Review

Richard and Hugo’s Pregnancy Patrol (Die Frau ohne Schatten)

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Any sighting of the big and complicated Die Frau ohne Schatten at an opera house is an event. Strauss’s score is one of his most varied and exciting and unique (it’s not violent like Salome or Elektra, but nor is it hyper-romantic like Rosenkavalier or Arabella). The libretto is, shall we say, obscure, mixing spirits and mortals, symbols and talismans like a Zauberflöte without the proverbs, and even less logic. Where Die Frau ohne Schatten excels is majesty. This musically distinguished and beautifully designed Met revival captures that magic, and is definitely one of the must-sees of the fall season.


Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten. Met Opera, 11/12/13. Production by Herbert Wernicke, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski with Anne Schwanewilms (Empress), Ildikó Komlósi (Nurse), Christine Goerge (Dyer’s Wife), Johan Reuter (Barak), Torsten Kerl (Emperor), Richard Paul Fink (Messenger), Jennifer Check (Falcon).

Before this performance, I read Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s novella version of the story. It’s a beautifully written story and clears up some of the more immediate confusions of the libretto. But on the larger issues I can’t say I’m that much more enlightened. (It’s only available in German, unfortunately.) The story is about a spirit brought into the world of humans by marriage to the Emperor–thus she is made the Empress. To remain in the human world, she needs to acquire a shadow (also meaning become pregnant). Her Nurse decides to manipulate a poor dyer’s wife out of her shadow and thus fertility. This does not go too well.

The clearest message that can be extracted from the libretto—that the Empress and Dyer’s Wife need to stop thinking so much about themselves all the time and realize their essential function as baby-making factories—is, um, not my favorite conclusion in all of opera. (It, as well as the novella’s obsession with food, probably have something to do with the time of the opera’s composition right after World War I, though it was begun before that.) While the music seems to make it all make glittering sense, productions of Frau have struggled to find a visual realization for the spectacular and causally confusing events, e.g. the earthquake at the end of Act 2, the Fountain of Life, and even the titular shadow. The last production I saw, Christoph Loy’s in Salzburg, threw in the towel entirely and put the whole thing in a recording studio (weak sauce).

On that front, Herbert Wernicke’s Met production is a great success, and actually lives up to the music’s energy and atmosphere. First performed in 2001, it’s being revived for the first second time and first since 2003. Wernicke died at a tragically young age in 2002, and the direction here is credited to J. Knighten Smit. The design—all by Wernicke—is the primary attraction. The world of the Empress, Emperor, and Nurse is a mirrored box, whose transformations are seen in various dramatic flickering lighting effects. In contrast to this glamour, the Dyer’s house is in a gritty sewer or subway, located below the box and connected by a fire escape staircase (one of the best uses of the Met’s scenic elevator I’ve seen). The upper level is timeless and mythic, the lower contemporary and realistic (Act 1 ends with the dyer Barak poignantly staring into an open refrigerator). The implication is vaguely Marxist: the Empress (surrounded by narcissistic mirrors) is exploiting the literal underclass, for whom she gradually learns compassion. The finale is Brechtian–or lieto fine-ian—with the lighting scaffold descending to reveal the stage mechanism and the singers addressing the audience directly. Since the music does not follow suit in any way, I found this gesture a little ineffective, but overall this is a very strong and convincing production.

The larger problem was the distinct lack of direction of the singers. The images are strong enough that I trust Wernicke’s vision remained at least partially intact, but it would have been a lot more engaging and stronger with less park and bark. The singers seemed left to their own devices, with varying and dissonant results. Anne Schwanewilms was a blank, impassive Empress, intentionally so, and her slim, cutting soprano also sounds otherworldly. It’s a very German sort of sound, somewhat squeezed and instrumental. The highest notes were difficult for her, and her enunciation of the words was not very clear, particularly for a native speaker. Overall, I found her performance of this role in Salzburg a few years ago more satisfying.

In contrast, Christine Goerke’s Dyer’s Wife was earthy and personable. This has been a major career breakthrough for her, with the kind of singing where we ask where she has been for the last five years (the answer does not involve an Incongruous Former Profession like morning radio host or roller skate saleswoman, she’s been singing in Europe, plus the Foreign Princess at the Met a few years ago). Her voice has an all-encompassing size and dark, rich color, best in the middle and bottom. She can blast out the high notes, too, as in the end of Act 2, which was great. Her Dyer’s Wife is a shy, unsatisfied housewife–a drastically different interpretation from the high octane Evelyn Herlitzius in Salzburg. I must admit I found Herlitzius’s edgy, intense singing more viscerally exciting, but Goerke is sure a whole lot more accurate and reliable, as well as more likable. (They are a textbook example of Ethan Mordden’s typology of the “Stimmdiva”–Goerke–versus the “Kunstdiva”–Herlitzius.)

The other singers were less notable, though all were pretty good. Ildikó Komlósi sounded worn and shrill as the Nurse, but this role is not exactly a walk in the park. Torsten Kerl coped with the high-lying role of the Emperor capably and reasonably musically (he repeatedly gets the opera’s One Big Tune, representing his and the Empress’s first encounter and the choice of the postshow subway sax/flute player), but did nothing resembling acting and his voice sounds a little on the small side. Johan Reuter made a very human Barak, but also a very lyrical one, and was not ideally audible. Richard Paul Fink as the Spirit Messenger was rather better on the volume front, and countertenor (!) Andrey Nemzer was alarmingly loud as the other messenger. The Young Man and the Falcon were both amplified, and sounded quite artificial.

Of course the orchestra is one of the main stars of any Frau, so I’m sorry to have arrived here last. Vladimir Jurowski conducted a beautifully delineated, controlled, very vertical account of the score. I heard lots of details and the singers were only occasionally drowned out. He is restrained, saving the full Straussian power for a few big moments. I kind of wish he were less parsimonious? It was a very beautiful and elegant reading, but Strauss is not a composer who thrives on frugality, and I would have appreciated a bit more sonic extravagance. (Caveat: I was in the damn rear orchestra again, where acoustics are bad. If i didn’t have so much work, I’d go again and sit in the Family Circle.) I also missed the momentum of Christian Thielemann’s Salzburg rendition, which I preferred by a small margin.

But this is nonetheless a musically distinguished and scenically remarkable production; go see it.

Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met.

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Review

Norma again: Some Gaul

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Like any good New York opera fan, I heeded the calls of prominent persons and went to go see Angela Meade and Jamie Barton headline the second cast of Norma last week. (Sorry that I’m slow to write, but some people indicated they were still interested so I figured better late than never.) I arrived with high expectations, but I only saw one breakthrough, not two.

Angela Meade sounds like she finds Norma a more natural fit than Sondra Radvanovsky did. Perhaps her singing sounds easier, period. She’s got a sweet, silky tone that slides easily through the coloratura and still has the force to fill the house. She struggled with breath in “Casta diva,” cutting several phrases short, but improved over the course of the evening and showed real force in the final scene. She’s fairly musical and varied her vocal color more than I have heard from her before, but has a bit of a tic when it comes to high notes, singing many of them pp, a few ff, and few anywhere in between.

But if her singing appears effortless, her acting is anything but. She is trying, but it’s a matter of indicating rather than embodying, and was rarely convincing. Most problematic were the several times where she brandished her dagger at someone–her children, etc.–where I never believed in the least she could stab anyone. I was up in the very last row of the Family Circle (more on that in a little bit), which is a bad place to see acting at all, but I could still detect a severe charisma and conviction deficit. So while this was a vocally successful Norma, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, it was not a particularly moving one.

But Jamie Barton’s Adalgisa was a complete performance. Her voice is large, not Stephanie Blythe-giant but big for this role. She’s got a dense, voluptuous, viola-like mezzo and not only phrases elegantly but sings with genuine dramatic intent and direction, and from what I could tell from up in the rafters is an expressive actress as well. The tessitura of Act 2 seemed a little high for her, but she got out that high C just fine. It was an exciting performance and I think we can expect more great things from her very soon. (Watch a video of her singing at the end of this post.)

As Pollione, Aleksandrs Antonenko was a holdover from the first cast. He was rather better this time around–still blunt, but less clumsy. You can read my thoughts on the crappiness of the production here.

It had been months since I had been up in the back of the Family Circle. Student tickets have been available for almost everything recently and they are (counting fees) less expensive, plus you get to see and don’t have to plan far in advance. But those seats are often in the back corners of the orchestra, where the sound is drab. I kind of forgot how glorious the acoustic is up high: you trade visual presence for aural presence. The further away it looks, the closer it sounds. It makes me wonder to what extent the size of the Met has been a determining factor in the house’s production aesthetic, beyond the difficulties of filling the large stage. Some of the most noisy and devoted patrons—though probably not the richest ones—are sitting where the architecture renders the visual aspects secondary. (Unless you go for the scenic equivalent of carpet bombing, and, well, who is the house’s signature director?) There is a certain school of thought that defines creative production and acting primarily as compensation for less than distinguished singing. While I am sure they found this Norma overall more satisfying than I did, I think that’s a limiting view and really a shame.

I will be missing the first FroSch later this week because I will be in Pittsburgh at the American Musicological Society’s annual meeting (do say hi if you’re there, readers). I’ll catch up with the Empress, Barak, and the gang next week.

Bellini, Norma. Metropolitan Opera, 10/28/2013.

Here’s Jamie, from last year’s Tucker Gala (which I wrote about here):

Photo copyright Marty Sohl/Met.

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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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Review

The Met’s opening Onegin

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Last night’s Met opening gala premiere of Yevgeny Onegin rendered the opera being performed more or less incidental in the face of multiple protests and technical snafus. It was four and a half hours long and only a little over half of that was taken up by music.

Nonetheless, let’s try to start with that opera. It’s hard. Because despite some distinguished singing, it’s difficult to make something so routine the centerpiece of this unusually eventful evening.


Chaikovsky, Eugene Onegin. Met opening night gala, 9/23/2014. Production by Deborah Warner, directed by Fiona Shaw. Conducted by Valery Gergiev with Anna Netrebko (Tatiana), Mariusz Kwiecien (Onegin), Oksana Volkova (Olga), Piotr Beczala (Lensky), Elena Zaremba (Madame Larina), Larissa Diadkova (Filippyevna), John Graham-Hall (Triquet), Richard Bernstein (Zaretski), Alexei Tanovitski (Gremin)

Deborah Warner’s traditional, realistic production looks like an aspirational BBC miniseries, and outside the scenic happy peasants it’s about equally Russian in its sensibility. It’s realistic and gratuitously detailed. In Act 1, set in a farm workshop kind of place (sets designed by Tom Pye), a bevy of servants bustles around endlessly, which keeps some motion onstage even as the main characters often stand still. The same set–which has windows looking out over a field and a lot of clutter inside–is the setting of Tatiana’s epistolary adventures, as well as her subsequent rejection. The Act 2 ball takes place in a modest parlor-like setting, the duel in a wide open foggy field bisected by a dead tree (the shooting features very large guns for some reason), and the final act in a far grander, colonnaded ballroom. In the final scene, this room apparently is outside, because people are wearing coats and it starts snowing.

Conservatives
will be happy to see that Warner doesn’t seem to have any big original
ideas. The acting comes in and out of focus. (Maybe this is due to its often-absent director.) There is dancing, and there isn’t anything big that you wouldn’t expect. The last scene is by far the most compellingly
directed part of the production, though that might be because it’s one of the
only places in the drama where both the leading characters express strong feelings at the same time. For once both singers seemed to be feeling
it and it was appropriately tense. When the text is less clear, the staging tends to do less, and when there is music without singing no one really does much at all. This is most
egregious in the first act, which is very generic. Onegin in
particular is a notoriously under drawn character, and neither Warner
nor Mariusz Kwiecien have done much to give him any substance. He is,
however, more flirtatious than usual with Tatiana, which seems to make her
infatuation a little more explicable but his rejection less.

PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED
Onegin in Amstersdam
Stefan Herheim/Mariss Jansons
 Onegin in Vienna
Falk Richter/Michael Güttler

Actually, there is one dramatic action that is added. Or rather two. After rejecting Tatiana, Onegin gives Tatiana a brief peck on the lips. She returns this in dramatic fashion at the very end of the opera, stopping the music for an awkwardly long makeout session. I didn’t like either addition, which struck me as running violently against the relatively faithful period atmosphere of the rest of the staging, not to mention creating an awkward caesura at the end of the score, a point when its momentum is all-important. There has been nothing to imply that Tatiana’s concern for her marriage and honor were anything less than genuine. It feels impossibly modern and Hollywood. Forbidden love! She shows him what he cannot have! Etc., etc., etc.

It’s a safe, unimaginative production that marks no improvement on the 1997 Robert Carsen production that it replaces. The Carsen had what I consider a respectably long run, but it’s a shame to replace it with something that is less interesting and overall less effective. Carsen also used traditional dress, but the stark setting of an empty box (with birch trees) allowed for the kind of large-scale images that registered in the giant theater. Warner’s eye is more cinematic and problematically intimate. What originality there is is small moments character work that is hardly visible in this large a space. It was best seen through my opera glasses (I was in Orchestra Standing; many seats are far more distant).

Musically, last night lacked the kind of polish one would expect from a premiere. Largely at fault was Valery Gergiev’s weirdly ponderous conducting, which stressed the singers out and often made the action drag. He has infinite experience with this piece, but much was sloppy, and he found none of the brilliant radiance that Mariss Jansons did the last time I heard this opera. The orchestra sounded good at points but out of sorts at others.

The leading roles are strongly cast, the supporting less so. Like every opening night, it was the Anna Netrebko Show. She is ideally cast as Tatiana, singing in her native language and finally find a role that often suits her ardor without straining her agility. But in the first two acts she seemed mostly concerned with appearing modest and disappearing, lest she release the diva before her time had come. This did not help create a character. It was in the Letter Scene and third act where she could show her capabilities, which include a lustrous, rich, tone and a startling immediacy and intensity of expression, as well as a variety of color she doesn’t always find in Italian or French. Sometimes she struggled with Gergiev’s slow tempos, but such vivid singing is always worth it.

Mariusz Kwiecien makes a handsome Onegin, though I didn’t see him doing much to solve the character’s essential vacuity. His singing was handsome too, with a pleasantly smooth, moderately-sized lyric baritone and short on his usual tendency to bellow. Only a soft high note at the end of the Act 1 arioso almost cracked. I’ve already heard Piotr Beczala as Lensky at the Met, and besides Netrebko he did the best singing of the night, sounding the best he has in a while. At his best he has a plangent and well-controlled tenor, and sang the aria with exemplary musicianship. He did not show great interest in acting.

The supporting roles were uneven. As Olga, Oksana Volkova mostly acted with her hips, her singing accurate but grainy and unglamorous of tone. Alexei Tanovitski was an unmemorable Gremin. Richard Bernstein was, as always, an outstanding Zaretski and should be singing leading roles. John Grahm-Hall was an inept Monsieur Triquet and sang with an awful wobble that some singers would pass off as a trill. The chorus sounded a bit spotty.

Now to the rest. The gala audience was more interested in chatting than operagoing, and the whole thing ended almost an hour late due to a late start and long intermissions. There is no place on this or any planet where the 2.5 hour opera Onegin needs to take 4.5 hours (I was standing, which made me very aware of this). One lighting pause after the Letter Scene was mistaken for an intermission by a large portion of the audience, who rushed out and then tried to get back in during the next scene. (Bad house management. I think the Met will have a headache dealing with these gala-goers.)

More importantly, to protest Russia’s laws against LGBT people there was a small picket line outside the theater, and a shouted protest inside before the National Anthem before the performance. The protestors were aiming for visibility and symbolism, and that’s a testament to the Met’s prominence. But I have to wonder what exactly they wanted out of the non-Russian Scrooge McDuck of arts organizations. Peter Gelb’s statement on this matter was asinine, but perhaps all one could expect from someone who is running a gala where many of the seats cost more than my first car. Targeting Netrebko individually seems particularly off-key. What could she safely do? Probably not much. (I am in agreement with La Cieca on this matter.) Moreover, why restrict yourself to symbolic protest and involve Netrebko and the Met when Valery Gergiev is conducting? He is a far more powerful figure and has done several things that could legitimately be cause for a more focused protest (see also: Georgia). Russia’s human rights abuses are not limited to those against LGBT people.

On a lighter note, it’s time for another episode of Program Notes Smackdown. I am, I hasten to add, neither a Pushkin nor a Chaikovsky expert, but I have a few complaints against Gavin Plumley’s notes.

“Its [the novel’s] success was no doubt due to the immediacy of Pushkin’s tale and his ability to draw the reader in to the emotional trials and tribulations of its characters.”

The verse novel is actually famous for its irony and the sardonic tone of its narrator. That’s one of the biggest differences between it and the opera.

“[Chaikovsky] relies on the universal power of recollection, triggered by pithy but persuasive musical ideas…”

The phrase “universal power” makes me nervous. More pointedly, Chaikovsky’s score evokes a wide variety of musical genres and melodic forms that Russian audiences would have recognized and associated with certain contexts (even including a quotation in the opening quartet). That’s far from universal, and it’s one major reason why this opera is part of the Russian national canon.

***
Onegin continues through the fall. The November performances feature a second cast with fantastic Onegin Peter Mattei, and iffy Marina Poplovskaya (Tatiana) and Rolando Villazon (Lensky). The HD is on October 5.

Photos copyright Ken Howard.

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Review

Anna Nicole: a new $#@*ing opera

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Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas have brought Anna Nicole Smith’s silicone-enhanced charms to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a co-production with the New York City Opera.


cMark-Anthony Turnage (score) and Richard Thomas (libretto), Anna Nicole. Brooklyn Academy of Music, September 19, 2013 (BAM and New York City Opera co-production). Production by Richard Jones, conducted by Steven Sloane with Sarah Joy Miller (Anna Nicole), Susan Bickley (Virgie), Rod Gilfry (Stern), Robert Brubaker (J. Howard Marhsall II), Christina Sajous (Blossom), many more

The basic conceit of Anna Nicole is that people singing obscenities at top operatic volume is really funny. You may or may not agree with this; personally, I found the effect wore off after about five minutes. Its comic effect depends on our expectations for opera as a highfalutin’ cultural activity.  Anna Nicole’s story isn’t unusual in opera–she’s a modern Manon–but the soloists and chorus screaming out naughty language are, and to a lesser extent the score’s slides into jazz are also mildly transgressive. (Redneck caricatures coloratura-ing a blue streak are what made librettist Richard Thomas famous in his earlier work, Jerry Springer: The Opera. That was a scruffier Fringe Festival endeavor compared to Anna Nicole’s Royal Opera House–where the opera was first seen in 2011–high gloss. I think this kind of cheeky fusion is more convincing on a lower budget.)

We open with the chorus, describing Anna Nicole’s tale in a prologue that seems to be borrowed from Sweeney Todd. They present her as both an “absurdist tale of woe” and a “fabulous eccentric.” The first half of the opera presents in a series of short scenes a relatively amusing, obvious satire of American trashiness. This shows Anna’s rise to fame through fast food, teen motherhood, and stripperdom. Finally she marries the elderly oil baron J. Howard Marshall II. In the second half, Marshall dies and the opera suddenly makes an awkward jump of a decade to show Anna in addicted decay. It leaves out the years of Anna Nicole’s legal fights in favor of showing her final months and attempts to be a tragedy and indict the grotesque pleasure we took in the first half. The chorus becomes a creepy voiceless swarm of dancers with cameras as their heads.

It doesn’t really work; the creators want to have their satiric cake and eat it too. One problem is that Anna is left more or less a spectator in her own story. She is presented as superficial and incredibly stupid (the occasional note that she was “smart” doesn’t counteract what it is showing us the rest of the time), as well as passive and reactive. The libretto’s baffling lacuna is also at fault here, excising the years where she was a Famous Big Personality but rather showing her pathetically trying to deal with the consequences. The original soprano who sang Anna Nicole, Eva-Maria Westbroek, has a hefty voice and was imposing and ungainly onstage. Sarah Joy Miller, singing Anna Nicole here, has a much slighter presence both physically and vocally. Her default expression is a deer-in-the-headlights look of smiling amazement, which is, to be fair, just about all the libretto gives her to work with. Lacking agency, personality, and much in the way of self-reflection, Anna succeeds as neither a heroine or an antiheroine.

The libretto is incredibly wordy. Thomas loves lists (more Gilbert cluttered than Cole Porter languid), and his verse starts tripping over itself when getting stuck on long lists of synonyms for breasts, deadbeats, etc. I swear that the composition of this libretto must have involved a very profane thesaurus. These lists usually end with a line like “you get the picture,” as if the situation is simply too outrageous for his words to contain. The language is an intentionally heightened, stilted colloquialism that is sometimes funny but mostly vocally unfriendly and sometimes less stylized than just plain dated (even my family doesn’t say “harsh the vibe” anymore).

It would really be better if the music could do more narration and the words less. The voice developed by Turnage is a jazzy sort of Sondheim with some operatic effects used for comedy and, occasionally, a more lyrical arioso. Mostly, he sets the words dryly for maximum comprehensibility. You can understand most of them, but there’s a lack of a controlling musical voice. The score could have done a lot to reconcile and prepare for the mood shift between the two halves, it could have deepened the characters, but instead it contents itself with being inconsequential. The best stretch is instrumental–in the interlude bridging the libretto’s decade gap–but its would-be Wozzeck moment doesn’t have a dramatic context. Similarly, the orchestra could do more–though to be fair, it was probably doing a lot that I didn’t notice. From my seat, the sound design was both obviously miked and heavily favored the voices. (Steven Sloane conducted, but I could hear so little orchestra I can’t say anything about him. It stayed together, and seemed well-paced.)
 

The strongest element of the opera is Richard Jones’s inventive, fluent production, which has been transferred from London. It keeps the action moving and offers genuinely amusing visuals. Miriam Buether’s colorful sets and Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes are also great: there is a lot of bright pink, giant plastic animals, a giant mattress, and a tendency for dying characters to finagle their own body bags. The ensemble is less universally strong and dramatically attuned than it was in London, but they’re all giving it their best and their Texas accents are far more consistent. Miller seems a little too cute for Anna Nicole, and never convincingly debauched. Susan Bickley, the lone holdover from London, makes a strong impression as her mother, but the character is awkwardly transformed from a monster to the voice of conscience. Broadway stalwarts James Barbour and Mary Testa are wasted in the tiny roles of Anna’s father and aunt, while Richard Troxell has a better cameo as her plastic surgeon. Robert Brubaker is funny and loud as J. Howard Marshall II, and Rod Gilfrey is also wasted in the small role of lawyer Howard Stern (reportedly cut down before the London premiere due to threats of litigation from the real Howard Stern–fittingly, the character frequently enters pronouncing his intention to sue everyone).

I remain somewhat uncomfortable with this opera. It makes me feel unexpectedly sorry for the real Anna Nicole, who seemed never fully in command of herself, exploited by others in death just as she was in life. I don’t want to be naive about this or say she was just a victim, she knew how to play the game and took what she could. (Besides, I don’t know anything about her.) But we never really see that in the opera, which seems to have plenty of interest in watching a hot mess but no interest in understanding a person. (Its most persuasive act of empathy is for her son.) I can’t quite shake the feeling that here we have a bunch of privileged men again profiting from Anna Nicole’s lack of privilege. It leaves a bitter aftertaste to an opera that already is somehow less than the sum of some formidable parts.

This brings me to City Opera itself. This is a co-production with BAM, which seems to be just the right place to produce it: it’s an institution that has long explored works that cross between high culture and low. But the City Opera, now in desperate financial straits, is promoting itself as “The People’s Opera.” This seems tone-deaf. “People’s Opera” implies something populist, an element that is family-friendly, and accessible. That’s City Opera’s history. But now they put on a small season of Johann Christian Bach and Telemann operas. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, we need people who will tread where the Met doesn’t, and I hope they’re able to keep doing it. But that’s a boutique company, not a populist one. The Met’s outreach and HD series makes it look much more populist than City Opera does right now. So I hope the company survives, but am worried about their apparent confusion of mission, and wonder how they got here. If this is their last production, at least they went out with something that seems appropriate to their aims.

Anna Nicole plays through September 28.

Photos copyright Stephanie Berger.

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