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Jean-Stéphane Bron's new documentary about the Paris Opera's 2015-16 season spins behind-the-scenes theatrics into high-drama.]]>
It's no surprise that drama inherent in running an opera house can outpace the onstage theatrics, but rarely have audiences been given as clear a look at the pitfalls and turmoil of an intendancy as Jean-Stéphane Bron's new documentary about the Paris Opera's 2015-16 season — the first full slate offered under then-new director Stéphane Lissner. The film chronicles a rather chaotic season wherein the company endures a strike; choreographer Benjamin Millepied arrives then departs as the company's ballet director; music director Philippe Jordan stewards several challenging new productions — including Romeo Castellucci's thrillingly exegetical Schönberg's Moses und Aron — to the stage; and the city shows a courage indéfectible in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the Bataclan. At just 110 minutes, the documentary outpaces Adriana Lecouvreur by about an hour, but delivers a dose of backstage drama than would have kept Cilea inspired. Keep an eye out for cameos by Bryn Terfel, Jordan, then French President François Hollande and rising baritone Mikhail Timoshenko. Indispensable viewing for opera lovers curious how their saucisson gets made. The film's US premiere is slated for October 18 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Quad Cinema near Union Square in Manhattan.]]>
"Best Opera Recording"
Ghosts of Versailles, John Corigliano, Pentatone.
"It is not satirizing, subverting, pastiche-ing or deconstructing anything; it's just quite lovely and memorable. … There really hasn't been anything quite like Ghosts of Versailles, before or since, imperfections and all. This CD is an essential release." —Joshua Rosenblum, August 2016
Giulio Cesare, Handel, Decca.
"Breathtaking music-making coupled with a production that is frivolous at best and, at worst, utterly incoherent vandalism." —Adam Wasserman, November 2016
Cold Mountain, Jennifer Higdon, Pentatone.
"About two-fifths of the opera … is the kind of strong, original, ear-grabbing writing one would expect from Higdon … But much of the remainder of the piece … is soft-edged, prairie-tinted prettiness. It's superficially attractive but artistically anonymous." —Joshua Rosenblum, June 2016
Le Nozze di Figaro, Mozart, Deutsche Grammophon.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin "never loses sight of the work's comedy, but his effervescent reading also reveals the emotional resonance that makes it a humanistic masterpiece. … [He] offers a reading so well gauged, and so bursting with life, that it continually provoked me to think, 'What a wonderful opera!'" —Fred Cohn, December 2016
Król Roger, Szymanowski, Opus Arte.
"An insightful, artistically masterful production of a gripping, gorgeous opera." —Joshua Rosenblum, March 2016
IN A MEDIUM-SIZED GALLERY on an upper floor, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City is now exhibiting "Wagner's Ring: Forging an Epic," a collection of rare materials from the Morgan, Bayreuth, the Met and other archives that's essential viewing for fans of the composer and his magnum opus. While the exhibit tells a coherent story of the work's genesis using manuscripts and artifacts—from Wagner's inspirations to the first performances of the Ring in the U.S.—it might be most enjoyable for the access to particular extraordinary objects, regardless of their context: the handwritten draft/outline of the score for the "Ride of the Valkyries"; Wagner's reduction for a friend of Wotan's Farewell; his personal revisions to the published libretto; and original tickets to the first performance of the full cycle at Bayreuth.
|Tickets dating from 1876, the year that the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus opened
Courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum
And there's more to discover than what we've mentioned: costume sketches, letters, hand-signed invitations, newspaper coverage, satirical cartoons, rare manuscripts, many other orchestral sketches, and much more. Find out what appeals most to you before the exhibit closes on April 17.
More info can be found at The Morgan Library & Museum.
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Of the Monteverdi, our critic William R. Braun wrote, "There have been versions of Ulisse that seemed studies in marmoreal ritual, and versions that took delight in the syllable-by-syllable inflection of Monteverdi's setting of text. But this one … is notable for what might be termed a 'modern' sensibility in the dramaturgy … the production as a whole treats the work almost like a brand new opera. It renews appreciation for the way Monteverdi, presented with a not especially astute libretto, tweaked such elements as the timing of the revelation as to who Minerva really is, and the presence of Penelope at the archery trial, with a fine dramatic instinct that puts some of today's literary adaptations to shame." Find the full review here.
The Steffani CD was featured in our upcoming January issue's Best of 2015 list, for Philippe Jaroussky's turn as Anfione, which Braun called, "an out-and-out star performance," adding, "under music directors Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, Baroque practice and modern tastes are both accommodated." You can read the full review here.
For the Entführung, our critic David J. Baker notes that soprano Diana Damrau offers a fresh interpretation of Constanze, but that it doesn't always work. "Damrau's vocal condition on this recording undermines her attempt to soften the music's impact," Baker writes, and conductor Nézet–Séguin's tempos often don't help. But, "When Constanze is not at center stage, the conductor emphasizes spark and contrast," Baker writes. "He maintains tension in the melodic line and … strong forward momentum. His style is informed by the historically informed school of Mozart performance; he adopts the period instrumentalists' brio and, in the overture and march, traces of their jangly 'Turkish' timbres." You can read the full review here.
Our critic Joshua Rosenblum was skeptical of the silent, two-minute opening of the Jenůfa video, but praised much of the rest of the disc, particularly the "versatile, charismatic powerhouse" mezzo Jennifer Larmore, who plays Kostelnicka. "In a role that almost demands to be shrieked, Larmore achieves startling vocal and dramatic intensity without ever sacrificing the intrinsic beauty of her resplendent, crystal-clear mezzo," he writes. "The result is a fully fleshed, three-dimensional Kostelnicka, who manipulates others with charm and persuasion as opposed to cold-blooded, brute force domination. Larmore's multilayered portrayal brings out the best in everyone around her." Read the full review here.
(OPERA NEWS did not receive an advance copy of Enfant, so we did not review it, though a review of another new recording, from Naxos, featuring the Lyon National Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, is scheduled to appear in our April 2016 issue.)
Works nominated in other categories were also reviewed by OPERA NEWS. Jonas Kaufmann's Puccini Album, our #1 Recital Disc of 2015, was nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. So was Joyce DiDonato's Joyce & Tony—Live from Wigmore Hall (our #3 Recital Disc); Mark Padmore's recording of Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart; Talise Trevigne's take on Christopher Rouse; and Cecilia Bartoli's St. Petersburg.
Of the Kaufmann recording, our critic Judith Malafronte wrote, "After a dazzling start with excerpts from Manon Lescaut, we hear something from each of Puccini's operas, arranged in order of composition, offering a superb look at the composer's development as well as Kaufmann's virtuoso vocal acting … the superstar tenor's zillions of fans … will be ecstatic." You can read the full review here.
Of the Padmore, Malafronte wrote, "If you make it through the opening tracks of Mark Padmore's newest lieder-recital disc—or better yet, skip the overindulgent, mannered Haydn set altogether—you'll be rewarded with imaginative, committed performances, especially of some out-of-the-way Beethoven songs"—the cycle "An die Ferne Geliebte." You can read the full review here.
About St. Petersburg, Malafronte wrote, "The relentlessly curious Cecilia Bartoli investigates the birth of opera in Russia with world-premiere recordings of arias by Italian and German composers based at the eighteenth-century court of St. Petersburg. Bartoli turns her keen musical personality to the lyrical shapes and gestures of this style, and her clean, instrumental approach is highly satisfying." Read the full review here.
Of the DiDonato, Henson Keys wrote, "The ebullient personalities, instinctive musicianship and rock-solid technique of mezzo Joyce DiDonato and pianist Antonio Pappano are amply displayed on this two-CD set." Find the full review here.
OPERA NEWS did not review the Talise Trevigne disc. It did however review several more nominees, including two nominees for Best Classical Compendium—Handel's Allegro, Il Penseroso Ed Il Moderato, conducted by Paul McCreesh; and Laura Karpman's setting of Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama—as well as Gerald Barry's Importance of Being Earnest, nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Of the Handel, Malafronte writes, "Most Handel-lovers admit a special affection for" this work, adding, "It's a pleasure to hear conductor Paul McCreesh return to Handel, and his thoughtful approach is matched by passionate, deeply felt performances, especially from the chorus and orchestra (the Gabrieli Consort and Players)." You can read the full review here.
Of Ask Your Mama, critic Sam Perwin wrote, "The Carnegie Hall performance of the piece was well received by critics and audiences alike, prompting an ongoing tour of Ask Your Mama at concert halls around the country. Unfortunately, despite its best efforts, the urgency of the live experience is lost on the recording. Many moments that I assume would take flight given a staging, multimedia accompaniment, and live singing instead fall flat in a studio. This is not to diminish the magnitude and impact of the work. Karpman's score, in adhering to the sprawling nature of Hughes's poem and musical instructions, explores genres ranging from Afro-Carribean drum beats and R&B ballads to German lieder and jazz-club swing." Read the full review here.
Lastly, of the Barry, critic Joanne Sydney Lessner was harsh. "Barry is a deconstructionist, dismantling the elements of Oscar Wilde's perfect comedy of manners and reassembling them on his own terms," she writes. "The result is engineered cacophony, topped by impossibly angular vocal lines—all necessarily doubled in the orchestra—that are virtually unsingable and almost entirely incomprehensible. Even if the listener can parse specific words, any meaning, let alone subtext, is completely lost in Barry's purposeful disregard of the natural rhythm of the text. Worse, there is no delight in the language. Barry's approach would find a better match in the work of Ionesco, whose dialogue is largely absurdist. But Wilde is about wit; it's not about nonsense, and it's not about nothing." Read the full review here.]]>
Each year, the centerpiece of the gala is the winner of the $50,000 Richard Tucker Award — an American artist who shows every sign of being on the threshold of a big international career. The 2014 winner of the Richard Tucker Award, the gifted tenor Michael Fabiano, led off the program with "Si! De' Corsari il fulmine" from Il Corsaro; he was in superb voice, and his final "Alarmi!" packed a visceral wallop that got the program off to a thrilling start.
After that, there was a slow stretch: soprano Pretty Yende has an attractive voice, but her interpretation of "Qui la voce" was dull; she seemed unable to shape the aria or move it toward any kind of climax. Bass Ildar Abdrazakov's "Infelice! ... e tuo Credevi" from Ernani suffered from a similar lack of engagement, and by the end, he was nearly inaudible. Tenor Joseph Calleja's "E lucevan le stelle" was not in the thrilling Richard Tucker tradition, but he did display a fine messa di voce, and generally opted for sweet over stentorian.
The evening then moved into high gear: Angela Meade, the 2011 winner of the Tucker Award, electrified the audience with "Esprits de l'air" from Massenet's Esclarmonde, backed up by mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano. Meade sang with tonal beauty, splendid rhythmic elasticity and fearlessly made the spectacular jumps to a high D. She expertly captured the aria's magical lunacy and wit; it was also a brilliant programming choice, since the repertory at the Tucker Gala tends to be unvaryingly meat and potatoes. Meade returned for an unannounced "Pace, pace, mio Dio" from La Forza del Destino, in which she floated certain phrases magnificently and landed on her climactic B-flat, held past the double-bar line.
The rest of the program was a mixed bag, with baritone Željko Lučić offering a rather dry-toned, juiceless "Nemico della patria" from Andrea Chénier, and tenor Paul Appleby and Broadway soprano Alexandra Silber (a last-minute addition to the program) making absolute hash out of the Balcony Scene from West Side Story. Michael Fabiano figured in all of the remaining high points, including a "N'est-ce plus ma main" from Manon (in which he was superbly partnered by the fine soprano Joyce El-Khoury) and the finale of Act II from Lucia di Lammermoor, in which Fabiano's Edgardo was the real dramatic centerpiece, particularly when he emitted an achingly pain-wracked "Rispondi!" to Meade's Lucia — eschewing the usual triple-forte rage that tenors go for at that moment.
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It was discovered last spring that Georgian soprano TAMAR IVERI's Facebook page included hostile comments about a 2013 gay-rights protest in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Among other things, the page stated, "Georgian man has always been the symbol of bravery.... Should we, in the future, hand Tbilisi over to the guys with Louis Vuitton bags?" (There appears to be a large faction in Georgia — including many in the ruling party, the Georgian Dream Coalition — that feels public squares should not be given over to gay demonstrations.) It was subsequently announced that both Brussels's Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and Opera Australia had been moved to cancel upcoming contracts they had with the singer. On June 23, Opera Australia denounced Iveri's comments as "unconscionable" and stated that she would not be singing Desdemona, as planned, in OA's production of Otello. It appears, however, that there was more to the story — on both sides.
According to Justin Koonin, the convener (or chair) of the New South Wales Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, the initial response from Opera Australia was silence. "After forty-eight hours," says Koonin, "the company issued a statement on its Facebook page saying that they had made Tamar Iveri aware of the situation, and she had issued an apology, and rehearsals were going ahead with her." Iveri did issue a statement, placing the blame for the posting on her "very religious" husband and his "tough attitude towards gay people." This appears disingenuous, as it seems that the anti-gay comments first appeared on Iveri's Facebook page in mid-2013, nearly a year before the scandal became international news. The Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, having discovered a July 2013 interview with Iveri that seemed to support her husband's position, turned up the heat under Opera Australia. Only then did the company post a statement finding Iveri's remarks "unconscionable." (Opera Australia's chief executive CRAIG HASSALL and artistic director LYNDON TERRACINI declined to discuss the matter with OPERA NEWS, and the company has since removed any comment on the matter from its Facebook page.)
When OPERA NEWS requested a comment from Iveri, the soprano claimed that she withdrew from performances herself, because she did "not want such an important artistic event to be marred by any problem which, however unintentionally, has developed because of my presence in the cast. This is the sole reason why I have left the production. I want to add that I am immensely saddened and hurt by the campaign which is now being mounted against me.
"I have never been prejudiced against anyone, whether for religious or racial reasons, or for any other kind of prejudice, including those regarding sexual preference. I abhor prejudice in any form altogether. I have been performing in an art form that includes thousands of gay people on both sides of the stage, and there is no one who can come forward and claim that I have ever exhibited any such prejudice against them, as indeed I do not. I have said before and say here again that the words attributed to me were not my own, and that I therefore cannot take personal responsibility for them. I can only repeat again and again that this is my position.
"I also want to make clear once more that my concerns last year about the Parade in Tbilisi for Gay Rights were not based on any opposition to the rights of gay people everywhere. Rather they were founded on my fears that the parade would arouse a violent reaction from parts of the arch-conservative Georgian religious community. Unfortunately, this is exactly what did happen, as those participating in the parade were criminally attacked by such elements."
At the moment, Iveri is scheduled to make her role debut as Tosca in Melbourne in November 2014, under the auspices of Opera Australia. Given her sluggish performance of "Vissi d'arte" in concert on YouTube, this casting seems questionable on artistic grounds; it remains to be seen whether the engagement is in jeopardy for other reasons.
On April 28, I attended the competition finals. "You had to kiss a lot of frogs to get a few princes," murmured one of the judges to the Foundation's administrative/artistic director, Stephen DeMaio, on the way out. It was true: the competition began shakily, with several singers turning up whom I felt should have been granted no money at all. But as the day wore on, things picked up considerably, and there were some dazzling talents on display.
The top prize of $12,500 was justly awarded to tenor Benjamin Bliss, twenty-eight, who sang "Una furtive lagrima" in a lovely, caressing tone. It was a magical performance that was absorbing without becoming lachrymose. The two first prize winners were also completely deserving of the $10,000 award granted to each of them: Rebecca Pedersen, only twenty-two, and a winner in the 2013 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, sang Le Cid's "Pleurez mes yeux" with a big, beautiful sound — she needs only to dig in a bit more emotionally, because she has everything else — and Ryan Speedo Green, twenty-eight, offered a completely satisfying, magnificently finished performance of "Solche hergelaufne Laffen" from Die Entfuhrüng aus dem Serail. He seems ready to perform this role on any stage, anywhere.
Baritone Alexey Lavrov, twenty-eight, took second prize ($7,000) with Edgar's "Questop amor vergogna mia." His voice has a solid core and he's a highly expressive artist. This was one of the most complete performances of the entire day, and I wouldn't have complained even slightly had he won the top prize.
The third prize winners ($5,000 each) also showed up strongly: mezzo Virginie Verrez, twenty-five, with "Deh, per questo," performed with both elegant Mozartean style and dramatic bite; twenty-eight-year-old tenor Mario Chang, another ready-to-go artist, sang "Che gelida manina" with a warm, glowing sound and exciting dramatic involvement; and twenty-three-year-old soprano Courtney Johnson offered La Wally's "Ebben? ne andrò lontana" in the best performance I've yet heard from her. I did not think, however, that Johnson should have placed above the stunning mezzo Shirin Eskandani, thirty, whose "Non più mesta" was extraordinary; her singing is joyous and she seems incapable of making an unmusical phrase. Eskandani took the $3,000 fourth prize, but again, I would have had no quibbles if she had earned the top award. Twenty-seven-year-old tenor Paul Han took fifth prize ($2,500) with an exquisitely phrased and impassioned "Fantaisie aux divins mensonges" from Lakmé that was full of dramatic surprises along the way.
There were ten additional $1,000 grants and nine $500 Encouragement Awards handed out as well. Among these, baritone Norman Garrett, singing "Vision fugitive," was having an off day and didn't show nearly as well as he usually does; soprano Courtney Mills, thirty-two, sang "Pace, pace," once again demonstrating that she has one of the best instruments of any young singer today, though she often seems to falter a bit in competition, as she did here; and mezzo Ewa Plonka, thirty-one, with a highly musical, dramatically pointed rendition of Konchakovna's Aria from Prince Igor. I would like to hear more of soprano Shelley Jackson, whose "Tu, che di gel" showed off a good grasp of Puccini style and a vocal with a distinctive profile. Soprano Jennifer Cherest, twenty-nine, seriously overcalculated her charm with a too-cute-for-words performance of Norina's aria, "Quel guardo il cavaliere," from Don Pasquale. And twenty-six-year-old baritone Jarrett Ott, who offered Die Tote Stadt's Tanzlied, is very talented, but he tends to stand outside the things he sings; he needs to engage emotionally to a greater degree. (In fairness, he was handicapped by being interrupted by one of the judges.)
On March 24, near the end of the first half of Broadway Backwards, the annual gender-bending concert benefitting both Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Manhattan's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, something stunning and unexpected happened. The curtain rose to reveal Patricia Morison, decked out in diamonds and looking far younger than her ninety-nine years, sitting onstage with a music stand in front of her. The applause was overwhelming, and Morison was quite visibly moved, putting her hands up to her face more than once. Dimly remembered as a leading lady of minor '40s films, but a Broadway immortal, thanks to her performance as Lilli Vanessi/Katherine in the original 1948 production of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, Morison explained to the audience that she had chosen something appropriate for the evening's sex-reversal theme: "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," which she used to sit backstage and listen to "two very funny men" (Harry Clark and Jack Diamond) sing. She then sang the complete number with great panache and style, nailing every laugh. The ovation dwarfed the one that had greeted her entrance; the shouting, stomping and clapping went on for what seemed like minutes.
Miraculously, this was followed by the biggest laugh of the evening. Julie White, who hosted the evening with The New Normal's Bebe Wood, strolled onstage to announce the closer for the first half: Norm Lewis, singing "Home" from The Wiz. "This next performer . . ." White said, " . . . is just fucked." (Lewis came through with a lovely performance.)
The show, directed and written by Robert Bartley, offered plenty of other show-stoppers, among them: Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Andy Kelso in a hilarious performance of "The History of Wrong Guys" from Kinky Boots; Robin de Jesús and six terrific dancers (including standout Marty Lawson), with "Prehistoric Man" from the 1949 movie version of On the Town; Beth Leavel with a brilliantly inventive "She Likes Basketball" from Promises, Promises; and Michael Berresse and Tony Yazbeck with a deeply touching and resonant "Nowadays/Hot Honey Rag" from Chicago, featuring the original Ann Reinking Fosse-based choreography. In the end, the evening raised an impressive (and record-breaking) $423,000.
The show takes the young Carole (née Klein) from her days as a precocious student at Queens College, when she has her first taste of success writing songs for doo-wop groups in the 1950s and '60s, through her loving but volatile marriage to her collaborator Gerry Goffin, to her emergence as a star singer–songwriter with the multiple Grammy-winning album Tapestry. (Is there anyone who didn't own this LP back in 1972?) There's a generous helping of King's hits along the way, and several by Goffin and King's close friends, the songwriting team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann. The numbers are neatly staged by director Marc Bruni and particularly by choreographer Josh Prince (who help turns "On Broadway" into a show-stopper), but what keeps the show earthbound is the book by Douglas McGrath. From the early scenes, which are reminiscent of the hackneyed old movie composer biopics from the '40s and '50s, McGrath's script listlessly rolls by, feeling like an outline that he couldn't summon the energy to develop. There are some nice individual lines, and they are given a good spin by Jake Epstein as Gerry Goffin, Anika Larsen as Cynthia Weil, Jarrod Spector as Barry Mann and, most of all, by Jessie Mueller as Carole King. ("I have the right amount of body, it's just not organized properly," complains the young Carole.) Publisher Don Kirshner (Jeb Brown) is a device, not a character, and Liz Larsen works much too hard as King's self-involved mother. Most of the big scenes are under-written, including the one in which the two couples' problems come to the surface over a strip poker game, and many of the moments dealing with marital discord seem strained and a little trivial, like an old '70s sitcom that decides to go all dramatic with an episode on infidelity.
But Jessie Mueller, like Hugh Jackman in The Boy from Oz a few years ago, works magic with her material. It might seem risky to build a big musical around a menschy woman who never loses her equilibrium, but Mueller so fully inhabits King's Brooklyn-girl-niceness that she ennobles her shaky vehicle. Her charm is never forced; she gives the show a quiet but absorbing center.
Recently, on a Sunday afternoon, my partner and I walked into Mel's Burgers in our Columbia University neighborhood. In addition to having the greatest burgers on the West Side, Mel's is something of a sports bar. "Which game would you like to be seated next to?" asked the hostess when we walked in. "Um," said my partner, "I dunno. Do you have figure skating?"
I'm afraid this about sums up our degree of attachment to the world of sports, but we were of course keen to tune in on Super Bowl Sunday this year, because for the first time, the event would feature an opera singer — none other than soprano RENÉE FLEMING — singing the National Anthem. In the days that followed, we were frequently asked what we thought about her performance. My take was: slow beginning, odd, goopy arrangement. In the beginning, I experienced my familiar irritation with Fleming's refusal to sing English words simply and cleanly, without affectation, but I thought she dug in as it went on and finished up triumphantly.
Then I was sent a YouTube clip of soprano/comedienne DOROTHY BISHOP, performing her spoof of Fleming's performance of the anthem. It's not the anthem at all, but a re-lyriced version of Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing," which Fleming has performed in concert. "It must be a drag / If you don't love the flag," sang Bishop, launching into a wild scat section and then coming back with "It makes no difference if I'm black or white / I'm singing 'Oh say can you see' tonight!" Along the way, there are riffs on "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," too. It's a very funny — and not at all mean-spirited — takeoff on Fleming's ideas about singing jazz and pop music. I have never liked most of what Fleming has done in this area — I usually feel she is avoiding any real connection with the music in pursuit of what she considers "style" — but the odd thing about Bishop's performance is that it made me relax a bit about Fleming's pop side. It's obvious that Fleming loves this music, and Bishop somehow tapped into the star's immense likability factor. (There's also a strong resemblance between the two women — so much so that once, when Bishop got tired of being stuck in Met standing room, she jumped a parterre box seat and fended off an usher by telling him she was Renée Fleming.) New York audiences will have a chance to experience Bishop's take on Fleming when she brings her show The Dozen Divas to the Metropolitan Room, one of New York's top cabaret venues, on April 30 and May 5.
Bishop is a Yale-educated soprano who came to New York and enjoyed what she describes as "a successful, ten-year B-level career that wasn't going where I wanted it to go." She noticed that she was getting cast in comedies — she did dozens of Rosalindes and Fiordiligis, and she gradually began moving into musical-comedy cabaret, which is not the most remunerative of genres. "I saw that there was money headlining in the cruise ships," she recalls, "and so for a number of years, I made up my own Sarah Brightman show and did a pop-opera tribute — not necessarily to Sarah, but kind of copying her own style. I started throwing in a lot of comedy. I left the ships in 2011, burned out and frustrated artistically, and started to develop The Dozen Divas." The show featured Bishop's impersonations of Cher, Adele, Stevie Nicks and others, and for its run at the Manhattan night spot the Iguana, Bishop was nominated for a Broadway World Award for Best Musical Comedy Cabaret Performance.
"Renée has that gorgeous spin that separates an A-level singer from a B-level singer. My voice probably has more metal, but hers is so pure and spinny. I wouldn't even try to imitate her opera singing. But people are sensitive about her — and about 'The Star Spangled Banner,' too. I think at the moment on YouTube I have fifty-five likes and forty hates. I left some of the bad comments up, but there were so many, with people writing stupid stuff. A lot of Vietnam vets said they were offended that I made fun of the National Anthem.
"Renée is, for some people, the highlight of my whole act," says Bishop. "I don't know her personally, and I'm not making fun of her fabulous, glorious opera singing. I have people who claim to be friends of hers and who have come to my show and say, 'She doesn't care.' Now when I was doing Sarah Palin, she sent some people, and they sat in the front row with arms crossed, not laughing at all. They did not laugh. I closed with a very funny parody of "Rose's Turn" — "Sarah's Turn" — you can imagine. Then I did sing-along Christmas carols with a Rudolph parody that ended with her shooting John McCain. Afterward, they were very sarcastic. They said, 'We're so happy we can go back and tell Sarah she has nothing to worry about.' I just smiled and said, 'Thank you for coming.'"
This July, Fleming herself will be reaching out to a new audience when she stars in Joe DiPietro and Garson Kanin's comedy Living on Love at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.
In this generously programmed act, both Gillette and Fuller showed crack comic timing and solid vocals, as they wove their way through a loose narrative that ticked off high points of their careers but never became stale or predictable. A raucous high point was Gillette's ultra-swacked rendition of "If I Were a Bell," from Guys and Dolls; she reached a stunning emotional peak with "Isn't He Something?" from Stephen Sondheim's Bounce, and the gorgeous "Once Upon a Time," from All American, which she sang with Fuller. (I've never known anyone of a certain age who didn't succumb to this lovely song). I had always considered "One Halloween" one of the junkier numbers from the 1970 musical Applause, a show that an Encores! concert presentation of a few years ago proved is beyond reviving. But in Fuller's expert hands (she received a Tony nomination for the role of Eve Harrington), it was magical — an example of a real artist transforming her mediocre material. In duet, Gillette and Fuller shone in "Little Me" and a medley of tunes from Cabaret; both actresses had their turn playing Sally Bowles on Broadway. The audience, which included SHELDON and MARGERY HARNICK, JOHN GLOVER, HARVEY EVANS, SONDRA LEE, MALCOLM GETS and LEROY REAMS, came away with a bracing sense of two women who have gotten the most out of their careers and still have many premium performing miles to go. They'll reprise Sin Twisters at Club 54 on October 9.
Vienna to Weimar begins reassuringly, with Sullivan offering Rudolf Sieczynski's "Wien, Wien nur du allein," English words by Kim Gannon. (Gannon is one of my favorite trivia subjects: he wrote the words for some awfully good popular songs, including Max Steiner's "It Can't Be Wrong," taken from the 1942 Bette Davis film Now, Voyager, and the Christmas classic "I'll Be Home for Christmas." He deserves to be mentioned oftener than he is.) Then Sullivan lit into a delightful version of Fledermaus's "Mein Herr Marquis" (including the English words by Howard Dietz), hitting all her comic marks with ease and grace; she has a wonderful self-mocking quality that lands consistently with the audience. With Kohler, Sullivan also dusted off "Wenn die beste Freundin" (When the Special Girlfriend) and "Maskulinum-Femininum," both by Mischa Spoliansky and Marcellus Schiffer, revealing them as the sophisticated, subversive gems that they are. It fell to Kohler to cover the Weimar section of the waterfront and convey most of the spoken history lesson to the audience, which contrasted effectively with Sullivan's lighter approach. And although Sullivan didn't get near the chilling fury that an artist such as Nina Simone can bring to the Brecht–Weill "Pirate Jenny," she did manage to make that song uniquely her own. After spinning through a fine group of Friedrich Hollaender numbers, including the choice "Illusions," both women brought the evening to a memorable close with Leonard Cohen's "Take This Waltz," from 1967, and Franz Lehár's "Merry Widow Waltz." Jed Distler was the evening's excellent musical director.
As New York's cabaret scene continues its quiet erosion, K. T. Sullivan is one of its enduring delights.
On Tuesday, February 19, NYFOS presented a deeply satisfying program of French popular song, Jacques Brel & Charles Trénet: Fire and Fantasy. The ensemble was wonderful — Blier at the keyboard, plus guitarist Greg Utzig (who was sometimes a bit loud, throwing off the balance) and the marvelous accordionist Bill Schimmel. In addition to playing superbly (with no music in front of him all night long), Schimmel looked the part, as if Central Casting had come up with the ideal character actor to play a French accordionist in a Truffaut film. Tenor Philippe Pierce got things off to a stunning start with Brel's ever-accelerating "La Valse à Mille Temps." Pierce has a fine voice and sure rhythmic command, but in some of the evening's more soulful works he came up a bit short, lacking the French "lived-in" quality for a powerful song such as Brel's achingly poignant "Chanson des vieux amants."
In the second half, Brel gave way to Trénet. "Maybe if Irving Berlin and Mary Martin had had a baby they might have come out with Charles Trénet," said Blier, "but I doubt it." Here, Pierce's teammate, mezzo Marie Lenormand, gave what for me was one of the standout individual performances of the season, making magic out of "L'âme des poètes" (I won't soon forget the sublime way she landed on the word "artiste") and the famous "La mer," while showing great comic verve in her big finale with Pierce, "Grand-maman, c'est New York."
At the end, Blier announced that the evening was something of a landmark — the fortieth anniversary of his first public performance.
Fortunately, things picked up once she began to sing Top-40 hits from her own growing-up years. With excellent support from a band headed by her musical director Joseph Thalken, Mazzie gave killer renditions of schlocky '70s numbers such as the Partridge Family's "I Think I Love You," the Barbra Streisand–Paul Williams Gibson greeting-card romance "Evergreen" and Barry Manilow's "When Will I Hold You Again?" which she managed to make us believe is a pretty terrific song. Just as she was reaching an excellent performance peak, the evening seemed to end rather abruptly, leaving the audience feeling just slightly undernourished.
Mazzie is one of the most exciting singing actresses on the Broadway scene, and I'm always a little frustrated that, apart from Passion, she hasn't originated a show that was really worthy of her. (Her replacement-cast performance in Next to Normal, opposite her talented husband Jason Daniely, was one of the most electrifying turns I've seen in years.) Now I'd like to see her do a full-scale cabaret show on the order of those offered by the great Marilyn Maye — something that really lets us know who she is.
Cook has made many appearances at Carnegie over the years — the first being in 1961, with Leonard Bernstein. "Here I am again," she said when she padded onstage. "Blinked my eye — and eighty-five!" She then launched into a highly satisfying program, skipping some of her famous theater hits ("Vanilla Ice Cream," from She Loves Me, "They Were You," from The Fantasticks, "It's Not Where You Start," from Seesaw) in favor of a well-chosen collection of pop and jazz standards. In places, Cook's voice sounded drier than it has on past occasions, and now and then, from her seated position, she couldn't quite muster the support for an isolated high note, so that her vibrato widened in ways we aren't used to hearing. But for the most part she was in excellent voice, nailing stunning high notes in "Georgia on My Mind" and "When Sunny Gets Blue" and making a heartrending lament out of "Bye Bye Blackbird." There were a few miscalculations: Dan Hicks's country-flavored "list" song, "I Don't Want Love," is better suited to a performer who uses bolder, cruder strokes, and Musiker's arrangement of "I've Got You Under My Skin" undulated so much that the song itself got lost. But the almost-forgotten '30s ballad "If I Love Again" was pure, heartfelt magic, and "The Nearness of You" and "Makin' Whoopee" were all but flawless. At the concert's end, some surprise guest stars — John Pizzarelli, Jessica Molaskey, Sheldon Harnick, Susan Graham and Josh Groban — showed up to boost the birthday celebration by each doing a turn; the high point was Groban's cleanly sung performance of Stephen Sondheim's "Not While I'm Around."
But it wasn't as much an evening about music-making or vocalizing as it was about honesty. Clearly, it took Cook many years to reach the point of exhibiting such ease onstage, so we shouldn't insult her by describing her art as "effortless." But it is a rare pleasure to listen to an artist who never forgets that her biggest job up there onstage is just letting us know who she is.]]>
While individual Met artists such as Danielle de Niese and Joseph Calleja have been booking LPR for one-off events, Friday night's concert reflected the Met's maiden voyage to the Bleecker Street cabaret bar. The evening's program — presented first at 6:30 PM, then repeated at 9 PM — was curated by composer Thomas Adès, whose opera The Tempest is currently playing at the Met, and who put together an hour's worth of Tempest-related material spanning three centuries of music. (A second event in the Met–LPR collaboration, this time an evening with composer Nico Muhly, is slated for May 14.)
As he explained his selections at the top of the program, Adès displayed a quiet magnetism. Right from the start, the intimate setting seemed to inspire a different kind of interaction between the artists and their audience: it felt warm, informal and personal. In a nice little bit of serendipity, Adès's program included five different settings by five different composers of Ariel's timeless verse "Full fathom five," from Act I of Shakespeare's play.
Countertenor Iestyn Davies sang two of them, first Purcell's, in Adès's arrangement, and later in the program, Michael Tippett's. (Adès played piano all evening.) The piano accompaniment for the Purcell still possessed a Baroque stateliness, but Adès stripped away the formality of the original and forged a more direct emotional connection — at least by modern standards — to the words. Davies's sprite-like timbre was a lovely fit, but for Tippett's gorgeous, unabashedly tonal, just-sentimental-enough setting from 1962, I wanted something more soulful and tender from the vocalist.
Kate Lindsey also received a pair of "Full fathom five" assignments. First, she braved Stravinsky's serialist setting from 1953, sitting alongside the flutist, clarinetist and violist as if she were just one more instrument in the quartet. Her delivery of Ives's "A Sea Dirge" was so devastated (and devastating), embodying the narrative voice so completely, that Adès could not suppress a smile from his seat at the piano. (Afterwards, my companion leaned over to me and said, "She's the Amanda Peet of opera. I'm completely obsessed with her.")
Laure Meloy, who is covering the role of Ariel in The Tempest at the Met — which I saw the following night; my favorite evening at the opera so far this season — sang the version from Adès's opera. (The lyric was reworked as "Five fathoms deeps" by librettist Meredith Oakes, who couldn't help but keep most of Shakespeare's unforgettable language.) She delivered the high siren calls with much success though not without what seemed like fear. In such a small venue, with such a dry, unflattering acoustic, the mercilessness of Adès's sky-high vocal writing was all too apparent.
But when you have a singer like Simon Keenlyside, there's no need to quibble about acoustics. His voice could probably reverberate in a vacuum. His ninety seconds onstage, singing Prospero's "Our revels are ended" from Adès's opera, were magnificent in every way. He somehow scaled his performance to the venue but didn't at all. He was big and impressive but connected to every person in the room, holding his hands up just so, keeping you in his grasp. All I can say is, to hear an artist of Keenlyside's stature booming from the stage not twenty feet away like some kind of secular, seductive operatic god is well worth the two-drink minimum.
|Tori Amos at (Le) Poisson Rouge
Photo by Ebru Yildiz for NPR
Tori Amos — pop siren and dazzling keyboard technician — gave a special, one-night-only concert on Friday at New York's (Le) Poisson Rouge. Over the past few years, classical musicians in search of the below-Fourteenth Street crowd have gravitated to this cabaret venue on Bleecker Street, so it makes sense that Amos, who has partnered with the Deutsche Grammophon label, would embrace the quirky venue for a chamber concert with string octet. Tickets were free and available exclusively through a lottery on LPR's website, though I noted at least one lucky, ticket-less fan who waited out the line, which wrapped around the block, and gained standing-room admission.
Amos was promoting her latest album Gold Dust, a collection of greatest hits in newly orchestrated renditions, marking the twentieth anniversary of her breakout success with Little Earthquakes. For fans who grouse that the updating on Gold Dust is too subtle, that the new versions sound suspiciously similar to the old versions, this concert was a revelation.
In the live show at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Amos's interaction with the string players felt substantial and collaborative. The crescendos in "Cloud On My Tongue" were excitingly synchronized, and she sprinkled extra measures of music throughout the song, exposing the seams between verse/chorus, giving the piece a sense of expansiveness and showing off the instrumentalists. Even a fan-favorite like "Hey Jupiter" got the revisionist treatment: Amos deconstructed the song and put it back together, turning a teary, haunting ballad into an up-tempo cabaret number, with plucked strings and percussive keyboard effects. It sounded like a cross between Gotye and Kurt Weill. Going solo for some selections, Amos proved that she could turn a beautiful composition that had seemed too earthbound on record into a buoyant success — most notably "Taxi Ride," her tribute to makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, who died in 2002.
Of course, Amos's prowess in a live setting is well documented. Rolling Stone acknowledged her undeniable onstage allure in 2003, placing her at No. 5 in its list of the "20 Greatest Live Bands" and branding her "a one-woman wrecking crew." With the industry-wide decline of CD sales, Amos is one artist who has benefited from the increased importance of concerts and tours in bolstering a recording artist's profile. Luckily, NPR Music sponsored and broadcast the LPR concert, and it is now available in streaming fashion in their online archives.]]>
I was going to skip Allen's new film, To Rome with Love. I didn't, for the simple reason that I was drawn by the opera elements in the plot. Allen plays Jerry, an avant-garde stage director who has been reviled for tampering with the classics. (One of his famous productions is a Rigoletto with everyone dressed as white mice — a detail that, like practically everything else in the film, isn't nearly as funny as it's meant to be). Jerry and his wife, Phyllis (Judy Davis), travel to Rome to meet the Italian man their daughter plans to marry. The boy's father is an undertaker named Giancarlo (played by tenor Fabio Armiliato). When Giancarlo steps into the shower and begins singing, Jerry, standing outside in the hallway, hears evidence of a remarkable voice, and Jerry hectors him to turn pro. The trouble is that Giancarlo can't sing well except when he's in the shower: when Jerry organizes an audition for him in front of a group of top-flight opera managers, Giancarlo blows it completely. Jerry comes up with a solution: recitals and stage productions will be engineered so that he can sing while showering. The gag is mildly amusing the first time but less so in its many repetitions. And really, the whole conceit of the talented amateur being terrified to perform in the professional arena is old-hat. (Remember Marilyn Horne guesting on TV's The Odd Couple, as the opera singer who couldn't open her mouth unless her pal Oscar, played by Jack Klugman, was in the room?) Allen skips lightly over the opera material as if pleased just to show us another facet of his cultural fluency; he never really gets into it at all — never does anything truly inventive with it.
The main raisons d'être for To Rome with Love are Darius Khondji's lovely, terra-cotta-tinged scenes of Rome, the funny individual moments contributed by Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni and Judy Davis and the film's biggest surprise — the relaxed, appealing screen presence of Fabio Armiliato.
I heard Bostridge most recently on November 28, when he appeared in recital at Carnegie Hall accompanied at the piano by composer Thomas Adès. It was a strange — also strangely memorable — evening that I'm still puzzling over to some extent. Bostridge has always spiked his recitals with peculiar poses and lurches about the stage that often make it difficult to determine exactly what his specific motivation might be. He did so again at the Carnegie Hall performance, and he was matched moment by moment by Adès, who attacked the keyboard almost ferociously at times, punching out individual notes rather than sculpting phrases. One odd detail about Adès's playing: he often picked up one hand from the keyboard and stared at it momentarily, as if he was surprised that it had shown up for the performance. The overall effect was that the music sometimes seemed pulled instead of merely allowed to take shape. This unnerved me most of all during their performance of Schumann's Dichterliebe which has to go down as one of the most eccentric performances of this cycle I've ever heard. The entire recital was built around the theme of loss and personal isolation, so many of their choices made sense dramatically. Yet underneath it all, I had a strong feeling — which I'm encountering in performance more and more these days — that the artists onstage weren't particularly interested in bringing the audience into the experience of portraying alienation. For me, the high point was Dowland's magnificent "In Darkness Let Me Dwell." I couldn't help but wish that more of the recital had managed to be so chillingly desolate and illuminating at the same time.
It's refreshing that New York City Opera has been leading arts coverage recently. I only wish it were for different reasons. At a press conference on July 12, NYCO's artistic and general director George Steel said, in response to a question from The New York Times's Daniel Wakin, that the company had no plans to dispense with the services of music director George Manahan. Members of the press corps who are inclined toward skepticism may have noted that Steel seemed peculiarly vague about how many months Manahan had to run on his contract.
Only three weeks later, the company announced that the position of music director was being eliminated. I have commented in other sections of OPERA NEWS on Steel's lack of candor in certain areas, and I'd prefer not to return to the subject here. What troubles me is this: what kind of future does NYCO have without a music director in place? One very important thing that music directors do is to block ham-handed artistic decisions from being put into play. If music directors are any good, they examine the artistic health and future of the opera company as a whole entity. (Obviously, guest conductors don't necessarily bring this concern to the table; often, they are focused on maximizing their isolated appearances at the opera houses, their eye very much on their own future.) An opera-house orchestra usually absorbs — for better or worse — the artistic personality of its music director. Without a single person at the helm, an orchestra runs the risk of sounding like a pack of musicians on a freelance gig. If all this isn't a compelling argument for the existence of a music director, what about this one (since money seems to dominate conversation in the opera world these days)? Music directors come armed with their own network of major donors. I know that New York City Opera is dealing with punishing financial realities, and I feel for the company. But for Steel and the board to treat this central position as if it were a mere vestige seems more than foolhardy. It seems maddeningly self-defeating.
I support this push for new audiences in opera, but I think I may be coming at it from a slightly different angle. Implicit in all of the arguments about the need to lower the median age is the suggestion that all of those older people currently filing into the theater are engaged, tuned in, fully responsive to what's happening onstage — and that it's crucial to get younger audiences to function in the same way.
I would hope we could get the new audiences, wherever they may come from, to do much better than that. I do not believe for one second that most of the senior citizens I often find myself surrounded by in New York really have a profound connection to the music that the younger generations will have trouble matching. I think many older people, in New York especially, were brought up with the idea that attending live performances was crucial to being culturally well-rounded. They may be paying to fill the seats, all right. But I'm not sure they're filling them in a meaningful way.
One recent example, among many: in mid-June, I attended a concert of the New York Philharmonic, with Ludovic Morlot conducting. On the first half, the orchestra played the lovely Prelude to Khovanshchina, followed by William Walton's Violin Concerto, impressively performed by the wonderful Gil Shaham. The woman in front of me dozed off as soon as the Mussorgsky began. The man next to her waited until the Walton to start bagging his Zs, and he came to only when the audience broke into sustained applause at the end of the entire concerto. Behind me, a man wrestled with his hearing device, pitched at air-raid level. My favorite, though, was the lady to my left, who, before the music started, bitched endlessly at her husband about the jacket he was wearing. Later, she wondered aloud why it took so long to rearrange the stage for the Walton. Throughout the first half, she restlessly leafed through her large-print program notes without once looking up at the stage. In the middle of the concerto's exciting final movement, she said, to no one in particular, "You'd at least think the program could mention that Gil Shaham comes from Israel." What could any of these people really have taken away from the evening other than a hefty Visa bill for dinner and a parking garage?
As a journalist, I prize evenings such as this. It's wonderful to be able to look around and eavesdrop on the people sitting near you, because you can learn a great deal about where we're heading culturally. But my greatest hope for the succeeding generations of ticket holders is that they'll be more tuned in than those who came before them.
Perhaps the best way to preview Michael Grandage's new production of Don Giovanni, due at the Met this fall, is to see his staging of King Lear, playing at BAM until June 5. The works have some things in common — the necessity of vivid, meaningful ensemble work; a descent into wildness as night falls halfway through the show; and a seminal place in each artist's oeuvre in competition with a sometimes more widely esteemed work (Le Nozze di Figaro, Hamlet). Of course, both protagonists spend a good deal of time with their shirts unbuttoned, too, though for admittedly different reasons.
Don Giovanni and King Lear share a common pitfall, too: they can both fall victim to pageantry. Grandage strips the stage naked for his Lear, leaving rows of planks upon which the action unfolds. The play benefits from quick, seamless transitions between scenes, thanks to the unit set, which puts a burning emphasis on the interaction between characters.
But that doesn't necessarily mean the Don Giovanni will go without eye-popping designs. The Donmar Warehouse, where Grandage is artistic director, has shown another way to humanize a classical work. For its sizzling Broadway production of Mary Stuart from 2009, the battling queens were sumptuously attired in period fashions — a visual feast against a spare background that threw into relief both the costumes and Schiller's ornate language.
Either way, if Grandage brings this kind of depth and humanity to Mozart, Met-goers are in for a real treat.
The statue of Christopher Columbus that towers over Columbus Circle is well known, but I suspect fewer residents and visitors to the Big Apple realize that just a few blocks north of there, the composer who towered over the opera scene in Italy for most of the nineteenth century is honored with a statue of his own. It stands in a triangular island, on Broadway between 72nd and 73rd Streets, known as Verdi Square.
I had been vaguely aware of the presence of the statue since its restoration in 1996, but I hadn't paid close attention until yesterday, when the afternoon sunshine of a perfect spring day, glinting off the figure of Verdi, caught my attention from across the Great White Way. Wandering over to take a look at my favorite composer rising up out of his bed of tulips, I noticed for the first time the four figures surrounding the lower part of the monument. I recognized only one of them right off, but it was clear that they were all characters from the operas, and a helpful sign on the wrought-iron fence confirmed my guesses about the other three. (You can find that information on the Parks Dept. website as well.) With the warm weather having finally arrived and the Met season still going, I highly recommend that any Metgoers who have a few minutes to kill before a performance take a walk up to Verdi Square and see for themselves.
Meanwhile, I leave you with the following description of the dedication of Verdi's statue back in 1906, from the aforementioned website:
"The sculptures were unveiled by Barsotti's grandchild, who pulled a string that released a helium balloon, lifting the monument's red, white and green shroud (the colors of the Italian flag). As it peeled away, a dozen doves — concealed in its folds — were released into the air, and flowers cascaded from the veil upon the participants."
Oh to have been a New Yorker in the good old days!
I think this is key to the casting of the Countess: as Mark Thomas Ketterson touches on in his "Coda" in the March issue of OPERA NEWS, the audience's memories of the star singing the role should bring with her a certain gravitas, an emotional connection from the past that matches up with the Countess's own sad, backward glance. We need to be aware that it is really is an older woman up there — not a healthy, vibrant woman in her mid-fifties. It's what gives the role its real punch: our feelings about the aging singer and what she gave us over her long career play into the performance itself. I'm reminded of Elaine Stritch's observation that women in their forties and fifties have no business singing Stephen Sondheim's "I'm Still Here."
My choice for the Countess would have been Renata Scotto: she has more magnetic glamour than ever, and even though she's seventy-seven, I'll bet she could have sung the role superbly. Any other suggestions?
On a more recent weekend, an invitation from a fellow Vassar alum, who was the most dedicated and instinctively musical of the Madrigal Singers when we were in school together, drew me to the Aaron Copland School of Music, to see what the Queens College Opera Studio was up to this season. The young voices in a David Ronis's tidy, attractive staging of Dominick Argento's Postcard from Morocco were strikingly well prepared and, under the tutelage of music director James John, more than up to the considerable challenges of Argento's tricky rhythms and rangy, harmonically difficult vocal writing.
It's tempting for New Yorkers like me, who have the privilege of regularly attending live performances at the Metropolitan Opera, to allow their view of the city's opera-life to become entirely Met-centric. But these two recent forays into smaller-scale operatic ventures have whetted my appetite for more. Instead of paling by comparison with the productions of the big house on Broadway, I find each enhances my appreciation of the other.
I was there for her Met debut in 1985, as Desdemona. The company was chastised for not having her sooner; after all, she had made her professional debut twenty-three years earlier, as Cherubino at Welsh National Opera. Belated or not, her Desdemona was widely discussed as one of the most important Met debuts in years — another being Jessye Norman in Les Troyens in 1983. Price gave a superb performance. The sound she poured out was ample yet with an exquisite fragility and femininity. She was all we could ask of a Desdemona, and even though she loomed large onstage physically as well as vocally, I don't remember anyone I knew saying a word about her size. Her degree of vocal artistry made it seem crass even to suggest that she was too hefty to be "convincing."
She returned to the Met in 1989 as Elisabetta in Don Carlo. This is the performance of hers I will always carry with me. She was a study in torment as she sang "Tu che le vanità," her ravishing voice filling the house. In the years that followed, I remember thinking it was odd that this performance wasn't commented on more feverishly when people I knew were recalling great performances. Perhaps this was simply her own shyness and reticence coming through to the rest of us. Perhaps we perceived somehow that she didn't want us to demand too much of her: she just wanted us to listen and leave her alone.
Over the years I have discovered something about this opera: no matter the variations — even with the occasional subpar exponents in the leading roles, lackluster conducting or staging miscues — the final moments never fail to make their effect. I mean NEVER. Of course, the Zeffirelli touch helps, as does the generally superlative level of casting at the Met, but they are really icing on the cake. Even on a bad day, when my mind is elsewhere, those last pages of the score invariably move me to tears.
This phenomenon is born out strikingly by a perfectly dreadful old movie called Mimi, based on Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. Its plot is only loosely connected to that of the opera, and despite a starry cast led by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as Rodolphe and Gertrude Lawrence in the title role, the characters here emerge as singularly self-centered, dippy and unsympathetic, so that by the time poor Mimi lies on the brink of death, one is ready to roll one's eyes and say, "Not a moment too soon" — until, somewhere in the background, rise the strains of that final scene from Puccini's score. For a brief second, I caught myself thinking cynically what an injustice is was to the composer to drag him into this mess of a film at the eleventh hour, but in the next moment, my face was streaming with tears. It didn't make the movie any better, but it certainly provided testimony to the extraordinary, enduring and instantaneous power of this masterly few measures of music.
Check out the clip below of Fleming singing Marietta's lied from a 2006 Moscow concert.
This was the first time I'd heard the opera onstage; I had become interested in it, years ago, on the basis of the 1986 Deutsche Grammophon recording. Back then, I thought it was a fascinating mess. I still think so. Parts of Wadsworth's libretto — particularly parts of the ending — are painful, like undigested thoughts and memories thrown out randomly in a therapy session. I can understand why my companion denounced the whole thing as "dreck." And I don't think that it quite works to integrate Trouble in Tahiti into the middle of the work. I grasp the idea of a simpler time versus a more complex one, but it seems to me that Trouble in Tahiti simply interrupts the spell cast by Act I of A Quiet Place and reminds us that it has better tunes than the later work.
And yet — the damned thing moved me even more than it did when I first listened to the recording all those years ago. Bernstein contributed some wonderful writing to A Quiet Place — the warring eighth and sixteenth notes of the strings do a marvelous job of conveying Sam's tormented state of mind, and I love the oddball harmonies of the trio "Dear Daddy" and the prelude to the final act. I think Bernstein and Wadsworth must have felt a mutual need to create a tribute to the American family in all its inarticulate glory. A Quiet Place is no well-made musical play: it's much closer to a Robert Altman movie, showing the way real families function — we miss each other's points, say the opposite of what we mean, don't notice when people are reaching out to us. At the time of its unveiling, The New Yorker's Andrew Porter was one of the few critics who understood this.
I think A Quiet Place means even more to me now because it's really about something we can all understand. It isn't a dry literary transcription of a book we were forced to read in high school or college. It's a real, American, contemporary story — something that's always a rarity on the opera stage. Perhaps if it had been more successful originally, its example might have led to more of the same. Perhaps not: it's amazing how insistently the world has ignored the example set by Bernstein, in so many ways.
I don't know what Stephen Wadsworth thought about this production. He's a fine stage director himself, so I'm sure he had strong opinions about it. I couldn't help thinking, however, that Alden had made an excellent case for the piece. I gasped when the lights came up on Andrew Lieberman's funeral home set at the beginning: everything looked exactly how it should have looked, to the degree that I was deeply uncomfortable.
It's probably too much to expect an NYCO revival anytime soon, but kudos to the company for having taken a chance on it at least once.
From the moment I first won gainful employment at OPERA NEWS, I have regularly faced those uncomfortable cocktail-party moments when some new acquaintance, learning how I earn my living, says with wrinkled nose, "And do you actually like opera?" Now, I know we don't all have the luxury of choosing a congenial career, and I freely confess that as a college grad desperate for a job, I once interviewed for a newsletter called "Garbage Collector Weekly," eager to get my foot in the publishing door any way I could. But it's hard to imagine a consenting adult spending nearly a quarter-century at the same magazine if its subject did not genuinely appeal.
Those conversations are always a rude reminder that opera, though thriving in many respects, is still not exactly a mainstream entertainment. So it always pleases me when I run into it in unexpected places. The most recent such encounter was in a re-run of the Inspector Lewis series on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery. Back in the days of Lewis's erudite predecessor, Inspector Morse, it used to be a fair bet that the culturally savvy protagonist's elitist pursuits would periodically lead to some reference to the lyric art — perhaps even with some actual music thrown in. But with Morse replaced by his erstwhile sidekick, the distinctly working-class Inspector Lewis, the opportunity for operatic enlightenment seemed to have passed, so I was surprised to find Wagner at the center of a recent episode.
With the murder victim an Oxonian Wagner expert, connected obliquely to a Stasi informer with the code name Siegfried, the master of Bayreuth had a prominent role in the plot, but the fun part for me came toward the end, when Lewis — partly in a nostalgic tribute to his old boss, partly as a way of trying to understand the dark forces at play in the case — put on a Ring recording and sat down to listen. It wasn't a long excerpt; Lewis's operatically challenged partner arrived all too soon to pre-empt it with some modern musical drivel of his own. Still, it pleased me to think there might be mystery fans out there in TV-land with no previous experience of the Ring who might be sufficiently drawn in by the intriguing plot references and the brief snippets of that glorious, sweeping score, to find their way to Youtube for a second helping. And from there … who knows?
Of course, just getting to sit there for free in a red-plush seat (during the work day, no less) watching the great vocal artists of our time ply their trade is a pretty nifty perk in itself. But for me, a big part of the fun nowadays is being present along with a whole balcony-full of young people as they discover opera — many of them, no doubt, for the first time.
Last week, the Met revived Gian Carlo del Monaco's lively spaghetti-Western production of Puccini's brilliantly colorful and dramatic, achingly sentimental Fanciulla del West. It gave me a great kick to sense the surprise and excitement of those youngsters as they realized that this elevated art form had room in it for lusty barroom brawls, live horses and gunslinging women holding their own in an overwhelmingly male world. There was a distinctly twenty-first-century-feminist tinge to the audible reaction from the peanut gallery when Minnie first pulled her tiny pistol out of her bosom to fend off the advances of Jack Rance. And there's definitely something to be said for straightforward realism, especially where new audiences are concerned. I strongly doubt that if Minnie and Dick Johnson had appeared in some high-concept production, in the guise of, say, apes or bumble bees, the kids in the family circle would have burst into spontaneous, giggly applause when the heroine surrendered to her first kiss, or cheered her so heartily when she arrived just in time to free him from the posse.
There are times when audience noise can be a most unwanted distraction. (At that very same rehearsal, one fan was so eager to share his admiration of Marcello Giordani's "Ch'ella mi creda" that he shouted "Bravo!"at the top of his lungs just as an emphatic chord from the orchestra punctuated Jack Rance's punching the unfortunate Johnson in the gut. This musically and dramatically misplaced interruption gave the effect that the shouter was encouraging the sheriff's brutality.) The irrepressible and instinctively appropriate responses of the schoolchildren at the back of the house, on the other hand, lent an added charge to the proceeding that enhanced the experience for at least one jaded operagoer down in the orchestra section.
Since Don Carlo opened, I have received an amazing number of phone calls from friends and colleagues who wanted to know what I thought about Poplavskaya. What I find interesting is that they don't really want to know what I thought about her performance as Elisabetta, which I heard recently. They want to know what I thought of Talese's profile. "Have you read the Poplavskaya piece? Have you read it? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU HAVEN'T READ IT?" I was beginning to get the feeling that the other things occupying my thoughts — what to get my sister-in-law for Christmas, where to find a contractor to do house repairs, whether to take my cat to the dentist, or finding the time to finish writing my latest book — were all things I didn't deserve to be worrying about. I should instead be experiencing what I was beginning to think must be a milestone in cultural journalism.
This morning, I finally sat down, closed my door, turned off the telephone and read Talese's profile.
It opens with a very New Yorkerish nonfiction trick — the relating of a specific action in the subject's life, told in plangent detail. You know the type: "On a recent chilly morning in September, Estelle Rubin left the apartment she had occupied for the last forty-five years on Manhattan's West Side, on a grocery-shopping expedition. As she approached her neighborhood Food Emporium, she noticed a man she had never seen before standing on the corner, wearing nothing but ankle socks and a surgical mask, loudly singing a ballad from the obscure 1940s musical Ankles Aweigh...."
Talese's article began this way: "On an August night this past summer, the opera singer Marina Poplavskaya lay motionless for nearly three hours on the floor of her mother's apartment in Moscow, having collapsed shortly after 4 A.M. from inhaling noxious smoke from the forest fires that were burning out of control in the countryside...." The author developed this scene at some length, in the process confusing me. I was beginning to wonder what the point of it all was: was he suggesting that Poplavskaya had somehow started the forest fires? But the point eventually became clear. The soprano telephoned a friend: "'Darling, I'm about to die," she whispered into the receiver. 'And so I ask that you help take care of my mother!'" It was Talese's clever way of setting up Poplavskaya as a creature with a truly dramatic nature.
I was expecting this to be a prelude that was going to make the link between the diva's often excessive and outrageous behavior in real life and the spell she weaves on the stage. But that never happened: Talese's piece was really just a catalogue of bizarre personality quirks, ranging from Poplavskaya's tendency as a child to burst into song in the classroom whenever she was bored, through her terrorization of cab drivers and rehearsal pianists, to her insistence on bringing her own towels to her Met dressing room. At no point did Talese attempt to connect all of this with her artistry and musicianship. Nor, for that matter, did his article delve into her singing in any detailed way. Seven pages of text, plus a full-page photo — and no real discussion of her an artist.
I think there's plenty to say about Poplavskaya. Listening to voices is a highly subjective thing, and I don't quite agree with critic Zachary Woolfe that her tone has a "smoldering darkness." The night I attended the Met's Don Carlo, I didn't hear a great deal of color in her voice at all. But she can act, and she has presence — and she was certainly light years ahead of her countrywoman Anna Smirnova, who was vocally the clumsiest Eboli I've ever experienced.
Talese has sometimes not shown the best timing in his career. His 1971 novel Honor Thy Father, about the mob, appeared two years after another book on the same topic, called The Godfather, caused something of a stir in the publishing world. But his article on Poplavskaya never gets out of first gear. It came as something of a jolt, given the magazine's distinguished history of music reporting — from Winthrop Sargeant to Andrew Porter to Alex Ross. Does the Poplavskaya profile represent the standard of cultural coverage we can now expect from The New Yorker?
Recently, I urged friends to catch Next to Normal, which now stars husband-and-wife artists Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley as a couple whose lives are blighted by the wife's ongoing mental illness. The score, by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, is an amazingly demanding one, and it's unthinkable that the stars could get through it without exercising everything they know about technical command, about holding back vocally and not getting so lost in the emotionalism of the music and words that they do themselves permanent vocal damage. Yet I've seldom seen two performances in the musical theater that I thought showed less artifice, less obvious "control." One of Mazzie's strong suits is her astonishing ability to generate heat onstage. Anyone who witnessed her brilliant turn as Lily Garland in the Actors' Fund of America concert version of the Cy Coleman–Betty Comden–Adolph Green On the Twentieth Century, back in 2005, will know what I mean. In Next to Normal, her tormented Diana seems utterly skinless: there is no barrier between her and the audience; she submerges herself so deeply in the role that you wonder if she will ever be able to come back for the curtain call. As her husband, desperately trying to see his wife through an illness for which the "remedies" are notoriously short-term and not even understood fully by the doctors who administer them, Danieley gives a moving, beautifully judged performance. The scene in which he reluctantly agrees to let Diana undergo electroshock treatment is all but impossible to shake off. Mazzie and Danieley plan to be in the show until January. It would be a grave mistake to miss them.
Fellow opera-goers, I ask you: is this not the lamest, most odious commercial ever aired? If any of you are like me, the appearance of this ad must also prompt your family and friends to burst into laughter at the conspicuous rising of your blood pressure, that pulsing vein in your neck, your violent clenching of the chair arms, followed by obscene gesturing at the television and an apoplectic descent into the nadirs of the English vocabulary. Let me say, unequivocally, that I despise this commercial more than any piece of advertising I've ever encountered. According to the information accompanying the YouTube video, the ad was created by the Burns Group, an agency known as such a conspicuous arbiter of good taste that its other clients include Fruity-Cocoa Pebbles, Beck's Beer and Hebrew National hot dogs.
I suppose what makes this ad so fundamentally insulting to me as an opera-goer is that, in addition to it being obvious that the director knows nothing about the art form he's skewering, it's viscerally repellent. Clearly filmed on a shoestring budget — it was shot on location in the perennially teeming vacation spot that is Rovinj, Croatia — the spilled wine looks like thick strawberry Kool-Aid and the voices are out-of-sync with the actors. Most notably, though, their voices are off pitch and abysmal. They're not just bad parodies of trained operatic voices — they also happen to bad. Could the folks at the Burns Group really not find a pair of young, conservatory trained singers that could, at the very least, do this lame jingle justice?
The tagline for the ad, "Great wine doesn't have to be expensive," seems to suggest that the commercial's creators equate opera — or some terribly conceived signifier for it — with the one label that still seems deserving of derision in an era notable for the relative degree of political correctness in commercial advertising: elitist. The truth of the matter is that opera isn't nearly as snobby or — with the popularity of Live in HD screenings and rush ticket programs — expensive as the commercial's creators seem to think. Nor, for that matter, is Yellow Tail's shiraz anything even approaching "great." (According to the company, Yellow Tail's chardonnay is "best served at backyard temperature," while a recommended food-pairing for its merlot is a chicken sandwich. Bacchus, it seems, has become a fan of KFC.)
Maybe I'm being oversensitive about a mindless portrayal of an art form that I love, or maybe it's just that this ad seems so completely devoid of any of the redeeming characteristics attendant in the other commercials that have drawn opera as inspiration. (Ghirardelli Chocolate and British Airways, which both use Lakmé's flower duet, and Johnsonville Italian Sausages, which ran a commercial with Domingo's "Di quella pira" as its soundtrack a few years back, stick out in my mind as particularly effective.) Either way, it's rare that I see a commercial that strikes me as so repugnant that I'll actually go out of my way to avoid a company's product — let alone write a 700 word screed about it. Yellow Tail has done the deed. I'd rather have a glass full of bits of cork.
The first was a house concert hosted by my friend Jim, who decided on the spur of the moment to offer his living room as a venue for three talented musicians to try out a new program. The second was a concert performance of Handel's Rinaldo, uncut, with piano accompaniment, given at my local church by the New York Opera Forum. My friend's living room accommodates something short of twenty-five seats, and though the church is somewhat larger, it was, alas, less than a quarter full for this event. From a commercial standpoint, one might have thought it a waste of the artists' long hours of preparation to perform for audiences that, combined, would not have filled a single row at the Met.
Not so.
When the young violinist Colin Pip Dixon introduced the Kreuzer Sonata by reminding us that its dedicatee had declined ever to attempt the piece on the grounds that it was unplayable, then proceeded to play the bejesus out of it; when Ivy Adrian, at the keyboard, drew a whole symphony orchestra's worth of sound from Jim's parlor upright, with the rest of us so close behind her we could almost imagine we were playing this incredible music ourselves, surely Beethoven was well served.
When Tonia Manteneri all but literally raised the roof of the church with a whopping high note, from a spot barely twenty feet in front of us; when, in the Rinaldo–Almirena duet "Scherzano sul tuo volto," Marilyn Spesak and Karole Lewis traded exquisite and ravishingly voiced pedal-point effects that seemed to suspend time, or Spesak and Manteneri faced off in a war of notes more viscerally thrilling than any hyper-realistic 3D movie battle; when Richard Nechamkin, at the piano, transported every person in the room far from big-city cares to Almirena's serene and bucolic garden; when Tyler Wayne Smith, a countertenor I'd never heard of, sailed through Handel's formidable hurdles unscathed, in a voice of rich resonance and expressive warmth — surely these earnest performers' labor was not lost.
And when a casual operagoer cannot help laughing in sheer delight at the vocal fireworks; when an entire audience leans in to the keyboard as one with the pianist in a particularly intense passage, or exerts all its collective energy to will a singer through a particularly challenging passage, then cheers him to the rafters when he succeeds, the musical gods must be smiling as beneficently on these anonymous efforts as they ever smiled on the top box-office draw at the greatest opera house in the world.
These names may never be household words in the music industry, but in my book, the thrilling connection they made with a small handful of music-lovers on those two memorable nights rendered them worthy present-day votaries to the same muse that inspired Handel and Beethoven so many years ago.
Soprano Patricia Racette, who appears this month and next in Il Trovatore at the Met, has contributed a video to the It Gets Better Project, which was launched in response to the rash of gay teen suicides that have appeared in the news.
In the video, Racette and her partner, mezzo Beth Clayton, speak touchingly about the personal significance of Racette's "coming out" cover story in OPERA NEWS in 2002.
The video is available on the Metropolitan Opera's YouTube channel.
My operagoing life began in much the same way. Back in elementary school, I used to join eagerly in the annual class trips to the Met — sometimes a rehearsal, sometimes a student performance — led by my kindergarten teacher, herself a one-time Met chorister. Though I am sure at the time a large part of the draw was getting out of school for the day, I can recall several occasions on which my young ears were permanently imprinted with a level of vocal brilliance that I took for granted in my innocence but have valued more and more in retrospect. There was, for example, a student performance of La Traviata with Robert Merrill as Germont — the only time I heard the Great American Baritone live (with the exception of numerous Star-Spangled Banners at Yankee games) but more than enough to form my lasting impression of what a Verdi baritone should be.
Another memorable trip was a 1975 Puritani — a work that, needless to say, I had never heard of at the time, with a plot that, despite Mrs. Harris's best efforts, I was able to follow only in a vague, childish way. (I'm still not entirely sure I know what it is all about.) I remember a greater than usual sense of occasion — my parents were opera fans, so the names of Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland and Sherrill Milnes were familiar to my fledgling ears even before Mrs. Harris had given us a glowing idea of what to expect. In the event, I am ashamed to confess that what remains of my first impression of the great Pavarotti is that the combination of his physique with the long cloak that hung over his long sword rendered his profile indistinguishable from that of a large duck, and that for all the ballyhoo I preferred the voice of Mr. Gross, the admirable tenor soloist in our church choir at the time.
Joan Sutherland, though, was a different matter. I remember thinking her appearance ideal — that great, imposing jaw seemed just right for an operatic heroine — but I remember most of all the astonishing accuracy of her coloratura, the awesome scale of her voice, and the sense that she was singing all her lines not because someone happened to have written some pretty music for them but because there were things she needed to express that could be communicated in no other way. Thanks to Sutherland, no one ever had to explain to me what the big deal about a "mad scene" was: the concept of music as a conveyer and enhancer of dramatic/emotional truth was unmistakable even to the merest novice. Sutherland knew how to achieve that strange operatic alchemy by which pain and suffering can be transformed through sound into transcendent beauty that touches the soul.
Her death this week was a reminder to me of how incredibly fortunate I'd been to have the privilege of hearing such once-in-a-lifetime artistry in the flesh. Much as I love listening to her recordings, I cherish much more that memory of having been there in real time.
If I were to choose a composer to orchestrate the more tempestuous events of my life of late, it would have be Verdi, whose storm scenes so brilliantly capture the fascinating and humbling combination of terror and natural splendor evoked in the human breast by what the law and the insurance companies quaintly refer to as "Acts of God." Of course, the start of Wagner's Walküre belongs high on the list of torrential depictions, as does the wonderful Wolf's Crag scene in Lucia ("Orrida e questa notte," indeed!), not to mention Peter Grimes's hurricane-force seacoast monsoon. And no one but Verdi himself could have topped the magnificent tempest that precipitates Gilda's demise in Rigoletto. But given my druthers, I would go with Otello's electrifying opening as aural backdrop to the wild weather that overturned ancient oaks and sent trees crashing onto rooftops in my erstwhile shady and sheltered New York City neighborhood.
Verdi again takes the laurels for music that expresses the exquisite and lingering anguish of watching a loved one in failing health. Could one ask for a more moving accompaniment for gnawing filial worry than the finale of Simon Boccanegra, with poor Amelia murmuring in that inimitably melodious fashion of Verdi's, "No, non morrai, l'amore vinca di morte il gelo. Risponderà dal cielo pietade al mio dolor" .
As for something to help conquer the horror of the water pouring relentlessly through our kitchen ceiling for hours on end, well, do not Tamino and Pamina brave their watery trials with fortitude and even joy under the wondrous musical umbrella that issues from his magic flute, which transforms the deluge to a sparkling waterfall and stretches a kind of existential rainbow over their heads even in the face of disaster .
In the end, though, what one really needs to pull one through such a disheartening stretch is a sense of humor. So I think, really, the most appropriate soundtrack for my life at present would be found here — at Fawlty Towers.
Reports of the death of the music video, much like that of print media, are greatly exaggerated. Lady Gaga proved as much earlier this month at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she nabbed eight "moonmen" (MTV's equivalent to the Oscar statuette) in recognition of her revitalization of the genre.
Classical-music marketers never met a pop trend they didn't like, so Deutsche Grammophon gives us "El Vito," a music video of mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča singing Obradors' song in support of her latest album, Habanera.
The video seems singularly designed to convince us that Garanča is a sexy minx in her role as a hard, bewitching, capricious Gypsy — but is that enough of a concept to sustain its three-and-a-half minutes? Music videos were created to visualize pop music, and over the past thirty years, the style of their presentation has evolved in tandem with the style of that particular genre. Does Garanča's video embrace the idea of a cinematography of classical music? No. Could one be created? Maybe.
Many opera fans probably first took note of director Martin Scorsese's taste in opera with Raging Bull, which employed Cavalleria Rusticana's Intermezzo as the soundtrack to its opening credits. Likewise, his 1993 period piece, The Age of Innocence — based on the novel by Edith Wharton — opened on a tableau of Gounod's Faust playing at the New York Academy of Music. In 2006, Scorsese had Jack Nicholson — portraying Irish-American mob boss Frank Costello in The Departed — throw a handful of cocaine at a prostitute, while the sextet from Lucia, "Chi mi frena in tal momento?" played in the background. (The tune is heard later in the movie as Costello's ringtone.)
Scorsese yet again demonstrated his interest in opera with Monday night's premiere of Boardwalk Empire, HBO's new drama about the woes of Prohibition in Atlantic City. Scorsese and Sopranos writer Terence Winter have assembled a fairly huge cast for the twelve-episode show, including Metropolitan Opera character-tenor Anthony Laciura. One thing is already apparent: the breadth of talent on the show ranges widely. Laciura, all opera-industry bias aside, is one of the most capable actors, and Paz de la Huerta is one of the least.
In a sequence at the end of the episode, two characters are knocked-off while Cavalleria Rusticana's "O Lola, ch'ai di latti" plays in the background. One actor stands at the gramophone when the hit comes, and moments later his blood decorates the famous picture of Caruso, mid-drum-strike, dressed as Pagliaccio. Indeed, la commedia è finita.
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For those of you who were riding the Number 1 uptown local this morning, I'm the fellow who was laughing out loud at the book I was reading. Patti LuPone: A Memoir — the brand-new autobiography by the star of Broadway's upcoming Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown — is one of the best theater memoirs I have read in years. LuPone pulls no punches and takes no prisoners; her stories about Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, are sharp enough to cut glass. She tells plenty of stories on herself, not afraid to own up to her mistakes or confess to her own occasionally wild behavior. But this lady is an artist to her core, and her passion for acting and for the theater registers on every page. The last actor who wrote about the theater and about herself with such candor was the late Ruth Gordon — like LuPone, a complete American original.
LuPone became a star in 1979, when Evita opened on Broadway, and has stayed a star ever since. Within the past ten years I've met LuPone several times in connection with OPERA NEWS — she's been on the cover twice — and been completely charmed by her professionalism and her wit. But I date my time as a LuPone fan from the winter of 1973–74, when I saw her and her fellow members of The Acting Company in New York at the Billy Rose Theater on Broadway and on tour at the Spingold Theater at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. I admired her ripely bitchy Lucy Lockit in The Beggar's Opera, but I loved her as Irina in The Three Sisters. It's my favorite Chekhov play, and more than thirty years later, that Acting Company staging by Boris Tumarin is still at the top of my list. In the last act, Irina has a heartwrenching scene with Baron Tuzenbach, a man whom she does not love, but who is about to die in a duel. I've never forgotten the way LuPone looked at Norman Snow, her Tuzenbach: with a small, tight lift of her chin, LuPone's Irina swallowed her pity for the Baron but seemed to increase the distance between them by miles. You knew that both of them were doomed, and that neither of them deserved it. It was a great moment — and LuPone's book brought back memories of many more of them.
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It wasn't until the opera bug bit me as a young teenager that I started branching out and discovering that all those great melodies could be sung in many idiosyncratic ways, and to very different effect. Via television and radio, I became a devotee of "little Renata" (Scotto), a great Met favorite at that time, whose lean, metallic sound struck my ears as particularly youthful and clean. As I began attending live performances more and more regularly, I gradually came to recognize and appreciate the vast variety of timbres, personalities and styles offered by the artists of the day and no longer expected that archetypal Tebaldi sound — a good thing, as no other soprano has ever reproduced it.
The danger of such early familiarity with a great singer is that one often comes to take her charms for granted. Tebaldi always sounded exactly right to me, but because she was the first and, for a time, only example I had of how certain roles should be sung, I did not understand quite what a special thing her artistry was. My loyalty to Tebaldi was such a foregone conclusion that as time went on I did not listen as closely to her as I might to other less familiar artists, because I already knew what I was going to hear.
The beauty of it, of course, is that later in life one has a chance to "discover" a beloved singer all over again in the context of many years of exposure to different interpretations, both live and on recording. The advent of podcasts and YouTube and the release of archival materials on CD and video has brought easy access to historic performances I had not encountered before, and in poring over them, I have relished the chance to listen old favorites with fresh ears. It's nice to know, in retrospect, that it was not ignorance that made Tebaldi seem so perfect: the warm, luminous tone, the unbroken legato, the infallible evenness from top to bottom of the register, the breath control and command of dynamics, and above all else, that rich, creamy, enveloping wave of sound, utterly devoid of shrillness, are sui generis. For vocal beauty and Italianate line, Tebaldi is still "it."
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We take such technological marvels in stride nowadays, but what, one wonders, would Verdi have made of this development? Back in 1871, it took endless, painstaking negotiations to arrange for the world premiere of his Aida at Cairo's Khedivial Opera House, and in the event the proposed January opening fell victim to the Franco–Prussian War, which trapped the sets and costumes (not to mention the scenarist, Auguste Mariette) in Paris. Verdi had to wait another eleven months before the project came to fruition, and it took place without the composer in attendance, as he had decided the trip was too arduous to be worthwhile.
Could any of the participants in that cultural milestone for Cairo have imagined that one day whole seasons of opera from another continent could be wafted over the airwaves to Egyptian shores?
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George and Ira Gershwin's melodies pervade popular culture with the same frequency as Carmen or Debussy's "Clair de Lune." Two weeks ago, Brian Wilson contributed to the fold of Gershwin interpretations, releasing his newest album "Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin." The album, issued on Disney Pearl Series, is his second after the release of the much-anticipated "Smile" in 2005.
As you might expect, the former Beach Boy presents these standards, musical theater numbers and arias in cooing, three and four-part harmonies awash in reverb. Wilson plays "'S Wonderful" as a bossa nova, à la João Gilberto; he redefines "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" from Porgy and Bess as a instrumental jig for harmonica; and he adds both string and saxophone accompaniment to "Summertime" , singing with what you might call Southern California sprezzatura.
If it's too weird for you, there are plenty of other renditions to fall back on. Take the following, for instance: Leontyne Price singing "Summertime" for Jimmy Carter in 1978.
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Luca Guadagnino's film Io Sono l'Amore, which is being billed in the U.S. as I Am Love, is an enchanting consideration of love in a modern Italian world.
The movie is a delight for the senses, and not just because of the shots of the ancient-seeming, lavishly appointed villas. The director cobbled together preexisting music composed by John Adams to create the film score. The results are anything but your typical, sentimental movie-music. The selections, including "The Chairman Dances" and excerpts from Harmonielehre, have the clear, ringing and invigorating sounds that mark Adams's early-career minimalist compositions — music that seems to awaken the movie's heroine, played by the magnificent Tilda Swinton, to the life-affirming power of love.
Below, Swinton calls it Adams's "unedited" sound, which is a nice way to put it.
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Among my guilty pleasures are movies about opera — that is, film that feature opera in the plotline as opposed to movies of operas, such as the Zeffirelli Otello, or the Francesco Rosi Carmen, which despite their many virtues are somehow never as satisfying as an opera-house performance. (Captures of live performances, such as the Met's HD presentations, are in another, more exalted, class entirely.) What I love to watch are backstage films on the order of Serenade — Mario Lanza and Licia Albanese as Otello and Desdemona! — or Interrupted Melody, which has Eleanor Parker lip-synching her way through everything from Musetta's waltz to Brünnhilde's immolation.
I recently watched a DVD of The Glass Mountain, a 1949 British film about a composer (Michael Denison) torn between his love for his genteel English bride (Dulcie Gray) and his passion for the earthy Italian girl (Valentina Cortese) who nursed him to health when he was injured in the War. The Glass Mountain was evidently very popular in the U.K., although not an international success on the level of 1948's The Red Shoes, another movie that presented a triangular love story within the context of a backstage milieu. Just as the climax of The Red Shoes was the presentation of an original ballet, the payoff in The Glass Mountain is a lengthy sequence, set in La Fenice, devoted to an original opera (or at least excerpts from an original opera) called The Glass Mountain. It's about a poor young man who loves a poor young lady but marries a rich young lady, only to have signora numero uno die and show up as a ghost at the wedding reception. The original pair of lovers are reunited when the young man plunges to his death while searching for his beloved in the mists that shroud the glass mountain of the opera's title.
The score is by the incomparable Nino Rota — the main theme is quite striking and almost impossible to forget, as is often the case with Rota's film work. The opera stars at work are soprano Elena Rizzieri, an attractive artist with a tangy sound whose work is otherwise unfamiliar to me, and the great Tito Gobbi, looking quite handsome and slim at thirty-six, sounding marvelous and handling the English-language dialogue with impressive ease. In an odd twist, Gobbi is meant to be playing himself — "Tito Gobbi of La Scala" — within the confines of a fictional story but pulls it off with complete conviction. In addition to his work as the hero of The Glass Mountain opera, Gobbi also sings a lullaby of sorts, accompanying himself on the accordion, to a group of wounded soldiers and does so with an almost indecent amount of charm.
The soundtrack for the Glass Mountain opera is conducted by Franco Ferrarra, who was later one of Riccardo Muti's teachers; the on-screen conducting is handled with painful clumsiness by actor Michael Denison, who plays the conflicted composer at the center of the drama's love triangle. Despite Valentina Cortese's sympathetic performance as the "other woman," the movie's stiff-upper-lip love triangle is mightily silly stuff. What makes the film of interest today is Gobbi and Rota's haunting music; the opera excerpts leave one wondering what the full score sounds like.
I watched the film on a VCI DVD that had poor sound — most noticeable in the disc's "extra," a 1939 cartoon featuring egrets meandering through a moonlit waterscape to the strains of Debussy's "Clair de Lune." But a YouTube clip of Gobbi at work in The Glass Mountain has been posted below that is well worth a look.
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One of the great joys of summer is listening to music al fresco — preferably on a lush lawn, with a group of good friends and a lavish picnic spread before you. There's something about the fresh air that enhances both the love of food and the food of love and makes the whole experience transcend the sum of its part. Yes, the mosquitoes can be annoying, the ground is hard and sometimes damp, and the speakers, especially if one is a bit removed from the stage, can hardly be said to transmit a lifelike surround-sound effect. Indeed, it's often hard to tell whether what one is hearing is a transcendent performance by a great virtuoso or something more run-of-the-mill. Worst of all, the company outside one's own blanket can be noisy and noisome. We've all had to sit next to the chain-smokers, the chatty Cathys, the cell-phone addicts, the parents who think their children's shrieks of delight or whines of sheer boredom add something to the musical texture. Still, it is always great music being played or sung at a high level under the inspiring vault of nature, and even on occasions when all the aforementioned irritations have conspired together to detract from the hoped-for idyllic setting, I have seldom regretted spending an evening in this fashion.
Of course, New York still has the Philharmonic's summer concerts, and the Met, even in these hard times, has been generous enough to provide its own free Summerstage events, featuring up-and-coming operatic artists alongside some seasoned stars. But one of my favorite things about those complete opera evenings of yore, when I lay stretched out in the grass with thousands of my fellow New Yorkers as bel canto or verismo filled the air, was the pleasant awareness that many of my neighbors were just dipping their toes into this fabulous art form I love so much for the very first time, taking advantage of the chance to let a whole opera wash over them without having to commit to the price of a ticket or put on their Sunday best or sit still in a red plush seat for hours at a time. Despite the limitations of the sound system, a live, full-length performance gives a sense of what opera is all about that cannot be had from a concert of excerpts. (A week's worth of HD screenings on the plaza does provide the complete-opera experience, but not the thrill of living the music in real time along with the singers, or the decadence of lolling about on a blanket in the midst of a lofty cultural event.) I used to love to eavesdrop on the pre-concert and intermission conversations of my neighbors, as they tried to make sense of the often perplexing synopsis or offered their awed newbie takes on the singing, and on the astonishing scope and scale of the whole endeavor. And for every rambunctious child that spoiled my enjoyment of a favorite musical moment, there was another, rapt and open-mouthed at this novel sound-world, whose wonderstruck enjoyment exponentially multiplied my own.
It's great that some of the Met's young artists are getting a new kind of exposure via the free concerts on Summerstage. But I cannot help hoping that one summer soon the grand-scale, full-cast-and-orchestra performances that once captivated seas and seas of people on the Great Lawn will be back in business again.
"Actually, no," I said. "How do you get into it?"
"Oh, come on — everyone knows that the singers' publicists pay for that kind of coverage."
Well, that's news to me. In the twenty-two years that I have worked for OPERA NEWS, I've witnessed many jaw-dropping incidents with people who work in the music business, but never has a publicist offered to pay to get a client into the magazine's pages. Who knows how people get these ideas about what goes on behind the scenes at our publication? If publicists paid to get their clients into the magazine, does anyone honestly think I'd still be living in a small one-bedroom apartment and planning budget trips on Expedia? But this little episode did get me to thinking about why people talk so much about music publicists, assigning them such a significant role in the way the business works.
I'll tell you something: many of them are quite insignificant. What's more, many of them are quite unnecessary.
Now, institutional publicists can do a great deal of good. Large symphony orchestras and opera companies need good P.R. and marketing people, and they can be of enormous benefit to the singers who perform with those organizations. (I'm not so sure about some of the smaller organizations: there's one group in New York that changes publicists the way I change rolls of paper towels, and it never seems to make any difference.)
But I think that every single one of my OPERA NEWS colleagues agrees with me on this point: an individual singer or a conductor has the greatest need of a publicist when the career has grown so unwieldy, so complicated by millions of details, that a publicist can act as kind of a combination of clearing house and production stage manager. A lot of singers — younger ones, especially — sign on with publicists because they are under the impression that publicists will bring them greater visibility and that greater visibility will yield more work. Back in the day when cultural departments in media outlets ran wider and deeper than they do now, and when everyone was reading the same magazines and newspapers and watching the same T.V. shows, that might have been the case. But the whole media scene has changed so dramatically. I'm not a member of the Greatest Generation, and I hate to sound like one, lecturing those darned kids on the importance of a proper work ethic. But: the best way to secure more work for yourself, to build your career, is by showing up on time for rehearsals, knowing your music, performing your heart out, not making a pest of yourself with management — in other words, doing your job. That way, you have at least a fighting chance of being re-engaged.
Whether you are a young singer or one in mid-career, a publicist really can't help you get work. If you are a young singer, what most publicists are going to do is charge an exorbitant monthly fee. Most likely you will be charged every time the publicist has lunch with someone like me for the purpose of pitching a story. One thing I think a lot of young singers don't understand is that a lot of editors and writers keep their eyes open — they can spot young talent and develop an interest in it without some paid handmaiden spoon-feeding information to them.
Now, I know that this is not always the case. There are some editors who rely heavily on publicists to supply not only the story idea, but the whole package — the writer included. I think this is a horrifying practice: at OPERA NEWS, we tend to resist the idea of the publicist recommending a writer, because we automatically assume that what we're going to get is a piece that the publicist has unduly influenced.
There are good publicists around, too — smart, seasoned pros who really know how to pitch a story and don't whine if you say no. But I'm afraid that they're outnumbered by the publicists who don't do their homework, pitch story ideas that have appeared in the magazine only a few months earlier, or alienate the editors by trying to use various forms of bullying or emotional blackmail to get their way. I'm not going to mention any names, not even the names of the good ones, because if I do, the "others" will be calling me wanting to know why their names were included, and why they thought I always liked them, and wondering what they've done to offend me and how they might make it up.
The music business is in a shambles, and it simply can't — or shouldn't — support the number of publicists who have hung out a shingle for themselves. So, especially to those struggling young artists, I would say: use that money that you were saving for a monthly P.R. commission to hit that sale at Barneys or Bloomingdales. Buy your grandmother that Three Irish Tenors CD she's seen advertised on TV. Hire someone to teach you how Wozzeck really goes.
That is not to say that Dark Hope, her new indie-rock effort, is nearly so heinous as Haunted Heart, which left me demanding concrete, recorded evidence that Fleming actually spent any of her college days touring as a jazz singer.
At the end of the day, Dark Hope is simply impressive in its genre impersonation (more the music than the video for the first single; see below). You can catch Joanne Sydney Lessner's delicious yet fair review of the album in the October issue of OPERA NEWS.
— Oussama Zahr]]>
The undeniably operatic life of Nelson Mandela (with the bonus character of his now ex-wife Winnie) was a suggestion that did end up onstage, if not yet in major international houses. The fall of the Romanovs, another proposed storyline, received royal opera treatment with the debut of Deborah Drattell's Nicholas and Alexandra at Los Angeles Opera in 2003, with Plácido Domingo (well, really, who else?) in the pivotal role of Rasputin. One of our contributors felt strongly that the lives and deaths of the Ceausescus, the evil husband-and-wife dictators of Romania, would be ideal grist for the opera mill. This one never happened — probably because nobody could think of a Romanian soprano to play the missus.
Not one of the group we asked in 1993 mentioned J. Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the atomic bomb as a promising opera topic. Oops. In fact, none of the suggestions we received has inspired an opera with broad, mainstream appeal, let alone multiple productions.
Nobody considered TV talk-show hosts potential title characters, so Jerry Springer: The Opera, London's long-running, Olivier-Award winning musical wasn't on anybody's radar. Apparently we didn't realize that tabloid topics and "real" news would become almost indistinguishable within a few years. After all, could any of us have predicted that an opera about the life of Anna Nicole Smith would find its way to — of all places — the stage of the Royal Opera House in 2011?
Maybe we should forget the news (and what passes for news today). It does seem that now, perhaps more than ever, novels — from The Little Prince to Moby-Dick — lure librettists. This is by no means a new trend, but a surprising number of the resulting operas display considerable (for these times) staying power. So former Book-of-the-Month Club selections make for good operas, right? Not everybody would agree on that (check out the OPERA NEWS Archives and read Joel Honig's "A Novel Idea," OPERA NEWS's Aug. 2001).
— Elizabeth Diggans]]>
Many artists have successfully made forays outside what is considered their home territory. Take Eileen Farrell's recordings of Irving Berlin or Rodgers & Hart: I defy anyone listening blind to identify Farrell as an interloper in the pop world. And Cesare Siepi's "I've Got You Under My Skin" — silly, over-the-top and heavily accented as it is — remains fun, sexy and utterly irresistible. In the opposite direction, Sting has earned kudos for his idiosyncratic but earnest ventures into lute song, and Aretha Franklin's accidental appropriation of "Nessun dorma" was a smash hit.
I can't imagine Farrell would have had much objection to the term "crossover," since she seemed to hold dual citizenship in the pop and classical worlds and could travel back and forth over the border confident of a warm welcome whichever way she went. The trouble seems to arise with artists who want to be taken for natives but come across more as the kind of daytripping tourists whose cameras, Hawaiian shirts and socks-with-sandals are a dead giveaway. One suspects there would be less niggling over terminology if the artists in question were not so worried about tripping over the barbed wire and finding themselves caught in no-man's land, with hostile searchlights trained on them from both sides.
— Louise T. Guinther]]>
On the other hand, at the end of an even average ballet performance, a whole new show begins in front of the curtain. Any prima ballerina worth her salt recognizes that she now owns that little piece of the stage, and she's not about to let anybody take it from her. This is her moment, and you'll get none of that surprised "Oooh, all of you nice people standing there applauding for little ol' me?" attitude from her. And her male costar (no matter how spectacularly he himself has danced) gallantly assumes the role of her enslaved go-fer, trotting around obediently picking up bouquets and presenting them to her on bended knee with an expression of adoration (probably concealing the fact that he can't stand the very sight of her). She may deign to remove a flower from a bouquet and return it to him with a gracious nod or affectionate kiss (never letting on that she's not quite certain what his name is). This can go on for quite a while, and the audience loves it — and stays to watch, as if the ballet hadn't really ended when the prince pledged his undying love to the wrong swan and had to go back to that damn lake to find the swan he truly loved.
So, should opera singers take a lesson from this? Would a master class on the art of the curtain call taught by one or two (preferably Russian — they do it best) ballerinas help? The problem, of course, will be how to train the tenors to pick up the bouquets — and actually hand them over to the sopranos. Maybe that's where the baritones come in.
— Elizabeth Diggans
Recorded sound is not necessarily accurate or fair. Like a photograph, it carries the promise of realism, deceiving us into believing that what we're hearing (or seeing) is 100% representational — a duplication of a live experience — when in fact it isn't at all.
Sondra Radvanovsky is an estimable artist, a soprano capable of delivering thundering fortissimos and a keening line in the Verdi repertory. But in my opinion, her latest CD, entitled Verdi Arias and reviewed in our upcoming August issue, shows off the singer's power but not her strengths. Now, Delos is what we might call a boutique record label. But even so, the engineer could have given us something better than a big, fuzzy soprano sound drowning in reverb.
Having seen Radvanovsky live at the Met as Elvira in Ernani and Leonora in Trovatore (selections from both operas appear on the CD, and excerpts can be heard below), I can testify to her distinctive timbre, dynamic range and, above all, tonal clarity — to say nothing of intangibles like her warmth and dramatic alertness.
The disc puts me in mind of Dolora Zajick, a colossus of the dramatic mezzo repertory, who also recorded an album of Verdi arias that seemed to miss the point of her art. Let's hope that Radvanovsky finds a sound engineer as loving and solicitous as the ones Renée Fleming enjoys over at Decca, the kind of collaborator who can lavish attention upon her voice so that we might better enjoy it.
— Oussama Zahr
"D'amor sull'ali rosee" from Il Trovatore
"Tutto sprezzo che d'Ernani" from Ernani
So should live-performance criticism suffer the same fate as film criticism appears to face? In a word, no.
A well-written, carefully-considered live-performance review not only tells its reader something about a once-in-a-lifetime experience (that exact performance is never going to happen, even with the same artists at the same theater in the same production, more than once) but ideally offers something more: background information on the piece and possibly its composer or creator, its production history and why the specific performance in question is special (or not).
I like to think I've learned something after reading a review, and I also like to think the reviewer has been to a lot more performances of the work (or at least studied it more closely and knows far more about it) than I. Theatrical experiences should be described, dissected and criticized (or praised) by the best writers we can find. How else will future generations know what they missed when we're no longer around to tell them how much better theater was in our day? Sure, YouTube is a gold mine, but isn't it really best for samba-dancing babies (ginormous or not) and well-informed beauty-pageant contestants educating us about international problems?
— Elizabeth Diggans]]>
The radio broadcast of Battle's Adina from 1992 features another artist of small but spectacular vocal means: Stanford Olsen, who sang Nemorino, was a light lyric tenor blessed with rare musicality and refinement. Like Battle, he possessed the clarity and brilliance of tone, the incisive articulation and the instinctive feel for the shape of a phrase to project an illusion of vocal power when needed, so that even without a big, beefy sound he could produce a whopping musical effect. When he sang softly, you could probably have heard a pin drop in the hall, except that the audience tended to be so rapt at those moments they would have died rather than drop one. And because he had the courage, the technique and the delicate beauty of sound to offer a true pianissimo — always audible in the prevailing hush it inspired — his fortes, though never loud by Met standards, provided sufficient contrast, build and ring to pack a genuine punch within the context of his nuanced singing.
I've never quite understood why Olsen did not have a bigger career. His Ottavio was suave, manly and heartfelt; his Belmonte made the long, sustained phrases and tricky articulations that can come across as a tenorial obstacle course into the miraculous expressive devices they were meant to be. His Nemorino was poignant, mellifluous, honey-sweet, at once dignified and hilarious. And he had one thing that is in far too short supply — the ability to float an ethereal note or phrase so freely and easily that it seemed to emanate straight from his heart, bypassing the constraints of his throat, and hang effortlessly and magically in the air.
I often wonder whether the current craving for big, blaring voices is a result of generational hearing loss occasioned by too many rock concerts and sessions with the headphones set on high, or is part of a discouraging trend toward passive participation in the arts. Nowadays, we seem to require the singers to come to us with a kind of in-your-face boldness that demands our attention, whether we like it or not, rather than requiring us to prick up our ears and lean forward eagerly to catch every shade of musical meaning.
Do we go to the opera just to hear the music as it goes by, struggling to drown out the din of our own distracting thoughts — or can we muster the extra effort to focus actively on taking in every word and note of something worth really listening to?
— Louise T. Guinther]]>
I confess that I've often been surprised by how difficult it is for many musicians to discuss the nuts and bolts of how they do what they do. When I began writing for OPERA NEWS, back in the late 1980s, it didn't take me long to discover that singers and conductors — singers, particularly — were often at something of a loss to describe the evolution of their performances in anything other than rather vague and general terms. I would nervously traipse off to an interview armed with a list of questions that I hoped would trigger a provocative, detailed conversation — and often I was disappointed in the result. Not always: Dolora Zajick, for example, can hold forth on technical matters in a way that's endlessly fascinating. Too often, though, I came away feeling that I had learned half of what I'd hoped to learn.
It took me a while to understand that many singers — many musicians, period, in fact — are much better at making music than talking about it. In the August issue of OPERA NEWS, Richard Bonynge freely admits this. In fact, in my experience, I have had many more precisely detailed conversations with writers and professors about the structure and demands of various works than I have had with performers themselves. Why? I think it's because those writers and professors tend to approach music as a problem to be solved, and understood; they're always looking to crack the code of some monumental work, as if understanding every facet of how it's all put together will lead them to a more profound appreciation of the piece itself.
There's no guarantee that that will happen, of course. I was thinking of this recently as I was listening, once more, to Eileen Farrell singing Brünnhilde's immolation scene — a live performance from 1951, with Victor de Sabata conducting the New York Philharmonic. The soprano is in astonishing form — although she sang brilliantly for much of her career, she never sounded as ravishing as she did during the 1950s, before gall-bladder surgery cost her some of the refulgent bloom at the top of her voice. Her Brünnhilde is a staggering achievement, sung in firm, taut musical lines, and in sensuous, impassioned, womanly tones. (Although Farrell is one of my favorite sopranos, I have no trouble admitting that she doesn't always inhabit her music as fully as she does here.)
I began thinking of the two years — 1997 to 1999 — when I collaborated with Eileen on her autobiography, which the publisher, Northeastern University Press, stuck with the meaningless title Can't Help Singing: The Life of Eileen Farrell. (When the book was published, Deanna Durbin wrote me a letter from France, indicating that the title was more appropriate for her life story than for Eileen's; I didn't argue with her.)
While we worked on the book, I frequently pummeled Eileen with questions about how she did this, how she did that. Usually, what she did in response was bite her lip and frown at me. Once, she made me fall over laughing by saying, "Do you think I give a shit about stuff like this?" She had a great appreciation of the various twists and turns of her own career, a terrific, self-deprecating wit, and she told a story like nobody else. But I soon realized that she wasn't giving me much about how she had mastered various parts of the Ring or Cavalleria Rusticana or Wozzeck … because she didn't quite know herself. She'd been a good student. She'd worked hard. She'd perfected her technique. She could sing a vast and varied amount of repertory incredibly well. She was touched with musical genius, in an unlikely package. But she didn't know exactly how she'd done it all. She'd just done it. Like all great artists, to a certain degree she'd been a creature of instinct, and there was only so much she could tell me. She knew how it felt, and that was enough. Once, while she was teaching at Indiana University in the 1970s, a student bombarded her with a string of technical questions. Eileen put her hand up and said, "Listen, honey — I don't know your soft palate from a hole in the ground."
All of that technical knowledge is nice. Book-learnin' is a wonderful thing. I prize it. But how much does it really enhance our experience of listening to a great performance, which most often skips the brain and goes straight to the heart? Isn't the most important thing to be able to feel that magic, to recognize and respond to it, when it really happens?
Jenkins's latest heir apparent is Countess LuAnn de Lesseps, from the Bravo TV show The Real Housewives of New York City, who decided one day to record and release a dance-diva, spoken-word track called "Money Can't Buy You Class." (We can count our lucky stars that Jenkins's brilliance was untouched by Auto-Tune, which La Contessa uses quite liberally.)
The comparison begins with their shared trouble in tackling ascending intervals, but really, do we need a point-by-point? Enjoy!
– Oussama Zahr
The five films, which were being screened at Manhattan's IFC Center, almost defy written description: there are surreal creatures, abstract and remote settings, and a loose, coming-of-age plot to the cycle, something like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man set in Narnia. Music is an integral part of the cycle, and composer Jonathan Bepler has scored nearly every moment of it. In Cremaster 3, the protagonist (played by Barney) rigs an elevator shaft in the Chrysler building as a harp — leaving the other empty shafts as drones — which a Gaelic-singing maître d' (played by Paul Brady) uses to accompany himself.
I saw the cycles in order by title (Cremasters 1 through 5 were filmed in 1996, 1999, 2002, 1995, 1997, respectively). This is an occupational hazard, admittedly, but as I watched the films, I wondered what it would be like if Barney were to direct an opera. Cremaster 5 offered the answer to that question: Barney set most of the film inside Budapest's State Opera House, with the Budapest Philharmonic playing in the pit, while a costumed climber (again played by Barney) climbs up, across and down the proscenium, as former Bond-girl Ursula Andress "sings" from the theater's Royal Box. (Soprano Adrienne Csengery does the actual singing.)
The result, however, is a bit of a letdown. Bepler, who is a talented orchestral composer, fails to create much variation in the vocal parts. Where he is otherwise capable of creating spontaneous rhythmic texture, he provides Csengery with what seems like one endless legato phrase, with a tepid orchestration underneath. She is less than pleasant to listen to: her intonation is spotty and she sings with one of the widest vibratos around. Andress, and her accompanying twin sprites, perform a campy lip-syncing job to go along with it.
With the proliferation of operas in high definition, it's possible to imagine Barney directing an opera, without omitting any of the media he synthesizes so well. Judging by the ending of Cremaster 5, I'd say the director may be ready to direct Rusalka.
– Tristan Kraft
More information can be found at www.cremaster.net, the IFC Center and the fan-site Cremaster Fanatic, where one can see Barney and family sitting at the MOMA's Marina Abramović exhibit, or the avant-garde artist modeling for Macy's in the late 1980's.]]>
I recently discovered the pleasures of barbershop singing when a group of friends decided their male quartet needed a female adjunct to provide variety (and perhaps to liven up the inevitable post-rehearsal cocktail hours). Barbershop is toe-tapping fun, and though I confess to liking it best in its original low-voiced form, it's a great outlet for vocal wannabes like me, who can count and sing pretty much on pitch and even manage a passable "Voi che sapete"in the shower but outside the friendly acoustics of that tiled echo chamber could not produce a lush, opulent tone if our lives depended on it. Those four parts together, even sung in thin, individually unremarkable voices like mine, produce all the rich resonance one could wish for, and it is quite a thrill to be partially responsible for such a sound, even if one can only claim one quarter of the credit.
"So," a friend asked me at one of those cocktail hours, "has there ever been an opera with a barbershop quartet?" He thought he was kidding, but the answer, of course is yes. (Is there anything of musical value or interest that has not made its way into opera at some point in the long history of the lyric art?) There may be a multitude of examples, and I would be delighted to hear about them if anyone out there is familiar with others. The one that came to my mind was "We will rest awhile," from Scott Joplin's only opera, Treemonisha, a work never produced in its composer's lifetime, but which has enjoyed sporadic revivals in recent years. I sort of knew it was out there, but it wasn't until I had tested the quartet waters myself that I grew eager to hear and inwardly digest the operatic form of that time-honored and very American genre.
YouTube to the rescue. In among a surprising number of dreadful renditions by amateur choral groups (one foolproof way to kill the spirit of barbershop is to perform it with massed choral forces, rather than one voice to a part) I found the following homemade video, taken in a backstage corridor during a performance. It's not only good barbershop singing: it overflows with the sheer joy of making music and the matchless sense of true bonding one derives from collaborating in a tight ensemble. Watch the guy on the left — that electric smile and the way he locks in the other three with his hands, his eyes and every other expressive means at his disposal. I dare you to listen to it and not be tempted to try it yourself.
– Louise Guinther]]>
In the 1980s, when I worked on the performing arts staff of the 92nd Street Y, the program's director, Omus Hirshbein, worked overtime bringing a wide range of twentieth-century music to the Y's somewhat hidebound audience. I used to answer many of the letters from subscribers who wrote in angrily protesting that they had to sit through works like Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht or Berg's Chamber Concerto, which they usually derisively characterized as "new music." Berg was near completion of Lulu when he died in 1935, but for me, the Met's recent performance carried the wallop of discovery. This time around, it really did seem, in so many ways, like "new music."
– Brian Kellow]]>
As if a piano-playing fashion designer weren't enough of a surprise, "Clair de Lune" reared its lovely head again a few days later, this time in a pop song called "Say You'll Go," from Janelle Monáe's new album The ArchAndroid (released May 18). Monáe is a tiny sensation, making small waves in the music industry for the high-concept sonic landscape of her music, drawing on influences from hip-hop and Cab Calloway to disco, David Bowie and movie music. She is fascinated by futuristic film dystopias, with album titles that reference Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The ArchAndroid creates its own alternate universe, filled with a riot of musical ideas. It's nice to think that amid the general cataclysm, Monáe finds comfort in the wistful strains of "Clair de Lune," just as Mizrahi does.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet plays "Clair de Lune" from Debussy's Suite Bergamasque .
Janelle Monáe sings "Say You'll Go" from ArchAndroid .
[Bad Boy Entertainment]
– Oussama Zahr]]>