Archives of the Republic of West Thirdflooria

IWD posting from the Ministry of Noise

2012-03-08T00:24:00.000-05:00

It's International Women's Day, might as well play Hedningarna

from the fronts

2012-03-06T19:58:00.004-05:00

Sameer Rahim, Opera Novice, reports on his encounters with Norma and The Death of Klinghoffer, over at The Telegraph (which likes Anais Mitchell's new album, btw). He's setting an impressive pace, I think I got through only five operas in the first year of my apprenticeship, but the first of them was Otello, and that took a lot of listening.

And speaking of which, La Cieca posts news that medici.tv will be webcasting Bartoli's Rossini's Otello, details over yonder, including evidence that Zachary Woolfe actually liked something. Lotus-Eater's review (auf Deutsch) is here.

Penultimately, Maury D'Annato's bulletin from the house on Latonia Moore's Met debut is, as always, worth the read.

Lastly, NDR has an interview with Christine Schäfer (also auf Deutsch).

Sunday morning Malvina from the Ministry of Noise

2012-03-04T11:35:00.001-05:00

"Everybody thinks my head's full of nothin',

wants to put his special stuff in,

fill the space with candy wrappers,

keep out sex and revolution,

but there's no hole in my head.

Too bad."

a statement out of character

2012-03-03T12:57:00.001-05:00

I've generally avoided this neck of the editorial woods, so forgive me, but would somebody give that asswipe back his oxycontin and maybe he'll shut the fuck up?

"Yo" in the valleys but "Hoit" in the hills

2012-03-03T11:54:00.002-05:00

The Grey Lady reports on the completion of the Dictionary of American Regional English, just in time for the social media-driven de-regionalizing to begin, seems to us. Moreover, vis à vis the accuracy of the Twitter-generated soda/pop/Coke map, linguistic field research indicates cargo-cult usage of "pop" in and around the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York, whereas in the land-locked West Thirdfloorian Republic, in cases where Coke is the specific referent, "St. Jerome's Bugjuice". (Mutually understood in the East Thirdfloorian Republic, but not common usage there.)

Update: Criminals, gypsies, women, food, social diseases...they got it all: the Urban Dictionary of 1811 is up on Gutenberg.

lenten entertainments

2012-03-02T18:54:00.007-05:00

The next free audio webcast from the Met is Monday's L'Elisir d'amore, with Damrau, Florez, Kwiecien and Corbelli, 7:30pm ET at the usual place.

The grapevine also says that Violetta Urmana is out for Saturday's Met Aida, so sub Latonia Moore will be making her Met debut. Read Anthony Tommasini's review of her in the 2000 Met Council Auditions concert here. (Not that she hasn't done other stuff since then.)

Last Saturday, while the rest of the world was distracted with the Ernani HDcast, Renée Fleming was testing out her Ariadne in the provinces (Baden-Baden), with Sophie Koch as the Komponist, Jane Archibald as Zerbinetta, and Robert Dean Smith, who survived Bacchus pretty well. Up on medici.tv for free another month or so, I b'lieve.

The next fun thing up on medici.tv will be the Harmonic Convergence, or Match Made in Hell, or both, of Robert Wilson and Pelléas et Mélisande on March 16th at 1:30pm ET. It's likely I'll be on some fabulous painkillers that day, which can only enhance the experience.

miscellaneous portents

2012-02-29T21:25:00.003-05:00

In the interest of having all these in one place when it's the Met's turn, here's a roundup of (ex post facto) Klinghoffer@ENO print reviews, from Culture Wars, the arts desk, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, and (via tweet de la Cieca) Bloomberg.

Speaking of the Met, in case anybody missed it, here's the 2012/13 HD season. Huzzah for their deciding to HD the Ponnelle La Clemenza di Tito, but we wonder if that means this production's due for the axe. This prospect could prompt a lot of whinging on our part, but having done Lamentations of the Old Opera Geek in the previous post, all we'll say is: Wouldn't it have been nice if they'd gotten it together to get this on some sort of visual medium back in 2005, when they had both ASvO and Frank Lopardo, a Tito who could actually, y'know, sing the notes -- all of them, in the order in which they were written, even -- instead of... well, never mind. We're sure it will be fine. Dammit.

the revolution will be HD-cast

2012-02-28T00:28:00.000-05:00

Lucy over at Opera Obsession has a thought-provoking meditation on opera and audience. Having lived through a few decades of the Imminent Demise of Opera™, it always seemed like mine would be the demographic cohort destined to kill the lights and slam the door on the way out (if there turned out to be enough of us, which was doubtful). Now people who probably weren't born yet when I was hearing my first dire predictions are trading tweets about how much it sucks to be missing the Khovanshchina prima. That's the prima I'm listening to right now, leisurely on a Monday night, not in some hard-won, barricade-defended Saturday afternoon NPR ghetto. Kewl :-)

On the other hand, I was just listening to a Met broadcast from 2005, and the degree to which Margaret Juntwait has changed her game is quite striking. Back then, of course, she was replacing the magisterial Peter Allen, and she was a solo act. I kind of preferred it to the Juntwait & Berger (or Siff) Show. Yes, I suppose it's a more, uh, user-friendly presentation now. But, frankly, nothing blows the atmosphere faster than two bright-voiced people brightly chatting about the auto da fe that just happened in Don Carlo or the kid about to go over the cliff in Peter Grimes. And what will they do with those Carmelite nuns next year? Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Oh wait, one thing does blow the atmosphere faster, and that's interviewing the singers at intermission. Remember that absolutely drop dead awesome exposition of Billy Budd John Culshaw did for some intermission back in...Probably not, I think it must still have been the Carter (Trudeau/Thatcher/Schmidt/d'Estaing) Administration(s). Not all intermissions were like that, and I grant that Boris Goldovsky could be kinda freaky. But you learned a lot, and it wasn't about where Anna Netrebko bought her frock.

Can intermissions be made user-friendly, not to say informative, without being like an interview with ARod? Maybe not. Lucy writes of being an evangelist for opera. I was, once, too. But not long ago I decided it was no longer warranted. Now people can find their own way just fine into some iteration of the opera house without anybody having to Virgil them. Above all, they want no details, smooth or spikey, to come between them and the surface experience: they don't want to know how Iago starts that riot just by sliding off the beat or how Isolde, at a mere suggestion, makes the hunting horns morph into the sound of the fountain right there, and suddenly, despite your better judgement, you're in her world, not Brangäne's.

Which means what they don't want is to know exactly why this stuff really is as amazing as it is.

This is an unstated doctrine of the Gelb revolution, and I know it to be true.

Does it matter?

2012-02-26T00:24:00.001-05:00

Nomi

incoming

2012-02-23T19:20:00.013-05:00

The Met has released its new season cyber-prop. David McVicar wins.

John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer looms this weekend at ENO. According to The Telegraph, the rhubarb has already sprouted. Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, Tom Service suggests there might be some music to consider in there somewhere.

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music students get their Rosenkavalier on, free video streaming this Friday and Saturday night here, starting at 7pm EST.

IU Rosenkavalier update: staging needs work but singing was fab, and orchestra had its Straussian mojo workin. It's a different cast tomorrow night.

Also, the news via Towanda is people on the left side of the Atlantic could make it a Strauss double-header.

Don Pasquale @ TCE

2012-02-21T00:32:00.000-05:00

is now up via ARTE LiveWeb, subtitles in French

or subtitles in German

2012-02-19T01:56:00.000-05:00

coming up on the outside

2012-02-16T21:01:00.000-05:00

This modest bit of Philadelphia@SPAC listing might bode well:

8 p.m. Aug. 9

Nezet-Seguin presents "Italian Opera Night," featuring two operatic vocalists to be announced and arias and overtures by Verdi, Puccini, Rossini, Leoncavallo and Mascagni.

It may seem like nothing special, but the last operatic thing we heard them do in Saratoga involved Tatiana Troyanos. They pretty much abandoned all things operatic after that, and probably this is why. Who will TBA turn out to be, and will the fairly robust local Met in HD scene generate the audience that wasn't there of old? Place your bets.

Welcome to the Spa City, maestro.

Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report

2012-02-14T18:31:00.000-05:00

Anthony Tommasini in the NYT thinks Jonathan Miller's CDC-approved Traviata at neo-NYCO shows some signs of life. James Jorden in the NY Post thinks it should get its affairs in order.

http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/details.asp?pid=8438

sundry items

2012-02-10T20:44:00.002-05:00

late addition: "After two hearings I still couldn’t fathom whether it was a comedy or a tragedy." The answer is Yes. Sameer Rahim, Opera Novice, scales Mt. Rosenkavalier.

and NYC Arts has an interview with Angela Gheorghiu, wherein she says pretty much the usual Angela Gheorghiu things (starting about 9 minutes in):

Watch NYC-ARTS Full Episode: Angela Gheorghiu, Spanish Dress on PBS. See more from NYC-ARTS.

Previously:

"I do not think that the function of the visual world...necessarily needs to mimic or copy or even add to the narrative surface of the opera." From back in October, John Conklin talks about "the performative power of design".

Countdown to Klinghoffer: In anticipation of the ENO premiere, Jessica Duchen rounds up the controversy, and librettist Alice Goodman discusses the aftermath.

Money and ideas: The FT has the numbers on the business of converting novels to film.

these tell-tale women: Richard III @ BAM 2.5.12

2012-02-07T01:11:00.001-05:00

Across the stage hangs a curtain and one word projected onto it, Now. It's the first word of the play, of course, "Now is the winter of our discontent...", but it foregrounds the past, marks the beginning of the play as a turning point in a story that has been going on for long years and seven plays previous. All these things have happened, and now... A word that points in both directions. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York."

But if you're coming in here, at the point where it seems like the wars are all done, you've missed all the context. "...This son of York," he says, and he points over his shoulder to the still image in the newsreel he's turned his back on. He's wearing a paper crown from a cracker and he's armed with a noisemaker. Woohoo. "Grim visag'd War hath smoothed his wrinkled front..." Then he gets up from his chair.

Arduously. He's got a brace on his left leg, which, as it is, is twisted near half way out of its socket. His spine's a mess, too, and his left hand. He uses a cane, it seems to give him extra limbs and moves him like a malevolent insect. He leans on irony a bit too much. Well, actually, more sarcasm. You wonder why anyone would believe him. Sometimes you know they don't,that they're just following form and hoping it'll all come right in the end. Odds aren't good.

If there's an overarching theme to this production, it's the notion of spin, of manipulation of the public image, starting with newsreel footage of King Edward triumphant. Later the focal point of the play will be Richard's engineering of his accession to the crown, which is done via live link, a script, and an audience primed by the Duke of Buckingham (Chuk Iwuji) -- half motivational speaker, half televangelist, all Boar Party operative -- to respond in a particular way. Give the people what they think they want, and you will get what you think you want.

And after that, who cares what anybody thinks. "Thus high, by thy advice and thy assistance, is King Richard seated," says Richard, addressing not Buckingham (as the text would indicate) but us, the audience, who have been his co-conspirators from the beginning. Now, and briefly, confident in his position, Richard announces his new queen's impending death as she sits by, gazing catatonically into the middle distance.

She's lost already, but he won her quick, and not altogether convincingly. "What though I kill'd her husband and her father...", but this is one of the hardest scenes in Shakespeare to manage, you either surf the subtleties, or skim them and shoot for as much unsettling comedy as you can squeeze out of this abrupt, unlikely situation. Actually there are a lot of scenes in the play like that, and Mendes chooses the latter strategy for nearly all of them. I'm not sure whether that indicates lack of commitment or a directorial aim that doesn't quite come off -- like if the production of what is essentially an ensemble piece is built around the title character, and everyone else ends up being secondary.

If that's the case, what's arresting is how much that spotlight throws the women's shadows long: Lady Anne, forced to choose; Queen Elizabeth, forced to lose; the old Duchess, who has seen it all before; and Queen Margaret, like a force of nature, who, seeing it all coming, brings it all into being, cracking bones together like the summoning of war, marking an X on every doorway shut by Richard's bloody policy, until there's only one way out.

Of these tell-tale women, then, Maureen Anderman's old Duchess had the truly hair-raising moment, when she lays a mother's curse on her tainted offspring to his face, and he withers a little bit more under its vitriol: "Bloody thou art and bloody will be thy end; Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend." There's no more final casting off than this. Thanks, ma.

Elizabeth Woodville, Edward's Queen, probably has the most to do in this play -- Margaret might get the hot speeches, but her course is set. Elizabeth has to manage the slow devolution of her power, and all that entails, including the death of her husband, the murder of her sons, and the targeting of her daughter, in which she is forced to collude. Haydn Gwynne was entirely up to the task.

When it comes to Margaret of Anjou, we're always glad when she's there at all. She has the sharpest poetry to speak, and yet it's not unknown for the role to be eliminated altogether. (As witness the Ian McKellen film version, though here they gave at least some of her lines to Maggie Smith -- those who like her as the Dowager Countess of Grantham should check her out as the Dowager Duchess of York, paragon of badass.) And it's a strange role, no question. What is she still doing there, wandering in among the squabbling victors so long after her own defeat? It can be tough to bring any kind of coherent answer to that question.

Mendes solves it by making her inhabit two worlds at once -- on the one hand, a kind of spirit world where she can observe and move and serve as the conduit of fate; and on the other, when she needs to, materialize and speechify. Gemma Jones, in old army greatcoat, tarnish-crowned and strega-headed, walks the fine line this production gives her and makes it believable, in a way most Margarets aren't though given less to do.

As Lady Anne, Annabel Scholey has the trickiest scene in the play and if, as stated above, it doesn't quite come off, the fault doesn't lie with her. She puts up a serious fight to win that scene, but she never gets the space to work out Anne's transformation of conviction in any kind of reasonable way. In spite of that, she holds her own against a monster, even as the character she plays is caving in to his.

As physically demanding as Sam Mendes' production makes the title role -- when at the end the slaughtered Boar is hoisted up, feet first, like so much bacon to exsanguinate, after three hours of watching him, as they say in Thomas Hardy, "bent round all twisty-ways", it's sort of a relief to see him get in a good stretch -- as physically demanding as it is, Kevin Spacey takes it all at an intense clip from the starting gate. I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure it altogether works, but it's certainly entertaining to watch. In short, don't hope for subtlety, this one's all about the fireworks.

Friday night posting from the Ministry of Noise

2012-02-04T01:13:00.002-05:00

and my, how much more insomnia-inducing the utubes have become of late...

Meanwhile, wasting no time at all, The Telegraph's Sameer Rahim, Opera Novice, encounters Tosca.

Happy Imbolc, pagans!

2012-02-02T21:56:00.001-05:00

2012-02-02T21:28:00.000-05:00

harbingers of heat: Tanglewood 2012

2012-01-31T22:51:00.000-05:00

That's heat as in "wouldn't it be nice if we had some". But never mind. It will be February already in a little over two hours, and you know what that means: packets of tomato seeds on the kitchen counter and summer schedules tossed in over the transom.

Tanglewood's a bit thin on the vocal side this year, but what there is is La Damnation de Faust with Susan Graham, Paul Groves, and Willard White on July 28th; Gerald Finley doing a recital on August 2nd, then Mozart arias and Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée the following night; Karina Gauvin pops in for a Bach cantata on August 22nd; the 25th has Falla's La Vida Breve with a long list of people I'm too lazy to type, but here are the details, and the 26th has a Beethoven 9 with Meredith Arwady, Frank Lopardo and John Relyea on August 26th. Frankly, if it weren't for the people involved, it would all be a bit zzzzzzzzzzzzz....

On the other hand, Sequentia brings The Rheingold Curse, in Old Norse with English supertitles, to Ozawa Hall on July 12. It's where the cool kids will be.

"glowingly Octavian"

2012-01-30T18:37:00.002-05:00

The Arts Desk likes everything about ENO's anglo Rosenkavalier.

Update: Jessica Duchen mostly concurs, and posts a flickr link.

another update: The Independent is on board.

the week in talking heads

2012-01-29T23:21:00.000-05:00

Front Row has Alice Coote, about seven minutes in. NDR has Klaus Florian Vogt and Simone Kermes (in German).

ping

2012-01-29T21:58:00.003-05:00

Alex Ross posts a quote from Miss Evans -- okay she'd have been referring to herself as Mrs Lewes by then -- on the problem of judging new music by its criticism. If memory serves, she herself thought the third act of Tannhäuser dragged, when in fact we now know it is the first.

rock solid

2012-01-27T22:59:00.001-05:00

Paul Plishka, best Fiesco ever, gives his last performance at the Met in tomorrow's Tosca broadcast. The NYT's City Room has a few stories. His name might not really be Baseball, but he has been a great player for the home team.

Of course we can't prove here that he's the best Fiesco ever, for that you'll have to look on Sirius for those Boccanegras from '84 and '86. But here's another from his wheelhouse.

the slippery slope

2012-01-26T19:10:00.002-05:00

The Telegraph's Sameer Rahim ventures into the Great Opera Unknown, and promises to tweet what he finds there.

And speaking of long-form adventure, the next free audiocast from the Met is the new Götterdämmerung, tomorrow at 6pm Eastern, at the usual place. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the previous episode:

Watch Jay Hunter Morris: A New Siegfried for the Ring on PBS. See more from SundayArts.

Wednesday night posting from the Ministry of Noise

2012-01-25T22:05:00.000-05:00

Vintage Tom Waits from Austin City Limits

Watch Tom Waits on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

2012-01-24T18:23:00.000-05:00

sundry items

2012-01-21T22:30:00.002-05:00

A reminder came down the pike today that tomorrow is Bayerische Staatsoper's live videocast of Don Carlo -- Kaufmann, Harteros, Smirnova, ~~Kwiecien~~ Daniel, and Pape, all if the creek don't rise -- starting at 11:00am, Eastern Time. (5pm CET)

Update: Well, that had its moments, but if you're going with glitter confetti in the auto da fe, there can be no half measures.

Update 1/23: Staatsoper reports 459,000 views of Don Carlo livestream.

Schiller and Verdi tell us power corrupts, but John Webster, Thomas Middleton and their drinking buddies would probably say what corrupts absolutely is just the act of being born, so you might as well poison, stab, and screw (in that combination or any other) as many people as possible, and anyway it's all in good fun. Andrew Dickson muses on the present theatrical ubiquity of Jacobean tragedies. The New York metro area's next opportunity for gleeful exploration of vintage vice will be Cheek by Jowl's Tis Pity She's a Whore, which comes to BAM in March.

Before the Jacobeans' reckless abandon there was Shakespeare's military-political meatgrinder. The Arts Desk has a review of the new film adaptation of Coriolanus. Reviewer Matt Wolf says it's all down to Fiennes and Redgrave. (I'm in just for John Kani, because there really is a world elsewhere.) Over at The New Yorker, Richard Brody is less enamored.

I suggested rebranding it "Nano-Classics"...

2012-01-17T19:43:00.000-05:00

Two Quotes of the Day, from Mary Beard in the NYRB:

"What I have stressed so far is our engagement with our predecessors through their engagement with the classics. The slightly different spin on that would be to say that it would be impossible now to understand Dante without Virgil, John Stuart Mill without Plato, Donna Tartt without Euripides, Rattigan without Aeschylus. I’m not sure if this amounts to a prediction about the future; but I would say that if we were to amputate the classics from the modern world, it would mean more than closing down some university departments and consigning Latin grammar to the scrap heap. It would mean bleeding wounds in the body of Western culture—and a dark future of misunderstanding."

[Though she says she doesn't think this will happen. I'm not so sure, meself.]

"...The overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin and Greek from high school or university. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously—and ultimately paying for."

Read the full commentary here.

It may be worth noting that the year before SUNY Albany famously axed Classics, it had more than seventy Latin 101 students, up from twelve when I took it in the 90's. Whatev. Curse the gold-giver.

2012-01-16T21:18:00.000-05:00

Erebus and Terror

2012-01-13T19:11:00.000-05:00

For Northwest Passage geeks, poet Jo Shapcott's radio play Erebus, about the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, is up on BBC iPlayer for a week. Brrrrr.

busted

2012-01-12T06:36:00.001-05:00

Daniel J Wakin reports on an egregious cell phone incident at the NY Philharmonic that caused Alan Gilbert to slam on the brakes on the Mahler 9. Huffpost says when Crookback Richard wears the crown, he has ways of dealing with this sort of thing.

update: Wakin gets Patron X's side.

scrape

2012-01-10T22:11:00.000-05:00

Over at the arts desk, Jasper Rees suggests they've run out of 19th century things to adapt for television, makes some interesting suggestions, and invites your views. My view is you can't call the Gaskell mine exhausted if Mary Barton hasn't been done since 1964 (it sez over at imdb) -- though I grant it could rate as "too working class" if the litmus test is Downton Abbey. Think of it as Cranford with poverty, prostitution, drug addiction and murder. And Chartism. Think of it as Cranford if Cranford had been written by Zola.

The History of Pendennis could be fun, too, and nobody remembers it exists except my erstwhile Victorian Lit professor and the people who proofed it for Project Gutenberg, so it will have the benefit of novelty (no pun intended) while retaining all those tight-corseted tropes we've come to know and evidently desire: long story, cast of zillions, upstairs downstairs, scrappy Victorian journos, scrappy Victorian London, advent of the bourgeois lifestyle, blah blah blah. Plus you could probably squeeze in some Bellini. What's not to like?

More as they occur but do go over and weigh in, because somebody from the BBC might be reading and those people, seriously, they need ideas.

entropy

2012-01-09T21:50:00.000-05:00

noyse

2012-01-08T22:32:00.000-05:00

There's some good stuff over in the Clubfoot Hall of Mirrors.

I want my Music Telephonovision

2012-01-06T20:47:00.000-05:00

A Liberal's Libretto has posted a link to a Library of Congress lecture by Mark Schubin, the Met's HD Über-Geek, about opera as engine for technological innovation. Okay, that sounds kind of dry in description, but in execution it's actually quite awesome. The lecture is about an hour of opera-lover's steampunk holiday, followed by a Q&A which is mostly about the technical ins and outs of HDcasting the Met, which, inquiring minds...

"...the footage of the New York that I remember seeing..."

2012-01-06T17:53:00.000-05:00

drama drama drama

2012-01-05T22:23:00.000-05:00

I suppose the toughest part of doing a realist production of a Handel opera is what to do, o what to do with a stage full of people cooling their heels during things like Rodelinda's Act I da capo screed. But did anyone else think the hyper-reactivity approach to crowd direction came off looking a little like this?

how fleeting is the pleasure

2012-01-02T01:43:00.003-05:00

The things we did we'd do again:

Pelleas & Melisande @ MET: Having a soft spot for insane polymaths, I suppose I'm one of those people who tend to like Jonathan Miller productions, even in their variability. And I love this production. And I loved this cast.

Diary of a Madman @ BAM: Geoffrey Rush in anything, and this was quite something.

King Lear @ BAM: Under Michael Grandage's direction, and done the Donmar way, which is to say as bare-bones as possible and still have sets and costumes. Derek Jacobi was all the focus but Ron Cook's Fool was the first one I've seen that ever made sense, and that alone was worth the trek.

Niobe @ BEMF Boston: Philippe Jaroussky and Amanda Forsythe, an insanely complicated plot, feather volcano hats, Beethoven Medusa shields and, I've said it before but I'll say it again, sparkly glow-swords. Every production should have them.

Acis & Galatea @ BEMF Great Barrington: The conceit is a masque at Cannons, the forty million dollar trophy mansion of Handel's patron the Duke of Chandos, and Handel has shown up with his librettist homies to put on a show. Duke and Duchess get to play the leads. John Gay gets to be the Monster Polypheme. Poor Handel gets to be Damon and sing "How fleeting is the pleasure that flatters our hopes in pursuit of the fair..." wistfully at his, alas, totally hetero boss. 'Twas very sad. But beautifully sung, and I wanted everybody's clothes.

The Winter's Tale @ RSC Armory: What Othello has a whole play to do, Leontes has to manage in the space of one set speech. Greg Hicks, he's yer man.

Atys @ BAM: Long-awaited, unexpected, perfect.

If there could be only one? Probably The Winter's Tale. It was that good.

PSA

2012-01-01T11:03:00.001-05:00

Intermezzo has posted a present. Quick, before they realize there's been an escape.

the pertinent facts

2011-12-30T18:30:00.000-05:00

"He explained to me in great detail what a castrato was. It sounded wonderful. You were specially chosen, then you remained a boy forever with a voice borrowed from God and became famous, fat and rich. You never turned into a woman, nor did you die in childbirth."
~ Patricia Duncker, The Doctor

[also, great hats - Ed.]

Department of Linkery

2011-12-28T21:12:00.003-05:00

Front Row has a recap of interviews done earlier in the year with Mark Padmore, Ian Bostridge, Joseph Calleja and Iestyn Davies.

Meanwhile, NPR has archived the Karita Mattila recital at Carnegie Hall from earlier this month. (There's other good stuff in that archive, too, including some Stile Antico.)

Here's an update on the lack of groundswell for restoring the pigeonholing power of the Grammys to its former glory. Just the fact that they now stuff Cajun accordion players, Hawaiian slack-key guitar players and Native American drum circles into the same award category should pretty much indicate how much the major labels really give a tinker's expletive about music that will never see the light of wherever it is major label product gets played these days. Seriously, people, isn't this just the majors advertising their own obsolescence in a world where industry accountants can no longer control the demographics?

road

2011-12-27T03:11:00.002-05:00

Pike Playlist: Ensamble Gurrufío, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook, Ann Hallenberg

Noise exchanged: Atys, Creole Choir of Cuba, Dub Colossus ~ Addis Through the Looking Glass

the Yule Log version!

2011-12-24T12:46:00.002-05:00

In case the Semi-Sane Madwoman doesn't get around to it this year, we carry on the tradition of posting Dar Williams's contribution to the holiday canon. (Though you might only find this version funny if you are of A Certain Age and grew up in the tri-state.)

Friday posting from the Ministry of Noise

2011-12-23T09:43:00.003-05:00

Department of Linkery

2011-12-21T19:08:00.000-05:00

Live streaming on Boxing Day, Hansel & Gretel (I almost wrote Handel & Gretel, now there's a mashup idea), another Guardian/Glyndebourne collaboration, details here. While you wait, they offer a Mozart Requiem -- not wicked Christmas-y, but it is the Guardian. (Oh but wait, they've commissioned downloadable wrapping paper!)

Plus some things we missed (or possibly just forgot): from WGBH, Boston Baroque's Les Indes Galantes recorded last May, and some Boston Camerata (both audio only); and Daniel Catán's Il Postino, from LA Opera, is up at the Great Performances website.

Cesaria Evora

2011-12-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

Jon Pareles writes here.

woes r us

2011-12-16T19:43:00.001-05:00

The Independent has a thumbnail review of Atalante's album Reliquie di Roma I: Lamentarium on Nimbus. Atalante is an Erin Headley project -- she plays lirone and wears silver shoes, two qualities the Thirdfloorian delegation find admirable. Full dope here and here. For the person on your Christmas list whose Seasonal Affective Disorder needs that post-Monteverdian sparkly.

2011-12-14T20:16:00.000-05:00

sundry items

2011-12-13T23:11:00.001-05:00

From the Noise Ministry: Sumi Jo talks Mozart on The Strand.

Also, Arte's got a Beethoven 9 with Matthias Goerne, Sally Matthews, Steve Davislim and Karen Cargill, who was pretty excellent in the Mahler 3 rehearsal I caught at Tanglewood summer before last (and here with Runnicles/BBCSSO), and whose Met debut will be the last Waltraute of this year's run of Götterdämmerung, whereupon maybe they will figure out that she can hack it and give her more fun stuff to do.

From the Ministry of Histrionics: sterling yet in England, Donmar Warehouse Richard II reviews here, here, and here.

From the Ministry of Ranting, Office of Buzz-Mumbling, commentary on Amazon's bold new app for market monopolization here and here. As a former bricks n' mortar record store employee who had at least one former customer apologize to me about my job "but, you know, Amazon just had better prices", my only question is what's taken them so long? But consider, o Christmas shoppers, what Amazon is doing is not just beating the competition but actively moving to obliterate it, even as they sell their proprietary e-reader and make direct deals to cut out publishers altogether. My job fell to a variety of market forces, but all that means is it's a lot harder to find some stuff Former Customer could once have relied on us to have. We shrug. We live. She gets to find something else to listen to. But seriously, not to be paranoid or anything, but all the above taken in the aggregate, do you really want the likes of Jeff Bezos determining what's worth reading and how you read it, and keeping a record of it all the while? Kinda looks like fascism to me.

grain from husk

2011-12-12T10:55:00.002-05:00

Here's the NYT review.

Saturday springlek

2011-12-10T02:41:00.000-05:00

Saturday posting from the Ministry of Noise

2011-12-10T00:05:00.000-05:00

Haven't had one of these in awhile... How about Martin Simpson doing a Chris Wood cover?

Friday Cable from the Court of King Festus

2011-12-09T17:45:00.000-05:00

King Festus supports literacy among the common people.

Make Your Own Robert Wilson Production with Everyday Household Materials: Satyagraha @ OperaMall Millionplex

2011-12-08T20:36:00.004-05:00

An inclination to anthropological observation (or demographic arts presentation research) being endemic round these parts, the Thirdfloorian delegation to last night's Satyagraha encore HDcast noted an audience of 50-60 people, mostly the usual encore crowd, skewing in age about 60+. There were few if any attendees under 40. (That crowd, interestingly, tends to show up only for warhorses.)

This is not so much in contrast with the audience at the November 26th performance attended in-house, which also skewed grey. Except that at that one, for some reason which probably involved a rumor of puppetry, there were an unusual number of little kids. Note to future audiences, if such there be: unless your kid is precociously into late 20th century Minimalism, this is not a good show for 8 year olds. (And when Big Apple Circus is set up next door in Damrosch Park, it might even count as cruel and unusual punishment.) In fact, given the ubiquity of puppetry in all corners of the theatrical world these days, it's probably a good idea not to assume that puppets = kid-friendly. But never mind, that's another post.

I was curious to see how this production would translate to HD, given the subdued lighting and how much filming tends to darken things up.* It actually came off much better than expected -- with the aid of subtitling, since much of the projected text that was visible to the eye in-house was lost to the camera. As you all probably know by now, there were no Met titles for this production, partly because reading them was considered unnecessarily distracting, and partly because the libretto, which really isn't one, fits on all of two pages -- and as you also probably know by now, is entirely made up of quotations from the Bhagavad Gita.** This has the odd effect of making the text both secondary to the piece and primary to the experience of it. Or maybe it's the other way around. Or both.

As noted recently by operaramblings, there is a fashion these days for filming opera productions almost entirely in close-up, and the Met is as prone to this as everyone else (if not the chief instigator thereof). Perhaps because the stage business in this production is fairly, uh, minimal, only a few things got lost, and this had mostly to do with the overall sense of stage movement in certain scenes. A few more long shots wouldn't have hurt, but it didn't kill the enterprise, and in fact this is one of the most successful stage-to-screen translations we've seen in the Met HD series so far.

* For example see what happened with John Doyle's Peter Grimes production, but as Grandma would tell you, don't watch it all at once, you'll ruin your eyes.

** Though with all the discourse going on about that fact -- unless I missed it, in which case somebody say something -- Met-generated commentary on what the Bhagavad Gita actually is (other than "a sacred text...in Sanskrit!!!1!") was entirely missing from the scene. But isn't that the really interesting bit, given what the conversation between Arjuna and the guy with oddly blue-ish tan actually is? (Granted that's as I understand it, from a long time ago and in translation.) Anyway it would have made a worthwhile twenty minutes of intermission blether maybe.

From the Smithsonian, Freer Sackler Gallery, via wiki

mashup baroque

2011-12-08T12:23:00.001-05:00

WQXR's preview of The Enchanted Island

Modulate Wall Street

2011-12-03T00:25:00.000-05:00

Seth Colter Walls reports in The Awl on Occupy Wall Street's visit to Lincoln Center for the last performance of Satyagraha.

Alex Ross has the key video of Philip Glass addressing the 99%...via the People's Mic, which is somehow fitting.

So were two music journos the only members of the "mainstream" fourth estate on the scene? Surely it seems the New York Times knoweth not of these things.

and sorceries terrible to enter human hearing

2011-12-02T23:59:00.000-05:00

...but of course I mean that in a good way. FT interviews Jeremy Sams, the man behind The Enchanted Island.

Christa Wolf

2011-12-01T23:06:00.001-05:00

An obituary from Spiegel's English page. Weirdly, I'd just picked up Kassandra to reread after twenty years, and found it full of unexpected resonances with everything that's happened in the intervening period. The notion of the non-existent Helen was particularly striking, in that yellow-cake-uranium-from-Nigeria kinda way.

Wir haben ja dann alle den Anlaß für den Krieg vergessen. Nach der Krise im dritten Jahr hörten auch die Kriegsleute auf, den Anblick der schönen Helena zu fordern. Mehr Ausdauer, als ein Mensch aufbringen kann, hätte es gebraucht, immer weiter einen Namen im Munde zu führen, der immer mehr nach Asche schmeckte, nach Brand und Verwesung. Sie ließen von Helena ab und wehrten sich ihrer Haut. Um aber dem Krieg zujubeln zu können, hatten sie diesen Namen gebraucht. Er erhob sie über sich hinaus... Paris selbst war, widerwillig, schien es, auf den Marktplatz gekommen und hatte den Namen der schönen Helena dem Volke hingeworfen. Die Leute merkten nicht, das er nicht bei der Sache war. Ich merkte es. Warum sprichst du so kalt von deiner warmen Frau? hab ich ihn gefragt. Meine warme Frau? war seine höhnische Antwort. Komm zu dir, Schwester. Mensch: Es gibt sie nicht.
--Christa Wolf, Kassandra

BBC roundup

2011-11-30T20:16:00.000-05:00

A bunch of people on Night Waves wax eloquent on The Singing Detective twenty-five years after its initial airing.

Front Row interviews Simon Keenlyside on his new album Songs of War.

ENO's Eugene Onegin (audio only) is up until Saturday-ish on BBC 3 (Deborah Warner soundbites included).

Manhattan project

2011-11-29T17:45:00.002-05:00

Counting down to the free audiocast of the Met Faust prima, which starts at 7:30pm EST at the usual place, with Jonas Kaufmann in the role of J Robert Oppenheimer, Rene Pape as Edward Teller, and Marina Poplavskaya as Hiroshima.

Okay that's done, here's Anthony Tommasini's review in the NYT.

linkery

2011-11-27T23:58:00.001-05:00

Via NPR, Joseph Calleja at Le Poisson Rouge in October.

the bloody office of his timeless end

2011-11-27T21:12:00.000-05:00

But first, John Simon reviews a new book on Verdi and Shakespeare. Could be good.

And speaking of the latter (or not, if you prefer), as foretold, grim visag'd war comes to Brooklyn in January, and is coming to stay for a couple of months. If one's exchequer weren't quite so...what it is, one could catch the beginning,* then the end, and skip all that business with France in the middle.

Meanwhile Collaborators is out and about in the coming weeks via NTLive. Simon Russell Beale: could have been the next Bond villain but Sam Mendes couldn't scope the Cute and Deadly. So have him as Stalin instead. That'll do. Check your local, as dates and times tend to vary this side of the water.

*and behold the absence of moss gathered

another trip in the wayback machine

2011-11-25T17:34:00.000-05:00

While Anthony Tommasini is waxing nostalgic in the NYT for the days of John Dexter, here was a view from the ground from one of his predecessors.

2011-11-24T10:17:00.001-05:00

Over the river and back again. Turnpike playlist: Thao, Shoukichi Kina, Rinkenband.

RIP Montserrat Figueras

2011-11-23T18:08:00.002-05:00

A nice summation, with tracks, has been posted at NPR here, and at Alia Vox.

update: and the folkies weigh in as well.

RIP Well-Manicured Man

2011-11-22T21:01:00.001-05:00

another Orpheus

2011-11-21T21:36:00.000-05:00

Boston area alert: What better way to dispel the horrors of Thanksgiving + Black Friday than with Charpentier Double-Bill Weekend? The Jabberwock of Rampant Consumerism will never think to look for you in Jordan Hall. (Though the Little Imps of Acquisition may find you at the CD table, as they usually do me.)

descent into fish

2011-11-20T12:00:00.001-05:00

Something of a Mahagonny Songspiel for the OWS age, Hadestown's hellmouth opens in NYC tonight at Le poisson rouge, and word is tonight's Persephone will be Ani DiFranco.

Redefining the Omelet: Don Giovanni @ OperaMall Millionplex 11.16.11

2011-11-18T21:31:00.002-05:00

First allow me to disqualify myself from any valid opinions about Don Giovanni by confessing that I really liked Francisco Negrin's 2003 Glimmerglass production. It was ugly and depressive. The Catalogue Aria was a case study in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder illustrated by a tour through the Collected Underwear. The revenant Commendatore was a ruse conceived by Don Ottavio to push a psychologically unstable Don Giovanni over the edge, and his manifestation in the penultimate scene was a marching, sign-waving, anti-Giovanni Occupy Seville. As the orchestra ratcheted up the tension, our anti-hero, standing in a coffin, slashed his wrists in both defiance and despair. None of it was pretty. Everybody hated it.

I was with an opera neophyte. I had a lot of explaining to do.

Last night, by chance, I was sitting next to another opera neophyte. I could tell she was new to all this, not just because she was telling her friend she'd never been to the opera, but because she spent the whole second act munching popcorn. People who have been to the opera, I find, generally skip the popcorn at the HDs. Or at least they'll be likely to put it aside for the duration of Il mio tesoro. No such luck here, alas. But she seemed nice, so while we were waiting at the end to exit our row, I turned to her and said "Did you enjoy the performance?" "Oh yes!" she said, with genuine enthusiasm. "But are they all that long?" (Two for two! If someone says it again at Siegfried, I reserve the right to yell "Bingo!" in a crowded theater.)

Here is Michael Grandage's ideal audience member, as stated in what passes for his directorial manifesto vis a vis this production. She's never seen it before. She had a good time. She didn't need anything explained. Win. On her right was her friend, from what I could gather also a neophyte. She also had a good time. She also didn't need anything explained. Win. On her left was some thirty years of opera experience. I've done a lot of explaining to neophytes. Here I didn't have to explain anything to anyone. Win.

I've seen stagings that were luminous and performances that were brilliant. I've seen workmanlike stagings and performances both. I've seen things that were perplexing, and things that were wrong-headed and infuriating. I've seen things that were openly disrespectful of the material they were supposed to be presenting (Mark Lamos, I'm talking to you). Like everyone else who's parked themselves in an opera house with any regularity, I've done a lot of armchair directing in my time. Apart from a weak Commendatore -- and Commendatores are weak nine times out of ten -- and a Donna Anna who wasn't in nearly as much of a twist as she should have been, I didn't have the impulse to do any here. That was kind of refreshing. Win.

Michael Grandage hasn't, in Deborah Warner's parlance, smashed the Fabergé. That isn't what he does. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been what he does. Neither, in the fashion of Regietheater, has he taken the piece and used it to his own ends, plastering a concept onto it with complete disengagement from authorial intent. As he has said elsewhere, "I'm not the kind of director who enjoys immediately looking at a time and a place set by a writer and then going 'Let's not do that.'... It's always been of interest to me to use their starting point as my starting point." Not the manifesto of a theatrical radical. Unless, of course, the scene is already full of theatrical radicals.

Grandage's modus operandi has tended to favor interiority. Not that he's only ever worked in tiny spaces but most of his work in the past ten years (Frost/Nixon, Red, Hamlet, King Lear, Luise Miller, et cetera) has been at London's Donmar Warehouse, the directorship of which he took over from Sam Mendes in 2002. Unlike the Met's slightly-shy-of-4000-seat enormity, Donmar Warehouse is 250 seats. Its stage could fit comfortably inside the Rad Cave and still leave room for the bar. Interiority is a luxury it can afford. The Met, not so much. So what's he doing there?

By now we've all read James Jorden's piece, here, where

a) he lauds Peter Gelb for innovations like the HD series, but then
b) takes him to task for enabling the dumbing down of productions by hiring directors for the sparkly shiny that the words Tony Award Winner attaches to their name. Then he
c) gives Grandage a shelling for suggesting that there might be a preponderance of Met audience members who have never seen Don Giovanni. And of course Mr. Jorden is right...for the actual Met audience inside the actual Met building, that would be a rare demographic indeed.

But here's the thing, the same is not necessarily true of a 250 seat theater at the OperaMall Millionplex. Which brings us back to Neophyte A, and her having a really good time, and all she needed was lots of close-ups from cameras way closer to the singers than even the first row of the orchestra. Close enough to see that those were military oak leaves on the Commendatore's greatcoat, not his zombie-like exposed ribcage. Close enough to see the expressions on people's faces and the looks in their eyes and the minute gestures that will never read from the foie gras seats, let alone the chicken seats.

And this is really where Peter Gelb either is or is not a fucking genius, to use the tags of JJ's alter ego, because Grandage of the 250 seat theater plays great to 250 seat theaters full of opera neophytes, who get their opera on Hollywood terms, sung well-amplified by the thin and attractive, with popcorn and Twizzlers and half-gallon Cokes. Who's the Met audience now?

2011-11-17T22:57:00.002-05:00

punito

2011-11-16T23:54:00.000-05:00

So the delegation has been to see the Don G encore. Seriously, y'all went a little Lord of the Flies over this thing. Not ground-breaking, no, but you want to see a performance really gel into a wad of spackling, remember the production it replaced? I will belabor the point as soon as I don't have to be up again in five hours.

incoming

2011-11-14T19:49:00.002-05:00

In light of recent blogospheric phenomena, the money quote from the FT's interview with Deborah Warner, whose production of Eugene Onegin is up at ENO and will be replacing Robert Carsen's at the Met:

“It is dismaying when you come to opera from the theatre for the first time, this terror of offering something which is already perfect. How do you improve Elvira’s aria [from Don Giovanni]? I didn’t know then how to take this thing, which was like a Fabergé egg, and then smash it. I do now.”

Rodelinda re-ups

2011-11-13T23:44:00.002-05:00

The next free Met webstream is Rodelinda, tomorrow (11/14) at 7:30, at the usual place. Renee Fleming, Stephanie Blythe, Andreas Scholl, Joseph Kaiser, Iestyn Davies, Shenyang and Harry Bicket, the man with the most perfect Baroque/Early Music conductor name in show business. (And most of you reading this will already know that he's got his Handelian mojo workin'.)

Incidentally, this belt-driven production could give The Machine a run for its money in the industrial noise department. On the other hand, Stephen Wadsworth has no doubt saved the Met Marketing people a lot of brass and shoe leather in demographic research via his set design for the Library scene. Previous audience response data seems to indicate that this opera is popular with hopelessly over-educated bibliogeeks who have all read Alberto Manguel.

Update Monday, 9:13pm: Ha! See? Bibliogeeks.

2011-11-11T17:03:00.000-05:00

res retro

2011-11-09T23:33:00.000-05:00

So, by the time the crunching begins, how many generations of tablet and smartphone will have been used argue about, design, and build the thing? And will the Lego version get there first?

While we wait, there exists a relevant chronicle of crime-fighting escapades, wherein, among other things, Charles Wheatstone* is revealed to have been an evil criminal mastermind. And there's loads of footnotes. And monkeys. And Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

*Inventor of the concertina, which should have been the giveaway.

Wednesday night Norwegian C&W Robert Burns from the Ministry of Noise

2011-11-09T19:26:00.001-05:00

via Sigrid Moldestad

Ein sæl kyss/Ae fond kiss

Teach Yourself Sanskrit

2011-11-07T23:00:00.002-05:00

Just a reminder that the Met will be (audio) streaming Satyagraha tomorrow (Nov. 8) starting at 7:30 via its Real Audio stream here. (Meanwhile, Sirius appears to be working again, huzzah!)

oh yes, and...

2011-11-05T22:00:00.002-04:00

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, Thomas Hardy geeks.

warm ups

2011-11-05T21:45:00.000-04:00

Hey, turns out WGBH has started a half hour World of Opera pregame show called Arias & Barcarolles, wherein they present cool and interesting things, including, most recently, snippets of Carolyn Sampson at 2007 Boston Early Music Festival.

The program archive can be found here.

"this is not a competition"

2011-11-04T22:31:00.000-04:00

quoth she! Angela Gheorghiu on Callas and Gheorghiu, via The Strand

Everything old is the same only more so

2011-11-03T23:19:00.004-04:00

Barry Crimmins, who once said of Strom Thurmond "He should have snakes for hair!", addresses Anti-War Rally...that's, um, the first Gulf War. And the Assad he mentions...that was the first one. And the George Bush he mentions...uh, that was the first one too. Henry Kissinger, though...well, there can be only one.

Now Mr Crimmins is issuing forth from his mountain fastness and descending on NYC. It's a rare opportunity to lyao at all the things people are currently camped out in protest of across the planet, so I'd take it.

can't win for losing

2011-11-02T23:48:00.000-04:00

So, since it was Take a History-Loving Opera Newbie to OperaMall Night, we did. I hate to tell you this, O Camera-Ready Opera Stars and the Marketing Departments That Love Them, but History Buff thought everybody on stage looked fat. Even Keith Miller's abs and Tamara Mumford's wafer-thinness did not escape calumny. So my advice to the opera world is keep doing the elliptical, yes, it's good for you. But don't kill your voice for the sake of the camera, because people will see what they are expecting to see no matter what you do. Moreover, O Marketing Departments, a sylph and a sixpack aren't likely to sell the product if Donizetti himself can't. Unless we're talking a literal sixpack. And then it would probably need to be more than one. (And for the record, I have seen this strategy work for dorm parties and Scandinavian folk music workshops.)

from the Special Envoy

2011-10-30T00:47:00.001-04:00

theater of vagaries

2011-10-29T10:43:00.000-04:00

Other thoughts on the subject of Michael Grandage's Don Giovanni from Charlotte Higgins @ The Guardian. And linked in her article, but interesting enough to link again here, Mark Shenton's take.

Art is risk.

fanning the flames

2011-10-27T23:17:00.000-04:00

BEMF presents Apollo's Fire and Philippe Jaroussky @ Emmanuel Church in Boston, Saturday, November 5th, in a program of Handel and Vivaldi entitled, appropriately enough for the band, the repertoire, and the day, Fireworks. BYO Guy Fawkes mask and subvert the dominant paradigm.

pinch hitters

2011-10-27T08:12:00.001-04:00

The Met streams the Siegfried opener here tonight at 6pm EST, with Siegfried 3.0 Jay Hunter Morris in the title role and Conductor 2.0 Fabio Luisi in the pit.

A bit of JHM in SFO Ring here, with Stemme.

again with the snoods

2011-10-25T00:37:00.002-04:00

I like Angela Meade. With her I can tell what the notes are supposed to be because they're pretty much, y'know, there, where Donizetti put them. And Stephen Costello has indeed figured out the pacing thing. So yay.

Now if only SiriusXM would fix their webstream so critically large segments didn't sound like they were being broadcast over one of those WWII field radios live from the Moon.

Update: And if they really are going to be broadcasting the Jonas Kaufmann recital on Sunday, I don't suppose they could choose this week to finally fix the problem?

interlude

2011-10-24T21:16:00.000-04:00

give the people what they want

2011-10-22T21:47:00.000-04:00

BBC World Service interviews tenor Joseph Calleja -- whose former repertoire, it turns out, once included Iron Maiden and Metallica -- about opera and elitism, and that there is no difference between Thailand and Krumville unless you're talking about everything written in the last ten years. Interviewer Tom Service mentions Michael Bolton (whose opera album, let us remember, emerged from the nether regions of Sony Classical during the reign of Peter Gelb), Hayley Westenra and Bruce Dickinson in the same breath. To the best of my knowledge, Bruce Dickinson never made a crossover opera album, but if he had...

On the other hand, as Superconductor has already reported, Metallica is getting into Wedekind, so can the 2nd Vienna Skool be far behind, cuz, y'know, Berg, he shreds \m/

and speaking of punitive: a rhetorical question

2011-10-21T22:44:00.003-04:00

So NPR decides to use freelancer host Lisa Simeone's participation as a private citizen in the Occupy movement as an excuse to quit distributing NPR World of Opera? 'Scuse me? Oh but wait, it isn't even called NPR World of Opera anymore, because NPR bailed out on producing it last year, whereupon WDAV took up the slack. So if Lisa Simeone isn't actually employed by NPR, how is it necessary for her to be bound by NPR's quote unquote journalistic ethics policy? And if NPR is now willing neither to produce nor distribute the last year-round syndicated opera program on the Americanistanian airwaves, then what is the reason that I as a contributor should not send my public radio contribution to WDAV while inviting NPR to suck this enormous plastic implement?

Okay, maybe the question isn't all that rhetorical.

Update: James Fallows comments in The Atlantic. Here are Simeone's comments in an article from mid-week in The Baltimore Sun, before WDAV stepped up to the plate. James Poniewozik over @ Time points to subversive anti-capitalism in the Ring and La Bohème, and Erik Wemple warns of dystopian nightmare in The Washington Post.

fellow travelers and undesirable elements

2011-10-20T19:33:00.000-04:00

From the NYT, an article about Britain's artist visa process, at which all Americanistanians may rejoice, since it seems theirs is as punitively byzantine as ours. (There was a time when I would ask "How did Foreign Performer X manage to book a tour?" and the answer would always be "Because she/he/they live in Brooklyn." Now I just assume.)

The article does beg the question, though, of why the violist would "sail through" while the violinists are sent for interrogation and the cellist is deported outright. Is this because they couldn't believe anyone would hire a violist to play for money?

This was all so much easier when it was just about commies.

an exhortation

2011-10-17T21:58:00.001-04:00

Sirius, fix your webstream!

via The Guardian

2011-10-11T18:18:00.000-04:00

Fiona Shaw discusses her new production of The Marriage of Figaro at English National Opera.

all in a lather

2011-10-10T18:36:00.001-04:00

Daniel J. Wakin reports that Peter Mattei will be subbing for back-injured Mariusz Kwiecien at the Don Giovanni opener on Thursday, which the Met will be streaming (for free) from here. Which means Rodion Pogossov will be parachuting into Barber to replace Mattei. I know this kind of fire drill is fun and generates publicity, but wouldn't it be more cost effective to actually let Dwayne Croft cover, since he's cooling his heels in the wings for that very purpose? Just curious.

in a nutshell

2011-10-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

Saturday posting from the Ministry of Noise

2011-10-08T13:23:00.002-04:00

(I know it looks scary but it's just a Gershwin/Schoenberg mashup for piano four hands.)

Occupy Weimar revisited: Threepenny Opera @ BAM 10.5.11

2011-10-06T10:56:00.005-04:00

Update: Suchen Sie Occupy Weimar den Protest? Hier werden Sie die Facebook Seite finden.

Timing, they say, is everything, and what better week for the Berliner Ensemble to bring Die Dreigroschenoper to New York than in the third week of the Wall Street Occupation. Thus it is no surprise that the biggest audience reaction (laughter and cheers) of the evening was for Macheath's gallows oration, and his comparison of the petty criminal to the incorporated criminal, roughly: "We small, middle-class craftsmen, who toil with honest crowbars at the cash boxes of small-time shopkeepers, are being swallowed up by huge corporations, and the banks stand behind them. What is a picklock compared to a share? What is robbing a bank compared to the founding of one?"

Not to belabor the point or anything.

One might think that Robert Wilson's production would get in the way of the piece -- certainly he's been accused of that before. Ben Brantley in the New York Times called it "frost-bitten", and it's easy to paint Wilson productions with that single brush, particularly his Noh-inspired, gesture-heavy extravaganzas of glacial movement and mostly blue color scheme (e.g. Lohengrin). But he doesn't always do things that way, and this is about the most continuously animated production I've seen of his, barring possibly Woyzeck (in which, if the actors weren't getting much of a workout, the people in the lighting booth definitely were). In fact, where Brantley saw in the actors' whitened faces the cold post- WWI irony of George Grosz, I was consistently reminded of Ren & Stimpy. That may say more about the origins of Ren & Stimpy, or it may say more about me. Or it may all be pure coincidence. But there is that heightened cartoonish element inscribed in Wilson's choreography of the characters (of which facial movement is very much a part): the put-upon thieves, the boozy Mrs Peachum, Tiger Brown's happy-dance... In the end, if Wilson's approach puts the play into an emotionally inaccessible realm, well, that's sort of the point, isn't it? The only question then is if the whole Verfremdungseffekt is ultimately undone by Wilson's intriguingly designed stage pictures (cf Atys).

A professor of mine once described the concept of alienation in Epic Theater as "If something happens to draw you in emotionally, then, to derail that reaction, someone gets up and sings a song. Badly." In his review, Brantley compares the Broadway-style misconceptions of previous NY productions unfavorably to the Berliner Ensemble's more...can we say Brechtian without sounding tautological? Right...to their more Brechtian way of doing things, and rightly so. It's surprising how much more interesting those already interesting lyrics get when not approached like it's Wicked. Then, given the strictures of Wilsonian staging, one wonders how much the haphazard feel of the delivery is, like everything else, precisely planned, and how much is purely improvised.

Brantley described longueurs, but I didn't find any, even with the first act clocking in at two hours. If I had any suggestion to make (not that anyone's asking), it would be to find a simpler translation of the text for the supertitles. John Willet's 1976 translation -- meant for performance, not for a gloss -- is funny and fantastically singable, but also wordy and thus often hard to read in fast succession. (Also, much as we love it, he does tend to over-sharpen Brecht's often very blunt language.) As happens with supertitles, this left audience reaction out of synch with the actors' delivery. Some of that is inevitable, but a lot of it might have been mitigated with a more tailored rendering.

It's up through this Saturday but tickets are thin on the ground, so call the BAM box office (718.636.4100) or go Occupy Lafayette Avenue.

Occupy Weimar

2011-10-05T13:48:00.001-04:00

Update: Suchen Sie Occupy Weimar den Protest? Hier werden Sie die Facebook Seite finden.

From the NYT, Ben Brantley's review of Threepenny Opera @ BAM is out. We'll see for ourselves presently.

Bert Jansch RIP

2011-10-05T11:43:00.001-04:00