Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

The 20th-century revival of interest in Baroque operas has, more or less, resulted in two types of contemporary productions of works from the period. On the one hand there are those that attempt to present something of a reverent reconstruction of imagined 18th-century productions. This is exactly the kind of thing I saw a little over a week ago in Paris with Ivan Alexandre's production of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, which got a detailed work up relying heavily on stage craft from the composer’s own era. On the other hand, whether it is set in an earlier period or a contemporary one, there are those stagings that give an ironic wink to the past commenting on the musical and dramatic tropes of Baroque operas themselves. This is often done for laughs—whether or not they make sense in terms of the libretto—in an effort to break up the rather lengthy running times many of these operas have. A good recent example would be Francisco Negrin's recent Rinaldo for Lyric Opera of Chicago. There are those that break the mould like Peter Sellars who has been known for giving Baroque operas contemporary updates fully realizing dramatic parallels between their stories and contemporary themes, a task he did quite well in Chicago the season before with Handel's Hercules. But leave it to Stefan Herheim to go his own way.

Herheim has become perhaps the best regarded of opera stage directors in recent years for a string of wildly imaginative, unexpected and insightful stagings including a 2008 Parsifal for the Bayreuth Festival and Berg’s Lulu for Dresden in 2010 to name just two. He doesn’t just place the events of stories in more recent time periods, but actually investigates deeper meanings in the score for shows that can have unexpected contrasting elements that can puzzle more than shock in a particular context. His staging of Handel’s Xerxes for the Komische Oper Berlin, which I saw last week, was no less mysterious, albeit in a very funny way. It’s a production that seems to comment as much on the way contemporary audiences view Baroque operas as it is about the event of the opera itself.

The action takes place on a rotating 18th-century stage within the larger frame work of the Komische stage that reveals the wing and backstage areas. This opera-within-the-opera idea isn’t new, but Herheim’s off-kilter working of it is. Instead of giving the show an additional implied storyline with the cast playing both opera singers and the characters of Handel’s opera, the cast remain as the latter throughout. Even when leaving the stage to enter the wings, Xerxes, sung here by a lovely Stella Doufexis, is still Xerxes. He is not puzzled by his surroundings, but instead appears to be acutely aware of them as part of the world. The “onstage” performances tend toward the broadly comic and include more unexpected elements such as performers dressed as sheep who wander on stage, a chorus dressed as creatures from the deep blue sea, and some other clever visual gags that recur throughout the show. Yet, while the spirit is light-hearted, Herheim never appears to be taking shots at the convention of Baroque operas. Nor does he seem to be interested in reconstruction as tribute given the use of unexpected elements like neon lights.

So what’s going on here? My bet is that the show is a running commentary on producing Baroque operas themselves for contemporary audiences. The characters are all trapped in a world not of their own creation – aware of their existence as something besides what they are onstage, but not actors or other real-life figures either. This is reinforced in the end when the chorus enters for the final minutes of music dressed for the first time in contemporary street clothes. The seven characters in the cast seem honestly shocked and surprised to see them, a reaction that suggests for the first time in the long, strange goings-on in this show that they view something as foreign and out of place. For the first time they are removed from the audience as the chorus sings about the importance of joy and celebrating love.

It’s a surprising and rather moving moment in the opera and one that suggests the heart of performing  Baroque opera isn’t about lampooning it or recreating some modern ersatz version of it. Herheim, in his rather round-about way, is taking the work on its own terms, though granted not in a way that’s obvious or simply about relating it to contemporary themes and issues.

Musically the show was solid and on par with the quality one comes to expect at the Komische Oper. Konrad Junghänel conducted the contemporary instrument orchestra with fervor if not always the greatest detail. There were standouts in the cast including Julia Giebel as Atalanta and Katarina Bradic as Amastris who give some of the bet comical turns in the whole show. But if Regie theater is about directors and their ideas, then this was certainly it where the most intriguing and thought provoking work of the night rested squarely in the hands of Herheim.

Labels: Out of Town

With so much of the standard opera repertory consisting of works composed over a century ago, the omnipresence of the historical oppression of women is inescapable. However, this material is an important site of artistic interrogation in the world of opera, where inequalities still exist in at least in the number of women at the most senior levels of artistic management and direction. All of this was in high relief during the closing week of the opera season at Berlin’s Komische Oper where two men took on some of the more problematic stories about women in the opera canon during the festival week that closed Sunday. The Komische Oper’s departing intendant, Andreas Homoki offered a revival of his popular 2010 staging of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg the night after the final performance of this season’s new production of von Weber’s Der Freischutz from the mind of the poster boy of Regietheater, Calixto Bieito. Both stories involved contests where young women have been offered up as prizes by their fathers to contest winners. Both have a favorite potential victor in mind, but it’s the snags in getting that suitor into the winner’s circle that creates the drama. And yet the differences in approach in these two male directors couldn’t have more different implications in terms of sexual politics.

Homoki’s Meistersinger, which was conducted by the Komische Oper’s outgoing music director Patrick Lange is a study in understatement. There is so little to it, that at times it feels and looks like a very German high school musical. The stage is occupied solely by the cast in quaint picturesque costumes on an empty stage with eight or so free standing square edifices meant to suggest the buildings of Nuremberg. There’s a chapel and various sized boxes all with pointed roofs that tower over the cast. Each “building” has a front wall-sized door that opens for characters to enter and leave but otherwise little happens other than the movement of these buildings to reinforce the societal underpinnings of the piece – sometimes the city is closed like a wall to the outsider, at others, as in the Act II riot, it is a state of disarray and overturned edifices. Homoki’s vision otherwise is more or less what you’d imagine the Disney film version of Meistersinger would look like. Beckmesser all but twirls the edges of his curled mustache to communicate his villainy, and doting Eva flounces across the stage. Homoki deals with Hans Sachs’ odd, closing aria by simply ignoring it more of less, and that action continues unabated toward the pre-determined happy ending. There are a lot of tired ideas here as well, most painfully the whole explosion of color stratagem in the final minutes. After four hours of looking at nothing but white walls and gray costumes, the day-glo onset of the final scene in both costumes and color is not only tired, but too little too late. It was also one of the quickest Meistersingers I’ve heard with Lange giving no one much time to ponder over the beauty of the score. In the end Eva is won by her knight and everyone goes home happy.

Ignoring the problematic undertones of an opera is a position that a director like Calixto Bieito has no stomach for. That doesn’t mean his productions are always sublime, but they undoubtedly make audiences uncomfortable in asking hard questions. In his recent staging of Der Freischütz the young and beautiful Agathe hopes to be wed to Max after she is won in a shooting contest. Bieito makes no bones about the obvious ideological parallels between marriage and hunting with women being the prey in the former. He casts the role of an animal killed by the hunters in Act I as a naked woman dressed in a fur coat, who, like prey, is brutally killed and stripped of her outer covering before being hoisted away, bloody on a hunter’s shoulders. Brutal to watch to be sure, but Bieito never lets up with the metaphor driving his point home. When Kaspar calls on the devil to cast the magic bullets to ensure Max’s victory in the deal Max has cut to win his bride, it takes place amid a clearly satanic woodland rite with Kaspar murdering a pair of newlyweds and unceremoniously annointing each bullet from between the legs of the brides corpse. This drives Max mad in this version turning him into a naked, mud-covered wild man or animal himself who will haunt Agathe for the rest of the opera. Max was sung by the excellent Vincent Wolfsteiner who stayed on board with the total frontal nudity throughout the entire second Act. Bieito follows through on calling the sexism and violence taken for granted in Der Freischütz all the way to the end by changing the ending where Agathe dies anyway and both the Hermit and Max shot dead by the modern dressed paramilitary hunters despite their songs of forgiveness and reconciliation. Bieito’s characters live by the gun and die by it despite any sentimental notion of this work hanging around in the minds of a contemporary audience. It was undoubtedly brutal to watch, but yet there was something much more honest about this production in terms of the material. Lange was on the podium again and overall the show was much more strongly cast with Bettina Jensen as a ringing, forceful Agathe and Carsten Sabrowski as the voracious and evil Kaspar.

Of course, it’s unfair to draw this sort of comparison in some ways, and I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to call Bieito’s work a feminist production in any sense of the word. The important thing is to remember how limiting the two approaches suggested here are in and of themselves. There is a power to having a variety of different voices interpret even the most familiar repertory. And that variety is still lacking overall when it comes to women directing opera on the world stage.

Labels: Out of Town

Damon Albarn is not the first British pop or rock star to venture into the world of musical theater, or opera if you must. He won’t be the last either, I wager, but he has shown some tenacity in the medium having provided music for at least two collaborations that have come to life at the Manchester International Festival and received subsequent stagings at English National Opera. The last of those Monkey Journey to the West was so successful, that Albarn teamed up with stage director Rufus Norris for a piece of his own inspiration, Dr. Dee, which just finished its run at ENO this week. While still a collaboration, Albarn had much more overall input into Dr. Dee. He is credited with the music and as “co-creator,” a title shared by Norris who is also the director.

You may have noticed the lack of a writing credit. I did as well, though I learned about it the hard way in actually seeing the show. On the good side, Albarn has an eye for interesting subject matter. Dr. Dee is about John Dee, a 17th-century mathematician and expert on the occult who was an advisor and political consultant at times to Queen Elizabeth I. The opera portrays a meteoric rise to power for Dee which is paired with the inevitable downfall. In the story, his troubles begin when he becomes increasingly involved in his real life project of deciphering the language of angels that was passed onto him through a medium, Edward Kelley. Kelley eventually tells Dee that an angels has demanded that Dee share his wife with him. In Dr. Dee, the court tires of his useless decoding work and he soon falls from favor. If all this sounds familiar, it should. The figure of the real life Dee is thought to have had some influence both on the figure of Marlowe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Prospero.

Neither Albarn nor Norris has quite those talents, though, and Dr. Dee falters both in its rather pedestrian musical score, and an overreliance on 20th-century clichés about faith and love. The music isn’t unpleasant, mind you. It’s a string of pop songs, many of which Albarn plays along on during the show tinged with Elizabethan musical instrumentation. There is very little padding between the songs making the show a bit less of an opera and a tad more of a musical theater piece. The songs are sung by Albarn as well as some members of the cast including Paul Hilton who sings John Dee and Christopher Robson who sings the role of Edward Kelley. I can’t say much more about the songs in that the acoustics of the show were plagued with the problems pop shows usually are. Amplification was used for all the sound, and in this setting, it meant voices were so distorted as to be indecipherable. For some inexplicable reason, the house which uses supertitles despite performing everything in English chose not to use them for Dr. Dee helping no one.

The strongest parts of the evening come from Norris’ sharply designed and directed staging. A large, stage length room resembling a meeting hall fills much of the stage when things begin. The room contains a band with period instruments as well as Albarn but before long the room elevates revealing a large space where Dee and his fellow Elizabethan’s will act out the depicted events. There is ample use of video to highlight Dee’s mathematical and supernatural work. The images sweep along in a pleasant way and there is clever use of large paper screens to escort players on and off stage in a manner reminiscent of Japanese theater. There are even live birds that fly from the theater balcony onto the stage at one point that created a lot of excitement.

But at the core, and despite it’s good looks, Dr. Dee is hollow. It attempts to dredge up drama from the rather banal conflict Dee feels about the idea of “sharing” his wife with Edward Kelley. And when its not doing this, the story feels more like filler than anything else. Of course, other British pop and rock acts have turned stranger and more esoteric music theater pieces into gold, so who's to say what Albarn might get to next or what Dr. Dee might look like over time. Now it just looks dull.

Labels: English National Opera, Out of Town

There are so many beautiful things about the operas of Benjamin Britten. Perhaps my favorite is the inherent ambiguity. The things that are assumed and acted upon by the characters in his stories without them ever being explicitly stated. I know more than a few opera fans who dislike his operas for this very reason – particularly when it comes to male homosexuality. The idea being that the undercurrents of unspoken male desire, or the stand-in conflicts that are sometimes meant to be thinly veiled storylines about the destructive effects of homophobia, strike some of these folks as timid and passé. And yet, I doubt that any of these folks would be much more pleased with the manner in which director David Alden has chosen to deal with these finer points of subtlety in the new production of Britten’s Billy Budd, which is wrapping up its run at English National Opera this week and which I saw on Tuesday.

Actually the performance, conducted by ENO’s musical director Edward Gardner, doesn’t so much deal with fragile emotional ambiguity as do away with it almost entirely. In fact it pretty much does away with the sea and the boat of Melville’s original entirely. Outside of the scenes in Captain Vere’s quarters, all of the action takes place in front of or on one of two giant steel hull walls. The Indomitable may be at sea, but if it is there, it’s as a mid-20th Century German U-Boat. The residents of this submarine are dressed for the occasion as well with all the stocky, bearded officers in enough black leather boots, caps, and floor length trench coats to take one back to L.A.’s Faultline on a Saturday night. But this isn’t just about décor, it’s about Alden’s need to amp up the show by treating Claggart and his henchmen in particular as more clearly the arm of some fascist military repressive force complete with billy clubs to beat back the ship’s crew. Claggart himself, sung by the vocally lovely Matthew Rose, never stops walking in this production, pacing slowly in broad, right angle sweeps often away from the action and other characters he is supposedly interacting with like some uninvolved sentry. Claggart’s aria, “Handsomely done…” is staged like some melodramatic Hollywood mad scene where he mangles a floor mat. It’s almost as strangely wrong minded as the decision to play the Novice, here sung by Nicky Spence, as a man driven mad under Claggart’s harassment. And if all of this doesn’t beat the obvious into you, you can always put Vere in all white and Claggart and all the rest of the officers in black. Subtlety, thy name is not David Alden.

In the moments I wasn’t trying to figure out what the huge glossy black barrels the crew were moving around were doing on this man of war, I did find time to admire some of the musical performance. Edward Gardner continues to provide exciting musical direction, and his leadership of the orchestra this evening was fully realized, digging in with the players for some thrilling scenes. The chorus, always a key element to a Britten opera, was fabulous as well. Alden’s production served one good end here by using the large curved reflective surfaces to reflect the sound out into the auditorium. I rather liked Benedict Nelson in the title role. He wasn’t as large voiced or warm perhaps as you might like, but he was convincing with a young spirited energy. Kim Begley sang Captain Vere and, though he sounded somewhat unsteady to me when he was most exposed in the intro and the conclusion, he fit in well with the cast and proved a plausible, flawed leader struggling with regrets. He, like all involved parties, used the rather minimal set to maximum effect, but they really did deserve a bit better here. It’s not so much the modern updating of the show or even the change of setting that is so much of a problem, it’s more the desire to stamp out the tender ambiguities and conflicts in Britten’s opera that sinks this Indomitable. Billy Budd continues through July 8 at ENO.

Labels: English National Opera, Out of Town

When the curtain rises on David McVicar’s new production of Berlioz’ masterpiece Les Troyens, promoted as a highlight of the Royal Opera House season in London, my immediate thought was, here we go again. The audience is immediately greeted with that sort of monstrous pile of darkly lit, post-apocalyptic rubble and walls mixed with somber costuming straight out of the Crimean War. (It’s always the Crimea isn’t it?) If you’re one of those people still wondering if McVicar is running out of ideas, his short-sighted muddled vision of Les Troyens should settle that once and for all. It’s not the updating of the action or even the now predictable visual look of the show that is so much the problem, it’s a lack of interpretation and often a plain understanding of some events in the libretto that can sink this very long performance over and over again despite some wonderfully coordinated musical performances.

Of course, going in to the run, the big story was Jonas Kaufmann. Originally booked to sing Enée, Kaufmann pulled out due to health issues weeks before the show was to open. His image is still festooned all over the house and town as his appearance was a major calling card for the company this Olympic summer, and ads show him in the corner of a boxing ring dressed in a tuxedo. Oddly enough, as much as I love to hear him sing, in the end, his presence on this team wasn’t missed as much as one might have thought it would be. The reason why is tenor Bryan Hymel, a rising American lyric tenor. He’s had bigger and bigger assignments lately, including the role of Gounod’s Faust at Santa Fe in 2011 and an appearance in the ROH’s recent run of Rusalka. Something big has clicked for him in the last year, and on this particular Sunday afternoon he sounded amazing, with easy top notes and big volume for the house. He’s not in an easy corner of the vocal repertory to pull it off all the time, but admittedly his bright, light voice in the end was preferable, I’d argue, to the kind of darkened baritonal sound Kaufmann is known for.

Hymel did much more than keep up and hold a place in the show. Which is saying a great deal for the quality of performances given by the two other major principals in the show. Eva Maria Westbroek continues to startle world audiences and she did again with the her grounded, accessible take on Didon. She kept her stamina up in this long sing right through the concluding aria. Granted, the chemistry between her and the other principals in the cast could be iffy, but vocally it was a solid, admirable performance. Meanwhile the Cassandre, Anna Caterina Antonacci, demonstrated why she has such an ardent following for a singer who is careful about vocal assignments and how much she travels. The intensity she brought to the first two acts of the evening was up in the Waltraud Meier range. Cassandre’s rage and resolution was captivating and frankly her singing alone made the whole show worthwhile. She was well paired with the Chorèbe of Fabio Capitanucci, although again they weren’t always acting together as much as alongside each other. All these superstars got a performance from the ROH Orchestra and music director Antonio Pappano that was nothing short of spectacular. He dug in for rich, solid, warm sound throughout that rivaled anything I’ve personally heard him conduct in the house despite some indulgent tempi here and there.

That the cast was let down by the production is an understatement. There are so many distressing elements, it’s hard to know where to begin. Perhaps the surest sign of weakness were the numerous poorly choreographed and dramatically ignored ballet sequences. I’m not intending to lay blame on choreographer Andrew George, although he could let things get a bit silly at times. The issue is that McVicar treats them as dramatic time outs resulting in endless moments of goofy sailors, amorous slaves, and happy peasants jumping around the stage for minutes on end. Berlioz intended the dance sequences to move the story forward in the way that everything else musically in the opera does, and McVicar’s repeated sloughing them off is a disservice. There is a giant replica of Carthage used in Act III onwards that Didon walks about on and then in subsequent acts is lifted above the scene and finally destroyed. It’s tired and heavy handed symbolism that didn’t look so great when Francesca Zambello used it, if my memory serves, in her own vision of the opera many years ago. There is also that Technicolor happy, happy, joy, joy business in Act III which appears as a set from Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World After All” ride only this time the audience is not in motorized fake boats. As the opera wore on, the production’s inability to maintain a consistently dramatic tension became more and more of a problem. And when a giant mechanized figure, which I assume was Hannibal as referenced in Didon’s concluding passage, rises above the stage, you can already envision the stage hands struggling to get the flames out on cue with the darkened stage at the final note that you know is just around the corner. The audience shouldn’t be thinking about that, and the fact that McVicar hasn’t put something like that out of everyone’s mind after over four hours of music and a performance by hundreds of people is a sign of the underlying mediocrity of it all. But you’ll be able to judge for yourself in the near future at both Vienna and La Scala before arriving at some point eventually in San Francisco. Don't get me wrong, if I were here through the end of the run on July 11th, I'd be seeing it again. This is a big show and not an everyday occurrence with a remarkable cast. But one hopes by the time it arrives in San Francisco, the kitsch factor will be dialed down a wee bit.

Labels: Out of Town, Royal Opera House

The streets of Paris were crowded and alive with young revelers on Saturday. It was gay pride weekend and the carnival atmosphere filled the Place de la Bastille with men and women in colorful attire that could leave more or less to the imagination. As tempting as joining the party was, I soldiered through the crowd to the international airport terminal that is Opera de Paris’ Bastille opera house to watch Strauss’ Arabella hand that proverbial glass of water to her intended. That’s not kink, it’s simply a moment of bizarre understatement which those who love opera love almost as much as grand spectacle and dramatic excesses of all kinds.

Of course, this doesn’t just happen on its own. It takes hundreds of artists to make some of these most basic of opera moments work, and in Arabella that challenge is particularly great. The story is a wisp of a thing about a titled Viennese family on the brink of bankruptcy whose only hope to survive is to marry their oldest, Arabella, sung in Paris by superstar Renée Fleming, off to a wealthy suitor. Her father has taken steps to ensure this including soliciting potential grooms via the mail and dressing the family’s youngest daughter Zdenka, here a radiant Genia Kühmeier, as a boy to cut out the competition and reduce cost. Arabella meanwhile is the belle of just about every ball until almost against all expectations her father's plans come to fruition when she falls for Mandryka who has responded to his dead uncle's solicitation as a suitor. The drama arises from everything not working out quite as simply as it is supposed to, though this is an opera at times blissfully free of event.

But the Opera de Paris placed some very good bets on a team with a great track record with the more delicate and ephemeral of Strauss’ operas. In 2008, a nearly identical team fashioned a superb staging of Capriccio for the Vienna State Opera, which was one of the highlights of my recent opera going career. This Arabella wasn’t quite that good, but it was spectacular in its own way nevertheless. Ms. Fleming lives up to her star billing in her core repertory here. Granted she may not look like a woman celebrating what her character calls the last night of her childhood, but she certainly can sound like it, all bright, lush and beautiful. There is a warmth and inherent melancholic edge to her sound that fits so perfectly with Strauss that it is hard to pay too much attention to whatever legitimate criticisms one might raise on finer points of vocal technique. She is again placed among a stellar cast including one of the most outstanding of current German baritone’s Michael Volle as Mandryka. He portrays a rough-around-the-edges masculinity that imbues the whole opera with an internal logic that sustains it during even the thinnest moments. And while on the topic of vocalists, I must mention another artist whom I’m eager to see on American shores much more frequently , soprano Genia Kühmeier who stepped into this run with this performance as Zdenka. Her Act I duet with Fleming was so achingly beautiful you could wrap yourself up in it for days. Kühmeier's easy and bright ringing tone is a joy and she adds further depth to an already great cast. Kurt Rydl sang Arabella’s father Waldner a bit on the bombastic side and Joseph Kaiser, who was announced as ill before the performance but sang anyway, managed a respectable Matteo.

Also on board again as with the Vienna Capriccio was Paris’ music director Philippe Jordan who manages again to give Strauss a quick-on-his-feet sweep. He kept the pressure on the cast volume-wise, but never to the point of forcing anyone to go beyond where they were comfortable from the sounds of it. The design team also returned again under director Marco Arturo Marelli who employed a similar mobile, dream-like set to maximize a sense of time flowing by like a ball or a party. Set elements entered and exited the viewing area on a large circular rotating stage bisected by several panels that each rotated on their own axis to reveal either the paneling of a 19th-century parlor or a burnished silver wall. At one end, the parlor wall gives way to a painted view of a partly cloudy sky. But the color motif here is the steely blue of Arabella’s gown. It matches the curtain used to close Act I and outside of white and a few dashes of pink or purple, it dominates the stage. In one of the more stirring passages, its that same gown that is worn by numerous imagined Arabella stand-ins that haunt Mandryka’s understandably jealous mind in Act II as he sees her dancing and kissing any number of young, handsome bare-chested men as the couples wheel and dance across the stage in pairs.

The tone is perfect throughout without ever managing to take all these events too seriously and keeping things dreamy and romantic. The pair of duets between Mandryka and Arabella anchor the show beautifully and can—and do—bring tears. To be fair, despite its strengths, though, this Arabella is not a revolution in opera. But what it does represent, I think, is exactly the kind of production and success that a company like Peter Gelb’s Metropolitan Opera has been searching around in the dark for. It is decidedly not an old-fashioned grade school diorama of a show. It looks modern, and pretty as well. But it is also not radically reinterpreting or sharply investigating the source material either. It's the kind of show that might trick you into thinking its something daring, when in fact, its just he latest update of something that's good, but decidedly familiar. However as New York audiences have found out in the last few years, wanting something like this and getting something like this are two very different things. In the meantime, Paris has a wonderfully sung Arabella that runs for three more performances in Paris through July 10.

Labels: Opera de Paris, Out of Town

I started my European opera tour this summer in Paris where the young guys are all coiffed like Usher circa 2001 and wear high-top sneakers. It’s a look, regardless of whether or not its au courant, and it works for many of them. Which is kind of how I felt about the first opera I saw on my current European trip, Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie at the Palais Garnier. Of course, the similarity in the above comparison falls apart when it comes to the “works for them” bit since Ivan Alexandre’s production, which is new to Paris after being created for Toulouse, is a throwback to something that may not be worth revisiting.

Rameau’s first opera is a Baroque gem filled with mythological characters including gods, sea monsters, and young lovers. It revisits the story of Phèdre and her love for her stepson Hippolyte. He meanwhile has a chaste love for Aricie, which is blessed by the goddess Diane, but is also put in jeopardy by his father Thésée. Alexandre and the design team have gone for something old-fashioned. Very old-fashioned, in fact, in their attempts to recreate the look and theatricality of an 18th-century opera production from the costumes, to the painted backdrops, to the gods who are lowered from the fly space on clouds suspended by ropes. The flat lighting mostly from the foot of the stage reinforces this visual style. It’s pretty to look at, and despite its contrast with the Garnier’s hyper 19th-century surroundings, it looks at home on the stage. Sweet Jesus, is it ever boring, though. In another throwback to the period, principal performers come to the foot of the stage, strike poses and stay there. They’ve got singing to do, but none that requires pesky movement. Even the stage trickery used to create mild surprises here and there fell mostly flat.

What’s worse, this notion of an ersatz recreation of a 18th-century staging isn’t even a new idea in the last thirty years. The Metropolitan Opera regularly trots out a few of Jean-Pierre Ponelle’s productions from decades ago that are essentially the same thing. Those shows (and I’m talking to you here La Clemenza di Tito) are painfully dull much of the time, and Alexandre does an amazing job of recreating that sensation in this Hippolyte and Aricie. Blogger Zerbinetta has had some great points to make recently about production teams not taking Baroque Opera seriously enough to really make it work well. And while gag-filled cynicism some Baroque operas face today can kill them (And I'm talking to you here The Enchanted Island), this kind of almost perfectionist reverence for something that may have never been in the first place isn't doing the genre any favors either. Alexandre and his team need to take Hippolyte and Aricie by trusting the drama at the material's core in order to actually interpret it instead of simply turning it into some kind of museum piece or treating it as something that needs to be apologized for.

It’s not totally a lost cause, though. Emmanuelle Haïm and her Le Concert d’Astrée give a lively period-informed performance of Rameau’s score. She makes room for the vocalists without being overindulgent and produces a great dynamic range with this kind of ensemble. The vocalists themselves were a mixed bag. The best was Stéphan Degout’s Thésée who was sizable and certain enough for a king. The other big name in the cast was Sarah Connolly who sang Phédre with lovely tone and enough fire to bring Racine to mind. Jaël Azzaretti had some lovely detail in her passages as L’Amour and got a warm ovation at the curtain calls. Anne-Catherine Gillet and Topi Lehtipuu were the lovers Aricie and Hippolyte respectively but weren’t particularly engaging and had sloppy attacks here and there. Despite some good musical moments, it wasn’t enough to shoulder the weight of a strange, almost willfully naïve staging that mired everything down for the long evening. The show has four more performances in Paris through mid-July.

Labels: Out of Town

Music critic Alex Ross, among others, has noted the strange disconnect in the public’s mind when in comes to 20th-century art forms. As he so eloquently argues in The Rest is Noise and elsewhere, while art forms of many genres became deeply involved in various abstract and conceptual movements in the 20th Century, visual arts from the period now fill top tier museums selling tickets to legions of adoring fans, while Western art music has taken a very different course. Those same decentralizing, avant-garde trends that are beloved in the visual arts are seen by many in the public as anathema when it comes to music. Classical music audiences in the U.S. are still prone to prize works of the 18th and 19th Centuries above all else, although many in those same audiences would have no problem waxing poetic on the beauty of a Pollock or a Donald Judd sculpture.

So it was with great joy that I attended two of three programs while in St. Louis last weekend as part of Retrospectives and Innovations: A Celebration of The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. The mini-series was a look back at 8 years of music programming sponsored by The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in their Tadao Ando-designed museum in the heart of St. Louis. The music programming at the Foundation sprung from the mind of Richard Gaddes who recognized an acoustically desirable space in the museum’s galleries at the bottom of a wide descending staircase positioned strategically in front of Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Black, a painting commissioned by the Foundation in 2000. With the support of the Foundation’s Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the museum’s board approached the St. Louis Symphony and their musical director David Robertson about a 20th-century and newer music series to be held in the galleries of the museum dedicated primarily to 20th-century and newer art.

David Robertson, of course, a brilliant music director and advocate of music from that period, jumped at the chance to bring more of this kind of music to St. Louis audiences. Robertson is one of the great American maestros and he was central to last weekend’s concerts which revisited works from concerts over the last ten years since the Foundation's physical space opened in 2001, while also including works new to the series and St. Louis. It was an inspiring set of shows not necessarily because of the specifics of any of the particular pieces or performances, but because of the unavoidable connection being emphasized in the galley between movements in both the visual and musical arts of the 20th Century. It was about an arts organization supporting art music from the same period without apology, a more revolutionary idea sadly than it should be in this country.

On Saturday evening, the series welcomed visiting percussion quartet So Percussion, who performed Steve Reich’s landmark works Clapping Music and Four Organs, as well as two of their own commissions: Reich’s Mallet Quartet and David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature. Robertson himself joined in on the clapping after some introductory comments welcoming the players to town emphasizing his personal involvement in the curation and presentation of the music programming at the Foundation. It was a show that not only highlighted percussion’s meteoric rise to prominence in Western art music in the last century but also captured both the raw primacy of the earliest minimalist works alongside the legacy those works left behind. Lang’s three movement piece which finds the ensemble moving with their mallets from blocks of wood, to metal tubes, to flowerpots and teacups was both witty and inspiring in its everyday resourcefulness. Lang has the four percussionists play identical patterns throughout the piece which each movement using a different set of mostly handmade instruments in a sort-of musical science experiment about the sound of different objects played under identical circumstances.

The following Sunday afternoon headed off in a much different direction with players from the St. Louis Symphony who began the final program with Donatoni’s equally cat-and-mouse game of a string quartet, La Souris sans sourire. This “mouse without a smile” alludes to Boulez Le marteau sans maître with an ironic if still reverent sneer as cellos and violas moan with decaying tones which are less Tom and Jerry and more Felix the Cat. The show ended with one of Olivier Messiaen’s monumental works, Visions de l’Amen, played by pianists Peter Henderson and Nina Ferrigno. This was muscular sounding Messiaen with the skies crying out from above that made the most of the indeed excellent acoustics of the Foundation’s space. But perhaps the most intriguing piece on the program that afternoon, and a highlight of the festival was Unsuk Chin’s Fantasie mécanique from the mid 1990s. Robertson conducted the small percussion, piano and brass ensemble, as he noted, less because of interpretive issues and more for simple guidance for a work that rapidly swerves and changes as it goes along from pounding machine like forces to bare stripped cries from various corners. As Robertson also pointed out, it reflected many of the same musical qualities that recommended the composer’s concurrently running Alice in Wonderland across town at Opera Theater St. Louis. It was exciting playing from members of one of America’s great if underrated orchestras. It, and all of the weekend’s shows, was also a testament to the great and forward-looking work that David Robertson is doing in St. Louis and around the country. And all in a singular, lovely architectural space in a city known for its singular artistic gestures.

Labels: Out of Town

The omnipresent La Traviata continued its drive through the 2011/2012 Royal Opera House season on Monday with its third cast since the fall. It’s not unusual for repertory opera companies to switch things up along the way in a long run of a warhorse like La Traviata especially in a production as old and familiar as ROH’s 1994 Richard Eyre staging! which has already been filmed twice: once with Angela Gheorghiu in her breakout performance early in her career and more recently with Renée Fleming. This season’s Violettas have included Ailyn Perez and Marina Poplavskaya thus far. Anna Netrebko was scheduled for two performances later in January until she dropped out recently due to a reported foot surgery. Her likely replacement will be Ermonela Jaho, the Albanian soprano who is already scheduled for all the rest of January’s performances alongside Stephen Costello as Alfredo and Paolo Gavanelli as Giorgio Germont. (Vittorio Grigolo watchers may note that he is still scheduled to sing two of the Alfredos at the very end of the run.)

But while multiple cast changes can keep an oft repeated show fresh, it can also create problems. One of the most common of these is not enough rehearsal time for a new cast in a show that is already up and running, which seemed to be the major problem on Monday. Many of the cast had difficulty staying in synch with conductor Maurizio Benini and eyes were glued to him throughout. His pacing could turn plodding at times. The blocking appeared unfamiliar to some of the cast and there was virtually no chemistry between any of the principles throughout the evening. The revival's direction this month is credited to Paul Higgins but if he had anything to contribute to this performance, it appears he didn't have enough time to do it in.

The good news is that some of these issues may get better as the last set of these performances comes along. Jaho has a compelling enough voice with adequate power and agility. Her acting was stiff in the first two acts and it wasn’t until the big finale that she seemed to show up dramatically. Act III Violetta’s aren’t uncommon (Fleming is one as well) but it goes without saying that one can’t spot them the first time around until that home stretch. She handles the dying well but never really gave us a sense of Violetta’s fragility before then, even when Alfredo confronts her in Act II. It sounded like she was coming at everything vocally at full-bore, and I often wished she could have delivered a little more in the way of dynamic range sound-wise. The most satisfying performance of the night went to Paolo Gavanelli. He’s a treasure (and will be performing alongside Placido Domingo in L.A. next month in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra), and, although no one in the cast was particularly interactive with him in this rather stoic performance, he was a pleasure to hear. Stephen Costello meanwhile is having a very high profile season following appearances opposite Netrebko’s Anna Bolena in New York. I like him a lot as a singer, but he lacked a certain darkness of tone here and instead emphasized Alfredo’s more youthful attributes. And while there’s a place for that in Traviata, I felt the lack of direction and chemistry between him and Jaho left me puzzled through much of the evening as if Alfredo was trying to convince himself he loved Violetta as much as he was trying to convince anyone else of it. Overall it is not a necessary La Traviata to see at this point, but if you’re a big Gavanelli fan, things may solidify to a better state later in the run, which continues through January 25.

Labels: Out of Town, Royal Opera House

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is an opera that takes readily to modern interpretation and reinvention. There’s that strange unfunny “comic” plot and the weird holy German art business at the end. Directors all over Europe have taken various cracks at this opera in recent years with varying results not the least of which is Katarina Wagner’s production for Bayreuth in 2007. So one might think the atmosphere would be ripe for something a bit more subtle like Graham Vick’s 1993 production of Mesitersinger for the Royal Opera House, which was revived in December with conductor Antonio Pappano under the direction of Elaine Kidd this time around. Unfortunately, as seen on New Year’s Day in London, Vick’s staging looks startlingly naïve. Critics here have focused on the excesses of the Brueghel-inspired costumes complete with cod pieces. But frankly I found those much less concerning than the cartoonish characterization of just about everyone in the production. Thank god Sixtus Beckmesser doesn’t have a moustache here or the audience would certainly have gotten a chance to watch him twirl the ends of it while laughing fiendishly. Not that the show isn’t colorful, but it’s bland with very few moments of visual invention over the course of a long nearly 6 hours. Those moments would include the topsy-turvey Act II riot with villagers popping out of the walls and ceiling in response to the noise Hans Sachs and Beckmesser are making.

The revival is not a total wash, though, thanks to the orchestra and the conducting of the newly-knighted Antonio Pappano, who entered the pit for the first time since receiving the honor late last week. Pappano gave an energetic, brisk take of the score that eschewed a feeling of grandeur and ceremony. (This may have compounded the production's weaknesses that cried out for something more processional than active.) Pappano did give the show a sense of motion when events on stage were essentially static and listless. Besides the excellent chorus though, he got little help from the stage in terms of vocal performances that ranged from uninteresting to mildly unpleasant. The two exceptions to this came in smaller roles with the always dependable Toby Spence as David and the legendary John Tomlinson as Veit Pogner. Simon O’Neill who was announced as sick before the show but performed anyway played Walther von Stolzing. As advertised he looked all but green by the end of the evening and often sounded strained and pinched. Emma Bell’s Eva could also sound harsh and was broadly acted. Peter Coleman-Wright was the aforementioned Beckmesser who wasn’t opposed to chewing what little scenery was made available, although vocally he was certainly competent. And then there was the matter of Wolfgang Koch’s Hans Sachs. Although not announced as sick, Koch also looked rather pasty and green at the end of the evening. He seemed rather absent in the first two acts, but then came on strong in Act III with increased projection, and clarity of tone. Yet his concluding music was overshadowed by the superb ROH chorus which had been there all along giving the highest-quality performance. But this production has long ago passed its sell-by date and is undercooked in a way more reminiscent or recent failures of new productions like Don Giovanni and Anna Bolena in New York. There are two more Mesitersinger performances in London through the end of next week.

Labels: Out of Town, Royal Opera House

Anna Netrebko, Susan Graham, and Renée Fleming in Diane von Furstenberg
Photo:Richard Termine/Met Opera

There was plenty going on outside of the opera house in New York this weekend. In fact right outside on the Lincoln Center Plaza were crowds milling about streaming in and out of the pavilion for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. All around, the fabulous and not-so-fabulous made their availability for any passing photographer known. It was not unlike the Halloween Parade in West Hollywood with perhaps a bit more fur. Even some of the biggest opera names currently appearing at the Met got into the act, as pictured above, when Anna Netrebko, Susan Graham, and Renée Fleming got into the act in Diane von Furstenberg designs while attending her show.


And, though I've always considered her more of a Commes des Garçons gal myself, Mitsuko Uchida was also in town in her gauzy, flowing signature look at Carnegie Hall on Friday. Any performance for Uchida is a special one, and her sold out recital at Carnegie Hall on Friday night fit comfortably into this mold. She has a remarkable ability to generate drama without sacrificing clarity or detail, and, while the program was filled with familiar romantic solo piano works, it sounded as fresh and unexpected to me as anything I’ve heard recently. After the introductory salvo of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D major, she plunged into the showcase work for the evening, Schumann’s Davidsbundlertänze which she has recently recorded and released on Decca. These eighteen short impressions are the height of Romanticism. Schumann ascribed each segment to one of two different characters representing opposite Romantic poles of Schumann's personality, Florestan and Eusebius. From this concept flows some beautiful music, however. Uchida's tone and color changed with amazing alacrity from one segment to the next and she held the audience completely mesmerized throughout. After the break, it was Chopin and more Chopin with the Prelude in C-sharp Minor followed by the Sonata No. 3. Uchida's precision in the context of so emotionally sweeping and familiar music was again utterly enthralling. And just to make the weekend all that more notable for the pianist, she picked up her first-ever Grammy on Sunday night for her recording of Mozart's Piano Concertos nos. 23 & 24. There are precious few like her and even in New York she stands out as one of a kind.

Labels: Out of Town

Photo: mine 2010

Don’t ask me why or how, but I found myself in New York briefly on Sunday after two days in Dallas for a quick visit before heading back to L.A. First on the agenda was another performance from the Dresden Staatskapelle who were still touring with conductor Daniel Harding and appeared at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday as part of the Lincoln Center’s “White Light Festival.” What the Festival is exactly about is somewhat hard to tell. In the words of Bruce Hodges from the program, "In today's fast-paced, technology-filled society, it's easier than ever for us to feel always turned-on, yet simultaneously disconnected from our essential inner selves." (And if that doesn't bring back memories of Freshman comp, nothing will.) The "White Lights Festival", as far as I can tell, is a collection of performing arts events over a period of a few weeks tied together by some Western bourgeois notion that modern life alienates its denizens from their underlying spiritual nature, which is not necessarily tied to any specific religious tradition. Music and art can supposedly help us reconnect with that underlying nature. Yep, you guessed it. Before long people start throwing around words like "transcendence". I was more interested to hear the Dresden Staatskapelle play Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem with the assistance of the Westminster Symphonic Choir and soloists soprano Christiane Karg and baritone Matthias Goerne.

The Dresden Staatskapelle onstage at Avery Fisher Hall Photo: mine 2010

In some ways the Brahms’ Requiem may have been the ideal piece for the festival. It's a spiritual work about death that is not a setting of an actual mass or other liturgical work although it freely references others in an indirect 19h century way. It is certainly lovely music, but sadly the Dresden Staatskapelle proved to be dealing with the same sleepy formalism it had earlier in the week during its tour with Rudolf Buchbinder. It was a burnished, accurate sound, but strangely lifeless and somnolent at the same time. It was beautiful as well. The best thing about the show were the superb vocal performances from Karg and Goerne. I was especially taken with Karg at this year’s Salzburg Festival as Amore in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. She was well paired with perhaps the world’s foremost German baritone, Goerne, whose rich and commanding voice provided all of the higher realm the Requiem may have otherwise been lacking. His performances are usually a highlight and his scheduled appearances in Berg’s Wozzeck at the Metropolitan Opera next spring are a must see. Sadly there was one other unfortunate note to Sunday’s show when a chorister fell from the riser into the brass section during the last few bars of the piece. The crash drew attention from the players and while I don’t know if the singer tripped or became faint, I certainly hope he or she is doing well.

Labels: Out of Town

Paulo Szot as Don Giovanni at the Dallas Opera Photo: Karen Almond/Dallas Opera 2010

Yes, Paulo Szot won the wet T-shirt contest in Dallas Opera’s current production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Or at least he should have. To be honest there is no wet T-shirt contest in this production, although there is a somewhat out of place splashing in the fountain scene in Act I. To be honest this decidedly unsexy production could have used one. In fact it could have used any number of things. By today’s standards, this import from Washington National Opera to Dallas, directed and designed by John Pascoe, is mighty tame. No heroin shoot-ups, neon lights, or police raids here. It’s just shoulder pads, mullet hair, and lots of fabric. The period is non-specific with Zerlina in her wedge espadrilles like she’s on her way to Studio 54 while others are in something approaching 19th-century garb. At times I’d swear Dona Elvira was channeling Kelly McGillis with her stretch pants, trench coat and multi-colored bustiers. Actually, the period non-specific take on the opera is not without its merits. It did manage a dark and creepy look and there were some interesting set elements including the Commendetore’s funeral. I also felt Pascoe did an excellent job of clarifying the who-knows-what-when plot elements in Act I that are sometimes a bit confusing. But I was most bothered by the difficulty managing the dramatic aspects of the story in favor of the comic ones. A lot of bad pizza comes up in this work, but Pascoe and his team more often than not glaze over it instead of milking the natural laughs to their fullest when they arise.

The cast was an interesting array of singers. At the center, as mentioned above, was Tony-winner Paulo Szot in the title role. He’s one attractive man and proved earlier this year he can carry an opera like Shostakovich’s The Nose, which he did for the Metropolitan Opera. In this season he’s singing a lot more opera on a lot more stages around the world and quite a bit of Mozart. I had mixed feelings about him here. He has a lot of stage presence, no doubt, but he was a bit underpowered in this particular cast and was not helped by the giant angular costumes he spent most of the evening swimming in. I felt he got a little croony at times as well. His Leporello, Mirco Palazzi, was much more engaging with his puckish performance and his round even tone. He was making his American debut in Dallas, and I’m hoping I get to hear more out of him soon. The women in the cast included Claire Rutter as Donna Anna, Georgia Jarman as Donna Elvira, and Ailyn Pérez as Zerlina. All of them had their moments. Rutter has a big voice and went after her arias with abandon. Jarman was probably the most consistently enjoyable to listen to, though she, like everyone else, was hampered by some fairly difficult costumes. The orchestra under Romanian conductor Nicolae Moldoveanu gave a solid contemporary performance of the score that kept moving and had a decent dramatic range. Of course, the house was by no means full on Saturday night, given the holiday weekend and game three of the World Series (which the Rangers won). But luckily there are two performances left before the show closes. It’s a good opportunity to see this great opera and Szot in the flesh if you haven’t had a chance. So, if you're in Dallas next weekend, check it out.

Labels: Dallas Opera, Out of Town

Jasmina Halimic in Anna Karenina Photo: Pat Kirk/Opera San Jose 2010

Friday night brought my first visit to Opera San José on my way north for the weekend. The company has a number of assets that are immediately apparent. First is the beautifully restored California Theater in downtown San José where the company currently performs. The 1927 marvel comes complete with two working organs including one in the lobby and frankly was worth the visit in and of itself. The second major asset on display was the quite good San José Opera orchestra. For a company its size, I wasn’t expecting an ensemble that sounded as warm and on target as they did. Which I suppose says more about my shortsightedness than their significant abilities, which were under the guidance of Stewart Robertson. The orchestral performance was undoubtedly the highlight of the evening. It was clear that a lot of time and money had been lavished on this good-looking and sounding production.

Now all anyone could ask for was a good opera. Sadly, David Carlson’s Anna Karenina wasn’t it. The work was commissioned in 2007 by Florida Grand Opera in a co-production with Opera Theater of St. Louis and is now receiving its West Coast Premiere. I suppose it’s some measure of success that the work has received as many performances as it has, but it is undoubtedly a long and unconvincing slog. The music was reminiscent of a movie score and seemed to float in the background without ever poking its unobtrusive head into the mix. The vocal writing had an absent quality as well. All of this is only compounded by libretto issues. Credited to Colin Graham with additional text by Mark Strenshinsky, the opera does undertake a Sisyphean labor in converting Tolstoy’s huge novel into only three hours of stage drama. This is not an iporssible task as proven by Gene Scheer with his excellent libretto for Jake Heggie's Moby-Dick in Dallas earlier this year. Anna Karenina however is littered with unnecessary characters, storylines and dialog for a rather simple and melodramatic story of an affair. The text waxes between the cliché and the pedestrian arriving at the prosaic “It is over” for Anna’s exit line. But wait - at the 2 hour 50 minute mark, there’s more with an additional 10 minute or so epilogue.

The vocal performances themselves were professionally done by the members of Opera San José’s cast of resident artists. On Friday’s performance Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste sang Anna Karenina with her dueling paramours Karenin and Vronsky performed by Isaiah Musik-Ayala and Torlef Borsting respectively. All were watchable performers who projected well with good clarity and stability. I also rather liked Steven Kemp’s romantic, if minimal, sets that were evocative without being fussy. But the action on stage often flagged with too much to say and too little to do. Even the business about jumping in front of the train, which is revisited on three separate occasions in the work was underwhelming relying on the old walking into the bright oncoming headlight trick. However, you cannot fault the company for giving it their all for a strongly made case of a losing argument. For a recent opera, that's a sizable risk for an American company these days and they should be acknowledged for it.

Labels: Opera San Jose, Out of Town

My recent weekend in New York ended with a concert from the world-class Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at Carnegie Hall under James Levine. It was a bit of an Oreo cookie of an afternoon – a familiar favorite whose best part was a delicious center part. Bookended by Schubert’s unfinished Eighth symphony and Beethoven’s Fifth which closed the program was a wonderful mini-recital from soprano Diana Damrau. She appeared in the crazy patchwork gown she wears on the cover of her latest recording “Coloraturas” and she focused on material that spectacularly showed off her adept acrobatics. She started off with eight familiar Strauss Lieder including “Morgen!” and “Das Bächlein”. She gave intense and thoughtful readings of both and closed the set eventually with “Amor,” which more prominently featured the vocal acrobatics she’s readily capable of. This was all prelude, however, to Zerbinetta’s aria from Ariadne auf Naxos which she dispatched with real humor and lightheartedness mixed with real power and control. She was clearly having a great time and the audience shared it with a huge ovation. She came back on stage several times afterward and then gave a true encore singing the last portion of the aria again, clearly hamming it up with Levine perched on his stool nearby. It was lovely in just about every way and an expert bit of cross promotion for the opera. The Met will be opening Ariadne next week and while Damrau will not be in it, she will be singing Marie in La Fille du Regiment with Juan Diego Florez as she takes over for Nathalie Dessay in the Laurent Pelly production that was so warmly received everywhere. As much as I like Dessay, Damrau is fairly spectacular in this production, which she gave a test run in San Francisco to loving audiences last Fall. (And as an extra bonuse, Meredith Arwady who played the Marquise de Berkenfield in San Francisco will be returning the the Met stage in this revival as well. She's great.)

But back to the rest of the cookie. Levine and the Met Orchestra can pull out the drama in a flowing and smooth production with ease, and both the Schubert and Beethoven got the full body workout. The Schubert fared better and was rather lush. The Beethoven, however, was decidedly overcooked with big gestures drowning out any detail. It was not an inappropriate approach, but not the most convincing one. It’s always great to hear the Met Orchestra play music that they don’t get to do everyday even when it’s familiar to the audience. But it’s hard to deny the orchestra’s strong suit and even here, it was the relationship with a vocalist that showed the group off in the best light.

Labels: Carnegie Hall, Met opera reviews 09/10, Out of Town

Renée Fleming and Susan Graham
Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2009

I hate to admit it, but apparently it is possible for a cast to sing and act its way out of a bad opera production. At least that’s what I took away from the first of four last performances of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier this season at The Metropolitan Opera on New Year’s Day. This musty Nathaniel Merrill production left over from another era is in bad need of some serious rethinking and refurbishment. Given that it's just slightly older than I am, I recognize how someone might have nostalgic feelings for it like harvest gold-hued kitchen appliances or the Nixon administration. However, despite the decay, tonight’s Der Rosenkavalier was the best opera I’ve seen in New York all week. The reason was a cast that dreams are made of. In the pit was Edo de Waart who played Strauss with no regrets. While Strauss' tide may have turned between Elektra and this, his subsequent opera, de Waart treated the score with the love and care it deserves. Of course, he had help on stage from three women who are not only among the world’s best in these roles, but are perhaps some of the best ever.

Renée Fleming is singing the Marschallin, one of her signature roles. Which is to say that outside of Rusalka it may be more suited for her than anything else she has ever sung. Just heart-breaking to the point of tears. Fleming's Octavian was Susan Graham who sang with such conviction and clarity that it was almost like I had never heard her before despite my longstanding admiration of her voice. Then there was Christine Schäfer as Sophie whose small frame and beautiful voice provided the perfect foil to the powerful and large Baron Ochs of Kristinn Sigmundsson. There is often too little for the cast to do onstage, but luckily these four are not just incredible voices. The sheer experience and acting abilities of the entire cast filled in a dreadfully large amount of standing-around time. Suddenly the musty confines of the past seemed to fade away under the glories of these performances. The final trio between the three female leads was absolutely first rate. Luckily there are three more of these necessary performances between now and the 15th of January, though they are mostly sold out. Best of all however, is that there is an HD broadcast to see next Saturday afternoon that everyone can take advantage of.

Labels: Met opera reviews 09/10, Out of Town

Elīna Garanča as Carmen
Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2009

In the program for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Bizet’s Carmen, which I saw last night, a reference is made to the intentions of director Richard Eyre and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. --Maestro Nézet-Séguin agrees with the director’s approach. “I’m not looking at this production in terms of, ‘Oh we need to do something different.”’ -- If this is the standard by which to judge this new Carmen, one could officially say “Mission Accomplished.” Richard Eyre’s production offers virtually nothing new to say about these conflicted residents of Seville that hasn’t been said thousands of times elsewhere. That’s not to say that this is a bad production, but it certainly isn’t a groundbreaking or even particularly memorable one. Eyre has updated the story to 1930s Spain and set all the action in a single giant rotunda of sorts. There are concentric rings of giant collapsing brick walls that rotate in opposing directions to reveal various spaces that are...surrounded by giant collapsing brick walls. Although there is a lot of movement, it can be rather bland to look at, especially in the first two acts. The 1930s house dresses of the cigarette factory workers do little to explain why the soldiers find them so attractive in Act I. This is only slightly less confusing than watching the factory workers rise from a cistern in the center of the stage for their entrance.

But underground cigarette factories aside, I will admit that all of these spinning layers started to grow on me by Act III. Eyre uses some of this activity for an almost cinematic effect. The opera ends with Don Jose holding Carmen’s dead body rotating away upstage to reveal in their place a red-lit tableau of the townspeople watching Escamillo delivering the deathblow to a life-sized downed bull. Sure it’s obvious, but it looked pretty cool at the time. Most remarkable to me, though, was probably some of the best choreography I’ve seen in any opera production before. Christopher Wheeldon provided an excellently coordinated flamenco sequence in Act II, which received the biggest mid-performance ovation of the night, as well as two superb and rather sexy bits at the beginning of each act. Two half-dressed solo dancers, a man and a woman, would appear in a large rift in the brick wall of the set and perform during both overtures. You get the idea.

Elīna Garanča and Mariusz Kwiecien
Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2009

Sadly, most of the cast was unable to generate this level of sex appeal. Elīna Garanča was the Carmen. She sounded great, but I found her a little cold and removed for my taste. Roberto Alagna was a volatile Don Jose. And even though he handled the rage well, I couldn’t help but wonder how much more interesting the scenes would have been if his soon to be ex-wife, Angela Gheorghiu, had gone through with the plans to sing Carmen opposite him anyway in an operatic Shoot Out the Lights. I'd have loved to see that Act IV. If you wanted sex appeal from the vocalists, you’d have to turn to the "hot Pole", Mariusz Kwiecien. Apparently he traveled to Spain to be fitted for authentic bullfighter threads for this production and trust me, it was money well spent. He sounded pretty decent, too, as did Barbara Frittoli as Micäela. She may not have had the benefit of skin-tight high-waisted trousers, but her tone was bright and actually rather heart-breaking.

I felt Nézet-Séguin made a good impression with his Met Opera debut. He lunged into the overture at a remarkably fast pace leaving the orchestra struggling to keep up and I was initially a little worried. But things smoothed out and he managed pleasant dynamics and a lightness the piece requires. So while this new production may not be anyone’s dream of a perfect Carmen, it’s not unpleasant either. It’s modern looking enough with a few visual tricks to keep things from being totally boring, even though they can drag at times. And best of all, it continues the company’s efforts to enter the 20th century artistically. There were a smattering of boos for the production team during their curtain call which suggests that this is becoming as de rigueur here as it has been in Europe for well over a decade. It was hardly enough to think that most people were actually upset by the production, but enough to indicate that those desperately clutching onto the past aren’t pleased. A sure sign of success for the company, even if this individual production isn’t one for the record books.

Labels: Met opera reviews 09/10, Out of Town

Kate Lindsey in Sher's staging of Hoffmann
Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera 2009

On Wednesday I arrived at The Metropolitan Opera to see the new Bartlett Sher production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann to discover that the star tenor playing Hoffmann, Joseph Calleja, had called in sick and would be replaced by Canadian tenor David Pomeroy in his Met Opera debut. Now many people might have found this distressing, but I was not necessarily one of them. I knew nothing of Pomeroy other than the general disparaging remarks one reads about all living singers in the comments sections of Parterre Box. On the other hand, I do know something about Calleja. While he’s gotten good reviews for his performance of Hoffmann in this production, my own personal experiences seeing him perform have been highly variable, but trending toward the unremarkable. So I can’t say I was totally bummed out or anything. And after hearing Mr. Pomeroy tonight, I can’t say that he was any worse than I would have predicted Calleja might have been given my prior exposure to him. Pomeroy was certainly able to sing the part and finished the evening without unraveling. He may not have the size or warmth Calleja has, but from where I sat he was not at all unpleasant and for stepping in to this big role for his debut, I’d go so far as to say it was a pretty solid performance.

That consideration aside, this Hoffman was certainly a reasonable if not completely satisfying evening at the opera. Sher’s production is a bit timid. Sher blends in a variety of Kafkaesque and even German Expressionist elements. It’s dark with rather elaborate costumes, but the sets tend toward the monotone. There are a lot of visual elements that are momentarily interesting to look at, but I never felt that the whole thing went far enough. This is one wild and phantasmagorical opera and while the production is aware of this, it doesn’t really reach for anything as far afield as it might have, even though it was certainly dressed for the occasion. Think warmed over Baz Luhrmann. But all that being said, at least it had a modern look about it. Despite this Hoffmann’s shortcomings, it still looks better than the museum pieces that still make up a too high percentage of the Metropolitan Opera’s schedule throughout the year. Heaven knows I’d rather see this again than sit through another round of something outright laughable such as the current Aida or Turandot.

The rest of the cast on Wednesday all made it in, and there were a number of enjoyable vocal performances. Kathleen Kim’s Olympia seemed relaxed and surprisingly strong. Netrebko seemed a good fit for Antonia and came through in the acting department as she usually does. She still generates a lot of excitement on the stage. Alan Held’s villains were all on target. I think I was most partial, however, to Kate Lindsey’s Nicklausse who haunts the stage throughout this whole evening in male drag, infusing the thing with a little melancholy. She sang splendidly and gave the most emotionally connected turn in the whole opera. John Keenan conducted the orchestra in one of his scheduled nights covering for James Levine who is still on tap to return for Saturday’s closing performance.

Labels: Met opera reviews 09/10, Out of Town

Susan Bullock and Deborah Voigt
Photo: Marty Sohl/Met Opera 2009

Tuesday in New York brought the final performance this season of Srauss’ Elektra at the Metropolitan Opera. And while it didn’t split the earth in two or anything, it was far from shabby and rather fitting for this centenary year of the work's premiere in Dresden. Let me put it this way. Earlier in the day, I’d seen the excellent retrospective of Kandinsky’s work at the Guggenheim. Seeing the radical, increasingly abstract pieces produced by Kandinsky around the time Strauss composed Elektra was a potent reminder of the break these artists saw from what had gone before. And while Kandinsky would move on to become friends with Schoenberg as Strauss headed off in another direction entirely, Elektra is cut from a particularly radical early 20th-century cloth. At the Metropolitan on Tuesday there were some intensely beautiful colors, but it wasn’t exactly a completely new way of seeing things.

The well-regarded Fabio Luisi conducted the orchestra in the most revolutionary part of the performance. The brass alone was worth the ticket price. Dark and brooding but powerfully slashing at others, it was nothing short of world class. There were some things to shout about onstage as well. Primarily Deborah Voigt. I know it’s fashionable to bitch and moan about how her voice has changed over the years, but her Chrysothemis has few serious challengers in the world even now. She gave the most integrated and felt performance of the evening. As for the Elektra, Susan Bullock, despite my initial reservations I must admit she grew on me. By the time Orest showed up, the steel and stamina of her voice were clearly on display and she seemed to actually be fully coming to life. There was the unfortunate bit of her hurdy-gurdy style ax dance, which evoked Rosie O'Donnell in Fiddler on the Roof more than ancient Greece. But a little laughter can be a good thing. Strauss certainly thought so in the long run.

The production itself, another Otto Schenk/Jürgen Rose number, is remarkably pedestrian even for 1992. There is that giant fallen horse statue everyone must stumble around, but it’s an otherwise rather drab jewelry box. Of course, all of the trinkets are being worn by Klytämnestra who looked like Madame sans Wayland Flowers, which cut into the whole feeling of terror around her. But Palmer handled the role well, given the costume cards she was dealt.

Labels: Met opera reviews 09/10, Out of Town

Sandra Bernhard doing Whatever It Takes
Photo: Michael Davis 2009

And you won’t be sorry. Especially if you are a fan of her particular brand of sarcasm, biting social critique, and celebrity-filled cabaret numbers. Sandra Bernhard kicked off her week-long run in New York last Saturday at Joe’s Pub. And as Bernhard herself notes, while it is a more intimate space than the big room at Bally’s in Vegas, Joe’s Pub is almost too small to contain the energy and size of her performance. The show is new material she’s been working on over the last several months, but the content and plan of attack are very familiar. There are songs, including one from her most recent all-music release Whatever It Takes, but most of the show is monologue. Compared to her more recent outings, this is a much more chatty show and Berhard at times seems looser and freewheeling. She often digresses from the bigger set pieces for brief asides on her personal life that were often some of the best bits. Bernhard’s parody of celebrity-life and popular culture is often mixed with songs performed in a cabaret style—often for comic effect.

But not always. And this is the beauty of her work. Even when Bernhard speaks of personal topics – her family, her faith – there are many times where it isn’t clear exactly what she’s joking about, and what she isn’t. The ambiguity in her sarcasm is one of the things that make people either love or hate her work, but it is undeniably her calling card. Even her broadsides at celebrities like Kate Gosselin, Brad Pitt, and (oh-yes) Madonna can be as glamorizing as they are eviscerating. Like the work of her comic offspring, Kathy Griffin, she inserts herself in the middle of this celebrity world. But unlike Griffin, she eschews a populist tone. Griffin presents herself as just one of us, sneaking inside the velvet ropes to breathlessly report the ridiculous truth. Bernhard makes up a fantasy world of fictional events she is a character in, operating by a fractured logic that is the main source of the laughs. The references to events past and present can fly by and it isn’t always easy to keep up with the names, places, and things in her routine. But that is part of the fun as well. Sandra Bernhard is not, and has never been, a lowest-common-denominator kind of entertainer. Her performances at Jos’s Pub this week, including two on New Year’s Eve, are a great reminder of that.

Labels: Out of Town