Review

Lulu, the destroyer destroyed

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“Ich habe nie in der Welt etwas andres scheinen wollen, als wofür man mich genommen hat, und man hat mich nie in der Welt für etwas anderes genommen, als was ich bin.” 
(“I’ve never wanted to appear to the world as anything other than what I am perceived to be, and no one in the world has ever taken me for something other than what I am.”)

In this dark and dazzling performance, Lulu wears many guises. She is the star attraction of a circus, drawing a succession of honest citizens into her deadly orbit. But she succeeds only as much as she is a projection for what they want, even if they can’t publicly admit it.

Lulu is an opera that demands superhuman efforts, and the Dresden Semperoper has, unusually, found that in cast, orchestra, and production with an embarrassment of riches, from Gisela Stille’s Lulu to Cornelius Meister’s conducting to and Stefan Herheim’s fascinatingly strange production.


Berg, Lulu. Semperoper Dresden, 6/19/2012. New production directed by Stefan Herheim, set by Heike Scheele, costumes by Gesine Völlm, lights by Stefan Herheim and Fabio Antoci. Conducted by Cornelius Meister with Gisela Stille (Lulu), Christa Mayer (Gräfin Geschwitz), Nils Harald Sodal (Der Maler/Ein Neger), Markus Marquandt (Dr. Schön/Jack the Ripper), Jürgen Müeller (Alwa), Ketil Hugaas (Schigolch), Almas Svilpa (Ein Tierbaendiger/Ein Athlet)

I’m not going to summarize this staging at length because
James Jorden already has in impressive detail. (He saw it in Copenhagen but
there seem to be only a few changes.) A lot has been written on this production already but everyone seems to see something different in it–dense cryptic spectacles are like that–so I’m happy to add my bit about what it, uh, “means.”

Lulu is a circus
from the very start: the opera opens with the Animal Tamer inviting us into his
show. Generally that is the end of that and we proceed into the Painter’s
workshop in proper quasi-realistic operatic manner. But Herheim organizes the
opera as an opposition or even dialectic between the circus (grotesques, a
surreal atmosphere, ghosts, the id) and the bourgeois world of operatic
performance (propriety, a miniature version of the opera house’s stage, Lulu’s
lovers before they become ensnared, the actual composition of Lulu, we the audience, the superego).
Lulu herself is the passage between these two realms, and as acted by Gisela
Stille, somewhat inside and outside the action at once, always aware but rarely
autonomous.

Lulu appears first as Eve, the original tempter of men,
seemingly nude but wearing, it becomes obvious, a garishly painted bodysuit.
(Are we supposed to notice this or pretend we don’t? Yes, it’s OK that we
noticed, it is later clarified.) She is haunted by a band of clowns who observe from an upper level and help
along the action by providing props and ultimately
encouraging the demise of each of Lulu’s husbands. After each one dies, the
clowns forcibly recruit him into their ranks, dragging him over to a makeup
table and painting his face white, and Lulu reappears wearing a wedding dress,
ready for her next. The clowns, it seems, are all former lovers of Lulu, condemned in
their postmortem state to serve her backup team (she can see them but
no one else can). Notably, the three we meet when they are already in her grasp
and are not destined for marriage—Schigolch, the Acrobat, and the
Schoolboy–already appear circus-like. Geschwitz stays bourgeois, never able to
join this world. It’s not a production of realistic or psychologically
developed characters but rather types who fit together to tell the story—Geschwitz is the only one who is kind of left out in this, and often played for
laughs.
Lulu looks different in every scene, her dress and hairstyle
morphing to fit each circumstance (though with some respect to the piece’s symmetry). But the surroundings of Heike Scheele’s funhouse set stay oddly the same, the same set pieces rearranging themselves slightly for each scene. Lulu’s image is an obsession of the
characters—the Painter’s paintings, we see, are all of her—but it’s at the same
time entirely unstable. Her autonomy is limited, though her self-confession
(the Lied der Lulu, quoted above) gets a round of applause from the clowns,
still under her spell. Yet we seemingly see her true self a few times: first
when she peels offs that bodysuit for Dr. Schön immediately after the Painter’s
death, later proclaimed to be the one man she ever actually loved. The second I’ll get to in a second.

Running through the whole production is a, wait for it,
metatheatrical deconstruction thing. (Never saw that coming.) Lulu performs at
times—her dance, her modeling–on a miniature stage replicating that of the
Semper Oper (which apparently was the old Copenhagen opera house when the opera
was performed there), and panels replicating the auditorium interior dot the set. Another tiny model of the theater hangs out stage left. Most significantly Alwa is revealed as the composer of Lulu, starting to scribble at the “one could write an interesting
opera about this” line and continuing to write occasionally for some time.
Sometimes the characters read from music he hands them, prominently Lulu’s “ist
das noch der Diwan” line. She’s only doing what Alwa is telling her, only
behaving as the dark side of his own desires.

Of course in Act 3 things get interesting. This production
uses a new completion by Eberhard Kloke rather than the standard Friedrich Cerha
one. Based on what I understood of
Cerha’s work (which obviously was mistaken), I was surprised at how much was
very different, but suffice it to say that Kloke departs much more from Berg’s
style than Cerha did. Kloke has a tendency to put things in quotation marks,
ensembles becoming oddly opera buffa and the Wedekind song quote leaping out. I didn’t find it very convincing, mostly fragmented and doodly. He also wrote several virtuosic solos for violin, accordion, and piano, which
is where Herheim comes in again.

The musicians playing these solos appear onstage, and they
are all doubles for Lulu. I took this as a commentary on Lulu’s incompletedness. The act began with a little pantomime where
Alwa and the actual conductor argue about who gets to start, but it becomes
clear that Alwa and the establishment in general are no longer in charge (just
as Berg is not in control of the score), their standing and control falling
faster than Jungfrau Railways stock. The solos show Lulu herself is trying to
take over and playing the tune.

But Lulu is powerless
without powerful men who want her, and the world has seemingly decided it is time
for her to be punished. Her doubles playing the solos are usurped by a
mechanical instrument, a hurdy-gurdy. It only needs to be given a crank to take
over, reasserting the force of the composer and of the opera house (the score
quotes a tune by Wedekind, the hurdy-gurdy takes the place of the tiny stage on
a cart and later in larger form the small Semperoper stage). Lulu is
ensnared again and she’s off to London. The rest plays as an even more
nightmarish version of the first acts, with the clowns finally taking their
revenge. In another bit of dark comedy, she is stabbed with an umbrella, like the one she played with in the very first scene (symmetry again).
It’s all an amazingly elaborate spectacle (though less cluttered than Herheim’s Rosenkavalier or Parsifal—not that clutter is bad, those are some glorious
clutters), but we get the story with unusual clarity and immediacy. It’s just
augmented with the constant interrogation of why we are telling it.
The musical values were really wonderful and could stand up
against those of any opera house and I could easily write a post just about
them (cue a few commenters asking me why I didn’t—if you haven’t noticed, guys,
I have some other favorite topics). Cornelius Meister conducted the excellent
orchestra in a very tense and dark interpretation, with a post-Romantic,
Mahlerian weight to the more melodic passages (you know the one I mean). He’s a conductor to watch, he’s going places. Lulu
is a role where even weakness is impressive, and strapping on the required false
eyelashes constitutes a brave act. But while many seem owned by Berg’s music,
Gisela Stille has made it her own. Her voice is impressively forceful and full
in tone, with steely certainty through the scariest passages without ever
leaving the character. She might not have the ultimate ease at the very top,
but her strength throughout the rest of her range more than compensates.
As Alwa Jürgen Müller was in much-improved form from his
weak Florestan on Sunday, though his voice is not exactly fresh it was
consistently solid. Alone among the cast he tended to overact, though in this
case hamminess kind of works, Alwa is already quite taken with himself. Markus
Marquandt was a young-ish Schön with an impressive voice and authority, and a
genuinely frightening appearance at the end of the opera. The production
neglected the Gräfin Geschwitz a bit, but Christa Mayer sounded excellent.
One thing that is not
high on Herheim’s priority list is the intricacies of Berg’s twelve-tone
technique. Berg’s stage directions are notoriously numerous and, to analysts,
portrayed in the musical texture with a degree of complexity and integration
surpassing anything in Wagner. Herheim follows many of those directions, but
adds a lot that doesn’t have a specific antecedent in Berg’s musical-dramatic
structure. That he does not take a gnostic analyst’s approach is a grave sin
according to some (like the aptly-named Zwölftöner), but I have to say I
don’t mind a bit. Not that I would object to a staging that does incorporate
this kind of analysis—even if 99% of the audience doesn’t know about the
significance of that B natural (and half of those who do only hear it because
George Perle told them to), those details add up to create a full drama.
But I think there’s more than one way to make a meaningful Lulu. I don’t think 12-tone analysis should be accorded any inherent
privilege as the only valid option. Herheim’s production was to me new, exciting, and meaningful, and thus
has value. (I do admit that a few times I was very aware that he was not
staging the music, most blatantly when Geschwitz stared at the painting without
the accompaniment of the portrait chords.) The problem with Perle’s argument regarding performing Lulu is the basic premise that there is one correct way to do most of it. But it’s a rich, multifaceted piece, and as elusive as the
title character itself, and the theorist’s approach is only one way to
illuminate its depths.
Go see this one if you can!
Photos copyright Matthias Creutziger

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Review

Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Berliner Philharmoniker

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On Saturday night I caught up with the Berlin Philharmonic
at the Philharmonie in a concert led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin of music of
Berio, Chaikovsky, and Ravel. This was my first visit to the Philharmonie and
one of the first times I’d heard the Philharmoniker live conducted by someone
other than their current music director Simon Rattle. My impression of their last performance with Sir Simon (in Carnegie Hall) was decidedly mixed, of technical brilliance
lacking in any perceptible heartbeat. This was also the first time I’d heard
Nézet-Séguin conduct outside the Met, and he, the orchestra, and the concert
hall all left me very impressed indeed.


The program opened with Berio’s Sequenza IXa for solo
clarinet, and odd choice but apparently they are gradually performing the whole
cycle of Sequenze. The Philharmonie’s wonderful acoustics allowed lone clarinetist
Walter Seyfarth to resonate clearly even at the softest dynamics. I know this
piece from, um, playing it (only casually), and Seyfarth’s account was
technically impeccable and extremely clearly thought through. Clarinet
multiphonics (the closest we can get to a double stop) are unreliabe and wheezy
at best but Seyfarth’s were rock solid.  Motives
and structures were clearly defined, but nonetheless it was a bit more an
austere plateau than a collection of giant hairpins.  

Perhaps they chose the clarinet sequenza because the next
piece, Chaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet
Fantasy Overture, opens with a clarinet solo. I don’t know. Anyway, this
Chaikovsky was magical, taken with big ultra-Romantic pathos and rubato and
schmaltz and all that kind of thing that I like in Chaikovsky and occasionally find
suspect in Korngold. Nézet-Séguin took a glutinous approach to the transitions
that made the piece more smooth than exciting, but the orchestra’s considerable
virtuosity and precision in the fight portions was exciting enough. After my
recent spate of neat freak conductors it was nice to hear someone really go for
the emotional payoffs, and the horns’ countermelody was a thing of wonder.

Maybe it was the remnants of jet lag but I have to admit my
attention drifted at a few points during Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloe—not that it isn’t very beautiful music but I might
be in favor of performing the suite versions in this case. The orchestra here
sounded more like the one I knew from Rattle, light and precise (even in the
trickiest passages in the winds, including wonderful wind solos and one
slightly wonky violin one), and yet, when required, very very loud.
Nézet-Séguin showed the same flexibility as in the Chaikovsky but also the
needed delicacy. The ahs emanating from the Rundfunk Chor Berlin were also
excellently balanced with each other and the orchestra.

I find many modern concert halls alienating, but the
Philharmonie’s nooks and cranies were fun. It’s like hearing a concert in a
retro spaceship!

This concert is included in the Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall and will soon be available ondemand if you’d like to see it yourself.


Berliner Philharmoniker, Philharmonie, 6/16/12. Yannick
Nézet-Séguin, conductor; Walter Seyforth, clarinet, Rundfunk Chor Berlin.
Berio, Sequenza XIa; Tchaikovsky/Chaikovsky, Fantasy Overture on Romeo and Juliet; Ravel, Daphnis et
Chloe (complete ballet)


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Review

Serse: Stefan Herheim goes for baroque

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Like every utterance of “Frau Blücher!” in Young Frankenstein makes a distant horse neigh, the pastoral piping of recorders in Stefan Herheim’s Serse has the power to summon animals, in this case a small and jolly herd of dancing sheep. Elsewhere we get slightly creaky stage machinery, big shiny costumes, and some jokes that can only be described as corny (or, um, German). It’s good fun, and for what you expect out of this director and this opera house, mild-mannered madness indeed.


Handel, Serse. Komische Oper Berlin, 6/15/2012. German translation by Eberhard Schmidt adapted by Stefan Herheim. New production directed by Stefan Herheim, sets by Heike Scheele, costumes by Gesine Vollm, lights by Franck Even. Conducted by Konrad Junghaenel with Stella Doufexis (Serse/Xerxes), Karolina Gumos (Arsamenes), Brigitte Geller (Romilda), Julia Giebel (Atalanta), Dimitry Ivanshchenko (Ariodates), Hagen Matzeit (Elviro).

See more photos at the end of this post.
Maybe Stefan Herheim is the opposite of Robert Lepage.
Lepage limits himself to literal representation; Herheim dissolves the work as
we know it into a sea of symbolism, references and shifting time frames and
perspectives. While this dreaminess comes naturally to Parsifal and Rusalka,
Herheim obviously recognizes that Handelian opera rests on the firmer ground of
dramatic formula. The fantasies of our collective unconscious are replaced by
the more readily explained magic of stage illusion.
This is yet another metatheatrical, theater-in-a-theater
production, a device that has been done to death over the past few years. The
setting is an eighteenth-century theater populated by a troupe of opera singers
very like those of Handel’s premiere. As in David McVicar’s Adriana Lecouvreur, the miniature
theater onstage rotates to reveal itself in profile and the backstage action in
the rear. Some of the opera’s action takes place onstage and some off.  The stage features the expected
period-appropriate flat scenery of trees and columns, stormy painted waves,
drops, and a beautiful perspective view of a London street. The libretto never
puts us in London, of course, but here the boundaries between life and art are porous.
Herheim wisely does not attempt to establish two separate sets of
characters, and the drama flits on and offstage freely. Serse is a divo,
Romilda the diva, Atalanta her jealous rival attempting to usurp her position,
and so on. (Romilda and Atalanta appear as doubles and for a shorter period
Arsamene and Serse, which is quite confusing. The point is that in the plot’s love triangles they want to take each others’
places.) That the singers’ onstage personae are the same as their offstage ones
is the entire point: the hoary mechanics and outsized passions of the plot find
their analogue in the machinery and colorful personalities of the world of the
theater. The opera is determined by the social environment that produced it. (This is what Herheim meant by describing the opera as a Muppet show–everyone has their particular role to fulfill onstage and off.)
It’s a great point.
What annoys me about these lampshade-hanging stagings (most egregiously Mary
Zimmerman’s Met Sonnambula ) is their pointed
winking that indicates the drama is so ridiculous it can only be portrayed as
something self-consciously fake, that the revelation of the illusion is an
apology for its implausibility. Herheim instead shows why we love opera: it’s
our life, only with fancy costumes and music. Dressing up is awesome (also sometimes tacky, ridiculous, and immobilizing, but don’t we love the shiny crap anyway), but the
emotional situations are real, and our own.
Handel never tries to create a “Persian” (the opera’s
nominal setting) tone, and for all his exploitation of ornate
eighteenth-century gesture and image (also switching between German and Italian–Italian taking place only “onstage” in the loftiest of the music) Herheim is also decidedly
twenty-first-century. Just as the characters never leave their
eighteenth-century selves, the singers never leave their present-day ones either,
as Herheim somewhat heavy-handedly reveals at the production’s conclusion by
revealing the chorus in contemporary dress.
There are some spectacular aria stagings that are both
inventive and revealing of eighteenth-century culture: I particularly liked the
succession of weaponry brought by Atalanta to Serse as he proclaims his hatred
of Romilda (a knife, a gun, a poisonous snake, a teeny tiny cannon that hilariously breaks the backdrop, and finally
a crossbow that even more hilariously downs a small plaster cherub from the rafters). In one of the big “I want it” arias, Serse’s name gets
spelled out in lights and then reversed into, yes, the German is Xerxes so figure out what that is backwards for yourself. Only at one point does the production hint at a darker
side, when Atalanta’s adoring fans begin to get a bit too close for comfort. It’s
not quite historical—the more spectacular visuals are far more Versailles than
London—but I think the homework has been done. Amastre may be the least
convincing cross-dresser ever, but even if Herheim doesn’t actually have any
castrati the gender bending of this era is never far from his mind (Elviro’s
flower-seller getup is apparently a My
Fair Lady tribute). The fourth wall is broken and the orchestra gets to
join in on the action. Sometimes the singers address the audience with a disarmingly
self-conscious directness. Winton Dean would entreat us to remember that Serse is a sophisticated comedy and not
a low farce, but I laughed at Serse humping his favorite tree and Dean can stuff
it, opera has far too much good taste going around as it is. (If you whine that
present-day opera is as a rule not classy enough, I suggest you take up
collecting stamps.)
But switching between offstage and on requires some
compromises. The drama feels episodic from one big set piece aria to the next, the
stakes are never high and the dramatic arc is, well, lacking. The main plot
line is shifted into the background, so how valuable is that which displaces
it? Herheim has something to say about baroque opera, but he doesn’t have much
particular to Serse, and this staging
with small alterations could be applied to basically any moderately comic
eighteenth-century opera. I know that’s kind of the point but I have to wonder
if it’s one that lasts for three and a quarter hours of performance. (Herheim not dense enough? I cannot believe I am typing this. Really, this was very uncharacteristic work.)
If Herheim is always asking us to take another step back and
question our perspectives and motivations, that’s what I’m going to do with his
production. I like his message, but the performance of eighteenth-century
formulas in quotation marks has become a cliché in itself. As Herheim insists,
these conventions might work again and again, but I’m not sure if their modern unmasking
via self-conscious imitation maintains the same novelty value when repeated ad
infinitum. If you have any familiarity with the playbook of, say, the early
work of Peter Sellars, Nicholas Hytner’s Serse,
David McVicar’s Giulio Cesare (and Adriana, I suppose, whose setting is baroque)
and even the dread Enchanted Island, you’ve
seen a lot of this before. The rhythmic shaking on the coloratura, the chorus
of sea creatures, the cutout ships, the self-conscious gesture, none of this is
new. For all Herheim’s spirit and joy—for execution  I would rank this production at the very highest
level, it’s only that Herheim sets very high standards with regard to Konzept— and always exceptional musicality,
I have to say I would prefer Herheim to go nuts and expected something a little more fresh. Can we stop
the theater in theater thing now, please?
As usual with Herheim, the cast is dynamic and fully present
at every moment. Stella Doufexis’s Serse is hilarious, toothily and awkwardly
grinning at every opportunity and, for all the bluster not in command of
anything impressive. Her clarinet-toned mezzo sounded a little windy in “Ombra
mai fu” (way to open with the opera’s greatest hit), but warmed up to sound
clear and precise on each note, though she was drowned out a few times during “Crude
furie.” Karolina Gumos as Arsamenes commanded a warmer, rounder sound, probably
my favorite of the cast, and her “Si, la voglio” (sorry, not sure what the
German incipit was) showed excellent coloratura. Brigitte Geller was sweet and
lyric as Romilda though a little brittle at the top of her range. Julia Giebel
was the first Atalanta I didn’t find insufferably annoying, which is something,
and sounded good too. Katarina Bradic as Amastre couldn’t really boom at the
bottom of her range, but she has a lovely mahogany tone and musicality. Hagen
Matzeit as Elviro was announced as ill, which is why I suppose we were deprived
of his Bacchus aria, a pity, otherwise Sprechstimme was fine for this comic role.
Dimitry Ivashchenko was an exemplary Ariodates.
The orchestra was modern but the continuo period and
conductor Konrad Junghaenel had clearly coaxed some period practice into the
modern players. The playing was crisp and precise but light and didn’t use too
much vibrato. Ensemble was excellent both within the orchestra and through the
playful interchange between orchestra and players, and the continuo included a
theorbo and a baroque harp. Eberhard Schmidt’s German translation had been
given an “Einrichtung” by Herheim and was so clear and straightforward that
even I could understand almost all of it, though sometimes it put a few too
many syllables in where the Italian had required far fewer.
It’s a totally fun evening out, but maybe not quite what you
expect from Herheim, perhaps bearing a hint of baroque dilettantism (it is, in
fact, his first second? baroque opera). But if more baroque productions, and more of
these metathetrical things, had this kind of loving spirit, I’d be happy. (I
might be even happier if there weren’t so many metatheatrical things, though?)
Photos copyright Komische Oper.

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Review

Nina Stemme comes out ahead in Carnegie Hall’s Salome

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I went to Salome at Carnegie Hall with the Cleveland Orchestra and Nina Stemme and Eric Owens and Franz Welser-Möst and I wrote about it for Bachtrack.

“When I looked at you, I heard secret
music,” says Salome in her monologue to the severed head of John the
Baptist. Richard Strauss’s opera trades in the unseeable and the
unknowable—from the range of metaphors applied to the moon to the nearly
impossible staging of a ten-minute striptease performed by a dramatic
soprano—which makes it unusually well suited to concert presentation.
Strauss’s high-octane, atmospheric music can seem all the more lurid and
mysterious when its subjective visualization is left to the imagination.
When the stage seems to agree with Herodias and show that the moon is,
in fact, merely the moon, things are rather less interesting than the
swirl of images in the orchestra.

In Thursday night’s presentation by the Cleveland Orchestra at
Carnegie Hall, these depths were reached only sporadically, and the
performance served largely as a showcase for the stunning performance of
Nina Stemme in the title role.

You can read the whole thing here. Stemme was magnificent and Welser-Möst disappointing. Do all the conductors now consider swiftness and textual transparency the absolute highest virtue (HIP birds coming home to roost?)? Or have I just overdosed on Fabio Luisi? I’d kind of like to hear someone try something dense and thick for a change. Stemme could certainly handle it. Most of my recent Salomes have been lyrics with ambition and I found a real dramatic voice refreshing, particularly Stemme, who is loud but at the same time still so nuanced. I am greatly looking forward to hearing her sing Brünnhilde this summer.

photo © Roger Mastroianni

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Review

Classical Musical Blogger Survey: The Results

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Early bloggers
Who is writing about classical music? In recent years, the coverage of high art in (predominately but not exclusively American) newspapers and other print media has decreased precipitously. Like print media, classical music’s death has often been prophesied, or even announced, and its increasing absence from mainstream media is often cited as a sign of its ostensible decline.
But what if the coverage just moved? The internet—a giant and rapidly changing place that means radically different things to different people—is host to an enormous variety of people writing about music. If you look at the classical music blogosphere, you don’t see a dead culture (hell, for habitues of Parterre, Maria Callas isn’t even dead). It’s a weird and wonderful place full of writing similar to newspaper coverage but also very specific subcultures and rants. Some the writing is fantastic and some is awful—just like the rest of the internet, in other words.
A problem remains: with established print media, the institutional credibility of the publication backs up the critic, which if it’s a good paper should serve as some kind of guarantee of quality. On the internet, anyone can write anything according to any standards of ethics, knowledge, etc., and while some are associated with one of those old-fashioned print media most are not. Some people think this is a Very Bad Thing. But I think it’s great. Bloggers are judged solely by the quality of their work. Sometimes artists and performing groups have no idea what to do with us. Sometimes, though, they have no idea what to do with print journalists either, as has been abundantly clear in recent days. The amount of independence and objectivity in print is hardly black and white. And bloggers, for all of our variability, aren’t going to be shut up like that.
But I was curious: who are these people writing stuff? What have been their (our) experiences? During the first two weeks of May, I conducted a survey of all the classical music bloggers I could convince to complete one.

Here are the results.

Due to my network, the respondents were mostly American, and many were opera bloggers. These two groups may have been overrepresented, but it’s also true that there are a lot of Americans and a lot of opera bloggers out there. Thanks to Colin Eatock’s Big List of Classical Music Blogs and some help on the Twitter, I found some people new to me too. It’s not quite scientific, but I tried to be as accurate and scrupulous as possible.
A few highlights:
  • 57 bloggers participated. (At the bottom of this post there is a list of those who chose to be credited.)
  • 65% were male, 32% were female. This is actually not as male-dominated as I thought it would be.
  • Geographically, the San Francisco Bay area was most represented with seven bloggers. Several of them reported excellent camaraderie between each other, print critics, and presenting organizations, suggesting strength in numbers. Also that Californians might be more internet-savvy than the rest of the world.
  • 82% of bloggers began to study music as children. While their expertise varied, it’s clear that early education is very important in keeping people involved in music. (Parents, this is aimed at you!) Many also had studied music in college.
  • Many bloggers have real writing experience. 57% had written at some point for a news or arts website other than their own blog. 47% had also written for print, and 21% had written books.
  • Criticism  of live performances was considered by the most people to be the most important topic, while interviews were the least (suggesting that bloggers either aren’t interested but also possibly do not always enjoy easy access to interview subjects). Opera was the genre of music covered most often while popular music was covered the least.
  • Around half of bloggers have received free tickets for performances, and many reported contact from presenting organizations and artists over what they’ve written, suggesting that the Power of the Internet is great. Some reported friendly thanks or offers of photos and information, and some also reported rants or hate mail.
You can download a full report with all the statistics and selected comments from the long form questions here. (Go to File, then Download.) Please credit me if you’re going to write about it.
Here are the detailed results. Click on any of the charts below to enlarge. Thanks to Lisa for her advice on putting together the questions and to all the bloggers who participated!
Demographics 
Gender
  • Female: 18 (32%)
  • Male: 37 (65%)
Age
  • under 21: 4 (7%)
  • 21-35: 20 (35%)
  • 36-50: 20 (35%)
  • 51-65: 9 (16%)
  • over 65: 4 (7%)
Country of residence
  • USA: 34 (60%)
  • UK: 9 (16%)
  • Germany: 4 (7%)
  • Canada: 2 (3%)
  • France: 2 (3%)
  • Other: 5 (9%) (Austria, Spain, Greece, Switzerland, The Netherlands)
City:
  • San Francisco Bay area: 7
  • NYC: 6
  • London: 6
  • Washington, D.C.: 3
  • Los Angeles: 2
  • Other: 30 
MUSICAL EDUCATION
Instruments studied:
  • None: 7 (12%)
  • Orchestral instrument (classical): 25 (48%)
  • Piano (classical): 35 (61%)
  • Voice (classical): 15 (26%)
  • Instrument (non-classical): 6 (11%)
  • Voice (non-classical): 3 (5%)
  • Other: early winds (2), organ (1), guitar (1)
Performing level on primary instrument:
  • None: 7 (12%)
  • Beginner: 3 (5%)
  • Intermediate: 11 (20%)
  • Advanced: 14 (25%)
  • Professional: 11 (19%)
  • Lapsed: 11 (19%)
Other areas of musical study:
  • Studied as a child: 47 (82%)
  • Began as an adult: 3 (5%)
  • Professional performance experience: 21 (37%)
  • Amateur or school performance experience: 29 (51%)
  • College/university degree in music : 15 (26%)
  • Studied music history: 33 (58%)
  • Studied music theory: 34 (60%)
  • Studied composition: 13 (23%)
See PDF for additional comments on musical education, mostly including a wide range of academic degrees.
PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION
What is your “day job”?
  • Writer (including music): 8 (14%)
  • Writer (not music): 5 (9%)
  • Music (not writing): 10 (18%)
  • Music professor: 1 (2%)
  • Not music or writing: 18 (32%)
  • Student: 11 (19%)
  • Retired: 2 (3%)

 Have you written…
  • For another news or arts website: 24 (57%)
  • For a performing organization’s website or blog: 10 (18%)
  • For a print publication: 27 (47%)
  • For radio or TV: 5 (9%)
  • Program or CD notes: 21 (37%)
  • A book: 12 (21%)
BLOG INFORMATION

How important are the following kinds of

posts for your blog? (click to enlarge)

Other topics (write-in): Criticism of other art
forms (art, books, film, theater, dance, etc.), aesthetics, career and industry
issues, satire and humor, historical topics, politics, calendar posts.
 

How often do you write
about the following genres of music? (click to enlarge)
 
How long have you been writing your blog?
  • under a year  13 (23%)
  • 1-2 years: 9 (16%)
  • 2-4 years: 11 (19%)
  • 4-5 years: 5 (9%)
  • over 5 years: 19 (33%)

Do you write under your own name?

  • Own name: 35 (61%)
  • Pseudonym: 20 (35%)
  • No answer: 2 (4%)
Is your blog affiliated with an institution?
  • Independent: 53 (93%)
  • Performing organization: 2 (3%)
  • Print and web media organization: 2 (4%)  

Have you been quoted in any publicity materials?  

  • Not aware/no answer: 21 (36%)
  • Only internet: 18 (32%)
  • Print and internet: 18 (32%)
Have you accepted any free stuff from publicists/performing organizations/artists/etc.?
  • Nothing: 17 (30%)
  • Tickets: 31 (54%)
  • CDs or DVDs: 30 (53%)
  • PR email: 31 (54%)

Write-ins:
invitations to special events (2), books (3), subscription to online profile
site (1)

Has a performing organization or performer ever contacted you regarding
the content of something you’ve written on your blog?
  • Yes: 33 (58%)
  • No: 12 (21%)
  • No answer: 12 (21%)
Comments included both friendly and helpful interactions and some hostile ones, including rants and hate mail.

Additional comments included warm words for the blogosphere and the options it offers, and a certain disinterest in print critics.

Participants:
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Review

Peter Gelb’s charm offensive strikes again

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Then there are the opera companies that sell this shirt in their gift shops.*

Less than 24 hours elapsed between the Times reporting that semi-resident magazine Opera News will no longer be reviewing Met productions per General Director Peter Gelb’s request due to recent less than complimentary assessments and the decision to reverse that decision. (Both were reported by Dan Wakin, who has been doing a great job covering the Met and New York classical music in general.) The reversal came in the form of a press release from the Met, offering further assurance that Opera News is an independent organ of faultless journalistic integrity.

I generally agree with Anne Midgette’s take on the situation (written before the reversal). But remember, the publication in question has a temperament that earned it the nickname Opera Snooze. If you’ve managed to do something sufficiently rash that even they are getting mad, you’ve really got a problem on your hands. And that’s the most worrying thing here. Yes, Gelb is acting like a tyrant and disregarding the normal freedoms of a democratic society, and that’s pretty awful. But he’s not single-handedly turning New York into 1937 Russia. He is, however, showing himself unfit to be the leader of an organization, particularly a creative one: unable to take criticism and, I suspect, unwilling to acknowledge or learn from failures. This attempt to cover up, though, backfired massively.  (Opera News enjoys an awkward relationship with the Met, as explained by Midgette, and despite being equipped with the paraphernalia of editorial independence has revealed itself to possess none. I wouldn’t mind the Met having its own PR-stuffed house magazine à la Prolog and basically every other European opera house–if only everyone concerned were honest that that is what Opera News is.)

Pro music critics far and wide condemned Gelb’s decision, as well as plenty of other people with internet soapboxes (Lisa has a good roundup, sorry, I wasn’t fast enough to comment sooner than this, lots of work to do today). And the decision was reversed quickly, albeit in a doublethink-full statement that chalked up the decision to the passionate outcry of opera fans who want to hear about their precious Met. Gelb is a little more forthright in the Times piece, admitting it just might have been a mistake.

Some of the reaction was hysterical, none more than this rather embarrassing anonymous Parterre screed. We all want art to feel like a matter of life and death but seriously, folks. Gelb isn’t the state, and he isn’t killing anyone. (And why aren’t we remembering the silent compliance of the Opera News editors? They’re almost worse than Gelb’s trigger finger.) To indulge in such large-scale, apocalyptic comparison of our little problems to those of people whose lives and livelihood are being threatened and have even been murdered shows an astonishing lack of proportion and empathy. I don’t care about the little disclaimer at the end. That the author was able to publish this piece (the anonymity is to protect their professional reputation, they are not going to be disappeared–the pseudonym, by the way, is from Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which made me think it might be satire but I fear that it is not), as well as the rest of today’s hullabaloo and the eventual reversal should be a clue that we’re not headed to the gulag yet.

Back to the opera, folks. See y’all at Salome on Thursday. I promise survey results really soon, but making pretty charts is hard.

*Not kidding. “Ein Buh für Sie!” means “A boo for you!”

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Review

Telemann’s Orpheus at the City Opera

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I went to see Orpheus (not that one… or that one… or that one) at the City Opera and wrote about it for Bachtrack.

The New York City Opera has spent the
season reinventing itself from a large company with a large theater to a
peripatetic one presenting small works. Perhaps it was apt that they
closed their season with Telemann’s Orpheus. Not only was it
one of the first stagings of any Telemann opera in the United States: it
also presents a radically reworking of a familiar story that seems
unwilling to confine itself to one geographic location.

Click here to read the whole thing. It’s an intriguing work but not ultimately a spectacularly rewarding one, at least in this production (though Jennifer Rowley is really great in the central role!). It was also an extraordinarily odd choice to produce. (I heard that it resulted from George Steel meeting someone who has worked on it extensively. Not from research in “baroque operas we should put on.”) I’m all in favor of choosing weird and random repertory, so on the one hand I’m proud of them for doing it. But on the other, are we running before we are walking here? I mean, when it comes to recently discovered operas, New York (unless you count New Haven) hasn’t gotten a staging of La finta pazza yet, which is a much more important work. When you have such a tiny season each choice has to be good, and this one while it was promising didn’t quite pay off.

Also be aware that while the running time is listed on the website as two and a half hours, it was just shy of three on Saturday. El Museo del Barrio’s theater is functional enough; I was sitting too close to the front to judge the acoustic properly.

photo © Carol Rosegg

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Review

A classical music blogger survey

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Pictured: Opera Obsession and I talking about Robert Lepage

Do you, like I, regularly commit the sin of blogging about classical music? Bloggers have a reputation as people who say much while knowing little. I have met many conscientious and knowledgeable bloggers and believe this to be a false charge. (I recommend reading Lisa at Iron Tongue of Midnight’s recent entries on the classical blogosphere for more thoughts on its place in the musical ecosystem. Part one and part two.)

But in the interests of exploring who is doing all that writing out there, I’m conducting a survey. If you have a classical music blog, you should fill it out! It has some general questions about your musical background, a section on what you blog about and your interactions with the Classical Establishment, and a bit about demographics. You can fill it out here. The survey is in English but is open to blogs written in all languages and locations. I’d like to wrap it up around May 14 and will publish a report on the results soon after that. Thanks!

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Review

Götterdämmerung: Zu End’ ewiges Wissen, and other endings

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Why do we still want to see and hear the Ring? It’s not because of the dwarfs, the spells, the sword, or the gold. The Ring includes an unfair quantity of the greatest music ever written, and it’s expressing something a lot more profound and ambiguous than the novelty of seeing a dude in a bear suit. We want the Ring because in it we can hear love and rage and hope and evil amplified into the most glorious, mysterious sound. This is something Robert Lepage never seems to have grasped in his Met Ring Cycle.

To quote the First Norn, “ein wüstes Gesicht wirrt mir wüthend den Sinn.” Götterdämmerung is the weakest link of Lepage’s cycle. If there was redemption in this final performance of the Met’s Cycle 2, it was through the talent and hard work of the performers.


Wagner, Götterdämmerung. Met Opera Ring Cycle 2, 5/3/2012. Production by Robert Lepage, conducted by Fabio Luisi with Katarina Dalayman (Brünnhilde), Jay Hunter Morris (Siegfried), Iain Paterson (Gunther), Wendy Bryn Harmer (Gutrune), Hans-Peter König (Hagen), Karen Cargill (Waltraute), Richard Paul Fink (Alberich), Maria Radner (First Norn), Elizabeth Bishop (Second Norn), Heidi Melton (Third Norn).

If you take the Ring literally, it’s pretty silly. So much of it’s supernatural, the causality of some events can be muddled (the Ring ends up back in the Rhine, so why does the Götterdämmerung proceed apace anyway?), there are a few weird plot holes (dead Siegfried shooing Hagen away from the Ring), and all sorts of other ridiculousnesses. Of course you can “solve” these problems–but in the larger picture to take the Ring so literally is idiotic. It’s myth, and it functions on a symbolic level and speaks to us in terms more ambiguous and timeless than the specific events that are being portrayed.

Robert Lepage, for all his talk of “fantasy,” has given us the expected, the swords and breastplates that confine the story to a picturesque storybook. The Machine dwarfs the singers and imposes its overwhelmingly simplistic scene-setting upon every moment. The characters, the emotion, and music that carries them all seems like an afterthought, because we have mountains to look at here, dammit. The Machine does not open up possibilities but preclude them, it threatens to make bland and tame all it touches.

Lepage reaches new heights of vacuity in each act of this Götterdämmerung. First the Norns stand still as the Machine wiggles. Then Brünnhilde incomprehensibly enters from the opposite side of the stage as Siegfried and equally incomprehensibly wields Nothung. This leads to nonsensical character work in Act 1 (Hagen and Gunther and Gutrune are just one big happy family… wait, what?), and then Hagen delivers his entire monologue sitting still in a chair. I suppose he could be sitting still with menace. But really, he’s not.

That seems minor compared to the problems of Act 2. It begins with the Hagen-Alberich scene in which Hagen remains still behind a big shield that looks like a speaker’s podium. We had a last-minute replacement Alberich, Richard Paul Fink (not pictured), and I was sure he was just wandering onstage in his street clothes. It turns out he was in fact wearing the costume–minus, of course, Eric Owens’s hair (pictured above on the left) (which on Fink would have been a disaster far greater than Frank van Aken sporting Jonas Kaufmann’s hair last weekend was). It’s just not the most inspired costume design, suggesting Alberich has spent his spare time away from the world of the rest of the production, perhaps becoming a new music conductor.

Later, the conspiracy trio involves a pair of angled chairs (seen above) that look like a setup for William Berger to ask Jay Hunter Morris a few more questions about working in roller skate rental, and the act concludes with a small crowd of vassals waving teeny streamers and creating a traffic jam near the undersized stage left exit to the flurry of smash-bang triumphant-scary music (sorry, Wagnerian German inspires such collocations).

But the end of the opera remains the worst thing (skipping over the scene where the Rhinemaidens slide down the wall, climb back up it, and slide down again ad infinitum*). Siegfried’s pyre flickers meekly and slowly trundles upstage, Brünnhilde gets on Grane (props to Katarina Dalayman for managing this by herself with relative grace, an improvement over being lifted into place as seen earlier) and follows, and the machine rotates to enact a transformation to the Rhine. Hagen briefly runs after the Rhinemaidens, ending in a freeze-frame with his arm stretched back as if poised to grab them, but he doesn’t do so and they hold this for several seconds and then all slowly descend on an elevator. We get a lot of visible stagehands apparently helping the statues of the gods to gently crumble, as if centuries are passing seen through a time-lapse camera. An inglorious end to an infuriating project.

It may have been promoted as the Wagner Event of the Century (and I can’t blame the Met for doing this, they have to sell their tickets), but it’s best treated as a revival of a 20-year old production to which each singer brings their own strengths and weaknesses. When I managed to forget the hulking mass of the Machine and concentrate on the performers, I enjoyed it the most. This means to give up hopes of a unified dramatic conception, but there has never been one here. Forget Lepage, take and leave each individual performance for what it offers. (This is not a Gesamtkunstwerk.)

Katarina Dalayman was a noble Brünnhilde of considerable dramatic stature and power. Her voice remains shrill and uncontrolled at the top, but her presence and vivid way with the music had grown considerably since Walküre. Her raw emotion was the only thing worth watching in the big betrothal scene, and her Immolation had a generosity and large-scale expression that almost made the silliness around her recede. I wish I could understand her German better, but I feel like she knows what she’s saying even if her diction isn’t that great.

Jay Hunter Morris had a more successful evening than at the premiere. He got off to a scratchy start in the Prologue, but warmed up to his customary bright and clean singing (though skipping the C). He never has the power to really fill the house, but paced himself extremely well and was still sounding fresh through the torturous death scene. He has a likeable, friendly presence, and Siegfried is hardly a complex character, but I could use more acting-wise in the final scene. (If one can ever ask for that without being very nasty. It’s a hard thing to sing, to say the least.) I hope he can next work on this interpretation somewhere in Europe where he’ll be singing in a smaller house and get some good direction.

Karen Cargill had big shoes to fill replacing Waltraud Meier as Waltraute, but if she isn’t Meier’s rival in textual insight (who is?) her giant chocolately voice was a considerable pleasure. Iain Paterson is an interesting Gunther, aware and frustrated but resigned to his status as a beta male, and a fine singer of this rather thankless role. Hans-Peter König’s Hagen is an enigma: astonishingly well sung with an enormous, black bass, but so utterly lacking in menace that he might as well be Baron Ochs. In the remaining roles, Wendy Bryn Harmer kept up her duties in the Help! Help! fach, Heidi Melton’s Third Norn is the great Wagner soprano of the future, and the Rhinemaidens were less shrill and more evenly balanced than before. The chorus was excellent.

I’ve run out of words to describe Fabio Luisi’s conducting. It’s competent, fluent, perfectly sufficient and at most points falls a bit short of being profound. The brass didn’t have the best night, but I’ve heard far worse.

The Ring is so special, even a mediocre Götterdämmerung has the power to leave you sort of a mess at the end, but still I can’t picture myself going to see this production again in a hurry. It’s too distancing, too boring, too ugly. With a major stroke of casting genius–Christian Thielemann or Nina Stemme come to mind–we’d talk, but when it comes to next year’s line-up I don’t think I’ll be alone in giving it a miss.

I went back to see the first thing I wrote about this Ring. It was this:

I am a Robert Lepage skeptic. He seems more interested in creating
images than narrative, and more taken with gadgets than characters.  And
a Ring Cycle without an overarching sense of narrative would be
dire.  This will be an important moment for the Met, and let’s hope that
it turns out well.  As if that weren’t enough, add a complicated set, a
very fragile conductor, and a dangerous number of unreliable and/or
role-debuting singers and you have… enormous potential for backstage
drama. 

To which I say this.

I’m putting the Wagner back on the shelf for now but not for long. I’ll be returning to the Ring in July for the Bayerische Staatsoper’s Cycle B.

*Also in this stretch: Gunther washes Siegfried’s blood in the Rhine, turning a large part of the Machine red. This reminded me of the end of Herheim’s Bayreuth Parsifal in reverse, but I really doubt Lepage has seen it.

PREVIOUSLY in order of appearance:
HD broadcast, Die Walküre
Siegfried prima
Götterdämmerung prima
Cycle 2 Das Rheingold 
Cycle 2 Die Walküre
 
A few more photos, all © Ken Howard/Met:

 

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Review

Die Walküre: Stories twice told

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I fear writing this much about the Met’s still-unfolding Ring cycle may be having a bad effect on my brain, but I went to Die Walküre on Saturday and here’s what happened. The production is still simple-minded, Bryn Terfel is still the best, Fabio Luisi is still Fabio Luisi, Jonas Kaufmann canceled, and I continue to learn what makes Wagner special by seeing what has been drained out of this production.


Wagner, Die Walküre. Metropolitan Opera Ring Cycle 2, 4/28/2012. Production by Robert Lepage, conducted by Fabio Luisi with Bryn Terfel (Wotan), Katarina Dalayman (Brünnhilde), Frank van Aken (Siegmund), Eva-Maria Westbroek (Sieglinde), Stephanie Blythe (Fricka), Hans-Peter König (Hunding).

At MIT last week, Peter Gelb said that Robert Lepage intended to “tell the story that Wagner wrote” in his Ring. But what story is that? Lepage seemed to describe it as Icelandic myth, but the sources are actually much more diverse than that. Das Rheingold is largely Icelandic, but much of Die Walküre is based on the Völsungsaga, which is Nordic or Central European, and is a source for the Nibelungenlied, the Germanic source for Götterdämmerung. And that’s a vast simplification.

You might say that doesn’t matter: what matters is what Wagner put together. But this collage of myths, and the instability and “live-ness” of oral transmission is imprinted upon the Ring. Again and again, characters tell us, and themselves, and each other, stories–Loge and Wotan in Rheingold, Wotan in Walküre, and Siegfried in Götterdämmerung are a few of the most prominent examples. These long scenes are often considered dramatic dead zones, but they’re very very important. We learn important new information in each one, the listening characters make decisions, and the characters learn things themselves as they narrate (Wotan realizes why he has to let Siegmund die or Siegfried gradually regaining his memory, for example). The Ring’s story is not linear or even a grid but a shifting, perilous web (the Norns).

That’s why I found Lepage’s conception of the machine as a shifting ground of Iceland symbolically intriguing–but seemingly in a very different way than did Lepage himself. For Lepage, the myths are a return to childlike simplicity, “fantasy,” and picturesque images. Inserting film to illustrate a long and potentially dull narrative passage is a “mixture of media,” but the problem is that it flattens the act of narration itself The video doesn’t “echo” or “magnify” the performer as Lepage suggested, it transforms them from being a subjective, live presence to a neutral voiceover narrator illustrating a story given authority by its visualization.

I think this is one reason why the staging feels so spiritually empty. No one has their own story to tell, nor the imperative to speak it. They are just pawns in the service of a mechanical Machine that will very insistently help them relay their material in a homogenous way–here the most egregious incidents being a film during Siegmund’s biography and a giant eye with shifting images helping us get through Wotan’s Act 2 monologue. Lepage’s Ring seeks to be mythic while operating on terms antithetical to myth.

I’m sorry if my review hooks are getting abstract (abstraction being, in Gelb’s mind, a mortal sin), but it’s becoming pretty difficult to come up with new stuff to say about this thing, and since I now have seen the whole cycle I can consider the big picture a bit.

But I guess we should talk about this Walküre. I have to say that this was the first time the prelude reminded me of this. OK, that was a gratuitous comparison but I think there is some truth to it. The orchestra sounded much refreshed after a messy Makropulos the previous night (probably a different crew). Somewhat to my surprise I liked Luisi’s flowing, lyrical approach to the farewell and Magic Fire, which had a welcome luminosity. But along with the quiet first act came an intelligently-paced but lightweight Todesverkündigung.

Lepage doesn’t have too many ideas of how to use the Machine here–it is essentially a glorified projection screen, though it does flip Brünnhilde (a double who was unconvincing even from the Family Circle) upside down onto her mountain at the end. The rest I think I’ve already covered in my previous piece on this staging, when I saw the HD broadcast.

Out of the disappointment of a Jonas Kaufmann cancellation as Siegmund, the Met pulled off a publicity coup by hiring Frank van Aken as a replacement. Van Aken, you see, is soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek (singing Sieglinde)’s husband. He is perfectly qualified, but evidently had very little rehearsal time and had never sung at the Met before. He showed some signs of being a fine artist with good phrasing and diction and a sensitive characterization (and good rapport with his wife), but it soon became apparent that his voice wasn’t backing him up and he was up against more than he could handle. Luisi kept the orchestra down, but he was still difficult to hear, and sounded congested and wobbly when audible, and a few entrances were early. The Todesverkündigung contained a number of near cracks, one, with tragic irony, on “Helden.”

His death fall–I don’t blame him for this, but I have to describe it because it was kind of hilarious–missed the spotlight by a good four feet and he managed to kick his way stage left before croaking. Good instincts, though I missed that heartbreaking father-son recognition moment that was my favorite bit of the HD last season. The only other major blooper was Wotan’s spear, which made a beeline for the pit at one point but stopped rolling just short. While I’m at this I would also like to suggest to Sieglinde that clutching a large fragment of Nothung around the edges of the blade is not the most convincing thing ever.

I remain a great fan of Bryn Terfel’s Wotan. He can sometimes turn blustery–more Bayreuth Bark than bel canto–but he really sings it when required, and has such dramatic concentration and intensity, and such clarity with the words that the narrative sections are unusually transfixing. He seemed quite on the energetic side of things at this performance, and as far as I’m concerned walked off with the show.

Katarina Dalayman replaced Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde in this cycle (no photos were available, these show Voigt). She is not quite commanding onstage, and her high notes are screechy and unreliable. But I found much to appreciate in her performance. Her middle voice is substantial and attractive, and while her German diction isn’t the best she still conveys the meaning of the text. And she has a clear dramatic conception of the role, and filled in the pause button moments of the staging with engaging acting. Brünnhilde’s entrance in the Todesverkündigung (yes I will mention this scene a few more times, it’s my favorite) is one of the worst flubs of the cycle: to incredibly ominous and dramatic music, she walks up some escape stairs stage right. But once she arrived, Dalayman made much of Brünnhilde’s conflicted feelings, eventually composing herself into valkyrie mode. She also really listened to Wotan in the monologues.

Eva-Maria Westbroek is a wonderful Sieglinde, with a sincere, natural and passionate stage presence. She can really fill the theater with her voice, which has a beautiful glow to it (though the highest notes can spread). Hans-Peter König luckily has a role in most of these operas, and his imposing bass is perfect for Hunding, though his rather avuncular presence is not. Stephanie Blythe was again a very loud and not very specific Fricka.

The other surprise highlight of the performance was a fantastic bunch of Valkyries, without a single wobble among them, giving the clearest rendition of the Ride that I’ve heard live. I suspect several of them could be great Brünnhildes. The staging of them sliding down the planks of the Machine, however, verges on the embarrassing. As does, to be honest, this entire cycle in a house that aspires to be a home for art.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that should Kaufmann show up for the final performance I’m going to be seeing this again. As for the rest of Cycle 2, I’m skipping Siegfried (almost the same cast as when I saw it in the fall), but I’ll be at Götterdämmerung on Thursday.

PREVIOUSLY in order of appearance:
HD broadcast, Die Walküre
Siegfried prima
Götterdämmerung prima
Cycle 2 Das Rheingold 

All photos © Ken Howard/Met.

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