Well, death is easy in the arts. And it sure gives you a built-in advantage when it comes to critical consideration. Comedy, on the other hand, is not only hard to do, it’s hard to get cred for.
Let’s pretend, for instance, that the Oscars have any kind of relevance in terms of actual quality and wonder: When was the last time they rewarded a comedic role? I’d argue that Steve Carell is as good if not better in The 40-Year Old Virgin as Daniel Day-Lewis is in There Will Be Blood, but one actor has a statuette and the other doesn’t. (Actually DDD has two, having already scored with an eminently predetermined Oscarable part in My Left Foot.) And Hilary Swank, a two-time winner, could never dream of offering a performance as nuanced and unpredictable as Molly Shannon’s in last year’s tragically underrated Year of the Dog.
This train of thought was prompted by the prospect of this weekend’s broadcast: Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment, a funny opera staged in a funny manner by Laurent Pelly, with funny performances by an ultra-game cast. Of course, many in New York found the production too broad, too over the top. read more
It is fascinating to think that Die Soldaten, a vast, experimental opera by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the same time during which the AMC’s popular hourlong television drama Mad Men is set. Mad Men is about the advertising world in New York just before America’s decorous lid got blown off with rock ‘n’ roll, be-ins, the Vietnam War, and all the rest. Zimmermann’s opera tried to blow the lid off of opera; his goal was “opera as total opera theater! In other words: architecture, sculpture, painting, musical theater, spoken theater, ballet, film, microphone, television, tape and sound techniques, electronic music, concrete music, circus, the musical and all forms of motion theater combined to form the phenomenon of pluralistic opera. In my Soldaten, I have attempted to take decisive steps in this direction.”
Die Soldaten was first performed in 1965 in Cologne, Germany, in a scaled-down production because it was considered “unperformable” the way Zimmermann had … read more
Pity the Rodolfo and Mimì pouring out their hearts this July in La Scala’s La Bohème. It’s possible that more people will be craning their necks to see 27-year-old Venezuelan conducting sensation Gustavo Dudamel in the pit, than either the Mimì (Italian soprano Carmela Remigio) or Rodolfo (American tenor James Valenti, who sang a televised Pinkerton this season at New York City Opera). Neither Valenti nor Remigio is a big name like Angela Gheorghiu, the Met’s Mimì this season, or Jonas Kaufmann, who sang Rodolfo in a Bohème conducted by Dudamel in February. But at least Remigio has lived through Dudamania before: she sang Donna Anna in a 2006 Don Giovanni he led in Milan.
Yes, Dudamania is in full swing. In Los Angeles, where Dudamel begins as the L.A. Philharmonic’s new music director in 2009-10, the orchestra welcomed its curly-haired superstar this spring with a lunch catered by none other than Pink’s hot dog stand, creating for the occasion a special “Dude dog”—guacamole, cheese, fajita mix, jalapenos, tortilla chips. (Dudamel is said to be fond of hot dogs.) read more
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
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
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
How many opera-lovers have already heard the nine high Cs Juan Diego Flórez sang recently in “Ah, mes amis (Pour mon âme)” from La Fille Du Régiment at the Metropolitan Opera? Impossible to say, other than: a lot (most of them via YouTube). And as you’ve likely also heard by now, a week ago on Monday the Met lifted the traditional house ban on encores, Flórez actually sang eighteen high Cs after the second go-round. (At La Scala, they broke the ban for Flórez in the same opera, too.)
Obviously, there’s more to singing opera than high notes. But there’s no denying the thrill of hearing them done so well: the gladiator aspect of opera. After all, here’s a guy singing with complete abandon, seemingly popping out high notes like they’re nothing. Anyone who’s been at the opera at a night with a tenor having a hideously bad night knows those high notes are not easy. read more
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