatable beach toys and dozens of handkerchiefs falling from the flies—but this was not good, and was also less entertaining than that one.

I am on the record as a fan of Renée Fleming’s Desdemona, but I found this outing overall less successful than her Parisian effort. The kitsch quality of the production left her, often an emotionally unengaged performer, under glass until the Willow Song. That, and the Ave Maria that followed, were the highlight of the evening. Fleming’s voice still has a beautiful burnished quality and flexibility, and she sang this with a straightforward expressivity that made it some of the only real honest music of the whole thing. Elsewhere she tended to be drowned out. She again did the thing where her death throes included pulling her nightie over her knees so she would not be lying on the bed bare-legged for the rest of the opera. Modest, and relatively smoothly executed, yet still distracting.

The only performer who consistently made drama of the music was Falk Struckmann. This was more or less the Bayreuth Bark Jago, I don’t think legato is exactly an option for his tough, dark baritone. But he actually seemed to be consistently expressing something, even if that was fairly generic oily villainy, it made everyone else look a little lazy. I’m not sure what was up with his repeated fencing pose, but it gave him some visual profile.

The supporting cast was fine. Michael Fabiano’s bright tenor again showed promise as Cassio, though I similarly found him to have more personality in Paris. I wonder when we will be seeing him in bigger roles? To be honest, personality-wise he would have been a far better fit for the opening night’s Elisir production that Polenzani, though he is a less mature singer. On the other hand, it’s weird to see James Morris in such a small role as Lodovico, however considering his current vocal estate we may not want to wish for more. Renée Tatum was a finely sung, alert Emilia, and avoided doing that thing where the ladies-in-waiting always clasp their hands horizontally and for that we thank you, Renée Tatum.

But mostly this performance never met an operatic cliché it didn’t unthinkingly adopt, resulting something closer to mass ritualized enactment than living art. Three performances remain this fall; I wouldn’t call this a must-see, particularly with Amonov. Perhaps wait for the spring run, conducted by up-and-comer Alain Altinoglu (with whom I’ve had mixed experiences, but he seems to be going places) and the marvelous Krassimira Stoyanova as Desdemona.

P.S. Sorry about the sporadic blogging, I have been busy at work and have had the dismaying feeling that I have not actually missed very much!

Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met.

You can see a video of Renée Fleming singing the “Ave Maria” here.

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Review

The Met’s new Mehlisir d’amore

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Are you DELIGHTED yet?

For a repertory performance, this Elisir d’amore would not have been all bad. The singing is decent and the story happens, though the beats fall haphazardly. But this was a new production for the Met’s opening night, which requires confronting the reality that a lot of people thought that making this thing from scratch was a good idea, and put a lot of time, craft, and money into it.

The ideal seems to have been to create something as mainstream and inoffensive as possible. In practice, this means the production has all the appeal and originality of a suburban shopping mall (whose multiplex probably plays The Met Live in HD). There’s a ritual aspect to opera, particularly live performance. There are certain thrills we want to experience, together, over and over. But new productions are for, you know, new stuff, and to come up with something as cookie cutter as this you have to be really actively opposed to creativity.

In other news, I love you, Trebs, but stop kidding yourself.

Donizetti, L’elisir d’amore. Metropolitan Opera opening night, 9/24/2012. New production (premiere) directed by Bartlett Sher, sets by Michael Yeargan, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lights by Jennifer Tipton. Conducted by Maurizio Benini with Anna Netrebko (Adina), Matthew Polenzani (Nemorino), Mariusz Kwiecien (Belcore), Ambrogio Maestri (Dulcamara), Anne-Carolyn Bird (Giannetta)

L’elisir is a human comedy that has to find a way to balance sincere emotion with slapstick, and deal with the fact that its hero Nemorino is, well, not the sharpest tool in the shed. (I think this is why most productions keep the setting rural and full of peasants. Those country people are dumb!) This production preserves the traditional rustic Italian setting, though the set is blown up to almost Zeffirellian proportions. The stage is framed in a false proscenium that fulfills its promise to portray only a storybook—these are faultlessly clean and well-dressed peasants, with a generous touch of opera’s favorite time period, Slutty 18th and 19th Century (it’s like the 18th or 19th century, only with more cleavage). There seem to be both farm folks and town folks, but I couldn’t figure out why. Anna Netrebko’s Adina does wear a top hat, and an outfit with a red skirt and belt that led some people in front of me to conclude that she was “a gypsy” (sic).

Many of the sets are flat cutouts. The maze of buildings, wheat and many unidentified objects reads very badly from the bird’s eye view of the Family Circle, I can’t really tell you much more about what it looks like. (To paraphrase Mitt Romney, those trees are not the right height). But while the sets speak of Italy, the lighting plot is of Sweden in December. Gratuitous follow spots pop on and off randomly, and it always looks like sunset. I tried to figure out how much time was passing between scenes and what time of the day it was supposed to be, and I had to give up.

 Sher portrays Adina and Nemorino on close terms from the start, getting physically intimate with each other even before the elixir is involved. But it’s not consistent, and Sher prefers everyone to constantly run around and fall over a lot rather than anything genuinely emotional or constructing a convincing through-line. And since they started getting in each other’s faces, unless you have some detail there’s nowhere you can really go. (I was in the Family Circle, FWIW.) But for all the broadness there is little that is funny here. And if you’re going to make this a psychological drama you have come up with characterizations a little more distinctive than these. Belcore is not as over-the-top as usual but nor is he anything more than a guy who comes on and sings an aria. I guess you can choose to pass up comedy if you like, but to have such wonderful opportunities as Dulcamara’s aria, Nemorino opening the elixir bottle, and the gondola girl song pass with hardly a laugh makes the whole thing even more confusing and bland.

This may have been partially due to a certain lack of star wattage. Anna Netrebko is a treasure but has a hard time wrapping her increasingly big, dark voice around this light part. While the results were sometimes interesting, and the sound is pure gorgeous, her pitch went flat sometimes and this voice in this role is, despite her aggressively flirty acting, matronly. As for that top hat, I don’t know. It makes no sense, though it isn’t alone in that regard. The stage desperately needed lighting up, and she wasn’t quite enough to do it.

Based on Matthew Polenzani’s sound, you’d think he should be more famous than he is. But considering the whole performance his place seems, as cruel as this might sound, about right. He has lovely technique and smooth liquid tone, sounds Italianate enough, is musically tasteful, and can sing piano like nobody’s business. But he is completely, utterly lacking in charisma. (That only one of these photos features him is not my fault but rather the Met website’s. Maybe that means something.) Nemorino might not be a glamorous guy but he’s the hero and you have to be rooting for him. Polenzani is just this dude singing, and his dramatic ritardando at the end of “Una furtiva” was immaculate and accomplished yet empty.

Mariusz Kwiecien sang Belcore cleanly but sometimes has a bit of strain in his voice in the higher ranges. Ambrogio Maestri is a big man with a big voice and is very Italian and would thus seem ideal for Dulcamara, but despite booming it out just fine (with an excellent upper register) never seemed to have the personality to match his other attributes. Anne-Carolyn Bird’s Giannetta chorus scene was beautifully done, featuring several of the most elegantly shaped phrases of the night.

Maurizio Benini kept to the tradition that Elisir d’amore should only be conducted very, very badly (see my records on this—yeah, I like this opera and go see it a lot, we go back, Elisir and I, and for the record my production was cuter than this one and I still have the bottle of elixir sitting on my bookshelf). Coordination was faulty in the chorus preceding Dulcamara’s entrance, the tricky concertante that closes Act 1, and several other spots. In general Benini seemed content to let the singers do their thing and not make anything too exciting or dramatic.

Alas, this seems to have been everyone’s mission. Doing anything that hadn’t been done before doesn’t seem to have been on anyone’s mind. It’s less twee than most of Sher’s other work for the Met, but it’s slapdash, superficial, and hella boring. I think I’d actually prefer to see Otto Schenk’s Vienna production, which isn’t any more innovative but at least doesn’t bury its characters in sets and shadows. If opening night sets the tone for the rest of the year it’s going to be a long, long season.

On the way home I tried to think what would make me want to see this thing again and I came up with the following casts:
Marina Poplovskaya and Lance Ryan
Simone Kermes and Johan Botha
Nadja Michael and the sax/flute player from the subway
You might gather I think this production needs an infusion of weird energy. Putting together a certifiably insane HIP diva and an immobile Heldentenor might not be kind to Donizetti but it would sure be something different. Any further ideas?

Should you wish, this production is on for the next while and on HD later.
Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met Opera.

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Review

Einstein on Lafayette Avenue

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Chucks and sand: only one of these things is found in Einstein on the Beach

On Saturday night I said to a friend that I had never fallen asleep at a concert or opera. It was true, at the time. (We were at an electroacoustic concert that was far too fun and loud for the possibility to arise.) But on Sunday I went to see the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson/Lucinda Childs quasi-opera extravaganza Einstein on the Beach at BAM, and I can say this no longer. Sometime as the train dancer was going diagonally forwards and backwards for the nth time, I drifted off. And woke up, and she was still yo-yoing, and I dozed off again. As you may know, this is during the first full scene.

I know that as a theoretically hip arts lover, I’m supposed to find a Einstein on the Beach to be total genius. And if I don’t love it and feel like I don’t get it that means I’m doing it wrong because I am told that “there’s nothing to get.” But, seriously, guys. There’s something I’m totally missing here. I have no idea why this is supposed to be great. It seems like a very small number of mildly striking images stretched out to gargantuan proportions to no effect other than mind-numbing boredom, over a soundtrack of finger exercises.

Maybe you had to be there. In 1976, I mean. Because while this revival preserves Robert Wilson’s production and the disco-y electronics of the score, Einstein occupies a very different cultural space today than it did then. In 1976 it was only semi-professional, its creators at the beginnings of their careers, its sounds and sights presumably fresher than they are now (at least people would get the Patty Hearst references). Now it arrives with classic status, an influential masterpiece. But while it might have seemed otherworldly and mysterious, now it’s more or less a known quantity, and the actual work seems, when stacked up against its legend, so thin that it could almost float away.

As you probably know, it’s not about Einstein, really, though apparently the great scientist liked trains, who knew? The “opera” is a series of mysterious scenes, dances, and texts. Of the latter most are non sequiturs and almost all, in this extremely poorly amplified production, were completely incomprehensible.* People come and go, they stay stuff. A chorus energetically sings numbers over and over and over. But nothing makes sense, we don’t know why there’s a trial and why there’s a bed in the courtroom, or why a rectangular beam of light slowly moves from a horizontal to vertical position over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes of a single arpeggiated chord. The dances that are like the most boring parts of Paul Taylor’s Esplanade repeated 250 times without the Bach.

I love abstraction but there’s nothing here that makes me care about or have any interest in anything I’m seeing. There’s no humanity, no emotion, just a trancelike randomness. The music is subservient to the images, bubbling along in harmless arpeggios before moving on to another predictable, dull harmony to no particular effect. It’s not unpleasant, exactly, but going to a yoga class wouldn’t have taken almost four and a half hours, and my legs wouldn’t have been so stiff afterwards.

It must be murder to perform this music, and it sounded polished to me. My favorite sections were the solo saxophone in “Building” (played by Andrew Sterman) and Jennifer Koh’s solo violin Einstein. Both had a personality and inflection to their musical performance, particularly Koh, not found anywhere else in this anonymous scale book. The amplification wasn’t nice, but it seemed to give Koh’s deep, earthy tone a metallic edge that was quite striking.

There’s something off-puttingly self-indulgent or masturbatory about Einstein‘s determined, willful meaninglessness and lack of content, its presentation of itself as a cryptic yet substance-free alien object with no need obligation to justify its existence. I guess I will be told I have no soul because I lack the key that will unlock this thing; I have a short attention span when it comes to bass lines and an appetite for answers that I can write down. But I can’t help it, I want art that seems to have a soul itself, art that has something to say.

Glass/Wilson/Childs, Einstein on the Beach. Brooklyn Academy of Music, 9/16/12. With Helga Davis, Kate Moran, Jennifer Koh, and many others, and the Philip Glass Ensemble conducted by Michael Riesman.

*But since you hear each at least 20 times, you might pick up all the words by the end. I guess Young Bob Wilson wouldn’t care if you could understand the text or not but it was being enunciated clearly I assumed you were supposed to understand it here, it was just given an acoustic that sounded, from the balcony seating, like it was underwater.

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Review

Le poème harmonique’s distant mirror

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I went to hear Le poème harmonique playing Monteverdi and such at Columbia and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.

In his 1995 book Text and Act,
the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote of the historically-informed
performance movement, “the very recent concept of historical
authenticity is implicitly projected back into historical periods that
never knew it.” To be fair to the French group Le Poème Harmonique,
whose program “Venezia” opened the Miller Theatre at Columbia
University’s season, their press release trumpeted an “eye-opening
approach to opera using historical gesture” rather than textual
authenticity. But the program also claimed to depict 17th-century Venice
from the “streets to the palaces,” and, as my companion remarked,
Venice doesn’t have any streets. It has canals and calle, alleys.

Read the rest here. You may gather that I didn’t like this concert much! It’s a real shame the Konzept proved so misguided, because the actual performances were decent and the rep was interesting, so I wish I had been able to appreciate it. I do not wish to pile on and therefore will refrain from having another Program Notes Smackdown here, but I do want to note that there is absolutely no scholarly consensus that “Pur ti miro” is by Ferrari as the notes state. Also, why did this program not feature Arianna’s lament? It’s arguably only semi-Venetian, but it’s so good!

Administrative note: I can’t promise much blogging for the next few months, but I am going to Einstein on the Beach tomorrow, and will get out to Elisir d’amore as soon as I can.

Here’s a piece that was not on Wednesday’s program (and Neapolitan rather than Venetian): the Lamento della pazza, attributed to Pietro Antonio Giramo, given an audacious performance by Anna Caterina Antonacci.

photo copyright O. Matsura

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Review

The Met Ring on PBS, plus Wagner docs on YouTube

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Just in case you haven’t heard/seen/read enough about the Met’s new Ring cycle, those with American TV can take the whole thing in again on PBS this week. The fun starts with the documentary Wagner’s Dream [of the Planks of Doom] on Monday, September 9, and then actually starts with Rheingold on Tuesday. Do not adjust your television: it actually looks like that. James Levine and Fabio Luisi split conducting duties.

I wrote far too much about this thing when I saw it live, relive the magic here.

(A critic recently told me that he hopes he will never have to write another word about this cycle ever again. I have to agree.)

If you’d like to see something more stimulating, consider the classic Boulez/Chéreau Ring, if you haven’t seen it. You might also consider Harry Kupfer and Daniel Barenboim’s excellent production, Kasper Holten’s intelligent Copenhagen Ring, or the spotty but frequently brilliant Stuttgart Ring, split between four directors (Peter Konwitschny’s Götterdämmerung in particular is unmissable). Unfortunately, last time I checked none of them were on Netflix. Try your local library, or if you’ve got the money some of these aren’t as expensive as you might think.

On your local YouTubes you can watch two fascinating documentaries on the Ring cycle that have nothing to do with Lepage. The below video contains both: the first concerns the Chéreau Ring, the second, Sing Faster, shows the staging of the Ring at the San Francisco Opera. Both are super awesome and feature excellent vintage hairdos.

Sorry about the lack of blogging. There hasn’t been much going on in New York, and I’ve been so busy with work I haven’t been creative about finding other things to write about. See you soon.

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Review

Parsifal from Bayreuth–watch online

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This year Stefan Herheim’s revelatory Bayreuth production of Parsifal was taped and broadcast on TV. You can now watch it online. Don’t miss this one.

Herheim takes the story of Parsifal as the story of Wagner and Bayreuth
themselves, a journey from isolation to disaster to the possibility of
redemption. It’s challenging but will make you see the piece and hear
the music in many new ways. I saw this production live last year, with a slightly different cast and, from what I hear, slightly different production (I am watching this video tonight, so I can’t yet say how different). Here is what I wrote about it then. I also recommend Wagneroperas.net’s short introduction, which has links to many more reviews.

To be a ridiculous elitist, I expect the video is a poor substitute for the live experience. Camera direction is a problem with filmed Herheim–there’s always a lot going on and the camera strictly controls what you see, including some things and excluding others and governing when you move from one part of the stage to another. (I think Rusalka in particular was far more exciting live.) But this production is also about the journey you took to get to Bayreuth, and why you made that not uncomplicated trip.

That’s not meant to discourage you from watching this, indeed it would have been a travesty had this production not been filmed. (This is the last year it will be seen in Bayreuth before being replaced.)

The videos are on YouTube; I recommend downloading them because who knows how long they will stick around.

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Postscript: I warn you against listening to Parsifal and Bohème in close proximity. At some point you will hear, in your head only, Rodolfo crying out “Mimì!” followed by the Heilesbuße-Motiv (the descending arpeggio), and it will be really weird.

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Review

Met Opera 2012-13 Preview

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Luxury! Opulence! Sarongs!

Single tickets for the Met 2012-13 season go on sale tomorrow, August 12. I can’t say it looks like a very exciting season, it is conservative and draws on repeat Met offenders whose past work hardly inspires confidence, but here’s the deal as I see it. Meaning, these are the questions I would like to ask the people who scheduled the thing.

New Productions
L’elisir d’amore. Why did you pick a charming but extremely modest opera for the grandeur of opening night? What makes you think Anna Netrebko still has the coloratura facility and endearing but, well, modest Matthew Polenzani has acquired enough star power to carry this thing? Why another production from the twee, superficial Bartlett Sher? WHY? (Opening night September 24, HD October 13)

The Tempest. Why did you let Robert Lepage direct again, after how it turned out last time? Why do you think “recreating the interior of the 18th-century La Scala” is a remotely original idea and what does it have to do with The Tempest? What does living composer Thomas Adès have to say about this, as I see he doesn’t actually say anything about his own opera in the publicity despite being the person conducting it and having, um, written it? (Opening October 23, HD November 10)

Un Ballo in Maschera. Wow, who around here found the nerve to hire David Alden to direct? Well done, person. Also a big thanks to the person who already convinced Karita Mattila that this role is not for her and hired Sondra Radvanovsky instead, who despite intonation issues is correct that this role is for her. Will Alden find the elusive key to Marcelo Alvarez’s inner actor? (Opening November 8, HD December 8)

Maria Stuarda. Who thought “nothing like a New Year’s Eve Gala that ends with a beheading”? You may be my people. Will someone pleaaaase get the old, interesting David McVicar back, who might even inspire Joyce DiDonato to forego the perky, and put the one who directed Anna Bolena and Les Troyens out to pasture? Also will you kindly tell me if Elza van den Heever is good, because I have not heard her? (Opening November 31, HD January 19)

“I could be in Paris right now”

Rigoletto. OK, I realize that this was supposed to be this other production from Vienna, which turned out to be dreadful, but why did you think that the keywords of “debut by a Broadway director,” “Las Vegas,” “antics,” and “tragic sidekick” were necessarily more promising? Meaning that I think this is the best opportunity for pure production filth in the season (except possibly the Faust revival). Also, who is conductor Michele Mariotti? Will Diana Damrau’s Babypause interfere with this one? And who will send Piotr Beczala a big bottle of vodka in sympathy? (Opening January 28, HD February 16)

Parsifal. Have you heard that this production by François Girard was outsourced to the arty Europeans for its first run and is rumored to be good? Have you thought about how the Met’s “Pick Your Pleasure” ad campaign is going to work with an opera that basically has no plot and when conducted by Daniele Gatti takes about a week? You know that this is the only thing except maybe Ballo that I am buying a ticket for at noon tomorrow on the dot? (Yes, you could have guessed that.) (Opening February 15, HD March 2)

Giulio Cesare. Do you realize that the Met is about the last house in the world to get this Bollywood-inspired all-singing all-dancing production, which hails from the glorious end of David McVicar’s Goofy Period? Oh well, I’m not sure what makes you think Natalie Dessay is a good choice for Cleopatra, and David Daniels is aging for Cesare, but Alice Coote and Christophe Dumaux will be lovely, right? (Opening April 4, HD April 27)

On to repertory!

Repertory
Der Ring des Nibelungen: It was so great with the big-name cast that with many fewer famous names and keeping Fabio Luisi’s brutally efficient conducting it will be even better, right?

The voice is variable but the abs are golden
Roberto Alagna in Aida

Aida: Apparently I have forgotten a production deemed by the PR to be “unforgettable,” but I hear soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska is someone to get to know. (HD December 13)

La Clemenza di Tito: This quiet production should suit Elina Garanca’s elegant singing and legendary dramatic temperament as Sesto. Lucy Crowe is also good. (HD December 1)

Carmen. Their names are hard to pronounce, but you should maybe go hear Anita Rachvelishvili as Carmen and Ekaterina Scherbachenko as Micaela?

Le Comte Ory. I missed this Bartlett Sher high jinks-fest when it premiered but have been warned. Juan Diego Florez is back, rest of the major cast is new.

Dialogues des Carmélites. Ding ding ding! Here is our token semi-recent opera to appease the arty crowd! AKA “me.” Felicity Palmer is an excellent idea as Madame de Croissy. Only three performances, Met? Lame. It probably will be less naked than this Berlin production, FWIW.

Don Giovanni. Erwin Schrott is a delight as Leporello and Edward Gardner is a fine conductor but this is a production to skip.

Don Carlo. I am unpersuaded by Ramon Vargas as Carlo but will go because I haven’t seen this production yet. Lorin Maazel? Lorin Maazel.

Faust. Nooooo! Sorry you got stuck with this one, Piotr. You deserve better.

Wikipedia claims this is Francesca da Rimini

Francesca da Rimini. Token verismo obscurity to be ignited by the fiery baton of Marco Armiliato. Probably a must only for Eva-Maria Westbroek superfans? And Marcello Giordani superfans, should they a) exist b) not be too exhausted after Les Troyens. (HD March 16)

Otello. Can you tell me who persuaded Placido Domingo to withdraw from conducting this so I can send them some #@*ing flowers? Also y’all should go see Krassimira Stoyanova in the second cast because she is the best. (HD October 13)

Le Nozze di Figaro. Blah blah blah it’s a Figaro so I would end up there even if the cast included Wolfgang Schmidt. Thankfully it does not though Mojca Erdmann as Susanna inspires great skepticism. Gerald Finley’s Count should make up for that.

La Rondine. What an unfortunate debut role for the exciting, dramatic Kristine Opolais. This role requires placid prettiness and that would not be one of La Opolais’s strengths. Filianoti should be right for Ruggero, though.

La Traviata. Diana Damrau’s Babypause again makes this one questionable, but whoever ends up signing Violetta, it will almost be worth it solely for the novelty value of Placido as Papa Germont.

Les Troyens. It’s a big opera, possibly the Biggest opera. The casting and the Luisi conducting is not the most reassuring, but Karen Cargill as Anna! She’s good. Graham should be good in this too. And we could always hope that this happens at some point. (HD January 5)

Il Trovatore. Throw another baby on the fire. Who is conductor Daniele Callegari?

Turandot. Timur is double-cast with James Morris and Samuel Ramey. Whose wobble will be bigger?

I welcome your company as we all try to make the website crash at noon tomorrow!

Rigoletto photo copyright Nick Heavican, Tempest costume by Kym Barrett, no credit listed for Alagna.

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Review

Jonas Kaufmann crashes Anna Netrebko’s Bohemian party in Salzburg

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I went to a
Very Special Performance of La Bohème
at the Salzburg Festival and I wrote about it for Bachtrack:

When Salzburg Festival intendant Alexander Pereira stepped onto the stage of the Großes Festspielhaus last night to announce that one of the cast members of La bohème was sick and unable to sing, he faced a chorus of hisses from the audience… Piotr Beczala had decided a mere ten minutes earlier that his vocal cords would not be up to singing Rodolfo that night. We would have to wait forty minutes for a replacement. Further hisses. Fortunately Pereira had an ace up his sleeve: the replacement would be another star, Jonas Kaufmann.

You can read the rest here. This review
has everything: Anna Netrebko. Special surprise Rodolfo Jonas Kaufmann. Me
saying nice things about the Wiener Philharmoniker. You’re not going to believe
it.

A few more thoughts and photos below.

If you go to
as many performances as I do eventually you’ll see something crazy like this. As
I said in July when I wrote about a very different Bohème, this opera has never been one of my particular favorites.
That performance didn’t change my mind. But this one may have. The set design isn’t
great and doesn’t do much for the drama, but the Personenregie is remarkably nuanced. The characters were less idealized than usual, but for me that made them much more sympathetic, because they seemed real. As for the big cast change,
the singer/actor split is never a good thing but this staging is never static
and there would have been no way in hell to work anyone new into it on short
notice without severe damage. And I’m glad that they didn’t do that.

The scene at
this performance was incredibly glitzy. It’s a Salzburg irony: the festival
glories in the red carpets and paparazzi, yet many of the productions that draw
this crowd (before we even consider the smaller or more niche events) are far from
a Zeffirellian celebration of opulence for its own sake. (Think of the Decker Traviata. Or Frau ohne Schatten.) This was a case in point: the audience looked
far more glamorous than anyone onstage, except maybe Musetta.* (Including, however, Kaufmann, who really did
look like they had pulled him off the street, though not the same street these
Bohemians were occupying.)

And this
ridiculously last-minute slapped together substitution added a further human
touch and charm to something almost too fancy to bear.  There was widespread hissing when Pereira
announced the delay, because these are people who don’t like to wait, and then not
long after we’re all happily watching Jonas Kaufmann emerge stage left with his
shirt untucked, look slightly confused, disappear again, and return dragging a
very large chair. Getting a big-name replacement is a Salzburg sort of luxury, and the
singing was certainly of that class, but I loved how the trappings were pure
Baurentheater.
(Though if
Beczala was feeling ill all day, as Pereira said, shouldn’t they have started
scouting for a replacement Rodolfo a little earlier? Or at least given Kaufmann
a chance to be warned that with Gatti “Che gelida manina” was going to be a special preview of the Parsifal they’re doing together at the Met next year? Seriously, doing
this without rehearsal must have required nerves of steel in the first place
but when one of the weirdest conductors in the business is involved it’s even
worse. On an absolute scale there were coordination issues but under the circumstances I’m going to say it was damn good.)
This was far
from the Bohème that I expected but
it was certainly a Bohème to
remember. That’s all for me in Europe this summer, but this was an excellent finale.
*Except for
me. It had been raining buckets and while it everyone else had seemingly arrived
by helicopter, their outfits perfectly intact (not really, but as press
I got a nice seat), I had walked from the Neustadt and despite having an
umbrella resembled a drowned rat.

Curtain call:

Spot the non-Bohemian

Production photos, copyright Silvia Lelli

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