The Bastille

Here's a first for the Buces: after all these years, we finally made it last night to the Bastille Opera House in Paris.   Takeaway, it's wonderful.  We'd heard the stories about its scandalous growing pains and also had a vague sense that theg'd turned things around.  The vague sense was right.  Just about everything here is first rate: great acoustics, comfortable seating, big stage.  Although that last could be a problem: the stage actually feels better than the Met, though perhaps only because in a somewhat smaller auditorium.  And the secondary stuff:  helpful staff, convenient signage.  And you walk right in from the Metro, with no risk of winding up in the wrong place.

Apparently some folks still complain that it doesn't look enough like the grand old confectionary of the Palais Garnier downtown.  And they have a point: the Bastille biuilding has all the charm of a Holiday Inn express.  But at least a wel-designed Holiday Inn Express, with findable rest rooms 

The performance--well, pretty good, actually.  Bellini's I Capuletti d I Montecchi, with a capable cast, albeit not the same as the show-stopper with Natalie Dessay and Nicole Cabell at San Francisco a couple of years back.  The staging here at the Bastille was something else again: evidently it's a much-repeated and much-admired rendition. But it struck us as pretty flat.  Maybe our tastes have ben jaded by HD.

Così Followup: What Was Eating Renée?

I've been meaning to follow up on The Curious Incident at the HD Opera the other day--specifically, Renée Fleming as intermission hostess, insisting that the libretto of Così somehow required an apology, as you might apologize if, for example, your football team bore a name that is an ethnic slur.  Of course we wouldn't say that sort of thing today, we nice people, but those were olden times and the music is beautiful so let's forgive ourselves a bit of impropriety.

Say what? Impropriety? How odd. 

The plot is easily told, almost fairy-tale in its simplicity: in the first act, the ladies promise undying love; their lovers depart. In the second a act--uh oh. At the end, a kind-of-a sort of-a-resolution, except maybe not.

Now, I suppose you might find this simply funny (cue: "You find that funny?")  Perhaps more likely, you read it (as I suspect Mozart intended it to be read) as a kind of bleak, autumnal wisdom.  It's mutable, this humanity.  What you thing will last forever--it doesn't last forever, and the chances are you don't even want it to last forever (are you really looking forward to meeting Granny in heaven?  Tell the truth, now.  Really?).  It's the paradox of existence: enjoy yourself, but don't kid yourself. Stuff happens.

With Renée, my first thought was--who wrote her script? Does she have a banker problem?  A political commissar?  But no--on second thought, my guess is that this was her doing, and that the sentiment is deeply felt.  I mentioned before that I read her memoir, which I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend.   I thought it a superb account of how to live in the arts, how to build a career.  But it struck me also as tinged with an odd note of pathos, in the sense of: if I am so successful and famous, why am I not having more fun?

To which, were I her friend, I would say: Renée, love, welcome to hard times.  You are one of fortune's favored, a gift to all humanity and I delight in your success.  But Renée, love, stuff happens.  Even to the likes of you, love, even to the likes of you.

In her perplexity last Saturday, Fleming seemed to try to spin it into a kind of feminist message, as if to say not that "people don't act that way;" rather more on the lines of "women don't act that way, and it is piggy of us to suggest that they do."    Sugar and spice and everything nice (she seems not to have noticed that the men in  Così  are set forth as bearing an equal (perhaps greater) burden of comic humanity--but maybe for the men, it is no more than justice?).  But I don't think she had her heart in the larger political agenda.  It was these women she was thinking about, or this woman, Fiordeligi, whose transition is so central the theme.  Or more precisely, this woman, Renée, who has sung  the part often enough. Personal note, it was my great good fortune to see her sing it there back in '96, and I count it as one of the defining opera occasions of my life.

So, dear friend, go with the autumnal-wisdom flow.  Don't feel any need to try to explain it away and don't ever, ever, try to apologize.  If you haven't got the message yet, you might look back to an earlier New York arts-darlng:

By the time you swear you're his,

Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is

Infinite, undying,

Lady, make a note of this —

One of you is lying.

First printed in Life, (8 April 1926) p. 11

Being, of course, Dorothy Parker. Me, I think I'll revel in Fiordeligi's great (albeit ironic) anthem of faith:

Met HD Così

We took in the Met's HD showing of Così fan tutte and it certainly lives up to its notices: it's a bravura performance and the star of the show is James Levine, powering both the orchestra and the cast with a grit and drive that I've never seen before. Someone in an intermission interview said that it's the rhythm and I bet that's right: for such a spare and elegant story there are some fiercely complicated intertwinings in the score and it's possible for even the best of singers to get lost in a puddle. Not so here: everything fit together. The Levine story is an opera-sized story itself, of course: after two hers, during which most people thought we'd never see him conduct again here he is back again, evidently to show himself that he's still got it and that he is determined to squeeze the juice out of any chance that remains to be offered him.

The singing itself was fine, but that's the thing: I've seen better. I still think Cecelia Bartoli owns Despina and  I'd say that Paolo Montarsolo brings a dark elegance to Don Alfonso that his hard to match.  The only one in the current cast who seems so exactly suited to his role would be Rodion Pogossov as Gugliemo.  But it hardly mattered; Levine (or whoever it was) succeeded in teasing a fully realized performance out of everybody on the stage.  It must be a delight--and a challenge--to work for this guy.

Where Was the Understudy (I Spy a Koch!)?

Okay, I get it--high drama and a break into legend for Kristine    who died twice at the Metropolitan Opera in 24 hours.  If you follow opera you know all about this by now. Opalais sang Butterfly on the big stage last night; she fell asleep about 5 am and about 8am got a phone call--could she sing Mimi in in Bohème in the same place this afternoon, as stand-in for Anita Hartig who had the flu?  Well, no I'm sleeping.  I mean maybe; I mean--and there she was as the afternoon unfolded, looking a little grey and bewildered which was actually just fine for poor consumptive Mimi,  For the curtain call, she knelt and bowed her head.

Brava, brava and all that Kritine, and best wishes to ailing Anita.  But wait.  There's one guest conspicuously absent from this feast.  And that would be?  And that would be the understudy--the one retained and trained to be ready go at a moment's notice in exchange for her big break (on desultory search, I haven't been able to find her name but I know she's out there somewhere).  Look, very likely Opalais is a better singer--that's why the other is the understudy. But she's also bone-tired.  And even though she knows the part (she has sung it before,  and recently) she doesn't know the blocking, the directorial conception nor any of the rest of the stuff that would have made the understudy a more suitable and reliable choice.

So why not the understudy?  I bet I know the answer, or answers.  Start with the house: 3,800 seats, many, even most, occupied by customers who paid retail. Move onto the HD performance in umpty ump theaters world wide. And wasn't this also a radio day?

All of which puts ineluctable pressure on Met General Manager Peter Gelb to put on a rully big show.  And by "pressure," I mean the bank, the donors, the big money who fill the gap between the stiffs in retail and the full budget.  I'm not saying "the bankers told him to do it."  I'm saying they hired him because they knew he was a guy who wouldn't have to be told, because he was understood it.  So, curse you, David Koch! And I hope someone is buying the understudy a beer. 

Update:  Oh, so that's it (maybe).  Evidently Hartig's scheduled understudy cover was Hei-Kyung Hong who has sung the role some 60 times before: see the interesting comment thread here.  So  it was not a case of depriving the unknown beginner.  Still an odd decision, though.

Met HD Prince Igor

We took in the Met's HD of Borodin's Prince Igor today.  It was a first for both of us and I must say I liked it although I'd probably have to see it a couple more times really to get my mind around it.  Meanwhile, a few takeaways:

• They say of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov that the real hero is the chorus.  Maybe, but much truer here: I can't think of any other opera in which the chorus exercises quite so much narrative heft.

• Can you name any other opera which fixes so much compassion on the plight of a nameless peasant girl,married off as a sexual convenience and then discarded?  Or presents the marauder and his friends so unambiguously as a gang of loutish frat rats?

• Is there any other opera--Russian or otherwise--that gives God so slender a role in determining the outcome of military conflict?

• As a reconstruction of the only opera by an important Russian composer, this new production would seem to be an important Russian cultural event.  Yet it seems to have been hatched in Turin and launched and now we see it launched in New York City. Why isn't it at the Mariinsky, and where is Gergeiv?  Netrebko? Come to think of it, where is  Putin?

Fun fact: It appears that Putivi, locus of this Russian masterpiece, is in the Ukraine.

Met HD Rusalka

Mr. and Mrs. Buce share of a vivid memory of their first visit together to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  It was 1990.  The show was Rusalka, with Renée Fleming.  It was coming on summer. We were way up in the balcony, and it was hot.

The trouble is, this memory has to be wrong in each critical respect.  The Met first sowed Rusalka in 1993.  And Fleming didn't play it there until 1997.  Must have been some other opera, or star, or year or whatever.

Give us this much, though: we have seen Rusalka more than once, more than twice in our long and varied career, and we know that it is Fleming's signature role.  Indeed while she did not play it in full at the Met until 1997, the showpiece aria-"Song to the Moon"--was her breakthrough performance as a competition piece at the Met back an 1988.   It has formed a sort of arc for her career.

Even if we didn't see her before, we did see her again yesterday in the Met HD.  It was a fascinating and rewarding performance.  With this kind of history, it was bound to be a Met crowd-pleaser.  It might even have been Fleming's choice--one gets the impression she has been able to dictate he choices of late. Still, I have to wonder how much she enjoyed it.  She was, granted, in good voice.  And while she's not my favorite Met superstar, I have to say I've always liked and admired her (or at least, ever since I read her fascinating memoir/briefing-book on how to build a career).  She's careful and disciplined and never phones anything in  Stll. when all is said and done, it is still an ingenue role: about a nymph and her sexual awakening.  Fleming is 55.  They had her up a tree--really.  You could see she was worrying about getting  her wig entangled in the branches.  Or worse, simply falling out.  You've got to think she is wondering whether, at this time of life, she should be looking for other uses for her talents.

It was nonetheless, as I say, a rewarding performance--much mores for us than it was 23 years ago (heh!) that first time.  I, at least, have a better sense of Czech culture--the folk tales arising out of the bogs and forests (I think also of the Pripet Marshes, not that far east, and of Carol Burnette, singing of "The Swamps of Home.)  I think I can understand Dvořák better--as an orchestral composer, even if he might not have had quite the knack for opera (I mean, what opera composer would let his Soprano go mute through the second act).  I think I can appreciate the kind of scoring that just couldn't have happened before Wagner (same for Verdi's Falstaff, almost exactly contemporaneous).

I must say I also got something out of those snippets of intermission interview that have become a staple of Met HDs.  I appreciated Piotr Beczala that he's not there to be a star; that he is part of a performance and he wants to make the whole thing work. I was greatly intrigued by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the conductor, recounting how he tells his orchestra that they are there to perform "three Dvořák symphonies"--which nails both the virtue of the production and its limitation. And you've got to love Dolora Zajick as the witch--a role which, it says here, she also played in the Met's first outing back in 1997. She knows who she is and what she can do. And for what it is worth, turns out that she is only seven years older than the star.

Here's a treeless rendition of the "Song to the Moon" from the Proms in 2010:

Big Weekend for Music (And a Note on Accessibility)

A big weekend for the Buces on the music scene. Saturday we took in the Met HD Falstaff at the Palookaville multiplex: we had to buck the crowds for The Desolation of Smaug and  I must say they did tank up the (operatic) sound rather a lot--perhaps left over from the previous night's megalolapalooza but otherwise, I'd say it lived up to expectations: a rollicking good time, going as far as you can go to confirm Falstaff's somewhat shaky label as a "comedy."    It was fun also  to listen to James Levine, restored to mental vigor if not physical mobility, wax ecstatic over a comic tradition in which he brackets Falstaff alongside Marriage of Figaro and Meistersingers.  I'll certainly have to give him Figaro which can be falling-down funny (along with so much else).  I still don't get Wagner and Meistersingers in particular gets up my nose.   But it's true that these are three operas in which no virgins are sacrificed which may be enough to put them into a special class, however small.

Sunday we trekked on down to Davis to take in a lovely Messiah from  the American Bach Soloists.  It was all you could hope it could be--maybe not the most show-stopping soloists, but a carefully-thought-out, fully-integrated, coherent production.  It was heavy on the 18th-Century origins, which was fine and refreshingly different from the last full Messiah I saw, this at Royal Albert Hall in London, with double orchestra and double chorus.  I do wonder why the alto/countertenor had to rrrrol so many rrrrs, not just on rrrredeemer but even on rrresurection--but I suppose I should allow him a personal tic.  [Mrs. Buce adds: integration of words and music.  She says she finds it hard to remember any production in which the conductor seemed so completely to understand that there was a reason why particular phrases went with particular themes (she added that she particularly liked the scourging)].

But here's a pointless anomaly that offers me amusement, if  nothing and nobody else.  That is: one thing you have to say about Messiah is that it is just about the most accessible piece of good music ever presented.  Hard to think of a spectator with even the slightest musical literacy who cannot hum HA le lu ja, HA le lu ja.  People in my generation even "knew" that the tune was the same as "Yes. we have no bananas," though this trifle may have passed from the popular inventory.

Now turn to Falstaff.   Verdi's last opera here has many virtues but accessibility it not one of them.   It is, as many say, loaded with musical material. But it tends to come at you thick and fast, such that even the careful listener is left repeating "hey, wait a minute, what did he just say?"  You cold almost say that this torrent of thematic material is a vice except that, in a good performance, it is tried together by a unity of tone.

I've seen Falstaff a number of times now, and I think I have come to appreciate it, though I probably don't have the musical chops to appreciate its nuances (quaere whether I have yet heard it for the first time).  I am spurred to wonder, though, how, if Falstaff presents such challenges, then why was the current Met offering such a success?  I'm sure part of the answer lies in sheer musicianship.  You could see that Levine could barely contain himself as he enjoyed this reprieve opportunity to show that he still has it.  Ambrogio Maestri certainly has the title role down and cuffed to the doorknob; and that Stephanie Blythe woman is a wonder of nature.

But you'd also have to give some of the credit to showmanship.  Robert Carsen has put together a production that you can't help but enjoy, even if the music goes a bit over your head.  It is cheerful, energetic, warm-hearted, earthy enough to carry you over any number of rough spots.  Of course there might be a question of when all the stage hokum turns into a kind of betrayal, distracting attention from its real reason for being.  Could be: I  think this happens a lot with contemporary productions of Shakespeare.  Could be, but for Falstaff I'd say not yet.  There's enough going on underneath the glittery surface which the surface serves, I think, only to enhance.

The Shostakovich Nose: An Assignment

There's a live/HD performance coming up Saturday of "The Nose" by Dmitri Shostakovich in the William Kentridge staging which opened at the Met in 2010.  So here's some homework.  No, not the Gogol story, silly--which you have already read and fully assimilated.  Rather, take a swing at something by Andrey Platonov, perhaps particularly Happy Moscow, which I mentioned briefly the other day (cf. link, link)  and which captures better than anything I know the mood of anxious and giddy expectancy that seems to have swept (urban) Russia in the 30s--that is, before the Great Purge of the later 30s which did so much to define the Stalinist experience in our memory.  

We know that Shostakovich embarked on his career in a mood of high optimism; we know that Stalin didn't cotton to his operatic writing (he was probably baffled and disturbed by it all).  We know that Shostakovich, unlike so many of his contemporaries, survived the turmoil that devoured so many of his contemporaries, and that he went on to become a Soviet icon.  In his introduction to the new NYRB edition Happy Moscow, Robert Chandler says:

A conventional view of Russian history sees the 1917 Revolution as a movement of Utopian  promise and the mid-1930s as a time of fear-shackled, conventional thinking in every area of life.  In many respects, however, it was the other way around.  For several years from 1917 the Bolsheviks were trying simply to cling to power, most people were trying simply to survive, and only a tiny--though vocal--artistic avant-garde was proposing Utopian plans for the restructuring of both the world and the human psyche.  By the middle 1930s, however, it was the State itself that was claiming to make Utopian dreams into a reality.

 Chandler also retells a wonderful anecdote from Wolfgang Leonhard, the German  historian, about emigrating to Moscow in 1935 with his German communist mother.  He reports that they couldn't get any adequate maps.  The only ones they found showed what the city was like before 1914, and what it would be like in the future.  

Afterthought:  And you know, now that I think of it, I remember one other item that captures the same spirit of Moscow in the 30s. That would be the early chapters of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, of which I wrote here.  Read 'em all, and in any event, enjoy the opera.  

Tchaikovsy Update: Met HD Onegin

In the event, we did catch up with the Met HD Eugene Onegin last  night and we render a split decision:   I mostly liked it; Mrs. B thought it rather  mess, and wishes she could go back and redo the all-Russian version we saw in St.  Petersburg a few year ago.  

Well.  With Valery Gergiev in the pit and Anna Netrebko on the stage, this was plenty Russian enough for me, especially in the fine first scene at the country house.  Although I confess I persist in being the outlier on Netrebko: apparently she reigns as the Met's flagship superstar but she still seems to me so often lazy and lackadaisical--as for example in the big letter scene here which is, I suspect, for most viewers, about the only reason they go to Onegin anyway.  On this I admit Mrs. B had a point: neither of us can figure out what Netrebko's Tatyana is doing in what seems to be a glorified cowshed--if this is a time to sleep, why isn't there a real bed?  Or is it that Netrebko just loves to wind up on the floor?  And if this is a letter scene, why don't we see her write a letter?  Whatever; the fact remains, she just can't play ingenue (in fairness, she was a lot better as the older and wiser wife-of-the-rich-guy in the final act).

But in lieu of yet one more review, let me offer two of the most memorable moments of the evening, both from an intermission interview with Deborah Voigt.  One involves Marius Kwiecien, the Polish tenor in the title role.  In the break just after the crisis where we had just seen Onegin blow off the heroine with a puff of hot air, Voigt asked him how he understood is character.  Oh, he is really a nice man, said the star, trying to be kind to her and let her down easy.  

Boy, what a hoot.  The whole point of the scene is that Onegin is a total shit, one of the best so represented in all of opera.  The odd thing is that this is exactly how Kwiecien played him, i.e., just as it should be and not at all like his avowed understanding.

The other was Netrebko herself.  Voigt kept trying to draw her out and learn how she saw her character, how she prepped for her role and got--nothing.  For all I could see, Netrebko simply didn't have an idea.  Mrs. B says I should give her a break here; that her English isn't that great, and anyway, she was trying to maintain a character of dignified reserve.  Could be, but my guess is that she really hadn't given the topic much thought.  

Oh,  no wait, she did make one point, firmly and loudly: that she didn't learn it from Gergiev.  That for you, Valery.

How (and Why) Tchaikovsky is Different.

We missed the Met opener HD of Eugene Onegin last Saturday--just too much going on and truth be told, it's not a favorite, although it certainly is a worthy piece of business.  We saw a marvelous performance in St. Petersburg a few years ago, just full of seemingly non-exportable Russian-ness, which might have capped out motivation to see another.

Still, we may get to the encore tomorrow night, if for no other reason than to test it against this provocative offering from one of the most remarkable opera books I ever read:

[By the late 19th Century] romantic emotion had itself become a sickness.  This is the judgment of Tchaikovsky in his two operas based on Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1879) and Queen of Spades (1890)... .   Pushkin's Onegin [is a figure] from the first age of romanticism.  ... Onegin is too worldly to [kill himself] and, proudly, miserably guards his loneliness in the middle of an incessant social whirl.  Now, at the end of the nineteenth century, these poetic solitaries are redefined by opera as neurotics.

Tchaikovsky's operas are terrified of a dangerous desire which in the composer's case (and in that of his brother Modest, the librettist for The Queen of Spades) was homosexual.  The more violently the musical emotion pours out--in Tatyana's impulsive love letter to Onegin, or the obsessive vows of Herman in the later work--the more prudently or vindictively society in the drama represses it.  ... Tatyana is aloofly spurned by Onegin, and in turn regretfully spurns him; they must both learn to live without desire.  It is as if Tristan and Isolde had agreed not to love each other in deference to Marke. The unoperatic conclusion is dictated by Tchaikovsky's dread of feelings which can be expressed in music but not in action.
At first Onegin is frigidly proof against emotion.  He mocks the susceptibilities of his friend Lensky, and Olga teases her sister Tatyana for wandering off into literary and musical fantasies.  A superficial life is best. The long scene in which Tatyana writes her reckless letter telescopes a whole night from bedtime to dawn, and thus listens in on her unconscious mind.  She ought to be asleep and harmlessly dreaming, rather than entrusting her fantasy to print.  Her aria ends in a swelling musical triumph; another operatic heroine could look forward to having her wish come promptly true. Tatyana, instead, is cold-shouldered by Onegin. Later she is grateful: his cruelty has taught her the self-preservative virtue of the social forms.  Her elderly husband Gremin extols in his aria a very unoperatic kind of love.  He admires her goodness, and is cheered by her kindness; neither feels passionately about the other.  Social duty is their salvation.  The only outlet for musical impulse which society approves is dance, because it obeys strict rules and precludes intimacy--the rustic jigs of the peasants, the jolly waltz at Larina's party, the strutting polonaise which leads a conducted tour of the nobleman's house in St. Petersburg.

Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera 191-2 (1987).   But I'd quibble on one point: I think Gremin does feel passionately about Tatyana.  He can't believe his good fortune in having acquired such a young and lovely wife, and he is besotted by her.

Met HD Giulio Cesare

Mr.  and Mrs. Buce ventured forth on a bright spring morning to spend 4.5 hours in the Palookaville multiplex in the audience for the Met HD presentation of Handel's Giulio Cesare--and count our time well spent.   This is the famous-all-over-town Glyndbourne production, decked out as Gilbert and Sullivan.  Most of the buzz has centered on Natalie Dessay and David Daniels as Caesar and Cleopatra and for sheer theatricality, they deserve the credit. They're both warm, engaging personalities with a knack for theater far above the mean among opera singers.  Dessay in particular--she's got her Carol Burnette cover down cold.

But for music, the day belonged to the second string--Patricia Bardon and Alice Coote as Cornelia and Sesto, two mezzos together as mother and son.  Each was fine in her own right but the chemistry was astounding--the kind of companionship in which each makes the other look better.  Bardon's injured dignity as the quintessential Roman matron was so much more in evidence when set off against her impetuous, hot-blooded son.    And by precise corollary, you got to see better what he was by letting her show yo0u what he was not.  Their first-act closer, "on nata a lagrimar"--I can't remember when I've heard two people work so well together or enrich each other so much.*

Aside from Bardon and Coote, the show-stopper was Christophe Dumaux as Tolomeo--heavy on the clowning but for Tolomeo, that is rather the point: he's a callow little twit, the Lieutenant Fuzz of assassins, one who can squeeze frivolity from the gravest of occasions.

Daniels and Dessay are charming--so much so that you might not notice that neither one was quite up to the job.  Daniels has fine acting chops but he lacks the sense of menace, the capacity to inspire awe, that you would want in any Caesar.  And his voice was so weak at the beginning that you had to wonder whether there was something wrong with the sound system (as the day went on, either he got better, or I got used to it).  

And Dessay--said to say but she really seems to be passing her prime.  I say this without a hint of schadenfreude: I love her all to pieces and I owe her gratitude for some of the happiest evenings I ever spent in the theater anywhere.  But she's apparently had some voice troubles lately and it seems to show.  Not that she is phoning it in or anything: you can see as much discipline and attention to detail as ever.  In the intermission interview, she says she has been doing yoga an hour and a half a day and I can believe it: from the look of those biceps, she could lift up a Volvo.    Right now I think her best days may be behind her and I can only hope I am wrong.
 ---
*But wait: here's a review of an earlier production when Cornelia and Sesto were Stephanie Blythe and, yes, David Daniels.  Wish I could have been there: for my money, Blythe is the best there is, and I suspect Daniels is better suited in any event for Sesto than for the star.  In any event, the reviewer called it "maybe the most electric moment I have ever experienced in an opera house."  Strong language: wonder if he would say so today.

--

Update:  Woo hoo, here it is:

 

Met HD Rigoletto

You had to feel for Renee Fleming doing the intermission interviews for the Met Rigoletto  yesterday,  As in  --paraphrased--You've sung this opera before; how did the new 1960s Las Vegas set change your understanding of the opera?  --Oh, not a lot, Rigoletto is more or less timeless.  --Ah.  Well, how did working with this case enrich your appreciation of the part?  --Well, we are old friends and have sung it together before.

In short, happy, good-natured and a little bland.  Although the negative information is itself probably interesting: Rigoletto probably is an opera that survives changes of period and locale better than some others--seduction, betrayal and murder being, after all, among the constants of the man condition (leave it to the Germans, of course, to do it with apes).  Perhaps the two having most fun were Christine Jones and Susan Hilferty as set and costume designers--they are the ones that got to play around with the neon lights and those glistening faux-sharkskin tuxedo jackets.  Aside from those two, the most interesting thing I heard was the director Michael Mayer, fresh from the more conventional theatre, as he remarked on how invigorating it was to work with a cast who actually seemed to understand their roles: just as a guess, no mainstream opera star ever turns to the director and asks "what's my motivation here?"  (as Ronald Reagan is alleged to have done before a State of the Union message).

But good-natured and bland, you have to admit, sound like odd adjectives to apply to so murky a tale of vengeance.   Mrs. Buce (a special friend of Rigoletto) offers a telling insight--one important respect in which Verdian malediziione still trumps the Sinatran Las Vegas.  That is: take Don Rickles--the most point of comparison with the Verdian hunchback.  Rickles may have been a professional jerk, but you never doubted that he had his own bank account and that he might survive even if Frankie Boy cut him off.  But the Duke's jester--ah, aside from his keeper, he's got nothing.  I think she's right: since he is not hanging by a thread over the abyss, the Sinatran version loses an indispensable note of desperate  insecurity.

Footnote: I'd say the use of a n Arab guy in Arab headdress was a stretch that didn't get across.   I think I see the point:  Mayer wanted somebody menacing and exotic to deliver the curse.  But as staged, he just wound up looking a little silly,.  Besides, at the risk of indulging in chronological fussiness, this is the 1960s we are talking about: my guess would have been that the Arabs didn't show up in force until after OPEC quadrupled the barrel price of oil, i.e., 1973.

The Met HD Maria Stuarda

Deborah Voigt, doing the intermission interviews at the Met's HD Maria Stuarda yesterday, asked the stars if they had done any research into the history behind the great conflict between the two queens, Mary Stuart of Scotland and England's Elizabeth I.  Joyce DiDonato, who sang a glorious Mary, said someone had given her a picture book.  Joshua Hopkins, (Cecil), said he'd looked at Glenda Jackson's performance in the old PBS Series.

One could snigger at the definition of history.  But then Matthew Rose (Talbot) harrumphed that history really didn't figure: that this was a reworking of a play by Schiller and as everybody knows, the central event--the personal confrontation between Mary and Elizabeth in the forest at Fotheringay,  simply did not occur.   So, an Italian operatic rendition of a German dramatic presentation of what never happened to begin with.

All fair comment, but there's another sense in which both DiDonato and Hopkins had it right.  This is, to labor the point, a drama, and it is perfectly respectable to wonder what others had done with it.  DiDonato made essentially this point: she said she had watched others, and learned from them, and then felt the freedom to make it her own.

Peter Gelb, the Met's major domo, likes to promote the fact that  this is a first-ever Maria Stuarda for the Met--odd, which you recognize that it is a wonderful showcase for the female lead (or maybe two), and at the same time gratifyingly cheap to produce--no need for overproduced sets, or overdone crowd scenes.  And while strictly accurate, Gelb's remark may miss a larger point: the two queens have really never faded into obscurity.  Beverly Sills turned in a career-defining performance of the opera next door to the Met at the NYC Opera back in 1972.  And there have been at least two remarkable productions of the Schiller play in the last decade (more by lucky accident than plan, I got to see both, and they were wonderful). That plus any number of old TV and movie renditions should give the aspirant enough to work with.

People speak of this as a two-character opera--Elizabeth and Mary.  I'd say a bit more like one and a half.  Elizabeth galumphs (sic) on stage first at the Met and the two share the big scene in the middle, but in terms of sheer number of notes sung, Mary clearly runs the table.  DiDonato's Mary was everything you, or at least I, could want (I gather she took the register down a bit from the original but my ear isn't well enough attuned to notice). Elza van den Heever's Elizabeth was --interesting, and I don't mean that to be quite as snide as it sounds.  Hers is a crudely masculine queen who waddles in a Pythonesque sort of a costume.  Either it works or it doesn't: I thought it interesting but I can see how others might think this display of chromosomal excess comes at the expense of feminine delicacy.  Either way, she seems to have thought through every line, and to mean exactly what she says.  A larger issue is that her voice doesn't seem very big.  This wasn't really a problem in the boxy little movie theatre; I wonder how it worked in the yawning excesses of the Met.

A final point: everyone will talk about the confrontation between the two queens, but for  my money one of the most arresting scenes was the dialog between Talbot and Mary after she learns that Elizabeth has sealed her doom.    It's at once understated--so  much so that you can overlook it--and deeply engaged.    Ross is a big guy with a capacious voicebox and he is afflicted with a blessing that can be a curse to any performing artist trying to build a career: he makes it look easy.

Sketchy Notes on Les Troyens

An opera generalization: if I'm going to spend five daylight hours in an opera theatre, I'd rather be in the company of Hector Berlioz than Richard Wagner.  Lots of campy over-the-top self-indulgence in Berlioz but the same is true of Wagner and it is not nearly so hit-you-over-the-head irritating.    In any event, Les Troyens (in HD today) is not really one opera, it's two: one about Troy, one about Carthage one about love and one about war, one with lots an lots and lots of dance.  With so much of the day gone, I take time for only a few brief  notes:

• Susan Graham looks her age (she's 51) but for vocal performance, she is absolutely at the top of her game.


• Last-minute-replacement tenor Bryan Himel makes it look easy.  Which is not remotely to say that it is easy, except in the narrow sense that the role seems almost perfectly suited to his natural talents.


• When people talk about Met conductor Fabio Luisi, they still seem to wind up talking about his predecessor, James Levine. Still needs work on the branding, I'd say.

Mozart's La Clememza de Tito ...

... is much better than I had realized before.  That's a considered judgment, based on the HD of the Met presentation conducted by Harry Bicket.  Granted it's a perfunctory assemblage on a borrowed libretto (did I read somewhere that it had been set 40 times before?).  And everybody knows that opera seria is a pain.

But here's the thing--well, bear with me for a moment, this is going to be a stretch.  Consider Hamlet.  Yes, I know, Hamlet is a much bigger deal than CT. But recall how Hamlet comes about.  It's about midway through Shakespeare's career.  He's tried everything at least once. Now he gives you a kind of summing-up of everything he knows about the theatre.  So Mozart here: he is in the last year of his life. Apparently he was scratching to put food on the table but you also get the sense that he was desperate to show us what he knew while he still had the chance.  They say that old artists paint with fewer and fewer strokes.  Bicket in an intermission issue said something to the effect that Mozart when young would have spent ten minutes telling you something that he gets off in ten bars here.  Concentrated, almost frantically direct and to the point.

Which brings me to a second comparison, even more of a stretch: Verdi, Falstaff.  A last chance to tell you everything he knows.  You have to stay alert and catch your breath, it is all going by so fast.  With the qualification, of course, that Mozart in his testament is just 35 years old, while Verdi in his was over 80.

The Met's Ballo: A Discovery

Mr. and Mrs. Buce caught the Met HD performance of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera yesterday and I must say it came across as a better opera than I had realize, or remembered.  I'm pretty sure I have seen it before, at least on disc, but as must be evident, it didn't make a dent on me. 

I herewith revise my opinion.  Grant that this isn't top-of-the-line Verdi.  But accept also that with Verdi (as with, e.g Shakespeare) even second rate is likely to be better than first-rate anybody else.  And recognize also that under conditions like these, the problem for the second-tier may not be its inferiority but just the fact that may get lost in the shuffle.  If Ballo is "mediocre"--in the strict sense of "middling,"--it's "mediocre only in that it stands below, Falstaff or Otello or--well, you get the idea.

Another problem:  shaky provenance.   If you know only one thing about Ballo,  you know know that this is the one that met with censorial disapproval because it feature(d) the assassination of a King in Sweden and the authorities thought that hit a bit too close to home.  Whereupon Verdi responded, "va bene, Boston," and whisked them all off to a locale where he had never set foot and about which he knew nothing.  The modern observer is likely to suspect that if Verdi didn't take his own intentions more seriously than that, then there was no reason for us to do so either.

This was probably never a fair inference, but whatever; at any rate, in recent years, Ballo has moved back to Sweden and the American stuff is history. Seen in its  native habitat, there's nothing particularly weird about it: just a good, straightforward Verdi plot, with an insolent  authority figure, a troubled friendship and a ong, slow, loud, death scene.   I suppose this might be a problem: Mrs. B says it all reminds her too much of her favorite Rigoletto, from just half a dozen years before. I can see her point, but I think there is a difference here: I think you see Verdi really trying hard not to repeat himself; to stretch out, to explore some different musical forms,  In his exhaustive appraisal of the operas of Verdi, Julian Budder quotes a 19th-Century review, saying that Verdi here "having rejected convention and formula, having assigned to each character his own particular language and having rendered the dramatic situation with evident effectiveness, in fact [has] moulded the drama."  This strikes me as good enough for government work.

One could add the fact that it's a marvelously singable piece of work, and that the Met fitted it out with a world of talent.  For my money, Stephanie Blythe might be the most accomplished singer now working and my only complaint is that in her role as the fortune teller, she gets to go home so early (I'm intrigued to note that the cast for Verdi's original "Boston" version specifies that she be "of the negroid race," or so it is translated in Budder).  I'll even give grudging points to  Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the aggrieved and betrayed best friend.  But I do have to wonder--how did a tough kid from Siberia get such impeccable teeth?

Met HD Elisir

Elevator pitch: town drunk stalks wealthy landowner.  She flics him off until she learns that he just inherited a bunch of money, at which point she flics him on again.

You buyin'?  Well, audiences buy: that's the plot of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, constantly in the repertoire since it opened in 1832, now 13th on the Operabase list of most-performed operas.   Granting that opera plots never make much sense, you will surmise that I don't quite get it.  I'll agree that there's a lot of mighty purty music, though.

The Met used Elisire as sits season opener a couple of weeks back, and as the opener for its HD season yesterday.   We caught the Palookaville avatar.  It's  new production and I gather not everyone was impressed.  I can see where the critics are going on this one: it's certainly not a production for purists.  Bart Sher, falling victim to the familiar directorial impulse to Make his Mark, has sandblasted away some of the innocence and given it all a darker edge.  There's a loss here:  as the other man, the thoroughly amiable Mariusz Kwiecien comes across as a boor (as the rejected suitor): he loses the comedy without any obvious compensation (chalk the fault up to Sher, not Kwiecien).    As diva, Anna Netrebko did what Anna Netrebko does.  But both performances more or less cleared the way Matthew Polenzani as the guileless young swain.  I heard Sher at the break mutter something about his "poetry" but that's a distraction: he's just a love-struck kid and (though he is three years older than Netrebko) I think he nailed it.

There's been a fair amount of buzz about the sets.  Cognoscenti keep nattering on about the inspiration of Oliver Messel, the ballet designer, but the reference is likely to be lost on the average opera viewer/listener.  For me, a more direct reference might be those racks of engravings that street vendors used to offer in Rome, as a small flicker of immortality for the passing tourist.  Whatever modernism there may have been in Sher's interpretation, the staging provided an almost eerie counterpoint that cast everything in context and made sure you didn't take any of it too seriously.

More on Opera and Sexual Anarchy

I have few unfulfilled wants in life but I still wound like just one chance to sing the role of Giorgio, old Germont, at the Met in Verdi's Traviata.  You remember old Germont?  He's the the swain's father, the one who is trying to maintain the good order and stability of his family and (not least) to marry off his daughter.  To achieve this end, he has to ice Violetta, the consumptive prostitute courtesan, inconveniently beloved of Alfredo,Giorgio's son, the handsome young Labrador retriever of a tenor.  In both his social and his operatic role, old Germont gets to sing one of the warm-hearted and pathetic, yet also blackly comic, numbers in the entire catalog.  You understand, don't you dear (I translate loosely).  My daughter is a respectable woman.  She needs a respectable husband.  And you are a whore, so you will have to go.


But watching Manon last weekend at the multiplex HD, it dawned on me that old Germont, just like the hero and heroine, is a stock type.   Manon has his own Germont: Comte des Grieux, whose job is to bring his own young man back to the path of righteousness (which in his case, oddly, means leaving the church).  All brought off nicely by the American base/baritone David Pittsinger, who does not seem to have sung Germont, though I wish he would.  In Madama Butterfly,  you get a similar perspective from Sharpless, the American consul---not precisely a father, but still the man-to-man avatar of common sense and good order.


Carmen offers a different take.  Here the force of order is Micaëla, the "village maiden," as it says in the cast list, who tries to persuade the hapless Don José to abandon his lethal bout of fun and games.  This time, it is the baritone Escamillo who gets all the nookie.

Hello, Peter?

Manon and the Idiocy of Men

Mr.and Mrs. Buce ventured forth to take in the Met's HD production of Massenet's Manon today.  It's a fine presentation of a not-quite fine opera.  Massenet is almost never challenging or actively engaging but he is fluent and here, at least, he seems to have mastered the knack of matching the score to the meaning of the moment.

Still, it was all non-taxing enough so as to allow my mind to wander to the whole array of golden-age operas premised on the idea that sex is an antic force disruptive of stable social order.  I thought partticularly of La Traviata, Camen and Madame Butterfly, although I probably would have to allow a dozen more.  The standard mantra for all of these is that they demonize women (or "woman") as the creature who brings evil into the world.  But on the evidence at hand, this doesn't seem quite right to me.  Sex is an antic force alright, but the women are more or less the bewildered vehicle, perplexed as anybody else about the strange power of the visitation.  Carmen is no doubt the most explicit expression of human agency, but Carmen doesn't want to make trouble; she just wants to be free.  The hypnotic power she holds over others appears to her to be almost a curiosity, perhaps useful in its way but nothing to write home about.  I suppose the most damaged of the four would be Cio-Cio-San who has the misfortune to entangle herself with  imperial realpolitik, and did everyone notice that she is the only one to have a baby?

The other common theme of the four, perhaps more consistent, is the men.  And what a bunch of lamebrains they are, lacking the most rudimentary tools of prudential wisdom. You could say it's all dopamine poisoning, but I'm not so sure: looks to me like they've pretty much earned their lamebrain status on its own terms. There isn't any one of them for whom you can feel much of anything other than the notion that he had it coming.  Even, or especially, Pinkerton who gets to walk away--"her gentle face will always haunt me, torturing me endlessly," ri-ight.  You walk away with the profound sense that it wouldn't take any great skill to beguile this lot, and if the devil really wants a challenge, he'd better look someplace else. For extra credit, consider what happens to my list if you add Berg's Lulu.)

Afterthought:    and speaking of men and their lives.  The intermission camera lingered patiently over the  workmen moving the sets.  All men as far as I could see: a job that requires considerable skill, along with cooperation, teamwork.    And they get to use their fabled upper-body strength. And they've got a union. Do they begin to understand how well off they are?

Don't Miss Ernani

If you've got any taste for opera--and if you missed the opener Saturday--remind yourself to make room for the replay on Wednesday March 14 of the Met's HD presentation of Verdi's Ernani.

Yes, it's early, green Verdi, not up to the standard of the the bigfeet of decades to come.  The plot is absurd even by operatic standards and you pretty much skip the (short) fourth act.   But if you want to understand the arc of Verdi's career, it's essential.  This is the one in which, as the serious students might say, Verdi becomes Verdi: you've got your lovestruck but troubled soprano; your faintly befuddled tenor; your imperious and manipulative baritone and your sinister passacaglia basso.  Good singing all around here, but I'd say that the prize goes to Ferruccio Furlanetto, who has lately taken total command of those Verdi basso roles (I see he'll be back at the Met next year in Don Carlos).  In a break-time interview, Joyce DiDonato asked him a question about (I'm quoting from memory) how you deal with the ahem somewhat shaky structure of the plot.  His answer was something on the lines of you just have to make the character carry conviction and the  rest will take care of itself.  Good point: works for Verdi's great progenitor, Shakespeare, and Furlanetto shows how it can be made to work here, too.