Opera: I Have Seen the Future and it Works, Mostly

I had my first shot at HD-theatre opera Sunday. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning, but that’s a detail: this stuff is going to stand the opera business on its head.

We took in Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet in the boxy corner room at the multiplex here in Palookaville. This place is, from one point of view, just your typical crappy little armpit of a theatre, with broken seats and where your feet stick to the floor. And the production was, shall we say, not up to Met standards. First, early arrivals were assaulted with the same drumbeat of commercials that they feed to the slack-jawed yahoos in the regular theatres down the hall (and at the same volume—I assume the kids have all lost their hearing by the age of 14?). But then when the main event got going, we found we had no sound at all—not a plus in an opera. Dutiful, we mostly sat there, but a few truculent souls went out to the front of the house to raise a little sand. I was one of them, and I admit I felt a bit sorry for the $8-an-hour kid who got left behind with the machine gun to cover the retreat. She said she was sorry but it was a new (improved?) projector. We weren’t impressed. She said she couldn’t rewind because it was live. But it wasn’t live, it was a rerun of the previous day. She said the whole thing was run from someplace else (New York?). We asked her why that should matter. Despairingly, she said she’d give refunds. But by now, the sound was actually on –though 20 minutes into the show—so we figured we’d go back and make the best of it. And unexpectedly, a couple of minutes later, the same kid showed up again, this time to announce that, well, actually, yes, she had figured out how to start over. And so we got our second shot. So, bully for her, and I won’t dwell on the few brutal interruptions when the screeching of the soprano was superseded by the screeching of a projector (do those things still have sprockets?).

But all this is details; the ship will right itself in a heartbeat. Thing is, the performance as a whole was wonderful—as remarkable as any performance I’ve ever seen. The screen seemed huge as it more or less wrapped itself around me, far more enveloping than any live performance I’ve ever intended. And the staging—well, they probably overdid it with all the jumps and swoops, but the plain fact is you can see so much more with live cameras than you can with your own paltry little eyes: live performance will never be the same again. Yes, yes, it’s not live. That’s a problem: even in the H-est of HD, there is some stuff you will never see. But there is so much more stuff that you do see that no live performance can ever offer.

[The opera itself? Oh, that… actually, it was fine, though I admit I wouldn’t have gone so gaga at a live performance. Juliet is Anna Netrebko (link) and she is certainly the woman of the hour. Roberto Algana Alagna (Damn! Sorry about that!)(link) as her Romeo may not be a world-shaker, but he’s cheerful and warm-hearted and the chemistry (the “shimmy,” as he put it demurely) between them was all that you could hope for. The opera itself has some lovely music, and it is a dutiful representation of a remarkable play (in some ways, perhaps an improvement on the play)—but you can’t really say it is one of the majors. I have to admit I found the orchestra a bit obtrusive. I don’t think the problem was in Domingo’s conducting so much as in the score itself, which seems to me sometimes to get in the way with what the singers are up to (I suppose a more discreet sound mix could have helped).]

But the HD performance: that’s the ticklish part. Mrs. B is already disgusted with the TV screens in the balcony at the San Francisco Opera House (though I am not). Now we have one more reason to wonder whether it is worth all the time and trouble to trek down there for a live performance (we are, be it noted, 170 miles away). Indeed, can any opera house compete? Well, yes, the Met—surely one of the great public spaces on the planet, on a par with the Piazza San Marco in Venice. But even there, it may be the space, not the opera, that is the draw.

I can see that this stuff is only beginning. They’re noodling around with the equipment now in ways that will look amateurish, primitive, five years down the line. On the way out I repeated my crack about how I’d hate to be an opera company manager today because I wouldn’t know what business I am in. My friend Dick waved his arms at the theatre around us. “This,” he said, “is the business they’re in.” I think he may be right.

Footnote: And it's not just HD screening. For a full display of what the Met is up to, go here.

Opera Note: Met HD Rosenkavalier

I already weighed in on the Met's Der Rosenkavalier when we saw the live performance last fall so let me draw on yesterdays' HD performance at the Palookaville Multiplex for just a few extra comments.

One: the horseplay between Renée Fleming and her "boy toy" (!) Susan Graham at the opener is a lot more erotic at close range than it did from the Balcony Circle. You can see them tickling, poking and very nearly giggling their way through the morning, which is just exactly what a young lover and an old cougar would be expected to do.

Two: I can't even remember who we saw in the "third-banana" role as Sophie at the Met--maybe it was Christine Schäfer who played it in the HD and if so she's a big gainer from the HD format. She's got a lovely voice but it's weak in the low register. She's also a wonderful actress, with loads of great face-action (she reminds me of James Woods, as a performer with more going on in his/her mind than s/he can contain). Both the voice and the face deliver better in close-up than they do on the big stage. I'd love to hear her in something like Schumann songs (fn.: I see from Wiki that she debuted as Sophie in San Francisco back in '95. We had season tickets for the SFO Opera back then--so chances are I saw her before yesterday).

Three: Mrs. B, and I disagree over how they played the great trio in the third act. Mrs. B. thought they destroyed the unity by focusing on the singers one (or two) at a time. I thought it helped me to follow what is a thrilling but fairly intricate piece of music. Either way, it's a reminder of what you already know: HD and big stage are two different shows. Opera will never be the same.

Opera: Lucia

A scan of Google results suggests that people were dumping tickets for today's performance of Lucia di Lammermoor--either the stage version at the Met or the HD simulcasts at theaters around the country, including here in Palookaville. Hard to tell whether this wave of unloadings came from the absence of Rolando Villazón,who had to bail after highly public display of cracks and coughings a couple of weeks back at the opening--or because of the somewhat-south-of-iffy reviews of the performance itself.

Either way, the sellers might have been missing a bet. At least from the cheap seats at the HD, today's show may not have ranked as entirely magical, but it was a perfectly acceptable piece of work--balanced, appreciative and tightly integrated. For Piotre Beczala Villazón's replacement as Edgardo, this had to be a kind of a Judy Garland moment, though at 42 he is not exactly a newbie (he sang the Duke in Rigoletto a couple of years back). But you can't buy the kind of attention you get when you show up on short notice. I'd say he rose to the occasion: his performance wasn't as fully thought out as it might have been with more practice, but he has a good feel for the language and the drama and he engaged remarkably well with his leading lady. It might be also that he doesn't project quite well enough in enough in the big house.

The leading lady herself--that would be Anna Netbrebko, still fresh back from maternaty leave, has a full, rich merlot-y sort of voice, although she may not have recovered quite all of her electricity just yet. But I'd say the palm goes to the villain of the piece, Mariusz Kwiecien (another Pole) who starts out as your ordinary case of tragic responsibility and then quickly turns nasty when things don't go his way. Or if not Kweicien, I'd say the conductor Marco Armiliato, who made it clear that he loves this score and the orchestra he gets to perform it with. Unfortunately, if you failed to notice him, it was not for the Met's lack of trying: somebody in production turned up the volume on the orchestra to a point where (perhaps particularly with Beczala) it had an unfortunate tendency to trump the vocals.

Mary Zimmerman's set took a lot of flac at the opening. I don't know whether or how much she may have changed it since then but I must say I didn't mind; perhaps some things work better in HD than they do on stage. The Met's in-house publicity bills the presentation as "a Victorian ghost story." I think that may be a bit too kind; the opera itself is surely a bit more in the nature of neo-Gothic and the production, as things tend to be, is somethiing of a melange.

Perhaps I have tipped my hand here: Lucia has never been at the top of my list of favorite opera war horses. It certainly has one of the great coloratura show pieces, and as a whole, there really isn't anything wrong with it. For my money, there isn't quite as much right with it as one might wish, but it's a perfectly pleasant way to while away an afternoon (or midday, in HD), and this presentation, even given its improvisational touches, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Opera: The Met's HD Tales of Hoffman

I can't remember when I've seen such a first-rate combination of staging and singing as we saw today in the HD theatre broadcast of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman from the Met.

The singing, to coin a phrase, kind of speaks for itself (but I will say more infra). The staging--well, if you don't like it, you will say that it is cluttery and intrusive. If you like it, you know that the reason it works lies in the nature of the opera itself and its composer. Recall this is Offenbach's only "serious" opera (or the only one that persists in the repertoire). He wrote it toward the end of a career, in which he felt increasingly the need not just to prove himself but to justify himself.

And everything about Offenbach is a contradiction. He is a Frenchman, but he's not. He's a Jew, but he's not. He's a serious composer, but he's not. He's a divided soul. He's a cosmopolitan. And that is the point. I've never seen any production that goes further to identify the welter of cultural connections that Offenbach can exemplify.

Offenbach wrote the opera in the 1870s--a troubled time in France, hard on their humiliation by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war (he staged a performance at his home in 1879, but then died in 1880, before any full public staging). The Met's director, Bartlett Sher, says he has pushed it forward to the 1920s, which is true enough but only up to a point. Granted, there are enough cabaret touches that you half expect Joel Grey to pop out and shout "Wilkommen!" But there's a lot more than that; there's plenty of leftover Belle Epoque; there's an anchoring pub scene and for the finale, the whole gang goes to Venice. The point is that the music seems to be able go resonate with all of these.

Joseph Calleja here in his first outing as Hoffman is the glue that holds it all together, the same way James Gandolfini holds together The Sopranos. Calleja has said himself that the voice is a fine fit for the music and he's right: Calleja seems as much at home in Hoffman as Anthony Dean Griffey is in Peter Grimes (except that Griffey may be a one-opera singer; Calleja has given every evidence that he is nurturing a full career). Calleja gives you a Hoffman who is all of a piece, a searcher and a sensitive soul. And also something of an outsider; Sher likes to talk about Kafka and that is not wrong, but you could tell the story as a chapter in the long history of romanticism without any reference to Kafka at all--or putting it the other way around, calling him "Byron" would do just as well.

Aside from Calleja, I thought the most winning personality onstage today was Kate Lindsey as the muse. She doesn't have the strongest voice but she knows exactly what she wants to convey, and she is on stage through almost the entire production--detached and ironic, yet still sympathetic with her somewhat bewildered protege. The star turn belonged to Anna Netrebko as the thwarted prima donna. She turned in a perfectly creditable performance, but it's remarkable that this segment actually seems somewhat thin in a presentation like this where a different woman sings each of the three leads.

James Levine was back at the podium, dealing (to all appearances) graciously with a back brace. Sher got to join the onstage applause line at the end, along with Michael Yeargan the set designer Catherine Zuber who did the costumes--and well deserved, I say, probably should happen more often.

A side note: if you're having as much trouble as I did getting a grip on Offenbach, you might consider starting with La Vie Parisienne, which must be about the most successful of his undertakings in opéra bouffe. "Comic" is just exactly what Hoffman is not, but this blowout extravaganza in a medium with which he was much more familiar may give you a more accessible sense of what he thought the musical stage might be.

Afterthought: Just a few days ago, we watched Red Shoes--Michael Powell's high-kitsch mash note to The Arts. Powell weent on to do Hoffman, and I can see now how much Powell's Hoffman is a sequel to his Red Shoes. In retrospect, Powell's Hoffman is good fun, but it's got about as much to do with Offenbach as it does with John Wayne.

Must-read for Opera Fans: Isherwood on the Met

Opera fans will not want to miss the fine wrap-up by Christopher Charles Isherwood in this morning's NYT about the Current State of Things at the Met (that "Spider-Man" lead in is only a distraction).  Nothing sensationally new here, but a sane, measured and generally sympathetic account  of life under Peter Gelb.  But the part that made me laugh aloud was a look back at the old days:

Directing for the opera house is a discipline with its own distinct demands, and the scale of the Metropolitan Opera’s stage adds another troublesome factor to the challenge. In the pre-Gelb era the grandiose literalism of Franco Zeffirelli was the house style at the Met, at least for the core of the repertory. His meticulous re-creations of period décor and his penchant for filling the stage with boisterous crowds and the occasional animal were pleasing to fans who enjoy opera as an escape into an eye-popping fantasyland of the past where even the greatest suffering took place in sumptuous surroundings. But Mr. Zeffirelli’s productions often had a way of diminishing the operas themselves; their emphasis on scale and spectacle could trivialize the musical dramas they were meant to showcase.

Also a fine throwaway on the challenge of performing under the close scrutiny of the HD camera:

Watching the telecast of  [Nicholas] Hytner’s production of “Don Carlo” on DVD, I noticed that the performers were often acting in different keys. Roberto Alagna, in the title role, a creature of the old-school European opera stage, hits the emotional notes squarely and with ample recourse to semaphoric posturing, while Simon Keenlyside, portraying his boon companion Rodrigo, employs a more inside-out acting style. He occasionally seems to be searching for an authentic human connection that Mr. Alagna’s more presentational style made impossible.

Almost impels me to betake myself to the Palookaville multiplex for five more hours of Wagner's "Ring."  Well, probably not.  

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:

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.

Liveblogging The Future of Opera

Liveblogging a DVD performance of Richard Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten, I'm marveling at how the whole business of opera is morphing (you could say) before our eyes.

Review the bidding:there was a time when you went to the theatre and listened while overweight and overaged warhorses belted out the favorites (sometimes they sat on stools, which cannot have helped the drama). Then somebody cooked up the ides of translation--I still have a couple of CDs of Italian operas sung in English, and they're actually not bad. -

Then the operatic Bolshies stood the whole business on its head with translation subtitles--an innovation from which the purists have not yet recovered. Subtitles (surtitles) are a problem, I admit, when they are so situated that if you watch the subtitle, you can't be watching the stage (or where, like the Kennedy Center, there are parts of the theatre from which they can't be seen at all). But they sure made the whole process accessible to a much broader audience. I got a sense of what life was like before subtitles a couple of years back when I went to a performance of Die Zauberflöte--an opera I have seen many times--in Budapest, sung, of course, in Hungarian: if you didn't already know what was going on, you were just lost.

And then recordings. Along about 1944 my mother, determined to inflict a little culture, brought home as stack of 78rpm recordings of longhair favorites. One of them was laabeled Rienzi. Since the operatic Rienzi extends over six hours (two evenings), it is interesting to wonder what we could have gleaned from a three-minute disk.

Then come LPs and then CDs and a whole body of quite respectable full-length performance.s But of course, vocal only: we can imagine the cast in Levis and sweatsuits with folding chairs and music stands.

VHS and DVD brought some quite respectable repackaging of live [performances like the one I'm watching right now (Solti, from Decca). But even the best of these are pretty static, in the sense that they show you little that you wouldn't see if you were sitting in the audience.

Somehow it took the Met's new HD to liberate the techies to play with the old toys in a wholly new way. So far in the first couple of seasons it has been free-range experimentation (bliss was it in thet dawn to be alive!). Some of it is goofy but forgivably goofy as they explore the limits of this whole new venture. One thing that is clear is that the electronic version is moving further and further away from live performance. Example: we saw Hamlet at the Met a few weeks aback and then just fdays laater Mrs. B. (though not I) caught an HD replay. She says it is a whole different show when you can see Simon Keenlyside's nosehairs,

Someday soon, someone will ask--no, wait, surely somebody already has asked--hey, wait a minute, why do we need the live audience anyway? If we did away with those messy spectators, there's no telling how much we could come up with by way of swoops and dives--we wouldn't have to worry about the camera blocking anybody's view. And we could do it all in Wichita, where the rents are lower. And so the Met finds a whole new home.

Fn: A particular enthusiasm--I don't know if anybody else does this or not, but I like to watch Italian opera with Italian subtitles--I can almost make it out that way. And if it works for Italian, I should think it would work for English just as well--uncoupling "subtitle" from "translation altogether."

Who Said It, and When?

Maybe someday they'll think I was crazy, putting all this work and energy into an art form in decline.  Frankly, I'm not at all sure that it isn't a losing battle.

 Oh, I won't be coy.  It's James Levine, music director at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, rounding on 40- years' association with the company.  The remark  is quoted in The Maestro Myth, Norman Lebrecht fascinatingly gossipy history of modern conducting.  I'm not clear on the exact date but it seems to be about 1990.  Lebrecht says that Levine's "prime achievement" (at least in his early years) was "to nurture a succession of fine singers in a world bereft  of vocal talent.

But he adds that "in addition to developing singers, Levine worked wonders with the troublesome orchestra, never one of the Met's glories."   I'll say; I'm not old eno--well, actually am old enough to remember the earlier barren years but I wasn't doing opera back them (my first Met encounter was 1990; they were doing
Dvořák's Rusalka; we were in the upper balcony and it was hot).  Still if you follow opera journalism at all, you can sense the awe with which his reputation is held among opera professionals and fans.  We saw him just a couple of weeks ago in the HD performance of Don Pasquale; he looked pretty decrepit (but if I count right, he's only 67).  Still, as I guess I said back then, the opera was good but the overture itself was one of the most remarkable I've ever heard.  One can only wish him 40 more.

Update:  Here's a source that says that the Met premier of Rusalka doesn't come until 1993.  Memory a little shaky tonight is it, old boy?

Projections of Power

Here's another topic on which I am perhaps just playing catchup: projections of power in architecture.

For starters, I suppose that just about every durable structure can be read as a projection of power:d the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, the Hagia Sophia, whatever.  But move closer to home: for thre moment, I'm particularly interested in the late-19th Century bank building.  You recall: it was down at the corner of Fourth and Main.  It may have been Greek revival, perhaps faux Renaissance.  In any event, its point was: we are stable and durable, we will be here when you need us.  Correspondingly, I think one of the inflexion points in modern finance came to pass at that point--say, the early 80s--when it sank in on bankers that you didn't need a building for a bank.  If you were a money center potentate, sloshing around in surplus capital, you could just ship it all out to some guy with a swivel chair and a computer in an office in a strip mall between the Karate Dojo and the manicurist.  Presto, a bank.

Item two: the opera house.  Seems to me the standard opera house in Central Europe or Northern Italy is  an outcrop of the Austrian Empire, saying "we're here and we're staying--deal with it."  Perhaps this explains why every jerkwater pioneer town beyond the 100th Meridian in the 19th Century had to fling up an opera house, as if to say, "don't be misled, we are real."  I can only begin to imagine what we will do with that tradition as face-to-face opera gives way to multiplex HD.

Item three: railroads.  Up in Tacoma a couple of weeks ago, I marveled at the splendid old rail terminal, now a courthouse, and wondered to myself--what kind of optimism,  not to say cash, led to the construction of so grand a facility in what is, after all, something of a tank town?

I thought of these "projections of power" again this morning when I read the splendid  Business Week piece on the implosion of the postal service. Here in Palookaville, we've a newish post office in drab Steelcase modern.  We also still keep the old one--a dignified pile on the south side of the town square.  The new one always seems to be packed with customers, the old one, not so.  What would it be like if we just abolished the old one and farmed out the residual traffic to, say, the convenience store just a couple of blocks up the street?  We'd have more convenient parking, for one thing.

I know that each of these examples poses issues of its own.  Post offices, for example--I know that no community, no matter how small and forlorn, wants to let go of its local postal service (in this, it is just like passenger rail, although I guess the rail battle had been pretty much fought and lost).     Post-office building must also have a lot do with political patronage--the local politician getting goodies for the boys and projecting his own power via a heap of building material with his name on it.

I really don't know where to go with this except to roll my eyes and say declare that "my, it's a changed world."  I guess it is obvious that our lives today are more abstract, more in our head.  But do we know how to live in a world without stable points of reference--banks, opera houses, railroad stations, post offices, that have done so much, for good or ill, to define who we are?   

"I'd Sell My Soul to See Her Do the Shimmy Once Again"--Once Again

A while back I showcased Newman Levy, the greatest of opera doggerelists, and in particular his imperishable narrative verse account of Thaïs, known to opera lovers as the work of Jules Massenet. When I first ran across this gem 50-odd years ago I had never heard the story of Thaïs, didn't know there was an opera by that name, knew scarcely nothing about opera at all. I always loved the verse and today, I close the circle: we're off to the Palookaville Multiplex to see the Met's HD production of Thaïs with Renée Fleming. High expectations, more later.

Afterthought: Well, maybe tomorrow or Monday. After the opera, we trek off to a sing-along Messiah. I love these things: they can make me believe (against all evidence) that I really have a voice.

La Bohème on the Big Screen

I admit it, I never have been that crazy about everybody’s favorite opera, La Bohème. And it’s not mere snobbishness: I love everybody’s other favorite opera, Carmen. I guess where I get off the train with La Bohème is that first scene where they try to keep themselves warm by setting fire to a musical score. Hello, a score? That won’t keep them warm for long enough to get back to the chair. As Mrs. Buce says, they’d be a lot better off setting fire to the chair. Either Puccini didn’t know anything about garret life, or he’s being willfully facetious—I guess I lean to the latter.

All this is by way of saying how much I liked the Met the production that I saw live via satellite this morning (sic) here in Palookaville. It’s one of those new Met HD simulcasts that I’m so entranced with. It’s not perfect: Puccini still insists on hitting you with a baseball bat and in the midst of all the romantic misunderstandings, I keep reflecting on how much better these people could have functioned with just a little bit of counseling. Still, I must say that Angela Gheorghiu is as convincing a Mimi as you are likely to get, Yes, Gheorghiu—she’s got a peachy keen voice which I know she doesn’t always present with the discipline she needs, but this time she was more careful and thoughtful than ever I’ve seen her before.. Earlier in the day on the radio, I happened to hear a compare-and-contrast between Ghoerghiu and Maria Netrebko, and on Mimi, I’d give the palm to Gheorghiu. And for my money, Ramón Vargas is as good a Rudolfo as you could hope for. I see the New York Times thought him just so-so. Well, no accounting for taste: I thought him his mix of winsome, warm-hearted and just slightly bewildered was all you could ask for in this particular role. I’d love to see him try the same approach to Elixir of Love, although I suppose that role takes a bit more by way of wit.

And the Zefirelli set—well, I can see why they might have tired of it at Lincoln Center after 347 performances, but here in Palookaville—and tricked up with a lot of HD camera work—it was fresh and exciting. Fact is, I’m pretty much of a sucker for just about any Zefirelli set. I suppose they are beginning to look dated in the age of post- postmodernism but hey, then, so am I.

I still get tired of Puccini way sooner than he gets tired of himself. I guess it explains something that the one I really like is Gianni Schicchi, a one-actor and only remotely a romance. Witty and acerb with a lot of (then) new musical tricks, it gives you a chance of what he could do when he wanted to. Meantime, if I have to see La Bohème again—and if I keep on hanging around opera houses, the chances are pretty good that I will, then I hope it is at least half as good as this one.

Opera Note: Met HD Carmen

Okay, here's the scoop on the Met's HD Carmen, as seen at the Palookaville multiplex yesterday: it was a room largely populated by 50- to 80-year-old women, decently dressed and presentable, all kicking themselves sideways for having listened to the nuns in middle school.

Think of it: with just a little bit of enterprise, they could have been the brooding, butt-smoking beauty who gets to run off with Mr. Studola. Instead they wound up as Micaela, loyal, self-sacrificing and long-suffering whose greatest thrill comes when she is nearly gang-raped by a barracks full of horny soldiers.

Okay, so Micaela goes on to a comfortable maturity, with a 401k and tickets to the opera on Saturday afternoon, while Carmen lies dead in the rubble at the end of the third act. Forget that. A short life but a happy, not so?

It was that kind of Carmen--energetic to the point of urgency, and dripping with lust. Not least, it made its good-girl point by showcasing far and away the best good-girl Micaela that I've ever seen --the Italian soprano Barbara Fritolli, hiherto unknown to me, who inhabited the role with a density and conviction that added heft to the drama as a whole. From her half-time interview, I gather that she meant it this way: she appears to think that Micaela is an underappreciated and often underplayed role, and she certainly made her point.

Of course it's still a secondary role, and if you remember much about the show, it's going to be more of Carmen (Elina Garanca) and Don Jose (Robert Alagna). Their chemistry was superb (it needs to be: I remember a Carmen a few years back at the New York City Opera where Carmen and Don Jose just didn't seem all that interested in each other). But I'd have to say it is Alagna who is the more at home in his role. No longer lost as the Other Guy in the team of Angela Gheorghiu and the Other Guy, Alagna is a talented and polished singer with just the right touch of loser about him to make his Jose plausible.

Garanca for her part has a lovely voice and a world of technique, but sadly, there is nothing of the loser about her: no fatalism, no superstition, no incapacity to frame the future, no aura of doom. Impresive a she is as a singer, you can never quite forget that underneath the Cher wig there's a strapping Balt whose shots are up to date and who spend an hour this morning on an elliptical trainer (a NordicTrac?).

Teddy Tahu Rhodes who played the role with four hours' advance notice, turned in a perfectly creditable Escamillo; the trouble is that part of the point of Escamillo is that he's really nobody--just a reflection of the adulation of others. So if he comes in and just belts a few, why then he is just doing his job.

The production by Richard Eyre is getting a lot of favorable but invidious comparisons with the Tosca that opened the Met's season last fall. I didn't mind the Tosca that much, but I must say that Eyre, together with Choreographer Christopher Wheedon, put together a production with a lot of originality while continuing to carry conviction. The dancing works; it's integrate with and develops the story. And as I guess I said, it's a production that does not stint the sex. I can't remember when I have seen quite so much langourous stroking of the female fanny. A bit too much, actually, I think, for the two ladies next to us. But we were in the third row (the theatre was crowded and we came late). And anyone you look at it, there was no way of missing the point that as between Micaela and Carmen, it is Carmen who has more fun.

Opera Note: The Met's HD Onegin

We caught a rerun of the Met's Eugene Onegin last night in HD at the Palookaville multiplex. It was the second time we'd seen EO in a month--previously, in as Russian theater with a Russian cast, chorus and orchestra at St. Petersburg. The compare/contrast is entertaining and probably instructive, if I am smart enough to dope it out. There was something wonderful about the insistent Russian-ness of the St. Petersburg performance. The Met's, by contrast, is a cultural encounter--I do not say a clash. The Met's Tatiana is the almost-inevitable Renée Fleming; Lensky was the Mexican-born Ramón Vargas. But the conductor was the ubiquitous Valery Gergiev, by now established as the sole proprietor of Russian opera culture worldwide. And the title role went to Dmitri Hvorostovsky, who looked and sounded like he'd been preparing for this occasion all his life (the Met debut of the production with this cast was in 1997; I'm not clear when exactly the DVD wa made).

I feel a bit equivocal about EO; it's easy to stick up your nose at it--to say that Tchaikovsky isn't that great to begin with, and that opera was really not his dish. Indeed there is nothing here that sticks in your mind like "Nessun Dorma" or "La Ci Darem La Mano." No doubt the signature piece is Tatiana's confessional "Letter Scene," but it is more famous for its length (15 minutes, give or take) than its content. There's a lot of opportunity for display in the orchestra and plenty of dance--enough of both to make you suspect that Tchaikovsky just wasn't all that interested in, or comfortable with, the singing. Many have remarked that his scenes are more tableaux than action.

Yet it's almost unfailingly an agreeable way to spend an evening: an interesting story well told, with a lot of music that is agreeable even if not dazzling. In the Met's presentation, I think you get something a bit better than that. Hvorostovsky,, as I suggested, is the ideal Onegin: handsome, dynamic, proud, self-involved. He's probably a good exemplar of why women like bad-news guys: he'd be the very devil to live with, but you have to concede that he sure is cute.

If Hvorostovsky was born to his part, you'd have to give even higher marks to Vargas, who had to learn his. Press reports say that he threw himself into mastering the Russian. But more than that he mastered the character: his Lensky is just as proud and self-involved as his friend, but tetchier and more unsure of himself--and susceptible to a romantic self-delusion that leads him to his doom.

In the early acts, I thought Fleming was Fleming--disciplined and polished in a style that gives you nothing with which to quarrel. But did you ever notice how often after a Fleming performance, the main thing you remember is the gown? Whatever else you can say about her, the girl does love her threads.

All this is background for saying that her final scene with Hvorostovsky was one of the most arresting I've ever seen her play. I don't know if it was him, the score, or the mere fact that for once she was not wearing a fancy frock: the two of them just ripped off in an ecstasy of passion and, of course, separation. For the sake of her fans if not her career, I can only hope those two get together more often.

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.

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:

Opera Note: The Met's HD Nixon in China

I'm delighted I had (took) the chance to see the Met's HD Nixon in China today, and oddly, I'm just as glad I didn't see it when it first came out 24 years ago.

Why would this be?  The simple reason is that this is an opera where I suspect just everything has to be first-class to make it work.  And it's hard to think of any place that comes even close to the Met for supplying the support that the creators would need.

But more than that: we know so much more about Nixon than we did 24 years ago. We know more about how awful he was--but we've also come to to recognize what an interesting, challenging and in so many ways constructive person he could be.  And it is hard to think of any opera that offers a complex  hero with quite so much complexity and nuance.  Peter Sellars in a commentary mentioned Mussorgsky--I assume he was thinking of Boris Godunov--and Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, two other stories of flawed and troubled leaders.  This is a useful insight and it is a compliment to Sellars--and, oddly, to Nixon--that Nixon is able to stand in their company.

It's an imperfect work, for all that--almost three separate works, each act in an entirely different style, and some parts work perhaps better than others.  In the first act, we see Nixon and Mao face to face in dialog.  Here the librettist (Alice Goodman) works almost straight from the script.  It's a delight to see/hear Nixon in all the creepy weirdness that we've come to know so well, and also Mao, floating free somewhere between sagacity and senility on a transit that neither he nor anyone else can quite follow.

The second act gives us Pat Nixon.  I was thinking before I saw her that she might be the toughest nut to crack in this effort at recreation--so taciturn, so bitterly private.  I think the creators did the right thing here: with Pat, in contrast to her husband and Mao, they simply didn't try all that hard to hew close to reality.  They created a woman who could give herself voice and who came across as a plausible Pat, quite aside from the question whether she was the actual Pat.

But the second act was largely dominated by that hoariest of operatic staples: a ballet.  Here it is that hoariest of Marxist staples, "The Red Detachment of Women," as recast by Mark Morris (and  it is one of my great regrets after a lifetime of cultural gormandizing that I passed up a chance to see the real "Red Detachment of Women" in London back in the 70s).  With one qualification that I'll get back to later, I thought it was a complete success: a full-blown panorama, at once funny and very scary, of the Chinese past, and of what the Maoists thought of their past.   It ends with a show-stopping coloratura (three high C's), from Madam Mao (Kathleen Kim), fit company for Olympia or the Queen of the Night.

The third act I thought didn't work as well.  The team tried to give us the back-narratives of the protagonists on interwoven musical lines.  It was worth a try: the idea of listening to Nixon and Mao as they to explain and justify themselves was promising as a  device for adding texture to their encounter.  But the creators seemed to have cluttered things up a bit by trying also to interweave some insights from Chou En-Lai and Henry Kissinger, and it didn't help (Pat Nixon and and Madame Mao came along for the ride).  The stage became too busy and unfocused.  I'm not sure, it might have been the libretto and the characterization, maybe the music, perhaps the singers--maybe something as simple as the fact that their voices were not well enough delineated.  But I found myself checking my watch.

Chou in particular was the one of the six who seems not fully thought out.  Chou has always gotten a bye from western observers of China as the thinking man's Maoist, the suave and cultivated cosmopolitan who rose above the vulgarities and excesses of his boss--yet how he could survive at the top so long without some blood on his hands would seem to be a question.  In any event,  there's a problem here, and   it is much like Pat Nixon's: Chou is too private,too guarded, too circumspect for easy presentation on stage.  You'd have to take liberties like the creators took with Pat.  For good reasons or bad, they didn't do so with Chou.  (the fact that Chou was dying of cancer didn't make it--aren't we all dying of something?).

Which leaves Kissinger and here I think the creators missed a great opportunity   With Nixon, they made a great success by presenting him in all his nuance.  Kissinger, they just left as a clown. This isn't fair and worse, it isn't good theater: Kissinger is at least as complex and interesting as his boss and it was a shame not to present him so.  Perhaps part of the problem is that they felt the need to run him into the ballet as a sexual predator.  But of all Henry's indisputable vices, I'd say that sexual predation is probably quite a long way down the list. Granted that  he liked to greet the photographers on the arm of a blonde a head taller than he, in a $7,000 frock.  But by all accounts, he didn't bother stay the night: he'd slap her in a cab at 10 o'clock so he could go home and tuck in with a good book.

These failures are defects, but not fatal defects.  Unlike so much new stuff, Nixon in China seems to have grown in esteem over its lengthening lifetime.  As I say, I think we understand Nixon better; very likely we understand John Adams better; perhaps we understand ourselves better.  It's an arresting piece of work and very much deserves its place in the very short list of new operas that might actually be worth seeing a second time.  

Afterthought: just how many instances of oral sex will henceforth be regarded as the de rigueur minimum for a modern opera to be taken seriously.  It's getting to be like the appearance of the brass band in Verdi.  Tan tan tara.

Update:   Mrs. Buce emails from home in Palookaville to recommend the NYT review by Max Frankel, who, whatever his chops as a music critic, enjoys the peculiar distinction of having been present on the tarmac at the original of the opening scene.

Opera Note: The Met's HD Don Carlo

Okay, so back to Verdi's Don Carlo, specifically the Met's HD transmission of same today. The short point is that it was superb, a splendid response to a score that needs no less.

Though it has competitors, I suspect that among serious Verdi fans this might be the all-time favorite.  Among more casual opera goers, perhaps less so: it is probably less vivid in mind than half a dozen others, from Rigoletto to Falstaff.  The same evidence supports both points of view: Don Carlo is massive--running a bit shy of five hours portal to portal in today's version, which is about par.  And there are three versions in two languages; while they are largely similar, there's enough difference in detail to make you wonder whether you've really seen it before.  And it takes six strong voices which means it will be a lucky day before you see an all-round strong performance.

The plot, too, is a bit of an oddity.  It seems simple enough on the surface: young love seeks to outwit the elders in the quest for freedom.  Well, yes, but in this case, the desired one is also papa's wife, which adds a touch of incest, not to say confusion.  And papa--specifically, King Philip II of Spain: Verdi dismissed him as a "savage monarch," and at times,  he does play the villain of the piece.  But in fact, he is not his own man: we quickly learn that he is a mere pawn of the dread Inquisition and that his own terrors and disappointments are as great as those of anyone else in the cast (Don Carlo surely is, bye the bye, the most anti-Catholic of operas, although I'm not sure anybody pays that point much mind).

Six roles, but fact it is the young lover and freedom fighter, Don Carlos himself, who bears the brunt of the work: he is on stage in almost every scene and interacts with virtually every other character.  Carrying the weight today was Roberto Alagna, and you might have been surprised to see (hear) how good he was.  It's easy to underestimate Alagna: he came to the major league in the baggage of his former wife, Angela Georghiu, and he offers so relaxed and laid-back a manner that you might well mistake him for the boy who cleans the swimming pool. (and it wasn't that long ago that he walked off a major stage in a pout).

In fact, Alagna has a steady and dependable voice, coupled with a capacity to connect with almost anyone with whom he share the stge.  Don Carlo is very much a duet opera--as Alagna says, "a duet, not  duel," with lots of intense, breath-to-breath voice-to-voice encounters.  So while he might not be the most brilliant Carlo in terms of technique, he's got just the mix of stamina and emotional availability you need to make this work.

Simon Keenlyside as his best buddy and sometimes collaborator, seems to offer more by way of suavity and nuance.  But--Mrs. B would kill me for this--but I wonder if his situation isn't the revere of Alagna's: he's pretty good at expressing himself, but perhaps not quite as good as you, if you are not paying attention, might think. 

For me, however, the real star of the show was Ferruccio Furlanetto as the king. He has three big moments: one with Keenlyside, one with Eric Halfvarson as the Grand Inquisitor, and a nine-minute display of isolated anguish on his own. He nailed them all: here is a guy who can sing but also, clearly, has given a lot of thought to what he wants to do and why he wants to do it: he is the glue that holds a pretty good production together.

The women were a bit more problematic.  Marina Poplavskaya as the bride/beloved has a luscious voice although I'd say her emotional range was narrow. Part of the problem may be her relationship with Anna Smirnova as Princess Eboli. I gather she Smirnova has taken some flac elsewhere and I feel no need to pile on. But she seemed to me to be miscast: her first song was supposed to be light and sexy which apparently she can't do at all. The rest of the afternoon she sang more convincingly but she seemed to be looking for, and never quite finding, a fixed center for her character.

I don't want to forget Yannick Nezet-Seguin, who looks like me must be all of 13 years old as conductor. Poplavskaya called him "Mozartian" which is extravagent but not entirely off point: he gets a kind of clarity and ease out of the orchestra while making it look like he's just having a grand time. He debuted at the Met a while back in Carmen; he did  fine job there, but I suspect that maybe Don Carlo was a better showcase for his talents.

Staging was restrained, which I thought a relief.  There is so much else going on, you don't want to have to worry about sets too.  Anyway, thank heavens they didn't bring Zeferelli; he would have given us a real auto de fé.

Live and Still Wriggling from the Met!

The estimable Alex (The Rest is Noise) Ross links to his own New Yorker piece about a non-fiasco at the Met--as he succinctly puts it, Tristan and two Isoldes (link). And as Ross so insightfully observes, this kind of screwup is not a bug, it's a design feature:

Any true fan who claims to attend opera solely in the hope of encountering sublime displays of vocal and dramatic mastery is putting you on. Certainly, operagoers cherish those rare occasions when all variables intersect to create the appearance of perfection; but they hold just as dearly to the memory of those unmagical nights when it all falls spectacularly apart. The gladiatorial aspect of opera is as old as opera itself. No other art form is so exquisitely contrived to create fiasco.

Yeh, we know how that is. Mrs. B still enjoys regaling newbies about the night we saw the third-string Carmen with her leg in a cast, wiggling her little fanny through the Habanera while kneeling on a table--and how she used plates for castanets, and how they shattered midway--and how Escamillo powers through the door, only to have the wall fall down around him. But it sets me to worrying: I've waxed ecstatic already over the virtues of the new HD transmissions--a new world of opera, all seen from the comfort of your own gummy seat at the Palookaville multiplex (link). Will we be seeing any more of this? How live is "live," anyway? Note that the blooper reel is not enough. Somehow or other, we want the raw, unadulterated accident. Ross again:

As [new General Manager Peter] Gelb’s Met lays greater emphasis on marketing stars, it shouldn’t forget the primitive thrill of the unexpected, which causes the most devoted fans to return night after night.

Quite right, too. And Palookaville wants its disasters, just like everyone else.

Opera: The Met's HD Turandot

I don't think I ever really got Turandot until today. I had seen it only once before, and that under inauspicious conditions. It was a David Hockney production at San Francisco, with some sort of bleachers/platform built up at the back of the stage. I was way back in the balcony and most of the performance took place way up in those bleachers, so I went through most of the evening seeing the cast only from the waist down. There's a frisson of postmodern hip there, but I can tell you it is distracting.

Having seen today's Met production, I have two words: Zeffer Elli. Everything about this libretto and score is over the top, and you have to have the world's most excessive stager to get away with it. There will never be a Turandot set in a darkened basement or a steam laundry, or if there is, I will stay as far as I can away from it. To do this kind of absurdity with a straight face, there is no one but the Z-ster (not even Hockney? I think not, but then maybe I am not qualified to judge).

The opera itself is kind of a dog's breakfast of materials and styles, based on a Persian story westernized by Schiller and laced with what Puccini seems to have thought was Chinese music. There are indeed some interesting and unfamiliar sounds here, although I suppose you could say the same thing for Hoagy Carmichael's Hong Kong Blues:

It's a story of a very unfortunate Memphis man
Who got 'rrested down in old Hong Kong.
He had 20-year privilege taken away from him
When he kicked old Buddha's go-ong.

An even closer comparison might by Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado, which probably owes at least as much to Japan as Turandot does to China. Now that I think of it, the comparison is not at all frivolous: both stories turn on a poisonous brew of lust and cruelty that would be horrifying if not laced out in the gauze of exoticism. And Turandot herself probably owes more than Puccini would want to acknowledge to Gilbert's Katisha (I suppose it is pushing things to say that Puccini's Ping, Pang and Pong echo Gilbert's Three Little Maids from School).

But accepting this frontal assault on disbelief it is actually a pretty good show--which is I suppose the least I can say for the opera that brings us the one song that says "opera" in every coffee shop, bookstore or romantic movie comedy--that is, Nessun Dorma (the only competitor is another Puccini--O Mio Babino Caro from Gianni Schicchi). Today's Met performance was well sung all around, although I'd give the rosette to Marina Poplavskaya as Liù--the voice is peachy cream although if you listen, you can pick up just a hint of an underlying abrasiveness that makes you recognize tht Poloavskaya the singer isn't nearly as docile as Liù the character.

And that, of course, brings you back to the ineradicable problem with Turandot. I mean really--in the long annals of operatic absurdity, this one really takes the biscuit. No matter how strong the performance, you can't help but find yourself thinking that if Liù had only stabbed that idiot princeling instead of herself, then Turandot would have made her queen consort.