Review

Don Giovanni in the Trees

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A forest is a dangerous place: a symbol for the unknown and the unconscious, both the embrace and the threats of nature and a natural state. In fairy tales, characters enter the forest to find themselves, but they inevitably find peril as well.

In this 2008 Salzburg Festival production on DVD (Amazon), Claus Guth stages Don Giovanni in just such a forest, a group of pines that rotate on a turntable to disorienting effect. Is there a world outside of it? Sometimes mist rises threateningly in the background. But despite the presence of a bus stop and Don Ottavio’s car, there’s no exit. Don Giovanni and Leporello are a mortally wounded and drug-addled Vladimir and Estragon who are waiting for… something.

I needed an antidote to the Met’s empty Don Giovanni of a few weeks ago, and this production was perfect. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s fascinating and very smartly done. The Commendatore seems to escape the duel OK, but Don Giovanni is mortally wounded and spends the rest of the opera dying; it’s never clear whether the rest of the events are actually happening or just his fervid memories or delusions. This twist plus the surreal setting mean there’s a fair amount of the plot that is not staged literally (the Serenade is sung out to the audience as a memory of seductions gone by, almost a mad scene), but this actually makes the episodic second act work unusually smoothly. The characters are modernized: Donna Anna is repressed housewife engaged to the useless yuppie Ottavio (yeah, this problem), Donna Elvira is a repressed businesswoman who is actually sex-crazed (kind of an ugly characterization, but  I can see how it comes out of the text). It’s dark and spooky–literally in terms of darkness–and the sextet at the end gets the axe. (It’s the Vienna version of the score, which means there’s the little Leporello-Zerlina duet but no Il mio tesoro and no final sextet. The cans of Pilsner Urquell may be an allusion to the opera’s Prague premiere, though.)

The main disappointment of the production is Bertrand de Billy’s bland conducting. He goes with HIP fleetness, but the Wiener Philharmoniker plays with so much vibrato that the pitch in the overture actually doesn’t seem quite stable somehow. Fortunately the cast can both sing really well and carry off the complex production convincingly. Christopher Maltman gives an intense performance in the title role, with the kind of magnetism required of a Don Giovanni and a beautiful, fairly light voice. Other vocal highlights are Dorothea Röschmann’s powerhouse Donna Elvira and Ekaterina Siurina’s impeccable Zerlina. Theatrically, Erwin Schrott’s Leporello carries the show. I’ve seen Schrott as the Don in several different productions (I’m not a particular fan but there were a few years when you basically couldn’t see a Don Giovanni without him in the title role), but I wonder if he isn’t actually better as Leporello. It suits his low voice better, and also his wit and comic timing (his Don was sometimes too funny). Anyway, here Leporello is going through some drug issues and it isn’t going well. The cast’s only major weakness is Annette Dasch as Donna Anna, whose squally tone and iffy intonation are tough on the ears, though she acts well. Matthew Polenzani is a well-sung but rather faceless Ottavio.

Video:

More photos:

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Review

DVD Update, Anna Edition

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A few productions I’ve written about here are now available on DVD or will be soon. The links go to my reviews of their live incarnations. Our name of the day is “Anna.” Or “Anja.”

If you’re intrigued by the problematic charms of Anna Nicole, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera about Anna Nicole Smith for the Royal Opera House, you can see her on DVD. If you’re an Anja Harteros fan, and what opera buff is not, you can see her in Alcina from the Wiener Staatsoper. The excellent Les Musiciens du Louvre under Marc Minkowski are this production’s other main attraction. I’m guessing not too many of you made it to Graz to see Peter Konwitschny’s brilliant La traviata, with a heartbreaking performance by Marlis Petersen in the title role. (I did, obviously.) Luckily it will be released on DVD on November 15! A note to British readers: this production is likely headed to the English National Opera in the future. If you missed Atys in France or at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, you can see it on DVD too. The cast includes Stephanie d’Oustrac as Cybéle and Bernard Richter in the title role, both of whom should be improvements over the BAM singers. Soon you will be able to see Anna Netrebko’s first salvo at Anna Bolena, made in the company of Elina Garanca at the Wiener Staatsoper last April. Watch it and see why I thought David McVicar’s Met production was a model of fine Personenregie. The Vienna costumes were far shinier, though.

US Amazon listings:
Anna Nicole (Opus Arte)
Alcina (Arthaus Musik)
La traviata (Arthaus Musik) (not on Amazon yet, but CD Universe has it)
Atys (FRA Musica)
Anna Bolena (Deutsche Grammophon)

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Review

Don Giovanni at the Met

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The Met has rounded up a good cast for this Don Giovanni premiere, particularly stellar late replacements Fabio Luisi conducting and Peter Mattei in the title role. It’s a shame that despite a lot of excellent singing the evening rarely rose above lukewarm. Michael Grandage’s fearsomely homogenizing and tame production bulldozed any personality in its path.

Mozart/Da Ponte, Don Giovanni. Metropolitan Opera, 10/13/11. New production premiere, directed by Michael Grandage and conducted by Fabio Luisi with Peter Mattei (Don Giovanni), Luca Pisaroni (Leporello), Marina Rebeka (Donna Anna), Barbara Frittoli (Donna Elvira), Ramón Vargas (Don Ottavio), Mojca Erdmann (Zerlina), Joshua Bloom (Masetto), Stefan Kocan (Commendatore).

Based on this and Anna Bolena, the new Met house staging style seems to be “no interpretation allowed.” More on that in a second, let’s start with the interesting and positive part–the music. New principal conductor and Levine stand-in Fabio Luisi led an elegant and clean account of the score, with fast to moderately fast tempos and light textures. He has a fantastic sense of dramatic pace and is never obtrusively showy or different. Everything flowed along as it should. He played the harpsichord continuo himself (the first time I’ve seen a non-HIP conductor do that, I think) and was witty and well-timed without ever straying towards René Jacobs’s sports commentator fortepiano territory. He passed my Don Giovanni conductor test–how is the timing in the Act 2 sextet?–with flying colors.

The cast was almost universally strong, and well-cast for vocal size, projecting without sounding oversized. Peter Mattei’s velvety baritone is the most seductive characteristic of his Giovanni, who otherwise tends towards the aggressive and dangerous. But it is a very sexy voice, and his serenade was a highlight, simple (with tasteful ornamentation in the second strophe) and quiet. He also managed an unusually accurate “Fin ch’han la vino.”

My last impression of Luca Pisaroni was in the Wiener Staatsoper’s Nozze di Figaro, but no singer should be held accountable for that particular production. He was a delight as Leporello, funny and spontaneous in the recitatives and musical and smooth in the big aria. It is nice to see Ramón Vargas back in Mozart as Don Ottavio after his dubious attempts at heavier rep. There was palpable effort in his “Dalla sua pace” messa di voce, but he sounded sweet and clear and the coloratura in “Il mio tesoro” was long-breathed and impressively clean. Stefan Kocan was an undersized Commendatore and Joshua Bloom an excellent Masetto.

Rebeka and Vargas

The women were led by house debutant Marina Rebeka as Donna Anna (like 60% of singers these days, she is Latvian). Her cool, somewhat steely and white soprano isn’t naturally glamorous, but everything was evenly produced, elegantly musical, and solid, including her coloratura. She’s quite loud and tended to dominate the ensembles. Barbara Frittoli’s much warmer and richer-voiced Elvira was an excellent contrast to Rebeka. Her top notes often turned wobbly but I appreciated her refinement. The cast’s weak link was Mojca Erdmann’s Zerlina, whose fragile, very small soprano awkwardly shifted between a straight silvery tone and an excess of vibrato. Her phrasing was inexpressive.

But despite the good performances, no one gave a true star turn. Zachary Woolfe’s “charisma” and JJ’s “glamour” were both in short supply. The extraordinarily bland production may be to blame. If you gave any opera buff or stage manager this set and these costumes and told them to produce the most conventional Don Giovanni they could imagine, they’d probably come up with something like it. The Personenregie is detailed and not that bad, meaning that it’s clear and it’s not static. Mattei and Pisaroni are strong actors, Vargas and Rebeka less so. But Grandage has no perspective on a work that really demands interpretative unpacking. Don Giovanni is a weird, fascinating, confusing, contradictory opera, it’s a black hole of mystery, but no personality at all emerges from these harmless characters. They all seem to lack individuality and soul. It’s a smoothly executed job, but there’s nothing beneath the surface, and fails to draw you in emotionally.

Christopher Oram’s set has multiple levels of balconies and lots of little doors. This is a look we’ve seen before at the Met and it’s not one I like. The tiny space at each balcony doesn’t allow for much action, and Donna Anna and Don Giovanni’s confrontation at the beginning of the opera (something I care about a lot) was so constricted in space that you couldn’t tell what was being expressed. (I was gratified that she did not seem to like him very much, though.) The walls move around a bit, creating some variety, but it’s basically a unit set. The costumes, also by Oram, are basic frilly 18th century, with a side of our favorite (meaning least favorite) time period, the Slutty 18th Century, when even Donna Anna’s mourning dress displays lots of cleavage.

Ben Wright’s choreography is rather busy and fills the stage during Zerlina’s wedding and the first act finale, but it seems to function solely as a space filler. Grandage surrounds Giovanni with some downmarket ladies of the night in the last scene, hardly as daring a move as giving them to Scarpia but still the most originality to be found here. The final scene is a conflation of an anticlimactic Darth Vader entrance by the Commendatore and the Fire Swamp scene from The Princess Bride (minus the ROUSes, unfortunately). After a lot of am dram shaking, some hellfire does start up, but it’s too little, too late.

Despite the musical accomplishment, this was an unfulfilling evening. Unlike Jean-Louis Martinoty’s recent Wiener Staatsoper train wreck, it is not a confusing or incompetent Don, just an empty one with a discouraging lack of intellectual curiosity. Very disappointing.

Photos copyright Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera (special thanks to @PaulCavaradossi)

Curtain Call (photos courtesy of B., who unlike me had a camera and was on the orchestra level):

Video: Peter Mattei sings “Da vieni alla finestra” in a different production.

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Review

The Advent calendar’s revenge

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This is a model of Christopher Oram’s set for the Met’s new production of Don Giovanni (I wasn’t able to find a shot of the real thing, which has more railings.) It represents the return of 2008’s favorite set design fad: what I call the Advent calendar set (also known as Hollywood Squares). This set has multiple levels of little rooms, whose doors pop open and reveal people in them doing stuff. Here is a look back at its predecessors:

 Le Damnation de Faust (2008)

 Orfeo ed Euridice (2007) (no doors, but the same idea)

Peter Grimes (2008)

Doctor Atomic (2008)

The problem with these sets is that the little boxes don’t allow for enough room to do much of anything in except stand still, and the looming wall often leaves a shallow amount of stage floor. It’s a striking look and does more with the enormous vertical space of the Met’s stage than some other designs, but it often doesn’t help the drama.

Edited to add: I don’t think I invented the “Advent calendar” quip and was curious as to who did, particularly because Anthony Tommasini uses it in his Times review of Don Giovanni. The earliest example I can find is by the always-pointed Anne Midgette, in her 2008 Washington Post review of Grimes.

More on Don Giovanni later.

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Review

The Mariinsky, Gergiev and Daniil Trifonov

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On Tuesday I went to see the Mariinsky Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. To quote anonymous advisors of Rick Perry from a week or so ago, we’ve got a tired puppy (I mean the orchestra, not somewhat puppy-like pianist Daniil Trifonov, who was not tired at all). But they were still exciting! I wrote about it for Bachtrack. You can read it here.

The orchestra’s sound came as a bit of a shock after all that Viennese refinement. I think I like it, but I may be allergic to that soft-reeded sound of Russian woodwind sections.

Off to the Don tonight.

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Review

Giuditta’s Pasta

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Since I haven’t been waiting in line for standing room every night (though I promise I will be at Don Giovanni this Thursday), I’ve had some time to indulge one of my other hobbies: cooking! So here’s some operatic food. It’s not from the infamous Die Oper kocht, but rather Pasta alla Norma, supposedly renamed in honor of the opera of the same title (whose title role was first given by Giuditta Pasta, pictured). Like Bellini himself, it is popular in Sicily. And it tastes amazing.

This recipe is based on the one from Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, adjusted for laziness and greasiness.

Serves 6, supposedly, but as a main course more like 3 (adjust amount of pasta accordingly).

Ingredients:

Yes, that’s a bag of frozen basil leaves. Sue me. The red pepper flakes were just hanging out there, I didn’t use them.

1 to 1.5 pounds eggplant
salt
olive oil
1/2 cup onion
1.5 teaspoon garlic
2 cups canned whole plum tomatoes, drained
pepper
3 tablespoons pecorino romano cheese, grated
3 tablespoons ricotta (or grated ricotta salata*)
some basil leaves
1 to 1.5 lbs pasta (rigatoni or spaghetti)

*Ricotta salata is a kind of salty hard ricotta popular in Sicily and required by the most traditional versions of this recipe. You can find it in Italian grocery stores. I did find some but it cost $8 (this is not only Lazy Cooking with Zerbinetta but also Cheap Cooking with Zerbinetta) so I used regular ricotta instead, which tasted fine. You could also try feta or even fresh mozzarella.

Directions:
Peel the eggplant (or not) and chop it into small cubes. If desired, salt, let sit for a while, and dry off to make it less bitter.

Start heating up some water to cook the pasta.

Brush the eggplant with olive oil and spread it out on a broiler tray or baking sheet. Heat up the broiler and put in the eggplant in for around 10 minutes or until slightly browned. (You could also dust it in flour and fry it in vegetable oil, but broiling is less greasy.)

I may have overcooked it a little bit but it tasted fine.

While the eggplant is cooking, slice the onion very thin, mince the garlic and cut the tomatoes into narrow strips. When the eggplant is done, set it aside.

Heat 1/4 cup of olive oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook until golden, around five minutes. Add the garlic and stir, then quickly add the tomatoes and turn the heat up to high. Cook around ten minutes or until it looks done.

When the tomatoes are getting towards done (drier and turned a darker color), add some salt to the boiling water and start cooking the pasta.

When the tomatoes and onions look done, add pepper and the cooked
eggplant and stir. Turn the heat down or off if it looks like it might burn.

Add the cooked pasta along with the ricotta, romano,
and basil leaves.  Add a little Parmesan if you feel that the dish is still lacking in cheese, and enjoy.

Yum!

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Review

Carmen in Philly: Another mantilla bites the dust

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Last night the Opera Company of Philadelphia opened their 2011-12 season at the Academy of Music with Carmen. For the first time the performance was broadcast to a big screen out on Independence Mall for an audience of reportedly 5,500 people. They got a standard Carmen elevated to memorable by a few great performances, namely Rinat Shaham’s fantastic gypsy and Ailyn Pérez’s gorgeous Micaëla.

Bizet, Carmen. Opera Company of Philadelphia, 9/30/2011. Production by David Gately, conducted by Corrado Rovaris with Rinat Shaham (Carmen), David Pomeroy (Don José), Ailyn Pérez (Micaëla), Jonathan Beyer (Escamillo).

Maybe it was the free champagne before the show (doled out in tiny portions in plastic cups) that made the audience punchy.  I don’t think of Carmen as a particularly funny opera (you know, he kills her) but evidently the people of Philadelphia disagree with me on this one, the gens certainly found the opera drôle. David Gately’s production does tend towards the opéra-comique side of things and has a few bits that are clearly intended as comedy. I liked the soldiers threatening the children to get them to stop singing, I can’t stand those squeaky buggers. But for the most part the production has everything you would expect to have in Carmen and nothing that you would not. It is a truth universally acknowledged in traditional Carmens that Don José will attempt to rip off Carmen’s mantilla in the final scene. Check. One pleasant surprise was that the production uses spoken dialogue rather than recits. Some of the spoken French was iffy, but it’s still the right choice, I think (cough Met uses recits cough).

The heart of this production is Rinat Shaham’s Carmen. She’s very experienced in this role and you can tell. Her super-smart Carmen is two steps ahead of everyone else, is always doing as she likes and never tries harder than she has to (without ever appearing uninvolved). This extended to her singing, which had a beautiful naturalness. She never pushed her dark mezzo and her French sounded very idiomatic to me. She’s got a real deep mezzo timbre, but never sounds stretched at the top. Everything worked together and convinced, plus she has that wit and spark that keeps her sympathetic and human. (Also I think it is hilarious how she wears way more clothes in this production than she did when I saw her in Salome…  as the Page.)

None of the other cast members had this level of polish and effortlessness. Closest was Ailyn Pérez’s Micaëla. I think this was the first time I’ve heard her (I may have heard her at AVA but I’m not sure) and her rich, warm lyric soprano sounds like the real deal. All she needs to do is iron out some wayward high notes and odd French vowels and she’ll be there. Less satisfying was David Pomeroy’s blank Don José. He has a large, even and strong voice (pulling an effective “démon” in the final scene), but showed little musicality or range of color, hitting the “toi” in the flower song at forte. His acting was indicated and uncommitted. My last two Josés were Alagna and Kaufmann so I may be spoiled but he did nothing for me. Jonathan Beyer did a good job managing the tricky tessitura of Escamillo, however he never stood out from the scenery. Escamillo needs flair.

Corrado Rovaris led the orchestra in an effective if not quite electrifying interpretation. I’ve heard this unreliable orchestra many times and was happy that they were having a good night. The chorus also sounded excellent, though their stage direction left a lot to be desired. The set, a brownish Seville square with a high walkway, seemed to suffer a paucity of entrances and exits, and once the chorus finally had finished entering, they tended to stay put, sometimes grabbing the nearest member of the opposite sex when required to act amorous.

Director Gately opens the curtain at the “fate” part of the prélude to discover Carmen reading her cards. While it is true to the letter of the libretto–she says that the cards have already told her she and José will die together–I find it problematic for two reasons. First, it deprives her of her great first appearance later in the opera–doesn’t that music that opens the Habañera give us a better sketch of her character than this? Shaham made a wonderful physical entrance running on at that point, seeing her sitting still, no matter how intensely, is just not as compelling an introduction.

PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED
Carmen at the Met (1)
Aldrich/Kaufmann
 Carmen at the Met (2)
Garanca/Alagna
 Carmen at the Met (3)
Borodina/Alvarez (old production)

Second, this is a very literal production. After reading the cards, Carmen hears other people approaching and gets up and leaves. But what motivates those people to enter? The curtain usually comes up on a crowd that’s already there, they’ve just been hanging out. Here they process on for some unknown reason. And how did Carmen get out of the cigarette factory into the square to read her cards in the first place? Judging by that bell, they’ve got quite a routine there. So even if you want to see Carmen as a Violetta type who knows she’s doomed, and I’m not going to argue with you about that as a valid interpretation, this is not the way to portray that. Maybe if it weren’t framed so literally–for example just happening in a bare spot that fades out instead of having her exit as people arrive–it would work better.

I would also like to note that this production included the return of the Set Piece of the Damned, which I first saw in this company’s production of Richard Danielpour’s opera Margaret Garner. This set piece is an electric campfire with a visible electrical cord that has been visibly taped down to the stage, here appearing (in duplicate, even) in Act 3. I cursed the thing then, and I do again now. The amount of incredibly visible (from the high-up Amphitheater) glow tape is also a problem–you can be safe while also being a little more subtle than that.

This may sound like quibbling, but maybe these small issues have something to do with the audience never being able to take it seriously and giggling through the whole thing. Such carelessness with details detracts from the total emotional effect. (Remember that I am that person who is convinced that Velcro is the Scourge of Opera.) This is also a way of explanation for my Anna Bolena review. I seemed to like David McVicar’s production more than anyone else, and this is probably surprising to you if you know my general dislike of traditionalism. But I think McVicar, for all his dullness in this one, doesn’t often make this kind of dramaturgical mistake, and the Anna Bolena held together in a way that is very difficult to achieve in bel canto, or actually in any opera. This Carmen lapsed on that count, and never seemed quite worthy of its protagonist. I was left a little underwhelmed, which is a bummer.

I received a lot of my early operatic education as an Opera Company of Philadelphia subscriber while I was in university, and I saw the company through a lot of ups and downs.* I think they’re on a bit of an up right now, but it’s a little hard to judge by one show. Just toss those electric campfires onto a real fire somewhere and keep on trucking, guys.

Carmen continues through October 14, you can get tickets here.

 The Academy lighting seems just right for curtain call photos, here it is (from the high-up Amphitheater, in this photo you can see at the top the giant safety bar that cuts the view of the stage in half when you sit in one of the first few rows):

*I didn’t see their previous Carmen but it was by all accounts a down, with an interpolated private eye character informing us that “this Carmen girl, she’s from the wrong side of the tracks.”

Top and third photo from OCP website, copyright unknown. Shaham/Pomeroy photo copyright Philadelphia Enquirer.

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Review

Les Arts Florissants bring Atys to BAM

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Happy fall, everyone! The opera season in New York started this weekend with Atys at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and I went and wrote about it at Bachtrack.

In 1676, Louis XIV’s court composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, wrote Atys,
an unusually tragic opera that became a favorite of the king. In 1987,
William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants revived it in an acclaimed
series of performances in Paris and eventually at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music. Like Louis XIV centuries before, modern audiences were
enchanted by the work’s austere, pure declamation, grand choruses, and
graceful dances and its success was again influential.

Click here to read the whole thing. (By the way, I am blogging again. I’ll report from the Anna Bolena dress at the Met on Thursday, such as one can report on a dress rehearsal. I can’t go to opening night, unfortunately.)

This was a great performance, but I personally preferred LAF’s last big BAM project, The Fairy Queen. This is probably because it was so funny and different and as a semi-opera had a lot of novelty value for me. This is the kind of novelty that Atys had when it was first performed in NYC in 1987 1989. Lully opera has become more established but hardly commonplace since, so some of that freshness is still there today, but not to the same radical degree–I’ve certainly heard a lot more Lully than I have semi-opera. How much of Atys‘s original success was due to the novelty of French Baroque and how much due to the production’s undeniable excellence?

This is part of the reason why I’m a little disappointed that Les Arts Florissants have redone Atys instead of creating another production to expand our limited repertoire of French Baroque opera in New York (LAF has done a lot more in their home base in Europe but only a few of those productions have come to BAM). I know that this new iteration came into existence solely because of the generosity of a philanthropist, and we should be grateful for that! And 22 years is a long time, perhaps too long to begrudge a repeat. But I still am a fan of variety, and if you only know Atys you don’t know the full diversity of the French Baroque. I recommended some DVDs in the review, here are some clips. Most of these productions are a lot more daring and modern than Villégier’s Atys.

Most similar to Atys is Lully’s Armide, which is way better than Rossini’s and the LAF’s DVD is awesome. The Armide is Stephanie d’Oustrac who was Cybèle in Atys in France (and in the forthcoming DVD) but did not come to New York, unfortunately. Her replacement was talented but a little undersized for the role. D’Oustrac is epic.

I love this goofy, almost all dance production of Rameau’s Les Paladins.

Finally, this isn’t Les Arts Florissants, but I remind you of the DVD of Cavalli’s Ercole amante from De Nederlandse Opera that I wrote about a year ago, which is a fusion of French and Italian
styles.

Photo above © Pierre Grosbois

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Review

Holiday reminders

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Bayreuth: Parterre Box reports that next summers’ broadcast (and subsequent DVD) will be Parsifal. If it ends up actually happening, this will be fantastic. It’s a genius production and one that is uniquely inaccessible (my review of it on this blog is here). Also at Parterre, be sure to read Dawn Fatale’s brilliant reviews of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser at Bayreuth.

Vienna: The Staatsoper is going again. Could anyone stop
it? The place is truly a force greater than Franz Welser-Möst’s beat,
than the shine from Dominique Meyer’s Glatze, than an
elderly standee trying to get to the front to see Netrebko. It can be equaled only by a certain aging baritenor. They opened with Placido as the Doge, natch. So it’s still going.

New York: Opera Omnia, one of the small non-Met New York opera groups that is inevitably described as “plucky,” is currently producing Cavalli’s Giasone at Le Poisson Rouge. Remaining performances are this Tuesday and Wednesday; please report here if you’ve seen it. Giasone is a wonderful opera, one of the masterpieces of seventeenth-century Venice, but I’m not going to be there because a) in English b) amplified and c) I just moved to a newly Manhattan-adjacent location and can’t see the floor of my new place yet. (Correction: contrary to the report I heard, apparently it is NOT amplified.)


New York: We would like to take this moment to remind you that Les Arts Florissants will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this month with Lully’s Atys. Don’t you dare miss it. Do you remember how they did The Fairy Queen a year and a half ago and how it was the best?

New York: One to possibly mark on your calendar. In November, the Opera Orchestra of New York will be Adriana Lecouvreur-ing with Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann (well, we can hope so, considering his recent health issues). I saw them do this in London already, and it’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm for another Adriana (I also saw Guleghina and the baritenor at the Met). But who am I kidding, I’ll probably end up there anyway.

Non-Americans FYI, the holiday is “Labor Day” on Monday, our totally socialist-/communist-free alternative to May Day.

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Review

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Novel

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Wesley Stace’s novel Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer (Picador, 2011, US Amazon page here) is a clever mystery set in the world of early twentieth-century British music. The narrator, conservative gentlemanly music critic Leslie Shepherd, befriends young composer Charles Jessold and accompanies or watches him through folk song collection, World War I, and further career development, culminating in the composition of an opera based on the English folk ballad Little Musgrave, which sounds like a combination of Tristan and Wozzeck. Jessold goes from promise to alcoholic ruin, and as the title suggests, his story ends badly, in a situation paralleling the deadly love triangle of Renaissance mad genius Carlo Gesauldo. We go through the story twice. Naturally, the first version leaves out some key details.

I really wanted to like this book. The historical background of English music between around 1910 and 1925 is fascinating and well researched, even if you don’t care for the oft-denigrated “cowpat music” of Holst and Vaughan Williams.* The description of the music itself is unusually convincing. But I enjoyed the first 100 pages of exposition the most. The mystery is unveiled ingeniously over the course of the rest of the book (though I did figure it out around two-thirds of the way through), but there is progressively less plot relative to the amount of conceptual ruminating. The actual events are only vaguely sketched in places. This wouldn’t have been such an issue had I not quickly tired of Shepherd’s omnipresent, self-consciously wry, would-be Wodehousian narrative voice, which infects the tone of the whole book (“A countertenor?… I thought it would be beautiful and unique. Or eunuch.” [emphasis original]). None of the characters are very sympathetic, and the only ones with three dimensions are Shepherd and Jessold; Shepherd’s wife Miriam assumes great importance in the second half of the novel, but never is more than an enigma.

While Shepherd’s inability to see Jessold’s life except in the model of his or others’ works is ultimately deceptive, the constant harping on these parallels (oh, Jessold is Peter Grimes as well? and Ulysses?) gives the book a smoke and mirrors quality. It is all Easter eggs (“the critic Ross” is definitely Alex, and did we just run into Adrian Leverkühn, shorn of his umlaut? of course we did) and short on gravitas and emotional weight. In the end, its cleverness makes it more smug than involving.

Next in Books, I’ll consider Matthew Gallaway’s new novel The Metropolis Case, which I’ve only just started but like a lot so far. Next in Performances, well, hopefully I’ll get to something soon. I survived the hurricane, but getting around is still a hassle.

*I don’t know much about this subject but I did catch a few mistakes, such as his unlikely familiarity with Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria in the 1910s. More numerous are the anachronisms in language and idiom–“cowpat music” wasn’t coined until the 1950’s, for example–but these may have been intentional.

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