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
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
It’s spring in New York, and Philip Glass is bursting out all over.
The biggest event is his Satyagraha, which is in the middle of its first-ever run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera. Naxos has just released a four-CD boxed set of previously recorded works called Of Beauty and Light: The Music of Philip Glass, which contains his second, third, and fourth symphonies, plus The Light, Prelude and Dance from Akhnaten, Violin Concerto, and Company, for string orchestra. At the IFC Center, they’re showing Scott Hicks’s 2007 film documentary of the composer, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. Glass even managed to get in last week’s New York magazine after he stated at an April 9 Brooklyn Academy of Music gala that he thinks the United States should pull out of the Beijing Olympics because of China’s record on human rights.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Glass is how his place in the classical-music universe has changed over time. read more
For most stage directors, enticing audiences towards an appreciation of a work has always been something of an exercise in accommodation. That is, giving recherché knowledge the appropriate context. Style, epoch, provenance, language, politics, philosophy, etc., all amount to considerations that must be grappled with and reconciled, in one way or another, before an audience might find meaning or relevance in a performance. Witness the abiding success of an opera production like the Met’s Franco Zeffirelli Bohème, which takes all the bustle and hubbub of a Parisian street-scape and plops it down on the company’s stage in an effort of exacting verisimilitude. At the same time, consider the ways in which a production like Robert Wilson’s Lohengrin — an austere and hyper-stylized staging that also happens to be one of my favorite productions in the Met’s repertoire — arguably succeeds by emphasizing the universal and archetypal over the specific.
In this case, I’m not talking about the details of singing, acting or music, but rather the onstage creation of time and place, “setting.” And I can’t help but wonder if we’re living in an era of live performance that will amount to the setting-sun of traditional scenery and stagecraft. read more
I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m cheap.
Back in the days when I didn’t get up before noon on weekends, I used to drag myself out of bed on Saturday at 8 a.m. after a friend told me about a Cambridge, Massachusetts shop called Dollar-a-Pound. On weekends only, the store cleared out its warehouse floor by selling clothing for a dollar a pound; customers were given giant plastic garbage bags at the door, and then we all rushed in to grab never-worn or barely worn castoff designer clothing before someone else got it first. Merchandise was weighed on a scale and paid for on the way out. I’ve replenished an entire season’s wardrobe in an hour that way—and had money left over for brunch (after a short nap).
I’ve waited all afternoon in the sweltering heat in Central Park for free tickets to see Shakespeare in the Park, and like most New Yorkers I’ve waited in the TKTS line for cut-rate Broadway show tickets. I’ve won tickets via radio promotions to live tapings of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. One of the big reasons I’m happy about the alliance between the Metropolitan Opera and WNET/Great Performances is there’s now more opera on television—and it’s free. Or at least free after I’ve paid my monthly ransom to Verizon.
At the Metropolitan Opera, I’ve saved money by getting standing-room tickets—for operas as long as Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (more than five hours on your feet for the latter, with all the cuts opened).
So my initial reaction to the Metropolitan Opera’s 2006 program offering same-day tickets for certain performances was: Finally, someone in opera heaven is listening. read more
If you want proof that the the borders of classical music just keep getting more porous, you need look no further than Three Lost Chords, a one-hour show that has been playing at the offbeat little Zipper Theater on Wednesdays and Sundays since March 23. The Zipper is a tiny space in the garment district big enough for perhaps 75 audience members, who sit in vinyl two-seaters from 1950s-era buses; adjacent to the theater there’s also the funky Zipper Tavern with twinkly lights and shabby-chic furniture like slip-covered loveseats and wooden chests. Not your ordinary opera venue.
This macabre/funny/over-the-top trio of short monologue operas with music by Lance Horne and libretto by Mark Stephen Campbell, directed by David Schweizer, had a run at the Zipper in January and is now back for a brief reprise. The composer—who also plays piano in this one-hour show—studied with Milton Babbitt and David Del Tredici at Juilliard, and he cites some of his influences John Lennon, David Bowie, Fiona Apple, Benjamin Britten, and the Captain & Tennille (!). He also has a band, Lance Horne and the One-Night Stands .
The three singers in the show each portray a character based on short stories: Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist (about the predicament of a man who hates food), Muriel Spark’s The Girl I Left Behind (about a young woman struggling with a strange kind of memory loss), and Edgar Allan Poe’s well-known A Tell-Tale Heart. Nathan Lee Graham, with a resume that is a mix of television and movie roles, Broadway, and classical, portrays Kafka’s hunger artist, while Michael Slattery (Poe’s guilt-plagued murderer) and Caroline Worra (the woman trying to remember what she is missing) are both well established in the classical universe. read more
As an avowed opera-goer, my preferred locale is Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I’ll readily admit that I have painfully little patience for the throngs of tourists that make the Theater District an ambling, sight-seen garish miasma on the order of a mid-town Ellis Island. (”Give me your fanny-packed, your Drakkar Noir spritzed, your huddled masses yearning for Olive Garden…”) Fine — I’ll admit it: I’m also a snob. But after a long workday, Lincoln Center’s travertine Plaza — even with its current redevelopment in full effect — can feel something like a Doric temple to the Great White Way’s Thunderdome.
Nevertheless, I’ll admit that it’s been a notably good season for theater of the non-sung variety. Wanting to make the most of a recently renewed TDF membership, I’ve partaken like a protein-starved marathoner celebrating at a Brazilian steakhouse. To have witnessed a few of the Theater District’s stunning dramatic coups over the past few months has given me some unexpected — yet appreciated — perspective about the opera stage’s own goings-on. Since it’s just after Easter, let’s make “ecumenical” the word of the artistic day as well.
Here’s my unsolicited advice: run, do not walk, to see Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, where Jim Norton’s character, Richard, takes to the stage like a blind, besotted Falstaff, and in the process confirms that someone can still qualify as “human” — ironically more so than some other characters — despite having 70% of their fluid body-weight comprised of Jameson whiskey. After that, get a ticket to The Homecoming, where Ian McShane, as the patriarch Max, offers up Pinter-pauses with enough causticity to tear a hole in the space-time continuum. Finally, head to the Met and catch Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto’s genuinely masterful portrayal of Silva in the revival of the early-Verdi gem Ernani — a performance so truthful and detailed in its bitterness as to suggest that the opera should have been titled after Furlanetto’s puritanical vengeance-obsessed graybeard. Yes, it’s been a particularly good season for curmudgeons and the theatrical arts. Bah humbug. read more
During the past year, one of the upbeat stories in the classical-music business has been the proliferation of opera in movie theaters.
The Metropolitan Opera, under its new general manager, Peter Gelb, jump-started this trend last season with its high-definition simulcasts, which have proved so successful that now other opera houses—including Royal Opera, Covent Garden; La Scala; San Francisco Opera—are jumping on the bandwagon.
Hearts in operaworld are aflutter. The rest of the world has finally caught on to the wonder and beauty of opera, by the simple virtue of its increased accessibility—and the $22 ticket price, far lower than a seat in most opera theaters. The reality, as reported in a Sunday 3/23 front-page article in The New York Times is a bit different. Cinema chains, looking for ways to stay profitable, have discovered that opera is a reliable modest source of income because opera-lovers will still pay money to go to the opera, even when theaters’ main source of revenue from moviegoers is dipping. If I had to guess, I’d say most of the people going to the cinema to hear opera not newcomers to our art form: they are the same people you see at the Metropolitan Opera or Lyric Opera of Chicago or San Francisco Opera. read more
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