I remember a favorite old college T-shirt, yellow with blue lettering, proudly proclaiming “a century of women on top” (this from a women’s college), which finally got so shredded from overuse that I had to throw it out. Back when I first got that shirt, which is a long time ago now, I think I would have been shocked to consider how little headway women have made at the very top echelons of the arts. I got thinking about this after a spate of articles on the topic appeared in major newspapers last week in L.A., Washington, D.C., and London. The theme of all these articles was how few women are employed as top-level theater directors, choreographers receiving big commissions, and music directors of major orchestras.
Ironically, these articles—which appeared in The Guardian (choreographers) and The Los Angeles Times (music directors) and The Washington Post (theater directors)—appeared the same week that the Metropolitan Opera’s performance of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice aired on SundayArts. read more
Red Fly/Blue Bottle, the title of a music-theater show at HERE, recurs in a memorable song that bookends the work. Christina Campanella wrote the haunting, melodious music, with words by Stephanie Fleischmann; Mallory Catlett directs. Old meets new in the Jim Findlay-designed set that resembles an attic, dense with antique clocks, audio/visual equipment, insect imagery. The detritus is interspersed with geometric white panels that serve as screens or scrims and slide laterally to create or take apart rooms.
Video elements by Peter Norrman and Mirit Tal are scattered across the theater, at times serving as a kind of tangible memory, sketchpad, or remote scene. The cast (including vocalists Jesse Hawley and Chris Lee, actor Black-Eyed Susan, plus music/text performed by Campanella, Sam Baker, and Erich Schoen-Rene) inhabits all corners of the set, appearing and disappearing with regularity, aided by Miranda Hardy’s lighting.
The team behind Red Fly/Blue Bottle (presented by HERE and Latitude 14 and developed through a HERE Artist Residency Program) has put together an intriguing, richly layered work of music-theater that resists categorization, for better or worse. It’s a problem faced by new multi-media or cross-genre performances that are ostensibly created to shatter convention, and do. read more
This past week, the two most potent cultural events I’ve seen involve both space travel and music—Wooster Group’s La Didone, and SciFi Network’s Battlestar Galactica. Coincidence?
La Didone intertwines tellings of Francesco Cavalli’s opera and Mario Bava’s film, Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires, 1965). Wooster Group regulars, including Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos, and Scott Shepherd, re-enact Bava’s kitschy film pretty faithfully, down to the super-enunciated line readings and comically overt gestures. Elizabeth LeCompte directs this production at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which runs through April 26.
The opera singing cast members, including the revelatory Hai-Ting Chinn as Dido, joined by John Young and Andrew Nolen, wear the same silver pleather spacesuits (by Antonia Belt) as the actors, zipped to varying degrees of reveal. It took some time to be able to process the juxtaposition of the two genres, but it works in the end. read more
Danielle de Niese is back in her hometown of New York this month for her New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall on February 27. This comes directly on the heels of a run of performances at the Met as Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice opposite Stephanie Blythe’s Orfeo, for which Blythe and de Niese received excellent reviews, including from Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times and Martin Bernheimer in The Financial Times. At twenty-nine, the American soprano—of Sri Lankan and Dutch heritage, born in Australia—has reached the opera world’s A-list at a much earlier age than most contemporary opera singers.
She recently spoke about Handel and Mozart—two of her her favorite composers—what it has been like growing up in the public eye, her U.S. recital tour this month, performing for a camera versus for a live audience, and why she thinks she’ll have to be dragged off the stage when she’s 80 years old.
Jennifer Melick: Congratulations on your performances in the Met’s Orfeo ed Euridice this winter. I caught it twice—live at the Met’s January 14 performance—that turned out to be the night Stephanie Blythe was ill and did not sing. So I came back for the Saturday HD movie-theater broadcast on January 24.
Danielle De Niese: I haven’t had a chance to hear the broadcast yet, but I’ve heard from people about it.
Melick: What sort of feedback have you gotten?
De Niese: Amazing feedback. I’ve gotten loads of messages on my website, and my friends who went to the movie theaters all over the world, in Japan, they totally loved it. read more
Mark Morris has proven how deft he is with opera, particularly when it includes his wonderful dancers. His productions of Romeo & Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare, Orfeo ed Euridice, Platée, King Arthur—and the sublime L’Allegro ed il Penseroso ed il Moderato and Dido and Aeneas for his own company—all integrated his astute sensitivity with music and his playful, earthbound choreography.
Now he has taken a bit of a departure in directing Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Joseph Haydn’s L’Isola Disabitata (The Deserted Island), with a libretto by Metastasio, in five performances at John Jay College from Feb 18- 28. There will be no dancers or chorus, just four soloists and an orchestra: sopranos Takesha Meshé Kizart and Valerie Ogbonnaya, tenor Vale Rideout, and bass-baritone Tom Corbeil. read more
Last week, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it was facing a budget crunch. Wow, like, that’s a surprise? Some staff members have already taken pay cuts, salaries will be discussed with unions. And of course the crisis will impact programming: Costly revivals of Ghosts of Versailles, Benvenuto Cellini, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Die Frau Ohne Schatten have been scrapped; some won’t be replaced, others will be switched for less pricey productions. But the Met is not really representative because there’s no such thing as a really cheap show there: Your choices are expensive and very expensive. What I fear is that we’re really going to start missing out on very large, very outlandish, very ambitious productions all over town, not just at the Met. read more
Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Arvo Pärt’s compositions rank among the most inspirational for choreographers, at least in my neck of the woods. Reich and Glass are beloved for their muscular propulsiveness, their vigorous rhythms, their hypnotic threads. But it is Pärt’s compositions that invite collaborators into a shared space, a helium-filled elysium, or on Earth — in the earth, rich with dirt, minerals and other creatures. The Guggenheim Works & Process series focused on Pärt as a muse for artist Sophie Calle, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, and another composer, Tarik O’Regan.
Wheeldon, artistic director of Morphoses, has done some of his finest work to Pärt, and it is perhaps not a coincidence that NYCB ballerina Wendy Whelan — another of Wheeldon’s muses — is usually the star. Two duets done for NYCB were performed at the Guggenheim: Liturgy (2003), featuring Whelan with Albert Evans, and the pas de deux from After the Rain, which she danced with Sébastien Marcovici. read more
“I’m aware of the speculation that I’m a candidate. I’m not interested in the job at New York City Opera.”—George Steel, Bloomberg News, December 22, 2008
So, after months of rumors that George Steel, Dallas Opera’s newly hired general director, was considering coming to New York City Opera after incoming general director Gerard Mortier abruptly quit this fall before even starting the job—the other shoe has dropped. Yesterday, Steel accepted the job of general manager and artistic director for NYCO, abandoning the Big D for the Big Apple and a post that might make him the opera world’s equivalent of Tim Geithner, Barack Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary. NYCO is a perfect microcosm of the economy generally: there is a mountain of problems to fix. So expectations will be set high for Steel, whom the company has chosen as its savior in a moment of crisis. For starters, as mentioned read more
Lots of cheap tickets: The economy tanked, and tickets to everything were magically available at short notice, at cut rates. Example A: The Metropolitan Opera continued its yearlong offer of same-day $20 tickets in the orchestra section, offered many 2007-08 operas on television here at Thirteen/WNET, continued its live HD broadcasts to movie theaters, and opened up an online lottery for $25 tickets for unsold seats in the Orchestra and Grand Tier sections.
Lots of cheap tickets, part B: I never thought I would say this, but now that it’s suddenly cool to be a spendthrift, I’m not sure if I like being part of a large crowd that until recently looked down on us lifelong cheapsters. Last week, I went to the Saint James Theatre to get tickets to Gypsy so I could see Patti LuPone one more time before the show was set to close for good. I paid a very good price for excellent seats—without trying hard at all, or breaking the law. New York is not an easy city to live or work in. I had become attached to the struggle associated with finding concert tickets I could afford. Now everything is a struggle. And it’s just wrong that Gypsy is closing. read more
Opera companies hit hard by economic times include the Baltimore Opera, which has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and New York City Opera, which has been publicly struggling as well.
Things are much better at the Metropolitan Opera, but the board of directors there—faced with declining ticket sales in its upper price categories, as the economy continues in freefall mode—has opted to make a contribution that will allow the company to sell a chunk of Orchestra and Grand Tier seats for $25. To which I say hoorah!—readers of this blog know my bias that cheap, affordable tickets in the GOOD seats are critically important, even in a house with excellent acoustics like the Met. A few years ago when he was writing for Newsday, Justin Davidson (now classical-music and architecture critic at New York magazine) voiced a similar concern when he described the Met’s Family Circle seats (the cheapest seats at the topmost tier) as the spot “from which the tenor’s head looks like a deer tick but where the sound remains impeccable.” I agree that the sound in the Family Circle is just fine, but from a physical standpoint the distance to the stage is hugely problematic: it’s like sitting across the street from the action. If I had $150 to spend, I would rather go to the opera by myself and sit downstairs than buy two tickets for half that much, in the nosebleeds. So, at $25 this is a great deal. read more
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