I went to see La Périchole at the New York City Opera and I wrote about it for Bachtrack:
Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as
“something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that
Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that
Christopher Alden most certainly is. Alden’s new production of La Périchole,
which closes the New York City Opera’s season, is strange, abrasive,
and also extremely funny, careening past the everyday to end up
somewhere deeply bizarre.
You can read the whole thing here. I highly recommend this show! It is a great piece in a top-notch and hilarious Alden production, and that’s a winning combination (check out the video below). It’s actually been quite a fortnight for opera in New York, between Giulio Cesare, Mosè in Egitto, best of all David et Jonathas at BAM, and finally after all those Egyptians and Romans, then Israelites and Egyptians, and then Israelites and Philistines, finally ending with this insanely delightful farce that just has Peruvians.
It’s also basically the end for me of this season’s operatic adventures in NYC, though the Phil’s Dallapiccola in June will provide a coda. I recommend y’all go see Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Met, but there are only three performances and unfortunately none of them fit into my schedule. As you may remember, I have mixed feelings about this piece and have seen it twice recently, once in Robert Carsen’s excellent traditional staging and once in Calixto Bieito’s excellent non-traditional staging, so I don’t regret it too much. It will spare you my habit of nun puns (sorry).
Anyway, I have some other stuff elsewhere coming up, so I’ll see you soon-ish in any case.
Photo copyright Carol Rosegg
I went to see David et Jonathas by Les Arts Florissants at BAM and I wrote about it for Bachtrack:
New York is again lucky to host William
Christie and Les Arts Florissants at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Their visits are always special, and it’s not just because the unique
nature of their repertory – Baroque opera, usually French, which is
neglected by most of New York’s major companies – nor the virtuosic ease
with which they embody this otherwise-foreign idiom. Their productions
have a passionate unity of purpose and a loving, handcrafted quality
that somehow seems antithetical to many of our more slick and snarky
local efforts. Their present offering, a touching production of
Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, has little in common with
2011’s Atys, but fortunately these virtues are again in full force.
You can read the whole thing here. Highly recommended. It’s a great and extremely unusual work with a fantastic musical performance and a smart production. Performances that meet one of these three requirements are unusual enough, ones that fulfill all three far more so. Still could have used some program notes, however.
This production will also be released on DVD on April 30.
Photo copyright Julia Cervantes
Put on your dancing shoes and/or take off your shirt, there’s a new David McVicar production in town. I use “new” advisedly, since this Giulio Cesare was first seen at Glyndebourne in 2005. But it’s still a clever and often delightful piece of work, and as Met Handel goes it’s pretty convincing. The cast is a little patchy, but it’s still a good time.
Handel, Giulio Cesare. Met Opera, 4/12/2013. Sort of new production directed by David McVicar, conducted by Harry Bicket with Natalie Dessay (Cleopatra), David Daniels (Cesare), Alice Coote (Sesto), Christophe Dumaux (Tolomeo), Patricia Baron (Cornelia)
It seems tiresome to recount the details of this production, since it has already been out on DVD for so long and been seen in multiple opera houses, so I’ll be brief: it casts Caesar’s Romans as late-nineteenth century British imperialists and the Egyptians as Indians. The set shows traces of eighteenth-century design (including an old school wave machine) and also the more recent phenomenon of Bollywood. It sets up the characters well–Sesto and Cornelia are identified by their very British looks as Romans, something that some productions don’t make very clear–and it’s pretty entertaining, though rarely asks to be taken seriously or complicate this political construction any further than I’ve already explained it. You can take a more serious approach and have it work (for example I like this Francisco Negrin production), but the comic tone is fine with me too, it fits the artifice of the genre.
You do have to have some tolerance for cutesiness, though. There are vaguely Mountie-looking British soldiers periodically bopping on the beat, some groaners (Cleo puts out her cigarette in Pompey’s urn), and a lot of dancing. If you’ve seen McVicar in goofy mode before (we haven’t at the Met, really–his Trovatore and Bolena and Maria Stuarda are all dully earnest) you know what I mean. I think he’s at his best at this kind of self-conscious genre stuff–his Faust is the only production of that opera I’ve seen that I think really works as theater–and when he tries to be Important he tends to be respectable but boring. This production succeeds in making Baroque opera fun and accessible to a far greater degree than last year’s Enchanted Island. The story moves along, there is enough visual splendor (notably colorful drapery and a very sparkly outfit for Cleo’s “V’adoro pupille”), and the da capos are mostly staged through, giving them a continuous narrative flow. (They are, also, there! Text-wise, I have no objections at all, and the ornamentation is fine.)
That being said, I think it probably worked better at Glyndebourne. The Met stage is far, far bigger, and the set is plopped in a small portion of the middle of it. The space narrower than the Met’s full width, but appears to be using most of its depth, meaning the wave machine is around as far away as the Hudson and the whole thing looks like a hallway. The setting is also obviously more personal for a British audience (particularly aristocratic Glyndebourne) than an American one, though I hope most everyone at the Met understood what was going on. (Some of them had never heard a countertenor before, though. Ahem.)
Natalie Dessay was in far better voice for this performance than she was at last year’s Traviata, but I still don’t think this is quite her role or her production. Her voice sounds flimsy, with very little core or bite, and while she can act cutesy in a gamine sort of way, this production was intended for a Cleopatra far brasher and brassier and, well, Danielle DeNiese isn’t a great singer but she sold this production on the DVD. Dessay does it all OK but doesn’t own it in the same way. When Cleo became down on her luck partway through Act 2, however, Dessay seemed to come to life, suddenly becoming a much more interesting actress and singing a spectacular “Se pièta” that was actually very moving.
I’m sorry to say that David Daniels also is sounding rather worse than he did in earlier years, though he is an excellent musician and sometimes things clicked. His Cesare was effectively acted if not particularly charismatic or insightful, and sang unevenly. “Presto omai” was kind of hollow and hooting, as was some of “Va tacito” “Se in fiorito ameno prato” (in which David Chan was an absolutely superb violin soloist). The fast arias like “Quel torrente” went very, very fast, where Daniels’s coloratura still works well but he lost some volume and sometimes needs extra breaths. He also has a way of swaying back and forth when singing coloratura that made me want Peter Sellars to swoop in and give him a finicky prop to manipulate while singing.
The vocal star of the evening, as far as I’m concerned, was Alice Coote as Sesto, whose viola-toned mezzo sounded firm and solid throughout, including a beautifully spun-out, quite slow “Cara speme.” Sesto might not be a character who gets a lot of theatrical variety, but she did the shell-shocked thing well. As Sesto’s mother Cornelia, Patricia Bardon had a unique, vinegary sort of tone that doesn’t appeal to me very much, but it is unique. As Tolomeo, countertenor Christophe Dumaux had a more beautiful tone and more variety than Daniels, including some impressive high notes in “L’empio, sleale.” He also managed some impressive feats of athleticism that vaguely made me wonder if countertenors at French music schools need to often defend their machismo.
Harry Bicket seems to be the Met’s Handel conductor of choice, and you can see why: he makes it still sound like Handel, but also manages to fill up the house to a reasonable degree. It’s not terribly inventive leadership but he does a very tricky job smoothly. It’s also great to hear the theorbo/lute/guitar in the pit (Dan Swenberg, who also played Eliogabalo). The supporting characters I can’t be too enthusiastic about: Rachid Ben Abdeslam sounded almost voiceless and mugged as Nireno in a fey characterization that McVicar and he should have thrown out long before 2005. Guido Loconsolo was a unagile and growly Achilla, but may just have been miscast.
It’s a shame that the Met couldn’t put on a fresher production, but it’s nice to finally see some more spirited work from McVicar here, vintage or not. Baroque lovers should be relatively satisfied (probably close to as much as we can expect of Handel performed by a company unsuited to it in many ways), and this production is fun enough that it might even make some new ones. Who will hopefully write the Met demanding new productions of Ariodante or something. Well, maybe not, and if they did I doubt anyone would listen, but a girl can dream.
Photos copyright Ken Howard.
I went to see the New York City Opera’s production of Mosè in Egitto at City Center , and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.
In recent seasons, the New York City
Opera has largely limited itself to chamber operas. Its newest
production marks a renewed ambition: Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, a
proto grand opera that ends with nothing less than the parting of the
Red Sea. Fortunately this scrappy but worthwhile performance showed that
the company can tackle large-scale works on its own terms, albeit with a
few stumbles along the way.
You can read the rest here. It was a frustrating afternoon: some very talented performers and interesting production ideas (Harry Kupfer’s Rossini video game) that ultimately didn’t quite make a full show. I still think it’s worth seeing, though: it’s a unique spin on an unusual piece, and that’s something in itself.
A few other notes, though. I wish City Opera would show some care with its presentation. (Their website doesn’t even give the address of the theater where they’re performing. I had to Google it.) This performance was trumpeted as the “original version.” Putting aside the problematic construction of “original” and its implied superior status, that can’t be true: the third act of the first version was lost, as you can read in the introduction of the critical edition. (This production didn’t even use that critical edition; the program credits Hendon Music/Boosey and Hawkes.) I would have liked some program notes, but maybe I’m alone there. If you’re going to claim scholarly status, you have to do your homework.
But enough of that, the actual performance did exceed my expectations. The LED video (more like a TV than projection scenery) occasionally looks like the VHS version of the Met’s Parsifal Blu-Ray. Jayce Ogren isn’t a Rossini conductor but the orchestra is sounding much better than it did last season and it’s good for the City Opera to have him on board as music director. There’s some good singing. So still recommendable, if you like Rossini.
Photo copyright Carol Rosegg.
I went to hear Elina Garanca’s New York recital debut on Saturday and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.
Elina Garanča can always be counted on
for a coolly polished performance. Her silvery mezzo is beautiful, even
throughout her range, and impeccably on pitch. She is musically
tasteful, and her sound has grown in recent years. But something often
seems to be missing. While she’s too accomplished to call bland, her
performances rarely show evidence of a beating heart. On Saturday night,
her Carnegie Hall recital debut kept in character, showing an excellent
singer rather than an effective communicator.
You can read the rest here. For all I know Elina Garanca is the nicest, warmest person in the universe, but she still has trouble portraying humanity onstage. This recital was very well-prepared and she really was trying, but the effort was all too obvious.
I’ll be going to Giulio Cesare at the Met at the end of this week.
I went to see Francesco Cavalli’s Eliogabalo as produced by the Gotham Chamber Opera at The Box and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.
Describing its new production of Francesco Cavalli’s 1668 opera Eliogabalo, the Gotham Chamber Opera compares the exploits of titular depraved Roman emperor Heliogabalus to Salome. There’s an obvious mistake here: Salome
is an opera; Heliogabalus was a historical figure. While the Gotham
Chamber Opera has done a valuable service by bringing this compelling,
interesting opera onstage, the production unfortunately makes the same
mistake, confusing a few historical accounts with the very different
aesthetic of 17th-century Venetian opera.
You can read the whole thing here. (In my discussion of the intersection of seventeenth-century orchestration and burlesque, I introduced the Bachtrack editorial staff to the phrase “bump it with a trumpet.”) This production didn’t work because it was one-note while seventeenth-century Venetian operas are heterogeneous. Venetian opera is closely associated with Carnival (in that respect the timing of this production was really bad–sorry, you go through one Viennese Holy Week of Faust, Parsifal, and Dialogues of the Carmelites and the idea sticks with you forever). But Eliogabalo is something far more interesting than a celebration of excess.
I thought of Calixto Bieito’s fantastic production of Platée, which I saw last summer at the Staatsoper Stuttgart (and didn’t blog about, sorry). It’s set in a nightclub, though not in the environmental theater sense of The Box. The Studio 54-like club (a good modernization of the ancien régime) provides an ostensible freedom for an outsider like Platée. But the hierarchy of court life is always lurking just beneath the surface, and the outsiders never escape their eventual punishment. Eliogabalo never leveraged its similar setting with this kind of dramatic intent.
The singing was fine but most of it was not very stylish. New York doesn’t attract enough people with extensive experience with this music. (The Wooster Group’s utterly bonkers sci-fi La Didone mashup was better sung, actually, and far more compelling.) The US’s cavernous opera houses and conservative programs confine all but the most famous Baroque operas to boutique outfits like Gotham, but unfortunately based on this production they lack the expertise to present these works to their best advantage. Gotham is, usually, a very strong company, and I hope they’ll try another early Venetian opera soon with better results.
I went to the final performance of Parsifal at the Met last Friday night,
in the company of an old friend and great Wagnerian who also happens to
be a religious studies and South Asian scholar. Since religion is a part
of the production that I didn’t mention at all in my earlier review, I chatted
with him about it a bit.
Since we don’t talk about the musical side of things: Asher Fisch conducted this performance instead of Daniele Gatti. I found him perfectly fine but not as compelling. I think he was obliged to more or less follow Gatti’s tempos (the performance was a mere five minutes shorter), and I don’t think that conducting at Daniele Gatti’s tempos is advisable for anyone who is not Daniele Gatti (and, in some cases, perhaps not even then). I was actually more conscious of the slowness this time around, since he didn’t find the same amount of detail and shape inside those very drawn-out phrases. The Flower Maidens’ scene, however, was noticeably less hard-driven than it was under Gatti.
Now for the conversation. You may remember “Pelléas” from our earlier post on Die Walküre.
Pelléas: Let’s talk about balance. Because that’s what I think the big theme of the production is. The balance of men and women is the most obvious way that the theme is expressed, but it’s much larger than that. We can think of balance between humanity and the natural world, but also a proper balance in the religious sphere that the protagonists of this opera operate in.
Zerbinetta: I agree that’s the theme but I want to hear more. Because honestly I hoped that I would see the production differently this time but I really didn’t. This may be due to the thought processes required to write my review of it, organizing your thoughts like that kind of fixes them in place.
Pelléas: Basically we’re in this post-apocalyptic world and the knights (men) have no idea how to deal with it, so they retreat into their own world. But they don’t just separate from the women, they also practice this strange version of Christianity that is wholly centered on the Eucharist, which they also pervert. But they forget everything else that is part of Christianity. The Eucharist is but one sacrament, sexual asceticism is but one lifestyle, men are but one gender. The production seems to be saying that the knights have gone down this greatly restricted path (and in so doing they’ve also forgotten even what they deem most important) but that they must more fully embrace the world, even the aspects that they may find to be sinful. One image that perfectly represents this balance is Christ being pierced on the cross. Both blood and water flow from the wound, the two central symbols of the production. Now the piercing can seem like the most sadistic, vindictive act of violence, yet it also leads to the conversion of Longinus and is therefore celebrated.
Zerbinetta: Who is Longinus?
Pelléas: The Roman soldier who pierced Christ’s side on the cross. With the spear that is central to the opera. The blood from the wound represents the Eucharist, whereas the water symbolizes baptism (I’m not reading anything into that; it’s standard Christian symbolic interpretation of the image). In this production the blood is associated with the men, whereas water, and therefore baptism, is associated with women.
Zerbinetta: Which is why there isn’t very much of it. I thought the production could have done a better job telling us what Kundry’s deal was, too. Anyway, go on.
Pelléas: The dried-up river bed separating the men from the women represents this lack of balance. Yet there’s memory of water flowing through the river (when Gunermez first goes to the bed the river briefly flows with water). But the water will only actually flow through the river when Parsifal baptizes Kundry in Act III, beginning the process of joining men and women, eucharist and baptism, asceticism and sensuality back together. But the majority of the time the river only flows with blood if it flows with anything.
Zerbinetta: Remember, the riverbed is also the wound!
Pelléas: Yes. But in the knight’s lack of balance they only are concerned with the Eucharistic aspects of Christianity: the blood. If they participated in the balance of Christ then Amfortas’ wound would pour forth with both water and blood, but instead it is only blood, and it never heals. The choreography of the Eucharistic scene makes it clear that the knights remember some aspect of the ritual, but they don’t really know it. Their hand gestures mix Christian aspects of prayer with vague new-agey Eastern motifs. Additionally, the way they participate in the feast has this strange melding of the Kiss of Peace, with the men dipping their fingers into the grail, touching their mouths, and then bringing their fingers to the mouths of other brothers. But while the knights are busy pressing their fingers to each others lips the women are miming a more traditional Eucharist, lifting an imagined chalice to their lips. They remember the proper aspects of this ritual.
Zerbinetta: I got that it was a new Eucharist but I sort of assumed that was because the production wanted it to be abstract and not built on specific Christian doctrine.
Pelléas: I saw too much literal, traditional Christian symbolism to think that the director was trying to distance himself from Christianity.
Zerbinetta: But the wound isn’t a natural condition, it’s the cause of their problems! It’s because Amfortas was enchanted by Klingsor and gave in to Evil Woman.
Pelléas: Amfortas was enchanted by Klingsor to give in to his version of Evil Woman. The flower maidens don’t represent real femininity. They represent the overly sexualized, virginal fantasy of men. (Come on, white dresses [more like night gowns] gradually bloodied by dancing around in the pools of blood; you can’t represent an imagined or fantasized deflowering any more literally than that!) They’re under Klingsor’s control. It’s because of this idea of women that the knights separate themselves from other women, but the only place that this fantasy actually exists is in Klingsor’s domain. The actual women are normally sexualized (they leave on their high heel shoes whereas the men take off their dress shoes) but they aren’t hyper sexualized.
Zerbinetta: So my next question is, I guess, what prompts Parsifal’s turn towards Mitleid? And why does he have to wander however many decades between Acts 2 and 3? Did not really come up with an answer to this myself.
Pelléas: Water represents the form of balance that the knights lack. It is the water that comes from Christ’s side, the water of baptism, to complement the blood. There are projections of rippling water throughout Kundry’s seduction of Parsifal in Act II. It starts out rather small and subtle and then builds in intensity. The fact that her seduction is NOT sexy is important I think, it’s enough to be believable, but not as over the top as the flower maidens. Her costume as both flower maiden (in Act II) and normal woman (in Act I) represents her ability to be a bridge between the unbridled sexuality of the flower maidens and the unrealized sexuality of the normal women. When she kisses Parsifal the water images begin to be broadcast around him. They’ve never been projected for him before.
He’s been exposed to the proper balance of sexuality, but he’s so startled that he can’t accept it yet. So he wanders. But then in Act III he has finally come to accept it. He’s able to embrace water for himself, most importantly in his baptism of Kundry which brings water to the stream again. Only after he baptizes Kundry can he step into the women’s realm. Although he and Kundry have been the two characters who have been able to really approach the border and pass things across it, no one has actually crossed that border until this point. (As a total aside, for a wonderful book on the many valences of water as a female symbol, especially for female sexuality, that is both celebrated and denigrated in the Christian tradition, check out Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep.)
Zerbinetta: I did notice that was when he crossed the river! That’s also a key point in the musical development–the pure fool diminished seventh that represents Parsifal is heard with the grail rhythm underneath it for the first time–so I really appreciated the timing.
Pelléas: Well, I can’t comment on that bit of music theory 😉
Zerbinetta: In general this was not the most Leitmotiv-conscious production but they did get that one perfectly. You said that balance is the most important thing, but I think of this as a more Buddhist concept than a Christian one. In a similar category, there’s the Schopenhauerian negation of the Will which you haven’t really mentioned but still seems to me to be very important element of the work, though perhaps not of Girard’s interpretation of it. (Also in the Eastern category, there is a LOT of obvious yoga in Act 3.) But the symbols you are discussing here are all very specifically Christian. What do you think of this mixture?
Pelléas: It strikes me very much as a 19th century orientalist looking at Buddhism or The East. A lot of philosophers at the time viewed India as this pristine, primeval abode of uncorrupted man. None of this really had much to do with India, but with projections of what these Westerners wanted their present, future, or past to be. I think it’s appropriate to have all of the symbolism be Christian in this context, because it’s honest about what Wagner and a lot of other philosophers were doing with India at the time; the philological study was excellent but the philosophical understanding was a mess. So we’re getting at this concept of balance, but balance such a vague idea that it could be Western, it could be Eastern, it could show up anywhere. The wound in Christ’s side is just as good a metaphor of balance as Buddhist equanimity or Vedantic absorption of the Self into the Ātman. But even if we’re using Eastern ideas to get there our aims are fully grounded in Western sensibilities and desires, in this case to realize an authentic, historical, dogmatic, balanced Christianity.
The moment when Parsifal tells the women to intersperse with the men he comes closest to giving an authentic sign of the cross as he does in the entire production (and blesses not only those on stage, but the audience too). So even in this cathartic moment Girard is opting for something akin to Christian orthodoxy.
Zerbinetta: On a more basic note, do you have any comment on the interplanetary projections? I wasn’t sure about them and some people in my comments section were as well.
Pelléas: I have no clue. It seemed rather lame to me. Definitely not symbolically interesting.
Zerbinetta: They didn’t bother me too much one way or another. OverallI I thought the production was very clean and elegant and modern. It might be a little too minimalist for its own good, though.
Pelléas: I still have questions about the production. It seems that the men are the ones who are reacting baldy to the ecological disaster. They separate from the women. They become ascetics while convinced that women are hypersexualized (when they aren’t), they misremember the Eucharist (whereas the women remember it but can’t perform it), they forget baptism. Yet why are the women basically passive the entire time? Why do they wait calmly for Kundry to seduce Parsifal and then have Parsifal convince the men of their folly? Why aren’t they more active in trying to restore the balance that the production says that they hold the key to?
Zerbinetta: Yeah, that is a problem. I am tempted to say “because Wagner didn’t write them in the score, and Wagner’s music is so gestural that it’s pretty hard to add that much” but then you look at Herheim’s Parsifal and, like, NO. You could. That’s what the ladies in Act 1 and Act 2 have in common, passivity, and it’s why I didn’t really think that there was an existential difference between the two (as in one group was real and the other was enchanted or projections of Amfortas’s or Klingsor’s desires).
Pelléas: Well, the lades in Act I are simply passive, but not under anyone’s control. The flower maidens are definitely in control of Klingsor. The way they all writhe in unison is like a creepy anime film. Whereas in the prelude I believe the men separate from the women, but it’s only when the men depart that the women move to coalesce into their own group. They passively accept their rejection, but aren’t actively controlled by anyone.
Zerbinetta: Also it occurs to me that, intellectually, this production is very French. Is it OK to say that? I mean, it gives you these big ideas that are kind of vague but immensely evocative, it’s like reading Zizek or something. (I am aware that Zizek isn’t French. And that Girard isn’t either.) You like it and it’s kind of inspiring but at least for me you try to really process its meaning and it ends up like mist, or, well, Wagnerdampf. I can’t help it, I’m intellectually Germanic, I want everything to be logical and add up.
Pelléas: I feel that it’s important to try to point out the deep symbolic nature of the production. Because when you approach it in that respect it’s all actually quite coherent and logically argued. It’s quite ingenious actually, because so much of this symbology is in the libretto itself, so Girard isn’t upsetting the traditionalists. But he supplements it in subtle ways and makes it much more intellectually compelling than they would be otherwise.
Zerbinetta: Well, I like your reading, but it’s relatively narrow. While I find it overall more convincing, ingenious, and detailed than Opera Cake’s, I’m not sure about treating these things like puzzles, and this one in particular seems almost actively resistant to specific interpretation. Kind of like Parsifal itself, I guess. You used to have to haul out to Bayreuth just to see it. It does a lot to present itself as a mystic, precious artifact that is full of meaning–but just try explaining exactly what all of that meaning is!
At the same time this production leaves open so many ways of thinking about it, and I think most of them are on the whole progressive and positive. There are poisonous, dangerous messages in most traditional readings of this piece (arguably the most Wagner-adjacent ones), whatever the beauties of the music, and this production seems to avoid those pretty much entirely. That’s important. To salvage a message like this out of it seems to be a significant achievement.
Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met
Don Carlo, Met Opera, 3/6/2012. Production by Nicholas Hytner (revival), conducted by Lorin Maazel with Ramón Vargas (Don Carlo), Ferruccio Furlanetto (King Philip II), Barbara Frittoli (Elisabetta), Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Rodrigo), Anna Smirnova (Princess Eboli), Eric Halfvorsen (Grand Inquisitor)
Photos copyright Ken Howard/Met