My introduction to Il Barbiere di Siviglia (Sunday, June 8, on Thirteen) came from watching Rabbit of Seville, a 1950 Looney Tunes cartoon directed by Chuck Jones, when I was a kid. Musical director Carl Stalling slightly tweaked Rossini’s overture to back up Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd’s frantic chases, and the juxtaposition couldn’t have felt more natural. It’s as if Rossini had scored the cartoon, instead of the cartoon having been set to preexisting music. Seven years later, Jones went back to the trough with What’s Opera, Doc?, in which he and arranger Milt Franklyn deconstructed the entire Wagner canon in under seven minutes. It’s hard to underestimate the influence this pair of cartoons had on at least a couple of generations of budding music lovers, as Richard Freedman wrote in an article for Andante. But this casual referencing of “high art” in a so-called low medium feels alien now, when film, TV and YouTube tend to refer other pop-cultural artifacts. Judging by its lack of pop spoofing, high art doesn’t exist anymore in America. read more
In the singing biz, they talk about money notes—the notes a singer hits that make your spine tingle, the ones that often get a singer hired in the first place. Are the first “money notes” you think of high notes? They’re pretty hard to ignore—this season at the Met, Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez have been wowing audiences with their high-note pyrotechnics. For me, the first money notes I think of are probably from “Sempre libera” (soprano high E-flat) and “Nessun dorma” (tenor high B).
But let’s talk for a moment about rich, juicy, resonant low notes—these are the money notes for basses and contraltos (and the occasional mezzo or baritone). read more
Kander & Ebb may have set Cabaret in Weimar Berlin, but quoting from the show’s title song could not be more appropriate as we bid farewell to the long-running New York eatery Florent. Now, why should we mention the closing of a restaurant in this arts-focused blog? First, Florent always was a haven for creative nightowls; the chi-chi uptown crowd may have had Elaine’s and the likes, but the downtown people would get their steak-frites in a much more egalitarian setting. In addition, the departure of this beloved 24/7 institution, forced out by rising rents, is only the tip of the iceberg that is the gentrification of New York—or rather, it’s the latest ship to slam into that iceberg. And that of course is something with repercussions on how the city and its cultural scene interact. read more
In the opera universe, there’s wacky and weird—and then there’s Stefan Zucker. This living “world’s highest tenor” is so strange as to defy description—the closest I can come is that his speaking voice sounds like a Mike Myers impersonation in an Austin Powers movie, and his attachment to Italian opera divas of the past is almost pornographic. Many New York opera-lovers remember him from his WKCR radio show, which was discontinued in 1994. For the uninitiated, he can be viewed in a YouTube clip.
Zucker’s voice opens Jan Schmidt-Garre’s 1998 film, Opera Fanatic, just released in the U.S. on an Arthaus DVD, with a telephone message: “Oh hi, this is Stefan. I feel like shit with a touch of fever and a sore throat, but I will get on the plane… I have some little pimples on my face, and I would feel much more at my ease, much less self-conscious with makeup.” If this doesn’t give you the heeby-jeebies, I’m either not telling it right, or you’ve never heard Zucker’s voice before. read more
Television commercials are probably as good an indicator of a society’s cultural health as any. And anyone looking for proof of the cachet that opera once maintained in American life would do well to consider these commercials, which Rice Krispies ran in the 1960s. To a certain generation of opera goers, these hilarious vignettes probably imparted a degree of prestige and brand loyalty that companies — Texaco, for one particularly painful example — used to consider incomparably positive P.R.
I’d never seen these clips until someone passed them along as YouTube fodder a few weeks ago; but I’ve come to love the bizarre combination of high and low culture that seems plainly an anachronism compared to the current world of advertising. read more
Warning, this post is on the long side, but I promise it’ll be fun to anybody with a passing interest in the live arts. And if you follow opera, it’ll be doubleplusgood, with copious hissing and dissing, but also words that should bring hope to those who yearn for a democratic and provocative culture.
A few days ago, the New York Times ran an interview with Gérard Mortier (also previously profiled on here on SundayArts), the Belgian-born incoming manager of City Opera—the house entwined in a long-running sibling rivalry with the richer, glitzier Met, sitting across the Lincoln Center plaza. As interesting as the Times’ piece was, it either didn’t ask the right questions or Mortier opted for diplomacy. read more
I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train at least six or seven times, including when it recently aired on Reel 13. With its tight screenplay adapted from the book by Patricia Highsmith (author of the Tom Ripley books), fabulously evil villain played by Robert Walker, pivotal train scenes and tense back-and-forth between Farley Granger’s Forest Hills tennis match and Walker’s evidence-planting trip to the scene of a murder, the film has always been one of my Hitchcock favorites.
Of course, music plays a huge part in Strangers on a Train, as it does in all Hitchcock movies. Many individual Hitchcock films have been studied for their music—particularly the films scored by Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the most famous film-music cue, the shower scene in Psycho—but Jack Sullivan’s detailed guide to music in Hitchcock films, which comes out in paperback on May 20, appears to be the most comprehensive. The book, Hitchcock’s Music, covers all the Hitchcock films, from the early silents to the British films like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes and the best-known films like Rebecca, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The book, which won a 2007 ASCAP Deems Taylor Best Book of the Year award in the concert music category, is so detailed that you may feel the need to go watch numerous scenes again, just to listen to the music cues you somehow missed.
Recently I spoke to Jack Sullivan about Alfred Hitchcock’s film music, how the director’s carefully plotted approach to making movies extended to its music, and the post-Hitchcock era of film scoring.
Jennifer Melick: How far back does your interest in Hitchcock’s movies go?
Jack Sullivan: Back to my childhood. I was just old enough to probably sneak out and see Vertigo. Then right after that I saw North by Northwest and Psycho. As a kid, I remember being riveted by the music. read more
Reality check: The Tony Awards aren’t about theater in New York—they are about a certain kind of theater in New York, namely the expensive, mainstream one found on Broadway. Which is fine, but let’s not forget that there’s a lot more to the stage than the Great White Way. For instance, you’d have no way of knowing it by looking at the list of nominees, but one of the most inventive musicals of the season is The Adding Machine, and it is still playing—Off Broadway.
That said, I might as well admit that the Tonys sure are fun! In fact if you follow Broadway, the level of excitment is unbearable—it’s like the World Series, a presidential election and the grand finale of Project Runway rolled into one. read more
On May 13, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the four recipients of its first-ever NEA Opera Honors: soprano Leontyne Price; composer Carlisle Floyd; opera administrator Richard Gaddes; and maestro James Levine. The four will receive the awards and be celebrated in Washington, D.C., on October 31 at a special awards ceremony and concert, with performances by Washington National Opera and members of that company’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program. The recipient names revealed no shockers—Price, Floyd, Gaddes, and Levine have reached the very top of their professions and have each had a huge impact on opera in this country.
I sat in at the May 13 press conference announcing the awards at Lincoln Center’s New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and I am as thrilled as any opera-lover about these awards (more on which in a moment), but … can we talk? read more
Yes, tenor Juan Diego Flórez hit his high Cs again at yesterday’s performance of La Fille du Régiment, all 18 of them—because as he did at the premiere back in April, he immediately encored his aria. This was clearly anticipated by the crowd since Flórez had done it at the premiere, but wouldn’t it have been better to just go on with the show and let us savor with the uniqueness of the moment? Besides, isn’t this kind of behavior predictable, which isn’t meant to be a good thing in the live arts? read more
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